Iron Cast

by Soria, Destiny;

  She cut herself short, and James raised an eyebrow. Before he could ask anything further, Madeline called on him to do his impression of the French prime minister.

  “He’s better at being Clemenceau than Clemenceau is,” she told the table, eyes bright with laughter.

  James winked at Corinne and obliged, donning a ridiculous French accent and somehow capturing the essence of a walrus mustache with just his expression. Their conversation was quickly swept away by the merriment of the guests.

  Once the party had adjourned to the parlor, Corinne took her usual spot in the northwest corner, which was the farthest from any iron and kept her headache to a dull roar, easily silenced with some aspirin and a few swigs from her hip flask when no one was looking. She was in the middle of a furtive sip when someone slapped her back roughly.

  “Please tell me that’s medicinal,” came the booming voice.

  “Phillip,” she said through her coughing. She barely had time to stash the flask before her mother breezed across the room, arms wide to embrace her son.

  “Phil, when did you get here?” Mrs. Wells cried. “You slip in without even a word? Where’s Angela?”

  Her questions went unanswered for a few minutes as the other guests noticed the new arrival. There were handshakes all around and congratulations on his upcoming nuptials. Corinne was trapped in the corner behind the tall bulk of her brother, and she eventually just sank onto an ottoman to wait it out. After declining dinner and wine and cheese and everything else their mother tried to shove at him, Phillip finally took a seat. He shared their mother’s brown hair, though his eyes were blue like their father’s. He’d inherited all the height in the family as well, towering even over Mr. Wells. When she was younger, Corinne had started a game with herself, trying to keep count of the number of times people told the Wellses how dashing their son was. She’d lost count somewhere in the hundreds.

  “Angela’s staying with her parents until tomorrow,” Phillip said, completely comfortable under the weight of the entire party’s attention. “She wanted me to come early to help Mother with the final preparations.”

  Corinne couldn’t suppress a snort of laughter at that.

  “And to spend time with family that’s coming in,” he continued. He leaned over to muss Corinne’s hair with just a little too much force to be tenderly affectionate. She jerked away from him and almost fell off the ottoman. He knew how much she hated when he did that.

  “She’s so considerate,” Mrs. Wells said, beaming with pride at her son’s choice of bride.

  Corinne ran her fingers through her hair and thought it much more likely that Phillip was tired of Angela’s family, but she wasn’t keen on being pulled into the tedium of wedding preparations. As far as Corinne could tell, Angela was much more comfortable dictating her preferences from a tea table at a country club.

  The conversation ran swiftly toward the stress on young brides and from there on to the economy and which neighborhoods were going downhill. Corinne lost its thread for a while, so she was caught off guard when the discussion suddenly turned to hemopaths and the Harvard Bridge.

  “Are the police even trying to find them? Surely out of all the people on that bridge, someone remembers them.”

  “It’ll be the Hemopath Protection Agency that’s after them, not the regular police.”

  “Charlotte Dower said her cousin was there, and he barely remembers a thing. Still swears up and down those elephants must’ve been real.”

  “I’ve been saying for years that hemopaths are a danger to us. If they know how to get inside your head like that, what’s to stop them from doing it all the time?”

  “Is the law even enough to stop them? I’ve heard they still host those parties in secret. The police can’t shut them all down.”

  “Maybe the ironmongers have the right idea.”

  The man who said that was one of her father’s business partners. An uneasy silence fell over the room at the suggestion. The masked vigilantes who kidnapped hemopaths from their beds were hardly a topic for civilized conversation. Corinne squeezed her hand into a fist and concentrated on the pain of her nails cutting into her palm.

  “There’s no need for anything like that when there’s Haversham Asylum,” said one of the women from her mother’s bridge club.

  “Did you hear that some hemopaths are petitioning the governor to shut it down?”

  That set off a new flurry of titters. Corinne had to hold her breath to keep herself in check. She knew where the conversation would go. She’d heard it so many times, it was like a hated song on a phonograph that she’d memorized completely but never learned not to despise.

