‘Oh, look. Talk of the devil. It’s Minister John.’
He was covered in a layer of brown grit and fine sand. He was wearing a large wooden crucifix on his bare rain-soaked chest and a sodden sarong around his waist. He drove the scooter right up to the porch steps. His long thin hair was plastered back from his head and a pair of rain-lashed and misted-up spectacles sat on his nose, through which he couldn’t have possibly seen anything.
‘I’m sorry, Isla,’ he said, ‘but I’ve come to tell you that I just picked up a radio call from your pilot. He says he’s stuck on the Caymans because this storm is set to worsen and he’ll check the forecast again in the morning.’
‘Oh well,’ chirped Grace, with a nonchalant shrug. ‘We now have another pair of hands to help with the battens. Although you look like you need a cup of tea before we start, Minister John.’
John told them how he’d almost been knocked off his scooter several times by flying palm fronds and falling coconuts and that he would love some tea. ‘Is there any of your delicious lime drizzle cake to go with it, Grace?’ he enquired, licking his lips in anticipation.
He dried off in the downstairs bathroom and came out wearing only a towel around his waist.
Isla had no choice but to concede that she was better off waiting until tomorrow morning rather than risking her life in a small aircraft today. So she excused herself, thinking that she should email Evie straight away, to ask her to contact the airline she was supposed to be flying with tonight and amend her onward travel plans yet again.
She found that the internet was no longer working and neither were the phones. Feeling glum, she wondered if Minister John had left any of the lime drizzle cake. Back in the kitchen, she found Grace receiving a message on one of the old radios.
‘Go ahead, Bravo One. Receiving you loud and clear. Over!’ she said into the handset.
Isla listened to the message in alarm. It seemed that help was needed at the harbour to assist Leo Fernandez to get the pearl farm ashore before it was all destroyed. Her hand flew to her mouth.
Oh my goodness, why hadn’t she given a thought to the pearl farm in this storm?
She had been so engrossed with reading Kate’s journals and then feeling tired and frustrated at not being able to wrap up a sale quickly or being able to leave the island that she had only thought about herself, and while she’d been sleeping the morning away, Leo has been worried sick about the pearl farm and his first harvest.
‘Come on!’ Isla urged Grace and Minister John. ‘We’d better get down there right away.’
Minister John drove the golf cart down to the harbour while the wind and the rain battered them from all directions. They clung onto their raincoats. Grace had also managed to find a raincoat for John to wear that she told him had once belonged to Mr Ernest. It was far too big for John and the hood was acting like a scoop, catching all the rain and pouring it down the back of his neck.
When they reached the harbour, they saw a group of men standing around on the dockside holding onto pushcarts and wheelbarrows.
‘What are they planning to do with those?’ Minister John wondered out loud.
‘They’ll use them to take the oysters to the grotto,’ Isla explained. ‘It’s the only place they will survive off the reef. Where is Leo? Have you seen him yet?’
Grace pointed out to sea. ‘Look! Out there…’
Isla strained her eyes against the wind and the spray to see the Perfect Pearl riding the waves towards them. She left Grace and John’s side to rush to the dockside to meet the boat as it came in.
‘How many trips have they done?’ Isla asked one of the men who was waiting with his cart.
‘A few,’ the man replied. ‘Maybe this will be the last.’
Isla was angry. She should have been here earlier. This was her pearl farm too, so why hadn’t Leo got word to her sooner? This was just so typical of him, to think he could leave her out of something when she had a right to be involved.
As the Perfect Pearl came in to the dock, Jack saw Isla and threw her the landing rope.
Isla stared at him for a moment and clenched her jaw. He glared right back at her with those long remembered menacingly dark eyes and with a frown upon his face, which had the effect of increasing both her heart rate and her hostility towards him. Hands on hips, Isla took measure of the notoriously regarded man standing in front of her and saw that, although he was still huge in stature and his body was still strong, Jack’s face was now etched with far deeper lines and his once dark hair was now completely silver grey, making him appear far less intimidating than he had before.
