“Not no more, by the sound of it.”
“Did he ever mention someone called Morrell?”
“Not that I heard.”
“Thanks for your help, Leah, I appreciate it.”
“I’m trustin’ you, Miss Ella.”
Leah hitched her bowl of rice on her hip and, aiming a nod at Calder, she set off walking back down the street, shimmering in the sun. But after twenty paces she turned and her voice rang out clear as a church bell.
“Hey, Miss Ella. You know about the room he keeps there for his own personal use, if you get my meaning?” She jiggled her bosom suggestively, then she meandered away, chuckling to herself.
Ella looked at Dan Calder warily and to her astonishment found that he was laughing. She gave him a wry smile.
“So, Mrs. Sanford, what the hell was all that about?”
* * *
The two of them were in her car and it was stifling hot. Flies, drunk on heat, staggered in and out of the open windows and the metal of the car was now too hot to touch. Ella leaned her head back and felt sweat trickle down her neck, pooling in the hollow between her collarbones.
They were waiting for Emerald. As usual when she’d finished her egg work in Bain Town, Emerald waddled off to visit an ancient bedridden aunt who was tucked away somewhere in one of the narrower streets. The maid had been as pleased as punch when Reggie announced that he’d found some kind of work for her aunt’s niece by marriage. She’d baked him a steaming-hot jam roly-poly and Ella had looked on with amusement as he devoured the lot with relish.
“Mrs. Sanford?” Dan Calder’s voice prodded her out of her stupor.
“Mmm?”
“Do you actually believe you are in any danger?”
It was too hot to move her head. “No.”
She heard the rhythm of his breathing change.
“Why?” she asked. “Do you think I’m in danger?”
“I’m here to protect you. So no, I think you are safe.”
“Like you protected me in my garden this morning, you mean?”
She heard a click, the sound of his teeth snapping together. She rolled her head to look at him.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean that to sound rude. You did what you had to.”
A muscle below his ear moved back and forth under his skin. “I hope,” he said, “that you sorted out the problem that is Miss Wyatt.”
“You think she is a problem?”
“Don’t you?”
“I think,” she said, “that you are taking care of me so well that I have no problems.”
With a flick of his head, he looked across at her. But when he saw she was teasing him, his gray eyes relaxed.
“Do you carry a gun?” she asked.
“Ah, that’s top-secret information, I’m afraid. If I told you that, I might have to kill you.”
Ella burst out laughing, just as Emerald came trundling down the street toward them.
* * *
The moment Ella reached home, she stripped off her clothes, took a shower, and toweled herself dry.
What did it feel like?
She stretched out on the floor of her bedroom, having made sure that the jalousie blinds were securely drawn. She lay flat on her stomach, her breathing reined back to something close to normal.
What did it feel like? To be facedown on the grass. To have a man treat you like dirt. She clasped her hands behind her back the way she’d seen it done, her cheek pressed to the floor. Nerve ends twitched in her skin. She tried to imagine it. To imagine Calder’s knee on her back, his strong hands gripping her wrists. She closed her eyes and felt heat surge through her blood.
The door of the bedroom opened.
“Good God, Ella!” Reggie swept into the room. “Are you ill?”
Ella leaped to her feet. “No, I . . . was dozing.” Color burned her cheeks.
“With no clothes on?”
“I was hot. The floor felt cooler.”
His gaze raked over her breasts, sank to the glint of the golden triangle of curls between her legs, and without comment he quickly closed the door behind him.
“It was too hot to work in the office. I didn’t have too much on today, so I came home early,” he explained.
He approached her with the tentative smile and the diffident steps of someone who would die rather than push a woman’s face into the grass.
Chapter 24
Dodie
The shop looked respectable enough from the outside. Dodie inspected it from across the street. It was Minnie who had told her about it, the tiny kitchen maid she worked with at the Arcadia who seemed to possess a mental map of every shop in Nassau. It was an area that looked just a mite run-down without actually tipping over into shabby. The tone was raised by a smart dress shop with flower tubs outside and an expensive brass sign that glinted like solid gold in the sun.
