Sunbaked Page 4

  “The fact remains that I have a prior interest in this property, and I intend to obtain it. I’d like to make you an offer that will earn you a tidy profit on your brief little adventure on Pineapple Cay.” He smiled at her in a way she guessed he thought was charming.

  “Listen, Mr. . . .” She realized he hadn’t introduced himself. Should she call him Barry? Maybe better to just avoid the issue. “I’ve just arrived here. My intention is to stay. I’m not interested in selling the cottage. I just bought it. It was nice to meet you, and thank you for the fruit basket, but if you don’t mind, I have things to do. Let me walk you out.” She started walking around the side of the cottage, where a stone path led to the front yard. He stood his ground for a few seconds, but then finding himself alone on the veranda, he stood up and stalked after her.

  “I was hoping you were a reasonable woman. I guess I was wrong. As I’ve never actually met such a woman, I guess it was too much to hope for.” He walked past her, got in his Mercedes, and sped away, spraying sand. Nina walked back around the side of the house to the veranda. The fisherman had come closer to shore. He was about a hundred yards out and moving toward the beach. She looked directly at him, and he stopped walking. Then he turned away and resumed casting.

  It was after five o’clock. The sun was getting low on the horizon. Time to meet Pansy at The Redoubt. Nina brushed her teeth and hair, pulled on her sweater, and tucked her wallet in her pocket. With her flip-flops hooked over a finger, she started off down the beach toward the village center. As she got closer, she heard music. The deck of the restaurant was almost full, with groups of laughing patrons enjoying beer, burgers, fries, and colorful salads at picnic tables. Climbing the wooden stairs from the beach, Nina picked a path between the tables and went inside through wide-open double glass doors.

  It took a moment for her eyes to adjust to the dark. A slow reggae beat oozed out of the sound system. The interior featured exposed wooden timbers and wood-paneled walls strung with fishing nets and buoys. There were about ten tables, each covered with a blue-and-white-checked tablecloth and a candle flickering inside a storm lantern. A row of booths lined the wall on the right side of the room, and a long, polished wood bar ran almost the full length of the wall on the left side, with rows of bottles behind and polished wood stools pulled up to it on three sides. The lights above the bar cast a warm glow on the room. Nina noticed the honeymooners from the airplane tucked into one of the booths. They were holding hands across the table and sipping frosty whipped drinks.

  There were a few other tables occupied but no sign of Pansy yet. Nina slipped into a seat at the bar. At the opposite end of the bar, a female bartender was mixing strawberry daiquiris for a pair of laughing middle-aged women with sunburned arms who were keeping the good times going after a day on the beach. Nina looked around the room as she waited. There was a small raised stage tucked in the corner by the glass doors and a jukebox beside it. Through the open doors to the deck, Nina watched the sun slip below the horizon. The sky was outrageous shades of salmon pink with orange-and-purple streaks.

  “Hello, Nina Spark!” Nina was so startled she almost fell off her chair. Behind the bar stood Danish the mailman.

  “What can I get you?” he asked, leaning forward with both hands on the bar. He had a white towel over one shoulder, and his thick, dark hair was sticking straight up, styled with beer foam.

  “Danish. I thought you were the mail carrier.” She glanced down the bar toward the other bartender, who had turned her attention to a tray of drinks.

  “What I am, Nina Spark, is versatile. How about a bikini martini?”

  “Hi, Nina! Sorry I’m late.” Nina felt Pansy’s hand on her shoulder. “The peas were touching the mashed potatoes, and that is a major crisis in my house.”

  Pansy turned to Danish. “Hi, Danish. I’ll have one of those, too, please. Make it a double.”

  “Hi, Pansy,” said Nina. “This is nice.”

  “Yeah. Isn’t it great? Veronica has made a real welcoming spot.” Pansy looked over at the other bartender, undoubtedly the owner of The Redoubt, who was serving the tray of drinks to a table of six across the room. She had the erect, no-nonsense posture of a dancer. Her hair was done up in long cornrows gathered in a silver-streaked ponytail, and she wore large, dangling silver earrings. When she was done dispensing the drinks, she swept across the room in a flowing batik skirt and snug black crewneck cashmere sweater, which showed off her sculpted biceps and triceps. She reminded Nina of Olympic sprinter Merlene Ottey.

