Grace fell asleep clutching the brush to her chest, as though it could somehow ease the hollowness she could feel there.
She dreamed fitfully of herself as a young girl, with Oliver and Lillie, playing as children in a strange garden. Then the dream shifted to the night the police had come to her father’s restaurant. Walt had broken into Moore’s General Store down on Fifth and tried to steal a fancy clock to feed his morphine addiction, and the police were searching for him.
She remembered her mother’s stricken face when they came to the door. The restaurant had gone silent and then its patrons had scattered, carrying with them a devastating stream of whispers about Walt.
In her dream, Grace let out a silent sob and twitched.
And then Walt reached out for her. His hand was ice-cold when it touched her face.
“Grace,” he said.
She startled awake, soaked in sweat.
In the morning, Grace melted into the thronging crowds outside the hotel as though she were walking with friends instead of alone.
She had no particular destination in mind, and no plans until she was to meet Oliver and Lillie for breakfast in an hour, so she followed the pathways down Skinker Road and passed the Ceylon tea pavilion, where waiters served visitors fragrant cups of tea while wearing snow-white jackets and sarongs. Beyond that was a Gothic-style, two-story Canadian pavilion with verandas and large wraparound porches. It would easily take a week to see all that the fair had to offer. She’d heard that some families planned to come for six.
Grace couldn’t remember the last time she had done something as a family.
A familiar squeeze returned to her chest, as though she couldn’t get enough air. She crossed the bridge over Arrowhead Lake to the Parian gate and a replica of the walled city of Old Manila. The Philippine exhibit was one of the largest parts of the fair, meant to be a testament to America’s recent victory in the Spanish-American war. Inside the tribal villages there were Negrito people building thatched huts and demonstrating archery. Suyoc women, from one of the Igorot tribes, braced their feet against stones and wove cloth from vibrant yarn with their handlooms. There were lively dances and demonstrations of spear throwing. The Visayans had an adobe Catholic chapel. Young boys were whispering to one another and smiling and pointing, and once again, it struck Grace how many ways there were to live a life.
And yet it felt a little strange, that they were behind a fence. That she was observing their exhibit in much the same way she had the Persian rugs and new John Deere tractors.
She paused, considering this. One of the young boys waved at her, and she brightened. She waved back. But the sadness that she hadhidden away so well, even from herself, suddenly welled up inside of her again.
She kept walking. The day after the police had come to the restaurant looking for Walt, her friend Ada had appeared at her front door. At first Grace assumed she had come to offer comfort, but then Ada had begun kneading her gloves in her hands. Her pretty ring had shone as she explained that her fiancé didn’t want the focus to be on Grace with the scandal, and this was terribly awkward, but would Grace mind stepping down from the wedding party?
Grace had climbed the stairs, past Walt’s abandoned bedroom, and cried while she wrote out all the words that raged inside her. She had to purge the anger so it didn’t destroy her—anger at Ada and her fiancé, at Walt; but most of all at the world and its silly games of looking well for other people. Of ranking and devouring them, putting people in boxes and behind fences. The same world that had hurt her precious brother so much that he had to escape it somehow and, in the process, scattered buckshot and shrapnel in his wake.
She circled back through the fairgrounds and scanned the crowd for Oliver, raising her hand in a wave when she saw a different familiar face instead.
Harriet Forbes. Her head was down, and her face drawn, and Grace wondered if Oliver had told her about the previous evening’s calamity. How had Aunt Clove found out the truth? Grace hadn’t even had time to consider the answer to that.
But Harriet hadn’t spotted her. Instead, she glanced over her shoulder nervously, as if she were anxious not to be seen.
Grace paused, letting her arm drop back to her side.
And then she watched Harriet approach a dark opening between buildings that Grace hadn’t even noticed before.
With another quick look over her shoulder, she disappeared inside.
Grace picked up her pace, darting through the crowds of the Pike to follow.
She paused outside of the dark entrance. Water was draining down the slope inside, disappearing into a darkness that looked like a portal to the night.
“You don’t want to go in there, dearie,” a passing worker said. He had an Irish brogue and was carrying a piece of lumber on his shoulder. “It’s where the unsavory things go on. Stay away. That’s not a place for nice girls like you.”
She knew instantly what it was, and where Harriet had gone. The Tunnels.
Grace’s heart beat fast. Oliver was getting ready to throw his entire life and inheritance away for this woman. Grace had to make sure he knew what he was getting into.
She waited until the well-meaning worker had gone on. Then, she fought all the demons she felt rising inside of her and followed Harriet into the Tunnels.
It was dark and damp in the Tunnels. A thin light made it through from above. The people there looked as though they’d been up all night and hadn’t seen the sun in too many days. Though the fair had just opened and everything aboveground was sparkling and new, the Tunnels had already been there for awhile. Grace knew that St. Louis had networks of underground caves that formed due to the acidic water that cut through the limestone. They burrowed below the main thoroughfare of the Pike, spidering out into endless tight passages.
Grace’s collar suddenly felt itchy. She hid her purse in the folds of her dress and kept her wits about her. Wearing one of Lillie’s dresses, she looked especially out of place.
“You lost, missy?” someone asked to her right, leering at her with sallow skin and missing teeth. She couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman, but she didn’t like the hollow note in the laugh that followed. It was disorienting here, as though time had been snagged somewhere between an endless dusk. How was the bright, gleaming Ivory City just above this place that felt like a tomb?
