The Crimes of Jordan Wise

ANNALISE WAS THERE to meet me when my flight arrived at Truman Airport on St. Thomas. The trades weren't blowing that day and the overheated air dripped with humidity, but she somehow managed to look cool and fresh in a white skirt and madras blouse and white straw hat. She was tanning already, too. I kissed her passionately right there in the lobby and I didn't give a damn what anyone thought about it.

The Mini she'd bought was bright blue. It had a tendency to make farting noises when you started the engine, but it ran efficiently enough. She drove us down off the plateau where the airport was located, into heavy traffic that was mostly tourist-related—tour vans and buses, taxis, rental cars.

Tourists were the island's major drawback then, same as now. There weren't nearly as many in those days, but still they clogged the airport, Lindbergh Beach across the street, the roads into Charlotte Amalie, the waterfront, and the downtown shopping streets. The seventies building boom—villas, condos, a couple of big resorts—was partly responsible. You could lay the rest of the blame on the damn cruise ship industry. St. Thomas was a primary lure because of the size of its harbor and the fact that it's a duty-free port where you can buy Swiss watches, Irish linen, French perfumes, Italian weapons, single-malt Scotches, Caribbean rums, and a hundred other things at bargain prices.

"It gets really bad when five or six cruise ships come in at once," Annalise said as we drove. "One of the first things the Verrikers told me was to stay away from downtown on those days. The only locals who like the tourists are the shopkeepers."

Despite the overcrowding, the island for me was still the tropical paradise the guidebooks made it out to be. Once you got past the ramshackle native quarter, you encountered lush tropical vegetation and old-world charm just about everywhere you looked. Frenchtown, for instance—Cha-Cha Town to the locals—where the descendants of the first Huguenot settlers on St. Barthelemy lived in small, brightly colored frame houses that had been passed down from generation to generation. They were fishermen, mostly, who spoke an ancient Norman dialect and wore square, flat-topped straw cha-cha hats and had little to do with the other white residents.

I had my first look at Charlotte Amalie from half a mile across the bay. A mix of new and ancient commercial buildings set along the curve of the waterfront, private homes spread in a wide arc halfway up the surrounding mountains—red roofs and whitewashed stucco walls sunstruck and shimmering in the humid heat. The broad harbor, the offshore islands, the turquoise blue of the Caribbean dotted with sails stretching out beyond. It's not easy to describe what I felt, seeing it for the first time. The best I can do is call it a sense of rightness, of belonging, as if I were meant to be there. As if my previous life had been a waiting or trial period, everything I'd done a rite of passage. I tried to put this into words for Annalise, but she didn't understand. She just smiled and nodded.

We dropped down to Veterans Highway and drove in along the harbor past the airboat terminal, the slips for the Tortola ferries and glass-bottom excursion boats, the anchored yachts at the King's Wharf marina. Annalise pointed out landmarks along the way. One was Fort Christian, a looming pink-plaster pile guarded by a couple of ancient cannon, built in 1671 by the Danes who'd been the first whites to settle the island. It was not only a tourist attraction, which housed a museum in what had once been the dungeon; it was also, in those days, where police headquarters and the local jail were located.

Near King's Wharf, Annalise turned onto one of the uphill streets. We climbed across Dronningens Gade, the main drag, and up past the old slave market and then around Berg Hill into the residential district. The streets up there were narrow, mostly one-way, forming a maze of curves, loops, angles. It had taken Annalise half a dozen trips before she could make all the right turns without consulting the real estate agent's instruction sheet.

We emerged finally onto a twisty little street called Quartz Gade. The handful of villas along it were on large lots carved out of the hillside below street level; all had red tile roofs and lush gardens and either steep driveways or covered parking platforms. She indicated one as belonging to the Kyles, Gavin and Robin, and a larger one on the hillside above, flanked by huge flamboyant trees, as the Verrikers' home.

Our place was down toward the end. White stucco, red tile roof, walls draped in crimson and purple bougainvillea; driveway and one-car garage set at right angles to the house. There were high stucco walls on both sides. The wall on the east side flanked a steep set of stairs that led down to the next street and beyond. The steps were wide and made of ship-ballast brick imported by the Danes during the mid-1800s; they'd been built because the pitch on some of the hills was too steep for streets and cars and also to provide residents with direct foot access to the shopping district. There were several of these long public staircases in Charlotte Amalie. Once I got to know their locations, I mapped out a series of shortcut routes to and from our villa. The return climb could be a bitch in the heat of the day, even though the crow-flies distance was only about a quarter of a mile, but we got used to it and used the stairs fairly often to keep in shape.

The villa was built of stone and stucco, and the thick walls cooled the interior. Annalise had said it was small, but that was a matter of perspective. Six rooms, all good-sized, the living room and master bedroom long and wide with high, beamed ceilings. Whitewashed walls hung with tapestries and pictures by local artists. Beige tile floors. Massive old furniture. All the modern conveniences.

Two sets of heavy, jalousied doors opened from the living room onto a wide cobbled terrace that ran the width of the house. Two more sets of doors gave access from the master bedroom to the terrace and to a narrow side veranda. The garden ran downhill some fifty yards: coconut palms and guava trees, oleander, hibiscus, white ginger. The view was spectacular. From one point or another on the terrace you could see most of the harbor, Hassel Island and its mountaintop fort, a section of Water Island, the Caribbean in the distance.

When we finished the tour, Annalise said expectantly, "Well? What do you think?"

"As advertised. You couldn't have made a better choice."

"I just love it. I knew you would, too." She kissed me. "So what do you want to do now, as if I didn't know?"

"A shower first," I said. "And something cold to drink."

"You go ahead. I'll make us a couple of rum punches."

I was in the shower, soaping off, when she brought the drinks. brought them naked into the tiled stall. We drank standing close together under the cool stream of water, not sipping but gulping, and then we took turns with the bar of soap. That kind of foreplay doesn't last long or allow for a time-out to towel dry and hop into bed. Our first round of lovemaking in our new home was started and finished standing up in the shower.

Over the next ten days we christened all the other rooms. The terrace and the side veranda and the garden, too, each of those after dark in deference to public decency.

I met Royce and Maureen Verriker the next day, and the Kyles and some of the other members of the white establishment at a Christmas party the Verrikers hosted that weekend. Only about 10 percent of the island population was white—U.S. expats, and descendants of U.S., Danish, and French settlers—so it was a fairly small and close-knit community.

Richard Laidlaw was more comfortable in a party atmosphere, among strangers, than Jordan Wise had ever been; better able to mix and make small talk. But that doesn't mean that I liked it. Annalise was genuinely at ease, smiling, laughing, charming everyone, enjoying the attention, but a part of me stood off and observed what she and the others did and said and then took cues from them so I could make all the appropriate responses.

Royce Verriker was a few years older than me, tall, lean, with a mop of sun-bleached hair and intense gray eyes. Very suave, very glib: if I hadn't known he was a lawyer, I would have guessed it on the first try. When he and I talked, he asked a lot of questions, not prying, just displaying interest. I gave him all the rehearsed answers—successful Chicago tool-and-die manufacturer, made a bundle in the stock market, decided to sell my business and retire young, moved down here to live the good life in the sun. He smiled and said he envied me. He also said, "I imagine Annalise has told you that my specialty is domestic law. But if you ever need any other kind of legal help or advice, my door is always open." I thanked him and said I'd keep that in mind. Typical lawyer. Cut him open and he would bleed green for money and brown for bullshit.

His wife, Maureen, was a slender, thirtyish redhead, the dark-complected rather than the pale-skinned variety. One of those pretty cameo faces, but with oddly sad eyes. A little reserved until you got to know her, pleasant and gracious. She and Annalise had hit it off from the first and were already friends. She wore a skintight blue dress that night—and low-cut blouses and tight pullovers and skimpy bikinis at other times—that called attention to overlarge breasts. The way she dressed was Verriker's idea, not hers; he was the one, she'd told Annalise, who wanted to show off her boobs.

