The Sea Grape Tree (20 page)

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

L
istening to the Walrus slide the top bolt closed after bringing in the breakfast tray, Sarah held her breath for a second, waiting until the second slid shut. The assault of locking noises outside her door had sorted themselves out after the first few days, and she knew there were two bolts outside. She always waited now to hear if both bolts had been slid shut when someone left. It sounded as if sometimes the bottom bolt was closed with one foot or hand simultaneously with the latching of the top bolt, making it sound like a single noise, but sometimes they were closed separately, and sometimes the bottom bolt wasn't closed at all.

Her visitors never knocked. She seemed to be a job that had been thrust upon them. Respecting her privacy would have been one task too many. Conversation was limited and brusque, which suited her since she could barely understand what they were saying. Walrus had been her most consistent visitor in the four days she'd been held captive. She'd push the door open with one shoulder, always with a frown and a puffy upper lip, the red plastic tray clasped tightly between her arthritic hands.

The thin man had appeared once with another man, who'd fixed the leaky bathroom faucet. With all of his front teeth missing, the plumber had chatted to his companion as if he were conducting a major repair while he replaced a washer, and he'd smiled at her when they were leaving.

“You can't keep me here,” she'd said, holding her voice steady, before the men got to the door. “The British High Commission will come looking for me.”

The plumber had looked uncertainly at the thin man, who'd pushed him out and slammed the door behind them, sliding both bolts noisily on the other side.

On Sunday night she'd heard a discussion coming from the living room. She'd tiptoed to the door and put her ear against the tiny gap between door and frame. The low, guttural voice of one man, the driver, it sounded like, was followed by the older man's higher, clearer words.

“—can't
do
that here,” the thin man was whining.

“The boss say so,” the driver had grunted.

“Remember she
English,
and next thing Scotland Yard come down, and all of us end up swinging from a rope. Is not everything the boss tell you to do you have to do. Remember, she don't even pay us yet.”

The driver said something inaudible and the skinny man said something about a passport. He seesawed up and down, louder now. “Like how she don't see nothing coming here, she not going to know how to find us if we leave her near the airport.”

“Don't give me no
bumba claat—
” the other shouted.

The conversation got more heated, impossible to translate. The men seemed to be coming to blows and she pushed her ear harder against the gap, straining to hear more about the recurring
she
of the conversation. The debate ended as quickly as it had flared up with the slamming of the front door. Afterward, she'd sat in the middle of the bed for over an hour, waiting, her arms wrapped around her legs, heart thumping, listening intently to the muffled noises outside.

After a night of dark dreams with no details she could remember, she'd started eating on Monday. Even though her pulse still ran high day and night, even though her ears pricked up at the slightest sound, making her jump in the middle of the night, she'd decided to
live,
a decision not made lightly. Since she was being allowed another day of life, she reasoned, and since they were feeding her as if she was expected to survive, she needed to live as normally as possible. Not only would it demonstrate maturity, but it would also keep her sane. Cleanliness and sanity were bedfellows, her mother's aunt used to say. Sarah had started by sorting the clothes in her suitcase into three piles—dirty, clean, half-clean—and started washing the dirtiest items with the cake of bath soap and hanging them over the shower rail.

Her mother had come to mind while she washed her underwear, her mother who insisted on taking packets of detergent on trips. Bent over the bathroom sink, she chastised herself for not writing her mother and Penny more often. They would have missed her postcards and emails and made inquiries, sent somebody to find her. It had never occurred to her before that she needed them, that she needed anybody. She'd often thought she could live entirely alone as long as she could paint, had even flirted with the idea of living on the outskirts of London in a less expensive flat, a place where she'd know no one. But now the absence of the two people closest to her was even more palpable than her hunger, joining the hollowness inside. She wanted to put an arm around her mother's thinning shoulders, needed to laugh at Penny's startling comments. But there was nothing she could do now but wait—and take care of herself as best she could.

Eating was a necessity, she'd decided, if she was to be strong enough to escape or fight or run. That afternoon she'd started nibbling at the tray's contents and discovered that Walrus's food was tolerable.

“You try the food,” the woman had commented, her frown almost disappearing when she saw that the prisoner had eaten.