  “They say there’s torture going on there. Some kind of experimentation.” The man speaking was trying to sound informational, but he obviously just wanted to scandalize everyone.

  “Torture? In Boston? We’re not the Bolsheviks.”

  “Can you imagine the nerve, petitioning against a prison that was built solely for their comfort?”

  “Judging from the crime rates, they should be expanding the asylum. Phillip, maybe you can talk to Angela’s father about that.”

  “Yes, I’ve told him as much,” Perry Wells said, placing a hand on his son’s shoulder. “If you’re serious about running for office, that’s your campaign platform right there.”

  Her father was not a man of many words, so each one of those cut Corinne to the quick. Her father had no idea that she was a hemopath, of course. That didn’t make it hurt any less to hear him talk about the asylum in such generous terms.

  Her brother just shook his head, his lips turned up in a slight smile. Corinne watched him closely, though part of her wanted to find an excuse to leave the room.

  “It’s an interesting situation, that’s for sure,” Phillip said. A standard answer for polite society. “Seems like a better platform might just be reminding voters that our esteemed Councilman Turner paid twenty-five hundred in taxpayer dollars to a couple of hemos for a poem and a song.”

  “Twenty-five hundred?” Corinne echoed before she could stop herself.

  Phillip cocked his head at her, his eyes bespeaking a hidden amusement. “To the penny,” he said. “I play golf with one of the city accountants, and he saw the requisition.”

  “A disgrace,” said her father, shaking his head.

  “Indeed.” Corinne pressed her hand to her lips to conceal a smile. She and Ada had conned Councilman Turner out of only two thousand, meaning that five hundred dollars had mysteriously vanished. Johnny would be interested to know that the councilman was skimming off the top. That kind of information had value.

  “Well, surely that’s enough of this topic,” Mrs. Wells said, her hands twitching nervously in her lap. She hated anything that verged on controversy, so touching hemopathy and politics in the same conversation was a social catastrophe.

  Corinne had never been so grateful for her mother’s delicate sensibilities.

  “Mother’s right,” she said. “Next thing you know, we’ll be talking about anarchism and women’s suffrage and racial equality, and then the gates of hell might open up right in this parlor.”

  There were a few titters at that, but most people looked at their feet in awkward silence. Corinne wasn’t sure why she felt quite so pleased about that. Only Madeline was still looking at her, lips quirked in amusement. James was shaking his head, perplexed either by her manners or by his wife’s tacit approval of her manners. Suddenly Phillip laughed, a thunderous sound that always made Corinne jump. He probably would have tousled her hair again if she hadn’t been subtly scooting the ottoman farther and farther away from him.

  “You’d think a school like Billings would be able to train the sarcasm out of you,” he said. “I thought Father was paying for a proper young lady.”

  “All the tuition goes to bleach for the uniforms,” Corinne said.

  A few people laughed at that, and the conversation moved on. Corinne stared defiantly at Phillip until he looked awa
y. She hated how he always wore that smug expression, even when she had clearly bested him.

  Though the party had been about to break up, Phillip’s arrival had given it new life. Corinne stopped trying to appear engaged and started fantasizing about giving a poetry recital and making everyone think that the house had been overrun with badgers. She couldn’t, of course. Without Ada here to lay down a fog on their memories, they would realize she was a wordsmith immediately. The scandal of the Wells girl being a hemopath would hit the papers by morning, and by the next evening there would be no place left on the Eastern Seaboard for her to live in peace.

  When a maid slipped into the room to tell her she had a phone call, Corinne leapt off the ottoman so fast that she almost tripped and landed face-first on the Persian rug. She took the call in the hallway and was surprised to hear Ada’s voice on the other end. No one from the Cast Iron ever contacted her at home.

  “You’d better get back here fast” was all Ada said. She hung up.

  Corinne stood dumbly for a few seconds before dropping the receiver in the cradle and sprinting toward the chauffeur’s cottage behind of the house. He answered the banging on the door after a couple of minutes and promised to have the car around front in ten minutes.

