by Janet Fox
Connor had amassed an assemblage of fossils—fish, dinosaur, shell—preserved and labeled. Pottery shards and complete pots had been collected from Mesoamerica; shale flints and obsidian knife points from the western United States; jasper beads and small onyx statues from Africa. Larger mammal fossils came next, including the intact skeleton of a great ape.
As I paused there, looking up at the skeletal hulk, jaw open in a shriek, great arm incongruously wielding a club, Connor came up beside me. “I understand we are now related to this fellow.” He gave a slight laugh.
“You don’t believe in evolution?” I asked.
“I don’t believe in anything except being on top,” he replied. “And at the moment, he’s dead, his direct descendants are picking lice out of one another’s fur, and we are on top.” He shrugged. “But as it happens, I do believe that we have evolved to master all living things, we humans. Some of us have, at any rate.”
I had nothing to say.
The next section contained jewelry, ancient and antique pieces from all over the world, pearl, jade, bone. I examined a lapis necklace, heavy and huge.
“I’m thinking of having a replica made.” Connor said from behind me.
“It’s lovely,” I murmured.
“Perhaps I could have it made for you. The color would complement your eyes.” He shifted, while I stood frozen in place. “Wait.”
He stepped around me as he took a small key from his pocket, then unlocked the case and lifted the glass covering and set it aside.
“Turn around,” he commanded.
I turned. I couldn’t breathe. Connor lifted the necklace over my head with both his hands, hooking the clasp at the nape of my neck. Hold still. Do it for Pops and Teddy, my inner voice said. Don’t shudder or pull away. Sacrifice. Remember Pops and Ma and Teddy. Time stopped.
He took my shoulders and steered me in slow motion to a glass case just reflective enough to catch our ghostly figures, my eyes now lake-wide, my short hair dark as midnight, the necklace a broad collar, his eyes over my shoulder. He smiled, then dropped his hands.
“You see?”
I nodded. We stood like that for what seemed forever, our eyes meeting in the glass, and then I reached up, undid the clasp, removed the necklace, and turned, holding it toward him. I took one step away from him, holding the necklace between us with my outstretched arm, waiting for him to take it.
“Ah,” he said, and smiled more broadly. “Not yet, then.”
Not yet. Not ever. Not ever?
He returned the necklace to the case. As he locked it he said, “If not a necklace, then why not a position at Vanity Fair? I understand they are eager to hire smart young women like you.”
I swallowed. “I’ll have to look into it.” This was what I’d planned, wasn’t it? Make Connor like me.
“I can make it happen,” he said with a shrug. “Or not. I just need to know about Teddy.”
Ma. Pops. And my own dreams, just within reach, just out of my grasp. “I’ll think about it,” I said. I tried not to let my voice shake.
He smiled.
I said nothing more as we progressed toward the far end of the museum, and I circled the displays, always aware of just where Connor was in the room, aware of the precise distance between us.
Beyond the jewelry was a selection of rare manuscripts—some illuminated; some, from what I could see, one-of-a-kind rarities, hand lettered in a language I could not read—but finally, at the far end of the room lay Connor’s treasure: a sarcophagus from Egypt.
It was painted, decorated with the figure of a man reclining, scenes from life or death depicted in miniature around the base that sat on a high plinth; resting on top of the man, as guardian, was a jackal, sleek black, with ears like arrows and white eyes with black pindot pupils.
“The mummy is still inside, still intact.” Connor turned to me. “Would you like to see it?” He leaned with his full weight against it and pushed on the lid, which slipped back a quarter of an inch.
I raised my hands and took a step back. “No, thank you.”
“Does death make you squeamish, Miss Winter?”
I considered my answer. “No. Not death. Just the thought of a body preserved that way. It’s…it gives me the creeps.”
“Ah. But the spirit—do you think the spirit prevails?”
I remained silent.
“There is a magician, Howard Thurston, who claims to speak to spirits. I understand you are a fan of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. I believe he’s a spiritualist, too. Unlike their mutual friend Houdini, who believes in nothing but the facts.” Connor paused. “What do you believe, Josephine?”