Gavin and Robin Kyle were both architects pushing forty, owners of their own firm. A study in contrasts, those two. He was short, on the tubby side, with sparse hair the color of ginger ale, and a gossipmonger who liked to hear himself talk; she was six inches taller, skinny, had thick dark hair, and seldom spoke more than two sentences in a row. I liked them both. Despite Gavin's constant chatter, most of what he had to say was interesting and amusing.

The guest I related to best, though, was Jack Scanlon, the middle-aged manager of a cement plant. That was because he was a day sailor, the only person there who had any but a passing interest in sailing. He owned a twenty-four-foot sloop that he kept at the marina adjacent to the West India dock. When I told him I was planning to learn to sail, hoped to buy a boat of my own one day, he invited me to join him on a day cruise after the holidays.

St. Thomas is a small island, just thirty square miles. Annalise had already seen some of it, but we explored it all together, one end to the other, in a handful of day and night excursions.

Some of its attractions appealed to both of us. The views from atop Crown Mountain and the Drake's Seat overlook, of the sixty-odd reefs, islets and islands that ring St. Thomas, and on clear days, of the British Virgins and some of the Puerto Rican archipelago. Coral World, an underwater observation tower where you could see all sorts of exotic marine life and coral formations. Blackbeard's Castle, atop Government Hill—a sprawling, three-hundred-year-old, cannon-guarded fortress that had been turned into a luxury inn and restaurant. Annalise liked it for the cuisine, which was among the best on the island. I liked it for its architecture and its history. Local legend had it that Edward Teach, the pirate known as Blackbeard, used the five-story masonry tower as a lookout post for the merchant ships carrying rum, cotton, and spices he later ambushed. I felt a certain kinship with the old buccaneer, and his supposed use of St. Thomas as a safe haven amused me.

But for the most part, Annalise's and my tastes differed. She preferred Market Square, the remodeled Danish warehouses along Dronningens Gade that dispensed all the duty-free goods, the palm-fringed beaches at Magens Bay, Coki Bay, Secret Harbor, and Sapphire Bay, and the raucous nightlife. I preferred the marina next to the West India dock, with its slips for two hundred luxury yachts, and the working waterfronts at Red Hook and Frenchtown and Sub Base harbor where you could hire charter boats or catch ferries or buy fresh fish and shellfish or watch the pelicans and flamingoes on their fishing rounds. The narrow, winding, old-world streets of Frenchtown. The bluff above Nazareth Bay, where you had the best view of St. John three miles across Pillsbury Sound. The ancient French cemetery on Harwood Highway with its decaying walls and rusted iron gates, its gnarled old trees and peeling whitewashed tombs.

And the sunsets.

Christ, the sunsets.

They impressed me more than anything else. Annalise was alleady starting to take them for granted by the time I got there, but I never have. They still stir me, even after twenty-seven years. Bright gold, dark gold, burnished copper, old rose, fiery orange, lavender and pink and saffron and deep purple . . . all the colors and some gradations and combinations you can't imagine until you see them. Plus thousands of intricate cloud shapes and formations to reflect the colors and the dying light. Most travelers will tell you that Caribbean sunsets are the most spectacular in the world; I don't see how anybody can dispute it. Doesn't matter where you watch one—backyard terrace, restaurant patio, mountaintop, deck of a boat at sea, even through an open-air window in a back-island cafe like Jocko's. Each is unique, and nearly all of them are magnificent.

Our different tastes weren't a problem in those early days. We'd come down here to enjoy ourselves, do whatever made us happy. It wasn't necessary to agree on all our pleasures, to share them in lockstep. There was plenty for us to do as a couple. So why shouldn't we each have time to ourselves, some private space of our own?

Annalise was thrilled and a little overwhelmed by her present on Christmas morning. She cried when I slipped the diamond wedding band on her finger, the first of the two times I ever saw her shed a tear.

I seemed to have passed muster with the Verrikers. They invited us to a New Year's Eve dance at the Royal Bay Club, one of the members-only, whites-only places that they and the Kyles belonged to. It took up a full block down near the marina. The old, whitewashed main building housed a bar lounge with leather chairs and card and chess tables and a private library, and a ballroom large enough for a five-piece orchestra and a ring of tables around the dance floor. A smaller building at the rear contained handball courts, men's and women's saunas, and locker room facilities. Outside there were tennis and badminton courts.

At one point during the evening, while the women were in the ladies' room, Verriker asked me if I played handball. I said no, nor tennis or golf, explaining it by saying I'd been too busy making a living to get involved in sports.

"Great game, handball," he said. "Keeps you fit. I could teach you the basics in one session, if you're interested."

I wasn't, but I said, "Sure, I'd like that."

"Members have unlimited use of the courts whenever they're free. All the other facilities, too. How would you and Annalise like to join?"

I pretended to be flattered and asked casually what becoming members entailed, if there was some sort of screening process. No, he said, the club wasn't that exclusive. Strictly social. There were no hard and fast rules for membership; financial status and background were of no importance. As long as you were able to pay the yearly dues of $500, and had the sponsorship of a member, your acceptance was pretty much a given. And he'd be glad to sponsor us.

So I accepted with a show of gratitude. The more firmly entrenched we became in island society, the less likely our new identities would ever be questioned or breached.

I went sailing three times with Jack Scanlon on his little sloop, Manjack. Annalise came along the first time. The sea was calm that morning, when we left the harbor, but a strong wind kicked up later in the day as we were tacking out of Caneel Bay on St. John, and it got a little rough. She was seasick and shaky by the time we docked. Never again, she said afterward. I thought that once I had my own boat, something larger and made for smoother sailing like a ketch or yawl, I might be able to change her mind. But until then I wouldn't try. You can't force somebody to love the things you love, any more than you can force them to love you.

That first sailing experience had just the opposite effect on me. I took to it immediately, as I'd been sure I would. Had my sea legs from the start. From my reading I'd already internalized much of the basic information and language of the sea. I knew that sloops and catamarans had a single mast, ketches and yawls two masts, and that most modern sailboats were Marconi rigged. That's a triangular rigging with the sails spread by two spars, with a lower boom that extends past the mast and a second that runs at an angle from the forward end of the boom to the masthead; Depression-era sailors gave it the Marconi name because the stays and shrouds holding up the mast reminded them of the first radio towers set up by the Italian inventor. I knew the names of all the sails, the meaning of such terms as luff and kedge and reef points, and I could define jibstay, lapstrake, burgee, spinnaker, genoa, freeboard, lubber line. I knew that a boat will sail in three basic ways—before the wind on a run, with the wind abeam on a reach, and close-hauled or toward the wind; that the wind fills the sails from both sides, on either a starboard tack or a port tack. I knew a lot of facts about sailing, or thought I did, but I didn't know a damn thing until I learned the working application of those terms and principles.

Scanlon was a fairly good small-craft sailor, though he'd only been at it about four years, and those day cruises were more exhilarating than anything I'd done except for the Amthor crime and making love with Annalise. Standing on Manjack's deck, hanging onto one of the stays while she ran with the wind, the sea creaming up around the bow and back along the hull, the wind singing in the sails . . . I'd had no other experience quite like it.

I learned a few rudimentary lessons from watching Scanlon and following his instructions. The first time he let me trim the jib, I did it without hesitation or mistake. But he wasn't much of a teacher overall because he was still learning himself, and because he was a day sailor and a twenty-four-foot sloop was all he ever aspired to own and operate. He wasn't offended when I asked him if he could recommend someone more knowledgeable and more experienced I could pay for private lessons.

I discovered Arundel Cane Rum at a rum tasting in early January. The hosts were a British couple, the Potters, rum connoisseurs and historians who lived out on the West End and delighted in throwing this kind of shindig for newcomers to the island. The invitation came through the Kyles, who were both rum drinkers, and we went with them. There were a dozen or so others there in addition to the Potters, among them another recent arrival, a London banker named Horler.

