by Rachel Woods
I hadn’t been back to the bungalow since the day I’d arrived on the island, when Icarus had led me down the path through the rainforest, claiming he had to make sure the spa’s doors had been locked.
Wary and yet excited, I had no idea what type of adventure awaited me. Even now, the intensity of the memories was potent, transporting me back in time to the moment when Icarus and I first made love.
Exhaling, I told myself to snap out of it. Now was not the time for reminiscing. Now was the time for truth. Hopefully. If Stazia actually planned to tell me the truth, which I was starting to doubt. I was also starting to doubt she was here or that she would even show up.
Leaving the small reception area, I headed down the hallway and ended up in the first room, which was slightly bigger and featured the long panels of whispery gauze I remembered. The room seemed darker and there appeared to be more panels.
A sudden, strange whirring noise made my hair stand on end and gave me goose bumps. I moved around and among the gauzy panels, trying to identify the sound, but a moment later, the whirring stopped and I froze.
Standing still, I concentrated on listening, but I could barely hear over my pounding heart. Letting out a shaky breath, I took a step. A muted click, and again I froze. What was that? Had the bungalow door opened?
“Stazia?” I turned. Gauze panels seemed to swing toward me. Startled, I pushed them aside, trying to see through the fabric. I shuddered, realizing Henri must have been in the bungalow, watching and secretly recording Icarus and me as we made love.
In the second room, a faint, spicy smell of incense lingered. Stazia wasn’t in the room. There was a massage table, and around the perimeter of the room, bamboo shelves and cabinets housed towels, candles, stacks of stones in various sizes, and dozens of oils and lotions in various bottles and jars.
“Stazia?” I sighed, annoyed, not sure if I should search the last room or just accept that I’d been made a fool of, again, and—
Something brushed my back, and I jumped just as I remembered the gauzy panels; however, there were no gauzy panels in this room, the second room. The gauze panels were in the first room. Heart slamming, I spun around. There was nothing behind me, which made the panic increase. I had felt something on my back, hadn’t I? Maybe. Or maybe not. Maybe I was just jumpy and irritated, pissed because it was becoming more and more obvious that Stazia wasn’t going to show up to tell me the truth about Icarus.
Facing the hallway I had just walked through, I peered into the dim, shadowy passageway. I could see into the first room a bit, where the gauze panels swayed slightly, the fabric disturbed by the hints of breeze seeping through slivers of space in the walls. Exhaling a slow breath, I stared down the dim hall, mesmerized by the gauzy panels, trying to discern if someone else was in the spa bungalow.
“Stazia,” I called out just in case she had arrived and was making her way through the gauzy gauntlet, looking for me. “Stazia?” No reply. With heightened apprehension, I turned and headed toward the hallway that would lead to the last room.
The third room was the largest, used exclusively for guests who wanted some type of sexual spa fantasy. Walking through the hallway, I thought about my own experience in the third room, where Icarus and I had made love for—
A whispery scurrying gave me a jolt of panic and fear so potent that my legs went rubbery, and I almost lost my balance. Pressing a hand against the bamboo wall to steady myself, I glanced behind me and then looked ahead, my pulse jumping. Farther along the hall, closer to the entryway into the third room, a window let in an unusual burst of bright sunshine in the shape of a square on the opposite wall. As I passed the window, I turned my head toward it for a second and then looked ahead, continuing down the hall.
The after-image of a face in the window flashed in my mind, and I froze, stopping dead in my tracks, confused and panicked. A face in the window? Trembling, I turned slowly and took a step forward, walking back to the window. Determined to overcome my hysteria, which I knew was just my mind playing tricks on me, I faced the window. Squinting from the bright sunshine slanting through broad leathery green leaves, I stared at the cloudy glass pane and—
A face, transparent and shadowy, like a flickering specter, stared back at me. Terrified, I gasped at the wide eyes and opened mouth. I was about to scream when I realized I knew the face in the window.
It was my own ghostly reflection.
