Beautiful Days Read Free

happy about it.
    â€œCordelia is here,” Jones announced.
    â€œGood!” Charlie turned, handing his cue off to Danny and giving his sister a rakish grin. Smiling back, she put out her cigarette. “Cord, come talk with Jones and me. There’s something we want you to do for us.”
    Charlie threw his arm around Cordelia’s shoulders, and under that strong shelter she allowed herself to be drawn down the hall. Charlie’s office, if one could call it that, was not as grandly kept as their father’s had been. There was a large mahogany desk with only a telephone and several empty glasses on it. She had never asked Charlie why he didn’t use the library downstairs, where Darius Grey had given his orders, but she felt she already knew the answer. That was where the secret passageway originated from, the one that the gunman who assassinated their father had escaped through. Cordelia couldn’t so much as think of it without a shudder running down her spine, because it was she who had made the fatal error of showing the passageway to Thom Hale, back when she was infatuated with him and had not yet come to understand the ugly history between their families.
    The makeshift office did the job, and the view through its high, curtainless windows of Dogwood’s west lawn, stretching out to the hedge labyrinth, was as impressive as any gold-edged books or satinwood chairs. Charlie pushed a few of the glasses out of the way, propped himself against the desk, and gave Cordelia an intent, twinkling stare.
    When Cordelia first met Charlie—by chance, at a place called Seventh Heaven, before she was anybody—she had not liked him, and he had not liked her. A day or two later, when she was restored to her father, he hadn’t immediately taken to the idea that she was his half sister, either. On occasion, Cordelia had wondered at them being related at all—but in moments like these she got a glimpse of their shared parentage. He could be hot while she was cool, but they were unmistakably cut from the same cloth. They were both tall with light-colored hair and sweet brown eyes that shone and searched at the same time.
    â€œSmoke?” Charlie took the pack from his front pocket and Cordelia pulled one out. Jones lit it for her, and then retreated to the edge of the room and leaned against the bare wall.
    â€œThank you.”
    â€œDad wouldn’t like what a tough broad you’re becoming,” Charlie said, with a smile and wink.
    Cordelia inhaled and watched her brother reflectively—he was joking, she knew, but how much she couldn’t be certain. “I don’t know how tough a broad I can be when I never leave the house.”
    This was not, of course, the New York life that she’d imagined for herself on those lonely, bleak nights back in Ohio. There had been plenty of trees and quiet there, and she had longed instead for noise. She’d imagined busy, epic evenings during which she would meet a great variety of people. Astrid, meanwhile, was always trying to convince her to go out, but in her grief, Cordelia hadn’t felt like having fun, and even if she had, it wouldn’t have seemed appropriate. Instead she’d spent her days obsessively going over the hours that had culminated in her father’s murder. She played back the reel of those days again and again, trying to locate the moment when she went wrong, imagining that if she closed her eyes and concentrated hard enough, she could return there and make the story come out differently. It had been a sleepless, nervous time, and if Letty hadn’t been there, checking in on her with those round blue eyes, gently encouraging her not to drown in grief, Cordelia might have given up on eating and bathing entirely. Smoking seemed to her the least of the bad little habits she could have picked up.
    â€œCord, please. You don’t have to stay in the house forever, and anyway, you can’t live in