Scandal. Julie Kistler
politicians, dukes and princesses, the cream of society, artists, writers and inventors, citizens from far-off lands including belly dancers, gondoliers and a tribe of alleged cannibals, as well as regular Joes off Chicago’s mean streets, had all come together to see the wonders of the new age and celebrate the 200th anniversary of Columbus “discovering” America. Buffalo Bill, Susan B. Anthony, Teddy Roosevelt, Thomas Edison…Anybody who was anybody was there. With Isabella Tempest right in the middle of it, kicking up a huge scandal.
Jordan stared into space, imagining herself in the middle of the White City. It wasn’t hard. It had happened practically on her doorstep, and the Midway Plaisance, the long, grassy area where the Ferris wheel and hot-air balloon and other popular attractions had sat, was still part of the University of Chicago campus.
Besides, the Chicago World’s Fair had been the event of the century, so there were thousands of photographs and souvenirs of the place. Jordan had plowed her way through stacks of them since she’d started this dissertation. She’d even bought herself a coin on eBay, a commemorative half-dollar sold at the fair with Columbus’s face on one side and one of his ships on the other, and she’d kept it on her desk for good luck ever since.
“I could use a little luck right now,” she murmured, pushing papers aside to get to the cup where she kept it. Quickly, she found her lucky coin, held it tight and closed her eyes, picturing in her mind what it must’ve been like at Chicago’s turn-of-the-century World’s Fair.
The shining White City. Blue skies. A breeze off Lake Michigan. The world’s first Ferris wheel twirling in the background. Art and treasures from around the world. And Isabella’s outrageous arch.
Jordan opened her eyes. Ah, yes. The cool white marble arch, etched with figures of Greek gods and goddesses in flagrante delicto . Once displayed at the exposition, the piece had created a huge triumph and an even huger scandal. And then both of them—Isabella and her fabulous, scandalous arch—had simply vanished. Not one more word about their whereabouts, not in newspapers, magazines, books, journals, diaries…It was one thing for a woman to go missing. But how did a six-foot marble arch evaporate into thin air?
It was infuriating. And it had kept Jordan stuck for months. If only she could think of some new way to look at the facts.
“So Isabella creates the most sensual, most beautiful thing she’s ever done,” Jordan said out loud, spinning around in her chair to glance at the wall behind her desk, where she’d taped up pictures of all things Isabella Tempest, including a poster-sized representation of the sculpture in question. “Her masterpiece.”
Even in a poor re-creation like the sketch on her wall, the arch looked fantastic. And fantastically sexy, with all those nubile, naked marble bodies wrapped around each other, and all those women in the midst of ecstasy. Jordan couldn’t help getting a little flushed every time she gazed at it.
She moved closer. Yes, the arch was a stunner. No question. Her finger traced a figure of Apollo on the upper curve of the sketch, where his mighty, muscular thighs pinned Daphne against a laurel tree. In the myth, Daphne had turned into a tree to escape the god’s advances, but here, carved into Isabella Tempest’s risqué arch, Daphne was clearly enjoying herself, tree or no tree. Head back, mouth open, nails raking Apollo’s back, she looked as if she were in mid-climax, and a pretty steamy one at that.
“Isabella certainly knew how to heat things up,” Jordan said with a shiver, her gaze sliding around the arch. “Daphne and Apollo up against the tree, Psyche blindfolded with Eros behind her, Artemis on top of Orion…Whew. Each one is hotter than the last.”
Isabella had carved sixteen images like that, the extremes of pleasure and passion, up front and unashamed, into the pale, creamy stone. But all that flesh and all that ecstasy had apparently put Chicago society blood pressures in overdrive. And Isabella Tempest under arrest.
It was hard to pull herself away from the erotic power of the arch, but Jordan forced herself as she mentally went through the story one more time. Methodically. Dispassionately. Like a scholar.
“So Isabella gets a coveted spot in the Women’s Building at the Columbian Exposition,” she said out loud, looking for something, anything, she might’ve missed. “The World’s Fair officially opens on May 1, but Isabella and her arch aren’t there. Not finished, presumably. Sometime between then and June 16, she puts her arch in the Women’s Building. And then, on the sixteenth, suddenly there’s an uproar when society matron Mrs. Prentice Stanhope takes Susan B. Anthony on a tour of the building and one or the other catches sight of Isabella’s ‘indecent’ creation. Shame, horror, outcry, all that good stuff. Isabella is arrested and then she and the arch vanish, never to be heard from again.”
Jordan perched on the edge of her desk, gazing at the sketch, reflecting on what a shame it was that Isabella had only had time to make one masterpiece. Genius like that should never have been stifled.
“But where did it go?” she asked with an edge of frustration, tossing the Columbian half-dollar back into its cup with a loud, disappointed clink. “Where did Isabella go?”
She reached onto her desk, picked up and put down three large binders, crammed full of notes about Isabella’s life, and riffled through a stack of folders containing information she already knew. She chewed on the end of a pen. She went back through her outline.
But there was nothing. No spark of inspiration. Just like every other time she’d tried this exercise.
She’d already tried to leave it with an ambiguous “we’ll never know” ending and it just didn’t work. It was like admitting that she was a failure when it came to research and analysis.
“Maybe I am a failure. Maybe that is the answer,” she grumbled. She wanted to scream.
Finally, giving up, Jordan dumped the whole pile of folders back onto her desk and yanked open her desk drawer. She knew what she wanted, what she needed. It was getting to be a habit. She skirted away from words like addiction and obsession . It wasn’t so bad, was it? To feel better because she could look at the two small pictures?
His pictures.
“Nick,” she whispered, feeling a rush of relief just to look at him. “If you’re going to keep driving me crazy like this, the least you can do is send me a psychic message from the Great Beyond to tell me where Isabella and the arch went. C’mon, Nick, help a girl out, will you?”
If only he could. She’d already spent far too much time examining every grain of the two existing photos of Nicholas Tempest, and she hadn’t gotten any answers yet. But that didn’t stop her from trying. She’d even made one of the pictures her screensaver, which meant every time she was stuck long enough for her laptop to go dark, she ended up gazing at Nick, daydreaming about him and drifting even farther away from working.
It was odd how attached to those photos she was. Nick Tempest, the man in the photos, who just happened to be Isabella’s older brother, was only peripheral to her dissertation. But for some reason, Jordan kept finding herself coming back to him, somehow convinced that this man was the answer to every question she had, if only she stared at his picture long enough.
It was bizarre. It was unlike her. She’d never been one to sigh over rock stars or movie idols or sports heroes, not even when she was twelve. When her high school friends had swooned over Johnny Depp or Tom Cruise, she’d just rolled her eyes. No attraction there. Not even a flutter. How strange that Nick Tempest was her first fantasy crush, and he’d been dead for 110 years.
She’d stumbled over his photos on eBay when she went searching for background on the Tempest family and their department store. Nick was one of the founders of Tempest & Trent, a stylish store that still sat, grand and imposing, in the exact same spot on State Street it’d occupied since 1894. In fact, Tempest & Trent had always been her favorite department store, and she and her grandmother had come to look at the Christmas windows every year when she was little. Funny she’d never wondered about its founder, not until she saw those pictures on eBay.
But once she saw them, she was determined to have them at any