The Siren

by Katherine St. John

  The bloodred blob wobbling westward across my computer screen had only just been named Tropical Storm Celia, but it already looked suspiciously like a hurricane to my anxious eye. “It’s rotating counterclockwise,” I pointed out, struggling to stay calm as Jackson and Price peered over my shoulders.

  Price ran a hand through his shock of ginger hair, worried. “It hasn’t got a center yet, so I guess that’s good?”

  “Shit. Nothing about this is good.” Jackson squinted at the image and tilted his head. “They keep saying they can’t predict the path, but it’s headed straight for us, don’t you think? It’s so close that even if it turned, we’d still catch the outer bands.”

  “I spoke to the resort manager right before you guys got here,” I said. “He told me a voluntary evacuation order has already been issued in Gen Town and the ferry will be running all day tomorrow to get people out. Hurricane prep is under way in Saint Vincent and Saint Ann as well.” I didn’t feel the need to mention that last bit was from Rick, who was adamant I evacuate as soon as possible and had offered his house to any of us who might need shelter, only adding to my growing panic.

  Jackson paced to the windows, where he rested his forehead against the glass, staring out at the dark night. “There goes the movie.” He groaned.

  Price and I scooted our chairs closer to my glass kitchen table as I opened the information tab beneath the radar animation. “The system is currently moving west-northwest at thirteen miles per hour with sustained winds of up to seventy miles per hour,” I read.

  Price rubbed his temples. Even his perpetually calm exterior was showing cracks. “Seventy-four is a cat one hurricane.”

  I used the little graph at the bottom of the image to determine the distance. “Looks like it’s about six hundred miles away.”

  Price did the math in his head. “So it’ll be here in roughly forty-eight hours, if it maintains that speed.”

  Jackson turned from the window, his face tense. “Who knows how strong it’ll be by the time it gets here. We’ve gotta get everyone out.”

  “I agree, but the budget to do that is gonna require approval from Cole,” I said. “Did you talk to him yet?”

  He sighed. “I tried to have a conversation with him about what he did to Stella last night, but he flat-out denied it. Swore it wasn’t him. Said he’s seen her popping pills constantly and that she probably took extras that interacted with the alcohol.”

  The blood rushed in my ears. “He’s lying,” I said, trying to control the rage in my voice.

  “I know.” The poor guy looked defeated. “What do you want me to do?”

  “What did he say about replacing Madison?” I asked, then cut my eyes to Price. “You know about this?”

  Price nodded.

  “I filled him in,” Jackson said. “Cole wouldn’t hear of canning Madison. He doesn’t seem to like Felicity for some reason.”

  “Probably because she doesn’t want to sleep with him,” I grumbled. “Did you tell him Madison lied about having cancer?”

  He shook his head. “I thought we might want to keep that to ourselves, in case we wanted to use it.”

  I gave him a sly smile. “Look at you, becoming a shark.”

  “When it’s kill or be killed…” He shrugged.

  “Okay,” Price stepped in. “We’ll circle back if we still have a movie after this storm hits. For now we have to focus on the task at hand.”

  “Agreed,” I said. “Let’s talk to Cole and get him to approve the funds so that we can figure out an evacuation plan. The rest we’ll deal with later.”

  I snapped my laptop closed and rose, the edges of the world going black as I stood. I gripped the edge of the table to steady myself, and Price took my elbow. “You okay?”

  I nodded, cursing silently. “Stood up too fast. Let’s do this.”

  Outside, the storm had cleared, but residual low clouds blocked the stars and the air was cool. I could see the lights of Cole’s oversize bungalow reflecting in the still choppy sea below as we approached. Had the water risen? It looked higher beneath the wooden boards than usual, but in the dark I couldn’t be sure. Price rapped on Cole’s door. “You do the talking first,” I whispered to him. “He’s most likely to listen to you.”

  I could hear faint music coming from within, but nothing else. After a minute, I rang the doorbell. Nothing. Price knocked again. “Call him,” I said. “Don’t say we’re with you.”

