The older people had a secret place. The younger ones just had secrets.

I got to town and found a bar at the edge of the sand. A restaurant-bar.

I walked in off the beach and sat down at an outdoor table on a concrete apron. For a while, nobody came to wait on me, and then a waitress showed up, a local girl, a Tica, short, squat, with a dazzling smile when she chose to use it and the same attitude I had seen at the hotel. You want to eat? Fine. You want to drink? Fine. You don’t want either one? That’s fine, too. I asked her what was good and she said coconut pie. I looked at my watch, saw that it was only three o’clock and ordered coconut pie and a beer. It turned out to be the best coconut pie I ever had.

Then I sat and stared at the water and wondered what I should do next.

I EVENTUALLY HAD to notice the sailboats. We were on a big bay, a broad bay, and it had no marina as such. Sailboats were simply anchored, most of them about a quarter-mile off shore. There were nice-looking two-and even three-masted craft out there, flying flags of the United States, Canada, Australia, and other countries that I did not immediately recognize. Jason Stockover, my prey, was a sailor. He had sailed with the Gregorys. He had sailed to the finish of the Ensenada race just to be there when the competitors came in.

I called the waitress over and when she eventually made it I asked where the sailors hung out. She ran the question through her mind, probably translating it as she tried to understand what I was asking. “Here,” she said.

I looked around. It was now about four o’clock and the only other customers at the restaurant were a table full of Germans pounding Imperial beers faster than I was. She saw me look and said, “Wait.”

A minute later she was back with the manager. I had seen her before, seen her messing with napkins and things like that, moving in and out of the kitchen, but I had not paid much attention. Now I did. She was a jockish-looking woman whose short brown hair did not quite go with her complexion. She had a slight gap between her front teeth and a dusting of freckles that had more or less been faded by the sun. She wore a sleeveless blue shirt that showed off a pair of muscular arms and that was not intended to reach the top of her white cotton drawstring pants, from which a tattooed green-and-red bird was clawing its way upward to get to her magnificently flat belly. “Hi,” she said.

“Hi,” I said, trying not to look at her tattoo, not to look at her belly.

“You wanna go sailing?” She was clearly an American.

“Well, I was just asking. I see all the boats out there and I didn’t realize this was a sailor’s port.”

“It’s not, really. More of a fishing village turned surfer town. Those boats … mostly people who like to cruise the coastline.” She put her hand over her brow and stared out to sea as if to confirm what she had just told me. I again tried not to look at her belly.

She was saying something about people who were sailing around the world sometimes coming in and anchoring for a week or two. But there was not really a sailing culture in Tamarindo.

She pronounced the word “cul-tcha.”

I asked where she was from.

She told me all over.

I said she had a Boston accent and she blushed. “Yeah. Grew up around there,” she said, “a long time ago. I been trying to lose it.”

I told her I was from the Cape and a whole new look came over her face. It was as though she was inspecting each and every one of my features, making sure it passed muster. She wanted to know where I was staying and I took that as a good sign, a sign to keep talking. She listened attentively until I asked if she knew a guy named Jason Stockover.

No, she told me, didn’t know him. And she really had to get back to work.

“Nice chatting with you,” I said, but she was already gone, there was somebody at the front desk, somebody who could not pick out one of the twenty empty tables for himself.

I flagged the waitress and ordered another Imperial. Then I looked around. The manager had disappeared. More people came in. They simply sat down without the manager’s help.

I got the waitress’s attention yet again.

“Yes?” she asked, smiling as though I was becoming a pain in the ass, ordering my beers one at a time, not even giving her a few minutes … five, ten, fifteen … to go and get them.

“The manager,” I said. “What’s her name?”

“Leanne,” she said.

“That’s what I thought,” I said.

3

.

IWALKED BACK TO THE HOTEL AND TRIED THE DANE.

The waitress hadn’t been able to tell me any more than Leanne’s name and the fact that she was the owner’s girlfriend. The owner whose name was not Jason, but J.T. Which was close enough. She did not know where they lived. But she had pushed her hand in the direction of the Captain Suizo.

“Yes,” the Dane said when I asked if she knew the restaurant down the beach. She had been leaning on the reception desk, reading a newspaper. It was a tabloid newspaper, printed in Spanish, with lots of photos. She looked up, as if she actually were going to pay attention to me this time.

“You want a reservation?” Her tone said such a thing was unnecessary, maybe even unimaginable.

“No. I was hoping you could tell me something about the person who owns it.”

“The restaurant?”

I nodded, tried to look as though it was a perfectly innocent question.

“You mean J.T.?”

“J.T. what?”

“What?” the woman said back. She folded the newspaper without looking at what she was doing.

“What’s his last name?”

“You want to buy the restaurant?”

I was not sure why she cared, what business it was of hers, why she could not just answer my question. “Is it Stockover? Is that it?”

“Maybe.” She was looking at me peculiarly.

“Is that his girlfriend who works there—”

“You mean Leanne?” A slow smile crept over the woman’s face.

“You know her?”

She shrugged. The smile faded but did not disappear completely. “I know her.”

“Know where she lives?”

Slowly the smile grew back. “You want to see her?”

I suddenly felt like a lug, an oversized American with wet feet and sand all over his shorts. “Well,” I said, formulating excuses as I spoke, “I was just trying to figure out if I knew who her boyfriend was, if he was this guy I used to know named Jason Stockover. Back in the States.”

Something was going on with this woman. Everything I said, every question I asked, was making her think thoughts that were not in keeping with mine. “You like her?” she said.

“Who? Leanne?”

She nodded once and waited for me to answer.

“Yeah. She’s great.”

“You like her hair?” The Dane touched her own hair, mimicked cutting it off.

What was she telling me? That Leanne had just changed her appearance? That the strawberry blonde of Landry’s description had just become the nondescript brunette of Tamarindo?

I told her I didn’t think one way or another about her hair. I just wanted to know where she lived.

She pointed down the beach, away from town. “Get to the big rock. Go over it. Then one, two, three, maybe four houses. Look for the big table under the big tree.”

“Maybe I should drive there.”

“Is better to walk. No wachiman ask what you are doing.”

“I’m just going to visit a friend.”

“Of course.”

“I could just go and ring the doorbell.”

“Only thing is,” the Dane said, “it’s got a big”—she demonstrated, sliding a hand up and down in front of her face—“gate. It’s like a big door. You can’t just go in there from the street. The door has to open up.” She put the backs of her hands together and then drew them apart as if she was doing the breaststroke. “No. Better to go the beach.”