Huck isn’t sure what they’re dealing with either, but he does know one thing: he was relieved when the dog didn’t go pawing at the floorboards and they didn’t discover blocks of cocaine or heroin to go along with all that money.

Someone on this island must know more than Huck does. The coconut telegraph is real. Huck picks up his phone and calls Rupert.

Because Rupert doesn’t like to leave Coral Bay, he and Huck meet at Skinny Legs. It turns out, it’s as good a place as any to have a quiet conversation in the middle of a gorgeous sunny day. Skinny Legs is the quintessential Caribbean bar. It’s tucked into a grove of shade trees a few hundred feet from the lip of Coral Bay. The bar itself looks like a lean-to built by Robinson Crusoe after a few rum punches. It’s open to the air on one side and features picnic tables thick with paint and a little stage for live music from happy hour until last call. There’s an adjacent gift shop that sells souvenirs celebrating all things Skinny Legs; Huck has never set foot in it. In Huck’s opinion, Skinny Legs’ only fault is that it’s gotten so famous. The best way to ruin a place is to make it popular.

One of the things that keeps Skinny Legs authentic is that characters like Rupert still hang out here. Rupert is the prince of the establishment, if you can call a sixty-something-year-old man a prince. He’s in his usual spot, corner stool on the right-hand side; he has a Bud Light in front of him. Huck checks the time: eleven fifteen. He still has more than three hours before he has to pick up Maia from school, and for this conversation, he probably needs something stronger than an iced tea. He flags down Heidi, the bartender.

“Painkiller, please,” Huck says.

Rupert chuckles. “That’s a woman’s drink.”

“I’m not allowed to say things like that in my house,” Huck says. “Don’t you know any better?” He takes a stool and rubs the top of Rupert’s bald brown head.

They fall into their usual pattern of conversation, which is distinguished by long pauses and subsequent non sequiturs. Rupert doesn’t like to be rushed; he’s retired now and has earned the right to mull things over, and if his mind wanders in the process, oh, well. Rupert has lived on St. John his entire life; his family goes back generations, and Huck teases him by saying that Rupert’s ancestors invented the concept of island time, but Rupert is the one who perfected it.

Huck drinks one painkiller and waves to Heidi for another before Rupert finishes summarizing his list of physical ailments: his back has been giving him trouble, his right toe throbs in the rain, he can’t sleep more than three hours without having to get up to take a piss. Then it’s Huck’s turn to talk about how the fish are running. Better since the new year, he says—meaning since Rosie died, meaning since Irene set foot on his boat and into his life.