“Loved who?”
“She’s always loved him.” The wind snatched at his words. “Ever since the day she first met him.”
“Who? Sir Harry Oakes?”
He uttered a raw bellow of laughter that sent a scattering of wings through the trees. “No, the Duke of Windsor, of course, he’s the one she loved. He bewitched her, you know, with his blue eyes and his infantile smile and the smell of his blue blood. She couldn’t bear to see him unhappy. That’s why she hated that Wallis woman and Sir Harry. Their affair was killing the duke.”
Dodie felt Flynn tense. “Your wife shot Sir Harry because of his affair?” he said in a low voice. “Not because of the gold?”
“Ah, Hudson, it was both.”
Hector raised the gun and Flynn threw Dodie to the ground, but there was no need. Hector placed the gun barrel in his own mouth and pulled the trigger.
Chapter 60
Ella
“There is too much light.” Ella shut her eyes.
“You need light, Miss Ella. You is in the dark too much these days. Ain’t you feelin’ better none?”
But she closed the blinds halfway and the slats of sunlight settled around Ella’s feet, while Emerald waited patiently with her hands on her hips for a reply. She wasn’t going to let Ella get away with another of her silences.
“You gonna lose the use of that tongue of yours soon if you don’t use it, Miss Ella.” She had just placed a cup of tea in front of her and a slice of walnut cake fit for an elephant. “Now you eat up.”
Ella was tired of people being patient with her. That’s not what she wanted. Dan had never been patient, he had always been ready to push back at her when she’d tested where his limits lay.
“Thank you, Emerald.”
Emerald took the dismissal, but with ill grace.
* * *
“Ella, lovely to see you down for breakfast again.”
Reggie beamed at her and she saw his eyes carefully scan her face, looking for signs.
“I’ll always be here for breakfast, Reggie. You know that.”
She smiled at him across the table, laid out with his favorite Fortnum & Mason marmalade from London and white Egyptian linen napery, exactly as he liked it. She wanted to make him happy in the ways she could. There were so many ways now in which she couldn’t. That’s why she was wearing the gold gate bracelet with the sapphire.
“Good.”
His tone with her these days was resolutely cheerful. Sometimes she heard herself copying it and that made her want to cry, but she didn’t because he had been wonderful. He had dealt with everything. Cars and bodies had been removed and discreet funerals carried out without scandal. The police were kept at arm’s length, such is the power of a diplomat’s word. Ella had told him everything—without any mention of Dan. She had left that part out. Reggie knew she had left it out but never asked, and in return she didn’t go to Dan’s funeral, which had nearly killed her. When she complained that Freddie de Marigny was being held in jail for a crime he didn’t commit, he had patted her shoulder and promised that the injustice would be dealt with when it came to his trial. She believed him implicitly.
“Toast?”
One word. One simple question. A husband offering his wife food. But they both knew it was more. Ella lifted her gaze to the garden lawn spread out behind him, to the abundance of oleanders and zinnias and the cascade of scarlet bougainvillea, and she knew that to say no to the toast would be unforgivable.
“Yes, please, Reggie.”
“You’re looking lovely today, my dear.”
It was so untrue, it made her blush. In the mirror she could see ten years etched into her face that had not been there before the day on the boat.
Reggie passed her the toast rack.
“Enjoy it, Ella.”
“Thank you.” With her eyes still on the toast, she added, “I’ll make you as close to happy as I can, Reggie.”
“Thank you, my dearest Ella. You always do.”
So polite it hurt.
Chapter 61
Dodie
“The gold, Dodie.”
Flynn squatted down and placed a square box at her feet. It was an old Huntley & Palmers biscuit tin with a picture of the Derby horse race on the lid and a speckling of rust like a ginger snowstorm in one corner.
Dodie stared, appalled. “Take it away.”
“Don’t you want to look?”
“No, I don’t.”
Nevertheless he removed the lid. Inside lay the stuff men’s dreams are made of and Dodie wanted to turn and run away but couldn’t. She stared down at the coins that Sir Harry Oakes had given to Morrell to buy him off, at the burst of light that dazzled the eye and beguiled the heart.
“I found it exactly where the Latchams said—on Oakes’s estate, buried where only a guy like Morrell would think to bury such treasure.”
“Where?”
“Under the pond.” Flynn smiled. “The same as Oakes’s gold mine lies under Kirkland Lake.”
Dodie laughed at that.
“Morrell was smart,” Flynn said.
He lifted a coin between his fingers and offered it up to her, but she wouldn’t touch it, so he dropped it in his pocket and replaced the tin lid over the rest. They were in Mama Keel’s yard. The sun was baking the earth as hard as concrete and a handful of barefoot boys in shorts were kicking a ragged football around.
