THE WICKED REDHEAD
A Wicked City Novel
Beatriz Williams

Copyright

Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London, SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in the UK by HarperCollins 2020

Copyright © Beatriz Williams

Cover design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2020

Cover photograph © Granger

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.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780062660329

Ebook Edition © February 2020 ISBN: 9780008219000

Version: 2020-02-17

Dedication

To the memory of those killed and wounded in the Prohibition wars

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

New York City, April 1998

ACT I: We Fly South for the Winter

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

New York City, April 1998

ACT II: We Are Cleft in Twain

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Cumberland Island, Georgia, April 1998

ACT III: We Pass Like Ships in the Night

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

New York City, April 1998

ACT IV: We Raise Our Glasses

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

East Hampton, New York, April 1998

ACT V: We Are Tossed Upon the Sea

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Southampton, New York, April 1998

Finale

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Greenwich Village, New York City, April 1998

Acknowledgments

Reading Group Guide

Keep Reading …

About the Author

Also by Beatriz Williams

About the Publisher

New York City, April 1998

THE PHOTOGRAPH in Ella’s hand was about the size of a small, old-fashioned postcard. It had a matte finish, almost like newsprint, and the edges were soft and frayed, as you might expect from a photograph over seventy years old. From anything over seventy years old, really, but especially a photograph of a naked woman.

And what a woman.

She sloped along a Victorian chaise longue, wearing nothing but black stockings and ribbon garters, face turned upward to receive a fall of light from the sky. Miraculous breasts like large, white, dark-tipped balloons. Everything black and white, in fact, except her hair, which was carefully tinted red. Ella couldn’t stop staring at her. Nobody with a heartbeat could stop staring at that woman.

And it wasn’t her beauty that so transfixed you, because you couldn’t really see her face. It wasn’t even her incandescent figure, although that was the point of the photograph, wasn’t it? That figure. Ella couldn’t put a name to this mesmerizing force, except that it began somewhere beneath the milky skin of the woman herself and never really ended. You had the feeling that if you stared long enough, willed hard enough, she would turn her head toward you and say something fabulous. From the wall behind her hung a giant portrait, in which a painted version of the same woman languished on the same sofa, conveying all that sexual charisma in raw, awestruck, primitive brushstrokes. The title at the bottom said Redhead Beside Herself.

Ella turned on her side and traced the curve of the Redhead’s hip. No kidding, she thought. Her fingertips buzzed at the contact, but she was used to that, by now. On the bed beside her, Nellie lifted her head and growled softly, and Ella put out her other hand to soothe the dog’s ears.

“Nothing to worry about, honey,” she said. “Go back to sleep.”

But the dog kept growling at the same low, loose pitch, and the photograph buzzed even harder beneath Ella’s fingers, like a dial turning right, until Ella forced herself to look up and saw the hands of the clock on the bedside table.

She rolled to her back and stared at the ceiling.

“Damn,” she said. “It’s time.”

BEFORE SHE HEADED UPTOWN to the offices of Parkinson Peters to get fired, Ella dressed herself carefully in her best charcoal-gray suit and black calfskin pumps. Mumma used to say you should dress for your worst moments as if they were your best. Dad said to scuttle the ship with flags flying. Probably they meant the same thing.

After a fine, cool Sunday, the weather had turned damp overnight, and the smell of urine and vomit stuck to the air of the Christopher Street subway station. Ella sidestepped a puddle of spilled, milky coffee on her way to her spot—directly across the tracks from a peeling movie advertisement—and tried to breathe through her mouth. The film starred Jeff Bridges, looking even more scruffy than usual, locked in some kind of arabesque with an actress dressed in a gladiator outfit. Ella had spent the last month of mornings trying to decide whether the two of them were bowling or ice skating. The question was driving her slowly insane, and now, as she stared at the distant object in Jeff’s hands that might or might not be a bowling ball, she thought, At least I won’t have to stare at that fucking movie poster anymore. After this morning, she could stand somewhere else on the platform, instead of the particular spot that would put her on the subway car nearest the exit turnstiles at Fiftieth Street, and stare at some other advertisement.

The rails sang. The train roared softly down the tunnel. Burst like an avalanche into the station a moment later, rippling the coffee puddle, and Ella stepped on board and creased her Wall Street Journal into long, vertical folds that doubled back on each other, just as if this were any kind of regular morning, and she was headed for the office. The electronic bell rang its double tone. The doors thumped shut, found some obstacle, thumped again. The train jerked into motion, and Ella, staring at the blur of words in the newspaper column before her, realized that she had no idea what the name of that movie was. Maybe she never would.

At the Fourteenth Street station, the train filled with Brooklynites transferring from the 2 and 3 trains, and Ella, who was already standing, ended up shoved against one of the center poles, pretending to read her vertically folded Wall Street Journal in the alleyway between two thick male arms, belonging to two men in identical navy suits who were probably not going to get fired this morning.

Fired. Canned. Let go. Laid off, dismissed, discharged. Sacked, if you were British. Query: If Ella were working in the London office of Parkinson Peters, would she be sacked? Or could she demand to get fired instead? She refolded the paper to feign reading the second column and decided she would so demand, damn it. You had the right to get axed on your own terms. The train lurched for no reason. Squealed to a stop in the blackened tunnel between Eighteenth Street and Twenty-Third Street. The lights died. The whir of ventilation vanished, and the sudden stillness was like the end of the world. Nobody moved. The whole car just went on staring at its darkened newspapers, staring at the dermatology advertisements on the train walls, staring at ears and hats and backpacks and necks, staring at anything but someone else’s stare. Sweating palms on metal poles, submitting to the close-packed indignity of the New York subway. There was a garbled announcement, something about Penn Station. The car came to life, lights and noise and air, and lurched forward again. Ella fixed her gaze to her knuckles. Next to her, the man with the navy jacket sleeve made a slight movement and slipped his hand further up the pole, away from hers.

The train blew into Twenty-Third Street and stood on its brakes. Pitched Ella into the chest of the navy suit guy, who looked at her in horror.

Five more stops. Thirty city blocks between Ella and unemployment.

And her job was the least of her worries.

IN AN UNEMPLOYMENT TRIBUNAL, which God forbid, Parkinson Peters and its polished, navy-suited lawyers could probably make a reasonable case against Ella. You could always find actionable cause if you wanted to get rid of somebody, after all, and maybe Ella could have been more careful to make absolutely certain Travis Kemp—the managing partner on the Sterling Bates audit—knew that Ella’s husband happened to be employed at Sterling Bates, albeit in a wholly different division. She could have reminded Travis of the information on her disclosure form on file with human resources, instead of assuming he’d reviewed it before assigning her to the project. She could have used that opportunity to affirm that her husband, Patrick Gilbert, had no relationship, formal or otherwise, with the activities of the disgraced Sterling Bates municipal bond department, which Parkinson Peters had been hired to audit, and allowed Travis to decide whether Ella should remain on the team.

But none of those actions would have mattered, in the end. Ella’s dismissal had nothing to do with any kind of wrongdoing, at least on her part. She’d known that from the moment she hung up the phone with Travis on Friday evening, brimming with tears, brimming with all the physiological symptoms of shock. She was the kind of person who always paid for the apple she dropped in the supermarket instead of putting it back on the stack, who slipped a tip in the Starbucks box even when the barista wasn’t looking. She had tagged the unusual pattern of payments at Sterling Bates not because it was her job, but because it was the right thing to do.

Friday night, she’d shook with rage at the injustice of it all.

Not until later did she realize she had bigger things to worry about.

But she couldn’t think about that. She couldn’t think about Saturday night and she especially couldn’t think about Sunday afternoon, because the subway was really cooking now, congestion cleared up ahead, and by the time Ella had finished pretending to read the left two columns of the Wall Street Journal and started feigning the middle one, she was already crashing into Fiftieth Street, brakes squealing, mosaics blurring past, slowing, stilling. In the instant of silence before the doors opened, Ella nearly gagged on the smell of somebody’s sausage sandwich.

And then she was free. She burst out into the sour, damp underground and through the turnstiles, up the stairs, clutching her company laptop bag that contained a laptop scrubbed clean of files, clutching her Wall Street Journal in the other hand. She emerged into a chilly mist and checked her watch—seven thirty-nine, way too early, even for Ella—and ducked into a Starbucks to gather herself. Her hair was already curling into a hopeless cloud; she pulled an emergency scrunchie from the outside pocket of her bag and bound the mess back into a ponytail. Found her security pass and cell phone. Saw that she had missed two calls, one from Patrick and one from Hector, who had each called within a minute of the other. Hector had left a voice mail. Patrick, knowing better, had not.

Her husband and her lover. To be clear, her estranged husband and her brand-new lover, but did that matter in the eyes of God? Maybe it did, but waking up yesterday morning, she hadn’t felt a shred of guilt. Had instead felt bathed in something like God’s mercy, after six mortifying, agonizing weeks.

Now, as she stood before the pickup counter and accepted a latte she didn’t really want, Ella thought that maybe she was wrong. That she had bathed in nothing but sexual afterglow, and God was a vengeful God after all. Like Parkinson Peters, punishing her for a crime that belonged to somebody else.

BY ANY ABSOLUTE MEASURE, Ella had woken on Sunday morning in a state of sin. The waking was Nellie’s fault, the sin was all her own. Actually, the waking was probably Ella’s fault too, since responsibility for the dog’s bladder now belonged to her. She’d set aside Nellie’s wriggling, investigating body and squinted her eyes at the clock on the bedside table. Eleven minutes past nine. Also, there was a note.

Nellie lunged forward and licked Ella’s nose in frantic little strokes.

“All right, all right,” Ella had said. Sat up too fast and wobbled. Set her two hands on either side of her bottom and shook her head. Nellie climbed into her lap and stared beseechingly upward. Nothing more soulful than the round black eyes of a King Charles spaniel who needed to pee.

Across the room, the blinds were down over the windows, but the sunlight streaked fearlessly around the edges and illuminated what seemed like acres of Ella’s bare flesh. Full, happy breasts. Flushed, decadent skin. Curling, tumbled hair. Ella hadn’t examined her naked body in months, maybe even a year or two; she couldn’t even remember the last time she performed that ritual of minute, critical, inch-by-inch dissection of flaws, ending in resolve to eat less, exercise more, use moisturizer, buy another push-up bra, maybe reconsider a long-standing personal prohibition against cosmetic surgery. Back then—happily married—she hadn’t cared.

More recently—wronged wife—she hadn’t dared.

And now? Right that second? Staring down at breasts and stomach and thighs and calves and feet against the wrinkled, disgraceful white sheets? She’d thought she looked pretty damned beautiful.

Pretty damned beautiful. (That was Hector’s voice, echoing in her head.)

Hector. She reached for the note. Nellie barked and spun in a desperate circle.

“All right, all right,” Ella said again, retracting her hand, and this time she swung her legs over the edge of the bed and rose. The movement made her head slosh. Made her belly swim. Swamped her with the seasick, full-body hangover sensation of a night without sleep, except that unlike actual hangovers, or those following all-nighters spent at work, this malady represented a small price to pay for what had caused it. If you threatened Ella with a lifetime of such wakings, she wouldn’t trade away last night. If you erased her memory of the past twelve hours, she would still know it existed, humming in her bones and skin, shimmering down the long lines of her veins, hovering like a ghost inside her—

“I think I’m going to throw up,” she told Nellie, and exactly six seconds later she was leaning over the edge of Hector’s toilet bowl while Hector’s dog watched anxiously from the door.

After vomiting, she’d felt much better, the way you did. Weak but purged. Purged of what, she wasn’t sure. Guilt or sin or something, right? After all, she was married.

Except she didn’t feel guilty. She was quite sure of that. Ella knew what guilt felt like, and this wasn’t it. This was something more complicated, like when you walked onto an airplane headed to a brand-new country and couldn’t turn back, adventures waiting before you, and yet somewhere, in the back of your skull, pounded the certainty that you’d forgotten to pack something important. She found a washcloth on the counter and turned on the faucet and wondered whether her husband had barfed, the first time he cheated on her. Aunt Julie had said that Patrick was a congenital cheater; she could smell it on him, the way you smelled garlic on someone who had eaten forty-clove chicken the night before. He’d probably cheated in kindergarten. Kissing Michelle after telling Jennifer he was going to marry her. He was numb to sin. What was that line from Dangerous Liaisons? It only hurts the first time.

