She wobbled and her eyes sprang open; he touched her shoulders to steady her. She reached for the railing and he let go.
“What terrified you about the water today?” he asked.
Underwater lights attached to the pilings cast arcs of turquoise in the otherwise black sea.
“I’ve always had this thing about dark water, but I don’t think that was it—or all of it. Is there something spooky about this island?” Ever since her arrival, she’d felt porous and fragmented, as if she were cracking open. Drunk even when sober, and overly candid when tipsy.
“Could be just superstition, but I’ve heard people say there are magnets in the mountain that can cause clairvoyance or hypersensitivity to the supernatural,” Liz said. “Or maybe what you feel is just that old Caribbean magic coaxing you to let down your guard.”
They strolled to the end of the wharf.
“Jason beat me to the zodiac,” he said. “I’ll have to swim home.”
“You’re joking,” she said, eyeing the inky water, the distance to Iguana.
“Got a better idea?” In one swift motion, he removed his necklace, looped it over her head, and said, “Many happy returns.”
The warm bead fell heavily against her breastbone. She inspected it under the wharf light: a pentagonal shape, worn smooth. “You mustn’t,” she said. “This is some sort of talisman.”
“It’s a blue bead of Statia,” he said. “Rare diving treasure. Too bad you’ll never get down there to see any of it.” He touched the bead, then dove into the water. He surfaced in a swirl of phosphorescence, looked up at her, and feathered his arms, which made him appear to sparkle. “See you around.”
His words hung between them, more a question than a farewell. Els clasped the bead, the only impetuous birthday gift she’d ever received.
He stroked away, crossed the beams from several yachts, and disappeared into the darkness.
CHAPTER 4
Els insisted on sitting in the front passenger seat for Sparrow’s tour, the first stop of which was the Culturama Bar, where he bought rotis to eat along the way. The aroma of curried vegetables partially masked the odor of diesel and open drains that pervaded the congested center of Charlestown. On the sidewalks, uniformed schoolchildren and bank employees crowded among women in dresses. She’d expected the island people to have a distinctive look, a tribal resemblance, and was surprised by the diversity.
When she mentioned this, Sparrow stared into the knot of traffic ahead and said, “Nevis people come down from slaves, miss.” He pointed out a fenced empty lot near the sea and a plaque across the street. “Das where dey say dey used to sell dem. We come from different parts a’ Africa. White masters like black women, so we mixed up with dem now.” The traffic cleared and Sparrow maneuvered the van toward the courthouse. “De white people tek way we identity,” he said. “So we hadda fin’ a new one. We is Nevisians now.”
Pricked by her own display of insensitivity and naïveté, she looked out the window at an elderly man soaking his legs in the hot spring below the remains of the Bath Hotel.
They drove around the island counterclockwise. Sparrow showed her the plantations, some mere ruins of sugar works, some transformed into posh hotels, each with a history both rich and cruel. She was charmed by the place names—Gingerland, Morning Star, Saint John’s Fig Tree, Coconut Walk, Chicken Stone, Hermitage, Golden Rock—and the views of neighboring Redonda and Montserrat.
“That house we saw, the one that’s for sale, must be as old as some of these others,” she said. “Does it have a name too?”
“Trouble,” Sparrow said. He pulled up in front of Nevis Pottery, where, he explained, the craftspeople worked with locally dug clay. He ushered her inside and told her she couldn’t leave without a souvenir.
She selected a rustic horse, captivated by its energy.
Once they’d passed the airport and the cottages at Oualie Beach, Els began looking for the abandoned house, and as they climbed the hill toward its gate, she said, “Pull over there.”
“Crazy to stop here,” Sparrow said.
“Pull over.”
With a whispered expletive, he stopped in the dirt strip between the road and the wall and looked at her. “Doan get out here, miss.”
“Just a peek.”
When she opened her door, he grabbed her arm.
“What’s the matter with you?” she said.
“Jumbie doan want nobody ’round here.”
