The Lucky Ones (Bright Young Things 3) Read online

  “How,” Letty said, mimicking his hand gesture.

  “How,” he replied with a laugh. “I am glad to see you still blush,” he went on, and the tone of his voice told her that he wasn’t angry anymore. “It’s a telltale sign that you’re still human, no matter the company you keep.”

  “Oh.” Wishing she could stop blushing now, Letty placed a palm on her cheek.

  “I’m sorry. Did that sound harsh? It was a pretentious thing to say. I only meant that I read about your ascent almost every day.”

  “It can’t be every day.” Averting her gaze, Letty caught a glimpse of Sophia, watching her from the sofa. “I certainly haven’t done anything to deserve that kind of attention.”

  “Perhaps the current coverage is an advance on your future activities. I’d like to think I’m the only one who knows you’re special, but that doesn’t seem very likely.” Saying this, Grady smiled, almost sadly, and put his hands deeper into the pockets of his trousers.

  The flattery sent a pleasant ripple over the naked skin of Letty’s arms that lasted until she saw the sadness persisting in his deep-set gray eyes. “Are you courting Peachy Whitburn now?” she asked awkwardly. “I saw you together that time at The Vault, and you seemed so happy together.”

  “Oh, yes—Peachy,” he replied without sounding any happier. “I suppose I ought to marry her. Everyone says I should.”

  Letty was almost pleased now to see that he didn’t really want to marry Peachy Whitburn, but then she remembered Sophia’s most recent instruction, that she should try to pick out the most important man in the room, and she felt a touch ashamed to think that she had occupied herself with the one fellow present she knew for certain couldn’t get her a part. Guiltily, she turned to see what Sophia thought of her now—but her guilt was washed away by surprise when she realized that Sophia was no longer on the sofa near the polar bear rug.

  She shrank a little at the thought that Sophia had gotten miffed with her and left the party. How alone she would be if that were the case—and in a room like this one, it was as terrifying a thought as she’d had in weeks. Stepping away from Grady and toward the center of music and chatter, she craned her neck in search of her mentor and saw women in every shade but turquoise.

  By the time she spotted Sophia’s waterfall of a dress, Letty had drifted from the balustrade to the doorway to the grand ballroom. But suddenly Letty wasn’t sure if the woman was Sophia at all. An arm clothed in red velvet was wrapped around the woman’s waist, and the hand that emerged from that same red velvet was rested familiarly on the upper flank of her thigh.

  “Grady, will you excuse me just a moment?” Letty murmured as she moved back into the room. He answered, but Letty wasn’t sure she heard all of the words, because at just that moment the woman turned and Letty saw for sure that it was Sophia. Her face was shining up at the man in the red velvet smoking jacket, showing him a daffy smile. He wasn’t handsome exactly, but he had large, carved features, and his body was big, as though he played a lot of sports and ate a lot of meat. He was important, that was obvious, and he was old enough that his hair was going gray. Old enough that he might have been Letty’s father, or Sophia’s.

  As she moved to follow them through the crowd, Letty realized that the man in the red jacket was their host, Jack Montrose, and that Sophia must have gone to him because she wasn’t feeling well. That was why he was holding her close; she could no longer stand on her own, and he was taking her somewhere she could rest. They were passing through a doorway on the far side of the ballroom, and Letty had almost caught up when a black tuxedo jacket blocked her way.

  “Letty Larkspur!”

  She glanced up at the fair, beaming face of Laurence Peters. “I can’t talk right now,” she said quickly.

  “Talk—who wants to talk?” He guffawed good-naturedly and picked up one of her hands as though he meant to waltz her across the floor. “There’s some real second-rate dancing going on over there, and I thought we could show ’em how it’s done.”

  “No, I—” Letty glanced back and saw that Grady was framed in the doorway to the terrace, looking at her. She knew how she must appear right now, in that bright, flimsy dress, with Laurence almost ready to pick her up off the floor. But she couldn’t think about that. The woman who had taken her under wing and promised to teach her everything she knew had fallen ill, and Letty had to help her.

