“I’m not stopping. We have to keep trying,” Grace said. “For Oliver.”
“We will. You’ve been stubborn and strong-willed for as long as I’ve known you, and I love you for it. But, Grace—I can’t lose you in the process.”
“Let’s go to the baby incubators on the Pike,” Earnest gently interrupted. “Figured Lillie might like to see something medical.”
“Yes,” Lillie said, standing. “I would.”
They made their way toward the Pike, where they found the baby incubator exhibit in a large, flag-topped building with two U-shaped columned floors. It was situated next to Cairo and cost twenty-five cents to enter. They stepped inside a crowded, narrow room withwhite-capped nurses tending to premature babies in twenty-four metal boxes with glass windows.
Grace peered inside the first incubator, at the baby’s small, rosebud mouth. It was twisting, writhing its little legs. Flies were buzzing around the incubators, some even caught inside of them.
“Step right up and see how this little mite, Jack, weighs less than three pounds!” a male announcer exclaimed. “The baby incubator is truly the highest attainment of human achievement. These weaklings hardly stood a chance without this intervention.”
Some of the babies were listless, their cheeks flushed. They stared out at Grace with glassy eyes.
Lillie began fanning herself.
“It’s too hot in here,” Lillie said, her voice rising in panic. She waved down one of the nurses. “Excuse me, but this child looks like it needs help.”
“I can assure you that Mr. Bayliss has taken care of everything,” the nurse said curtly.
“Is he even a doctor?” Lillie shot back.
Grace felt that familiar panicked feeling of not being good in a medical situation, and she began to walk backward, tripping on someone as she made her way out of the exhibit.
She passed the shop where she could buy a soap baby souvenir, and then through the exhibit’s themed café. She didn’t start breathing normally again until she was out in the sunshine. She found a bench beneath an awning toward the end of the Pike, where they held reenactments of the Great Galveston Flood of 1900. She pulled out her small notebook and revisited her original suspect list.
This—this she could do.
Her breathing steadily slowed. She stared at the names on the page.
There was the robber who had first discussed money with Harrietand then threatened Grace to stop looking into the case. He was the prime suspect in her mind. Had Harriet borrowed money from him to help save her theater? Had he been there at the Ball that night? Grace didn’t remember seeing him, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t there.
And what about Harriet’s sister Penelope? Why had Harriet met with her in the Tunnels?
There were the Gatewoods, the betrayed family with a possible revenge motive against Oliver himself, but Grace no longer thought of them as prime suspects.
She could almost definitively say it wasn’t Aunt Clove, or Vera Lackey, the woman who had been following them.
The publisher Sam Whitcomb had been there at the party that night, but he had supposedly been filming, hadn’t he?
Earnest Allred was definitively on camera, holding the drink with his bandaged hands, not putting poison in it.
Who else had been there that night?
Lillie had been at Grace’s side, arguing with her in the ladies’ room.
And then there were Frannie and Copper. What about Frannie? Why had she lied about the message that had been left for Earnest and Grace? Was she merely being a thorn in Grace’s side or was it something more sinister than that?
There was something Grace was missing.
Then there were any of the other guests—fifty, a hundred more—who had been present that night, who would show up on the list Lillie would get from the lawyer. And of course… Theodore.
She instantly began to banish the thought as ridiculous, but a small piece of it caught like a tangled ribbon in a branch. She let her mind wander toward it. Theodore Parker. Present at all these events that were burned in her mind. The Winter Ball, where he disparagedher so cruelly, only to turn up later and begin to change his tune just as everything began to disintegrate around them.
She paused, feeling a growing numbness. He was the only person who was there all three times. The only other person who knew the truth about Harriet and Earnest. He had been present for Earnest’s explosion, when he fell out of the sky. Then Theodore had led them to the restaurant, when the thief had found and threatened Harriet. He had been there at the Ball on the night when she was killed.
But he was conveniently away when the thief found them in the Japanese gardens to rob and pressure them.
