Page 73 of Book of Night
She heard the echo of Vince’s voice:Do you think that stars have shadows?
“But I have always been comforted,” he said. “And do you know why?”
Charlie shook her head, since that seemed like what she was supposed to do.
“Because they signifiedpossibility. In all that vastness, it was impossible that the universe didn’t have secrets left to be ferreted out. And when I took in my grandson, I saw that I was right. Because for all that was broken in him, he had one incredible talent.”
“Magic,” Charlie guessed.
Salt nodded. “When I saw him command it—which he did without a split tongue, having had no formal education with any gloamist—I felt as though I had found what I’d been looking for my whole life. A true secret of the universe, and a path to greater mysteries. But for Edmund, it was merely a crude little trick. He played with the thing like it was some imaginary friend and sent it off to steal candy and cigarettes.”
The car pulled into a long drive marked with a carved and painted sign proclaiming they were entering the grounds of the Grand Berkshire Private Club. It seemed as though Salt intended to keep his word about taking her to lunch, in public.
“I will send you two girls to the spa. There are showers with which to refresh yourself, Ms. Hall. The staff can bring you clothing. We’ll meet for lunch in a half hour. And then we can finish our business. Now, see, isn’t that civilized?”
It was, except for the gun in his pocket.
The driver came around again and opened the door. Adeline allowed him to take her hand as though she were departing a carriage. Charlie followed, scooting out inelegantly, trying not to flash her panties.
The rain had turned into a light drizzle. She looked around, taking in the rolling green grounds, most of them golf course. The grass looked impossibly bright for this late in the fall. There was a large building in the distance that seemed to be the common space of the country club. The spa building was smaller, its wooden shingles painted the charmingly cottagecore color of a fern.
A sign set to one side of the door proclaimed that this was the relaxation and wellness center.
Inside, the air was warm, humid, and scented heavily with eucalyptus. A woman behind a desk took two towels from the shelves behind her and placed them on the counter. She smiled at them as though it was utterly normal to have a hungover client in a spangly dress with makeup all over her face. The steadiness of her gaze didn’t so much as flicker.
“We’d like a private sauna room,” Adeline said. “And we need some clothing in a size… twelve?”
“Fourteen,” Charlie corrected.
The woman continued to smile. “There are towels and robes waiting for you. Would you like some cucumber water?”
“Absolutely.” Charlie felt dehydrated enough to drink abathtubof cucumber water. “Do you have aspirin?”
“Of course. Anything else?”
Charlie wondered if there was anything they could ask for that would dent her smile. A giraffe? A hot-air balloon? The loan of a crossbow so she could shoot Salt in the back?
Still making that mental list, Charlie followed Adeline into the sauna room. White lockers lined the left wall, robes hanging on attached hooks. The door to the sauna itself was shut, with a lot of dials on the door meant to, she supposed, optimize the heat and moisture levels, as though she and Adeline were lizards in an extremely fancy tank.
And there was a shower room.
Charlie grabbed a robe. “Back in a minute,” she called to Adeline.
Under the steady heat and excellent water pressure, Charlie scrubbed her face with body wash, ignoring the way it stung her eyes. She shampooed her hair twice, then shrugged on the robe.
Adeline stood waiting for her, hair twisted up in a tortoiseshell clip. “The sauna really is the best thing for a hangover. You sweat out the liquor.”
Charlie spotted a pitcher of cucumber water and a bottle of aspirin sitting on a silver tray. She took a generous helping of both before following Adeline into the steam.
The air inside the little room was scented even more strongly of eucalyptus than the front desk, and so thick she seemed to be drinking it as much as breathing it in. Charlie hadn’t been in a sauna before, so she wasn’t sure if that was normal. The combination of heat and moisture created a claustrophobic but not entirely unpleasurable sensation. She sat on a bamboo bench and stretched out her bare toes.
“You’ve got a bruise,” Adeline said, pointing to where Charlie’s calf had come up black and blue after being knocked around by Hermes’s shadow only three days before.
Charlie decided the best thing she could do was ignore that and redirect the conversation. “You and Edmund are almost the same age, right?”
Adeline hesitated, as though the question bothered her. “We were close from the time he first came to live with us. My half sister was so much older than I was that I never knew her well, so it was easier to think of Remy as a brother, more than anything else.”
Her half sister. Right. Edmund’s mother. “What about your mom? Did she mind having another kid in the house?”
