The Far Side of the Sun Read online

  “You mustn’t come, Mama. You must tell me what to do.”

  “You bein’ foolish, darlin’ heart. You know nothin’.”

  “It’s too dangerous. There are men who want to silence him.”

  Mama Keel paused. “You scared?” she asked softly.

  “Yes, I’m scared. Of course I am. I’d be crazy not to be. But I’m also scared for you. You are too . . .”—she gestured toward the door from which the boy had emerged—“too precious here. They need you.”

  Dodie knew that Mama Keel watched over a shifting pack of feral waifs and strays. She had no children of her own but her door was ever open to the island’s orphans and runaways, and behind that door there could be anything from ten to twenty young souls who clung to her. Without her, the waves would come for them.

  Mama Keel breathed hard through her broad nose.

  Dodie opened the basket purposefully. “Just tell me what to do.”

  * * *

  The door of her shack swung open at Dodie’s touch. Yet she had latched it, she was sure. Behind her the vast reaches of the Atlantic Ocean sighed, low and insistent, and threads of moonlight floated on the waves. As if nothing had changed. She stepped over the threshold. Wary, but not wary enough. The black muzzle of a gun was pointing straight at her and sent her heart spinning up into her throat.

  “Get in here. Quickly.”

  It was Morrell. He was propped up awkwardly on one elbow, sweat pouring off his face, a tiny pistol dwarfed in his hand.

  “Shut the door,” he growled, and collapsed back against the pillow, letting the gun fall to his side.

  Dodie kicked the door shut and bolted it. “Don’t ever do that to me again.”

  “I didn’t know it was you.”

  She dumped the basket on the table and started unloading it. “Has anyone else been around?”

  “No.”

  “Sure?”

  “Yes.”

  Why would he lie to her? “Have you been out of bed and opened the door?”

  He rolled his head to one side and gave her half a smile. “Yes, I’ve been out for a half-mile swim and a few handstands under the stars.”

  She tried to smile back at him but didn’t quite make it, so she busied herself with the medicines instead, smelling them, tipping ingredients into a cup, putting water from the enamel jug to boil on the kerosene stove. The shack started to fill with aromas.

  “What the hell is all that stuff?” Morrell muttered.

  “It’s native bush medicine.”

  He grimaced. “Does it work?”

  “Of course it does. Bahamians have been using these herbs for hundreds of years.” She looked up from the bowl of chopped green cerasee leaves. “Don’t worry, Mr. Morrell, they know what they’re doing. It’s often impossible to get a doctor to the hundreds of Bahamian Out Islands. They had to find alternative medicines that work, so”—she paused and walked over to his side with a small pot of what looked like rabbit pellets—“take three of these.” She smiled encouragingly and held out a cup of cerasee infusion for him to wash them down with. “They will help the pain.”

  He took them and swallowed them down, making no comment on the bitterness of the infusion. His skin had a slick sheen over it like furniture polish and Dodie could feel the heat radiating from him as she removed the towel.

  “Now, Mr. Morrell, let’s look at this wound of yours.”

  * * *

  He was tough. She’d give him that. He made no sound but watched everything she did, his hands curled into fists at his side. Dodie worked with great care. She did exactly what Mama Keel had told her. She bathed the wound, applied a pungent herbal antiseptic, and holding the raw edges of his flesh tight between her fingers, she drew them together over the slippery innards inside. A coating of stiff antiseptic paste to seal the wound finished the job. And all the time her fingers worked, she murmured to him constantly, to steady him, though she had no idea what words were coming out of her mouth.

  Painstakingly she bound him up with strips torn from her best sheet and dosed him with more of the pellets. With a flannel she gently wiped the sweat from his face and smeared cream on his bleeding lip where he had bitten a piece out of it.

  “Thank you,” he said when she’d finished. “That took courage.”

  “You’ll feel better soon. Close your eyes. Try to sleep now.”

  “You are kind.”

  “It’s Mama Keel you should be thanking.”

  Dodie plunged her hands into a bowl of warm water and scrubbed hard at the blood under her nails.

  * * *

  “What are you doing here in the Bahamas?”

  Morrell’s voice startled Dodie. She thought he was still asleep. She had continued to dose him every hour throughout the night with one of Mama Keel’s concoctions, but it was only with the first hint of dawn that the heat at last ebbed from his skin. When he opened his eyes she smiled with relief and asked, “How are you feeling?”

  “Better than last night.”

  “Good.”

  She rose from her stool at his bedside and unbolted the door. The shack was stifling and she needed to breathe in fresh sea air, so she threw it wide and sat down on the front step. Her toes touched the cool sand and she felt calmer.

  “I like it here,” she told him.

  Her eyes scanned the beach, still wearing its night shadows like a shawl. Off to the right, dawn was starting to paint the slender trunks of the palm trees gold.

  “Are you on your own here?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “No family?”

  “No.”

  Silence settled while they both listened to the easy roll of the waves, and at the far end of the bay an egret spread its shimmering white wings to catch the first thermals of the morning.