Flynn looked up at Dodie from where he was crouched on the ground and eyed her carefully. “Do you want this gold, Dodie?”
“No, Flynn. It’s blood money.”
He patted the tin. “Yes, it’s that all right.”
“Are you going to give it to the police?” she asked.
His eyes widened with amusement. “Sure as hell I’m not.”
“To Sir Harry’s family?”
“Those guys have more than enough already.”
She paused. “Are you going to keep it?”
He frowned, as if thinking hard about it, but he was teasing her. He tipped his head sideways toward where Mama Keel was hanging out washing on a rope line. “I know someone,” he said under his breath, “who will know how to use it.” He nodded. “Sir Harry would like that.”
They walked down to the beach, where they ambled through the shallows of the surf together, the sky an endless arc of gleaming blue above them. Dodie didn’t hurry to ask the question on her tongue because she wanted this moment to stretch into the future. She fixed it in her mind as one she would hold on to. The feel of the warm skin of his arm around her waist and the sight of his long pale feet swimming like lazy fish beneath the waves.
But she could sense the vibration in the air, like thunder out at sea, and she knew what was coming. Out of the western sky roared a formation of B-24 Liberators. Seven of the great monsters were climbing up from Oakes Field and droning overhead, young men with their hearts tight as they set off to patrol the Atlantic. Each plane boasted the United States Army Air Force roundel, a dark blue circle around a white star, and she saw Flynn’s eyes while he watched them. There was no need to ask her question. She already knew the answer.
“You’ll be leaving.”
He turned to her, surprised, and then smiled when he recognized what was in her eyes. “You see too much, Dodie.” He laughed. “You see what’s in me before I see it myself.”
She stood in front of him, the waves meandering around their ankles, and looked him full in the face, loving each feature of it. Every rise and fall of it constantly revealed more to her of the person inside.
“The Bahamas has stamped its mark on you,” she said, and kissed the light golden tan that colored his cheek. “Our sun has got to work on you so you won’t forget us in a hurry.”
“No, you’re the one who has got to work on me, Dodie.”
He didn’t sm
ile as he said it and he didn’t say, I won’t forget you in a hurry. But he took both her hands solemnly in his and Dodie knew the words she dreaded to hear were going to spill out into the bright sunlit morning.
“I’m leaving.”
It was said. The day crashed to a halt.
“Sir Harry Oakes and Johnnie Morrell were my friends, Dodie. More than friends, they became like fathers to me—for good or for bad—and it was because of those guys that I stayed linked to the mob. I don’t have a damaged lung from tuberculosis. That certificate was forged by the mob’s doctor to keep me out of the forces. But now”—he looked up at the airplanes still in formation but no more than small birds in the distance now—“all that has changed. I want a different life.”
“You’re going to sign up.”
“Yes.”
“To the army?”
“The Army Air Force.”
Twenty thousand feet of nothingness between him and the ground.
“You’ll be good at it, Flynn.”
“Even the mob thinks twice before getting mixed up with the military, so I will be safe there, but I’m taking my mother’s surname just in case.”
“What is it?”
“O’Hara.”
“Flynn O’Hara. That’s good. I like it.”
“I’m glad you like it, because I’m coming back to get you used to it, Miss Wyatt, you and your bewitching island.”
Dodie felt her day start up again and she looked around her at the silvery beach, at the lazy palm trees, the effortless blue of the sea and sky, at all that she had here on this side of the sun. She wanted to share it with him.
“Too many people have been killed, Flynn. In Nassau. In Europe. In places we’ve never heard of on the far side of the world. Death changes us, it takes away parts of us that we can never get back.”
She thought of Ella and the deep gulley at the back of her eyes where her sorrow lay buried. She was busier than ever with her Red Cross work and had invited Dodie to join her at it in her spare hours, but there was a look about her these days, as though she had left too much of herself at Portman Cay.
And now Flynn was taking to the skies, where airplanes were shot down in flames every day and death became the thief that stalked young men’s lives.
“Dodie,” Flynn said, and cradled her chin in his hand, “You mean too much to me to take away a part of you. I’ll never do that, I promise.”
“Good, Flynn O’Hara. I’ll hold you to that.”
AUTHOR’S NOTE
A Story of Greed and Gold
The reason that I felt drawn to set a story in the beautiful Bahamas was not just because I fancied a glamorous research trip! It was because of a car. Not any old car, of course. It was a glorious, monstrous, coffin-nosed Cord automobile produced in America in 1936.