She shook free and said, “Jumbie, whoever he is, will never be the wiser.” She hopped out and went to the gate. The frosted flames of giant blue agaves stood sentry on either side of the drive. A Jeep was parked farther up the hill, the trunk of an uprooted palm dimpling its bonnet. The tree’s dried fronds obscured the view of the house, but she could see wide stone steps rising to a covered gallery with a frill of gingerbread trim. Another fallen palm had sheared off a corner of the hip roof.
A bearded man stood at the end of the gallery beside a crimson hibiscus. Wedging her sandal between the boards of the gate, Els pulled herself up, waved, and called to him.
“Miss, who you talking to?” Sparrow said.
When she looked back at the house, the man was gone. She returned to the van and pulled out her tote.
“Get in, miss,” Sparrow said. “Now.”
“In a sec.” Coralita vine had claimed most of the wall, nearly covering a sign warning “Beware of Gardenia.” She opened the letterbox built into the wall with “Jack” painted on its door. Empty but for a spider’s web and the bodies of its prey.
Sparrow hit the horn.
“Just hold your horses,” she called. She took out her beach read, Island of the Moon, and scribbled the estate agent’s number inside.
Sparrow shot her a look of pure terror, gunned the engine, and raced away toward town, swerving around a man on a donkey.
“You crazy son of a bitch,” she yelled after him. She kicked a pebble across the road, followed it, and threw it as hard as she could toward the sea. It bounced off a boulder and plopped into an incoming wave. She gazed back at the house and garden, which evoked her favorite childhood stories—tales in which nothing was as it appeared—and wondered what secrets they held.
After waiting for a lorry to pass, she crossed the road again, clambered over the gate, and threaded her way up the drive around nests of desiccated palm fronds. The Jeep was hitched to a trailer cradling a small boat under a tarp. Beyond it, in the center of a gravel court, blue starbursts of lily of the Nile erupted from an enormous rusty cauldron. The property’s silence was a presence, but when she listened, she heard doves cooing, birds whistling, a skittering in the brush. She smelled hot stone, damp earth, and the fragrance of gardenia, though she saw none blooming.
She climbed to the gallery where a cannon—too small for a weapon, too large for a toy—was mounted on a stone pedestal. Sitting on the top step, she gazed toward the sea until sunspots polka-dotted her eyelids. The view sent her into a fuzzy memory of azure sky between palm branches, the scents of gardenia and oil paint, and a woman singing in Italian, but she didn’t know if she was remembering something real or wished for or dreamed.
A man was standing at the foot of the steps. She started, not having heard his barefoot approach, and stood up. “What the hell are you doing here?” She glanced down the drive, mapping the fastest route back to the road.
He chuckled. “Getting a front-row seat for the sunset,” he said. “Just like you.” American, she thought. Midwestern. There was a mocking confidence in his cocked hip and ironic smile. A gardenia poked from his shirt pocket; his trousers were cut off at the knees, the edges frayed. The sun at his back turned the locks escaping his stubby ponytail into a chestnut aura. He was younger than the bearded man she’d seen before, barely thirty.
“I’m not staying that long,” she said, and hurried down to the court, skirting where he stood.
“The sunset’s magical from here,” he said. “It’s why this house even exis
ts. The fiery Sophia wanted this view. It was her joy . . . and her undoing.”
“Sophia who?”
He poked his toe at a bed of ground cover the color of papal velvet, which was spreading headlong onto the gravel. “Unless someone inherits the obsession for this place, this garden will revert to cactus and weeds,” he said. He climbed the steps, sat down, and gazed toward the sea with an expression of wondrous anticipation, as if the daily sunset was, in fact, a magic show about to begin.
“What is it about this place that would make my driver clam up and run off?” she asked.
“During the big hurricane last year,” he said, “the owner was supposedly spotted on the seawall over by Tamarind Cove. No trace of him since. The locals believe he jumped into the sea, or let it sweep him away, and that his jumbie haunts this place. Won’t set foot here, even to loot.”
“Mr. Jumbie,” she said, “is this Jack person’s ghost, then.”
