by Lucy Taylor
Later, naked, slick with sweat, she gasped, “Oh God I’ve missed you, Julian! I didn’t think we’d ever do that again,” and he snorted a laugh. “You’re wrong, Sister Girl. We’ll do this ‘til we’re old and dotty, while we’re married to other people and procreating their kids, every chance we get, we’ll still be fucking each other like minks. And you know why? Cause a husband or wife is always replaceable, they’re strangers, bottom line, not family, not the honest to God blood and bone of family.” He seized her hand. His palm felt hot and damp. She could see his heartbeat in a blue vein at his temple. “We won’t stop wanting each other, Sister Girl. Not ever. How could we? We’re in each other’s blood.”
She hugged him hard. “We’re all we’ve got, aren’t we?”
“I’d say so.”
She slipped into her shorts and fastened her bikini top. “Will you come out with me for just a quick look, Julian? Please?”
He shrugged and stared up at the sky, where a single cloud, like a lost sheep, roamed the blue. She saw his Adam’s apple bob as he swallowed. “Why don’t you let it drop? We could make Happy Hour at the Hilton.”
She punched his shoulder. “You just had Happy Hour, you goose.”
“Okay, you’re right, but I’m parched now. You wore me out. Let’s go drinking.”
A sly smile, a more appealing version of Roberta’s, crimped the corners of her mouth. “What if I told you Vonnie said she only thought at first she’d dreamed about you? That later on, she realized it wasn’t a dream at all, that it was real?”
He canted an eyebrow. “I don’t follow.”
“Remember the hammock at the edge of the beach where Vonnie used to like to sleep?”
Julian looked surprised, then vexed. “I don’t remember one hammock from another. But if you’re getting ready to say Vonnie claimed something happened between her and me, it didn’t. Not in a hammock. Not anywhere.”
She balled a fist and whacked him on the shoulder. “Shut up, you filthy-minded brat! That’s not what I was going to say at all! The hammock isn’t there anymore, it blew down, but three years ago it was. Daddy used to tell her not to sleep there. He said it wasn’t safe, that anybody could be passing by and see a girl alone and take advantage—anyway she told me that she woke up and saw you, coming down the path in the moonlight, and you were carrying a girl in your arms. She said she looked drugged or unconscious. You carried the girl out to the beach and then into the water, but then she lost sight of you and she fell back to sleep. When she woke up again, she thought it was all a dream. But then, a few days later, the body of the Brockton girl washed up and…it was right after that that Vonnie disappeared.”
She stopped abruptly, expecting Julian to retort with sarcasm or anger, but instead he spoke matter-of-factly, like someone discussing the choices on a menu. “So that’s it? You mean, Vonnie thought I killed that girl, that I took her out and drowned her.”
“She didn’t know what to think. She was afraid to say anything, afraid you knew she’d seen you. And she would never have gone to the police, Julian, not Vonnie and not me, either, but—that’s why I never really thought that she was dead. Because she always said she’d run away, she’d told me she had friends—men who skippered boats and would let her crew for them, no questions asked—I always wondered if she ran because of what she thought she’d seen.”
She was silent then, waiting for an explosion or rebuke. Instead Julian only shook his head and exhaled forcefully, like one recovering from an unexpected blow. “Oh, God, Sister Girl, you mean to tell me you’ve been carrying that around all this time, what Vonnie told you? Jeez, why didn’t you just come to me? Why didn’t she? What happened that night, I could have cleared it all up.”
“You could?”
He made a show of bugging his eyes and gawking at her. “Well, what, you think I killed a woman? Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, Sister Girl, I don’t even step on ants, I don’t eat veal, for Christ’s sake, and you think I’m out there killing women.”
“Not women, Julian, just the one.”
“Oh, well, only one, that hardly counts then, does it?” He raised an index finger, made his voice deep and stentorian. “Objection, Your Honor, my client’s not a killer. It’s just that it was on his bucket list, commit a murder, just to see what it would feel like. No danger here to society, Your Honor, none at all.” He was laughing now, so good-naturedly that she joined in, too, not sure what they were laughing at, only knowing that it felt right and good, laughing with her beautiful brother in the sunlight.
