by Alice Orr
The courtyard area centered around a huge banyan tree. Strings of pin-lights were twined among the branches, unlit now at the brightest part of the day but ready to create a romantic atmosphere at dusk and after. That thought brought Des back to mind. Suddenly, Taylor not only sensed but knew why she had come here. She had felt the warmth of his embrace earlier today. She wanted to feel that now. She needed almost desperately to be in his arms and pressed against the firm certainty of his body. She longed to lose herself in the oblivion of the desire he made her feel. Whatever consternation that desire might cause would be of minor concern compared to what she was now feeling.
But would he feel the same way about seeing her? Did he know the things Winona had talked about? She said they were the subject of public gossip. He must know. Why hadn’t he mentioned them? Taylor knew the answer to that question. He would have been hesitant to bring up something so terrible. He might be direct and even abrupt sometimes, but he didn’t seem to be cruel. He would have been more careful about her feelings than to confront her with such a horrifying truth. Or, was she crediting him with compassion he didn’t feel? Could he possibly find compassion in his heart for her after what she was supposed to have done? Could anyone be that generous, especially under these circumstances? She doubted that she could. She was telling herself that she’d made a mistake coming here to look for Des and she should leave, when he appeared through the open doorway of the cafe.
He spotted her immediately and smiled, quickening his pace toward her. It was too late for her to reconsider. She could run away, of course, but it seemed she had done a great deal of that in her life without even realizing it. The time had come to stop running and face the consequences of the past, newly arrived to haunt her present and create heaven knows what havoc of her future. She was standing near the connecting wall between the courtyard and the saloon. That wall was crisscrossed by blossoming vines of sweet fragrance, but she couldn’t really appreciate their beauty or their scent at the moment. She sank into a chair at an empty table and watched Des’s inevitable approach.
“Just in time for lunch. May I tell you about our specials today?” he asked with a small bow.
She could see that the other tables were being attended by female employees in jeans and T-shirts with the Beachcomber logo on them. Des was playing at being a waiter for her amusement. As he looked more closely into her face, his tone suddenly changed to one of sincere concern.
“What’s wrong?” he asked. “Has something happened?”
“Please, sit down,” she said. “I have to talk to you.”
Des lowered his tall, broad frame into a white café chair that looked instantly too small and too unmasculine for him. That super-virile impression was all but contradicted by the gentleness in his face as he looked at her. She felt that gentleness wash over her like a warm bath. She longed to sink beneath its soothing waters and never come to the surface again. There would be peace and comfort there. She was certain of it. He reached across the table and laid his hand over hers in a gesture so kind and caring it seemed, for a moment, so out of sync with his usual coolness that she could hardly believe it was happening. She could hardly believe any of this was happening. She concentrated on the way the sun picked out the blond among the dark hairs on his forearm and burnished it into strands of precious gold.
“What is it you want to talk about?” he asked.
Taylor thought about pulling her hand away so that this conversation might be as dispassionate as possible, but she didn’t. Instead, she did what she needed to do. She turned her hand over and twined her fingers tightly through his, as if her life depended on it. As well it might.
“You know, don’t you?” she asked. “You’ve known all along.”
“Known what?”
She felt his sudden tension. She could see it in the way the tendons grew even more defined along his muscled arm.
“About the past,” she said. “About what happened at Stormley?”
“What happened at Stormley?”
His eyes had lost some of their gentleness, but he still made no attempt to let go of her hand. There was a war going on inside him. She could sense it. She could almost see it. It occurred to her that the kind thing for her to do would be to get up from this table and walk out of this place right now. If she did that, she would spare him whatever discomfort this conversation was bound to cause him. She started to pull her hand away, but he gripped it more firmly.
“What do you know about what happened at Stormley?” He rephrased his question less harshly than before.
“I don’t know anything.”
Taylor felt the tears rising behind her eyes. She stared into her lap for a moment and willed them not to fall. “I don’t remember anything about the night of the fire. Until yesterday, I didn’t even think I was on this island when it happened. Now, I discover that I was.” She hesitated long enough to take a deep breath before plunging on. “I have also discovered that I may be the one who set that fire.”
Des looked away from her for a moment, in the general direction of the banyan tree with its many trunks and twisted tangle of woody vines and branches, like the tangle her life had so recently become. In the absence of his gaze, Taylor noticed that she had such tight hold of his hand that her nails were digging into his flesh. She loosened her grasp, and that brought his attention back to her face.
“No one knows for sure who started that fire,” he said. There was a strangled quality to his voice, as if he were struggling to keep his emotions out of it and not entirely succeeding. “Didn’t Winona tell you that?”
“Yes, she said there was circumstantial evidence, but nothing conclusive.” Taylor’s own voice had softened. She could feel that Des was the one who needed comforting now. She was surprised that, considering her present state of torment, what she wanted more than anything was to provide that comfort for him.
“Then you should believe what Winona said. Nobody knows what happened that night. Nobody knows who started the fire.”
