Flynn’s hand touched her shoulder. “Don’t move.”
He was across the room and flattened against the wall behind the locked door, invisible in the darkness, though one of his shoes was cut in half by a stray slat of light. The noise came again. It was the rattle of a doorknob, a man’s tuneless whistle, and then again, yet another doorknob. A shuffle of feet. Then silence.
“The night watchman,” Flynn breathed.
Checking the offices. Clearly not a man to pocket his earnings and laze the night away on a bench under a tree with a pack of Woodbines, this one was conscientious. For another five minutes neither moved. Eventually the whistle vanished and reappeared below them in the street, as the man took his time ambling off to the next building.
“He’ll be back,” Flynn murmured, his voice urgent. “Time to go.”
Together they replaced the files exactly as they’d found them, and while Flynn relocked the safe Dodie returned the diary to its drawer. They left the room in a hurry, locked it once more, and were halfway across the unlit area that was the reception hall for Harold Christie’s land agency company, when a rough voice shouted at them from the far corner, “Stop where you are. Put your hands up. Don’t move.”
Dodie’s heart shot into her throat. “No,” she whispered. To Flynn more than to the hidden stranger. “Don’t do anything.”
“Are you hungry?” the voice demanded.
Relief tore through Dodie and she seized Flynn’s arm. “It’s a parrot. Christie keeps a bloody parrot in here.”
Flynn gave a laugh. A brief burst of exhilarating sound before he silenced it. Dodie loved him for it.
* * *
The smell of wood fires still drifted on the night air in Bain Town, reminding Dodie that she was hungry. Somewhere the staccato bark of a dog pricked the silence of her small hut, and she could hear the murmur of deep male voices. They were swapping late-night stories on their front stoops and drowning the day’s troubles in home-brewed beer. It was comforting, that sound. It reminded her of nights lying awake after her mother died and listening to her father and his friends drinking in the next room and arguing over what Prime Minister MacDonald should be doing to sort out the mess left by the Wall Street crash.
She was waiting for Flynn to return. She didn’t know where he had gone but could tell by the way he’d set his shoulders and moved on light feet that he was preparing himself for something. She asked what for, but in reply he kissed her mouth and made her lie down so that he could massage her back once more with Mama Keel’s ointment. She didn’t tell him how much it hurt because she wanted his hands on her. She was happy to trade a little pain for that, and loved the way while he was doing it he teased her about turning into a cat burglar, a shadow’s shadow, he called her.
“Nerves of steel,” he’d said with respect.
He’d left his jacket behind and she put it on, sliding her arms into its sleeves, rubbing her cheek against its collar like a cat. She prowled the tiny hut, worrying, sliding her hands into his pockets and finding them empty except for a tin containing three of his hand-rolled cigarettes. She smoked them. She made deals with God. Please let him come back to me unharmed in the next ten minutes and I will never again be a shadow’s shadow. She promised.
But minutes ticked past. She couldn’t hold them back.
Let him come back to me in the next half hour and I will tell the police about the gold coins. I will make a fool of myself.
But the minutes became hours.
Let him come back to me. Please. I will give You Morrell’s gun hidden in my safe box underground at the beach. I will give You my job. I will give You my father’s Bible. Please.
Please.
* * *
Flynn slid back into the house, silent as a thought. He stripped off his clothes, the skin on his flanks gleaming white in the faint veil of moonlight that drifted through the window. He crossed to the mattress that lay in darkness and Dodie saw his head whip around when he found she wasn’t there.
“Where have you been?”
His eyes struggled to find her in the blackest corner where she was sitting.
“Dodie.” She heard him inhale with relief.
“Where have you been?”
He came toward her voice and knelt down in front of her, but something in her voice told him not to touch her.
“Dodie, don’t ask me, please. It is better for you not to know.” His voice sounded bone-tired.
“It is not better for me not to know.”
“It is safer. Believe me, it is—”
“No, Flynn. I’m not going to believe you. I am already in danger just because I nursed Morrell. So don’t tell me that.”
She saw the dark shadow of his head shake back and forth.
“Listen to me, Dodie. I would never forgive myself if anything happened to you because I—”
“Enough! Enough! I can’t go on not knowing. I can’t sit alone here night after night not knowing where you are and fearing I will find you in a filthy alleyway with a knife in your guts.” She steadied her voice and asked again, “Where have you been?”
The darkness in her corner was hot and airless. Flynn exhaled a hard breath, and after a long silence he drew her face to him, holding it against his cheek.
“I’ll tell you,” he said.
* * *
He brewed them one of Mama Keel’s herbal teas. It calmed them. Dodie remained in her dark corner, but Flynn lit a candle and examined her face with an intensity that left her nowhere to hide. She was wearing the blue dress, her hair loose and uncombed, her eyes fiercer than she meant them to be, and the world shrank to no more than the circle of light from the candle. It threw pools of color into the shadowy fringes of the tiny room, deep purples and rich magentas that crawled closer each time the candle flickered. They were seated on the floor, face-to-face, Dodie’s knees drawn up under her chin as if they knew she would need protection from his words. Flynn was wrapped in the sheet.