“Do you believe in ghosts?”
“Fervently,” she said. “I grew up in a stone pile in the Highlands. Been in the family for centuries.”
He smiled. “Scotland: home of some of the best ghosts. Ever see one?”
“Once when we were children, my . . . friend . . . and I thought we’d seen something, but we couldn’t be sure.”
“Spirits are, like a lot of things, in the mind of the beholder,” he said. “Only receptive people can see them. Smell that gardenia? The flower of secret love. That fragrance takes me back to junior prom, 1977. The last uncomplicated night of my life.”
“I took you for younger than that,” she said.
“I never said it was my junior prom.” He settled back on his elbows.
Though she’d planned to wait for the sunset, the idea of being caught in the near dark with this stranger—at best enigmatic, at worst a complete nutter—clanged all her citified self-defense bells. She took a few steps toward the drive.
“Don’t leave before the show,” he said. “You’ve nothing to fear from Jack’s jumbie, if that’s what you’re worried about.” His gaze was tender. “Or from me.” He hopped up, went to the cannon, and stared at the sun, which was oozing into the sea.
Els’s glance bounced between him and the sun.
“Three, two, one. Bingo,” he said. “See the green flash?”
“Where?”
“You weren’t paying attention,” he said. “Caribbean holy grail. If the horizon is clear, the sun makes a green flare just before she disappears. Doubters say it’s just a trick our eyes play, a spin of the color wheel, but I believe it’s Mama Sun’s little good night wink. Some people think a green flash brings good luck.”
“I ran through my luck a while back.”
“Pay attention,” he said, “or you might not recognize luck when it appears.”
In the sky, high puffs of cloud were turning peach with purple edges, and a swirl of golden wisps hung in the west. “You should see yourself in this light,” he said. “That red hair might burst into flame any second.”
If he was going to flirt, she was going to run. “Enjoy the evening.” Without waiting for a response, she headed down the hill at a purposeful and fearless pace, abandoning the obstructed drive for the more open grassy patches.
She hadn’t heard him following, but while she was scrambling over the gate, he vaulted the wall; he was standing at the side of the road by the time she made it over. The gardenia was now behind his ear and he removed it, smiled rakishly, and set it on the ground between them. At close range she could see that he wore an earring, a tiny skull and crossbones with ruby eyes that seemed to glow from within.
He caught her staring at it. “A sailor’s earring pays for his burial if he dies at sea.”
She looked left and right along the empty road. He pointed down the hill. “The receptionist at Oualie will arrange a taxi to the Resort.”
“How do you know where I’m staying?”
“Lucky guess.” His hand over his heart, he made a little bow. “See you.” He began walking toward Charlestown, whistling, “Begin the Beguine.”
When she stooped to pick up the gardenia, she thought to question him about the warning on the gate, but by the time she’d straightened up again, the road was deserted.
CHAPTER 5
Cursing, Tony Hallowell struggled with the padlock and overgrown chain until his face had gone nearly as pink as the coralita vine. “Goddamn jungle swallows everything,” he said. He propped the gate open with his knee.
“When was the last time you showed this place?” Els squeezed through the opening, avoiding Tony’s belly. His breath smelled of this morning’s mint and yesterday’s rum.
“Never,” he said. “Since Jack Griggs is only believed to have drowned, maybe on purpose, and no corpse ever turned up, the court has only just ruled his estate can be settled. What you see here is as he left it.”
“No family?”
“No contact in decades, as I understand it. The heir’s solicitor is handling everything. Mind where you step.” He started up the drive. He was slack-shouldered, balding. Everything about him sagged.
“What’s that enormous stalk with the orange flowers?” she said.
“We call it a century plant,” he said. “There’s a serious garden under all this mess.”
“And the price includes everything?”
“‘As is, where is,’ as we say in the trade.” He walked onto the court, planted his knuckles on his hips, and surveyed the roof. A solar water heater dangled from one of its fasteners. A green vervet monkey like those she’d seen at Golden Rock was sitting on it and glaring down at them.
