TW: Canonical character death. Author's notes at the end.
Richard unfolded the letter once more and began reading again. He could hear Clara in every word he read, like she was standing behind him, whispering in his ear. Clara's pain and anger were there in her writing, but so were her confusion and even her love for him. She still loved him.
Since he found the letter tucked in his door frame, he had read it a hundred times, and still didn't know what to do. The idea of Clara hurting made him feel like he couldn't breathe. However, nothing was different. In fact, things were worse. How could he approach her when things were so fragile?
Two days prior was the only time Richard had allowed himself to be truly angry with Jimmy. Waxey Gordon had failed to kill the butcher. Jimmy had dispatched Mickey Doyle to finally, finally settle the debt he owed Manny Horvitz, butcher. Richard had tried to explain to Jimmy that with men like the butcher, it was as much a debt of honor as it was a debt of money and that Jimmy needed to go in person to make amends with the man. Jimmy had blown Richard off, dismissing his concern.
Jimmy's behavior at the warehouse pushed Richard to the edge when Jimmy threw a tantrum as he realized that it was Nucky who was drowning Atlantic City in inexpensive, top-shelf Irish whiskey. Richard's hand worked furiously as he thought about the Irishman. He should have killed the man that day at the casino, he thought. It would have weakened Nucky, it would have prevented this Irish whiskey gambit, and it would have meant the man wouldn't have come to take Clara away that awful afternoon.
Jimmy's tantrum (Richard couldn't think of another word, although it made him feel like his mother to use it) over not being able to sell the liquor they had bought from George Remus had caused Richard to walk away. Jimmy had utterly lost it in front of Capone, Lansky, and Luciano.
The alcohol and the men that it was worth trying to kill Nucky over. The alcohol and men it was worth hurting Clara over.
In front of Luciano. Richard closed his eyes, trying to forget the image of Luciano's body pressed against Clara, Clara's lipstick smudged across the corner of Luciano's mouth, Clara asking Luciano to get her away from Jimmy and from him.
More than the kiss, it was the fact that Clara trusted Luciano when she needed help that felt like a knife in his side.
The ringing telephone made Richard jump. He reached for hesitantly, still getting used to its intrusion into his life. Jimmy had wanted him to get one for months, but it was when Clara started staying with him that he acquiesced. He wanted to have a way to reach her, and it seemed safer for Clara to have a way to call for help if needed.
"Hello," he rasped out.
"You need to come to Jimmy's house immediately," a woman's voice said in his ear.
"Mrs. Darmody? Mmm. Why," Richard tried to respond.
"Now," she said, and he heard the click of the phone in his ear.
Richard's mouth was dryer than usual as he sped to Jimmy and Angela's, and his hands trembled so badly he had to purposefully try to steady them so the car would steer straight.
Mrs. Darmody stood outside smoking as he pulled up to the house. "It took you long enough. Angela and her friend are dead upstairs. Where is Jimmy?"
Richard stepped back. He felt like the air had just been punched out of his body.
"Mmm. Angel-"
"Is dead," Gillian snapped. "I know you aren't a whole man, but you need to pay attention. Where. Is. Jimmy?"
Richard would never be able to clearly remember the events of the morning. Somehow he managed to tell Mrs. Darmody where Jimmy was staying in Princeton, and then she sent him upstairs to see if he knew the woman Angela was with.
It wasn't as if he had never seen a dead body before. His grandmother was the first body Richard ever saw, back when he was still just a boy. What he remembered most was how small she looked lying in bed with the blanket pulled up to her chin. Nothing at all like the sturdy farm woman who baked him apple cakes and still built her own fires. He had seen sixty-one since he was personally responsible for, and countless others besides. The trenches with bodies piled like broken toys abandoned by careless children, the field hospitals where men, boys, died next to him and sometimes lay there for hours before anyone had time to remove them.
That one hospital, with the nice nurse from Yorkshire whose voice stayed with him although he had never seen her face clearly because of the gauze around his head, the one from the hospital he dreamed about later, who he heard quietly raging about the senseless of a nineteen-year-old dying from a head injury as she ordered someone to take the body away but it was hours before anyone did. It was after the boy's body was moved he heard the American girl trying to talk to the nurse, but her voice was damaged, and...
