The Friday Society (12 page)

Mr. Carter.

The name sounded awfully familiar.

As she racked her memory, Nellie’s gaze shifted, and she noticed a pretty wooden box sitting farther back in the drawer.

The party! Of course. There had been a Mr. Carter at the party last night. He’d come backstage to introduce himself to Sir Callum Fielding-Shaw. Mr. Carter . . . he was an MP. A Tory, if she remembered correctly. Yes, she was a consummate eavesdropper.

Follow the money. Mr. Carter.

Dr. Mantis still wasn’t back yet, and Nellie couldn’t resist. After returning the checkbook to its spot, she picked up the small box. She noticed the familiar heron carved on the top. This could be something. She opened it.

Staring up at her were half a dozen pairs of eyes. Nellie was frozen in horror. She couldn’t look away. It was like the eyes had drawn her unwittingly into a staring contest that she had no chance of winning. And still, despite it all, she stared. The box was lined with lead, and each pair floated in that blasted formaldehyde, preserved as good as new.

“That’s private.” It was impressive how Dr. Mantis’s whispery voice could cut through a room like that.

“Oh, I’m sorry.” Nellie quickly stashed the box back in the drawer and closed it shut with a bang. She tried to defuse the situation by smiling broadly at him, but then remembered how he didn’t seem to respond to that.

“How’d you get into that drawer?” he asked, approaching the desk as Nellie tried as casually as she could to maneuver herself around to the front of it.

“What do you mean?”

“It was locked.”

“No, it wasn’t.” A quick glance of the room: one door, no windows. Ceiling: one vent, too high.

“It was.” They were standing at the foot and head of the desk respectively. The door was behind him.

“I . . . don’t know what to tell you. I’m sorry for snoopin’, got bored, see. But the drawer was definitely unlocked . . . sir.”

Be polite. Be a little stupid. Be pretty.

She took a small step to the right, and he countered it.

“That’s my private drawer. That’s private.”

Each time he said “private,” saliva shot out of his mouth on the
“p.”

“I’m sorry.” She was now as quiet as he was. She watched his hands tighten their grip on the desk. “It’s a lovely . . . collection. Very . . . unique.” She took a step back and absently opened her purse and reached inside.

He took a step around to the front of the desk and toward her.

“I imagine it must be a difficult collection to maintain. I mean”—she gave a small laugh—“stamps are one thing; you’ll find them on just about every letter. Eyes, on the other hand . . .”

“Nothing rare about eyes. Everybody’s got them.”

“Good point.”

She felt a grainy substance in the bottom of her purse and recognized it instantly. Thank goodness. Okay, then. For this to work she’d have to let him get closer.

She took another step back, this time bringing herself close to the wall. He took the bait and stepped in toward her again. One, maybe two more steps, that’s all she needed. Then she noticed the scalpel clutched in his right hand. He must have picked it up on passing the desk. Great.

“Well, still . . .” she said, “it’s . . . very interestin’.”

Dr. Mantis took another step and he was right there. So close she could hear his shallow wheezing. He squinted at her. Not good enough . . .

“You said earlier you liked my eyes,” she said, her throat getting tight.

“Yes.”

“Would you like to take a closer look?” She brought her purse up to her chest. At that offer, he opened his eyes wide. Bloodshot. Not worthy of his own collection, she mused.

She had one chance and one chance only. She whipped her hand out of her purse and tossed the fistful of glitter into his face. It hit the mark perfectly, and Dr. Mantis bent over, thunderstruck, his eyes full of sparkly irritation. For good measure, Nellie gave him a swift kick in the kidneys, which caused him to double over further, and then she was out of there.

She flew along the hall, down the stairs, and out the front doors.

She didn’t stop running until she’d turned the corner, and even then she kept walking at a fast pace.

It was at this moment, only when she was several streets away, that she allowed the shudder to come over her, starting at her tailbone, working its way up her spine and to her shoulders, down her arms, and shaking free through her hands.

If this was what the members of the Society of Heroes were into . . . after meeting Dr. Body Parts Enthusiast, she could see how her dead guy might have gotten dead, carrying on with such characters.