What should I say?
Connor went on. “I agree with Houdini. It’s all nonsense. There is nothing but this moment.” He swept his hand around the room. “What you see here is the smallest reflection of the history of our planet, which is a tiny inkblot in the universe. The only thing that matters is what we have in this moment, in this life.” He looked back at the ape, captured in permanent menacing reach. “What we have. What we take. What we win.” Connor raised his clenched fist, echoing the gesture of the naked ape, with the closest thing I’d seen to actual emotion, though his voice was soft and controlled.
I met Connor’s eyes, reweighing my earlier question: Was he a genius or was he insane? He smiled at me. “Shall we?” he asked, and gestured toward the door behind the sarcophagus. The white eyes of the jackal seemed to follow me as I moved.
Connor opened the double doors that led into a sunroom in the shape of a hexagon. It was filled with plants and rattan furniture, and featured a small splashing fountain in the center.
“Is this your greenhouse?” I asked.
Connor threw his head back and laughed. “No, no. This is the solarium. There’s the greenhouse.”
A broad lawn stretched downward away from the house, toward Long Island Sound. The water was still, glinting and shimmering in the morning light beyond a low line of trees and shrubs that framed the end of the lawn. Just before the line of trees stood a large glass-and-iron greenhouse.
“Let’s walk down to the water, shall we?”
Connor led me on a winding path that trailed past the greenhouse, through the trees and scrub roses, now fully in bloom, to a slim stretch of rolling dunes that fell to the water. A dock lay in front of us, a small trim motorboat secured alongside. I stopped, not walking past the edge of dunes onto the flat sand.
“You aren’t fond of the water, Josephine?”
“I don’t mind the water. But the beach…”
“The sand, then. Yes, it does get everywhere.”
“No. It’s Teddy. The last time I was at the beach…” Ach! I bit my lip. What was wrong with me? Why did I mention Teddy? Was he a hypnotist, Daniel Connor?
Connor coughed, casual, his eyes surveying the water. “Of course. They thought he’d drowned, isn’t that right? They found his clothing not far from here, as I recall. Of course, you and I know better, don’t we?”
Oh, yes. I knew where they found Teddy’s clothing, all right, since I’d led them there. And I surely did know better.
“He had to hide, I imagine, after what he’d suffered. The war damaged a great many people, including, I believe, your brother. The terrible price of freedom. But hiding is not dying, is it?”
The back of my neck prickled. Burned. I switched subjects. “What did you do during the war, Mr. Connor?”
He looked at me sharply. “I was looking after a good many people. People who counted on me. People from the neighborhoods, those who have little.” He paused. “My brother served.”
I hadn’t heard mention of Daniel Connor’s brother before this. “Did he come back?”
Connor looked out over the water, shading his eyes with his hands. “I’d like to show you my greenhouse, Miss Winter. It’s time I showed you my orchids.” He took my elbow in a firm grip, steering me back through the trees.
Connor took a small key fastened to a long gold chain f
rom his pocket to unlock the greenhouse door.
While the day was sparkling, clear, with pleasant late-spring temperature, the greenhouse was stuffy, hot, dripping. And the scents of the flowers inside were powerful. The combination made me light-headed. The greenhouse seemed even more enormous from the inside: two aisles with tables covered with plants lining both walls and another stretch of bare tables down the middle. It was a radiant jungle, with orchid blossoms dripping exotically over the paths. And water dripping in long beading strings down the glass.
“Look at this one. It hales from South America, from Brazil.” Connor paused before a specimen. “Do you see how the stamens and carpals are fused? How it lolls? This provides a platform for insects to pollinate the flower.” His hand hovered over the flower, not touching it. “Such a desperate and desirous thing.” He walked a few steps farther. “Ah. Look. The color of this blossom. Such a scarlet. What insect could resist?”
“They are beautiful.”
He stood still before the blossom, staring into it. “How could anything—anyone—compete with that? Such pure beauty.” He wasn’t talking to me; he seemed lost. And as I watched him I felt shock: Danny Connor’s eyes glistened. His voice dropped to a near whisper. “How could one ever hope to attain such perfection?”