You think of rum as being light or dark, with varying degrees of alcohol content, and mainly as an ingredient in mixed drinks. I did, anyway, until that day. But there are a lot of different varieties, each with characteristics as distinctive as those separating single-malt Scotches. Rum has been made in the Caribbean since the seventeenth century, from fermented molasses, cane syrup, or fresh sugar-cane juice derived from a multitude of species and hybrids of cane. Originally it was distilled in clay pots, then in single-pot stills that look like teakettles with long spouts, and finally in single-, double-, and mutiple-column continuous stills. Some blends are rich and heavy, others carbon filtered to produce a clear spirit; some are aged for up to four years, others not aged at all. The taste of each depends on the raw ingredients, the bottled strength, its barrel time or lack of it, the distillation purity and the length of fermentation. A rum drinker's preference is highly individualistic. There are no universal standards or measures for judgment.

The Potters gave a little lecture that included this information (and later I did some studying of the subject on my own) and then proceeded to demonstrate. They had more than sixty varieties arranged on sideboards around their big living room. From Puerto Rico, the British Virgins, Martinique, Barbados, St. Lucia, Marie-Galante. Well-known labels such as Bacardi and Pusser's, and obscure brands like Buccaneer, Blackbeard's Five-Star, Cockspur, Jack Iron, and Rhum Vieux du Pere Labat. Various potencies, light and dark, from Mount Gay Eclipse's 154-proof, 80 percent alcohol rocket fuel down to the milder 80-proof, 40 percent alcohol content types. There was water and ice and cane syrup, as most distilleries provided in their tasting rooms, but we were encouraged to try at least a few of the rums straight for a better evaluation of the flavor.

We were also encouraged to follow a little ritual on each tasting. Read the label first, to determine how strong the rum was and how long it had been aged and what it was distilled from. Pour a little into a glass and hold the glass up to the light so as to judge the color or clearness. Swirl the rum in the bottom of the glass. Take a deep breath, exhale, then lift the glass to the nose to assess the delicate flavors in the aroma. Repeat the process if you liked what you smelled the first time; if you didn't like it, you probably wouldn't care for the taste, so just move on to the next. Sip a little and roll it on the tongue, then savor it and mentally compare your impression of the taste with the aroma.

I'd drunk rum before that day, but it wasn't until I began sampling and comparing that I began to really appreciate it. It was all good, but I preferred the mature, dark types. Most of the women were partial to the light and clear. And most of the men, predictably, preferred the 151-proof Cruzan and 154-proof Mount Gay Eclipse. I agreed with them, more or less, though I had yet to find one I really liked until I came to the bottle of Arundel Cane Rum.

The label said it was distilled from pure cane juice and aged in oak casks. That it had been distilled and blended by the Callwood family in the Caribbean's oldest continuously operating pot distillery in Cane Garden Bay, Tortola. The first sniff hooked me; two more confirmed its character. The taste was as close to ambrosial as anything I'd ever had. Nobody else seemed to find it as special as I did, which proved the dictum about personal preference.

Potter told me Arundel Estate had been in operation for four hundred years, the last two hundred in the hands of the Callwood family. It was the only distiliery still operating on Tortola, the only licensed one in the eastern Caribbean that used a single-pot still, and one of the few that made rum directly from sugar-cane juice from locally grown green cane. They manufactured both white and dark, the light kind mainly for local islanders. The thick, rich dark was what I'd tasted.

The next day I went to one of the larger liquor stores in Charlotte Amalie and bought six bottles of dark Arundel Cane, all they had in stock.

From the day of the Potters' tasting in 1979, I've never willingly drunk any other kind of rum. Iced usually, straight or with a little water occasionally. And never, never in punches or Collinses or any other concoction that would dilute and spoil the flavor.

The first private sailing lessons I took were from an acquaintance of Jack Scanlon's who skippered a private yacht for a local government official and kept a schooner of his own at Red Hook. After half a dozen sessions, I moved on to a grizzled ex-navy, ex-charter fisherman and working drunk who claimed to've sailed the Caribbean for more than forty years. Less than a month of him was all I could stand.

I felt I'd learned pretty well what little seamanship I'd been given, but I wasn't satisfied with the quality or content of the instruction. Practical enough, but dry and basic, lacking in detail and lore—skimpy value for the money I laid out. They paid Up service to my ability to absorb information and put it to use, but not for a moment did either of them act as though I had the makings of an equal. They treated me with the disdain, the thinly concealed contempt commercial boatmen have for the idle rich. Deaf ears when I tried to tell them I had no interest in racing cutters or sport cats or any other kind of craft, or in being a day sailor like Jack Scanlon or one of the aimlessly cruising weekend yacht owners more interested in partying than seamanship. Mocking little smiles when I said I wanted to be more than a hobby sailor, to eventually single hand my own ketch or yawl. And eyes that looked through me most of the time we were together, the way people had once looked through Jordan Wise.

So I went looking for someone reliable who'd teach me as I wanted to be taught. I'd been to a couple of the boatyards in the Red Hook area, to soak up the atmosphere and to look at the boats they had for sale, and the owner of Marsten Marine, Dick Marsten, had been friendly and unpatronizing. I solight him out. He didn't hesitate when I asked him for a recommendation.

"Bone's the man you want," he said.

"Who's he?"

"Fellow who works for me now and then. Does odd jobs, takes on day charters and gives lessons when the mood suits him."

'' Temperamental?

"Too strong a word," Marsten said. "He's his own man, marches to his own drummer. And there's no better sailor in this part of the world."

"Where can I find him?"

"He rents a slip at the Sub Base harbor marina. Ask anybody over there. They all know him."

"Bone," I said. "His last name?"

"His only name, far as I know. Just Bone."

The Sub Base harbor area, west of Frenchtown and named for the submarine base that had operated there during the Second World War, wasn't half as picturesque as the Charlotte Amalie or Frenchtown harbors. The Water Island ferry was located there, but for the most part what you saw were tramp steamers and charter fishing boats and sloops and schooners and ketches of various sizes and condition. Bone's boat was a forty-foot gaff-rigged ketch, old but well-maintained, humorlessly named Conch Out. C-o-n-c-h, like the shellfish. That was where I found him, on his ketch, giving the deck a coat of gray nonskid paint.

I don't know why I was surprised when I first saw him. His name, maybe. A bone is white, and I guess I expected a white man. He was black. The color of milk chocolate, actually. A Bahamian native, I found out later, from Nassau Island. Big man, not so much tall as broad and solid, beefy through the shoulders and torso and across the hips, with short legs and heavy thighs, like a tree split at the crotch into a pair of thick boles. There were flecks of gray in the grizzled beard he wore; otherwise you wouldn't have had a clue as to his age. His skin was smooth and unlined except for a few sun wrinkles around his eyes. He had two gold-crowned teeth, one upper and one lower, that glinted whenever he smiled. Which wasn't often, and not at all on our first meeting. Mostly his expression was flat and unreadable. I took this to be the usual stoic native reserve until I got to know him. In fact, he was neither stoic nor reserved; the expression masked an almost fierce dignity. Bone was an intensely proud man, and smarter than ninety-nine percent of the white men circumstances now and then forced him to serve.

I introduced myself, told him that Marsten had referred me and why I was there. He studied me for half a minute, squinting in the sun glare, taking my measure, before he said in his lilting Bahamian accent, "Where you come from, mon?"

"Chicago," I said. "But I live here now."

"St. Thomas?"

"Yes."

"Own a boat?" He pronounced it "bow-ut."

"Not yet. I intend to buy one, but not until I'm ready for the responsibility—not until I'm a good enough sailor."

Bone studied me again. Then he said, "Come over in the shade," and went ahead without waiting for me. He sat down on the mushroom bitt that the ketch's bow was tied to, took out a stubby briar and a cracked oilskin pouch, and loaded the bowl with tobacco as black as tar. The aroma, when he set fire to the shag, had a molasseslike sweetness. His movements were deliberate, economical, efficient. He used words the same way, as if he had a limited supply stored up and was parceling them out a few at a time.

