“Excuse me,” she said, rushing out of the office and along the street. She saw Rudy up ahead, standing by a fruit stall, chatting with the owner.
“Rudy!” she called. “Can you call an ambulance? Keri’s had an accident.”
***
The small clinic in Port Louis was a pleasant, airy place, but it was obvious from the start that its facilities were basic. The elderly British doctor in charge told them that Keri’s condition was stable, but he wanted to transfer her to Trinidad by helicopter. Ryan was to accompany her.
“I’ve seen decompression sickness a few times,” the doctor explained. “She’s young and strong, carries no excess weight, and it’s not a severe case. We’ve dealt with the joint pain. But I would prefer her to be in an intensive care unit as soon as possible.”
Ryan was sitting and nodding as the doctor went on about Keri’s condition, but Sara did not think he was taking much in. For the first time, she felt unalloyed sympathy for the guy. He was distraught. While they waited for the chopper, Joe and Sara began to do the inevitable paperwork and tried to comfort Ryan. After a while, a nurse appeared and said two of them could speak to Keri, who was now conscious and comfortable.
“Go in with him,” said Joe, looking up from an array of forms. “I’ll finish these.”
Keri was getting standard treatment for what was commonly called the bends. She was sitting up in bed, oxygen mask on her face, an IV line putting fluids into her system. She raised her free arm in greeting. Sara was shocked at how pale the teenager looked, and her expression. There was no trace of the cheerful, outgoing Keri of that morning.
“Oh God,” Ryan breathed, taking Keri’s hand. She squeezed his fingers. He started to sob, and Sara saw dark spots appear as his tears fell onto the covers.
“I’ll be fine, baby,” she said slowly, voice muffled by the mask. “I’m just kind of tired. They gave me morphine, I think. That’s some irony. Spent so much time trying to kick that stuff. Floating on a cloud right now. Biiiiig fluffy cloud.”
Sara wanted to ask what had happened, how a qualified diver could have made such a rookie error. To her surprise, she found she no longer thought of Keri as stupid, merely young.
“I was pretty dumb,” Keri said, as if reading Sara’s mind. “I went up too fast. Real dumb.”
Sara nodded, tried to smile. Her realtor’s instinct had kicked in again. She knew Keri was lying about what happened. The girl had not made a mistake, or at least not a foolish, unforced error. Something had happened out on Wreckers Reef to make Keri forget her training, the most basic principle of scuba diving—always return to the surface slowly, by stages.
“We need to get Miss Pedon ready for her little trip to Trinidad,” said a brisk, efficient nurse. Two orderlies were wheeling in a gurney. Sara heard the distinctive clatter of an approaching helicopter, and she got up, taking Ryan’s arm to lead him out.
“That’s your ride,” she said to Keri. “See you soon.”
***
Ryan was talking. It was nice, though it was hard to understand all the words. But Keri knew that one of them was love, which made her happy. He’d held her hand from the small island to this bigger island, whose name Keri could not quite remember. She had met lots of nice people once the helicopter landed. She felt kind of achy in her joints, and she knew this was caused by the bends. But the pain was not too bad though, and now she was in her room, and Ryan was there by her bedside, talking. She loved Ryan and knew now that he loved her, too, so that was good. Sometimes, a good thing came out of a bad one.
There was only one problem. The other chair. Ryan’s chair was by the bed, but the other one was in the corner, behind the door. The door was half-open; she saw people passing by, nurses and doctors and visitors. That was normal. But the chair—there was something wrong. She was short-sighted and somebody had removed her contacts. There was a blurred shape on the chair that did not quite fit, but she couldn’t make it out.
At first, she thought it was a dark coat, maybe Ryan’s, casually thrown onto the seat. Men were untidy, they were prone to drop things around the place, never folding or tidying or hanging stuff up. But a coat? Why would Ryan or anyone else wear a coat in tropical weather? And then the dark shape moved, just a little. It was this that showed Keri it was a living thing. Perhaps a cat? But surely nobody would allow a cat into a hospital. Besides, it seemed a little too big, and the wrong shape, for a cat.
