The Wicked Redhead. Beatriz Williams

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