What if she had told Lillie the truth earlier?
What if she and Theodore Parker hadn’t agreed to keep Oliver’s secret?
She felt a strange new terror, now that she knew life could change so drastically from one hour to the next. Harriet was alive, and then she wasn’t. Could the decisions Grace made, no matter how seemingly small, have changed something?
For the second night in a row, she hardly slept.
The next morning Grace hurriedly packed and checked out of her room. People were gathered in the lobby, crowding together andreading the newspaper. She glimpsed the enormous font on the front page of theFair’s Fare:
DEATH AT THE FAIR
Actress Dies Under Suspicious Circumstances, Police Investigating
Grace turned in her key and half ran out of the hotel. On the corner, boys were holding fresh copies oftheSt. Louis Post-Dispatch.
“Death at the fairgrounds!” they called. “Was it murder?”
An anxious crowd was starting to form.
Grace reached into her purse. The coins there were thin. She needed to save enough for her train trip home. But she used some of the last of the money she had to hail a horse-drawn cab to the Carter house on Westmoreland Place.
She stood on the sidewalk beneath the dappled leaves of two wide oak trees. Though it was almost eleven o’clock in the morning, the windows were darkened with drapes.
“Miss Covington,” the butler said solemnly, opening the door to greet her.
“Hello, Waters. I’m here to see Oliver,” she said.
Waters bowed to her. “I hope you realize that I cannot directly disobey Mrs. Carter’s orders,” he said. “But I shall let Oliver know that he might do well with some fresh air outside.”
“Thank you, Waters,” she said.
Her heart twisted within her when Oliver slipped out the back door to join her a few moments later. He looked like he hadn’t slept all night.
As soon as they were out of eyesight of the house, tears began falling down his cheeks.
“Do you want to talk, Ollie?” she asked.
She loved her cousin, and that love melted and found all sorts of new cracks within her to see him hurting.
“How can she be gone?” he asked. “I don’t understand. I keep waiting to turn and see her face.”
He let out heaving sobs, like the time as a boy he had fallen and impaled his leg with a stick and was trying to pull it out and also trying to be brave.
“Tell me what you loved about her,” Grace said.
“The way she laughed.” His voice sounded wooden, even while snot began to run down his face. “I loved her voice. It could touch something deep inside of me. She made me feel like a different version of myself. One who wanted to be settled down, one who cared about people more than how much money they had. I didn’t want my parents’ life, their marriage. I wanted her voice to be what I heard when I came home each night.”
Grace’s chest ached. The what-ifs of what she had done and not done over the past few days haunted her. “Do her parents know?” she asked.
“The police are contacting them. They live in Illinois.”
“They think she was killed, Oliver.”
His hand tightened into a fist. “I saw the papers. Those vultures, circling around like they were looking for meat.”
“Do you think someone killed her?”
“She didn’t overdose, if that’s what you mean. I never saw her take anything, not once, the entire time we were together.”
