peculiar. The way it is in dreams.
But I wasn’t made for waiting. Some people can wait around forever in the face of bad news, putting off the inevitable, insisting on living in a world that doesn’t really exist, but I can’t. I stepped forward and yanked the thick brown parcel from the bottom of the stack, toppling the envelopes, and sure enough it was from New York, all right, from the headquarters of Metropolitan magazine on Madison Avenue, sent by airmail at considerable expense. Miss Brown—Lightfoot’s secretary—she always knotted that string but good. I carried the parcel into the office and found the scissors in the drawer. Snip, snip. The string fell away. I tore the paper to reveal the latest issue of Metropolitan—hot off the press, as they say, not even yet present on an actual newsstand—and flipped to the “Lady of Nassau” column on the inside back cover.
And it was no more than I expected, really. Because while my Remington and I had composed a brilliant column on the Burma Road riot last month, clickety-clack, had quoted from the duke’s radio address, had described the scene and snapped a photograph of the smoke and ruin the next morning, called it “Now Is the Summer of Our Discontent,” I had also taken the precaution of sending along an alternate column. An alternate June, in which Nancy Oakes’s elopement with Alfred de Marigny occupied every imagination, and that was all that mattered.
And thank goodness for this particular precaution. Thank goodness I had lain awake all night after writing the Burma Road column, heart smacking, and counted up how many dollars might remain in Lulu’s coffers if dear old Daddy decided not to run her column that month. Thank goodness I’d risen at dawn with the damned songbirds and rattled off the usual tittle-tattle, the awful scandal, the whispers, and sent it off to Madison Avenue for Lightfoot to weigh against the first. Thank goodness.
Because, according to her column in the upcoming issue of Metropolitan, it seemed the Lady of Nassau had never heard of Burma Road, had never wandered outside on a hot morning, the first of June, and discovered a riot. In the July 1942 issue of Metropolitan magazine, she had nothing to talk about but heiresses and playboys.
From between pages eighty-two and eighty-three a check fluttered to the floor, made out to Leonora Randolph in the amount of two hundred dollars. Thank goodness.
Because it was Saturday, the bank was closed. I tucked the check in my desk drawer and locked it—not that an enterprising thief couldn’t crowbar the thing to smithereens in a jiffy—and considered the clock. Quarter past one. At least five hours remained before the evening got under way, before I would freshen up and dress, select my shoes and my pocketbook, and head to Lady Annabelle’s for the dinner party before moving on to Emerald Beach, where the RAF officers would surely be dancing until midnight. After that, who knew? I was the Lady of Nassau, after all. Saturday nights were part of my job. Two hundred smackeroos to swan around paradise and flirt with the flyboys, flatter the flutterbys, you couldn’t sneeze at that.
I went in the kitchen and poured myself a glass of lemonade from the pitcher in the icebox. Drank it outside, where a merciful cocoanut palm shaded the garden table. It was the time of day when you escaped your insufferable bungalow, when you made your way to your cabana at one of the beach clubs, Cable or Emerald or someplace, and took in whatever limp breeze the ocean offered you. That, too, was part of my job. People dropped the most delicious tidbits on the beach, when they were bored out of their skulls and halfway to sunstroke. Overhead, an airplane droned toward Oakes Field, louder and louder, some flyboy in training, the original cause of all our discontent, after all. At Oakes Field, at the airfield taking shape on the other side of the island, along Burma Road connecting them, the men had gone back to work under the terrible sun, five shillings a day plus lunch. Bay Street had repaired itself and returned to its ordinary rhythms. I finished my lemonade and rose to clean the empty glass in the sink. When I had returned the glass, clean and dry, to the kitchen cabinet, I went to the telephone and dialed the number on the scrap of paper Thorpe had given me last December.
“How’s the arm?” he said,