A thousand miles to the south of Cape Cod, the island of Green Turtle Cay sprawls among the Abaco chain, the most northeasterly cluster of the Bahamas, far from the glitter of Nassau and Freeport. Like most Bahamian cays, Green Turtle is little more than a hefty sandbar, three miles long and barely half a mile wide, its elongated shape contoured by the flow of the Gulf Stream over many millions of years. The only community of any consequence on Green Turtle Cay is the old colonial town of New Plymouth, population five hundred, whose quaint wooden houses painted in gaudy primary colours stand within teetering garden fences enclosing flocks of chickens that scratch and gossip in the yards.
Green Turtle Cay offers many features to attract a world-weary middle-aged man who has spent twenty years of his life as a Boston homicide detective. The island is free of grinding poverty and serious crime, and no gusty winds flood the November air with bone-chilling dampness. In their place, gentle trades and soft morning breezes stir the grass under the warming sun.
Green Turtle Cay is not heaven. But it is as close to paradise as a tough ex-cop might expect to get.
At the opposite end of the cay from New Plymouth, a ring of hills encloses a quiet harbour and its small yacht club, dimly lit waterfront bar and outdoor restaurant. Atop the hill behind the club, on the highest point of the island, sits a gray cabin with a teetering television antenna and shiny stainless steel chimney.
The cabin’s several windows, located with no apparent logic on each of its four walls, look out upon sharply contrasting vistas. To the west the view is tranquil: A gentle slope leads down to the sheltered harbour and several anchored yachts. To the east lies Ocean Beach on the harsh and untamed side of the island where the waves of the Atlantic, unencumbered by outlying islands or reefs, roll ashore with a soothing endless thunder.
The morning following Cora Godwin’s death, the resident of the hilltop cabin was walking hand in hand along Ocean Beach with a woman from Pittsburgh named Barbara Mayall. Barbara Mayall, who had recently separated from her husband, was thirty-five years old and staying in a villa on nearby Treasure Cay, a sprawling ten-room oceanside home owned by her father, whose company was the largest supplier of industrial minerals in the continental United States. She was slim with shoulder-length blond hair, wide-set pale green eyes and the wary smile of someone who, having recently suffered severe pain, is prepared to receive anguish from any source. At any time.
On this morning her smile was wider than it had been since the day three months earlier when her husband of six years confessed he had been having an affair with a woman who worked for his firm’s bank. An affair he did not wish to end. An affair which afforded him, he was convinced, more future happiness and fulfillment than his marriage to Barbara Mayall. After several weeks of emotional trauma, at the urging of her outraged father, Barbara escaped to Treasure Cay.
She spent the first weeks in long periods of quiet mourning interrupted by explosions of rage. She alternately cursed her husband and declared her love for him, secluded herself in her room for days and emerged to throw extravagant parties, rejected her friends for offering advice and embraced them for their tenderness and understanding. After almost two months, she agreed to join an excursion aboard a yacht sailing to Green Turtle Cay to sample the harbourside restaurant’s famed blackened grouper. After the meal, everyone retreated to the restaurant’s low-ceilinged bar, tended five days a week by a retired Boston homicide detective named Joe McGuire. The evening was uneventful. Sailing back to Treasure Cay in the moonlight, Barbara declared she was growing stronger each day, and that she was ready to rejoin the world. Her friends congratulated her. The word “breakthrough” was repeated several times, and shortly after disembarking Barbara politely deflected a pass made by the husband of a friend from her college days.
The following day she returned to the bar on Green Turtle Cay for cocktails. And again the day after that, traveling aboard the mid-afternoon ferry from Treasure Cay.
“How are you?” McGuire asked when Barbara Mayall entered the bar the third time and settled herself on a stool directly in front of him.
“In free fall,” she answered. “Got anything for that?”
“Sorry.” McGuire offered a tight smile. “No parachutes.”
“What if I get drunk enough so I don’t care whether I come down or not?”
“Just might work.” McGuire held up a bottle of tequila. “With orange juice, right?”
They talked through the fading light of day while the harsh Caribbean sunshine mellowed into dusk. McGuire mixed tequila sunrises and listened to Barbara Mayall describe her father’s villa on Treasure Cay and how he had offered its use for as long as she needed it.
“Which might be the rest of my life,” she confided. The admission clouded her face. She turned away from him to blink at the oversized navigation charts displayed on the far wall, her eyes shining.
