He just has to figure out how to get it to her.
A few days later, Maia stays overnight with Ayers. It’s the first time Huck has been alone since Irene left. He could easily go out and spend a few hours tinkering on the boat, then grab a burger from the Tap and Still on the way home. Or he could buy some good beer, grill some tuna, lie down in his hammock, and finally crack open the Patterson book. But when he pulls up to the National Park Service dock and lets out his charter guests—a perfectly nice couple from he can’t remember where and their three boys, who were all in boarding school; they obviously didn’t see one another very often because they were so happy to be together—he hears steel-drum music coming from Mongoose Junction blending with strains of Kenny Chesney over at Joe’s Rum Hut: Save it for a rainy day! And he decides he doesn’t want to be alone. He calls Rupert. “You out?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Skinny?”
“Aqua.”
Good, Huck thinks. He’s been craving the Aqua Bistro’s onion rings for a while now. “I’ll be there in an hour,” he says.
“I’ll be waiting,” Rupert says. “But I gotta meet Sadie at Skinny at nine and Dora at Miss Lucy’s at ten thirty.”
Typical Rupert; he has a woman at every watering hole. No doubt Josephine will be singing tonight at the Aqua Bistro. Huck will hurry and shower. He loves Josephine’s voice.
Forty-five minutes later, Huck is seated at the round open-air bar of Aqua Bistro next to Rupert. Josephine is playing the guitar, lulling everyone into a sense of well-being with her sultry rendition of “Come Away with Me.” Rupert orders tequila shots with beer backs.
“Don’t forget, I have to drive home,” Huck says.
“Ha! That’s no excuse on this island. Stay left, go slow, tell the donkeys to get out of your way. You and I both know you could do it blindfolded.”
They click shot glasses and throw the tequila back. Huck feels okay. He slaps down five bucks and asks for the roll. The bartender hands him a leather cup filled with dice. He shakes it and lets them spill—nothing.
Rupert laughs. “Might as well have taken out your lighter and set your money on fire.”
It’s something to do. Only locals can roll. Irene can’t roll. The Invisible Man couldn’t roll. Huck’s luck has been so damn awful this week that it’ll surely take a turn soon. Why not now?
He throws the dice. Three threes, five, six.
“The pot is over a thousand bucks,” the bartender says. “Nobody’s won since before Christmas.”
Josephine sings “Do You Know the Way to San Jose,” only she changes “San Jose” to “Coral Bay.”
“I love that woman,” Rupert says.
“You love a lot of women,” Huck says. Part of him wishes he were built this way, but he isn’t. He loves Irene. I love you, Irene, he thinks and he throws the dice one last time. Two fours, two ones, and a six.
The bartender sweeps up his money. Rupert says nothing but Huck can sense him wanting to blurt out I told you so.
“Heard you and the Invisible Man’s wife are shacking up,” Rupert says.
“You’re behind on your gossip. She moved out.”
“Any fool off the street could have told you that wasn’t going to work,” Rupert says. “There’s too much tangled up between you.”
Huck wants to tell Rupert he knows nothing about it but he doesn’t like to bicker with Rupert, and also the phrase tangled up feels like a bull’s-eye. Huck and Irene have always communicated on the level. But beneath all that was a mess both of them had willfully ignored—because neither of them had created it. Those diaries must have been salt in a wide-open wound. Huck should never, ever have showed them to her. It must have seemed like he wanted to hurt her, when the truth was, he assumed she was so strong and resilient that Rosie’s words wouldn’t matter.
Why would they matter when she has me? Huck had thought. He was there for her day in, day out, waiting, adoring, offering whatever support and encouragement she needed. Wasn’t that enough? Why did the events of thirteen years or six years or two years earlier matter?
Huck spins his finger at the bartender. Another round—more shots, more beers. He found a way to get Irene the letter, ingeniously, or so he thought. He hasn’t heard from her. Yet.
“You’re right,” Huck says to Rupert. “It was never going to work.”