What was with all those body parts? Especially the eyes? And then there were the sketches in the drawer . . . the spinning brass ball . . .

Icky and scary, clearly very dangerous. And clearly she really needed to know what was going on  . . .

18

Making a New Friend

“
B
E NICE,” HISSED
Lord White as Cora climbed into the globe.

“And you, be good,” she said to him in return.

“Just get the work started. I want to see progress by the time I get back.”

“Good luck.” She paused at the top of the staircase and gave him a smile, hoping that he’d forgive her for not joining him this afternoon. Her head was spinning too much to be useful in a social setting.

Evidently his lordship wasn’t in a forgiving mood. “Get it done.” With that, Lord White stormed out of the library, and Cora continued down the stairs.

Mr. Harris was there, sitting at the long table, already examining the order his lordship had just received for a new invention.
Be nice,
Cora thought to herself.

Then she thought . . .
Why?

“Let me see.” She snatched the paper from under Mr. Harris’s nose and took it with her to her cubby as she grabbed her lab coat and gloves. “Odd,” she muttered to herself.

“What is?” Mr. Harris was standing behind her, breathing down her neck.

Cora ignored him and returned to the table.

“What’s odd?” asked Mr. Harris again, following like a puppy and sitting next to her.

Just answer the question, Cora, or he’ll never shut it.
“What’s odd . . . is that I’ve never seen such a specific order before. Usually the client asks for something, a device that shoots fire, a machine to haul the shopping, and then we figure out how to create it. But this . . .”

“Is a set of instructions.”

“More like a puzzle.” It was a list of components for the device, and suggestions on how to put the whole thing together. At the bottom, there was a question written in an almost illegible scrawl:
But how do we activate it?
“So the client is seeking outside help because he doesn’t know how to make it go.” Cora immediately felt disdain for this client. Making it go was, after all, the most interesting, even if it was the hardest, part.

“Do we have to follow the instructions to the letter?” asked Mr. Harris.

Cora didn’t want to admit it, but she’d been wondering the exact same thing. Making this invention work wasn’t just a question of sprinkling some fairy dust over an inert device. It required that the whole object be constructed in such a way that it could be activated. This meant every piece was critical to “making it go,” and if these component parts that the client wanted didn’t serve that function, they could be considered useless.

“Let’s just work on the blueprint and see if we can’t do this as the client wants us to. If it’s impossible . . .”

“Then we get to have fun?”

Cora looked up at Mr. Harris and immediately heard Nellie’s voice:
“Do you fancy him?”
Examining him now, she felt embarrassed for having said yes the other night. Mr. Harris in a lab coat was utterly ridiculous. Like he was playacting “lab assistant.”

“Really, Mr. Harris, you don’t already find this fun? I do.”

He smiled a closed-lipped smile at her which she returned with one of her own.

“Fetch us some paper and pencils, Mr. Harris.”

They worked on the blueprint for an hour; however, it seemed pretty clear that “activating” the device was not going to be possible with the information that they’d been given. Fun eluded them. In fact, all that followed was frustration and annoyance with Mr. Harris, who, despite making a few reasonable suggestions, was altogether useless at coming up with a solution.

Then again, so was she.

They were at that point that Cora so hated. The point that required Lord White’s input. Cora longed for the day when she wouldn’t need his help, and thought she was coming pretty darn close to it. But every once in a while . . . she got stumped.

So they had to set the blueprint aside for now, which she knew meant that Lord White was going to give her a good talking-to about not completing assignments. Instead, she got Mr. Harris to do some busywork tidying up the lab, and she set about working on a personal project. As she fiddled with a screw, she did have a tiny thought in the back of her head that maybe she’d given up a little too easily in favor of working on her pet piece. But then again, she was still hungover from the night before, and not in the mood for serious problem solving. Bad excuse, but one Lord White seemed to use on a regular basis.

“So you’re not going to help at all, is that the plan?” Mr. Harris dropped a box of tools on the table right next to Cora. She flinched inwardly, but nothing was going to make her react to his presence.

“Hey, don’t look at me,” she replied. “You were hired for a job. I have my own things to take care of.”