She turned away to focus on tying the rope to the cleat. When she looked up she saw that Leo was at the helm and that the storage tanks were full of oysters. She yelled out to Jack to pass her one of the baskets.
He stared at her for a moment and then he shook his head.
‘They’re too heavy for you. This is a man’s job!’
Isla quickly boarded the boat and went straight up to Leo.
‘Why the hell didn’t you call me about this sooner?’ she yelled at him.
He looked at her with disbelief in his eyes. He also looked exhausted.
‘Oh, Isla, why didn’t you think to take a look out from your princess tower this morning and notice there was a storm raging?’ His voiced was laced with sarcasm.
She glared at him. He had a point.
‘Well, I’m here now.’
The boat rocked and swayed as she staggered over to one of the tanks and, ignoring Jack’s protests, attempted to lift a basket. It wouldn’t budge because, as he had warned, much to her disgruntlement, it was far too heavy for her to lift. She tried to lift a net of shells next but filled with water and big old knurled oyster shells, it too was simply too heavy for her.
She cursed under her breath and turned to Leo, who was now leaning against the wheelhouse, clutching his ribs with one hand and holding onto the handrail with the other. His eyes were closed, he was gritting his teeth. He had a look of agony on his face.
Five burly men climbed aboard and were now hauling the load ashore. Isla pushed past them to reach Leo.
‘You are hurt. What happened?’
He opened his eyes and looked at her. ‘I think I broke a couple of ribs.’
‘Then you have to go and see the nurse straight away.’
He shook his head. ‘No. Later. I have to save the spats.’
Jack was on the radio getting an update on the path of the hurricane.
‘I’m told we might have an hour before the full force of Kate is upon us,’ he said, dryly.
Isla gave Jack an incredulous glare. ‘What did you just say? You named this storm Kate?’
Jack shrugged. ‘Not me, the National Hurricane Centre. But it’s kind of ironic, don’t you think?’
Leo gave her a pained smile. ‘Okay, let’s go, Jack. Time for one more trip.’
‘I’m going with you,’ Isla blurted.
‘No way!’ Leo and Jack yelled together.
But with the last of the oysters being hauled off to safety, Isla was already untying the docking ropes. ‘You have no choice in the matter. This pearl farm is half mine and you need me. Leo is in no fit state to go into the water again, so I’ll go down and get the spats. Jack, you can help me by hauling them out.’
Jack took one look at Leo and didn’t argue. He simply threw Isla a life jacket and she quickly slipped it on. She then pulled in the buoys as they left the dock and squeezed herself in between Jack and Leo in the wheelhouse. Jack was driving the boat and Leo was grimacing in pain with every wave that crashed over them.
After about twenty minutes, they reached the pontoon. The boat was bucking like a bronco on the waves and they could see that part of the raft had broken away, exposing the bamboo poles.
Jack secured the boat while Isla peeled off the life jacket and her drenched trousers and shirt.
She felt the men’s eyes on her as she undressed. ‘I can’t risk my cl
othes getting caught on the raft!’ she snapped, as she grabbed a facemask and snorkel.
Leo handed her a knife in a sheath, which she strapped to her leg.
As she climbed over the side of the surging boat, he grabbed her hand.
‘Isla, please be careful.’
She nodded. ‘I will. It’s okay. I can do this.’
She waited until they hit a trough in the waves and then, taking a great gasp of air, she slipped into the water and used the lines to pull herself down. Visibility underwater was almost zero. She felt her way along the raft until she located the ropes holding the young oyster spats that Leo had cultivated and then, when she felt she had a good handful of rope, she kicked herself back up to the surface. Jack was leaning over the side, he grabbed her hand as she reappeared. She handed him the ropes, then took a deep breath and went down again.
Four times she did this until Leo confirmed that all the spats were more or less accounted for.
As they made their way back to the harbour, he kept looking at her and smiling, despite his pain, and she tried her best to ignore him and hold onto the wheelhouse in the terrifying squall.
