Iron Cast (27 page)

For as long as she'd known him, Saint had spent most of his time in the Cast Iron. He left only when Johnny had a job for him, or when he was visiting James at the Mythic. The rest of the time he was perfectly content to stay home with paintbrush or pencil in hand.

“I like it here,” Saint said, returning to his sketch. “It's safe.”

He spoke the last so softly that Ada wasn't sure if she'd heard him right. She waited, but he didn't say more. He was lost again in his work. After a couple of minutes, the silence got the better of Ada and she stood up. There was a phone call she had been putting off, and she was running out of time to do it.

She went down the hall to Johnny's office. The electric light buzzed and flickered when she turned it on, before it settled into a dull hum. She sat down in the chair across from the desk and pulled the phone toward her. She told the operator her mother's number and waited for the line to connect. Her mother answered in a polite, if wary, tone. She wasn't accustomed to using the phone.

“It's me, Mama.”

“Ada, what is wrong?”

“Nothing. Nothing. I just . . . wanted to talk to you.”

Ada bit her lip because she didn't know what else to say. She needed to ask if the two agents were still parked out front, but she didn't want to frighten her mother.

“I am sorry I was angry at you, Ada,” Nyah said, after a few moments of silence. “I wish we had not fought.”

“It's my fault,” Ada said. “I wanted to come see you, but I can't—I can't get away.”

“I know.”

The way she said it was so solemn and resigned that tears pricked suddenly at Ada's eyes.

“I have to go,” she said before they could spill. “I love you.”

“Good night, Ada.”

Ada hung up with more force than she intended. She hadn't even asked about the agents, or if the police had come by. She hadn't said anything she meant to say.

She swiped her hand across her eyes and picked up the receiver again. She asked the operator to connect her to the Red Cat. A gruff voice answered. Ada could hear the sounds of musicians warming up their instruments in the background. Someone was laughing raucously. It was a normal night there, with music and patrons and clinking glasses. In that moment, it seemed so far away from the deathly silence of the Cast Iron that Ada was disoriented. The voice spoke again, even gruffer this time.

“Is Charlie Lewis there?” she asked before he could hang up.

The sounds became muffled, like he was covering the mouthpiece with his hand. Ada held the receiver away from her ear during the ensuing scrapes and clatters and muted shouts. When Charlie answered, he was out of breath.

“Hello?”

“Hello.”

“Hey there, Ada.”

Ada leaned forward in her chair and rested her elbows on the desk. The knot in her chest loosened, if only slightly.

“Are you busy?” she asked.

“Got a set in a few minutes, but they can wait.”

“You sure?”

“Not like they can start without me.”

She heard his grin through the phone, and she smiled too. She could picture him in his shirtsleeves and suspenders, with his hat tilted at a rakish angle. The tattoo on his arm would be visible, with
the inked tree branching like veins. Somehow, the night felt less empty. She wished she could see him in person. It wasn't safe for her to leave the club, though, and she would never ask him to come here, not after what had happened to Stuart Delaney. She had just wanted to hear his voice.

“I wanted to make sure everything was okay,” she said.

He was quiet for a few seconds. “Sure, I guess so,” he said. “You sound different. Is something wrong?”

Johnny was dead, and the Hemopath Protection Agency was lying in wait. Everything was wrong.

“No, nothing's wrong,” she said. “You sound different too.”

Another pause.

“I can't stop thinking about Stuart Delaney,” he said.

His voice was low, and Ada thought she heard a tremor.

“There was nothing you could do,” she said.

“Maybe.”

Ada listened to his breathing. She wound the telephone cord around her finger, counting the seconds that passed.

“None of us are safe anymore,” she said at last. She was thinking about the agents in her mother's home. “We can't go back to the way things were.”

“I don't know,” Charlie said. He hesitated. “I think—I think if anyone can manage it, you and Corinne can.”

Someone called Charlie's name, and he hollered at them to hold their horses.

“Sorry,” he said to her.

“No, I'm sorry,” Ada said. “I knew you had a show. I shouldn't have called.”

“I'm glad you did.”

Ada's heart skittered at the simple honesty in his voice, and
she squeezed the receiver until her fingers hurt. Three days ago he'd told her he loved her. She still didn't know how to say it back, or if she even could. The words were a precipice, and she was too afraid to leap.

“Go play your set,” she told him. “And stop flirting with me.”

She could hear the grin again, like music through the line.

“You're the one who called me.”

“Good-bye, Charlie.”

“Good-bye, Ada.”

She hung up the receiver and slumped back in the chair. Her heart was still pounding an uneven rhythm, echoing in her ears and fingertips. She wondered if this was what it was like for patrons at the club, listening to music that filled them with unfamiliar emotions, letting that music carry them to places they could never reach on their own but always, always trusting that it would lead them safely home.

Giant double doors at the end of the ballroom opened onto an adjacent room with two parallel dining tables. Between shoulders and elbows, Corinne caught a glimpse of ornate candelabras and flower arrangements. The bride and groom, whom Corinne had been avoiding all night, entered first, followed by their parents. Corinne grabbed Gabriel's arm.

“My mother is going to try to seat us at different tables,” Corinne said. “If you let that happen, I will possibly never forgive you.”

“I'm not sure what you expect me to do about it,” he said, but he was smiling.

Corinne's name placard was near the head of the larger table, across from her parents. Gabriel thoughtfully pulled her chair out
for her, then took the placard beside her and tossed it unceremoniously away.

“Someone named Hamish Everett,” he said as he sat down beside her.

