Temptation Bay (A Windfall Island Novel)

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To Erin and Jake, setting off on the road to your very own Happily Ever After

October 16, 1931. Windfall Island, Maine.

C
hrist, Giff, pay attention. You nearly swamped us.”

“You’re the one who overloaded the boat,” Hank Gifford ground out, bending his back to the oars with renewed concentration.

“You won’t be complaining when we rake in the dough this stuff’ll bring on the mainland.”

“If we live long enough to run it over to them hoity-toity, soft-handed city slickers,” Giff muttered.

His contempt for the wine-with-dinner crowd ran deep, but his love of life ran even deeper. The fishing boat they’d “borrowed” was little more than a thirty-foot canoe, and the waves were wicked tonight, slapping the bow and splashing over the gunnels. It took all their strength to keep the little boat from foundering, but even with death at the hands of the frigid Atlantic mere inches away, Giff found it hard to concentrate.

His eyes kept straying back to the trio of ships, loaded with liquor brought down from Canada or up from the Caribbean, riding at anchor twelve miles out from shore at what bootleggers had dubbed the Rum Line. The distance
did little to discourage the smaller boats that steamed, sailed, or rowed out from shore in order to place bids on the contraband, and to ferry bootleggers and their flapper girlfriends, musicians and gamblers to join the nightly floating party—a party all the livelier for taking place within nose-thumbing distance of the U.S. Coast Guard.

The 18th Amendment, intended to deliver America from the evils of alcohol, had instead created a whole new category of crime, where even the average citizen flouted the law and huge fortunes were made practically overnight. And not just by your run-of-the-mill lawbreakers, Giff thought with a sniff. The hoi-polloi were in on the fun as well, making great gobs of money with no risk, seeing as they hired men for the cloak-and-dagger, and kept their own backsides safely in their parlors. Those like Giff and his friends took their own risk and lived or died by it.

Then again, what was life without a little risk? And those rich men, well, they’d gotten themselves into a shitload of trouble—and the rest of the world along with them—what with all their speculating and high finance. Likely the only thing keeping them from throwing themselves off the roof of a New York skyscraper was the booze, whether they ran it or drank it.

Giff laughed at that, and wished again they could row back to the ships instead of on toward the cold and lonely shore. His old grandma would have warned him he was going to perdition, and she’d be right, seeing as one of those rumrunners went by that exact name. Giff supposed the moniker was apt, but he’d have a hell of time, well, going to Hell.

Norris fired up the small outboard motor, now that they were far enough away from the big ship named
Perdition
to be obscured by the moonless night and the ugly mood of the Atlantic. Even if they caught the noise of the motor,
the eager beaver Coast Guarders would have a hell of a time pinpointing the sound in miles of dark ocean. As they swung in a wide arc that would keep them safely in the dark as they made their way back to shore, Giff’s hopes were well and truly dashed.

“Don’t see why we couldn’t stay a tad longer,” he grumbled.

“Weather’s turning,” Norris said, his breath steaming on air gone icy in the hours since they’d motored out from shore. “A tad longer and there’d be no getting back tonight.”

“Then I’d be cozied up with that pretty little floozy we ferried from one ship to the other.”

“Like she’d have you.”

“I woulda talked her around to it, if you hadn’t dragged me away.”

“Oughta be grateful,” Norris muttered. “Loreen woulda smelled that skirt’s perfume on you and then where’d you be?”

“Bunking with you, I guess.”

Norris snorted. “Your feet smell like that rotten French cheese they got at the grocer’s by mistake last spring.”

Giff ignored him, listening instead to the jangle of the music floating back to them, enjoying the way the lights shone in the moonless dark and reflected off the surface of the heaving ocean. He could still smell the booze and the perfume of the dancing girls, and the sour sweat of the losers at the clattering roulette wheels.

Their boat hit the rocky shingle of beach in the sheltered curve of Temptation Bay, and he put his mind back on reality, turning to stare expectantly at his partner.

“Thanks for nothing,” Norris said, jumping out to tie the boat off to an old metal pole sticking out of the ground for just that purpose.

A figure appeared out of the darkness, his boots swirling through the thin mist crawling across the ground.

“Bitch of a night,” Floyd Meeker said, setting a dimly lit lantern on the ground so he could blow on his hands to warm them. “See you made it. Took you long enough.”

“Like waiting’s a problem for you, Meeker,” Giff said as he climbed out of the boat. “Your best talent is doing nothing.”

“Giff had his way,” Norris put in, “We’d’ve spent the night.”

“Just wanted to keep warm. And mind you there’s all kinds of warm on that big boat out yonder.”

They all laughed.

Even Meeker, notoriously sour of disposition, cracked a smile, although he had a dire pronouncement to chase away the humor. “You’d’ve likely waited out the weather, but not the Coast Guard.”