  Price took out his phone and raised it to his ear. “Hey, man,” he said into the phone. “I need to talk to you about the schedule.” We held our breath while he listened. “No. It’s time sensitive. I’m at your door.” He gave us the thumbs-up as he listened. “Okay.”

  He hung up the phone and the door swung in, revealing Cole wet and shirtless in board shorts, a longneck beer dangling from his hand. The slightest displeasure flashed across his face when he saw Jackson and me flanking Price, but he covered it quickly. “What’s up?” Cole prowled into the living room, leaving a trail of water on the floor.

  It was the first time I’d laid eyes on him since discovering he’d raped me, and it was all I could do not to grab the heavy Buddha statue that anchored the entry table and smash it over his head. But that would make me no better than him.

  “There’s a tropical storm—Celia, it’s called—a few hundred miles east of here,” Price said. Cole wandered out the open sliding glass door onto the deck, and we followed. “They think it may turn into a hurricane in the next day or so.”

  The jets on the Jacuzzi were firing at full tilt, the water changing from red to blue to purple and back again in time with the reggae blasting over the outdoor speakers. Cole took a slug of the beer. “What’s that have to do with me?”

  Price raised his voice over the noise. “It’s likely headed this way. We need to come up with an evacuation plan.”

  Cole stepped into the hot tub and sank beneath the water. Jackson, Price, and I exchanged a weighted glance as we waited for him to emerge. When he did, he shook the water from his hair like a dog, splattering all of us with tiny droplets. “Saint Genesius is safe,” he said.

  “Not hurricane-safe,” I protested.

  “Yeah it is, up to a category five,” Cole returned.

  “You’re trying to tell me these over-water bungalows can weather a category five?” I asked, incredulous. “That’s insane.”

  He shrugged. “So everybody can come up to the lobby. It’s made of concrete block.”

  “With tons of windows and surrounded by giant trees that could fall on it,” I argued. “At the very least, we need to get people to shelters on Saint Ann, though I’d rather fly them out while we still can.”

  Cole laughed. “For a little tropical storm that may or may not hit us?”

  I glared at him. “For once in your life, could you try not to be an asshole?” I snapped.

  A small smile played around Cole’s lips as he ignored me. I balled my hands into fists and bit my tongue so hard I tasted metal. Maybe murdering him was the right choice after all.

  “Dad,” Jackson said evenly. The word never sounded quite right when it came out of his mouth. “It’s going to hit us. The storm surge alone will put most of the island underwater. Villagers are already evacuating. We need to get everyone to higher ground.”

  “So send them to Saint Ann.” Cole shrugged. “I’m not spending fifty grand on plane tickets.”

  “You should at least give them the option,” I said through my teeth.

  “They have the option—to buy their own plane tickets if they’re pussies that can’t handle a little storm. But I’m not coddling them.”

  I shifted tactics. “It won’t look good on you or the production company if any of them talks to the press.”

  He laughed. “They can’t talk to the press. They all signed NDAs.”

  “I don’t know that NDAs cover reckless endangerment,” Price pointed out. “It’s a crime.”

  “Only if someone gets hurt, and no
one’s going to get hurt. You said yourself the path of the supposed storm isn’t even determined yet.”

  “The bungalows could flood in the storm surge, and we’d be sued for lost or damaged possessions,” I pointed out.

  “It would take a fifteen-foot swell to flood these bungalows.” He laughed as though the idea were absurd. “But they can bring their shit up to the lobby if they’re worried.” He beckoned to someone behind us, and we turned to see Madison, wrapped in a bathrobe, her long hair in a plait over her shoulder. So their tryst was confirmed. “Let’s talk in the morning.”

  Madison lifted the lid from one of the many room service meals strewn across the dining table and popped a grape in her mouth, then sauntered over to the hot tub with a smug smile.

  After the door had shut behind us, Jackson stood on the pier with crossed arms, his eyes blazing. “I’ll fucking pay for it if he won’t. I’m not letting him put my crew in danger.”

  “Can you afford that?” I asked.

  “Not as easily as he can, but I’ll make it work.”

