The Girls at the Kingfisher Club (24 page)

I worry for his health, and recommend you come as soon as you can. You seem a reasonable young woman, and I know you will understand the obligations of family.

He is asking you to come home.

twenty-six

Show Me the Way to Go Home

Jo stood on the front steps of her old home for the second time in her life.

It had been two months since she'd been chased out the front door by a man brandishing a weapon at her—a man who had now summoned his oldest daughter back to his side.

But the woman standing on the steps was different from the one who had staggered down them, nearly blind with panic and unable to do anything but run for her life before the truck came to carry her away.

“Should I come in with you?” asked the man at her side.

She looked at him and smiled. “That won't be necessary, I'm sure, Sergeant Carson. But thank you. I'll be down in no time.”

Van de Maar was waiting for her at the threshold, looking remarkably like Walters.

“Miss Hamilton,” he said.

“Mr. van de Maar. I trust this won't take long? I don't want to leave my associate waiting.”

“Not at all,” said van de Maar, with a glance at Carson's uniform.

“Shout if you need me, Miss Hamilton,” said Carson, fixing van de Maar with a level look. “I'll have my ear out.”

Then Jo smiled in earnest.

“Sergeant, if I need you, you'll hear it for miles.”

• • •

“You look well, Miss Hamilton,” said van de Maar when he'd closed the door and it was just the two of them in the foyer of the house.

“Thank you,” she said, and tugged the cuffs of the mustard-colored dress out from under her coat. She refused to be in anything that looked like mourning—not today.

“You've been all right, then?”

If this was his way of drawing her out, he didn't know how to do it very well.

She said, “No doubt it's just the benefit of sunlight and some clothes that can be bought in person.”

He didn't have an answer for that, and before the silence got strained, she went on. “I'm glad to see you again. I've wanted to thank you for the help you gave a while back.”

“Please,” he said, looking uncomfortable. “It was nothing.”

“Not to me,” she said.

“Don't mention it,” he said. He glanced at the door.

It took her a moment to realize why he was uncomfortable; he didn't want her father to think he'd had a hand in her escape.

She spared him. Sometimes a good deed done out of bewilderment and disbelief was still a good deed, and there was no need to force the other party to agree.

“You said my father wanted to see me,” she said. “What about?”

“Well, he'd like to speak with you himself, of course,” said van de Maar, taking a step toward the stairs and offering his arm.

“And he may,” she said. “As soon as you've told me what this is about. You didn't specify when we spoke on the phone what exactly he wants to discuss, and my father has not earned any trust from his daughters.”

“Well, your father—”

“Mr. van de Maar, the days of me walking blindly into my father's offices are over.”

Van de Maar looked truly taken aback, and she wondered what her father had told him to expect, that a daughter who disliked him could be such an unpleasant surprise.

“Your father is dying, Miss Hamilton,” he said at last. “He wishes to speak with you.”

He said it with all the gravity he could possibly want the words to carry, as if the statement would shatter her composure.

Instead she thought, I wonder if this is an illness that came on slowly, or if he had a heart attack after he tried to beat me.

She asked, “Is he alone?”

“A nurse is with him,” said van de Maar. “I'm happy to accompany you, if you'd like.”

“Do you already know what he's going to tell me?”

After a pause, he nodded.

“Then there's no need,” she said. “I'll see him myself, thank you.”

She took the stairs, and paused on the landing for a moment before she heard rustling from one of the doors, halfway down the hall on the right-hand side.

It was the bedroom directly under Rose and Lily's, and Jo was grateful those girls were so quiet. It might have gone wrong for them sooner, if it had been Rebecca and Araminta bickering over his head.

(It was across the hall from the clean, quiet room that Jo had entered only once, long ago, to look for their mother.)

She knocked at the closed door. A moment later, a nurse answered.

“Miss Hamilton?”

“Yes.”

The nurse beamed. “He's been expecting you all morning,” she said. “Please come in.”

Jo stepped inside and froze in the doorway as her eyes adjusted. The curtains were drawn tight, and her father was just a shadow under the covers of his dark-wood bed.

“I'll leave you two alone,” the nurse said.

“No,” Jo said, too loud. “Stay. Thank you.”

The nurse hesitated in the doorway, and Jo took one step closer, then another, until she could see her father's face.

He looked sweltering under the blankets, his face strained. It was the first time she'd ever seen him less than able, and it made her uncomfortable, as if she was spying.

His arms were folded on top of the coverlet, and his limp fingers under thin skin seemed a good twenty years older than the hands that had curled around his cane as he moved to attack her.

It was unfair that he would call her back now, when she would be tempted to pity him.

“Father,” she said, “you asked to see me.”

He opened his eyes, and she saw that no matter what else had happened to him, his mind was still as sharp as ever.

“Where are your sisters? What is this? Did you come alone?”

“I've brought a police sergeant with me,” she said. “He's waiting downstairs. None of my sisters have come, or will.”

Behind them, the nurse sucked in a quiet breath. Jo could almost see the thought forming in the nurse's mind: What an ungrateful daughter.

But her father hadn't forgotten the promise she'd made about his never laying eyes on any of her sisters again, and he grimaced.

“I suppose you didn't tell them,” he said. “You didn't even have the decency to tell your sisters that their father is dying and asking to see his children again—”

“They know.”

He faltered, but even now that wasn't nearly enough to throw him.

“Well. I suppose I should expect that. I can't imagine what terrible things you've told them about me, during all those years.”

The years they were upstairs, he meant. The years he'd held on to them. Jo waited with clammy hands for him to say it, to admit it at last.

But he had stopped for breath, and she realized he was going to go no farther.

“No,” said Jo, her voice steady, “you can't imagine.”

He flinched.

