"So ask it."
"Okay, I will." She pauses. "How is your room?"
And the laugh she's been holding back breaks loose.
"Not funny," I say. "I mean, separate bedrooms? What's that all about?"
Barbara shakes her head.
"I don't know," she says. "I mean, this is Aunt Trula's home and she is entitled to make the rules. Still, I must say that the sleeping arrangements rather surprised me. When I stayed here before with Bryce ..."
She stops, the mirth of a moment before suddenly gone.
Bryce was Bryce Gannon, Barbara's former fiance. He's been dead going on two years. Barbara had split up with him long before that. Still, his death-his murder, actually-had been brutal and ugly and she had felt largely responsible for it.
"You can talk about Bryce. It doesn't bother me."
Barbara nods. She doesn't say anything.
"Do you mean to tell me that when you and Bryce stayed here, she let you share a room?"
Another nod from Barbara.
"And here I am stuck clear in another wing of the house? Good thing I dropped bread crumbs. I think I might find my way back."
Barbara smiles.
"So," she says. "What about Boggy?"
"Oh, Aunt Trula put him out in the servants' quarters."
Barbara's eyes go wide.
"Kidding," I say. "He's next door to me. He's already tucked in."
I lie down beside her on the bed, hold her close. We're a good fit, like spoons in a drawer.
Barbara lets out a big sigh.
"What was that for?"
"Oh, nothing really. Old memories, good times," she says. "It feels more like home here than anywhere else I know."
"More like home than back in Florida?"
Barbara touches my cheek, smiles.
"I can't help it, Zack. I was a little girl here. It was all horseback riding and learning to swim and magnificent golden days with endless possibilities. I've always thought ..."
She stops.
"You've always thought what?"
"I've always thought that if I was to get married then this is where it would be."
There are any number of things I could say at that moment. I don't say any of them.
I roll onto my back, stare at the ceiling.
We've been together four years. Exclusively. Of course, I spent almost two of those years in a federal prison for something I didn't do. So that time doesn't count.
Or maybe it does. Maybe it counts even more because we endured it. We have endured a lot.
I keep staring at the ceiling.
Barbara says, "That wasn't meant to be, you know, a hint or anything like that."
"I know."
"It just came out," she says.
"Things do."
There isn't much to see on the ceiling except maybe it could use some paint.
"Look at me," Barbara says.
I look.
"Is it just a girl thing?"
"Is what?"
"Dreaming of where you'll get married, how it will be? The music, the flowers, the dresses ..."
"Definitely a girl thing. Because I have never once dreamed about dresses. Except whichever one you might be wearing and the quickest way to get you out of it."
She takes a swat at me.
"You," she says. "You know what I mean."
"I do," I say.
Barbara gets a funny look on her face.
I sputter: "I mean, I know what you mean. About thinking about getting married and all that. I don't mean 'I do' like 'I do.' Not like that. But I've thought about it. In, you know, a general sense. Nothing specific or ..."
She puts a finger on my lips.
"Shut up, please," she says. "I love you."
7.
By noon the next day everything is proceeding about as well as one can reasonably expect.
On the palm-tree front, a backhoe crew has arrived to survey where the eight holes need to be dug. They have brought along an auger attachment and they figure it will chew through the limestone, no problem. Still, it will be slow going and take several days to complete the job. Boggy and Cedric the gardener are working with them and have everything under control.
On the Aunt Trula front, the caterer is due to arrive any minute. Aunt Trula wants Barbara to sit in and help finalize the menu for the big party.
And on the Zack front, I'm hurting. The cuts on my foot and shoulder are puffy and red and show every sign of imminent infection unless I keep dousing them with hydrogen peroxide.
That's OK because no one seems to need me for anything. I am Zack the Expendable. Not that I am feeling sorry for myself. There's something I need to do.
"I think I'll go visit my money," I tell Barbara.
"I'd almost forgotten about that," she says. "It's living here now, isn't it?"
"Yes. Richfield Bank in Hamilton."