Richard pushed the thought away. No, he thought, I won't take refuge in a dream. He took a deep breath and tried to think like a soldier as he opened the door to Jimmy and Angela's room, the one place in the beach house where he had never been.
Angela looked young and so fragile. He had never noticed how small her bones were. She was wearing one of those silk and lace one-piece things Clara wore to bed. Did Angela and Clara shop together, he wondered wildly, buying pretty silky things and eating lunch and bribing Tommy with ice cream so they could dawdle over coffee and talk about art and books and Jimmy?
The young woman under Angela was naked, and Richard didn't recognize her. She looked to be in her mid-twenties. She had been shot first, Richard decided, and then Angela. The other girl must have been standing, but Angela was kneeling.
Angela knew she was going to die, Richard thought, and the idea of Angela terrified in her last moments made him want to be sick. Angela was so kind, Angela was a good mother, a good friend, a good person who never hurt anyone. But she died afraid.
He reached out and touched her hand, something in life he had only done to help her in and out of the car. The flesh under his hand was cold and felt dense, not like the soft, dry hand he had felt yesterday. Like in life, Angela's fingernails had flecks of paint under them, from a painting she'd never finish.
Whoever shot her was a professional. There were closer range shots through both women's foreheads. A small-caliber handgun, Richard decided. A tall man.
The butcher.
The shower dripped from the bathroom. Jimmy had complained about it, Richard remembered. The faucet had to be turned a certain way or it leaked. So the woman must have been in the shower, and Angela asleep in her bed.
Asleep in her bed, when a monster came and destroyed her.
He heard sirens and went back downstairs, trying to make sense of everything that had happened. Gillian Darmody talked, and talked, and talked to someone from the sheriff's office who wasn't Eli Thompson while Richard thought. He stood in the window and watched Angela's body be taken out on a covered stretcher. It was only a little over six months ago he had stood on a truck and unloaded Jimmy and Angela's belongings into their new home. Clara and Angela had stood on stools and hung the white drapes in the sunroom that were now blowing in the midmorning breeze. He had been so jealous of Jimmy that day. Jimmy, who had a son, a beautiful wife, a house, and a sister for whom he could still feel love.
And now Jimmy's wife was dead, his home was an abattoir, and his sister was turned against him.
After the deputies left, something made him need to go upstairs again. It was as if with every moment there was less of Angela in the house, even though he could see her purse sitting on a kitchen chair and the flowers she bought the day before carefully arranged in a vase on the table. He couldn't bear for Angela's sweet spirit to dissipate from her home so quickly, unmourned, unnoticed. He mumbled excuse me to Mrs. Darmody and went back upstairs, where he had to steel himself to walk back into the bedroom.
All that was left was a dark stain on the floor, and blood splatters on the wallpaper. Richard knelt and reverently reached out to the stain, feeling the viscous fluid between his fingers. Blood. Blood, like he'd had on his hands so many times. Blood, blood that had turned Angela Darmody's pretty bedroom into a scene of horror.
He knew what he had to do. Angela was neat. She couldn't bear disarray. It was one of the things he liked about her because he felt the same. Disorder made him want to twist things between his fingers.
Mrs. Darmody was on the phone, trying to call Jimmy again, he thought. He carefully retrieved Angela's cleaning supplies from the service porch. It meant he was removing the last of her physical presence from her home, but he knew Angela would want her house set back to rights as soon as possible. So he took off his jacket and tie, rolled up his sleeves, and set to work.
He wasn't sure how long he washed the walls or scrubbed the floors until the evidence of the last moments of Angela's life was carefully removed so that her son or husband would never accidentally see them. Richard walked into the bathroom to clean himself up. A bar of Clara's special orange soap sat in the soap dish. He remembered using her bar to make sure there was no blood left on his hand before he touched her the night he and Jimmy scalped Parkhurst.
Clara, he thought.
Clara.
The knit of the blue sailor-style dress Clara wore was so delicate as to feel like she was wearing tissue instead of cloth, but the heat was already so oppressive the dress clung like wool to the silk step-in she wore beneath it. She sat next to Eddie in the front seat so that her father could sit with Margaret and the children in the back. Emily was in Margaret's lap, but her steel braced little legs stretched across into Nucky's lap.
Clara decided she wouldn't complain about the heat while poor Emily was encased in metal.