McGuire watched her carefully, admiring how loose strands of her blond hair swept in gentle waves across her forehead and above her wide-set pale green eyes. He found her surpassingly attractive and when she lowered her head and continued to blink spasmodically, he handed her a tissue. “Have you seen the view of the harbour up behind the boathouse?” he asked as she brought it to her eyes.
She whispered, “No.”
McGuire called across to the bar manager to announce he was taking an hour’s break. Then, leading her by the hand, he guided her through the kitchen, out the rear entrance of the bar and up a series of wooden steps to a tired white wicker loveseat set on a small terrace. She sat and rested her head on his shoulder and together they watched the yachts and day-sailors glide in and out of the harbour below them. McGuire said nothing and twice, when her body shuddered in long avalanches of silent sobs, he tightened his arm around her and she hid her eyes against his chest.
When she rose to leave a half hour later, she kissed him on the cheek and promised to return the next day.
And she had. And each day since.
Over the next two weeks, McGuire grew familiar with the many small details of her being. Her habit of biting her bottom lip before permitting a wistful smile to appear and display perfect snow-white teeth. The graceful line of her shoulders and the blush of tan across her back, bared in her cutaway summer dresses. Her small hands, a child’s hands on a woman’s body. The thin line of once-sheltered skin, like pale ivory, across her ring finger.
On the day Cora Godwin died, McGuire was not scheduled to work his regular evening shift in the bar. As they had planned the previous day, Barbara arrived at Green Turtle Cay on the afternoon ferry carrying an overnight bag. She climbed the hill to his cabin where McGuire waited, slouched on the porch in a faded canvas director’s chair, reading a novel by a Spanish-American writer and sipping vodka and soda. From within the cabin soared the music of Paul Desmond, the jazz musician’s alto saxophone swooping through the melody of a Cole Porter ballad.
He rose to kiss her gently and she teased him, first clinging to him, then giggling and pushing him away as his hands moved down her back to the swell of her hips. He mixed her a drink and they sat together on the porch, talking and watching the sun disappear somewhere beyond Florida. Then they changed into bathing suits and walked down the east side of the hill to Ocean Beach carrying a blanket and canvas bag containing T-shirts, towels, fresh bananas, apples and figs, a bottle of California Chardonnay, a corkscrew and two plastic tumblers.
At the beach they spread the blanket over the talcum-textured sand in a location sheltered by wild bougainvillea and lay back to marvel at the rising moon, impossibly brilliant in the cloudless night sky. They ate the figs, drank most of the wine, counted the stars, danced with words among personal memories both sweet and bitter, made love and fell asleep wrapped in the blanket and themselves.
When dawn arrived they rose and swam naked in the chilly South Atlantic water. Then, gathering their belongings, they donned their swimsuits and began walking barefoot along the beach, bathed in the warmth of the Bahamian dawn. McGuire wore a faded brown plaid bathing suit topped with a torn Buffalo Bills football jersey. Barbara wore a two-piece blue swimsuit beneath a diaphanous lacy cover-up whose hem danced in the breeze from the ocean.
At one point Barbara stopped and gave him a mock menacing look. “Kiss this face,” she said, and when he did she laughed and hugged him tightly.
Reaching the northern end of the beach, McGuire paused at a break in the line of bougainvillea marking the edge of the sand and the beginning of the wild sawgrass, where a path of crushed seashells meandered around the foot of the hill back to the sheltered inner harbour. The corners of McGuire’s eyes crinkled in the sun and he nodded toward the path. “Coffee,” he said simply.
“At the restaurant?” Barbara asked. She raised her hand to his tanned face and traced, with one long-nailed forefinger, the white scar across his upper lip.
“Hot and black,” McGuire nodded. “And fried eggs. With bacon.”
“You make it sound better than sex,” she said, and at his glance she threw her head back in laughter so the low rays of the sun hatched a suing of emeralds in her eyes. She rested her cheek on his shoulder and for several moments they stood that way, the sun caressing their backs, the ocean roaring empty threats at their feet, the air around them blessedly warm and clear and strangely resonant.
At the harbourside restaurant, the first stragglers from the tourist villas skirting the shoreline were arriving for breakfast, and the restaurant manager, a Bahamian named Lewis McIntosh, separated himself from one of the tables to approach McGuire, his face solemn.
“Lawyer, his name Leedale, he called last night,” said McIntosh. He nodded to Barbara and withdrew a note from his shirt pocket and handed it to McGuire. “I wrote what he said to me, word by word, and this is it.”
