"Where do you want us to go?" Alice said.
"Anywhere you like," Marietta said with an expansive gesture.
"Not upstairs," I cautioned.
"Oh, Eddie. She's not going to hurt anyone."
"Who are you talking about?" Rolanda wanted to know.
"My mother."
"Louie'll sort her out. She likes a good fight."
"Cesaria isn't a fistfighting lady," I said. "You just stay downstairs and things'll be fine and dandy."
"Can I have my whiskey back?" Rolanda said to Marietta.
"No you can't," Marietta replied. Rolanda frowned. "You're drunk enough."
"Oh, and you're not?" Rolanda said. She turned to me. "I know what you're thinking," she said, with a sly smile.
"Oh and what's that?"
"If only I were a woman, I'd get myself laid tonight. And you know what? You would. Big time." She reached down and without a word of warning cupped my genitals. "Pity you got this ol' thing weighing you down." She grinned. I don't think I even attempted an answer. If I did, I stumbled over it, and she was on her way, following the other five.
"So this is your crowd…" I said to Marietta.
"Aren't they a riot? They're not always like this, by the way. It's just a special night."
"What did you tell them?"
"About what?"
"About the house. About us. About Mama."
"Eddie, will you stop fretting? They couldn't find their way back here if their lives depended on it. Anyway, I trust them. They're my friends. I want to make them welcome here."
"Well why don't we just have an open house for the county?" I said. "Invite everyone in."
"You know that's not such a bad idea," she said, poking me in the middle of the chest. "We've got to start somewhere." She glanced back at the house. All the women had disappeared inside.
"What did you want to talk about?" I said.
"I just wanted to drink a toast," she said, raising the bottle between us.
"To anything in particular?"
"You. Me. Alice. Love." She smiled at me. "It is a pity you've got a dick, Eddie. I could find you a nice girlfriend-" She laughed uproariously at this. "Oh Eddie, I wish I had a camera. You're blushing."
"I am not blushing."
"Baby, take it from me. You're blushing." She kissed my cheek, which was probably somewhat flushed, I'll admit.
"I need to live a little," I said.
"That's our toast, right there," Marietta said, "to being alive and living a little."
"I'll drink to that."
"It's been too fucking long." She put the bottle to her lips and drank, then passed it over to me. I took another swallow, vaguely thinking that I was going to be as drunk as the rest of them if I went on like this. I'd only eaten a sandwich all day, and this was my third shot of liquor, including my gin, in the space of half an hour. But what the hell? It wasn't often a man got to play among wild women like this.
"Let's go inside," Marietta said, slipping her arm through mine. As we ambled to the house she leaned against me.
"I am so happy," she said as we got to the door.
"That's not just the whiskey talking?" I said.
"No, it's not the whiskey. I'm happy. I'm deep-down happy. What a beautiful night." She glanced back over her shoulder. "Oh my Lord," she said. "Look at that."
I turned to see what had drawn her attention. There in the middle of the lawn was a quartet of hyenas, their eyes upon us. There was nothing predatory in their stare, I didn't think, but their presence so close to the house was indeed surprising. Their natural nervousness seemed to have vanished. They were suddenly brave. Three of them halted when we stared back at them, but the largest of the four continued to approach, undaunted, and didn't stop until it was perhaps four or five yards from where we stood.
"I think she wants to come in," Marietta said.
"How do you know it's a she?" I said. "I thought you couldn't tell male from female."
"I know a bitch when I see one," Marietta remarked. "Hey, honey," she called to the animal, "you want to come join the party?"
The hyena sniffed the air, then glanced back at her companions, who were watching the whole scene intently, but hadn't come any closer. Deciding perhaps that she needed to study this situation more closely before she took the final plunge and entered the house, the animal lay down in the grass and put her head on her paws.
We left her to her scrutiny. It would only be a matter of time, I thought, and the creature would be over the threshold. Then what? With the wedding party and the hyenas in residence, how long before the foxes came, and the birds? L'Enfant, in its old age, would soon be as busy on the inside as it was out. Perhaps after all my doomy predictions the house would not die a violent death, but be gently brought to ruin by animals that had flourished in its vicinity. Hadn't I even predicted the possibility, many months ago? The thought that my prediction might prove correct was surprisingly sweet.
I left the front door open when we went inside, just to be sure the hyena knew she was welcome.
Why is it so much harder to describe happy times than sad? I've had little trouble conjuring scenes of grief and devastation for the last God knows how many pages, but now-when I come to the simple business of telling you how I passed three or four blissful hours in the company of my darling Marietta and her tribe-words fail me. I was simply content with these women, whose repartee tended toward the ribald, and whose voices-when raised in argument-were deafening. What were the bones of contention between them? I can't remember, to tell you the truth. I know I contributed little or nothing to the debate. I sat and watched and listened to that charmed circle and I swear there was no seduction on earth that would have persuaded me to leave it.
At last, however, the drink and the hour took its toll on even the hardiest of the celebrants, and sometime after midnight the group broke up, and we all went on our way. I'd found a moment to tell Marietta about Dwight's departure, so she invited Rolanda and Tern-Lynn to take his bed for the night. Ava had been tucked up on the sofa since the beginning of the evening, and Lucy went to join her there. Louie stayed where she was, at the dining room table, her head sunk on her hands. The newlyweds, of course, traipsed away to Marietta's bedroom, hand in hand.
As I wandered through the house, heading back to my study, I thought about what was left for me to write. I would have to make an account of how Galilee and Rachel left the island: strictly for neatness' sake; it was an uneventful departure. And then there was the matter of the bodies in the house. I'd have to dedicate a couple of paragraphs to how they were discovered. It was certainly a more interesting anecdote than the details of the lovers' departure, touched as it was by an element of the grotesque. The same blind dog that had wandered up from the beach to be petted by Rachel when she'd first come to the house had been the one to raise the alarm. He had done so not by sitting on the veranda and howling, but by turning up on his owner's porch with a portion of a human foot, chewed off at the ankle, in his mouth. It didn't take long for the police to find the two corpses. Though the body of Mitchell Geary was inside the house, it was his body that was missing the foot. For some reason the animal had stepped over the corpse on the veranda to make dinner of the man at the bottom of the stairs.
The coroner determined that both men had been dead for forty-eight hours. Though the police began a search of the island immediately, it was assumed that the murderer was already long gone; probably back to the mainland. There was plenty of evidence pointing to Rachel, of course: her bags were up in the bedroom, her fingerprints on the banisters, close to the place where Mitchell Geary lay. Later, however, there would be good forensic reasons to doubt her culpability: the general store owner would identify Mitchell as the man who'd purchased the murder weapon; and there would be only one set of prints-Mitchell's prints-found on the knife. But just because she hadn't actually delivered the lethal wound didn't exonerate her. The newspapers were soon full of theories as to what had happened at the house, the most popular being the belief that Mitchell had come to the island to get his wife back, but had suspected that she had some plot laid against his life. He'd armed himself as best he could, killed the man she'd hired to murder him, and then-in some kind of struggle with Rachel-had fallen downstairs and perished in what was essentially a freak accident.