“Do you believe that?”
“Who am I to question Winona? She’s supposed to be some kind of all-knowing guru.”
Des had grown more distant with each word. Taylor felt him withdrawing from her as surely as if he had turned and walked away. He was retreating into the safety of his customary aloofness. She could almost see the mantle of that coolness fall over him like a protective cloak against the pain of the memories she was stirring in him. Her heart ached to pull him back to her. She wished to know the magic words to make that happen, but they didn’t come. She held his hand a second longer, then untwined her fingers from his. This time he made no attempt to hold on.
“What else did Winona tell you?” he asked.
Taylor thought for a moment about whether they might both be better off if she left here right now. She would certainly save them at least one painful conversation if she did. She could go to the airport, abandoning her luggage, and catch the next flight north. The fastest escape possible might be the best. Detective Santos had told her not to leave the island, but Detective Santos wasn’t here now. She doubted he would be at the airport, either. She could get out of this place before anybody knew she was gone and worry about the consequences later.
Wasn’t that what her aunts had done all those years ago? Didn’t they whisk her off this island to the safety of the north country and let the past take care of itself? But look how that had turned out. The past hadn’t taken care of itself, at least not permanently so. The past had returned, rearing its hideous head straight through the fabric of the present and making a gash that might never be mended. What had been so long and so carefully buried beneath layers of falsehood had come to the surface at last. No airplane could soar high enough or fly fast enough to carry Taylor away from that. She relinquished the fantasy of escape and settled back into her chair.
“Winona told me that my mother and I hadn’t been getting along. I was angry with her a lot of the time and very rebellious. I was w
hat they call a problem child.”
Des didn’t comment so she went on.
“Winona says I had begun to act out, as she put it. Tantrums, refusing to do what I was told, that kind of thing. It sounds to me like I was the brat of the world.”
That was more flippant than Taylor meant it to be, but she’d felt she had to release a bit of tension or she might explode. Still, Des made no comment and showed no reaction. He sat there watching her, his posture almost casual, his expression as close to a blank canvas as a human face could be. Taylor pressed on, though she had a sense of her words bouncing off the wall of his facade before he could even hear them.
“The fire was apparently set with fuel oil, the kind I could easily have found in the caretaker’s shed. According to Winona, the general opinion was that during one of my fits of temper I saturated the place in oil and set it on fire.”
Taylor couldn’t bring herself to repeat exactly what Winona had told her, that the oil had actually been spread around only in Desiree’s room. That was too horrible a fact for Taylor to speak aloud. She feared that if she did, the earth would open up beneath her feet and she would drop into a chasm forever.
“Apparently, charges were never laid because of my age at the time,” she said in conclusion, “and the fact that my aunts agreed to put me into therapy.”
“Therapy with Winona.”
“Yes. That’s why she knows so much about what went on.”
“Does she say you admitted to setting the fire?”
Taylor sighed. She wished against all probability that this conversation could be instantly over and the topic never raised again as long as she lived. “She says I claimed not to remember any of it.”
“Did she tell you that you were locked in your room at the time of the fire? That you were almost killed yourself?”
Taylor nodded. She had asked about the details, and Winona had mentioned the locked room. It was surmised that Desiree might have shut Taylor in to punish her for some bad behavior or other and her fury over that had driven her to light the fire.
“Then how did you get out of your room to start the fire?”
“They think I crawled out the window and along the roof to my mother’s room. Supposedly I had done that before.”
“And where did the fuel oil come from?”
Taylor looked down at her lap again. The tears rushed up again, no longer so readily controlled. They trembled on her lashes, and one fell onto the back of her hand. “That’s the worst thing of all,” she said in a voice that was barely more than a whisper. “The suspicion was that I had hidden the oil in my room, that I might have been planning the fire for some time.”
Taylor bit her lip so hard she tasted the sharp flavor of her own blood. She held her breath against the flood of grief and guilt welling inside her. She was vaguely aware of the hum of conversation from other parts of the courtyard. For the past several minutes she hadn’t been aware of anything but the sound of her own voices, the one that was speaking and the ones in her head accusing and condemning her for what her childhood self had very probably done.
Suddenly, her arm was in a firm grasp and she was being eased up out of her chair. Her newly reawakened awareness detected a lull in the conversational hum as surrounding lunchers must have turned their attention in her direction. She didn’t see them do that because she was staring up into Des’s face.
“I’m going to take you somewhere more private,” he said.
Taylor thought about asking where that private place might be. Ordinarily, she wasn’t the kind of woman who would allow herself to be led off to some unknown destination without inquiring about details. This moment, however, was hardly ordinary. Somewhere in the course of saying the things she’d just forced herself to say she had used up the energy that would have allowed her even to ask a question. She followed without resistance as Des guided her among the tables toward the restaurant building.