But Dodie wasn’t looking at dresses. Her gaze was fixed on a jewelry shop with a fancy display of watches and pearl necklaces in its window. She waited just long enough for one of the pretty surreys—the little horse-drawn carriages adorned with bells and fringes—to tinkle past, then she dodged across the road and entered the shop.
Inside the temperature shot up a few degrees. The large brass fan whirred dutifully on the ceiling but didn’t stand a chance against the many lights trained on the display cabinets. The air sparkled with flashes of gold and silver and the floor was polished to a mirror sheen, so bright that Dodie had to narrow her eyes against the glare. Behind a bead curtain at the back of the shop stood two figures, a man and a woman. The man had his arm looped around the woman’s waist but she detached herself and brushed her way through the curtain when Dodie entered. Her heels tapped their way across the floor to take up position behind the counter.
“May I help you?”
The woman had ginger hair cropped short as a boy’s, scarlet-painted nails, and was a walking advertisement for her wares. A ring on every freckled finger. She wore a three-string pearl necklace and milky earrings to match. Three gold bracelets jangled together on each pale wrist. It occurred to Dodie to wonder how the woman dared risk walking down the street even in broad daylight. The smile she gave her customer was friendly.
“I’m told you know about old coins,” Dodie started cautiously.
The woman’s smile slipped. She turned her head toward the curtain. “Marcus,” she called.
The man emerged. He had glossy ebony skin and the slow easy manner of one born and bred to the island’s rhythm, a place where the women took charge and the men were content to let them. He went about his own business with quiet dignity and placed himself beside the ginger-haired woman, his hip brushing hers.
“What can I do for you, ma’am?”
“I have a coin. I’d like you to take a look at it, please.”
“Certainly. I am always interested in old coins. They have lived a life and they tell a story.” He laid out a rectangle of black felt as an invitation for her to reveal what she had.
Dodie felt nervous. She didn’t know what was coming. She placed the coin on the felt and stood back. But she saw the way the jeweler’s eyes ignited in the light that flashed off the gold surface and the sudden flaring of his broad nostrils.
“I think it’s French,” she suggested.
He nodded. A magnifying glass sprang from his pocket.
“You’re right. It’s French.” He smiled at the coin affectionately and with a gentle touch picked it up. “A forty-franc napoleon. See its date? An IZ. That’s French for year twelve. That means it was minted twelve years after the Revolution when the new French government set up a brand-new calendar system.” He glanced at the woman at his side. “That was 1803, see?”
“Is it gold?” Dodie asked.
He twirled it under the lights. “Oh yes, ma’a
m. It’s ninety percent pure gold and signed by its engraver. See here? Tiolier. He was the engraver general of the Paris Mint until 1816, a true master artist.”
“Is it rare?”
“Rare enough.” He turned it over on his palm. “Look at the head of Bonaparte as premier consul, how finely Tiolier crafted it. That’s why it’s called a napoleon.”
“Were many of them made?”
“Yes, over a quarter of a million were minted.”
“Oh.”
“But not so many survive today. Most were melted down.”
“Is there anyone in Nassau who is keen on old coins, do you know?” Dodie kept it casual.
The air in the shop changed. Ice water dripped into it and the temperature dropped. Dodie saw the shopkeepers exchange a look. The man replaced the coin on the felt and leaned his elbows on the counter either side of it, surveying her calmly. He was in a business that liked to keep its secrets under the counter.
“Do you have someone in mind?” he asked mildly.
The name of Sir Harry Oakes teetered on the tip of her tongue but she clung on to it. “Maybe one of the big businessmen on the island has an interest in collecting coins.” That was as far as she dared go.