  “Miss Larkspur, I know I’m not as big as Valentine or Sophia.” Laurence’s brow had somehow or other gotten stormy, and his mouth puckered. “But I don’t think that’s any reason for you to treat me badly.”

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to.” Letty pulled away—already she had lost sight of Sophia and Jack Montrose. “But you’ll have to excuse me now.”

  “Well, I expect you to make it up to me!” Laurence called after her, but by then she was turning the corner where she’d last seen Sophia draped over Jack Montrose’s arm. Through the doorway was a dimly lit hall, which Letty hurried down. After it turned, she could scarcely hear the party anymore, and she came to two doors that faced each other. Sophia must have gone behind one of these. Letty went to one and knocked timidly. There was no reply, and she had just turned toward the other when she heard a low moan from within, as though Sophia were in pain.

  “Sophia!” Letty gasped and knocked on the door.

  No one answered, but there was a sound as though someone was being pushed against the door from the other side, and another moan. Letty’s heart quivered. She raised her hand and knocked harder. “Sophia!”

  The noises stopped, and then the door opened a crack.

  “What?” Jack Montrose’s cheeks were ruddier than before, and his tie was undone, and she knew right away that he was angry. She swallowed and forced herself to hold his gaze.

  “Where’s Sophia?” she said wildly. “Is she all right?”

  He stared at her, almost quizzically, and then a smile crept across the lower part of his face. The smile was much worse than the scowl it replaced, and for a moment Letty felt as rotten and small and sad as on the night she’d almost been duped into performing at a stag party, when a room full of men had wolf-called her and demanded that she remove her clothes.

  “She’s indisposed. That’s all.” He said it slowly, drawing each word out lasciviously, so that they both knew it was a lie. “I’m taking care of her. She’ll be better in a minute.”

  The door slammed shut before Letty could say anything more. She stumbled backward, shocked to the core by this irrefutable evidence that a woman might have the love of Valentine O’Dell and still seek amorous attention elsewhere. If more sounds came from inside the room, she didn’t want to hear them. She wished that Sophia would emerge and explain that it wasn’t what it looked like at all, but she didn’t, and after a while Letty hung her head and began to move slowly back toward the party. All she could think of was Valentine, how anonymous he had been as he walked away from them along the sidewalk, and how impossible it was going to be to keep what she had seen Sophia doing from him.

  6

  IT WAS THE HEAT THAT WOKE CORDELIA. SHE ROLLED over in the twist of her sheets and saw that the maid had been there. A polished wood standing tray had been erected, and there was a pot of coffee and a carafe of orange juice waiting for her. The newspaper had not come with the rest of the breakfast things, and for a moment she felt short-tempered with Milly, who never could seem to concentrate on a single thing at a time long enough to do it right and ought to know by now how Cordelia liked to start her morning.

  But then she remembered how hard Milly had taken it about Danny, who died from bullet wounds the night Astrid was kidnapped, and also how busy Astrid kept her now that she lived at Dogwood, and decided that there was no use in being irritated. The Vault had been full last night, and Max Darby loved her—at least, she was pretty sure he’d thought it. Anyway, that habit of newspaper reading, of trying to learn about the world from smudgy broadsheets, seemed like a relic of her old life. Especially w
hen she stood up and walked across the thick white carpets, past the low, fashionable white furniture of the Calla Lily Suite—which even now was stocked daily with fresh deliveries of its namesake flower—and peeked down on the rolling landscape of soft green velvet that was Dogwood’s west lawn. She was looking at her father’s vision of what life ought to be, and she knew that she had found it, too.

  With a sigh of satisfaction, Cordelia determined to go find Charlie and tell him how well they had done the night before. It was a fine thing to have a brother, and though they never needed to say it out loud, they could glance at each and silently know how proud Darius would have been of them. She stepped into a pair of wide-legged trousers and an ivory camisole that fluttered at the neckline, and pinned her hair away from her face so that the skin of her neck would remain as cool as possible. Then she poured herself a cup of coffee and went downstairs.

  As she came onto the second-floor landing, she saw Keller, one of Charlie’s boys, coming out of the billiards room, and she smiled brightly. “Morning,” she said.

