“Were we?”
“I asked what you were really doing here.”
“Why don’t you go sit with the other women?” He shifted his attention to where her father stood, eyeing Mr. Black with wary displeasure.
Fern hadn’t taken another drag from the cigarette, and the gray tip hung perilously. She leaned forward and fumbled to tap the ashes into the tray.
“I don’t think they’d appreciate the smoke,” she answered.
“I’m pretty certain that was your intent.”
Well, if the mysterious Mr. Black had gleaned asmuch, certainly everyone else had as well. Good. Hopefully, they would spread some new rumors.
“Snuff out that cig and run along,” Mr. Black said. “I need to speak with your pops.”
Oddly, the dismissal hit like the corner of a brick. She had no intention of slinking off to the sidelines now.
“Nobody wishes to speak to you, Mr. Black. I would have thought that much was clear.”
“Do you consider yourself a nobody, then? Because I can’t seem to shake you.”
She bit her bottom lip, eager to rise to the challenge of this verbal sparring.
“I’ll leave you alone if you first tell me what you’re doing here.”
He went as bristly as a porcupine at that.
“Listen, princess. Why don’t you go test out your little revolution on one of those other fellas? I’m sure they’ve got a flask hidden away in their coats and wouldn’t mind liquoring you up a bit.”
Their voices had been low, likely nothing more to the others than lip movements and murmurs. However, now, Buchanan and his friend left the wet bar and headed for the sofa.
“I’m most certain theywouldmind,” Fern replied, mashing out the butt of the cigarette. Buchanan was nearly upon them. “May I have another?”
Mr. Black sighed. “If it’ll get you out of my hair.”
He retrieved his case and popped the lid just as her brother arrived.
“She won’t be taking that.” Buchanan stepped between the sofa and ottoman and blocked Fern’s viewof Mr. Black altogether. Her brother loomed over her, his hands deep in his trouser pockets. His shoulders were so tight they were practically up to his earlobes.
“Fern, you’re embarrassing yourself,” he whispered.
She stood and forced herself to look him dead in the eye. “I’m sorry, I know that’s usually your job.”
His lips thinned. “You are acting like a child.”
She knew she was but didn’t particularly like being accused of it.
“Mr. Black,” her father interrupted, saving her from saying something that would surely have been juvenile. “Perhaps we could speak in my study.”
The judge clasped Buchanan’s arm with noticeable force as Mr. Black took a leisurely time rising from the sofa. Her father gestured toward the White Room doors with a convivial wave of his hand and an easy smile, as if he hadn’t been avoiding Mr. Black like the Spanish Flu all evening. Fern could imagine why; no circuit court judge wanted to be associated with a bootlegger. What in the world could they possibly have to discuss?
Mr. Black shouldered his way into the space between Fern and Buchanan. He held out his hand, the cigarette case still open to her. She took one, ashamed of the way her fingers trembled.
Mr. Black snapped the cover shut and tucked the case back inside his suit coat. “Teach her how to smoke those things,” he said to Buchanan before following the judge from the White Room.
As soon as he was gone, the temperature in the room seemed to drop. The silence thickened to an impenetrable state. Fern clasped her hand around the cigaretteand, without meeting a single gaze, left. Echoes of her brother’s accusations—that she was embarrassing herself and acting like a child—followed her into the foyer. They stuck to her back and were impossible to shake free.
Buchanan hadn’t always been right. He’d made plenty of blunders when they’d been growing up, and usually, he’d find himself the recipient of a proper dressing down from their mother. He’d come home from school drunk as a skunk one day when he was thirteen, and another time, he’d been sent home for knocking out another boy’s front tooth. Their father did not often intervene, and soon Buchanan became old enough to walk out of the house rather than subject himself to their mother’s scolding.
