It was truly humbling.
She’d also found new respect for Minister John. What a rock he had proved to be – a small wiry man with a big heart and clearly a deep affection for Kate.
She couldn’t help but reflect with guilt on her own behaviour as a teen and how abhorrently she had behaved. She’d been so demanding and yet so unappreciative. Seeing her aunt as some kind of evil stepmother because she had objected to anything that might involve or mention Jack or Leo Fernandez. Now she knew why: Kate believed Jack had murdered Ernest.
He’d certainly had both the opportunity and the motive to take him out of the picture. Especially if he knew that Ernest was planning to retire and to stick around. Jack wouldn’t have liked that when he was obviously in love with Kate himself. She thought about how angry Jack always looked with those coal black eyes of his, and how she could easily imagine him being a killer – squeezing the life out of someone with his strong arms or beating someone to death with his enormous fists.
Or knocking someone out with the butt of his gun…
Isla stopped mid thought to realise she was instinctively touching the part of her head where she still had a small scar.
Did Jack strike her that night on the boat ten years ago?
She’d always assumed that she might have slipped and hit her head and that’s how she’d been rendered unconscious. All she could recall was how dark it had been and how Leo had wanted to take her back to the beach using the dinghy. Except, he couldn’t have done so because he’d been caught on the boat by the coastguard. So how had she got home that night?
Again, she’d always assumed that after finding herself back on the beach, she’d somehow managed to walk home, but she didn’t remember. So much just didn’t add up any more.
According to Kate, when he was caught with the drugs, Leo had insisted that he had been acting alone – but this simply wasn’t true. She had been there that night and she was damned sure that Jack Fernandez had been there too. Had Jack tricked Leo into trafficking the drugs?
Had Leo been protecting them both all this time?
It was three am and outside the wind was howling. She jumped at hearing the loud bang of what might have been a coconut striking the roof before rolling down to the ground with a thump.
Heavy rain was being driven against the windows and she could hear the sound of thunder rumbling somewhere out at sea, where lightning flashes occasionally lit up the skies. It was one heck of a storm and she only hoped it would blow itself out by morning.
Isla went over to draw the curtains and then she hopped back into bed. Her eyes felt sore and heavy from reading, but she still had several chapters to go that included her own childhood, which would be interesting reading from Kate’s perspective. She lifted the last dozen or so pages out from the jewellery box and saw an envelope addressed to her that had been tucked away at the bottom.
It was a personal letter from Kate…
Chapter Twenty Five
My dearest Isla,
If you have now read my journals, then you’ll know that I loved you from the first moment I knew of your existence and once we were back on the island, I loved you as my own. I was determined to do right by you, to protect you, and to give you a wholesome childhood. We read fairy stories together and filled a whole new section of the library with children’s fiction. You attended the local school and made lots of young friends. I bought you a pony and I taught you to swim and to play tennis. We went to church every Sunday, you, me, and Grace. The house was full of your laughter – and mine too – as I felt truly happy again when I never thought that was possible after losing my darling Ernest.
With you in my life, my life had new purpose.
Unfortunately, a few years later, I found having a headstrong young girl in my charge rather a challenge. I discovered that I hadn’t been blessed with a nurturing maternal nature after all and I struggled to balance the task of encouragement with discipline.
Thank goodness for Grace, as she seemed to be able to reason with you when I couldn’t.
I was alarmed by your interest in a boy from the village, and it didn’t seem to matter how many nice little girls I invited to the house for tea parties and games, you continued to insist this boy was your best friend. I remember trying to explain to you that you should have a best friend who is both a girl and the same age as you – like Grace and I.
But you replied, ‘Leo and I are best friends like you and Minister John.’
So you see, no matter what I said or did, you seemed to outsmart me and also defy me at every turn. And from then on, my dear Isla, you and I had a battle on our hands.
As you blossomed into a young woman and continued to see the gypsy-boy you had befriended – who was Jack’s boy – and who was two years older than you, I began to despair.
I was afraid for you. I asked you not to see him but you defied me over again.
I insisted. I banned you from seeing him because I wanted to protect you. Jack Fernandez was a bad man and I didn’t want you getting involved in anything to do with him – including his son.
Now you know that I blame Jack Fernandez for my husband’s death.
I discovered that Jack was heavily involved with smuggling and piracy and other illegal activities and I truly believe that Jack killed my Ernest because he was jealous of him – not of his wealth or status because Jack had plenty of that – but because he wanted to punish me.
I was so afraid that if you got involved with his son that something bad would happen.
I hate to say that I told you so. I knew you were sneaking off to see the boy but I didn’t know how to stop you. You deliberately chose not to listen to me, to go against my wishes, to ignore my warnings. I wasn’t an experienced parent. I didn’t know how to handle your animosity or disrespect towards me. I did my best. I never stopped loving you, Isla, not once. But dealing with your teenage tantrums and your single-minded obsession with Leo Fernandez and your determination to challenge me over him, drove a huge wedge between us.
