The Devil on Chardonnay (16 page)

“The agent said it is offered by the heirs of one of your richest families,” Mikki said, jumping out of the stern in thigh deep water.

Wolf jumped out of the front and began pulling the launch onto the brief beach tangled with brush and driftwood.  Donn and Pamela hesitated getting their feet wet.  Boyd, taking the lead from Mikki, slid over the side and waded in, pushing the boat.

It may have been just a sandbar, but the trees on Sand Island had been there for three hundred years. Live oaks with trunks 12 feet thick and branches spreading 90 feet, parallel to the ground, do not spring up in one man’s lifetime.  Palmetto palms grew thick in the sand near the shore but gave way in the interior to huge oaks, poplars and gum trees.  It was quiet and cool. 

A circular charred area just off the beach surrounded by oyster shells, ketchup bottles and beer cans suggested trespassers used the island.

Wolf was tense.  His bulk clearly didn’t lend itself to stepping over logs or around brush and vines.  He’d already scratched his leg on a thorn and a thin line of blood was visible on his calf.  He walked as if there was nothing like this in his native Austria, or on the French Riviera where he lived.  He seemed to expect a wild beast to leap out of the forest at any moment.

Boyd and Eight Ball walked woods in the midlands of South Carolina almost daily.  He knew each tree and bush here but hadn’t seen anything this old outside the gardens of the plantations along the Cooper River north of Charleston.

“Private islands are hard to come by in Oklahoma.  I tried to buy a town once,” Donn said, walking through the brush to the interior.

“A town?”  Mikki asked.

“Yep.  Skunk Wells, Oklahoma.  The oil fields around there dried up, and cattle prices were down.  The local bank went bust, and I offered them a package deal. Bank, town square, town hall, the whole deal for two million bucks.  I was going to put in a golf course and sell lots.”

Near the center of the island, Boyd came upon an ancient magnolia, its thick trunk nearly obscured by the drooping of its lower limbs.  Midway up, on the very outermost tip of a long branch, was a rare late season bloom, pure white in the darkness of the forest. 

“Here, hold this,” Boyd said impulsively, digging into his pocket for the small knife he carried.  He handed it to Pam.

Pam took the knife and looked at it for a moment and then looked dumbly at the tree.

Boyd ran at the tree and leaped at the trunk, planting one foot as high as he could while grasping a branch and pulling himself smoothly upward, pausing momentarily with his torso across the branch before throwing a leg across it and standing.  Now 10 feet from the ground with his head  six feet higher into the foliage, he repeated the process and disappeared. 

“I’ll pull the branch down,” Boyd’s voice came from within the tree. 

From her pose, it was evident Pam had no idea what he was trying to do. 

He walked out on a large branch, holding a smaller one above it.  When he got near the end, both of them now sagging, he pulled himself up on the smaller branch and it bent near to the ground.  On the end of that branch was a pristine white flower 8 inches across.

 “Cut it with the knife,” he said, hanging from the branch.  “But don’t touch the flower.”

Pam cut the branch several nodes above the flower.  The others gathered to look at it while Boyd dropped to sit on the branch on which he’d been standing.  He sat there for a moment and then grabbed a lower branch and swung down another level, dropping to the ground and rolling in the soft earth.  He walked to Pam and took back his knife and the flower.  The fragrance, as always, took him back to early summer nights at home in southern Missouri, cicadas buzzing in the big oak and the fragrance crossing the road from the magnolia in the neighbor’s yard.  He trimmed the excess leaves from the stem and handed it to Mikki.

“You climbed the tree just to get a flower?”  Wolf asked.

“It’s a magnolia.  It blooms mainly in the spring, but for special occasions will sometimes produce one this late.  This tree has been popping these out for a hundred years or more. It’d be a shame not to look at one up close.”

“It’s beautiful,” Mikki said, smelling it.  “Thank you.”

They walked south, taking turns carrying the cooler. 

“So, are you going to buy it?”  Boyd was walking with Mikki.

“Perhaps.  The price is high.  I want it.”  She looked around, then back at the magnolia.  “There is a feeling here.”

Boyd nodded without speaking, looking back at the woods they had just traversed.  A cloud passed overhead and obscured the sun.  In shadow, the forest changed.

“Primordial. Do you know the word?” Mikki asked. “It is primordium in Latin.  The English word must be the same.”