Well, Ella didn’t hurt at all, that Sunday morning. She didn’t regret a minute of the night before.

Nellie’s paws grabbed her knee. Bark ended in a whine.

“All right! All right!” Ella said, for the third time. She set down the washcloth and went back into the bedroom, Hector’s bedroom, Hector’s bed, Hector’s simple wooden furniture. On the chair lay her clothes, neatly folded, nowhere near where she had left them last night. In fact, Ella could have sworn she wore not a single stitch by the time Hector carried her from the living room to his bed, and yet here sat all those stitches, reconstituted, primly stacked, bra and panties on top, just as if they hadn’t spent the night strewn all over the living room floor.

This time, Ella didn’t bother deciding whether Patrick had or had not ever picked up her clothes from the floor after a night of passion. Didn’t think of Patrick at all, in fact, as she dressed herself in the clothes Hector had peeled off her body under a high, bright moon and then gathered together again, in the hour before dawn, while Ella lay absolutely expired under the down comforter. She pulled her hair back in the scrunchie Hector had also recovered from the floorboards. Nearby, Nellie chased her nonexistent tail in a kind of canine delirium. Ella slid on her shoes, tucked Hector’s note into her pocket, and called for Nellie to follow her into the living room.

By virtue of being related to the landlord, and also by virtue of his own skill at carpentry, Hector had the entire attic floor to himself: bedroom, bathroom, open living room and kitchen. The Sunday sunshine hurtled through the skylight to land in a scintillating rectangle on the kitchen counter, where Nellie’s leash and a plastic produce bag lay together with a bottle of water and a key. By now the dog was dancing on her claws. Yipping and begging. Ella leaned down and clipped the leash on her collar. Grabbed the bag and the water and the key as Nellie dragged her like a sled dog toward the door. Together, they raced along the flights of stairs, and Ella was out the vestibule and leaping down the stoop before she realized she hadn’t even looked at her own apartment door on the way down. How crazy was that? When that apartment had changed everything. The Redhead’s apartment, now hers.

Ella had to run to keep up with Nellie, who was making for a patch of gravel surrounding a tree near the corner, and her stiff muscles begged for mercy, like that time Ella’s sister Joanie had talked Ella into joining a Pilates class. And maybe she wasn’t quite that stiff this morning, not quite so aware of just how many muscles the human body could contain; maybe her soreness today was tempered by that sense of marvelous well-being set off by the joyful firecracker in her belly, the sensation she still couldn’t name.

But something else gnawed at her flesh—even when Nellie, after some investigation, decided on a spot and hunched down in relief—and Ella, resting at last, thought that maybe that gnawing came from her back pocket, where she’d stuffed Hector’s note as she flew out of Hector’s apartment. Moreover, she decided—shifting her balance, blowing on her fingers in the brisk air—the gnawing wasn’t because she missed him, although she did. She missed him the way you might miss a bone, if you woke up to find it missing from your arm or leg or rib cage. She missed kissing him and laying her hands on him in utter freedom, in the way they had finally done last night, the dam breaking at last under the pressure of Ella’s distress, but that wasn’t all; just being with Hector, just laughing with him and playing piano with him and lying on the floor staring through the skylight with him. She could live without the sex long before she could live without any of that.

She missed him, yes, she missed everything about him.

But the thing was—and Nellie was setting off again, full of purpose, and Ella had to force her legs to move—the thing was, when she woke up this morning, alone in Hector’s bed, she was kind of glad he wasn’t there.

And the note? Gnawing from the safety of her back pocket? She wasn’t in any hurry to read it.

HECTOR HAD LEFT TWO other voice mails on Ella’s cell phone, one Sunday afternoon around the time he must have landed in Los Angeles, and one in the evening. Both of them untouched, the same as Hector’s note, and just like Hector’s note the cell phone now went inside the front pocket of Ella’s laptop bag. She couldn’t listen to Hector’s voice right now, any more than she could look at Hector’s handwriting. He was probably frantic with worry, and still she couldn’t bring herself to hear those words, read those words, return his call and hear him speak more words. Not because she was guilty. Not because she didn’t care. Not because she didn’t long to hear Hector read the entire fucking Manhattan telephone directory in her ear, in the same way she longed to breathe.

Ella tried the latte. Too hot. She set it down and checked her watch—seven forty-eight—and decided she might as well get it over with. Lifted her laptop bag from the counter stool and walked out the door, forgetting all about the latte left on the counter until she was pushing her way through the glass revolving door of the Parkinson Peters building on Fifty-Second Street and Sixth Avenue and wondered why her right hand was so empty.

TO ELLA’S SURPRISE, HER security pass still worked. She spilled through the turnstile, in fact, because she’d been expecting it to stay locked. So maybe forgetting that latte was an act of mercy; it would have sloshed right up through the mouth hole and over her suit if she’d been holding it. What a disaster that would have been, right?

Fortunately, the lobby was still empty at this hour, and only the security guy noticed Ella’s misstep. Most of the Parkinson Peters staff wandered in around eight thirty, though you were expected to stay as late as it took, and certainly past six o’clock if you wanted a strong review at the end of the year. And that was just when you were on the beach, between assignments, performing rote work in the mother ship. (The cabana, if you didn’t want to mix your metaphors.) Ella crossed the marble floor like she owned it—that was the only way to walk, Mumma had taught her—and pressed the elevator button. While she waited, somebody joined her, and for an instant made eye contact in the reflection of the elevator doors. A woman Ella didn’t recognize, dressed in a charcoal-gray suit similar to hers. Nice suit, Ella wanted to say, a final act of transgression while she still had the chance. But of course she didn’t say it. There was no point. Ella thought she had a finite amount of rebellion inside her, which she had used up considerably on Saturday night, and she didn’t want to waste any of the remainder. Unless rebellion was the kind of thing that fed on itself. Unless breaking the minor code of elevator silence—they had boarded the car by now, rushing upward to the thirty-first floor, where Ella was shortly to be made an ex-employee of Parkinson Peters—unless committing that misdemeanor gave her the courage to break other, larger rules, a courage that she was shortly going to need in spades. In which case—

But it was too late. The elevator stopped at the twenty-fourth floor and the woman and her suit departed forever. Ella continued on to the thirty-first floor and unlocked the glass door to the Parkinson Peters offices with her pass. Strode to an empty cubicle, dropped her bag by the chair, went to the kitchen, and poured herself a cup of coffee to replace the one she had left behind at Starbucks. The room was in the center of the building and had no windows. The fluorescent light cast a sickly, anodyne glow, so that even the new granite countertops looked cheap. Ella was stirring in cream when an apologetic voice called her name from the door. She turned swiftly, spilling the coffee on her hand.

“Ella? I’m so sorry.” It was Travis’s assistant, Rainbow, crisp and corporate in her Ann Taylor suit and cream blouse. Ella always imagined a pair of hippie parents serving her Tofurky at Thanksgiving and wondering where they had gone wrong. “Mr. Kemp asked me to send you to his office as soon as you came in.”

Ella turned to reach for a paper towel. “I’ll be just a minute, thanks.”

She took her time. Cleaned up the spill and washed her hands. Stuck a plastic lid on the coffee cup and took it to her desk, so she could drink it later. Her hand, carrying the coffee, setting it down on the Formica surface, remained steady. The nausea had passed. She unzipped her laptop bag and took out a leather portfolio, a yellow legal pad, and the Cross pen she used for business meetings, the one her father had given her when she first landed the job at Parkinson Peters, and as she walked down the passageway between the cubicles, it seemed to her that she could hear his proud voice as he gave it to her, Ella, his firstborn. Use it for good, he’d said, wagging the box. There’s power in this.

She reached Travis’s office, which was not on the corner but two offices down—he’d only made partner a few years ago—and knocked on the door.

“It’s open,” said Travis, in a voice that was neither stern nor angry, and in fact sounded as if he’d just been sharing a joke.

So Ella pushed the door open and discovered she was right. He had been sharing a joke—or at least some pleasant morning banter—with a muscular man sitting confidently in the chair before the desk.

Ella’s husband.

Before she even comprehended that it was Patrick, before her eyes connected with her brain and lit the red warning light, he was bounding up from the chair and kissing her cheek. “Well, hello there, Ella,” he said, just as if they’d woken up in bed together this morning, as if he still owned the right to her kisses.

“Patrick? What the hell are you doing here?”

There was a brief, nervous pause. Patrick took a step back and laughed awkwardly. Ella looked from him to Travis, Travis looked from her to Patrick. He was jiggling a pen in his left hand, and an artsy, black-and-white photograph of his family smiled over his shoulder. The sight of it, for some reason, maybe its black-and-whiteness, made Ella think of Redhead Beside Herself. She turned back to Patrick and said, Well?

He tried to lay an arm around her shoulders, but she edged to the side.

“I’m here for you, babe,” he said. “I heard what happened on Friday.”

“How? Who told you?”

He shrugged. He was smiling—Patrick had one of those room-lighting smiles, it was part of his arsenal—and Ella realized he wasn’t wearing a suit. Just a pair of chinos and a navy cashmere sweater over a button-down shirt of French blue. He looked like he was off to race yachts or something.

“Just heard from someone at work,” he said. “I tried to call you this weekend, but you weren’t answering. So I came down here this morning to see my man Kemp and explain.”

Travis had turned his attention to some papers on his desk during this exchange, making notes in his quick, tiny handwriting that had always confounded Ella. But she could see that his ears were wide open. His neck was a little flushed above his white collar. He was going to tell his wife all about this tonight.

Ella folded her arms. “Explain what?”

“I quit my job,” Patrick said.

“You what?”

“I quit. Tendered my resignation over the weekend.”

“This is a joke, right?”

Patrick shook his head. Still smiling. “Nope. I figured if one of us had to take a fall, it should be me. You didn’t do anything wrong.”

“Neither did you.”

“Well, then call me a gentleman.”

“Ella,” said Travis, looking up from his papers, “I got your husband’s email over the weekend and discussed the matter on the partner call this morning, and we’ve agreed to keep you on at Parkinson Peters. You’ll be moved to a different project—”

“No,” she said.

If she’d taken a pistol from her pocket and fired a bullet through the window, the two men would probably have been less startled. The pen dropped from Travis’s hand and smacked on the desk.

“No, what? No, you want to stay on the Sterling Bates audit? I’m afraid—”

“I mean, no, I don’t want to stay at all.” Ella opened up her leather portfolio and removed a sheet of paper. Set it on the desk in front of her, edges exactly straight. “My resignation letter.”

“Jesus,” said Patrick.

Travis stared at the letter and said, Well.

Ella snapped the portfolio shut. “So that’s that. I’ll stop by HR with a copy for them—”

“Can I ask where you’re going?” Travis said, looking up from the letter. He gathered up the pen and started clicking the end. His eyes were bright and narrow. “Who’s recruited you? Deloitte?”

“No one.”

“You’re not moving somewhere else?”

“No.”

Travis sat back in his chair, still clicking the pen. He bounced a few times, causing the chair to squeak. His window faced east, and the gray sun balanced at the back of his head. Between the buildings, where Queens should be, there was nothing but cloud. His lips stretched into a smile.

“Can I ask what you’re planning to do?” he said, in a tone of absolute pity.

Ella returned her portfolio under her arm and smiled back. “Nope,” she said, and walked out the door, right past her dumbstruck husband.

BUT PATRICK NEVER STAYED dumbstruck. He always had something to say. He chased her down the corridor of cubicles and caught up when she reached the one she’d claimed with her suit jacket.

“Ella,” he said, “wait.”

“I have nothing to say to you.”

“Did you get my flowers?”

She turned. “First of all, how did you get my address? From my family?”

“No.” He hesitated. “From Kemp.”

“Oh my God. How illegal is that?”

“We’re still married, Ella. I have the right to know where you’re living.”

“And I have the right to get a restraining order, if I need to.”

He took her elbow and spoke in a low, heartfelt voice. “Don’t. It doesn’t need to be like this. Come home, Ella, please. I mean, seriously. You left our place for some shithole in the Village?”

“I left you because you were cheating on me, and it’s not a shithole. It’s—” She stopped herself before she said magical. “It’s a special building.”

“It’s a dump. You can’t live there. It doesn’t even look safe.”

Ella removed his hand from her elbow and reached for her suit jacket. “It’s the safest place I’ve ever lived, and I’m not moving anywhere, especially not with you.”

