The Bungalow (36 page)

Genevieve arrived at our hotel room at three o’clock. Jennifer let her in, and she set her bag down on the desk. “You’re never going to believe what I found.”

“What?” I said eagerly.

Genevieve sat down on the bed beside me. “The inscription on the knife,” she said. “I looked it up.” She shook her head in amazement. “It doesn’t belong to Lance, Anne.”

“My God,” I said, shaking my head. “Then who?”

She retrieved her notebook from her bag and opened it to the first page. “It may come as a frightening surprise,” she said. “The knife was issued to Colonel Matthew Donahue, the commanding officer of the entire base.” She looked at me for an explanation. “There must be some mistake.”

I got it all wrong.
“No mistake,” I said, sitting up straighter. Images from the past ran through my mind—of Kitty, crying on her bed; of Atea, confused and distraught the night of the Christmas service; of Westry’s bloodied face in the men’s barracks.
Of course it wasn’t Lance.
I could see that now. The colonel had been behind it all, every bit of it.

Genevieve looked confused. “No one will ever believe that a commanding officer, a respected one, at that, could have committed such a brutal crime.” She paused to retrieve her notebook from her bag. “The only way we can know for sure, the only way we can get our proof, is if we find the American nurse he was involved with and talk to her. Maybe she’s the missing piece in all of this. The knife is much too corroded for fingerprints, and the islanders who are old enough to remember won’t talk. Believe me, I’ve tried.” She shrugged in defeat. “What are the chances that we could get that nurse on the phone? Not likely, huh?”

“Maybe,” I said quietly, pausing to consider what I was about to say. “I happen to know the woman.”

Genevieve’s eyes widened. “You do?”

“Yes,” I said. “Well, I did, anyway. She was a very old friend of mine. My
best
friend, actually. We traveled to the island together, in fact.” I paused to survey her face, so like Kitty’s. Would it be too late for them?

“What’s her name?”

“Kitty. Kitty Morgan.” I sighed. “Of course, I don’t know what became of her. We haven’t spoken since, well, it’s been a very long time.”

Genevieve’s eyes lit up. “I know that name, Kitty. Yes. I believe I took down her information from the staff roster records for the infirmary. At one point I looked up her phone number, though I never called—didn’t see any reason to at the time.” She thumbed through her notebook, then paused on a page. “Yes, here it is,” she continued. “Kitty Morgan Hampton. She lives in California now—well, at least she did two years ago. Anne, would you call her?”

I felt weak all over. “Me?”

“Yes,” she said, looking at me expectantly.

“But this is your project,” I said. “You should be the one.”

Genevieve shook her head. “She’s more likely to talk to you than . . . a stranger.”

I thought of Kitty’s coldness to me in our final month on the island, the way she’d acted toward Westry—the way she’d put herself between us, severing our love forever. No, I couldn’t speak to her.

I felt Jennifer’s chin on my shoulder. “Time changes people,” she whispered. “You loved her once—don’t you want to hear her side of the story?”

I did love her, yes. And maybe still. Her memory still affected me, still moved me, after all these years. “All right,” I conceded. “I’ll make the call.”

Jennifer handed me the phone and I hesitantly punched in the numbers written in Genevieve’s notebook.

“Hello?” Kitty’s voice was raspier now, but the tone was still the same. I froze, unable to find my voice.

“Hello?” she said again. “If this is a telemarketer—”

“Kitty?” I finally said in a squeak.

“Yes?”

“Kitty,” my voice cracked, and tears began streaming down my cheeks. “Kitty, it’s Anne.”

“Anne?”

“Yes!” I cried. “Anne Calloway, Godfrey.”

“My God, Anne,” she said. “Is it really you?”

“Yes, it’s really me.”

Jennifer handed me a tissue, and I blew my nose quietly, just as I heard Kitty do on the other end of the line.

“Anne, I—I—” Her voice faltered. “I don’t know where to begin. How are you?”

“It’s funny,” I said. “I’m not sure how to answer that question after all these years. Where do I start?”

“Well,” Kitty said softly. The edge in her voice, the one that had shaken me so in Paris, was gone now. The years had softened her tone, and perhaps her heart. “I can start by saying I’m sorry.”