  “You’re English, aren’t you? What brought you here?” Morrell asked.

  She turned to look at him. “Why the questions?”

  “I’m interested in you.” He shook his head weakly from side to side, his hair dark with sweat. “You saved my life.”

  She could tell him to mind his own business. But she recalled the feel of the hairs of his chest, springy and full of life, when she washed the blood off them, and somehow the intimacy of that simple act linked her to him in a way she couldn’t explain.

  “I grew up in Chippenham, a rural town in England. My mother died in the influenza epidemic of 1931 when I was nine, and my father struggled after that. He’d had a bad war and my mother always said he came back from the trenches of Ypres with part of him missing. But he grew worse after her death. More of him was missing.”

  She stopped. Stared bleakly at the sea.

  “I’m real sorry about that, Dodie.”

  She shook her head, quietly moving her thoughts around. “It was the old story, the same as thousands of others before him. He took to the bottle and could never hold down a job after that.”

  “So,” Morrell continued for her, “he brought you out here for a fresh start.”

  She nodded. “When I was sixteen.”

  “But it didn’t work out?”

  “No,” she admitted, “it didn’t work out.”

  “So where is your father now?”

  “He’s dead.”

  A silence rippled through the shack and it was a long time before either spoke.

  “I’m sorry,” Morrell said again. He sighed. “Life can be tough on youngsters.”

  “So, Mr. Morrell, tell me what you are doing here. What business are you in?”

  He took his time. “You don’t want to know, ma’am.”

  “I do.”

  Outside, the sun finally burst over the horizon and set the crests of the waves on fire. Dodie watched her shins glow pink and the sand around her feet glitter like glass, and she shook her th
ick chestnut hair loose to catch the warmth of it.

  “I’m in insurance,” Morrell said. “Of a kind.”

  But something in the way he said it sent a shiver through her. “What does that mean?” she asked. “What do you insure?”

  He lifted a hand and gently tapped the side of his head. “I insure what’s in here.” He made an odd sound that at first concerned her because she thought it was a groan of pain, but she recognized it as a chuckle of amusement. “Information,” he explained.

  Dodie glanced out at the beach and her eye was caught by the information she could see there. That was the thing about sand, it cradled imprints as efficiently as wet cement, until the waves or the wind came to steal them away. In front of the shack she could clearly make out the jumble of her own hurried footprints from last night and their track off to the left. But off to the right the marks in the sand told a different story. There was another set of footprints, large and intrusive. They led straight as a poker from the water’s edge right up to her own front door and then dipped away along the tree line, where they vanished inland.

  Insurance.

  Well, Mr. Morrell, I’ve taken out my own insurance. Your dainty gun is lying wrapped in a towel, safe under my cooking pot.

  Chapter 6

  Dodie

  “Don’t let him bury my wedding ring with me, Dodie. The undertaker will only steal it.”

  They were her mother’s words. The wedding ring was a thick gold band, bought when times were good. Toward the end of her life the ring fell off her hand, her fingers were so thin.

  “And don’t let him spend it on one of his crazy schemes. Or,” she added darkly, “on his demon.”

  The demon was whiskey. Silk-smooth or rotgut, it made no difference to her father, it all went down the same slippery way. An ardent Baptist who could not say no to a drink when the devil was riding his shoulder. To be fair to him, he never asked for the ring, not once in the hard years that were to follow. But she would catch him sometimes casting sidelong glances at the band of gold that hung on a black ribbon around her neck, especially when he had the shakes real bad. But he never asked and she never offered. It was all she had left of her mother. That and her sewing machine.

  The ring had paid for this beaten-up old shack. Sometimes when the nights were blackest, she thought she could hear her mother humming in the roof timbers but it was only the wind in the thatch. Now the morning was looking better than she’d dared hope last night—the beach had remained empty and acquired no fresh footprints, and Mr. Morrell had slept quietly all morning, his breathing smooth and regular, his skin a better color despite the sweat that glistened on it.

  In the clear light of day Dodie could see him more distinctly, but even in sleep the toughness never left the set of his features and she could tell that at some point his nose had been broken. A street fighter, that’s what he was, a man who knew how to use his great fists, and yet the gentle drawl of his voice and the manner in which he had clung to her told a different tale. She was sweeping out the sand that had blown into the shack, driving it back on to the beach where it belonged, and working out what her next move should be. She needed to contact Miss Olive at the Arcadia Hotel to explain why she was not at work but she daren’t leave Morrell, not even to run to the phone box on the edge of town.

  “Young woman.”

  His voice surprised her. It was far stronger than the whisper of last night and the southern accent was more pronounced.

  “I’m Dodie,” she reminded him with a smile, pleased to see him awake and looking about him at his surroundings.

  “Well, Miss Dodie, what a right pretty home you have here.”

  It was the last thing she expected. She abandoned the broom and glanced around the room at the abundant cushions, as well as a patchwork quilt that hung on one wall. The colors were bright—kingfisher blues and hummingbird yellows, all shades of green—the colors of the island.