“For God’s sake, Ella. I just quit my job for you! Managing director at Sterling Bates, and I threw it all away just to prove to you—”

“Look. I don’t know the real reason you quit the bank, Patrick, but I’m pretty sure I wasn’t it. This conversation is over. You’ll be hearing from my lawyer pretty soon. As they say.” She dodged his reaching hands and slung her laptop bag over her shoulder. Headed for the elevators, followed by every pair of eyes on the floor, and she didn’t care! Maybe a little, but not really. Didn’t care, for once, that everyone in the office had just heard the soap opera that was Ella Gilbert’s life. That her husband had cheated on her—too bad she had no time to rehash for them the full story, the visceral details, the grunting-sweating-banging of an orange-skinned hooker in the stairwell of their own apartment building—and that, as a result, Ella was divorcing him. Omigod, poor Ella, did you hear? She passed Rainbow, whose awed eyes followed her all the way to the glass doors, while Patrick followed, saying something, some blur of words.

As she found the door handle, Patrick reached out to cover her hand.

“Ella, you can’t just cut me out of your life,” he said in her ear.

She stared at Patrick’s hand, his left hand. The gold wedding band that circled his ring finger, engraved on the inside (she knew this because she had ordered it herself, picked out the Roman lettering as both traditional and masculine) EVD TO PJG, 6*13*96. He had nearly lost it on their honeymoon. Nearly lost it while they were swimming together off some beach in Capri, because a ring was such a new, unfamiliar object to him, and he kept jiggling it on his finger like a toy hoop. Off it came. He was distraught. Dove for it, again and again, even though Ella begged him to stop because each time he plunged under the water and the seconds ticked by, panic took hold of her stomach. Then he came up at last, triumphant, brandishing the plain gold band between his thumb and forefinger like he’d recovered some pirate’s diamond from the seabed. Salt water dripping from his skin. He handed Ella the ring and made her put it back on his finger, right there in the chest-deep water, and she did as he asked, wiggling it all the way down to his knuckle. He’d snaked his arms around her waist. “That’s the last time,” he said, when he was done kissing her, which took some time. “It’s never coming off again. You’ll have to bury me with that ring on my finger.”

And now, here they were. Ella stared down at the shining band that reflected the fluorescent office lights, at his big hand covering hers, and she remembered thinking, in the sunlit moment while she kissed Patrick on that beach, how lucky she was. How lucky she was to have found a man who loved her so much.

With her own left hand, which contained neither engagement ring nor wedding band, she plucked Patrick’s fingers away.

“Honestly, Patrick?” she said softly. “I don’t think we have anything left to say to each other.”

A QUARTER OF AN hour later, Ella pondered this lie as she sat on a Starbucks stool, drinking a fresh latte to replace the one she’d left behind earlier. Her phone buzzed from her laptop bag. She waited for the buzzing to stop, waited for another minute or two after that, and then she tilted the bag toward her and plucked the phone free. Hector again. She put her fingers to her temple and stared at the screen, Hector’s name—just that single word, Hector, formed of tiny green LED lights, followed by his phone number—until it blinked out. Until her ribs ached. Until the joints of her fingers turned white, she was gripping the phone so hard.

She put it back in her bag and took out the note.

You have to face him sometime, Dommerich, she told herself. (She was now addressing herself by her maiden name again—that was something, right?) If she couldn’t yet trust herself to listen to his recorded voice, to God forbid speak to him, she could at least do him the courtesy of reading the note he’d left behind for her, when he slipped out yesterday before dawn and caught his flight to L.A. The flight he’d already rescheduled in order to spend Saturday night in bed with her.

Ella. Think I’m supposed to wake you up and say good-bye right now, but it might kill me. [There was a clumsy drawing of an arrow and a heart, with you written next to the arrow, and me written next to the heart.] Stay here, sleep in my bed, drink all my booze, play my piano, listen to my band watching over you. Think of everything we have left to do. Don’t be afraid. Back soon. H.

Back soon.

Today was Monday; Hector would return to New York on Saturday. On Saturday morning he was going to come bounding through the door, he was going to call her name anxiously, he was going to scoop her up and demand to know why she hadn’t returned his calls, hadn’t picked up the phone, hadn’t let him know she was okay, that she loved his apartment, she loved Saturday night, she loved him like he loved her.

What was she going to say?

Don’t be afraid, he wrote. My band watching over you.

But Hector had it wrong. She was afraid, yes, but she wasn’t afraid of the band playing inside the apartment building on Christopher Street. They had kept her company Sunday night, when she had buried herself under the covers of Hector’s bed and wrapped her arms around her stomach and cried. The clarinet had played her something beautiful and comforting, until she loved that clarinet almost as much as she loved Hector himself. Then, as now, she had taken out the photograph of Redhead Beside Herself and stared at that image, that naked, wicked woman who had inhabited those walls over seventy years ago, and the sight of her—just as it did now—dried up Ella’s eyes and her despair.

Don’t be a ninny, the Redhead told her. I got no time for ninnies. You got yourself in trouble, you go out there and figure out how to fix it. You go figure out what to do with yourself. Just go out there and live, sister. Live.

Ella slipped the note and the photograph back into her laptop bag. Gathered herself up and walked out of Starbucks to start looking for her.

For the Redhead, whoever she was.

Wherever she was.

ACT I
We Fly South for the Winter

(better late than never)

COCOA BEACH, FLORIDA

April 1924

1

THE SCHOONER cruising before me looks innocent enough. I am no expert on maritime matters, having been reared up inside the walls of a mountain holler, yet still I can admire the beauty of her lines, can’t I? Lubber though I am, I can appreciate the sky’s pungent blue against the cluster of milk-white sails, and the way the dark-painted sides reflect the shimmer of the surrounding water.

As we draw near, the ship grows larger, until the sight of her fills my gaze like the screen at a picture house. I am wholly absorbed in her, and she in me. She bobs and rolls, and I bob and roll in sympathy. The boards of her deck articulate into view, and it seems I see every detail at once: the seams sealed in tar, the coils of perfect rope, the black paint of the deckhouse, the wooden crates in stacks at the stern and the middle, each stamped with a pair of letters: FH.

We come to board her, my companion and I, and I can’t say why I’m not alarmed by her lack of crew. Not a single man hails us as we pass over the railing; not the faintest rustle of movement disturbs the dead calm of the deck. I do understand she’s a rumrunner, this vessel, carrying liquor to America’s teetotal shore from some ambitious island, and it seems reasonable that the fellows on board might have gone into hiding at our approach. Why, even now they might crouch unseen behind those silent objects fixed to the deck, or wait speechless at the hatchways for some kind of signal. My friend hovers watchfully behind me, pistol drawn in case of ambush, but I don’t feel the smallest grain of fear. Anticipation alone drives the quick pulse of my blood. Something I desire lies below those decks, I believe, and I will shortly see it for myself.

At what instant my anticipation transforms into dread, I don’t rightly notice. Maybe it’s the sight of the dark, irregular stain on a section of deck near the bow hatchway; maybe it’s the unnatural blackness that rears up from below as my companion tugs away the cover of the hatch itself. My breath turns stiff in my chest as I commence to descend those stairs, and I have gone no farther than the first two steps when my foot slips on some kind of wetness, and I tumble downward to land like a carcass on the deck below.

The impact shocks my bones back into wakefulness, but in the nick of space before my eyelids open to the clean, sunwashed Florida ceiling above me, I catch glimpse of what lies in the hold of that silent, innocent ship.

The piles of mutilated men, and a pair of beloved eyes staring at me without sight.

2

NOW, FOR a redheaded Appalachia hillbilly bred up in the far western corner of Maryland, I do reckon I’ve seen a fair measure of this grand country of ours. New York City, mostly—well, don’t snicker, you meet a lot of everybody atop that pile of concrete and wickedness they call Manhattan Island—to say nothing of the splendid estates of Long Island. And the long, rain-soaked corridors of Pennsylvania: you can’t forget those. And Baltimore and all points in between, as seen from the window of a third-class carriage along the Pennsylvania Railroad, hurtling passage across slum and swamp into the belly of Pennsylvania Station.

But Florida. The state of Florida is something else. Like you have been plucked from the gray mire and dropped into a land of warm, green abundance.

For a moment, I can’t quite recollect where I am, and why I should be swathed in such divine warmth, and what angel did dress the room around me in the clean, white colors of heaven, when—but an instant ago—I was staring into the face of death. I consider I might have died.

Then I remember it’s not heaven, it’s Florida. We have arrived here to this place of safety during the night, my beloved and my baby sister and me, and every nightmare is now behind us. My pulse can surely settle, my breath can lengthen into calm. We are free. The long, hellish ride is over.

At this memory—sister, beloved, hellish ride—I bolt straight up. White counterpane falls from my chest. I cast my eyes about the room, which contains but the one double bed and no other person, inside bed or out of it, for we have come to a respectable house, the three of us, in which unmarried persons must sleep without the comfort of a nearby human body. Why, he and I parted company before we even climbed the staircase to the bedrooms upstairs, and I confess I made no protest at this separation. Did not even question the identity of the woman who led me to this chamber. Me, Ginger Kelly, who never did shy away from asking somebody a question or two, when she needed to know the answers! I guess I was plumb worn out, and so should you be, had you spent the past three days driving a Model T Ford south down the endless Dixie Highway, driving and driving, past pines and palmettos and salt marsh the color of chewing gum, to arrive at this house in the hour before dawn, to meet its astonished owners and collapse into its astonished spare bed. There is just about no question in the world that can’t wait, when you are so worn out as that.

But you can’t help to dream, can you? A dream so real as that, so alive in every aspect, how can you possibly set it aside?

And where is the fellow whose lifeless eyes terrified you most of all?

The fellow is now gone. Nothing remains of him, not a single one of those details I have memorized over the course of the past days. Not a hollowed-out pillow, not clothes nor hat nor wristwatch wound up on the bedside table. Not a trace of warmth on the white linen sheets. Not the faint, familiar scent of his skin, weather and soap and perspiration and something else, sharp and medicinal, belonging to those bandages on his chest that I cleaned and changed by my own hands, twice every day. As if he’s been swallowed up and carried away during the night, and maybe that’s the reason for this dream of mine, when I have never set foot on such a ship as that, have never had a thing to do with rumrunners until I first met Oliver Anson Marshall in a Greenwich Village speakeasy two months ago.

This light, quiet room, absent of any danger. This innocent bed. Is this the reason I dreamt of Anson’s death? Because he lies not here beside me, not safe inside my refuge, but elsewhere? Surely I am not so weak as that.

After all, I don’t worry for my baby sister, Patsy, though she occupies some other bedroom nearby. Why, I figure she has probably charmed half of Florida while I lay asleep, so marvelous is her beauty and her sweetness.

You see, Ginger? There is nothing more to fear.

3

WE HAVE brought no luggage to speak of, but a dressing gown hangs thoughtfully from a curving silver hook on the door. I wear neither nightgown nor pajamas, only the most ancient and serviceable of underthings, obtained from a dry goods in Virginia somewhere, last supplied in the previous century. My clothes—likewise ancient, likewise Virginian—lie slung over the back of a nearby chair. I can’t stand the sight of them. I drape myself in the dressing gown instead, which is made of some kind of expensive silk, as fine as gossamer, trimmed in satin piping and no lace whatsoever. I tidy my hair with the silver-backed brush lying on the dressing table, and as I do these elegant things, I consider that our hosts—whoever they are—are likely well-stocked in the lettuce drawer, if you know what I mean.

And just as I’m giving this point the full weight of my concentration, some noise drifts in from the window, the screaming of happy children, and I lift the window sash and stick my head out into the hot afternoon sky. Underneath it, two girls and a boy tear apart the oncoming foam of a most blue ocean, supervised by a tanned, long-limbed, gravid woman wearing a shocking pink bathing costume that does nothing whatsoever to disguise the girth of her expectant belly. One of the girls in the surf is my Patsy, shrieking her head right off as a crestfallen wave swirls about her knees. The damn boy holds her hand solicitously. (As well he might.) The woman, perhaps hearing the slide of the window sash in its casing, cranes her head to meet mine. Waves. Calls out with cupped hand. Motions me down to the white, sunlit beach. Her head’s wrapped up in a matching pink scarf, and she’s so gorgeously happy, so free of every care, I want to fly right out through the window and into her arms, where my own sorrows might dissolve by the heat of her joy.

