So we had figured out, way back at the start of the whole mess, that he must've come ashore earlier and hidden a load of supplies.
Supplies that might've included the ax, rope, etc.
By the time I'd spent a few hours hiking along the shore, I had pretty much convinced myself that I wouldn't be finding any house. The house was a phantom, thrown together by bad logic and wishful thinking.
It would've been too convenient, too easy.
Find them all in a shack by the shore. Go sneaking in late at night, commando-style . . .
No, it wasn't going to be that simple.
I would probably need to hunt for them in the jungle. In the region above the lagoon and in the areas beyond where I'd never been before. Who knows? Maybe they had a cave.
The problem was, I didn't want to go looking for them in the jungle.
I wanted to stay on the beach, where I could feel the sun and the soft breezes, where I had a fine, open view in all directions and nobody could sneak up on me.
Besides, the house might exist.
Even if it didn't, there were plenty of good reasons to continue along the beach. No telling what I might find. We'd always intended to explore the boundaries of our island, but had never gotten around to it. Thanks to Wesley, there'd always been more urgent matters to deal with first.
I was finally getting around to it.
I decided to keep at it, too. Any journey into the jungle would have to wait for a day or two, or however long it might take me to circle the island.
I felt as if I'd been granted a reprieve.
Then I found the house.
Some time earlier, I had rounded the north end of the island and started back along the eastern shore. I'd been hiking southward for quite a while when I came to a cove.
From a distance, the cove had been out of sight. I'd seen nothing ahead except more beach -- ocean on one side, jungle on the other. Though my view had been obstructed, here and there, by rocky areas, I assumed that I was approaching a continuous shore-line.
I was climbing over a low spine of rocks when I first noticed a break in the beach ahead.
Seeing my forward progress blocked by water, I felt frustrated and annoyed; it was an inconvenience that would force me to walk a lot farther than I'd expected. Within a few seconds, though, my curiosity took over.
I could see across the water to where the beach started again, but very little of what lay to the right. The trees at the edge of the jungle got in the way. What seemed to be ahead, however, was a small bay, or cove, that looked at least five times as large as our little inlet on the other side of the island.
Hurrying down from the rocks, I ran through the sand. With each stride, more of the cove's opposite shore came into sight. More and more.
Nothing but sand and rocks; jungle further back.
When the boat loomed into view, it scared the shit out of me. I dived for the sand.
Stretched out on the beach with my head up, I gazed at the vessel.
There'd been no need to panic; it wasn't under way, as I'd thought.
I saw anchor lines stretching down into the water.
I saw nobody aboard.
It was a big white cabin cruiser -- about a forty-footer.
Matt's boat, I figured.
And our ticket out of here.
Now all I've gotta do is find my women . . .
That's what ran through my mind, for a few seconds. I was elated. Then scared, realizing I might've already been seen. Just because the boat looked deserted . . .
I stared hard at it, and wondered if Wesley or Thelma might be staring back at me through a window or port.
No sign of anyone.
I scurried on my belly for the edge of the jungle. In the shelter of the bushes and trees, I got to my feet. Then I snuck through the thick foliage until the cove came into view again.
From my new position, I had a full, wide view.
Off to the right, perhaps a hundred yards beyond the anchored cabin cruiser, a dock jutted out from the shore. Floating at the end of the dock were two dinghies. One of them had probably been used to transport people (Matt and the woman?) ashore from the anchored cruiser. The other looked a lot like our dinghy.
I'd last seen it heading north, Wesley aboard, when he was making his getaway after splitting open Andrew's head.
He must've brought our dinghy here, and docked it.
I hardly got a chance to think about the dinghies, though, because the house suddenly caught my attention.
For my high-school graduation present, just last summer, my parents took me on a special trip.
It started with spending a week in Memphis, Tennessee.
There, I almost got trampled to death by a mob of spectators in the lobby of the Peabody Hotel when I tried to catch a glimpse of the damn ducks that march through twice a day. I almost got scared to death when we visited the Civil Rights Museum at the old Lorraine Motel where Martin Luther King got shot. My white parents and I were pretty much the only people of that shade roaming through the museum, which seems to be a monument to the evils of the white man.
Memphis wasn't all bad, though. It had delicious barbeque and fabulous music. Every night, we walked from our hotel to Beale Street, where the blues were born. Beale Street was great.
While staying in Memphis, we also visited Elvis's home, Graceland.
The house on the cove didn't remind me of Graceland.
No, this house was what I'd imagined Graceland would be like: a huge plantation-style mansion.
Graceland had turned out to be smaller, more modern than I'd expected. But I had a chance to see plenty of actual plantation houses after leaving Memphis.
My real graduation present wasn't the visit to Memphis, but a trip down Old Man River on an authentic paddlewheel steamboat, the Mississippi Queen. (For one thing, I'm a big fan of Mark Twain.) We spent six days and nights on the river, and ended up in New Orleans.
Along the way, we stopped at places like Vicksburg and Natchez. And visited God-only-knows how many antebellum homes. These were plantation houses built in the period before the War Between the States. Big old hunchers, usually three storys high, full of narrow stairways and tiny rooms, their outsides loaded with columns, balconies and verandas.
They were very interesting until you'd been through about two of them. After that, they mostly looked alike. (Mom is big on antiques and Dad is a Civil War buff, so they were happy as pigs in slop. My fondness for Mark Twain didn't extend far enough, though, to cover endless, dreary tours of mansions.) The deal is, the white mansion beyond the cove looked as if it had been plucked off the grounds of an old cotton or tobacco plantation on the Mississippi, and plonked down here.
I gaped at it, stunned.
What the hell was an ante-bellum mansion doing on a little lost island like this one?
My imagination told me that a Southern Gentleman had settled here, long ago. Maybe he'd lost his original plantation house during the War Between the States (most of them went up in smoke, though you wouldn't think so if you ever got pushed into touring them), so he'd sailed to this island to start over again -- far from the Yankees -- and built this home in the image of the one he'd lost.
Sort of a romantic notion, and probably wrong.
Maybe it was built in the 1980s by a rich guy with a weird fondness for Scarlett O"Hara (or Rhett).
I kept staring at it from my hiding place at the edge of the jungle.
I would've been pretty thrilled to find any house at all.
But this!
I felt as if I'd taken one small step into The Twilight Zone. All I needed was Connie to give me the "doo-de-do-do" music and her Serling intro -- One Rupert Conway, eighteen, took a little walk along the beach one day in search of his missing ladies. Instead of finding the ladies, he found himself venturing into a strange land ruled by the limits of the imagination . . .
I stared at the mansion for a long time.
It had probably been the home of Matt and the woman I'd found in the lagoon. Just as the cabin cruiser and one of the dinghies must've been theirs.