Iron Cast(41)

“I’m fine,” he told her, for the eighth time that day. “I need to go check on my mother.”

“I’ll go with you.”

“No.”

His voice was even, but the word had a finality to it that gave Corinne pause. She remembered how carefully Ada guarded her mother’s home. Gabriel walked to the stairs with only the slightest hitch in his gait, and Corinne decided he was probably okay to hobble home on his own. The wound on his side didn’t have that many stitches, after all.

“We leave at six,” she called after him. “Wear a suit.”

He lifted a hand in acknowledgment and disappeared, slowly, up the stairs.

“And try not to look armed,” Corinne shouted as an afterthought.

Gabriel responded by slamming the panel shut. Corinne picked up the book she’d been trying to read, but even in solitude she couldn’t focus on the words. When Saint crept out of his room, she was glad for the distraction. He kept to himself these days, which made him easy to forget about. Saint didn’t say anything to her, just slipped past her chair to the coffee table and snatched up an egg that she didn’t remember seeing during her attempt at tidying.

“Where did that come from?” she asked.

He looked at her like a preying wolf had just spoken to him, and he cupped the egg protectively.

“It’s for a painting,” he said, not really answering her question. “The—the composition is wrong.”

Corinne wanted to say more, like how odd it was that eggs seemed to be turning up all over the Cast Iron, as if there were a stealthy chicken on the loose. But she remembered she was supposed to hate him and looked back at her book. Saint scurried away. Once he was gone, Corinne twisted in her chair and leaned over the back as far as she could. She could just barely see past the doorframe into Saint’s room. He was pulling a painting from the easel and replacing it with a blank canvas. Stretching over the chair back a couple more inches, Corinne saw that the finished painting was of the common room, rendered in perfect detail, down to the rips in the couches and the clutter on the coffee table.

Saint shut the door—possibly he had noticed her not-so-subtle spying. Corinne dropped back down in her chair and made herself dutifully turn the pages of her book until half past five, when the phone in Johnny’s office began to ring. She sprang free from the chair and ran to grab it. Maybe Johnny was calling with news.

It was Ada.

“Hey, Cor. Don’t be mad.”

“Something wrong?”

“No, nothing.”

There were muffled voices in the background. Corinne thought she heard music.

“We just lost track of time,” Ada continued. “I’m not going to make it to the play tonight.”

“Who’s we? Where are you?”

“Charlie and I are in the South End. You don’t need me, do you?”

Corinne wanted to tell her that she did need her, even though that wasn’t strictly true. Mostly she just didn’t understand why Ada would rather go to what sounded like a party with Charlie than help them figure out who was behind the shooting at the docks.

“I’ll live,” Corinne said. “You sure you’re okay?”

“Everything’s copacetic. Don’t go alone, though. Take Gabriel.”

“I hope you realize that making me attend a play alone with Gabriel is cruel and unusual punishment.”

“I owe you one, Cor. Gotta run.”

The line went dead, and Corinne dropped the receiver into its cradle with a sigh. She returned to the common room, trying to convince herself that she wasn’t upset. Ada had begged off things before, and Corinne understood that. The theater district was a welcoming place relative to the rest of Boston, but society could stomach only so much progressiveness before it revolted. A girl who was both black and a hemopath could not expect a carefree evening on the town, which was something Ada had to remind Corinne of occasionally, as Corinne preferred to forget the ugly truth of it.

This was different, though. Two members of Johnny’s crew were dead, another wounded, and Johnny still hadn’t returned. Why did Ada insist on pretending that everything wasn’t falling apart? Corinne kept telling herself she wasn’t angry all the way across the common room and to Saint’s doorway. She knocked on the door twice, and after a few seconds he creaked it open, dripping paintbrush in hand.

“You’re coming to the Mythic with us tonight,” she said. “Find a suit.”



Ada hung up the phone right as the musicians in the other room roared into a new song. It was all staccato horns and plucked strings and rolling piano. She couldn’t help but smile at the sound.

“Hey,” Charlie said, sticking his head into the room. “You need to go back?”

Ada shook her head. She took his hand, and he led her back into the parlor, which had once been a quaint sitting room, decked with floral wallpaper and matching chartreuse curtains. Now the room was hot and packed with bodies. Everyone moved together, sharing cigarettes and passing bottles of liquor. The glossy china plates displayed on the walls quivered with the pounding percussion and shaking floors. The ambience was overwhelming and powerful, and Ada felt closer to the music than she ever had before—even when she coaxed it herself from the violin.

Corinne didn’t need her at the theater to talk to the Gretskys. And if Ada was honest with herself, she didn’t really want to go. Even if they figured out who the thespian at the docks was, there was nothing they could do about it until Johnny came back. She would rather be standing here, leaning slightly into Charlie, letting him sprawl his fingers over her left shoulder. His index finger tapped an absent rhythm into her collarbone.