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.
(better late than never)
COCOA BEACH, FLORIDA
April 1924
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.
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.
