Pirates' Lair

by Jane Corrie

  The next question was entirely predictable: would she care for a spin in the boat the following morning? and in spite of his casual invitation, Thea felt that she could not refuse the offer, but she warned

  him that she didn't know if she was a good sailor or not.

  `It's as calm as a pond out there,' he had replied with a cheery grin. 'I'll pick you up about ten, how's that?' he told her. 'I don't know where you live,' he had added, just before he left her, 'or your name, come to that,' he apologised.

  `I live just over there,' Thea replied, nodding in the direction of Beach House, 'and my name's Thea John.'

  Timothy Saunders held out a hand towards her. `I'm Tim Saunders- we seem to have got things the wrong way around, the introductions usually come first, don't they? Did you say John?' he queried as he shook her hand. 'That's odd, I used to know a Michael John,' he hesitated, then gave a light shrug. `It's probably a common name anyway,' he added.

  Thea withdrew her hand from his firm shake and looked towards the waves gently lapping the shore. What a small world it was, she thought sadly. Of all the people she had to meet it had to be someone who had known Michael. 'He was my brother,' she said quietly.

  `You're Michael's sister?' he asked on a note of incredulity, then paused and shook his head slowly. `So that's why you're out here. He did say something about his sister joining him, but after ' He hesitated, then fell silent.

  `I arrived the day after the accident,' Thea explained. 'Otherwise I don't suppose I would have made the trip, there wouldn't have seemed any point,' she added sombrely.

  Tim gave a great sigh. 'Gee, I wish I'd known you were here,' he said. 'It must have been hell to

  walk in on that news.' He shook his head again as if at a loss for words. 'I hadn't seen him for a fortnight, though, before it happened. I was away on leave in Miami. Not that we saw that much of each other, we used to meet up now and again for a drink and a parley, and we'd see each other at local flings.' He gave Thea a sympathetic look. 'So you decided to stay on, then, did you?' he asked, and flicked a quick eye over the interior of the kiosk. `Not much of a job,' he commented. 'I'll see what I can come up with in that line for you,' and as Thea started to remonstrate he held up a silencing hand. `Look, you're my buddy's sister, and that kind of makes us related,' he grinned. 'You're not to worry about a thing. I'll look out for you—Mike would have done the same for any kid sister of mine,' he added firmly.

  Thea was worried, and her expression showed it as she said hastily, 'Please, I know you mean well, but I'm perfectly happy here, and I should hate any other job. Look at the sunshine I get!' she added, trying to sound jocular about it, and it didn't quite come off as she was too concerned about proving her point. She had enough trouble with Marcus looking out for her, without adding another contender for the post, in spite of her earlier wish to find just such a person.

  `What about free time?' Tim demanded. 'It's my guess you don't get much of that.'

  `I don't want a lot of free time,' Thea replied quickly, then sighed. 'Not yet anyway,' she added slowly. 'Surely you can understand that? I need plenty of work, and this job suits me perfectly—if I were offered any other work, I wouldn't take it,' she

  ended firmly, her lovely wide grey eyes meeting the doubtful ones of her companion.

  Her last few words had settled the issue, Thea found with no small relief as Tim replied softly, `Okay, okay. We'll leave it at that for now.'

  Shortly after that he left her, telling her to bring a warm sweater with her the next morning as the sea breezes could be chilly.

  Thea's eyes followed his retreating back until he was out of sight. She had a nasty feeling that things were going to become very complicated, and wondered what it was about her that brought out the protective instinct in the opposite sex. Tim had alluded to her as Mike's kid sister, and it was hardly a fitting description of a twenty-two-year-old woman. Marcus's attitude towards her had been exactly the same, and Thea was getting a little tired of being treated as if she didn't know how many beans made five!

  `Everything all right, Miss John?' Sam queried in his soft voice.

  Thea broke off from her indignant musings and stared at Sam watching her with those large doleful brown eyes of his.

  `Yes, thank you, Sam,' she replied tartly, as if it had been Marcus who had asked the question, then relented as she saw his rather hurt expression at her curt reply. 'That was a friend of my brother's,' she explained carefully, thinking he might as well know that, as it looked as if Tim was going to be around quite a lot in the future, and it might be as well if Marcus was informed of this fact. She was almost sure that Sam had

  back to his boss, if indeed anything. Perhaps it was enough that he was there and kept an eye on her.

  When Mrs Welling heard that Thea had got herself a nice boy-friend, as she called Timothy Saunders, later the following morning when Thea returned from her outing in his boat, to change into a light suit ready to be taken out to lunch, Thea was quick to point out that Timothy was only an acquaintance, and certainly not a boy-friend, to which Mrs Welling had given a knowing nod and said that it was early days yet, and wasn't that him? She had heard a car draw up outside the house.

  A few minutes later Thea sat in Timothy's Fiat and was whisked away from Beach House in a manner that reminded her of her brother's approach to driving, giving her an added insight to the man seated beside her. She had learnt a lot about him that morning on the boat trip, where she had received a short resume of his life history—how he came originally from a Miami bank to work in Charlotte Amalie.

