Ada couldn’t hold back a sigh of relief. For the first time since fleeing Haversham, she didn’t feel the asylum’s presence bearing down on her. Maybe one day, the past two weeks would become a distant memory, something she could tell as a diverting story between cigarette pulls and frenzied turns on the dance floor. Until then she was just content to be here, hidden away in the tiny kingdom that Johnny Dervish had built. The Cast Iron meant safety—it always had.
She and Corinne shared a room opposite the stairs, with a low door partially obscured by a potted plant. Not much more than two army cots and a stack of milk crates, but they had made it a home, papering the walls with magazine cutouts and draping silk scarves from the plywood ceiling.
Ada shed her shapeless asylum garb and slipped into a skirt and blouse. She yanked the scarf off her head and tossed it into the corner. Her freed hair emerged cloudlike around her face. She examined it carefully in the mirror. Two weeks without proper care had left it worse for wear, but the damage was not irreparable. Out in society, she would garner nasty glares by leaving it free like this, but if there was one place she could always walk without fear, it was the Cast Iron.
Behind her, Corinne had stripped off her uniform and left it bundled in the corner with Ada’s scarf. She was dressing in a blue, low-waisted frock that appeared to have spent the majority of its life wadded in a ball. She leaned around Ada’s shoulder at the mirror to twist her fingers through her limp hair for a few seconds before finally giving up.
In the reflection, Ada caught a glimpse of something on her bed that she hadn’t seen before. She turned to find a small canvas painting, maybe twelve inches square, propped against the wall. It depicted a sprawling tree by a creek, ringed by the riotous glare of yellow-white sunlight. The emerald grass grew tall and wild, even in the dappled shade of the branches. There were clumps of vibrant purple wildflowers, painted with such dexterity that they seemed to have motion in the breeze. A wooden swing hung in the foreground, a picture of peaceful tranquility.
In front of the painting on the bed, tied with simple twine, was a bunch of purple wildflowers, the exact shade and shape as the ones in the painting.
“Saint left that for you.” Corinne was in the corner, hopping on one foot as she tried to free herself from her shoe. “He thought you might want some springtime, after the asylum.”
There was a pang in Ada’s chest, and she bit her lip. For a split second she was back there again, paralyzingly alone in a prison built for people just like her.
“Is he here?” she asked, struggling to keep her voice even.
“I haven’t heard from him in a while.” Corinne finally gave in and sat down on her bed to unbuckle her shoes. “You should have seen him the night you were arrested, Ada. He was a wreck when he got back to the Cast Iron. Johnny almost called the doctor.”
Ada pushed the painting facedown on the bed and turned her head so that Corinne couldn’t see her expression.
“Everything jake?” Corinne asked after a few seconds.
“I don’t want to talk about it.” Ada went back to the mirror and rubbed vigorously at the dark circles under her eyes.
Beyond her own reflection, she could see Corinne eyeing her, deciding whether or not to press the issue further. Finally Corinne shrugged.
“Come on,” she told Ada. “Johnny will want to know it all went without a hitch.”
Ada followed her out the door, relieved the moment had passed. It was rare that she kept anything from Corinne, but this was still too fresh a wound. She arranged her face into the wry expression she knew Corinne would expect.
“Giving you the key to his Ford and sending you off to an asylum with a fake uniform and the foolproof alias of ‘Nurse Salem’— how could he think anything would go wrong?”
“I’ll have you know that this brilliant plan was entirely my design,” Corinne said.
“Oh, I don’t doubt it.”
“Do I detect a hint of sarcasm?”
“You’re the wordsmith around here, Cor. I just play the music and look pretty.”
Corinne snorted but didn’t say more.
Johnny’s office was in the basement as well, at the end of a corridor by the stairs. Johnny didn’t live at the Cast Iron, in the sense that he had a house and bed elsewhere, but anyone would be hard-pressed to find a time when he wasn’t in his office or at his reserved table on the club floor, working through lines of visitors and petitioners like a king of old.
“There’s my girls,” he said, beaming at them from behind his massive oak desk.
There were a handful of people in his office, including someone Ada had never seen before. The stranger was sitting on the corner of the desk, his black shirtsleeves rolled up to his elbows. He had short, unruly brown hair, pale skin, and a look of suspicious amusement that belied his youthful features. His coal-gray trousers were neatly pressed, but Ada saw that his shoes were practical and well-worn.
The office cleared, with most of the visitors patting Ada on the shoulder. The exact circumstances of her absence weren’t widely known, but it was hard to keep a tight lid on something like that. No telling what the latest rumor was. No telling how much Corinne had embroidered those rumors herself.