  Corinne didn’t know what she was supposed to tell her parents. There was a sick feeling in her gut that she couldn’t shake. In the end she cornered her father, who was less apt to ask questions, and told him that her friend in the city was grieving the loss of a dear cousin and needed her support. He was confused but didn’t try to stop her from leaving. She didn’t bother saying good-bye to anyone, even though Madeline was eyeing her suspiciously, and she slipped out the door before her mother noticed.

  Ada’s mother was baking pão, filling the apartment with the warm aroma that reminded Ada of the birthdays and holidays of her childhood. Ada liked sitting at the table, kneading dough while her mother kept an eye on the bread in the oven and told stories about Mozambique. Her mother was tall and graceful, with high smooth cheekbones and lips made for softly whispered bedtime stories. When Ada was young, she would sleep on the sofa in their tiny one-bedroom apartment. She loved her mother’s stories, but what she loved most was looking past her mother into the darkness of the bedroom doorway, where her father would stand, his face pale in the moonlight as he swayed gently to the cadence of her voice.

  The day her father was convicted for a crime he didn’t commit, Ada had gone to Johnny Dervish and asked to join Corinne on one of her cons. Even though she’d been living in the Cast Iron and playing shows for two years, she’d always refused to be a part of the club’s less-than-legal side operations. But when she and Corinne worked together, it was magic, and it took her only six months to move her mother to a nice flat and fill it with stylish furniture and colorful drapes and ornamental figurines. None of it could make her mother happy, but that didn’t stop Ada from trying. Even with Johnny’s connections, she couldn’t free her father from prison, and she couldn’t bring herself to leave the Cast Iron.

  So instead she visited her mother once a week, sometimes more, and helped bake and listened to stories about a beautiful African queen named Nyah and the scrawny prince named António who sailed to her lands from a faraway country. She told how the prince was afraid of snakes, though he pretended he wasn’t, and how he would sing to her, though he couldn’t carry a tune. She told how he fell in love with her, and she with him, and how they decided to run away together to a new country, full of promises.

  Sometimes she told about the beautiful princess they had in this new country, a princess who could evoke purest joy or deepest sorrow with just her violin, a princess who could crumble kingdoms with a song.

  The stories always stopped there. Ada never asked her to go on. She knew how the real story ended.

  “And how is Corinne?” her mother asked, leaning over her shoulder to prod the dough.

  “Still getting me into trouble every chance she gets,” Ada said.

  Her mother smiled. She liked Corinne, who always devoured her bread and stories alike.

  “She is a very strange girl,” said Nyah. “Strange and clever.”

  It was the same epithet she always gave Corinne. Ada had relayed that to Corinne once, and Corinne had laughed so hard she fell off the bed. That night she had introduced herself onstage as Corinne the Strange and Clever, Master of Illusory Delights. Johnny had snorted his drink out his nose.

  When the phone rang, Ada was on her second hot pão roll, which she ate by itself despite her mother’s insistence that it wasn’t a proper meal. Her mother was elbow-deep in suds, washing dishes, so Ada reluctantly abandoned her food and snatched the phone off the cradle on the fifth ring.

  “Ada, I need you and Corinne. Get here as soon as you can.”

  “Johnny? Johnny, what’s wrong?”

  “As soon as you can,” he repeated. “Be careful.” He hung up. Ada grabbed her coat and hugged her mother good-bye.

  “Wait—I wanted to talk to you about something,” Nyah said, grabbing her wrist with a soapy hand.

  “I can’t, Mama. I have to go.”

  “You have time for your mother.” Her voice was sharp, which was distinct enough that Ada hesitated. The rare times when Nyah was angry, she bellowed Swahili and threw dish towels across the room. The rest of the time she was all grace and tenderness. There was no in-between.

  “What’s wrong?” Ada asked.

  “You told me months ago that you were going to come back home. You cannot live in that . . . place for your whole life.”

