Chapter 2 — Chapter 02

The next night, I watched the door.

This was stupid. I knew it was stupid. A smart woman doesn't look for trouble in Malone's — she avoids it, steps around it, pretends she never saw it coming. But I couldn't help it. Every time the door opened, my eyes went there before I could stop them.

The dark-haired woman — Eleanora, I'd heard someone call her — didn't come in until nearly midnight. She took table four again, the same table where the man had sat before he disappeared into the back room and never came out.

She ordered wine. Malone's served wine, but nobody drank it except people who didn't know better or people who were there for something other than drinking. Eleanora didn't touch hers.

I sang "Darktown Strutters' Ball" and "After You've Gone," the kind of upbeat numbers that made people feel safe. The kind that made them think this was just a speakeasy, just a good time, just a way to forget the world outside for a few hours.

Eleanora watched me the whole time.

---

After the set, I went to the bar instead of my usual table in the corner. The bar was safer. More witnesses. More light.

"She's asking about you," Danny said, sliding a glass of water toward me. Danny was Malone's bartender, a big Irish kid who'd been a boxer before he'd gotten slow and Malone had given him a job that didn't require footwork.

"Who?"

"Don't play dumb, Rose. It don't suit you." He nodded toward table four. "The Vance woman. Asked Malone if you were reliable. If you knew how to keep your mouth shut."

"What did he say?"

"What do you think? He said you were the best singer he'd ever had and you never saw nothing you didn't want to see." Danny's voice dropped. "But that was before, Rose. Now she's asking about you. That ain't good."

I looked at table four. Eleanora was talking to Malone, leaning close, her hand on his arm like they were old friends. Malone was nodding, his face blank.

"She come in with anyone last night?" I asked.

"Just that man. The one who — " Danny stopped, looked around, lowered his voice further. "The one who had the heart trouble."

Heart trouble. That's what they were calling it. A healthy man in his thirties, no history of heart problems, suddenly dying in a soundproofed back room at Malone's. Just one of those things.

"Did anyone see him leave?"

Danny's eyes met mine. "No one sees anything at Malone's, Rose. You know that."

---

I went home early that night. Told Malone I had a headache, which was true enough by then. The headache had started around the time Eleanora Vance had smiled at me from across the room.

My apartment was on the third floor of a building that had survived the earthquake, which meant it listed slightly to the left and the floors creaked in a different pattern every night. I'd lived there for three years. I knew where everything was.

Which is why I noticed immediately that things had moved.

The photograph of my mother on the dresser — it had been facing the window. Now it faced the door. My music sheets, which I kept stacked on the piano by key signature, were now in a different order. And the lipstick on my vanity, which I always kept with the labels facing forward, had been turned around.

I stood in the middle of my room and felt the familiar cold of someone walking over my grave.

Someone had been in my apartment. Someone had touched my things. Someone wanted me to know they could get to me.

I didn't call the police. I didn't tell my landlord. I just sat down at my vanity, looked at myself in the mirror, and started to think.

Eleanora Vance was rich. She was beautiful. She was connected enough to make Patrick Malone nervous. And she'd killed a man in a speakeasy back room and gotten away with it.

She thought she was scaring me. And she was — I'd be stupid not to be scared. But fear and stupidity weren't the same thing.

The woman had made a mistake. She'd come to my apartment, touched my things, moved them around to unsettle me. She'd left fingerprints, probably. Or someone had seen her. Or one of a dozen other loose ends that people like her always left behind, because people like her thought they were untouchable.

I didn't touch anything else. I just sat at my vanity and started to plan.