Chapter Twenty Eight
At the harbour, men were ready and waiting to help get the Perfect Pearl into dry dock for some protection from the incoming hurricane. Isla kept insisting that Leo sought medical help for his ribs but he wouldn’t listen to her. He was only interested in taking the spats into the grotto and making sure that all his oysters were properly immersed in the pools there.
‘They need some space around them. If they are stacked too close or on top of each other, and they can’t filter water, they’ll die within the next few hours,’ he insisted.
Isla began loading the spats into the golf cart. ‘Then Jack and I will go. Please, Leo, you need to go to the medical centre and see the nurse straight away.’
‘Look, Isla, I have been nurturing those oysters for two years. I’m not about to lose them now.’
He walked away from her, his body bent with pain, into the wind and towards the headland.
She quickly followed him in the golf cart. ‘Okay. But will you please at least get in?’
Jack had stopped to pick up a long rope. He threw it into the back of the golf cart alongside the spats and the three of them made their way over the headland. The cart struggled forward against the wind. If it hadn’t been so weighed down it might have blown away.
When they reached the path down to the grotto, the sea was smashing hard against the huge boulders standing at the entrance to the cave. The tide was so high that it looked impossible to get inside.
‘We’ll wait for a slack wave and then dash inside,’ Jack told them.
He slung the rope around his body and lifted most of the spats. Isla successfully fought off Leo to carry the rest. Then on the count of ten, when a slack wave made an appearance, they each made it past the giant boulders and into the cave.
Once inside, Leo was in despair as he found all the baskets containing the oysters had just been thrown haphazardly into the pools and the nets had been piled on top of the baskets, effectively suffocating them.
‘We have to move them. I did tell them it was important how they were stacked.’
He was wheezing now. Isla thought that one of his lungs might be punctured.
‘I have a plan,’ she told them. ‘I’ll swim down and attach the rope to the baskets. Jack can take their weight from the surface, which will allow me to separate them from the nets.’
Both Jack and Leo liked this idea, so Isla jumped into the first pool and soon had all the baskets and the nets and the ropes and spats all arranged in the pools exactly to Leo’s liking. When she came up from the last pool a final time, breathless and a little dizzy, they each took a hand and helped her out.
‘Now, can we please get you out of here, so you can go and see the nurse?’ she begged of Leo.
‘I don’t think that’s possible right now,’ Jack warned. ‘The winds are gusting. I’m afraid your golf cart’s gone. We should wait it out here.’
‘How long do you think it will take for the hurricane to pass?’ Isla asked him.
He shrugged. ‘The last report said the storm was a hundred miles across and moving at around twenty miles per hour. So it could be several hours.’
Leo went further back into the grotto to find himself a dry area in which to wait. He eased himself down to sit against a large rock. ‘I need to rest. We might as well make ourselves comfortable.’
Isla found a place to sit too, although she was now feeling cold and shivery in the cool damp cave. ‘There doesn’t seem to be any driftwood lying around to use for a fire,’ she said, in disappointment. A warm and cosy long ago image of her and Leo sheltering from a storm next to a fire in this cave flashed through her mind.
Jack took off the life vest he was wearing and offered it to her. ‘Here, put this on. It will warm you up.’
She accepted it reluctantly, but it did feel warm from his body heat. Then she saw that Jack, who had sat down opposite her, was staring at her again, making her feel uncomfortable. She remembered how Kate had said in her journals how she too had felt uncomfortable being subjected to this man’s devilish gaze.
‘Why are you looking at me like that?’ she eventually snapped.
‘You remind me of your aunt, that’s all. You look so much like her.’
‘Kate wasn’t my aunt,’ she decided to tell him. ‘She was my grandmother.’
Jack looked to be just as surprised by this news as she had been.
‘Really. Did the lawyers from Grand Cayman tell you that?’
‘No. Kate did. I read it in her journal. I also read that you and she were once very close friends.’