  “Thank you,” she said. She wasn’t used to compliments. “I made them myself.”

  His gaze fell on the treasured sewing machine in its curved box in one corner. “You made all this stuff?” He stared at the quilt on the wall, at the intricacy of it.

  She nodded.

  “It sure is beautiful.”

  “It took a while.”

  “I bet the hell it did. It’s lovely.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Where d’you learn all this pretty stitching?”

  “My mother taught me.”

  “That’s nice,” he murmured. “Real nice.” In the same quiet voice he added, “If I die, tell no one. Especially not the police. Just chuck me in a hole somewhere and forget about me.”

  She sat down on the stool by the bedside. “What happened?” she asked. “Who did this to you?”

  Slowly he raised the hand that had been lying across his stomach and pressed his forefinger on Dodie’s forehead, right between her eyes.

  “You don’t want dirt inside that lovely clean and shiny mind of yours.”

  He withdrew his finger but the imprint of it remained on her skin.

  Clean?

  Shiny?

  You don’t want dirt inside.

  Too late for that, Mr. Morrell.

  * * *

  Dodie was picking beans in her vegetable patch when she heard the tin rattle. She dropped them in panic and raced barefoot back to the front of the shack. She snatched up a spade as she ran, wielding it like a club, and lost her battered old straw sun hat, so that the midday sun landed like a blow on top of her head. But when she reached the door it was still locked.

  “I’m here,” she yelled as she pulled the key from her pocket and kicked open the door. “I’m here.”

  She had given Mr. Morrell a tin can with a handful of stones inside and told him to shake it like a rattlesnake if he needed her. She was just popping round the back to pick some beans to cook for him for his lunch. She’d locked the door. Taken no chances this time. Now the tin had summoned her. Sweat cut a path down her back as she burst into the shack, but at first glance nothing had changed. Morrell was exactly where she had left him. He was still stretched out on the bed, a single cotton sheet draped over him, an enamel mug of Mama Keel’s brew on the stool beside him. But one hand was clutching the tin can and banging it like a death knell.

  Dodie saw the blood. Scarlet threads of it creeping from under his hand, through the bandages and twisting into the fibers of the sheet. Thick bile shot up into her mouth. He had talked of her sewing and pointed at her quilt, and was about to eat the beans she’d picked for him. He couldn’t be sick again. But she snatched a clean towel and hurried to his side, lifting his hand and sliding the towel beneath it.

  “Pressure,” she whispered.

  But instead his hand grasped her wrist. She could feel the slickness of the blood between their skin, and the smell was back, stifling the room.

  “It’s all right,” she said calmly, “we stopped it before, we can stop it again.”

  But he was shaking all over, and when she looked into his eyes, there was something different in them, something that she couldn’t bear to look at.

  “I’ll get the medicine,” she said quickly.

  But still his hand gripped her wrist and she could not bring herself to break the contact in case the tiny spark that was keeping this man alive blew out in the shuffle of air as she moved. She pressed down on the towel to stem the flow.

  “Dodie.”

  “I’m right here.”

  “Give me . . .” His voice was a thin whisper. “Give me my shoes.”

  “Your shoes? But you’re going nowhere, Mr. Morrell, you’re far too weak to—”

  “My shoes.”

  She bent and reached under the bed for the white loafers. Brown speckles of blood marred their surface.

  “A knife,” he said.
<
br />   “What?”

  “I need a knife.”

  She didn’t argue. She fetched a knife from a drawer but his fingers were trembling so hard he couldn’t control the blade and pushed it back into her hand.

  “Pull up the insole,” he muttered.

  She lifted the insole with the tip of the knife and took out a small square of folded paper that lay under it. On it in a bold hand was written a name and an address: Sanford, Bradenham House, West Bay Street, Nassau.

  “My jacket,” he whispered.

  “Mr. Morrell, I really think you should lie quietly. This isn’t helping you. Please keep still.”

  He fixed his eyes firmly on her face. “If anything happens to me . . .” A grimace touched his bone-white lips. “In my jacket . . . please.”

  She picked up the crumpled jacket, stiff with dried blood, and felt something heavy in one corner. This time he didn’t even attempt to do the work himself.

  “There,” he said, “open it.”

  She did as he asked, opening a cleverly concealed pocket. Onto her lap tumbled two gold coins, gleaming in the muted light within the shack. She stared at them.

  “One for you and one for Mrs. Sanford.”

  “No, Mr. Morrell.” Her tone was sharp. “Forget about the money, just get well. I’ll boil up more of Mama Keel’s herbs to fix a tisane for you to—”

  A fragile cough slipped through his lips. That was all.

  “Mr. Morrell?” Dodie leaned closer.

  Blood spurted from his nose, a trail of scarlet that stained his lips, and his eyes rolled up in his head.

  No.

  No, no, no.

  “Mr. Morrell?” Her fingers touched his cheek. It was slippery with sweat.

  Please, no, please no.

  “Can you hear me?”