"How much you been on sailboats?" he asked.

"Not much. Taking private lessons the past two months."

"Who from?"

"A couple of boatmen at Red Hook." I named them.

"Why you want somebody else?"

"They weren't teaching me what I want to know."

"What you want to know?"

"All there is about boats and the sea," I said. "I told you the kind of sailor I want to be."

"Let me hear what you learned so far."

"Everything?"

"Everything you know."

I told him that, too. I thought it would take some time; I thought I was crammed full of basic knowledge. But when I laid it all out, it sounded pretty thin. Just the bare rudiments.

"I know I've got a lot to learn," I admitted. "That's why I'm here. I'm serious about this, Mr. Bone."

"Not Mister," he said. "Just Bone."

"Will you work with me?"

"This ketch," he said, "she's a fussy old woman, sometimes. Hard to get along with. Some say the same about her cap'n."

"I'm not looking for an easy time of it. When I buy a boat of my own, it won't be new and it won't be fancy."

"So you say now."

"I mean it, Bone. What do you say?"

"You take orders from a black mon, no argument?"

"You're the master, I'm the new hand. I know my place."

He sucked on his pipe, thinking about it.

"I'll pay you well," I said. "More than whatever you usually charge for lessons."

"What I charge depends."

"On what?"

"How hard you want to work."

"As hard as I know how, for as long as it takes."

"Might take a long time," Bone said. "Might take more time than you or I got."

"Meaning I might never be a sailor?"

"Some men born to it, some not."

"It's in my blood, Bone. I honestly believe that. I just never had the opportunity until now."

He almost smiled. "We'll find out," he said.

I could not have hooked up with a better sailor or better man than Bone.

He didn't just live on that ketch of his; he treated her the way I tried to treat Annalise, as a friend, a lover, an extension of himself. He pampered her, handled her with great care and gentleness. Growled at her now and then when she didn't cooperate, but never with any real anger. He knew more about sailing and the sea than any man I've ever met; now and then he'd surprise me with such obscure facts as the origin of the term starboard (a corruption of the Norse word steerboard, from the days when Viking dragon ships had right-side rudders). And he had an aptitude for practical instruction. He taught me more in a week than the others had in two months.

I spent full days with him once or twice a week when he was in port and not working at one of his other sources of income. Every now and then he'd sail off by himself—"going out," he called it, the real meaning of the ketch's name—and stay away for a week or two, one time for more than a month. He never said where he'd been or what he'd done on these trips. Long, solitary cruises, probably, and visits to his native Nassau. But I never asked him. It was his business, not mine or anybody else's. His own man, Dick Marsten had said. That was Bone in a nutshell.

Some days we'd go out on a sail. Short practice runs around some of the little islands like Thatch Cay and Hans-Lollik Island that surround St. Thomas; longer trips to Great Tobago or Jost Van Dyke or around St. John. In all kinds of conditions except for heavy-weather seas. Other days we'd stay in the harbor and work on the ketch—sanding, painting, reeving new main and mizzen halyards, cleaning the head and the bilge, checking oil, gas, and water lines, doing a hundred other small chores that go into the maintenance and smooth operation of a sailboat—

He was doing what? Using me as a workhorse and taking pay for it?

No. Hell, no. You couldn't be more wrong.

After the first couple of weeks he wouldn't accept a dime for the dockside days, even though I kept offering—and he did most of the chores himself, with little enough help from me. He let me pay him the going rate for lessons on sail days, and buy gasoline and other provisions, but that was all. Money didn't mean much to Bone. Almost all of what he got from me or from his other labors went into the ketch, and what was left over into the few small creature comforts he allowed himself.

Mostly, he taught by example rather than words. He'd perform this or that task, or series of tasks, and he expected me to watch carefully and internalize what I was seeing and understand the reasons for it and be able to perform the same task on my own when the time came. The Red Hook boatmen had insulted my intelligence; Bone accepted it and counted on it. He didn't talk down to me, or look through me. From the first he treated me with the same respect I accorded him.

Over a period of several months I learned the proper way to rig and trim sails and the fine points of docking and anchoring. How to read geodesic charts and tide tables, how to use compass roses and track a course—easy for me because of my mathematical turn of mind. How to read water depth and gauge the weather and navigate by shooting sun and stars and by dead reckoning. How to whip the ends of manila line to prevent raveling, make an eye splice, tie a clove hitch. The right and wrong ways to dock a boat under power and under sail. All the running rules and safety rules. All the little things that could go wrong on a boat and how to safeguard against them. What to do in this or that type of emergency. What essential tools and repair materials to keep on board. These and a hundred, a thousand more.

Often he'd spring a question on me, by way of a test. Is a jib the strongest pulling sail per square foot of area? (No. A jib's main function is to increase the power of the mains'l.) If you're running downwind, how do you prevent a dangerous jibe? (Rig a secure boom vang.) What's a long fetch? (The fetch is the distance the wind blows over unobstructed water; a long fetch can create dangerously high waves.) Why should a sail be set smooth and at the same time as stiff as possible? (The wind doesn't just flow onto the sail, it flows off it as well. Every little wrinkle or hard spot sets up eddies on both sides that break up the wind flow and reduce the sail's efficiency.)

Bone also taught me about sharks. He had a thing about them, an odd mixture of hate and reverence. "A shark, mon, he's all stomach and never full. He don't care what he eats and he's always hungry. Sailor falls into deep water and can't get back on board, chances are he'll be some shark's supper." Another time he said, "Sharks, they like to race a boat sometimes. Some mon keep a rifle on board, every time he see a fin he shoot at it. Think it's fun to watch other sharks tear up a wounded one. Don't you do that. Bad luck to kill a shark for fun. Bad luck to kill anything lives in the sea you don't plan to eat."

He had amazing patience to go with his fierce dignity. When I made a mistake, as I did often enough in the beginning, he'd shake his head or growl in the same mild way he growled at the ketch. That was all. He never once raised his voice in anger. Not even after the worst of my screwups, the day I was responsible for blowing out the ketch's mains'l.

That day we were over in the Virgin's Gangway, the narrows between St. John and Tortola, and a squall began making up to eastward. Bone decided not to shorten down any more than we had to, so we left all the sails on and turned in a couple of reefs in the main and mizzen. Just as we were finishing the main, the squall hit us and Bone ran back to the wheel to keep her into the wind. My job was to tie in the last few points and raise sail again, and I had the halyard taut and was throwing it on the winch. The wind and drumming rain kept me from hearing Bone's shouted order to slack off. I slid the handle into the winch and took a turn, and all of a sudden the mains'l split all the way across. I realized what I'd done wrong before Bone had to tell me. I'd mixed up a pair of reef points, tied one from the first row to another on the opposite side in the second row; that had pulled the sail out of shape and put all the strain in one place.

One growl and a quick hard glare was all I got for my stupidity. Bone had another mains'l on board, fortunately, and the squall passed and we didn't have any trouble getting the new one up. Afterward, ashamed of myself, I kept trying to apologize, but he wouldn't listen to it. All he said was, "You'll never do that again, Mr. Laidlaw." It was a statement, not a question. And he was right, I never did anything that sloppy again.

After each day with Bone I wrote out a list of what I'd learned, to make sure I didn't forget even the smallest detail, and on the days I didn't see him I pored over the lists and star charts and geodesic charts that I'd bought myself. I plotted courses and made increasingly complex calculations—a whole new set of equations—and then embarked on imaginary voyages and dealt with various kinds of situations. I approached these studies with the same intensity as I had my accounting courses at Golden Gate University and the Amthor crime. The only difference was that this time, what awaited me on graduation wasn't a well-paid job or $600,000. It was a boat of my own.

Day-to-day living on a tropical island is not the same as it is on the mainland. Time slows down. The heat and humidity induce torpor and indolence. You don't keep regular hours or eat balanced meals. You have a tendency to drink too much, lie around too much, and when you play, to play too hard. Routine translates to boredom, unless it involves something you're passionate about. So you make an effort to see new places, develop new interests. And in my case, to be more social.