Josephine takes a break and comes to sit between them. Onion rings arrive, compliments of the kitchen. Huck admires them—fat, golden, glistening with oil, stacked on a dowel like so many rings in a game of quoits. (Did he eat any? He couldn’t say. He might have waited for them to cool and then forgotten about them.)
Another beer.
Rupert says, “Jojo, you have any lady friends you could introduce to Huck here?”
“I hear Huck’s taken,” Josephine says, but Huck is saved from explaining that he’s not, because it’s time for her second set.
“Let’s get out of here,” Rupert says. “I’m late for Sadie.”
Huck follows Rupert around the road in Coral Bay over to Skinny Legs. The place is crowded but there are two bar stools empty in the corner—how is this possible? Rupert must have called in on the way.
They take the seats; Huck orders a margarita with salt. Rupert says, “Who are you, Jimmy Buffett?” He asks for Cruzan Gold over ice. Heidi is bartending. She’s in the weeds but she takes one glance at Huck and Rupert and says, “How ’bout a couple of burgers, fellas?”
Burgers, yes, sure. There’s a band playing songs that Huck doesn’t recognize and a bunch of kids in their twenties dancing. Tourists, spring-breakers. Huck and Rupert are geezers in this crowd but it doesn’t matter, they’re having fun, Heidi is taking good care of them. Huck feels a hand on his back and he turns to see Sadie. She pulls Rupert up out of his chair, and he claps a hand on Huck’s shoulder, which is his way of saying he won’t be back, please cover the check, Rupert will get him next time.
Fine, fine, Huck thinks. Good for Rupert. Sadie is Huck’s favorite of the women anyway.
He should leave—but it’s been so long since he’s been out like this and it’s working like a tonic against the ache in his heart. He orders a beer in an attempt to sober up.
He sees a familiar-looking blonde across the bar. She’s one of the mothers from the Gifft Hill School, he figures out that much, though he couldn’t in a million years come up with her name. She’s waving at him like crazy, and he raises his beer in a way he hopes says, Yes, I see you, please don’t come over here.
The band plays one last song, and when it’s finished, the bar empties out somewhat. Finally, Huck can hear himself think.
Heidi comes over and says, “Woman over there wants to buy you another drink. Beer?”
“Please,” Huck says. “Which woman?” He assumes it’s the Gifft Hill mother whose name he can’t remember or never knew in the first place.
“Behind you,” Heidi says.
Huck turns to see a redhead in a pale green dress sipping what looks like a painkiller over at the side bar. She’s by herself, gazing out at the people drinking on the back deck. Is that who Heidi means? Well, yeah. She’s the only woman behind him.
The beer arrives. Huck takes a swallow, then checks behind him again. The woman is gone.
Huh, he thinks. Strange.
A second later, someone takes Rupert’s stool. It’s the redhead in the green dress. “Good evening, Captain,” she says.
Huck has had one—or a few—too many, perhaps. He has to back up a few inches to get a look at this woman. The mother on the boat today had red hair but no, no, no…this is…
The woman smiles.
Holy shit, he thinks. “Agent Vasco?”
“Colette, please.”
Colette. Tonight, she looks like a Colette. Her hair is sleek and shiny. The green dress has buttons down the front; the top button has been undone to reveal a modest bit of her cleavage. She’s wearing lipstick.
“Thank you for the beer,” he says.
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“I’m happy I bumped into you.”
He wonders for a second if she followed him here. She’s an FBI agent; is any contact accidental? “Are we breaking the law?” he asks.
“I’m off duty,” she says. “And you’re not under investigation.” She orders another painkiller from Heidi. “I will break protocol to tell you a few things, though. First of all, those diaries didn’t give us enough to lock up Croft.”
Huck spins his beer by the neck. All that for nothing? “What about the stuff Russ told Rosie about the dummy driveways? About the illegal business dealings?”
“Hearsay.”
“What about the end, where Croft shows up at La Tapa to threaten Rosie?”
“It isn’t enough,” Colette says. “The person who’s implicated is Steele. And even Rosie. You turned over the cash you found in the dresser drawer, but I had to persuade my superiors not to go after the money in Rosie’s accounts. I made the argument that the amounts were consistent with what she might have saved from her job.” Colette takes a healthy pull of her drink. “But we could easily have called those tainted assets.”