  He averted his eyes. “Afternoon now.”

  Before she could reply, he was past her down the stairs.

  “Is something wrong with Keller?” she asked as she walked into Charlie’s office and sank into the big chair opposite his desk.

  He was facing the window and didn’t turn around to look at her right away. Outside, the sky was hazing over, and she wondered if more rain wasn’t on the way.

  “Who?”

  “Keller! The new man. The one who can’t seem to grow a beard.” A few seconds passed without a response from Charlie, and her fine mood began to flicker. She wanted Charlie to feel as light with good fortune as she did, but he wouldn’t even look at her.

  “Nothing is wrong. He just didn’t get much sleep last night, and I expect he’s feeling it today.” The chair groaned when Charlie took his feet off the sill and began to slowly swivel.

  “Charlie!” she exclaimed, once he was facing her. “You look like hell. You might think about getting more sleep yourself.”

  He smiled thinly and lit a cigarette before putting his oxfords up on the desk. “Dad never slept,” Charlie said after a while.

  “He didn’t?”

  “Said he didn’t like it. Said when he slept he just mostly tossed and turned and worried he was missing something.”

  “Doesn’t mean he wouldn’t have wanted you to.”

  The focus of Charlie’s eyes drifted and became indistinct. They were milky, tired eyes, and the skin beneath them had a punched-out quality. “He would have wanted you to sleep. He always said you were just as pretty as your mother, and just as precious, and that you should be pampered the way he wasn’t able to pamper Fanny when she was alive.” He held the cigarette between his index finger and thumb, contemplating it. “I have one memory of her, did I ever tell you?”

  Cordelia took in a breath. “No, you didn’t.”

  “Well, it’s not a memory so much. More like a picture in my mind of a shack somewhere, probably some hideout of Dad’s, and they were listening to the radio and dancing. Duluth Hale was there, it was when they were still friends, and I can remember his fat face with its big gaping pie-hole, and dancing around Mrs. Hale, and everyone laughed a lot.”

  “That sounds nice,” Cordelia said with a smile. She hadn’t known that Duluth Hale and her father had been friends like that, but it didn’t sound so bad, now that she was hearing it.

  “They were probably drunk, and Dad probably smacked me later and told me I should have come from a nice, pretty girl like Fanny instead of the no-good one I actually crawled out of.”

  Charlie still wouldn’t meet Cordelia’s eyes, and she was somewhat glad of this, because her face had grown long. She didn’t like to think that there was any difference between her and Charlie, or that their father could have said a mean thing like that. But she didn’t have to conjure a reply, because Elias Jones came in then and walked straight for the desk.

  “Cordelia, I need to talk to Charlie.” The way he spoke, Cordelia knew he meant alone.

  “Of course.” She stood up awkwardly, glad to go but also wishing she could have thought of something to say to her brother.

  “I’ll want to talk to you, too. Later.”

  She nodded and, after a few seconds of unsuccessfully trying to catch Charlie’s eye, went out of the room.

  The dark mahogany of the second-floor landing had an icing of pale blue light from the skylight high above, and Cordelia paused, staring at it, wondering why she felt so ill at ease. She had seen Charlie in foul moods before, and there were always things that Jones wanted to discuss with him alone. For a while she hovered there, frozen, unsure whether to go back to her room or downstairs. Then the door to the billiard room opened and one of the boys came out. He paused when he saw Cordelia, and then his eyelids half sank and his mouth curled in a funny way.

  “What?” she demanded indignantly.

  But he only shrugged and went down, taking the stairs two at a time. The door to the billiard room was ajar and she paused for a moment in the door frame, as though she might catch someone doing something that would explain the pall that hung over Dogwood. But there was only one person left in the room—Victor, Astrid’s bodyguard, sitting on the worn sofa by the window, his legs crossed and a newspaper open in front of him.

  “Miss Cordelia.” He stood up when he saw her and put the paper away.

  “Where’s Astrid?”

  “I don’t know, I haven’t seen her all morning, is she all right?” He said it too quickly, then afterward cracked his knuckles as though he was embarrassed.