“I went to see Sir Harry Oates,” he said bluntly.
She felt a layer of sweat spiral to the surface of her skin, but she said nothing.
“I go often. Usually around midnight.” His mahogany eyes were gentle. “Aren’t you going to ask me why?”
Still she said nothing.
He gave a small sigh. “It’s because I work for him.”
Outside, a tree branch groaned and cracked. Or was it inside herself? She could no longer tell.
“What do you do?” she asked.
“You’re smart, Dodie, too smart. You were bound to figure out that something else is going on. Everything I told you before is the truth, but because I love you, I left some parts out.”
I love you. His words moved in the room, rustling around her.
“Explain to me exactly what it is you do for Sir Harry Oakes.”
“After I quit Chicago, I ended up with Johnnie Morrell in Niagara Falls. That’s where Oakes was living. He was a multimillionaire by then because of the Lake Shores Gold Mine near Kirkland Lake.” A smile tilted Flynn’s mouth. “Oakes discovered it in 1912 and he was a generous guy with his bounty. The Niagara Falls community struck it rich.”
“How did you get involved?”
“Like I said before, Oakes and Morrell were prospecting buddies from way back and so—through Morrell—I ended up working for Oakes.”
“Doing what?”
“Anything and everything. Prohibition had only just been knocked on the head. I was only sixteen but Oakes took a shine to me. He said I had guts and persistence, two things he sets high store by. The Canadian government was taxing him into a fury—milking him for eighty-five percent tax—so he shifted himself and his family to the Bahamas, where there is almost no tax. He’s no fool.”
Flynn rose to his feet, fetched a cigarette, and lit it, but he only took one drag and ins
tantly stubbed it out. He took a prowl around the room before sitting down again in front of Dodie. She hadn’t moved.
“You’ve got to remember, Dodie, that it’s all about money with men like Oakes. It’s what they eat and breathe, it’s their life. He’s real clever, you know. He went to medical school before he took himself off prospecting in the Klondike.”
“Medical school?” Dodie couldn’t imagine Sir Harry as a doctor. He’d scare his patients to death. She put out a hand and touched Flynn’s sheet-swaddled knee. “What then?”
“The mob got after him, always on his back.”
“Why?”
“They aim to set up casinos here and Oakes won’t have any of it.”
“I thought gambling was against Bahamian law.”
“Darn right it is. But laws can be changed, if the right people decide to change them.”
She could hear a bitterness in his voice. “And you?” she asked softly. “What happened to you?”
“Oakes put me back to work with the Chicago Mafia and Capone.” He wiped a hand across his forehead as though dragging away the memory of it from his mind. “I was a kid. Too young and too stupid. Did I want to please and impress Harry Oakes, one of the richest men on the planet? You bet I did. So I became his eyes and ears within the mob. I report to him. Through me Oakes knows what’s going on and this way he keeps one step ahead of them.”
She bridged the gap between them by resting both hands on his knees. “What happened tonight?”
The light from the candle flickered across his tense face. “I asked him straight out if he’d arranged for thugs to kill Morrell on his way back into town. To get back his gold. He said no. We had a row. It wasn’t pretty but no one rows with Oakes and finds it pretty.”
“I’m sorry.”
“He claimed he didn’t have anything to do with Morrell’s death. And he told me he doesn’t own Portman Cay.”
“So it has to be Christie.”
“Morrell would have known.”
Dodie edged forward and slipped her arms around Flynn’s waist, drawing them together. “Why don’t you leave the mob? Just abandon them.”
He laughed and it was a harsh sound.
“You don’t walk away from the mob, Dodie. If you do—or if they find out you have betrayed them—they come after you like a pack of hyenas and tear you limb from limb.”
Dodie rested her cheek against his and found it ice cold. Everything had changed.
Chapter 40
Dodie
The day dawned gray and morose. Dodie and Flynn took one of the horse-drawn surreys out as far as Cable Beach past the golf club, and walked from there, enjoying the change in the air, the scents of faraway spices carried on the morning wind. Coral-pink tracks twisted away through the wild and wooded landscape, where lizards basked hopeful of sunshine on rocky slabs. Hummingbirds whirred and darted to the last late blossoms of the jacaranda trees, faster than ants to jam.
Dodie didn’t talk much. Her mind was still caught up in the night before. But Flynn was determined to repair her mood and whistled with a cheerfulness that made her smile as they walked. He’d brought along a breakfast of fresh-baked rolls, goat’s cheese, and mango, and they sat eating it on the gleaming white sands of Portman Cay. The gray sea blurred into the sky and its surface shifted like sheets of polished steel. It looked threatening. As though it wanted to play rough.
“A storm tonight,” Dodie commented.
He took a bite of cheese. “You love this island,” he said. “You know its moods and its colors.”
The remark caught Dodie by surprise. It was true but she hadn’t realized he understood quite how much the island meant to her.
“We could leave,” she said quietly.
“Leave the island?”
“Yes.”
“I thought we agreed we owed it to Johnnie Morrell to find his killer.”
“That was before.”
