The Crimes of Jordan Wise (26 page)

I ran aft to the wheel, steadied
Windrunner
up into the wind until she was right in stays. Then I hurried forward again, dropped the main and staysail, came back aft. Bone had reached the ring, was resting there with one arm looped through it, looking in my direction. I waved at him. He didn't wave back.

I went below to start the auxiliary engine. At the wheel again, I circled the yawl under power until I could see Bone and the doughnut bobbing to windward. I idled down a hundred feet from him, eased the yawl upwind until I was close enough for him to reach up with one hand and catch hold of a rail stanchion. He tossed the preserver on deck, hung there two-handed until the roll was right, and then heaved himself aboard.

He wouldn't take any help from me. Wouldn't look at me until he'd hoisted himself to his feet, streaming water, and then it was only a brief glance followed by a short, sharp nod. There was an angry-looking welt on his shoulder where the boom had clipped him.

"That was close," I said. "Too close."

He didn't say anything.

"You shouldn't have grabbed me like that," I said. "The coffee . . . it was an accident. The jibe, too. One of us must've kicked the wheel. . ."

Silently he tugged at his wet clothes.

"Bone, listen to me—"

"Don't say it, mon. Ain't nothing I want to hear."

He made eye contact for three or four seconds and then moved past me and went belowdecks. But that look stayed with me, left me feeling chilled and empty. The burn in his eyes had been extinguished; there was nothing in them for me any more, no feeling at all. Cold, blank, like the unseeing eyes of a dead man—

What? Did I think of what?

Not rescuing him? Leaving him out there to drown?

My God, no! Not for a second. The thought never entered my head. I could no more have killed Bone than I could have chopped off my right arm, to save my ass or for any other reason. He was my mentor, my friend—my only friend. I loved him like a brother.

What do you think I am, some kind of monster?

How did he know about Annalise? The question kept nagging at me. It couldn't be from any mistake in my calculations. A combination of little things, probably. My telling him she'd left me. The empty ice chest. His abnormally long sleep and the hangover effects of the Valium mixed with rum. The new padlocks on the sail lockers and the fresh scrape in the starboard rail. Bone noticed every detail on a boat. He may have been sensitive to anything abnormal on one, too, in the same way he was sensitive to atmospheric conditions. He was an intelligent man; give him enough components and he could fit them together into the correct equation.

What would he do about his suspicions? Turn me in? I didn't think so. Didn't want to believe he would. His code of noninvolvement was why he hadn't confronted me; it would also keep him from going to the law. Our friendship weighed in my favor, too. And the fact that I'd saved his life had to count for something.

Still, you can't be absolutely certain how anyone will react to a given situation. You can't even be certain how you yourself will react. He could never condone the taking of a human life, no matter what the reason. He couldn't even sanction the killing of sharks. If his moral code was stronger than all the factors in my favor, there wasn't anything I could do about it. You could talk until you were blue in the face to a man like Bone, and the only voice he'd be listening to was his own.

Time would tell. All I could do was to keep as silent as he was and sweat it out.

Two long days passed. No one came around asking about Annalise. By the end of the second day I began to relax again. I'd been right, I thought, to do nothing, keep my distance. Bone had had plenty of time to think things over; if he was going to the law, he'd have done it by then.

That night I had a bad nightmare. Awake, I didn't think about the Annalise crime; my conscience bothered me not at all. But asleep, my subconscious dredged it up. I awoke suddenly, or thought I did, and Annalise was sitting naked on the foot of the bunk, dripping wet, her body draped in seaweed and rusted chains, her hair hanging in sodden strings, part of her face eaten away by sea creatures. I screamed once and really woke up, shaking and pouring sweat. For a time afterward I worried that I'd have the nightmare again, but I never did. Just that once, as if it were a purge.

On the third day, I debated the advisability of a visit to JoEllen Hall. She hadn't contacted me when Annalise disappeared the first time, so it wasn't likely she'd be concerned enough to do it this time. But if Annalise had confided in anyone about me or her new lover or her future plans, it was JoEllen. Safer for me if I knew what she might have said.

I drove over to Red Hook and hunted up the woman at her rundown beach cottage. I asked first whether Annalise was there, then whether JoEllen had heard from her in the past several days. No, she said, why was I asking? "I might as well tell you," I said. "We had an argument over her drinking, among other things, and she packed her suitcase and walked out. Took some money with her that I had stashed away. That was three days ago, so she must have left the island."

"Well, I don't know where she went and I wouldn't tell you if I did. The shitty way you treated her, I don't blame her for leaving."

"The shitty way / treated
her?
Is that what she told you?"

"She never should've come back, that's what she told me. She practically crawled to you, but you never let her forget the mistake she made two years ago. Always giving her orders, forcing her to live like a dog on that damn boat of yours. Poor kid was miserable."

"That's all Ues, JoEllen."

"So you say, when she's not here to defend herself."

"Did she tell you she was planning to leave me again?"