“It was good, thank you,” Sarah had replied with a small smile. “A little less oil next time, please?” Walrus had pulled her whiskered chin into the folds of her neck, but the breakfast the following morning was less greasy.

“What's your name?” Sarah asked the woman when she came back to get the breakfast tray. “My name is Sarah.”

Walrus reached down to pick up the tray. She had whiskers growing out of her ears, too.

“My name Clementine,” she said in a voice so low that her listener had to crane her head forward. Sarah thought later of the Jamaican mother who'd loved her baby enough to name her after a small northern flower, and she pondered the fact that her captors might be from the lower classes, as described by Eric, but that there was a kindness to Clementine that Roper lacked. And she was genuine, like Danny. Her mind sharpened by captivity, Sarah decided that kindness and authenticity trumped race and class for her now, would always trump it going forward. She'd tell her mother if she got a chance.

After Clementine left, Sarah walked to the plastic chair in the corner, still piled high with her easel in its traveling box and the bag with her paints and brushes. She'd thought about it the evening before and concluded that, if her jailors were ever to release her, they would have to see her as a person in control of her life, not as a quivering victim. She'd made two decisions. The first was that she wasn't going to beg anyone ever again to release her, no matter what happened. As the driver had said, there was nothing more disgusting than a begging woman, and she was already ashamed that she'd groveled at his feet.

The second decision was that she was going to start painting again. Worrying about her fate, puzzling over why she'd been kidnapped and when she was going to be rescued, would lead to nothing but anxiety. After testing the burglar bars and ruling them out, she'd decided that her best course of action if she was going to escape was to let her captors get to know her. She would humanize herself to them, get them to like her, and perhaps negotiate a release that way.

She set up the easel and the chair beside the window, resting her supplies on top of her other bags. In case she had to provide evidence of her imprisonment, to a police force that couldn't care less about a missing woman, apparently, she began on one of her large sheets—only slightly creased, thank goodness—with a four-by-four sketch of her bed. She paid particular attention to the cheap, varnished headboard with oceanlike swirls carved along the top. On the same sheet she drew the open door to the bathroom, the curtainless shower a dark cave within.

The third sketch she made from the bed. It was of the three vertical windows and their parallel wooden louvers, which she'd started closing at night, unsure of who might look inside while she slept. She added the bars last, paying special attention to the hearts in the decorative overlay. The wall in the background and its glittering crown of glass she couldn't bring herself to draw.

When she came out of the bathroom later, Clementine was leaning over the bed, looking at the drawings.

“You is a ahtist.”

“What's that?”

“A ahtist, a say, you is a
artist
.”

“Yes.”

“It nice,” the woman said, and turned away quickly with the breakfast tray, like she knew she was overstepping her bounds. After Clementine left, Sarah pulled her chair up to the window, angling it to the left so she could sketch the tree.

It was a sea grape tree, Danny had told her, its presence bringing back a day with him on the beach. He'd loved the fruit and said that he and his sister used to eat the salty-sweet fruit that hung, grapelike, in the summer. But it was the flat, open leaves that had fascinated her from the beginning. They were almost perfectly circular, each with a red vein dissecting it, and she'd thought that it made the tree look more animal than vegetable, with warm blood running through its most intimate parts, and she'd wanted to paint one of its leaves ever since.

She reached through the burglar bars, her hand escaping for the first time, assisted by her elbow on a louver. Her fingertips touched the leaf closest to the window. She traced the vein down its center with her index finger and circled the firm outer edge. It was a survivor, this sea grape tree with its strong leaves and smooth cream bark. No one touched or climbed it. No one looked at it. But it had stayed alive all these years, found nourishment in the soil, lived one day at a time, the way trees did, and survived behind a wall of jagged glass.

After wetting some toilet paper, Sarah wiped the dust off the three leaves nearest her, touching each one as if it were a baby's arm. The leaves turned a brighter green as she wiped, the veins more alive, and she thought of their connection, of her own red hair and the leaves' red veins. Later, while she drew a leaf on her sketch pad, she thought again of Danny, wondering where he was and why he hadn't come to find her. A thought startled her and made her stare at the wall. Danny could be involved with her imprisonment. He might have wanted her out of the way, for some reason she didn't know. Maybe he'd told her something he shouldn't have. But no, that didn't feel right. She couldn't believe he was capable of harming her—being unfaithful, yes, but not having her seized and locked up.