Giff snorted. “Lousy Coast Guard.” Which was the reason they worked at night, and went miles out of their way to keep to the darkness, for Christ’s sake, so there’d be little chance they’d be seen.

“Ahoy,” their fourth partner called out, appearing, as Meeker had, out of the darkness, his young son like a shadow a step behind him.

Norris was already hefting a wooden crate, the bottles inside it tinkling musically, when Jamie Finley stepped up beside the boat.

“Might’s well earn your keep,” Giff said to Finley’s son Emmett, handing the kid one of the smaller crates.

Surprised, grinning hugely with the joy of a boy being treated like a man, Emmett took the crate. And bobbled it.

“Hey.”

Three men lunged for the crate. Norris managed to
rescue it before it hit the rock, then tucked it under one arm to cuff Giff on the side of the head with the other hand. “What the fuck’s wrong with you, giving the good stuff to a scrawny kid barely old enough to piss standing up?”

Giff grabbed Norris by the collar, cocked his fist back. Finley hooked his arm, pulled him off. Giff stumbled back a step or two, but he dropped his arm. He’d be damned if he rubbed his head like a sissy, but he wasn’t above digging the toe of his boot into the rocks and shying one Norris’s way.

Finley took the crate from Norris and handed it back to his son. “May be scrawny, but you’re strong, aren’t you, Emmett?”

Speechless with the trust his father showed, Emmett took the crate and carried it—very carefully—toward the old horse-drawn wagon they used to ferry the stuff to their hide.

“Mind you put that up front, and be careful,” Norris called after the kid, turning back to Finley. “Why’d you bring him, anyway?”

“His mam—”

“Has you whipped?” Norris said, Giff and Meeker laughing and tossing in their opinions of Laura Finley’s hold over her man.

“Wanted Emmett out of the house,” Finley said quietly. “Maddie,” he finished. That single word was all it took to have the others choking back their humor.

They fell silent, but for the shuffling of crates and the crunch of rocks underfoot, all of them contemplating the measles epidemic cutting like a scythe through the island’s children. Older kids, like Emmett, caught it and seemed to sail their way through. The smaller children and the babies… They were another story.

A few of the island’s families were already in mourning, and so many of the other children were sick. Including Finley’s baby daughter. They’d almost lost her twice already, but the doctor from the mainland said the longer she survived, the better her chances. And if it seemed like he was sticking his nose in, well, what were neighbors for? Windfall Island was a one-for-all kind of place. They gave each other hell on a regular basis, Giff allowed, but they counted it as a right—and a duty—to know their fellow islanders inside and out. How could you watch someone’s back if you didn’t understand what they were facing?

“Jay-sus,” Meeker spat on the ground, “what are we, girls?”

“Only an asshole like you’d begrudge Finley and all the families a moment of respectful silence.” Giff clapped Emmett on the shoulder. “C’mon, kid, sooner we get this lot unloaded, sooner we can get away from sourpuss over there, and cozy into our racks.”

Emmett lifted his head, all four men ignoring the way his eyes shone in the meager light from the flotilla three miles out. And then those young eyes widened when, clear as a bell, they heard a thin, reedy wail.

“That sounded like a—”

“Baby,” Emmett breathed, and as four grown men stepped back, he moved forward, following the cries to the bow of the boat. There, in a tiny space between some crates that had been braced apart so they wouldn’t shift, he found what looked like a bundle of blankets. A bundle that moved and cried.

Emmett leaned into the boat and gathered up the bundle. He pulled back a corner of the blanket, saw the glint of gold surrounding some sort of jewel that proved a deep red when he carried her a few steps so he could hunker down next to Meeker’s lantern. In its light he saw the letters
embroidered onto the silk lining of the baby’s blanket—an ornate S bracketed by a smaller but equally embellished E on its left and an A on its right. He hastily covered the jewelry, telling himself it would be best to wait for his mam. His mam always knew what to do.

“She’s about the same age as Maddie,” he said, thinking of his baby sister. He stood and turned to the watching men. “Fair soaked, too, and probably chilled clear to the bone.”

“Rough waters,” Meeker said. “She likely caught her death.”

Finley gently rearranged the child so that she rested against his son’s chest, then pulled Emmett’s jacket around her. “We’ll hurry,” he said, squeezing the boy’s shoulder.

“Aye,” Norris chimed in. “We’ll take her back once we’ve finished—”

The
Perdition
exploded with a roar that sounded like the end of the world. The ship they’d just left riding the high waves and the high times shot flames and debris a hundred feet into the air, then subsided into an inferno—fueled by a hold full of liquor—that no one could have survived.

Emmett stumbled back, lost his footing and sat down hard on the rocks. He never dropped the baby, just sat there staring, as if the crackle of the burning timbers, the hiss of debris hitting the water, even from twelve miles away, might tell him where the little girl had come from, and if there was anyone left to know she was lost. Or care.