I heard the slow drip, drip of moisture, and smelled the must, the heat prickling my skin.
He turned to face me, his steel eyes shining. “They are more than beautiful, Miss Winter. They are as perfect a thing as exists.”
I turned away to remove myself from his disturbing gaze and walked down to the end of the row, fanning my face with my hand. “What’s this?” I asked, seeing something that looked different, hairy and vaguely threatening.
He laughed. “My one peculiarity: a Venus flytrap.” He came to stand beside me. His face was pale and cool, his eyes icy. “It’s a carnivorous plant. Would you like to see? I keep dinner at the ready.”
I stepped away from the seductive mouth of the plant. “Ah…carnivorous?” The heat was stifling. Beads of sweat formed on my forehead.
Without another word, Connor took a bottle from a nearby shelf. Several grasshoppers flopped against the glass. He opened the bottle and removed one of the grasshoppers with a pair of tweezers, clutching it by one leg. The grasshopper came to life, struggling and bucking, trying to wrest itself from the vice grip of the tweezers. Connor leaned forward and dropped the insect onto the moist throat of the flower.
It closed at once, with such a snap that I stepped away again. “Oh!” I clutched at my throat, as if I could feel the grasshopper fighting for its life.
“Amazing, isn’t it? It will dissolve the insect over the next day or two.”
“Alive?” I squeaked. “It eats it alive?”
Connor shrugged. “A grasshopper has no feelings.”
I began to shake. “And you know this because…” I found it hard to form words.
He laughed and tossed his hand. “A grasshopper is an insect of almost no brain. Unlike you, Miss Winter. Unlike me. What does it matter? In nature, the grasshopper would succumb just as it does here.”
“In nature,” I said, the heat rising to my face and my whole body in a tremble such that I couldn’t control my voice, “it would have a fighting chance. It wouldn’t have spent time stopped up in a bottle, and it wouldn’t have been so carelessly and…and cruelly helped to its death.”
“I know a great many things about having a fighting chance.” Connor’s voice was low, a faint rumble. His eyes grew brighter still, and he brought his clenched fist to the air between us. “You have to take what you want. Take it. Take it!” His fingers were squeezed so tight his knuckles were white. “I thought you understood that, Josephine.”
My skin grew cold, my limbs stiff. He was horrifying, cruel, and selfish. Not a minute ago, the orchids brought him to tears, and yet, this emotion from him now. He hid his cruelty behind a veil of cultivation and seduction.
He collected himself, turned away, and replaced the bottle on the shelf; I watched the remaining grasshoppers batter themselves fruitlessly against the glass. Then Connor turned to me, placing his palms flat on the bench. “You are an attractive girl. But you are too soft.”
I took several steps until the end of the table lay between us. “Really.”
His eyes were narrowed and hard, focused on me. “I think I’ve had enough of this dance, Josephine. I would like to know what you know about your brother. About Theodore Winter.”
I laughed and repeated, “Really?”
“Yes. What did he tell you before his unfortunate disappearance?”
“Why should he have told me anything?” My smile felt fixed and frozen.
Connor gestured, tossing his hand. “I know that you and he were close. That he trusted you. I happen to know that he confided in you. Maybe even left something with you.”
I bit my lip. How could Connor have any idea about Teddy and me, about what Teddy left me?
“Your brother was privy to certain information, Josephine. Information that concerns me. Did he divulge it to you?” He paused. “I believe he did.”
I trembled, even in that smothering, stifling greenhouse; but I folded my arms across my chest, defiant, forgetting what I’d promised myself I’d do for the family. Begging such a man would do nothing for us, no matter how much he liked me. “Even if he did, I wouldn’t share Teddy’s secrets.”
He stepped forward and bent over the table toward me. “You are like an orchid, Josephine, as I have already said. Attractive. Difficult. Enigmatic.” He stepped away and pulled a pair of scissors from his pocket, then turned to the shelf behind him, upon which rested a small plant with a pendulous fuchsia blossom. With a sharp snap of the scissors he snipped the blossom from the stem and held it to his nose. “And fragile. Like this blossom. Which will wilt and die now in a matter of hours. Such a perfect thing, made for one purpose, and now its purpose is unfulfilled.”