She did him a favor, and he’s not ungrateful. He has that money to send Maia to college. “Thank you,” Huck says.
She dips her head and gazes up at him. “I don’t want you to think of me as the bad guy.”
“You’re just doing your job,” Huck says. “I get it.”
“Secondly, I got a call from the police in Charlotte Amalie. Apparently Oscar Cobb’s girlfriend reported him missing. We watched Oscar a few years back because we knew he was selling drugs aboard the cruise ships—though ultimately he was too small a fish for us to pursue. I was surprised, though, to see his name show up in Rosie’s diaries.”
“Oscar Cobb,” Huck says. “Not one of my favorite people. My wife, LeeAnn, wanted to disappear Oscar herself. He was terrible for Rosie—although I guess ‘terrible’ is all relative.”
Colette says, “The police were wondering if we had any leads, which we didn’t, but here’s the thing: the girlfriend admitted that Oscar actually went missing on January first. She said they were at a New Year’s Eve celebration and that Oscar left the party between two and three a.m., saying he had ‘work’ over on St. John.”
This gets Huck’s attention. He thinks about the black Jeep with the tinted windows—but no, it wasn’t Oscar driving, and that woman didn’t seem like a girlfriend of Oscar’s. She was old enough to be his mother and, as Huck had learned, Oscar preferred his women much younger. “Did she say what kind of work?”
“She wasn’t sure what he did exactly, but in the police report, she used the word ‘investments.’”
“So Oscar Cobb disappears the same day that Rosie and Russ die in the crash. Could be a coincidence. Rosie doesn’t mention Oscar again in the diaries and I haven’t seen him around here. Believe me, I would have noticed.”
“I don’t believe in coincidences,” Colette says. “But I also don’t have anything that ties Cobb to Croft. I’ll follow up with the girlfriend—she said she didn’t report it earlier because she was scared, and I guess Oscar had a habit of disappearing for weeks at a time…”
Of course, he did, Huck thinks. He flashes back to the first time he laid eyes upon Oscar Cobb—at the Rolex Regatta in the late nineties. Rosie had been so young, only fifteen, and infatuated, completely blind to the fact that Oscar Cobb was bad news.
Though “bad news” is all relative.
“If I don’t get anywhere with the girlfriend, I do have one last hope,” Colette says. “Someone left a message at the field office saying she wants to talk to me about Croft. It was all very mysterious; she didn’t leave a name, only a number. She might be a crackpot. Or she thinks there’s money in it for her. The only thing is, she asked for me specifically. So she might be for real.”
“You’ll follow up?” Huck asks.
“I’ll follow up,” Colette says. “That’s enough talk about work.”
Huck has another beer and buys Colette Vasco another painkiller, and then he can’t wait another second. He has to have a cigarette. He says, “I’m going out to smoke. I’ll be right back.”
“We share a vice,” Colette says. “I’ll come with you.”
Huck tells Heidi they’re coming right back and the two of them go stand in the grass past the back patio. There are a few crooked palm trees, then the lip of Coral Bay. Huck lights Colette’s cigarette. It feels a little weird; the last woman he smoked with was his first wife, Kimberly.
She points to his left hand. “What happened to your finger?”
“Barracuda,” he says.
“I love a man with scars,” Colette says.
Huck lets that comment slide, though it’s starting to feel like she’s flirting with him, maybe more than flirting, which he can’t deny is good for his battered ego. How old is she? Maybe closer to forty than he’d thought. “How did you end up in the Caribbean?” he asks.
She tells him she’s originally from New Jersey, around Manasquan, Brielle, Belmar. Springsteen territory, she adds, because he’s never heard of any of those places. Colette’s father was a policeman; she went to Rutgers. The FBI recruited her. She spent years working the ports, fell in love with her boss, got married, and when he was transferred to the field office in Puerto Rico, she went with him. She got promoted, they split (it’s unclear to Huck if these two things are related), he went back to New Jersey, she stayed in Puerto Rico. The FBI acknowledged the need for a bigger white-collar crime investigative team in the territories.
