Bermuda Schwartz

by Bob Morris

  I laugh.

  “You’re probably right about that,” I say.

  “I know I’m right. Women get straight to the heart of the matter. Men just nip around the edges. You’re very superficial creatures, really. But somehow we manage to love you anyway.” She smiles. “You and Barbara are quite lovely together.”

  “Thank you.”

  “And I can’t even begin to imagine how beautiful your children would be.”

  I don’t say anything.

  She laughs again.

  “You men …”

  45

  Half an hour later, we’re pulling into the parking lot of Deep Water Discoveries. It occupies part of a small marina on a cove just off Great Sound, a squat concrete-block building painted a wake-up shade of aquamarine with an office, gear room, lockers, a retail shop, and a small classroom for conducting scuba certification classes.

  A young man perches on a stool behind the shop counter. He’s shirtless with a shaved head and no visible space left on his torso for another tattoo.

  I tell him who we are and why we’re there. After that, I figure I’ll let Fiona handle the talking.

  “You should really be speaking with Bill,” the young man says.

  “Bill?”

  “Bill Belleville, the owner. He’s usually around, but shorthanded like we are right now, he’s running one of the boats. Should be back any time now from this morning’s trip,” the young man says in a brogue that hints strongly of Ireland. “Sucks, what happened to Ned. A solid one, he was, don’t know how anyone coulda done that to him.”

  “Did you know Ned well?” asks Fiona.

  The young man shrugs.

  “Not all that well. Just around the shop here, really. Ned, he’d sometimes join us for a pint down at the Onion, but not so much lately, he didn’t. Lately, he seemed to have his own thing going. Even Polly was riding him about it, complaining that the two of them never went out.”

  “Polly?” asks Fiona.

  “Yeah, Polly … uh, don’t know her last name, sorry. Just Polly. American, tiny little thing, pretty as a bug,” he says. “She and Ned were a pair. The two of them shared a place just down the road.”

  Fiona covers it well, but I can tell that her brother’s living arrangements have come as a surprise.

  “Can you tell me how to get there?” she says.

  “Sure, no problem. Keep going another mile or so and you’ll come to Bedon’s Alley. Hang a left, go all the way to the end, and you’ll see a row of small cottages on your right. Their’s is the last one, painted yellow, I believe.”

  “Have you spoken with Polly since all this happened?”

  “Just briefly. She called in after word came down about Ned. Said she wouldn’t be in for a few days. She’s not scheduled until next week.”

  “She works here at the dive shop, too?”

  The young man nods.

  “She’s the one supposed to be running the shop, not me. I’m usually out on the boats,” he says. “Polly, she was freaked bad by what happened. She was supposed to have gone out on the boat with Ned that day, but she got called in to pull a shift at the Onion. She waitresses there sometime. Cost of living here on the Rock and what a dive shop pays? We’ve all got to bust a hump working somewhere else. Me, I wash dishes down at the …”

  “Wait, wait,” Fiona says. “You say she was supposed to have gone out on the boat with Ned that day?”

  “Yeah, that’s right.”

  “What boat?”

  “Right out there,” the young man says, pointing to a boat tied off in a slip. It’s a Delta, a twenty-eight-footer, a workhorse of the scuba trade. “Police hauled it in yesterday afternoon.”

  “The police brought it in?”

  “Yup, that’s right. There was a whole crowd of them out here earlier. From what I gather, they figure Ned was trying to get away from whoever it was that was after him. Think he might have jumped overboard and let the boat run. They found it jammed up in the mangroves just this side of Daniel’s Head.”

  Fiona looks at me.

  “So much for that bastard Worley keeping me in the loop,” she says.

  She is out the door and on her way to the boat before the young man can get off his stool.

  “She can’t go on that boat,” he says, sliding out from behind the counter.

  I step to the door and block his way out. He stops.

  “The police said no one can go on it until they give the OK,” the young man says.

