Beautiful Little Fools(42)

He pulled the hairpin out of his jacket pocket and held it out to her, in his palm.

“That’s not mine,” she said quickly. “I’m afraid you’ve driven all the way down here for nothing, Detective.” Her tone was matter-of-fact, her eyes remained right squarely on his face. She appeared to be telling the truth.

“Are you sure?” His own voice faltered a little. He hadn’t exactly expected that Jordan would claim the hairpin, but he’d expected to get a sense she was lying to him, the same way he had with Daisy and Catherine. That maybe Jordan’s lie would reveal something about the other lies. But Jordan… appeared to be telling the truth? There was all that business in the past with her and the cheating scandal. Nick Carraway had told him she was an incurable liar. Out of all three of the women, Frank had been apt to trust Jordan the least, going in. “You’ve never seen this before?” he prodded.

She leaned in to examine it closely. “Well… it might be Daisy’s.”

“Daisy Buchanan’s?” He repeated her name, while trying to make sense of everything in his head. If it was true, and the hairpin was Daisy’s, wasn’t Jordan supposed to be her closest friend? Why would she tell him the truth and potentially incriminate Daisy?

“I guess I couldn’t tell you for sure,” Jordan was saying now. “But it looks an awful lot like the hairpins I helped Tom pick out for her wedding present…” Her voice trailed off and she seemed to be remembering something, in another time.

“Well,” he said now. “I appreciate your honesty.” He did, even if it also confused the hell out of him.

“I don’t know why you’re fixating on it, though,” Jordan said. “Daisy was at parties at Jay’s house all summer. She could’ve dropped it anytime.” She barely finished that thought when she turned, began to walk off toward the clubhouse to join her teammates for lunch.

“Miss Baker,” he called after her. “One more question.”

She whipped her head around and cast him an icy stare. Men had certainly withered from less. “Did you really move the ball?” he asked her.

Every paper said she had. Her first professional golf tournament, she’d been in the lead, but supposedly she’d moved the ball and had been thrown out of the tournament for cheating. At that point, she’d retreated to New York, and that’s what had eventually put her there last summer with Daisy and Catherine, Nick Carraway and Jay Gatsby. Yet, here she was, back on the tour now. If she’d cheated, why had they let her back? And if she was an incurable liar, as Nick had told him, why was she the only one who seemed to be telling him the truth?

She chewed on her bottom lip a little, like she was considering whether or not to answer him or to simply walk away. But then she said, “What do you think, Detective?”

“I think…” What did he think? Jordan was tough and smart and here she was today, winning the tournament on her own. “I think maybe you didn’t,” he said.

She screwed her face into a funny half smile and she nodded. And then just like that, she turned and ran off toward the clubhouse.





Jordan 1921

ATLANTA, GEORGIA




THE NIGHT BEFORE THE END of everything, I felt like fire.

My body was hot, emotion coursing through my veins, explosive. I could feel it in my skin and on my lips and in the pounding of my heart. It was the adrenaline rush of a real paying tournament the next morning. But it was more than that too. It was a confidence, a sheer, bright, stupid confidence that I could have it all. I could have everything I ever wanted. That I, too, could be happy.

The whole team was staying a few blocks away from the tournament. It was a quaint little southern inn, with only a few rooms, and we took up all of them. In spite of that, Mrs. Pearce warned us all upon arrival not to disturb any other guests. At which point Mary Margaret had turned to me, rolled her eyes. I suppressed a giggle, and Jerralyn shot me a dirty look. Mrs. Pearce didn’t notice any of it, and she kept on talking. “… Breakfast downstairs, promptly at eight,” she was saying. “The tournament will begin at ten…” We’d already received a schedule and I already knew all this, so I tuned her out. It was late, nearly eleven. The train ride had felt interminably long, and my body was already jittery with the fire in my veins. I shuffled my feet while she continued to drone on and on and on.

At last, she was finished with her diatribe, and we all carried our bags upstairs to our rooms. Mary Margaret and I were sharing, just like we always did back in Charleston. But instead of bunk beds, here we would share the room’s one double bed. We stood in the doorway for a moment, both just staring at it. Then Mary Margaret put her bags down first, sat on the bed to test it, bounced a little. “Which side would you like?” she asked me, her voice sounding cool and polite. She refused to meet my eyes.

We’d kept a careful distance from each other since my return from France, her rescinded middle-of-the-night invitation to Nashville still an unspoken weight between us. She hadn’t climbed down into my bunk bed even once back in Charleston, and now I eyed the double bed and my cheeks flushed. “I don’t care,” I told her. “It’s up to you, Ems.”

“I suppose I could sleep on the floor,” she said. Her voice came out so husky now that I had to resist the urge to go to her, to run my hand across her throat, her chin, up to her lips, to trace the origin of that voice.