He leans over and brushes a dried smear of muck from my calf. He smooths my leg with his fingertips. I am thinking that the calf is not a place that anyone touches much. I wonder if he shaves his head every day. What the top of his head would feel like.
“She’s kind of detached,” he says, withdrawing his fingers. “She doesn’t stay with people long.”
“How long have you two been together?”
“About five months. Actually, I think my tenure is almost up.”
I think of saying to him that to judge by the sounds emanating from the forward cabin, I cannot agree.
In front of us, Billie lies down at the waterline. Mostly, I think, to get sand in her hair. I tense and begin to rise. Rich puts a restraining hand on my wrist.
“She’s OK. I’ve got my eye on her.”
I relax a bit and sit back down.
“Did you want something more?” I ask. “From Adaline, I mean.”
He shrugs.
“She’s very beautiful,” I say.
Rich nods. “I’ve always envied you,” he says. “You and Thomas.”
He puts his hand to his face to shade his eyes, and he squints in the direction of the boat.
“I don’t see anyone in the cockpit,” I say.
A few minutes later, I take a photograph of Rich and Billie and her pail of mussels. Rich is lying on the small piece of rough beach, his knees raised, dark circles inside the wide openings of his khaki shorts. The eye is drawn to those dark circles. His arms are spread at his sides in a posture of submission. His head has fallen into a depression in the sand, so that his body seems to end at his neck. Billie is standing over him, perfectly bent at the waist, her arms stretched out behind her for balance, like two tiny wings. She is talking to Rich or asking him a question. Rich seems vulnerable under her scrutiny. Beside Billie is her green plastic pail of mussels, perhaps enough to make an appetizer for two. Up behind them both is the Haley house, small and old, the trim neatly painted in a dull brick red.
When I look at the photographs, it is hard not to think: We had seventeen hours then, or twelve, or three.
Immediately after the photograph is taken, Rich sits up. He remembers, he tells Billie, that a pirate named Blackbeard once buried his treasure on the island. He gets up and searches through the scrub, examining this branch and that, until he has made two forked sticks. He sets off with Billie while I wait on the beach. After a time — fifteen minutes, twenty? — I hear a cry from Billie. She is calling to me. I get up to look and then walk over to where she and Rich are standing together, about two hundred feet from the beach. Billie and Rich are bent over a hole they have dug in the sand. In the hole is a treasure: five quarters, two dollar bills, a gold-colored toothpick, a chain with a single key attached, a bracelet made of copper wire, and a silver-colored ring. Rich pretends to read the inscription under the band of the ring. “To E from E with undying love.”
“What’s ‘E to E’ mean?” Billie asks.
“Blackbeard’s real name was Edward, which begins with E. And his wife’s name was Esmerelda, which also begins with E.”
Billie ponders this. Rich tells her that the silver ring belonged to Blackbeard’s fifteenth wife, whom Blackbeard himself murdered. Billie is nearly levitating with excitement and fright.
The boundaries of the Hontvedt house — also known, before the murders, as simply “the red house” — have been marked with stakes. The boundaries delineate an area approximately twenty feet by thirty-six feet. In this small space were two apartments, separated by a doorless wall. The northwest side of the house had two front doors.
After the brief ride back, I step up onto the Morgan from the Zodiac, Rich catching my hand. Thomas and Adaline are sitting opposite one another, on canvas cushions in the cockpit, seawater dripping from their bodies and making puddles on the floor. They have been swimming, Adaline says, and Thomas seems mildly out of breath.
Adaline has her hands up behind her head, wringing out her hair. Her bathing suit is red, two vibrant wisps of fire-engine red on glistening skin. Her stomach, a lovely, flat surface the color of toast, seems that of a young girl. Her thighs are long and wet