“Just so,” Teal said, and placed the final document in front of her. “I’ll inform my client that she can rely on your discretion in this matter.”
Els gave him her deal smile. “You do that.”
She tasted salt spray mixed with the rain as she and Tony hurried across the car park, dodging potholes brimming with water.
Safe inside the car, she wiped the condensation off the inside of her window and said, “I want to go to my house.”
“It’s not yours, officially, until all your clearances come through,” Tony said.
“Who’s to care if I just nip in for another look about?”
“We’ve got a major hurricane bearing down on us, in case you haven’t noticed.” He steered around a tangle of seaweed on the harbor road. Spume crashing over the seawall splattered the car. “Goddamn Gravy,” he said, “just paying us back for pressuring him. You couldn’t rush that man if you set fire to his tie.”
Pinney’s Hotel hugged the corner at the edge of town, and between its pink buildings Els caught a glimpse of the beach, now submerged, with waves reaching the thicket beyond. “Stringing it out, the bastard,” she said. “Since it was on my nickel.” In the crowded TDC home center car park, two men wrestled a sheet of plywood into a pickup truck.
“You could’ve had that relic for at least a hundred thousand less,” Tony said. He switched on the defroster and ducked his head to peer through the widening clear spot on the windscreen.
“I underestimated you, Tony,” she said. “Imagine, letting you wring that much out of me.”
“You let your heart do the bidding,” he said. “Cardinal mistake numero uno.”
“My heart must be out of practice,” she said. “Been out of commission for a year.”
He slowed at the swale near the golf course, now running with muddy water. “You still paid less than it’s worth.” They were approaching the Resort now, and he put on his indicator light.
“We’re going to Jack’s,” she said.
“Bugger,” he said, and accelerated around the curve. “How are you imagining you’ll get back here?”
“Taxi,” she said. “Or I’ll just stay there. Jack’s has survived those recent storms pretty well.”
“You’d better be joking,” he said. “Mark my words, Miss City Banker, this Lenny is no Georges or Jose. It’s going to knock the shit out of this side of the island.”
“I can take care of myself.”
At the hairpin turn at Tamarind Cove, where the waves battered the volcanic rock seawall, Tony stopped, then gunned the engine. The car dipped into the flooded swale, shuddered, and crawled slowly out the other side.
“You might want to go another way back,” Els said.
“There is no other way.”
Tony unlocked the new padlock and opened the kitchen door, releasing that fetid smell—a mix of ashes and something rank and animal.
“Ladies first,” he said. The half-light of the stormy afternoon barely entered the house. “Jack was in arrears on his current. You’ll have to settle that account too.” He looked around the room, rubbing his arms. “Look, you really must go back to the hotel immediately.”
“I’ve never had a property in my own name before.”
“It’s not even yours yet. I can’t take this risk.”
“I’m staying,” she said.
He lit his torch and handed it to her. “With my compliments,” he said. He went out but returned immediately. “Don’t go anywhere near the ghaut—that ravine on that edge of the garden—or any of the others around the island,” he said. “The mountain carved them out for a purpose over all these millennia. When this storm gets going, water, boulders, all manner of debris will come roaring down.”
The door slammed behind him, plunging her into an eerie greenish darkness.
She opened the refrigerator and flashed the torch beam over jars and packets, all furry with green, pink, and black mold. Slamming the door immediately couldn’t stop the smell from spreading into the kitchen.
She climbed the steps and cast the beam into the corners of the lounge. Some of the photographs had blown about the room, and she collected and arranged them on the refectory table. Jack’s preferred subject was a girl in her late teens, blond and kittenish with erect breasts and a smile that was not at all innocent. Scrawled in pencil on the back of one photo was “S, Christmas 1977.”
The flames had spared fragments: an Asian woman’s boyish head and torso, a zaftig beauty, and a black woman’s legs and feet. Els stacked the remains and weighted them with a tarnished brass candlestick.
The secret door in the paneling stood ajar, revealing a narrow stairway. She climbed up to a hallway that ran along the back of the house and gave access to three rooms, all facing the sea.
