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.
ST. THOMAS
1982
THE FIRST WEEK was very bad. I didn't leave the house, didn't bathe or shave or bother to get dressed except for a pair of shorts. I drank steadily, without ever getting to the blotting-out stage, until the supply of liquor ran out. I raged at her. I raged at myself for misjudging her and for being too stupid to see it coming, and because maybe part of it was my fault for neglecting her, and because there was still some residual love left in me in spite of what she'd done. The phone rang three times during that week and I answered each time, thinking it might be Annalise, and when I heard somebody else's voice I hung up without saying a word.
When I couldn't stand the empty house or my own miserable company any longer, I cleaned up and got out of there. I needed to talk to somebody, and the only one I could confide in was Bone.
He listened to me unload as much as I dared to, without interrupting. His face showed no emotion, but I could tell that he empathized; we were friends and he'd gone through the same kind of thing himself with the second wife whose name he wouldn't mention. He didn't offer any bullshit advice, as most men would have. All he said was, 'You hurting bad, Richard. Mon hurts like that, only one thing to do. Go out. Let wind and sea wash out the poison.'
I said, 'Will you go with me?'
'No, mon. No place for Bone on that kind of trip.'
'Alone? I couldn't do it. I'm not ready to singlehand.'
'You're ready,' he said. 'You never be more ready.'
The next day I put in fresh stores, fuel, water. Then I painted a new name on the yawl's transom and reregistered her with the harbormaster's office. Annalise was gone; I wanted
The day after that, I left early into a stiff wind and an uncertain forecast. I had no idea where I was going. If I succeeded as a singlehander, fine. If I screwed up badly enough so that the yawl lost a mast or broached and went down, so be it. I didn't much care then, either way.
I set sail to windward on a starboard tack and let the trades take me wherever they felt like. I had a little trouble handling her at first, without Bone's sure hand with the rigging and the Dacron, and came close once to a bad jibe. But the lessons I'd learned from him, plus instinct and applied skill, allowed me to regain and maintain control.
The not-caring didn't last long. Singlehanding a thirty-four-foot yawl is work, hard work, and requires constant vigilance even under optimum conditions. When you have a passion for sailing, the work soon translates to pleasure and then to that sense of exhilarating freedom. I
By nightfall I was no longer running aimlessly. I reckoned my position by compass and celestial navigation, used the nautical almanacs and logarithmic tables to chart a course that would take
The weather held until the afternoon of the third day, when I encountered a rain squall off East Point on the northeastern tip of St. Croix. That was the only real test of my seamanship that I faced. A following breeze had risen, and before long the swells steepened and there was a rough cross chop. Then, as the wind increased, I saw the squall line moving in dark and fast. I double-checked the hatches, lashed down the loose gear, then went forward to replace the genoa with a working jib, again to reef in the main, and one more time to replace the working jib with the storm jib. Rain burst over the yawl in a blinding tropical downpour. The squall lasted about an hour, but despite the driving rain and thrashing sea it wasn't bad as Caribbean blows go.
I stayed out five and a half days. At night I slept on the cushions in the cockpit aft. Every morning I pumped the bilges, ran the auxiliary for an hour to charge the batteries, checked the sails and halyards. I shot the sun at noon and took star sights at dusk and dawn, and kept a daily log. The yawl sailed herself with the wind abeam or on the quarter; those times I ran a piece of the sheet from a cleat on the lee coaming to the wheel's king spoke to keep her off the wind, and made my meals and lazed on deck, communing with the towering emptiness of sea and sky. I saw schools of flying fish, and what I was sure was the dorsal fin of a trailing shark. I passed deserted cays and other boats with their sails bellied fat, and avoided reefs, and once made five knots running close-hauled against the wind.
Bone was right, as usual.
When I sailed back into the harbor at Charlotte Amalie, the poison was gone.
The second dose came two weeks later.
I was all right then. But I wouldn't have been if I hadn't purged myself of the first dose with that long singlehand voyage.
I don't know why I picked that Tuesday to make my last visit to the Royal Bay Club. I don't believe in predestination, cosmic manipulation, any of that crap. It was a random choice of day and time to clean out my locker and cancel my membership. I'd never really felt comfortable at the club, and now there was no longer any need to keep up appearances. Since my return I'd managed to avoid the Verrikers and Kyles and other members, and I intended to keep on avoiding them; the last thing I wanted to have to deal with was pity.
The club was usually more or less deserted in the middle of the afternoon, the hottest part of the day. I expected to be in and out in a few minutes. The fact that Gavin Kyle happened to be in the lounge, and I happened to overhear him talking to the British banker, Horler, was sheer coincidence.
The steward wasn't in his customary cubicle at the front entrance, so I walked into the lounge looking for him. Gavin and Horler were at the bar. I would have done a quick about-face before they saw me, except that
