Iron Cast (43 page)

“I know.”

They were both quiet for a long while. Corinne could hear the mechanical sputtering and coughs of the car as it was cranked to life outside. If there was more to say, she couldn't think of what it might possibly be. She had the thought that she might not ever see Gabriel Stone again after tonight. She couldn't decide how she felt about that. She couldn't decide how she felt about anything right now. Her head hurt so badly.

She massaged her temples and sighed. “You and Charlie drop Jackson off at the station and take Saint to the Red Cat,” she told Gabriel. “Ada and I will be there later.”

The lines in his forehead deepened, and he took a step forward.

“You two can't just go off alone,” he said. “The HPA is still looking for you.”

“Let's get something straight,” Corinne said. The flaring anger in her chest was easier than her other conflicted feelings, and she latched onto it. “You don't get a say in how we conduct our affairs. Normally I would tell you that New York is a pit of despair where dreams go to die, but maybe it's for the best if you take your mother and go.”

She didn't relish the hurt that registered in his features, and she hated herself for the words as soon as they left her mouth, but she didn't take them back. It didn't matter how sorry he was. Madeline was gone. Nothing would ever be the same again. She turned away before she could reconsider and walked out of the warehouse.

Ada followed Corinne without hesitation. Corinne didn't say where they were going, but it didn't seem to matter anymore. They were
in step again, in the way that drew everything into sharp relief, in the way that balanced the world. The night was still clear, with a raw wind blowing from the east, howling through the streets. Their skirts blew about their knees as they walked. They didn't pass many pedestrians on their way, and the farther into the financial district they went, the more deserted the streets became.

“We've made a balled-up mess of things, haven't we?” Corinne hugged herself and pressed her chin against her chest.

“Johnny used us,” Ada said. “We couldn't have known that all he cared about was the money.”

“We could have seen it,” Corinne said. “If we'd wanted to.”

The bitterness in her voice was impossible to miss. Ada had to listen harder to catch the wounded strains underneath. Ada thought about her mother's last admonition and nodded.

“You're right.”

Corinne stopped walking and squinted up at the buildings around them.

“It was right here,” she said.

“What was?”

“Our first con together.”

Corinne dropped down to sit on the curb, mindless of the freezing concrete and the remnants of snow packed in the gutter. After a few seconds Ada sat down beside her. They were across the street from the Oriental Tea Company, with its giant teakettle sign over the front door. Steam drifted from the spout in ghostly whorls.

“You jumbled the lines to ‘Song of the Moon' and lost the illusion halfway through,” Ada said.

“Only because I was distracted by your pitiful attempt at Beethoven.”

“Tchaikovsky, actually.”

“My point.”

Ada laughed. She nudged her shoulder against Corinne's, and Corinne nudged her back.

“Damn, we were good, though, by the end,” Corinne said.

The way she said it made Ada realize where the conversation was really headed. Corinne had rested her head on Ada's shoulder. She was picking at a loose thread on her navy-blue dress, unraveling the seam stitch by stitch.

“Do you remember what it felt like, when it actually worked that first time?” Corinne asked.

Ada watched a light in an upstairs window across the street flicker off. She listened to the sound of distant motors revving, carrying people to their homes. One block over, a trolley whirred its way down the icy tracks.

“Not really,” she said. She remembered the pride that had welled inside her when Johnny had handed her that first stack of cash. She remembered the look on her mother's face when she'd seen her new apartment for the first time. She spent every day of her life trying to forget all the rest.

“I do,” Corinne said, in a distant voice. “It was like we were invincible. I guess Johnny probably knew that.”

Looking back, knowing what she knew about Johnny, Ada could see the patterns now. The way he'd used their dependence on the Cast Iron against them, how he had made sure the danger of the HPA was close but not too close, how he had whittled away their ties to their old lives until they'd felt they had no choice but to trust him. No choice but to lose themselves in the thrill and glamour of the Cast Iron's underworld.

It wasn't all Johnny's doing, though. Ada knew that after her father was arrested, a part of her wanted to be lost. Pretending she
didn't have a choice was easier than admitting that she had made the wrong one.

“I don't know if we can do better,” she said, resting her cheek against Corinne's head. “But I think we should try.”

“How?” Corinne asked. “Even if we could somehow set the Cast Iron to rights, we still have the HPA after us. And what about Haversham? We can't just abandon those people to Dr. Knox and his sick experiments.”

Before Ada could remind Corinne that she was always the one with the brilliant plans, an idea came to her. She stood up and pulled Corinne to her feet.

“I know something we can try,” Ada said. “You're going to hate it, though.”

“Try me.”

“How did you leave things with your brother?”

Corinne groaned. “You're right. I hate it.”

Ada laughed and wrapped an arm around her shoulder. They headed south, in the direction of the Red Cat, leaving the sleepy quiet of the financial district behind them.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

The day after the Wells-Haversham wedding, which was the headline of all the society pages and the talk of all the country clubs, Phillip Wells followed the handwritten directions his sister had given him to a building between the South End and the theater district. Corinne met him at the door and let him inside. He didn't say much, just stood in the empty club and stared at the lonely microphone on the stage.

“What did you tell Angela?” Corinne asked.

She moved behind the bar, still watching her brother as he walked the length of the Cast Iron, his hands shoved into his pockets. It was strange, having him here. Two parts of her life that were never supposed to meet had collided.

