In front of Orient Beach, Bud hooks to the mooring ball next to the catamaran TikiTaki. The nudies are wading out, drinks held high, for the sunset nude cruise around the island. Most are blood-red from their first day in the sun and already drunk. Lolita goes below in disgust, but he knows she is watching through a porthole.
With binoculars, Bud inspects the new La Belle Creole—shaped just like the previous one, only elevated on concrete piers, probably anchored to bedrock. The restaurant might survive the next hurricane, but everything built on the beach is just another taunt to Mother Nature. Even as blue metal panels are nailed to the restaurant’s roof joists, a wood deck underneath the floor among the round piers is crowded with customers. There is a walkup bar in the back, but it is too shadowy inside to see who is running it. He thinks he recognizes Betty walk out on the beach and look back at the construction crew. She turns and looks directly at Carpe Diem. Knowing Betty, she would know the name of his boat, but the wind has the transom facing out to sea.
As TikiTaki raises sails on the far side of the reef, Lolita comes back up and sits beside Bud on the aft bench. He jumps up and acts like he is pulling off his swim trunks. Lolita pulls him back down and wags her finger. She smiles easily now, swatting his arm when he teases her.
Bud takes her hand and points to the ring on her thumb. “Nicki.” Then he points to La Belle Creole. “Nicki—take this to her.” Lolita acts confused, but Bud thinks she understands. “Regresara, por favor.” Her eyes become wet, not from what he is saying, but the pain she reads in his face. Bud shuts his eyes. It is the only way. She touches his arm before going aft to pull in the dinghy. Bud thinks of his grandmother, her story of arriving at Saint Martin with nothing more than her bathing suit and a dinghy. Lolita has that kind of grit.
He will miss her.
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The Creole girl pulls the rubber dinghy out of the surf. When she looks back at the yacht, the bearded man points to the restaurant. He has sent her in for booze, Betty thinks. The girl leaves her deck shoes in the dinghy to more easily walk in the powdery sand, then picks a path through the congestion of umbrellas and beach chairs, averting her eyes when she passes a nudist. She walks to the steps of the deck underneath the restaurant and stops, seemingly unsure what to do next.
Betty calls out to her, “Do you want liquor?”
“Nicki?”
Betty reflexively glances to the bar at the back of the deck. The girl points to where Betty looked.
“¿Está Nicki?”
The girl reads the answer in Betty’s face, mounts the steps and strides purposely between tables. Betty follows, expecting trouble.
The girl pulls the ring from her thumb and plops it on the bar. Nicki gives her a questioning look before picking it up and examining it, comparing it to the ring on her own finger. The girl discerns what she wants to know from Nicki’s gasp.
“Bud.” The girl turns and points. “No!” she shouts when she sees the yacht she arrived in leaving. She bolts back out to the beach, running along the water’s edge to the dinghy. The yacht is already past the reef, the jib sail raised. The girl frantically tries to push the dinghy back in the water and then, when she realizes it is too late, sits on the nose of it crying into her hands.
“Is that Bud?” Nicki asks Betty.
“Is that his ring?”
Nicki slips the ring on her pointer finger, Bud’s ring size. “Yes.” She looks out at the yacht, the mainsail at the midpoint of being hoisted. “We’ve got to stop him. He murdered William. I just know it.”
“Call the shore patrol. They’ll pick him up, but I don’t think you could prove anything. Even if he admitted it, what would that get you?”
“We can’t just let him get away.”
“Nicki, you’re the reason William is dead. Bud let you get away.”
Nicki looks out at the girl. “Why dump his girlfriend here?”
“My guess is they’re not lovers, if that’s what you’re thinking. She’s in trouble and Bud wants you to take care of her. That ring is her letter of introduction.”
Betty walks to the edge of the deck, watches the girl walk knee-deep into the surf, chin jutted out defiantly even as her shoulders heave with sobs. The girl has been here before. Had Lily Ana not stood destitute at that very spot—and Zuzu while deciding to take her own life? Had she herself, pregnant and alone, not looked to the ocean that way? She thinks of the enigmatic Golden Maiden stuck in the sand facing the bay.
Nicki walks up behind Betty. “What should I do?”
Betty leans back against the wooden rail and looks Nicki in the eyes. “You’ll do the right thing. This place has a tradition of being a safe harbor for wayward women—you included.” Betty turns and looks out at the girl again. “I’ll take over the bar. You both speak Spanish. Why not take her to the cabin to meet the baby? You two have things to discuss.”
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