And Sam and Evelyn. When his wife’s heartbeat remains ordinary, and a tiny foot twitches against his palm, he eases himself from his haven and pads across the floorboards to the door. Lifts his dressing gown from its hook. Slips through the door and down the hallway to check on the children.
There was a moment, as he lay in the dirt of the road to Cocoa Beach, when he thought he might never see his own daughter.
He remembers how his mouth tasted of dirt and blood and salt. How he lay there without moving, aware only that something terrible had happened; something more terrible than the injuries to his body, of which he was aware without knowing, exactly, which parts of him were injured, and how. More terrible than the night that surrounded him, and the dirt and blood in his mouth, and the appalling confusion in his head.
Something had happened to Virginia. Samuel. Samuel had taken her away. Driven off. Beaten him.
He remembers how he spat out the grit and the blood, the awful taste of copper that made him sick. How his stomach heaved. How he lifted himself on his elbow and vomited into the earth, and by this action was made aware that his injury, at least the primary one, had something to do with his shoulder. That his head was sticky with blood, and he had lost the top part of his ear to Samuel’s bullet.
He remembers how his heart beat wildly, but not because of this new awareness, the shock of discovering one’s blood, realizing one’s wounds. His heart beat wildly because Virginia was gone, Virginia had driven away with Samuel—he remembers the Ford, the smell and strength of Samuel heaving him over the side of the car and into the road—and Samuel would take her to Lydia, who had escaped from her prison—that much Simon learned from Marshall, in that brief telegram two days earlier, just before leaving Cuba, sending him into a frenzy of worry—and Lydia would do what Lydia had always done. Lydia would punish him, through Virginia.
Through his daughter.
He remembers how he made a fist and cried out again, a keening lament, and because the thought of Evelyn was nearly unbearable, he did the thing that hurt less: rose up on one hand, and then, with great effort, to his knees. And then, greater effort still, broken ribs straining under the necessary expansion of his chest, climbed to his feet, popped his dislocated shoulder into place—terrible agony—and listened carefully for the sound of the ocean.
How, when he found it, he set off in the opposite direction. Toward Cocoa. Toward Virginia and Evelyn.
Because he could not possibly die without seeing his daughter, just once.
He could not die without finding some way to save her.
She’s safe now. Lying on her bed, tucked under blankets, clutching a doll to her cheek. The window’s open a few inches, screened against the damned mosquitoes, because Simon believes firmly in the virtues of fresh air. How she’s grown in that year—now nearly two—since he first saw her! Bouncing against Lydia’s hip, framed by the terrible billowing smoke that poured from the windows of Maitland. So small and flushed and confused. Crying out Mama! over and over, as he jumped free from the Packard, Clara shouting out something he couldn’t hear—Clara, who had encountered him on the street outside the hotel, who had driven him to Maitland while he drank from a flask of rum and bandaged his own wounds—and then Evelyn’s little head snapping sideways as Lydia slapped her.
That cheek now rests on a clean, white pillow, and the beautiful dark hair is brushed and shiny, the skin washed pink, the mouth full and twitching slightly under the influence of some dream. He doesn’t quite remember how he saved her in that terrible dawn—he knows he attacked Lydia, he knows he snatched Evelyn away, he knows Lydia pulled a gun out of nowhere and threatened to shoot his daughter, he knows Samuel then took the gun and shot his lover—but these are details that were told to him later. In his memory the entire brief exchange is nothing but a grotesque blur, and maybe it’s better that way. Maybe it’s better that he only remembers the relief of collapsing in the dirt, clutching Evelyn to his breast, and looking up to find Virginia staggering across the portico with Portia and little Sam. Smoke pouring out behind her, bloodied and brave and alive, the kind of woman worth waiting for. Fighting for. Dying for. Living for.
He visits his son next. Sam always sleeps on his stomach, crosswise, the sheets and blankets long kicked from the bed. Simon straightens him out and tucks the bedclothes back around him. Smooths his hair and says he loves him. The boy’s been asking about England lately, out of the blue. Remembers the old house in Cornwall, the gardens where he used to play. Sometimes Simon wonders if they should go back and visit, whether Sam maybe deserves to choose whether he will be a Cornishman or an American. The other day, over breakfast, Clara mentioned that Penderleath has gone up for sale again—Clara and Portia now jointly own the hotel and the shipping business, he figures it’s their right, while he and Virginia and the children spend much of their time at Maitland, tending to the orchards and the rebuilding of the house—and Virginia turned to him, eyebrow raised, meaning What do you think? Should we buy it, she meant. Should we do all those things you dreamed of, once, when you brought me to your home all those years ago.
