Undeniable Proof

by B. J Daniels

  She relaxed a little and felt guilty for the rude way she'd reacted to his kindness.

  "How about you?"

  "You mean what I do for a living?" she asked, giving herself time to come up with an answer. "I've been a waitress, a barmaid, a receptionist, a grocery clerk. Right now I'm just taking a break to figure out what I want to do."

  "Been there," he said. "You're still young. You'll figure it out." He cocked his head at her. "You look like an…artist to me." He must have seen her shocked expression because he laughed. "No, I'm not psychic. The box lid came open and I saw all your art supplies."

  The box had come open? Not with the amount of tape she'd used. "It's just a hobby."

  "Yeah, that's how my writing is. I just hope to turn it into something more," he said, and looked toward the Gulf. "This would be a great place to paint." He turned back to her. "I'd love to see your work."

  "I don't let anyone see it," she said too quickly. "It's just…embarrassing at this point."

  He laughed. "Probably the same reason I don't let anyone read my work." Another song drifted on the breeze. He glanced toward the third floor where the elderly woman was dancing again. "If you weren't crazy when you came here, you will be."

  "I'm sorry. How long did you say you've been here?"

  "Just since this afternoon, but long enough to go stir-crazy, although not as crazy as some people." He made a face and cocked his head toward the tower, making a circle with his finger next to his temple.

  Since this afternoon? So he'd arrived only a little earlier than she had. She felt a chill at the thought that someone had found out where she was going and Odell had been sent to wait for her.

  "Thank you again for your help."

  He smiled and nodded. "My pleasure."

  Almost apologetically she turned away from him. She picked up her suitcases and stepped inside the apartment. As she started to close the door, he called from the stairs, "Hey, I never caught your name."

  "Will—Willie." It was out before she could call it back.

  She was tired and just wanted to be left alone and she hadn't thought before she'd spoken or she would have given him the name she'd planned to use. Too late for that.

  "Short for something?" he asked turning on the stairs.

  She was forced back out on the balcony to keep from yelling her answer. "Actually, it's a nickname. My real name is Cara Wilson. My friends started calling me Willie and it stuck."

  "Cara," he said. "That's a pretty name. But Willie suits you."

  She smiled nervously and gave him a nod as she stepped back into her apartment and closed the door, leaning against it, feeling like a fool.

  She concluded Odell was more lonely than anything else. Nosy and lonely. Unless she was wrong about him—the way she'd been wrong about Landry Jones. To think she had almost gotten in the car with Landry.

  She shivered at the memory, her gaze skittering over the rooms where she'd be living until Landry was caught. The apartment wasn't bad. If you liked living in a monastery. The walls had once been painted white, the ceilings were cracked and ten feet high at least. The temperature was nice and cool, though, so that meant the walls were thick.

  That was a plus and the place was furnished. Kinda.

  Not that any of that mattered. She would be safe here. At least she prayed that was true.

  Dragging her suitcases into the bedroom, she was excited to see the wonderful light coming in through the window. She felt a sense of relief. She would be able to paint in here. In fact, she couldn't wait to get started.

  She dragged the box in. As she started to open it, she noticed that the tape was open on one corner and the flap turned back. She ran her finger along the edge of the tape. It had been cut.

  Chapter Four

  Willa's heart began to pound a little harder. Someone had cut the tape to look inside the box. Odell? Was it possible he had a knife in the pocket of his shorts? A lot of men in South Dakota carried pocket knives. But in Florida?

  Or could it have been someone else? The box had been on the dock unattended for some time while Odell had brought her suitcases up to her room. But who else was there?

  She glanced toward the third floor. The music had stopped again. She recalled it stopping before, a break between songs before she saw the elderly woman dancing once again. Was it possible the woman had gone down to the dock to look in Willa's belongings?

  What harm could a curious old woman do anyway? Willa liked that theory better than thinking Odell had purposely cut the tape to see what was in the box. The man was nosy, but whoever had cut the box was looking for something. Looking for her?

  But if whoever had looked in the box was here to kill her, then that person already knew she painted. And not even her changed appearance would fool him.

  She tried to put the incident out of her mind as she unloaded her painting supplies and set up an easel by the window.

  Painting relaxed her, let her escape for a while from the reality of her life, the reality that Landry Jones was still out there on the loose and she was the only witness to the murder.

  Until the police captured him, she wasn't safe. Even when he was caught, she wasn't sure she would feel safe, possibly ever again.

  She stacked up all of her art supplies on the top of the chest of drawers, hoping they would last until she got to leave here. Eventually she would run out of rent money and be forced to leave and get a job.

  She moved to the window by the bed and peered out. Through the palms she could see the Gulf of Mexico. It looked endless. How odd not to be able to see land on the horizon. Just water as far as the eye could see. No wonder early man feared sailing to the edge and falling off.

  Turning back to the room, she considered making the bed and taking a nap. She'd been running on fear for so long, she felt drained. She needed her life back. All she had to do, she told herself, was stay alive until Landry was caught.

  She stared at the empty canvas on her easel. She had to paint. It had been days since she'd gotten the opportunity. She itched to pick up a brush.

