Chapter One
While
my grandfather PoPo was alive, he
worked as a doorman at the Hotel Galvez on the seawall in Galveston. He wore a
dark maroon coat trimmed in black cording, which hung down past his knees, and
he proudly donned a cap with “HG” stitched on the brim with golden thread.
Whenever my family came to the island for a visit, I’d make a beeline to the
hotel and stand with him while he greeted guests. People who saw us together
knew in an instant that I was his granddaughter. We were cut from the same
mold: tall, thin, and redheaded. I was proud of that fact, for James Robert
Lockhart was the most handsome man I’d ever seen. When I found him crumpled on
the floor in the hotel foyer, his body riddled with bullet holes, I knew my
life would never be the same. Now, as I stepped into the lobby eighteen years
later, the memory of that day hit me square in the gut.
My name is Sydney Jean Lockhart. I’m thirty,
single, and I recently tossed aside a perfectly fine, secure career as a
science teacher to try to make a go of it in a man’s world. The year is 1953,
and I’m the first female reporter hired by The
Austin American Statesman. After my last assignment—covering a political
powwow in Palacios, Texas—turned into an exposé on murder, scandal, and
deception of which I was a surviving victim, my opportunities as a journalist
have escalated. My editor, Ernest Turney, learned of my connections with the
island and asked me to write a piece on another political situation, this one
brewing in Galveston. At first, I hesitated: the event was to be held at the
Hotel Galvez. My reluctance was not only because my grandfather had been
murdered at the hotel, but also because Galveston was where my parents had
chosen to live after my father retired.
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