“But thank you just the same, Mrs. Shreave.”

“I’m not Mrs. Shreave,” Genie whispered somewhat urgently.

Honey whispered back: “I know.”

“Really? What gave me away?”

“That pearl in your tongue, for starters.”

The woman nodded ruefully. “My name’s Eugenie Fonda. I think I’ve made a terrible mistake.”

“Oh, don’t worry,” Honey said. “I won’t try to sell you any real estate.”

“No, you don’t understand-”

Shreave called out Genie’s name, and Honey touched a finger to her lips. The two women returned to the living room, where Shreave had been nosily examining the contents of Honey’s bookcase, which she’d neglected to purge of personal memorabilia.

“Who’s the track star?” He pointed to a shelf of trophies.

“My son.”

“Yeah? He must be pretty fast.”

Honey wanted to change the subject. “Have some OJ, Mr. Shreave.”

“Yeah, it’s really good,” Eugenie Fonda said. She was clutching the glass as if it were the rip cord on a parachute. “Got any vodka to go with it?”

Shreave said, “I ran some seriously swift relays myself, back in the day.”

At first Honey thought he must be joking, but she was set straight by Eugenie’s scornful expression.

“Until I blew out my knees,” Shreave continued.

Soon the rising babel in Honey’s skull made it impossible to follow what he was saying. She considered the possibility that she, too, had made a large mistake. Boyd Shreave didn’t seem like a person who could be easily chastened, moved or transformed. He presented no convictions, or true sense of himself. He’d made the Everglades trip only to prove to his girlfriend that he wasn’t a wimp.

Honey prepared herself for three challenging days.

She said, “You folks do know how to kayak, right?”

Gillian’s real last name was Tremaine but in college she’d changed it to St. Croix to piss off her parents. It was the same reason she was majoring in elementary education; her parents had wanted her to take a degree in finance and join them at the discount brokerage house in Clearwater. That’s what Gillian’s older sister had done, and her unhappiness was currently manifesting itself as sloppy promiscuity.

Although Gillian was theoretically committed to the idea of teaching school, it wasn’t a true calling; it was a job she thought she could stand until she experienced a cosmic awakening, or met the right poet-musician. She’d settled on the name of St. Croix after visiting the island with her then boyfriend, the self-perforated rock guitarist. The vacation itself was not especially magical but Gillian understood that she wasn’t easy to amuse. Boredom had always afflicted her like a wasting disease. Every skirt she picked out seemed drab the moment she got it home. Every CD she bought sounded old and trite the second time she listened to it. Every book she opened with high hopes turned into a slog through the mud by page one hundred. It was the same with relationships.

“I’m twenty years old and I’ve got nothing interesting in my life except you,” she informed Sammy Tigertail.

“That’s scary,” he said.

“Don’t worry. It won’t last.”

Wolves that they were, Len and Ginger Tremaine had followed southward the herd of retiring, fully pensioned midwesterners. Gillian was a teenager when the family moved from Ohio to Florida. On the first day of school her tenth-grade French teacher, Mr. Hodgman, told Gillian that she was too pretty for her own good, which inspired her to reach beneath her blouse and remove her bra in front of the class. She would become so well known for such high-spirited antics that her fellow students christened her “Psycho Babe,” not without affection. She graduated with good grades but also with enough disciplinary footnotes to kill her chances with Wharton and three other private colleges short-listed by her parents. They were aghast when she surprised them with an acceptance letter from Florida State, a notorious party school located in a notorious party town, Tallahassee, which also happened to be the state capital.

Soon after arriving in Florida, the Tremaines had read a scandalous story in the St. Petersburg Times about a powerful state legislator who’d put his favorite Hooters waitress on the state payroll. They feared that a similar tawdry fate awaited their youngest daughter, but they didn’t know Gillian very well. She wasn’t impressed by power, position or money; she was impressed by rebels.

“My cell phone finally died,” she told the Indian. “Ethan never called back.”

“Big surprise.”

“Which is fine with me.”

“How long you gonna stay up in the tree?” Sammy Tigertail asked.

“You know why I started dating him? One night he and some other guys drove down to the Keys and freed some dolphins from a marine park. Ethan said they put on scuba tanks and used wire cutters to make a hole in the fence around the lagoon,” Gillian said. “It made the front page of the Miami paper. He showed me the clippings. He was like a total outlaw.”

The Seminole was frying some fish that he’d caught. He told Gillian he was going to eat it all himself if she didn’t climb down soon from the poinciana tree.

She said, “Later he told me what happened. The dolphins swam out through the hole in the fence and then the very next morning they all came back, just in time for breakfast. And they never left again! They just hung around the lagoon, doin’ all those corny Flipper tricks and beggin’ for fish. Meantime the owners patched the fence and, like, that was the end of the big jailbreak. Of course Ethan didn’t clue me in until after I’d slept with him.”

Sammy Tigertail peered up at her. “You on dope?”

Gillian closed her eyes. “I wish I could spend the night up here. It’s so damn perfect.”

Sammy Tigertail said, “Come on down. You gotta eat.”

Gillian rose, balancing in bare feet on the long branch. “I’m really not so messed up. I’m just waiting for something phenomenally stupendous to happen to me.”

“On this island?”

“I don’t see why not.” She hopped down and joined him by the campfire and even ate some snook, which was sweeter than any fish she’d ever tasted.

The Indian told her she was being too hard on Ethan. “At least the guy tried. It’s not his fault the dolphins didn’t want to be free.”

“But he should’ve told me that part in the beginning,” Gillian said, “so I wouldn’t go around for weeks feeling great about somethin’ that didn’t really turn out that way.”

“Maybe he wanted you to be happy.”

“Sure, so I’d ball him.” She paused to pick a fish bone out of her front teeth. “Tell me about Cindy.”

“Nothing to tell. She’s a disaster.”

“All because she’s white?”

Sammy Tigertail said, “It was my mistake. I wasn’t strong.”

“So, what exactly are you lookin’ for out here?”

“I already told you. Peace.” He carefully poured the warm grease from the fry pan into a rusty beer can. “Not world peace. Just peace for me-I need to shut out all the craziness.”

“Bullshit. You’re hiding.”

“That’s right,” said the Seminole.

“The man who died on your boat-was it your fault?” Gillian asked.

“I didn’t kill him. He knows it, too. Told me in a dream.”

Gillian said, “It’s weird, but I don’t hardly dream at all.”

“You will if you stay here too long.”

“Is that, like, an Indian thing?”

She dropped the sensitive subject of the dead guy. Sammy Tigertail went to pick some cactus berries, which they ate for dessert. He said, “For fifteen hundred years this place was home of the Calusas. Spirits never go away.”

The oyster people, Gillian thought. She had never believed in afterlives but she was open to persuasion.

She said, “Doesn’t it ever rain here in the winter? Because I’m dyin’ for a drink of water.”

“We’ll go get some tonight, if the clouds give us a moon.”