She swung the beam into the first room. A desk. A filing cabinet with an open drawer, its contents strewn on the floor. Bookcases on two walls, framed documents on another.
In the next room she found a brass bed, its mattress a desert camouflage of stains. A knot of mosquito netting swung over it, and a breeze turned the ceiling fan. The rain, coming harder now, clattered on the roof. Hanging by a chain from a rafter was a basket chair with a heart-shaped pillow in its seat.
When she forced open the bathroom door at the end of the hallway, wet wind rushed at her, carrying the smell of ammonia and filth. A monkey clung to the edge of a jagged hole in the roof and bared its teeth. The wind slammed the door behind her. A smaller monkey screeched and leapt from the back of a chair to the top of a wall shelf and up to the hole, where it huddled with the first one and hissed.
The stench was so strong she could taste it. “Get the fuck out of my house!” she yelled. The monkeys stared at her, blinking. Gnawed fruit, nut hulls, and monkey dung littered the floor. In the clawfoot bathtub, a mouse was decomposing atop a soggy pile of partially burned papers, and behind the tub a full-grown male monkey occupied a nest of grimy towels, his eyes glittering in the torchlight. When he jutted his chin and rocked forward onto his knuckles, she wrenched the door open and stepped into the hall, and the wind slammed the door behind her again. The screams of the monkeys pursued her to the bedroom, dissonant clarinet wails echoing above the growling tuba of the wind.
She latched the bedroom door and leaned against it. When her breathing slowed, she opened the cupboard doors and roamed the light over the clothing. She pulled a cotton blanket off the shelf, wrapped it around her shoulders, and returned to the kitchen.
In the storeroom, she found an orange oiler hanging from a nail; when she reached for it, her hand ripped through spider webs that clung to her damp fingers. She flapped the jacket hard, hoping to dislodge any creatures that might have taken refuge in it.
She set the torch on the kitchen table and pulled a pad out of her briefcase. “I could murder a cup of tea just now,” she said. “Care to join me, Jack?” She tried the knob on the stove. A whisper of flowing gas. She found matches in a mason jar and lit the burner. A ring of blue brightened the room slightly; the odors of sulfur and gas reminded her of the kitchen at Cairnoch. She found tea bags in another jar and went to fill the kettle. A dribble of brown water slowed to a drip and stopped. Cursing, she killed the flame, pulled the musty blanket tighter, and began making lists.
The torch beam flickered and dimmed. She clicked it off and sat in the dusk, listening to the wind pummel the house. “Brilliant, fucking brilliant,” she said.
Perhaps a failing torch was a harbinger of obstacles to come, but under her chagrin at having overspent so impetuously was a bloom of joy.
She slung her briefcase strap over her head, nestled the bag against her stomach, and pulled on the rain jacket, which reached almost to her knees. By the time she’d locked the padlocks on the door and gate, her hood had blown off three times, water had run up her sleeves, and her skirt was clinging to her legs, hobbling her stride. She stopped at the gate and tried to map in her mind the route back to the Resort—maybe two miles straight along
the main road, hardly a daunting distance for someone brought up on mountain hikes, and surely she could hitch a ride for part of the way.
Before she’d gone a quarter mile, she’d twisted her ankle. Limping and leaning into the wind, she approached the turn by the seawall where Jack had supposedly disappeared. The flooded spot that had nearly swamped Tony’s car was knee-deep now and growing with each wave that crashed over the wall. She rubbed her throbbing ankle.
A pickup truck with roof lights flashing crawled toward her. She stepped into the road and the driver stopped, rolled down his window, and looked her up and down. She realized the briefcase bulged enough to make her look pregnant.
“What in God’s name you doin’ out here?” he said. He was gray at the temples and wore a NevLec logo shirt.
“Give me a lift to the Resort?”
“You can’t see the road’s closed?”
“You could drive through that.”
“I gettin’ the hell back to Newcastle,” he said. “Get in if you want a ride that way.”
She climbed in and he turned the truck around.