“What happened then?” she said, wiping away her tears with the back of her hand. “You mean the man Vonnie saw was someone else? It wasn’t you?”
“No, it was me, and the young woman in my arms was dead, all right, dead drunk, that is. I was at the pool bar at the Hilton as usual and this girl—her name was Michelle, she was from Canada—we clicked, you know, incendiary chemistry right off the bat, and I invited her to come back with me to Summerland. We could’ve gone to her room, of course, but she was sharing a suite with a couple of other girls and anyway I wanted to impress her, let her think she had a shot at marrying into fantastic wealth before I gave her the heave ho. What better way to plant the hook than to show off Summerland?” He had the grace to offer an embarrassed shrug before continuing. “We got as far as the gazebo, but we never made it to my room. We’d been slamming Yellow Birds and Goombay Smashes all night, and then I’d bought a pint of rum to nip from as we walked. Right by the tennis courts, she got violently sick, then dropped like she’d been clubbed. I couldn’t wake her up, I wasn’t sure if she was even breathing. I did the only thing I could think of. I picked her up and carried her straight out into the water, dunked her down like a Holy Roller doing a baptism. She woke up and projectile puked all over me, and it was coming out the other end as well, so I piled her into Daddy’s golf cart and whisked her right back to the hotel. Rounded up her roommates who came down to tend to her. So you see, the only thing that died that night was my fantasy of a beautiful romance.”
“So the Brockton girl—”
“—was not my date, I promise you, just some poor thing got herself drowned, maybe even murdered, but not by me.”
She was almost shaking with relief, a reaction that perturbed and shamed her. Until today, she hadn’t thought about Vonnie’s story since that awful summer and didn’t realize how desperately she’d needed Julian to refute it, to explain what Vonnie actually saw.
Now she hugged him fiercely, rocking them both to and fro. “Oh, God, I knew there had to be an explanation! If only I hadn’t doubted you, if only I’d just gone to you and asked.”
“Really?” Julian said. He looked forlorn. “You doubted me, Sister Girl?”
“Only a tiny part of me,” she said, holding up her thumb and index finger a quarter inch apart. “Just the smallest part.”
««—»»
For a man whose energy was usually boundless, Julian seemed exhausted, sapped. On the walk back to the dock, he seemed utterly spent, so much so that Sonya wondered if he even had the strength to go out snorkeling. Once out over the reef, though, he gamely donned his mask, snorkel, and fins and followed Sonya’s hesitant and sometimes contradictory directions without complaint. He seemed drained, but at the same time solicitous and tender, stroking her cheek once when she’d lamented her poor navigational skills, telling her not to worry, he didn’t mind.
The water, which that morning had been smooth and flat as a glassine envelope, was choppy now, small swells rippling along the surface. They moved the dinghy from one spot to another, finally stopping at a place where the drop-off into the deep water was fringed with branching coral. Sonya cut the motor. At once they were engulfed by silence.
She leaned over, peering into the water. “Julian, I think this is where it was!” She turned to him. “I know you’re wiped out. Will you go down one more time and have a look?”
“No problem, Sister Girl.”
He slid over the din
ghy’s side and kicked down. For a few seconds, she could see him gliding along the edge of the reef, surfacing now and then to blow water out if his snorkel and inhale, working his way toward the place where the water darkened. Then he must have begun to descend, because she lost sight of him. Time crawled by and she glanced around nervously, expecting him to surface.
When he didn’t, she felt a rush of irritation and alarm. In the boat, he’d seemed so listless and exhausted.
Come on, Julian. What the hell are you doing?
Another twenty seconds. Something was wrong. Without hesitation, Sonya grabbed her mask and snorkel and jumped over the side.
She kicked down, looking frantically around, and spotted Julian almost immediately. He was hovering above a staghorn forest that descended into a steep ravine, where the sunlight dwindled and the water turned blue-black. He was seemingly mesmerized, staring at something in the deeper water. Sonya put more heft into her strokes, kicked harder.
As she swam to him, he turned around. His blue eyes, magnified behind the mask, looked distant, vacant, the eyes of no one that she knew. For an instant, she had that same prickly sensation she’d had earlier, that he’d known all along she was there, that he was only pretending to be distracted, and she felt a bite of fear.
