I shrugged; sipped my iced tea. “Not while we’re eating, Marjorie. I’ll tell you later.”
She nodded solemnly, looked down at her food; she had a chastised expression, and I didn’t want her to.
“Hey-Marjorie. It’s no big deal. It’s just not polite supper conversation…okay?”
She smiled again, a little. “Okay.”
I asked her about herself, her family. Both her mother and her father had for many years worked for various wealthy white households in domestic positions.
“My father…really isn’t my father,” she said. “He is my father to me, and I love him, but…he married my mother when she was expectin’ me. Some rich man was my blood daddy. I don’t know who he is, and I never look into it. But that’s why I look like this. Mama’s kind of light-skinned, too. Papa, too, a little. That’s why we live on the other side of the wall.”
“Other side of the wall?”
“In Grant’s Town, a concrete wall separates us light brown ones from the darker.”
“And you folks are higher up the social ladder, I take it?”
She nodded. “We have a nice house. Two stories. No electricity, no indoor plumbin’…not as nice as livin’ here by Westbourne. But nice enough.”
“You mentioned you had a brother you want to put through college….”
“I have two sisters, one older, one younger. Mabel’s married and works at the straw market; Millie’s a maid at the B.C.”
“I’d like to meet them.”
She smiled and ate her food. Somehow, despite her openness, I knew that me meeting her kin wasn’t high on her list.
I was finished with my main course; my stomach glowed with it. I looked at her as she nibbled at her food, and thought about how she’d leveled with me about who she was; how personal she’d been with me.
“Last year about this time,” I told her, “I was on an island called Guadalcanal.”
Her head tilted. “I read about that place in the papers. You were a soldier?”
“A Marine. I was on a patrol that got cut off from the rest of our company. We fought back the Japanese for a day and a night, out of a hole in the sandy ground a shell made. Some of us died. Some of us lived. All the ones who lived were…wounded. Not necessarily physically. Do you understand?”
She nodded gravely. “It was a place like this, Guadalcanal. A tropical island.”
“Yes.”
She smiled ever so gently. “And the land crabs were there.”
I laughed, tapped my empty plate with a fork. “Skittering around like ugly baseball gloves with legs. Lots of legs.”
“Well, you ate you him, now. Your enemy.”
I touched her hand. “Thanks to you.”
Her hand was warm; so was her smile. “Now, dessert.”
She went to the oven and put on a kitchen mitt to pull out a cookie sheet on which were two steaming, oversize custard cups. Soon the cup with its orangeish-white, crusted-brown contents sat before me, its rising, swaying steam beckoning me like an Arab dancing girl.
When I broke the skin with my spoon, a rich orange-white liquid ran through the custard.
“Coconut souffle,” she said, beaming, obviously proud of herself. “Be careful…it’s hot….”
It was, but
“I make it with Yellow Bird,” she said, taking a little taste herself.
“There’s a
She laughed musically. “No! Yellow Bird is a drink that mixes banana liqueur, orange juice, Triple Sec, and rum. I put the same things in my souffle.”
“Are you
“I’m sure. She’s so much better than me-but not as good as my mama.”
After supper, we sat out on her front stoop and watched the tide roll in; both the look and sound were shimmering. We sat close, but didn’t touch. The moon in the dark clear blue sky looked unreal, like a poker chip you could reach out and pluck. There were very few stars to wink at us tonight. The horizon was endless, though I knew the countless islands of the Bahamas were scattered out there; that hundreds of beaches, just this lovely, were ivory under the moonlight, just like this one. But somehow this was the only one. Anywhere.
“You know, Nathan…there’s something that’s been botherin’ me….”
“Oh? Something I’ve done or said?”
“No! No. Something about Sir Harry.”
She looked into her lap; she must’ve slipped out of the petticoats when she went into the bathroom after supper, because the blue-and-white dress was spread out before her now, flat, like a tablecloth.
“Sir Harry seemed kinda…funny, a month or so before he died.”
“Funny? How?”
“He was always takin’ precautions. Like he was scared about somethin’.”
I laughed a little. “Some precautions: he left every door in the house unlocked and every window open.”
“I know, I know. But still…he was takin’ precautions like I never see him take before.”
“Such as?”
She sighed, shaking her head slowly, thinking about it. The beads of her wooden necklace made brittle music. “One night, he would sleep in one room. The next night, another room, next night, another. Always a different room.”
“Well…that’s a little odd, but I don’t know that it means he was necessarily taking precautions….”
“Maybe, but he took to always sleepin’ with his gun next to his bed-
I sat up a little. “That’s a precaution, all right. That’s definitely a precaution. What became of that gun?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know. I see it on his nightstand, when I put his clothes out, night of the murder. That’s the last I saw of it.”
“Jesus. This could be important, Marjorie. What sort of gun was it?”
“Oh…I don’t know much about guns. I don’t know anything about guns….”
“Was it a revolver or an automatic?”
“What’s the difference?”
I explained, briefly.
“Revolver,” she said.
“How big?”
She thought about it, then held her hands apart about six inches.
“A.38, maybe. You’ll have to tell Colonel Lindop about this.”
“I already did.”
“Oh. Well. Thanks for telling me about it. The prosecution sure as hell isn’t likely to.”
“I’m sorry I didn’t mention it sooner….”
“That’s okay. There’s a lot to keep track of in this crazy case.” I checked my watch. “It’s almost ten. We’ll have to leave in forty-five minutes or so, to meet Arthur.”
“Okay. You want to take a swim?”
“Well…sure. You got any spare trunks in your place?”
She looked at me with what might be irritation. “Do I look like the sort of girl who keeps a man’s swimmin’ things in her house?”
“No-not at all, I just…”
She rose, and undid something, and the dress fell to the sand.
I was looking, dumbfounded, directly at a dark triangle between her legs when the white of her blouse fluttered past me. Then I looked up and her body rose like the perfect statue of a woman, modeled in milk chocolate by some lascivious confectioner. Her breasts were round and high, not large, not small, the sort of overflowing handfuls that would outsmart gravity for decades; the waist seemed impossibly small, legs muscular and endless, a