Shocked and embarrassed, I spun away from the window, shaking my head as I hurried down the long, narrow hall and into the third room.
The room where Icarus and I had first made love brought back a torrent of memories, and yet the room wasn’t the same. There was something different about the large, airy space, I realized, as I stepped toward the king-sized bed. Trembling and confused, I frowned and forced myself to take another step, trying to process what I saw.
Dizzy and nauseated, I stared at the body sprawled in the middle of the bed. A large knife jutted from the center of the chest while white sheets, stained with pools and splatters and splotches of blood, were twisted around muscular limbs.
A scream rose in my throat, but when I opened my mouth, only strangled gasps escaped as I walked even closer to the bed. I recognized the lifeless face.
It was Sam Collins.
“Oh my God,” I whispered, holding a shaking hand against my lips.
Horrified, I took a step back, my mind racing, struggling to figure out what was happening even as something was telling me to leave, to turn around and run as fast and as far away as possible. I didn’t understand why Sam Collins was lying on the bed in the third room of the bungalow with a knife in his chest.
I coughed and cleared my throat as a vague sound filtered through the haze in my mind, something like a strange crackling noise.
Glass shattered, and before I could jump, there was a series of tinkling pops. Panicked, my breath coming in short bursts, I turned from Sam’s dead body and stared toward the hallway leading back to the second room.
“Oh no …” I sputtered, coughing again as the cloud of smoke in the hallway drifted into the third room. Smoke? I didn’t understand. Why was there smoke in the hallway? I took several steps forward, but then jumped back when more glass shattered and the strange crackling sounds grew louder.
My heart pounding, I tried to peer through the smoke. There was a sudden flash of orange at the entrance into the second room. Gasping, I skittered back, still staring down the smoke-filled hallway, my stomach twisting as I saw more flashes of orange and realized what they were.
Fire.
Coughing harder, I backed away from the entryway and spun in a circle, looking for an exit, some way to escape, but there were no windows in the third room. Only bamboo walls and a thatched roof. I had to get out of the bungalow. Now. Before the walls caught fire and the flames spread to the roof, consuming me.
The smoke in the hallway terrified me. In seconds, it seemed to have grown more voluminous and potent, and I was wheezing, trying to breathe. I could not stay in the third room. Several minutes more and the entire space might be swirling with smoke. I’d read somewhere that most people who died in fires expired from smoke inhalation. The smoke got into their lungs, burning them from the inside out.
Assailed by another fit of coughing, I tried not to scream and cry as I made tentative steps toward the hall. Pulling the hem of my tank top over my nose, I headed down the hall, hesitant at first and then breaking into a jog as smoke and heat surrounded me, stinging my eyes and burning my throat.
From the hallway, I ran into the second room. The heat was intense, and as I squinted, I had to force myself not to scream. The second room was on fire. Flames crackled and snarled as they devoured the bamboo walls surrounding me. The smoke wasn’t as thick, and I was able to make my way to the hallway leading to the first room. Blindly, I half-walked, half-ran, through a wall of smoke that seemed heavy and oppressive and determined to choke me to death.
I couldn’t die like this! Please, God, n
o, I prayed, hacking and coughing, struggling to breathe as I pushed through the hallway and then entered the first room. Gasping, I stumbled back into the hall, watching in horror as flames leaped and danced around the room. The gauzy curtain panels were no match for the fiery conflagration. Fire raced up the filmy gauze, leaving behind smoldering charred fabric.
The flames roared and rose. Flames joined other flames, creating small infernos that twirled and swirled. The fire had a life of its own and was spreading. Smoke grew thicker, cloudier and dark, like brimstone straight from the bowels of hell.
Coughing and gagging, I tried to peer through the roaring flames, tried to figure out a path I could take to get to the hallway that led to the reception area. All around me, the gauze looked like swirling, burning ribbons of fabric, but the walls of the room were not completely engulfed. If I stayed low and kept to the perimeter, then maybe I could make it to the hallway. Maybe. I wasn’t sure. I was hacking and gagging and could hardly see, but I had to try to escape. I couldn’t just stay there.
