He faced me and I realized that he was angry. But there was something else, too, a look of desperation in his eyes that resembled what I saw in my own reflection when I bothered to study it closely enough. Without warning, he leaned forward and kissed me, his mouth hard and demanding, my head pressed against the wall of the elevator. I told myself that I would have pulled away if I’d had somewhere to move, that I didn’t want him to touch me, to kiss me. But neither thought stopped me from kissing him back.
The elevator shuddered to a stop, and he lifted his face away from mine, his eyes still dark. He slid open the gate and followed me from the elevator and toward the stairs that led to the seventh floor. I knew without asking that we were headed to the attic room, and I balked, not wanting to be confronted with the memories of the night we’d spent there, of the moonlight mixed with the smell of paint and dust and us.
But I knew, too, that this was where the bricks Olive pointed to in the mural were, and how neither Cooper nor I could leave it alone until we had all the tarnished pieces of Olive and Harry’s love affair laid open and exposed before us. The only thing I was unsure of was what we were supposed to do once we had all the answers.
Cooper’s bed had been stripped of its sheets, the brown blanket folded neatly at the bottom and matching the other two empty beds. The room appeared to be more of a dormitory now instead of a room forgotten at the top of the old mansion, a room whose walls contained more than just bricks and mortar. I stood by the wall opposite the window, not looking in that direction so I wouldn’t remember. As if I could block out that night any more than I could forget the color of my own hair.
Cooper walked toward the bed and placed his hat and cane on top of the blanket. After a quick glance in my direction, he approached the fireplace where three squares had been painted on the bricks in a heraldic design. But the one in the middle was different, displaying Saint George, the red cross over his chest like a beacon marking treasure. Cooper reached out his hand, hesitating only a moment, then gently pressed his fingers against the cross. A cluster of bricks slid out from below the square, revealing a shallow opening.
Looking back at me, he raised an eyebrow. “I feel like Caesar, fixin’ to cross the Rubicon.”
I almost laughed at his Southernism but found I was trembling too much to do anything else but watch. I didn’t come forward, choosing instead to look over his shoulder into the dark space within. At first I thought the hole was empty, hoped it was empty. Because then there would be nothing that would bind us together, nothing that would make our good-bye less than permanent.
But when Cooper reached in and pulled out a stack of paper, I knew that the connection between us that I’d felt the first time I’d seen him was as real and constant as morning following night.
He sat down on the bed and smoothed his hand over the top sheet of paper, staring at the heavily embossed letterhead. “Pinkerton Detective Agency.” He looked up at me as if it were my decision for him to proceed. But we both knew that we were already on the far bank of the Rubicon.
I waited quietly while he bent his head to read. When he was done, he slowly raised his head, his eyes troubled.
“What does it say?”
He looked from me to the letter then back again. “Harry hired a detective to find Olive, to make sure she was all right. It says she married Hans Jungmann in 1893. It’s dated end of January, the same month you told me that Harry Pratt disappeared. Which, coincidentally, is right before my grandfather, Augustus Ravenel, went to Cuba.”
“And changed his name from Harry Pratt.” My legs didn’t feel strong enough to hold me up anymore, and I moved to the bed and sat down next to Cooper, being careful not to touch him. “I think I know why Olive and Harry were separated.”
Cooper turned to me with a lifted brow.
“Prunella,” I whispered.
“Prunella, as in Harry’s sister. My great-aunt Prunella, apparently.”
I nodded. “When I visited her, she told me that she’d always wanted to see Harry again so she could make amends for something horrible she’d done. Maybe she said something or did something that tore them apart. Something they were both powerless to stop.”
Cooper nodded slowly. “The timing of it all certainly lends itself to that theory. His sudden disappearance from New York and reappearance in Cuba, and Olive’s marriage all in the same year.” He gave me an odd look. “When was your mother born?”
I sucked in a quick breath as I found my thoughts wandering down the same dark path. “Not until November of 1893.”
“Thank God,” he said under his breath.
I glanced at the other letter still folded on his lap. “What’s that?”
Laying aside the detective report, he pulled out what appeared to be several attempts at the same letter and then held them between us so we could read them together.
The date at the top read January 30, 1893. My darling Olive it began. My eyes read quickly, each word more painful to read than the last, the ink heavier and darker as the author wrote, as if his grief were pouring out onto the paper along with the black ink.