pass, she crossed the road again, clambered over the gate, and threaded her way up the drive around nests of desiccated palm fronds. The Jeep was hitched to a trailer cradling a small boat under a tarp. Beyond it, in the center of a gravel court, blue starbursts of lily of the Nile erupted from an enormous rusty cauldron. The property’s silence was a presence, but when she listened, she heard doves cooing, birds whistling, a skittering in the brush. She smelled hot stone, damp earth, and the fragrance of gardenia, though she saw none blooming.
She climbed to the gallery where a cannon—too small for a weapon, too large for a toy—was mounted on a stone pedestal. Sitting on the top step, she gazed toward the sea until sunspots polka-dotted her eyelids. The view sent her into a fuzzy memory of azure sky between palm branches, the scents of gardenia and oil paint, and a woman singing in Italian, but she didn’t know if she was remembering something real or wished for or dreamed.
A man was standing at the foot of the steps. She started, not having heard his barefoot approach, and stood up. “What the hell are you doing here?” She glanced down the drive, mapping the fastest route back to the road.
He chuckled. “Getting a front-row seat for the sunset,” he said. “Just like you.” American, she thought. Midwestern. There was a mocking confidence in his cocked hip and ironic smile. A gardenia poked from his shirt pocket; his trousers were cut off at the knees, the edges frayed. The sun at his back turned the locks escaping his stubby ponytail into a chestnut aura. He was younger than the bearded man she’d seen before, barely thirty.
“I’m not staying that long,” she said, and hurried down to the court, skirting where he stood.
“The sunset’s magical from here,” he said. “It’s why this house even exists. The fiery Sophia wanted this view. It was her joy . . . and her undoing.”
“Sophia who?”
He poked his toe at a bed of ground cover the color of papal velvet, which was spreading headlong onto the gravel. “Unless someone inherits the obsession for this place, this garden will revert to cactus and weeds,” he said. He climbed the steps, sat down, and gazed toward the sea with an expression of wondrous anticipation, as if the daily sunset was, in fact, a magic show about to begin.
“What is it about this place that would make my driver clam up and run off?” she asked.
“During the big hurricane last year,” he said, “the owner was supposedly spotted on the seawall over by Tamarind Cove. No trace of him since. The locals believe he jumped into the sea, or let it sweep him away, and that his jumbie haunts this place. Won’t set foot here, even to loot.”
“Mr. Jumbie,” she said, “is this Jack person’s ghost, then.”
“Do you believe in ghosts?”
“Fervently,” she said. “I grew up in a stone pile in the Highlands. Been in the family for centuries.”
He smiled. “Scotland: home of some of the best ghosts. Ever see one?”
“Once when we were children, my . . . friend . . . and I thought we’d seen something, but we couldn’t be sure.”
“Spirits are, like a lot of things, in the mind of the beholder,” he said. “Only receptive people can see them. Smell that gardenia? The flower of secret love. That fragrance takes me back to junior prom, 1977. The last uncomplicated night of my life.”
“I took you for younger than that,” she said.
“I never said it was my junior prom.” He settled back on his elbows.
Though she’d planned to wait for the sunset, the idea of being caught in the near dark with this stranger—at best enigmatic, at worst a complete nutter—clanged all her citified self-defense bells. She took a few steps toward the drive.
“Don’t leave before the show,” he said. “You’ve nothing to fear from Jack’s jumbie, if that’s what you’re worried about.” His gaze was tender. “Or from me.” He hopped up, went to the cannon, and stared at the sun, which was oozing into the sea.
Els’s glance bounced between him and the sun.
“Three, two, one. Bingo,” he said. “See the green flash?”
“Where?”
“You weren’t paying attention,” he said. “Caribbean holy grail. If the horizon is clear, the sun makes a green flare just before she disappears. Doubters say it’s just a trick our eyes play, a spin of the color wheel, but I believe it’s Mama Sun’s little good night