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of the feisty ship that brought the Bermuda settlers here from the damps of England. Before he ran off to sea, this mate had done a season acting at the Globe. The letters he wrote to his cronies still on the boards in London, letters drunk on paradise, had made him the model for Prospero, or so the story went. Even as a schoolgirl, Vivien Willis understood that the island estate on her mother’s side was classier in the way of pedigree than that which attached to her father’s ancient lands—those flat square miles of desert scrub that grew to be Orange County, going up a hundredfold in value just in twenty years.
    Vivien’s mother had kept the Bermuda house as a refuge from her husband, Jacob Willis. There was no paved road or a telephone. The water was out of a pump. As she pointed out to Vivien every spring, the only guidebook a body needed to roam these woods and raw pink beaches was a copy of The Tempest . And though the warring parties of her parents’ marriage were now long dead and done with, Vivien saw no reason to improve the old stone house. Not that she needed a place to hide from Jasper Cokes, the husband of her dreams. They were far too busy, she and Jasper, to bother each other with marital ties, skirmishes or otherwise. She came here once a year in April to flee the larger matter of herself.
    But she couldn’t always shake it. It was just after midnight on Monday the third when she gave up and got out of bed. She left the lights all off and took no robe. She made her way out of the house, down the overgrown path to the water. From the close and crooked bushes, she came to a ledge. The nearest lights were far away along the sound, the water as black as the moonless sky. She could have dived in without a light, since she knew the depth at every point for a quarter mile on either side. But she knew she’d never sleep at all if her hair got wet, and she didn’t dare risk losing the thin gold chain at her neck, pendant from which was the Willis diamond.
    A thing she only wore when she left L.A., in case she was caught in a world depression and needed cash in a hurry.
    She knelt into a tangle of ice plant that cascaded along the ledge. She gripped a rusted iron ring that had been in the stone, for all she knew, these past three hundred years. Then she put a foot over the edge, felt for the first step carved in the face of the rock, and made her way down. She reached the water line between the sixth and seventh steps. The water lilted and lapped against her as she went in. Irresistible as ever, warm as the air and supple as silk. When she was in hip deep, she let go the ladder cut in the stone and lay back limply and floated out, like somebody sinking to sleep.
    She started to drift, the diamond still as an anchor on her throat. Jasper wasn’t the type, she thought, to swim on a sleepless night. If he had no boyfriend current, he still had Artie and Carl, his bodyguard and manager, right at the flick of an intercom. He buzzed them up on a moment’s notice whenever he couldn’t sleep, and they took up where they had left off in a running game of Chinese checkers. Jasper knew not to dial his wife’s room after hours. It was one of the countless rules that allowed them to survive. What was strange just now was thinking about him at all, since she hadn’t been home in over two months. Stranger still, she missed him.
    They’d talked at ten o’clock, when she called him from a phone booth at the Mid-Ocean Club to let him know she’d detoured here. He’d finished shooting on the new film only a couple of hours before. Already he was beside himself with boredom. She told him to get coked up and go to the Oscars, but that was the one thing he wouldn’t do without her. Besides, if you weren’t awfully sure you were going to win, it was too much trouble just to get out of the parking garage at the end. Jasper was always the first to admit: He was a