He shrugged and went back to his newspaper, but his pulse beat hard, his mind teemed with possibility. Last night, as they settled into bed, she asked him again, this time outright, and he said, You decide, it’s your money, and she kissed him and said no, it’s our money, we’ll decide together. And it seemed to him, in that instant, that his heart might actually burst, that there was no containing so much love in so small and human an organ.
On the other hand, Florida suits him. He loves the unending warmth and the rampant way things grow under its sunshine and its abundant rain. Loves the way he can make love to his wife in the secret garden he planted for her, the way the sea beats against the sand outside his door in Cocoa Beach. How he rebuilt his marriage here, brick by brick; how he taught Virginia how to swim in the surf, and do you know, that was when she returned to him at last: swimming together at midnight under a full, bright moon. She came out of the sea, long-limbed and silvery, covered in nothing but salt water and moonshine, laughing for the first time in ages, collapsing in his outstretched arms. She looked up at him, and he looked at her, and it was time. Time to be man and wife again. Time to lie down together and remember what it meant to be happy.
A few months later she was carrying a child.
He realizes he has fallen into a reverie, standing there in Sam’s bedroom staring at the glittering ocean outside the window, and he shakes his head and turns for the door. As he does so, he catches sight of something, a bit of movement through the glass, and he recalls the instant of waking, a quarter of an hour ago. What made him wake.
He steps to the window and looks out. Nothing. The moon—an old, waning crescent—has disappeared from view, but the sun is just starting to illuminate the horizon. To give shape to the waves and the stretch of unmarred beach.
No. Not unmarred. As he stands there, eyes adjusting to the darkness, he can just pick out a line of footprints, a double line, along the plateau washed smooth by the tide during the night. He can’t tell which way they’re pointing—Sammy’s room is along the side of the house—or where they came from. How long they’ve been there.
But he does know that his brother, Samuel, disappeared that night at Maitland, after shooting Lydia through the heart, and nobody’s seen him since.
He leaves the room and hurries down the hall to the staircase. In the cupboard near the door, on the highest shelf, he keeps his old service pistol in a locked box. He unlocks it now, a matter of seconds, and looks out the window. He has no patience for danger, no tolerance whatsoever for any kind of menace to this peace, this fragile joy, this precious family he has finally found after so many years of loneliness. If he has to kill someone, he will bloody well kill someone.
Movement. The corner of the porch.
He leaves the window and creeps to the door. Lifts the latch on the pistol. Heart thuds in his ear. Skin prickles.
A soft knock sounds on the door. A
soft shout.
His name?
“Who’s there?” he calls. Back against the wall.
Through the night, through the sturdy walls of his rebuilt villa on the Atlantic shore, comes a single word.
Marshall.
So he sighs and lowers the pistol and opens the door a crack, though he doesn’t replace the safety latch on his pistol until he sees the large, brown head of Agent Marshall bristling in the dawn.
“What the devil,” he says.
“Sorry to turn up so early in the day, old boy,” Marshall says.
“Think nothing of it.”
Marshall ignores his dry tone. Sticks his boot in the doorway. “I need your help. Can we come in?”
“Simon! What’s the matter?”
Simon turns swiftly to find his wife standing in the middle of the stairs, awkward with child beneath an enormous dressing gown. Her right hand grips a long, slim object that appears to be Sam’s favorite baseball bat.
He turns back to Marshall and says, “We?”
Marshall pushes the door open, and now Simon can see that he’s holding not a pistol of his own but someone’s hand: a person who now comes into view from the shadows of the porch. A pale, sharp-faced woman in shapeless clothes, her weary blue eyes tipped up at the corners. Her bobbed red hair shining in the dawn. Bruise along one side of her face. Small, young girl-child blinking sleepily from the folds of her skirt.
Simon stares, open-mouthed. Nearly drops the pistol. Behind him, Virginia gasps, and not even this sound of shock from his pregnant wife can detach his gaze from Marshall’s remarkable companions.
Marshall frowns, looks back at the woman, and clears his throat.
“I don’t suppose you’ve got somewhere to hide them?” he asks.