  The phone rings. He looks at it.

  “You need to answer that,” I tell him.

  He watches Fiona as she reaches the dock. The phone rings again.

  “The phone,” I say. “Now.”

  The young man steps back behind the counter and answers the phone. He’s on it for a few minutes, telling the caller about the availability and pricing of dive trips.

  After he hangs up he looks outside to the boat. Fiona stands near the wheel, inspecting the console, going through storage compartments.

  He shakes his head.

  “It’s her ass, not mine,” he says.

  “That’s the attitude,” I say. “Now, you just sit tight and keep an eye on the shop, OK?”

  As I step outside to join Fiona, a boat pulls in from the sound and makes its way to the dock. It’s a bigger Delta, a forty-footer, with the Deep Water Discoveries logo emblazoned on its hull. A couple dozen people are on board, divers and crew.

  A husky, bearded guy leaps off before it docks. He hurries to the slip where Fiona is still searching through compartments on the boat that was hauled in by the police.

  By the time I walk up behind him, the guy is yelling at Fiona.

  “I don’t care who the hell you are, I want you off my boat!”

  “Almost done,” Fiona says, ducking into the cabin, out of view.

  “No way, lady…”

  As he starts to climb aboard, I grab his arm. He whips around, ready to square off against me. He’s a pretty tough-looking guy—thick shoulders, broad chest, a sun-worn face. His appearance is made even grizzlier by a crusted-over gash on one of his cheekbones that looks as if it should have had stitches. Above it—the yellowed remainder of a black eye.

  I’ve got a couple of inches and several pounds on him. Plus, I am who I am. He thinks better of the match-up and backs off.

  “You Belleville?”

  “Yeah. Who are you?”

  “I’m the lady’s helper.”

  Belleville grinds his jaw. He looks at the boat. Fiona is still down below.

  He looks back at me.

  “Well, you’re going to be helping both your asses straight to jail,” he says. “I’m calling the police.”

  “Do what you have to do,” I tell him.

  As he moves past me, Fiona emerges from the cabin.

  “That won’t be necessary,” she says.

  She hops off the boat and stands beside me on the dock.

  “My brother was aboard that boat before he died. I needed to see it for myself,” she tells Belleville. “I’ll take full responsibility with the police.”

  Belleville is still fuming.

  “You going to take full responsibility for your brother’s gas bill, too? Ned had been going out a lot on the boat. He was running a tab. He owed a couple of hundred.”

  I step in, tap Belleville on the chest.

  “Listen, asshole,” I say. “Her brother just died. How about you play bookkeeper some other time.”

  As Belleville swats away my hand, Fiona moves between us.

  “It’s all right, Zack. Mr. Belleville is entitled to look after his best interests, just as I am entitled to look after mine.” She looks at Belleville. “I intend to honor all my brother’s debts. You may present me with a bill whenever it suits you.”

  She turns and leaves the dock. I give Belleville a friendly pat on the shoulder.

  “A real pleasure,” I say.

  He grunts something in response.

  I
can’t make out exactly what it is. Probably just as well.

  46

  “What a dick,” Fiona says once when we’re both inside the car. “He was almost a dick with a broken nose.”

  “That wouldn’t have gotten us anywhere.”

  “Except that I would now be basking in the afterglow of manly accomplishment.”

  “Spare me,” says Fiona. “Besides, looks like someone else already got a crack at Belleville. You see that gash on his face?”

  “Pretty hard to miss.”

  I crank the car, check the time on the dashboard clock. Already after noon.

  “Look,” I say, “I know you probably want to go by your brother’s house and …”

  “And meet the girlfriend? Bloody well right I do. I mean, the girls were always thick around Ned. He could never settle on just one. Now to hear he had a live-in? Bit of a surprise that.” She looks at me. “But we can swing by later, Zack. We need to get you back to Barbara.”

  “You sure?”

  “Drive,” she says.

