Chapter 2
I t was after eleven when we turned at the entrance of Port Antigua.
George’s house was at the end of the street, the corner lot flanked by water on two sides.
It was a good half-mile down, but we weren’t a hundred yards off the highway before the blue lights ahead came into view.
Waylan lifted his foot off the accelerator, fingers gripping the wheel as his head slowly turned, eyes asking if I’d seen what he had.
And if I had, what the hell should we do about it.
I kept a calm voice, hoping not to alarm Ellie. “You might ought to flip a U. Like now.”
He nodded, jerking the wheel to veer across the road before he braked and slammed it into reverse. I was glad it was him making the three-point-turn in the car that was longer than a bread truck.
“What’s going on?” Ellie craned her neck to look over my shoulder toward the flashing lights in the distance. “Are the police at the party? ”
“Looks that way, ” I said, focusing on the road leading away from the blue lights.
“Why are we running from them?” Ellie asked, confused. “We’re not doing anything wrong. You’re just going back to work.”
Waylan’s voice was calm and confident. “That champagne in the trunk is black market. And we drank half a bottle of rum between us. We don’t need a run-in with the law.”
Despite the jealous sting, I was impressed with Waylan’s quick thinking. “We should get the limo off the road. It draws too much attention.”
Ellie blinked, still straining to see what was going on behind us that we were in such a hurry to avoid. “What if someone’s hurt? Or something bad happened?” Here eyes were wide with worry. “We should go back.”
“If we go back there, Waylan could get arrested for DUI,” I said softly.
“And we’ve got bootleg booze in the trunk.
We can’t go back there right now.” I patted her knee, hoping to soothe her without letting her in on the real truth.
“Don’t worry. Waylan can drop us at a friend’s house for the time being. ”
The comfort I offered apparently wasn’t very comforting. Ellie’s hands were wringing in her lap, eyes as wide as saucers. “My aunt’s van is back there. I have to go back.”
My palm covered her delicate hands with a gentle squeeze. “We will, later. I promise. But right now, we’ve got to go.” I turned to Waylan, keeping my voice steady. “Drop us at Sammy’s.”
He nodded, eyes straight ahead and jaw clenched. “Good idea.”
Sammy’s shack was more of a thatched lean-to with an outhouse than an actual shack. I saw his feet swing over the side of a hammock in headlights that shined into the makeshift structure he called home.
Waylan killed the lights.
Sammy lit a kerosene lantern with a match and strolled toward the limo with his head cocked. His smile spread when Waylan lowered the blacked-out glass.
“Hey, Sambo. I wasn’t sure if you’d be here.”
“Yeah, man,” Sammy stroked his scraggly beard. “Where else would I be?”
Sammy acted ancient compared to most 25-year-olds. It didn’t matter that it was a holiday. Sammy would be out shelling in the morning like he did every day. So of course he’d be home.
Waylan shrugged. “I dunno. Maybe a party? It’s New Year’s Eve, dude.”
Sammy’s brow slanted. “I don’t do parties.” He peered inside the limo, over the lowered partition into the back of the car. “You guys partying in the limo?”
Ellie shifted beside me nervously and I had a strong urge to put an arm around her, or a hand on her knee.
Instead I gave her little smile and a wink.
She eyed me curiously while Waylan shook his head and waited until Sammy looked him in the eye, speaking carefully.
“Not exactly. There’s been a little incident at the party we were working for George. The heat is there. ”
Sammy’s smile faded as the news registered. “Ah. So you brought his limo here?” He was trying not to sound annoyed that the drug smuggler’s conspicuous vehicle was in his yard.
I felt a pang of guilt since it was my idea.
It was kind of a dick move, but it was the safest place I could think to go.
“No,” I said, holding up my hands to calm him.
“Waylan’s dropping me and Ellie so he can go get the limo off the road, somewhere safe.
We just need a place to lay low for a bit. ”
Sammy waved me over, but took a stern tone with Waylan. “Get on out of here. And be careful.”
Sammy lit another lantern, illuminating the thatched walls on three sides under a tin roof. “Make yourselves at home. I only have two stools, but I’ve got three hammocks. Have to have spares.” He grinned, trying to make us feel welcome.
“Thanks, man. This is Ellie. Eleanor Russell.”
He smiled. “The Russells are a nice Conch family. Pleased to meet you, Ellie.”
“Thank you, Sammy. Nice to meet you too.” Her eyes wandered around the sparse space. “How long have you lived here?”
“Six months.”
Ellie raised a brow. “Well, you survived hurricane season, so you should be safe for six more.”
Sammy laughed. “Hopefully by then I’ll have something a little more permanent built.”
He’d scrimped together the money for half the price of the beachfront property the shack sat on, and convinced the owner to finance the rest. He was scrimping again to save for a real house.
But he didn’t seem to be in any hurry. The Robinson Crusoe life suited Sammy, which was why he was one of my favorite people.
Ellie sat on a stool and watched, quiet as a mouse while I helped Sammy sling ropes over the log beam to string up two more hammocks. “How’re you related to Bernard?”
Bernard Russell was a local hero. The fire department was named after him.
“He’s my great uncle.”
“Funny you mentioned hurricane season. Hearing him tell his stories of the ‘35 hurricane on 6o Minutes gave me nightmares for weeks when I was a kid.”
“We don’t talk about that much in my family,” Ellie said softly. The Russells had lost over a dozen in that storm—a founding family decimated. Ellie’s eyes roamed the rough-hewn rafters. “I don’t suppose you’d try to ride out a storm here if one was coming.”
“Nah,” Sammy said. “I take too many chances sometimes, but I’m not that stupid.” He shot me an unmistakable look.
