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Maybe he ought to go look for her.
Not that there was anything to worry about on this island. It was wild and isolated, but nothing here could harm her. There were no predatory animals, not of a size to be a problem. No bears, or coyotes...
Well, he supposed there probably were snakes, though the odds of Annie meeting up with one on the neatly kept gravel path that traversed the island were remote.
Spiders, though. There were definitely spiders—he’d seen some Class A specimens the first time Tanaka had brought him out here. They’d been the size of a child’s fist but they were harmless.
It was just that Annie had a thing about creepy craw-lies.
He’d learned that the winter he’d scored his first really big contract. On his way home after he’d landed the deal, he’d stopped to buy Annie a box of chocolates. There was a kid on the corner near the subway, selling single red roses; Chase had selected the prettiest one he could find and just then, he’d spied a travel agency across the street. There was a big, bright poster in the window.
Come To The Virgin Islands, it said.
Under the words was a picture of a smiling couple, holding hands under a fiery tropic sun and gazing lovingly into each other’s eyes.
Chase hadn’t hesitated. He’d trotted across the street and straight into the travel agency. A bored clerk had looked up from a scarred wooden desk.
“We’re just about to close,” she’d said. “Why don’t you come back tomorrow and—”
“That poster. The one in the window.” He’d been too young, and too flushed with excitement, to phrase his question with any subtlety. “How much would it cost for me to take my wife to the Virgin Islands?”
The clerk had looked at the rose in his hand and the chocolates under his arm, and maybe at him, too, all youthful, eager anticipation, cleaned up but wearing, as he had in those years, the chambray shirt, jeans and work boots he felt most comfortable in. She’d sighed, but something that might have been a smile had lit her tired face.
“Come and sit down,” she’d told him. “I have a couple of packages here that just might interest you.”
So he’d gone home to Annie with one perfect red rose, a box of candy, a contract that made all his, and her, sacrifices worthwhile—and reservations at a resort on Saint John Island.
Neither the poster nor the travel agent had exaggerated the beauty of the islands. To this moment, he remembered the shock of first seeing the pale sky, white sand and crystal-clear blue water.
“It’s the color of your eyes,” he’d whispered to Annie, as he held her in his arms that first night, in their wonderful hideaway overlooking the sea. Compared to this, the place had been a shack—but oh, how happy they’d been there!
Chase smiled to himself. That night had been what he’d come to think of as the Night of the Spider.
He and Annie had made love on the secluded terrace of their little house, cocooned in a black velvet bowl of night sky.
“I love you,” he’d whispered, after she’d cried out in his arms and he’d spent himself in her silken heat. Annie had sighed and kissed him, and then they must have fallen asleep, there in the darkness with the soft whisper of the surf seeming to echo the beats of their hearts.
Sometime during the night, he’d awakened to a shriek.
“Annie?” he’d shouted, and though it had taken only a couple of seconds to race through the little house and find her in the bathroom, his adrenaline must have been pumping a mile a minute by the time he got there.
Annie, white-faced, was standing on the closed toilet, trembling with terror.
“Annie? Babe,” he’d said, pulling her into his arms. “What is it? What happened?”
“There,” she’d said, in a shaky whisper, and she’d pointed an equally shaky hand toward the tub.
“Where?” Chase had responded. All he saw was the porcelain tub, the bath mat, the gleaming white tile...
And the spider.
It was big, as spiders went. Definitely the large, economy size. And it was hairy. But it was only a spider, for God’s sake, and in the time it had taken him to get from the bedroom to Annie, he’d died a thousand deaths, imagining what might have happened to her.
So he’d reacted the only way he could, scooping the spider up with a towel, marching to the back door, dumping the thing into the sandy grass and then returning to his wife, slapping his hands on his hips and asking her what in hell was wrong with her, to shriek like a banshee because she saw some little spider that was probably more afraid of her than she was of it.
Annie had slapped her hands on her hips, too, and matched his angry glower with one of her own.