  She knew that he was ambitious, and determined to get on in his chosen career. 'The guys thought I was crazy putting in for this post,' he had told her with a smile, 'but I'm willing to bet I'll be a manager before I'm thirty, and that's more than you could say of most of them.'

  The more Thea learnt about Timothy, the less she could see that he would have had in common with her brother, apart from a natural aversion to the responsibility of matrimony. Michael had worked hard and played hard, and she supposed it was that that had brought them together, but she had a suspicion that Timothy had deliberately cultivated Michael's company, for there had been an underlying reference several times in the conversation he had had with her that morning, on the wealth accumulation of some of the island's inhabitants, and how important it was to know the right people who just might transfer their accounts to another bank, preferably his. Thea had also learnt the name of his bank, and knew that it was not the bank that Michael had dealt with, or Marcus, for that matter, for she had received a cheque from Marcus for Michael's last month of work. With this in mind it had not been too hard to guess what type of client's accounts he was interested in, and she was certain that Marcus would be one of them, very probably the main one, for she knew that he was a very wealthy man indeed.

  When Timothy told her where he intended taking her for lunch, her heart sank, for she had last visited the Coral World, an underwater observatory, with Marcus, and had had lunch with him in the restaurant leading to the entrance to the aquarium.

  That was the trouble with small islands, she thought sadly, this was the sort of thing that would crop up with depressing regularity and she would, she supposed, eventually get used to it, as she would have to get over Marcus.

  As with her visit to Mountain View with Pauline, she told Timothy that she had previously visited the aquarium on a sightseeing tour, adding quickly that she looked forward to another visit. 'It's amazing, isn't it,' she went on, 'to be able to glimpse the wonders of the deep. I don't think I'd ever get tired of watching.'

  This remark successfully turned Timothy's

  thoughts away from her previous visit, and stopped him from enquiring who she had made the visit with, and that could have been awkward for Thea, who had no intention of mentioning her friendship with Marcus.

  The two-hundred-and-fifty-seater restaurant was half full when they arrived, and Thea tried not to look towards the end of the restaurant w
here she and Marcus had sat on their visit, and was glad when they found a table near the entrance.

  While they ate their lunch, a crabmeat salad for Thea, and a thick steak with salad on the side for Timothy, Thea found it hard to work up an appetite, for memories were crowding in on her just when she could least have done with them, and she wondered dismally if she really ought to consider going back to England, since there would be no poignant memories there to plague her existence— no anything, really, she thought bleakly, as she refused dessert, and wished she could get the rest of the visit over with in the shortest possible time. Meanwhile she resolved to refuse any further invitations from Timothy.

  It wasn't that she had anything against him—in fact, if it hadn't been for her heartache over Marcus, he would have been the ideal companion for her, just the sort of person she had wished would turn up, for there would be no emotional ties here. He looked upon her as Mike's kid sister, as he had called her, and that was exactly how she would be treated, and that suited her fine, only she hadn't bargained for the memories such an alliance would bring. It was different with Pauline, of course, and she wished it was Pauline that she was sitting opposite to and not this friend of her brother's, who was very kind, but somehow alien because he was not the man she loved, and she very much doubted if they would have much in common once the subject of Michael had been dismissed.

  All these thoughts went through her head while she answered Timothy's polite questions on her background, and how well Michael had got on in what was a very competitive career. 'I guess some have it, and others haven't,' he had commented with just a little envy in his voice. 'You have to be in the right place at the right time, and he sure was when he got that commission from Marcus Conan.' Then realising that this was not a very tactful remark to make, he hastily apologised.

  Not liking the way the conversation was going, Thea asked him about his background and again successfully avoided having to answer any awkward questions that might concern Marcus, since she was certain that Timothy had no idea that she had once been engaged to him.

  Once lunch was over and they were in the aquarium, Thea felt much better. There was so much to see and personal problems could be pushed aside. They first ascended to the top of the three-tiered building that gave a breath-taking view of the Atlantic and the surrounding Virgin Islands, that could just be seen through a heat haze in the distance, and invariably the subject of the past was brought up again, and Thea was forced to listen to her companion's remarks on the subject of piracy, that somewhat differed from Marcus's comments, in that Marcus had approached the subject from an historical angle and Timothy from a more material one,

  such as the plunder the ships had been carrying, and how many vessels still lay on the ocean floor with the spoils of their rich cargoes waiting for some enterprising diving team to discover.

  This completely different outlook between Marcus and Timothy Saunders only underlined Thea's feelings on somehow extricating herself from any future excursions in his company. If she hadn't still been in love with Marcus, she supposed she would have welcomed his interest in her, but as it was, she would only go on comparing the differences between the men, and that was not fair to Timothy, who was so keen on working his way up the ladder of success that it had coloured his outlook, and somewhere along the way he had picked up a cynical bitterness tinged with envy towards those who had made it.

