The hospital was on the outskirts of a small city. There was a red light over the emergency entrance and a young intern waiting there.
“Someone telephoned us to be ready for a man who was shot. He said it was the Governor. But who would—”
“Hurry!”
Jeremy was put on a stretcher with wheels. Tash followed it into an elevator. On the fourth floor it was pushed down the corridor to a pre-surgery room.
The intern looked at Tash. “You’ll have to wait here, ma’am.”
She stood and watched them wheel the stretcher away. Doors closed after it.
A nurse came out of another elevator. “Miss Perkins? There are some reporters downstairs—”
“I’ll talk to them,” said Carlos.
Tash found chairs at the other end of the hall and sat down.
“Tea? Coffee?” said the nurse.
She shook her head.
The chair was uncomfortable. She looked down and saw blood had stained the robin’s egg blue of her skirt. So it really was happening. You couldn’t imagine bloodstains that real.
She did not know how long she had waited when she heard a step and looked up to see Carlos again.
“Any word?”
She shook her head.
He sat down beside her. “It was clever. The heckler to distract us so everybody was looking his way and no one saw who fired the shot.”
“I know who the heckler was,” said Tash. “Freaky. He used the same trick when Halcon picked my pocket. Diversion, misdirection.”
After a while Carlos persuaded Tash to lie down on a couch and close her eyes. She could almost feel time crawling by, second after second, minute after minute, the unendurable that had to be endured.
Footsteps and a murmur of voices. She opened her eyes. One look at Carlos’ face told her everything.
She whispered: “No . . .”
A long time afterward, they were driving through a cold, gray dawn. The car had to stop when it came to a place in the road cordoned off by state police.
“You might have taken her around another way.” The voice was Hilary’s.
She heard Carlos answer. “There is no other way.”
She looked beyond the little knot of state troopers and reporters and curiosity seekers to mountain peaks and a river flowing around a curve between two of them.
She spoke to the trooper who was driving.
“Does this place have a name?”
“Yes, ma’am. It’s called Desolation Bend.”
PART IV
Cayo Siesta
16
INSHORE, THE SEA was Egyptian blue, brilliant as newly mined turquoise, a blue with green undertones. Out- shore, it was the deep, clear, acid-looking green of jewel jade. The roads were cut out of white coral rock, and the blocks dug out were used to build houses. The fine, white sand of the beaches was powdered coral tinged sometimes with the faintest blush of pink. When you saw a spray of pink oleander blossom against the improbable seascape, the first reaction was simply: I don’t believe it! How could Nature, so gray and circumspect in the north, cut loose with the exuberant vulgarity of a picture postcard the moment she came south?
The hibiscus, carefully cultivated as a small pink flower in the gardens of Leafy Way, was a big splash of red growing wild along the ditches here.
You didn’t go to a florist for gardenias here, or to a grocer for lemons. You picked both from your own bush or tree, where they flourished among passion flowers and night-blooming cereus, gold trees and orchids and bougainvillea.
In your orchard were guavas and mangoes, persimmons and pomegranates, papaya and monstera deliciosa.
It was not only the vegetable world that flourished. There were bold palm rats that could swim across an inlet and flying cockroaches that ate clothes. Spiders here were big as a man’s fist and might drop on your head or shoulder from the ceiling at any moment. There were coral snakes for whom anti-venin was kept in every house. There were fleas so prolific that if dogs brought them onto your wall-to-wall carpet you had to analyze their breeding cycle before you could get rid of them. There was heart worm that killed dogs without warning. There were virus diseases that struck you with an exuberant will to live at your expense, which no well behaved northern virus ever displayed.
Even in the sea there were colonial organisms like the Portuguese man-of-war, which looked more like a gaudy plastic toy than anything alive, but whose sting could put you in the hospital for days. And in deep water there were always the sharks.
In short, the eternal sun that so invigorated you and your species also invigorated all the other species that preyed on you and yours. What Nature gave with one hand, she took away with the other. The Miranda family had adapted to all this generations ago, minimizing the disadvantages and enjoying the advantages without any distortion of their ideals. Sun and rum might act like adrenalin on cruise tourists and tax evaders from the north, but over the rest of the island there still brooded the amiable spirit of Granada and Algeciras.
Cayo Siesta was the largest island in the Sotavento group and shaped like a crescent. The Casa Miranda was on one tip of that crescent. If you wanted to go to town, your shortest route was to take a launch in a straight line across the bay instead of going the long way around the crescent by car.
The house itself reflected a Spanish tradition that goes back to the days when Iberia was a Roman colony. It was built around a true patio with house walls on all four sides, a cloister along each inner wall, and a fountain in the middle of the patio.
Outside, the house was like a fortress with barred windows and high double carriage doors of heavy mahogany.
Inside, the patio was an outdoor room with only the sky for its ceiling, yet guarded from all observation by the walls of the house itself. Persian