"If you are going to drive the Rolls, perhaps I should give you new lessons," Eddie said quietly.
"Let's all hope I never have to drive it again," Clara said lightly. "Did I damage it terribly?"
"It's only a vehicle," Eddie allowed. "It can be repaired."
Unlike so much else, Clara thought.
Arriving home, Clara sat her purse and hat on the table by the stairs and let her father and Margaret settle Emily into the drawing-room without her interference.
"Miss, a telegram arrived for you," Katy told her as she put her things down.
Clara ripped it open hopefully.
COME AT ONCE. ALWAYS WANTED MY OWN ARTIST COLONY. EXPECT TWO BEST SELLERS & ONE ARTISTIC MASTERPIECE AS PAYMENT. MARTHA LEVITZ.
Meeting Rose Grenville, she thought, was one of the most fortunate occurrences of her life. Rose had saved her, Rose's mother had helped put her back together when Clara believed she had been irrecoverably broken back in 1918, and now Rose's grandmother was going to help her make sure Angela and Tommy weren't damaged by this war.
As she sat down to eat lunch with her father and his new family, she smiled at him. "You know, you weren't entirely wrong to send me to Foxcroft."
"I wish you had realized that back in 1914," Nucky said sardonically, wondering why his daughter brought up that subject seven years later.
Clara had always considered Margaret's homes chaotic, but that afternoon was exceptionally hectic. Her father had set up his office in the morning room. Bill Fallon, her father's new attorney, came to consult about her father's criminal case while Owen Sleater helped Margaret carry Emily upstairs for a nap.
"Can we play checkers?" Teddy asked her.
"Sure," Clara responded. Teddy was hardly her favorite child, but she had understood the boy better over the last weeks. Clara almost felt bad about leaving him when Margaret was clearly not going to have enough time for him, and her father was so distracted. She'd play checkers with Teddy, she decided, and then she'd go see Angela, go to the train station to buy four tickets to Newport, and send a response telegram to Mrs. Levitz with their arrival information.
There was a knock at the door. Clara heard Katy answer it.
"You can not be here," Owen said from upstairs.
Clara looked into the foyer, and saw Richard stood with his hat in his hands by the front door.
"Richard," she said questioningly, not quite believing he was standing in Margaret's house. She looked him over closely and saw one lock of his hair was loose and his eye was red. Her heart began to race.
"Clara," he said, and his voice made a chill go down her spine.
Clara realized Sleater was galloping down the stairs, and moved to the bottom of the staircase, effectively trapping the Irishman. "What are you doing here?"
"Miss Thompson, get back," Sleater ordered.
Clara looked over her shoulder."Don't be ridiculous, he's not here to hurt us."
When Clara looked back at Richard he was looking down to the right while his hands were rapidly cupping and uncupping around his cap.
"I'm. Mmm. Leaving," Richard said finally looking Clara in the eye.
"I don't understand," Clara began, her hands tightly clutching her skirt, out of fear she would reach for him if she didn't.
"I want," he started hesitantly.
Bill Fallon was in the morning room, explaining to Nucky exactly how serious the charges were when they heard something happening in the foyer. Nucky opened the door and was taken back when he realized it was Jimmy's freak standing in his foyer while Clara stared at the man from the bottom of the staircase.
"What the hell are you doing here," Nucky asked in disbelief.
"I want you. I need you," Richard continued, his voice breaking with every syllable as he tried to ignore everyone but Clara, who was staring at him with large, watery eyes.
"To come. With me."
Clara heard the click after every word and knew in a flash what this was costing him.
"What is going on down there," Margaret called from upstairs. "Emily is trying to sleep!" Margaret stopped when she saw Mr. Harrow looking at Clara like he was baring his soul to her in the foyer while Owen tried to get around Clara, Nucky stared at them from the doorway to the morning room, and Teddy stood unnoticed in the drawing-room.
"Richard, I..."
"Mmm. I love. You, Clara. I need you. To come. With me."
Clara could see the fear in his eye, but she was rooted where she stood until he reached his left hand out towards her. She took a shaky breath, bit her lip, and nodded as she crossed the foyer and put her hand in his.
Richard looked down at Clara's hand for a moment and then turned quickly, determined to get them away from the house.
"Let go of my daughter," Nucky ordered from the door.
