“I’m sorry.” She extended her hand again. “Let’s try again. My name’s Elizabeth. Ford. I go by Liz.”
We shook and I opened the Land Rover’s door. Liz climbed into the seat next to Chance. I threw her purse, duffle bag and my stuff in the back and got in next to her. Rumble jumped into my arms, licking my face, wiggling, wagging his stumpy docked tail. For a change the Rover started at first crank. We drove down Ocean Road, water from the uncovered foam rubber cushions soaking into our clothes.
“What kind of a place is Smugglers Inn?” Liz spoke, grabbing my arm as Chance swerved to avoid a large pothole in the road. “I’ve got reservations there, but I don’t know anything about it.”
“There are three good hotels and eleven lousy ones on the island,” Chance said. “They all cost between a hundred and three hundred bucks a night. Smugglers is the nicest, it’s only two and a quarter and it has Ron Martin, the best manager on the island. Delano’s, over on Little Coconut Bay is filled with cockroaches, bedbugs, has hot, small rooms, contaminated water, and costs two hundred.”
“Sounds like I’ve got one piece of luck anyway.” She did not sound happy.
“There’s an added major advantage to Smugglers.” I grinned at her.
“What’s that?”
“The hotel sits on a bluff on the east side of Smugglers Bay. My place is on the west bluff. If you’re sitting on the hotel verandah you can see me sitting on mine.”
“How grand.” Her voice hung between sarcasm and disinterest, but there was a glint her eyes that allowed me to convince myself that she was hiding a spark of curiosity.
“I’ve got a better idea, though,” I said. “Why don’t I meet you at your hotel in about an hour? I’ll take you to dinner at the Tabard Inn.”
Saying nothing, she rested her head against the back of the seat and groaning softly, closed her eyes. Chance wove the Land Rover around a series of potholes along a section where the pavement was eroded by waves crashing constantly over the sea wall. When she did reply it was in a tired defensive tone, edgy.
“Look, you’ve been a help, Frank, and I don’t mean to be rude, but I need time alone. That’s why I’m here. I’ve got a lot to sort through, plans to make, letters to write. I don’t have time to look at your etchings.”
I shook my head. “Poems. I don’t etch. I write poems. But I don’t show them to people. Ask Chance. And you were rude. Sometimes dinner really means dinner.”
Chance nodded. “It’s true. I haven’t read more than five of his poems in four years.”
She smiled, the tension in her face easing slightly. “Sorry. I’ve had a bad few days. I have to rest a while and have time alone.”
I grunted, and we rode in silence. Time alone I understood after seeing her throw her ring into the Caribbean from the sun deck of The Yellow Bird. I’d been single-minded in my pursuit of solitude after my divorce.
There was no other traffic on the road for the first few miles. At the junction of North Road and Ocean Road on the west side of Salvation Hill, a bunch of kids in three Mini Mokes ran the stop sign and nearly forced us off the road. They were singing and hooting, waving beers as they pushed on by us at a curve, nearly crashing into an empty dump truck passing us going the other direction, probably headed to a beach where, under the cover of darkness, the driver could steal a load of sand for a construction job.
Chance drove slowly, giving me time to talk to Liz Ford. Waves crashing against the sea wall and we were damp from the spray, but he kept a deliberately slow pace. At one point he stopped by a roadside hibiscus hedge and picked two blossoms.
“For your hair.” He handed two of them to Liz. “Put one over each ear.”
She did, laughing. “You do that with practiced grace.”
I patted Chance on the shoulder. “According to the usual reliable sources, it has been said if you see a woman with a hibiscus in her hair in the morning you can make book she’s spent the night before with Chance.”
“These islands are full of mythmakers.” He popped one of the remaining flowers in his mouth. “They make good eating too.”
She laughed again. We rode the last three miles trying to describe Smugglers Inn’s Ron Martin to her.
“He’s tiny,” Chance said. “Less than four feet, eight inches tall. He claims to be eighty-six and says he was a gag writer for Milton Berle.”
“No one’s ever been cruel enough to check his story,” I said.
“I choose to believe him,” said Chance.
“We all do,” I said.
If Ron Martin wanted to be a former gag writer for Milton Berle, then he was. The islands are filled with people who reinvented their pasts. Whatever he once was, and maybe that included writing gags for Berle, now he ran a damn good inn, and he had built it himself brick by brick. The lobby was filled with huge framed black and white posters of Milton Berle in every kind of imaginable costume. Milton Berle as Queen Victoria. Milton Berle as Harpo Marx. Milton Berle as a giant chicken. Milton Berle as George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, George Armstrong Custer with a hundred phony arrows sticking out of the costume. There were shots of Milton Berle as anything but Milton Berle. Ron Martin claimed he was the mastermind behind Berle’s costume gags. Now he ran a weekly comedy night during high season in the inn’s lounge, known from Puerto Rico to Trinidad as an excellent training ground for aspiring stand up comics.
Chance pulled the Land Rover into the circular drive in front of Smugglers Inn. Yellow lights lined the way, throwing soft shadows of century plants, palms and lime trees over the closely cropped lawn. The night sky was clear; the stars bright, the moonlight a shimmering silver glaze over the landscape.
Ron met the car by the front door. He opened the passenger’s side door as we moved slowly and I jumped to the ground the moment we came to a stop. He helped Liz from the seat as I grabbed her bag from the back. I walked with them to the front of the inn.
“Maybe I’ll see you again.” I touched her shoulder as she stood in the doorway. “Here’s my card. Give me a ring if you feel like a good dinner some evening while you’re on island, or if you feel like having a good talk you can call me for that too, or both. A good meal and excellent conversation can be very therapeutic, you know.”
“Thanks.” Standing outlined by the lights in the lobby, she read the card aloud. “Frank James, poet/private investigator. You’re a private detective?”
I shrugged. “I do some investigations. It’s mostly little stuff, looking for kids who’ve been kidnapped by one parent and brought down to the Caribbean so the other parent can’t find them, things like that. Sometimes it gets a little heavier, but I don’t get much work down here. It’s a hobby as much as it is a job. Besides, it’s all under the table. The Ursuline authorities would never give a non-islander a permit to work as a private eye.”
“Who knows, maybe I’ll hire you,” she laughed. Then, giving us each a final handshake, she said goodnight and disappeared into Smugglers Inn, followed by Ron and her bag.
“Class act,” Chance said.
“Yeah.” I stretched my legs under the glove compartment, pushing the full weight of my body against the seat. Sliding my hand along the cushion, I could feel the warmth of the spot where Liz had been sitting. I pulled