"Not the first time and not this time. Why should she? Her business where she goes and what she does, not mine. And not yours anymore."

"You're right about that," I said. "Tell me something, will you? The answer doesn't make any difference now, but I'd like to know. Was she having an affair the past month or so?"

JoEllen had never cared for me, and Annalise's lies had cemented her dislike. Her smile had an edge of malicious satisfaction. "Damn right she was. With the same man as before—Royce Verriker. She said he was the best fuck she'd ever had."

His slip at the marina was empty. He and
Conch Out
were gone.

He'd left the previous morning, I found out. Hadn't told anybody where he was bound. One of his periodic solo cruises, prompted by his suspicions of me—a long one, maybe. He'd be back in a week or two, three at the outside. He always came back eventually.

But not this time.

I never saw Bone again.

I got away with the Annalise crime. It was as perfect as the Amthor crime and the Cotler crime. Perfect.

That is what's important.

How many times have you heard that, and all its variations? Life is for the living. Take each day as it comes. Live for the moment and don't look back. It's the state of mind people slip into when they've suffered irreparable losses. A refuge for the grief-stricken, the depressed, the unhappy, the emotionally wasted. And the unrefiliably empty.

My refuge, after a while.

I should have been content again. Annalise and the threat of exposure were gone for good. I was safe. The tight, structured little world I'd established for myself on St. Thomas was secure. I could continue to indulge my simple tastes for the rest of my life. I could be at peace.

Only I wasn't. The barrenness remained, like a seared landscape on which nothing that had been there before could be rebuilt and nothing new would grow. The reason for it, most of the reason anyway, was a deep sense of loss and privation that I couldn't shake. It had nothing to do with Annalise. It was Bone, of course, the wrenching away of his friendship, his companionship, his knowledge, his wisdom. And it was something else I'd lost that I cherished as much as Bone.

Windrunner,
and all the yawl meant to me.

I don't mean physical loss; I continued to live on her, to take her out now and then. Psychic loss. Spiritual, maybe. The symbiotic connection of boat and man to the sea had been severed somehow and I could not seem to splice it back together. It was as if I'd tainted both
Windrunner
and my love of sailing beyond repair or redemption, as I'd tainted my relationship with Bone, by using them as instruments in Annalise's destruction.

Over and over I berated myself for not devising a different equation that didn't involve either Bone or the yawl, for rushing ahead with a deficient plan. I could have designed a better one, if I'd invested more time. Instead I'd opted for the quick and easy answer, and for that miscalculation I paid a damn high price.

Nothing was ever the same for me again.

The magic of singlehanding was gone. I still derived some pleasure from the wind, the sea, the night sky, the fast-running tacks and the dead-calm afternoons, but it was never again as intense or as lasting. Even the magic of Laidlaw Cay was gone—something else I lost. The first time I went back there, the terns and frigate birds had abandoned their nesting ground; without them the cay was just another barren sandspit. The second and last time, I discovered that heavy storm seas had diminished it to less than half its original size and all that remained were the reefs and a slender hump of sand strewn with sea wreckage. A dead place.

After a few months, I was sailing infrequently. Not working on
Windrunner
as much, either; the day-to-day tasks required to maintain upkeep on a yawl her size seemed to have grown tedious. Snorkeling also seemed to require too much effort, so I gave it up. Gave up driving around the island, too, except for shopping trips and an occasional visit to Marsten Marine. The closest I had to a friend now was Dick Marsten, but he was a workaholic and had a family and I saw him only for short periods at the boatyard.

I took up walking. Long walks in the morning and sometimes in the evening, along the winding streets of Frenchtown and the edge of Crown Bay, once all the way down Veterans Drive to Emancipation Garden and back. It was good exercise, it passed the time, and I learned to occupy my mind by concentrating on details of the surroundings.

I lost interest in sitting alone and communing with the night; I craved companionship, the kind I'd had with Bone. So I took to frequenting Harry's Dockside Cafe and some of the other local hangouts. But there was no substitute for Bone, not at the marina or in French-town or anywhere else on the island. I had to settle for the brief, boozy company of natives and of tourists hunting local color, and for meaningless conversations about women, politics, all sorts of topics I pretended to be interested in but wasn't.

I thought about Bone quite a bit that first year. Had he gone back to Nassau to be with his dalighter? Down to St. Lucia or Carriacou or one of the other as yet unspoiled islands in the Windwards or Grenadines? The Turks and Caicos? There were any number of possibilities. I might be able to find out if I tried hard enough, but then what? It was better if I didn't know.

I wondered how much longer he would have stayed on St. Thomas if it hadn't been for what I did. Not long, probably. The commercialism and the overcrowding would have driven him away. Would he have let me tag along with him? Two men, two boats, seeking fresh horizons and a brave new world? Maybe. Maybe not. Better if I didn't know that, either.

Wherever he was, whatever he was doing, I hoped he was happy and that his dalighter would become a marine biologist as planned and make him even happier. He deserved it. He was a good man, he'd never harmed anyone, he'd never committed any crimes or thrown away any of the things that were central to his life. He deserved happiness a hell of a lot more than I did.