Our first year on St. Thomas, and most of the second year, we took the ferry to St. John a couple of times a month to eat and shop in Cruz Bay, to soak up sun on the powdery white sand beaches at Maho and Trunk and Hawknest bays. Now and then we took the longer ferry ride to Tortola, where we visited the Arundel Estate distillery and Annalise bought an antique music box and I bought a small brassbound mahogany chest that was supposed to have come from a Soper's End pirate's den. She didn't seem to mind riding on the larger ferryboats; it was only the pitch and roll of small craft that made her seasick.

We flew to Puerto Rico and spent five days exploring San Juan and the outlying areas. We took interisland flights to St. Croix, Culebra, St. Martin. We went snorkeling and tried scuba diving in Coki Bay. We attended parties, gave a couple of parties of our own. At the Royal Bay Club I played handball with Verriker and she played tennis with Maureen. One or two evenings a week we ate out and then went to Bam-boushay, Annalise's favorite nightclub, named for an old Calypso tourist phrase that means "Have yourself a fat old time"—a dark, noisy place that featured steel Calypso and Fungi bands and exotic native dancers. In April there was Carnival week—music and dancing, masquerades, costumed stiltwalkers representing the legendary West Indian spirits called jumbees—and the St. Thomas Yacht Club's annual regatta.

Some afternoons when it wasn't too hot and the trades were blowing soft, we played sex games. In one corner of the living room there was a daybed that Annalise had piled high with white throw pillows trimmed in blue. We opened the jalousied doors in that corner and moved the daybed over close to the sill, so that it commanded a view of the harbor and the sea beyond. Then we'd take turns sitting propped up naked against the pillows, while the other—

Christ, why did I bring that up? I don't want to talk about that.

Some things—

No, forget it, I'm not going to say any more.

Annalise liked the beaches more than I did; too many tourists to suit me. On the days I worked or sailed with Bone, she'd go to Magens or Coki or Sapphire alone or with Maureen or one of the other nonworking wives; swim, sunbathe, sit under an umbrella with her sketchpad designing swimsuits and beach attire. Occasionally she and Maureen would take an off-island trip together, or spend an evening at Bam-boushay when I preferred to sit home with an iced Arundel and watch the sunset and the harbor lights.

No one asked any questions about our past life that we couldn't answer with a few simple lies. No tourist or island resident looked at me as anything but another well-to-do expat. We spent money, but not as much as you might think. The cost of living wasn't all that high on St. Thomas in the late seventies and early eighties. And the return on my investments had exceeded expectations, so much so that I added another $100,000 in blue chip stocks to the portfolio.

I can't say exactly when Bone and I stopped being just tutor and pupil and became friends. It was a gradual thing, built on mutual respect and ease in each other's company and our shared passion for boats and the sea. One of those curious, not quite explicable, almost symbiotic relationships that occasionally develop between like-minded men of different races and cultures. But I can tell you when I first realized it and knew that he felt the same way.

It was a day near the approach of hurricane season in '80. The kind of humid day where you can almost see the moisture dripping in the air, feel it wet in your lungs every time you breathe. We'd been belowdecks on Conch Out all afternoon, installing a rebuilt chemical toilet and a new water Une in the head, and when we finished we were dehydrated and sweating like pigs. I suggested we head over to one of the waterfront taverns for a cold beer, as we'd done a few times before. Bone nodded, but when we were up on the seawall he asked if I'd brought my car today. I said I had, and he said, "How about we go to another place I know."

The place was on the edge of the native quarter, a rust-spotted Quonset hut that must have dated to the early years of World War II. The only indication that it was a tavern was a painted sign over the entrance that read "Bar"; if it had a name, I never heard Bone or anyone else mention it. And if any curious tourist had ever walked in, he'd likely have turned right around and walked out again. The interior was dark, with a plank bar and mismatched tables and chairs and a pair of vintage ceiling fans that did little to stir the sluggish air. The customers were mostly Thomian blacks, one of whom turned out to be an Obeah woman who dispensed charms for love and luck and to ward off jum-bees. You had the feeling that trouble brewed there now and then, and that you wouldn't want to be around when it did.

The dozen or so drinkers that day wouldn't have tolerated me half so well if I hadn't been with Bone. They all knew him; a few spoke to him; the bartender called him by name. This was his regular watering hole. I understood that was why he'd brought me there: he'd decided to let me into a corner of his private world. For a native black man to do this for a white expat was not only an expression of friendship but a privilege, and I didn't treat it lightly. He bought the first round and when I bought the second he raised his glass in a toast and for the first time called me Richard instead of "mon" or Mr. Laidlaw.

After that day, he wouldn't take any more money from me except for gas, oil, and provisions when the two of us went to sea together. "No, Richard," he said when I offered. "Remember when you first come to see me? You said you have sailing in your blood, I said we'll find out. Now we both know. Bone won't take pay from a mon same as him."

We went to the Bar fairly often. And now and then to one of the native cafes for fish chowder or conch fritters or callaloo. Sometimes we talked, sometimes we just sat and drank beer or iced rum. Occasionally he would reveal snippets about himself and his past. He'd been married twice; his first wife had died and he refused to talk about his second, even to speak her name. He had a teenage dalighter, Isola, he visited from time to time in Nassau. He'd attended college for a year before the sea called him. He'd once worked as a deckhand on a Panama-bound tramp steamer, once been approached to smuggle a ketch-load of weapons to a group of Puerto Rican insurgents (he wouldn't say whether he'd actually done it), once spent two years island-hopping his way around the Caribbean.

I envied him his free spirit and his adventures, and part of me wished I could tell him about the one bold, daring adventure in my life. It was just as well that I couldn't. For all his knockabout ways, Bone had a strong moral code to go with his intelligence and his dignity. He might have understood what had led me to do what I'd done, but he'd have thought less of me and probably severed our friendship. Would he have turned me in? No. He wasn't the kind to involve himself with the law. His duty was to himself and those he cared about, not to white or black society.

After a while I was more or less accepted by the Bar regulars, though I wouldn't have wanted to walk in alone after dark. In Bone's company I felt as comfortable there as I did at the Royal Bay Club. I was acquainted with a lot of white people on the island by then, the Verrikers and the Kyles and Jack Scanlon and Dick Marsten and several others, but the only man I considered a friend was a West Indian black sailor with a single name.

Bone.

He was the only real friend I ever had, before or since.

Hurricanes are always a concern when you live in the Caribbean. The hurricane season runs from June through November, but historically more storms—and the worst ones—occur in September than any other month. Most are Category 1 or 2, sustained winds of 74 up to 110 miles per hour, and if any of the islands is in the path of the blow, you can expect relatively minor damage such as flooding and what the official notices refer to as "moderate defoliation of shrubs and trees."

There was a Caribbean hurricane that first year, in early August. Hurricane Allen, I think it was. A monster blow, so intense that it reached Category 5 status—sustained winds of more than 156 m.p.h.—three different times over a period of about five days. Its central pressure was one of the lowest of all time, around twenty-seven inches when it was south of Puerto Pico. For a while it looked as though it might hammer the Virgins, and there were all sorts of storm warnings and preparations. But the eye stayed out over open water, bypassing us and howling up through the Lesser Antilles, where it weakened off Haiti and Jamaica; it didn't cross land until somewhere near Brownsville, Texas. We did get a taste of it, though: high winds and heavy rain for a couple of days.

Annalise was terrified the whole time. Her appetite for danger didn't extend to hurricanes. She'd been through earthquakes, as most native Californians have, but they were a tolerable threat because they came suddenly and were over in a minute or two. With a hurricane, you had plenty of advance warning and dire predictions of how much devastation to expect, and then, when it came howling and screaming like a bombing blitz, you had to ride it out over a long period. She wouldn't leave the villa, or let me take down the storm shutters and open the jalousies, until the day after the winds died down and the rains stopped.