4

INSTEAD, I take the stairs, which lead downward to a series of bright rooms arranged around some kind of courtyard, smelling of lemon and eucalyptus, and go out through the front door and across the beaten lane to the beach on the other side. The woman awaits me patiently, wearing a calm, beatific smile beneath a pair of strict cheekbones, and a wary tilt to her dark, straight eyebrows. The Florida sun has washed her fair skin in shades of delicate apricot, which become her extremely. Under the cold sky of a New York City winter, she might be nothing more than handsome.

“I hope you slept well, Miss Kelly,” she says, by way of greeting, in a voice that speaks of private schooling and a dignified upbringing. I want to reply, Sure looks that way, don’t it, by the late angle of that afternoon sun, but I can be civil when civility is called for. My own vowels were shaped by a cadre of disciplined nuns, you know, though they do have a tendency to revert to their original form when left unattended.

“Very well, thank you,” I reply, in my best Bryn Mawr accent, though I did attend that fine institution but a single year. “I appreciate your taking us in like that, right in the middle of the night like a pair of thieves. I hope we didn’t scare you.”

She laughs pleasantly. “Well, you gave us a shock, that’s for certain. But Ollie’s an old friend, a dear old friend, and he’s welcome in our house anytime. Even at three o’clock in the morning.”

“I see Patsy’s making herself at home. I hope she hasn’t been any trouble.”

“Oh, not at all! She’s a darling. She’s your sister, Ollie said?”

“My baby sister. Five last year.” I shade my eyes and watch the small fry gambol about, soaking themselves in the kind of abandon we older, wiser ones have long since discarded. We haven’t yet told my baby sister that she is an orphan, that her daddy has joined our mama under the wet soil of River Junction, Maryland, and that the brother she adored—the brother who all but reared her up himself—now basks in the everlasting peace of the Lord Almighty. She imagines, I guess, we’ve taken her on a surprise vacation to a southern paradise, and as I watch her play, I have no desire to disabuse her of this illusion. The sun grows hot on my hair and my shoulders, the milky skin of my redhead’s neck. The salt air fills my chest. The pungent sky makes my heart race in recollection of my dream, and I clench my fist to quell the memory. “She must be over the moon. I don’t know that she’s ever seen the ocean beach before.”

“She’s taking to it wonderfully. Sammy and Evelyn practically grew up in the water. They’ve been looking out for her.”

“So I see. You have beautiful children, Mrs.—” I cut up short and turn to her. “Ah! I apologize. Ollie never did tell me your name, and I was about dead last night by the time—”

“Oh, look at me. Chattering on like this, and I haven’t even introduced myself! Fitzwilliam. Virginia Fitzwilliam.” She holds out her hand. “And my husband, Simon, who’s gone off with your Ollie right now, I’m afraid.”

I clasp her hot, firm hand and tilt my head back to the house. More like a villa, I perceive, the kind of Mediterranean building you see in pictures of Italy or the south of France, an impromptu eruption of yellow walls and red tiles and round arches. I consider the words your Ollie, carelessly uttered, and my stomach grows a pair of energetic hummingbirds. “In there?” I ask.

“No, no. In town. To our offices. I understand they meant to talk business.” Her expression turns a little blank, enough to send an electric signal shimmering across the surface of my brain, which—as you perceive—is something of a suspicious organ to begin with.

“Business?” I inquire.

“Now, Miss Kelly. I imagine you can tell me far more about all this than I can tell you.”

“But you’re too polite to ask.”

Mrs. Fitzwilliam places her two hands on the underside of her enormous belly, as if the infant has begun to weigh upon her insides and wants support. Turns her head and looks back out to sea, where her children play. “For what it’s worth, Miss Kelly, my husband left the rum-running business some time ago. He wasn’t cut out for it.”

“A rumrunner, was he?”

“We own a shipping company,” she says simply, and I guess she doesn’t need to say more. After all, any fool with a seaworthy boat and a sober pilot can get his start in the rum-running trade off the coast of the eastern United States, and a lucrative trade it is, too. A fellow with the foresight or the luck to own a fleet of such craft? Why, he might clear a fortune, in short order. He ought to clear a fortune, if he’s got a lick of mortal sense. Nothing extraordinary about that.

“I see. And I suppose that shipping company brought you to Anson’s notice?”

“Anson? Do you mean Ollie?”

“I beg your pardon. Anson’s his middle name. He took what I guess you’d call a nom de guerre for a time, which is when I met him. And you know how it is with names.”

She smiles. “They have a way of sticking to people.”

“Yes. But to you he’s Oliver Marshall. Reckon I shall have to get used to that.”

We have both returned our attention to the children splashing in the surf, but when I say these words Mrs. Fitzwilliam glances back at me. “No, don’t do that. Keep him by the name you knew him first. The name you fell in love with.”

“Who says we’re in love?”

She laughs. “Nobody needs to say it, Miss Kelly. My goodness. I have eyes in my head, even at three o’clock in the morning.”

“Then you might consider an appointment with an oculist, Mrs. Fitzwilliam.”

Instead of replying, Mrs. Fitzwilliam calls out to the boy, who—together with his sister—has begun to swing Patsy between them. “Sammy! Put her down, now. She’s not used to the ocean.”

“Oh, she’ll be all right,” I say, but Sammy and his sister obediently lower Patsy back to her feet. Patsy makes an imperious squeal and tugs at their hands, yet they will not be moved by her. I start forward to settle the matter, until Mrs. Fitzwilliam takes my arm.

“No,” she says. “Let them be. Sammy’s got a way with him. He knows how to handle the younger ones.”

“Lucky for you, I guess. With another one on the way.”

“Yes.” She releases my arm and nods to my sling. “Simon tells me you took some bruising.”

“Did he, now?”

“Well, he didn’t need to. For one thing, there’s a nasty swelling right there on your left cheekbone. And Ollie told us a little of your story, while Simon was changing his bandage.”

“Oh? And just what did Ollie tell you?”

“That the two of you had been through a fight. Beaten about by a criminal of some kind.” Her voice is kind, full of sympathy and all that, but not overspilling. I don’t believe Mrs. Fitzwilliam is the overspilling sort of person, which is a trait I prize, and one you rarely find in women. Why, most females about smother you with sympathy for your troubles, and then expect you to smother them in turn, until the two of you can hardly breathe for the wetness of your mutual commiseration. Whereas I prefer the wetness of a nice dry martini, myself.

I tell her: “I guess that’s true. But we survived, I guess. I’ll do just fine, as I’m sure your husband told you.”

“No doubt.” Mrs. Fitzwilliam speaks so soft, the words be swallowed right up by that purring ocean nearby. “But the truth is, Ollie’s worried sick about you. And I don’t know what happened back there, among those bootleggers of yours. I’m not sure I want to know. God knows I’ve seen enough evil to make me grateful for my present peace. But whatever it is, whatever you’ve endured, believe me. That man would rather die than see you come to further hurt.”

I wrap one hand about my stiff elbow and stare at the round, bald spine of a rising wave. The heavy pause as it commences to overturn into the foam. Because what can I say to this woman? Can I tell her how my insides ache like murder from the battering of my stepfather, who did punish me for my betrayal of him? Can I tell her about my arm he nearly broke in two, about my belly into which he drove his meat fist? Can I tell her about the sight of my brother’s neck, broken like a rag doll, or how it feels to witness a man being struck in the jaw with a set of brass knuckles, such that you will never forget the sight, you will witness it evermore you close your eyes?

She’s but a stranger, after all, and my hurts belong only to me.

Mrs. Fitzwilliam touches my shoulder. “I have an idea. Let’s drive into town and meet them, shall we?”

5

TOWN IS Cocoa, a collection of mostly wooden buildings sprawled along the edge of what Mrs. Fitzwilliam calls the Indian River, and is really some kind of inlet from the ocean itself. Maybe a river feeds it, I don’t know. Anyway, you reach this squirt of a town by means of a pair of long, flat bridges directly west from the barrier strip of Cocoa Beach, leapfrogging an island they call Merritt, which I confess I have no recollection of crossing the night before.

“You were likely asleep,” Mrs. Fitzwilliam says. “I’ve never seen such an exhausted pair as the two of you last night. Not since the war, anyway.”

“The war? Did you nurse?”

“No. I drove an ambulance on the Western Front. Well, a number of ambulances. They had a tendency to break down often.”

She tosses this off gaily, like she’s describing some kind of picnic expedition. Shifts the automobile into another gear—it’s a fine blue Packard roadster, immaculate cloth seats, a real nice piece of tin—while the draft loosens her scarf from its moorings to spread out behind us like a white flag of surrender. Air smells of salt and muck and burning oil. I narrow my eyes against the afternoon sun and say, “I guess that explains the way you drive.”

“Oh? Just how do I drive?”

“Like you mean it.”

She laughs and steers us into Cocoa, pulling up outside a large brick building that proclaims itself home of the Phantom Shipping Company.

“Who’s the phantom?” I ask.

She sets the brake and leaps free of the seat with breathtaking agility for a woman with so much baby inside her.

“Me,” she says.

6

THE MEN have gone out for a sail, says a receptionist in a neat navy suit, and if we hurry we might just catch them. I tell Mrs. Fitzwilliam I don’t especially enjoy messing about in boats. She tells me don’t be silly and takes my arm. The Phantom Shipping Company warehouses and dock lie but a pair of blocks away, she explains, and so we stride down the broiling sidewalk so fast as we are able, one of us recently beaten up to blazes and the other one set to whelp any minute, sweating and puffing, and lucky enough the ship is still moored, though a tall, bull-shouldered man stands beside her, unwinding a rope from a bollard.

Now, while I have spent the past three days and nights in Anson’s company, while I have lain in his bed and wept in his lap, while I have woken in the dark to the sound of his breath, have dressed his wounds and whispered to him things I have never before whispered to another living person, while we have eaten together and drunk together and driven together and slept together, still my cheeks burn as I make my way up the dock, and the shape of his brown, clipped head becomes clear against the green edge of mangrove lying along the opposite bank of the river. Mrs. Fitzwilliam calls out. Anson straightens and turns, stiff as some kind of machine, lit by the high, white sun.

Another man appears at the boat’s edge and, spotting us, calls something back, her name I think, crammed with delight, and leaps to the dock. Mrs. Fitzwilliam surges forward, and I envy the quick, eager way she hurries across the boards toward her husband’s open arms. My own feet have turned to sand. Anson spares not the least regard for Mrs. Fitzwilliam, propelling her great belly toward the man presumably responsible for it. Just stands there, tethered to the boat by the coil of rope in his left hand, and watches me approach. He’s not smiling, either. I have the idea that he’s making out the state of my injuries. The degree of strength returned to me by my night’s rest.

As for me, I walk forward measuredly, because I am yet incapable of swift movement. Because I am yet incapable of saying a word. What do you say to this man, when you have lived by his side for three days, and now find everything has changed between you, in the space of a morning’s separation? Now that the horror’s over. Now that you’re safe by the sea in Florida, under a tranquil sun, under the care and protection of a doctor and his wife. Now that you’re in paradise, the two of you, when a moment ago you were trudging through hell. How do you turn yourself into an ordinary, happy couple, like the one embracing next to you?

On the other hand. Here stands Anson, my Anson, wearing a white shirt and an ill-fitting suit of pale linen, too tight about the shoulders, his olive skin soaking up the light and his golden-brown hair bristling unfashionably; his navy eyes as grave as they ever were, his lips as thick; every detail, every bruise and scar so blessedly familiar in this strange new world, this Florida. I find myself smiling.

“Good afternoon,” I say.

“Good afternoon. Sleep well?”

“Had no choice, did I? It was either sleep or die.” I lift my hand and touch the bruise purpling his jaw, and I guess it says something for the both of us that he doesn’t flinch. “You?”

“About the same. Where’s Patsy?”

“She’s having the time of her life playing with the Fitzwilliam fry. Housekeeper’s minding them.” I nod my head toward the boat, which is some kind of sailing vessel, maybe twenty feet long, single mast, pulling eagerly at the rope in Anson’s hand. “Where are you headed?”

“Just for a cruise offshore.”

“For what purpose?”

His eyes slip away to inspect the rigging. “No purpose.”

“Liar. You’re going out to see the rum ships, aren’t you?”

“I guess we might happen to catch sight of a few. You can’t avoid them, after all.”

“Oh, naturally. You weren’t going to pull up alongside some old ship, some rum warehouse anchored just outside United States waters, and maybe flap your gums for a bit? Maybe tease a little knowledge out of somebody?”

He lifts the hand that holds the rope and rubs his chin with one thumb.

