Dagger Key and Other Stories

DAGGER KEY

…and morning comes to Cay Cuchillo, a dagger-shape of sand and rock off the coast of Belize, a few miles southwest of the Chinchorro Bank. Nine miles long, seven wide at the hilt. The gray sky is pinked in the east, bundles of mauve cloud reflecting the new sun. Venus low on the horizon.

Rollers break on the beach at Half Shell Bay, the waves sounding like a giant breathing in his sleep. Crossing the tidal margin, a ghost crab pauses in its creep as the thin edge of the water inches up to erase its tracks from the mucky sand. The fronds of a coco palm twitch; the round leaves of sea grape appear to spin in a sudden freshet. Hummingbirds hover beside the blossoms of a cashew tree.

Near the hilt of the dagger, shielded from the winds by a hill with a concave rock face, lie the white buildings of a resort. Treasure Cove. A skull-and-crossbones hangs limp above the office, a stucco faux-colonial that also encloses two luxury apartments and a bar-restaurant. It’s set close against the hill and, among palms and jacaranda and flowering shrubs, bungalows are scattered beneath it along the curve of the beach. From the eastern end of the beach, a wooden pier extends into the water—moored to it are several sailboats and a cabin cruiser. Dark-skinned women in head wraps and blue uniform dresses mop the patio that abuts the beachside bar, a construction of poles and thatch. A radio plays softly. Solo tu…siempre solo tu. Astringents mask the smell of brine.

Swann’s faces the Belizean coast, about two miles from the point of the dagger. It’s a low, derelict building with a thatched roof, a packed sand floor, and boards painted red, green, black. A hill rises inland and clinging to its side, about halfway up, is a shanty with boards painted in identical colors. Inside the café, Fredo Galvez, a slender, small-boned man of middle years, is sweeping up broken glass from last night’s riot with a twig broom. He wears a pair of ragged shorts and a T-shirt from which all but the word Jesus has been bleached. His features and coloration are a mix of Spanish and Indian, yet he has sharp blue eyes and his hair is crispy. Once he’s finished with sweeping, he stows the broom in back of the bar and rights an overturned stool. He surveys his work and, satisfied, steps out onto the beach and lights a cigarette, stands looking at the sea, at the dark coastline melting up from the morning haze. The sun has not yet cleared the horizon and already the morning freshness is burning off.

Beside the café is a palm tree stripped of its fronds, its trunk shaped roughly like an L, growing more-or-less parallel to the ground for eight or nine feet, then shooting upwards. Fredo sits on the horizontal portion of the trunk to finish his smoke and plan his day. He has to fetch fuel for he generator, meat for the kitchen. They have enough rice and potatoes to get through the week. He spots a solitary figure off toward the point and, though he can’t make her out, he recognizes her by her clothing—a white blouse and tan leggings—and by the thrill that passes across the base of his neck. It’s been three years since she came to him, and he’d been hoping for at least three more. She’s been up in the hills, keeping company with animal spirits and duppies, with the soul-shell of an old Caribe wizard.

“What you know, Annie?” He whispers the words; she could not possibly hear them, but she does. Neither can he hear her—the words tumble into his head somehow.

They seem to mingle, the edges of two clouds interpenetrating, yet he has no real sense of her, no clue as to what sort of woman she is. She never lets him near, except when she wears him like a dress and then he can remember no more than bits and pieces. He knows her story, but it’s only a story and has little personal context. The vague apprehension he has of her is fading and, though her image lingers, motionless on the beach, if he turns away for a second, if he even blinks, she’ll be gone. He lowers his head, worried by what she has told him.

A bell ringing.

Armed with a long switch, William Jerome, a skinny black man, is driving five cows along the beach toward their grazing ground in the hills inland. As he comes abreast of the cafe, he sings out, “How’s she going, Fredo?”

“You know, mon. It going and going.”

The bell cow veers toward the water and William drives her back with a flick of his switch. “Damn,” he says. “If I rule the day, it ain’t going to get no hotter than this.” He waves to Fredo and, as the herd picks up the pace, he breaks into a trot. Fredo sits a while, listening to the hiss of the surf, then he sighs, stands. He’s got work to do.

Fredo buys turtle meat, conch, and a stalk of bananas in the market at Dever’s Landing, the island’s sole town, a collection of shanties perched on thin posts against the storm tides, like drab long-legged birds carrying their nests on their backs, and, at the foot of a long concrete wharf, a dun-colored stucco building housing the police, the customs office, the bank. Tully Langdon, the man who runs the wharf, is late in rising, so Fredo has to wait for his gas. He sits on an empty oil drum, cooled by the salt breeze.

A vulture,

it might be carved

of shadow or obsidian,

black wings folded

atop a creosote-tarred piling,

turns its head

toward him and he crosses himself. Tully arrives and, once Fredo has accomplished his business, he catches a ride on the iceman’s truck back to the café. At mid-morning, his wife Emily, a lean black woman in faded print dress and tennis shoes, walks down from the hillside shanty and joins him, their four-year-old, Leona, in tow. Their boys, Jenry and Palace, are at school. Leona plays about Emily’s feet in the kitchen as she cuts the turtle meat into strips and pounds it soft. Shortly after noon, Wilton Barrios, thickset and yellow-skinned, acne scarring on his cheeks, comes in and plants himself at a table, the chair complaining beneath him. Heavy eyelids lend him a sleepy, sated look. He’s one of the island’s few prosperous citizens. Gold rings on his fingers, cell phone clipped to an alligator belt. He sold the land upon which the resort was built and, for the particular character of his prosperity, if for no other reason, he’s not well liked.

“Got some nice turtle,” Fredo tells him. “If you want, Emily fix you some conch salad, too.”

Wilton grunts his approval and says, “I’ll take fries with the turtle.” He adjusts his belt beneath the overhang of his belly. “There’s a white mon asking about you at Treasure Cove.”

“That so?” Fredo carries Wilton a beer.

“Yeah, a German fella. The mon’s crazy about pirates. ’Pears like he got an interest in talking to you. I tell him I’m going up your way for lunch, I got room for he and his woman in the Jeep. But he just grin and say, ‘No, we going to walk. Walking be good for us.’” Wilton chuckles. “The sun duppy panting in the street, and he think it be good for them.”

“When they coming?”

“I seen them toiling up the beach. They be along directly and they don’t die first.”

A battered truck pulls up outside and two laborers saunter in and sit as far away from Wilton as possible. They order beans and rice, beer. Wilton has almost finished eating and a squall is moving in from the northeast, leaden clouds sweeping over the island, when the German couple arrive. The man is fit and tanned, in his late thirties, dressed in shorts and a sweated through T-shirt, his blond hair pulled into a ponytail; the woman is similarly attired, but her hair is a silky platinum blond, and her skin is pale where her clothing has protected her, face and arms and legs sun-reddened, and she is soft, voluptuous to the point of caricature, with enormous breasts and a rear-end that nearly obscures the seat of the stool onto which she has collapsed. She has the look of an enormous doll, skin dappled with hectic patches, stuffed into garments that must have belonged to a smaller doll. A diamond plump as a cashew on her left hand signals wealth to the world. She orders a Pepsi, which Leona fetches, and, as the little girl gapes, astonished by her milky immensity, she presses the cold bottle to her neck and forehead, and gazes at the thatch, her eyes lidded and lips parted, as if spent by passionate demands.

Emily darts from the kitchen and snatches Leona back, and the man introduces himself as Alvin Klose (Klo-suh, he says) and asks if he is speaking to Fredo Galvez.

“That’s my name, all right,” Fredo says.

Klose divests himself of a small backpack, setting it atop the counter. The woman, whom he introduces as his wife, Selkie, asks if they have a ladies’ room and Fredo tells her there’s a place out back. Klose unzips the pack, extracts a notebook and pen, and says, “I hope you won’t mind if I ask you some questions?”

“As things allow,” says Fredo, gesturing at the tables.

“Yes…yes, of course. I understand you’re busy.” He stares at Fredo admiringly. “I want to ask you about Anne Bonny.”

“Anne Bonny.” Fredo pretends to reflect on the name. “Weren’t that the Yankee girl got herself killed over on the mainland?”

“No, no. She was a privateer. A pirate.”

“We don’t tolerate no pirates on the cay.”

“This was years ago,” Klose said. “Hundreds of years. In the early eighteenth century.”

“Anne Bonny.” Fredo swipes at the counter with a rag. “Maybe I hear something about her. Yeah.”

Wilton scrapes back his chair, heaves a sigh, comes over and drops his money onto the bar. He salutes Klose and says to Fredo, “I’ll see you tomorrow.” He calls back to the kitchen, “That some fine salad, Emily.” As he makes for the door, thunder growls. He glances back, gives Fredo a wink, and says, “Right on!” The laborers, who have been talking quietly, laugh and one says to Fredo, on hearing the Jeep’s engine turn over, “Now the mon think he Jesus.”

“Last week he thinks he Bob Marley, so Jesus be a comedown,” says Fredo.

John Bottomley and his son take stools at the bar. Fredo serves them beer and holds a brief conversation about fishing. Selkie, who looks paler for her experience of Swann’s outhouse, retakes her seat and the couple begin whispering heatedly in German. Fredo’s been around tourists enough to know that Selkie wants to go and Klose insists on staying. They break off their argument. Selkie stares at the wall with a frozen expression. Rain seethes on the thatch. Klose, his tone clenched, says, “We will have lunch now.”

He orders the turtle and, after a second heated exchange, Selkie orders the conch salad.

Things get busy and, when next Fredo notices, the German couple are in a better mood. Selkie is drinking a beer. Klose says something that makes her smile, then turns his attention to Fredo, who is clearing their plates.

“Let me tell you a story, Mister Galvez,” he says. “And afterward you can tell me if it sounds familiar.”

“I guess I got time for a tale,” says Fredo.

“It won’t take long.” Again, Klose opens his backpack and removes a paperback with a garish cover. “Anne Cormac,” he says, leafing through the pages, “was a young Irishwoman, barely sixteen, who married a pirate named James Bonny. He carried her off to Nassau—in those days it was known as New Providence. There she engaged in an affair with the notorious pirate Calico Jack. Anne was of a violent disposition, adept as any man with a cutlass, and when Jack put to sea again, she went with him. Some say she disguised herself as a man, but according to members of the crew, she only dressed in men’s clothing before a battle.” Klose offers the paperback to Fredo, open to a central page. “Here. Have a look.”

On the page is a sketch of Annie, a slender woman dressed in trousers and a loose-fitting ruffled shirt, a cutlass in one hand, a pistol in the other. Fredo has never had so precise an image of her and he studies it intently.

“Of course,” Klose goes on, “I’m skipping over a great deal. Anne had many adventures prior to meeting Jack. Many affairs. Her husband James was deathly afraid of her. In fact, he had her arrested at one point by the Governor of New Providence, claiming that she would kill him if set free. But Anne had done the governor a favor, informing him of a plot against his life, and he refused to send her to the gallows. He said if Jack could not persuade James to accept a divorce-by-sale, Anne would be flogged and returned to her husband. She was incensed by the idea that she could be bought and sold like a cow. She and Jack made their escape not long after. They stole a sloop and returned to pirating.”

“An early feminist, nicht wahr?” Selkie says, a sardonic edge to her voice, and asks for another beer.

“In a way, I suppose,” says Klose.

As Fredo sets a fresh bottle on the counter, she places her hand atop his and says, “You must forgive Alvin. He is drunk with these pirate stories.”

“Besotted,” Klose says coldly. “I believe that is the word you want.”

Selkie says something in German that Klose ignores. Thunder grumbles in the distance, the rain beats down harder. Outside, a vehicle pulls up, its engine dieseling.