  “Why don’t we grab a booth?” asked Pansy. They made their way across the floor to one of the few remaining booths. “Ah . . . it feels good to sit down,” she said.

  “So, how old are your kids?” asked Nina.

  “Oh, Susan is six and Kevin is eight. They’re good kids . . . I haven’t watched a grown-up movie in eight years . . . So, how was your afternoon?”

  “Here we are, ladies. Enjoy.” Danish set the pink drinks down in front of them, along with a couple of menus. “I’ll be back.”

  “I had a visitor this afternoon,” said Nina. “Barry Bassett came by to give me a fruit basket and offered to buy the cottage. He was not very happy when I declined the offer.”

  “I’m so sorry, Nina,” said Pansy. “He can be a real pain. I don’t know why he wants to live here. He seems to hate just about everybody around.” They opened their menus.

  “This morning you mentioned that he was involved in hunting for a lost treasure. Does that have anything to do with the donation of artifacts from a shipwreck to the Pineapple Cay Museum?” asked Nina.

  “Yes!” answered Pansy. “The Morning Glory emerald. You know how you read in the paper all the time about this Spanish galleon or that US merchant ship that went down with holds filled with gold bars and gemstones? All of them just waiting to be found. Well, there are about twenty wreck-hunting crews cruising around the islands in any given year. Most of them look for years without ever finding anything. Some spend years just waiting for permits to search the waters. Those that do find something are mostly foreign companies that sell off whatever they find for profit, usually much less than they were counting on.

  “There has been a lot of local protest over the last few years about the loss of the islands’ cultural heritage. The government tried to put a stop to the outflow a couple of years ago by slowing down the permitting of expeditions and putting restrictions on the sale of artifacts. Then Barry showed up last year with a permit in hand. He’d been reading about the wreck of the SS Central America, I guess—the guy who found thirty-million-dollars’ worth of gold bars off South Carolina in 1988. The guy went on the lam with the proceeds until the police caught up with him living under an assumed name at a fancy hotel in Florida. Anyway, Barry wanted in on the action—the actual open-water pirate hijinks. Somehow, within six months his team had found the wreck of the Morning Glory, lying in the cut between Lizard and Wreath Cays, just south of here. People have been searching for it for two hundred years!”

  Pansy paused to take a sip of her drink. “Mmm, that’s good. The funny thing about Barry is that I really don’t think it’s about the money for him. It’s the thrill of the hunt and the prestige. Same with the condo development. He likes to win. He could buy a nice beachfront property somewhere else and make more money, if that was really what he wanted. The scuttlebutt is he got his wrecking permit so easily because he signed an agreement to hand the whole haul over to the government. And he did. That’s how the Morning Glory emerald, et cetera, ended up in the Pineapple Cay Museum. Now Tiffany, his wife, she’s another matter. All she cares about is how much things cost and getting more of them. I can’t imagine what they talk about. My guess is she was one of the things he wanted but couldn’t have. And when he did get her, he lost interest. She, on the other hand, was dazzled by his money—but now she’s wondering if it was worth it. She makes no secret of the fact that she wants to go back to Miami. Civilization, she calls it.”

&n
bsp; Danish was back and looking at them expectantly. “What will it be, ladies?” he asked.

  “Oh, we haven’t really looked,” said Pansy. “It’s been so long since I ate out with grown-ups. I’ll definitely have another one of these, please. Nina, do you know what you’d like?”

  Nina shook her head and picked up the menu again.

  “Alrighty then,” said Danish. “Here’s what I am going to do for you. A nice spinach salad to start. The ladies like the salads. Makes them feel virtuous. Then the house specialty—the conch burger with a side of fresh-cut fries—not too many, of course—followed by Veronica’s homemade key lime pie, because you deserve it, goddammit. Okeydokey?”

  “Sounds good, Danish, except I’m a vegetarian,” said Nina.

  “OK. No biggie. We get your people in here all the time. A Jamaican veggie patty for the lady from New York, then. Respect. And I’ll just bring a pitcher, shall I?”

