Saturday began with a topsail wind gusting through green bananas. A lemon merangue sky haunted the east. Feeling depressed, Hannah sought the cozy "sunrise" nook in Cap's pub for a quiet coffee. Looking through the leaded panes of the Tudor window she viewed the chaos of the world from an artful perspective. A wan light reflected from the waxed wood of the table and touched her with melancholy. Strangely, vaguely, she was reminded of something she could not quite capture.
Phhht-pock!
A bird had struck the window.
She went outside and found a dead tern. There was a wickedness in the wind now.
Grit stung her eyes. Clearing them, she saw a man approaching. Tall and lanky, with a forward pitch to his stride, he climbed the path onto the lawn like a daddy-longlegs. His wavy blond hair had been tossed up by the ascending gale. He carried a Panama hat, its brim partially scrolled in one hand, and lugged with the other a piece of leather luggage. Angry elementals tugged at his trousers and threatened to peel the seersucker blazer from his back. Classic Ray-Bans shielded his eyes. Mask-like.
Referring to the bird, he said, "Too bad."
Then he stepped inside. She followed, eyebrows knitted in disapproval.
He seated himself at the empty bar.
"May I help you?" she inquired coldly.
"I'd like a room upstairs and a double scotch while we negotiate."
"Bar's closed."
He lowered his sunglasses and reproached her with terrible gray eyes. "Surely, you can see I am one of those people who need a stiff riser in the morning."
Not the slightest thaw: "I'll see what I can do."
"Pinch would be fine."
*
"Thanks so much," he said expansively after being served. "How may I call you?"
"Senora. And you?"
"Radcliff. Robert Sinclair Radcliff."
Hannah recoiled in shocked disbelief. This man? This man was the land speculator who had alighted in their midst like a carrion bird and snatched up the old copra plantation out on Horseshoe Crab Key?
His notoriety in the Daily Gleaner had led her to believe he was some kind of Donald Trump.
Nothing but a clutch of pick-up sticks, he wore elegance like a shroud.
Sitting in the diffused Vermeer light, he seemed incorpreal. As if between her world and the next. Only his Masonic tie-chain glittered for real.
*
Its color shifting from sago to sorghum, the sun descended into late afternoon. Ochre patio tiles lazily baked underfoot. At five o'clock Hannah seated herself in the shade of a Cinzano table umbrella and treated herself to a Fuzzy Navel. All was well in her world.
She watched the purple shadow, cast by the second story, inch along, tile by tile, toward a total eclipse.
At dusk her thoughts were of Mister Radcliff. The spectral lodger in Room 202.
Dressed rather formally in loose comfortable white for dinner-by-the-sideboard at the Jolly Roger, he reminded her of those effete gentlemen in old British movies. Claude Rains. Leslie Howard. She could not place his accent, so she asked him about it.
Furtively he replied, "I'm a Manxman."
"Very well. I'm not a nosy person."
He smiled, showing clean, yet crowded and crooked teeth. "I can see that."
There was nothing substantial about him, except his eyes. Gray, with violent violet irises that held you like those of a mesmerist. His manner of walking through the room resembled drifting fog. The thing that had struck her most was his aura of utter dissipation.
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