“In the end,” Klose continues, “Calico Jack and Anne were sentenced to hang in Jamaica, along with another female pirate, Mary Reade. She had joined Jack’s crew as well, recruited from a ship that they captured. Anne seduced her, thinking she was man, and the two of them had an affair. Quite a passionate one, it’s said. Eventually Jack was hanged and Mary was reported to have died of a fever in prison. But Anne did not hang. She disappeared. Now it is generally thought that her father, who was a wealthy lawyer, bought her freedom and conveyed her to a plantation that he owned in South Carolina, where she lived out her days under a false name. But this I do not believe. I believe she came to Cay Cuchillo.”

Fredo affects nonchalance; he scratches his neck. “Nobody around here named Bonny.”

Wilton re-enters, makes a show of shaking off rain. “Occurs to me you folks might want a ride back to the Cove. It’s coming down fierce.”

“That would be wonderful!” Selkie hops off her stool.

“She married,” Klose says. “She changed her surname to that of her husband.”

“Alvin!”

Klose casts her a bitter look, but begins to pack up his possessions. “The fact is,” he says to Fredo, “I believe she married an ancestor of yours.”

“You got your facts wrong there,” Fredo says, moving off to help another customer. “Ain’t no Yankees in this mon’s family.”

In the hillside shanty up from the bar, Fredo and Emily lie facing one another in a nylon hammock. Because wind is driving rain through the windows, they have put up the shutters and the air is close; the room is illuminated by the low yellow flame of a kerosene lamp that hangs on one of the posts to which the hammock is secured. Jenry and Palace are asleep in the next room. On a pallet to the side of the hammock, Leona makes a gurgling noise. The shanty shudders with a gust. Rain slashes against the boards.

“This weather harsh,” Emily says.

“It likely clear by morning.” Fredo presses against her and she laughs softly, pleased to feel his arousal.

“You want something? You got to work for it, then, ’cause I weary.”

“I weary, too. All except this one part.”

“That’s the part usually gets it way, don’t it?”

They kiss, his hand goes to her breast, and she makes a musical noise in the back of her throat. Her lined face looks older than her thirty-two years, yet despite three children, her body is still youthful, her breasts firm, and she likes having them fondled.

“Maybe you won’t have to work so hard after all.” She rests her knee on his hip and fits herself to him. “Mmmm,” she says as he pushes inside. “Ohh…that’s nice.”

They set the hammock to swaying, but their lovemaking grows less insistent and soon they are content with merely being joined, sustaining their arousal by means of slight shifts in position.

“I had a visit from Annie today,” he says.

“What she want?”

He tells her and she asks what he plans to do.

“I don’t know,” he says.

They move lazily together, hammock strings squeaking, and Emily says, “Think Annie warning us against the German?”

“The mon seem like a decent sort. It could be anybody.”

After a brief let-up, the rain pounds harder, the shutters rattle and, taking his cue from the storm, Fredo thrusts heavily into Emily, but she clamps both her hands to his buttocks, holding him still.

“Show him the pictures,” she says.

“The German fella?”

“You got to ’least show him. Find out how much money he willing to part with. And you know they got plenty. You see that stone his wife wearing?”

“We be taking a risk.”

Emily pushes him away, breaking their union. “Every time Annie come visit, there risk and there opportunity. We taking a risk not to show him. I worried about the boys.”

“The boys solid,” he says. “They be fine.”

“They not solid, they just young. But Jenry, he old enough he starting to understand that he don’t have no future better than what he sees in front of him. He come home the other day acting all crazy and smelling of gas. You know what that mean. He sniffing red gas with that bunch hangs around the wharf.”

“I speak to him.”

“Speaking to him won’t do no good. We got to give our children reason to hope.”

She rolls up to her knees, a practiced maneuver that allows for the unsteadiness of the hammock, and comes astride him.

“You want Jenry to wind up like them wharf boys? Begging for pennies and falling out back of Tully’s place?” She hisses in frustration. “That not my ambition. We got to do what we can for the children, no matter the risk.”

Fredo tries to pull her hips down, seeking to enter her again, but she restrains him.

“You don’t show him the pictures,” she says, “I will.”

Her ferocity seems to heat the room further and, confronted by such passion, weakened by desire, Fredo says, “All right. I’ll take care of it.”

“Tomorrow?”

“If you can manage the cafe…Yeah, I do it in the morning.”

She braces with her right hand, reaches beneath her with the left and guides him inside. In the yellowed dimness, like light from another age, ancient light, she looks younger now, her face softer and less careworn. As she moves, touching herself, her breath quickening, a hoarse groan is dredged from Fredo’s chest.

Lights break

behind his eyelids,

the serpent moon

uncoils

along his backbone,

a bamboo flute

shrieks in his ear

as Emily reaches her moment, collapsing atop his chest. They lie quietly, their breath subsiding, the hammock strings quivering. After a time she slips off him onto her side. She rests her head on his shoulder. “I know this hard for you,” she says.

“Hard ain’t the word for it.”

“Well, hard or worse than hard, it’s all we can do.” She turns onto her back, gazes at the ceiling. “We gots to put things right for the family.”

A muggy, windless morning, but Treasure Cove’s dining room is cool, air-conditioned, furnished with Spanish Colonial-style tables and chairs, its whitewashed ceiling crossed by thick varnished beams. On the wall above the bar is a painted map of the island—Dagger Key, the legend reads (the Spanish name is inscribed in smaller letters and enclosed in parentheses beneath). The other walls are hung with flintlocks and cutlasses, replica work manufactured and given a patina of antiquity on the mainland. Sunlight tilts in through a big bay window overlooking the sea, leaving most of the room in shadow. Beside it, bumping against the glass, a pair of flies mate in mid-air, their buzzing unnaturally loud. Close to the horizon, a shrimper lies becalmed in an inch of dazzle.

Only three of the tables are occupied, one by a woman and her two small children, their piping voices shrill and demanding; another by an elderly couple peering at a guidebook, and the third by Wilton Barrios and a gray-haired man. He picks at a fruit plate and nods solemnly while Wilton talks. Fredo sits at the bar and Vinroy, the bartender, a handsome, young, energetic black man, serves him a cup of rich-smelling coffee.

“Can you tell me anything about this Klose fella that staying here?” Fredo asks.

“Klose,” Vinroy says. “Yeah, the pirate mon. One thing I know, his wife ain’t never going to be lonely. She catting around something crazy. Every time he go for a swim, she in here fooling with whoever on duty.”

“You not tempted by that, now?”

“I tempted, all right.” Vinroy rubs thumb and forefinger together. “Cash money, you know. She willing to pay, I willing to play.”

“You going to lose your job, mon.”

“Ain’t lost it yet.” Vinroy grins. “Tell the truth, I expect her husband be happy if someone take her off his hands.”

Fredo sips his coffee. “How they fixed for money?”

Vinroy takes a stack of round glass ashtrays and begins distributing them. “He throw the cash around pretty good. Their diving gear real sweet.” He aims an ashtray as might a shuffleboard player, slides it along the bar, gives it some body english, and snaps his fingers when it teeters at the end of the counter and stabilizes. “Divina, the girl who clean they suite, she say the wife got herself some fine clothes.” He picks up a rag, swipes it along the bar. “They got a nice little motor boat with a cabin below decks and a wheel house. Klose tell me it were builded from a kit, you know. So I don’t expect it worth that much. They come down along the coast from Cozumel. That’s where he buy it. They planning to run the coast down to the Bay Islands.”

Fredo removes a cigarette from a crumpled pack. “They early risers?”

“You ain’t got long to wait. Mon come in every morning about this time. The woman like to sleep in.” Vinroy checks his watch. “I got to go change. You all right on the coffee?”

“I could use some fire.”

Vinroy reaches beneath the bar, flips him a packet of matches with a skull-and-crossbones on the flap, and goes out through the kitchen. Fredo lights the cigarette. His smoke uncoils bluely and his thoughts stretch out, less thoughts than they are appreciations of the coolness, the taste of the coffee, the play of light and shadow beneath the window.

Skin a delicate mosaic,

inlay of viridian and jade,

a gekko freezes on the wall

waiting for an unwitting fly

and Klose enters the bar, a folded newspaper under his arm. He stops on seeing Fredo and comes over. “Mister Galvez!” He puts a hand lightly on Fredo’s shoulder. “I didn’t expect to find you here.”

“Thought I’d hear the finish of that tale,” says Fredo.

Klose hesitates, smiles. “Will you join me for breakfast?”

They relocate to a corner table and Vinroy, now dressed in white shorts and a navy polo shirt with Treasure Cove inscribed in white on the breast pocket, comes to take their order. Fredo asks for eight strips of bacon, well done, and a roll.

“So much meat,” Klose says chidingly. “It’s not healthy to eat meat so early in the morning.”

“I have me some fritters earlier. I figure I wrap the bacon up for lunch.”

Klose’s smile falters as he digests, perhaps, the economic nuances that attach to Fredo’s response.

“What you got to tell me about old Eduardo Galvez?” says Fredo. “The mon who marry Annie.”

“You know about this?”

“Sure I know. It family business.”

Klose appears stunned. “You are claiming to be Anne Bonny’s descendant?”

“Yesterday you trying to pin it on me, and now you say I claiming it?”

“You denied the connection. I thought…”

“I don’t like talking about Annie where other people can hear.”

“But why? All this happened three hundred years ago.”

“It still happening, mon. But I’ll get to that.” Fredo has a sip of coffee, finds it to have cooled. “You worked out some of the story; now I going to tell you the rest. Annie come to the island and she marry Eduardo Galvez some years after. But she did not come alone. That Mary Reade were with her. I know…” He holds up a hand to forestall an interruption. “They say she die in prison, but that were another woman did the dying. It were Mary that engineered the escape. She bribe someone high up with the promise of treasure. It ain’t clear who. Someone she knew that were close to the governor, though…”

Fredo breaks off as Vinroy approaches with a tray, delivering bacon and rolls, granola, chopped banana, chunks of mango and papaya, a fresh jug of coffee.

“The plan were for Mary and Annie to take their share of the treasure and go to New Orleans,” Fredo says once Vinroy is out of earshot. “But Mary…”

“The treasure was here?” asks Klose. “On Cay Cuchillo?”

He’s excited, unmindful of his food, and Fredo feels more secure about telling him the rest.

“That’s right,” he says. “Calico Jack bury it here, and Mary use the knowledge to secure their freedom. They make sail from New Provincetown to Cay Cuchillo and once they divide the treasure up, like I saying, they plan to find a boat what will carry them to New Orleans. But Mary decide she want to stay here. They have a big row about it, but in the end they build a café on the island and call it The Two Swans.”

Wilton Barrios stands abruptly, knocking over his chair, and spits curses in Spanish. The gray-haired man looks up at him placidly and has a bite of melon.

“Maricon!” Wilton clenches his fists and appears ready to strike the man, but instead turns and stalks toward the door. On seeing Fredo and Klose, he takes a hitch in his stride and his furious expression abates as he goes out into the corridor, leaving the children gawking in his wake, the elderly couple whispering together, Vinroy shaking his head behind the bar.

As far as Klose is concerned, however, none of this might have happened. “The Two Swans,” he said. “This is your cafe?”

“It been rebuilt more times than I can tally,” says Fredo. “The boards rot, the winds blow it down…you know. Over the years, people drop the ‘Two,’ and then when the British write down the name for their records, they throw in an extra n and the change stick. But I guess you could say it more-or-less the same. It occupy the same ground, at least.”