A thunderous mountain of burning straw and bamboo crashed to the floor in the middle of the room. Screaming, I hurried along the side of the wall, staring up at the sky. Sun shone through the section of roof that had fallen while thick clouds and plumes of smoke escaped though the opening, allowing me to breathe just a bit easier. I continued around the perimeter, avoiding the fiery gauze as much as possible, wincing and crying out when sparks flew and landed on my hands and arms.
Undaunted, I ran though the hallway as fiery flames leaped toward me and cloying smoke burned my eyes and throat. It seemed as though the fire had personified into some kind of flaming spirit, sent to destroy me.
The fire and smoke hadn’t made it to the reception area—yet. Gulping and gagging, I ran to the door, grabbed the knob, and—
Screaming in pain, I yanked my hand back from the white-hot knob. Hysterical, I stared at my shaking hand, wincing and crying when I saw the glistening red blisters. Sobbing, my hand throbbing, I dropped to my knees. Something swung forward in front of me, and when I sat back on my heels, I realized the swinging object had been my purse, the small cross-body purse I’d looped around my neck before I left Icarus’s little yellow house.
My phone! It was in my purse. Wincing, I used my left hand to unzip the purse and pull out my phone. I forced myself to concentrate. Behind me, the smoke and fire were on their way, but I looked away, focusing on the display screen of my cell phone. Trembling, I started to enter my four-digit password, but I dropped the phone, and it skittered across the room beneath a chair.
Cursing and screaming, I did a diving crawl toward the chair and then flattened my body, reaching beneath the chair with my left arm. Feeling across the dusty floor, I located the phone, grabbed it, and then rose to my knees.
Beyond the smoke-filled hall, there was a cacophony of breaking and shattering and crashing, but I forced myself to ignore it as I entered my password on the phone’s display screen. Sweat broke out on my face, and I blinked rapidly, trying to keep the sweat from my eyes as I accessed the keypad and dialed the number.
Whimpering in shock and fear, I listened to the ringing, praying that—
Pain exploded at the back of my skull, spreading like poison as the phone fell from my hand. Confused and terrified, I felt bile rising in my throat. I fell forward, blackness engulfing me as thoughts fled and consciousness slipped away.
DAY TWENTY-ONE
Chapter Thirty-Eight
“Can you tell me what happened, Ms. Miller?” Detective Richland François asked.
Sitting up in the narrow hospital bed, propped up against the pillows, I stared at the detective. Standing at the foot of my bed, he gave me his familiar skeptical gaze, a mix of doubt and cynicism.
Hesitating, I looked down at my hands—the right one bandaged and the left one marred with a few burn scars from the fire I’d survived three days ago, thanks to Icarus, who was standing by the door with his arms crossed and a grim expression on his handsome face.
The story of Icarus’s heroism had been recounted to me more than once by several different nurses, all of them impressed by his bravery, and by his looks, no doubt. As the nurses told it, Icarus had found me unconscious in the bungalow, after rushing into the burning building, risking his own life, and had rescued me from the inferno. Once at the hospital, I’d been treated for moderate smoke inhalation, a pretty nasty burn on my right hand, and various cuts, gashes, and superficial burns on my arms and legs. Those weren’t my only injuries. Initially, the doctors had assumed the lack of oxygen had caused me to lose consciousness, but upon further examination, they discovered I had suffered some type of trauma to the back of the head. It was concluded I’d been struck with a blunt object and knocked out.
Earlier this morning, I’d called Lisa to update her. There were tears when we talked about the fire and how it had nearly taken my life—if not for Icarus. Lisa was grateful for his bravery, but she claimed she still didn’t trust Icarus, though I noted a lack of vehemence in her suspicion of him.
“Why were you at the spa bungalow when it was closed?”
Glancing at Octavia, I looked for some sign from her, a nonverbal cue, as to whether or not I should answer the question, but she looked as curious as the detective, and there may have been some suspicion in her gaze. Standing behind her, near the door to my hospital room, was Icarus, giving me a shrewd look.