"Father, I'm leaving," Clara said quietly.
"Harrow, let go of Miss Thompson," Owen ordered, now down the staircase, and standing directly behind Clara.
Margaret watched the scene unfolding and knew without a doubt that at least Mr. Harrow and Owen were armed. She did not want a shootout in her foyer, with Teddy watching from the next room. Clara's words from the dinner back in early spring came to her, 'the moment he asks,' Clara had said, 'I'm his.'
He had asked.
"Enoch, let her go," Margaret said.
Nucky looked up at Margaret in disbelief.
Someone pressed something into Clara's left hand. Clara looked up, and Katy was pressing her hat and purse into her hand. Katy smiled at her and then stepped away.
"I forbid you from leaving with this...man, Clara," Nucky said, taking another step toward his daughter.
Clara took a deep breath, butterflies raging in her stomach. She knew she was finally making a decision. "I love you, Father, but I'm leaving with Richard. Please, please just let us leave."
Bill Fallon had watched the entire drama play out from the morning room. He wasn't sure what, exactly, was happening, but anyone with eyes could see that Thompson's daughter was in love with the strange man she was clinging to, and the whole situation was about to boil over. Fallon's number one rule in life was not to be around when people started shooting at his clients.
"Nucky, she's an adult and you don't need any more distractions or problems. Let her leave," the attorney said without moving.
Nucky nodded slowly, anger apparent in every line in his face, and stepped away from the door.
Richard pulled her in front of him as they went out the door. "Mmm. Clara,"
"Get me back to your place, then we'll talk,"Clara squeezed his hand as she spoke.
Nucky watched his daughter hold on to the masked man, James's fucking point man, until Harrow helped her into a Ford, and they drove away.
Clara drove away. With his enemy's soldier. Clara, who never expressed one fucking feeling towards Darcy Blaine, but had tears running down her face when Harrow said he loved her.
When he said he loved her. Who the hell did Richard Harrow think he was to love Nucky Thompson's daughter?
Nucky turned to look at everyone standing around the foyer. "Would someone like to explain to me why the hell my daughter just left with Richard fucking Harrow?"
"Clara loves the Tin Man," Teddy said from the drawing-room. Every head swiveled to look at him.
"What?" Nucky snapped.
Teddy swallowed, suddenly sorry he had said anything, but still wanting to answer the man he called Daddy.
"Clara's always loved the Tin Man."
"Just go," Clara whispered when they got into the Ford, her fingertips smoothing and smoothing the pleats in her dress.
Richard glanced back at the house, half expecting Sleater or Thompson himself to come out shooting. They were silent on the ride to his room, but Clara's shoulder pressed against his arm, even though she looked straight ahead the entire time.
The silence continued when they reached his place. Clara felt shy as they walked in, like they hadn't done it dozens of times before. As she looked around she realized all traces of her were gone. The pillow, the quilt, even the toaster were missing.
"All. Of your things. Are in. Your dresser. I..." his voice trailed off. He didn't know how to tell her that he missed her and that seeing her things made her absence hurt even more.
Clara closed her eyes, and felt Richard behind her moments before she heard the sound of tin striking wood. His hand was still there, carefully lining up the mask with the edge of the desk. She ran her hand down the green tweed of his jacket, past the blue poplin of his shirt cuff, and on to the skin of his hand. A sigh escaped without her notice.
These were the last moments of their before. Everything that was about to happen, Clara thought as she drummed her fingers softly against his hand, it was going to propel them into the after. She didn't know what the after would be, and her stomach twisted in peremptory agony.
But right now, right now Richard had come to get her. They were no longer a secret. They were no longer apart, she was back in his room, where she had been so happy. Slowly Clara began to turn until she faced him.
He wasn't making eye contact with her. Clara reached up, running her right hand across the left side of his face.
Her hand was warm, and on instinct, he leaned into it and brought his own hand up to cover hers. He reveled in the warm softness of her hand, how alive it was, as he tried to banish the cold, dense feeling of Angela Darmody's hand from his mind.
"Clara," he tried to begin.
She shook her head. "Not yet, okay? I know...there are all sorts of things we have to talk about. And I know there's something else waiting. But not yet."
They stood without speaking. Richard finally looked at her. "I knew. You would. Look pretty. With a bob."