Fredo nibbles the end of a thick-cut strip of bacon. “Cay Cuchillo were a place where nobody care what two women do with one another, and that why Mary so strong for to stay here. For a while they happy, but Annie have a roving eye. She like men and other women, too. And come the day when she say she going to take her fair share of the treasure and leave. Mary beg her to stay, but once Annie have it in mind to do something, the weight of the world can be against her and she going to have her way. So Mary say, ‘Go ahead, then. But the treasure ain’t going nowhere.’ She snatch up a cutlass and menace Annie. She not angry, she stricken by the thought of losing her love. But Annie’s angry at being thwarted, and when she angry she a terror. She go at Mary with a dagger and stab her deep. Mary run out onto the beach, down toward the point from the café, and that’s where Annie catch her. Mary pleading for her life. She tell Annie that she didn’t mean nothing, she loves her. But Annie say, ‘To hell with love, and to hell with you!’ And she cut Mary down.

“When Annie realize what she have done, the spirit go right out of her. All her fierceness, all her joy in life, were spent with that one knife-stroke. She pass the days drinking and weeping. She don’t care no more about New Orleans, about the café, about nothing—she might have drink herself to death if Eduardo Galvez didn’t happen along. He prop her up, he help her to face things. She never come to love him, but she grateful to him and that’s enough. She bear him three sons. The last of them, the one she died giving birth to, I of his line.”

Vinroy saunters up, concerned that there’s something wrong with the food, they haven’t eaten a bite—Klose tells him, no, he was preoccupied, and shovels in a spoonful of granola as if to demonstrate his appetite.

“What all that fuss with Wilton?” Fredo asks.

“Some business. I don’t know,” says Vinroy, and nods toward the gray-haired man. “Wilton tell me he’s an investor. ’Pear he got the good sense not to invest with Wilton.”

“Yeah, mon,” says Fredo as Vinroy walks off. “I hear that.”

The dining room has begun to fill and Klose, taking cognizance of this, lowers his voice. “What happened to the treasure?” he asks.

Fredo reaches into his hip pocket, withdraws a grimy, much-folded piece of paper—stiff paper, like that used by artists—and lays it on the table. “This my family’s fortune,” he says. “If anybody hear of it, it could mean trouble for me.”

Klose rests the fingertips of one hand on the paper, but Fredo also keeps his hand on the paper.

“You seen my place,” says Fredo. “I better off than some, but I a poor mon nonetheless. Now you a rich mon. Maybe not king-rich, but rich enough you can help me out.”

The German’s face tightens as he realizes that money is to be the topic of conversation.

“I not going to try to sell you something you ain’t interested in,” Fredo continues. “If you don’t want what I got, I no be bothering you again. But if you interested, remember this. You tell anyone what’s on this paper, the deal is off. There’s three items sketched on it. A cross, a cup, and a dagger. There’s information written down about them. You can check it against the cargo manifest of the Nuestra Senora de Alegria, a Spanish galleon that were lost with all hands in these waters. The treasure ship sites online, they can tell you about it.” He pushes back his chair and stands. “The dagger’s not for sale, but I can let you have the cup or the cross.”

Suspicion gone from his face, washed away by eagerness, Klose starts to unfold the paper, but Fredo restrains him and says, “Not here, mon! Not where anybody can see. Take it somewhere private.”

Klose apologizes, then says, “May I show this to Selkie?”

“I’ll be direct with you. From what I hear about your wife, she ain’t the kind to trust with a secret.”

Strain surfaces in Klose’s voice. “I’m aware of my wife’s proclivities, but where a matter of finance is concerned, you can count on her to be discreet.”

“Well, that’s up to you. But the same rule apply. She tell anyone, we ain’t doing business.”

Fredo tells him they’ll talk early tomorrow and leaves Klose to his breakfast, intending to walk the beach to Dever’s Landing. He cuts across the patio toward the water and notices two boats moored to the wharf: a sloop with a blue hull and a white cabin cruiser, the Selkie. As he’s about to take a closer look, Wilton hails him and asks if he can use a ride. Minutes later, Fredo is hanging onto the roll bar of the Jeep as they lurch and rattle over the potholed road toward town, producing so loud a racket that Wilton has to shout to make himself heard.

“You got some business with that German fella?” he asks.

“He pay me a few dollars to tell him some lies. That’s all.”

Wilton appears to nod, though it may just be the bouncing of the Jeep.

“If it get any more than that, you let me know,” says Wilton. “These Germans, they slick operators. You need someone looking out for you. Someone who can see you don’t get took advantage of.”

Fredo gazes at the dusty-leaved shrubs along the roadside, at palms with brown fronds and bunches of dried-out nuts, at the aquamarine sea that shows itself whenever the Jeep tops a rise. “No doubt,” he says. “I be sure and consult with you first thing.”

All through the day, doing chores and filling orders behind the bar, Fredo worries about whether he’s doing the right thing. Annie thinks that dealing with Klose is worth the risk, that’s apparent, though Fredo’s not certain how much she actually thinks or what her process is. She may possess a thread of instinct or premonitory sense that causes her to seek him out, or it may be something unknowable that triggers her appearances. What worries him most is his family history. Once filling two deep chests, the treasure has dwindled over the course of the centuries to a cross, a chalice, and a dagger, and almost every transaction, every attempt to sell a piece or two, has been attended by abysmal luck, errors in judgment, drunkenness, and so forth. On occasion, a Galvez has realized some small profit from the sale of a ring or a golden place setting, but it seems that a curse has been laid upon the treasure and whenever a great profit is sought, tragedy results. Fredo believes that if a curse exists, it is one worked through the social fabric of the island. The way things are, the way they always have been, it’s extremely problematic for someone poor, someone powerless, to sell an item of great value and come away with any money. Too many prying eyes, too many men with grasping, conniving natures. Impoverished men with hopes like his own; the police; government officials; gangsters and thugs; each looking for a glint of gold in the ordinary dirt of their lives. And should they catch sight of such a glint, they’ll act without compunction.

The cross is a processional cross, 18 inches high, designed to be mounted on a wooden staff and held aloft by the acolyte preceding, in this case, the Archbishop of New Providence, for whom it was intended as a gift. Fashioned of yellow gold, exquisitely carved, and set with four diamonds of approximately forty karats and a ruby nearly twice that size. Also a gift meant for the Archbishop, the chalice is more resplendent yet, made of white gold and studded with emeralds and diamonds. By contrast, the dagger is nondescript, its hilt of horn chased with silver, but it has history on its side, having belonged to the fourth Marquis of Vallardo and been put to bloody use by both him and Annie. Fredo has held them in his hands several times, yet he has never once laid eyes upon them. Annie keeps her secrets close.

He sleeps poorly, ridden by dreams of a pale woman in a white blouse and brown leggings, and he rises before dawn to make the long walk into Dever’s Landing, catching a ride from town with young Gentry Samuels, who delivers fresh bread to the resort. The eastern sky is touched with mauve when he arrives, and Fredo waits on a stool at the beachside bar until a red sliver of sun has crept up over the horizon and the lights come on inside Klose’s bungalow, watching as

an orb weaver,

a galaxy of white spots

speckling its black back,

dangling from the thatch

on a single strand of silk,

lowers itself to within an inch

of the countertop, then stalls

as if wary of the wet ring

left by a drunkard’s glass…

and when it finally descends to the wooden surface, only then does he approach the bungalow and knock.

To his surprise, Selkie opens the door. She’s wearing a frilly nightgown that extends from the slopes of her breasts to mid-thigh, and conceals nothing. Her pink areolae are visible through the sheer fabric, as is the dark suggestion of a pubic patch, at odds with her blond head. Fredo is put off by this casual display, but he also recalls what Vinroy said and wonders how it would be to lie with her. She seems less woman than a parfait of cream and strawberry, and he thinks that though the image she presents is arousing, she would not give him the pleasure of a real woman like Emily. He asks where her husband is.

“He is showering,” Selkie says, sitting on the large overstuffed sofa that dominates the room, a harmony of white and pastel blues, except for the breakfast nook, decorated in sunnier colors. “Do not concern yourself with him. He is quite happy to remain in the bedroom while we are concluding our business.”

“He not coming out, then?”

“Not unless we wish him to.” Selkie pats the cushion beside her, indicating that he should sit, and, once he does, she scoots nearer so that their knees are almost touching. The musky scent of her perfume surrounds him, seeming to issue from the depths of her cleavage. She nods at the bedroom door. “Perhaps you would be more comfortable dealing with him?”

“I can handle it if you can.”

“Oh, of this I am quite sure.” She smiles coyly, the crimson bow of her mouth lengthening as if being strung, and gives his leg a pat. “The paper you gave Alvin…are you the one who made the sketches?”

He wrenches his eyes away from the milky valley between her breasts. “That were a friend of mine did the drawing.”

“Your friend has had a peculiar education,” she says. “He uses antiquated spelling. The double f instead of the s, for example. Did he perhaps copy the words from the cargo manifest?”

“I suppose,” says Fredo.

“Were you not present when he made these sketches?”

Rattled, Fredo says, “What you want to know all this for?”

“I am wishing only to satisfy my curiosity.” She dismisses the subject with a wave of her hand. “To business, then. Your friend has noted the diamonds in the cross are weighing forty karats, and the ruby is…” She casts about, as if searching for something. “Scheisse! My little book? Do you see it? It has a green cover.”

“The ruby seventy-eight karats, if that’s what you looking to know. The emeralds on the cup, now…”

“We have no interest in the cup. Too bulky. The cross is better because it lies flat.”

Fredo shrugs.

“We will, of course, require to see it before we commit,” Selkie continues. “Once we have made an assessment of its value, we will secure the funds.”

“No, no! That’s not how it going to be,” Fredo says. “You gets the money, I brings the cross. You like what you see, then we make a trade and go our separate ways. And we do it quick. If the money not here tomorrow evening, say about seven-eight o’clock, it might as well never be here.”

“But we must authenticate the cross…and the stones.”

“Then best you learn about authenticating quick. Look here. When you see the thing, you going to know it old. And if you don’t trust it, walk away. That’s what I intends to do and the money ain’t right.”

Selkie looks at him without expression for a long moment. “How much do you want?”

“Fifty thousand dollars,” he says. “Cash money.”

Selkie starts to raise an objection, but Fredo says, “I ain’t going to bargain with you. Fifty’s what I need. Fifty in small bills. I can’t get it from you, I’ll get it somewheres else. For fifty, you stealing it. Any one of the stones worth a damn sight more than that, so I ain’t going to listen about you ain’t got it. If that the case, we got no use to talk further.”

After a pause, Selkie says, “Fifty thousand. Yes. This I think we can manage, but it’s good you do not ask for more. We will have to sell some things. And to transfer the money takes time. We cannot do this in less than two days.”

Fredo doesn’t like it, but after a brief internal debate, he agrees. “Two days, then. Not a minute longer.”

He gathers himself, preparing to stand, and Selkie asks if he would like a drink. To seal the bargain, she says. She leans back, half-reclining on the sofa, and puts one slippered foot up on the cushion, opening her legs. A smile plays about the corners of her lips, and Fredo realizes that more than a drink is being offered. His eyes go to the bedroom door. It’s cracked open and would afford anyone behind it an unobstructed view of the sofa.

“Please, Fredo. Stay for a drink…or two,” Selkie says. “Alvin will not mind.”

Angry that they think him a fool, or that he would willingly serve their perversity, he stands and says, “I’ll take back my paper now.”

“Your paper? I don’t understand.”

“The one with the sketch of the cross.”

She makes a smacking sound with her lips, rises and goes to the breakfast table; she opens a drawer and extracts the folded paper, holds it out to him.

“I don’t want no funny business when I bring the cross,” he says. “I catch a sniff of anything wrong, and that be the end of it. You hear me?”

“No problem,” Selkie says flatly.

He snatches the paper, avoiding the touch of her fingers.

“When will you bring it?” she asks.

