Free Murder Under the Palms by Stefanie Matteson Page A

out. I tried to help put it out. That’s how I got burned.” His expression had turned pensive.
    “Were you badly hurt?” she asked.
    “I almost died,” he replied. “One of the rescue workers stumbled over me in a corridor in tourist-class and hauled me out. I have no idea how I got there. All I remember is feeling my way along those long, dark, smoky corridors, trying to find my way out. I still have nightmares about it. By that time, the ship was listing ten, fifteen degrees. So the corridors were tilted, like in a funhouse. You lost all your bearings.”
    “I remember,” she said.
    He looked at her oddly.
    “I was there,” she explained. “In the crowd on Twelfth Avenue.” She remembered the long lines of ambulances, moving like a line of cabs at a taxi stand through the smoke-filled side streets to the pierhead, and the stretcher bearers running up to them from the smoke-choked pier shed with their cargos of injured men. “I probably saw you being loaded into an ambulance.”
    “Like ships passing in the night,” he commented ironically. “I was in Bellevue for three months,” he continued, shifting his glance away from her. “A fractured skull and second- and third-degree burns. By the time I was well enough to write to you, you were married to Will. Then by the time he died, I was married to my second wife.” He looked back at her. “We could just never seem to connect, could we?”
    “Until now,” she said.
    “Yes,” he agreed. “Until now.” He paused, and then went on: “Maybe it wouldn’t have worked out. I was too hard-driving, a perfectionist. I saw everything in black and white then; there were no grays. I’ve mellowed,” he added.
    “So have I,” said Charlotte.
    The sound of conversation drifted up from the patio below. Marianne had descended the gangway and appeared to be questioning a couple who were standing off by themselves at the edge of the driveway.
    Charlotte saw the woman raise an arm and point in the direction of the beach. Uh-oh , she thought, then watched as Marianne marched down the driveway, crossed South Ocean Boulevard, and headed down the path to the cabana. A hurricane was brewing, and it wasn’t even the season.
    She returned her attention to Eddie. “Did you go back into active service after that?” she asked.
    He nodded. “Playing in a Navy band.”
    “It’s odd that so many people from the Normandie have ended up in Palm Beach,” she remarked. “I nearly fell over when René Dubord greeted me at the door. He’s been telling me his life story. He was quite bitter about the fire. Now he owns an exclusive private dining club in Palm Beach.”
    “So he told me,” Eddie said. “He looks great, doesn’t he?”
    Charlotte nodded in agreement. She was looking down at the crowd on the patio two stories below. The heads of the men were either bald or white. On second thought, she supposed it wasn’t so odd that so many Normandie alumni had ended up in Palm Beach: the population here was certainly of prewar vintage.
    “There’s another guest here who was on the Normandie , too,” Eddie said. “Our hostess’s escort, Admiral McLean. He was my commanding officer. I’m looking forward to seeing him again.”
    “I met him,” Charlotte said. “An imposing-looking man.”
    “A good officer, too,” Eddie added. “We used to call him Big Jack McLean.”
    “There he is,” she said, looking down at the tall man in the elegant uniform who was headed out toward the beach.
    “He still looks the same,” Eddie said, looking down at the admiral. “He was one of the officers who ended up taking the blame for the fire. But I always thought he was a scapegoat. Yes, the Navy was careless. But it’s hard to dot every i and cross every t when you’re under orders to convert a luxury liner to a troop carrier in five weeks.”
    “René Dubord wouldn’t agree with you. He had nothing good to say about the U.S. Navy.”
    “No. I suppose he wouldn’t.”