More than twenty years ago my husband owned one of these magnificent cars and through the Auburn-Cord-Duisenberg Car Club he met an author called James Leasor who also owned a Cord and who wrote action-packed crime novels. But James Leasor had also published a nonfiction book about a strange real-life crime that interested him, and out of politeness I read it. It was called Who Killed Sir Harry Oakes?
Immediately I was hooked. The book examined the unsolved mystery of how and why one of the richest men in the world was brutally murdered in Nassau in the Bahamas. The corpse was partially burned and scattered with feathers. This murder was committed in 1943 while the Duke of Windsor was governor of the Bahamas, and the investigation that followed did nothing but muddy the waters. Suspicions and allegations were flung in all directions in the full glare of the spotlight of the world’s press attention. It became a cause célèbre, knocking war news off the front pages.
It was an extraordinary story, far more bizarre than any fictional tale, and it remained with me for years to come, hovering in the shadows at the back of my mind. To my surprise, when the time came to start plotting a new book last year, the questions about this mysterious unsolved murder elbowed their way to the forefront of my mind and I became excited at the prospect of examining it further. I wanted to dig deeper, compelled to find out more about what had precipitated the tragic event on the paradise island of New Providence.
During the course of months of research I discovered that it was a fascinating whirlwind of mystery and murder. Of glamour and beauty. Of secrets and corruption. And above all else, it was a story of greed and gold. I was powerless to resist it. I hope you will be too.
Around these events I wove a passionate love story, and I must point out that, although a number of the events and people whose names you will recognize are included in my story, it is a work of fiction.
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
At the beginning of the novel, Dodie and Ella are presented as complete opposites in character and social status. However, when Flynn is arrested, Ella says to Dodie, “Perhaps I see something in you that’s in myself.” By the end, Ella seems to have embraced this wildness inside her, but Dodie is the one who saves them from the boat. What do you think this says about Ella’s true character? Could she ever be as strong and “wild” as Dodie?
The island presents a unique setting for the story, as it is both a paradise and an escape, and also in the midst of political turmoil. How do you think this environment impacts the behavior of the characters?
Across the island, there is tension between the white people and the black Bahamians. Emerald is an interesting character as she has her foot in both camps: She works for Ella and Reggie and seems to have a respectful bond with them, but she is also a Bahamian. When push comes to shove, where do you think Emerald’s loyalties truly lie?
Dodie considers herself “unclean” because of her past, but Flynn physically and emotionally cleanses her after she is attacked. Ella on the other hand likes that Dan can see her dirty and muddy after their picnic together. In what ways are these relationships similar and in what ways are they different?
In Ella’s final scene, she is at the breakfast table with Reggie. Do you think she will ever be happy in her marriage, after her affair with Dan? Do you think she feels any regret for her unfaithfulness?
Throughout the novel, Tilly presents herself as a self-assured, good friend to Ella. But when Dodie speaks with her, she catches a “glimpse of a loneliness that tugged at something in her.” Do you pity Tilly at all? What about Hector, who goes to extreme lengths to protect his wife?
At various points throughout the novel, love is equated with gold, and Hector says that “Everything is always about money . . . or love.” We are led to believe throughout the novel that the killings are all in pursuit of gold, but that doesn’t turn out to be the case. Do you think the decisions people make out of financial greed are similar to the irrational decisions people make when they are in love?
Throughout the novel, Reggie is described as a good and decent man. At the end of the novel, he seems clearly to have forgiven Ella for her infidelity, even though they don’t speak of it. Do you respect Reggie for this decision? Why or why not?
About Morrell, Dodie thinks, “She didn’t want his shoes or clothes or his filthy gold coins, all inanimate leavings, all objects that meant nothing and possessed no trace of him.” Later, Ella says that “As the wife of an MP she would be able to do something positive, influence his policies. She could leave a dent in the world that said Ella Sanford was here.” Do you think that Dodie and Ella have made their mark on the world by the end of the novel?
When we first see Ella, she is helping Reggie with his cuff links while wearing an evening gown, seemingly happy with her lifestyle. By the end of the novel, she has thrown herself into an affair with Dan, and has become more outspoken in her search for the truth about what happened to Morrell. Is there one particular moment, or character, in the story who you think first sparks this change in Ella?
Dodie calls Morrell a “killer” in fro
nt of Flynn, which naturally would extend to Flynn as well. Yet, Dodie has relatively few reservations about Flynn and dives headfirst into a relationship with him. Why do you think she is so trusting of this man?
What purpose does Mama Keel’s character serve in the story? What does her presence say about the island, its culture, and its people?
Why do you think Dodie and Ella are so protective of each other? Is it simply because they are both women, or are there other reasons that they form such a strong bond?
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