Chapter 82 Taylor
Taylor
For a few weeks following the fire, while Taylor is job hunting, she goes home to the Outer Banks.
She arrives with her suitcase and her knotted feelings surrounding her mom.
She thinks she might immediately unpack both, but she doesn’t.
She soaks in the sun and the sand and her dad’s weathered face, which suddenly seems so much older than she remembers.
At the restaurant, she fills up on crab legs and Old Bay–seasoned shrimp and the good-natured teasing of her dad’s longtime workers.
She notices the wealthy tourists, and those she used to see as such, but now thinks of as simply rich.
She kisses Grayson, who broke up with that girl Hatcher.
She goes surfing and smells the salt of the sea in her hair for hours afterward.
Then one night, running her fingers across the surfaces of her childhood home—the kitchen table, the creaky screen door, the pencil-marked wall her dad had used as a height ruler—Taylor realizes that she doesn’t know, if she had been in her dad’s shoes, what she would have done.
What she would have said to her own daughter.
She loosens slightly.
“It’s okay, Dad,” she says later that evening, while they silently work on a one-thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle of Boston’s skyline. He’s been quiet most of her trip. He nods, and the moment bumpily rolls over them, a choppy wave.
Then, gesturing to the board, he says, “Maybe I can see this in person. I’m thinking about coming to visit for Thanksgiving, to see you and Aunt Gigi.” He says a restaurant group has recently come forth as a silent investor, and for the first time in years, he’s in a stable financial situation.
Taylor googles the restaurant group, curious if there are any ties to the Knox. She doesn’t find any, but these days she knows better than to take anything at face value.
After a couple of weeks home, she feels replenished and is ready to return to Boston—and Sam, who has been cat-sitting China.
The Knox is reportedly undergoing a gut renovation, and Taylor can’t help but wonder what it’ll look like.
She’s been collecting information about what really happened there, the true reason behind Vivian’s abduction, like clues to her own puzzle she’s slowly solving: Eduardo providing some hints, Tara others.
She even briefly speaks with Michael, who is about as far from a murderer as one gets.
Rose had just been high from the opium fumes that night, confusing him with Oliver.
Mistaking identities, cats that talk—all in an opium day’s work, Taylor dryly thinks.
Sometimes, the image of Rose’s forlorn body, crumpled at the bottom of the basement stairs, flashes across Taylor’s mind.
But other images of the Knox have also started to resurface, prefire ones.
It starts when Eduardo tells her he’s planning to return to work at the Knox, once the construction is complete.
In fact, he reveals he’s already moved back into the servants’ quarters, which are now done with their fire restoration.
This news creates an unexpected longing in her, almost akin to nostalgia.
The others have no desire to return. She learns from Tara, whose pregnancy is plugging along, that Jerry is working at a restaurant in Southie, and considering going to school to become an X-ray tech.
The two share an apartment in Quincy, at the Watson.
He and Eduardo have apparently called it quits.
Liam gets a job bartending at the Cheers bar in Beacon Hill. He jokes that he likes to work at a place about which he can publicly boast. Occasionally Taylor goes by, and he hooks her up with a meal and drink.
“Well,” Liam remarks on one such evening, as he slides a Sam Adams to her across the bar.
“I was just thinking about all the shit I missed by not living in the servants’ quarters.
I mean, it’s like I was working at a place I thought was the Knox, and Jerry and Eduardo were working at an entirely different one. ”
“You and me both.”
“Want the cheeseburger again, medium?” he asks, and then adds, grinning, “although you might be interested to know that for a special tonight, we have the sacrificial lamb burger—I mean, the lamb burger.”
“Ha ha, very funny.”
New Girl, the Sacrifice is when potential members reveal their biggest secret, Liam had told her recently, between guffaws.
It’s a sacrifice because it’s a risk. You can reveal your secret, but then still not be admitted if the members don’t think it’s sufficient, and if geomancy doesn’t dictate it.
Taylor doesn’t think she’ll be living down her blunder anytime soon. Nor should she, really; the only real danger Vivian had been in was from Rose—and the questionable medical judgment of the Knox house doctor.