They’re dangerously close to their original topic. Huck is still trying to process the news about Oscar Cobb. Investments? By “investments” the girlfriend must have meant “dealing drugs,” because what kind of investments needed to be tended to at three o’clock in the morning on St. John?
“Time for me to call it a night,” Huck says. They wander back inside and Huck flags Heidi for the check. “I have a charter bright and early.”
“I should go too,” Colette says.
They end up walking out to the parking lot together. It’s dark and unpaved so Huck does the gentlemanly thing and offers Colette his arm.
“You didn’t drive the Suburban out here, did you?”
“I’m staying out here,” she says. “Company digs. I can’t disclose the exact location but it’s close enough to walk.”
Huck is relieved. He’s spared having to offer her a ride home. “Well, this is me,” he says, nodding at his truck. He lifts his arm in an attempt to reclaim it from her and Colette grabs his hand, then winds her arms around his midsection and hip-locks him.
Whoa! Huck isn’t sure what to do but he has to make a decision right now. Colette Vasco is pretty and there can be no mistaking her body language. She’s ready to go—all the way.
Kiss her! Huck thinks. Take her home. What’s stopping you? She’s divorced, you’re single, you’re both lonely, and admit it, there’s been something between you from the beginning.
He places his hands on Colette’s shoulders, then cups her face and bends down. He kisses her once, gently, and is overcome by a strong wave of the worst emotion that exists in the world: guilt. He pulls away.
She presses farther into him. “Huck.”
“Agent Vasco,” he says. He reaches behind his back and unclasps her hands, holds them in both of his. “You’re a very attractive woman. But I’m…involved with someone else.” He stops. Is he doing the right thing? Is he? “And although it is quite tempting to take you home and let things unfold as they may, that wouldn’t be fair to her. Nor would it be fair to you. So I’m going to say good night. Please get home safely.”
Colette Vasco stares at him with half a smile—incredulous? embarrassed? drunk?—and then disappears into the dark.
Huck climbs into his truck, lights another cigarette, and blows the smoke out the window. I hope you’re happy, Irene Steele, he thinks. You’ve ruined me.
He starts the engine, thinking, Go slow, stay left. Don
keys, get out of my way.
Ayers
During the first week of their stay on St. John, Ayers’s parents cover a lot of ground. On the very first day, they meet Baker and then take Mick and Ayers out to dinner. On their second day, they buy a two-bedroom time-share at the Westin from Baker, and Ayers experiences predictably mixed feelings. On the one hand, she’s comforted by this. On the other hand, she feels suffocated.
In the following days, Phil and Sunny hike the Reef Bay Trail, charter the Singing Dog with Captains Stephen and Kelly to the BVIs (no Treasure Island for them; they want to sail), experience happy hour at both Woody’s and High Tide, snorkel with turtles at Salt Pond, dance to Miss Fairchild at the Beach Bar, buy matching hook bracelets at Bamboo, and kayak to Lime Out for tacos.
And yet somehow, they’re still underfoot. They wake Ayers up with chai lattes from Provisions, they swing by with containers of sesame noodles and spinach-artichoke dip from the North Shore Deli, they appear at La Tapa while Ayers is working and introduce themselves to the guests at Ayers’s tables until she has to ask them to either sit at the bar or leave. They choose the bar and end up getting into a deep conversation with Skip about his trust issues with women.
How is she ever going to survive them? When will they leave for Barbuda, Bequia?
The dinner with Mick was…illuminating. Ayers wonders if, in her parents’ minds, Mick is still her boyfriend. Maybe they haven’t yet fully absorbed the news of the breakup or the idea that Ayers is pregnant by someone else. At dinner at the Longboard—which unfortunately evoked the evening of their engagement—Mick was his most charming self, sucking up to Phil and Sunny in every possible way, asking about their travels, begging to see their pictures, giving Sunny too much encouragement about her prospective blog. Ayers bit her tongue and thought, Fake it to make it, all the while hoping the staff at the Longboard weren’t getting out their phones in the back to broadcast the news that Mick and Ayers were together again.
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