  “Call a team meeting for the morning,” I instructed Price. “Let’s get the ball rolling.”

  When this was all over, I would quit. To hell with the repercussions. I didn’t care anymore whether I ever worked in Hollywood again. I’d rather sell the condo for pennies on the dollar and flip burgers at McDonald’s than be in the employ of Cole Fucking Power. The very idea of being free of him made me want to jump for joy.

  Part V:

  Storm Surge

  Felicity

  Saturday, June 29

  The day is still and clear, not a sign of the monster storm marching across the sea to destroy us. I shake the sand from a pair of cutoffs over the edge of the deck into the teal sea and grab my favorite beige bikini from where it’s drying in the sun across the back of a cushioned lounger, then step back into the deliciously cool bungalow, sliding the glass door shut behind me.

  Evidently I’ll be packing for both of us, as Stella’s at her most helpless today, drinking and binge-watching the weather while draped across the couch like Daisy Buchanan in The Great Gatsby. I keep expecting her to raise her wrist to her forehead and proclaim she always waits for the longest day of the year and then misses it. We are just past the longest day of the year, and it’s exactly the sort of thing she’d do; I’m sure she wishes she’d played Daisy in the latest film adaptation.

  As I gather discarded hats and shoes from around the bungalow, I can make out the reporters on TV debating whether newly upgraded Hurricane Celia, at the moment a category one, will turn north and head for Miami, or keep moving east, straight for us.

  “Roberta’s changed her dress,” Stella announces. Roberta being the weather girl she’s now on a first-name basis with. “Purple looks good on her,” she adds with a flourish of her hand that sends the nearly empty cocktail glass perched on the arm of the couch crashing to the floor. “Oops,” she says in reference to the glass, but she doesn’t move to pick it up. “Fee, can you get me another glass of rum, pretty please?”

  I take a bottle of fizzy water from the fridge and hand it to her. She looks at it like I’ve handed her a dirty diaper. “Drink this first,” I say. Then, off her look, “Dehydration is terrible for your skin.”

  At this she sighs and twists off the cap. “I’m onto you,” she slurs as I sweep up the broken glass. But she drinks the water.

  Initially I encouraged her alcoholism, thinking it would make her more likely to spill what happened to my mother, but I quickly found that Stella’s an incredibly frustrating person to try to get anything out of—largely because she has the memory of a goldfish—and the pills and alcohol only make it worse. The things she does remember, she’s embellished so frequently that she’s no longer sure herself what’s real and what’s fantasy. Every so often a memory will surface and I can see her gingerly lift it, dripping, out of the mire of her mind, then hold it up to the light to examine. Is it her memory or the memory of a character she played? Something that really happened or something she only wished or dreamed happened? It’s hard enough for her to determine, and she was—or wasn’t—there. I’m completely lost.

  I’d thought the memoir she plans to write would be my ace in the hole; I’ve been sneaking glances at her journal every chance I get, but besides one interesting entry about the warning Jackson’s mom gave her before she married Cole, all she’s written are short, meaningless passages about things that don’t matter in the context of Iris’s death.

  Nothing’s going according to plan.

  My sole objective, from the day my mother died, has been to determine who killed her and exact revenge. Every. Single. Thing I’ve done in the past thirteen years has been in pursuit of that goal. The move to Los Angeles, the backbreaking martial arts classes, the complete avoidance of any connection with other humans—it’s all been in service of this singular objective. I’ve been a machine. I have an encyclopedic knowledge of pharmaceuticals and the doses needed for illness, sleep, or death; I can bring a two-hundred-pound man to his knees in a dozen ways, change identities at the drop of a hat, and dig up dirt on absolutely anyone; I’ve never had a romantic relationship, best friend, or even a real social media profile, and very few photographs of me exist in the world. The cherry on top: I’ve now miraculously managed to weasel my way onto a small island with the three people who know what really happened to Iris that night—at least one of whom must be responsible—and yet I’ve completely failed in my mission. I’ve not learned a thing about how Iris died, somehow ended up in front of the camera (and worse, liked it), and most inconveniently, developed what I’m beginning to think might be real feelings for the boy who perhaps could have saved her but didn’t.

