Your mother is with him.
And… and Miss Brooks is resting in the adjoining parlor.
A physician was called for her nerves.”
“Give me the key,” I said.
He didn’t hesitate.
He dropped the brass keycard into my cut palm as if it were a burning coal.
I took the grand marble staircase rather than the mirrored elevators.
With every tread beneath my ruined leather soles, the sound of low, urgent voices grew clearer, filtering down the carpeted gallery like the buzzing of wasps trapped inside a wall.
Outside the heavy mahogany double doors of the Camellia Room, two more of my family’s private security guards stood at parade rest.
They saw me.
One reached for the lapel of his blazer, his eyes darting toward the emergency call button mounted in the wainscoting.
“Don’t,” I said, not slowing my pace.
I didn’t raise my hands.
I didn’t reach for an iron bar.
I simply looked at him with the vacant, unblinking clarity of a man who had already stood over his daughter’s deathbed and watched the monitors flatline into silence.
The guard’s hand froze at his lapel.
He took one step to the side, his chin dropping toward his chest in silent, humiliating abdication.
The second guard turned his back and stared intently at a nineteenth-century oil painting of the Chicago riverfront.
I pushed the heavy doors open and walked in.
***
II.
The Council of Vipers
The Camellia Room had been rented at a rate of twelve thousand dollars for the evening.
The mahogany dining table, capable of seating thirty, was strewn with the wreckage of a celebration that had died in the throat.
Silver platters held the melted gray slush of shaved ice where raw Belon oysters had turned warm and sulfurous.
Half-empty crystal flutes of Dom Pérignon stood among crumpled linen napkins stained with spilled claret.
At the far end of the table sat Harold Brooks.
He was sixty-two, with the barrel-chested, pugnacious build of an old Great Lakes dock boss who had poured his muscle into bespoke three-piece suits from Savile Row.
His face was florid, crisscrossed with broken red capillaries around his heavy jaw, his thinning white hair swept back with pomade.
He held a glass of rye whiskey in his right hand, swirling it with a slow, circular motion that clicked against his signet ring.
Beside him, wrapped in an ivory cashmere shawl that had been brought up from the hotel’s retail arcade, sat my mother.
Evelyn was holding a small ice pack against the left side of her jaw, where the collar of her camelhair coat had been crushed against her throat.
A fresh pearl necklace lay around her neck, but her hair—the immaculate, architectural bob that had remained unruffled through thirty years of political funerals and board takeovers—was limp, sticking to her temples with cold sweat.
On a velvet settee near the fireplace sat Amelia Brooks.
