Free Murder Under the Palms by Stefanie Matteson

thought I owed it to Celia to give our marriage one last chance, and I knew that if I saw you …” He looked back at her and his voice trailed off.
    “You don’t have to explain,” she told him. “I didn’t expect to hear from you.” He had made it clear that he felt an obligation to try to work things out with his wife. She smiled at him and then quoted a line from their song: “‘As Columbus announced when he knew he was bounced, It was swell, Isabelle, swell!’”
    “Touché,” he said.
    Below them, the guests had started to drift out onto the patio at the foot of the gangway to smoke. A few could be seen crossing South Ocean Boulevard to the beachfront cabana that went with the house, no doubt to admire the view of the crescent moon over the sea.
    Occasionally a car or a chauffeured limousine would pull into the driveway that ran alongside the tall hedge that screened the property from its neighbor, the headlights illuminating the figures gathered on the patio.
    Standing there, Charlotte remembered how dreamlike that voyage had seemed, the sense of timelessness. Every day the clocks had been stopped for sixty minutes, with the result that one never knew what time it was. Some passengers were on Paris time, some on New York time, some in between.
    And because of that timeless quality, what a shock it had been when they’d sighted the Nantucket lightship in the fog early that last morning. It was an anchored ship that had been painted red as a kind of lighthouse, and the first sign that they had made it home, that the dream was over.
    “‘It was swell, Isabelle,’” said Eddie, still looking at her.
    She nodded and looked into his eyes. She felt that same way now, as if she were on a cruise. The only trouble was that she had no idea what their destination was.
    Thinking back to that last morning, she remembered how relieved the other passengers had been. For them the lightship had meant the end of a dangerous crossing, not the end of a love affair. Six hours later they’d passed the Ambrose light at the entrance to the port of New York, and they were home.
    “We came so close to meeting so many times,” she said. “I always thought that fate must have been conspiring to keep us apart. Remember that awards dinner in Chicago? You left only two minutes before I arrived.”
    He nodded. “I didn’t find out that you’d been there until later,” he said. He deposited their empty champagne glasses on the tray of a passing waiter, then placed his hands on the railing, his fingers tapping out a rhythm.
    She remembered how his fingers had always been tapping, tapping. Even then he’d had music in his soul.
    For a few minutes they watched the guests coming and going below as they exchanged anecdotes about all the times they had just missed one another.
    Among the guests below were Paul and Dede, who, after lingering for a moment on the patio, headed down the driveway toward the beach. Charlotte watched for a moment until they disappeared down the path that led through a thicket of sea grapes to the cabana on the other side of the road.
    Eddie placed his hand over hers on the railing. “Like ships passing in the night,” he said of their missed encounters.
    Charlotte noticed that there were scars on the back of his right hand and wrist. With the forefinger of her free hand, she gently touched the scar on either side of his sleek gold wristwatch. “A burn?” she asked.
    He pulled up the sleeve of his dress shirt. The scars ran up his forearm almost to his elbow. “They’re from the Normandie . I was very lucky my fingers didn’t get burned. If they had, I might not ever have been able to play again.”
    It took Charlotte a moment to grasp what he was saying. “You were on the Normandie when it burned?” she asked, astonished.
    He nodded. “I enlisted right after Pearl Harbor. I was assigned to the Normandie , or the U.S.S. Lafayette as she was then called. I was in the Grand Salon when the fire broke