"So far I haven't pulled the hair out of my scalp," Clara answered, mustering a weak smile. But that might change soon, she thought.
Richard looked back down. A storm of feelings brewed inside him, more feelings than he could name or identify as the adrenaline rush that had seen him through leaving the Darmody house and going for Clara faded away. Now Clara was back with him, but standing in front of him looking lost and unsure. He wanted to tell her what having her hand on his face meant to him, that he couldn't believe she was back standing with him in his room, that missing her had hurt so badly it felt like physical pain, but he couldn't think of how to say it. Then he realized Clara had already given him the words.
"I thought. Mmm. About kissing you. A lot. Did you. Think about kissing me?"
Clara blinked as she recognized her own phrasing, and whispered, "Every day."
He put his hand on the back of her head and pulled her to him, hearing the half-breath Clara always drew before they kissed as he did. Part of him was afraid that after being away, after kissing Luciano, Clara would finally be disgusted by the ruined side of his mouth. Instead he felt her mouth open under his, and her right hand reached up to brush along the thick scar on the left side of his face, until her hand entwined in his hair and she used both hands to bring his face down more firmly upon hers. He felt himself melt into her, into the feeling of sweet escape from the prison of his mind that the physicality of Clara always offered, and finally he put his other hand against her back and gently pushed her torso against his.
What she wanted most was to drown into the kiss, to sink to the floor and pull Richard down with her, to forget about Atlantic City and families and booze and everything that wasn't the two of them, alone, in that room. If she had her wish, she'd stretch out on the floor and pretend to close her eyes while Richard unclipped her stockings, but really she'd be watching from under her eyelashes because she adored the serious look on his face at such moments, the way his eyebrows knit together as he undressed her or touched her.
Instead, when they broke the kiss so each could breathe, like swimmers emerging for air, Clara placed her forehead against his. This the end of this part of us, Clara thought. After this moment, I'm going to be different. We are going to be different.
"It's Jimmy, isn't it?" Clara said, her voice already heavy with emotion. "Something's happened to Jimmy."
Richard tightened his grasp on her arms and gently pushed her back, until she was sitting in the desk chair and he was kneeling in front of her. Clara's eyes were already bright with pain, and he wondered how many times this year he'd already seen such blinding pain on her face.
"No," he finally forced out, and he saw questioning look on Clara's face. "It's. Mmm. It's Angela."
"Tell me what I can do," Nucky snarled at his lawyer while he upended yet another box of his daughter's possessions onto the bed. Everything from purses to notebooks to an old stuffed velvet bunny fell out.
"To get your daughter back?" Fallon asked, turning to look at Mrs. Schroeder and Owen Sleater, who both stood in the corner watching Thompson destroy the room.
"Yes, to stop my daughter from ruining her fucking life!" Nucky barked back as he went through the purses, finding a small album of pictures.
"Well, not even a judge you bribed, if you could even afford to bribe one, is going to believe she's mentally deficient. How old is she?"
"Clara will be twenty-three in two weeks," Margaret said.
"So she's an adult, and you can only make medical decisions for her in certain situations. I think you need to let Clara make her own choices, and focus on your trial."
"What about Mann violations? If they leave the state, we could have them arrested, correct?" Nucky asked.
"You want to have Clara arrested on sex trafficking charges?" Margaret asked in disbelief.
"Nucky, the last thing you want is for your daughter or a man who used to work for you to fall into Esther Randolph's waiting claws with charges hanging over them. Especially if they are angry with you." Nucky was furiously flipping the pages of his daughter's photograph album and didn't respond. "I'm going back to the hotel and we'll resume work tomorrow."
Margaret tried to smile at the attorney as he left.
"Look at these pictures," Nucky said angrily.
Margaret pushed down a sigh and looked. Clara handing Mr. Harrow a lit candle as they stood in front of a Christmas tree. The two of them dancing. With the good side of the Tin Man's profile facing the camera, they were quite an attractive couple, Margaret thought. A picture of Mr. Harrow alone, but he was looking full faced down at the person taking the picture, his hair was mussed, and the good side of his face relaxed. Clara must have taken it.
"Don't you see?" Nucky asked her.
"No," Margaret said, as she fought the urge to say, don't I see that your daughter has been madly in love with Mr. Harrow for months, that practically everyone else in Atlantic City knew? Yes. Only you missed it.
