Iron Cast (3 page)

“What a waste of a good education.”

“That's funny coming from someone who thinks Walt Whitman is a brand of chocolate bar.” Corinne fiddled with the mirror for a few seconds, looking at the dark, empty road behind them. “Besides, I spent that time learning the first three cantos of the
Inferno
in the original Italian. A couple lines of Dante serve a wordsmith better than a year's worth of Latin conjugations.”

“Careful, Nurse Salem—we're not far from your namesake. They're probably still burning our type for being witches there.”

“Then you'd better be nice to me, or I'll be tempted to drop you off.”

“What could they possibly want with me?” Ada made a show of straightening her head scarf. “I'm but a simple escaped convict. You're the one taking the name of their beloved town in vain, as one of the most idiotic aliases in the history of crime.”

The familiar banter was like a tonic, keeping her exhaustion at bay. Haversham was retreating slowly from her thoughts as the aspirin eased the ache of her muscles.

“It wouldn't have been nearly as transparent if you hadn't started laughing like a fool.”

The car careened over a pothole, and Corinne had to hug the wheel to keep it steady. Ada braved a glance through the back window, but even in the moonlight, the road behind them disappeared almost immediately into darkness. Hidden behind hills and trees, Haversham wasn't even a distant glimmer anymore.

“You come in there with a name like Nurse Salem, and you want me to keep a straight face?” Ada asked, looking forward again.

“It really does mean
peace,
” muttered Corinne.

Ada laughed for only the second time in two weeks, a reckless, helpless laugh that rang over the rumbling of the wheels and the roar of the engine. After a few seconds, Corinne laughed too. Her fair skin was flushed a rosy pink. She rolled down the window and yanked off her blond wig, revealing her short brown hair, plastered with sweat. The blond braid flapped wildly, then was rushed away by the wind. The January cold dipped into the window, nipping at Ada's skin. She didn't mind, though.

She was going home.

CHAPTER TWO

The Cast Iron was a club on the corner of Clarendon and Appleton Streets, too close to the South End to be high-class but too close to the theater district to be disreputable. The current owner, a Mr. John Dervish, enjoyed skirting the line between the two. The building stood proud and alone, with only empty storefronts for neighbors and an abandoned bakery at its rear. A garish red door led into a dim corridor lined with mirrors. The heavy wooden door at the other end opened into the club proper, which boasted a long bar and tables of all shapes and sizes scattered around the room.

When Corinne and Ada walked in, arm in arm, just before seven, business was gearing up for the evening. There were only a few patrons scattered among the tables, nursing drinks and swaying to the sinuous melody of a lone pianist onstage. Ada reassured herself that her coat was buttoned over her Haversham-issued smock, just in case.

“Heya, kiddos,” said the bartender, glancing up from the glass he was drying. He was tall and lean, with salty hair and cheeks covered in grizzled stubble.

“Heya back, Danny,” said Corinne, tossing the car key onto the bar. “Be an absolute peach and get Johnny's car back to his garage?”

Danny looked down at the key, still polishing the glass with practiced flicks of his wrist. “I look like a chauffeur to you, Wells?”

Ada leaned across the bar and gave him a quick peck on the cheek. “I'll get you a cap, and you'll look mighty fine,” she told him.

Danny raised an eyebrow, with the look of a man determined
not to be moved. After a few seconds his face broke into a grin, revealing two gold teeth. “Ada Navarra, you incorrigible minx.”

“Five syllables, Danny? Where'd you learn that one?” Corinne asked, stretching over the counter beside Ada to nab a bottle of gin.

“Pain-in-the-ass girl I know,” he said. “Steals my alcohol and has apparently decided to take up nursing. By the way, that bottle's going on your tab, not mine. If those teetotalers get their way, I'm going to need every penny for my early retirement.”

“America is the land of liberty, Danny dearest,” Corinne said. “She won't stand for Prohibition, mark my words.”

Danny snorted and shook his head. “So you two dolls ever gonna tell me why the Cast Iron's best musician mysteriously vanished for two weeks and now you're both showing up looking like a couple of pawn shop mannequins?”

“Probably not,” said Corinne.

“Figured.”

Danny set down the glass on the worn wood of the counter and pocketed the key. Corinne headed toward the back, hugging the gin bottle. Ada reached over to pluck it from her arms and, ignoring Corinne's indignant protests, handed it back to Danny.

“Thanks, Ada,” Danny said. “Give your ma my regards.”

“Will do, Danny.”

Ada saluted the bartender and tugged a still-protesting Corinne through the doorway at the other end of the hall. The narrow stairs went down half a level to the storage room, which was stacked with crates of liquor, boxes of dry goods, and anything else that had been shoved there and forgotten. That included Gordon Calloway, who was two hundred-odd pounds of sunflower seeds stuffed into a cheap suit. He spent eight hours a day sitting in a wooden chair in the storage room and was paid handsomely to do it.

“Johnny's waiting in his office,” he said, spitting out a sunflower seed.

“Why yes, Gordon, my day has been swell. Thanks for asking,” said Corinne.

Ada elbowed her, but Gordon just grunted. Corinne went past Gordon to the wall in the corner of the room. She pressed against the wood paneling with one hand, and a section of it swung inward, revealing a flight of rickety steps that led all the way to the basement. When Ada had first come there, it had taken her days to find the right panel with any accuracy. She was still embarrassed thinking about the number of times Gordon had watched her out of the corner of his eye while she fumbled across the wall.

The only light in the stairwell emanated from the base, but Ada knew every step instinctively. The living quarters where Johnny Dervish's chosen few hung their hats were cramped and a little musty, but no one had ever complained. There was a central common room with a ratty couch, floral armchairs, and a coffee table— usually piled with sheet music, books, and half-finished bottles of whiskey or gin.

