Irene knew something was coming. Even if she didn’t feel the warp of her own instinct, she certainly noticed the signs of George Morrow’s own agitation. His thumbs circled each other. She noticed the whiteness of his cuffs against the tan of his wrists and hands. He was a fit man; he played tennis and swam and did all the fashionable new callisthenic exercises in a gymnasium he’d recently built at his own estate in Greenwich, Connecticut. Always Morrow gave off a racket of immense energy contained inside those well-tailored clothes, and maybe it was this energy that was so attractive, and maybe it was his attractiveness that made her hold him at a distance, made her fumble his first name whenever she tested it in her mouth.

Anyway, she knew something was coming, all right. She thought she was ready. She screwed her thumbs together in her lap and lifted an eyebrow to Morrow, as if to say, Out with it, then.

He made a movement of his hand, starting toward hers and then thinking better of it. “Now, what I’m about to tell you, I maybe should have said something earlier. I wanted to protect you. I thought the whole thing would blow over. But it hasn’t. And it’s time you know about some photographs out there.”

“Photographs? What kind of photographs?”

“By any chance,” he said, staring up at the ceiling, “by any chance did you and Mr. Mallory spend some time on the beach, while you were staying over in Honolulu?”

“Honolulu?”

“Early in the morning, I think. Just the two of you.”

Irene couldn’t speak. Morrow turned his attention from the ceiling to her face, and she saw that he was not kidding around, he was dead serious.

“You should know that someone took a couple of photographs and sold them to a newspaper,” George Morrow said.

She whispered, “It wasn’t how it looked. I was surfing, and Sam was on the beach, and he saw a shark out there. He thought it was going to get me. He was just relieved that I came in all right.”

“Listen, Irene. I don’t care. I can only tell you what it looked like. It looked like the two of you were—well, that you were actually . . . in the act of . . .” He shifted a bit, glanced to the window, overcome by the Puritanism that was stamped in his bones. “Embracing,” he said.

“But that’s not what happened. Not at all. Everyone’s got the wrong idea. I can make a statement—”

“Not now, you can’t. Right now, you have got to remain absolutely silent. You have got to remain right here in this house and not speak to another soul outside it.”

Irene stood up. “Where’s Sam? I want to talk to Sam.”

“Sam’s gone, Irene.”

“Gone? Where? Call him back. We’re a team. We—”

“Irene.” Morrow stood up and grabbed her shoulders. “Get a hold of yourself. Listen to me. Sam’s gone back to Sydney.”

She tried to pull away, to run for the door, but Morrow was stronger than she was and held her back, facing him, his eyes versus her eyes.

“Listen! There’s been a terrible accident. He’s got to go home.”

Irene stopped struggling and stared at Morrow’s kind, paternal face. She opened her mouth to say What’s happened, but the words remained stuck in her lungs somewhere, trapped and unable to rise.

He answered anyway.

“Mrs. Mallory’s in the hospital, Irene. She saw those photographs in the newspaper and tried to kill herself. Swallowed some pills and slit her wrists with a kitchen knife. The kid found her on the bathroom floor.”

Hanalei, Hawai’i

October 1947

When Lindquist and I return to Coolibah, I do something I haven’t done since I was a child. I crawl into bed in the middle of the afternoon and fall asleep.

A knock awakens me. It takes me some time to come to myself; I look around the darkened room and can’t quite remember where I am, or why I’m there, and the first thing I recall is the sea cliff and the picnic. Then the flight and the drive back to Coolibah, during which the cat unexpectedly curled on my lap, purring like one of those propeller engines on Lindquist’s airplane.

The knock comes again, a little louder. “Janey? It’s Leo.”

I swear and roll out of bed. The cat, which was apparently napping at the small of my back, startles and jumps. My shirt and trousers lie in a heap on the floor. I pull on the shirt and stagger to the door.

“Everything all right?” he asks cautiously.

“Why do you ask?”

“You’re kind of . . . rumpled.”

“I was taking a nap.”

He looks up at the sky. “Mama sent me to tell you it’s time for dinner.”

“Oh, she did, did she? And did your sweet stepmother tell you what she did to me today?”

“She told me you flew out to Ki’ilau together.”

Some fur twines around my ankles. I nudge it away. “Is that what it’s called?”