She turned to look at Spanish moss drooping from the limbs of a live oak, its massive trunk somehow supporting limbs larger in girth than a man and drooping to the ground only many feet from the trunk. 

“Primordial. Yes, that’s the word.”

“You belong here.  You seem …”

“I fit in?”  Boyd laughed.  “I’m a primordial man?”

“Not so bad in a troubled, dangerous world,” she said simply, and then walked, watching the others in silence as they walked through the trees.

“My cousin has heirs and will own the bank when my grandfather dies.  He is younger, but male.  I am preparing to leave the bank at the end of this year.” 

She paused and leaned against the trunk of a fallen tree, her intense blue eyes focused on Boyd now.  He felt the attraction.

“It’s a fine island.” 

Boyd glanced into the eyes, still on him.  In his mind, he replayed the grand entrance of Chardonnay into Charleston Harbor, the Yacht Club party, the hurriedly arranged meeting with Byxbe, and now the island and impending trip back to Europe.  This wealthy sophisticate didn’t leave the playgrounds of the Riviera to buy Sand Island or to hear a pitch by Lymon Byxbe on a new vaccination process.

“Do you own part of your bank?” she asked, shifting her buttocks further back onto the trunk of the fallen tree.

“No.  I’m just a hired man, a securities salesman.”  Boyd smiled, looking away to the east.

He felt her gaze, searching.  This lady was smart.  He tried to blank his mind.  When he couldn’t, he tried to think salesman thoughts.  Failing again, he imagined Mikki’s bare breasts, not too hard considering he’d had ample time to study them that morning.  He didn’t know whether people could really know what another was thinking, but he knew he could spot a liar.  Could Mikki?

The troupe converged at the southern tip of the island and walked out onto a clean sand beach that stretched 200 yards farther south before disappearing in a point beneath the blue water.  To the west, several miles away, lay the mainland and the beginning of salt grass and tidal creeks that went well inland.  Bull Island, a large wooded island was just visible to the south.  The expanse of the large bay their small island sat in gave them a sense of isolation.  Chardonnay sparkled in the bright midday sun, riding high and proud at anchor a half-mile east.

“It’s lunchtime,” Donn announced, lugging the cooler out onto the beach and opening it.  They gathered, sorting through for their choice of French mineral water, beer or a bottle of Absolute vodka.  Boyd took a beer, kicked his shoes off and walked alone to the spit of beach at the end, using the serenity to mull over his problem.  At the end, he stood in ankle-deep water and looked back over the 200 yards of sand that separated him from his companions.  He imagined the blotches on the dead farmers, saw Jacques sitting on the beach and heard the drums.  Ebola was the adversary here, and a pattern was becoming evident. 

He recalled Joe Smith’s bad dreams while they’d been quarantined at Diego Garcia.  Joe always thought of Ebola as a thing, a united force, not a zillion individual creatures.  It broke out of the jungle by playing to the basest impulses in humans.  The actual illness was secondary, just a means of reproduction.  Ebola wasn’t going to be back in Charleston in a freezer controlled by a couple of businessmen desperate to unload worthless stock.  Follow the pattern.  Ebola had jumped to another vector.  If he wanted Ebola now, he would need to be out there, on Chardonnay, bound for Europe.

CHAPTER TWENTY EIGHT

Skinny Dip

Boyd pulled off his shirt as he walked back down the spit of land.  With the shirt behind his back he pitted his triceps one against the other, then put his fists together in front of his chest and maximally contracted his pectorals, then twisted to each side and flexed his lats.  In the two minutes it took to casually walk back to the group he had engorged his upper torso as effectively as if he’d done a dozen bench presses.  He walked to where Mikki stood by the cooler and reached in for a beer, popping the top and gazing at the sky.  As he posed, he let the whole bottle gurgle into his throat before casually dropping it to the sand. 

“It’s not like we have to be anywhere this afternoon,” Boyd said.  “This is as pretty a section of beach as there is in America.  I propose we enjoy having it all to ourselves.”

The sound of the change in the pocket of Boyd’s shorts hitting the ground caused four heads, turned momentarily to look at the beach he’d just praised, to snap around.  He stood there nude like Adonis, soaking up admiring glances, then took a quick step toward Pamela. 

“Come on Pammie!  Let’s go swimming.”

Boyd picked her up and accelerated into the surf, easily hoisting her weight onto his shoulder.  The waves tripped him and he dived forward, throwing a loudly protesting Pamela, as they splashed into the sea. 

