That night, I went to talk to Bone. I had a story all worked out, a way to convince him that Annalise was still alive, an explanation for the padlocked sail lockers and the chain scrape and even for his drug hangover. But I don't remember what it was, because I didn't get to use it.
His slip at the marina was empty. He and Conch Out were gone.
He'd left the previous morning, I found out. Hadn't told anybody where he was bound. One of his periodic solo cruises, prompted by his suspicions of me—a long one, maybe. He'd be back in a week or two, three at the outside. He always came back eventually.
But not this time.
I never saw Bone again.
THE VIRGIN ISLANDS
1984-2005
THERE ISN'T MUCH MORE to tell.
Oh, sure, I know—twenty-one years is a long time, a lifetime. But they were mostly uneventful years. Only a handful of high spots—and low spots—worth mentioning.
I got away with the Annalise crime. It was as perfect as the Amthor crime and the Cotler crime. Perfect.
That is what's important.
Life goes on.
How many times have you heard that, and all its variations? Life is for the living. Take each day as it comes. Live for the moment and don't look back. It's the state of mind people slip into when they've suffered irreparable losses. A refuge for the grief-stricken, the depressed, the unhappy, the emotionally wasted. And the unrefiliably empty.
My refuge, after a while.
I should have been content again. Annalise and the threat of exposure were gone for good. I was safe. The tight, structured little world I'd established for myself on St. Thomas was secure. I could continue to indulge my simple tastes for the rest of my life. I could be at peace.
Only I wasn't. The barrenness remained, like a seared landscape on which nothing that had been there before could be rebuilt and nothing new would grow. The reason for it, most of the reason anyway, was a deep sense of loss and privation that I couldn't shake. It had nothing to do with Annalise. It was Bone, of course, the wrenching away of his friendship, his companionship, his knowledge, his wisdom. And it was something else I'd lost that I cherished as much as Bone.
Windrunner, and all the yawl meant to me.
I don't mean physical loss; I continued to live on her, to take her out now and then. Psychic loss. Spiritual, maybe. The symbiotic connection of boat and man to the sea had been severed somehow and I could not seem to splice it back together. It was as if I'd tainted both Windrunner and my love of sailing beyond repair or redemption, as I'd tainted my relationship with Bone, by using them as instruments in Annalise's destruction.
Over and over I berated myself for not devising a different equation that didn't involve either Bone or the yawl, for rushing ahead with a deficient plan. I could have designed a better one, if I'd invested more time. Instead I'd opted for the quick and easy answer, and for that miscalculation I paid a damn high price.
Nothing was ever the same for me again.
The magic of singlehanding was gone. I still derived some pleasure from the wind, the sea, the night sky, the fast-running tacks and the dead-calm afternoons, but it was never again as intense or as lasting. Even the magic of Laidlaw Cay was gone—something else I lost. The first time I went back there, the terns and frigate birds had abandoned their nesting ground; without them the cay was just another barren sandspit. The second and last time, I discovered that heavy storm seas had diminished it to less than half its original size and all that remained were the reefs and a slender hump of sand strewn with sea wreckage. A dead place.
After a few months, I was sailing infrequently. Not working on Windrunner as much, either; the day-to-day tasks required to maintain upkeep on a yawl her size seemed to have grown tedious. Snorkeling also seemed to require too much effort, so I gave it up. Gave up driving around the island, too, except for shopping trips and an occasional visit to Marsten Marine. The closest I had to a friend now was Dick Marsten, but he was a workaholic and had a family and I saw him only for short periods at the boatyard.
I took up walking. Long walks in the morning and sometimes in the evening, along the winding streets of Frenchtown and the edge of Crown Bay, once all the way down Veterans Drive to Emancipation Garden and back. It was good exercise, it passed the time, and I learned to occupy my mind by concentrating on details of the surroundings.
I lost interest in sitting alone and communing with the night; I craved companionship, the kind I'd had with Bone. So I took to frequenting Harry's Dockside Cafe and some of the other local hangouts. But there was no substitute for Bone, not at the marina or in French-town or anywhere else on the island. I had to settle for the brief, boozy company of natives and of tourists hunting local color, and for meaningless conversations about women, politics, all sorts of topics I pretended to be interested in but wasn't.
I thought about Bone quite a bit that first year. Had he gone back to Nassau to be with his dalighter? Down to St. Lucia or Carriacou or one of the other as yet unspoiled islands in the Windwards or Grenadines? The Turks and Caicos? There were any number of possibilities. I might be able to find out if I tried hard enough, but then what? It was better if I didn't know.
I wondered how much longer he would have stayed on St. Thomas if it hadn't been for what I did. Not long, probably. The commercialism and the overcrowding would have driven him away. Would he have let me tag along with him? Two men, two boats, seeking fresh horizons and a brave new world? Maybe. Maybe not. Better if I didn't know that, either.
Wherever he was, whatever he was doing, I hoped he was happy and that his dalighter would become a marine biologist as planned and make him even happier. He deserved it. He was a good man, he'd never harmed anyone, he'd never committed any crimes or thrown away any of the things that were central to his life. He deserved happiness a hell of a lot more than I did.
Dick Marsten contacted me in May of '86, to ask if I would consider selling Windrunner. I'd confided to him that I wasn't as keen on keeping her as I'd once been, and he had a buyer who was interested in a secondhand yawl or ketch of her size. I wasn't as keen on Sub Base harbor, either—too many memories, too many changes in the waterfront. I'd been thinking about moving over to Red Hook, maybe trading Windrunner for another, smaller boat. It was possible a different environment and a different craft would rekindle my interest in sailing and the sea.
So Marsten brought the buyer, a chubby, middle-aged Florida transplant, over for a look. The man liked what he saw, made me a generous offer, and I accepted, contingent on Dick finding me an acceptable replacement.
It didn't take long. Within a week, Marsten located a twenty-eight-foot schooner for sale at a reasonable price on St. Croix. I took an in-terisland flight to Christiansted to check out the schooner, Joy leg. She was clean and well maintained, with a new mainmast. The owner and I went out for a half day's sail so I could see how well she handled, and that sold me on her. I told him he had a deal, then notified Dick Marsten to go ahead with the sale of Windrunner.
I returned to St. Thomas to sign the papers and rent slip space at the Red Hook marina, then flew back to Christiansted and sailed Joyleg across. That singlehand voyage was the best I'd been on in the two years since Bone went away. And the ambiance at Red Hook was more like what it had been at Sub Base harbor when I first went there. The change seemed to be what I'd needed, all right. New boat, new environment—new beginning.