I didn't say anything to her, but I had just the opposite reaction to Hurricane Allen. There is something in the elemental fury and frenzy of a tropical storm that excites a matching wildness in me. Still does to this day. An appeal to the dark side, I suppose. Yes, definitely an appeal to my dark side.

Annalise was jealous of my relationship with Bone. It threatened her somehow, in ways other than the time I spent with him—irrational ways. She hadn't liked him when I first introduced them, a reaction based on nothing I could see that passed between them. He was polite to her, on his dignity, as he was with everybody he met for the first time and especially with whites. And yet all she had to say about him afterward was "God, he's ugly, isn't he?" It occurred to me that she might be prejudiced. I didn't want to believe it and I never spoke to her about it, and she never said anything to me, but now I'm convinced she was. She avoided native Thomians other than service and trades people, and looking back, I can see that there was a kind of condescension in the way she treated blacks.

Once he suggested we take Conch Out on a three-day run to St.Croix, and that night I told Annalise about it and asked her to join us. With Bone's blessing, I said, a poor choice of words.

"His blessing!" she said. "Well, isn't that big of him!"

"He thought you might like to go along. So did I."

"Well, I don't want to. You know how I feel about small boats."

"It's only three days. And the weather forecast—"

"Three days. Lovely. Cozy. Just you and Bone now."

"What does that mean?"

"If I didn't know you so well," she said, "I'd think the two of you were sleeping together."

"For God's sake, Annalise."

"Well? You spend more time with him than you do with me."

"That's not true."

"Oh, isn't it? Sure seems that way."

"You know how much sailing means to me—"

"And what about the things that are important to me? Like visiting other parts of the world. Like trying to get a foot in the door of the fashion industry. I haven't given up on that idea, even if you think I have . . ."

There was more in the same vein. And it was no use arguing or trying to reason with her when she was in one of those moods. I'd had a few stings from her sharp tongue in Chicago, and a few more that were even more barbed down here. It gave her a hard, nasty edge that I didn't like at all.

If she'd used that tongue on me regularly, I'd've confronted her about it. But she didn't. She seemed to sense how often and how much she could provoke me, and she never went beyond the limits of my tolerance. Most of the time she was the same soft, sexy, loving woman she'd been that year in San Francisco and the first several months on St. Thomas. It was only Bone and the time I spent with him, and not getting her way when she had her heart set on something, that brought out the bitch in her.

In February of '81 I had a call from Dick Marsten. I'd told him I was interested in buying a boat of my own, and he had one in the yard, he said, that I might want to take a look at. A twenty-five-year-old yawl, thirty-four feet at the waterline, that had just come over from St. John. You don't see many yawls down here anymore, but there were still a few around in those days. This one had been built in Connecticut, run for a time on Long Island Sound, then sailed down in the fifties. Her owner had been ill for some time and she'd been neglected as a result, but she was still a sound vessel. The owner had died recently and his heirs were looking for a quick sale. So the price was right—not exactly a steal at $16,000, but still something of a bargain.

I'd been counting on a ketch, but that was because it was the type of sailboat I was familiar with; the only difference between the two is that the mizzen is smaller on a yawl, and stepped behind the wheel. So I said I'd come down, and when I went I took Bone with me. The yawl was out of the water for scraping, and she looked old and frowsy sitting there in the hot sun. There were a lot of things wrong with her. Her hull and deckhouse needed painting, the spars and brightwork sanding down and varnishing; the halyards would have to be replaced, the tracks and slides overhauled, a new bilge pump put in, and any number of smaller repairs made above- and belowdecks. But she had nice lines, a plumb stem and broad beam, a clean-running stern without too much overhang, and lifelines that had been rigged in heavy bolted stanchions.

When I asked Bone what he thought of her, he said, "Good salty sea boat. Built strong, caulked tight. Hull's solid. Engine got to have an overhaul, but it should be okay. Tell you better when I hear it run."

"How long to put her back in shape?"

"Hard to say. Lot of work to be done."

"Six months?"

"Maybe longer."

"Is she worth the asking price?"

"Seems so to me. You want her?"

An odd feeling had come over me as we examined the yawl. The same sort of feeling I'd had for Annalise in the beginning, without the sexual element—an intense possessive need that I now understood was the first stirrings of love.

"Yes," I said, "I want her."

"Then you better buy her," Bone said. Then, as if he'd intuited what I was thinking, "Right boat for a mon like the right woman. Grab her quick before somebody else take her away."

"Will you help me with the repairs?"

His two gold teeth flashed in one of his rare smiles. "Nothing Bone likes better than shining up a good salty sea boat."

The $16,000 price was firm, but I wouldn't have tried to haggle anyway. We signed the papers that same day, in Marsten's office. When I told Annalise that night, she wasn't pleased I'd gone ahead with the deal without talking to her first, but she didn't turn bitchy about it. Not then. I took her out to dinner and Bamboushay to celebrate.

The next day I went to the harbormaster's office, reregistered the yawl in Richard Laidlaw's name, and arranged for slip space not far from Bone's at the Sub Base harbor marina. Once she was barnacle-free and had been relaunched, Bone and I ran her over to Sub Base harbor under power. The auxiliary diesel labored somewhat, but he was satisfied with its durability. The first thing we did after we got her there was to paint a new name over the old one on the transom. She'd been Moonlight Lady; now she was Annalise.

I thought Annalise would be pleased when I brought her down to show off the yawl. Wrong. Her reaction was distaste, scorn. The bitch coming out in her then, as if it were the end product of a long brood since I'd told her about the purchase.

"This is what you named after me?" she said. "This is what you spent sixteen thousand dollars on?"

"She's rough around the edges," I admitted, "but Bone says she—"

"Bone says. Bone says."

"She needs work, that's all. A lot of hard work."

"So you'll be spending even more time down here."

"It's going to take some time, yes."

"You and Bone."

"I asked him to help me. What's wrong with that?"

"Oh, nothing. Nothing at all." Heavy sigh. "I suppose now you'll never take me to Paris. Or even to New York."

Paris again, New York again. She'd been pestering me about a long trip to both cities, and I kept putting her off. The FBI wouldn't have forgotten about Jordan Wise after only two and a half years; there was still a risk in traveling on the mainland and in Europe. But it was a small risk, I couldn't deny that. And now that I had what I'd always wanted, and the way she was reacting to it...

"All right," I said.

"All right?"

"We'll go to New York. We'll go to Paris."

"When?"

"This summer. June or July."

Fast change. The bitch vanished; she was soft and sweet again. "Richard! You mean it?"

"Yes."

"Promise? You won't try to back out?"

"No. We'll start making arrangements right away. But you have to promise me something in return. When the repair work is finished and the Annalise is ready for a shakedown cruise, you'll come along. No fuss, no argument."

"When will that be?"

"At least six months. Maybe not until the end of the year."

"Just the two of us?"

"Well, maybe. Bone might have to join us."

"Why, for God's sake?"

"I don't know when I'll be ready to sail a boat this size by myself. It could be another year or two before I can singlehand. If Bone does come along, he won't bother us. You'll hardly even know he's there."

"So you say."

"Will you promise?"

"Yes, I promise," she said. Then she said, "New York, Paris. Monte Carlo, too? I've always wanted to go to Monte Carlo. And London? Oh, God, I can't wait!"

Jack Scanlon came down to see the yawl. So did another boat owner I'd met, and the Kyles. Royce Verriker wasn't interested. "I hear you bought yourself a boat," he said when I saw him at the Royal Bay Club. "A fixer-upper that's taking up a lot of your time."

"I wouldn't describe her as a fixer-upper," I said. "She's got a good pedigree. She just hasn't been taken care of."

"Well, everybody needs a hobby."

"It's more to me than a hobby."

"Sure, I understand. Every man needs a vice, too." He winked at me. "Mine's making money."

