handle Overton.” Blossom forces a gallows smile. “You’ve seen me do it, it’s better than fully staged Wagner. Now if I were you, I’d vanish in a pounding big hurry, honey.”
There’s nothing to be done. I leave her standing there, with her hand wrapped like a raven’s talons around the letter I found. I walk to my room. My heart finding new places to crack for the entire journey, the way even a crumbling ruin can still muster the energy to drop a fresh hail of stones. Locking my door, I spend a moment blinking stupidly.
It’s what I liked about you, I hear her spitting.
Liked. Before I read a letter and smashed her trust.
No. One letter and a few bonus sentences. More’s the pity, because the latter were terribly interesting.
And it’s after reflecting on these aforementioned missives—about a dreamed-of farm, about needed money—that I wonder just who was admiring to pay whom, and what an unusual “arrangement” could mean.
And what could it possibly have to do with Davy? Nothing at all?
These people adore the tyke, and it isn’t as if nowadays you can go around selling kids like they’re puppies.
It’s too wrong to contemplate. But why was Davy angry at Rooster before disappearing? And if Blossom knows all about Miss Christina’s secret and wants it left alone, same as Max, what can a white interloper do save to shut up and move along?
My thoughts disintegrate. Curling up on the coverlet, I soak my nest with my sorrows. The tears come bitter and strong and thick.
Liked. So we aren’t chums anymore.
She was wonderful. She glowed as bright as anybody, and she even looked for your eyes when she smiled.
Alice’s, if she still exists.
Not Nobody’s.
And you didn’t even get to tell her about kissing Max.
* * *
—
When I awaken, the sky is rotting from purple to black. The comforting rhythm of the rain is absent. But the stars are out—watchful and arrogantly bright.
The short rest revived me. Rising, I wash my face. Don a plain beige pocketed frock with a square collar, wrap up my hair, dab powder under still-swollen eyes. I regard Nobody the spinster suffragette and frown—I’m about as far away from professional journalism as Blossom is from the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union. Granted, I’ve been scribbling all-too-real data and observations in her prop notebook. Whether as proof should Overton ask to see it, or as an aid to my own memory, I can’t rightly tell. But I simply cannot commit any of these new aspects to indelible ink.
Miss Christina is hiding something. Rooster had a quarrel with Davy. And Blossom . . .
Blossom needs money. Very, very badly.
All thoughts of slinking away, slither-swish, are quashed. There’s too much at stake. There’s a missing boy and a band of good people and a populace being bullied.
There’s Maximilian Burton. And his lips tasted like almonds and rain and clean smoke.
My entire body still glimmers. But now isn’t the time; what I need is a heart-to-heart with Jenny Kiona. She’ll be happy as a veritable daisy in the field if I confess Blossom and I scrapped, even if I fail to discuss details. And she’s closer to Blossom than just about anyone other than Max and Mavereen.
That’s the ticket, now join the queue and step onto the carousel.
Fearful of another quarrel, I take the stairs. When I arrive in the nearly deserted lobby, Rooster is reading a newspaper, glancing every third second at the revolving doors. Whatever else can be said about the man, shirking isn’t his strong suit. He spies me at once, and I give an apologetic wave.
Rooster finds that he prefers the sight of the printed word.
Then the circular door turns. No—it blasts into orbit, churns dizzily, it makes the jazziest display of revolving that ever a lobby door did, and I flinch in alarm until it spits out Mrs. Evelina Vaughan.
She looks better than when last I saw her—but if it were a race, it would be by a nose. Her pastel features are less hectic, but her cheeks have sunken. Her yellow pleated coat is charming, but the body beneath can’t catch its breath. Her apricot waves are piled atop her head, but it looks like she employed two minutes and a fork on the project.
Mrs. Vaughan’s eyes gleam like grey pearls. She’s crying. Everybody and their maiden aunt seem to be crying these days.
“Oh!” she gasps. “Miss . . . James, was it? Were you at my house? Or did I imagine that?”
I shift into the