“If I not here by ten that night, I not coming. But I see you in the morning, day after tomorrow, and give you instructions. Meet me in the bar for breakfast. Eight o’clock.”

“So early!”

“I got things to do of the day.”

She tips her head to the side, as if this new angle will allow her to see inside him. “Is the cross buried so deep, it will cost you a day to dig it up?”

“Not deep,” he says, opening the door to admit the humid air, perfumed by a night-blooming cereus. “But deep enough that no man alive can find it.”

The bank opens each morning at eight-thirty, and at eight-fifteen, Fredo is sitting across the street in a shanty bar known as John Wayne’s, named for its owner, John Wayne Casterman, an elderly man with nut-brown skin and a wizened neck like a turtle’s, his head nearly bald, a few tufts of cottony hair seeming to float above his scalp like clouds above a barren planet. The bar is accessed by a two-tiered stairway of rickety boards and rotting railings, and consists of a single room containing half-a-dozen tables and a makeshift counter of oil drums. Faded reggae posters advertising bands that no longer exist postage-stamp the weathered planking of the walls. John Wayne is perched on a stool behind the oil drums, humming to himself, reading a day-old newspaper, and Fredo sits by the door, nursing a warmish beer, watching the armed guards smoking in front of the bank, the passage of a Toyota pick-up, an old VW bus, a Hyundai truck carrying a load of concrete blocks. A young black woman, Jenny Bowen, in a tight skirt and a red tank top, balances a bowl covered in cheesecloth on her head, her walk an African elegance, serene and sensual. She pays no mind to the guards, who stare at her, whisper together, and laugh. Fredo remembers her as a little girl, when she skipped everywhere she went. Two pariah dogs engage in a snarling match, snapping at one another, until a bystander runs them off. The sun is a yellow glare in the east. Dust settles, rises from the dirt street, settles again.

Garnett Steadman, a man even older than John Wayne, hobbles into the bar, and, after a brief exchange with Fredo, How’s Emily doing?, I spied your boy Jenry yesterday, etc, he takes a stool and talks fishing with John Wayne…

A little after nine, a taxi stops in front of the bank, and Klose climbs out. He disappears inside the stucco building. Less than an hour later, he emerges from the bank and waits, nervously pacing, until a second taxi arrives to collect him. Fredo bids so long to Garnett and John Wayne, and begins the long walk home. Satisfied that things appear to be going the way he wants, he’s anxious for the same reason. Annie has come to him three times before, none of which he recalls after a certain point. The first two occasions yielded neither profit nor loss, but the third time, after making a small profit from the sale of some coins, he had the idea that something bad happened. When he checked on the buyer the next morning, the man, a college professor from New Mexico, locked the door of his bungalow, refusing to admit him, and fled the island at the earliest opportunity. Now, with so much more at stake, dealing with untrustworthy people, he knows there’s a potential for serious trouble.

“When Annie come, never try and thwart her,” his father advised him. “You don’t want her mad at you. She got your interests at heart, and ’cept you a big fool, like some of us has been, she bound to keep you safe. Whatever she do, that’s on her, so don’t wreck your soul worrying about it.”

Sound advice, but Fredo is a less pragmatic soul than was his father and, since the old man died, he has learned he can’t equate absence of guilt with innocence. He dreads these days when Annie’s morality is imposed upon him, when he is at the disposition of a three hundred-year old spirit who, driven by a freakish sliver of blood loyalty, will go to any extreme on his behalf. As he walks the beach toward the café, he mutters prayers for himself and Emily, for Klose and Selkie, for anyone who may become involved. The words occupy his mind, but give him no comfort.

That afternoon, in the cool shade of the café, Fredo mopes about the place, drinking coffee and treating his customers dismissively. To avoid conversation, he takes a portable TV/VCR from beneath the counter, parks it at the end of the bar, and plays an old cassette of Miami Vice episodes, losing himself in gun battles and explosions, beautiful women, neon gleaming on the metal skins of expensive cars. Captivated by these images, three men join him at the bar and, when the tape ends, one of them, Philby Davis, says, “How about you put on some Baywatch, mon?,” a notion seconded by the other customers. Fredo complies, and soon the women of Baywatch are jogging down the beach in their red Speedos, breasts asway in slow motion, while the ragged men of Dagger Key hoot and offer risqué comment.

“Look like that brown-haired gal going to catch ol’ Pamela,” says Philby. “But Pamela always edge her out by a nipple.”

The others laugh and slap Philby’s palm.

Fredo goes outside and sits on the palm trunk, wishing that he remembered to buy cigarettes. The sun is declining in the west, the light going orange. Waves pile in—the same wave, it appears, a low roller thinning to a frothy edge of water that races up the slope of the island to be absorbed by the sand. Shadows blur on the beach. Sand crabs burrow into silt at the tidal margin, leaving tiny airholes. Fredo imagines his thoughts are similar to theirs, a quiet, fretful paranoia.

Emily joins him on the palm trunk, places a hand on his back. “Why don’t you go on up to the house?” she says. “You can send the boys down after dinner. They help me close.”

Fredo nods. “Okay.”

“What time you leaving?”

“I might go in tonight. These people got a boat. Little cabin cruiser. I need to make sure they don’t go nowhere.”

“How you going to do that?”

“Battery acid in they fuel. That way, if they want to test the motor, it going to start right up. But if they go to running, they won’t run far. I slip out early in the morning and take care of it.”

“You coming back home after that?”

“Maybe not. Maybe I find a spot up in the hills and sleep.” Emily looks doubtful.

“Don’t worry. Nothing going to trouble me with Annie around.”

She idly rubs his shoulder, appearing distant.

“What you thinking?” he asks.

“I’m hoping that Jenry and Palace don’t have to bear this burden.”

Resentment sparks in him, and he shifts away from her touch.

“Something wrong?” she asks.

“I wish you spare some of that hope for me.”

“What you talking about?”

“You always thinking about the children. Seem like you got nothing left over.”

She gapes at him, gets up and walks off a couple of paces, then turns back. “You must be crazy! I your wife, Fredo. I with you ’til the end. But I’m their mother, too. And you they father. You want them to have Annie with them all their days? Is that what you saying?”

Fredo says, “I expect Annie going to be with them one way or the other.”

“Not and you sell these three pieces! Once the treasure gone, she gone.”

“That’s just what my daddy say.”

“And his daddy before him, and his daddy’s daddy. They all been saying that from the back time ’til now.”

“Sometimes I feel that way, but just because a thing a tradition, that don’t mean it true. Other times I think Annie never let go. She going to hold onto that dagger ’til the last days.”

“Don’t you be telling me that!”

“I can’t help it. That’s how I feel.”

“No, don’t be telling me that!” She confronts him, hands on hips. “You just vexed about Annie, and you pitying yourself. And you trying to get me to pity you. But you don’t want that. The day I come to pity you, that’s the day I stop loving you.”

Shocked, he looks up at her.

“I’m serious,” she says.

“I can’t believe you say something like that, after all these years.”

She drops to her knees in the sand, puts her hands on his knees. “Fredo, I just trying to get your attention. You know I love you, but there’s days when it seem you got too much Jesus in your head.”

“You going to start blaspheming now?”

“If that what it take to get you straight,” she says. “Jesus don’t have to live in this world. We do. Like it or not, when time tough, we gots to be hard, even if it sinful.”

Fredo hangs his head and digs in the sand with the toe of his shoe, his thoughts circulating between the good sense of what she’s said and his views on personal salvation.

“We counting on you to be hard, Fredo. The boys and Leona, we all counting on you.” Emily sighs and pushes up to her feet. “I gots to go back in before Philby steal us blind.”

“I’d pass through hell for this family,” he says. “But I no want to get stuck there.”

Emily’s fingers brush his shoulder, startling him, and he glances up.

“Want me to wake you when I come in?” she asks. “Or I can sleep down with Leona.” In her face, beneath the worry and agitation, he finds what he has always found when she looks at him. “Yeah, wake me,” he says. “I leave the lamp burning for you.”

Palace is dribbling a soccer ball in front of the shanty, a skinnier, eleven-year-old Fredo, but with his mother’s dark eyes, and Jenry, a well-built fifteen-year-old with Emily’s African features and coloration, and his father’s blue eyes, is lying in his parents’ hammock, listening to dancehall on a battery-operated CD player. He’s a strikingly handsome kid and he knows it. Seeing him, Fredo is tempted, as usual, to take him down a peg. He considers bringing up the gas-sniffing incident, but limits himself to saying, “Turn that mess off.” Lately it has been difficult for Fredo to warm up to Jenry, and he’s had the thought that his son may be growing into someone he does not much like; but Jenry is still a child, still salvageable, and Fredo understands that this is the reason he has to go with Annie, to fund that salvation. That both makes him feel more kindly disposed to Jenry and amplifies his resentment of the situation.

Jenry lets the CD play, then—just as his father is about to repeat his instruction; he’s learned how to time these things—he switches it off and climbs from the hammock. He’s wearing his school uniform, as is Palace. Short-sleeved white shirt, dark blue trousers and matching tie. He shoves his hands into his pockets and leans against the wall, the generic pose of the layabouts who hang around Tully’s shop.

“Mama say you had a visit from Annie,” he says in a challenging tone, as if daring Fredo to deny it.

“Change out of them clothes,” says Fredo. “You got to keep them fresh for school.”

Jenry loosens his tie. “I want to go with you.”

Fredo grunts in amusement. “There a long walk between what you want and what going to happen.”

Palace, the soccer ball under his arm, comes into the room, and Fredo tells him to change his clothes, saying he’ll start supper going.

“Why can’t I go with you?” Jenry asks, and Palace says happily, “Roxy Tidcombe already fix us sandwiches over the resort.” He giggles. “Her cat purring for Jenry.”

Jenry gives him a scornful look.

“Go on,” says Fredo. “Change them clothes. Your mama’s got enough to do without washing ’em every day.”

He stretches out in the hammock and closes his eyes, listening to the boys bickering in the back room. Palace: “You the one tell me about Roxy!” Jenry: “Did I tell you to spread the news around, too?” Fredo’s thoughts slow, but he does not sleep, hovering just above sleep’s surface. A breeze pushes open the door, the rusting hinges squeak. Through the doorway, a narrow band of the sea appears to billow like a blue-green scarf drawn between earth and sky. Footsteps behind him, and Jenry steps into view. He asks again about Annie and Fredo, less irritable now, says, “Your mama needs you to help out while I gone. The time come soon enough you going to learn about Annie.”

“How soon?”

Fredo swings his legs over the side of the hammock. “You remember that toy you wanted a few years back? That robot with its eyes light up and it shooting sparks?”

“That were six, seven years ago,” Jenry says defensively. He’s clad in a pair of shorts and has a cheap gold chain about his neck, the links showing like golden stitches against his black skin.

“We told you it were a piece of trash, but you had to have it. And once you get it, it fall apart in a week. The eyes don’t light and the sparks burn your arm. Wanting to know Annie’s like wanting to get your hands on that robot. Ain’t no pleasure at the end of it.”

“So you say. Maybe I feel different.”

“What you want to argue with me for? Your mama need you—that all you gots to know.” Fredo comes to his feet, stretches, then with a sudden movement grabs Jenry by the back of the neck and tickles him with his free hand. “What you going to do now, huh? How you going to argue with this?”

After a brief struggle, which veers between play and actual ferocity, Jenry breaks away. He seems about to smile, but instead glowers at Fredo.

“Back off with the attitude, mon,” Fredo says. “Okay? I got a long night ahead of me, and maybe a long day to follow. I could stand a break.”

Jenry’s expression degrades into sullenness, and Fredo busies himself rummaging in the tool box that sits atop a dresser, searching for a large plastic syringe and a set of lockpicks.