More likely, it was a kidnapping for money. If that were the case, her captors could be anyone, a group of fishermen fallen on hard times, perhaps. The teenagers who'd stopped her on the beach, desperate for money. Maybe they'd cooked up the scheme with some friends. Oh, God, she thought, holding her breath, someone might be asking Danny or her mother for money while she was sitting in here. Phone calls might have been made and a ransom demanded. She leaned back in her chair and closed her eyes. To someone somewhere, she was either a threat or a reward. Anything was possible, anyone could be involved.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

T
here are those people in the world,'” Shad read slowly, keeping his voice low, two fingers underlining the words on the page, “‘who have a natural curiosity.'” He shifted on his bar stool and nodded. “‘If you give them a set of facts, they tend to see a pattern. These are the people who make the best private investi—
investigators
.'” He looked up, amazed that the author knew him almost as well as he knew himself, knew that he could spot a pattern in a set of facts. At a table in front of him, two tourist couples sat eating a lunch of curry goat, needing nothing but each other's company for the moment.

The book the bartender was reading had been sent to him years ago by a guest named Gerry who'd bent his ear for the seven nights he'd stayed at the old hotel. On the last night, the man had told Shad after several rum and Cokes that his full name was Leroy Fitzpatrick Gerard, and that he'd never wanted to be a doctor; that had been his father's idea. He'd wanted to drive a train.

“Wasn't there something you wanted to be when you were a kid?” Gerry had asked Shad.

“A private detective,” the inn's bartender had replied without hesitation, “because when I was little I used to listen to a radio show after my granny went to sleep. It was a detective show and it was about some place in England, and the detective used to solve problems that nobody else could solve. I always like that.”

After he got back to Kansas, Gerry had sent Shad the book, and he'd stowed it away in his bedside table after struggling with the first couple pages. But Miss Mac's reading classes were paying off, and Shad had returned to
The Secret World of the Private Investigator,
excited that he could finally slip into that world.

“Hello there!” One of the tourist men had his arm raised, signaling another round of drinks, and Shad put the book aside. Two rum punches, a club soda, and a banana daiquiri served, the bartender reopened the worn orange covers of his book. Just as he found the page he'd dog-eared, the phone started ringing on the counter behind him.

“Largo Bay Restaurant and Bar,” he answered snappily.

A subdued voice answered. “Shad, it's Danny.” It almost didn't sound like Danny, it was so serious.

“How it going, man? Everything good when you get back?”

“Yeah, no problems.”

“You want the boss?”

“No, man. It's you I'm calling.”

Shad closed the book. “How I can help you?”

“Remember you said I should call Sarah when I got back?”

“Yeah, I—”

“I took your advice. I googled her name—”

“Google?”

“I looked it up on the Internet, like you was saying, and found the name of the gallery where she sells her paintings. I called them and told them I was a friend from Jamaica and I was looking for her. They took my number and her roommate called me back last night. She said she hasn't heard from Sarah, man.”

“She don't go back to England?”

“The roommate says she could have gone to her mother's house, but she don't hear from her yet.”

“She not at her apartment and her friend don't know where she is?”

“What you think, man?” the American urged.

Shad leaned over the phone. There must be a pattern here he could find. “I going to check it out.”

“Call me back and let me know what's going on.”

“I don't have the pass code to make a long-distance call, and the boss don't give nobody. You call me back tomorrow, same time. I have something for you tomorrow.”

The hour dragged on until Shad's lunch break, time he passed by reading a chapter on interviewing witnesses, a chapter that called for listing all the questions the detective was going to ask, and, while he toted the departed guests' dishes back to the kitchen, he made his mental list. As soon as his break came and Eric relieved him, Shad walked down the road, had a quick sandwich at home, and went on to Roper's house. Carthena let him into the kitchen.

“Funny how the Englishwoman just leave without a trace,” he commented to the housekeeper. The warbling sounds of a trumpet were coming from deep inside the house.

“Funny, yes.”

“I bring you some thyme and scallion. Beth grow plenty this year.”

She took the brown paper bag from his hands and set it on a counter.