  On the positive side, I’ve become indispensable to the woman who at best covered up her death and at worst murdered her—but now that I’ve gotten to know Stella, I honestly can’t imagine her capable of murdering anyone, so I’m not sure that can go in the win column. I had to “humanely remove” a giant spider from the bathtub before she got in the other night because she was deathly afraid of it but couldn’t stand to hurt it. And the mother that stole all her money when she was young? I later found out Stella continued to pay her rent for years afterward, until she could no longer afford it.

  If I’ve learned anything from her, it’s that tabloids are trash, so I shouldn’t be surprised that I’ve yet to see a glimmer of her “famous temper.” Nor have I noticed an ounce of jealousy—the opposite, really. She idolizes beauty and talent, even if it belongs to a younger woman, and has been most encouraging of my acting. Though she’s never divulged the specific reason she and Cole broke up all those years ago, she has mentioned that he cheated, and there was the nugget she dropped about his fetish for sleeping beauties. So I guess my operation hasn’t been a complete wash.

  During the years I spent alone in my mother’s old bedroom secretly watching every movie Cole and Stella ever did, I saw an independent film Cole starred in about men who had a sexual fascination with sleeping girls. He’d been young in the film, a good decade younger than when he met my mother, and his character had used drugs to put the girls to sleep. I’d never considered that fetish might live on in him and be the reason behind the holes in my mother’s arms. But Cole does have that odd way of hanging on to pieces of the characters he’s played, and it made so much sense when Stella mentioned it.

  Cole had certainly paid Iris well, their relationship coincided with her drug habit, and it would be just like him to give his escorts heroin instead of sleeping pills. What didn’t make sense was that she’d stayed with him after the holes in her arms disappeared, which was around the time the money also dried up. I could only assume that Cole fell in love with her and began seeing her regularly, while perhaps continuing to pay other women to do the unconscious sex. Now that I know him, it’s nearly as hard to imagine Cole in love as it is to believe that my mother would fall for a man who preferred to fuck her when she was unconscious. But I have to ad
mit there were likely things about her that, as her ten-year-old daughter, I couldn’t have known.

  Of course, this theory still explains nothing about Iris’s death or Stella’s involvement in it, though I’ve begun to think that maybe Stella never knew my mother at all. It’s possible Stella assumed Iris was one of Cole’s sleeping beauties, and her presence the night of her death was only coincidence.

  I hope this is the case; for all her eccentricities, I’ve come to actually like Stella. I’ve never had girlfriends, and while I guess we aren’t exactly friends in the traditional sense, seeing as I’m her employee and also lying to her about pretty much everything, I do enjoy her company. Her flair for the theatrical is exaggerated, but her wit is dry, and she has a way of making everything seem grand yet at the same time a little frivolous, as though we’re characters in a high-society melodrama from a bygone era. Where at first I thought her delusional, I now see that she’s only editing the film of her life as she goes. Some scenes—possibly some entire years—she’s chosen to leave on the cutting room floor, focusing instead on the story she wants to tell, which she enhances for dramatic effect. Okay, so maybe she is delusional.

  Madison was a curveball I didn’t expect. Stella had only informed me on the plane that the original actress had been replaced, and I’d been so wrapped up in my own plans that I stupidly hadn’t had the forethought to ask by whom. I nearly had a heart attack when I first saw her the day we arrived. I’d been in acting class with Madison as Nikki Nimes, and she was right—we’d even done a scene together. I now realized that acting classes were obviously a mistake, but when I first moved to LA I’d never imagined that in a city of ten million I’d cross paths with any of those people again. Hollywood, though, turned out to be just as small as everyone was always saying it was.

  Madison was as terrible an actress then as she is now, and I hadn’t expected she’d actually have a career beyond whatever show she’d snaked her way onto by dating the studio exec that turned out to be Taylor’s father. Yet another example of how small Hollywood really is. I’d lied handily when Madison called me out the first day, but still wasn’t sure she totally believed me, regardless of my “much better nose” and brown eyes and hair.