“Anson. You look guilty as my brother Johnnie used to look, when he was caught skimming off blueberries that were meant for a pie.”

“There’s no danger, Gin.”

“I thought you were done with this business. I thought we were on the lam. Fugitives. Price on our heads, probably.”

“I wasn’t planning on giving anybody my name.”

“It’ll never work. You’ve got fishy written all over that beaten-up mug of yours, in case you didn’t know. Anyway, what am I supposed to do if something happens to you out there?”

“Nothing’s going to happen to me out there.”

“Oh? Good. Then I guess you won’t mind that I come along.” I start for the edge of the dock, and Anson makes a noise of objection and takes my elbow.

“See here. What’s going on with you two?” booms Dr. Fitzwilliam.

“Why, your wife and I are coming with you, that’s all. Aren’t we, Mrs. Fitzwilliam?”

She frowns and puts her hand on her belly. “Oh, I shouldn’t. I stopped sailing months ago. But you go on ahead, Simon.”

Now, this Dr. Fitzwilliam of hers is a handsome fellow, I’ll give him that, though his hair has turned to silver and the skin of his face has toughened under the sun. His eyes are hazel and terribly sincere, and his smile is too cheerful for my taste, exposing a vast amount of perfect dentistry. I guess Mrs. Fitzwilliam likes it well enough. He exchanges this speculative look with Anson, who is scowling fit to thunder, and turns to me. Speaks in a profoundly correct English accent, not softened at all by the Florida climate. “Can you sail, Miss Kelly?” he asks.

“I can learn.”

“In other words, she can’t tell a sheet from a sail,” Anson says, “aside from the fact that her right arm’s almost certainly sprained. Anyway, Gin, you can’t just leave Virginia onshore by herself, in her condition.”

“That’s all true,” says Mrs. Fitzwilliam. “So why don’t Ollie and Miss Kelly take the motor launch by themselves, Simon? You could keep me company onshore.”

“But—”

And Mrs. Fitzwilliam lowers her chin and sends some kind of telegraphic message in her husband’s direction, some kind of Morse marital code I can’t quite comprehend, and I’ll be damned if the good doctor doesn’t just cut his sentence short and lose himself in translation of those blue eyes.

“I think that sounds like an excellent idea,” I say, just to move things along.

Dr. Fitzwilliam runs a hand through his hair and casts a look at Anson that puts me in mind of a hound dog in the act of apologizing.

“I don’t see why not,” he says.

“Now, hold on a minute, Doc. I thought you were supposed to examine her first, before any kind of strenuous—”

“Oh, she seems about as healthy as you do, in my professional judgment,” the doctor says airily, “and in any case, Marshall, I was just thinking you might be better off in a motor launch yourself, in your bruised condition.”

“My condition’s just fine. It’s hers I’m thinking about.”

“Why, then! It’s settled, isn’t it?” Dr. Fitzwilliam takes his wife’s arm. “Come along. The launch is moored directly to the warehouse, there.”

7

SOMETHING I should tell you about, before I step on that motor launch with Anson. Head out to God knows where on the skin of the Atlantic, the two of us together.

On the second day of our journey south from Maryland, we woke at dawn. Or rather, Anson woke at dawn and roused me by the mere act of whispering my name—Ginger—against my ear.

The sleep had done me no good, I’m afraid. My arm had stiffened in the night, and the rest of me just hurt. We lay as a pair of spoons on our left sides, because of the injuries to our respective rights, attached by the exact same intimacy in which we had fallen asleep six hours before, and for a minute or two, or maybe more, neither of us moved a muscle. Maybe we couldn’t. As bad as Duke had beat me, he had done Anson worse: hung him by his arms inside a wet, frigid building made of mountain stone, while his earlier wounds gaped untended, in such a way as Christ Himself must have suffered upon His holy cross. So I guessed Anson’s limbs ached too, his muscles lay stiff alongside mine, his head drummed an old, fatigued beat. Above our heads, our left hands clasped. I felt the slow thud of his heart passing through his shirt and mine, to enter into my shoulder and spread along my bones like some kind of uncanny medicine. I said, We’re alive, at least, and he said, Yes, thank God. Didn’t ask me how I felt, how I was doing, any of that rote, empty talk. Didn’t mention my brother, who had died for our sakes, nor his brother, who had nearly died for mine alone. Didn’t tell me about love nor lust nor devotion, not pity for my present misery nor awe for our mutual survival. Just lay with me while the sun did creep up the edge of the sky outside our walls, and those words we didn’t utter lay there too, like smoke against our skin, like incense filling our lungs, like a benediction laid upon us.

The air began to take on light, and Patsy stirred in the cot beside us. Anson kissed my hair and ear and cheek and said it was time to go, we had rested enough. Go where? I whispered, because I had plumb forgotten where we were supposed to be headed, and he said, Florida, and I guess I might could then have asked him what waited for us in Florida, what lay at the end of our road, what was the nature of this life to which we were fleeing together.

But I did not. Maybe I was scared to ask, maybe I was too numb to care. I helped him clumsily with his coat and shoes, and he helped me clumsily with mine. We woke Patsy and carried her out through the drizzle to the waiting automobile, and I settled us both inside while Anson returned the key to the motor inn’s office. Started the engine and the automatic wipers and rolled back onto the black highway, and we never did stop for the night again. Just drove on, by sun and by moon, catching food and sleep by the side of the road, until the clouds parted and the air commenced to dry out and warm, and sometime in the middle of the third night we came to rest on a stretch of beach they call Cocoa, for no reason that I can properly tell.

And I don’t recount all this history to you now in order to illuminate some measure of what we endured together, Anson and I, before arriving at this earthly paradise. I don’t hold with wallowing in past afflictions; I like to walk into my future looking square ahead. Just to point out, so delicately as I can, that we have yet no actual future to speak of. No covenants between us, no vows of any kind, no physical sacrament to reunite us in the wake of that horrifying rupture at my step-daddy’s hands. Only a blind trust in that thing—that smoke and incense, that benediction, whatever you care to call it—that has taken form in the darkness around us.

Such that whatever lies upon this road along which we presently hurtle, it is surely made from this unknown substance. We ourselves are built of it. For better or worse.

8

NOW, I have taken to the seas but one other time in my life—if you don’t count the Hudson River ferries, which I don’t—and in that instance, as in this one, Oliver Anson Marshall himself was my pilot.

Then, we traveled in a racing motorboat, and the speed of that craft near enough flattened my chest forever into the fashionable silhouette. And if that boat was your naughty little sister, sleek and fast and amoral, why, this one’s your mama’s lazy uncle. Old and slow and overfed, kind of prone to fits and starts of his engine, if you know what I mean. Still, we’re free, aren’t we, the two of us. Making a white trail toward the ocean, while the sun heats our skin and the draft cools it right back down, and the other craft go about their business, large and small, without paying us any mind. We might be waterbugs on a pond so great as the universe. Free.

As you might expect, Anson’s not best pleased with me for my overturning of his usual neat plans. Gives me a dose of what they call the silent treatment as we head off down the Indian River, disturbing the peaceable green water with all the noise and energy of our sturdy motor. The draft rattles the brim of my hat until at last I remove the damned thing and toss it on a bench, and the sudden freeing of hair is like plunging from a cliff. Exhilarating and messy. “I remember the last time the two of us went on a boat ride together,” I call out, over the noise of the engine. “Was it only last week?”

“Didn’t end so well, as I recall.”

“Oh? I thought it ended pretty well, indeed. Best ride I ever took.”

A slow blush climbs over the top of Anson’s collar and up his neck.

“Now I guess you might have been referring to the fact that somebody shot you,” I continue. “But if that bullet hadn’t grazed you, and the good doctor hadn’t prescribed you a brandy cure for the pain, why, the whole evening might have been ruined.”

He says something I can’t quite make out over the wind and the engine. But he isn’t smiling, so I don’t press him. Maybe he wasn’t talking about getting shot at all; maybe he was thinking about what came after, caught in Duke’s trap, and that none of that horror might have come about if we hadn’t ventured out on the waters of New York Harbor in a high-powered speedboat that evening, hadn’t passed through the Narrows and into the wide ocean, hadn’t afterward spent the night in pleasure as we did.

“I guess we paid for it, all right,” I say, mostly to myself, but Anson has got the ears of a cat, I guess, because he replies, Paid for what? and I say boldly, Joy.

He doesn’t say anything to that. Maybe I was expecting the sound of this word—joy—might cause him to shut off the engine and seize me in his arms and deliver some kind of physical comfort to daub the wounds inside us both, but all I detect is a fresh whiteness at the joints of his fingers that hold the wheel and adjust the throttle. The boat pursues its long, clean course down the Indian River, mangrove passing to the left and the buildings and wharves of Cocoa slipping away to the right. Then the buildings thin out and disappear altogether, and Anson speaks up over the deep, angry throat of the engine.

“I telephoned my parents from Fitzwilliam’s office. Asked how Billy was doing.”

“And? Have they put his poor jaw back together again?”

“Yes.” He pauses. “Seems he hasn’t yet woken up. May be some injury to the brain itself, because of the force of the blow.”

I grip the edge of the seat with my good hand. Feel a little sick. “Poor Billy.”

“Yes.”

“Can’t they do anything? Some kind of operation?”

“I don’t know. It was a bad connection; I couldn’t hear half of what she was saying.”

“You mother, you mean?”

“Yes.”

I stare down at the ugly blue serge covering my knees, against which an image of Mrs. Marshall takes shape, as I last saw her. She stands in the moonlight beside a Southampton swimming pool, consuming a cigarette in swift, fierce drags, and she tells me about her sons. She wears a long, shimmering dressing gown, trimmed in down, and an aspect of fascinating beauty, made of delicate, high-pitched bones and preserved skin. In the tension of her face, I perceive a universe of keen emotion, which might be love but also fear. I swallow back a cup of misery and ask, “How’s she taking it?”

Anson lifts his hand from the throttle and works the brim of the flat newsboy’s cap atop his head. His profile is terribly grim. “How’s she taking it? Her son’s lying in a hospital bed with a broken head. I guess she’s taking it as well as the next woman. Considering she’s already lost another son to the war.”

“I hope you’re not blaming yourself. It’s my fault, if anything.”

“It’s Kelly’s fault, Ginger. And mine, for bringing you into this, first, and then dragging my brother into it because of you.”

I rise from the seat and grasp his elbow. “Don’t you say that. Don’t you even think it. You didn’t mean for that to happen. You were doing your job, that’s all.”

“But Billy wasn’t. Billy had nothing to do with this.”

“No, he got into this mess because of me, and I’ll never forgive myself for that. I should never have taken up with him. A sweet wee cub like that.”

“He wasn’t so naïve as that.”

“No, but he was fallen in love with me, and I let him fall, because I was vain and shallow and flattered by him. Because I needed a little solace. Because I hadn’t met you yet.”

Anson makes a noise in his throat, but nothing else.

“Anyway,” I say, “how was I supposed to know poor Billy was serious about me? Men make all kinds of promises. They’ll say anything. Maybe they even mean it at the time; I don’t know. Every man wants to run away with you, until suddenly he doesn’t.”

“Well, I knew,” he says. “I knew he was serious about you.”

“See here. You have nothing to be guilty for, do you hear me? If I’d known you were brothers, the two of you—”

“I knew we were brothers.”

“And you didn’t touch me, did you? I was the one who came to your bed, that night we went out on the ocean. I was the one who gave you that brandy and climbed in beside you.”

“I let you in.”

“You were an innocent before me, Anson. Don’t think I didn’t know.”

“Maybe so,” he says, “but I wasn’t so innocent I didn’t know what we were doing together. Wasn’t so drunk I didn’t mean what I did. I knew I was breaking my brother’s heart, and I did it anyway, because …”

“Because why? Because you’re such a mean, selfish, awful bastard and wanted me for yourself?”

His hand yanks down the throttle, smacking the engine back down to size, cutting our speed to a mere crawl. He turns to me, left hand gripping the wheel, and his face sort of shocks me, bruised and brutal, lit to blazes by the afternoon sun. “All right. Have it your way. You seduced me. I’m just some poor, innocent rube who fell in love with the wrong girl and stuck himself with nothing but trouble.”

“If you want out—”

“Want out? Out of what? Out of loving you? Out of waking up and thanking God you’re still alive, I haven’t killed you with this life of mine, this job of mine—”

“Oh, if that’s what’s bothering you—”

“There is only one thing that bothers me, Ginger. I might ache for my brother, I might burn for my part in what was done to him, but there’s only one thing that makes me so sick I can’t sleep, I can’t think straight, I can’t see reason, and that’s the thought I might lose you. Might not ever again kiss you or lie with you.”