Corinne snorted. Her mother, who had been saying something to Mr. Wells, eyed Corinne and Gabriel but apparently decided not to raise a fuss. After some shuffling at the lesser table to accommodate a miffed Hamish, the dinner was under way.

Mr. Wells wasn't at his best during parties and focused mainly on his food. Corinne's mother kept shifting in her seat, her smiles brief and fluttery, her eyes constantly darting. Corinne finally realized she was avoiding looking at Gabriel. He hadn't said a word and wasn't shoveling food with his hands or anything, so Corinne couldn't figure out her mother's problem. Maybe she was just angry that he wasn't Hamish Everett, who was supposedly Boston's most eligible bachelor now that Angela Haversham had snatched up Corinne's brother.

Phillip and Angela were in fine form, holding hands under the table and sneaking kisses when they thought no one was looking. To please her mother, Corinne exchanged a few polite words with them, but she couldn't look at Angela's expensive gown or multitude of diamonds without thinking that the entire ensemble had been funded by Haversham Asylum. And now her brother was a part of it. If her father had his way, Phillip's upcoming political campaign would revolve around an expansion of the asylum.

When it came time for Corinne's toast, she was two glasses of red wine deep and having trouble picking up her fork. Finally she managed to clink it against the side of her glass. Gabriel stood up, ostensibly to pull out her chair, but he ended up holding her elbows as she found her feet.

“You're drunk,” he whispered in her ear.

“Only a little. It's when I do my best work,” she said.

He shook his head and sat back down.

“Thank you all for coming tonight,” Corinne said, keeping both hands on the table edge to steady herself. “As most of you know, I've only just come back from school, and I'm afraid there's not enough time between studies to write a meaningful speech.”

She chanced a look at Phillip and Angela, who were holding hands again. Their smiles were bland and practiced. Corinne was surprised that Phillip hadn't interrupted yet to say something patronizing.

“Instead,” she continued, “I'd like to offer a poem I came across recently, by Lewis Carroll. I thought of my brother and soon-to-be sister when I read it.”

She conjured a sweet smile for the bride and groom. She'd actually memorized the poem years ago, and her brother had been the last person on her mind.

“A boat, beneath a sunny sky

Lingering onward dreamily

In an evening of July . . .”

Corinne kept a gentle cadence as she quoted. Despite its cheery beginning and lyrical rhythm, the poem wasn't a romantic one. It was about golden memories and the inevitability of their fading.

Under her left hand, Corinne brushed her thumb across the brass of her grandfather's watch, using the familiarity of it to center herself. If her grandfather had been here, he would be the one making the speech, telling some anecdote about his travels, sneaking a wink at Corinne. Maybe after it was all over, she would join him in
the quiet warmth of his study and he would tell her about Alice the acrobat or Alice the fortune-teller.

Corinne had to blink away the memories to get through the last lines of the poem. She hadn't meant to drink
quite
so much before dinner, but between the relatives and her mother and the iron in Gabriel's damn gun, itching at the edge of her sanity, she didn't see how she'd had much choice.

She lifted her glass with her right hand, letting her focus fall away from the room, into the abstract. It was a delicate art, finding the balance between the minds of the people she was trying to deceive and the deception itself, which she had to draw from her own mind. She'd spent years perfecting it. Trying and failing. There weren't very many wordsmiths who could conjure a tiny, detailed, lifelike illusion—one that would appear in the eyes of a room full of people. It was the movement that was the hardest. The trick was giving them the first glimpse and letting their minds fill in the details. Once they thought they saw something, then it might as well be real.

Everyone raised their glasses. Corinne brought hers to her lips. Then a gray, twittering rat ran down the length of the table, inciting uproar as it went, before finally leaping into the bride's lap. She thrashed and screamed, falling out of her chair and kicking Phillip in the chest multiple times as he dove to help her.

Ignoring the panic, Corinne calmly set down her glass and leaned across the table to catch her father's wide eyes.

“I don't feel well,” she told him. “Gabriel is going to take me home. Good night.”

She and Gabriel slipped out right as the serving staff arrived with brooms and mops to go in search of the culprit. They had to wait in the lobby for the footman to fetch their coats, and then wait
again outside for the valet to bring the car around. Corinne hopped impatiently from one foot to the other. Her feet had gone numb in her shoes, which was preferable to the aching of before. The snow hadn't started again, but the night was still bitter with cold.

The Ford was just pulling around the corner when Phillip came outside. “Corinne, wait,” he said. “Where are you going?”

He hadn't put on his coat and stood with his hands crammed into his jacket pockets. Corinne remembered when he had been a gangly teenager, with pimples and hunched shoulders. He used to stand the exact same way, even though military school was supposed to train that sort of posture out of its students.

“Gabriel's taking me home,” she said. “I'm sick.”

She didn't bother pretending to be sick. They had already escaped. It wasn't like he could drag her back in.

“You were just going to leave?” he asked. “You've been avoiding me all night.”

The valet had opened her door. Gabriel was hovering uncertainly beside her, and she waved for him to get into the car. Phillip wore an expression that Corinne hadn't seen on him before. He looked wounded.

“I told you, I'm sick,” she said. She didn't know what else he wanted from her. She had been on her best behavior all night—the rat incident aside, but he didn't know that was her.

“I told Mother not to invite Hamish.”

“I don't give a fig about Hamish,” she said. “Go back to your party. I'll see you at the wedding.”

She climbed into the car, thinking only afterward that maybe she should have hugged him or congratulated him or something. Then the valet shut the door, Gabriel kicked the car into gear, and she'd lost her chance.

CHAPTER TWELVE