"This has been going on since what, Christmas? No," Nucky said and turned back to face Owen and Margaret. "Teddy said Clara had always loved the Tin Man. Was Harrow taking liberties last summer?"
Out of those two, chances are it was your precious Clara taking liberties, Margaret thought.
"I don't think so, no. It was just obvious that Clara and Mr. Harrow were friends. She was different with him than she was with us, more open, like they'd known each other for years."
"They'd barely met!" Nucky said through gritted teeth, and looked at the pictures again.
"She screamed for him," he whispered.
"I'm sorry, sir?" Owen asked.
"When the fucking d'Alessios attacked her," Nucky said. "James and Harrow were with me. She saw us in the lobby, she was leaving out the side street entrance with O'Bryan, going to the damn library. We went out the main door, I was getting in the car, and then Harrow started running. Even before she screamed, he was running.
"When she screamed, she didn't just cry out. She didn't scream for me. She didn't scream for James. I would have expected Clara to scream for James," he said, looking up at Margaret and Owen like they would understand what he was saying. "It would have made sense if she screamed for James. But she screamed for him."
"Harrow?" Owen confirmed.
"And then she let him pick her up and stay with her, like her trust in him was just..." Nucky's voice drifted into nothingness, and then he started throwing Clara's belongings from the bed onto the floor, looking for something, until he found a copy of Tennyson's Idylls of the King and snatched it up, showing the cover to Margaret and Owen. "It all makes sense, don't you see?"
Neither Margaret nor Owen spoke.
"Clara's always loved stories about King Arthur, about courtly love. It's Mabel! It all goes back to Mabel. It's left Clara afraid of normal relationships, so she's concocted this fantasy where she's the princess and Harrow is the courtly knight whose love is pure so she doesn't have to worry about the unseemly side of a relationship. It's why she broke things off with Darcy Blaine. I don't know why I didn't see it before."
"Clara's concocted this fantasy?" Margaret asked.
Eddie walked in at that moment, so obviously upset he didn't even notice the destruction of the boxes from the Ritz that an hour before were neatly stacked against the wall.
"Nucky, Angela Darmody has been murdered," Eddie said breathlessly.
"Dear God!" Margaret exclaimed, feeling life, she thought. They were all paying. Emily paralyzed, Angela Darmody dead.
"That explains it, don't you see?" Nucky asked. "It's really because of James, not Harrow."
Neither Margaret nor Owen looked at him.
"That's not all. Your brother has been arrested."
"Damn it! Get the car, Eddie, I'm going to the hotel to talk to Fallon," Nucky snapped, stepping around the disaster of Clara's room.
After he left, Margaret and Owen stared at each other.
"I suppose no father wants to think of his little girl enjoying being bedded," Owen said with a smirk."But Mr. Thompson is reaching new levels of denial."
Margaret looked around the disaster of a room. She thought of Nucky, last year, when he found the Listerine douche she was using, when he threw it against the dresser mirror, breaking it.
"Do you know what a Dutch Cap is?" she asked quietly.
Owen looked up at her, surprised. "I've heard of such. Why?"
"Clara has one. We have to find it before Nucky decides to search her room again. It's better if we don't disturb his fantasy."
Their eyes met, and Margaret knew what they were both thinking. If Nucky was this unhinged over the idea of Clara and Harrow, what be his response if he found out about them?
"No," Clara said with despair in her voice. "Angela's fine. I saw her yesterday. We're going to Rhode Island tomorrow, to stay with Rose Grenville's grandmother. We are taking her friend Louise and Tommy. Angela's going to paint, Louise and I are going to write, we'll all help take care of Tommy. I was going to tell you, because I need to go get them settled, but then I'll go back and forth..."
Richard swallowed, wishing that just for once he could go back to speaking normally. "Clara. Someone broke. Into the beach. House. Angela and her. Friend. Were shot."
"No. Because that's not right. Angela was happy, she really liked Louise, I could tell. She had just started a new painting. And Tommy, in another year he'll be starting school and Angela will have so much more time and she can really paint seriously..." Clara rattled off, desperation in her voice.
Richard squeezed her hands.
"Tommy?" Clara asked.
"He's fine. He was at. His grandparents. He's with. Gillian."