Jack shifted his position and looked uneasy. But she didn’t care if it was an uncomfortable topic for him, because right now, she had Jack Fernandez in a situation from which he couldn’t escape.
She might as well take full advantage.
‘I can’t see what she saw in you myself,’ Isla said to him coldly. ‘All I see is a man who has a lot to answer for and an awful lot of explaining to do. And, as we are likely to be in this cave for quite some time, I think that right now might be the time that you get to do some of that explaining.’
Leo interrupted. ‘Isla, please, it’s not only Jack. I too need to clear up a few….’
Isla pressed her index finger to her lips to silence him. ‘Shhhhh... Leo. Let Jack go first!’
Leo took his cue but looked worried as his eyes darted from Isla to Jack.
‘Did you love her, Jack?’ Isla continued.
Jack closed his eyes, signalling his refusal to answer.
‘I think you did,’ Isla answered for him. ‘I think you were jealous of him.’
Jack’s eyes suddenly snapped open and the black coals were now glowering. ‘It’s none of your damn business,’ he hissed.
‘Kate went to her grave thinking you killed Ernest, her husband. Did you? Did you kill him, Jack?’
To her surprise, his look of anger on his face turned to one of anguish.
‘All right, I’ll tell you. Yes, I loved her. And no, I didn’t kill him. He was my friend!’
‘Then what happened the night he went missing? You must have some thoughts about what happened to him – a theory at least?’
‘I was asleep. When I woke up he was gone. That’s all I know.’
‘Were you both drinking? Was Ernest drunk? Could he have fallen off the boat?’
Jack shook his head. ‘Look, we had a few beers. We weren’t drunk. The sea was calm. Like I said, I woke up and he wasn’t there. I didn’t kill him. That’s all I know!’
Isla continued to search Jack’s unfathomable eyes. He continued to stare back at her without blinking or breaking eye contact until she decided that he must be telling the truth.
‘Well, that’s the first time I’ve ever heard you talk about this,’ Leo said to Jack, after those telling moments of silence. ‘But I’ve always thou
ght there must have been something… I mean, between you and Miss Kate for your feud to be so, well… passionate?’
‘It was a long time ago. Before either of you were born,’ Jack answered. ‘Kate wouldn’t believe me when I said I had nothing to do with Ernest’s disappearance. She thought I was jealous of him, which I most certainly was not. Anyway, I mean, who’s to say he’s not still alive? His body was never found. Not even bits of it. Maybe his “firm” didn’t want him to retire? Maybe they thought he knew too much about their business to allow it? That’s my theory at least.’
Isla stared at him. Ernest alive? Well, that was an unexplored angle, as far as she knew.
She was about to ask him what he knew about Ernest’s so called firm, but he’d closed his eyes again. And amazingly, within seconds, he was snoring.
Leo, leaning against his rock, was watching Isla closely. ‘I saw you again today,’ he said.
Isla looked at him curiously. ‘What do you mean “you saw me again”?’
‘The brave and fearless girl I feared lost. I saw you out on the pontoon yesterday and I saw you again today – when you saved the pearl farm.’
She laughed and thought she might be blushing; she hoped that in the half-light, he couldn’t tell.
‘Oh, I think you saved most of it, while I was waiting around in my princess tower.’
He was being nice. Telling her that he appreciated what she had done today, so at the very least, she could be gracious about it. And, as they were probably going to be in this cave for quite a while, it was probably time that she reciprocated and spoke to him without malice too.
She took a deep breath. ‘I’m sorry, Leo. I’ve been an absolute bitch since I came back here. I think I was afraid of seeing you again. There’s no other explanation for my rudeness. I really don’t think that you had anything to do with Kate’s death and it was ridiculous of me to say that—’
‘Isla, stop. Your apology is accepted. Like I said, I think you just got lost for a while.’
They looked at each other for a moment and she nodded. ‘Yes, I think you’re right.’
Island in the Sun Page 21