The Sea Grape Tree

by Gillian Royes

  She reached through the burglar bars, her hand escaping for the first time, assisted by her elbow on a louver. Her fingertips touched the leaf closest to the window. She traced the vein down its center with her index finger and circled the firm outer edge. It was a survivor, this sea grape tree with its strong leaves and smooth cream bark. No one touched or climbed it. No one looked at it. But it had stayed alive all these years, found nourishment in the soil, lived one day at a time, the way trees did, and survived behind a wall of jagged glass.

  After wetting some toilet paper, Sarah wiped the dust off the three leaves nearest her, touching each one as if it were a baby’s arm. The leaves turned a brighter green as she wiped, the veins more alive, and she thought of their connection, of her own red hair and the leaves’ red veins. Later, while she drew a leaf on her sketch pad, she thought again of Danny, wondering where he was and why he hadn’t come to find her. A thought startled her and made her stare at the wall. Danny could be involved with her imprisonment. He might have wanted her out of the way, for some reason she didn’t know. Maybe he’d told her something he shouldn’t have. But no, that didn’t feel right. She couldn’t believe he was capable of harming her—being unfaithful, yes, but not having her seized and locked up.

  More likely, it was a kidnapping for money. If that were the case, her captors could be anyone, a group of fishermen fallen on hard times, perhaps. The teenagers who’d stopped her on the beach, desperate for money. Maybe they’d cooked up the scheme with some friends. Oh, God, she thought, holding her breath, someone might be asking Danny or her mother for money while she was sitting in here. Phone calls might have been made and a ransom demanded. She leaned back in her chair and closed her eyes. To someone somewhere, she was either a threat or a reward. Anything was possible, anyone could be involved.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  * * *

  There are those people in the world,’” Shad read slowly, keeping his voice low, two fingers underlining the words on the page, “‘who have a natural curiosity.’” He shifted on his bar stool and nodded. “‘If you give them a set of facts, they tend to see a pattern. These are the people who make the best private investi—investigators.’” He looked up, amazed that the author knew him almost as well as he knew himself, knew that he could spot a pattern in a set of facts. At a table in front of him, two tourist couples sat eating a lunch of curry goat, needing nothing but each other’s company for the moment.

  The book the bartender was reading had been sent to him years ago by a guest named Gerry who’d bent his ear for the seven nights he’d stayed at the old hotel. On the last night, the man had told Shad after several rum and Cokes that his full name was Leroy Fitzpatrick Gerard, and that he’d never wanted to be a doctor; that had been his father’s idea. He’d wanted to drive a train.

  “Wasn’t there something you wanted to be when you were a kid?” Gerry had asked Shad.

  “A private detective,” the inn’s bartender had replied without hesitation, “because when I was little I used to listen to a radio show after my granny went to sleep. It was a detective show and it was about some place in England, and the detective used to solve problems that nobody else could solve. I always like that.”

  After he got back to Kansas, Gerry had sent Shad the book, and he’d stowed it away in his bedside table after struggling with the first couple pages. But Miss Mac’s reading classes were paying off, and Shad had returned to The Secret World of the Private Investigator, excited that he could finally slip into that world.

  “Hello there!” One of the tourist men had his arm raised, signaling another round of drinks, and Shad put the book aside. Two rum punches, a club soda, and a banana daiquiri served, the bartender reopened the worn orange covers of his book. Just as he found the page he’d dog-eared, the phone started ringing on the counter behind him.

  “Largo Bay Restaurant and Bar,” he answered snappily.

  A subdued voice answered. “Shad, it’s Danny.” It almost didn’t sound like Danny, it was so serious.

  “How it going, man? Everything good when you get back?”

  “Yeah, no problems.”

  “You want the boss?”

  “No, man. It’s you I’m calling.”

  Shad closed the book. “How I can help you?”

  “Remember you said I should call Sarah when I got back?”

  “Yeah, I—”

  “I took your advice. I googled her name—”

  “Google?”

  “I looked it up on the Internet, like you was saying, and found the name of the gallery where she sells her paintings. I called them and told them I was a friend from Jamaica and I was looking for her. They took my number and her roommate called me back last night. She said she hasn’t heard from Sarah, man.”

  “She don’t go back to England?”

  “The roommate says she could have gone to her mother’s house, but she don’t hear from her yet.”

  “She not at her apartment and her friend don’t know where she is?”

  “What you think, man?” the American urged.

  Shad leaned over the phone. There must be a pattern here he could find. “I going to check it out.”

  “Call me back and let me know what’s going on.”

  “I don’t have the pass code to make a long-distance call, and the boss don’t give nobody. You call me back tomorrow, same time. I have something for you tomorrow.”

  The hour dragged on until Shad’s lunch break, time he passed by reading a chapter on interviewing witnesses, a chapter that called for listing all the questions the detective was going to ask, and, while he toted the departed guests’ dishes back to the kitchen, he made his mental list. As soon as his break came and Eric relieved him, Shad walked down the road, had a quick sandwich at home, and went on to Roper’s house. Carthena let him into the kitchen.