“You can’t lose a thing that doesn’t ever mean to be lost, Anson. You can’t lose a thing that belongs to you. A girl that was made for you, the same as you were made for her, like a handle for a bucket, like a pillowcase for a pillow. A hearth for a fire.”

And I say this brave thing, and I sit back on my heels and wait, gazing at his battered face with my heart right there in my eyes, in such a way that I have never yet looked upon a man, stripped and raw, and still he doesn’t seize me in his arms. Still he doesn’t touch my skin nor kiss my mouth. His stare is that of a man condemned to death. His left hand grips that wheel as if some frightful hurricane be bearing down upon us.

“What’s the matter?” I ask.

“There’s another thing.”

“So tell me.”

“Something your stepfather said, back there in the springhouse.”

“He said a lot of things.”

“You know what I mean, Ginger. I didn’t say anything before. I figured we had enough to do, making it safely down here to Florida. Making sure you weren’t hurt any worse than I feared. And I know Duke said a lot of things, and most of them didn’t have any truth to them. But if there’s any chance, Ginger, any chance at all …”

He cuts himself off and looks away, blinking back something in his eyes, and how can I blame him? A question like that. And I know why he’s asking it. Not because he actually supposes he might have started a child in me; not even so much as a week has passed since we lay together in the cold, black Southampton night, reckless as two young thieves, while this same ocean spoke outside our window, and though Anson might have lost his wits entirely during the sweet course of those hours, he is yet sensible enough to understand the limits of nature’s bounty. No, indeed. A far more complicated possibility has risen up before him, and my step-daddy is to blame for that, as for most of our troubles.

So I forgive him for the indelicacy of his question. I feel his torment like an ache in my own breast. I take one step toward him and lift his right hand with my left hand, the one that isn’t near to broken by one of Duke’s various methods of torture.

“Do not,” I say, “for God’s sake, do not give that man the power to haunt you still. You just forget every word Duke Kelly said in that springhouse, do you hear me? Every word. It was the devil that spoke through his mouth that terrible morning, and the devil never did speak a word of truth to mortal men.”

He curls his fingers tight around mine and stares out across the boat’s bow. “Speak plain, Ginger. Just tell me. I know it’s a private matter, it’s your own business, but I’ll go nuts if—”

“I’m not carrying any man’s child, Anson. Not Billy’s and not yours.”

The faint, high scream of a steam whistle carries across the water. I take another step to stand but a breath away from his shoulder, and it seems to me that the tension in that coil of muscle is fixing to burst right through his shirt and his ill-fitting Florida jacket.

“You’re certain?” he says.

“As certain as a woman can possibly be.”

He just turns his head, that’s all, turns his head and lets his forehead fall against mine, and the tension in his big shoulder sort of dissolves in our blood. And that’s when I realize I’ve been feeling it all this time, down along the road from Maryland, thinking this wound-up tautness was just his ordinary pitch, his shoulder was just built that way, and it turns out his shoulder is more like a cushion than a rock, more like a cradle than a coil of tarred rope, and it fits the curve of my head like they were made for each other.

9

NOW I wasn’t lying when I told Mrs. Fitzwilliam that I don’t relish this business of messing about in boats. I wasn’t bred up to it, for one thing, and for another I can’t help but think of what happened last time I took ship with Oliver Anson Marshall. You know what I mean. The rough chop of that speedboat across the water, and the rat-a-tat-a-tat of a Thompson submachine gun searching out your flesh. The whisht-thud of a bullet whisking past you in the night air to find purchase in some nearby object, and the sickness of death that clung to you like the smell of blood.

So I try to close my eyes, but that only brings on nausea and the usual visions of broken necks and brass knuckles and blood creeping across a black-and-white floor, so I stand up instead and share the journey with my beloved. The water changes color from deep, tranquil green to an eager blue, and the shore thins out into sand. We don’t say much, just trade observations on the scenery. I wonder if he’s thinking the same things I am, if he’s thinking about all the death and hurt we have left in our wake, but that’s not a question you can ask a man like Anson in the golden light of a Florida afternoon. You ask him in bed, in the dark, when your skin lies against his skin, and he tells you the truth. Here and now, you ask him about the ships that lie ahead. Those smugglers’ warehouses floating atop the skin of the Atlantic, three miles out to sea. Why three miles? Because three miles marks the limit of United States territorial waters, that’s why. The sum total of the Coast Guard’s jurisdiction.

“I don’t know what you think you’re going to learn,” I tell him, just exactly as if I know his business as well as he does. “Surely the Florida racket’s got nothing to do with the northern rackets.”

“But they both have the Bureau and the Coast Guard to deal with. Any kind of news spreads fast, believe me.” He pauses. “I used to be assigned down here, remember? They sent me down to help break up one of the big family gangs. That’s how I met Fitzwilliam.”

“Aren’t you afraid they’re going to recognize you?”

He shrugs. “It’s a chance, I guess. I’ll just tell them I’ve left the Bureau. Out on the water with my girl, looking for a little refreshment.”

“Oh, they’ll believe that, will they? Mister Law and Order’s gone all wet suddenly?”

“Nothing corrupts a fellow like falling in with the wrong kind of dame.”

“You mean some kind of wicked red-haired floozy who drinks her own weight in gin and falls into bed with any old meathead Prohibition agent who strikes her fancy? That kind of dame?”

“She sounds just about perfect to me.”

“I see. And how are you going to explain our busted appearance? Don’t you think it might make a smuggler nervous, all these bruises and slings?”

“Don’t you remember? There was a fight at the Palm last night. I was defending your honor, as I often do, and you pitched in to help, as you often do.”

“Oliver Anson Marshall. You disgraceful liar.”

He smiles a little.

“Why, you’re enjoying all this, aren’t you? You relish a little adventure.”

“It’s what I do, that’s all.”

“What you used to do, you mean.”

“Yes. What I used to do.”

I guess I ought to ask him the obvious question. Ought to ask him why we’re out here on this boat, heading into a little adventure, when he’s no longer employed by anybody to do such things, when he’s found himself a nice place of refuge with a floozy who adores him. But what’s the point? When a man’s trying to get back his honor, prove to the world and the Prohibition bureau that he’s nothing but an honest, straightforward fellow caught up in some scoundrel’s game, he’ll keep hunting and hunting until he dies, won’t he? He’s not going to stop trying to find the man who has cast him into purgatory.

So instead of wasting everybody’s time, I just ask, “And me? You don’t mind dragging your dame into this nest of smugglers?”

“Ginger, these Rum Row skippers, they aren’t the kind of fellows you need to be afraid of. They’re just businessmen. Sometimes not even that, sometimes just fellows trying to make a few dollars, who wouldn’t put their necks at risk.”

“Then exactly whom should we be afraid of?”

“Pirates, for one.”

“Pirates! You don’t say. You mean like Bluebeard? Wooden legs and eyepatches? Chests full of gold doubloons?”

“Chests full of Scotch whiskey is more like it. They don’t usually attack the big storage ships on Rum Row. But they’ll stop the boats ferrying liquor to shore, or else the schooners out of Nassau or Havana hauling in more stock. Not small potatoes like us—we’re not worth the trouble—and mostly at night, when the rackets from shore are doing their dirty work.”

“And the men running the rackets? What about them?”

“Pretty ruthless fellows, by and large. You’ll want to give them a wide berth.”

“Thanks for the tip.”

“Why, you’re not anxious, are you, Ginger?”

“Of course I’m not anxious. The idea.”

“Because if you’re anxious, I’ll turn this boat around and take you back to shore. Can’t have a nervy partner out there. They’ll smell it on you.”

“Thought you said they weren’t dangerous.”

“They’re not exactly sissies, either.”

By now we have cleared the inlet entirely, and there’s nothing but blue sea ahead and yellow sand behind. The Atlantic wind drenches us clean. I savor the word partner on the back of my tongue. Glance across at Anson’s thick neck, pinkened by all that wind and excitement, and his eyes narrowed gleefully at the encounter ahead.

“Why, then, Mr. Marshall,” I say, folding my arms across my chest, “if that’s the case, I guess you’re going to need my help.”

10

THEY LIE anchored in a line from north to south, at intervals so regular it’s practically unnerving, if you’re that breed of person who misplaces his nerves from time to time. From three miles out you can still see the shore, verdant and kind of mysterious, but it might as well be another universe for all the good it does you. The boat bobs nervously under your feet, the ship looms large and black-sided, sails folded neat against masts and spars. I turn toward Anson and open my mouth to tell him about my dream, about the schooner that looked exactly like this one, only packed to the hatches with dead men. But he’s concentrating on bringing the motor launch alongside, on some exchange of hails with the sailors on deck.

I take his arm. “Are you sure about this? You know what you’re doing?”

He gives me this amazed look. “Why, what’s wrong?”

“I just got a feeling, that’s all. Chill down my spine.”

Anson examines my eyelashes, slings his arm about my neck, and pulls me in for the kind of long, soft kiss that draws forth a chorus of whooping from above. I am surely too shocked to resist. When he’s done, he touches his forehead to mine and whispers, “You’re safe. Trust me.”

I want to scream back that it’s not my safety giving me the chills, it’s his, but somebody’s calling down words of some kind—afraid I’m still too discombobulated by the kissing to hear them properly—and then a rope ladder falls at our feet, and the time for turning back has long past. Tick tock. Just swallow back your terror and climb that rope, I guess, doing your best to hold on with your one good hand.

11

TURNS OUT they know each other, Anson and this captain of his, I haven’t yet caught his name. He thinks it’s a great joke that Special Agent Marshall is no longer agent of anything to speak of. Pours him a bumper of Scotch whiskey to celebrate, and to my amazement Anson slings it right back. Yes, he does! Slings it right back, sets the glass on the table, and delivers me a slow wink that sets my insides to bubbling.

“For you, madam?” asks the captain.

“I’ll have what he’s having.”

I sip my whiskey with considerably more reserve than Anson does. I figure one of us should remain sober. The captain—turns out his name is Logan or something—pours out another for Anson and another for himself, and Anson asks Logan how’s business since he’s been away.

“Business is booming, Marshall. Business is booming. I can’t keep my vintage champagne in stock. Fellows come all the way from Palm Beach for champagne.”

“Can’t they get champagne in Miami?”

Logan makes a noise of disgust. “These boys out of Nassau, they got plenty of British liquor but they don’t get no French ships no more. So I have a fellow from up north who supplies me.”

“From where? Saint Pierre?”

“That’s the place. Ever been there?”

“Haven’t had the pleasure.”

Logan laughs and tops everybody off from a bottle of what claims to be a fifteen-year-old single malt from Ayrshire, though I have my doubts. In case you’re wondering, we’re sitting in the captain’s own cabin, which isn’t so grand as it sounds. Cramped, damp, dark, smells of fish and piss and wood soaked in brine, all of it baked together like some kind of stew in the oven of a Florida afternoon. There’s a bunk built into the wall, a green sofa—on which I’m presently sitting next to Anson—and an armchair for Logan the color of mustard, everything built of sticks and horsehair cushions and scraps of old upholstery. You’d think they were smuggling milk instead of a commodity so lucrative as rum.

“Neither have I,” Logan says, setting down the bottle, “but I heard it ain’t much. Just some wet rock off the coast of Newfoundland with a port that don’t ice over in winter.”

“I guess that’s useful, in your line of work,” I say.

“Oh, it’s useful, all right. But the real kicker is it’s French.”

“French? But doesn’t Newfoundland belong to Canada?”

“Thrown around between the two of them for centuries. England and France, I mean. The point is, Saint Pierre ended up French, which makes it a gift from God direct to champagne vineyards and Scotch distilleries. And the Canadians, too, by God. Especially the Canadians.”

Possibly my face betrays some confusion. I take in a little more Scotch whiskey and watch Logan as he pulls out a cigarette and lights it with a match kept in this special jar with a lid. I guess sailors worry about such things. Anyway, he watches me watching him and offers me a cigarette, which I accept because a low-down wicked dame like me ought to take a cigarette when it’s stuck in her direction, oughtn’t she? The better to corrupt her menfolk with. And I pick up a little courage with the familiar smell of burning tobacco, so I say, “Why does that make any difference? Being French?”

“Why, because of taxes, Miss Kelly.”

