He parked with the car headed toward a massive broken sea wall, the great slabs heaved up by hurricane, the reinforcing rods sticking out like naked bones.
“There’s a place where you can sit on the wall,” he said.
“Good,” she said. He walked with her to the place. It was still intact. He got on it, held his hand for her, pulled her up. They sat side by side on the wall. The waves made soft sounds on the sand.
“Is that something on fire?” she said. “Way out there?”
“Moon about to come up. Cigarette?”
“Thanks.” He cupped the lighter flame in his hands and held it for her.
“This is pretty crazy,” she said.
“Don’t mind that.”
“I better take it from the beginning. After your wife left the house empty, we asked around and got in touch with a nice man named Dobson, who gave us a fair price for a one-year lease. We thought we’d have our own place done in a year. Eddie and I worked awfully hard, and the little house was wonderful to come back to. We’d get back late and take a quick swim. We were too busy to be friendly with the new owner of Playa de Mañana, and then we found out he wasn’t renting the cabañas as they became empty. While we were still wondering about that, he put up the closed sign. Eddie thought maybe they were going to enlarge it or something, but they didn’t do anything to it. We were open by then, and working like dogs. But business wasn’t as good as we’d hoped.
“We were closed every Tuesday, the way we are now. We got up late one Tuesday and swam and then walked down the beach to say hello to Mr. Winkler and find out what he was planning. There were quite a few people there, friends of theirs, I guess, and they were pretty drunk and noisy, and Winkler was rude. Terribly rude. He ordered us off the place. It burned Eddie up. And we heard gossip in town about Winkler.
“Anyway, Eddie started wondering just what was going on next door. We’d see their boat go in and out after the new channel was dug, and we’d see them fishing off the reef out there. I’m a pretty-good swimmer, but Eddie was much better. Those people left us strictly alone, and we left them alone. Eddie swam out to the reef a couple of times, and once he swam way out beyond it to that rocky island out there. I told him it made me nervous to have him go that far out.
“He had to go into Miami alone one day, and he came back with a pair of binoculars. It made me a little mad because they were expensive, even if they were secondhand. About that time he started looking mysterious, and he stopped talking about what our neighbors could be doing. He left the restaurant a couple of times during the day without saying where he was going, but I had the idea he went back to the house.
“One night he accidentally woke me up as he was creeping back to bed in the middle of the night, breathing hard. I asked him where he’d been, and he just grunted at me. But he seemed more thoughtful and — I don’t know just how to say it — triumphant. Smug, sort of. I asked him what he was finding out, and he told me he’d tell me when he was absolutely positive.
“One morning, it was a Tuesday morning, he went out early for a swim. I got up and made breakfast and waited, and he didn’t come back. I went out, and I couldn’t see him anywhere. It was a sort of gray, misty morning. It made the water look oily, and it was quite calm. The tide was just coming in. I walked up and down the beach, but I couldn’t see him. The worst thing, I guess, was seeing his bare footprints in the sand going into the water and not being able to see any coming out. I got the binoculars and looked at the reef and at that rocky island. I kept telling myself he’d swum out to the island and he was on the far side of it and that was why I couldn’t see him. But I guess you know how you... have those terrible hunches about things.
“I was getting more and more frantic, and then I saw something in shallow water, and while I was running I knew what it was. I pulled him out, and I don’t know where the strength came from. I tried artificial respiration, but I could tell, just from the feel of him, that it wasn’t — any—” Her voice changed, and she turned away from him, in silence.
Paul sat stolidly, sensing she did not want any physical evidence of sympathy or awkward understanding. After a time, she turned back and dug in her purse for a cigarette. He lit it for her, looking at the flame rather than at her eyes.
When she continued, her voice was flat and under control. “When I talked to you in the restaurant. I left out one of the reasons I came back here. I was never completely satisfied about what happened to Eddie. If that Winkler was doing something wrong, and if Eddie was on the verge of finding out, then it was almost too perfectly timed.”
“Overconfidence, carelessness — they’ve killed a lot of swimmers, you know.”
“I know. I guess it’s crazy to keep thinking it was something else.”
“Have you told anyone about Eddie’s investigations?”
“You’re the only one, Paul. There’s one other thing, though. When I realized Eddie was — gone, I screamed, and I guess I fainted. When I came out of it, there was a blanket over Eddie, and Mr. Winkler and the two men who work for him were there, and they said they’d already phoned the sheriff. It was the only time they were anywhere near halfway nice, and they stayed right with me through the questioning and everything. It was only afterward that I realized that they had seemed relieved, sort of, after the questioning. Maybe because it had shown them that Eddie hadn’t told me anything — that is, if they knew he was spying on them. I can’t help feeling that if Eddie hadn’t drowned, they would have had something happen to him sooner or later, maybe to both of us. I sense that they’re completely brutal and ruthless and doing something wrong.”
He said slowly, “What happened to me today fits the picture, too. Winkler, out of the goodness of his heart, is letting me stay in my own house for one whole week. Then I’ve got to rent or sell to him, or else put a lot of money into giving the little house its own exit drive onto the highway. Let’s think out loud. It didn’t occur to Winkler in the beginning to suspect that anybody living in that little house could be dangerous to whatever he’s doing by getting too nosy. Suppose they’re aware that your husband has found out too much. And then, while they’re trying to figure some nice, quick way of shutting him up, Eddie has his accident. That makes it clear to Winkler that he better sew up the house. It sits empty, so he has no problems. Now I show up. He doesn’t want to push me too hard, so he gives me a week. Meanwhile they suspend whatever it is they’re doing. Smuggling, counterfeiting, whatever.”
“I suppose,” she said, sighing, “that I ought to just forget it.”
He sat there beside her, conscious of a weariness that was more than physical. It was deeper than bone marrow, a tiredness that lay like gray fog in the lowest valley of his soul. He resented the necessity to react, even negatively. There had been too many fire fights. A certain stranger named Eddie was dead. Another stranger named Valerie was gone. A young sturdy woman named Linda sat beside him, and from the beginning, from the first look across the bright restaurant, there had been a restless awareness of her — and he knew she, too, was puzzling about how quickly they had achieved a closeness that had nothing to do with what they had said or what they had done. Yet he resented even his inadvertent reaction to her. They were wrong about wars and woman hunger. Nobody came back full of need anymore. You had to learn to need all over again.