A Most Clever Girl by Stephanie Marie Thornton

Author:Stephanie Marie Thornton [Thornton, Stephanie Marie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2021-09-14T00:00:00+00:00

I moaned to recall the way Yasha’s hand had strayed to this same pocket over dinner, how he’d seemed ready to say something. How the moment had evaporated and instead he’d apologized.

I am sorry you are saddled with a broken old comrade like me. This is not what you signed on for.

My mind exploded with the enormity of all I’d lost.

A sob escaped my lips as I slipped the cold circle of gold over the ring finger on my left hand. I would never take it off.

Two minutes after the medics had left, I was sitting demurely on the wing chair across from the couch, the door unlocked and open. I’d powdered my face, rolled my freshly laundered stockings up my legs and snapped them into my garters, slipped my feet into the heels I’d worn to the restaurant with Yasha.

On the outside, I was a perfectly respectable woman who just happened to be sitting next to a dead man. On the inside . . .

In the battlefield of emotions, anger and rage are the infantry. Grief is the guerrilla fighter, waiting to lay ambush around every corner. Yet, in that moment—the last where I knew I’d be alone with Yasha—I held them all at bay with a single silent command.

Fall apart later. Not now.

A minute or two afterward, the medics arrived and stood around awkwardly once they’d covered Yasha with a white sheet—I ignored their attempts to make small talk, although I did accept the kindly one’s offer of a Lucky Strike to calm my nerves—until two friendly Irish policemen arrived.

Play dumb, Elizabeth. You know nothing.

“Hello, Miss—”

“Bentley,” I provided as I stubbed out the cigarette in my kitchen sink. It wasn’t difficult to look stunned, but I reminded myself that this was the most critical performance of my life. I had to recite my lines perfectly, for myself, for Yasha, for our contacts.

“Can you tell us what happened here? Who this man is?”

(Catherine, remember the truism where I mentioned that when lying, to always tell as much of the truth as possible? Here it is again in action.)

“His name is Golos. Jacob Golos.” The police would learn that themselves after a perfunctory search of his wallet. It was the next sentence that threatened to undo me. “He was an associate of mine at work, but I hardly knew him. I was on my way home from having Thanksgiving dinner at that place opposite the London Terrace”—the waitress there could confirm, although I was taking a chance that these two Pinkertons wouldn’t waste more of their holiday by spending the time to verify that I was alone—“walking through the neighborhood when he recognized me, asked if I could help him.”

I paused for effect. Three, two, one . . .

The first Irishman stopped scribbling in his notebook and gave a little frown. “Help him with what?”

Good man, I thought. They thought this was an interrogation, and it was, but on my terms. With any luck, they’d ask only the questions I guided them to, believe exactly the story that I wanted them to hear.

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