“Josephine,” he said, “I thought you would be ready to put all this behind us.”

She raised her eyebrows. “Then I hope that this isn't the only reason you asked me here, or you've wasted our time.”

Behind them, the nurse shifted her weight.

He let that sink in for a moment.

Then he said, “I would never have believed, before this moment, that any of my children could be so poisonous.”

Jo knew better than to listen—the word was meant to cut her, and she couldn't let it—but part of her was sorry, very sorry, that this was how her father had chosen to make his case, at the last twilight of his life, for her loyalty.

(He seemed like a stranger, just for a heartbeat; it was a comfort.)

“Sir,” she said, “why did you ask me to come?”

He huffed a laugh that rattled into a cough, and the nurse took a step forward, thought better of it, and hesitated.

Jo waited him out.

When he recovered, he took a deep breath. “I wanted to talk to you about my will,” he said.

He turned his head to better fix his eyes on her, as if waiting for her to change her tune.

She thought about all the money her father must have made in those years. The girls could make use of that sort of money—of any sort of money. If he was trying to apologize to family with his pocketbook, he wouldn't be the first man to have tried and succeeded.

But then she thought about all the money he had doled out to them one begrudging dollar at a time, and the money he'd been willing to take as payment for his daughters' hands in marriage, and the money he had been willing to part with to lock them all in an institution, just for defying him.

“I see,” she said.

Her voice was sharp. It snapped on the “S.”

He shook his head. “I didn't want it to come to this, Jo. I don't understand how you can stand there so cold, knowing what's happened between us.”

The nurse let out a breath.

“I know what's happened,” Jo said. “So do you. It's why there's a policeman downstairs. If you're trying to get an apology out of me in exchange for my name in your will, then I'm only sorry you called for me at all.”

Her father pulled his lips back from his teeth. “Josephine. What's happened to you, that you speak this way to me?”

Jo was trembling so hard she had to set her jaw against her rattling teeth.

“Eight years of dancing at night,” she said, and tried to smile. “It does wonders for the constitution. Once you're free to take it into the streets, there's no telling what happens.”

He blinked.

“Eight years,” he breathed. “Eight years, you were defying me.”

“I hope I was,” she said.

It was too close to an admission. She breathed in and out, slowly; her throat was tight.

There was a long silence. Jo refused to do so much as shift her weight until he spoke again. She had been too well trained to stand in her father's presence to break those habits now.

Her father closed his eyes.

“And have you—are they all right? How is Ella, have you seen her?”

Oh God, she thought, this was even worse. She could have hated him cleanly if he hadn't been worrying over them; now it was all awful.

“They're well. Thriving. Now.”

His expression hardened.

“Well, I'm leaving my share of the business and my personal interests to van de Maar,” he said. “The full estate will go to him. I've signed the will already, it's all sorted. What do you think of that?”

And there it was.

A will already signed, a decision already made, and this whole conversation with this news lying in wait, whenever he needed it to sting.

She smiled thinly.

“I think you must have been agonizing over whether or not I would come here so you could tell me that.”

She passed the stricken nurse and made it to the door before she heard, “What will you do now?”

His voice was softer now, and brittle, the voice of a man whose pride was slipping.

Jo missed, suddenly, a father she'd never had. She wrenched the idea apart from the man as fast as she could, but still she ached.

“We'll be happy,” she said. Her voice came out steadier than she felt. “Good-bye, sir. I hope you feel better soon.”

She turned and went into the hall before he could answer; suddenly, she was feeling weak enough to return to him if he called.

Then, almost out of habit, Jo went upstairs.

It was eerie to be there when no one else was. She'd never been near these floors when they were empty—they lived together, they left together, always.

She moved in and out of their old rooms like a ghost. The dust had hardly settled, which surprised her. It felt as though she'd been away for ages.

In each of the rooms there was a small thing that felt most as if it had been left behind. She picked them up, until there were more things than she could carry, and her arms were laden with ratted-out ribbons from dead pairs of shoes and empty tins of rouge and a music box that had long ago gone out of tune.

On her still-made bed with its layer of dust, she rolled all the trinkets into the black dress she had worn a lifetime ago and tied the package closed with one of Sophie's blue ribbons.

There was nothing for Lou. Lou had left nothing to take. The room was as if she'd never lived in it.

She stood still for a moment, until the grief passed and she could move.

• • •

Van de Maar was waiting at the door to the study when she came down the stairs again; a document was unfolded on the desk behind him.

“Have you reconciled?” he asked, half-hopeful.

“No, sir,” she said. “He said the estate would go to you, and I understand.”

He looked pleased enough that she thought about one last advantage, and added as though it was an order from her father, “I should take nothing but these mementos from our old rooms, and the letters from my sister.”

He nodded, unsurprised, and a moment later he was returning from inside the study with three letters. One of them had never even been opened.

Jo held her breath as he handed them over; when she took them, she forced a smile.

“Thank you again for all you've done,” she said. “I'll never forget it.”

Her footsteps echoed in the foyer as if she was comfortable there, as if it had always been her home. Strange how things sounded, sometimes.

Sergeant Carson was waiting for her on the front stairs and fell into step beside her as they walked out to the waiting car; he cast one dark look back at the door, as if wanting to make sure he had at least done something threatening, since he had come all this way.

Jo felt the press of the package between her ribs and the crook of her elbow. Two dollars' worth of cast-offs, folded so small that she carried it under one arm, weightless.

As inheritances went, she thought, this was enough.

• • •

At home in the little studio above the Marquee, Jo opened the letters from Lou as if they were so old they would crumble.

The first one had obviously been written for their father's benefit, in case he felt like reading something out loud for the amusement of the others—the language didn't even sound like hers. “Beautiful sunsets.” “The sweetest hotel, with fresh lemonade.”