  We’re a mile away from Deep Water Discoveries before Fiona opens her backpack.

  “Gee, look what I found,” she says, pulling out a black plastic something-or-other the size of a cell phone. It has a small, green LCD screen and a keypad.

  I take it from her, look it over.

  “A GPS?”

  She nods.

  “It was Velcroed underneath the console. I missed it the first time through. Battery has run down. Otherwise, it looks to be fine,” she says. “You familiar with this particular model?”

  “No, the one I’ve got is a few years old, nearly twice the size.”

  “Same with the ones they issue the water police. Shit for memory. But these newer ones, you can program them to spit out a log of every site you’ve marked for weeks. With any luck, it might just tell us where the boat stopped on the day Ned was killed.”

  “If he used the GPS.”

  “Yeah, if. But Ned was a gadget guy. Never met a gizmo he didn’t like. I’m betting he used it.”

  “Hypothetical question here, Fiona.”

  “Ask.”

  “You think maybe you ought to turn it over to the police?”

  “Oh, yes, by all means,” she says. “You’re absolutely right, Zack.”

  She returns the GPS to her backpack. She looks at me, smiles.

  “Then again,” she says. “I am the police, aren’t I?”

  47

  Barbara’s playdate involves us using Aunt Trula’s mopeds. I threaten a boycott, but she lures me with the prospect of a picnic lunch she’s packed. She won’t tell me where we’re going, but that’s OK. I’d follow her anywhere, even on an infernal moped.

  After zipping along the south coast, past Horseshoe Bay and Elbow Beach and, finally and appropriately, Hungry Bay, we arrive at the Bermuda Botanical Gardens.

  We cut across a broad lawn and head for a small, circular stand of cedar trees with ancient arthritic trunks and branches low to the ground.

  It takes some scrambling to cut through to the center of the stand, but once inside there’s a big payoff. It’s as if we’ve entered a room wholly apart from the rest of the world.

  Barbara is beaming. She sets down the picnic basket. She lies faceup on the ground and stretches out her arms.

  I lie down beside her. I stare up at the cedar-branch ceiling. Light streams in, all soft and golden, the way it does in paintings. The air is cool and comforting, as if set by the ideal thermostat.

  “So what do you think?” Barbara says.

  “I’m thinking I haven’t really done anything like this since I was a little kid.”

  “I know,” she says. “It’s great, isn’t it?”

  Barbara closes her eyes. She takes a deep breath, lets it ease itself out.

  “My mother used to have this giant cedar chest at the foot of her bed. It’s where she kept all her prettiest things. And when I was a little girl, she would let me sit in it while she sorted through her clothes, picking out something to wear. That cedar chest, its smell, I think it’s the first real smell I ever remember.

  “Later, whenever we went to church and the priest would talk about heaven, I couldn’t really picture it, you know? But I could smell it,” says Barbara. “It smelled just like that cedar chest. It smelled just like this.”

  I roll onto my side. That way I can see her better.

  “How did you find this place?”

  “It was right after my father died. Mother and I spent that summer with Aunt Trula. She used to be big in the Royal Botanical Gardens and whenever she came here for meetings she’d let me have the run of the place.”

  “You were how old?”

  “Not quite ten.”

  “Hard age to lose your dad.”

  “Weren’t you about the same age?”

  “Nine,” I say.

  “And to lose both your parents at once like you did.”

  I don’t say anything.

  Barbara looks at me, says: “You think that’s what draws us together?”

  “You mean, other than the knockdown, drag-out killer sex?”

  “Yes, other than that.”

  “I’ve thought about it,” I say.

  “And your conclusion?”

  “I don’t know. It could be that each of us has the same hole in our heart and somehow, without even knowing, without even trying, we manage to fill it for the other one.”

  Barbara takes my hand, gives it a squeeze.

  “Back then,” she says, “this was where I came to fill that hole in my heart.”

  We lay there for several minutes, not talking, not needing to, enjoying the quiet.