But then he held his hand out to her and beckoned, a familiar, calming gesture he’d made to her a hundred times. Reflexively, instinctively, she took his hand.
««—»»
On the other side of the world, in a small Croatian village that Sonya and her sister had once discovered together in the pages of an Atlas, the young woman who called herself Evelyn Marquis awoke with a gasp. She tasted sea water, her heart was thundering, and her throat blazed. For a horrific instant, she thought her lungs were filling up with water, and she turned to the man asleep next to her, thinking to wake him, wanting him to hold her as she died.
But then the terrible sensations passed. Her breath came easily. Her heart calmed.
Evelyn Marquis turned onto her side and dropped back into dark, dreamless sleep.
Soul Eaters
“The great peril of human existence consists of the fact that our diet consists entirely of souls.”
—Inuit saying
Heading south on a week-long cruise to Vancouver, the Sea Mist sailed out of Whittier, Alaska, a little after six p.m. and plunged into mushroomy fog. Most of the six hundred plus passengers were snugly inside, eating dinner, gambling in the casino, or enjoying one of several nightclub acts. Only a handful, untroubled by the cold, remained on deck. Had the fog not swathed the ship like a chilly grave cloth, one of them might have seen the body tip over the starboard side around seven-fifteen. But the fog was a co-conspirator with the killer, and so the body plummeted, mute and unobserved, into the high, choppy seas.
««—»»
At eight o’clock that evening, Hugo Santiago was beginning his rounds on Deck Five in a dour mood. Earlier, he’d ventured out on deck, but the knife-blade wind drove him back inside, feeling as trapped and frozen as an ice cube in a tray.
So dispirited was Hugo that he barely bothered to acknowledge Inz, the lusty Bolivian maid with whom he’d enjoyed a romantic, if short-lived, romp the previous cruise season.
“Ah, you forget Inz already,” she teased, bending forward to rearrange the soaps in her cart while providing Hugo with a view of bountiful cleavage. She wore the standard maid’s uniform, blue with white piping, but always managed to forget a button or two on the blouse and further jazzed up the ensemble by adding pink socks short enough to reveal the tattoo of hot lips on her ankle.
Hugo gave her plush rump a firm pinch as he passed, wondering if she might be persuaded to help him muss up the sheets in an unoccupied cabin or even get down on her knees in the linen closet, but she yelped and slapped him so hard across the back of the head that he actually stumbled forward.
“Dammit, Inz!” he said, rubbing his scalp. “Why’re you acting like this?”
She snorted and looked at him like he was dried puke she had to scrub off a carpet. “Better question is what you doing here, Hugo? What happen to all your too-good-for-Inz plans? I thinking you and your rich sugar mama jet off to Buenos Aires, live happily after ever, no? Hot smoking Imelda who does tango on your cock, tight like sixteen-years-old virgin, you say! Why you freezing your skinny ass off on board fucking ship? What happen? Hot lover she ditch you, no?”
This last smirked with a kind of snide exuberance that made Hugo want to choke her.
“I got tired of her,” he snapped and continued on down the corridor, reflecting as he did so that if he didn’t laugh at his current situation, he’d have to weep.
Here he was back in Alaska when, above all, Hugo hated the cold.
Born in the steamy swelter of the Yucatan, he yearned for the heat of his homeland, for sultry breezes and turquoise seas—above all, for the heat and solace between Imelda Thomasina de Hidalgo’s remarkably well-toned and energetic thighs.
He wondered idly what she would say if he called to beg her forgiveness. If he could only come up with a reasonable explanation that was flattering to her ego—anything but the truth—as to why he’d departed her bed in the middle of the night and run like a gangbanger fleeing a police raid.
As he pondered this, he gave the door to cabin 518 a perfunctory rap, got no response, and used his passkey. He entered a spacious suite divided into a sitting area with flat screen TV, computer and bar, and a luxuriously furnished bedroom. He hesitated, sniffed the air. An intriguing scent permeated the cabin: the subtle but compelling odor of sex, musky and hormonal, like the pale vestige of some lingering depravity. So enticing that his nostrils flared and his penis threatened to declare up periscope.
