“Mr. Styles would like to see you in his office.”
“Well, I—I can’t right now. I need to—”
But the waiter had already turned, intending that she follow. She saw Charlie Voss across the room and tried to wave but couldn’t catch his eye. Anna felt a thud of inevitability. Of course Mr. Styles was here. Of course she would see him. She had made that choice by walking through the lacquered door.
She followed the waiter into the turbulent clatter of a kitchen, then up a flight of narrow steps, scuffed and bare, which led through another door into a hushed corridor. This felt like a different establishment: thick soft carpet, oil paintings lit by small lamps attached to their frames. Anna heard muted laughter from behind closed doors. The air was gamy with cigar and pipe smoke.
Her escort knocked at a door at the end of this hall and pushed it open. Anna stepped inside a wood-paneled office and found Mr. Styles reposed behind an expensive-looking desk. “Miss Feeney,” he said in a hale, mannered voice, rising to his feet. “Swell of you to pay us a visit.”
Anna felt accused, as if she’d been caught trying to avoid him. “I looked for you,” she said. “I thought you weren’t here.”
“But I’m always here,” he said. “If I’m not, the whole place goes up in smoke. Right, boys?”
Four young men with the unfriendly faces of hoods had been lounging about the room like gargoyles. They murmured assent, apparently recognizing the rhetorical nature of their conversational role.
“In that case,” Anna said, “I suppose we’re lucky you stayed.”
The bantering channel remained open in her; she angled her discourse toward it and listened with pleasure as it jingled through.
Mr. Styles watched her with a gravity that bore no relation to his jocund tone. “Boys,” he said, “say hello to the exceptionally charming Miss Feeney.”
Mumbled hellos. Her guide had left, shutting the door behind him. Anna watched the handsome gangster in his beautifully cut suit and felt their day with Lydia at Manhattan Beach dissolving like an aspirin into a tumbler of water. She longed to withdraw, to leave the memory intact, but the power to summon and dismiss seemed to lie entirely with Mr. Styles. She was suddenly angry.
“Go on ahead, boys,” he said as they took up their hats. “I’ll see Miss Feeney out.”
When they’d gone, he stood at his desk, glancing at a page or two that lay there. Then he turned back to Anna and spoke in an altogether different voice. “I’m glad to see you. How is your sister?”
She froze, staring at her empty hands. As lightly as she could manage, she replied, “That’s a story for another day. I need to get back to my date.”
“To hell with your date.” He was smiling.
“He might feel otherwise.”
“No doubt.”
A buzzing filled Anna’s head. She was furious with Dexter Styles and could feel that he was angry, too. She’d no idea why.
“I’ll drive you home,” he said.
“Thank you, but I’ve no plans to leave at the moment, and I don’t need a ride. Besides,” she added mockingly, “won’t the whole place go up in smoke?”
“That’s an added incentive!” he said with a laugh.
She pushed past him through the door into the carpeted hallway. Making no effort to follow her or even raise his voice, he said, “My car is outside. Someone will meet you by the coat check.”
She pretended not to hear. But as she wended her way along hushed turns of hall, she found herself planning her excuse to Charlie Voss. This discovery further enraged her. Who did Mr. Styles think he was?
She fumbled through a warren of corridors and stairs and burst into the dining room through a different door than the one she’d left by. Hammond sat alone at their table, eyeing the dance floor with a look of pale fury. Following his gaze, Anna made out Nell and Marco pressed together.
She was relieved to find Charlie Voss a few tables over with several men he seemed to know. “I’ve run into an old friend of my mother’s,” she told him. “He disapproves of my being out and insists on driving me home. I hope that’s all right.”
If Charlie was surprised, much less hurt, he managed to iron every trace of it from his voice. “As long as I’ve your word that you’ll be in good hands.”
“Thank you, Charlie, for a wonderful evening. Let’s do it again.”
“I shall count the hours.”
There were lines for the coat and hatcheck, but the elderly waiter who had brought her to Mr. Styles’s office was waiting. He took Anna’s claim checks and joined her a few moments later with her coat and hat. They left the club through an exit that deposited them a few doors down the block from the lacquered entrance. Mr. Styles’s Cadillac idled there discreetly.
As the waiter was opening the passenger door, a man approached the driver’s window. Mr. Styles rolled it down. “Hello, George,” he said, shaking hands through the window as Anna slid into the front seat beside him.
“Leaving early?” George asked.
“Just to drive Miss Feeney home. Miss Feeney, this is Dr. Porter, my brother-in-law. Miss Feeney works for me.”
The doctor peered into the dark car at Anna. She caught a mirthful gaze over glints of mustache. A ladies’ man.
“Ask for a bottle on the house,” Mr. Styles told him. “I’ll look for you shortly. If we miss each other, I’ll see you at Sutton Place tomorrow.”
He rolled up his window and pulled away. As the big car drifted uptown, headlights misting the icy air, he said, “Tell me what happened.”
Anna explained what had followed their day at Manhattan Beach. It was the first time she’d told the story, and she told it carefully. The leather smell of the car transported her back to the day itself: holding Lydia’s warm weight, the heartbeat fanning out from somewhere deep. She was stricken by loss, as if her sister had just been torn from her arms. She remembered the roar of life under Lydia’s skin even in her stillness, and hungered for that life in a way that left her weak.
When she finished, Mr. Styles said in a tight voice, “I’m sick to hear it.”
They drove uptown and then back down. On Fifth Avenue, they floated past the public library, where Anna had walked after seeing her mother off at Pennsylvania Station. It was here she’d first perceived the suctioning dark and felt its danger. She’d been fending off that danger ever since. A different kind of girl. How did you know what kind of girl you were, with no one around you? Maybe those kinds of girls were simply girls who’d no one to tell them they were not those kinds of girls.