“Things are important,” she protests teasingly. “Don’t forget, I’m a collector of ‘things.’ ”
“Ah. I stand corrected.” He grins. “And I build things, so I, too, think things are important. Isn’t that a funny pairing?”
“What?”
“You and me. I like to build beautiful things, and you like to collect them.”
“I’ll give it to you, but it is a little simplistic.”
“Vivian,” he says, rather throatily, “there is nothing simple about the idea of you and me.”
He stares into her eyes, and Vivian feels caught in his gaze, like a net has entangled her. She parts her lips for a response, but none comes. His gaze moves to her lips, and then he leans across the table to kiss her.
“Come back with me to the Knox. I’m staying there tonight.”
“All right,” she whispers. Christ. What is she doing? Maybe this is exactly what she needs to be doing. She’s hot and cold, intoxicated and sober, fearful and fearless. She’s everything, at the same time—no.Theyare everything.
Peter smiles adoringly at her. “What I meant was: I’m new to love at first sight. Or third sight, in our case.”
The Knox
February
Idaresay, Peter is utterly besotted with Vivian—and was keen to prove it to her last night. My bedroom windows fogged up more than they did during the swinger parties Graham threw in the seventies.
But—all is not as it seems with that woman. Rose senses this, too. Last night, when she heard the two of them return, she cupped her ear against the bedroom door to take a listen. A touch improper, perhaps—but who could fault her? She’s been in quite the dry spell for some time. Not since…well, it’s not formeto disclose.
Once Peter nodded off, Vivian subjected me to a rather unexpected degree of scrutiny. She opened my doors, peered into my rooms, examined my internal contents. While I might ordinarily find such audacity intolerable, I confess to being slightly curious about what she was seeking—and who she is. I still cannot determine why she strikes me as familiar. She’s quite lucky, really, that Rose was also soundly asleep, and that she didn’t accidentally wander into Graham’s private chambers. (He has been in residence here, convalescing, since his recent heart attack.)
Familiar though Vivian may seem, she remains a guest—an outsider. And would be well advised to conduct herself accordingly. The last guest who dared wander my halls in the dead of the night had the distinct misfortune of stumbling upon one of the sacred scrolls.
Let’s just say our members did not take kindly to this transgression.
Taylor
Taylor steps onto Clapboard Street, uncrumpling the paper from her pocket to double-check the address she jotted down earlier on the phone. Yep, the Knox: 17 Clapboard Street. A raindrop smearing the ink, the seven now morphing into a nine.
She’s early for her interview, so she pauses under her umbrella to look around her. She’s never been on this small stretch of street before; it’s quietly folded into the Beacon Hill neighborhood like the dog-eared corner of a page. The road is cobblestoned and so narrow a car couldn’t fit on it, only the horse and carriage for which it must have been originally designed. Elegant gaslit lampposts dot the sidewalks, and the road rises at an incline, so the redbrick houses stack at sharp angles into the hill. Rain droplets plunk into the street cracks with a strange rhythmic quality, adding to the ambiance of a forgotten era.
She holds her breath, mesmerized. In North Carolina, the oldest building she was in was the public high school, built in the 1970s and not updated since.
A feeling akin to excitement bubbles in her for the first timein weeks. She suddenly feels with an absolute clarity that quitting the hospital was the right move. Not only has this job opportunity with access to the kind of life she’s always desired practically landed on her lap, but given the top hat symbol, this place is somehow connected to both Vivian and her mother. It’s as if, in a weird way, Taylor has been led to this very moment.
One side of Clapboard Street has beautiful townhomes with proper doors and window boxes packed with bright pansies and begonias and cascading greenery. The other side of the street feels like the back of a house, consisting mostly of a continuous brick wall interrupted every so often by a flat, unmarked black door or a small, iron-grated garden window. It is on this unadorned—unnumbered—left side that the Knox building sits, or rather the back of the Knox, where she’s been instructed to show up for her interview.
Employees must use the back door. That’s fine with Taylor if this is the street she has to traverse each day.
As she makes her way toward number 17, she glimpses up into the tall windows of the townhouses on the fancy side of the street. Sam once told her the reason why the front entrances are elevated from street level is because they were designed to avoid the horse shit that littered the roads back in the day. All she knows is that now, this elevation adds to their allure.
In one home, she spies the upper portion of a rich oil painting positioned beneath a picture light, and the curved, glossy black lid of a baby-grand piano. In another, she sees wainscoting on the walls and an ornate ceiling medallion from which hangs the most opulent crystal chandelier—the likes of which she’s only ever seen in one of those magazines that showcase celebrities’ homes. Imagine turning onthatlight each day.
At her dad’s Outer Banks restaurant, a crab house and tiki bar that swells with seasonal tourists and second-home ownersin the summer months, Taylor could always tell which people were the really wealthy ones. They didn’t ask for the price of the specials; they didn’t even glance at the restaurant bill. They just handed over their credit cards; they left tips that were sometimes too much and sometimes too little, the former because money was irrelevant to them, and the latter because they were too drunk to do the proper calculations.
In the South, wealth seems to translate to excess, and so far, in the North, it appears more buttoned-up, museum-like, viewed from behind a rope. Or from a rainy street.
But for Taylor, this is about to change.
When she reaches number 16, she swivels toward the opposite brick-faced side, where there is a black door with a small brass knocker in the shape of some flower thing. A camera attached to the upper right of the building angles toward the door.
