Killers of a Certain Age(25)

“Thank you, dear,” she murmured.

“My friend has left her wallet back at the villa. We’ll stop by later and let you make a copy after we’ve sent for our bags.”

Sophia hesitated for the length of a heartbeat and then smiled. “Of course. If you’ll give me just a moment.” She disappeared with the credit card and passport into a back office. If anything was going to go wrong, this was the moment. I took deep, calming breaths and repeated the mantra I had adopted while on assignment at an ashram in Kerala. Helen flipped through a coffee table book on the photography of Lorna Simpson.

A few eternal minutes later, Sophia emerged with a basket of chilled towels and bottles of mineral water. She passed them over with our papers and room keys.

“Welcome to the Park Hyatt, ladies. Enjoy your stay.”

We refused the resort tour on the grounds that we were meeting friends for lunch. As soon as we left the main lodge, we collected Nat and Mary Alice from the beachside and followed the map to our room.

“Safe for now,” Nat murmured. That had been another of the Shepherdess’ dicta. Whenever you were safe, even if it was for a short time, it was important to give yourself a chance to exhale, to take nourishment and rest and live to fight again.

I kicked off my espadrilles and stretched onto the bed, lacing my hands behind my head.

“What now?” Mary Alice asked. “We’ve gotten this far, but we’re still in the Caribbean with one passport and one credit card amongst the four of us. How are we getting home?”

“Not home,” Helen reminded her. “We need a safe house. We need to buy ourselves enough time to figure out what the hell is going on.”

We were silent a minute, all of us probably thinking the same thing. For all our experience, we were used to the luxury of an entire organization at our disposal, ready to pluck us out of the field if we were in danger, prepared to clean up our messes, remove us from the line of fire. For the first time in forty years, we were on our own.

I sat up slowly. “I have a friend who can help. Someone with no connection to the Museum at all.” I eyed the phone. “But we can’t take the chance of using the hotel’s phone to contact her. It’s traceable.”

Instead, I dug out the local directory and dialed an electronics shop in Basseterre. I told them what I needed and they promised delivery of a pack of burner phones within the hour. I stayed in the room to wait while Mary Alice sulked on the patio and Helen and Nat paid a visit to the hotel shop, collecting some toiletries and criminally expensive clothes for each of us, which they charged to the room. When the burner phones arrived, I plugged one into the charger and punched in a number from memory. Minka answered on the fourth ring, and I could picture her, Doc Martens propped on the desk while she fired lasers at aliens in a game she’d designed herself.

I skipped the preliminaries and rattled off what we needed—documents, tickets, etc. She knew better than to ask questions.

Minka promised the package would be to me within twenty-four hours and we hung up. When Nat and Helen returned, I explained what I had done. Mary Alice came in from the patio in time to catch the tail end, rubbing her eyes. She looked like she’d been trying—and failing—not to cry.

“Who is Minka?”

“Long story,” I said, waving aside her question. “But she’s solid. I’d trust her with my life.”

“And ours,” Helen pointed out coolly.

“If you have another suggestion, knock yourself out,” I told her.

She didn’t. We ordered room service and ate in exhausted silence. Helen had bought a few books and magazines from the hotel shop and she curled up with the latest from Reese’s book club while Nat surfed the Caribbean news channels, settling on a Venezuelan soap opera featuring a highly rouged woman who screamed her lines.

“I’m going for a walk,” I said to nobody in particular.

Mary Alice got up to join me. We left through the sliding doors and past the patio, out onto a grassy area lined by beds planted out with bougainvillea, banana trees, and pawpaws. A little distance away, a few loungers had been drawn up on the edge of the beach.

“Should we risk it?” Mary Alice asked, jerking her chin towards the loungers.

I shrugged. “Everybody else seems to be at dinner.” Sounds of silverware and soft music flowed out from the various restaurants dotted around the resort. At our end of the beach it was peaceful and deserted.

We settled ourselves and I lit a cigarette, the little scarlet glow of it winking like a firefly in the gathering darkness.

“Don’t tell me those survived a dunking in the ocean,” Mary Alice said with a smile at the cigarettes.

I shook my head. “Helen. From the hotel shop along with moisturizer and dental floss.”

“Helen hates it when you smoke.” Mary Alice and I sat perched on the edge of the loungers, our knees nearly touching as we faced out to sea. The sun had set off to our right, beyond the headland, and the air was purple

“And she got them anyway. That’s friendship.”

Mary Alice snorted. For a while there was no noise but the rhythm of the waves. Down to our left, a single palm leaned out over the water, as if listening to the secrets the sea had to tell.

I heard a brisk sniff. “I’m fresh out of tissues, Mary Alice. If you need to blow your nose, you’d better use your shirt.”