She closes her eyes and leans back in her chair, absorbing what dilute sunshine penetrates the thick striped canvas of the umbrella, and I direct Evelyn’s attention back to the sand. I don’t tell Clara that I’ve already given those ruins many hours of thought, and that any day—even now, perhaps—a steam shovel will cross the bridge from the mainland and start to work on that rectangle of charred land on Cocoa Beach, rebuilding Simon’s house according to the original plans. If work progresses on schedule, the new villa will be ready for occupation by the end of winter. Perhaps even sooner.
No, I don’t share this piece of information with Clara, because—for one thing—I expect she’ll find out, soon enough. From Samuel, at least, who will surely learn that a new villa is rising atop the old, even though I’ve instructed Mr. Burnside to keep the matter secret for the time being.
For another thing, I haven’t really decided who’s going to live there.
Evelyn turns over her bucket onto the beach and lifts it carefully. The loose sand falls away in a flattened cone, and she begins to cry.
“What’s the matter, darling?” I ask.
“Castle! I want castle!”
“A castle, is it? In that case, we’re going to need water. Water makes the sand all sticky, so it doesn’t fall apart like that.”
But Evelyn’s only two and a half, and the chemical properties of water and sand are unknown to her. So I take her hand and lead her down to the water, and together we fill the bucket with water and return to our umbrellas. I love the sun on my shoulders and chest, the sand clinging to my stockings. I stare down at the thick, loathsome scar on my left arm and wonder what it’s like, having the sand and the water on your bare legs. Whether the salt stings your skin, or whether it just makes you more alive. Whether maybe I should go shopping while I’m here in Miami Beach, and buy myself a new swimming costume, one more like Clara’s. Clara, whose legs splay comfortably into the sand, and whose dozing face now tilts into her shoulder, lips parted. I bend over the bucket with Evelyn, showing her how to send the water in a stream over the sand, and a finger touches the small of my back.
“Mrs. Fitzwilliam?”
I whirl about. A little scream rises in my throat. Dies away at the sight of the man before me: the grim, clean-shaven, thick-boned man watching us earlier from the table at the corner of the boardwalk. His eyes, staring hard, are the same opaque shade of navy blue as the ocean lying beyond the surf. His massive jaw might have been dug out of an ancient German valley. He lays his right forefinger vertically across his lips, hands me a piece of paper, and walks away through the sand, barefoot, shoes and stockings hanging from one hand. Back to the boardwalk.
At my feet, Evelyn squeals at the results of our little experiment. I stand there watching the man’s broad back, his thick shoulders and swift stride, the swinging ends of his blue jacket, the scrap of short brown hair under the rim of his straw boater, until he turns the corner of the casino building and disappears from sight.
The paper in my hand is thick and white, folded once across the middle. The edges waver, but that’s just my nerves. My shock. Clara’s still lying there, not a single muscle awake, and Evelyn scoops the sand with her small hands. I close my eyes briefly, and when I open them the paper’s still there, though the man who delivered it has gone, as if he never existed. A burst of screams carries across the surf, followed by the thundering crash of an especially large wave. I think, It’s just paper, fraidycat. A note of some kind. Just read the damned thing.
I lift my left hand—and I’m surprised by the effort this takes, as if someone’s attached a ten-pound weight to my wrist—and open the folded paper.
But it’s not a note, after all. Would you believe it? There are no words. No message of any kind, unless you consider that a stranger’s perfect sketch of your daughter, playing in the sand, her snub-nosed profile almost photographic in its uncanny resemblance to Evelyn, constitutes a message. The bile rises in my throat. I close the paper and start to crumple it in my fist, hoping that the dozing Clara hasn’t noticed this little exchange, and that’s when I see the small block letters running across the bottom edge of the back of the page, so even and regular as to appear almost typewritten.
Evelyn looks up at me, squinting her hazel eyes against the sun, and her expression, for an instant, recalls her father to my heart.
“Mama?” She tugs the end of my skirt.
“Just a moment, darling.”
I crouch on the sand and tuck the sketch into my pocketbook, and as I do this, swift and discreet, I smooth away the wrinkles at the bottom of the page and read: regarding your husband. flamingo tea garden. 11 p.m.
“Something the matter?” asks Clara. Her eyes are open now; she’s watching me fiddle with the pocketbook. On her face rests an expression of such sleepy, blinking, content curiosity, I’m reminded of a kitten.
“Nothing at all,” I say. “But I think it’s time to go back to the hotel for a rest, don’t you?”
I have a photograph of the house on Cocoa Beach, taken just before the fire. I’m staring at it now, as I lie alone on my narrow single bed in the Flamingo Hotel, while Evelyn sleeps in her little room next door and Clara attends a little party downstairs. We were both invited by no less a figure than Mrs. Fisher herself, the wife of Mr. Carl Fisher, who—as you know—owns this hotel and the beach casino and most of Miami Beach, really. But I pleaded a headache, so Clara went to the party on her own.
And now here I am. Staring at a photograph while the clock just ticks and ticks, ten o’clock drawing inevitably toward eleven.
This house, you see, is important. And yet it’s not the importance of the house that matters to me, at this precise moment, but its beauty. When I first pulled the photograph free from its envelope, I couldn’t quite believe that a house like that could possibly belong to Simon, that he could have approved its design and made himself at home there, right on the edge of the great, tempestuous Atlantic, in a villa plucked from some lazy Mediterranean shore. The roof of red tile, the inner courtyard anchored in place by a central fountain, the trees of lemon and eucalyptus, the wide windows and the simple lines: they aren’t anything like—for example—Simon’s ancient family seat in Cornwall, which he loved so much that he was willing to do anything to keep it. Anything at all.
But then I thought—as I gazed and closed my eyes and opened them to gaze again—I thought that maybe the simple, sunbaked beauty of this house made sense after all. Maybe the new architecture of this house represented a change in the architecture of Simon himself, or rather a reflection of Simon’s true architecture, instead of the one I had imagined these past three years. Maybe I had been wrong after all. Maybe I had been unjust and fearful. Maybe some other explanation existed for the dark events in Cornwall that spring.
Or maybe not. But the sight of that photograph gave me reason to wonder. Gives me reason to wonder now, in my room at the Flamingo Hotel, as I examine its monochrome details once more. To remember the way I once felt about Simon, the way I once loved and trusted him, because while a man can lie in his words and his kisses, his letters and his embraces, he can’t lie about the house that he lives in.
Or can he?
The clock ticks. 10:51.
Chapter 8
Paris, August 1917