“Like fiddling about with a pair of glasses? You don’t even wear glasses.” He sat next to her and dumped the tools out onto the table. They scattered about, some sliding right across to the other side and onto the floor.

Cora sighed hard.

“What’s wrong now? I’ll pick them up.”

“I just can’t understand why his lordship would hire someone so stupid.”

“Hey now!”

Cora looked up at him. “Well, what other conclusion can I draw? You really think these are glasses, do you, Mr. Harris?”

“Look, please, call me Andrew.”

“They’re goggles. Clearly they are goggles. Glasses look like glasses, goggles look like—”

“Goggles. Fine; I get it.” Mr. Harris . . . Andrew . . . stupid name . . . Andrew stood up and bent down to collect the fallen tools. “You know,” he said, his voice muffled, “you don’t have to be quite so unpleasant.”

“I’m not being anything. The fact that you bring out my unpleasant side has more to do with you than with me.” Cora returned to tweaking her goggles and Andrew started nattering on about something.

She’d been working on the goggles for months now. Lord White had always given her little personal tasks to challenge her, and his latest was to see if she could invent something that would make it possible for a person to see in pitch darkness. It had been his hardest assignment to date, and as she labored over the two glass plates, she had half a mind to just throw the whole thing on the floor and let it break into several pieces. But that was silly. Her frustration was with Andrew. Not with her invention.

She should just have gone with Lord White as he’d asked her to. He was making the rounds, drumming up support for the vote in the House tomorrow. But Cora had no desire to sit, drink tea, and be ogled by old white-haired men. She also didn’t want to spend the day listening to Lord White admonish her for the night before.

So she’d stayed behind. To work on the new order. To take inventory of the supplies from yesterday. Mundane stuff. If only she’d remembered that Andrew would be here, too, she would have totally put up with making the rounds.

“. . . with Mrs. Philips,” Andrew was saying.

“What?” His voice had ceased to be a buzzing in the background and was becoming too much of a distraction. She looked up at him with an exaggerated sigh.

“I said, I’ve seen you with Mrs. Philips. With Barker. You’re as sweet as all get-out. But with me, the way you just ignore me like now, or tell me off like before . . . You, little miss, are a perfect example of it.”

“Of what?”
Resist the temptation to punch him for the “little miss” comment, Cora. Resist . . .

“What I was just talking about. Before.”

“Oh, I wasn’t listening before.”

“I was talking about duality.”

“Were you? What the hell for?”

Andrew laughed. “In the book, the idea is that he has two sides to himself . . .”

“Book? What? Honestly Mr. Harris, I really wasn’t listening earlier.”

Of course, engaging him like this was a ridiculous thing to do, but she couldn’t stop herself. He smiled smugly at her interest, and Cora instantly regretted it. “
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
You might have heard of it. Rather popular. I think it’s really very interesting. It’s all about—”

“I’ve read the story,” interrupted Cora. “Didn’t really care for it. Found it tedious in the storytelling.”

“Well, I think it’s interesting. The notion that everyone has two sides.”

“Well, good for you.”

“For example,” he continued, oblivious to her contempt, “your two sides could be sweet and harsh.”

Cora rolled her eyes inwardly. “So you think me a Mr. Hyde, do you?”

“To be fair, you’ve never shown me your Jekyll.”

She sighed. It was just like a well-educated boy to want to talk themes and theory to show that the expensive education had been worth it. “What are you going on about?”

“I just find it interesting. How we all have fronts . . .”

She sighed. “And your front would be rich, pompous, intolerable fool . . .”

“Intolerable? I’ll have you know lots of girls are rather fond of my front. My back, too.”

Cora wasn’t really listening again. “I don’t know if we’re all hiding something,” she continued, thinking about it now despite herself. “You might be . . . but everybody?” No. Not everyone hid stuff. She thought of Nellie. So direct, to the point. Even with her admission of jealousy. But then there was Michiko, the opposite, all silence and mystery. And what was she, then . . .?

Well, damn it all. He might have a bit of a point. When it came to her.

But it wasn’t two sides to her personality. It was rather the difference between the real her and the fake her. It was the frustration bubbling under the surface. An ocean trapped in a goldfish bowl.