“Is he part of the package?” she asked.
“Vermin,” Tony said. “Bloody nuisance, all of them. Had enough?”
“I have to see the inside.”
“I told you, I haven’t the key yet.”
“Who the hell does, then?”
“Jack, presumably.”
She smiled tightly. “Surely you carry a tire iron in your car.”
“Break the lock and leave the house open until I get a replacement?”
“You said yourself that nobody dares bother the place.”
“Christ a’mighty,” Tony said, and headed back to the car.
Els circled the house, snapping photos. She examined the stonework built into the hillside, which included a cistern, cracked and dry, with pipes feeding it from the roof. In the overgrown grounds were an outbuilding with its roof torn off, giant mango trees, and a row of gardenias as high as a hedge.
A hummingbird brushing her arm startled and delighted her. Its hovering produced a surprisingly loud whir. From the tiny bird she sensed acknowledgment, mutual curiosity, and welcome. They stared at each other until Tony’s crashing through the palm fronds broke the spell, and the bird flashed green and zoomed off to gather nectar from the hibiscus.
Tony jammed the tire iron under the door’s hasp and the screws popped away, along with a piece of the doorframe.
Els touched the raw wood. “Just look what you did.”
“Relax, will you? It’s not yours. Yet.” He switched on his torch, wrenched open the door, and waved her through.
The kitchen was as cool as a cellar. Shelves with storage jars, an oilcloth thumbtacked to the table, three mismatched chairs in different paint box colors. Making its ghostly way up the wall was a sun-starved vine that had invaded between window and sill. A green gecko poked its head out of the cooker burner and puffed its golden throat; when Els stamped her foot, it retreated beneath the ring, reappeared on the stone floor, and sprinted under the fridge.
Tony pointed his torch toward some stone steps. “Be my guest.”
With each step the temperature rose, the light dwindled, and a putrid odor became more pronounced. The next level was a single room. Light pricking through cracks in the shutters barely illuminated stout beams supporting the floor above.
Tony ran his torch over the ceiling like a lecturer’s laser. “There’s a quirky b
athroom at that end, a bedroom in the middle, and a sort of study above here, if I remember correctly. Trust me, it’s odd but totally unremarkable.”
“Are you sure you’re an estate agent?” Els said. She took the torch and examined the room: a big leather chair and ottoman, threadbare sofas, a refectory table, elegant proportions, crowded bookshelves, and something else. “Mother of God.”
Tony hurried up behind her. “The crazy bugger must have been on one of his legendary tears.”
The sisal carpet had been rolled back, and on the stone floor were the remains of a fire made from a smashed wooden chair. Mixed with the ashes and charred spindles were partially burned black-and-white photographs, all of young women, many of them nude.
“His profession, or just destroying the evidence before their husbands caught him?” she asked.
Tony picked up a photo. The flames had spared the head and torso of a bare-breasted teenager looking seductively into the lens, her lips in a pout. “He was a teacher, story spinner, tinkerer, ladies’ man, brawler, intermittent drunk,” Tony said. “But photographer? Not to my knowledge.” He dropped the photo onto the pile.
“How do we get upstairs?” she said.
“I remember a stair starting somewhere over here,” Tony said.
The paneled wall looked solid.
“A secret stairway,” she said. “We have one of those at home. My favorite place as a wee lassie.”
Tony pounded his fist against the paneling. Els snapped a photo of the room, and he jumped at the flash before pounding again. One of the panels gave back a hollow sound. They examined the seams.
“Door must be swollen tight,” he said. “Surely you don’t want me prying away at it. You’ll just have to use your imagination.”
“So did Jack, it seems,” she said. “When I walked around the house, I saw a platform thing off the bathroom end that looks like a shower, but you’d have to climb out a window to reach it.”
“I’ve always heard the place is one big Rube Goldberg,” Tony said. Perspiration beaded his bald spot and mooned his underarms. “Let’s get out of here.”
The Moon Always Rising Page 4