  Ada hesitated. She’d told her mother that to appease her, thinking she would forget about it. This apartment that she’d rented and carefully filled with tiny luxuries for her mother was not Ada’s home. Once her home had been a tiny one-bedroom, with her mother baking and her father coming in late from his clerking job, bearing fresh flowers and a sheepish smile as an apology, but those memories were distant and hazy now.

  One day almost four years ago, Nyah had called her at the club, frantic because the police had dragged her husband away in handcuffs. What came next was a haze of meetings with a lawyer and trips to the courthouse. Ada knew her father hadn’t stolen any money from his employer, but she also knew that whoever had was probably long gone by now, and the police weren’t interested in digging further. The jurors had heard her father’s accent, still stubbornly strong after so many years, and they had studied Ada and her mother with varying expressions of suspicion, confusion, and disgust. Then they had declared António Navarra guilty.

  She hadn’t seen her father since that day in court. She had tried visiting him in prison with her mother, but there was too much iron. She couldn’t even make it through the front doors. Two different appeals had been overturned, and even though Corinne had offered on multiple occasions to help Ada mastermind an escape, Ada knew her father would never agree to such drastic measures. He was a law-abiding man, even when the law had betrayed him.

  There was only a year left to his sentence. Ada sometimes felt guilty at how fast the time had flown—she was sure that the years had not been as kind to her father. Her mother brought letters from him regularly, and Ada responded as often as she could, but there was only so much she could tell him about her life. Ada’s home was the Cast Iron now, and she’d promised to keep its secrets.

  “I can’t leave the club now,” she told her mother. “It’s the only place that’s safe.”

  Nyah snapped something in Swahili that Ada suspected was a curse. Her parents had spoken Portuguese to each other when she was growing up, so the only words she knew in her mother’s native tongue were from the bedtime stories.

  “I read the newspaper stories about the police raids,” Nyah said. “Eu sei o que se passa ali.”

  “Não te preocupes, Mama. Johnny knows what he’s doing.” Ada slipped her arms into her coat and started toward the door.

  Her mother said something else, this time in Swahili. Ada paused with her hand on the doorknob.<
br />
  “What?” she asked, trying to keep the impatience from her voice.

  “I said you put too much faith in that man.”

  “He’s never let us down.”

  More Swahili. Ada left and slammed the door behind her.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Corinne could sense the chaos as she entered the Cast Iron. Danny was shooing all the customers out of the bar, claiming a family emergency. Gordon had abandoned his chair and was standing in front of the back door, arms crossed, face clouded.

  Corinne hurried downstairs. The door to Johnny’s office was cracked open, and she went inside without knocking. Ada was in there with Johnny and Gabriel. At first Corinne couldn’t figure out what was wrong. Johnny was pacing in front of the desk, and Gabriel was sitting in his chair, shirtless, with Ada kneeling beside him. Then Corinne saw the bright-red blood on the towel Ada was pressing against Gabriel’s ribs.

  “Cripes,” Corinne said, rushing forward. “What the hell happened?”

  “It’s just a graze,” said Gabriel.

  “Then why’s it still bleeding?” Ada demanded. “Stop moving, or I’ll get another songsmith in here to play you into a coma.”

  Gabriel grimaced at her but stopped trying to push her away.

  “There was an ambush at the docks,” Ada told Corinne. “Glenn is dead. Maybe Jackson too. We can’t find him.”

  Corinne grabbed the corner of the desk. “Who did it?” she asked.

  “It had to be Messina or the Gustin gang,” Johnny said.

  Gabriel shook his head. “One of them was . . . like you.” He gave a vague wave of his hand.

  “You mean a hemopath?” Corinne asked.

  Johnny stopped pacing beside her and looked at Gabriel.

  “Jackson wasn’t there when we arrived,” Gabriel began, but Johnny interrupted him.

  “If he wasn’t there to signal, then why did you—”

  “He was there,” Gabriel said. “That is, he gave the signal, and when we got close, even Glenn didn’t see anything off. Then he shot Glenn, and suddenly he wasn’t Jackson anymore.”