She takes a deep swallow of wine, leaving a tiny purple crescent on either side of her mouth. “But the world has changed. Anger alone is not enough. You must have cunning and mystery as well as savagery. Do you know what sphinxes look like?” she asks the table at large.
Mary Alice speaks up. “Lions with the faces of men.”
“That is an Egyptian sphinx,” Constance Halliday corrects. “You are named for the Greek sphinx, a creature with the face and breasts of a beautiful woman, and the body of a lioness. She even has wings.”
“No shit?” Natalie asks, her eyes large and round.
Constance Halliday ignores her and sits back in her chair, studying the light playing off the wine in her glass. “Scholars do not agree on the etymology of the word ‘sphinx,’ but I prefer the theory that says it is from the Greek ‘sphingo,’ meaning ‘to squeeze.’ Because sphinxes are lionesses and that is how lionesses kill. They asphyxiate their prey, choking the life from them without mercy, not because they are evil or bad but because they are hunters, and that is what hunters do.” She pauses, letting her words sink in. “And you will put a shilling in the swear jar, Miss Schuyler,” she adds. “You may swear on your own time. But here at Benscombe, your time belongs to me.”
CHAPTER TEN
Helen kept the launch pointed east-northeast for the better part of the night, supervising as the rest of us took turns with the tiller. We held the speed low to save fuel, letting the wind carry us along, gigging the engine only to correct the course. Sometime after we set out, a boom shook the world and a pillar of fire reached up into the night sky. A cloud of oily smoke obscured the moon.
“Well, that’s that,” Helen said with a sigh. She turned her face to the blankness of the western horizon. Everything, sea and sky, was black and vaguely spangled with stars. We settled into the boat, wrapping up against the breeze that had sprung up.
It wasn’t a pleasant night, but we had all had worse. By late the next morning, Helen was steering us into a small cove on Nevis. We grabbed our gear, scuppered the launch so it couldn’t be traced to the Amphitrite, and headed along the paved road at the top of a little rise, skirting the houses and hotels. After half an hour of walking, I led the way down onto the beach.
“Where are we going?” Nat demanded, struggling. My espadrilles were flat, but she was wearing her wedges, hard going in the loose-packed sand.
“There,” I said, pointing to a sign which spelled out sunshine in rope lights that were unlit in the daytime. It was a beach bar, one of the most legendary in the Caribbean. “We’re going to order lunch and a round of Killer Bees. Anyone asks, we’re on vacation and we’re staying on St. Kitts,” I told them.
Whether it was the promise of roasted fish or the bar’s legendary rum punch, they didn’t fuss. We ate and drank until our plates were empty and the last drop of rum punch was gone, paying cash with a tip that was generous enough to be appreciated but not so generous as to be memorable. When we finished, the bartender dialed us up a cab, which dropped us at the water taxi landing. It was directly across The Narrows from the bottom end of St. Kitts, where the Park Hyatt lay gleaming under the sun. The landscaping was lush and the whole resort was tucked between the edge of the sea and the hills rising directly behind it.
The water taxi took six minutes to cross The Narrows, carrying vacationers and commuters. The captain chatted with his regulars, and Mary Alice made a point of flipping through a tourist magazine she had grabbed from a rack at Sunshine’s. The water taxi dropped us directly at the Hyatt’s dock.
I nodded towards a line of sun loungers on the beach, facing Nevis. “Go and sit comfortably for a minute. I’m going to get a room.”
“How do you expect to do that without a passport?” Helen demanded.
I reached into my pocket and pulled out the neoprene e-reader case I’d been carrying since I went off the stern of the Amphitrite. A quick flick of my knife along the seam, and it was open. Sealed inside was a Canadian passport with my face but a different name.
“I’ll be damned,” Nat said slowly. “Do you always travel with extra papers?”
“Ever since Argentina,” I said with a grimace. The Argentina job was one of the most dangerous I’d ever done, and an extra set of papers would have saved me a rough interrogation and two months’ incarceration in a prison camp on the pampas.
“And how is our Canadian friend planning to pay for her room?” Helen asked.