“You didn’t find it, did you?” she asked quietly. “What you came here looking for?”
“I’ve had a great time.”
“But you didn’t find it.”
He shrugged and smiled. “Maybe because I don’t know what I’m trying to find.”
“I don’t, either.” The words came out harsher than she’d intended.
Steve looked away. “Well,” he said with forced levity, “we’ve got one more full day on Pelican Key before old Peg-leg Pice picks us up. Maybe I’ll find it tomorrow. If I do, I’ll let you know.”
Kirstie refused to match his bantering tone. “Be sure you do.”
After that, no more words for a while. They listened to the night beyond the patio. A vireo trilled a courtship melody-a whisper song, it was called, in recognition of its delicate airiness. The female of the species must love being seduced so gracefully. Kirstie smiled at the thought.
She had learned the names and habits of many tropical birds in the thirteen days since Pice had left them on the island, after unloading their luggage and supplies and showing them around. The house, he’d explained, was equipped with dual generators that supplied electricity for appliances and hot water; a two-way radio would keep them in contact with the outside world. The UHF emergency frequency was
243.0; VHF, 121.5.
“If there’s any problem and for some reason you can’t use the motorboat, just get on the air and let ’em know about it in Islamorada. A boat can be here faster than a frog can jump.” He’d smiled, showing a cracked tooth like a paint chip. “Don’t worry, though. Nothing will happen-except you’ll have a great time. And in two weeks I’ll be back to collect you, and you’ll hate me for it.”
His prediction had proved accurate, for the most part. Despite Steve’s continuing remoteness, Kirstie had enjoyed their stay on Pelican Key, and she believed her husband had also. She was almost sorry to see the vacation end.
They had left the island only twice, taking the motorboat over to Upper Matecumbe Key to replenish their supply of food and other necessities. Not all their meals had come from the grocery store, though. The garden supplied fruit and vegetables: oranges, limes, grapefruit, breadfruit, sapodilla plums; tomatoes, asparagus, eggplant. Once, they’d dined on fresh snapper, caught by Steve as he lounged on the dock with a fishing pole. Baked, lightly seasoned, and brushed with lemon juice, it was the best thing she’d ever tasted.
Pelican Key offered many diversions. They had motored out to the reef and snorkeled among the coral gardens, spying on schools of parrotbills and beau gregories in their wonderland of spiral towers, rococo ridges, and white sand holes. They had played Frisbee with Anastasia on the beach, explored the dense hardwood forest, waded in the tree-shadowed cove, made love in a madly swaying hammock on the porch.
Some of their leisure had been enjoyed indoors. The bedroom featured a well-stocked bookcase. Kirstie had read I, Claudius and was halfway through the sequel, Claudius the God. There was a TV also, but at Steve’s insistence they hadn’t turned it on even once. Hadn’t listened to the radio either, except for daily monitoring of the NOAA weather frequency, a necessary precaution in hurricane season.
So far the weather had been clear, with occasional thundershowers to relieve the heat. Still, even the possibility of a hurricane had made real to Kirstie the isolation of this place, so unnatural to her after the hectic suburban life she was accustomed to, the balancing of careers and quality time, the whole dizzy yuppie scramble. It was good to get away from all that for a while-and good to know that it would be there when they returned.
Kirstie wondered if Steve would agree with the second part of that thought. Was he ready to head home the day after tomorrow, to go back to the life of a corporate attorney while his wife resumed scrounging for contributions to PBS?
She watched her husband, his face limned by starlight and the pale glow from the kitchen window. Wire- frame glasses shielded his gray, thoughtful eyes. His short brown hair was in need of combing. He was thin, almost skinny, not very muscular; work left him no time for an exercise program, but at least he didn’t smoke, thank God.
A rumpled T-shirt and cut-off jeans were his only attire. He hated dressing up, felt imprisoned by a jacket and tie. Lately he seemed to feel imprisoned by a lot of things.
He was staring past the rhododendrons and the trellises of bougainvillea, out to the sea. That distant gaze was the same one she had seen so often in recent months, as he looked past her, always past her, out a dew- frosted window or upward at the purple bellies of rain-pregnant clouds.
For a long while nothing had seemed to interest him. Then in March, he’d chanced to see an ad for Pelican Key in a travel magazine. Until then he hadn’t known that the elder Larson had died, or that the island was now available as a getaway spot.
Immediately he latched on to the idea of going there. His determination to do so became an obsession. Coming up with the money meant taking a knife to their savings, and Kirstie resisted until she saw that he would not be denied.
Still, it was not the island as such that mattered to him or occupied his thoughts; she knew that. It was youth, or innocence, or some other intangible thing he felt he’d lost.
She wished she could help him. But she didn’t know how.
Anastasia yawned and stretched supine on the patio tiles, her left ear ticking irritably at a mosquito. Kirstie smiled down at her, enjoying the beauty of the animal, the lean limbs and supple angularity of a purebred Russian wolfhound. The dog was three years old, milk white, her long hair the color and texture of fine silk. A bushy tail fanned out behind her like a silvery spray of moon rays.
Poor Ana was exhausted now, after her earlier encounter with the frog. She had discovered it in the garden shortly after sunset. Its madcap hopping had first perplexed her, then driven her frantic with frustration as the frog eluded her pursuit. Finally she’d hounded the frog into the trees on the verge of the garden, where with a final buoyant leap it had vanished into a deep thicket of anemone.
“I still can’t get over how new this place looks,” Steve said suddenly, and she knew his mind had been leafing through a scrapbook of memories again. “When we used to come here, it was like an ancient ruin. Literally uninhabitable. The garden was completely overgrown, and the orchard was a jungle.”
“Orchard?” She’d explored the entire island a dozen times and had seen no evidence of one.
“Oh, it’s long gone now. Swallowed by the forest, I guess. But back in the twenties this was a lime-tree plantation. Where we’re staying was the owner’s place. Those ramshackle row houses about a hundred yards from here-they were the workers’ quarters. I’m surprised Larson didn’t have them bulldozed.”
Kirstie had never asked him about the island’s history; vaguely she’d assumed he wouldn’t know much about it. But she should have known better, shouldn’t she? In many ways this was the most important place in the world to him.
“Why was the plantation abandoned?” she asked, stroking Anastasia’s back with her bare foot.
“The Depression shut it down, and the big hurricane drove off whoever was still here in 1935.”
“Hurricane?”
“It was a monster. Roared out of the Atlantic on Labor Day morning. There was a train running on the old railroad tracks, picking up evacuees. When the hurricane made landfall at Upper Matecumbe, it just knocked that train off the tracks. Eight hundred people died.”
“Eight hundred.” Kirstie drew a breath.
“They were still finding skeletons in the jungle years later… Sorry. I shouldn’t have mentioned that.”
“It’s all right. I’m just as glad I didn’t know it before we got here, though.” She shook her head. “That’s a terrible story.”
“It’s not the only one. I don’t know, maybe this part of the Keys is cursed. Sometimes I almost think so. Take the name Matecumbe. Nobody’s certain what it means, but a good guess is that it’s a corruption of the Spanish words mata hombre.”
“Kill man,” she translated uneasily.
“The Indian name was Cuchiyaga, which means essentially the same thing. Then there’s Indian Key, south of here. The Spaniards called it Matanzas: ‘slaughter.’ Legend has it that hundreds of French sailors were massacred by Calusa Indians on that island after their ships foundered on the reef. May not be true, but there was a Seminole raid on the settlement there in the mid-eighteen hundreds. Some of the settlers made the mistake of hiding in wells. The Indians found them and poured in boiling water.”
“My God… Who told you all this, anyway?”
