He smirked. “Now, there’s an acquired taste if I ever heard of one.”
Their server returned with everyone’s entrées. Once the food was placed before them, Ivy silently blessed her meal, and Elsa did the same.
“Bon appétit!” Archer picked up his fork with undue fanfare and dug into his duck and peaches.
Elsa’s plate of lobster medallions was so artfully arranged with the asparagus tips she almost didn’t want to ruin it by taking a bite. But she did, and it was worth it. The Beresford dinners were good, but the Ritz had earned its reputation.
“How’s your shrimp scampi and bean sprouts?” she whispered to Ivy.
“Another acquired taste, perhaps? But hang on a minute.” She swirled another bite through the coriander dressing and tried again. “Yep, I’m acquiring it.”
Percy lifted a blini and said, “To acquired tastes.”
“To the straight and narrow,” Elsa added.
Archer raised a glass toward her and then to Ivy. “To my collective conscience.”
CHAPTER
4
TARRYTOWN
THURSDAY, AUGUST 26, 1926
On the bright side, at least Elsa knew without any doubt that she was not alone in the Van Tessel mansion, thanks to the hammering in the library.
She hadn’t seen Mr. Spalding today, but he’d left two more notebooks on the table for her along with a note that he’d come across them yesterday. Perhaps he’d been looking for that aviary again. Regardless, she was delighted that the first one she opened was Birdie’s continued account of the expedition during which she’d suspected herself pregnant. Specimen data was mixed in, and that would be useful to cross-reference Linus’s notes for the same information. But it was clear she used this space for personal journaling and didn’t intend it as the scientific record her husband kept.
Not long into reading it, the racket from the adjacent room got the better of Elsa’s curiosity. She went to the doorframe to watch.
Luke sat on the floor before one fireplace, and Tom sat at the other, on the opposite wall. They must have brought in a larger crew yesterday, because the crown and baseboard molding were completely gone. The bookshelves, too, had been moved out.Barney rested on the bare floor in a patch of sunshine, but when the dog noticed her, he roused himself.
She extended her hand, mostly to keep him from getting past and disturbing the birds on the dining room table behind her. Misinterpreting her gesture, he pushed his head under her palm and wagged his tail.
Luke turned and stood when he saw her, then pulled cotton from his ears. A pencil poked up from the pocket of his shirt.
“You’ve made remarkable progress in here,” she said. Dust swirled on sunbeams and itched her throat. “What’s today’s project?”
Luke stepped closer, likely to be heard over Tom’s hammering. He angled himself so the scarred side of his face was less visible, and she wondered if that was intentional. She hoped it wasn’t.
Pointing to where Tom worked, he said, “You see all of those tiles surrounding both fireplaces? They’ve already been spoken for by one of our clients, an interior decorator.”
“So soon?”
He nodded. “She saw a photograph and decided these were exactly what she needed. Only, she doesn’t want the fireplaces they’re attached to. We’ve got to chisel each one out of the wall and label the backs so they can be reinstalled in the right order.”
Some tiles were spread on the floor already. She moved toward the fireplace to inspect them. They were not identical squares but had been painted with an intricate pattern of peacock and ostrich feathers that stretched from one tile to the next. “Now, that’s painstaking work. What happens if you break one?”
Luke winced, his gaze darting to a broken tile on the floor near where Tom knelt, the cotton in his ears obviously doing its job.
“Oh. Oh dear,” Elsa said.
“It was bound to happen. But we contract with some of the best conservators in the world. They’ll paint a new tile based on what we broke.”
We, he’d said. Clearly, the break had been Tom’s doing, and yet the way Luke spoke, he shared the blame. She wondered why. Luke watched Tom for a few moments, his expression dark.
No, not dark. Concerned. She must see past the scars that could disguise the man beneath.