Taylor still doesn’t know what to make of Rose. She wasn’t innocent, but she wasn’t an Oliver, either. Taylor gets why Tara’s feelings toward her are complicated.
When Liam serves Taylor the cheeseburger, she notices how he’s added sweet potato fries without her having to ask—and they’re well-done, just how she likes them.
She smiles; she’s beginning to understand him more, how loyalty means so much to him. Their little meetups here and there stack up in his mind like a steel-constructed ladder. He’d like to be more than friends, she thinks, but she’s not so sure they should try that.
Her landlord, Anna, only ever brings up the Knox twice to Taylor: the first in the form of a note slipped under her door, shortly after the fire.
Taylor,
I didn’t know. They got me hook, line, and sinker. A description for a job applicant that was you to a tee.
—Anna
P.S. Next month’s rent is on me.
The second time is late summer, when Anna shows up unannounced, rapping Taylor’s door with her cane. When Taylor cracks open the door, Anna thrusts The Boston Globe at her.
Taylor recoils at the sight of Oliver’s face on the front page; he looks as gaunt as ever. Corruption Scandal Rocks Private Club, the headline reads.
“Don’t you worry. You were never there,” Anna says.
She leaves Taylor with the article, which includes about as vague a description of the Knox as could be; the “private club” mentioned in the headline is about the extent of it.
Taylor can only imagine the walls the reporter must have repeatedly bumped up against while trying to crack the mystery of the Knox.
The focus of the piece is on Oliver Thurgood, and the charges brought against him: drug trafficking, distribution, possession with intent to distribute, conspiracy, among others.
He’ll likely spend many years behind bars.
The article makes it sound like Oliver was a rogue operator in drug importation, and had plans underway for a large-scale operation with an established international drug ring.
Maybe that’s true; maybe not. At any rate, Taylor knows it’s only a piece of what really went down at the Knox.
There’s no mention of murder, for instance; Graham’s name doesn’t appear in the article.
Some things, it seems, will be forever buried.
And the Knox itself is mostly spared, maintaining a healthy, notorious distance.
Sam says that Taylor has good stories to tell at a cocktail party, but she’s not ready to hit the Boston party scene.
She secures a job as a nurse esthetician at a fancy medical spa on Newbury Street.
She thought she’d love it, being able to interact with the high-end clientele, but she doesn’t.
She likes being able to try out some of the cosmetic procedures, but the women coming through the door are fussy and entitled, and such complainers.
Taylor finds she needs to take a mental snapshot of their outfits before she begins to converse with them, to separate the clothing from the personality.
In fact, Taylor discovers the aspect she enjoys the most about her new job is her walk to and from the clinic, passing the window displays of clothing storefronts.
She finds herself critiquing the mannequins, as if they were real models: what Taylor likes, what she would change.
Sometimes it’s pairing an entirely different top with a skirt, other times it’s an adjustment on the hemline.
Occasionally it’s adding one of her flower embellishments, for which she’s starting to take orders.
She has Vivian to thank for that; when Vivian wears them, her customers and friends always inquire where they can purchase such accessories.
“You have an innate sense of style,” Vivian compliments her, to which Taylor jokes, “Yeah, I like nice things.”
“No, it’s more than that,” Vivian says. “Everyone likes nice things. But you have a real nose for fashion. I see it in the things you wear, and your designs. It’s quite remarkable.”
It’s been a little strange to get to know Vivian the person. She’s still intimidating, and Taylor is still in awe. She feels awkward around her and probably acts as such.
Sometimes, when Taylor’s walking along the cobblestoned streets of Beacon Hill, she finds herself almost automatically turning toward the Knox.
Once, she stood for a good twenty minutes across the street, staring at the iconic redbrick building’s facade—which remained mostly intact, despite its fire-ravaged insides.
The Knox had looked both opened and closed, regal and plain, secretive and ordinary.
A tingle ran through her that she hasn’t been able to forget.
Then there’s that other place in Boston that also had a fire and is also full of secrets. The place on Greenwich Lane where her mother lived. Taylor has yet to visit.
“When you’re ready,” Sam tells her, “I’ll go with you.”