Author’s Note
Somewhere in the middle of writing this book—in fact, just as I was about to send Virginia off to her husband’s plantation to recuperate from a blow to the head—I discovered that Maitland Plantation actually existed. My in-laws had recently sold their house and were sorting through all the vast accumulation of books, photographs, and family heirlooms, and I waltzed into the kitchen just as my mother-in-law was organizing her parents’ letters. I picked one up at random. It was postmarked from Winter Park, Florida, in 1932. Carola Dommerich (faithful readers of my books will recognize that last name) had just arrived at someplace called Maitland and wrote to tell her then-fiancé about the journey.
“What’s Maitland?” I asked my mother-in-law.
“A citrus plantation in Florida, owned by my grandfather. Sold off when he died.”
It isn’t often that writers receive such signs from above, so I obediently set out to transform Maitland Plantation into the beating heart of this book, and its owner a devoted horticulturalist. It was as if I’d found the key to his soul: until then, I wasn’t completely sure if Simon would turn out to be (in my editor’s words) the “goodie” or the “baddie.” Several months later, when I visited Winter Park for a bookstore signing, I noticed the name “Maitland” on the map nearby, nestled comfortably among the suburban streets.
Nearly all of the characters in this book are purely fictional, though the Ashley Gang did in fact exist, terrorizing law-abiding Floridians during the early Prohibition era, until they were massacred in an ambush at Sebastian’s Inlet in 1924.
A final historical note: I based Portia Bertram’s experience at Radcliffe on that of Zora Neale Hurston, who was also raised in Florida, at Barnard College, although Hurston persevered and earned a BA in Anthropology in 1928. In fact, a number of extraordinary African-American women came of age in the Everglades State during the early part of the century, founding colleges and newspapers and fighting for racial equality. I like to think that Miss Bertram may have a fascinating life ahead of her, as this particular chapter of it comes to an end.
Acknowledgments
I gave my formidable editor, Rachel Kahan, early warning that Cocoa Beach was proving a Very Troublesome Manuscript. The plot kept growing and transforming, throwing off shoots, like the gothic Florida vegetation itself. The central feint of the narrative had so many facets. The main characters—all of them survivors of deep trauma—were deeply reluctant to make their true selves known to me. Parts of the book were written and rewritten so many times, I couldn’t even remember where I’d started. This had never happened to me! I wailed. It’s all supposed to fall in place at the end!
So Rachel took the draft home and did what all the best editors do: she found what was good (much more than I thought, thank goodness) and told me what wasn’t working, and how she thought I might fix it. I took the file back, followed her advice, found a few flashes of precious insight, delved deeper into my characters’ human souls, and rewrote the ending entirely. If you enjoyed Cocoa Beach at all, you have Rachel to thank. Send flowers. Or chocolate. (She loves chocolate.)
My deep appreciation goes as well to the entire William Morrow team—Tavia Kowalchuk, Lauren Truskowski, Kate Schafer, and Liate Stehlik, among many others—who turn pixels into books and send them into the world. My copyeditor was tasked with watching out for “dead rabbits”—my personal term for the bits accidentally left behind when you (ahem) keep changing the plot—in addition to the usual proofreading and fact-checking, and I thank her gratefully, while accepting full responsibility for anything overlooked.
My agent, Alexandra Machinist of ICM, already knows how much I love and appreciate her, but it never hurts to remind her. Her ridiculously capable assistant, Hillary Jacobson, has saved my skin on multiple occasions.
Throughout this challenging process, the love and support of my husband and children kept me writing on, in music school waiting rooms and soccer sidelines, and I am forever grateful to them.
And to you, my readers, whose kind comments shore up my confidence over the trickiest of narrative hurdles, and remind me why I write these stories in the first place.
About the Author
A graduate of Stanford University with an MBA from Columbia, Beatriz Williams spent several years in New York and London hiding her early attempts at fiction, first on company laptops as a communications strategy consultant, and then as an at-home producer of small persons, before her career as a writer took off. She lives with her husband and four children near the Connecticut shore.
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Also by Beatriz Williams
The Wicked City
A Certain Age
Along the Infinite Sea
Tiny Little Thing
The Secret Life of Violet Grant
A Hundred Summers
Overseas
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
cocoa beach. Copyright © 2017 by Beatriz Williams. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins Publishers.
Cover design by Mumtaz Mustafa
Cover photographs by Ilina Simeonova; © Bigstock (background)
first edition
Digital Edition JUNE 2017 ISBN: 9780062405005
Print ISBN: 978-0-06-240498-5
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Beatriz Williams, Cocoa Beach
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