“Good. Ready to head out?”
Clark looked at his watch. It was just after five p.m. He figured the cruise from East End Bay in Tortola to Tarpon Island would take four hours under engine power. Once there, he’d wait a few hours more to head to shore, timing his arrival to avoid anyone else on the water in the bay or walking along the sand.
“Let’s do it.”
It was a beautiful afternoon on Tarpon Island, but that was no surprise to anyone. This was paradise; even when it rained it was beautiful here.
Today there was no rain; the weather was characteristically perfect, the sky a deeper blue than usual, the ocean clear as glass in the foreground and perfectly aquamarine in the distance.
Seven-year-old Noah Walker splashed as he swam in the shallow surf. His mother, Kate, watched him from her beach chair, looking over the top of her book at him from time to time, just to assure herself he hadn’t wandered too far out in the deep. His snorkel, his tuft of jet-black hair, and the backside of his red swim trunks were the only things sticking out of the water anywhere in the bay.
Kate knew she was in heaven here, and she hoped Noah was able to appreciate it. She’d come from a lower-middle-class family; she’d worked for everything she’d ever had in life. It was hard for her to get her head around her son’s utterly different childhood experience, but she did her best to keep him as grounded as possible.
That was hard here in paradise, of course, with the maids and cooks and other attendants. With the seaplanes and fine dining, and daily celebrity sightings at the dining pavilion.
Noah knew nothing different from this life; even in London and Sydney they’d had it extremely good since he was three or so, but Kate still had a hard time accepting it all as part of her own existence.
She was no trophy wife, and nothing on earth infuriated her more than when she felt someone treated her as such. She’d worked as a waitress in Sydney while she went through school, then she’d met Terry when they were both programmers at a small software company.
When they were first married, neither of them owned their own car, and within a year they were parents, which made their financial situation even more precarious. Kate left work to take care of Noah, and soon after that Terry, much to Kate’s consternation, quit his job to spend his time developing new software products for the new virtual-currency exchanges cropping up on the Internet. They moved to London, where prices were even higher than in Sydney.
It had taken him years to bring his first piece of software to market, and he’d made a lot of money off it, and five years after that his masterpiece was finished and live — BlackHole.
For the first years of BlackHole they’d been rich beyond her wildest imagination, but then Terry explained to her that he needed to relocate from London, move to the Caribbean, and there he could truly realize the dream of making BlackHole the biggest and best virtual-currency exchange on earth. She agreed, provided he put a time limit on their relocation, and the next thing she knew, they were here and her husband was making $2 million a month.
The Walkers’ lives had changed dramatically, to put it mildly, but Kate often caught herself feeling wistful about those days in London when they were scrounging coins in the sofa cushions to pay for Noah’s diapers. At least they were together. These days, in order to keep Terry’s system up and running he had to work seven days a week; he had a never-ending array of clients to meet and trades to execute, and there was nothing but promises from him of when he would take a break, when they would get to enjoy their lives, when they would finally get a vacation from paradise.
Six more months was his promise, and it was a promise she planned on holding him to.
The beach here was nearly empty this afternoon, but that was usually the case. She came out here with Noah most every day around this time, after the worst of the sun’s rays, and she read while her son swam around, hunting shells in the shallow water of the bay.
She was just thinking about how boring paradise could be when a woman’s voice startled her. “Oh, hello there. Mind if I join you?”
She turned to find an attractive smiling woman sitting down in the next beach chair, a piña colada in her hand. She wore a conservative bikini with a wrap around her waist, and a wide-brimmed hat on her head. The woman’s European accent was noticeable, but Kate couldn’t place it.
“Hi,” Kate said. “Of course not. You must be new.”
“Just in today. We’re on the other side, in the little cottages. I hope it’s okay for me to be here.”
Usually this stretch of beach was reserved for the three villas up on the hill above them, and the cottages on the far end of the bay had their own, less exclusive stretch of sand. But it was not Kate’s job to enforce the rules of the resort, so she wasn’t about to send this lady packing. Plus, she realized she was happy for the adult company. She extended a hand. “Of course you can be here. Kate Walker.”
“I’m Julia.”
Kate thought the woman was beautiful, and she assumed she was someone famous. Most of the vacationers here on Tarpon Island were not rock stars or actors, but a significant portion were, and this lady sure had the looks, bearing, and confidence of a celebrity. The fact she’d given only her first name also contributed to Kate’s suspicion that Julia fully expected to be recognized.
Not wanting to appear to be a typical starstruck civilian, Kate didn’t ask her anything else. There was an unspoken rule here on the island: You didn’t question anyone about what they did for a living. At a place where many people went in order to get away from attention, it was seen as improper to peer into private lives.
Julia looked out to the water at Noah. “He’s got so much energy. All I want to do is lie around and sun.”
Kate smiled. “Same here.” She raised her own glass. “With a drink in hand.”
Julia tapped her glass to Kate’s. “You’re here on vacation?”
Kate could have answered simply “Yes” and shut down further inquiry, but she didn’t have many opportunities to talk about her life. “Not really. My husband is in the BVIs on business, and I homeschool Noah, so we are living here, for the time being.” She realized the tone she’d affected, and quickly added, “Not that I’m complaining. We’re living in a villa. This place is wonderful.”
Julia said, “It’s wonderful enough in the cottages.” She looked over her shoulder. “But I suspect that villa is exquisite.”
Kate nodded. “Sure is. We’ve been here quite a while, though, so I am looking forward to returning to Sydney.” She motioned to Noah. “He could stay right here forever.”
The two ladies were the same age, give or take a couple years, and it was bothering Kate that she couldn’t place Julia. She tried to picture her on a stage with a microphone in her hand, or in an ad in a glossy magazine, or even in a movie.
Nothing. She didn’t look familiar at all.
She decided she’d break Tarpon Island protocol. “How about you, Julia? What brings you here?”
“I’m here for work as well.”
“I see,” Kate said, but she didn’t. That Julia added nothing, just sipped her piña colada and looked out at the water, kept Kate from making any further inquiries.
It was quiet for several seconds, only the breeze and the squawks of a few grackles in the distance.
Finally, Julia broke the stillness. “My boyfriend and I are thinking about getting a tour of one of the villas before we leave. He has a big family, he’s Italian, Catholic, you know what I mean.”
“Sure,” Kate said. Now she was trying to picture the woman’s boyfriend. Maybe he was the famous one.