Clara's stomach twisted and she thought was going to be sick. Tommy was with Gillian at the Commodore's terrifying mausoleum, because Angela was dead. Angela, dead. The words were in her mind but they made no sense. How could Angela be dead when her life was so unfinished, when there were paintings to create and Tommy to raise and a whole life still to find?
Tommy, Clara thought and fear and grief rose up. "No, she can't be dead. Tommy just turned four, he needs his mother. He's just a baby, Richard. Sometimes she still has to rub his back to help him get to sleep. How can a four-year-old's mother be dead? He hasn't even started school or made a best friend or broken a bone or played a sport. Angela has to be there for those things, he's going to need her there. Little kids need their mothers. Angela would never leave Tommy, she would never leave her baby, she's not like that, because..."
The sobs finally over took her, and she clung to Richard. He knew his own tears were intermingling with hers. Angela dead, Tommy left motherless. He hadn't thought about that, and tightened his arms around Clara, knowing it was the motherless child within Clara making her understand the pain that little boy was about to go through.
Clara wasn't sure how long she lay against Richard crying. Angela's dead, her brain kept chanting, making it hard for her to think. "Angela said Jimmy went to Princeton? Booze run?"
"Yes," Richard said.
"Does he know? Is he coming home?"
"Gillian. Called him. He's not, he..."
He's not handling it well, Clara thought, and she felt a new flash of agony thinking of Jimmy's pain.
"Who killed her? Were they after Jimmy?"
Richard didn't answer.
She turned to look at him. "We can't have secrets. You came to get me, so now you have to tell me."
Richard swallowed, and began to tell her the tale of Manny Horvitz, Philadelphia butcher. How Mickey Doyle helped Jimmy make a deal with Horvitz to sell him booze. The warehouse that blew up with the promised booze inside. Jimmy's refusal to return Horvitz's money to him, Jimmy throwing Mickey off the balcony at Babette's, Mickey landing almost at Horvitz's feet. Finally, Jimmy paid the butcher but sent Mickey with the money instead of going to see the man in person.
We all killed Angela, Clara thought. I, because I keep Jimmy's secrets no matter what. I should have gotten her out of Atlantic City when this started. Jimmy, because he refused to deal with a situation he created. My father, because he blew up that warehouse. Gillian, because she manipulates Jimmy for her own reasons. And my father again, because he made Gillian.
Angela was dead, Clara's thoughts continued, because twenty-four years ago my father handed a twelve-year-old Gillian over to the Commodore. We are all paying for that original sin.
"Okay, let's go get him."
Richard looked at her.
"Tommy needs his father. Jimmy has to come home, and Jimmy is...hurting. He needs us." Clara stood up. "Do you have a valise? It's so late we'll probably have to spend the night in Princeton."
Clara went to the dresser and started pulling things out. Richard had packed everything away carefully, she saw. Her toiletry bag had all of her things inside except for her bar of soap, which he had wrapped in paper. The book she was reading the night she left, clean step-ins, stockings, her old favorite summer dress she'd just gotten back from having altered and hadn't even worn yet, her kimono, all were still here.
"I knew. You left your. Favorite. Things. I didn't know. How to get them. To you."
She reached out and put her hand on his wrist. "I'm glad all of my favorite things were still here waiting for me.
Richard put the leather bag that he'd once used to carry the German sniper mask around with him on the bed. Clara handed him a pile of her things and he put them in the valise next to what he was taking.
The phone rang while Clara was taking her stockings off and changing into her straw flats for the drive.
"Mmm, Mrs. Darmody. I..."
Clara was across the room in a flash. "Let me," she whispered to Richard. "Gillian, how is Tommy?"
There was silence on the line. "Clara?"
"Richard and I are about to go get Jimmy. How's Tommy?"
"Tommy is with his Mema, so he's fine. He hasn't even asked about Angela. Do you think it necessary you go with Richard to get Jimmy? We don't really need your help, Clara."
"We'll call you. Tell Tommy we love him." Clara hung up and stared down at the phone. It felt like ice water was running through her veins.
"Are you. Ready?" Richard asked, valise in hand.
Clara nodded.
Author's Note: As always, thank you for reading! I'd love to hear your thoughts on the story. I desperately wanted Angela to live, and almost cried writing this chapter.