“What time she leave that morning, the morning when she left for good?”

“She go painting early in the morning, and when I go to clean up her room later, everything gone. She must have come back and pack up.” The young woman picked up a bowl with coconut meat and started grating it.

“What time that was, when you went in her room?”

“Around twelve o'clock.” The woman stopped grating the coconut, the beads in her hair chattering when she looked up at him. “Why you want to know?”

“I just thinking that—”

“You say you come to give me little thyme and scallion from your garden. How come you asking me all them questions?”

“Is only—”

“Thank you for the seasoning, then. I busy, and I telling you I don't see the woman. I in the kitchen and I don't see nothing. She don't say nothing to me and I don't know nothing.” She turned back to her grating, muttering about
people who fast in other people's business
.

A knock on the back door swung their heads around. A man and two women, one holding a tiny baby, were visible through the glass panes. Carthena started toward the door, Shad behind her.

“The musician man still here?” he said quickly before she opened the door. “The one who play the trumpet?”

“Yes.”

“Call him for me. I want to tell him something, like how he going to play in the bar.”

Carthena opened the door and the visitors walked into the kitchen. They were strangers to Largo, a tall woman with hard, judgmental eyes that she narrowed at Shad, followed by a young couple, the girl holding a child. The baby looked like a newborn, a blue bonnet perched sideways on its head. Nodding to Shad's greeting, the man sat down on the kitchen stool as if he expected to take the best seat in the house. His hair was shaved close to the skull and his jeans hung below his T-shirt almost to his knees. He was one of those youths that you saw in the Pen, the same flat expression whether you gave them a job or the end of a knife. Beside him, her belly still swollen, the girl stood swinging the child from side to side with a wordless baby-mother smile as Shad slipped out the door.

When Ford appeared in the backyard, Shad waved him farther away until they stood between the clotheslines, the musician's chin well above the white sheets flapping against the trumpet in his hand.

“I just want to ask you,” the bartender started, “if you hear anything from the Englishwoman? She call or visit or anything?”

“Sarah? We haven't heard a word.”

“You don't find that strange, like how she spend all that time here? You would think she would call to say she arrive safe, you don't think?”

“She wasn't exactly happy when she left.”

“You mean about Danny—?”

“No, I mean about Roper.”

Shad frowned. “What you mean?”

Ford looked down at his instrument. “I don't know if I should be telling you this, man.”

“I just asking so we could invite her to the bar when you play, like how she really want to hear you.”

“Everything's changed since then.” Ford grimaced. “Sarah and Roper had a—a disagreement before she left. I thought he was talking shit, to tell you the truth, but I figured he'd had too much to drink, so I didn't say anything. I've known him a long time and I'm staying in his house, you know. I didn't want to—”

“And she act different after the disagreement?”

“She was real hurt, I could tell.”

“So you weren't surprised when she left.”

“I was and I wasn't. I think she expected me to defend her, but I didn't. I still feel bad about it, but I have enough of my own stuff going on. . . .”

Shad looked over the clothesline at the ocean, seaweed floating on top of the foamy waves, the sign of a storm at sea. “And you think she just get on a plane and go home.”

“That's what we all think.”

“She musta had an open ticket, when you can leave anytime. That was the kind of airplane ticket that Simone, the woman on the island, had.”

Ford shook his head. “She only had a one-way ticket to Jamaica that Roper had bought for her. Someone must have sent her the money or bought the ticket for her, because she didn't have any money while she was here. So she told me, anyway.”

“No money?”

“She used to joke about being penniless.” About to leave, Ford turned back. “I don't think she was good with money. She was broke, but she bought a new dress, you know what I mean?”

Late that night, after he'd shifted the gawky kitten off the bed, Shad slid in beside a silent Beth, her back to him. Her hips made a dark mound in the light through the curtain. It had been a busy evening, with a birthday party for a young man who'd gotten drunk and vomited on the floor of the bar.

When Shad's head touched the pillow, it was met with the crisp rustle of paper. “What that?” he said. His hand brought out a small rectangular slip.

Beth rolled over. “My first check,” she said sleepily, but he could tell she was smiling.

He put the check on the side table and reached for her gratefully, thinking of the Englishwoman who'd been penniless.