  “I’m not actually Rastafarian, but thanks,” Nina said as he disappeared again.

  Danish was just setting their salads and the pitcher of pink drinks on the table when a commotion broke out by the front door. A small group of obnoxiously loud people who looked to be in their early twenties erupted into the room. One guy was carrying a large boom box on his shoulder. It was blaring techno dance music, drowning out the subdued reggae on the sound system. The group—all of them wearing sunglasses despite the dark—danced over to a table in the middle of the room. It was obvious they were putting on a show, conscious of all eyes on them.

  “The Beer Commercial,” said Danish wryly. “Those idiots like to make an entrance. Makes them feel like they are living the life.”

  They watched Veronica walk swiftly toward the group and speak to the clean-cut, dark-haired guy with the boom box. Her hands were on her hips. The music shut off suddenly, and he looked slightly sheepish. There were three other guys and three girls, all dressed in preppy beachwear. They had draped themselves over the chairs around the table and assumed bored poses.

  “The head idiot with the boom box is Lance,” said Danish. “He’s the tennis pro at the Plantation Inn. He came down from the States for the winter and brought all his annoying rich friends with him. They’ve rented a big beach villa in The Enclave. I call them the Beer Commercial because they always look like they’re acting in their own movie version of what life should be like. Episode Twelve: A Fun Night Out with the Gang.”

  Nina thought they all looked just a little bit too old to be doing the spring-break thing all winter. Unlike her, of course. Now that they’d made their big entrance, they didn’t seem to know what to do with themselves. They sat drinking beer, munching tortilla chips, and looking around the restaurant. At least they had quieted down.

  The burgers arrived. Huge heaping plates Nina knew she had no hope of finishing, but delicious. The place was filling up with diners and drinkers, a mix of locals and tourists. The conversational buzz increased in volume, and the tempo of the music kicked up a notch. Nina was feeling the pink drink and was suffused with a sense of well-being, of being in just the right place at the right time, doing the right thing for the moment.

  “So, Pansy, are you from here?” she asked.

  “Heavens, no,” said Pansy. “I’m from Winnipeg.” Danish reappeared and slid into the seat beside Pansy.

  “I’m on my break,” he said, pouring himself a tall pink drink.

  Pansy continued. “About five years ago I was standing in my driveway in Winnipeg with a snow shovel in my hand. I had just finished clearing the drive so I could get the kids to day care and get to work on time. I sold real estate up there, too. Big beige mansions in what were once wheat fields. Acres and acres of them. It was minus thirty degrees Celsius with the wind chill—that’s minus twenty-two degrees Fahrenheit—at seven o’clock in the morning, and it was still pitch-dark outside. The city snowplow went by and dumped another foot of hard, crusty snow at the top of the drive. I thought I was going to lose it. I went back inside, and that morning Andrew and I made plans to move down here full-time. It took two years, but we did it! I still sell real estate, and Andrew still works at a bank, but we’re happy. Our kids learned to snorkel in gym class!”

  “‘Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it within us or we find it not.’ Ralph Waldo Emerson,” said Danish as he helped himself to one of Nina’s french fries.

  “Maybe,” said Pansy. “I’m sure there is a lot of truth in that. Just look at Barry and Tiffany, miserable with all their money. But you know what? It’s still bloody cold in Winnipeg in February.”

  Nina smiled and took another sip of her drink. “So, what’s the story on the Morning Glory? Where did it come from, and what was on it besides the emerald?” she asked.

  “I don’t really know much about the history,” answered Pansy. “Hey! Let’s ask Siri.” She pulled out a big cell phone and spoke into it like a walkie-talkie. “What is the history of the wreck of the Morning Glory?”

  Two seconds later, an electronic female voice with a British accent said, “The Morning Glory sank off Pineapple Cay in 1780. The ship was owned by Robert Sifton of Charleston, South Carolina.”

  Danish grabbed the cell phone out of Pansy’s hand and held it close to his mouth. “Talk dirty to me, Siri,” he whispered.

  The electronic voice responded, “I am sorry. I do not understand the question. Can you rephrase?”

