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Bordeaux Mountain a little too sharply. His jeep jettisoned off the road and down twenty feet into a patch of rain forest. The vegetation was so thick that if someone hadn’t been driving behind him, Larry might not have been found for days.
    St. John Rescue had to use the Jaws of Life to get him out of his jeep and bring him to the Myrah Keating Smith Health Center. Cassie asked if Neil would pick her upand take her to the clinic since Larry was driving their only vehicle.
    Of course he would, as soon as he found coverage for the bar. Larry was a good customer and friend. He ran the only seaplane out of St. John and had taken Neil to a number of islands when he first moved from LA.
    He hadn’t expected that Larry would be dead on arrival. Apparently neither had Cassie, who totally lost it and needed Neil to stay with her while she summoned her closest girlfriends. He didn’t want to have to comfort and console her while they waited, but he did. Wasn’t this one of the main reasons he had gotten out of practicing law? Too much human misery. And when it found him personally, packaged first in a divorce and then in the death of his only son, he’d gotten out fast, selling everything and moving to paradise. Paradise. Right.
    If the two messages on his phone—both urgent—were an indication of how his life in paradise was going to be today, he ought to just buy a one-way ticket back to LA. Or break down and just take the frigging Virgin Islands bar exam.
    The voicemail from an old client didn’t surprise him. Mark had told him that Sean Keating had stopped by Bar None the night before. What did surprise him was the message itself. Sean’s fiancée had died out on Ditleff Point, a remarkable coincidence because he knew Sabrina and Henry had a huge wedding at the new villa out there.
    Henry’s text had been more cryptic. “Death on Ditleff. Sabrina and I need you here NOW. Please.”
    Sabrina Salter, known to Neil as “Salty,” which drove her a little crazy, was the woman he found himself falling in love with. How could she be involved in another death? Only a few months before, she’d needed help from Neil with a police investigation for a similar incident. He didn’t think she did anything intentional to attract these situations any more than he did anything to encourage people to constantly seek his help.
    Neil looked at the open bar review book. Commercial Paper. He had hated studying the Uniform Commercial Code thirty years before when he was preparing to take the California bar exam. Dry and boring then, and no less so now. The US Virgin Islands had no reciprocity, regardless of how long you had practiced law anywhere. But the way things were going, if he didn’t take the bar exam, he ran the risk of being accused of practicing law without a license. No one, not even Salty, knew he was even considering putting himself through the ordeal of sitting for the bar exam again.
    He didn’t have to do this to himself. If he wanted to practice law again, he could go back to California. His ticket was still good. The amount of business his name alone would bring in would make any firm want to hire him.
    Go back? What was he thinking? Was it just all this tugging at his sleeve for help that was making him crazy?He loved living in St. John, on an old Bristol trawler in Coral Bay where he had to either row or paddle to get home.
    He slammed the bar review book closed. There were people who needed him. He thought of poor Larry Thomas, who had run out of choices the night before, and decided agonizing over his own was a privilege.

Chapter Nine
    Sitting under the shade of the canopied table, Sabrina watched Lucy Detree catch Anneka Lund Keating by the elbow just as the woman reached their table. She marveled at how Anneka’s branch of the family made a perfect blonde brigade, starting with its matriarch and extending down to the fair grandchildren.
    She was grateful that Henry had suggested to Sean that they move away