The repair work went slowly. Among other tasks, the spars had to be sanded down to the wood; that meant hoisting up in a bosun's chair, and I've never been fond of heights. I put in two and sometimes three days a week, much of that time by myself. Bone helped when he wasn't working on Conch Out, or at Marsten Marine or taking out a day charter, or when he hadn't been seized by the need to be alone at sea for an extended period. I offered to pay him longshoremen's day wages to work on Annalise on a regular basis, but he still wouldn't take money from me. He didn't make friends any more easily than I did and he had his own ideas, stubborn and prideful, about what was acceptable in a friendship and what wasn't.

At the rate the repairs were progressing, and with the off-island trip with Annalise coming up, there wasn't much chance the yawl would be ready for cruising until the end of the year. And maybe not even then.

We flew to New York via Miami the first week in June. We were away a total of three weeks. Five days in Manhattan: museums, restaurants, a couple of Broadway shows. I would've liked to hear a performance of the New York Philharmonic, but they were dark for the season. Annalise took one entire day to make the rounds of large fashion houses like Gloria Vanderbilt and Calvin Klein, as well as a couple of the smaller ones, lugging a portfolio of her designs and trying to wangle an audience with one of the head designers. I thought she was being naive, that she wouldn't get past the receptionist in any of the houses, and I was right. But the turnaways didn't dampen her enthusiasm. She left designs at two or three places, and held on to the belief that they were good enough to generate interest somewhere.

Six days in Paris, three in Monte Carlo, five in London. Annalise loved them all. For me the whole trip was an exhausting and uncomfortable experience. The cities were interesting enough, but not to my taste. Too many people, too many eyes. Every time we went through passport and customs checks, I felt exposed and vulnerable. I imagined policemen were watching me, thinking that I looked familiar. Ordinary citizens, too. In London a tourist pointed a camera in my direction, and I ducked and turned away before I realized it wasn't me but one of the double-decker buses behind me that he was interested in. If Annalise noticed my discomfort, she ignored it because she was having such a good time.

I was relieved to get back to St. Thomas. The island was my safe harbor, the Caribbean my comfort zone. An illusion, sure; I could've been recognized there just as easily as in New York or London or Europe. But everybody has a place where he feels secure, a lifestyle that suits him perfectly, and this was mine. More of a home, after only two and a half years, than Los Alegres or San Francisco had ever been.

I slept for fourteen hours and then went down to the harbor and talked Bone into a day sail on Conch Out. I needed time on a boat on the open sea to unwind and resettle.

It wasn't long after our return that things began to deteriorate rapidly between Annalise and me.

She was still on a high from the trip and she started lobbying for us to move to New York—"not immediately, in a year or two." I told her it wasn't going to happen, and why it wasn't going to happen. At first she pouted. Then, when the high faded and sank into a low, she turned broody and distant.

One set of the designs she'd distributed in New York came back stuffed in a envelope with no note and postage due. The others were never returned. This depressed her, started her drinking more than she had before. And the drinking brought out the bitch again.

"I'm never going to get anywhere with my designs living down here. If we were in New York I could talk to people, meet somebody who'd look at them and see the potential and give me a chance. Or I could enroll in Pratt Institute and eventually get a referral from them."

"How many times have we been over this?" I said. "New York is too expensive. And the weather is miserable."

"Somewhere outside the city, then."

"Same negatives apply."

"I suppose you want to stay here for the rest of our lives."

"That was the plan, wasn't it? We're settled now, we're safe here—"

"We'd be safe in New York, after all this time. That's just an excuse."

"Don't you like St. Thomas anymore?"

"You want the truth? No, not very much."

"Why? What's changed?"

"Nothing's changed, that's the point. There's not enough to do on an island this small—half the time I'm bored to tears. But you don't even notice. You don't seem to care about my feelings, my needs. All you care about is that goddamn boat of yours. And your black buddy Bone."

"That's not true, Annalise."

"Isn't it? Makes me wonder if you still love me. Or if now I'm just somebody you keep around to screw when you feel like it. . . ."

She drank more and more; I hardly ever saw her without a glass in her hand. We went out together less often. There were long silences whenever we were together. Our sex life slacked off, to the point where I was spending much more time on Annalise than I was on Annalise. It didn't seem to bother her. Before, she'd been in a constant state of heat, and the aggressor at least half the time; now the aggressiveness stopped altogether. She was still cooperative enough when I initiated lovemaking, but without any of the wantonness that had always made it special between us. She was the dutiful wife, nothing more.

I kept trying to put us back together, giving her little presents, surprising her with an evening at a restaurant she liked on St. John. Nothing worked. The rift between us kept on widening. But I refused to believe it was permanent. Denial. I needed us to be all right, so we'd be all right. Every marriage has its rocky periods, I told myself, and this was ours—a bad patch that would smooth itself out sooner or later.

There were other problems, too. By the end of hurricane season, she was no longer spending time with Maureen Verriker. When I asked her about it, all she'd say was a curt "The friendship's run its course." She wasn't seeing much of her other friends, either, the apparent reason being that she'd made a new one at Sapphire Bay she liked more. JoEllen something—Hall, I think—an artist who lived out near Red Hook.

I didn't care for JoEllen. She was from somewhere in Florida, one of the divorcees who stayed on to make a new life for herself. It wasn't much of a life, as far as I could see. She was fortyish, loud, bawdy—the bohemian type who dressed sloppily in shorts and a loose halter that kept threatening to expose one or the other of a pair of juiceless brown tits. A polar opposite to Annalise in every way except for their shared fondness for sun, steel and scratch bands, and rum punches. Beach buddies, drinking buddies. JoEllen lived hand to mouth on what she earned from seascapes and island scenes aimed at the tourist trade. Annalise thought the oils and watercolors were better than they were, just as she thought her fashion designs were better than they were. She saw JoEllen as another yet-to-be-discovered genius. JoEllen saw her as a regular source of free drinks and small loans.

They hung out together three or four days a week, sometimes well into the night. Once Annalise didn't get home until after midnight. I was waiting up for her and I heard her squeal the Mini into the driveway, veer off the pavement, and slalighter half a dozen plantings on the way down. She wasn't just drunk—she was glassy-eyed, slack-jawed, jelly-legged plastered.

I was furious. "What the hell's the matter with you, driving in that condition?" I yelled at her. "What if you'd had an accident, run over somebody?"

"Well, I didn't."

"But you could have. You could've been stopped, arrested, thrown in jail. Any kind of serious trouble, the police might do a background check, and then we'd be finished. We can't afford to call attention to ourselves, we can't afford to lose control—not ever. How many times have we been over that?"

"A million. Two million. That's your favorite word—control. You know what you are? A control freak, that's what you are."

"That's not true, I've never tried to control you—"

"Oh, bullshit, Richard. You've been controlling me for four goddamn years. Do this, don't do that, don't take chances, don't take risks. What's that if not controlling?"

"Being sensible. Being careful. Trying to keep us safe."

"Careful, right. Another of your favorite words. You don't sound like Richard anymore, you know that? You sound like that tightassed accountant back in San Francisco, Jordan what's his name."

"Now who's spouting bullshit?"

"You are. Control, careful, sensible, safe. What happened to all the excitement you promised me?"

"Haven't you had enough already?"

"No! I'll never have enough. I told you a long time ago how it was with me. I can't stand the way we've been living, all safe and careful. I want to take risks again, live on the edge again. Feel alive again."

"There's a big difference between living on the edge and crossing the line. We're fugitives, for Christ's sake."

"You're a fugitive, not me. I don't know anything about what Jordan Wise did, I only know Richard Laidlaw. Remember?"

"If we're cought, no matter what you say or I say, you could still be convicted as an accessory. You think your life is dull and confining now? Imagine how it'd be in a prison cell!"

That was the first big fight we had, but not the last. She was contrite when she sobered up, and for a while she reined herself in. She still hung out with JoEllen, but there were no more drunk-driving incidents; I told her I'd take the car keys away from her and cut off her access to the joint bank account if she ever came home loaded again.

But then the holidays rolled up, and there was the night of the Verrikers' annual Christmas party.

