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“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?”