Piyari attends the funeral service. She travels to Marion by taxi so that Heroman is free to take Harry wherever he might need to go. He asks to be taken to the coast. It is there, where Rose went missing, that he will spend the morning.
The road ascends gradually into forested hills. The air, cooler than in the town, is redolent with the sweet and sour of the tropical forest’s constant cycle of decomposition and rebirth.
Here and there, sudden clearings of well-tended lawn punctuate the miles of jungle through which the road to the ocean cuts. In the center of each clearing squats a modest, unpainted wood house. Curtains billow in the open windows and doorways. How many people, presumed missing, might be seeking all manner of refuge in places like these, he wonders. As Heroman drives slowly along the dangerously winding and narrow road, Harry peers into the houses, but not a soul seems to be about.
Heroman points to the sky ahead. A flock of green parrots flaps from one range of forest to another.
As they descend, the verdant lushness recedes. Stretches of dead man’s fingers, devil’s claw, and cockscomb hug the roadside. Guanaga and cuticut grow high, and pigeon peas are in bloom. Lush bamboo outlines the meandering passage of a river. Every now and then a single towering coconut tree punctuates the landscape. Soon the soil on either side of the road changes entirely from moist black dirt to drier coarse sand out of which lofty coconuts soar. Between their lanky trunks, Harry spots in the distance the powerful breaking waves of the foamy Caribbean Sea. A chill washes over him. As they head toward the seafront roadway, the air turns salty and oily. In no time, he hears the rhythmic crack of the ocean’s waves.
Harry asks to be taken to the area where the Bihars have their beach house.
“Oh God, man, I had a feeling you was going to ask me this. What you want to go there for?”
Harry insists on being dropped off, not at the house directly but in its vicinity.
“You know you shouldn’t go there. Why you want to go and torture yourself so for? Suppose now she wash up and is you and me who will find she?”
Nevertheless, Heroman drives to an undeveloped lot not far from the Bihars’ house. Harry is firm that he needs to be alone and asks Heroman to meet him back in an hour.
He walks uncertainly through the thicket of crocuses, fallen branches, and nuts out onto the open beach. He observes the taut silkiness in the belly of a cresting wave, wondering why some bodies, once snatched by the sea, are thrown back out, and why some are never returned.
At the water’s edge, he ambles toward a house he ascertains from Piyari’s story to be the Bihars’ beach house. The glare coming off the water and the scorched sand is merciless. He becomes uncomfortable, the hair on his body rising and stiffening. A policeman leans against the front wall of the house. Harry remains close to the water, but the man sees Harry looking in his direction and greets him with a nod. Harry returns the gesture and continues walking straight ahead, scanning not the beach or the water but the dark mass of foliage growing beneath the endless thicket of coconut trees. A rustling in the bushes behind him frightens him. He spins around, expectant, the pulse at his temples pounding. It is only a wild and skinny beach dog emerging to pick at scavenger birds’ leftover fish parts.
A quick glance toward the house again, and there is the hammock of Piyari’s story, still hanging between two coconut trees, the sliding doors to the house, the mound of coconuts, the louvered windows.
His head has become hot. Perspiration runs down his temples. He has brought no drinking water with him, and there is no tap in sight. The other holiday houses are closed up, no caretakers to be seen. Still, he cannot, dares not, approach that house to ask for anything. He removes his shoes and socks and tucks his belongings behind a fallen tree trunk. He rolls the hems of his trousers to midcalf and enters the water. The salt water he splashes against his face and on his head calms him instantly. Beyond the breakers, the water seems serene, almost as still as the water in front of his house in Elderberry Bay.
Rose swimming in the icy waters in front of his house there comes to mind. He recalls watching her, pleased that she was so clearly enjoying herself, and then turning away briefly, only to look back and find that she had disappeared. Then he saw her, a speck walking up the beach toward him. She had seen the small child clinging to an inflatable tire, so she swam down the coast and pulled the girl to shore. She had told Harry then that most drownings occur because of panic. Even in a riptide, she instructed him, a person shouldn’t panic. “Stay calm and go with the current. Let it take you where it will,” she had informed him, “and if you can just ride it, you will end up in still waters, perhaps a distance away.” He wonders where along the coast her body might have drifted. He studies the faint curving coastline toward the north, then turns to regard the southernmost peninsula. Couldn’t she have followed her own counsel, let it take her where it would?
He scoops and splashes more water on the top of his head, pats the back of his neck with it. A wave has broken close and is rushing forward. He is suddenly in water up to his knees. He looks behind him. The water has crept all the way up and stopped just before the tree trunk behind which his clothes are stashed. For several long seconds, there is no beach. Just as swiftly, the water retreats and, in rejoining the ocean, tumbles impatiently over new waves already pulsing toward shore. The sand under his feet slides away, and he sinks in deeper. Unsteadily he treads backward until he is in water so shallow that it only swirls about his feet. Silver mud skippers leap over the rippling water, and sea cockroaches nose their bodies vertically into the sand. He squints at the hazy northerly coast again. He turns and faces the peninsula. Around that crooked finger of land is the south coast of the island, uncultivated land, mosquito- and sand-fly-ridden beaches and coves that are accessible from land only by brush-cutting high razor grass and then ascending steep cliffs. There are no major towns down there, only a string of fishing villages. This Harry knows, for Raleigh is one of these villages. So many years later, those villages still remain distanced from the main towns. To get to them from here by car, one must travel all the way back to Marion, then carry on from there on the circuitous Link Road and over the Muldoon Bridge. It is not an area of the country that would likely have changed too much over the years. A body deposited along the south coast by a sea current has a good chance of being caught there and lost forever. He puts his hand in the pocket of his trousers and clutches the chain. He recalls Piyari’s words: “Day before she had went in the sea wearing it, so why, I want to know, that morning she remove it?”
The words repeat, mantra-like, in his head. As if whacked on his back with a thick plank of wood he stiffens: what if Rose counted on the chain landing in his hands? He shades his eyes from the glare and squints hard in the direction of the south peninsula. It is a good distance away. Perhaps as far away as Howe Sound’s far shore is from his house in Elderberry Bay. She told him, during idle conversation, that if she had to, she could swim that distance. Forced to, she would know how to pace herself.
What if she had put an inordinate amount of faith in Piyari? What if she had hoped that he would return to the island, and that Piyari would reveal to him all that was necessary? And that he would calculate what no one else likely would? Such thinking, he quickly admonishes himself, is foolish dreaming. If she took such a chance, she would have had more faith in him than he has in himself. A bigger wave prepares to break even closer to the shore. Running toward his clothing, he chides himself; such ideas are the dementia of denial. He slips a hand in his pocket again, grasping the chain tightly. Wasn’t it too strange a coincidence that she had removed it from around her neck on the very day she disappeared though? He whips up his bundle and races through the trees in search of Heroman.