“Roxy Tidcombe, huh?” he says. “That one pretty gal. She what we call back in my day pure glamity.”

“She okay,” Jenry says. “But she holding out on me.”

Fredo grins at him over his shoulder. “And here I thought you grown into a grindsman.”

“Seem like all she want to do is give me a car wash.”

“Well, I wouldn’t complain and I was you. Lots of girls that way at first. They afraid of catching a big belly.”

“That how it were with you and mama?” Jenry asks sneeringly. “She give up her puni straightaway and you never get no car wash?”

Something like anger,

but stronger,

something of the old blood,

Annie’s blood,

surges through Fredo,

and he has to close his eyes

against the sight of his son

until it has passed,

gripping the wooden handle

of the tool box

so hard it cracks.

“Get on down to the café,” he says. “You can ask your mama about the car wash and you got the courage. Take Palace with you.”

“It Friday night, mon! I got better to do,” Jenry says, and Palace, who has obviously been eavesdropping, comes to the door and says, “I ain’t finish my schoolwork!”

“What kind of schoolwork they give you on a Friday night?” Fredo asks.

Palace glances away, a sure sign he’s fishing around for a believable lie. “I got a book to read.”

“Read it at the café,” says Fredo. “Jenry can do your share of the chores. When you done with reading, then you can do his.”

Both boys complain and he says, “I ain’t going to tell you again.”

He stands in the doorway, watching them walk down the hill. Emily’s right, he thinks as his anger fades. Jenry may be already lost and Palace won’t be far behind. Contemplating this, Fredo shakes his head ruefully and spits. As they reach the foot of the hill, Jenry shoves his brother, knocking him off his feet, and starts jogging along the road toward town.

A moonless night; thin clouds reduce what stars there are to a scatter of dim white points. Fredo steals along Treasure Cove’s pier, his footsteps hidden by the slop of water against the pilings. The watchman is asleep on the beach in a cabana chair, his rifle resting across his knees. His dory is drawn up on the beach, the outboard tipped up out of the sand. A fresh creosote smell from the pier overwhelms all other odors. From its seaward end, the bungalows are almost indistinguishable in the dark—vague white shapes mounted against the hill, like lumps of mashed potatoes. Fredo climbs over the railing onto the deck of the cabin cruiser and locates the hatch covering the engine. Using a penlight to see, he picks the lock and slides off the cover. He draws battery acid into the syringe and squirts it into the fuel, repeating the process; then he slides the cover shut and locks it. The door to the cabin is open, and that astounds Fredo. These people must have no idea where they are, he tells himself. He disables the radio and makes a quick search, finding a flare gun and a revolver in a cabinet. He renders the flares unusable and, after emptying the revolver, decides it will be safest to drop it over the side. This done, he hurries along the pier, clambers into the rocks above the resort, and curls up on a ledge to sleep.

He wakes in bright daylight, worried that he’s missed his appointment. Entering the bar, he spots Klose and Selkie sitting by the window, dirty dishes in front of them. They’re dressed in shorts and tank tops, and Fredo thinks that they more resemble a brother and sister than a husband and wife. He threads his way among tables, drops into a chair across from them. With a petulant frown, Selkie says, “We thought you were not coming.”

“I had some business, but I here now,” Fredo says. “You have the money?”

“I will collect it from the bank this morning,” Klose says. “And the cross?”

“I fixing to get it this afternoon.”

“Then all is in order?”

“We got things to talk about, but I’ll order me some breakfast first.” Fredo gives Vinroy a wave. “You making out a damn sight better than me, so this on your tab.”

“There is no guarantee of that,” Selkie says with a degree of irritation. “We must smuggle the cross into Germany. We must find a trustworthy buyer. Boah! Too much can go wrong!”

“The poorer you are, the more you got those same problems. We both taking a gamble, but if you win, you crazy rich, mon. That cross, even and you sell it cut up for the stones and the gold, it worth millions. Like that English fella on TV used to say, you be having champagne dreams.” Fredo makes a disgusted noise. “Me, maybe I get my kids off the island. Nothing much else going to change. But if I try to sell the cross for true value…and it my property, mon! It come down to me all the way from Annie.” He slaps the table angrily. “If I asks for millions, you think I be getting it? Hell, no! You can’t count to ten before I’m lying in a ditch somewhere with my throat slit and some bastard already rich rolling into his bank and everybody smiling upon him, saying, ‘Have a chair, sir,’ and ‘Ain’t you looking splendid this morning, sir,’ all because he stole a poor man’s property.”

Having listened to this outburst, Klose seems abashed—he clears his throat and looks down at his coffee cup; but Selkie maintains her expression of sleek, sulky discontent. It’s evident to Fredo now, if it hasn’t been before, that she’s the ruler of the marriage. It’s also evident that her perversity colors the couple’s actions. Klose is merely a drone and she’s the one Annie will have to watch.

“What for you, Fredo?” Vinroy, looking crisp in his navy shirt and white shorts.

“Fry me up about ten of them little sausages and wrap ’em with some rolls. For now, let me have some hotcakes.”

“Coffee?” Vinroy asks.

“Yeah, mon.”

Vinroy inquires whether the German couple would like a refill of their coffee, and Selkie says, no, they have to be going. Vinroy stacks their dishes and, once he’s gone, Klose says, “You said you would have instructions for us.”

A wave of fatigue washes over Fredo. He sits up straight, blinks against the sunlight chuting through the glass. “I be at your place around nine o’clock. At eight-thirty, you sit down at the kitchen table and stay there. Don’t make a move until I say so. Leave the door unlocked and the window shade open so I can peer in. Wear what you got on now. That way I can see you ain’t carrying no weapon. Keep the money close by. I don’t want you have to go into another room to fetch it.”

“Would you like us to put our hands in the air?” Selkie lays the sarcasm on thick, but Fredo gives her question its due.

“Maybe, and I see something not right,” he says. “Do what I say, everything go smooth. But let me tell you this much. You ain’t dealing with no bobo tonight, so have a care.”

After Selkie and Klose leave, Vinroy brings Fredo’s food, the sausages and rolls wrapped in a tin foil packet. “I seen you scaling down the rocks earlier,” he says. “What you doing way up there?”

“Wasting time,” says Fredo. “I used to crawl up there when I a boy and spy on the water.”

Vinroy looks perplexed. “What you expect to see?”

“Seen manta rays out past the reef.”

“I ain’t see no mantas for years.”

“None left to see, I reckon.”

Fredo spreads butter and blackberry jam on his hotcakes and cuts them into little bites. His thoughts turn to Selkie as he eats, but he pushes them aside and recalls

a big shadow coasting

through aquamarine water

over white sand,

rising explosively,

hidden by spray,

and then revealed for an instant,

the great rubbery body aloft,

strange monstrous beast

flapping black wings of muscle,

peering into unaccustomed light

with eyes opposed like a hammerhead’s,

crashing down, making a splash

like a depth charge,

becoming once again

a big shadow coasting

through aquamarine water

over white sand.

A young American couple sits at an adjoining table; they talk about mix ratios and the woman’s new rebreather. Her hair is the color of a fresh honeycomb, bleached to straw in places by the sun. She has an easy laugh, health insurance, a future. For a change, Fredo is too preoccupied to envy her beautiful blond life. He ladles more preserves onto his plate, dips a bite of pancake in it, savoring the sweetness.

Long ago, after the murder of Mary Reade, before Annie conceived her first child, she was in the habit of walking into the hills, carrying with her a bottle of rum. There she would sit in a secluded spot and drink herself blind, grieving, weeping, lamenting the sins of her young life. That spot, shadowed by banana trees and sabal palms, is near the top of Dagger Key’s tallest hill, a weedy notch some twenty feet wide and twelve feet deep. Bromeliads, ferns and vines festoon walls of dark conglomerate rock; and, matting one section of wall, is a mass of vines that have been interwoven with dozens of cowrie shells, bits of ribbon and oddly shaped pieces of driftwood. Fredo doesn’t know who tends the notch. It must be tended, he thinks. The ribbons must fade, the shells must fall away as the vines wither; yet the vines are always green, the shells white, and the ribbons unfaded whenever he comes. It seems unlikely that an islander would be responsible—most recognize the notch to be a duppy place and keep their distance. Many of those who have trespassed will testify to having night terrors for months after the fact and rarely return.

Maybe, Fredo thinks, it’s Annie.

That was his father’s view. The first time he brought Fredo to the notch, he voiced the opinion that the vines were tended either by Annie or the Caribe wizard whose spirit has befriended her—or, perhaps, served her—through the centuries.

Fredo arrives at the notch shortly past noon and begins drinking from a fifth of unrefined rum purchased at John Wayne’s. Though not usually a drinking man, indulging in a beer now and then, he has been taught that he has to open himself to Annie, to attune himself to her drunken grief, her guilt and rage. He can’t abide the taste of rum, but he forces the raw stuff down and soon grows bleary and addled. The sun veers across the sky when he looks up, and the fringe of vegetation that hides the notch from all but the most discerning eye appears to undulate with unseen currents.

Mired in a complicated

shadow of banana fronds,

he feels that he’s being lowered

into a deep well,

a spiritual depth,

a hole bored into the bottom of the world

from the world below…

…and the more he drinks, the deeper he sinks, until it’s as if he’s at the end of a long tunnel, a place that the sun, although he sees it shining, cannot warm, and the wind, although it stirs the leaves around him, cannot reach. And it’s then that he starts to sense Annie’s presence and the presence of other spirits, too. The grass at his feet ripples with the passage of a snake duppy, the shade of a lizard, and the vine matte shakes itself as if some old ghost is shouldering on its cloak, the cowrie shells clacking together. The base of his neck prickles as Annie begins to settle over him, a cloud obscuring his soul. On the verge of passing out, he sees the vine matte shift forward, moving at the pace of a very old man taking hobbling steps. Something is dislodged from the matte, a bundle wrapped in a grimy sack, bulky, dropping with a clank onto the ground. Drool escapes the corner of Fredo’s lips, eels onto his chin. His head lolls, his eyelids flutter and a thick, glutinous noise issues from his throat. He stretches a hand out toward the sack, wanting to touch his treasure, to see its golden glory…but a crunching in the brush stays him. A voice, Wilton Barrios’ voice, says, “Fredo…” The remainder of his utterance is obliterated by Annie’s fury, a fuming hiss, like fire drowning in rain, that swirls around Fredo, seeming to occupy a space both inside his head and without. In his confusion, he’s inspired to struggle to his knees. Ignoring Wilton’s booming, unintelligible speech, he pushes up to his feet, staggers, braces with one hand on the ground, inadvertently gripping a fist-sized rock, and then he straightens, swaying, half-possessed, blinking in sunlight that has suddenly grown too warm and too bright. The world steadies around him. The vine matte snaps back to its customary position against the rock face; the vegetation seethes with the ordinary actions of the wind. Wilton swims into focus, wearing a sweated-through Cuban-style shirt that’s hiked up over the revolver stuck in his waistband, a confident look on his jaundiced, jowly face.

Effortfully, Fredo says, “Best you go from here, Wilton.”

“Now what I want to do that for? You going to shoot me with that rock?” He draws the revolver, trains it on Fredo’s chest, and nods at the sack. “This what you been hiding up here? Mon, you got to show me where you hide it. I been searching three years, ever since you put the fear of god in that professor, and I ain’t never find it.”

“You not going to steal my property, mon.”

“I ain’t going to do nothing but. Drunk as you is, think you stop me?” Again, he indicates the sack. “What you got in there? The professor say it a bag of pirate gold. You shouldn’t have scared that mon so bad. He couldn’t leave off talking, and him so angry with you.”

The vine matte shifts, rattling its shells, but Wilton does not appear to have noticed. He sidles toward the sack, keeping an eye on Fredo, and picks it up. “Heavy,” he says. “How much you got in here?”