“Honey?” said Ryan.
Keri turned her head, smiled at him.
“I’m still here,” she said. “Little tired, but still here.”
Ryan leaned closer, smoothed her hair away from her forehead.
“You kind of drifted in and out for a while,” he said. “But the doctor says you’ll pull through, you’ll be fine.”
Keri tried to nod and found the movement difficult.
“Oh, that’s great,” she said. “Great. Hey, is there a cat on that chair?”
Ryan looked startled, then turned his head to look. When he turned back to her, he looked worried. Not scared, like he had before, but anxious.
“There’s nothing on the chair, babe,” he said, lowering his voice. “Please, don’t say anything like that. You said some… some strange things when they gave you the painkillers. About a body, chains, blood. Somebody said that decompression sickness can cause brain damage. They talked about a psychiatric assessment. I didn’t tell them about the problems you’ve had, but they might find out, they might check with doctors Stateside. Please, don’t say any more of that weird stuff. I couldn’t bear it if you—if I lost you…”
Ryan started crying again, and she felt his warm tears fall onto her hand. She felt a sudden, profound wave of compassion for this man, for his love and his foolishness.
“It’s okay, it’s okay,” she repeated. “I’ll be totally normal from now on.”
They talked about trivial things for a while, and then a nurse told Ryan that visiting hours were over and that Keri needed to rest. Ryan kissed her gently on the forehead and left, promising to return that evening. Keri tried not to look at the dark thing on the chair. But when Ryan left, it moved again, quickly, furtively. It got down onto the floor and loped out of the room. It moved through a shaft of sunlight and she saw its little fists almost trailing on the ground, its head lolling to one side at a crazy angle.
She reached for the buzzer lying by her hand, and when the nurse came, Keri asked for more pain meds.
Chapter 4: Private Investigations
“From what Mr. Gale said to the paramedics, it seems that some detritus—perhaps garbage or offal illegally dumped from a passing fishing boat—nearly struck Miss Pedon. He saw this pass close to his partner. She seems to have panicked and surfaced too quickly.”
Charity Lomax looked from Joe to Sara and tilted her head slightly, inviting comment. When neither spoke, she continued.
“This was a near-fatal accident, and it raises some questions. I understand you plan to develop Pirate Cove as a dive resort, among other things?”
“Eventually,” said Joe. “But the resort is not open, as you know. And that means whatever happened is not connected to the project in any legal sense. And as far as I’m aware, there’s no law against people going scuba diving, qualified or not.”
The detective made a skeptical noise but did not contradict him. Just after Keri and Ryan had been airlifted from Port Louis, Lomax had called to ask them to drop by. She stressed that there was no suggestion of foul play, but that every incident had to be investigated.
“So, have you identified the boat that might have dumped whatever it was?” Sara asked. “Can’t be that many around. We noticed a white ship off the reef yesterday, and we saw it again this morning. Do you think they might have been involved?”
Lomax looked uncomfortable at the question. For the first time, she seemed to go on the defensive.
“That particular vessel never goes inside the cove,” the detective replied, then stopped abruptly. “No,
it could not have been responsible. And I have taken up enough of your precious time. You must be worried about your friend.”
Out in the street, they discussed the interview. It seemed to both of them that Lomax had an agenda beyond that of simple law enforcement.
“Notice how she was aware of that mystery ship,” Sara said. “She almost kicked herself when she said too much about it. And Laplace, I think maybe he was looking at it this morning. What gives?”
They considered their next move as they walked back to their rental jeep. They agreed that there was no reason to slack off on the project, as nothing had changed. Their investment in Pirate Cove amounted to all the money they had. They had to make it work. But they disagreed about how to proceed. Sara wanted to find out more about the death of Randy Hobart and the problem with les boucaniers. Joe felt there was some sort of conspiracy involving the mystery vessel and that maybe the accident that morning had been engineered to discredit them. He wanted to find out more about the white ship.