My hands were shaking, so I put them behind my back. “Teddy trusts me.”
Connor held the blossom between his two fingers. He stared at it a moment longer, then gripped his lapel and shoved the stem into the buttonhole. “I wear this blossom. It does not wear me.” He stared at me, and bitterness filled my mouth. “I care nothing about your relationship with your brother. I need what he entrusted to you.”
“I can’t help you.”
“Can’t?”
I resolved, stiffening my shoulders. “I won’t.”
“Then, I’m afraid, the rest of your family will learn, one way or another, about your stubborn attitude.” He paused. “And, my dear, you said, ‘Teddy trusts me.’”
I froze.
“‘Trusts.’ Present tense. Most revealing. Your family, Miss Winter, your father in particular, will not thank you.”
Teddy. Pops. I was trembling all over now, the heat notwithstanding. I turned and moved as fast as I could for the door of the greenhouse. Connor caught up with me from the other aisle. We reached for the doorknob at the same moment. I yanked my hand away, not wanting our hands to touch. Not wanting to feel the touch of his hand on mine.
“No one walks out on me,” he said, his voice soft, those steely eyes on mine.
All the flowers in the greenhouse seemed suspended, their blossoms frozen, even the slipping drips on the windows stilled.
The Venus flytrap shook ever so little. I remembered the overheard conversation between Connor and Pops. The threat, the tremor in Pops’s voice, the fear in Ma’s eyes. Pops didn’t have Teddy’s journal; he didn’t know that I’d helped Teddy stage his suicide. There was nothing Pops could do to save us.
This was up to me.
“Wait.” My throat was thick. “I might have been mistaken.”
Connor’s eyebrows lifted, those eyes boring into me like blades.
My family might owe Connor nothing if I…if I…“The orchids are lovely.” Sweat dripped down my spine. The skin of my scar chafed and burned. “Your orchids. They are lovel
y.”
“Yes,” he whispered. “And?”
“I will…Let me think.”
He smiled. “Think, Miss Winter. But not for long. I need to know where Teddy is. I need whatever he may have left behind. The clock is ticking. And I like adding to my collections in a timely fashion.”
I put my hand back on the knob and turned it, and the door opened, revealing Louie on the other side.
“Danny!” Her eyes flew between us. “It’s lunchtime.”
His words came out a growl. “I’ve told you never to disturb me here. Never.”
She nodded, but looked back and forth from him to me, suspicious and hurt. “But sweetie, Cook made such a luscious lunch, and it was getting cold; I just wanted—”
The slap was so hard it sounded like the vase smacking onto the paving. My hand flew to my mouth; Louie’s hand flew to her cheek, and the tears started to her eyes. I could see her swallow. I pressed my fingers to my lips to keep from telling Connor what I thought of him.
Without a word Connor pulled me outside, turned, and locked the greenhouse door behind us. He pushed past Louie and walked up the grassy slope toward the house, gripping the lapel that held the orchid and pressing it to his nose.
Louie and I stood facing each other. I knew he’d slapped her because I’d made him angry. It made me feel sick. I took my hand from my mouth and reached for her.
“Don’t.” She stepped back, her eyes snapping. “Don’t you dare.”
I wished we could be friends. “But Louie…why do you stay with him?”
Her cheek was scarlet; mine throbbed in sympathy. She leaned her head toward me and said from between clenched teeth, “I love him. I love him, okay? Fine with you? You just keep your mitts off him, sister.”
I shook my head, and spoke past the lump in my throat. “I have no intention—”
“Good. Fine. Then we’ll get along just fine.”
I watched her as she stared at her feet, then away at the ocean flashing sunlight beyond the edge of the lawn. The breeze riffled the grass, mowed to a perfect height. I wanted her to understand. I reached out to touch her arm. “I’m not going to take him from you, Lou. That’s a promise.”