When Fredo does not respond, Wilton says, “Tell you what. After I fix my problems, if there’s anything left over, I split it with you.”

Fredo grips the rock more tightly, trying to maintain consciousness and balance.

“You might wind up with more money that way than if you sell it on your own,” says Wilton.

“Listen here!” Fredo slurs badly and the words come out Liss’hyeer. He’s strangely concerned for Wilton’s well-being and wants to tell him to get away, to run, because nothing good can happen to him in this place, and he’s baffled by Wilton’s attempt to smooth things over. Wilton knows that stealing a man’s property, be it pirate treasure or an engine part, constitutes a blood crime on Dagger Key.

The vine matte shifts again, and this time Fredo sees that the vines are draped over the frame of a wizened black Caribe, a frail, bony old man, his face so withered and wrinkled, it appears inhuman, a crafty disguise contrived by a lizard or a spider. The wizard shakes his vines, clatters his shells. He capers, moving with unnatural agility, as if he’s light as a thistle, adrift on a breeze, the clacking of the shells counterfeiting a dry cackle. Wilton sees him, too. The big man gives forth with a guttural cry, the sound of abject fear, and fires twice in the direction of the wizard…and Fredo, fueled by an anger not entirely his own, steps forward and, with all the force at his command, slams the rock against Wilton’s head, catching him on the temple. As Wilton falls, Fredo is on him, striking again and again with animal ferocity. He feels the skull collapse, the cracking impact of rock on bone yielding to a soft, plush noise that brings to mind Emily pounding on turtle meat to tenderize it. In horror, he scrambles away from the body. One whole side of Wilton’s face is covered in blood. A brown eye stares up at Fredo, the mouth open in awed regard, tongue lolling, and, overwhelmed by terror at his mortal sin, by drink, by things less nameable, he loses consciousness.

Flies,

tiny black emperors of nature,

gather to their work,

crawling black on red—

their religious droning

adds a monastic note;

a heretic beetle walks up the cooling tongue

into the damp cavity of the mouth,

never to return,

losing its way amid the intricacies

of the flesh,

the garden of the flaccid organs.

Twilight…

…and Annie wakes, stunned by a newly elaborate sense of the world, though not relishing it, not comfortable with the sudden wealth of impressions. She squats beside the body, reflecting on the uses of violence, remembering her violent life, arriving at a sketchy understanding of what has happened here, aligning her memories with Fredo’s. She takes Wilton by the arms, drags him to the lip of the notch, pushes him over the edge with her foot and watches him roll away into the brush. Fredo’s body does not suit her, but she approves of its strength. She picks up his gun, studies it briefly, then flings it after him. A gun has never been her weapon of choice. She goes to the sack, removes an object wrapped in rags of linen. She reaches deeper into the sack and brings forth a smaller object, which she unwraps. A dagger with a thin, double-edged blade, its hilt fashioned of horn, chased with filigrees of silver. Mary. She says the name to herself, tasting its bitter flavors. She tucks the dagger into Fredo’s boot, carries the sack to the vine matte and thrusts it in among the vines, deeper than one would think it could be thrust—they writhe, seeming to welcome it, the shells clacking ever so slightly. Moved by the notion of a duty sacred to her, she bows her head and prays to the blur of memory in which God is concealed, asking that His blessings be not so dire as is His wont. And then she is off, making her way with a stride that might strike the eye as less purposeful than Fredo’s, somewhat delicate and mincing, not quite a woman’s walk, nor yet a man’s.

Inside the shadow

of a fragrant jacaranda,

the ground at her feet,

carpeted by its lilac blossoms,

Annie watches the window

of the Germans’ bungalow,

her attention held by the woman—

how she sits with one leg raised,

her knee drawn up, foot braced on a rung

of a wooden chair,

and the other leg outflung,

as if she were in her petticoats,

her stink doused with perfume,

reclining on a harlot’s couch

in New Providence.

Framed by the lighted rectangle of the window, the Germans’ mood is easy to read. The man, Klose, is negligible. Weakness shines out of him. He fingers his wedding ring, plucks at his shirt, his anxiety displayed in every gesture. But Annie recognizes in the woman, Selkie, a strength akin to her own. The way she looks down at her breasts, inspecting the white cloth that covers them and flicking off a speck of imperfection, then restores her gaze to the window and smiles—like a woman who knows she’s being watched and enjoys the experience. Another couple walks past, headed for the bar, and Annie steps deeper into the shadow. Once she is certain no one else is about, she enters the bungalow. The Germans stare at her expectantly; their eyes fall to the cloth bundle under her arm.

“Is that it?” Selkie half-stands, then sits back down.

Annie holds up her hand, cautioning them to stay put; she quicksteps into the bedroom, has a look around, then retreats into the outer room and lowers the window shade.

“There’s no one else here,” says Klose.

“Where’s me brass?” asks Annie.

The Germans are confounded by the question, and Klose says, “What do you mean?”

“Me brass,” says Annie impatiently. “The money.”

Selkie says, “We will see the cross first.”

Annie sets the bundle down on the edge of the table and steps back. The Germans come to their feet and Annie snaps at Klose, “You…sit! Let the bitch have a look!”

Klose retakes his seat and Selkie—in her greed, unmindful of having been referred to as “the bitch”—leans over the table, begins unwinding the linen rags, going carefully, as if what they cover were made of glass. She gasps when she glimpses the gold and, when the cross is revealed in its entirety, its surface worked with carvings of birds and fruit, leaves and vines, symbols of nature’s abundance, the great ruby glowing like a heart, diamonds glinting coldly under the yellow light, it seems to Annie, as it always does, a pagan thing, an object of power…and Selkie, trailing her fingers over it, says in hushed tones, “Ach, du meine Gute!” She turns to Annie, apparently overcome, unable to speak, and, after hesitating a moment, she flings her arms about Annie’s neck, presses her lips to Annie’s mouth.

If Fredo were the recipient of that kiss, he would almost certainly push her away, but his soul has been tamped down into a quiet corner by Annie’s cloudy presence, and it has been a very long time between kisses for Annie. The pressure of Selkie’s breasts, her pliant lips, the intimate physicality of hips and loins…it’s as though these sensations are restoring Annie’s body. A phantom body, yet she feels it nonetheless. Her nipples ache with longing, her quim grows juicy. She cups Selkie’s buttocks and pulls her closer, recalling another, firmer ass, and darts her tongue into Selkie’s mouth…

the serpent-kissing,

soul-stealing, silk-skinned,

female-fleshed demoness of lust,

licking pleasure from a woman’s slit,

’til it yields lavish, thick-flowing treasure…

…Mary…

…and then she does push Selkie away, roughly, recognizing that she is not Mary, but a whore who would get on all fours for a gentleman’s mastiff if the purse were sufficient, or even were it not.

Klose is smiling, a crooked, febrile smile, and Selkie, flushed, wipes her mouth on the hem of her shirt with undue thoroughness, as if wanting to remove every trace of spittle, and Annie, her head spinning, dizzy from the kiss, no matter how false, once again demands her money.

“In the cabinet. The one on the left.” Klose points to it. “Shall I get it for you?”

Annie eases around the table to the cabinet he’s indicated. It’s empty, but for a biscuit tin. She removes the tin, rests it on the counter and pries up the lid. Packets of bills inside, each bound with a band that states the value of the packet is five thousand dollars. She tells Selkie to sit, saying that she has to make a count. Selkie complies, still dabbing at her mouth, and, their backs to Annie, the two Germans fondle the cross as if it were a thing alive.

Annie counts one packet—as stated, it contains five thousand dollars. Counting the rest will be a chore, but she’s determined not to be cheated. She counts three packets…or was it two? She’s not sure. Three, she decides. She glances over at the Germans. Selkie looks at her and smiles, then goes back to admiring the cross; she whispers to Klose. Partway through the fourth packet, Annie loses the count and has to start over. She’s muddleheaded—from the excitement, she thinks, and she tries to concentrate. Twenty, forty, sixty…sixty. She can’t recall what comes next. A wave of lightheadedness seems to lift her and she realizes that something is wrong. She’s unable to hold a thought in her head and two Selkies, both insubstantial, both wavering, are smiling at her. Klose says…Annie’s unclear as to what he says. The words reverberate, seeming to overlap. And Selkie laughs, a giddy, high-pitched cascade of musical tones that serves to destabilize Annie further. Selkie parodies a kiss, her lips making a smacking noise, and laughs again.

The fat sow is mocking her, Annie realizes, and that recognition centers her, spurs her to act. Furious, she bends down, reaching for the dagger tucked in Fredo’s boot. Blood rushes to her head. The linoleum tile of the kitchen floor confuses her. It’s too close. It takes her several seconds before she understands that she has fallen. Her eye locks on the pattern, an abstract of yellow and gray, like gray swirls of cloud in a yellow sky. She strains to move, to stand, but succeeds only in stirring, her hand scrabbling, scratching at the tiles. Poison, she thinks. They’ve poisoned her somehow…and then she remembers the kiss, Selkie’s scrupulous wiping of her mouth. Fury takes her again and she pushes up from the floor, but a foot planted between her shoulderblades flattens her. Their voices swoop and curvet above her, one high, one low, intermingling like two currents. Beneath her, gray clouds larded with white folds are racing in a yellow sky, running away toward the rim of the world, a flickering dimness toward which Annie, too, is borne…

…into an abyss

painted with demons,

like the bole of that opium pipe

Jack smoked—

he pointed them out to her.

This, the Demon of Black Rope Hell,

And this one,

the Demon of Unsavory Appetites.

You’d think he’d be fatter, wouldn’t you?

And here be

the Demon of Lost Hope,

my favorite. How twisted and pale he is!

An eye peering

from each of the hundred sores

spotting his sour flesh. Pity the sinner

who falls to him…

Jack!

Those demons now

reaching out for her…

…and on the far side of that dimness, after a night of undetermined length, Annie discovers the clouds are no longer racing, the yellow sky is once again a floor, the demons stoppered up in their bottle. She comes to her knees, disoriented, head pounding, and becomes aware of the silence in the bungalow. She struggles to her feet, grabbing the counter for support, and makes her way to the bedroom. The closet’s empty, all the hangers unused. Anger and distress fuel her. She’s been dishonored, cheated, robbed of the pittance for which she sold the cross, and…As her head clears, her intent sharpens and she draws her dagger, holds it by her side as she goes out into the night. The moon hangs an insanely jolly, silver Jack o’ Lantern grin amid countless stars and the beach gleams white, its silicates sparkling. No one is about. The cabin cruiser is gone. Annie walks to the end of the pier, gazing across the glittering sea toward Honduras. That was their plan: Honduras. But common sense tells her that they have changed their plan. They would choose to return to Mexico with their treasure, then to Germany. They’ll be west of Cay Cuchillo, and not far. Not nearly far enough. An hour or two, no more.

“Stand easy!”

The watchman, coming along the pier, his antique rifle at the ready, shirttails belling in the breeze.

“That you, Fredo? What you doing here so late?”

In his fifties, already an old man from hard work and drink, the watchman’s grizzled face relaxes from its stern expression as he approaches. An unsteadiness in his step, rum on his breath, he lowers the rifle. Beyond, the shadowy outline of his dory notches the beach.

“You been drinking?” he asks. “You such an early riser, I expect you must be drinking, you out this late.”

“Which way did the Germans sail?” she asks.

“The Germans?”

“The cabin cruiser,” Annie says. “A man and a woman.”

“Oh, yeah. Now that a peculiar thing. They claim they off to Puerto Cortez, but far as I can tell, they headed for the Chinchorro Bank. They all turned around.” A chuckle. “Hope they knows what they doing. A mon can come quickly to grief out there.” He lays his hand on Annie’s shoulder. “Let’s have us a drink, Fredo. I got a bottle under my chair.”