I felt I had failed as a parent, a guardian, a godmother, and a grandmother.
All my fears materialised on that terrible night when Jack Fernandez brought you home to me, unconscious and hurt. I was terrified. He threatened me. He warned me to keep you away from his son and to make sure you kept your mouth shut or he would make sure I was eternally sorry.
I believed his threat. I knew he was capable of murder.
As the next day dawned, I heard Leo had been arrested on Jack’s boat for transporting a consignment of drugs – enough to have put Jack away for ever. Then came the news that Leo had pleaded guilty to all charges and was insisting he had acted alone, planned the whole thing himself, and taken the boat without Jack’s consent. I knew that none of that was true.
I knew Leo was covering for Jack and he was covering for you too.
To this day, I still don’t understand how Jack could have allowed Leo to go to prison for him. What a terrible and cowardly thing to do to his so-called son?
But I was in a terrible state of panic – you must understand that I had to keep you away from Jack and from his son, and also from ever speaking of what you knew about that night.
When you came around, you said you couldn’t remember anything. I wasn’t sure I believed you, and even if it was true, what if your memory ever came back and you decided to face Jack about what happened to Leo? I knew I couldn’t have stopped you because you would never listen to me where that boy was concerned.
As far as anyone knew, you were never on the boat that night, so the only thing I could do to protect you was to send you away – to protect you from Jack, from the authorities, and from yourself. Oh, Isla, your sobs and your begging and your cries that night as you were taken by a trusted friend over to Grand Cayman will haunt me to my dying day. You told me you hated me that night and that broke my heart. At least now, you’ll know that my motives were true and that I never stopped loving you. I have watched you from afar and I’ve bee
n so proud of the woman that you have become. Your mother would have been so proud of you too and of the success and opportunities you have made for yourself.
I chose to stay here on Pearl Island. I will admit that my anxiety about leaving here only worsened in my later years. The island became my prison and I know it will become my grave, but it was at least the place where Ernest and I had been so happy together.
So, Isla, I want you to have Pearl Island after I’m gone. I’ve left it all to you.
Leo is here. He is a free man now and I expect that you’ll be aware that he and I went into business together. He had the idea for a pearl farm on the island. It seems he spent his time in prison wisely, educating himself and others. I’ll admit, I didn’t want to give him the time of day when he first came back here, but I’m glad I did. He presented me with an exciting and well researched business plan. He had some money to invest. Importantly, and this was the thing that impressed me the most, he told me that he wanted something to offer you, Isla, when you came back to the island. How he hoped you’d want to stay here when you heard about the pearl farm. I think I was rather taken aback by his romanticism.
I didn’t tell him that I expected you’d want nothing to do with us or the island.
So, the challenge I faced in my last days was to find a way to tempt you back here.
I remembered how much you always loved my jewellery. I also knew that you’d become a successful jewellery designer – and how could you not be successful after being brought up here amongst diamonds and gems and pearls!
I also knew you weren’t married and I couldn’t help but wonder why.
I imagined you’d say it’s because you are a career woman, but is that the real truth?
Yes, I know, you are aghast that I’ve been spying on you all this time but I do have access to the internet here just like everyone else. The speeds are annoyingly slow but, as you know, I’ve always enjoyed keeping up with the latest in technology.
So, I’ve arranged for my jewellery box to be sent to you after my death, without the key, so you’d just have to jolly well come back to the island to get it. I know you’ll go straight to my little drawer – the one I made sure only you and I knew about – because it is the only way I can give you all the jewellery gifted to me by my darling husband Ernest Rocha.
I’m sure you’ll understand how I simply couldn’t risk sending it to you, so to give the box some weight I put my journals inside. It wasn’t to trick you – simply to give you a compelling reason to come back here. Now I’ll assume that you, having read them and having found this letter, know the truth – the painful truth that I couldn’t share with you, my darling granddaughter, while I was still alive.
Now you are a grown woman, I want you to know who I truly was and how our lives were intrinsically bound together. It didn’t work out for us because we both made mistakes along the way. I’ve laid mine bare in order to place some perspective on the things I’ve done in the hope that perhaps you will judge me less harshly and that you can learn from them.
Jack Fernandez is bad news and now you have the measure of the man, I suggest you give him a broad steer. Jack remained here on the island after Leo went to prison, much to my displeasure, and I’m told he continued to run consignments for the cartels after he’d lost their drugs to the authorities. I assume they had demanded that he paid back every single lempira.
I heard they’d threatened to have Leo killed in prison if he didn’t.
You see, that’s the thing about bad people, they know lots of other bad people.
And how do I know all this? Well, it’s a small island and I have my sources.
The day that Leo came to me, I’d just been told that my disease was untreatable and, without treatment, my life expectancy was around two years. When Leo told me it would take two years to see the first pearl harvest, I guessed I might never see it, but I always hoped that you would.