************

Holding the bow several points east of due south, Boyd steered Chardonnay, feeling her spirit in the wheel.  The wind had shifted to the southwest, and they had to close-haul out to sea to get back to Charleston.  Hitting a swell now, the spray blew back onto the deck with some regularity and was a refreshment when it did.

“Mikki was a wee lass when I first shipped out on Chardonnay,” Neville said, returning to the deck from the doghouse where he’d gone to light his pipe.  The sun was warm still, but low in the west.  Boyd had chosen the fading sun and Chardonnay’s wheel to cocktails and laughter below.  The others were having a grand time reliving the afternoon and tending to Pamela’s sunburn.

“Her family big sailors?”

“Chardonnay belongs to Mikki’s grandfather.  He inherited her as a young man and sailed her long and fast.  Quite a man.”

“You the captain all that time?”

“No.  I was the mechanic.  You had to have a full-time mechanic in those days. Diesels weren’t as reliable as they are now.  We prefer to use pure sail, but get in a bad blow and you’d better have the diesel.”

“You must have seen a lot,” Boyd said, looking around, alert for traffic now that Charleston Harbor was in sight.

“Aye, that,” Neville said, puffing, looking east at the horizon.

Several minutes passed.

“Mikki seems spirited.  Is that just from being rich?”

“It’s in the blood.”  Neville said, puffing again.

Then, lowering his voice, he said, “Lad, they are a fierce clan.”

“Fierce?”

“Aye.”

“Fierce?”

Neville didn’t answer.  He walked forward to stand alone on the bow, looking at the distant lights of Charleston.

*********

“I won’t go!  That son of a bitch said I had a big butt!”  Pamela exclaimed the next morning just after dawn, glowering at Donn.

They had anchored Chardonnay at the Yacht Club just after 9 and stayed below listening to Neville tell sea stories.  It had been exotic places, big blows and pirates.  Donn joined in with stories of elk camp in Colorado and snake hunting in Oklahoma until after midnight. 

“I said she had a big sunburn,” Donn said, laughing.  He’d spent the night in his own room and was already packed.  Mikki had spent a lot of time sitting with Donn, and now Pam was jealous, hung over and badly sunburned.

“Agent Prescott, you will go, and you will continue in your undercover role or see disciplinary action from your supervisor, which right now is me,” Boyd said, sounding too much like Ferguson. 

He’d spent an hour with Ferguson on the phone already this morning and heard the tale of jihadists in Sudan that Davann had gotten, and Raybon’s failure to find out any more from his Arab friend.  The CIA was reaching out now to covert agents around the world.  What was “the Wind of Allah?”

“My butt hurts,” Pamela said, throwing her suitcase on the bed.  She was clad in a chaste terrycloth robe provided by the hotel.  On the beach, she’d pulled steadily on the Absolut, her inhibitions dropping away like Salome’s veils, until finally she had traipsed nude down the spit of sand like a well-fed wood nymph.  This time it was Wolf and Mikki whose eyes kept flicking back to the goodies.  After lunch, Pam fell asleep, face down on the sand, her pale, muscular buttocks taking on a reddish glow.

Sitting cross-legged on the bench beside Donn that night, Mikki had laughed to the point of tears after hearing of his pitch to the residents of Skunk Wells, Okla.  Taking shares in his corporation instead of money for their town was the smart move, he’d told them, because soon scores of free-spending millionaires from Tulsa and Oklahoma City would buy second homes there to retreat to “the sylvan splendor” of their community on weekends.  The citizens had wised up at the last minute, and several had actually worn guns into town the day they advised him to leave.

“Pistols?  Like the Old West?”  She had laughed incredulously.

“Matched Colt 44s! Another guy had a Winchester 94 model.  I got the message all right,” Donn laughed, as Mikki sat close, her fragrance renewed after a quick shower. 

“We leave tomorrow for Europe. Will you come?” Mikki had finally asked. “It will take two weeks.  I must leave at Lisbon and fly to Luxembourg.  You may return from there or go on to Cannes.  We will stop in Bermuda and the Azores.”

Pamela, who’d brightened their afternoon with her so freely shared charms, was by the evening again glassy-eyed, having sobered up in the early evening to find the vodka and finish it.  Donn basked in Mikki’s attention as he interspersed his stories with Neville’s.