Without hesitation, Annie seizes the opportunity, drives the blade of the dagger deep into his abdomen, gives it a twist as she pulls it free. Before he can cry out, she yanks back his head, exposing his throat, and slashes him across the windpipe. The watchman falls, convulsing, and he is still convulsing when she wrenches off his belt and nudges his body off the pier. She hops down into the water, dragging the body under, holding her breath. Working blind, she secures him to a piling with the belt, leaving him among barnacles and tubeworms and crabs, all the little feeders for which he’ll provide a delightful feast, floating beneath the pier at a depth that will hide him until any urgency attaching to his loss has been forgotten. She strikes out for the beach, swimming with a strong, confident stroke. She’ll take the dory, go after Klose and his bitch. When she finds them, and find them she will, they’ll wish the Devil had come in her stead.

Early morning on the Chinchorro Bank. The sun burns a ragged hole through a pale blue, papery sky. A string of bone-white, lizard-haunted islands rises out of waters a thousand meters deep, the visible portion of a coral reef that stretches forty miles and more, from Belize into the waters off Quintana Roo. Fringed with mangrove, dabbed with spinach-colored vegetation, some of the islands bear living trees, but dead trees abound, their naked limbs hung with osprey nests. Overlying the reef, the sea is a patchwork of light and shadow, here dark over a bottom of yellow-green manatee grass, here a sun-dazzled expanse of aquamarine over white sand, dark again where a forest of feathery gorgonians overgrows a sloping shelf, brightening as Annie crosses a shallows above a bed of lettuce coral…She feels the slow, persistent beat of the coral’s mind on the perimeters of her consciousness, watches the reef’s traffic of angelfish and sergeant majors, tangs and jackknife, obeying the direction of that mind, flitting back and forth in schools, slaves to its unguessable purpose. She knows these waters, as much as they can be known. Ships out of Cartagena would ply north to Havana, then sail the western passage along the bank, and the William would lurk by Cay Lobo, picking off the weakest, though Annie would urge Jack to seek bigger prizes. She was ever hard on him. On the day he was taken to be hanged, she told him she was sorry to see him in chains and on his way to Deadman’s Key, but if he’d been more of a man, put up more of a fight, he might have avoided that fate.

There’s no sign of the Selkie. Perhaps, she thinks, she has miscalculated. She should have sighted them by now, and she wonders if they were foolish enough to try the windward passage. If so, they may have gone down, down into a graveyard already populated by hundreds of ships, some sent there by Annie’s hand. And yet she feels they’re close by. Engineless, they wouldn’t want to be caught out in the channel with weather coming and the cross on board; they would have allowed the boat to drift close to shore before trying to effect repairs. Leaden clouds are pushing in from the west, black brooms of rain sweeping the sea. She needs to find them before the squall hits.

Sputter and pop

of the dory’s outboard.

Annie cuts the motor and drifts.

Winded silence.

It was a day like this she first met Jack. Clear, with a squall in the offing. In the market at New Providence. She carrying a basket, tarrying by a fishwife’s stall, inspecting a fresh-caught bonita, and there he was, walking with his mates, like a lion among dogs, handsome in a tri-corner and an embroidered frock coat, a full head taller than the rest. In answer to her inquiry, the fishwife said, “Why that’s Calico Jack, miss. The pirate.” He was not much of a pirate, Annie learned. Too cautious by half. Cock like an Irish toothpick. Still, if he’d had a lion’s heart, she would never have strayed…though Mary would have tested her loyalties, no matter the circumstance, teaching her the woman’s way. The night Jack caught them at it, scissoring their quims in the sail locker, he made a show of outrage and wounded pride, but was intrigued by their display and let himself be drawn into a game of rub-and-tickle, seduced by shy looks and clever smiles. La, but that was a merry voyage! The crew rarely saw their captain abovedecks, and then only when they would anchor off the edge of the reef, lower a longboat and go fishing for shark, she and Jack and Mary, bait fish flopping in the bilge, their mineral reds and blues and yellows glistening like rare gemstones. The William might have sailed in circles and mutiny been muttered had not the first mate been a man of sober purpose and scant imagination.

God’s light! Where are they?

Having reached the end of one cay, Annie restarts the motor and points the dory toward the next, about two hundred meters away. Then a dazzle hard by the tip of the island, as of the sun off a metal surface. She cuts the outboard and peers toward it, shielding her eyes. There. By that cove. An off-white shape against whiter sand. She unships the oars and begins to row. After thirty meters, she’s certain it’s the Selkie. She quits rowing and assesses the situation. Unless she waits until nightfall, it’s unlikely she’ll be able to catch them unawares, and she doesn’t want to wait. She’s been too long in the body. The tastes of this world are too rich, their joys too poignant. She’s grown accustomed to being desireless and dreamless, the merest stripe of her old self. The memories circling her now, pecking and clawing at her brain…she yearns to have them fade, become as ephemeral as monsters in fog. Even the good ones have their attendant pains.

Her stomach growls. She wishes she hadn’t ruined those sausages. Water seeped through a rip in the foil while she was stowing the watchman’s body beneath the pier, making a soggy mess of the packet. She takes the dagger from her boot. Her best chance of approaching the Selkie without being noticed, she concludes, is to swim. She has a sailor’s fear of the water, and of sharks, but she’s dealt with that fear before. The sun strong on her back, she rows to within a hundred meters of the cabin cruiser, hoping the light chop is sufficiently busy to hide the dory, and drops the sea anchor. She shucks her boots and strips off her shirt, bites down on the dagger’s blade and slips over the side. The water feels like a new, cool skin.

As she swims, rain needles the sea and the leading edge of the squall darkens the sky. Annie’s less than twenty meters from the Selkie, when a figure in shorts appears in the stern. Klose. She stops swimming, keeping afloat by moving her arms. Klose appears to be staring directly at her, but gives no sign of alarm. He has a drink from a plastic bottle, then ducks down, going out of sight. He must be attempting repairs on the engine. She starts to swim again, dog-paddling, not wanting to make a splash, angling toward the bow. Music, faint and jangly, comes across the distance. On reaching the boat, she realizes the bow is too high—she’ll have to board in the stern. She works her way around to the other side of the craft and hangs onto a projection. The music is cut off. Selkie calls out, asking a question in German. Klose’s response, also in German, is curt. Annie waits for the music to resume, but it does not. There is only the slap of wavelets against the hull, the hiss of the rain, an occasional sound of metal on metal. She’ll have to be quick.

She gathers herself, seeking in the stream of time a propitious moment, a moment that summons her, and then she launches herself from the water, jaws clamped tightly upon the dagger, clutching the rail; her feet find purchase and she vaults over it, landing in a half-crouch. Kneeling by the open hatch, wrench in hand, Klose turns toward her, his aghast, grease-smeared face a parody of shock. Annie stabs downward, but the blade is deflected by Klose’s wrench. He calls to Selkie, tries to stand, but he’s twisted around, thrown off-balance by the blow. She slips behind him, bars an arm about his neck, strangling his outcry, and hauls him erect; she bends him backward and drives the dagger into his side, excavating under the ribs with the blade. He stiffens, thrashes about, makes an effort to see her, as if hoping to engage her mercy with his eyes. She stabs again, quieting his struggles, though he pries at her arm, which is slick from his spittle. A third blow quiets him utterly. His fingers unpeel from her arm, the wrench falls, he slumps to the deck. The rain, coming down harder now, sluices away his blood before it can pool.

At the bottom of the companionway, the door to the cabin stand ajar. Selkie must have heard the commotion, and Annie waits for her to emerge, to call to her husband, to peek out.

The cabin cruiser rocks on the heavying chop.

Gusts of wind slanting the rain,

whitecaps pitching,

land and sea gone gray as death.

At length, alert for surprises, she creeps down the ladder, pushes open the door with the point of the dagger, and passes through the galley into the sleeping quarters. Selkie is lying on her belly in a bunk, one foot in the air, wearing a pair of opaque pink panties. She’s leafing through a magazine, headphones over her ears. Annie’s captivated by the shape of her leg, the curve of her back. So like Mary in her carefree attitude, yet entirely unlike her in form. Plush and soft where Mary was lean and muscular. Annie steps inside the cabin and undergoes a dislocation. It’s as if she’s standing in a ruder cabin with dark, ill-fitted boards and a port whose glass is warped and bespotted with birdlime. The vision dissolves and once again the windows are narrow, the walls paneled, the bunk carpentered out of some polished reddish wood. Yet the shade of that other cabin persists and she thinks it may be a sign of more significant persistence. She recalls a Hindu sailmaker aboard the William who told stories of souls passing from one flesh to another, stories that charmed her with their easy, airy logic and caused her to rethink the moral oversimplifications of the Christian creed (not that she was ever a zealot)—it seemed just that the character of one’s life, as the sailmaker claimed, was a punishment for sins committed during a previous existence, that good be rewarded with perfect emptiness, that evil men be reborn as calves or suckling pigs, kings as chattels, and pirates as whores, all that was hard and strong in them made pliant and submissive.

Selkie turns onto her side and sees Annie. She registers the blood on his clothing. Her eyes drop to the dagger, sheathed in Klose’s blood. A look of fright occupies her face. She presses back into the corner of the bunk, breasts nodding, one hand clutching the sheet, the other braced against the wall.

“The money,” Annie says.

Tremulously, Selkie says, “In the galley. The cabinet under the sink. Please! Don’t hurt me.”

Annie half-turns, intending to investigate, but is struck by a more vivid dislocation—Mary, brown and naked, holding out her arms, inviting her into an embrace.

“Mary?” Annie says. “Is it you?”

She cannot believe it, yet neither can she deny the temptation toward belief—she wonders now if the things of herself she recognized in Selkie were intimations of Mary reborn in this harlot’s flesh. They shared a soul, she and Mary, though Annie owned the stronger half of it.

“Mary?” she says again, and her heart beats faster, as if those two syllables keyed the racing of her blood.

Selkie’s fear has been diluted by bewilderment, and Annie, uncertain herself, comes a step nearer.

“Do you not know me, Mary?” she asks. “It’s Annie.”

Bewilderment, again. And then a canniness shows itself in Selkie’s expression. Hesitantly, she puts a hand to her temple, the gesture seeming to convey that she’s experiencing an inner turmoil, that what Annie said has waked something inside her and provoked a fleeting recognition; yet it’s such an artificial gesture, it fails to convince, and the look of dismay that accompanies it accents this failure.

“Annie?” she says. “I…”

She makes a second pass with her hand, the fingertips just touching her cheek. A feeble noise issues from her throat. It appears she’s caught between grief and the memory of love, between her husband’s blood and a fleeting glimpse of another time.

Annie realizes that Selkie must have heard the story of Dagger Key from Klose and, confronted by this dangerous man with her husband’s blood on his knife, someone she must assume is deranged, she’s attempting to play a tune he’ll dance to—but that she’s acting is no proof of anything. Mary was always quick-witted. It may be she’s both acting and stirred by a memory.

Lowering the dagger, Annie sits down on the edge of the bunk, places her hand on Selkie’s thigh. A tremor runs through the milky flesh, but Selkie does not freeze up, rather her expression grows dreamy and unfocused; her eyes drift to Annie’s fingers, lying so near her quim. And Annie, possessed by yet another memory, re-envisioning the time when Mary first revealed herself and, lying back, let her knees fall apart to show Annie her rosy…Annie twigs aside the flimsy pink fabric and slides a finger along Selkie’s lips. Already moist. She cannot be, Annie thinks, so good at playing a part that her body would not betray her.

