IN THE GUEST bedroom, Cormac stood between me and the door to the hallway. Like Marco’s bodyguard, he had a tommy gun slung over his shoulder and a holstered revolver.
“Excuse me.” I hated how the squeak in my voice made him grin. I hated even more that he ran his thumb down a jagged, deep scar in his right cheek. He swayed to block me each time, his jack-o’-lantern grin ever widening.
If I jumped from the veranda, and landed just so in the bushes, I might get away with only a broken arm or a mild ankle sprain. I backed up, grabbed at the veranda door’s handle.
“Don’t,” he said. “I won’t kill you—unless Eddie tells me to.”
I slumped against the door, momentarily defeated. “I must go to help Rosita. She expects me. She’s still the mistress of the house.”
Cormac shrugged. “You can go to her—but with Eddie. Get her to open her door.”
“She doesn’t want to see him.”
“She’s made that clear.”
Eddie must have rushed straight up to their suite, shortly after his arrival, while I was down in the kitchen. I suddenly yearned to talk with Rosita, hear the details from her in the girlish sharing of confidences we’d once had.
“This is her property. She can send you—him—away—”
Cormac’s laugh conveyed the sad truth: if Eddie wanted to see Rosita, he would. No one could stop him. Not even Rosita. The island and mansion were Rosita’s property, but Rosita was Eddie’s so long as they were married. It didn’t matter how she felt about him.
“You’re feistier than the last time I saw you,” Cormac said. His voice, as always, was rough but flat, the sound of tires slowly grinding over gravel. But his eyes flashed with disgust—the message that I didn’t deserve to be alive, let alone be feisty.
Why the McGees had him bring me—the only passenger that morning—on the yacht rather than on a skiff, I never quite figured out. Maybe because a skiff would be too dangerous in early April, when there could still be icy spots in the lake.
Or maybe it was because I’d sobbed, I should drown myself, it’s what I deserve, as Rosita held me and murmured, No, no, that’s nonsense …
In any case, at some point early that morning, Cormac Herlihy—still a cop, still wearing his police uniform and badge—had come into the McGees’ home in the swanky West End of Toledo and roughly pulled me from Rosita’s arms, saying, Boss says get this over with. We got plenty to do tonight.
Cormac had hustled me into a Model T in the circular driveway, driven me across the city to the working-class Onyx neighborhood. The night was cloudless, the moon full, the gas streetlamp for once not sputtering, and I stared through the windshield at the narrow brick bungalow that was my home. It wasn’t lavish or posh like the McGees’, but even that night, for a moment my heart swelled with pride as I stared at the front porch, the pots with the pansies I’d just planted, the pineapple plaque on the front door, which I’d put there because the old German woman next door told me that meant “welcome,” the lace curtains I’d sewn, hanging in the upstairs window to the room that had been meant to be a nursery. My first house since leaving my childhood home, the house and my life so much nicer—or so I’d thought—than what I’d left behind …
Cormac had roughly pulled me from the automobile, snarling, You’ve got ten minutes. You can stare like a whipped puppy, or pack whatever the hell you want. I’d hurried inside, the front door still unlocked from earlier, and tried not to look in the parlor as I rushed past—but I did anyway.
I packed in five minutes.
Now, Cormac lurched toward me. I pressed my back into the glass door. He grinned, taking pleasure in my fear. I’d known men like him. I’d been married to a man like him. Pony.
Well, Anthony Walker. But he went by Pony.
But I straightened my shoulders, gave him a hard look, and a small, cold smile.
His expression collapsed into annoyance. He wasn’t used to people not quaking before him. His hard, hateful eyes that morning accused me as they had on that awful night just over a year and a half before:
Murderess.
A murderess who killed her husband.