  Then Barbara sits up. She crawls to a tiny opening in the trees. She motions me to join her. We peer through the opening onto a wide bed of flowers, their creamy yellow petals in full audacious bloom.

  “They’re freesias,” Barbara says. “Double Fantasy freesias. They import the bulbs from Holland.”

  “Pretty darn gorgeous.”

  Barbara nods.

  “That’s where I saw him,” she says.

  “Saw who?”

  “John Lennon.”

  I look at her.

  “The Beatle?”

  “Uh-huh, he was kneeling on the ground, right there, in the middle of all the freesias.”

  “Was this like an apparition or something?”

  She shakes her head.

  “No. The real thing. He used to visit Bermuda all the time, he and Yoko. This was after he’d split up with the others. He spent lots of time walking around in the gardens.”

  “And you saw him standing right there?”

  “I did.”

  “And you recognized him?”

  “What do you think? I am from England. He was a Beatle. Of course, I recognized him,” she says. “I was lying in here, off in my dream world, and I heard someone humming. I crawled over here, just like we are now, and there he was, kneeling in the freesias.”

  “By himself?”

  “No, he had his son with him. Sean. He was four or five, a few years younger than me,” says Barbara. “They glanced up, saw me staring out at them. And John Lennon said: ‘Ah, will you look, Sean. It’s a wee troll of the woods.’”

  “And then you crawled out and joined them and the three of you became fast friends.”

  Barbara laughs.

  “Not hardly. I scooted back behind the trees and hid there. I was very, very shy back then,” she says. “He died later that same year, right after his last album came out. You remember what it was called?”

  I rack my brain, but don’t come up with it. Truth is, I’ve always been more of a Stones fan.

  “Double Fantasy,” says Barbara. “Like the flowers.”

  “And you were here to witness the moment of inspiration.” “My solitary claim to fame.” “Aside from knowing me.” “Yes,” she says, “aside from that.”

  She puts her arms around my neck. We hug. The moment is broken by
the sound of my stomach in full feed-me mode. Barbara pulls away and opens the picnic basket. “I’ve got rare roast-beef sandwiches with horseradish sauce,” she says. “And?”

  “And some havarti.” “And?”

  “And a pinot noir from Oregon.” “Not a bad spread,” I say. “For a wee troll of the woods.”

  48

  After lunch, we stroll across the botanical garden to an adjoining park called Graydon Reserve. Atop a grassy bluff, with a commanding view of the south shore, sits a tiny chapel.

  It’s as plain and unadorned a place of worship as I’ve ever seen. No steeple, no arches, no architectural frills of any sort—just four whitewashed mortar walls and a cedar shingle roof. Behind it sits a small cemetery, with headstones old and new.

  We stop so I can read the historical marker that stands alongside the path.

  Graydon Chapel, built 1764, in memory of Capt. William Graydon, lost at sea. Erected by his loving wife, Ingrid, who mourned him until her own passing on January 27, 1811.

  “Forty-seven years,” I say. “That’s a long time to mourn someone.”

  “I think about her every time I come here. I’ve got this picture of her in my head.”

  “Standing on the bluff all alone, looking out to sea, wiping back a tear from her eye, forsaken and forlorn?”

  Barbara shakes her head.

  “No, not like that at all actually. I see her sitting here, her skirt spread out on the grass, surrounded by children, her grandchildren probably, telling them stories about their grandfather, the sea captain. Smiles and lots of laughter.” She looks at me. “Happy mourning, I suppose.”

  We walk up a stone path to the chapel. Three narrow wood-frame windows line the chapel’s side walls. They are open to take full benefit of the ocean breeze.

  From inside the chapel comes the sound of singing. Well, not so much singing as chanting. There’s not a lot of melody to it, but it sounds pleasant enough.

  “We’re in luck,” Barbara says. “They usually only sing at early morning and evening services.”

  “Who’s they?”