Isolde loved their house, but the pool gave her the creeps. She’d refused to swim in it long before the alligator arrived. Woody insisted that they couldn’t have afforded the house if not for the corpse that had been found in the pool. News of the corpse had made the house a hard sell, even after the price was slashed. Maybe it wasn’t a coincidence that Isolde was inspecting the kitchen when the real estate agent told Woody the story in the garage.
The house had been owned by a gay couple. One of them, Howard, wound up dead and floating. The police suspected murder, but nothing could be proved. Isolde didn’t hear about Howard until after she moved in. A retired pediatrician from down the street told her. A pool’s a perfect place for murder, he said. If you’re going to do it, do it in a pool.
Isolde was furious. “You knew about this?” she said to Woody.
“You wanted the house so badly.”
“You never would have told me, would you?”
Woody apologized, saying that he’d been waiting for the right moment.
Soon after they married and moved into their house, Isolde’s mother, Thais McCracken, arrived. She was tall, bulky, gray-haired, silent. She wore bright muumuus and took over the back porch. She spent mornings on a rattan lounge chair studying the Miami Herald, drinking coffee, and chain smoking Marlboro Lights, and afternoons watching soap operas, chain smoking Marlboro Lights, and sipping from a tall, never-empty glass of gin and tonic. To Woody, she represented another secret chamber in Isolde’s heart. Mrs. McCracken seemed to regard him with grim amusement. He was delighted to drive her out to the airport to catch her flight back to Boulder.
On the way home, he said to Isolde, “Didn’t you tell me your mother was dead?”
Isolde said that she must have been talking about her stepmother.
In the late afternoon, their flight from San Francisco landed, nearly as scheduled, in Miami. The airport shops and restaurants had closed, and travelers clustered around television sets in the terminal waiting areas, watching an orange circle spin northwest over a map of the Bahamas and the Florida Straits.
Isolde and Woody retrieved their luggage and found a taxi. While they rode south through sunstruck, emptying streets, they held hands and made plans. Woody would put up the hurricane shutters; Isolde would drive to the supermarket and the gas station.
When the taxi turned into their driveway, Isolde gasped. “Oh my God.” Woody saw the doors of his house and garage wide open and his junkie brother Chip and another man putting metal shutters on the front porch windows.
The taxi stopped near the open garage. Woody apologized for his brother, saying that the last he’d heard, Chip was living in a halfway house over on Miami Beach. Isolde said, “He can go back there right now,” but Woody explained that Miami Beach had probably been evacuated.
“I can’t leave my little brother out in a hurricane.”
Isolde said, “Let them go to a public shelter. Please, Woody, tell Chip and his friend to go away. I hate junkies. I’ve told you that before. Send them away. They’ll be all right.”
Woody replied that Chip was his little brother and needed his help.
Isolde said that Woody just didn’t get it. Chip didn’t care about anyone. He cared about drugs. He’d send Woody naked into the hurricane in two seconds if he had to do that to get his hands on drugs. Chip was a junkie, not a brother.
By this time Chip had put down the metal shutter he’d been carrying and was ambling toward the taxi. He was skinny, sallow, balding, twenty-eight, with acne scars on his cheeks. Woody thought he looked like the actor who played Salieri in the film Amadeus. Chip wore dark prescription glasses and talked with a lighted cigarette stuck in the right corner of his mouth. In the past, he’d survived on menial jobs and handouts from their mother. Now he walked around to Woody’s side of the taxi and tapped on the window. Woody lowered it.
“Hey, bro,” Chip said, his cigarette bobbing. “Hey, Isolde.”
Woody let the silence hang on them. Finally, he told Chip, “I persuaded them to drop the lawsuit. It’s all coming out of your part of Mom’s estate, that and the value of the other things you sold, so you were only stealing from yourself.”
Right after their mother died, Chip insisted on flying out to Bolinas to “do his part” preparing her house for sale, while Woody went to Brazil on business. Chip sold her Leica cameras, her good rugs, and her silverware for cash to buy drugs. He also sold her sickroom medical equipment — oxygen tanks, hospital bed and bedside table, special toilet seat, even her walker — not knowing that it had been rented. Woody was their mother’s executor, so the medical equipment company had been hounding him for restitution.
“Thanks, bro,” Chip said. “I really mean it. I’m sorry for the trouble.”
Woody asked Chip who the other guy was.
Chip said, “A guy from the shelter. Would you believe he’s an English lord?”
Woody looked more closely at the man. “What are those scars?”
Chip glanced over his shoulder and said they were bullet wounds. Those were just entrance scars. “Wait till you see where they came out. He used to own a bar in Jamaica, shipped a lot of ganja, until some bad guys came into the bar and let loose with a couple of Mac-10s.”
Isolde and Woody stood blinking in the heavy sunshine as the taxi reversed down the drive. Woody asked Chip how he’d gotten into the house; the alarm was on.
Chip said, “I cut the phone wires at the main box and disabled the alarm.”
“You cut my phone wires?”
Chip said the first thing a hurricane did was blow down phone wires, everybody knew that. “And I was in a real sweat to put up your hurricane shutters.” Chip added, “Got your cell phone?”
Without thinking, Woody handed it over. Chip slipped the cell phone into his shirt pocket.
Woody waited, then said, “I thought you were going to use the phone.”
“Yeah.” Chip nodded, his eyes sliding around the yard.
“Don’t let me stop you.”
Chip laughed. “Like, half a mo, bro.”
“Make the call.”
“I’m taking it for a walk in the yard, okay? Gotta speak to this guy.”
“I want it back.”
“In just a minute, okay?” Chip, looking amazed and a little hurt, spread his hands and, turning to Isolde for support, said, “I hope you can find something in the medicine cabinet to calm him down.” Isolde looked steadily back at Chip and said nothing.
Woody asked how Chip had gotten over here. Chip said, “We found a bike.”
Woody laughed, said, “The two of you on a bicycle?”
“No, no,” Chip replied. “We, you know, found a bike.”
Woody said, “You stole a motorcycle?”
Chip grinned boyishly, then said, “Did you know you’ve got an alligator in your pool?”
“Karma,” Isolde said. The English lord with the bullet scars had come around the corner of the house and was moving, slightly bent over, toward them. He was a slim, good-looking man in his early thirties, with curly brown hair and the bluest eyes Woody had ever seen in man or woman. Woody thought he looked remarkably like the Byron of Count D’Orsay’s 1823 Genoa sketch, which made the poet appear thin, almost convalescent. In another life Woody had written his Master’s thesis on Don Juan.
This lord was shirtless, wore dirty khaki shorts and orange flip-flops, and had a thin gold ring in his left earlobe. His four bullet scars formed an irregular diagonal from right shoulder down to left waistline. He moved with a tentative air, and, smiling as he came up, he told Woody that it was awfully kind of them to take him in at such short notice.