"And you intend to just waltz into the bank and spend some quality time with your money?"
"Yeah, I think I'll ask them to put it in a big pile and let me roll around in it."
"Not bloody likely."
"No, bankers are funny like that. So I'll probably just introduce myself, check the place out, and put a face on whoever's in charge of things."
"Meaning, you'll be heading into Hamilton."
"I'll need a car. Think I can borrow Aunt Trula's?"
"Don't see why not," Barbara says. "I'll go ask her if you like."
"I like," I say.
One reason things have proceeded so well this morning is that Aunt Trula and I have avoided each other. She is in her study, attending to her affairs and preparing to meet the caterer. I am sitting in a little alcove off the kitchen where Barbara and I have just finished a late breakfast.
Barbara steps away. And I sit there thinking about my money.
It is a pretty good chunk of money, better than two million gringo dollars. I need not go into all the details of how it came my way. That's why it is now living in Bermuda, where they tend not to ask questions about the lineage of one's liquid assets.
It took me a couple of weeks to earn the money, through a venture in Jamaica that I entered with no thought of profit, only friendship. When the friendship sputtered-exploded was more like it-and profit presented itself, then who was I to ignore it?
I need not go into too many details, either, about the guy who paid me the money. His name is Freddie Arzghanian, and he is based in Montego Bay, where he oversees various enterprises throughout the Caribbean, most of them illegal.
Still, Freddie is, in his own way, a man of honor, and I earned the money he paid me without breaking any laws. At least no big ones. Or any that didn't need breaking in the first place.
Put it this way: There's nothing for me to hang my head about.
Freddie had advised me that my life would be a whole lot simpler if I set myself up as an IBC, an international business corporation, with headquarters in Bermuda. Sounded fine by me.
I didn't have any moral qualms about sheltering somewhat shady money from the sticky fingers of the IRS. By my ledger, the U.S. government was still working off the debt it owed me for the one year, nine months, and twenty-three days I'd spent in Baypoint Federal Prison Camp for something I didn't do. My time was expensive. They owed me a ton.
So I'd let Freddie handle the details. He connected me with a firm in Bermuda that had done all the legal stuff necessary to establish an IBC. I decided to call it Guamikeni Enterprises, a little joke between Boggy and myself.
"Guamikeni" is what Boggy calls me sometimes, when he's trying to be funny. It's a Taino word, meaning "Lord of land and sea." It's what the Taino called Christopher Columbus after they were there to greet him when he landed on San Salvador. Less than a century later, the Taino were no more, victims of twin European imports-disease and colonization.
So when Boggy, who claims against all proof to the contrary that he is the last living full-blooded Taino, calls me Guamikeni, it carries with it the insinuation that I could be responsible for his eventual demise. Taino humor is really twisted.
In any event, it was easy setting up Guamikeni Enterprises as an IBC. All I had done was sign some papers. And my money was now residing at Richfield Bank.
I hadn't touched it. I'd just let it sit. I know people who are smart with money and they would never just let it sit, but I wasn't particularly smart with money. Besides, it felt good knowing I had money I could just let sit if I wanted to.
8.
Barbara returns from her mission to see Aunt Trula carrying a copy of the Royal Gazette. She hands me the paper and points to a boxed story at the bottom of the front page.
BODY FOUND ALONG CUTFOOT BAY, the headline reads.
There's a photo, not a very good one, showing Worley and the other policemen huddled on the beach, with the body just barely visible in the background.
The story is short. And it doesn't reveal anything I don't already know. The victim has yet to be publicly identified. Cause of death remains unknown. There is no mention of the victim's eyes and how they'd been mutilated.
The story quotes Worley as saying the police are "treating the incident as a possible homicide." Right. As if someone could hogtie himself and then commit suicide. After gouging out his own eyes.
I put the paper down.
"I asked Titi about her car," Barbara says. "She says she can't let you borrow it."
"Why am I not surprised by that?"
"It really has nothing to do with her, Zack. I'd forgotten, but they have some rather odd laws about cars here."