The woman picked up the napoleon and flicked it in the air, catching it again as though tossing Dodie for it. “Where did you get this?” she asked bluntly.
A thief. That’s what she thinks I am. A thief selling dirty money.
“It was given to me. A gift. I don’t know its history. Would you be interested in it?”
“We only buy items,” the woman announced, “when we know where they have come from.” She dropped the coin on the counter and folded her arms. “So no, we—”
“But perhaps”—the man with the kind eyes was gazing benignly at the gold napoleon, as at a favorite son—“we could make an exception in this case.”
“Marcus!”
“It’s a beautiful coin in fine condition.”
The woman sighed. “You are too easily seduced by lovely things.”
They looked at each other and smiled. But when the woman turned back to Dodie, the smile had gone and in its place lay suspicion.
“What’s your name?” she asked.
But Dodie was not caught out so easily. She said, “Oh, I’ve just thought of someone. What about Sir Harry Oakes?” An innocent afterthought, nothing more. “Does he collect coins by any chance? I’ve heard he’s a man who likes gold.”
The woman rippled her rings in the rays of the nearest lamp, skimming flashes of brilliance as fleet as shooting stars across the ceiling. “My dear girl,” she said with a look of disdain, “everybody likes gold.”
* * *
“Is Detective Sergeant Calder here, please?”
“No, he’s not.”
The police station smelled sickly sweet. Dodie glanced behind her at a bench where a man and his wife were fanning themselves and biting into overripe peaches, juice running down their dark fingers onto the linoleum floor as they waited for their turn at the counter. Flies, glossy and fat, droned around their heads, pestering their lips and settling on their hands like dried scabs.
The desk sergeant was regarding Dodie with undue interest. “Who’s asking?” he said.
“My name is Dodie Wyatt.”
“Oh right, I thought I recognized you. You’re the little lady who reported the murder.”
She could feel the two people on the bench against the wall switch their attention from the peaches to her.
“Will he be in later?” she asked.
“No, Detective Sergeant Calder is not on duty today, I’m afraid. What can I do for you?”
“I was wondering”—she lowered her voice—“if your inquiries have discovered anything further about Mr. Morrell.”
“Well, Miss Wyatt, from what I’m told, it seems that he’s proving to be something of a mystery, I can tell you that much. No trace of him arriving on the island. Not easy to find out where he came from, but it is under investigation, I assure you.”
“So you haven’t found any of his family?”
“Not yet.”
“He’ll need a funeral.”
“That’s true.”
Dodie was acutely aware of the fruit eaters’ gazes watching the back of her head; nevertheless, she placed a bundle of pound notes on the counter.
“What’s that for?” the desk sergeant asked uneasily.
“For Mr. Morrell’s funeral. I don’t want him buried in an unmarked pauper’s grave.”
He picked up a pencil on the desk and sank his teeth thoughtfully into its end. “As I understand it, you don’t know this man.”
“I don’t.”
“So why are you paying for his funeral?”
“I want him to have a proper grave with a headstone. A decent Christian burial.”
“Why? What’s he to you?”
“Nothing. Except that I was with him when he died.”
“That doesn’t mean you have to pay for his funeral, you know.”
“I know.” But it was her way of saying sorry to him for letting him die.
The desk sergeant was a good-looking man with a solid dependable manner, but his features were now spoiled as they twisted into a sneer. “Paid you good money, did he?”
He thought she’d had sex with Morrell. For money. Dodie felt a rush of shame crawling up the skin of her neck.
“I think you’d better have a word with one of our other detectives, Miss Wyatt,” he added sternly.
Dodie fled from the flies and the peach juice and the money lying on the counter, out into the street.
* * *
Money for sex.
No, Mr. Desk Sergeant, that wasn’t what this was about. But whichever way she turned, tracking down Mr. Morrell’s trail seemed to be leading her to places where she ended with her face in the dirt.
