The Wicked City
The Jazz Age comes alive with a love story for the ages: a rugged Prohibition agent and a saucy flapper from one of Appalachia’s most notorious bootlegging families…Manhattan, present dayElla Hawthorne thinks she’s going crazy when she hears strange noises coming from the walls of her new apartment late at night. When she discovers that it used to be home to a speakeasy during the Jazz Age, she’s determined to discover the building’s secrets.Manhattan, 1924Geneva ‘Gin’ Kelly, a smart-mouthed, red-haired flapper, reluctantly agrees to help rugged Prohibition enforcement agent Oliver Anson catch her stepfather, a notorious bootlegger. But the truth will shake Manhattan society to its foundations…
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Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 1 London Bridge Street London, SE1 9GF
First published in the UK by Harper 2017
Copyright © Beatriz Williams
Cover design by TBC © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2016
Cover photographs ©
Beatriz Williams asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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Source ISBN: 9780008132644
Ebook Edition © January 2017 ISBN: 9780008132651
Version: 2016-12-15
To New York City, you ambitious, resilient, breathtaking, wicked creature
Contents
ELLA VISITED the laundry room for the first time at half past six on a Saturday morning at the beginning of March. Not that the timing really mattered, she decided later, when her life had taken on its new, extraordinary dimensions and she’d begun to consider the uncanny moment of that beginning. Certain things—let’s call them that, certain things—had a way of tracking you down and finding you, even when you thought you were just going to wash some clothes in a Greenwich Village basement.
She’d moved into the building a week ago, and the hamper in the corner of the bathroom seemed pitifully empty without all the bulk of Patrick’s things. Still, it was time. Standards must be upheld. You couldn’t keep laundry in a hamper for more than a week, whatever catastrophe had interrupted your life. Too seedy. Too regressive. Anyway, Ella’s mother was bound to call her up soon for the morning welfare check, and she would surely ask whether Ella had done her laundry yet, and Ella wanted to be able to say yes without lying. (Woman could smoke out a lie like a pair of shoes on sale at Bergdorf’s.)
She’d already gone out for a run in the damp charcoal streets, but she hadn’t showered yet. (Terrific thing about insomnia: you could do things like go running and do your laundry without having to confront your fellow tenants in a state of squalor.) As she descended the cold stairwell to the basement, she realized that its strange odor was actually the fug of her own sweat—salt and skin, not yet turning to stink. Her hair, badly in need of washing, whirled in a greasy knot at the back of her head, held from collapse by a denim scrunchie that had not been fashionable even during the heyday of scrunchies. Loose gray sweatpants, looser gray T-shirt emblazoned with her college logo—she’d peeled off her running clothes to fill out the wash load—and on her feet, the shearling L.L.Bean slippers Patrick always hated, because they were crummy and smelled like camping. Teeth furry. No bra.
She remembered all these details because of what occurred inside that laundry room the first time she entered. Six thirty in the morning, the first Saturday of March.
A STARTER MARRIAGE, HER MOTHER called it. Ella had never heard the term before.
“There was an article in the Style section just a month or two ago,” Mumma said. “It made me think of you.”
“But we only split up the week before last,” Ella said, staring at the cluster of U-Haul boxes in the center of her new bedroom.