“One of my favorite spots. Used to sail out there as a kid and kick around on the beach all day.” He props one hand on the doorframe and tilts his head to one side. “If she took you there, she must really like you.”

“If she does, she’s got a funny way of showing it. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to put some clothes on.”

I shut the door in his face, and I have to tell you, it feels pretty good.

After dinner, we play goddamn charades. It’s a Friday, so the children are allowed to stay up an hour late, and apparently this is what the little delinquents like to get up to for mischief. Lindquist makes cocoa. Leo pops popcorn. Because Olle’s still in Honolulu with Uncle Kaiko, Lani comes in from the kitchen to even the numbers. Lindquist, Lani, and Wesley make up one side; Leo, Doris, and yours truly make up the other.

Leo hands me my mug of cocoa, which is piled high with whipped cream, and leans to my ear. “Added a shot of bourbon.”

I lick myself a hole through the whipped cream in order to make sure he wasn’t kidding. (He wasn’t.) “Well, thank you kindly, bartender.”

Now, apparently charades are big in the Lindquist household. They keep a big china bowl in the living room filled with scraps of paper, on which members of the family scribble down ideas throughout the week in preparation for Friday’s extravaganza. (I swear to God this is all true.) As guest of the house, I’m given the honor of drawing the first charade, which is

PEANUT BUTTER SANDWICH

in a childish scrawl that surely belongs to Wesley.

“Well, that’s easy,” I say. I stand up and mime spreading peanut butter on a piece of bread.

“Bread and butter!” screams Doris.

I fold my imaginary bread into a sandwich.

“Book?” says Leo.

I roll my eyes and take an imaginary bite from this mother-loving imaginary peanut butter sandwich, and as I chew my imaginary lunch, I wonder what sin I’ve committed that can possibly be so mortal as to condemn me to this purgatory.

“Fried chicken?” says Doris, apparently forgetting about the spreading of the butter, and I may kill myself.

“I know! I know!” Wesley jiggles up and down like he has to pee.

“You’re not on our team, dummy!”

“Doris, your brother is not a dummy,” Lindquist says.

I look helplessly at Leo, begging for relief, and although I can just about read the words peanut butter sandwich on his face, he only shakes his head and smiles, the bastard.

I set down my imaginary sandwich and unscrew an imaginary lid from an imaginary jar of peanut butter, and some fraught time later Doris screams out PEANUT BUTTER SANDWICH! at goddamn last and I crumple to the ground.

“I knew it! That was my charade!” Wesley says.

Doris is sulky. “I don’t even like peanut butter sandwiches, that’s why.”

Wesley jumps up and runs for the charades bowl. “My turn!”

And so on and so on for another hour or two, until Wesley’s curled up asleep on my lap and my cocoa’s finished, and Leo bends down to lift the limp carcass and carry it upstairs. Careful, I mutter.

Doris trips along after them, chattering about something. The bourbon’s gone to my head and I’m feeling a little reckless. When Lindquist stands to follow the ankle-biters upstairs, I say, “Not so fast.”

“Oh? Haven’t you got enough out of me already?”

“Just one question, really. I was mulling it all the way home.”

She crosses her arms and frowns. “What, then?”

“This thing you’ve told me about Mrs. Mallory. How she tried to kill herself. That wasn’t in the papers. I mean, this is the first I’ve heard of it.”

“George was always an expert about managing the press.”

“But that didn’t matter, did it? Wouldn’t have changed what happened, if the newspapers knew all about it and made Mallory out to be some philandering daredevil who drove his wife to suicide. Because his goose was already cooked.”

“Why do you say that?”

“You had already eclipsed him. You were the star now. Morrow made sure of that, didn’t he?”

She looks to the stairs and back again. “Yes. He wanted to make me a star, and he did.”

“Because I’ve been thinking about what you said, the way he managed everything in Australia, and you know what? I think it was all part of his plan. He wanted to separate you and Mallory, so he could get control of your career, and Mrs. Mallory’s little temper tantrum just fell right in his lap, didn’t it?”

“You could look at it that way. Or you could conclude that he was just doing what he thought was best for me. He thought Sam was reckless and impulsive, and I would be better off on my own.”

“Not alone. With him. With Morrow.”