  “I suppose there’s nothing strange about her being in bed past noon,” Cordelia replied slowly. “That’s how she was brought up.”

  “Right.” Victor cleared his throat. “Of course.”

  “Victor, what’s wrong?”

  “They didn’t tell you?”

  “Tell me what?”

  But before he could reply, she heard her name being said on the radio, and she forgot about Victor and charged toward the droning sound.

  “…ever since Miss Grey entered the young pilot’s life, his golden touch seemed compromised. Whereas before he was incapable of doing wrong, now he erred, his interest in flying went slack, and though he was reputed never to touch alcohol, he was spotted in clubs where drinking was known to be the main draw. Of course, there were many in the sporting world who thought he would return to form once the bootlegger’s daughter was out of his life, but as was reported in the Night Owl column this morning, it appears they’ve been seeing each other regularly, that in fact Cordelia was visiting Max Darby in his mother’s Harlem apartment and was apparently in on the secret that he was a Negro by birth…”

  Cordelia’s eyes rolled slowly toward Victor. Her face was numb, and she couldn’t begin to think of what to say. “It’s in the paper, too, isn’t it?”

  “I don’t know—”

  “Never mind.” She crossed toward him and snatched the paper out of his hand and flipped to the gossip section. There, taking up almost a quarter of the page, was a photo of her and Max stepping out of Mrs. Darby’s apartment, and then a smaller one of Max the next morning saying good-bye to his mother on the street. In the black-and-white photo the difference in their skin tone was exaggerated, but you could perfectly see the family resemblance.

  After that she was deaf to the radio and the ceiling fan and anything Victor might have tried to say to her.

  “If Jones comes looking for me, tell him I’ve gone on a long walk.”

  She didn’t gauge Victor’s reaction. By the time the last word was out of her mouth she was at the door, and shortly thereafter she had arrived in the first-floor library, where she asked to be connected to the Hudson Laurels’ place.

  “Mrs. Hudson Laurel’s line.” It was a strange, prim voice, and though Cordelia had never met Max’s patrons, she sensed that this was a secretary and not the lady of the house herself.

 
“Is Max at home?”

  “I’m sorry.” There was a long pause. “I don’t know who you’re talking about.”

  Cordelia’s eyes sank closed, and she set her teeth. The horrid coldness of this statement made her want to lash out, but she knew that wouldn’t help her any. All that mattered in that moment was finding Max. “Yes,” she said evenly, “you do.”

  On the other end of the line there was a sharp exhalation. “Well, he’s not here. Mrs. Laurel can’t have him in the house anymore. He was like a member of the family, you know, and that just wouldn’t do anymore. She was a suffragette! She’s still sore they got the vote before we did.”

  Cordelia put her forehead into her palm, and then drew her long fingers across her face until they were massaging her temples. “Please,” she whispered. “Please just tell me where he is.”

  After a long pause the woman went on in a changed tone. “There only ever was one place he seemed to like going. Mr. and Mrs. Laurel had a terrible row this morning, and I suppose he hasn’t had the heart to tell the boy that he won’t be able to fund him anymore.”

  “Thank you.” Cordelia put the receiver down and allowed herself one long moment with her eyelids pressed closed. After that, instinct took over. She drove fast toward the gates, ignoring the shouting of the guard who wanted to know where she was going and if Charlie had approved it. Ignoring him was easy, because she could barely hear anything over her self-recriminating thoughts.

  When Letty cracked an eye she saw that the light filtering in through the window was not yet strong. It cast the white expanse of wall next to her with the pale greenish color of six A.M., which meant that she was already late in getting up and that her father would be coming soon to rouse her. She burrowed deeper and closed her eyes and wished she could stay like that a while longer instead of going to the dairy. She pulled the sheet up close to her chin and let the silkiness settle over her, so that its cool surface caressed her skin. It was the silk sheet that jolted her. She opened both eyes again and blinked, remembering that she wasn’t in Union at all but in Manhattan, in the home of movie stars, one of whom she’d witnessed disappearing into a room with a man who was not her husband.