“We’ve only got Ryan’s word for what happened,” Sara pointed out. “Keri was seriously out of it. And we both know Ryan’s not what you’d call a reliable witness.”
She regretted the last remark almost before the words were out of her mouth. Joe’s face darkened, and he fell silent for a few moments. Then he spoke in a low voice, emphatic with anger.
“Ryan is my friend,” he said. “And I know you don’t like him, but he’s not just some random jerk. If he says something startled Keri, maybe some kind of sick prank, he’s not lying.”
Sara felt her old resentment rising, held it down as best she could.
“Okay,” she said, “let’s investigate everything, all of it. I’ll start with les boucaniers, see what we might do about them. You look into the white ship. It must have docked here or been seen close up by someone.”
Joe called Laplace and insisted on an immediate meeting, but he got sent to voicemail again. Frustrated, he decided to accompany Sara. They went in search of Rudy around the quayside and soon found him. She had decided to start with the supposed accident that had started their troubles.
“Your cousin, the boatman—can you take us to see him?”
Rudy looked dubious.
“He is in a bad way, Mrs. Hansen,” he said. “He doesn’t make much sense, gets agitated.”
“Call me Sara,” she said. “And we promise to leave if we upset him. We just want to talk.”
Rudy still looked doubtful but explained that his cousin Jonas lived with his parents a couple of miles up the coast. He offered to drive them for free but insisted that he accompany them when they spoke to Jonas.
“Otherwise, my auntie will send you away with a flea in your ear,” he explained.
The fishing village of St Pierre lay a couple of miles up the coast from Port Louis. It consisted of a group of a dozen houses set back from the road. Some homes seemed neglected, with peeling paint and a few overgrown front yards. Sara remembered what Rudy had said, about fishing being problematic at best. She wondered how many locals depended for their livelihoods on the whims of people like Randy Hobart, guys who just felt like going fishing. And when they didn’t, people suffered.
Rudy spoke to Jonas’ mother, a formidable-looking woman who frowned at the two Americans but eventually gave a curt nod of her head. After a few more words, she retreated inside her neat, well-kept house. Rudy waved the Hansens over and led them around back, where a man was sitting on a porch in a rocking chair. A large, ginger cat was perched on his lap and stared with golden, narrowed eyes at the newcomers.
As they got closer, Sara saw that the man was gazing into the jungle. She reflexively looked, too, but saw nothing.
“He sits here so he does not have to look at the sea,” said Rudy quietly, motioning them to stay back, out of his cousin’s line of sight. “His brothers make their living on the sea, like their father and grandfather before them, but Jonas, he will not go back now. It is very sad.”
Sara watched as Rudy walked around until he stood in front of Jonas. He bent over and spoke, too quietly for her to hear. The man in the rocking chair slowly turned his head and looked at the Americans. Then Jonas gave a slight nod, looked back at the wall of green foliage beyond the backyard.
“Maybe I should hang back,” Joe said quietly to Sara. “Too many people crowding him. You go ask.”
Sara went to stand by Rudy and smiled at the ex-boatman. Close up, she could see that Jonas was a young man. Rudy had told her his cousin was twenty-seven. But Jonas’ expression made him seem older. His face was careworn, his eyes seemingly focused on something only he could see. She introduced herself and explained that she and her husband were business partners of Randy Hobart.
Without looking up at her, Jonas said, “You chose badly.”
Sara hesitated, then decided that there was no point in holding back.
“Can you tell us what happened when Hobart vanished?”
Jonas gave a laugh, brief and low and empty of mirth.
“Vanished? He was taken, lady.”
He reached up for the monkey charm around his neck, clutched it so tightly that Sara feared the cord might break. Jonas began to shake his head, slightly but with increasing speed, and began to mutter something under his breath, something that sounded like a prayer. Joe appeared beside her, touched her arm.
“Maybe we’d better leave him,” he said quietly.
At the sound of Joe’s voice Jonas looked up at them, and his eyes widened. At the same moment the ginger cat stood up, back arched, its tail fluffed to a huge size. The cat hissed and then bounded off the porch and around the side of the house.