“Boss says to check the poles out this way,” he said. “When we gotta check them poles is after the storm finish wid dem, not before.” He looked at her. “I drop you at Nisbet, just past the airport. They emptied out yesterday. They can find a bed for you.”
“I just bought Horseshoe Jack’s place,” she said. “Let me off there.”
“That no place for someone like you to ride this out.”
“I’ll take my chances on that sturdy old dame.”
He made a low whistle. “Hurricane wash away one crazy owner,” he said, “next hurricane blow in a new one.”
CHAPTER 11
She slammed the kitchen door as if to seal out the breath of some enormous beast. In the failing light, she ransacked the cupboards and spread the food supplies on the table: three tins of evaporated milk, a package of spaghetti, a glass jar containing one sleeve each of Lorna Doone biscuits and saltines, jars of coffee, sugar, salt, and cornmeal. A plastic container with a few cups of cornflakes, cooking oil gone rancid, vinegar. A tin of sardines and another of Spam. Thin rations, but she’d survived in the bothy on cold tattie scones and Laphroaig.
Her search produced two lanterns and an Aladdin lamp, each with only a slick of fuel, the Aladdin holding a desiccated gecko that was curled around the base of the mantle. She collected all the candlesticks and rummaged through the kitchen drawers for stubs and matches. She set a bucket on the patio under the downspouts, and when she went back to collect it, the rain was falling harder and the wind was whipping the mango branches.
The wind squeezing through the hole in the roof created an eerie moan and sent a draft through the house. To silence the secret door’s maddening rattling, she wedged it shut with a chair. The storm’s noises were unnerving, made worse by intermittent crashes on the gallery roof that sounded like huge rocks hurled by a giant.
Though it was the darkest room, the kitchen felt the safest, so she gathered books, towels, pillows, and blankets and made a nest for herself in there. She set a pot in the storeroom for her privy. She’d found a rusty putter behind the big chair and kept it at hand in case the monkeys invaded.
Nibbling stale saltines, she wrote out a meal plan to stretch the supplies over three days, just in case. The best news was that the bar was well stocked, and she’d no aversion to drinking whisky neat.
After a tumbler of scotch, she fell into tormented dozing. Her house would be whirled away as by the tornado in The Wizard of Oz, carrying the screaming monkeys with it. Wind would rip off the roof and scatter Jack’s nude photos up the mountain. Mallo was outside, pounding the door to get in, but she hadn’t the strength to open it. She was in dark water, trapped in writhing fronds of seaweed.
A clap of thunder brought her fully awake and she felt she was on a raft, oddly stationary in a roiling sea. The closed shutters couldn’t keep out the explosions of lightning, or the thunder that followed almost immediately. Half three in the morning, dark as pitch, and the world was an undulating roar broken by earsplitting crashes and the ripping and slapping of roof shakes. A scream of wood wrenching loose, nails losing their purchase, fibers separating, then a crash of timbers on the patio.
She’d dozed off reading a history of Nevis, leaving a precious candle to burn out. Chiding herself for wasting the light, she threw off her blanket, stood up, and pawed the table for the matches and a new candle stub. Her shadow jittered on the wall until she sheltered the flame with the hurricane shade. When she shouldered the door, it moved only a few centimeters. The storm hurled itself in through the crack, and she latched the door to silence the wailing.
Door blocked. Front door and gallery windows nailed shut from the outside. She was trapped. The ceaseless noise might drive her mad, but she was curiously unafraid, trusting of the ancient house’s protection.
Without hope of further sleep, she made breakfast of rainwater tea and stale cornflakes in tinned milk and read how Nevis was dubbed Queen of the Caribees for outstripping the other islands in sugar production. A prize the British repeatedly fought the Dutch and French to retain, built on enslaved labor, its people freed to their own devices once emancipation robbed them of worth. Though trade, indenture, and fealty were woven into her family history, Els had never considered the plight of the millions of Africans wrested from their lands, families, and cultures and tossed into the furnace of greed to produce the riches of sugar, cotton, and rum. She wondered what guilt she shared and what she might owe to the people of this nation created by those who’d been dislocated and abandoned, but somehow remained unvanquished.
