No Sharks in the Med and Other Stories Read Online Free Page A

breeze was blustery here and fluttered his words back into my face:
    “So you see, within just a couple of years of our settling here, the village was derelict, and all that remained of people was us and a handful of Johnsons still working the mill. Then Lily-Anne came down with something and died, and I had her put down in the ground here in Easingham—so’s I’d be near her, you know?
    “That’s where the coincidences start to come in, for she went only a couple of months after the shipwreck. Now I don’t suppose you’d remember that; it wasn’t much, just an old Portuguese freighter that foundered in a storm. Lifeboats took the crew off, and she’d already unloaded her cargo somewhere up the coast, so the incident didn’t create much of a to-do in the newspapers. But she’d carried a fair bit of hardwood ballast, that old ship, and balks of the stuff would keep drifting ashore: great long twelve-by-twelves of it. Of course, Old Man Johnson wasn’t one to miss out on a bit of good timber like that, not when it was being washed up right on his doorstep, so to speak…
    “Anyway, when Lily-Anne died I made the proper arrangements, and I went down to see old Johnson who told me he’d make me a coffin out of this Haitian hardwood.”
    “Haitian?” Maybe my voice showed something of my surprise.
    “That’s right,” said Garth, more slowly. He looked at me wonderingly. “Anything wrong with that?”
    I shrugged, shook my head. “Rather romantic, I thought,” I said. “Timber from a tropical isle.”
    “I thought so, too,” he agreed. And after a while he continued: “Well, despite having been in the sea, the stuff could still be cut into fine, heavy panels, and it still French-polished to a beautiful finish. So that was that: Lily-Anne got a lovely coffin. Except—”
    “Yes?” I prompted him.
    He pursed his lips. “Except I got to thinking—later, you know—as to how maybe the rot came here in that wood. God knows it’s a damn funny variety of fungus after all. But then this Haiti—well, apparently it’s a damned funny place. They call it ‘the Voodoo Island,’ you know?”
    “Black magic?” I smiled. “I think we’ve advanced a bit beyond thinking such as that, Garth.”
    “Maybe and maybe not,” he answered. “But voodoo or no voodoo, it’s still a funny place, that Haiti. Far away and exotic…”
    By now we’d found a gap in the old stone wall and climbed over the tumbled stones into the graveyard proper. From where we stood, another twenty paces would take us right to the raw edge of the cliff where it sheared dead straight through the overgrown, badly neglected plots and headstones. “So here it is,” said Garth, pointing. “Lily-Anne’s grave, secure for now in what little is left of Easingham’s old cemetery.” His voice fell a little, grew ragged: “But you know, the fact is I wish I’d never put her down here in the first place. And I’d give anything that I hadn’t buried her in that coffin built of Old Man Johnson’s ballast wood.”
    The plot was a neat oblong picked out in oval pebbles. It had been weeded round its border, and from its bottom edge to the foot of the simple headstone it was decked in flowers, some wild and others cut from Easingham’s deserted gardens. It was deep in flowers, and the ones underneath were withered and had been compressed by those on top. Obviously Garth came here more often than just “now and then.” It was the only plot in sight that had been paid any sort of attention, but in the circumstances that wasn’t surprising.
    “You’re wondering why there are so many flowers, eh?” Garth sat down on a raised slab close by.
    I shook my head, sat down beside him. “No, I know why. You must have thought the world of her.”
    “You don’t know why,” he answered. “I did think the world of her, but that’s not why. It’s not the only reason, anyway. I’ll show you.”
    He got down on his knees beside the grave, began