Annalise didn't want to go, which would've been all right with me, but at the last minute she changed her mind. She and Maureen were stiff with each other when we arrived, avoided each other after that. At one point I asked Verriker what the problem was between them; he shrugged and said, "Beats me." Usually at parties Annalise was animated and charming, and restrained in her drinking. At this one she kept refilling her glass at the punchbowl, and the more she drank, the more erratic her behavior became.

I didn't realize how drunk she was until she dropped and shattered her glass on the floor tiles and then upset somebody's plate of hors d'oelivres. I was trying to ease her out of there without making a scene, when she said, in a voice loud enough for Verriker and some of the other guests to hear, "Oh, for Christ's sake, why can't you just let me enjoy myself? So I spilled a drink and some food, so what? I'm not gonna spill the beans, you know. Secrets are safe with me, yours, everybody's. My Ups're sealed."

"Be quiet!" I snapped at her.

"Whoops," she said. "Oh, shit."

Verriker said, "Maybe you'd better take her home, Richard."

"Yeah. Right away."

I dragged her out of there. When I got her into the house I cought her arms and shook her, hard. "Are you crazy? Are you trying to get us cought?"

"God, no." She wasn't fighting me. The night air had sobered her a little; she seemed horrified by what she'd done. "I don't know what happened. . . . It just slipped out. . . ."

"How many other times has something just slipped out'? To Maureen, to JoEllen, to Christ knows who else?"

"Never—never! First and last time, I swear."

"It better be the last time," I said. "I mean it, Annalise. Don't ever get drunk enough in public to make a slip like that again. If you do . . ."

She swore she wouldn't. Over Christmas and New Year's she controlled her drinking, stayed home most evenings. We still weren't spending a lot of time in each other's company—work on the yawl was nearing completion and I was putting in long hours at the marina—but when we were together, she seemed to make an effort to be reasonable and good-natured. No more pressure about moving, no more bitchy behavior, a couple of sessions in bed that she didn't treat as duty fucks. I felt relieved. It looked as if she'd gotten her perspective back and the bad patch was beginning to smooth out at last.

Work on Annalise was finally done at the end of January.

She was a thing of beauty by then, a sight to make you catch your breath when you stood off on the stringpiece and looked at her in the slanting rays of the sun. Her spars and brightwork, her hull and deckhouse gleamed with thick coats of varnish and blue and white paint, her brass was shined to a high gloss, her new Dacron sails had a freshly laundered dazzle when unfurled. The ship-to-shore radio worked fine. The overhauled auxiliary diesel ran without a hitch during every ten-minute test run. In the cockpit, all the gauges and dials were in perfect working order and the new compass sat bright and shiny in its gimbals. Belowdecks, the marine refrigerator and primus stove in the tiny galley were in order, the ventilators and new bilge pump worked fine, every fitting and connection had passed muster.

And she was mine, all mine.

January and February are usually optimum cruising months in the eastern Caribbean. Clear weather, light winds, calm seas. I picked an arbitrary sail date, the twenty-eighth, which fit into Bone's schedule. Then I gave Annalise a full week's advance notice. She wasn't thrilled at the prospect of four days on a thirty-four-foot yawl, but when I reminded her of her promise, she agreed to honor it. I asked her if she wanted to come down to the harbor early and see what all the months of hard work had accomplished; she said no, she'd wait and be surprised on the twenty-eighth. I thought about inviting Jack Scanlon and the Kyles for a look, decided it could wait until after the shakedown voyage. The only people I really cared to share the yawl with until then were Annalise and Bone.

I plotted out a course that would take us south around St. John, up through Flanagan Passage into Sir Francis Drake Channel, along the east coast of Virgin Gorda and out across the Hawks Bill Bank; we'd swing north by northeast near Horseshoe Reef and run due east through deep water outside the dangerous coral heads that ring Ane-gada, then drop down across the Kingfish Banks and home to St. Thomas through the Virgin's Gangway. Bone approved. It would be a good long test of Annalise's seaworthiness, and there were anchorages on Tortola, Guana Island, and Virgin Gorda, and a safe harbor at Ane-gada for emergencies or if any of us felt like an overnight stop.

The long-range forecast promised perfect sailing weather for the four-day period beginning on the twenty-eighth. The day before, Bone and I loaded in stores, topped off the fuel and water tanks, put fresh linens on one of the vee bunks up forward for him and on the double berth in the main cabin for Annalise and me. I ran the engine for ten minutes one more time, even though there hadn't been any tendency toward overheating; the gauge held steady at 140 degrees. Fussily, I even rechecked the gland nut in the stuffing box for any looseness that might cause leakage.

At six that night, the yawl was ready for sea.

At six the next morning, Annalise refused to go along.

She didn't feel well, she said. She thought maybe she was coming down with something, she said. It made her seasick just thinking about being out on the water, she said. I suspected that she was faking, but she sounded so apologetic and sincere, I didn't call her on it. I offered to postpone the trip; she said no, she felt bad enough as it was, she didn't want to deprive me of my pleasure. Why didn't Bone and I just go ahead, she'd come along next time, swear to God she would. I was disappointed and a little upset, but what could I do short of branding her a liar and shanghaiing her? She kept urging me to go, and so finally I went.

As soon as the yawl was out of the harbor and under sail, tacking up against a light southeasterly breeze, I forgot my disappointment and I forgot Annalise. Reality isn't always as wonderful as the anticipation of it, but in this case it was even better. Annalise handled like a dream. There is no other feeling like standing at the helm of your own boat, the wind in your face and the sea smell in your nostrils, listening to the hiss of the water and the wind-fattened sheets singing and the lines, shrouds, and stays thrumming in accompaniment. It's more than just exhilaration, a rush or a high. It's freedom and wonder and a kind of pure and innocent joy. I've never put much stock in religion, but there's something spiritual about it, too, an almost mystical connection of man to nature. If there is a God, the closest I've ever gotten or will ever get to Him is the days and nights I spent on that yawl at sea.

We were out four full days, and it was superb sailing the entire time. Running down the trades at four and five knots, the deep water an ever-changing mosaic of blues and greens topped by foaming crests, puffy white trade-wind clouds that never banked or darkened. Even the routine of sea-keeping—checking the chafe points on sheets and sails, restowing shifted supplies, all the other little chores—was a pleasure. We stood watch and watch, four hours on and four hours off; the man on watch steered and trimmed sail, the man off watch did the cooking and bilge-pumping and slept when he could.

We didn't talk much; there was no need for conversation. All your senses are heightened at sea, your thoughts clear and sharp, and you'd much rather tune in on them than on spoken words. The nights were even better than the days, with the vast, star-shot sky draped low overhead and the water sometimes black as oil, sometimes glistening with starshine and luminescent moon tracks.

When we got back to St. Thomas I docked the yawl without a bump, whisper smooth. Bone said, "Good job, Cap'n"—he'd taken to calling me Cap'n on the cruise, a term of respect—and I grinned and nodded. I felt as I had the afternoon I walked out of Amthor Associates for the last time. Apart from ordinary men, above them at a great height. Happier, more content than they could ever be.

The illusion, the delusion, lasted until I walked through the front door of the Quartz Gade villa.

And found that Annalise was gone.

No warning. No explanation, no good-byes.

Gone from the house, gone from the island—destination unknown. Vanished into thin air, just as Jordan Wise had vanished from San Francisco.

Everything of value that she could pack into her three suitcases went with her. Jewelry, hers and mine both. Clothing. The antique music box and a handful of gold doubloons we'd bought on St. Martin and all the gold and silver trinkets. The only thing she left behind was the brass-bound pirate's chest, and that was only because it was too bulky and too heavy to be easily transported.

Money, too?

Oh, hell, yes. All the cash from the safe deposit box, everything in the joint bank account, more than $26,000. If any of the stocks had been negotiable for her, they would've been gone as well. If she'd had access to the Cayman account, she'd have plundered that and left me with exactly the same amount she had left in the joint account.

One dollar.

One fucking dollar.

And there wasn't a damn thing I could do about it.