Sometimes I thought if I helped just one other woman the way I never was able to help my sister, then everything I’d done, every lie I’d told, it would all be worth it in the end. It would all mean something. My life would mean something. And maybe that was the last and biggest lie of all. That what I would do next with my life would be good enough to make up for what I had done.
Even in this new life of mine in Chicago, I dreamed of last summer sometimes still—the smell of the smoking gun and burning flesh, Daisy Buchanan’s scream and Jordan Baker’s ultimate cool head and practicality.
I’d seen both women in passing last summer when we’d all gone into the precinct, but since then I’d kept up with Daisy Buchanan in the society pages and Jordan Baker on the sports pages.
A promise was a promise was a promise. But I hoped that I would never speak to either one of these women again. Or that Detective Charles would never make his way to Chicago to visit me.
* * *
ONE AFTERNOON LATE in January, I saw Tom Buchanan.
I’d left work to go home, and he was suddenly just right there, walking ahead of me on Michigan Avenue. I recognized his unmistakable, arrogant swagger, even dressed in his overcoat, with the collar turned up against the cold. I slowed down, so I wouldn’t catch up, but he seemed to sense me there, and he turned around.
His eyes caught mine, and that brutish hulking face was exactly and awfully the same as it was six months ago. I remembered the way he’d looked when he’d punched Myrtle in the nose, the way her blood had felt on my hands then and later in the morgue.
“Catherine,” Tom said now. “Is that you?” He held out his arms to give me a hug, but I took a large step back. “You object to giving me a hug?”
“Yes,” I said. “You must know what I think of you.” I glared at him. Jay might have been driving the car, but it was Tom and George who’d driven Myrtle to such depths of desperation that she’d run out of her apartment that night, chasing what she must’ve believed was her last escape.
Tom opened his mouth, then closed it again. “You know I loved her,” he said. “I went to clean out the apartment before we left the city, and I sat there among her things and the dog biscuits and I cried like a baby.”
I stared at him for another moment, picturing Myrtle’s blood on those very same hands he’d just used to reach for me. “You don’t love anyone but yourself,” I said. “And furthermore”—my voice rose in pitch, so I was almost yelling at him now—“if you ever see me walking again on the street, just pretend you never saw me at all. Keep walking by. You disgust me, Tom Buchanan,” I said. One final, fleeting shot to the heart.
Then I spun on my heel and turned and started walking the long way home. Maybe Tom watched me walk away, surprised or hurt or angry. Or maybe he just kept on walking that arrogant walk, toward wherever it was he was going.
Either way, Tom Buchanan was behind me now. And I didn’t look back.
Jordan January 1923
SANTA BARBARA
“MISS BAKER!”
I heard his voice as I walked off the green and I stopped walking, my breath catching in my chest. He’d followed me, all the way here, all the way to California?
I turned and faced him, forced a smile. “Hello, Detective.”
Detective Frank Charles stood on the edge of the course, sweating in his three-piece suit. He tipped his hat, and I looked down, averting eye contact.
It was hot today, exceptional for a January day in Santa Barbara. Eighty degrees! And I had spent it tangled in a delightful day of golf and sweat and sunshine. I was in second place after round one—finally making my way back to the top after losing ground in my game for months and months.
Aunt Sigourney had passed away last September, and with the loss of my last family member came control of my entire inheritance—Daddy’s money and hers, and the old bird had built up quite a nest egg over the years. After making a more than exorbitant donation to Mr. Hennessey, lo and behold, I was invited back on the tour, and I was quickly rising up the ranks again. Jerralyn still hated me, and it was almost refreshing, the familiarity in the daily glares I received from her over breakfast.
Daisy moved to Minnesota only a week after that hot death-filled morning in West Egg, and we had written each other only the occasional letter since, filled with only the most mundane details about the weather. I missed her desperately, but I knew I had to stay away from her now to save her. To save myself, too.
I looked back up and Detective Charles was still staring at my face, like he could see right through me, like all my innermost thoughts were visible to him on an X-ray. It was disconcerting, to say the least.