I remember looking away and thinking, Well, that’s that. I can’t return home, not ever. She’ll have it out of me, one way or another, and once the deed was committed to words, once it floated free of my mouth and into the atmosphere, it became truth. I had killed my husband with my own hand and a .22 caliber revolver I’d procured myself and hidden in the bedside table. I had killed Thomas Randolph. So my mother and I walked away from that cemetery without saying a word to each other, not a blessed word. She’d returned to my childhood nest in Great Neck, and I’d found a room in a cheap hotel in Murray Hill, and I hadn’t seen her since.

Come to think of it, maybe that was why I felt this shiver of memory as we sped along West Bay Street. Why the smell of leaves returned to me, the rotting earth, the fear, the breeze that was nothing like the tropical draft that swept against us from the road. Not fear or premonition, or anything like an echo from one husband to the other. It was the opposite. I recalled Tommy’s funeral because at that moment, standing before his grave, I’d decided I never would confess. I never would tell a living soul what had happened in Bakersfield.

Surely no person existed whom I could trust like that.

When we came to my bungalow, Thorpe stopped the engine and dismounted to help me from the sidecar. The heat billowed from the asphalt, the wind sang. The surf was picking up; you could hear the noise all the way from the road.

To my surprise, the doorknob turned before I had the chance to insert the latchkey. “Hello?” I called.

“Miss Lulu?”

“Veryl!” I went down the hall, just as she emerged from the study, duster in hand. “You’re still here? Aren’t you supposed to be finishing up at the Prince George?”

“They give me the day off,” she said. “Why, what that on you finger?”

I looked at my left hand and saw, rather to my shock, a slim gold band adorned with a row of tiny diamonds. “I got married.”

Veryl put her hand to her heart and took a step backward.

“You see, Thorpe came home last night, as I’m sure you noticed, and he asked me to marry him—well, didn’t exactly ask—”

“Oh, Lord, Miss Lulu.”

“I’m still rather shocked, myself.”

“Oh, Lord. Where he at?”

“Putting the motorcycle out back.”

I went into the kitchen and pulled a bottle of champagne from the icebox.

“Miss Lulu?” said Veryl, from the doorway. “That fellow be back here today.”

“Which fellow?”

“The one be giving you they letters.”

I turned from the icebox. “What did you say to him?”

“I say you at the canteen, be home after lunch.”