God, now she was depressed. Was she meant to live a life of never being who she was? And did she even know who she really was herself?

“You’re quiet.”

“I’m bored.”

“I’m sorry. Didn’t think talking about a book about a murderer was dull subject matter.”

“The second you said ‘duality,’ I tuned out.”

“Miss Bell, look at me.”

She wasn’t aware that she hadn’t been looking and did. He seemed concerned. He looked . . . sincere. “What?”

“Can we start over?”

“What?”

“Can we be friends? I hate this tension.”

Cora sighed again. This time a silent, internal sigh. “It’s difficult for me. I don’t really like you.”

“You don’t really know me.” He edged his chair closer to hers. “You judged me from the beginning. And, of course, when we first met, you thought I was a thief. Then you learned Lord White hired me, and you clearly did not approve of that. And I think your judgment was colored.”

“You think?”

“Please?”

It was so draining hating him. And it wasn’t like they had to be best friends or anything. “Fine.”

“So we start over.”

“We start over.”

“Good.” He stuck out his hand and she took it with a roll of her eyes. Then he pulled her into a hot kiss, one hand at the back of her neck, the other moving from her hand up along her arm, holding it fast. Cora neither reciprocated nor pulled away. She was too surprised. All she felt was his hot breath and tight fingers. And a horrible, horrible feeling in the pit of her stomach that she feared might be something like pleasure.

He pulled away.

“And that was what exactly?” she asked.

“I’m really sorry—I didn’t mean to do that. It was an accident.”

“Weird accident.”

“I apologize. It won’t happen again. Now can we start over?”

“And if I say yes, what exactly will you do this time?”

“What if I get up and stand at the other end of the room, and then on the count of three, we start over?”

“What if we just . . . act normal?”

“Can you do that?”

“Probably not.”

“I’m going to the other side of the room.” And he did. He stood with his back to the staircase and held up his hand. “Ready?”

Yeah, so this game was not exactly what her mind was focused on at the moment.

“One . . .” He held up one finger. “Two . . .” Two fingers. “Three.”

There was silence. Then, with a smile, he came back over to the table and sat down.

“Hi!” he said, extending his hand. “I’m Andrew Harris. But you can call me Andrew.”

Cora shook her head and then, with a little laugh, took his hand. “I’m Cora Bell, but you can call me—”

His lips were on hers again, his hand at the back of her neck once more. This time, though, she didn’t leave her hands at her side, but rather brought them up to his head and ran them through his soft hair. It was so . . . soft. She returned the kiss. She wanted to drink in more and more of him, and she just wasn’t getting enough. She stood up, still tightly lip-locked, and sat on his knee as he pulled her in more tightly, running his hands down her back to her waist, holding on as if he were scared she might suddenly float up and away. And she kind of worried she just might.

Finally Andrew came up for air, taking in a deep breath and staring at her wide-eyed.

“I’m really sorry about this,” he said, panting slightly.

“You should be.” Cora leaned in and they were kissing again.

He pushed her away.

“I really want you to respect me,” he said.

“I do, I do,” she replied, leaning in.

“Oh, good.”

More kissing.

Then: “You’re just saying that.”

God, this fellow was infuriating. “What?”

“You think I’m an idiot.”

“What?”

“You do. I don’t think I’ve ever had anyone think that of me, especially not a servant.”

“I’m sorry, what?” She leaned back.

“No, it’s not that. I didn’t mean it like that, I’m sorry. It’s just . . . you’re very bright. Quite the marvel, really.”

Grand, both an insult and praise.

In any other moment she’d have had a word or two to say about that, but right then, in that moment . . .

“Oh, just stop talking,” she said, kissing him again before he could say anything that would really piss her off.

He pushed her away again.

“I think you’re just using me for my looks,” he said.

“I wouldn’t know how to do that.”

“This is doing that.”

“Well, I’m a quick study.”

Kissing time.

Pushing away time.

Tossing up her hands, Cora rose off his lap and shook her head at him. “You know, that whole duality thing? I’m starting to get it. Make up your mind!”