John D MacDonald
An Island of Her Own
I was drowsing a hundred yards off the Boca Grande beach when I heard a female halloo above the gentle surf sound. I rolled off my back and squinted through the hot November sunlight. I didn’t recognize the girl on the beach until I saw the old red pickup parked next to my jeep, and then I knew it was Mary Dawes, so I swam in with more eagerness than I was willing to let her see.
She is one of those rangy redheads with a lot of drive and independence. She owns a swampy little twenty-acre island down in Pine Island Sound, with an ancient cottage on it and a slightly less elderly guest cottage. When her grandfather’s estate was divided among a whole platoon of heirs, she got the island. It has a good artesian well on it, but there’s no phone and no electricity, so it is more primitive than most people will put up with.
Mary is a junior partner in a New York industrial-design firm specializing in consumer packaging. It is a high-pressure operation and she is supposed to be good at it. A couple or three times a year she comes down to the island, where she can work without any interruption.
She stood with a poised impatience on the beach.
“Barney, do you have a charter tomorrow?” she demanded anxiously.
“Not until Friday, and even that seems too soon.”
“Well, you’ll have to figure out some kind of rate. My sister was coming down and she can’t make it. She collects hopeless idiots and they sponge off her shamefully, and she’s sending one down because his nerves are supposed to be unraveling, and I didn’t phone her in time to fend him off. Darn Liz anyway!”
“What’s this got to do with me, Mary?”
“He arrives today, in an hour. I brought the Beastie in early to get the motor fixed. It won’t be ready until tomorrow. So I wonder if you could...”
“Why the big buildup to ask me to run you out to the island? No charge for that.”
“I want you to stay over. I don’t want to be there alone with one of Liz’s wounded ducks.”
“What about Maudie?”
She looked at me with exasperation. “If Maudie were going to be there, I wouldn’t need you, would I? She had to go up to Naples three days ago to help her kid sister, who is having a baby. She’ll be back tomorrow afternoon.”
Maudie lives on an island near Mary’s. She looks a little bit like Tony Galento in his prime, but with longer hair. She checks on Mary’s place when Mary is away, and when Mary is in residence she lives on the island and does the cooking and cleaning.
“If I can decide right off he’s harmless, you won’t have to stay over, Barney. But I want to be ready in case he looks susceptible to tropical passion.”
“I thought you could handle anybody, girl.”
“Well, you were easy, Barney. But you don’t know Liz’s friends.”
I told her I was at her service and the fee would be payable in food, drink and conversation. It would work out fine. I could bring her back to the mainland the following afternoon in my Baylady II, and by then her Beastie would be running right and Maudie would be back from Naples and ready to return to the island. In a watery world you learn to kill nine birds per stone or you waste a lot of gas.
She went on back to the bar at the Pink Elephant, where she would meet the stranger, and I went aboard my Baylady and got dressed. Then I walked to the Pink Elephant, where I found Mary Dawes waiting alone at a table. As I sat down across from her she gave me a weary smile.
“I wouldn’t mind so much if I didn’t have such a lot of work piled up, Barney,” she said.
“I used to be full of guilt and anxiety too, honey.”
“Don’t be so smug!”
“Good old Five Hundred Fifth Avenue. Good old commuters’ train to Larchmont.”
She scowled at me in a questioning way. “Was there some sort of last straw that did it? You’ve never told me.”
“After Jeanie decided she’d been married long enough and took off. I put the house on the market. One evening a guy came to the door — I thought maybe he was a buyer. Instead he wanted to sell me a cemetery plot. I suddenly realized that somebody actually believed my ultimate destiny was a hole in the ground in Larchmont, and I had no good reason that he shouldn’t think so. So I took off for Florida the day I closed the deal on the house.”
“How about a hole in the ground in Boca Grande?”
“It’s just as final, but somehow it isn’t as distressing. And at least I’ll have a better tan.”
“How is it going, really?”
“If you mean money, I’ve actually got some in the bank, much to my astonishment. If you mean all the other aspects of it, I have a healed ulcer, enough muscles to gaff a green tarpon, an unclouded mind and a restful disposition.”
“No yen to set the world on fire?”
“I tried that, honey. With damp matches in a high wind.” I reached over and touched her lightly between the eyebrows with an index finger. “Last year those two up-and-down lines hardly showed at all.”
“Erosion, dear. I’m not exactly sub-deb, you know.” She glared toward the doorway. “Where is that idiot?”
“What does he look like? What does he do?”
“I have no idea.”
“What’s his name?”
“It was a bad connection. We were screaming at each other. But he’ll be looking for me, and you aren’t exactly foundering in tourists around here. If I know Liz, he’ll be terribly creative, vastly neurotic and totally unable to cope with a cruel, indifferent world.”
Just as she finished speaking an enormous man came in out of the sunlight. He wore a dark city suit and carried a topcoat and an aluminum suitcase. He looked young, benign and fat. He stared around vaguely and moved toward the bar.
“Go herd him this way, please, Barney,” Mary Dawes said.
I crossed the room and approached him. At close range he was not young, not benign and not fat — just extremely large. His blond brush cut was salted with gray. His eyes were cold, ceramic blue.
“Have a nice trip down from New York?” I asked merrily.
“Hardly,” he said. “Who are you?”
“Barney Wescott. Friend of Miss Dawes. She’s right over there.”
He nodded at me and repeated my name in a way that made it sound as if he had printed it on a card, slapped the card into a file and slammed the drawer.
“I didn’t catch your name,” I said.
I am sizable, but he looked down at me — with distaste and incredulity. “Stonebarger,” he snapped. “The architect.”
He followed me to the table and I introduced him to Mary. He did not acknowledge the introduction until he had placed his suitcase on an empty chair and put his folded topcoat over it. Then he gave her an abrupt nod, sat, turned to me and said, “Club soda, one cube, juice of half a fresh lemon, thank you.”
“Do you have a first name?” Mary asked owlishly. “We’re quite informal here.”
“Are you? I suppose you would be, at that, Morgan.”
“I may call you Morgan?” she asked, feigning anxiety.
“If it pleases you, my dear.”
“And how is Liz?”
“I despise that particular contraction. Miss Dawes. Elizabeth is in good health. She keeps very busy.”
“I’ve noticed that,” Mary said.
Morgan Stonebarger turned his massive head and looked at me without expression. “I’m really quite thirsty, Wescott, if you don’t mind.”
I broke out of my trance state and got him what he wanted. As I brought it back to the table Mary was saying: “...really very primitive on the island.”
“I did not know there were any existing structures.”
“Did you think I slept in a tree?” Mary said.
“Inasmuch as I didn’t know anyone lived on the island, Miss Dawes, I’d formed no opinions about where and how you might sleep. I shall be happy to stay on the island.”