  Painting had always been her survival. When her father was killed in a tractor accident. When her first love married someone else. When her mother remarried and sold the farm, hacking away the roots that had held Willa in South Dakota.

  Willa hurried to catch the last of the day's light coming in through the palms. She never knew what she was going to paint until she had a brush in her hand and the white empty canvas in front of her.

  To her, painting was exploration. A voyage to an unknown part of herself. Her work was a combination of what she saw and what she didn't. It was a feeling captured like a thought out of thin air.

  She set up her paints and went to work, the evening light fading until she was forced to turn on a lamp. It wasn't until then that she really looked at what she'd been working on—and felt a start.

  What had begun as an old building along a narrow street had turned into the street where she'd witnessed the murder. A thin slice of pale light at the back illuminated what could have been a bundle of old rags but what she knew was a body slumped against a stucco wall, the dark BMW sitting at the curb.

  She stepped back from the canvas. She'd been so lost in the physical joy of painting, she hadn't even realized that she'd been reliving the murder.

  From this distance, she saw the face behind the wind-shield of the BMW. It was subtle, almost ghostlike, but definitely a face. Landry Jones's face. The same one she'd drawn for the police. She remembered the investigators' strange reactions. When she'd asked if they knew who he was, the detective who'd been questioning her assured her they knew Landry Jones only too well.

  Just her luck that a known criminal had taken an interest in her. She had wanted to ask what other crimes he'd committed but didn't want to know. Wasn't murdering a man in cold blood on a St. Pete Beach street enough?

  In the painting, Landry was peering out of the darkness not at the body of the man he'd just killed— but at her. She coul
d almost feel the heat of his dark eyes.

  She stumbled back from the painting, bumping into the sagging double bed and sitting down on the bare mattress, suddenly exhausted and near tears.

  Had she been foolish to think she would be safe any—let alone on this island? She would always be haunted by what had happened that night, would always see Landry Jones's face, if not in her paintings then in her nightmares.

  A tap at the door startled her. She didn't want to answer it but knew she couldn't pretend she'd gone out. Another tap.

  "Cara? Willie?"

  Odell. She groaned. Where had she come up with Cara? "Just a minute." She glanced around the room as if there might be something lying around that would give away her true identity, but didn't see anything. She couldn't help the feeling that she'd already made a mistake that was going to get her in trouble. She couldn't keep living like this.

  She opened the door. "Odell," she said as if seeing him was a surprise.

  "Hi. Sorry to bother you, but I noticed you didn't bring any food," he said, looking sheepish. He held out a sandwich wrapped in plastic. "If you don't want it now, you can eat it later. Turkey and cheese."

  She took the sandwich. "Thank you. It looks…great." She actually smiled and he seemed to relax. A part of her felt bad about being so unfriendly. Back home in South Dakota her behavior would have been outright rude.

  The whisper of fabric made them both turn. All Willa caught was a blur of white.

  "She sneaks around here all the time like that, I guess," Odell said of the elderly woman who passed on the third-floor balcony overhead. "Her name's Alma Garcia. She was the nanny."

  "The nanny?"

  "You don't know the story of Cape Diablo?" he asked, sounding surprised. "The island is cursed. At least according to local legend. There have always been reports of strange happenings out here, including storms that wash up all kinds of interesting things. For decades it was home to pirates and treasure seekers who looted ships that sank or were sunk just offshore, smugglers and drug runners."

  "Who built the villa?" she asked, unable not to. The place had drawn her from the first glimpse.

  "Andres Santiago, a rather notorious pirate and smuggler, and this is where it gets interesting," Odell said, warming to his story. "Back in the late sixties, early seventies, Andres smuggled guns, drugs, anything profitable in from Central America. The Ten Thousand Islands have always been home to smugglers of all kinds because it is so remote and easy to get lost in."

  She nodded remembering how quickly she'd become lost among the mangrove islands on the way here. "You said he had a nanny?"

  Odell nodded. "He lived here with his wife, Medina, and three small children from his first marriage. That wife died in childbirth. Medina was the daughter of a Central American dictator. During a revolt, her father was killed but Andres managed to rescue Medina and a devoted lieutenant named Carlos Lazarro. He brought them both to the island. Carlos still lives in that old boathouse by the pier." Odell paused. "Do you really want to hear this?"

  He didn't give her time to answer. But she would have said yes even if he had.

  "The woman up there, Alma Garcia? She was the nanny for Andres's children." He glanced toward the third floor. Only a faint light glowed overhead. "She went crazy after what happened."

  Willa felt a chill. "What happened?"

  "First, Andres's only son drowned in the pool. Then the whole family went missing. No one ever knew what happened to them. Alma and Carlos had been inland that night. When they came home some time after midnight, they discovered everyone gone. There was blood… The authorities suspected foul play, of course, but the case was never solved. That was thirty years ago."

  "How awful."

  "There are lots of theories. Some say Medina's father's enemies came and killed the whole family. Others say Andres made it look as if they'd all been killed so he could disappear with his family. In Andres's will he made provisions for both Alma and Carlos to live on the island for the rest of their lives. That's why the villa was divided into apartments since the money Andres left has long since run out. A lawyer friend of the family handles everything."