Selkie’s belly quakes, her hips bridge up off the mattress as Annie thrust two fingers inside her. The cabin shrinks around them. There is no corpse abovedecks, no history of betrayal. All that exists is the sounds of rain and wind, the rolling of the boat, the bunk. Lost amid the recollection of other days with the rain sawing and wind gusting hard, the William knocked about on a choppy sea, Annie cuts away the panties and lowers between Mary’s legs, Selkie’s legs, making play with tongue, teeth and lips, until Selkie’s outcry lights the sexual darkness and her thighs clamp viselike to Annie’s head. They lie quietly for a time. Annie rests her head on Selkie’s belly, her mind thronged with contraries, the urge to have done with this fancy contending with the desire to linger, to make of the day an idyll, or more than a day. After three hundred years, she has earned a bit of freedom, has she not? She exults in the taste coating her tongue, the scent cloying her nostrils. Then Selkie, Mary…she shifts away and sits on her haunches. Tentatively, she fingers the top button of Annie’s shorts and, when Annie doesn’t object, she undoes the buttons and slides the shorts down past her hips. Annie’s momentarily put off by the sight of a man’s yard standing to attention between her thighs and, when Selkie takes it in her mouth, it seems unnatural to know a man’s portion of pleasure. But in that milk-pale face she finds the lineaments of Mary’s darker, angular face. She closes her eyes, holds tight to the dagger and recalls a fiercer delight.

In the afterglow of sex, Selkie cuddles, her arm flung across Annie’s chest. She whispers, “Oh, Annie. It is you!” She, Selkie, claims to have been awakened by Annie, a process that began when she met him at the café. Met her, rather. It’s all so confusing! When she touched her hand, she had this curious frisson, a sense of there having been something between them. Does he remember that moment? Did he feel it, too? Ever since, bits and pieces of memory have leaked into her head. And then the kiss…She’s sorry about that. Alvin forced her to paint her lips with the drug. Of course, she was a willing complicitor. She hadn’t recognized Annie yet. Not entirely. But when they kissed, that’s when the memories really started to come. She can’t recall much about their time together, mere fragments, but she will remember, she thinks, with Annie’s help. And now, well, they’ll sell the cross and then they’ll travel, just as they always wanted. England and the Continent. Asia. Annie is charmed by this portrait of an ideal life and makes an affirmative noise, and Selkie, appearing to gain in confidence, prattles on about getting a little cottage somewhere, a home base. For the most part, Annie believes none of what Selkie says, yet she can’t discount it utterly, because Selkie’s physical reactions remind her so much of Mary’s. When Annie toys with her nipples, she shivers and gives a little musical sound that’s identical to the one Mary used to make. She thinks it strange that Selkie’s pillowy breasts would respond the same way as Mary’s, which were the size of onions. Yet all her soft cries and responses bear an astounding similarity to Mary’s and, as a result, Annie allows herself to be seduced by Selkie’s dream of the future, however calculated it may be. It’s as if the cabin has been crammed with the invisible furniture of another life…

…with bolts of silk,

half-unrolled,

gold coins spilled from a chest

the size of a piglet,

the sound of Jack pissing

into a pewter jug,

a tall mirror with an ebon frame

reflecting the tumbled bed,

two tousled female heads,

and beyond,

past the window frame,

a dawn sky, a flotilla of lavender clouds…

Annie lives among those clouds

for a time.

She breathes in spices,

tastes a softer clime…

Then, shocked from that dream, perhaps by some ancient reflex, a sense of wrongness, a ghostly alarm given, or perhaps it’s simply a matter of the overcast brightening, the squall lessening, the change in the weather alerting her to the need for action, she makes one of those abrupt decisions upon which her life has always turned. She leans over Selkie, who’s half-asleep, and, using the point of the dagger, nicks the artery in the side of her neck. Selkie’s eyes snap open. She clamps a hand to the wound to stifle the blood spray. She mouths a word: Annie. She pleads silently for a life that’s spewing out between her fingers.

“Go,” Annie says to her, retreating from the bunk. “Hurry from this world.”

Selkie gurgles; her eyes widen further.

Annie’s heart is numb, her spirit is numb. She leaves Selkie struggling on the bed, goes into the galley, looks in the cabinet and collects the biscuit tin; on the same shelf as the tin lies a bulky object wrapped in linen rags. She hesitates, then lets it lie. They’ve paid a sufficient price to carry it with them into eternity and, without the burden of the cross, Annie reckons that she’s one step closer to extinction…and, mayhap, rebirth. Serve her right, it would, if she were to be Mary’s victim in another existence. She snatches a hatchet from the wall and tests the edge—it will serve to scuttle the boat. She steps back into the sleeping quarters. Selkie’s fingers are still pressed to the wound, her eyes are open, but judging by the blood pooling on the sheets, she is either dead or close to death. There’s still a trace of color in her face. Annie studies her for a moment, feeling both regret and vindication. The voluptuous body on the bunk and the memory of Mary offer a dissonance and an affinity that she cannot resolve. It seems that she has been confronted by something approximating this odd imbalance in every relationship she’s had.

“If you are Mary, God rest ye. We’ll meet again someday,” Annie says by way of farewell. “If you’re not, you should remember it’s ever a bad omen to sail on a vessel that bears your name.”

It’s closer to morning than midnight when Fredo returns to Swann’s Cafe, walking the beach from the pointed tip of the island. He’s wearing a clean T-shirt and trousers that he knows must belong to Klose, and he has no memory of what happened aboard the Selkie. The biscuit tin under his arm, however, tells him that no good came that day to the German couple. And, too, he has a cloudy memory of a struggle with Wilton Barrios that will not come clear. High, thin clouds rush across the moon, reducing but not obscuring its radiance, and the wind blows steadily at his back as if pushing him toward home. When he reaches the L-shaped palm, he feels about in the sand for a key, finds it, and opens the door to the café. He digs with his hands in the packed sand behind the counter. Once the hole is deep enough, he places the biscuit tin in it, covers it with sand and stamps it smooth. Only then does he light a kerosene lamp. He sits at the counter, stares at the brightly painted boards for the longest time—they have the look of a puzzle that’s been fitted together, but the puzzle in his mind is scattered and fathomless. Exhausted, he puts his head down on his elbows. He drifts toward sleep, but the thought of the murders he almost certainly has committed pricks him to alertness and he sits up straight. Immediately, he wants to rest his head again, but instead he takes the broom from behind the counter and begins to sweep. He has been sweeping for about fifteen minutes, losing himself in the task, when the door creaks, giving him a fright. Emily peeks in, her hair covered by a paisley scarf. He doesn’t know what to say to her, so he lowers his head and takes an ineffectual swipe with the broom.

“Why you don’t come home, Fredo?” she asks, slipping into the café. “You know I’m worrying about you.”

“I just get back,” he said. “I thought I do some cleaning.”

She steps close, puts her hands on his waist. “You all right?”

He drops the broom and enfolds her in an embrace. Tears start from his eyes. They hold one another in silence, and then Emily pushes him away. “You hungry? I make you a sandwich if you want.”

He sits again at the counter while she busies herself in the kitchen. A brownish stain on his thumbnail attracts his attention. He scrapes at it with a fingernail until it is gone. Through the kitchen door, he can see Emily’s back—she’s bent over the cutting board. “How the boys?” he asks.

“Palace, he act angry all the time you gone. That how he show he’s worried, I expect. Jenry…” She makes a fretful noise with her tongue. “I don’t know what to do about that boy.” She glances at him over his shoulder. “You get the money?”

“Yeah. I bury it back of the counter.”

“You have trouble getting it?”

He lets the question hang for a moment. “I gone for…what is it? Must be more than a day, and you ask me that? Damn right, I have me some trouble! There’s blood on these hands. I don’t remember nothing about it, but I know!”

Not moving a muscle, Emily stands with her head down, back bowed, hands on the cutting board.

“I know,” says Fredo weakly.

Emily returns to her labors, but says nothing. She finishes the sandwiches and carries them to Fredo. Cheese, lettuce, avocado. And bacon.

“I got that bacon for you yesterday,” she says. “I had to cook it up, or else it spoil.”

Fredo nods his thanks, has a bite. The taste fuels his hunger—suddenly he’s ravenous and wolfs down half a sandwich. Emily fetches him a warm Coke and he takes a swig.

“We going to give some of that money to the church,” Emily says firmly.

Fredo swallows. “You think if we slip Jesus a little something extra, that make it right?”

“Don’t talk that way to me! Don’t make out it’s only you gots to bear this burden! I bearing it, too. Difference is, I glad to bear it for the boys.”

Fredo has another bite, chews. “Sorry.”

“I don’t need your sorry, I needs you to be a man.”

“Ain’t I proved that to you? You can’t allow me to have a bad feeling about things?”

Emily comes around to his side of the counter, puts her arms around him and kisses his cheek. “We both of us on edge. Things going to go better now.”

“This thing with Wilton,” Fredo says. “I can’t get it out of my head.”

“What about Wilton?”

He relates his clouded memory of a struggle between he and Wilton up at the notch.

“I’m not going to waste tears over Wilton,” says Emily. “If it happen, it were because he try and steal from us. The same with the Germans. Two days, Fredo. You gone two days. You know they must try and cheat you.”

“True,” he says.

“No matter her evil ways, Annie always protect this family. We in the clear—you can trust her to make certain of that. All that’s left is for us to live with what she done.” Emily cups his face in both her hands. “Together, we strong enough. It take some doing, but we’ll manage.”

The flickering light softens the iron of her expression. He seems to see down to her irresolute self and understands that she’s as frightened as he of the mortal consequences of Annie’s crimes. Oddly enough, that comforts him more than her assurances. He kisses the knuckles of her hands and sighs.

“If it up to me,” he says, “I throw that damn cup into the sea. The dagger, too.”

She pulls away, sits on a stool beside him. “Maybe we should take the money and leave the island behind. Maybe that be best for everyone.”

“It’s something to think about,” he says. “But I too weary to make decisions now. We got time to work it through.”

“Why don’t you go on up and get some sleep? I finish with the cleaning.”

“I ain’t ready to sleep. You need anything from town?”

“Some fish would be nice. Maybe a barracuda head for a stew.”

“Nothing else?”

“The usual. Bread, bananas…you know.”

They settle back into their familiar roles, discussing the functioning of the café, the household, taking refuge in gentle talk that seems to rise up like smoke to conceal the strangeness of the past days, Emily laughing as Fredo tells her about Garnett Steadman, his story of how he saw a vast congregation of mackerel off the reef, and Fredo chuckling over Emily’s gossip about Annabelle Lister and her several lovers.

Outside, the sky is purpling. Some of the stars have disappeared. A solitary wave crunches on the reef. The wind has all but died, an occasional breeze lifting a palm frond, causing a hibiscus blossom to nod. Crabs glide and scuttle across the beach, pausing in their race, hearkening to an indefinite signal. Somewhere inland, an engine sputters to life. Beneath the dock at Treasure Cove, the night watchman floats in murky water, tiny fish swimming in and out of his eyeless sockets. In the notch, the vine matte writhes, clacking its braided cowrie shells, and grows still. Fifty feet below, in a thicket of thorny shrubs, the corpse of Wilton Barrios has been rendered unrecognizable by dogs. Vultures soar on an aerial above hills that are starting to show green. The morning widens, the eastern sky is pinked. All the mysteries of Dagger Key are being obscured beneath the semblance of an ordinary day, buried in light. What’s true remains unknown, what’s false is abundantly clear. Fredo steps from the café, fires up a cigarette, and stares toward Belize. His exhalation suggests an expansive measure of relief. A pariah dog ambling along the edge of the water pauses to sniff at the still-pulsing body of a jellyfish.

The seagull’s wing

divides the wave,

the lights of Swann’s Café

grow dim…