* * *
THERE WAS A DOOR at the top of the stairs that led from the café to the space above the restaurant. That door opened onto a hallway with a gleaming, wide-planked floor. A carved wooden table of Caribbean design stood at the far end of the hall and held a matching carved lamp. Des opened a door halfway down the hallway and moved aside for Taylor to pass. She drew her breath in sharply at the sight that awaited her as she stepped across the threshhold. She was facing a wall of glass that looked out over the tops of buildings to the harbor with its mounded green islands and lolling white sails. She walked to the window and looked out.
“Let’s go outside for a minute,” said Des, who had come into the apartment and closed the door quietly behind them.
The glass wall was actually a sliding door that opened onto a wide terrace. A table near the railing had been set for two with the same bright china Taylor had noticed in the café. Taylor stood transfixed in the doorway, uncertain of what to do next. Had he been expecting company?
Des must have noticed her staring at the table. “I had hoped you might join me for lunch,” he said. He took her elbow and gently steered her toward a cushioned wicker loveseat that faced the railing and the spectacular view.
“Whenever I need to get things in order I come out here,” he said. “Just looking at the water can make the world right some times.”
That’s a lot to expect of a view in this case, Taylor thought. “It is very beautiful,” she managed to say.
“Yes, it is.” Des’s voice had deepened. Taylor realized he was looking at her and not at the harbor. Suddenly, she felt ill at ease. “Could I see the rest of the place?” Before he could answer, she had turned back toward the sliding glass doors.
The apartment was lovely, tasteful while still being masculine. They walked from room to room as Taylor tried not to think about the way being alone with Des made her feel. It seemed that she should be concerning herself with things other than passion right now. Still, she knew that was the source of the warmth that bathed her in places that felt as if they had never known heat before, at least not the kind she experienced with him.
“This is my favorite room,” he said.
They had come to another set of sliding doors. These were made of teak panels decorated in an Asian design of long, curving reeds that looked as if they might have been brush-painted by hand. Des slid the panels open to reveal yet another astonishing insight into his world. The floor of the room was tiled in terra-cotta of a deep red-brown color. The ceiling was mostly open in a tinted skylight that let in the sun but shielded its burning rays. Beneath the skylight was an octagonal hot tub filled with blue-green water.
Des bent down at poolside and tested the water with his fingers. “Just right,” he said. “I keep it more tepid than hot. I relax better at that temperature.” He looked over at her where she stood by the door, still marveling at the beauty of his world and what it told her about him. “You could use some relaxing. How about taking a soak with me?”
Taylor was so startled by the suggestion that she couldn’t think what to say.
“I wouldn’t expect you to go skinny-dipping. There’s a suit here that will probably fit you.”
The mention of skinny-dipping turned the warmth inside her even more molten, but what really bothered her was the offer of a suit. What was he doing with women’s bathing apparel in his apartment?
He must have guessed what she was thinking because he added, “It belonged to my wife. She left it behind when she had the good sense to get me out of her life. It still has the price tag attached.”
“I don’t really think I’m up to water sports right now,” Taylor said.
“That’s exactly why you need it. You can float your troubles away, or some of them at least.”
She was about to say that she suspected getting rid of what was upsetting her wouldn’t be so simple, but he had already hurried out of the room, probably to get the bathing suit. She shrugged. What harm could it do to go along with his suggestion? She was feeling so numb from repeated shocks to her system th
at she could hardly think what was wrong or right to do next. Until she glued herself back together enough to make that decision, maybe Des had a point. Maybe she could actually float some of her troubles away. She was suddenly ready to try.
The shimmering turquoise maillot did indeed turn out to fit. It slid over Taylor’s body like a second skin, clinging to every curve. The color brightened the pale blue of her eyes. She couldn’t help noticing how good she looked in the dressing-room mirror.
“Come on in,” Des called as she stood in the doorway to the hot-tub room.
She could feel his eyes on her body as she did her best to keep from staring at his. He was submerged to just above the waist and must have been sitting on an underwater bench along the side of the pool. His chest was broad and golden in the sun from the skylight. His shoulders were so muscular and his biceps so rounded they made her breath catch in her throat.
“Hurry up before I come out there and get you,” he said. His voice was husky in a way it hadn’t been before. She could tell that was because he liked what he saw of her in the formfitting suit.
Taylor eased herself into the warm water. The air in the pool room was cooled by a touch of air-conditioning, and the water felt just right, as Des had said it would. The silkiness of it lapped over her as he moved along the bench to her side. He reached up and pulled her down next to him. Then he put his hand at her waist and drew her close. The sleek wetness of his body molded itself to her own as he reached up and tangled his fingers in the heavy mass of her hair.
His mouth met hers in a kiss that was long and intense. When he finally lifted his lips from hers, Taylor felt faint and breathless for a moment. The warmth of the water, the dizzy events of the day, the spell of his kiss. She wondered if it might all be too much for her to take and remain conscious. She leaned against him for support. Suddenly, he had scooped his arms under her and was lifting her from the bench. He carried her up the few steps to the rim of the hot tub.