  Willa saw the woman sneak back into her apartment. The front of her white gown was covered with what appeared to be dirt.

  "When I got here, I saw her digging," Odell said. "Local legend has it that Andres Santiago hid a small fortune on this island."

  She felt her eyes widen.

  Odell laughed. "If it were true, fortune hunters would have found it over the last thirty years."

  "I'm surprised Alma and Carlos would want to stay here after what happened," Willa said, seeing the villa so differently now.

  "I guess they had nowhere else to go. Alma spends her days creeping around here like some kind of ghost. Carlos is the caretaker but most of the time from what I can tell, he's on the other side of the island in his boat fishing." He seemed to notice that she was still holding her sandwich. "You probably want to get that in the fridge and I've talked your ear off again. Sorry."

  "No, I enjoyed hearing the story, and thank you for the sandwich."

  He smiled. "Holler if you need anything. And don't worry about Alma and Carlos. They seem harmless enough."

  "Thanks." Willa stepped back into her apartment and closed the door. She waited a few moments, until she heard Odell's footfalls retreat, before she locked the door.

  After she put the sandwich in the fridge, she dragged her suitcase over to the marred old chest of drawers and unpacked. At the bottom of her suitcase, she found the sheets and towels she'd brought. She made the bed and hung up the towels in the bathroom, surprised to see there was a huge clawfoot tub.

  Some of her fatigue evaporated at the thought of sinking neck-deep into a tub of hot water scented with her favorite bath soap. She popped in the plug and turned on the water. The old pipes groaned and complained but after a few moments, wonderfully warm water began to fill the tub.

  Quickly she checked to make sure she'd locked the door before she went back to the bathroom and stripped off her clothing and stepped into the tub.

  Everything was going to be all right, she told herself as she immersed herself in the warm water and began to soap her body in the rich lather. From somewhere she heard music again, the song older than the woman on the third floor. Past the music, she heard voices, though too faint to make out the words.

  She couldn't help but think about the story Odell had told her. The history of Cape Diablo and the Santiago family fascinated her. She'd felt something when she'd stepped off the boat and looked up at the crumbling old villa. A sense of mystery. A story unfolding. Or had she sensed something else? The spirits of the lost souls? Or a sense of foreboding as if she'd been drawn to this island for another purpose?

  She shivered, wondering again what could have happened to the family and even more intrigued by the woman who'd stayed on upstairs.

  Odell certainly was knowledgeable about Cape Diablo. She felt foolish for suspecting him of having other motives for being on the island. And yet, anyone could learn the history of the place. And pretending to be a writer gave him the perfect cover.

  She shook her head at the path her mind had taken. She hated that she was suspicious of everyone now.

  Finishing her bath, she toweled dry and dressed in a sleeveless nightshirt. She felt better, calmer, back in control somewhat, she thought as she started to wipe the steam from the mirror and was momentarily startled by her own unfamiliar image in the glass.

  Her hand went to her short curly auburn hair. It did make her eyes seem larger. Or that could have been the fear.

  She picked up the glasses from where she'd left them on the sink. The lenses were clear, but the plastic frames distracted from her face enough to make her look entirely different from the woman she'd been just weeks before.

  She touched her hair again, missing the feel of her long, naturally straight blond hair inherited from her Swedish ancestors.

  But she would let her
hair grow out again. After Landry was caught, after the trial—when it was safe to go back to her life, she told herself, trying hard to believe she could ever reclaim it.

  Glancing around the apartment, she decided the first item of business would be to make this place more her own. What little furniture there was had been shoved against each wall.

  She grabbed the end of the couch and pulled it away from the wall and saw at once why it had been pushed against the wall as it had been.

  There was a sizable hole in the wall behind it.

  On closer inspection, she saw that the hole—four inches wide, a good foot high and seemingly endless in depth—had been chipped into the adobe wall. She couldn't tell how deep it ran. Not without a flashlight.

  As she straightened she noticed a scrap of paper on the floor near the hole. She picked it up and saw that it was a piece of a torn photograph. The piece appeared to be part of a face covered with something like a gauzy veil or a film of some kind.

  She peered into the hole and thought she saw another piece of the torn photograph. How odd.

  Vaulting over the couch she dug in her purse for the penlight on her key ring. In the kitchen she found a butter knife and returned to behind the couch.

  Shining the tiny light into the hole, she began to dig out the pieces of the photo with the butter knife. She still couldn't tell how deep the hole was—obviously too deep for her dim light. But there were more pieces of the photograph in there, as if they'd fallen down from the floor above.

  Diligently she worked the pieces out until she couldn't reach any more.

  Just as she was starting to collect the scraps, a sliver of light sliced down through the top of the hole. Willa angled her gaze upward into the opening and saw light coming through what appeared to be a crack in floorboards upstairs.

  She'd thought no one lived directly above her. She heard the creak of footsteps on the floor overhead. The light went out. She listened, but heard nothing more.

  Taking the pieces of the photograph over to the small kitchen table, she pulled up a chair and began to fit the pieces together like a puzzle, curious after seeing the veiled face in the first piece.