“We spoke to the hotel staff, and they told us the spa’s hours,” the detective said. “They weren’t open during the time the fire broke out. They also told us that the spa would have been locked, so how did you get in?”
“I don’t know,” I said, deciding on a course of action that I might not be able to make work, but I had to try. I had to stall until I could talk to Octavia and Icarus alone.
“You don’t know why you went to the spa?”
“No, I don’t,” I said. “What I mean is, I don’t know because I don’t remember.”
“You don’t remember?”
Determined not to falter under the detective’s withering gaze, I shook my head. “I don’t remember. The doctors told me that I’ve been in and out of consciousness, which is why they wanted me to stay in the hospital, so they could monitor me, and today is the first day that I’ve been able to stay awake for longer than an hour. And, all morning, since I woke up, I’ve been trying to remember why I went to the bungalow, but I can’t. The only thing I can think is that I booked an appointment and got the time wrong.”
“You didn’t have an appointment at the spa that day,” the detective said. “We checked with the hotel.”
“Well, then, maybe …” I shook my head. “I don’t know. I wish I did.”
“And, let me guess,” Detective François said. “You don’t know anything about Sam Collins’ murder?”
“What?” I said, trying to sound surprised, trying to forget the images of Sam’s lifeless body and the bloody sheets and the knife in his chest. “Sam Collins is dead? Why would I know about that?”
“My client is not answering any questions about the murder of Sam Collins,” Octavia told the detective.
“Ms. Miller, when I initially tried to get your statement, three days ago, your doctors wouldn’t let me talk to you,” the detective said. “As you said, you were in and out of consciousness, so they advised me to come back when you were more lucid and able to answer questions. Not once did they mention anything about you losing your memory.”
“The doctors may not be aware that Ms. Miller is having difficulty recalling the events of the incident in question,” Octavia said. “Which is why I think you should take her statement at a later date. I can tell the doctors about her memory issues, and they can run more tests. When Ms. Miller is able to provide you with more details, I will let you know.”
Shrugging, the detective said, “Ms. Miller, the problem with your memory is that you have forgotten how to tell the truth.”
Pretending to be offended, I said, “I’m not
lying. I don’t—”
“Detective, let’s allow the doctors to determine whether or not Ms. Miller’s memory has been impaired by the tragic ordeal she barely survived,” said Octavia, with a stinging rebuke that seemed to have chastened the skeptical lawman. “In the meantime, have you made any progress in finding out who started the fire and assaulted Ms. Miller?”
As he headed out of the room, the detective mumbled his reply, which was something about the investigation into the fire being ongoing.
Once the detective was gone, Octavia frowned at me.
“What?” I asked, wary, glancing at Icarus for support, but he seemed just as frustrated as his cousin.
“Okay, what's the real story?” Octavia asked. “I want the truth.”
Icarus moved from his spot by the door, where he’d been rooted, and walked to the foot of the bed. “The truth is that Quinn went to the spa to meet Stazia.”
“What?” Octavia’s head whipped toward Icarus and then back to me, her frown turning to a scowl. “Is that true?”
Contrite, and slightly irritated, I said, “Yes, but—”
“Quinn, why would you go to meet her alone?” Octavia asked. “That was a very dangerous thing to do, and as it was, you could have been killed.”
“She wasn’t supposed to go alone,” Icarus said, giving me a pointed stare. “I was supposed to go with her, but she didn’t wait for me.”
I glared at Icarus. “I was worried that Stazia would leave if I didn’t show up at the time when she wanted to meet me.”
“Neither of you should have been meeting Stazia without telling me about your plans,” Octavia admonished. “You need to always keep me abreast of everything you’re doing as you search for the better suspect.”
“Speaking of the better suspect,” I said. “I just remembered something Sam Collins told me.”
After telling Octavia and Icarus about Henri’s lies to both Stazia and Sam, Icarus said, “We need to find out who Henri sent to the money drop.”