He clutched his side. Above him, the light that had guided buccaneers and merchantmen, men-of-war and slavers, began its eternal sweep.

I've a rudder in my hand...

Maître shark, I have your teeth...

The pain of a thousand harpoons exploded in his chest, and he was one with his loa.

He swam east, toward a shadowed coast he had never known, never left.

The light turned blindly above him, and Whiskey Cay turned dark.

Chapter 10

Chapter 10

"I never got a proper look at the statue," Louisa said, rising from her chair. "Excusez-moi?"

From their table outside the Inn of the Happy Whale, Ellen watched Louisa cross Kingston Street. During the last few days the girl had drawn on some inner toughness. By the time Jake's funeral was over, she had seemed suffused with some firm resolve. The Loma Bella Club was closed, but even if it reopened again, she would never go back to dealing cards; she was going to study nursing and go back to Port-au-Prince.

It was their last meal together: Carla, Mike, Thea, Louisa, and Ellen. Calypso had bought a secondhand airplane and managed to keep its charter franchise to Whiskey Cay. Hoagie was cleaning up the plane now and flying Ellen to Nassau this afternoon, where she would catch an Eastern flight to La Guardia.

Ellen looked around the table. There was a certain sadness in Carla's face—she blamed herself still for Margaret de Lacey's death, but there was plenty of blame to go around: Mike shared it, too, and Hoagie; only Jake had escaped.

Thea squirmed out of the high chair the waiter had brought and ran to her side. "Let's look at Peeper, Grandma?"

Ellen put down her coffee. She wanted to talk to Louisa, anyway, alone, before she left. She took her hand and crossed the deserted street.

The square was deserted. The debris from the Festival had long been cleared away. The statue was a huge success: the senator saw it as the spirit of the Bahamas, rising from slavery to an international Caribbean power; Mayor Witherspoon saw it as a spaceship commemorating the Bahamian down-range role in Cape Canaveral's space shots; Mike saw it as a leaping dolphin; townspeople saw in it everything from a Gold Coast phallic symbol to a representation of the queen.

Only Carla and Ellen had ever seen the shark.

Louisa was gazing up at it.

"What do you see?" Ellen asked her gently.

"Pour moi it is a nun. A Sister of Mercy in Port-au-Prince. She nursed my mother, even when the church said non, that Mama must give up her voodoo or go to hell."

Thea said definitely, "No! It's Peeper. He's a doctor bird!"

Louisa squatted and made a ferocious face. "Non! Nun!"

"Doctor bird!" Thea giggled and ran back to the table across the street.

"So, then, it is over?" Louisa murmured, rising. She looked into Ellen's eyes. "You have no blame, Ellen."