Ada couldn't hold back a sigh of relief. For the first time since fleeing Haversham, she didn't feel the asylum's presence bearing down on her. Maybe one day, the past two weeks would become a distant memory, something she could tell as a diverting story between cigarette pulls and frenzied turns on the dance floor. Until then she was just content to be here, hidden away in the tiny kingdom that Johnny Dervish had built. The Cast Iron meant safety—it always had.

She and Corinne shared a room opposite the stairs, with a low door partially obscured by a potted plant. Not much more than two army cots and a stack of milk crates, but they had made it a home,
papering the walls with magazine cutouts and draping silk scarves from the plywood ceiling.

Ada shed her shapeless asylum garb and slipped into a skirt and blouse. She yanked the scarf off her head and tossed it into the corner. Her freed hair emerged cloudlike around her face. She examined it carefully in the mirror. Two weeks without proper care had left it worse for wear, but the damage was not irreparable. Out in society, she would garner nasty glares by leaving it free like this, but if there was one place she could always walk without fear, it was the Cast Iron.

Behind her, Corinne had stripped off her uniform and left it bundled in the corner with Ada's scarf. She was dressing in a blue, low-waisted frock that appeared to have spent the majority of its life wadded in a ball. She leaned around Ada's shoulder at the mirror to twist her fingers through her limp hair for a few seconds before finally giving up.

In the reflection, Ada caught a glimpse of something on her bed that she hadn't seen before. She turned to find a small canvas painting, maybe twelve inches square, propped against the wall. It depicted a sprawling tree by a creek, ringed by the riotous glare of yellow-white sunlight. The emerald grass grew tall and wild, even in the dappled shade of the branches. There were clumps of vibrant purple wildflowers, painted with such dexterity that they seemed to have motion in the breeze. A wooden swing hung in the foreground, a picture of peaceful tranquility.

In front of the painting on the bed, tied with simple twine, was a bunch of purple wildflowers, the exact shade and shape as the ones in the painting.

“Saint left that for you.” Corinne was in the corner, hopping on
one foot as she tried to free herself from her shoe. “He thought you might want some springtime, after the asylum.”

There was a pang in Ada's chest, and she bit her lip. For a split second she was back there again, paralyzingly alone in a prison built for people just like her.

“Is he here?” she asked, struggling to keep her voice even.

“I haven't heard from him in a while.” Corinne finally gave in and sat down on her bed to unbuckle her shoes. “You should have seen him the night you were arrested, Ada. He was a wreck when he got back to the Cast Iron. Johnny almost called the doctor.”

Ada pushed the painting facedown on the bed and turned her head so that Corinne couldn't see her expression.

“Everything jake?” Corinne asked after a few seconds.

“I don't want to talk about it.” Ada went back to the mirror and rubbed vigorously at the dark circles under her eyes.

Beyond her own reflection, she could see Corinne eyeing her, deciding whether or not to press the issue further. Finally Corinne shrugged.

“Come on,” she told Ada. “Johnny will want to know it all went without a hitch.”

Ada followed her out the door, relieved the moment had passed. It was rare that she kept anything from Corinne, but this was still too fresh a wound. She arranged her face into the wry expression she knew Corinne would expect.

“Giving you the key to his Ford and sending you off to an asylum with a fake uniform and the foolproof alias of ‘Nurse Salem'— how could he think anything would go wrong?”

“I'll have you know that this brilliant plan was entirely my design,” Corinne said.

“Oh, I don't doubt it.”

“Do I detect a hint of sarcasm?”

“You're the wordsmith around here, Cor. I just play the music and look pretty.”

Corinne snorted but didn't say more.

Johnny's office was in the basement as well, at the end of a corridor by the stairs. Johnny didn't live at the Cast Iron, in the sense that he had a house and bed elsewhere, but anyone would be hard-pressed to find a time when he wasn't in his office or at his reserved table on the club floor, working through lines of visitors and petitioners like a king of old.

“There's my girls,” he said, beaming at them from behind his massive oak desk.

There were a handful of people in his office, including someone Ada had never seen before. The stranger was sitting on the corner of the desk, his black shirtsleeves rolled up to his elbows. He had short, unruly brown hair, pale skin, and a look of suspicious amusement that belied his youthful features. His coal-gray trousers were neatly pressed, but Ada saw that his shoes were practical and well-worn.

The office cleared, with most of the visitors patting Ada on the shoulder. The exact circumstances of her absence weren't widely known, but it was hard to keep a tight lid on something like that. No telling what the latest rumor was. No telling how much Corinne had embroidered those rumors herself.

Only the stranger stayed behind, standing and unrolling his sleeves with slow, careful movements. He hadn't made eye contact with Ada or Corinne yet.

“Girls,” said Johnny, “this is Gabriel Stone. I hired him to help with security around here. After recent events, I want to make sure all avenues are covered.”

“Looks a little scrawny for a bodyguard,” said Corinne. He was nearly a foot taller than her.

“I manage well enough,” he said, his gaze flickering across the two of them for the first time.

“You a wordsmith?” Ada asked. He had that look about him. Perpetually smug and mildly sardonic. And he had obviously set Corinne on edge. She didn't play well with people she considered competitors.

He shook his head but didn't offer any more explanation.

“You can give him the rundown tomorrow,” Johnny said. “I assume you had a clean break from your little situation, Ada? I don't expect Jackson back for another couple hours.”

“They're going to take it pretty hard,” Ada said. “I was their favorite inmate.”

Corinne threw her arm around Ada's shoulders. “You know our Ada, making friends, respecting authority, flipping tables onto doctors.”