Under the hard blue sky, Dodie wove her way along pavements bustling with RAF uniforms and with women in colorful dresses carrying children on their hips and baskets on their head, till she reached the Arcadia Hotel. But the gloom that clung to her thoughts was swept away at the sight of a figure standing on the steps of the rear entrance. It was Flynn Hudson. He held a cigarette in his hand and a lazy smile sat on his lips as if it had been waiting there for her. He stepped toward her and she saw a strip of pink sunburn above his collar where the sun had run its fingers.
“Good morning, Miss Wyatt, I looked for you,” he said, “first thing this morning. In Bain Town. But you’d left already.”
“Oh.”
She’d missed him. She would have stayed. Stayed till he came. Why didn’t he tell her? Why didn’t she realize he might come?
“I had some errands to run,” she explained, “before I went to work.”
“And now more errands in your break?”
“Yes.”
“You’re busy today.”
“Yes, I am.”
His smile widened. “I brought you breakfast.”
“Breakfast?”
“Yes. To Bain Town this morning.”
“No one has ever brought me breakfast before.”
“I arrived too late,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
“Or I left too early.”
He laughed, a warm sound.
“What was in it?” she asked. “In the breakfast?”
One of his dark eyebrows swooped upward, surprised. But he held up his fingers and started to tick them off with the cigarette. “Bread rolls fresh from the bakery, boiled eggs, a papaya, banana . . .” He paused for thought and Dodie was aware of his mouth becoming unguarded in that moment, as if recalling the pleasure he had in choosing food for her. “And a pot of crab and—”
“Crab?”
“Yes. Just cooked on the harborside. I thought yo
u might like it.”
“I would.”
“And milk for tea,” he finished with a flourish. “That’s all.”
He inhaled on the cigarette, his eyes observing her with amusement, waiting for a comment. But how could she tell him that if she could turn back the clock, rewind it through the sneers in the police station, through the ginger-haired woman’s suspicion, and through her face full of dirt in Mrs. Sanford’s garden, she would. Wipe out every minute of today and start it again with him and his breakfast. She would.
“What happened,” she asked, “to this breakfast fit for a queen?”
“I had to eat it on my own.”
“Oh. Lucky you.”
Flynn was smiling at her, the kind of smile that came from somewhere deep enough to banish the shadows that usually haunted his face, but Dodie looked away. A cart carrying crates rattled past and a bicycle bell bleated at a reckless pedestrian, but she saw them only dimly. She had to look away because if she didn’t, she would cry.
But he mistook her intention. He thought she was leaving to enter the hotel and his hand grasped her wrist. “Don’t go,” he said. “Not yet, Miss Wyatt.”
“Please call me Dodie. Anyone who brings me breakfast is allowed to call me Dodie.”
She stared at his fingers. Not the big strong knuckles of the other man who had laid hands on her today. These were finely boned, threads of blue vein under the skin, as pale as the rest of him, with well-shaped fingernails and a sense of purpose in their grip. It could mean so many different things when a man’s hand was fastened like a shackle around your wrist. The image of Mr. Morrell clinging on to her for dear life rose unbidden to her mind and she shook her head to dislodge it. Immediately Flynn released his grip.
“No,” she said. “I didn’t mean . . .”
A clock somewhere struck four. Dodie’s hour-long break was over. Today her work shift was eleven in the morning till three, then four till eleven at night, and she had taken enough liberties with Miss Olive’s patience recently. It was time to walk away from him. But her feet wouldn’t move.
“Flynn,” she started.
She meant to say: Tomorrow bring me breakfast and I will eat papaya and crab with you with pleasure. Bring me your smile to banish the dreams that stalk my sleep each night. Bring me your certainty that lies in everything you do—in the way you hold your head while you’re listening to me or in your long pale fingers when you roll one of your cigarettes. Bring me all those things tomorrow, Flynn Hudson, when the sun comes up. But the wrong words slipped out instead.
The Far Side of the Sun Page 14