The Last Note of Warning (THE NIGHTINGALE MYSTERIES #3) by Katharine Schellman EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Status: Available for Free Download
- Authors: Katharine Schellman
- Language: English
- Genre: Historical Fiction
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 8 MB
- Price: Free
Manhattan, 1925
The champagne was flowing in the Nightingale, poured out for the dancers
who crowded around the bar.
Don’t tell, they agreed, toasting each other with sultry voices and bold
laughter. Don’t tell. You never saw me here.
You couldn’t see the stars if you went outside. The city lights were too
bright, the dingy clouds too thick. But inside, champagne stars fizzed in cutcrystal glasses, dancing like the couples who found their way through the
back alleys and down the stairs each night.
I’ll dance ’til last call, they whispered at the door, all hoping to escape
something. The monotony of wealth. The needs of a lover. The demands of
family and work and sometimes just scraping by. The drudgery of a city
where you would never see the stars at night.
Vivian Kelly knew what it was like to wish for those stars. She had
learned not to look up, to find her freedom in the rhythm of the music, in
champagne bubbles and dances with strangers, in the secrets they kept for
each other. She could tell, just by looking, who was there on a whim or a
dare, money flashing bright as the spangles on a dress, cares light as a
whisper of silk. They kept the liquor flowing, the dance floor busy, the
laughter loud.
And she could tell who was there for the same reasons she was. The
ones whose shoulders relaxed as they came down the stairs, who slipped
into their true selves like coming home. The ones who knew that freedom
came with a price, that freedom wasn’t safe, and still decided it was worth
the cost.
Don’t tell, they agreed when they heard what they weren’t supposed to
know.
Don’t tell, they whispered when they saw someone they shouldn’t.
Don’t tell, they begged. Oh, please, don’t tell.
You never saw me here.
“Mrs. Buchanan’s not here.”
Vivian Kelly, twenty-four years old and feeling three times her age, her
feet aching from trudging twenty blocks between deliveries and her arms
limp from the weight of three dress boxes, bit the inside of her cheek. The
housekeeper didn’t deserve her impatience or her anger. And the woman
who did—the one who had insisted that her gowns be completed and
delivered a week early—wouldn’t see anything but a polite shopgirl when
she finally arrived, either. Not if Vivian wanted to keep her job.
She arranged her face into a smile. “Does she want me to leave the
dresses? The hem and shoulders need to be checked, but if she wants her
own maid to do that—”
“I don’t know,” the housekeeper said, already distracted by the sound of
an argument in the next room.
Vivian stood in the tradesmen’s entrance, shivering from the wind that
snaked around her ankles and crept up her stockinged legs. It could snow
tonight, judging by that wind. She didn’t want to trudge back here in the
snow.
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