So Marsten brought the buyer, a chubby, middle-aged Florida transplant, over for a look. The man liked what he saw, made me a generous offer, and I accepted, contingent on Dick finding me an acceptable replacement.

It didn't take long. Within a week, Marsten located a twenty-eight-foot schooner for sale at a reasonable price on St. Croix. I took an in-terisland flight to Christiansted to check out the schooner,
Joy leg.
She was clean and well maintained, with a new mainmast. The owner and I went out for a half day's sail so I could see how well she handled, and that sold me on her. I told him he had a deal, then notified Dick Marsten to go ahead with the sale of
Windrunner.

I returned to St. Thomas to sign the papers and rent slip space at the Red Hook marina, then flew back to Christiansted and sailed
Joyleg
across. That singlehand voyage was the best I'd been on in the two years since Bone went away. And the ambiance at Red Hook was more like what it had been at Sub Base harbor when I first went there. The change seemed to be what I'd needed, all right. New boat, new environment—new beginning.

The new beginning lasted about a year.

I sanded and painted and varnished until
Joyleg
was in tiptop shape. Took her out more or less regularly, once on a long sail to Puerto Rico. Adapted well enough to living on her and to Red Hook. I even became the nominal drinking buddy of the ex-navy, ex-charter fisherman who'd once given me sailing lessons; it amused me that he didn't remember me from Adam's off ox and treated me as if I'd never been anything but his equal. I told myself the scars were starting to heal a little, that I'd found a measure of peace again, but of course it wasn't true. The pleasure and the illusion of peace faded along with the newness; I began to lose interest, the way I had with
Windrunner
and Sub Base harbor.

Thirteen months after I bought
Joyleg
and moved to Red Hook, I was again spending more time in waterfront bars than I was on the schooner in port or at sea.

There was enough advance warning for frightened residents and tourists to flee in droves before the storm battered the island. That left rooms available at high-ground hotels like the Inn at Blackbeard's Castle. I booked one there, and rode out Hugo in flickering candlelight and relative safety behind the inn's storm-shuttered stone walls. At the height of the hurricane, the noise was deafening—thunderous bellows, banshee shrieks, savage wailing glists that literally shook the building. Annalise would have freaked out before it was over. I considered it something of an adventure—until I went down to the Red Hook marina afterward.

Some boats survived relatively unscathed; others were battered beyond recognition. It didn't matter how well they'd been secured by their owners—the effects were a matter of pure random luck either way, good or bad.
Joy leg
was one of the casualties. Her spars were gone, one side of the deckhouse had been caved in, holes had been torn in her hull in two places above the waterline. She was salvageable, but just barely.

I could have filed an insurance claim, as so many other owners did—insurance is mandatory when you buy and register a boat in the Virgins—but it would have taken months for payment to come through and I was afraid that a claim might trigger a background check on Richard Laidlaw. I could have paid for the repairs out of my own pocket, but it would've cost thousands and I didn't have enough emotional attachment to the schooner to make it worthwhile. Boat living had pretty much lost its appeal for me by then, anyway.

I sold what was left
of Joyleg
to Dick Marsten, cheap, and moved back onto dry land for good.

But all this took time, and while it was going on I lived in French-town and avoided the commercialization as much as possible. I rented an old-fashioned three-room cottage down a lane off Rue de Gregoire.

It was quiet, it had everything I needed, and it was within easy walking distance of everything else I needed. The Bar had been condemned and torn down before the hurricane, but there were other watering holes and cafes, and the waterfront wasn't far away. I was known in some of the places, and accepted, because of my association with Bone.

Not a week went by my first six months in Frenchtown that somebody didn't ask me about him. What happened to Bone, why did he leave St. Thomas, where did he go, would he ever come back? I don't know where he went, I said, I don't know why he left. Maybe he'll come back, I said, maybe he won't. You know Bone, I said, he's his own man, he goes where he likes and does what he pleases. Good old Bone, I said, he was my best friend. And then we lifted our glasses and we drank to good old Bone.

One night, in one of the watering holes, a slumming Frenchwoman fresh from Martinique decided I would make a worthwhile conquest. My blue eyes, maybe. I'd given up wearing the brown-tinted contacts; enough time had passed, and the aging Richard Laidlaw looked nothing at all like Jordan Wise, so that the risk was negligible. Enough time had passed since Annalise, too, to make me boozily curious if what she'd broken had healed of its own volition. Until that night, I just hadn't cared enough to find out.

So I let the Frenchwoman pick me up, and took her back to my cottage. And the answer to the broken question was no. Nothing the woman did—and she was as much a sexual animal as Annalise had been—produced so much as a quiver. She said something that sounded like "Bah!" and got out of bed and threw her clothes on. Before she went away into the night, she reached down and picked up my cock between her thumb and forefinger and shook it as if it had been a bad Utde boy.

"Quequette mort,"
she said disglistedly.