The sirens were wailing through London’s dark night,
When Paul Marston stepped into Eileen’s pure light.
A soldier of fortune, a man with no fear,
Who held her as if the last judgment was near.
They wed in the shadow of bombs and of smoke,
A wartime devotion that never quite broke.

But the guns of the valley tore Marston away,
To vanish in blood and the German array.
They told the young bride that her husband was dead,
With nothing but ash to remain in his stead.
So Eileen wept bitter, and crossed the gray sea,
To marry for comfort, but never be free.

She lived in the canyons as Roger Wade’s wife,
A beautiful ghost in a glamorous life.
But deep in her bosom, the embers still burned
For the lost British soldier who never returned.
She did not yet know that the man of her youth
Was walking the city, concealing the truth.

[…]

He had survived the Gestapo, the fire, and the pain,
But his face had been shattered and mended again.
With a passport of silver and skin white as ice,
He took Terry Lennox as his name and device.
He married for millions, he drank to forget,
Entangled in Sylvia Potter’s dark net.

When Eileen beheld him across a bright room,
The spark of old Marston lit up the dark gloom.
She knew the scarred skin and the tilt of his head,
And realized her idol had risen from the dead!
But he belonged now to a rich, rotten wife,
Who mocked the clean beauty of their former life.

The madness of jealousy poisoned her mind,
A frantic devotion, destructive and blind.
If she could not have him, then no one would hold
The soldier she’d loved before silver and gold.
She went to the guest house with hatred in sight,
And slaughtered his wife in the dead of the night.

[…]

She framed her own husband, the writer, for crime,
To buy her lost Marston a package of time.
She let Terry flee to the Mexican sun,
Well knowing the bloody design had begun.
But Marlowe tracked down where the secrets were laid,
And stripped the disguise from the trap she had made.

When the detective confronted her there in the hall,
The empire of illusions began to misfall.
She confessed to the murders, but not out of greed—
’Twas the ghost of Paul Marston that prompted the deed.

“I killed them for him,” was her echoing cry,
Before she retreated to sleep and to die.

She took her own life with a chemical breath,
Escaping the courthouse by courting her death.
And Marston survived with a re-stitched conned face,
A cynical stranger who’d lost all his grace.
The love story ended in static and smoke,
For
the man she had died for
no longer awoke.