Grace stiffened. So Frannie would tell him who she was. She suddenly felt nervous, her warm confidence draining away as if a door had swung open and let in a draft. She worried about the expression she would find on his face when she looked up again. But she needn’t have. By the time she did, he was gone.
If only Lillie were there. Grace suddenly couldn’t wait to return to her cousins’ rented Chicago home, tuck herself into bed, and tell her beloved cousin everything over warm biscuits and morning coffee tomorrow.
“Don’t mind her,” Harriet said as she appeared beside them, her eyes cutting from Frannie to Grace. “Miss Allred’s never spoken to mebefore tonight. My family name only goes back two generations, and her minimum requirement is three.”
Grace laughed, and when Oliver began to stammer something almost incomprehensible again, Grace excused herself, taking a champagne flute merely to have something to hold. She climbed the stairs. Wound silently through the maze of hallways that coiled through the back half of the grand house, hearing the party fade. Through the magnificent arched windows, she could glimpse the balconies overlooking a lawn of green topiary mazes and lit lanterns floating in the pond.What would it be like, she wondered,to have this sort of wealth at one’s fingertips?To never be questioned as to whether you deserved to enter a room?She thought of what awaited her back in Kansas City. Finding a nice working-class man, like her father. Perhaps even needing to work herself.
She tightened her grip on the champagne glass. She wasn’t afraid of hard work. She didn’t think herself above it. But she did fear losing Lillie and Oliver the way she had already lost Walt—a thought she almost couldn’t bear. She stepped out onto the balcony to escape it. The frigid wind was a shock, and she hadn’t considered how little protection the dress would offer from the cold, when she ran into something—someone—solid. She felt the moment of shock when she realized it was the body of a man.
“Excuse me,” she said with a mixture of exhilaration and embarrassment. She barely missed splashing her glass down the front of Theodore Parker’s high, white-starched collar. He caught her wrist and rescued the glass from her in one smooth motion.
She caught a whiff of his scent again, stormy smoke and leaves, and a wide smile leapt to her lips before she could help it. He was staring at her with an imperceptible look, and her smile faded.
He raised an eyebrow.
“Did you follow me out here just to ruin my suit?” he asked coldly, brushing away the drops of champagne that had apparently found their mark. He sniffed the glass she’d been holding and narrowed his eyes. “Not a drinker, you said?”
Her heart instantly sank as he continued to look at her cruelly, all his warmth from a few minutes ago gone. What a fool she had been. So this was who Theodore Parker truly was—a completely different man than when he had believed she was a woman of high society. Someone who pretended that snobbish airs bothered him, when he had been putting them on more than anyone. The wind stung her, but the way he was looking at her hurt more.
She braced herself in her ill-fitting shoes. Her ego was already smarting after the probing looks from the crowd, after her interactions with Frannie. She’d never had much patience for simpering to begin with, and whatever allotment she had was long gone at this point. These people were no better than she was, or her mother and father, or perhaps even her disgraced brother. Her eyes flashed.
“I was just in search of some pleasant company,” she said, curtsying low. “I guess I’ll have to keep looking.”
To think she had found him devastatingly handsome a handful of moments ago. She almost relished the way his face darkened with surprise. She was about to turn away when he caught her arm.
“And what do you consider to be pleasant?” he asked. “A rich man in want of a wife?”
She almost laughed. She had never been good at hiding her emotions, something she heard far too often from her mother and Lillie, and she felt the amusement and pity for him plainly cross her face.
“I wish your future wife the best of luck, and most patience,” she said. “For I find that many riches tend to dull the most promising men into petulant boys.”
He dropped her arm, looking confused, and she continued. “However,I,as I’m sure you’ve heard, come from a line that marries for partnership rather than purse strings—a legacy I fully intend to continue. Good evening, sir,” she said.
He didn’t need to know how her heart had sped up at the sight of him, or that his criticism of her pierced straight to the bone. After all, was it wrong of her to want to make a desirable match, to marry above her station? To ease her mother’s worry, to stay in her cousins’ lives? She still wanted love above all else—but she was ashamed nonetheless. Face burning, she delicately took her champagne glass from his hand and went in search of Oliver.
“You look positively radiant tonight, cousin,” Oliver said when she found him. “How did you find the fresh air?”
“Invigorating,” she said curtly.
With a pricked heart, she drained the rest of her glass and promised herself she would never speak of Theodore Parker again.
CHAPTER ONE
ST. LOUIS
APRIL 30, 1904
Three Days Before the Murder
GRACE HAD SPENTmany of her summer days growing up within the elegant oak-paneled walls of the Carter mansion on Forest Park, despite the best intentions of her aunt. Grace resented the way her aunt Clove had cast out her mother, but her uncle Reginald had insisted that civilized people did not punish the innocent for the mistakes of their forbearers. So Grace and her brother Walt were to be given a fresh start and a chance to redeem their family line for the next generation.
Walt had squandered his chance in spectacular fashion and threatened to take Grace’s out as well, yet somehow it still hung like a charm on a thin string, winking in the light. This was in large part because her cousin Lillie had adopted her from their first breaths and insisted upon bringing her along to high society functions. But what Grace had secretly loved more than any of Lillie’s introductions to balls or dinner parties was the way the late-afternoon light splashed across the Carter mansion’s parquet floors; how she and Lillie had grown up believing the cast-iron fountain in the back courtyard was a magical, wish-granting spring; the way Lillie’s well-fed corgi Lulu padded around the house with a bell collar muffled by her fur.
It wasn’t the riches of the Carter mansion that called her back again and again, but the sense of family. Though it would never be her home in name, Oliver and Lillie had planted seeds in her heart that were not easily uprooted.
“Turn around,” Lillie ordered. She untied the sunhat from around Grace’s throat. Lillie was a stunning beauty, with her mother’s sculpted cheekbones and fair complexion, her father’s bright eyes and his kindness. Grace was utterly in love with her.
Grace had arrived a week ago, taking the train from Kansas City, and they had spent every afternoon sitting beneath parasols in the backyard, eating sandwiches and drinking lemonades with frozen blueberries floating on top while the frantic sound of hammering thundered around them. It was impossible to go anywhere in the city without seeing the lavish art nouveau posters plastered on every pole and building for miles—an image by Mucha of an elegant woman in a tangerine dress, grasping the hand of a Native American chief in a ceremonial war bonnet behind her.
