Others have gotten wind of the situation and are reentering the room in droves. The restaurant is now as full as it was during its dinner prime, perhaps fuller. No Xavier, though, Vivian notes. The air in Canton’s has become stuffy, suffocating.
“Likely heart attack,” someone murmurs.
“Secondheart attack,” someone else adds.
“Oh my God,” says a man whom Vivian recognizes as a statehouse reporter forThe Boston Globe. He’s not much of a journalist, chasing stories that aren’t really stories. She can almost see his wheels turning.Good luck with that, she thinks sarcastically. Given the secrecy surrounding the Knox, she’s pretty sure they’d break him before he could break this story.
It feels strange to be gathered with these people, watching this like it’s some sort of performance art. Vivian is reminded of when her mother abruptly fell on the street, the mask of the disease she’d tried to cover up finally slipping. Vivian had felt useless then, paralyzed with the realization that something was seriously wrong, like Oliver must be now. She almost feels sorry for him. The memory creates a heaviness in her chest—Vivian needs to leave, get some space.
She escapes into the hall. The air feels like a cool drink of water. Taking a deep breath, she looks around. She’s not alone. A figure is quickly absconding down the hall.
The girl with the blue hair.
Vivian instinctively follows. The girl is walking at a fast clip, blue locks bobbing with each step. She leaves a cloud of cheap perfume in her wake. Vivian holds her breath, trailing behind. As they near the grand staircase, a loud knock pounds at the front door. The paramedics?
The girl quickens her pace, disappearing around a bend. Vivian follows, securing her Chanel purse in a cross-body style. The hall becomes narrower, darker. She just assumed this hall dead-ended, but now that she’s thinking about the building’s orientation, she realizes there are whole swathes of rooms below—and above—her. The place is disorienting. The night of her sleepover, when she wandered around searching for secretaries, she was one level up—at least, shethinksshe was.
Right now, in the wake of everything else that threatens to turn her mind inside out, Vivian finds all she can focus in on, all she cares about at this moment, with an almost overwhelming desire, is figuring out who this girl is.
But she’s gone.
As Vivian turns the corner, the hall is frustratingly empty. Did she disappear into one of the many rooms with closed doorsVivian now passes? Or did she perhaps take this small elevator tucked into the wall? Vivian pauses to listen; there’s no grinding of elevator machinery, but there is the distant padding of steps.
Vivian follows the sound; it’s coming from an adjacent door. As she cups her ear against it, the door swings inward. She nearly falls over, stumbling onto a landing from which a metal spiral staircase winds upward. The stairwell is dark, but from beyond, footsteps ricochet.
The girl must be climbing these stairs.
Where do they lead? Vivian runs her hand along the banister as she, too, starts up. She keeps thinking of the way the girl clutched Peter’s shoulders, as if she had a right to touch him. Vivian bypasses a landing and continues ascending the stairs to arrive at—if her calculations are correct—the fourth floor.
The way Peter was so quick to help her with the suitcase.
The stairs continue to spiral upward to yet another floor, but something is pulling Vivian to this one.
The way Peter leaned into the girl.
Vivian is faced with two doors; she tries the first, cracking it halfway open. It’s a back entrance into a magnificent bedroom that feels like the inside of a jewelry box: deep-navy walls, a stunning Murano glass chandelier, copper-colored silk drapes, a brass four-poster bed with a deep rose-gold paisley velvet comforter. Graham’s room? She does a quick scan; there are no secretaries, but on the wall hangs a large seascape oil painting that takes her breath away: It’s Rembrandt’sStorm on the Sea of Galilee, stolen in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum heist.
Christ.
Vivian backtracks, stunned. If the girl disappeared intothatroom, Vivian’s not about to follow. She tries the second door, wondering what might possibly be behind this one.
It couldn’t be more opposite: a long, darkened corridor. Atthe far end, there’s shadowy movement—the girl?—followed by the slow groan of a door opening. Vivian hastens down the hall, but just as she reaches the door, it clicks shut. She grasps the knob, desperately trying to turn it, but it’s no use. It’s locked.Shit.
She’s lost her.
Suddenly, Vivian becomes aware of how absurdly she’s acted. What is she doing? Peter must be wondering where she is. And whereisshe, anyway? A quick glance through the only window seems to indicate she is in between buildings, like this long hall connects the Knox with another entity.
Just then, her purse vibrates, and she startles. There must be a pocket of reception here, by the window. Her hands feel like putty as she combs through to find the phone.
Vivian’s text to Rachel about the “pigeons on the building” apparently went through because Rachel’s responded.
Yes…remember when Xavier said one of the jewelers on the top floor in his building used to “bomb” aka clean the jewelry in a sink in front of his open window with a window fan blowing? And then there were all the dead pigeons of the roof…
It is slowly coming back to Vivian. She quickly sends a response, praying that Rachel is by her phone.
Yes…. now I do. But what was the reason again that the birds died??
Rachel immediately replies:
