A thought occurred to me, and I scribbled it down on one of the Post-it notes that still littered the table. I slid it in front of Paul.
Paul picked up my note and squinted at it. ‘Was their dog with them, too?’
‘Duffy? Yeah. I even asked Winnie to order a supply of special dog food for the little yapper.’
Frank, Sally and their Scottish terrier, Duffy. Overdue. I refused to use the term ‘missing.’
It was easy, I knew all too well, to lose track of time while in paradise. Frank wasn’t scheduled to speak until Wednesday. They were probably dawdling along, anchored in an idyllic lagoon, swimming, laughing, with Duffy barking at them playfully from the bow as they splashed in the water below him.
We knew Wanderer, too, a Reliant 41 yawl built by Cheoy Lee. We’d often sailed with the Parkers on the Chesapeake before Frank’s retirement had taken them away. They had sailed, quite literally, into the sunset, following a lifelong dream. Postcards had come from Norfolk, Charleston, Savannah, Hilton Head, Fernandina Beach, St Augustine and Cape Canaveral as they made their way south along the inland waterway.
‘I wish I had known they were coming,’ I complained to Paul when he’d finished his conversation with Tony and had cradled the mike. ‘We’ve got plenty of room on the dock. They could have tied up there. Slept in the snore box.’
‘We’ll tell them when we see them.’ Paul laid his hand on mine and gave it a reassuring squeeze. ‘Don’t worry.’
TEN
MR THEODORE R. ZICKES… CAME HERE AND ORDERED A THIRTY-FOOT AUXILIARY SLOOP. UNCLE WILL COMPLETED THE BOAT… AND IT WAS NAMED SWEET-HEART. THE SWEET-HEART WAS LEFT HERE YEAR ROUND IN UNCLE WILL’S CARE. I WET THE DECKS EACH MORNING WHEN IT DID NOT RAIN AND THERE WAS NO DEW. FOR THIS JOB I RECEIVED TWO SHILLINGS (28 CENTS) PER MONTH. EACH YEAR THE SWEET-HEART WAS GIVEN A COMPLETE PAINT JOB BY SOME OF UNCLE WILL’S WORKMEN.Haziel L. Albury, Man-O-WarMy Island Home, p. 55
I stuck my head into the bedroom where Paul had been hiding out all morning with his laptop, manipulating geometrical shapes with his Sketchpad software. A cube was spinning crazily around the screen.
‘The barge is just in, so I’m off to the grocery.’
‘Apples,’ he said without looking up. ‘And English muffins if they have them.’
His fingers only paused; they were still glued to the keys.
‘Dreamer,’ I muttered. The last time the Pink Store had English muffins, they had been three weeks past their sell-by date, but I bought them anyway. A shout out for calcium propionate, sorbic acid and monoglycerides.
I added ‘apples’ to my list and an optimistic ‘Eng muff,’ slipped the list into my pocket and my feet into my Crocs. As I emerged into the sunlight from the shade of the porch, I checked the sky. A malevolent black cloud had settled over Abaco. I wondered if I had time to get to the grocery and back before it reached Bonefish Cay and gave me and my purchases a good drenching.
I made a quick detour to haul the clothes off the line, toss them into the laundry basket without folding and slide it on to the bunkhouse porch under the shelter of the roof. They would need ironing, but since we didn’t have an iron – such a pity! – what did it matter?
Ten minutes later, I tied Pro Bono up at the government dock in Hawksbill Harbour and went ashore. The barge was still unloading cardboard crates of produce and dairy products at the Pink Store, so I walked on, stopping for a minute or two at Hawksbill Marina to enjoy the view. Fishing boats and luxury yachts that Paul and I could never afford in a million years were tied up to finger piers, gently rocking. I wondered if any of their owners would be moving to Mueller’s Tamarand Tree Marina when it opened in six months’ time, and what effect their desertion would have on the locals.
Next door, at Tropical Treats, I placed an order for lunch – two conch burgers and fries to go. Service at Tropical Treats is glacial – you pay extra for that – so I knew I could dilly-dally around town for as long as an hour before my order would be ready. But the food was always worth the wait.
At Pinder’s Boat Yard, I loitered outside the shed to observe while workers put the finishing touches on one of their custom-made launches. As I peered through the open doors, they lowered the helm into place on a twenty-five foot beauty and began fastening it to the deck. Nearby sat a fiberglass hull still in the mold; the next boat that would come off their modest, low-tech assembly line. I would have stayed longer, but I was starting to hallucinate on fiberglass resin fumes, so I decided to see what was going on in the yard outside.
Behind the shed, two other workers had maneuvered a yacht on to a sled and were hauling it out of the water on a marine railroad. The sled was attached by a steel cable to an electric winch, which cranked the vessel along the rails, across the road and up a slight incline where another winch and pair of rails moved the boat sideways. The whole operation took less than ten minutes, and when it was done, the boat was tucked neatly into a slot between two other boats at least fifty feet up on dry land. Impressive. Back home, that task would have taken three guys, one supervisor and a hundred ton, half-million dollar Marine Travelift the size of a town house.
Because it was hurricane season, the yard was full of yachts propped up on jack stands, packed together like proverbial canned sardines, awaiting the return of their owners in November when the threat of hurricanes would be over. Some were covered with shrink wrap, others with tarps. Still others were being cleaned, repaired and repainted, like the sailboat someone I recognized was working on now.
‘Bonjou, Daniel.’
Daniel stood on the top rung of a ladder propped up on the side of the vessel’s hull. He was brushing varnish on the wooden toe rail with deft, fluid strokes. When I spoke, he balanced his paintbrush on the rim of the varnish can and looked down. ‘Bonjou!’
‘Bel bato, n’est-ce que pas!’
Ah, I should own such a boat. A cobalt-blue hull, color so pure and deep I felt I could dive right into it. Woodwork varnished to a high gloss, glowing in the sun. Someone was very lucky.
‘Ki-moun posede sa bato?’ I asked Daniel.
Daniel grinned. ‘Mister Jaime.’ With his paintbrush, Daniel gestured toward the stern of the vessel, which I took as an invitation to check it out for myself.
At the stern I found another worker up on a ladder lettering A-L-I-C-E I-N W-O-N-D-E-R-L-A-N-D on the transom. That figured. The jerk probably thought that naming a boat after his wife would make up for the black eye.
As I admired the boat, though, I grew increasingly uncomfortable. Like luggage on airport baggage carousels, many boats look alike – their fiberglass bodies are laid out one after another in identical molds, after all – yet this one seemed familiar.
I stepped back for a broader view. The Alice in Wonderland had two masts, the smaller of the two mounted in the stern, behind the helm. So it was a yawl. An unusual rig for a boat these days. I could count on the fingers of one hand the number of yawls we’d seen in the Abacos since our arrival.
Trying to act casual, I paced off the distance from bow to stern. Forty feet, more or less.
My heart did a quick rat-a-tat-tat in my chest. Frank and Sally’s Wanderer was a forty-one foot yawl.
I couldn’t count the number of times we’d sailed the Chesapeake Bay with the Parkers on Wanderer. I remembered one long day on the bay when Frank, trying to beat a squall, plowed Wanderer into a piling, gouging her bow. I walked around to the bow of Alice in Wonderland and reached up as high as I could, running my fingers along the rounded seam, feeling for any sign of damage. But if there’d been any, it had been repaired.