  They then descended from the upper level down to the second tier of the tower, and here was a manmade aquarium set in the walls surrounding the circular dome building, where the tropical fish glided by in brilliant splendour. The scorpion-fish that had caught Thea's eyes the last time she visited the aquarium again enthralled her. The brilliant, feathery-like deep pink corsaged display of its beauty almost hid the fact that it was a deadly species of its kind, and as Thea stood gazing at it, she was irresistibly reminded of Sapphire, and was glad when Timothy suggested that they move on down to the underwater observatory.

  As this was the Coral World's main focal point, it was more crowded than the rest of the dome, and there was a lot of jostling for position, although the round chamber, fourteen feet beneath the surface of

  the sea, had ample viewing windows.

  They spent less time here than in the other sections of the observatory because of the crowd, most of whom were tourists, and who probably only had this one opportunity of seeing a sea-diver's view of the deep from a comfortable angle, and when Timothy, knowing that Thea had been before, suggested that they get some fresh air, she willingly agreed and made room for a small boy standing directly behind her and left him staring at the wonders before his eyes in open-mouthed absorption, and as Thea moved away she heard him call out to someone a little behind him, 'Look, there's a shark!'

  In spite of Thea's earlier resolution of excusing herself from any other invitation of Timothy's, she found herself accepting his casual offer of making a day of it, having tea out, and then taking her to one of his favourite haunts, a bar on the outskirts of Charlotte Amalie, where he had often met Michael and several of his friends. If she was agreeable, that was, and hadn't made any other arrangements for the rest of the day?

  Thea knew she ought to have snatched at the chance offered, and said something about having other plans, but her conscience would not allow her to do so. It wasn't Timothy's fault that she had made a fool of herself over a man who was way beyond her reach, and it was time that she made a positive effort to forget him. She was not going to do it sitting with Mrs Welling in her cosy front parlour each evening, relating her home life to the old lady, who loved to hear about England, and who in return would tell Thea of her own childhood. Thea had no complaints about these evenings, as she

  found them as absorbing as Mrs Welling did, but she couldn't go on shutting herself away from other company and Mrs Welling knew it, her pleasure in the fact that Thea had found a gentleman friend had borne witness to this salient fact.

  After a light but refreshing tea, taken in a hotel that overlooked the harbour, Timothy took Thea back to Beach House so that she could tell Mrs Welling of their plans, and that she wouldn't be back until later that evening.

  Had Thea previously had time to think about it, she might have wondered what they would find, to talk about during the day's outing, but curiously enough the time passed pleasantly by, with no awkward conversational pauses as might have been expected of two people who hardly knew one another, and it struck Thea that Timothy would make an exceptionally good bank manager as he obviously had the gift of putting one at ease, an essential ingredient for success in that particular career.

  Her own changed outlook , had considerably helped too, she admitted to herself as she recalled her earlier feelings during lunch at the Coral World when she had compared Timothy to Marcus and made herself feel wretched. Now that she had come to terms with this and decided to pull herself out of her self-pity, for that was what it all really amounted to, life began to look much brighter for her, and she was able to congratulate herself on the fact that she hadn't given Marcus a thought since their visit to the Coral World.

  The late afternoon and early evening period was spent in a leisurely drive down to the harbour from where they watched the activity of the busy port,

  and from there to a vantage point on the hillside overlooking Drake's Passage where the cool breezes off the bay fanned Thea's cheeks and were a welcome relief from the heat of the town sector.

  Soon the rays of the sinking sun were spread out before them like a fan of brilliant orange plumes across the water that reflected the image, and made Thea draw in a breath of sheer wonder at the sight, and banished all her good resolutions concerning Marcus for his image rose before her, and she wished with all her heart that he was there to witness this scene of perfect peace with her.

  `Think you'll stay—permanently, I mean?' Timothy asked her, breaking into her unhappy musings.

  Her hesitant, 'I don't know,' made him regret asking the question.

  `It's early
days yet, of course,' he said quickly. `Time enough to think about things like that. Now I'll show you some of our night life,' he added with a grin.

  The bar that Timothy took her to was in a hotel in the centre of Charlotte Amalie, and had only a few occupants when they first arrived. 'It'll get crowded later on,' he commented idly, after he had asked her what she would like to drink and Thea had requested a vodka and lime.

  While they waited to be served, two more people arrived, a man and a woman, who walked across the room to a couple of stools at the other end of the bar and settled down to give their order. Timothy, whose eyes had followed their entrance, said quietly to Thea, 'Now there's a lucky girl,' and catching the dark-haired girl's eyes, waved a welcoming hand towards her that she acknowledged with a silent

  nod, and turned her attention back to her companion again. 'I ought to introduce you,' he went on, still in an undertone, 'but perhaps it's not convenient right now,' he added with a grin.

  Thea glanced over to the girl again, wondering if she worked with Timothy or whether she was an old flame of his. She was very attractive and had a curvaceous figure, and was probably in her late teens, Thea surmised, and looked as if she knew her way around, because there was a certain air of sophistication about her.

  Apart from this one glance, Thea took no further notice of the girl and gazed idly around the bar. Its low lighting from antique-looking ships' lanterns that hung on the walls around the room, and cutlasses with various other wicked-looking weapons, gave the bar a cosy if slightly sinister air.