I thought, well, that’s the end of that. Too bad, I’m sorry, Martine. But I was more than just sorry, the entire episode was unnerving. The thought that a voleur could creep into our peaceful village in the dead of night. No telling what he could have been up to.
Daisy, our bread lady, was certain of one thing. “You can be sure he was nobody from the island. One of those étrangers from off-island, that’s who he was!” And Jasmine, the tiny Chinese waitress from the pier restaurant, shook her pretty little head and comforted me with “We got shrimp. We always got shrimp.”
A week later, a young gendarme tapped politely on the shop door. His English wasn’t quite as smooth as that of Jean Luc’s, but he managed to communicate a message. Would Madame be so kind as to step down to the gendarmerie? Her presence was required. Of course, Madame would comply; Madame followed Maurice down the street taking the same route as the voleur in the night. And sitting inside the gendarmerie, back-to on a bench, was a familiar, garishly printed shirt on a muscular island back. Like a flashbulb inside my head, an instant picture left no doubt. “That’s the man,” I said. “That’s him.”
And that was that, I thought.
The next day, three gendarmes appeared at my shop door. Jean Luc led the small parade. The voleur was flanked by the other flics. (We say “cops,” they say “flics”). He looked into my eyes; his were bottom-of-the-well dark with murky red-toned whites. Like an animal’s eyes, I thought, like the eyes of Emile’s boar housed behind a fence at the side of the house on the other side of the pond, which the road leading out of Grand Case circled. Jean Luc had yet another message, “Madame Cummings, it is necessary that once again you identify this man, Gerard Daniel from the island of Domenica, as the perpetrator of the crime of thievery from the household of Claude DuValle and his mother Martine DuValle.”
The boar eyes were trying to see inside my head, or so it seemed. Not begging. Nor supplicating. Only probing.
“Yes, Jean Luc. I’m certain. I’m very sure. I’m certain.”
“Merci, Madame,” responded Jean Luc, and they took him away.
I heard that they got the jewelry back, that he’d given it to a woman in Philipsburg on the Dutch side.
“Did Claude DuValle express his gratitude?” my neighbor Ellie wondered. I shook my head. “Ah, the French,” Ellie said, with a shake of his white head. “I must admit they are rude. Sometimes. C’est la vie. That’s the way they are. Sometimes. It is too bad.” He turned to go inside his house. “They are moving from here, Claude and his mother. To Marigot. They think it is more safe. Marigot is not safe. It is more dangerous because there are more French there. That’s what I think. The island has turned dangerous since times are better. It is too bad. Things get better but they get worse.” And he shook his grizzled head. “Maybe it is better to let lazy dogs lie.”
Martha, my maid (every American on St. Maarten/St. Martin had a maid), was more forthright. “Maybe it’s not a good thing,” she told me. “We think bad things happen when there’s too much talk. Sometimes.”
“Is that the reason that nobody complains when somebody — name unknown — drives through Grand Case one night and shoots Gilbert’s dog? Chances are somebody does know the name of the shooter, yes? But nobody tells.”
She gave me a sidewise glance, looked quickly away. “We like to settle things among us. We think it’s better. Sometimes.”
“Maybe. Sometimes.” A clear difference of opinion. But she could have been right. Not that it had anything to do with my visit to the gendarmerie, but Charley got hit by a car and killed. I found him, a lifeless, stiff little fur shape at the entrance to the walkway between the shop and Ellie’s house. As I stood there in shock, Claude DuValle came out from his dwelling and discovered Charley’s body. He looked down at him as he stepped over Charley and proceeded on his way. “Stop,” I cried after the departing figure. He didn’t even look back. Ellie, standing on his porch, had a comment. “The French, they can be... froid. Sometimes.”
But Charley loved him. He must have known that Charley loved him. As soon as Claude came home after work Charley would leave my bed and run to him. Inside my shop, I wept for Charley. My husband buried him on the beach.
We began to get winds and rain; it was September, hurricane season until the fall. The islanders had a little rhyme about hurricanes that ended, “October, all over.” We followed their lead. One morning very early in September we heard the sound of tap-tap-tapping, and when we looked out on the street we saw Ellie and Gilbert and other villagers wielding hammers on plywood panels, covering windows. My husband said, “They know weather is coming. I’d better get busy.” Our building was constructed of poured concrete (the walls were three feet wide), so we felt pretty safe.
In our bedroom, I insisted that my window be left open. “I’ll pull my shutters closed if need be, but I’ve got to see out. If I can’t see out, I’ll get claustrophobia. I’m serious, Bill. I must see out!” Which is why I saw the two people who visited Ellie that night. A man and a woman. The wind was strong, so I couldn’t hear what they said before they went inside. As the wind was howling and the rain was coming in sideways, I finally had to close my shutters — somehow claustrophobia didn’t bother me as much as I thought it would.
What turned out to be a tropical storm raged through the night. In the early hours, we heard someone calling our name, a neighbor from down the street, Maurice. “Madame Cummings, are you all right?” he called. The storm was easing.
My husband answered, “We’re okay, Maurice. Thanks.” To me he added, “I think.”
We’d lost power, so we waited until daylight to get up. The tropical storm had gone to sea by the time I pushed my shutters open and looked out on Ellie’s front room. It didn’t look like Ellie’s front room — white lacy curtains hung at the windows and all the furniture was covered with white fabric. It didn’t look like Ellie’s house, the shutters were open, plywood panels were down. A leftover breeze fluffed the white curtains. A room all dressed up for a wedding? For a funeral. Neighborhood women wearing white or purple passed in and out, through the room into the rear of the house, while neighborhood men gathered on the porch and smoked. Ellie had died in the night.
Martha told us that Ellie had died of a heart attack. And the little bridge at the end of town had been blown away. The gendarmes were directing traffic around our village, but those who came from the Marigot side of town came anyway. People gathered in the street where they talked quietly.
“It was the heart,” Martha told me when I inquired. But she didn’t look at me.
“She didn’t look at me,” I told Bill. “I think she’s hiding something. When Martha doesn’t look at me, she’s always hiding something.”
Ellie had a big funeral at St. Mary’s by the Sea, and the choir sang. It was the worst sounding choir I’d ever heard; that’s another comment I kept to myself. That and the distinct memory of the man and the woman who came to Ellie’s house in the night. The night he died. Of a heart attack.