McGuire unfolded the paper and read the message, scribbled in pencil:
If you are related to one Cora Meriwether Godwin, formerly Cora McGuire, I regret to inform you of her death yesterday. A memorial service will be held Wednesday at two in the afternoon at St. Luke’s Episcopalian Church, Compton, Massachusetts. Mrs. Godwin specifically requested your presence. Reading of the will in the office of Hirons & Leedale the following day at ten in the morning. Kindly reply by Tuesday. Parker Leedale, Attorney-at-Law.
McGuire read it twice, once silently to himself and once aloud to Barbara.
“I’m sorry,” Barbara said, reaching across to touch his arm with her small hand.
McGuire smiled and nodded.
“Who was she?”
“My aunt. My father’s sister. She was a good woman. She taught me a lot of bad habits. Like how to be stubborn. And how to demand honesty from everybody, especially myself. How not to give a damn what other people thought about me. Terrible stuff like that.” He looked out across the water and smiled. “Do you know what she said when she heard that the police academy gave me a special proficiency award when I graduated?”
Barbara watched, waiting for him to continue.
“She said, ‘Isn’t that clever of them?’” He looked at her and shook his head at the memory. “Cora was a sweetheart. Crusty as hell on the outside maybe, but inside . . .”
“You won’t go, will you?” Barbara asked.
“Have to.”
“But why?” Her voice acquired an edge, like a honed knife.
“Something I should do for her. Something I should’ve done a long time ago, when she was alive.”
“How much difference will it make now? To her? How much difference will it make to her if you go or not?”
McGuire turned and smiled. He reached for her shoulders but she stepped away so only his fingertips made contact. “It’ll just be for a few days,” he said. “I’ll be back by the weekend. I wouldn’t feel right not going.”
“What if I said I didn’t want you to go?” She raised her chin and her face hardened. “What if I said I just might not be here when you return?”
He ignored the threat. “Would you like to come with me?”
“No.” She folded her arms and turned her back to him, staring out at the harbour. “I don’t want to leave here. I’m not ready to leave. Even with you.”
“Then please wait while I do something that’s important to me.”
Her eyes snapped to his. “Aren’t I important to you?” she demanded.
Oh hell, McGuire said to himself. Has it come to this already? Yes, it has, he replied silently. He stepped to her and wrapped her in his arms, overcoming her mild resistance.
“Listen to me,” he said softly. “You don’t need to know the details, but I never really had a family. Not a mother who gave a damn or a father who was ever home. Except for Cora, my father’s sister. She married a good man, she moved out to the Cape and she taught me more than anyone else about how to behave like a decent human being. I’ve always owed her for that. And I never paid her back. So this is my last chance.”
“I really need you so badly right now,” Barbara said. “I don’t have any real strength any more, and I need yours.”
“You got it,” McGuire replied. “When I get back, you’ll have all you need.”
“Why did her lawyer track you down here?” Barbara demanded. It was late in the afternoon and they were seated on the ocean side of McGuire’s cabin, sipping orange juice. Her eyes were red-rimmed but she was calm. They both stared out at the water as they talked. “You don’t have to be there for the reading of her will, do you? Can’t they send you a copy of it or something?”
“I’m her only living relative,” McGuire shrugged.
“Really?”
“She had a son, Terry. He was drafted, reported MIA in Vietnam, last seen storming a mortar emplacement. Her husband Earl died a few years later. Earl went downhill from the day they heard about Terry. Never got over it. Cora was my father’s only sister, Earl was an orphan.” He shrugged. “I’m all that’s left.”
“Okay, I understand why you have to go.”
“Thanks.”
“But I don’t like it.”
“Won’t exactly be a day at the circus for me either.”
“You just think I’m on the rebound, don’t you?”
McGuire breathed deeply and turned to look away from her, saying nothing, wrapped in his thoughts.
“Well, maybe I am,” she said. “Maybe a year ago, a year from now, I wouldn’t have given you a second glance. But right now . . .” She faltered. “Right now, I can’t imagine staying here without seeing you every day. Just to trade a joke or go for a walk, you know?”
“We’ve done a hell of a lot more than that,” McGuire said.
“Yes, we have.” She tossed her head back and closed her eyes. “Was that so bad?”
“Bad? It was terrific.” McGuire turned to look at her, the sun highlighting the crow’s-feet at his eyes.
She smiled at the sight of him like that, his face shining and the fine hair at his temples shimmering like silver. Then she rose to kiss him, open-mouthed and hungry.