* * *
THREE DAYS LATER, I woke up before the breakfast bell to the sound of someone knocking on my door. The rhythm of the day had been broken before it had even begun, and I got out of my bed, disoriented. Maybe Jerralyn had told Mrs. Pearce what I’d said, and now she was here to yell at me, away from the others. Or maybe Lena had changed her mind, come back. I swallowed hard, before I opened the door.
“Oh my! They didn’t tell me I was rooming with the Jordan Baker from Louisville.” I blinked for a moment before I realized who was standing there speaking to me: Mary Margaret. She appeared bright eyed and wide awake, even though it was not quite light outside yet. Her acorn hair cascaded down in front of her shoulders, and she reached up and tossed it behind her before stretching out her arms to grab me in a fierce hug.
“What are you doing here?” I asked. I barely knew Mary Margaret, but I felt this flood of relief course through my body at the sight of her, almost as good as if I’d opened the door and Daddy or Daisy had been standing there. Almost.
She stepped back, picked up her suitcase, and walked inside the room. “Some business about a girl having to leave the tour and apparently, lucky me, I was the alternate.” She put her suitcase down, held up her hands, and shrugged.
She sat down on my bed, bouncing a little to test its firmness. “So tell me, Jordan, is everything as fabulous here as we thought it would be?” She looked up and stared at me expectantly. And all I knew was, now that she was here, everything would be better. The rhythm of the day would rise and fall. My arms would ache and ache. And Mary Margaret would laugh and we would whisper to each other at night in the darkness. And I would have a friend here and I might feel something close to happiness again.
“It is,” I told her, smiling widely to hide my lie. “In fact, it’s even more fabulous than we’d dreamed. You are going to love it here,” I promised her.
Detective Frank Charles September 1922
MINNEAPOLIS
THEY WERE LIARS, EVERY ONE of them. The more Frank dug into their stories, the more he could pull them apart, thread by thread. It reminded him of the way Dolores would undo a sewing stitch, and suddenly, an entire hem unraveled.
It was Nick Carraway whose version of the truth he trusted the most. And not, as Dolores had chided him, because Nick is a man. But because Nick was the only one he’d talked to who’d genuinely seemed broken up about Jay Gatsby’s death. They’d been neighbors, friends. It was fair to say Nick had even idolized Mr. Gatsby and that his murder had left Nick a little… flattened. Then there was that thing that Nick had said, about Daisy being dead inside. Frank couldn’t stop turning that over and over in his head. It sent him down to lower Manhattan at lunchtime last week, waiting for Nick to walk out of his office so he could chat with him again.
“What do you want?” Nick had asked abruptly when he’d spied Frank standing out on the sidewalk in front of Probity Trust smoking a cigarette. Nick gave Frank a wary look, shivered, and pulled his overcoat tighter around him. The air had turned, suddenly, and that sweltering heat of August, a month ago, when Jay Gatsby was bloodless and floating in a pool, almost felt like nothing more than a dream.
“I have a few more questions for you,” Frank said.
Nick pulled up the collar of his overcoat and started walking.
Frank dropped his cigarette and squashed it with his shoe, grinding it into the sidewalk. “Hold on,” he’d called, running after Nick. “I’ll buy you lunch.”
“I can buy my own lunch,” Nick had said, frowning.
Now, a week later, Frank got off the train in Minneapolis, still turning Nick’s final words to him over again in his head. Why don’t you talk to Daisy? Nick had said. She knew Jay so much longer than I did.
Longer? Frank had questioned then. According to Daisy, Nick was the one who’d introduced her to Mr. Gatsby, earlier in the summer.
“Talk to her,” Nick had said brusquely, before walking off, disappearing into the lunch crowd.
Later that night, Frank had combed through the files again. And then something had caught his eye that he’d missed before: Jay Gatsby had been stationed at Camp Taylor before the war.
Camp Taylor.
Frank’s younger cousin, Barney, had been there, too, and Frank and Dolores had even gone down to Louisville to visit him one spring, before Dolores got sick. It was a memory Frank had discarded somewhere in the back of his mind after Barney was killed in the war. But it came back to him again suddenly: Barney’s thin childlike grin, the great blue cascade of the Ohio River, the quaint brick storefronts of a city caught between the South and the Midwest. Daisy was born and raised in Louisville. Jordan too. And if he were a betting man, he’d bet the two of them had met Jay Gatsby there, once, years ago. Is that what Nick meant? And if so, why had they lied to him about that, of all things?