“I told her that my sister left me a mysterious urgent note to meet her at one of the most notorious hemopath clubs in town,” Phillip said. He had stepped between two tables to examine one of the framed photos hanging on the wall—Johnny shaking hands with his predecessor.

Corinne thought he was joking at first, but then he turned and she saw the frank expression on his features.

“Wait, you told her the truth?”

“Of course I did.”

“Did you tell her about going to Haversham too?”

“She's my wife,” Phillip said, speaking slowly, as if Corinne might not understand otherwise. “I love her, and I trust her. So yes, I told her about the asylum.”

It had never occurred to Corinne before that her brother might love Angela. She had always guessed that the entire arrangement was some kind of political agenda. She felt the sudden need to apologize for thinking of him in such ungenerous terms. That urge confused her even more, so finally she gave up thinking about it and dug out the bottle of cognac to fix them each a sidecar.

“So what is it?” Phillip asked once he had come to sit across from her at the bar. He accepted the drink but eyed it doubtfully, swirling the amber liquid in the glass.

Corinne had considered a hundred different ways of approaching the subject with Phillip. She had talked through all of them with Ada the night before, weighing each argument, trying to decide which would convince him to help. In the end, Corinne knew that she just had to say it.

“I need you to talk to Mr. Haversham and get him to stop the experiments at the asylum.”

It sounded so simple leaving her lips. As if all it would take was a memo from Mr. Haversham, and Dr. Knox would pack up his work and give all his victims proper burials.

Corinne wasn't a fool. She knew it wouldn't be that easy. But she also recognized, possibly for the first time, that she and Ada couldn't do it by themselves.

“I don't think I can do that,” Phillip said.

He finally took a sip of his cocktail. Corinne could read all over his face that his brief foray into the basement had left him scarred. Yet still he wouldn't help.

“I know you hate hemopaths,” Corinne said. “But what he's doing down there—”

“I don't hate hemopaths,” Phillip said, looking at her sharply. “Why would you say that?”

“Father always says your campaign platform is going to be—”

“Father says that,” Phillip said, interrupting her a second time. “I never have. Is that really what you've been thinking all these years?”

“You married into the family that's made its fortune torturing hemopaths, so it's not that much of a stretch.” Corinne slammed her glass down on the bar. Liquid sloshed onto her knuckles.

“I didn't know any of that was happening,” Phillip said. “Neither did Angela.”

He grabbed a towel from farther down the bar and handed it to her. Corinne accepted it, keeping her eyes on her brother.

“And now that you do?” she asked.

Phillip tapped his finger against the glass. He was quiet for a long while.

“I want to help you,” he said. “I just don't know what I can do. Angela's father is a businessman, not a humanitarian. If I go to him about this, he'll just tell me I have a bleeding heart.”

“What a lovely family you've hitched yourself to.”

Phillip shrugged. “Angela didn't choose her family.”

“I guess none of us did.”

Phillip's mouth curved into a bare smile, but there was sadness in it. “You remember the summers on Martha's Vineyard?” he asked. “You used to follow me around like a puppy. We'd search for sea glass together.”

Corinne's first impulse was a sarcastic reply, but it died in her throat. She could almost smell the salt spray again, feel the hot sand sticking to her skin as she knelt beside him at the edge of the surf. He was using a stick to gently nudge a starfish back into the oncoming tide. She'd thought for sure it was dead, but he assured her it wasn't.

“Chin up, young man,” he'd said to the pale-yellow star, sounding so much like their father that she'd wanted to giggle. “You've got a second chance to get it right.”

The cool water had rushed over their hands and knees, and when it rushed back into the sea, the starfish was gone. Phillip had laughed and put his heavy hand on her shoulder. Farther up the beach, their mother was calling them back for lunch, radiant in a blue dress and a white sun hat. For just that moment, Corinne had thought her life was perfect.

“I remember,” she said quietly.

Phillip absently rotated his glass in his hands, letting the liquor swirl almost to the lip.

“Then your second year at the Academy you stopped spending any time at home.”

“That's when I manifested and moved here,” Corinne said. “I haven't been back to school since then.”

Phillip surveyed the club's interior again with new dubiety. Then he took a long drink.

“I thought you'd hate me if you ever found out,” Corinne said. It cost her more than she would've thought to say those words, but she was glad that she had.

“I guess we don't really know each other that well, do we?” Phillip said.

“Guess not.”

Phillip rested his arms on the bar and looked at her.

“I know you've been on your own for a while now,” he said. “But we can be in this together, if you want to be. You're my sister, no matter what else you are.”

A slow smile spread across Corinne's face. “I think maybe you just found your campaign platform,” she said.

“What?”

“Mr. Haversham wants you to run for office, doesn't he? You leak to the press the story of me being taken to the asylum, of you coming to get me and seeing what's really going on there. You and Mr. Haversham can clean house, and you'll run on the platform of making Boston safe for everyone, even hemopaths.”

Phillip stared at her. “That sounds like a wonderful way to lose an election,” he said finally.

“You'll get the hemopath vote,” she said. “And once I give a few speeches to the reporters about how scared I was when they dragged me off the street without even charging me with a crime, and how happy I was when my big brother came to my rescue, then you'll get the vote of every half-decent family man in the city.”

Phillip set down his glass and rubbed the bridge of his nose as he weighed the possibilities.

“Everyone would know about you,” he said. “Couldn't they arrest you again?”