  “Funny how the Englishwoman just leave without a trace,” he commented to the housekeeper. The warbling sounds of a trumpet were coming from deep inside the house.

  “Funny, yes.”

  “I bring you some thyme and scallion. Beth grow plenty this year.”

  She took the brown paper bag from his hands and set it on a counter.

  “What time she leave that morning, the morning when she left for good?”

  “She go painting early in the morning, and when I go to clean up her room later, everything gone. She must have come back and pack up.” The young woman picked up a bowl with coconut meat and started grating it.

  “What time that was, when you went in her room?”

  “Around twelve o’clock.” The woman stopped grating the coconut, the beads in her hair chattering when she looked up at him. “Why you want to know?”

  “I just thinking that—”

  “You say you come to give me little thyme and scallion from your garden. How come you asking me all them questions?”

  “Is only—”

  “Thank you for the seasoning, then. I busy, and I telling you I don’t see the woman. I in the kitchen and I don’t see nothing. She don’t say nothing to me and I don’t know nothing.” She turned back to her grating, muttering about people who fast in other people’s business.

  A knock on the back door swung their heads around. A man and two women, one holding a tiny baby, were visible through the glass panes. Carthena started toward the door, Shad behind her.

  “The musician man still here?” he said quickly before she opened the door. “The one who play the trumpet?”

  “Yes.”

  “Call him for me. I want to tell him something, like how he going to play in the bar.”

  Carthena opened the door and the visitors walked into the kitchen. They were strangers to Largo, a tall woman with hard, judgmental eyes that she narrowed at Shad, followed by a young couple, the girl holding a child. The baby looked like a newborn, a blue bonnet p
erched sideways on its head. Nodding to Shad’s greeting, the man sat down on the kitchen stool as if he expected to take the best seat in the house. His hair was shaved close to the skull and his jeans hung below his T-shirt almost to his knees. He was one of those youths that you saw in the Pen, the same flat expression whether you gave them a job or the end of a knife. Beside him, her belly still swollen, the girl stood swinging the child from side to side with a wordless baby-mother smile as Shad slipped out the door.

  When Ford appeared in the backyard, Shad waved him farther away until they stood between the clotheslines, the musician’s chin well above the white sheets flapping against the trumpet in his hand.

  “I just want to ask you,” the bartender started, “if you hear anything from the Englishwoman? She call or visit or anything?”

  “Sarah? We haven’t heard a word.”

  “You don’t find that strange, like how she spend all that time here? You would think she would call to say she arrive safe, you don’t think?”

  “She wasn’t exactly happy when she left.”

  “You mean about Danny—?”

  “No, I mean about Roper.”

  Shad frowned. “What you mean?”

  Ford looked down at his instrument. “I don’t know if I should be telling you this, man.”

  “I just asking so we could invite her to the bar when you play, like how she really want to hear you.”

  “Everything’s changed since then.” Ford grimaced. “Sarah and Roper had a—a disagreement before she left. I thought he was talking shit, to tell you the truth, but I figured he’d had too much to drink, so I didn’t say anything. I’ve known him a long time and I’m staying in his house, you know. I didn’t want to—”

  “And she act different after the disagreement?”

  “She was real hurt, I could tell.”

  “So you weren’t surprised when she left.”

  “I was and I wasn’t. I think she expected me to defend her, but I didn’t. I still feel bad about it, but I have enough of my own stuff going on. . . .”

  Shad looked over the clothesline at the ocean, seaweed floating on top of the foamy waves, the sign of a storm at sea. “And you think she just get on a plane and go home.”

  “That’s what we all think.”

  “She musta had an open ticket, when you can leave anytime. That was the kind of airplane ticket that Simone, the woman on the island, had.”

  Ford shook his head. “She only had a one-way ticket to Jamaica that Roper had bought for her. Someone must have sent her the money or bought the ticket for her, because she didn’t have any money while she was here. So she told me, anyway.”

  “No money?”

  “She used to joke about being penniless.” About to leave, Ford turned back. “I don’t think she was good with money. She was broke, but she bought a new dress, you know what I mean?”

  Late that night, after he’d shifted the gawky kitten off the bed, Shad slid in beside a silent Beth, her back to him. Her hips made a dark mound in the light through the curtain. It had been a busy evening, with a birthday party for a young man who’d gotten drunk and vomited on the floor of the bar.

  When Shad’s head touched the pillow, it was met with the crisp rustle of paper. “What that?” he said. His hand brought out a small rectangular slip.

  Beth rolled over. “My first check,” she said sleepily, but he could tell she was smiling.

  He put the check on the side table and reached for her gratefully, thinking of the Englishwoman who’d been penniless.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  * * *

  Grimacing, Eric put the receiver back in the cradle to cool down. He couldn’t think of anything he couldn’t stand more than a telephone hot with someone else’s conversation. Behind him, Shad was counting the liquor bottles under the sink, doing the monthly inventory.