“One of you is marked by him!”
Jonas pointed, not at Sara or Joe, but over their heads. When Sara turned to look, she saw nothing. A hanging basket of flowers attached to the corner of the porch was swaying slightly. But the air was still.
“Marked by him!” repeated Jonas, getting up so abruptly that he knocked his chair over. Rudy tried to calm his cousin, but the man shook him off and went inside, slamming the door behind him.
“Well,” said Joe, as they headed back to the taxi, “that was a waste of time. We need to find out more about that ship. I’ll get in touch with some contacts back home, see what they come up with. Maybe snoop around the docks a little.”
Sara kept glancing back at the house. She had the feeling of being watched, and once she thought she saw a dark, small shape protruding above the ridge of the roof, just for a split-second. It might have been a large bird, though.
“What’s all this about, Rudy?” she asked, as they got back in the car. “I get there’s a superstition about pirates, monkeys, a whole lot of stuff. And that it somehow connects with the boucaniers. But can’t you tell me a bit more, join the dots?”
As he coaxed the cab’s motor into life, Rudy seemed to ponder the question. Then he gave his trademark grin.
“You want to know the whole story? You need to see Miss Mountjoy.”
***
Port Louis Public Library was a small, neat building in the town square. A box of red brick with a distinctly British look, it was not a particularly attractive building. But the date above the front door—1895—testified to how long it had been a part of life on Sainte Isabel. As Rudy pulled up outside, Sara saw a line of schoolchildren being ushered inside by a young teacher. Posters in the window of the building advertised readings by Caribbean authors, a short story competition, DVDs to rent.
“Yeah, no Netflix here,” Rudy said when she commented on this. “More people read books, I think.”
Joe, who had been quiet and distant during the drive back into town, got out after Sara.
“I still think it’s corruption we’re facing,” he said bluntly. “A course in local history isn’t going to help us.”
Sensing a potential argument, Sara agreed to split up. They would meet a little later in the day at the English pub Rudy had described as quiet. As she watched Joe walk off into the throng
of tourists, she wondered if she was being unreasonable. Seen from Joe’s perspective, a legend would just be a smokescreen to hide shenanigans by local officials, politicians, perhaps the police.
“Talking to Miss Mountjoy is never time wasted, Sara.” Rudy nodded at the library. “She is a very clever old lady. If anybody can help, she can.”
Inside, the library was cool and quiet. After the heat and bustle of the square, it was a pleasant change. But Sara wondered where the school kids had gone. In her experience, it was almost impossible to keep youngsters quiet. But then she heard a woman’s voice speaking somewhere beyond the bookshelves in front of her. She made her way forward, noting a large sign above the main desk that read SSSSH!
“… and can anyone remember the name of the Lady of the Lake? Yes, Marguerite?”
“Nimue, Mam’selle Mountjoy!”
“Nimue, yes, well done! Now, this time I will tell you the story of the Questing Beast, a terrible monster that Arthur sought to slay. But first, I see we have another visitor. Can I help you with something?”
Sara stood on the edge of a semicircle of about twenty little girls who were sitting on the floor. They looked like second graders, third at most. All of them looked at her, and she smiled at them, then at Miss Mountjoy. The elderly lady sitting in front of the school party had long, white hair and a flowing dress that made Sara think ‘ex-hippie.’ A large book was open on Miss Mountjoy’s lap, and she peered questioningly at her.
“No,” Sara said, retreating a couple of steps. “I can wait until the story is done. I’d like to hear it, if that’s okay.”
The librarian cleared her throat and the small faces all turned back to face her. Then Miss Mountjoy began the latest installment of Arthurian legends, complete with character voices, roaring monsters, and explanations of tricky words. Sara found a small stool in her book aisle and sat to listen. Soon, she, like the children, was absorbed in old tales of courage, treachery, and magic.
Devil Ship: Supernatural Suspense with Scary & Horrifying Monsters (Devil Ship Series Book 1) Page 6