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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