  “We going to need another case of red wine, boss.”

  “Make it a half case this time.”

  Eric picked up his ginger ale and walked away, still irked by the phone call Shad had just ended. The bartender had jumped up from doing inventory when the phone rang. His greeting had been followed by a hunched back over the receiver, ten minutes of mumbled sentences, and the frenzied waving of one hand. After he hung up, Shad had bent to look at the bottles right away.

  “Who was it?” Eric had asked.

  “Danny. He want me to do him a favor.”

  With no intention of asking what the favor was, and a burning curiosity about what his possible future partners would want to talk about that didn’t include him (coming quickly to the phrase two against one), Eric had poured himself a ginger ale. If they wanted to have their secrets, that was their business. He’d have to trust Shad, who’d always had his back, had to trust that he was keeping Danny engaged and the hotel venture in mind.

  There’d been little on Eric’s mind but Simone for the last few days. Snapshots of their time together had kept popping into his head. Earlier that morning, after doing a few side bends on his verandah, he’d remembered exercising when she was on the island, and how embarrassed he’d been to think she might be watching him in his old boxers with his paunch flopping around. In mid-bend, he’d straightened and swept a lock of white hair away from his face. By the time he got to the third and last squat, perspiration trickling down the groove of his spine, he decided that he couldn’t avoid the truth anymore. He wanted to see her and hold her and make love to her, even if she had to pay her own ticket down.

  He leaned on a post facing Simone’s island, the name the Parish Council woman had rejected.

  “It can’t be Simone’s Island,” she’d protested, disdain in her wide eyes. “It have to be Simone Island. It don’t belong to her; it belong to you. And we can’t have no apostrophe, the computer don’t like it.”

  The island sparkled in the midmorning sunshine, a light wind twirling the flat leaves of the almond tree. It was going to rain later, the weatherman had said, the beginning of the springtime rainy season.

  “Have the buckets ready?” Eric called to Shad.

  “The new roof not leaking too bad, boss,” the muffled answer came from under the counter.

  It had taken Eric five years or more to get used to the Caribbean seasons, to the dry seasons and the wet, but now he couldn’t imagine anything resembling four seasons. That very morning, while taking the cold shower he endured since he’d cut off the hot water, he’d created another of his little ditties to remind himself why he stayed in this godforsaken place. Strumming his imaginary guitar with the bar of soap, he’d rumbled the verse.

  Give me a cloud of rain (his voice trembling like Elvis’s),

  A little sun,

  My old flip-flops,

  And I’m ready for fun.

  He’d sung to Simone once. She’d invited him to sit down on her writing bench because she was lonely, and she’d asked him to sing one of the songs he used to sing when he played lead guitar. When he finished, she’d told him he was good, and he’d known she was being kind.

  Today he was going to tell her casually that he’d finally gotten Horace to come to an agreement about the infrastructure on the island. Actually, he and Lambert had gone together to see the lawyer and Lambert had talked him into it. Horace had admitted that he’d liked what he’d seen on the island the week before. He and his partner were still interested in the campsite. Sensing victory, Lambert had gotten him to agree that it would be best for them to install the steps, walkways, cistern, and solar panels themselves, and build them just the way they’d like them. He’d taken out his calculator and showed him how cost effective it would be to take out a building loan and deduct it from the rent for at least five years, enough for a good head start on the project.

  “Shad is definitely going to be a partner,” an emboldened Eric had added. “And the share split stays the same.” />
  “Please yourself,” Horace had said, then he’d sucked on a back tooth and gone back to talking about the campsite.

  The phone had cooled down when he punched in the numbers later. “Do you have a minute?” he asked Simone.

  “I’m in a meeting,” she said, sounding confident and businesslike, like she was trying to impress someone nearby. “Can I call you later?”

  Walking the phone to its holder on the counter, Eric did his version of sucking his teeth, causing his bartender to mimic him.

  “Boss,” Shad said after he’d finished laughing, “I was thinking, why we don’t connect the laptop to the Internet, like what Rickia was saying? It going to cost us a little extra, but we would be saving money because you wouldn’t have to make so many long-distance calls. Joella say you can telephone people on the Internet.”

  “You could have something there,” Eric replied, a lackluster answer.

  “We can’t move forward unless we put one foot first, right, like how Joshua learning to walk.”

  “And like how you’re learning to read better, you mean, and want to learn the computer yourself.”

  “Exactly, and what we don’t know, we can ask the children. They always know these things. Rickia say she sending emails to some girl in Australia now who live on a sheep farm. You ever hear anything like that—a child in Jamaica talking to another child in Australia, on a sheep farm?”

  Shad raised his shoulders up as he talked and dropped them suddenly. “If we don’t keep up, the next generation going to pass us out, even control up the hotel business and the tourists. We have to keep up with them, keep learning, right?”

  Eric sighed. “No peace for the weary.”

  “Plenty time for peace when you dead, boss.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  * * *