Beast Read Online Free PDF

his coffee, poured the dregs onto the grass, and as he turned to go inside, the first rays of the sun flashed over the water and bounced off the white-washed house. He looked at the dark blue shutters, paint flaking, slats cracked and sagging.
    “Lord, this house is a mess.”
    “They want two hundred apiece to do the shutters,” said Charlotte, “three thousand for the lot.”
    “Thieves,” he said, and he held the door for her.
    “I suppose we could ask Dana. …” She paused.
    “Not a chance, Charlie. No more. She’s done enough.”
    “She wants to help. It’s not like—”
    “We’re not there yet,” he said. “Things aren’t that bad.”
    “Maybe not yet, William.” She went into the house. “But almost.”
    ” ‘William’ now, is it?” he said. “It’s pretty early in the day for your heavy artillery.”
    William Somers Darling was named after the Somers who settled Bermuda by shipwreck in 1609. Sir George Somers had been on his way to Virginia when his Sea Venture struck Bermuda, which Darling regarded as a triumph of seamanship, since to hit Bermuda in the middle of a billion square miles of Atlantic Ocean was akin, he felt, to breaking one’s leg by tripping over a paper clip on a football field. Still, Somers wasn’t the first or the last: It was a safe guess that the twenty-two square miles of Bermuda were ringed by more than three hundred shipwrecks.
    Most Bermudians, black and white, were named after one or another of the early settlers—Somers, Darling, Trimingham, Outerbridge, Tucker and a dozen more. The names harkened to history, rang with tradition. And yet, as if in rebellion against mother-country pretension, most Bermudians, black and white, soon cast off one or two of their names and assumed a nickname that had to do with something they looked like or something they’d done or some affliction.
    Darling’s nickname was “Buggywhip,” in commemoration of the weapon with which his father had regularly thrashed him.
    His friends called him Whip, and so did Charlotte, except when they argued or discussed something she considered too serious for levity. Then she called him William.
    He was a fisherman, or, rather, he had been; now he was an ex-fisherman, for being a fisherman in Bermuda had become about as practical a profession as trying to be a ski instructor in the Congo. It was hard to make a living catching something that wasn’t there.
    They could live comfortably if not lavishly on twenty or twenty-five thousand dollars a year. They owned the house—it had been in his family, free and clear, since before the American Revolution. Upkeep, including cooking gas and insurance and electricity, cost five or six thousand dollars a year. Boat maintenance, which he and his mate, Mike Newstead, did themselves, cost another six or seven thousand dollars. Food and clothing and all the other magical incidentals that appeared from nowhere and ate money, consumed the rest.
    But twenty thousand dollars might as well have been a million, because he wasn’t making it. This year was half gone, and so far he’d made less than seven thousand dollars.
    His daughter, Dana, was working downtown in an accounting firm, making good money instead of going to college, and she tried to help. Darling had refused, more brusquely than he meant to but unable to articulate the confusion of love and shame that his child’s offer had triggered in him.
    For a while, Dana had succeeded in stealing some of their bills from their mailbox and paying them herself. When, inevitably, she had been discovered and confronted, she had advanced the matter-of-fact defense that since the house was going to be hers one day, she saw no reason why she shouldn’t contribute to its maintenance, especially since the alternative was for them to go to the bank for mortgage money, which would only burden her with payments later on.
    The argument had slipped away from reason into dark regions of trust and mistrust and had ended