He didn’t ask before what? They both knew she meant before she learned about the mob. He folded an arm around her shoulders and they sat in silence, gazing out at the relentless roll of the waves. She was utterly aware of every part of his body next to hers. The bone of his ankle where he’d rolled his trousers back. The muscle of his shoulder. The clean scent of him. And she knew she would give up this island that she loved for him if it would save him. But most of all she wanted to charge over to Sir Harry Oakes and tear his eyes out for what he’d done to Flynn, for the way he’d used him. But she didn’t tell Flynn that. She let it lie unspoken.
When she lifted her head, she caught him regarding her with a warm smile.
“Why did you leave England, Dodie? You’ve told me nothing of your past.”
She thought twice about raking it over. It was behind her. She wanted it to stay there.
“Beats me,” he said, “why anyone would want to leave England. With men like your Mr. Churchill running the place.”
She tilted her head back to rest on his arm.
“It’s a short story. My father was a kind man but the fighting in the trenches in the Great War destroyed him. He took to the bottle.” Two small words—“the bottle”—that hold so much power. “My mother died. In an influenza epidemic when I was nine and that was the end of him. And of me. Things got a whole lot worse. He couldn’t work for long periods and I scratched around for odd jobs.” The surf was playing tag with the sandpipers and for a long time Dodie didn’t speak, while Flynn kept his arm around her.
“Anyway,” she said with a shake of her head, “we came out here eventually to start a new life but he hated it. Hated himself. Three times he tried to kill himself. He would drive us to a beach, kiss me good-bye, and set off to swim back to England.”
“England! That’s one hell of a swim.”
“Three times he came back. But the fourth time he didn’t. The next day his body was washed up further down the coast.”
Flynn lifted his fingers to her lips, as if to wipe away the sting of her words. “I’m sorry, Dodie. You had it tough.”
“Everyone has it tough.” She rose to her feet. “Come on, let’s walk.”
They fell into step together, soft-footed along the beach. It was a long horseshoe cay with a dense fringe of palms and pines, and a slope down to the water with a patchwork of rock pools at one end where crabs congregated like churchgoers.
“What is it,” Dodie asked, looking around her, “about this Portman Cay beach that makes somebody want it so much? It is nothing special. No different from all the other beaches.”
Flynn glanced along the sand thoughtfully and then back to her. “Tell me about your sewing. You’re good at it, I know.”
“Oh, that was at the factory.” The word “factory” tasted sour on her tongue. “I was a dress designer.”
“Really?”
She laughed at him. “Doll’s dresses. There were thirty of us. The dolls used to arrive in huge cardboard boxes, a gross at a time, all pink and shiny and crying out for clothes. I must have sewn thousands of tiny dresses, before they were exported back to America. I enjoyed that work. It was . . .” She stopped abruptly, frowning at him. “How do you know I’m good at it?”
“I saw your quilt.”
“In my hut?”
“Yes.”
“When?”
“When I spoke to Morrell. I went into your hut to see him when you ran off to Mama Keel’s.”
Dodie stared. “I had no idea.”
“He told me how grateful he was to you. Asked me to keep you safe.”
Her mind suddenly filled with images of Morrell. Of his big bearlike hands and the mulberry stain on his shirtfront. Of the toughness that he wore like a second skin and yet the southern courtesy in his voice when he addressed her. So absorbed was she in these images that when a bullet slammed into the sand at her feet, she didn’t even re
alize what was happening until she heard the crack of the rifle a split second later.
“What the . . . ?”
She stared at the spot stupidly, her brain refusing to acknowledge that she was being shot at. But Flynn seized her arm and had her racing for the cover of the trees, zigzagging as they went. The sand was soft. The slope was steep. Her feet slid and stumbled. Her back jarred and it sounded as though there was a buzz saw inside her head, so she couldn’t hear what Flynn was shouting, though she could see his mouth moving.
Flynn drew her into the trees. Jinking and darting. Dodging patches of sunlight, heads low, feet leaping over the sprawling undergrowth. A bullet thudded into a palm off to their left, splintering the bark, and the crack of it sent a flock of finches scrambling into the sky. Flynn yanked her behind a thick trunk, still gripping her arm hard.
“Go,” he ordered. “Keep running. I’ll hold him here. Go!”
She was shaking. Calm down. She had never been shot at before and wasn’t prepared for her body’s reaction.
“No,” she said.
“Go!”
She focused her gaze on his face. It was composed and intent. His voice urgent, but no trace of panic. No sign of the terror in her own chest. Whatever he was feeling was under control. When another bullet whistled through the branches above their heads, Flynn didn’t even flinch, and her respect for him grew.
“No,” she said again.
In Flynn’s other hand was a gun. She stared at it, trying to make sense of how it got there. Black and blunt-nosed. Where had it suddenly come from? She clamped both her hands around its muzzle and held on tight.
“No, Flynn,” she hissed. “Put it away.”
“I’ll stop him.”
“You’ll get us killed.”
“In case you haven’t noticed, that’s exactly what the guy is trying to do right now.”
They talked fast. “Listen, Flynn. You’ve forgotten how an innocent person would behave. We should talk to him, not shoot.”
“Which would you prefer to be? Innocent and dead? Or guilty and alive?”
The Far Side of the Sun Page 25