Anson lays his arm across my shoulders and speaks in this low, gravelly voice. “In the first place, Saint Pierre’s import duties amount to maybe a tenth of what they charge in Nassau, which is pure profit for suppliers.”

“And the French don’t even pay that,” says Logan, “so they don’t send no more bottles by way of Nassau. Why should they? You could about bathe in champagne, on the island of Saint Pierre.”

Anson smiles. “And second, the Canadian distillers don’t have to pay duty on export bottles, so the government refunds the tax once the company provides proof it’s been imported into another country. That’s where the good men of Saint Pierre oblige. Unload the liquor, hand the captain a stack of stamped import certificates. Distiller gets his tax bond back from the Canadian government and sells the cargo to whatever racket’s waiting there in the harbor for some merchandise.”

“Or else ships it direct to the Row,” Logan says.

“Now every man, woman, child, and dog in Saint Pierre keeps busy from dawn to dusk in the liquor trade.”

“I bet they never had it so good.” I wave my cigarette to indicate the ship around us. “The liquor trade beats the fishing trade, any day. In price and in general atmosphere, if you know what I mean.”

Logan leans forward. “Listen to this, Miss Kelly. Listen good. I spent seventeen years fishing the coast around here, and I never cleared more than a thousand dollars in a single year. Just enough to get by. Keep my wife and my three kids. Now? I clear more than that in a month. Sometimes a week. I make so much dough, I got a wife and a girl down in Port Saint Lucie.” He roars his joy and slaps Anson’s knee. “Now that’s what I call prosperity!”

“I guess your wife’s over the moon,” I say.

“Aw, she don’t care. Why, she’s sitting in her nice new house right now, wearing a nice new dress.” He inspects the uninspired neck of my own serge frock. “You could use some more dough yourself, Marshall, now that you’re out of the enforcement business. You need to set this doll of yours up like she deserves.”

I suck on my cigarette and say I couldn’t agree more.

“You see, Marshall? A beauty like this, she likes a fellow with a little bread in his pocket. If she don’t get it from you, she’ll be looking elsewhere fast.”

Anson shrugs his big shoulders. Fingers draw a circle or two on my upper arm, through the thick material of the dress. “I might have a plan or two up my sleeve. You never know.”

“Well, you better not wait too long, brother. You better not. I hear there’s some talk of a new treaty. Move the line out another ten miles or more.”

“Is that so?”

“You mean the boundary for United States waters?” I ask.

“That’s what I mean.” Logan points out the nearby porthole. “You can just about see the shore from here, when the haze don’t set in too bad. From ten or twenty miles out, you might as well be in the middle of the ocean, for all you can catch glimpse of the United States. And some fellow carrying a few bottles from ship to shore, why, he’s got a lot of water to cover. Lot of salt water for the Coast Guard to catch him in.”

From the gathering tension in the muscles of Anson’s arm along my shoulders, I figure this piece of information interests him. But his fingers continue that delicious circling at exactly the same pace. His voice continues in the same gravelly drawl. He reaches out the other long arm and gathers up his glass of whiskey, and I guess I’m the only one who feels him wince. Those poor abused ribs of his. “Lot of water,” he agrees.

“Sitting ducks,” says Logan. “Sitting fucking ducks. Forgive my language, Miss Kelly, but it ain’t going to be pretty, if such a thing comes to pass.”

“Stinking Coast Guard,” I say.

“It ain’t the law I’m thinking of, Miss Kelly. The law plays fair, most days, and they got a job to do, I understand that, and if you want to break that law you might get arrested and your booze took away. But the pirates.” He shakes his head. Waves away the gathering smoke. “Pirates just as soon kill you. And when a fellow’s taking a few bottles from ship to shore, and he’s got ten or twenty miles of lonely ocean to cover, who do you think is going to find him? Coast Guard with a few little boats and a stingy Congress behind ’em, or a fellow with no conscience and a nice profit dangling in front of his nose? Why, already they’re getting greedier.” He turns to Anson. “That gang you was taking down the year before last, the Wilson boys. They was killed in ambush a few months ago, and what do you think happened? Do you think the trade went away? Got any softer?”

“I’ll guess it didn’t,” says Anson.

“No, it did not. Got worse. You can’t cough out here at night without some pirate hears you and flies on in with his machine guns. Sometimes mounted right there on his boat, like the Coast Guard itself. And he ain’t there to arrest you. Oh no. He ain’t worried about your constitutional rights. Why, we brought in a crate full of guns just last week, armed every man on board. Had no choice. Some ship got boarded a few miles south, and they killed everybody, everybody, dumped the crew over the rail, and left behind nothing but the captain’s head. Just his head, Marshall, just his head sitting there on the deck by the wheel. Now what kind of fellow does that?”

“Who was it? Which ship?”

“Aw, it was some new outfit, I never knew him. Maybe he was muscling in on somebody else’s neighborhood, I don’t know. But the whole thing shook us up. Put everybody on edge, up and down the Row. Sometimes you can hear the gunshots at night, and I don’t know whether it’s—”

Pop-pop-pop-a-pop-a-pop, comes a noise from outside, like somebody is making popcorn, like somebody is setting off some distant fireworks.

12

NOW I am already gone cold, already froze up and sick at the image of that dead captain’s head standing guard by his wheel, so what do I do at the sound of those fireworks but shriek. Shriek and startle and spill my whiskey all over the floor, the deck as they call it, while Anson lifts his arm away from my shoulder and puts his hand inside his jacket. Draws out a revolver. Logan jumps to his feet and swears. Heads right out the cabin door, and Anson turns to me.

“Stay here, for God’s sake!”

“You know I won’t.”

Anson is not a man who speaks profane, not the kind of man who takes the name of his Lord in vain, but he does now. Swears good and loud, better and louder than the captain himself, and hands me the revolver.

“You keep under cover at least, all right? You do as I tell you. And if you need to shoot, you just shoot. God knows you can fire a gun straighter than any man here.”

I stare down at the revolver in my palm, and then I look back up at Anson. Blazing, bruised face full of trust.

“Jesus God, how I love you,” I say.

He snatches my hand and commences to bolt straight out that door, pulling me behind, and I move my legs after him so fast as I can, because I will not be left behind to discover Anson’s blank face staring sightless, no sir. No more than I will be left behind to die in some dank cabin.

13

BROAD DAYLIGHT, and the deck of this Rum Row schooner reminds me of nothing so much as a good old church picnic brawl back in River Junction, except that nobody is drunk. You can chew on that irony if you like. I got more vital things to do.

Anson is all business, you understand. He has done this kind of thing before. He waves me back to the stern, behind some tall stacks of wooden crates, and because I did swear to follow his commands in this fight, I dive right into place, fixing myself a station by which I can watch the deck and fire that gun if I need to. The fear has fallen away from my skin, like it does in a set-to when your blood turns hot and your mind sharp, and only later do you start to shake and cry, only later do your insides curdle up and go cold. Now you’re just nothing but an animal, just a creature bent on keeping alive.

Seems the attack comes from the starboard side. Sound of bullets firing from my right, sound of bullets whizzing dead ahead. Some of them catch a mast or something, and the splinters go flying. Not twenty yards away, a man cries out and goes down, clutching his side. Idiot standing there in plain sight, no wonder. Anson’s ducked under the starboard rail, holding a rifle. Jumps up, aims, fires, ducks back down, all in the space of a second or two. His flat newsboy’s cap remains on his head, good solid plaid wool. I stare at that cap and pray.

But aside from Anson, nobody seems to possess the least idea what he’s doing. How to defend against a surprise attack from a shipful of what has got to be pirates, seeking to hijack Mr. Logan’s valuable cargo. Anson shouts out to a couple of Logan’s crew—Take cover! Wait and aim, goddamn it!—and they drop down and clutch their guns, but I can see they don’t know what to do with them. Me, now. I was reared up inside a mountain holler alongside three sturdy brothers, and I can shoot an acorn off a squirrel’s paws if I need. I can shoot a worm from a robin’s beak. I cradle that revolver in my palm like a diamond. Bring it to the level of my eyes and lift the safety latch, while Anson rises and fires again, rifle aimed at a more acute angle now, like to a boat drawing so close you might could count the noses of the men inside. He turns his head over his shoulder and calls out, and this time those two nearby men are paying proper attention. The deck is full of noise, guns firing and men shouting. I don’t know how you stay calm in a circus like that. He counts off on his fingers—one, two, three—and they rise together and aim down and fire, and maybe they hit a few men, I don’t know, because in the next second a small black ball flies over the railing and wobbles across the deck.

I don’t understand how it doesn’t hit anybody, but it doesn’t. Just wobbles there like an egg while the men carry on, while no one sees it except me, and I scream Anson’s name, scream, Grenade! so loud my throat seems to split, but I can’t even hear myself in that din.

So I run out from behind my crates toward that thing, that black ball fixing to murder us all, and now Anson sees me, now Anson sees what I’m after.

He shouts and motions the men back, dives forward and grabs that thing and tosses it over the side, and I’ll be damned if it doesn’t explode a half second later in an almighty boom, right there in midair, smacking everybody backward, even me, straight on my backside on that hard wooden deck.

I crawl forward, calling Anson’s name, but he’s already picking himself up from the deck, staggering a little, while a pair of hands appears over the side and then a man, skinny and blood-streaked. Anson’s lost his rifle—anyway, you can’t fire a rifle when a man’s that close—so he grabs the fellow by the shirt and hauls him back over the side into the water, and I yell with relief, except I can’t hear anything now, ears all stuffed up with cotton wool.

Yet already there are more men climbing over, five or six at a time from some rope ladders hooked over the rail, and I lose sight of Anson in the jungle of slinging arms and tangled bodies. Pick myself up and reel back to my crates and look for my gun to fire, but it’s gone. Clean gone.

Cold wave washes over me. No gun, Gin. Nothing between you and some pirate fixing to murder you, nothing between you and some pirate fixing to murder your beloved. I catch glimpse of Logan, punching at some fellow while another one comes up behind, lifting a knife, and the world just kind of tunnels around me while I hunt for Anson among all those fighting men, all those flying bodies. Start to climb up those crates so I can see the deck better, and that’s when I spot him, some kind of dervish, hauling men back over the side as soon as they pop over the ladders, and so great is his strength, so immense is the animal momentum in those arms and shoulders, the attack starts to falter. I don’t know how to describe the way everything changes. Just that these men are falling back, the center of gravity rolls toward the rail, the attack just thins and starves without new flesh to feed it. Anson’s cap is lost, his hair flashes in the sun. His skin seems to blur into his clothes, and I realize it’s my own eyes blurring. Blink blink. Perspiration stinging the corners. Perspiration slick on my palms. It’s over, it’s over. Men groaning on the decks. Smell of blood. Anson pausing, casting about, chest heaving for air. Picks up a rifle.

And I am so drenched with relief, so weakened by it, I don’t even notice the fellow who comes up behind Anson, not until the blade of his knife catches fire from the sun.

14

ICLUTCH THE edge of a wooden crate. Throat too dry to scream. Each muscle frozen against its ligament. Gun, where is the gun? Anson whips around last second. Grabs wrist. Somebody help. Help for God’s sake. Nobody helps, nobody sees, fists still swinging all over the place, and there comes over me this strange sensation like I am looking upon this scene from somewhere else, I can’t possibly be living inside this present moment, clinging with my one good hand to these wooden crates, standing here on this damned ship on this damned ocean while a pirate fights Anson with a knife.

When a couple of hours ago I drove across a sunlit bridge in a Packard roadster, laughing a little.

My fingers slip against the crate and down I go, crash bump crash, sliding along wood, stumbling to the deck. Gun, where is the gun? Anson struggling. Someone in the way, can’t see. Knife flashes. Big hand grabs my shoulder and whips me around, some mad, grinning, red-faced meaty demon, I go down on my back behind the crates.

The impact knocks away my breath. The man comes down on top of me, fumbling, tearing cloth. God no no no. Gun, where is the gun? Hot stinking breath on my face. Hand forcing my leg. You can’t fight a beast like that on strength alone. You can’t just pitch your feminine muscle against his masculine one. Nature favors the conqueror in these matters; Nature wants the strong to populate the earth. You have but one chance, and that’s what he don’t expect. I force myself limp, gather myself together. Bring my knee up hard and dig my teeth into his neck, I mean I tear his flesh like I am tearing meat from a sparerib, and he screams and falls away, screams a fisher cat scream. I roll the other way, toward the crates, spitting out blood and skin, and there in the crack between two stacks of booze lies the barrel of a Colt revolver.