Mid-morning, the wind died and the sun broke through. Els pushed out the kitchen shutter and saw that the storm had thrown sections of the pergola against the building. Squinting in the rinsed daylight, she climbed out the window and over the wreckage.
The sky was cloudless, the agitated sea a deep sapphire. As Tony had warned, water cascaded through the ghaut, the mountain channeling the rain into lethal torrents and sending them barreling toward the sea. Birds fluttered and pecked in the smashed garden, and she wondered how such tiny, fragile creatures could have survived.
Under the searing sun, the garden was steaming. Smashed coconuts, the missiles that had crashed onto the gallery roof, littered the court. The monkeys emerged from the hole in the ridge, shimmied down the outdoor shower supports, and scampered into the jungle, and she wondered if they’d decamped for good or were only foraging for food and would soon reclaim her bathroom. How quickly her opinion of monkeys had veered from adorable to verminous.
Each grass-edged stone on the patio held water reflecting the sky, a mosaic of tiny swimming pools. She stepped through the wreckage in the garden, gathering fallen coconuts and citrus fruit in her skirt.
The wind started to rise again, but from the opposite direction. A palm frond javelined past, and when she looked toward the sea, a wall of storm was fast approaching. The miraculous light was only the eye. The blue above quickly became a bruised gray. With its change in direction, the wind dislodged debris that had found a resting place and sent it flying again. She hurried back to the house and dumped her fruit through the window. She’d barely lowered in the brimming water pans, climbed in, and latched the shutter when the hurricane slammed into the house from the west.
She went to the lounge and flopped into the big chair, deep and enveloping, with a mannish scent. On the table at her elbow was a framed snapshot of three whiskery men cradling a mahi-mahi. All of them wore Blues Brothers sunglasses, fedoras, and goofy grins. She removed the photo from its frame, but the reverse revealed only the print shop’s date: April 25, 1998. “Is one of these characters you, Jack?” she said.
She perused a stack of books and files on the table. One file, titled “Works in Progress,” was stuffed with ideas, including a page ripped from a Nevis tour guide about Julia Huggins prowling the ruins of the Eden Brown Estate and mourning her love, who was slain
in a duel on their wedding eve. A story more suited to an opera than anything she imagined Jack writing. In a book of Derek Walcott’s poetry, a flattened cigar wrapper marked the poem “Ruins of a Great House,” in which Jack had underlined the phrase “the leprosy of empire.” On another page, beside the poem “Islands,” he had marked the lines, “But islands can only exist / If we have loved in them.”
On top was a well-thumbed paperback of The Tempest. She propped her feet on the ottoman, nestled deeper into the chair, and began to read, the cadence of the poetry a comfort against the wind’s clamor.
By the afternoon of day two, still trapped and in half-light, she paced the house, opened drawers and books, and sat for a long time in the study. Jack’s bulletin board, covered with snapshots of women and postcards from them, also sported a condom, a smile drawn on its tip, dangling from a pushpin. Rain on the roof no longer seemed romantic.
Evening approached, the blackness closing in again. Wherever she’d imagined she might be on the first anniversary of Mallo’s death, it wasn’t sitting in the dark hoping both she and her house would survive a biblical storm. She’d dreaded this day, mostly for fear it would be simply ordinary—a reminder that the world had gone on, leaving her dragging the weight of her invisible grief. The very drama of the lightning and rain comforted her, as if the heavens agreed that the world had been cracked asunder on this day one year ago.
She nibbled the last of the crisps and ate the sardines, and though she wiped her hands on a tea towel, the smell clung. She squeezed lime over her fingers and into her drink and licked off the sticky juice. Now well into her third rum and down to her last two candle stubs, she sat at the kitchen table and listened. The storm was abating. She pushed open the shutter. Rain still splashed onto the patio, but the wind had turned fitful. Clutching a sliver of soap, she climbed out the window and cupped the rain in her fishy hands.
The Moon Always Rising Page 8