“Kitty, I—”

“No, let me finish,” she said. “I am not well, Anne. I may not be able to say this to you again, so I must say it now.” She paused, as if to collect her thoughts. “I should have reached out to you years ago. I don’t know why I didn’t. I’m ashamed.”

“Oh, Kitty,” I said, wiping another tissue under my eyes to sop up the tears seeping out.

“I regret everything about the way I behaved on the island, and in Paris,” she continued. “I froze after the birth. I sank into a dark place I didn’t understand. I know now it was depression—what they call postpartum depression, my daughter tells me. But I—”

I looked at Genevieve watching quietly from the chair near the desk, so like Kitty in more ways than I could count: beautiful, vibrant, impulsive. “Kitty, you have a daughter?”

“Well, yes, I have three—well, four. . . .” Her voice trailed off. “I married a good man, you’ll be happy to know. I met him in Paris after the war, a Marine. We moved to California. It’s been a nice life.” The line went quiet for a moment. “Has your life been nice, Anne? I’ve often thought of you.”

“It has,” I said quietly. “In almost every way.”

Kitty sighed. “Anne, there’s something I need to tell you, about Westry.”

How can his name still stir up such emotion in me? Such pain?
I closed my eyes tightly.

“He talked about you incessantly in Paris,” she said. “He was always asking about you and hoping you’d come.”

“I did come,” I said. “You remember, of course.”

“Yes.” I could hear Kitty’s shame, feel it ricocheting across the Pacific. “I was jealous of what you had,” she said.

“So you intercepted his letters to me?”

Kitty gasped. “You know?”

“I only recently found out,” I said.

“Anne, I’m ashamed of myself,” she said tearfully. “To think I may have changed the course of your life by my actions. I can hardly bear it.”

In an instant, the anger that had churned in my heart lost its steam. “You have my forgiveness,” I said. “What you said earlier about time running out—I feel that too.”

“I still have my pin,” she said after a pause. “The one I gave you at the Cabaña Club. It’s in my jewelry box. Anne, I look at it often and think of you.”

I remembered the exact moment she’d given me the piece, her gesture of enduring friendship. I closed my eyes and could immediately picture the little box wrapped in crisp blue paper and tied with a gold ribbon. The smoke of the Cabaña Club swirled around us. If only that pin could have held our bond. Or maybe it had. I retrieved it from my pocket and turned it over in my hand, eyeing the engraving.

“I still have mine, too, Kitty,” I said. “I have it right here.”

“How I’d love to see you again,” Kitty said. “Where are you? Seattle?”

“No,” I said. “I’m in Bora-Bora.”

“
Bora-Bora?
”

“Yes, I’m here with a woman who’s researching a crime that was committed on the island, a murder.”

Kitty was quiet for a moment. “You’re referring to Atea, aren’t you?”

“Yes,” I said. “You remember.”

“Of course I remember.”

I decided not to ask her how she knew of the story. That didn’t matter now. “I wanted to ask you some questions,” I said cautiously, “if you don’t mind.”

“Go ahead.”

“We never spoke of who the father of your baby was,” I continued. “I’d always assumed it was Lance, but now we have evidence linking the murder of Atea to—”

“To the colonel?”

“Yes,” I said. “You know?”

“I do,” she explained. “And so did Westry.”

“I don’t understand.”

“He was protecting me, Anne,” she said, “by not telling. Before the murder, he’d gotten wind of my situation, even before you. He saw us together and overheard a conversation on the beach. Westry also knew the colonel had had similar encounters with island women. I was headstrong and naive. Westry warned me about him, but I wouldn’t listen.”

I recalled the brutal beating in the barracks. “He threatened Westry, didn’t he?”

“Yes,” Kitty continued. “The colonel warned him that if he tried to intervene or report any of it to his superiors on the mainland, he’d do something terrible to me.”

“My God, Kitty!” I exclaimed. “So by keeping quiet about Atea’s murder, Westry was protecting
you
?”

“Yes,” she said. “Looking back, I think I was in more danger than I ever knew. Westry spared me from all of that.”