Snatch it up.

Brace myself and heave up to my feet.

Wheel around the corner of that stack of crates.

Gun in my left hand. Raise it. Find that silver flash, find Anson’s white shirt, still struggling, knife surging toward his throat.

Fire.

15

THERE ARE two men dead of bullet wounds and another four injured. Anson piles them into the motor launch with the help of the first mate, who jumps in, too. Logan’s left arm and leg are badly slashed, but he insists on staying with the ship. Thanks us profoundly. Tells me I am a damn good shot. I stick the revolver in the pocket of my dress and acknowledge the truth of this compliment.

I don’t believe Anson and I exchange a single word the entire journey back to shore. The first mate has brought a bottle of whiskey, and he and I take turns. Settle our nerves. Anson just pilots the boat and refuses the bottle. I nudge him with the neck of it. “Come on. Not even your nerves are made of that kind of steel.”

“I’m all right.”

“You threw back two full glasses on the ship. Watched you do it.”

Without so much as a blink, he says, “We’re back inside United States waters now.”

And all at once, I am filled with fury. I fling that bottle into the water. Take him by the arm and strike my good left fist against his chest, over and over, while the boat makes this crazy lurch and the first mate dives for the wheel.

“Why? Why? We were safe, Anson, we were safe at last, and you head out to some ship and near enough get us killed!”

He pulls me right up against his chest while I keep screaming.

“Was it worth it? Was it? That fellow nearly killed you, and for what? What the hell did we learn that was so important as that?”

“We learned that the game’s about to change, Ginger. Learned that more people are going to get killed. More blood’s going to spill.”

I have nothing to say to that. Just fall back into my seat. The engine’s roaring, the boat lurches across the water. Blue sea jumps and spins before me. I think I might vomit. I turn my head over the side and I do vomit, heave the sparse contents of my stomach over and over into the horizontal draft. When I’m finished, when I’m collapsed on my seat, Anson’s hand lands gently on my back.

“All right?” he says.

“I’ll live. You?”

He pats my back once more. Caresses my hair swiftly. Returns his hand to the wheel and says, “So long as you’ll live, I’ll live.”

16

THE SUN’S long set by the time we arrive back at the villa in the blue Packard, and for an instant I’m bemused to see a small figure running from the shadow of the house, calling my name.

Patsy. I plumb forgot my baby sister.

I sink on my knees in the gravel and take her sobbing body against mine. Tell her it’s all right, I’m here, everything’s fine, what’s the matter?

“She wouldn’t go to bed until you came home,” says Mrs. Fitzwilliam, who stands nearby in a pale dressing gown like a ghost, doing her best not to sound reproachful.

I don’t dare look up at her face. The one pressed against mine is bad enough, cheeks all wet and hot, breath coming in tiny, desperate pants. She sticks to me like a burr, like a marsupial, like I am a kangaroo and she is my kangaroo baby enclosed to my chest and belly by some invisible pouch. Her small back shudders under my hand. I keep saying I’m here, I’m fine, I would never leave her, but my words ring hollow, don’t they? Not once did the thought of Patsy enter my head as I took off across the dangerous blue sea with Anson. Not once did I think of her left behind. Not once did I imagine some kindly person telling Patsy that her sister has been split clean apart by a Rum Row pirate, and she has no kin remaining to cherish her.

“W-where w-were you?” she hiccups out.

“I was with Mr. Marshall. Out in a boat.”

“Why didn’t you take me with you?”

“Because …” Because I forgot all about you, cherub. Because it was too dangerous, anyway. Because there is no sister in the world so bad as I am, nobody in the world less capable of looking after you, poor baby, poor darling, I’m so sorry.

I start to pull away from her, because I can’t stand the weight of her terror, and also I’m starting to cry myself, tears leaking out the corners of my eyes at this terrible, terrible day that started out in such peace. My arm hurts, my back hurts. Maybe every bone in my body hurts, every tendon and joint, every fingernail. A weight falls next to my left shoulder. Anson, crouching beside us in the gravel.

“Patsy,” he says quietly, “do you know what your sister did today?”

She peers out over my arm.

“Your sister saved my life.”

“She did?”

“She saved my life, and her own life, and the lives of a shipful of men. In fact”—he takes his finger and carefully parts her damp hair from her face, one side and then the other, so he can look in her eyes—“I think your sister’s about the bravest person I know.”

“That so?”

“That’s so. Ginny’s the kind of sister who will do anything to keep you safe.”

I let my arm fall away, so Patsy leans against me, turned toward Anson.

“But who’s going to keep Ginny safe?” she asks, terribly small.

“Well, I guess that’s my job, isn’t it? As best I can.” He holds out his arms. “And now I think it’s time you went to bed, sweetheart. You and Ginny, you need your sleep.”

Patsy goes so willingly into his embrace, I think my heart stops. Lays her head on his shoulder while he lifts her up with one thick, exhausted arm and takes my hand with the other. By the time we reach the stairs, her eyes are already half-closed, and her wet eyelashes stick together at the tips, and I can’t help recollecting the way we entered this house not twenty-four hours before. Just like this, except we have fresh, new bruises and hurts atop the old ones, and though the house is exactly the same, pale and peaceful, and our hosts make identical noises of relief and welcome, I am overcome by this swift, terrible vision that we are stuck on a wheel, the three of us, a nightmare Ferris wheel that turns over and over and never lets us off.

17

I STAY WITH Patsy until she falls asleep in her bed in the room she shares with Evelyn. The wee Fitzwilliam sprig doesn’t even stir throughout this disturbance, just lies there under her white counterpane, sweet cheek turned to the moonlight. I stroke Patsy’s hair and count the beats of her breathing. The house around us has gone still; even the slight, worried murmuring of the doctor and his wife has died into silence.

My own room is the one next door. I slip inside and climb under the covers, which smell drowsily of lavender. The window’s cracked open, releasing all the heat of the day, and for some time I listen to the strange, wild music of the Atlantic Ocean and recollect the night I spent in Southampton, when that same water beat against my shore in exactly the same key. Isn’t this supposed to lull you to sleep? Lavender sheets and the ocean noise? Well, it doesn’t. I turn on one side and the other. Stare at the blank ceiling and see visions of violent death, of lifeless faces, though I tell myself I’m safe and sound, safe and sound, nothing to fear.

Start to get angry.

I’m the lucky one, aren’t I? Survived all this trouble to find myself lying in a soft bed by the sea. I ought to be happy. Ought to be sleeping the sleep of the fortunate.

I sit upright. Stare at the billowing curtains. Throw off the counterpane, slide from the bed, and take my dressing gown from the hook on the door.

18

HOWEVER DEEPLY I am attached to Oliver Anson Marshall, I am not bound to him by anything so respectable as marriage. He sleeps virtuously, therefore, on the other side of the villa, in some kind of guest quarters that exist on the other side of the courtyard.

You might be in Italy as you steal through the French doors from the dining room and across the paving stones of that courtyard, breathing in some exotic scent of citrus and spice while a stone fountain rattles happily in the moonlight. The air is soft and still warm, blowing in from offshore, and I can taste the wholesome salt on the back of my tongue.

There is just enough glow to guide me to Anson’s door, which opens directly into this enchantment, and—to my vast surprise—the handle turns easily. Wouldn’t a fellow like Anson lock his door as a matter of course? Then he says my name as I enter the room, and I understand the oversight. I shed my dressing gown but not my nightdress and climb into the bed. Lie on my side, facing him, while he gathers me close. His skin is so hot as a fever. I press my forehead into his collar. “I can’t do this anymore,” I say.

“Do what?”

“Can’t go out into danger with you. Can’t keep watching people get killed.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry. Just stop. Give up.” I bring my good left hand up to cover his jaw and his ear. “Just stay with us, where we’re safe. A nice, quiet life.”

“Is that what you want? A quiet life? You, Ginger?”

“I’m done. I’m done.”

“Shh. It’s all right. You’re shaking.”

“Of course I’m shaking, you damn fool. Nearly died out there, the two of us, out there on the ocean. What’s my sister going to do, if we’re killed?”

“It’s over, it’s done. We’re safe. Won’t happen again, I promise.”

“Won’t it?”

He is silent for some time, resting his left hand upon my hip, his right hand up around my head, inside my hair. He’s bathed and shaved, I can smell the soap of him, and also the faint reek of antiseptic. I guess the doctor saw to him. Clean and dry and warm, bursting with bone and muscle and adventure. Pitching villains into the ocean one minute, carrying my baby sister tenderly in his arms the next.

“Just let me clear my name,” he says. “That’s all I want.”

“Why? Why does it matter?”

“It just does. So we can live honestly. No shadows behind us.”

“I’ve got news for you, bub. It’s too late for that. Why do you think I came down here tonight?”

“I don’t know. Why?”

I start to answer him, but my throat hurts when I try to make words. So I just breathe, breathe him in, breathe his soap, breathe the faint note of antiseptic and the particular scent of a warm bed and a warm man inside, like no other smell in the world. My heart slows. “I had this dream,” I whisper.

“What kind of dream?”

“Last night. Just before I woke. Dreamt I was trying to find you, and you were on a ship. A ghost ship, nobody on board until I went below decks. And then I found you, and you were dead. Everybody was dead.”

He sighs. “I see. Is that what all this is about? Some dream?”

“Wasn’t just a dream. Too real for that. Back home, we would have called it a vision.”

“A vision? You mean like a premonition?”

“I mean a vision, Anson, a glimpse of some future scene. A prophecy.”

“You don’t really believe that?”

“Don’t I?”

“Ginger, it’s a dream, it’s nothing more. You’ve never believed in that kind of thing. It’s a figment of your imagination, that’s all.”

“Why, you think I’m neurotic, don’t you?”

“No, I don’t. I think you’re exhausted, you’re—you’re full of nerves. Look at you, you’re shaking. It’s because of what happened in Maryland. Naturally you’re having nightmares. God knows I am. But it’s not real. There’s no such thing as visions, second sight, all that magical nonsense.”

“Isn’t there? Those men liketa murdered us tonight, out there on that damned ship, and you think it’s just a coincidence?”

“But we weren’t murdered. I’m alive, and so are you.”

“So maybe we got lucky. Maybe it’s a warning, I don’t know. What I do know is someone’s trying to tell me something. Someone’s trying to make me listen up.”

“Who, exactly?”

“Doesn’t matter.”

“Well, what, then? You want me to hide forever, just because of some foreboding?”

“Yes!”

“Ginger.” He shakes his head. Strokes my hip. “Ginger.”

I lift my face, so our lips nearly touch as I move them. “You’re going to keep going out there, aren’t you, and I can’t go with you. I’m done. I can’t follow you anymore. I’ve got my sister to rear up. I’ve got to love her and keep her safe.”

“Don’t say I, Ginger. Say we. We will love her and keep her safe.”

“We? There is no we, Anson. Not so long as your heart is out there on that ocean, out there on those highways at night. This fight, it’s in your blood, like Patsy and I could never be.”

“That’s not true. You’re in my blood. You are my blood. Heart and bone and everything else. You have no idea, Ginger, no idea how much I—”

I lay my hand quick over his mouth. “Don’t say it.”

Anson reaches up and picks my fingers away. Holds them inside his palm. “Tell me what you want.”

“You tell me first.”

“I want you. That’s all.”

“Really? What about the rest of it? Family, kids, house in the country? Dog lying on the hearthstone?”

“Is that what you want? No more city life?”

“Doesn’t matter what I want. I want what’s best for Patsy, I guess. She shouldn’t have to lie scared in her bed at night, waiting for me to come home.”

“I shouldn’t have taken you with me.”

“And if you hadn’t, you’d be dead. We neither of us should have gone out on that water.”

“Maybe not.”

“Maybe’s not enough, Anson. Not anymore. You need to decide what the future’s going to look like. You need to decide what you can take or not take, when it comes to me and Patsy.”

“I will take whatever comes with you, Ginger. Whatever comes.”

I lower my face back to the pillow and close my eyes. Listen to some faint, slow drum that I realize is not the ocean but Anson’s heart. Drop one hand to rest against this organ, and the slight movement of its contraction contains more soporific power than all the lavender, all the waves, all the salt breeze in the world.

“Beats for you,” he says softly.

My lips are too tired to move. I move them anyway, because this is important.

“If it stops, I’ll kill you.”

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