“Christ,” he says. “Virginia, no. It’s me. It’s Simon.”
And for a second or two I believe him. The flashlight is off. He hasn’t switched on the ignition, hasn’t turned on the headlights. His head is just a smudge, the glossy curves of his eyeballs catch only the tiniest glint from the hazy stars above us. I can’t see his face; I can only hear his voice, quiet and deep and doctorly, the way it used to reach me in bed, during our rendezvous in France, when we shared words in the middle of the night, and the absence of light and vision seemed to bring us into an even deeper communion than the acts of love we had just committed, in such fervor, during the hours before. He smells of cigarettes and the pungency of the ocean and his own peculiar perspiration, and such is the power of scent on the animal mind, the power of primal recognition, I want to plunge my hands around his waist and kiss his stomach, his chest, his neck, his mouth, his everything.
I suppose he senses this instant of weakness. He always did. He touches my shoulder and then wraps his hand around the side of my face, his thumb lying along the bend of my cheekbone and his fingers finding the tenderness under the curve of my skull. “Virginia, it’s me. It’s Simon. For God’s sake, you’ve got to trust me, you’ve got to give me that gun right now.”
And then: “Please, Virginia. Darling. My wife. Have mercy.”
I lift the gun to the back of his head and slide my shaking finger to the trigger.
The air shatters around us, a bang of unearthly noise, and Simon slumps onto my chest. For an instant I think I’ve done it, I’ve shot him, and a hysterical scream rises in my throat.
But a pair of arms looms over my head and grips Simon by the shoulders, tossing him into the air and onto the dirt at the side of the road.
“Thank God,” says Samuel, landing in the seat beside me, and without the slightest pause he starts the engine and grinds the gears, tearing the dirt, spinning the wheels, while I grip the side of the door and hold on for dear life, back up the road to the wooden bridge across the Indian River, while the sound of gunfire fades into the mangrove behind us.
Samuel takes me not to the hotel but to the Phantom Shipping Company offices. I ask him why we’re here, in a stunned, quiet voice I don’t even recognize, and he says we’ll be safer here. What about Evelyn? I ask, and he says he’s going straight over to the hotel, right now, and he’s going to bring her and Clara to the offices, too, and then we will drive out through the night to Maitland. We’ll be safe there.
Safe, I say. Safe from what? Simon’s dead.
Just safe, he says. Away from all this.
I must look a little pale, because he pours me a glass of brandy from his office and makes me drink it all down, a waterfall of fire, pooling in my stomach. I set down the glass. He asks if I want a blanket, and I say I’m all right, I just need to lie down for a moment. He takes me to the sofa in his office and says I can rest there. He’ll be back as soon as he can. He’ll lock the door, just in case.
All right, I say, and I close my eyes.
The sofa is soft, the brandy is warm. I have the strangest feeling that I’m floating, drifting quietly to the ceiling, watching my sleeping body from above. Somewhere, just out of reach, hovers the horror of the evening, the reality of what has just occurred, but I can’t quite grasp it. My head is too blurred. My bones too wispy. I can’t seem to feel a thing. Just the cushion under my cheek, the brandy fire simmering in my stomach, the weight of my eyelids like a kind of paralysis, creeping over me, minutes ticking away in a grotesque rhythm until one of them—the minutes, the snitch of seconds on the clock—strikes an electric charge in the center of my chest.
Evelyn.
I leap upward. Heart pounding in my ears. Evelyn. I need Evelyn.
It’s all right. Samuel has gone to fetch her. To fetch her and Clara, and we will drive to Maitland together, where we will be safe.
But there is something missing in this idea, some giant hole I cannot name, and into this void pours such a panic as I have never before experienced. I brace my hand on the arm of the sofa and haul myself to my feet, wavering, trembling from every pore, thinking, Don’t be silly, Simon’s dead, we’re safe now, and that’s when I realize I’m clutching something in the crook of my elbow, something soft.
I look down. A doll. Evelyn’s missing doll, the rag doll that sat on my chest of drawers at Maitland.
I think, Of course, she left it in the car. In Samuel’s car, as we drove through the night back to Cocoa. I had forgotten. And now I’m clutching it like a talisman; I have carried it without thought from the car to the office, close to my ribs, seeking any kind of comfort I can find.
Everything you seek is here.
The words echo in my head. I stare at the doll’s brown button eyes, her pursed thread mouth. She’s a large creature, comfortable and homemade, constructed of some kind of sturdy cambric. The delicate pink dress, tied at the back of the neck, covers a lumpy abdomen that sounds crisply when I turn it over in my hands.
Not the orange blossoms, I think. The doll.
In the gap between the two sides of her dress, a seam runs all the way down her back, sewn together clumsily in large black stitches. I insert my finger beneath the thread and rip it off, and the doll’s cotton stuffing sags away, revealing the sharp white corner of a folded paper tucked inside.
I seem to have stopped breathing. I sit down, dizzy. Grasp the paper at the corner and work it free from the stuffing.
A letter, written close in small, black, familiar script, folded into a square.
I stick my trembling fingers back inside the doll. One by one, I pull them out, thirty-four of them in total. Thirty-four letters without envelopes, hidden inside the body of a rag doll.
I read swiftly, because Samuel will return any moment. Because when you’re gorging yourself, you cannot slow, you cannot stop to ponder the nature of what you’re gorging on. I try to read them in order, though I seem to be having trouble with the months and the days, and where they belong in sequence. My mind is too overstruck, I think. By the time I finish the last one, the longest one, written on the last day of February, passionate and devastating, I have gone numb, the way you might go numb if struck by an electric charge too intense to bear. If you have just been told, on perfect authority, that the earth is no longer a sphere but has turned into a cube. If you have just learned that your mistaken testimony has sent an innocent man to the gallows.
I think, Evelyn. I must get back to Evelyn. I must find Evelyn at once.
I stand and grasp the edge of a chair for balance, swaying a little, and that’s when I notice the small, delicate figure standing in the doorway. Wearing a thin cotton dress and a worn cardigan jacket. Staring at me from a face at once unknown and familiar, mouth altered and hair lengthened, like a statue of soft clay that has been reshaped by its creator.
“Virginia?” she whispers.