I sighed. “It’s why you began to develop feelings for him, isn’t it?”

“I suppose,” Kitty said honestly. “After being treated so terribly by men all my life, here was a man, an honest man, who cared, who wanted to protect me. And yet, he was already in love with my best friend.”

I gazed out the window to the shore, remembering the way Kitty had looked at Westry. I couldn’t blame her for loving him.

“Anyway,” she continued, “Atea was murdered because he got her pregnant, and she refused to keep quiet, just like the other women.”

“The other women?”

“Yes,” she said. “There were at least two others, one barely fourteen.” She paused in the wake of such a disturbing revelation. “I should have come forward about this long ago, but I’ve had to move on. And after I heard of his death, I decided that he would burn in hell anyway.”

“When did he die?”

“Nineteen sixty-three,” she said. “A heart attack, alone in a San Francisco hotel room.”

I sat up straighter, looking at Jennifer, then at Genevieve. “It doesn’t mean justice can’t still be served,” I said. “He’s a decorated war veteran. We’ll have the military revoke his status posthumously. I’ll see to that.”

Genevieve nodded in agreement.
How will she feel when she realizes the man at the center of this evil was her own father?
I took a deep breath, for what I was about to say would change everything, for both of them.

“Kitty,” I said, gesturing for Genevieve to come over to the phone. “There’s someone I’d like you to speak to. Her name is Genevieve. I think you two have more in common than you know. Her daughter, for instance . . . well, I think you two should talk.”

Genevieve gave me a confused look, but reached for the phone and smiled. “Ms. Hampton?”

I walked away from the bed, and gestured for Jennifer to follow. She nodded knowingly, and we closed the door quietly behind us.

“That may have been the best thing that could have come from all of this,” Jennifer said, smiling at me in the hallway.

We walked arm in arm down the stairs to the open-air lobby, where we sat together watching the waves crash fiercely on the shore, catching sunbathers off guard and scattering them with sea-soaked towels up to the higher bank. I marveled at the sight. It was as if the island knew that justice had come and was cleansing its shores of the evil.

I ran my finger along the chain of my locket, wondering if what Tita had said could be true.
The curse she spoke of, will it now be broken?
Only time would tell.

T
he phone rang in the living room, and I groaned. Answering it meant standing up, leaving my bed, and feeling my bones ache with every step. But the persistent ringing enticed me to make the journey. One step, and then another. My legs ached, but they moved, and I reached the phone in time to pick it up and utter an out-of-breath hello into the receiver.

“Grandma, it’s me,” chirped Jennifer. “Today’s the day.”

More than three months had passed since we’d returned from the island. The trip had been satisfying in more ways than I’d expected, and yet I wasn’t prepared for the emotional exhaustion that persisted upon our return. While I’d made peace for Genevieve, Atea, Kitty, and perhaps even for the island, I had left with a tsunami in my own heart, with only whispers of Westry and a book of old letters to cling to.

“Grandma?”

“I’m here, dear,” I said into the phone. “I’m just not feeling like myself today.”

“But you’re still coming, right?”

“Oh, honey,” I said, sinking into the sofa before pulling a blanket over my icy feet. “I don’t think I can.”

Jennifer’s silence pierced my heart.
She accompanied me on my journey and stood by me with such compassion—how can I abandon her on this day?

“You can do without me, can’t you, dear?” I asked, rubbing my aching back. Jennifer had turned in her final article a week prior, and the newspaper had gotten wind of the project, as did the university’s public relations team.

“Oh, Grandma,” she said. “I know it’s a lot to ask, especially since you haven’t been feeling well, but I would love it if you came. So many people will be there, and I can hardly stand to face them alone. I’m so nervous. It would be comforting to have you there. I can pick you up in an hour. We’ll park close so you won’t have to walk far.”

I forced my legs out in front of me and stood up.
I can do this. For Jennifer.
“Well,” I said, taking a deep breath, “then I will come. For you, dear.”

“Oh Grandma, thank you!” she exclaimed. “I’ll be over soon.”

I set the phone down and reached for the letter from Genevieve on the coffee table. It had arrived yesterday, and I’d already read it a dozen times.