So why don’t you give him a chance too, Isla? That is, if after all this time, you are still in love with him. You have my blessing.
Your loving grandmother,
Kate.
Isla was sobbing when she came to the end of Kate’s poignant letter. It didn’t matter whether she still loved Leo or not or whether he still loved her, she had a different life now and he had moved on too. It didn’t matter that he was with Anya, because she hadn’t come here to wreck their relationship or to make amends. She’d come here for one thing only and that was closure.
Wiping away her tears, she realised that from the half-light creeping through a gap in the curtains that dawn was breaking. She felt incredibly tired but also totally enlightened.
There was so much about her grandmother that she’d never known nor appreciated. It was all quite disturbing in a sad sort of way. What a complicated woman she had been – keeping so many secrets, having so many affairs, dealing with her strange phobias, adopting spirituality and religion and then hiding herself away from the world.
But, at the same time, she had also been terribly manipulative and hard-headed too.
Hadn’t she also been a little blinkered when it came to her ‘darling husband’ Ernest?
Kate had seen Jack for what he was but surely Ernest had been cut from the same cloth?
They’d both operated in a somewhat dark and dubious underworld.
Yet, the circumstances surrounding Ernest’s death are almost too awful to contemplate.
Was Jack Fernandez really a murderer?
She cringed, realising that only yesterday she had accused Leo of being capable of the same thing.
Oh dear, really? What a terrible mess. So much for closure.
Chapter Twenty Six
Leo – Present Day
Leo had taken the rest of the pre-harvest sample of oysters back to his laboratory, where in the clean conditions and with his tools, he could better preserve the integrity of the oysters when he opened them. If they contained a pearl, he wanted to use the same oyster again to grow another. The ones that didn’t produce a pearl this time would be ground down and used to provide mother-of-pearl beads to be inserted into more productive oysters in future grafting.
An hour or so later, he’d counted the pearls he’d found so far. He had fourteen, which meant a yield of sixty percent of the shells he’d just opened. They were assorted sizes but, importantly, seven were perfectly round and unblemished and with the same lustre that he and Isla had observed in the first. If the entire first harvest was anywhere near as productive as this sample, then the pearl farm would go into profit this year, something he’d never even dreamed possible.
He sighed heavily. He knew he had to confront Isla again before she left the island. Although this Isla wasn’t anything like the darling sweet girl he remembered. This woman, this cold stranger in their midst, had come back here with the sole intention of cashing in on her inheritance without a care for anything she had once held dear. Even him.
It was hard to believe that he and everyone else who called Pearl Island their home were just collateral damage to her mercenary intentions. He had thought, for several precious minutes while they were on the reef together, that he’d seen her again, the old Isla, when she’d surfaced by his side, laughing and excited from swimming over the vents and from realising how this really was the absolutely perfect place to grow pearls. Her laughter had sounded like an echo from the past and the sparkle in her eyes had been too much for him and he’d stolen a kiss from her.
There was no mistaking that she’d kissed him back. And now…?
Now he was stinging from her gut wrenching accusations and, again, he’d hardly slept a wink.
Murderer? Trickster? Fraud? Liar?
She had seemed to take great pleasure in throwing the past and everything he’d worked for back in his face. Was this how she planned to exact her revenge on him? How she would make him suffer for what he had done to her? No matter that he had suffered already. No! That clearly wasn’t enough. She’d had to come over here to finish
the job herself.
And to make sure of it she would sell Pearl Island and the pearl farm to the highest bidder.
The weather this morning was a reflection of his mood – black and tempestuous. It wasn’t unusual to have a heavy rain overnight on a tropical island, as it usually cleared by morning, but today the wind was going to be an issue because it made for a choppy sea. The pearl farm out in the bay at the far side of the reef had some protection from squalls, but today’s conditions were hardly conducive for his first pearl harvest.
He smelled a waft of coffee brewing in the visitor centre, which meant Anya had arrived. He went downstairs to find her rubbing her long dark rain-soaked hair with a towel.
‘Did you check out the depression?’ she asked him, as soon as he came through the door.
He shrugged. ‘I don’t think there’s much I can do about it. Although coffee might help.’
‘Not your depression Leo, the tropical depression.’
Leo slid into the chair in front of Anya’s computer while she poured him a mug of coffee.
He frowned as he checked out the weather report. Right now, the winds were fresh at twenty knots, but there was a good chance of the storm escalating later in the day. So a change of plan was needed. Time was of the essence if he was to get out to the pontoon to get the rest of his harvest in before conditions worsened. Before Isla left the island for good and he’d proved nothing.
Right now, there was nothing he wanted more than to see that self-righteous smugness wiped off her pretty face when he showed her his haul of perfect pearls. When he told her she had been wrong about him and about the pearl farm. How she was a complete idiot to sell the island when it was already a valuable commodity. If he couldn’t appeal to her heart, then he had to aim higher.
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