His mood began to lift as well. Since he knew from the manifest that the cabin’s occupant was a single woman, he looked for evidence of recent hijinks, but the russet bedspread looked untouched and the few items of clothing in evidence were folded neatly, hardly an indication of passion-fueled haste. He felt let down. Vicarious thrills from the escapades, infidelities, and generally scandalous behavior of some passengers were one of the perks of a cruise ship job. Participation in these shenanigans, although technically forbidden, was, of course, an even bigger incentive to sail the seas. And if, like Imelda, the woman happened to be rich and single…?
With a mental note to try to meet Cabin 518 as soon as possible, he went into the bathroom, where he left fresh towels, replaced the pastel soaps, shampoos, and body lotion and folded the bottom square of toilet paper into a triangle. He took time to check his appearance in the mirror. He was a slender, wiry man, only five six, but with almond eyes, high Aztec cheekbones and a sensuous, full-lipped mouth that, for most women, offset the lack of height. He noted with some satisfaction that he still looked smart and crisp, even though his black bow tie was a tad askew and his red jacket (one of three) with his name and the cruise ship logo embroidered on the right lapel would soon be due for a laundering.
Back in the bedroom, he plumped the pillows and smoothed the coverlet before placing a foil-wrapped Godiva chocolate and a copy of the next day’s activities between two tasseled duvets.
Before leaving, he checked the closet to get an idea of 518’s taste in clothes—obscenely expensive designer stuff plus furs that could have populated a small zoo if their owners were still alive. Imelda, who dressed like Spanish royalty but disdained fur, would have turned up her Castillian nose.
He assumed the woman’s jewelry would be locked in the room safe but—ay, Dios mio!—she’d left a stunning pair of ruby ear rings and a matching bracelet on the night stand by the bed.
So, in addition to smelling like a wet dream, she was also a trusting soul, thought Hugo, ever more intrigued. He picked up the bracelet, trying to determine if it was real or one of those bagatelles you could buy for a few hundred bucks at The Real Deal on Deck Nine.
Real, he judged.
And almost jumped out of his highly polished shoes when a bla
st of freezing wind gusted into the cabin, as the woman whose jewelry he was fondling shoved back the sliding door and stepped inside off the balcony.
She was petite and winter pale with shoulder-length black hair threaded with silver. Early to mid-50’s, Hugo guessed. She wore black ski pants and a long-sleeved sweater under a fleece-lined parka soaked with spray—no hat, no gloves, no neck warmer—what was she thinking? He realized he was still holding the bracelet and placed it back on the night stand, making a brushing motion with his hand in a lame attempt to pretend that he was dusting.
“Why are you in here?” the woman asked. She spoke with a pronounced but indeterminate accent that reminded him of Helga, the Bulgarian social director.
“Just doing the turn down,” Hugo said, hoping desperately she hadn’t seen him scrutinizing her jewelry like a cat burglar tallying up the take.
The wind was rioting around the room like a vandal, but she took her merry time closing the slider. When she finally latched it shut, she brushed bits of ice from her hair and said, “I haven’t seen a schedule. Can you tell me at what time the ship will reach the Torngasak?”
“I’m sorry, what?”
“Oh, I forget. Torngasak is the Inuit name. You call it the Hurtigruten Glacier after some nineteenth century Norwegian sea captain.”
“Ah, the Hurtigruten. Day after tomorrow. Mid-day probably.”
“Will we get close?”
“Very close. The fjord where the Hurtigruten terminates is narrow, so the maneuver’s tricky. The captain has to exercise some care. If you’re interested, you might want to sign up for the glacier walk.”
Her face brightened.
“A bit strenuous, but well worth it,” he added enthusiastically, thinking he’d as soon swim naked with killer whales as go tromping around on a creaky slab of unstable ice that might fracture under his feet at any moment.
She was staring at him so intently that for a second he wondered if he’d actually spoken the thought out loud. The silence stretched between them like an invisible cord and—no mistaking it—the tang of rut wafted from her pores like heat throbbing from a stove.