I tried to ignore what I figured was a dig at my idiocy for being mixed up with George’s operation, and pulled the other stool next to Ellie, facing Sammy as he sat down in his hammock, his feet swinging over the dirt floor.
Ellie’s gaze wandered to the shelves made of cinder block and planks. “You collect shells for a living?”
Sammy looked around the sparse surroundings, a smile in his eyes. “There’s a much better living in it than my current accommodations suggest.”
He made plenty of money harvesting shells nine hours a day most days. But he’d saved every penny and put it into his dream. I admired his dedication and determination. That would be me someday.Minus the dirt floor, I hoped.
Sammy told me that he had set his sights on the property as a teenager while on a family vacation, during which he told his attorney father that ‘he was going to build a hotel there someday.’ His dad said he’d be back home, broke, in a year when he dropped out of pre-law at NYU to come down here to make a living diving for shells.
Five years later he was well on his way to his dream.
“Honestly, being out there every day is reward enough,” Sammy said. “I’d rather be underwater than on the surface. Because life on the surface is superficial. It’s only surface. You know what I mean?”
I shook my head, chuckling under my breath. “You mean life underwater is deeper ?”
“Totally!” Sammy leaned forward on his hammock, looking like he might leap up to shout it louder to whoever would listen.
I laughed, running my fingers into my hair, trying not to think about the blue lights back at George’s. “You've been smoking too much weed, man.”
“Fuck off.” He reached down from the hammock to pick up a piece of gravel and chucked it at me. “You know what I mean. You get it.”
I dodged the rock and chuckled. “Yeah, I know.” He was right.
I did get it. Being out on the water fishing was the same for me as shelling was for Sammy.
If you’re where you want to be, doing what you love, it’s not work at all.
It’s just a happy life. I didn’t need to go to college to figure that out. I just needed a boat .
My little Boston Whaler was only good for calm waters and three passengers max.
To have a real fishing business, I needed a real boat.
And every lookout trip I ran for George got me one step closer to it.
I’d been tucking away most of my earnings, with the pipe dream of buying a sport fishing boat I could run real charters on.
“Check this out!” Sammy hopped up, excited for whatever he’d just thought of, and went toward the single wooden table along the back wall of his hut.
He lifted a small carved shell container, admiring it before he twisted the top off.
He pulled what looked like a pink pebble from the box, holding it up in the dim, flickering glow of the old lantern for us to see.
“I found this beauty today,” he said, his teeth gleaning in a big grin. I wasn’t sure what I was looking at until he explained. “It’s a conch pearl.”
“Oh wow,” I said, squinting to see its details. Most pearls come from oysters, and they were rare. Those coming from Conch were even more uncommon, I knew. “You don’t see many of those.”
Sammy smiled, proud. “Especially not these days. Conchs are fewer and farther between every day. And pearls occur in one of every five hundred. One this nice is maybe one in ten thousand.”
I blinked, an amused smile spreading at Sammy’s scientific explanation.
Ellie’s eyes were wide, surveying the tiny gem in his palm.
He handed it over gingerly, so as not to drop it onto the sandy earth floor.
Ellie rolled it between her fingers, holding it up to eye it in the dim lantern light like it was the finest diamond in Africa .
“It’s beautiful,” she said with a wispy air that caught in my heart.Seeing her so taken by the pearl, her blue eyes wide, that was beautiful.
Sammy nodded. “The nicest one I’ve encountered in five years doing this.”
Ellie looked at it like it was suddenly too perfect to keep and started to give it back to Sammy.
I intercepted, closing her fingers around the pearl, her soft hand warm in my calloused palm. Her touch sent a jolt of warmth through me, as if her tenderness could soften even my hardest edges. “You like it? It’s yours.” I looked at Sammy. “We’ll settle up later.”
Ellie tried to refuse, shaking her head. “You don’t have to do that.” She smiled at Sammy. “You should sell it, to help build your house.”
I squeezed her slight hand in mine. “I’ll pay him. You keep it,” I insisted. “I can tell you like it.”
“That’s very kind, but I can’t.” She pulled her hand away and dropped the pearl into Sammy’s palm.
Considering the questionable circumstances we found ourselves in, it wasn’t a shocker that Ellie didn’t want anything from me.
Her wide eyes were full of worry. I lifted a finger to get Sammy’s attention as he placed the pearl back into the carved box, and pointed to myself to let him know to keep it for me.
He nodded discreetly before raising a tarnished silver pocket watch off the table and flicking the cover open. “It's been 1982 for twenty minutes already.” He shrugged. “Happy New Year, I suppose. ”
In trying to forget why we were there, we’d forgotten the occasion. Definitely not the way I’d hoped to ring it in, but at least we were safe, for now. “Thanks for letting us crash here.”
“No sweat. I’d have slept through the holiday it if you guys hadn’t shown up. You got a plan for tomorrow? I’m heading out at sunrise.” I could tell he hoped we’d be gone long before he got back.
Ellie spoke up. “I have to be home in the morning to help with my family fish fry.” She turned toward me. “And I have to get my aunt’s van back to her.” There was a faint smile on her lips that didn’t match the tension in the rest of her face, like she was faking being fine.
“I’ll get you home for your fish fry. Don’t you worry.” I reached to put my hand on her knee but she shifted to pull away.
Sammy’s brows shot up and he gave me a sympathetic look before he turned back to Ellie with a soft smile. “Grab a hammock and get some rest. Tomorrow’s a new day.”
“Thanks.” Ellie stood and moved toward the teal and yellow hammock nearest her stool. “Hopefully it will be far less eventful than today.” She laughed, adjusting her dress after she settled into the hammock, but I doubted she thought any of it was funny.
Guilt churned in the pit of my stomach as I stretched out in the hammock beside hers. Ellie was a good girl. She deserved better.