  Pansy grabbed the phone back from Danish, wiped the screen with her sleeve, and dropped it into her purse. “You know who would be the best person to talk to about the Morning Glory? Alice at the museum. She’s researched the whole history for the new exhibit.”

  “Yeah! Alice knows everything about it,” said Danish, his eyes glowing. “I could introduce you.”

  “Thanks,” said Nina. “I’ll see how things go.”

  “OK. It’s a plan! I’d better get back to work. The boss is giving me that look.” He got up and headed back to the bar.

  While they’d been talking and eating, several groups of people had come and gone. The Beer Commercial had slipped away without them noticing, and a group of about ten sleek-looking, silver-haired older gentlemen and a couple of well-dressed women had taken their place. They were laughing and chatting among themselves, the men nursing bottles of the local beer, the women sipping glasses of white wine. Unlike the Beer Commercial, they seemed unconcerned with making an impression on their fellow patrons, other than smiling at passersby and pulling in vacant chairs to let a waitress loaded down with two trays get by.

  There was a younger sandy-haired man with them, around forty years old, Nina guessed. He had the tan of someone who spent most his time outdoors. He was dressed in a khaki shirt and khaki pants, with a pair of gold-rimmed aviator sunglasses hanging on a string around his neck. A battered broad-rimmed khaki hat sat on the table in front of him. With his dirty-blond hair and tanned skin, he was various pleasing shades of beige and brown from head to toe. Only the whites of his eyes and his teeth when he smiled provided any contrast. At the moment, he was telling a story and held the rapt attention of the entire table. Nina and Pansy were too far away to hear the punch line, but when it came, the whole group burst into laughter.

  “That’s Ted Matthews, your neighbor,” said Pansy. She gave Nina a sideways glance. “Looks like he has a big group in this weekend.” The party made a move to leave, gathering up their jackets and purses and ambling toward the door. One of the men was talking to Ted in an animated fashion, using lots of hand gestures. Ted nodded now and then as the man spoke. As he stood and put on his hat, Ted glanced in their direction. Now that he was standing, Nina could see that he was tall—over six feet. He nodded at Pansy and Nina, touching the brim of his hat with his fingertips, and then turned back to the man, who continued to talk up at him as they walked to the door. Pansy gave a little wave.

  He looks like the Marlboro Man without the unhealthy nicotine habit, thought Nina. He probably lassoes the fish.

  Sh
e took one last bite of her key lime pie and then sat back. “That was delicious. I’m going to have to learn how to make it.”

  “Yes, the food here is amazing,” agreed Pansy. “Veronica grows most of the fruits and vegetables in her own greenhouses, and she has a big fruit orchard, too. We should go out and see it sometime. It is a pretty impressive operation. She supplies the Plantation Inn and has a farm stand, too. Let’s say hi, and then I’d better take you home. I’m up way past my bedtime.” They made their way over to the bar.

  “Hi, Veronica!” shouted Pansy. “This place is heaving tonight! This is Nina Spark. She just moved into Miss Rose’s cottage. Nina, this is Veronica Steeves, owner of The Redoubt and Smooth Harbour Farm.”

  Veronica smiled and extended her hand across the bar.

  “Welcome, Nina. I hope you will like it here. Miss Rose was my teacher. I’ve got an order up, so I’d better go, but come back and talk to me sometime soon, OK?”

  They made their way out of the now-crowded bar to where Pansy’s golf cart was parked under a mango tree. It was a short drive back to Sundrift Cottage. Nina hopped out at the gate.

  “Thanks, Pansy. That was a lot of fun. I hope you’re not too tired tomorrow,” said Nina.

  “Oh, no,” said Pansy. “It was great fun. Let’s do it again sometime soon. And Saturday night is another big night out! Jules and Kiki Savages’ do. Kiki told me you were invited. Can I pick you up and we’ll go together? Andrew is taking the kids to a birthday party.”

  “That would be great,” said Nina. “Um, Danish is coming, too. I said he could be my plus one.”

  Pansy didn’t bat an eye. “Sure, no problem. I’ll come by about five o’clock? There are cocktails before dinner. Don’t want to miss that.”