The afternoon tea dance beside the swimming pool was already in full swing by the time Johnny Liddell walked out onto the sports deck. He stood in the doorway to the aft veranda, squinted into the slanting sunlight.
Overhead the sky was studded with lazy, fat, cottony clouds. The white line of the wake arched gracefully behind them in the turquoise water, and with Grenada out of sight there was nothing to mar the perfect circle of the horizon.
On the postage-stamp-sized dance floor, a dozen or more couples were whirling to the rhythms of the small ensemble. Harry and Belle Doyle were sitting at a table at the side of the pool, they caught his attention, waved him down. He threaded through the tables to where they sat.
“We missed you at breakfast and on the island,” the raw-boned man gre
