“Walker is a private investigator, the only one on St. Marcos. Tutein says Walker knows everybody he needs to know on the island, and he works for a couple of the biggest businesses here. Maybe he can help you.” Jacoby started backing away. “But your parents died in a car wreck. There just doesn’t seem like there’s much for you to find.”
“So there’s nobody here I can talk to?” An angry fire started in my core and spread.
“Just Michael. And he’s dead.” He looked at Ava. “Good seeing you.” He turned on his heel and was gone.
My cheeks and ears flamed. Everything about this rang my alarm bells. I opened my mouth but Ava held her finger up to her lips. I shut it and clenched my teeth. She motioned with her head toward the exit, then started toward it, calling out to all within earshot, “A pleasant good afternoon to you.”
A wall of humid heat met me at the door, but I busted through it, fueled by my frustration. Two officers stepped past us and into the building, and then we were alone. I squinted and dug for my sunglasses.
Mindful of their friendship, I dialed my temper down. “Ava, I know he’s your friend, but doesn’t it feel like he stiff-armed me? I know I’m not local, but that felt all wrong.”
Ava’s eyes darted left and right. “Shush, Katie. Things different here than in the states.”
I opened the car door and clicked the locks open. We got in.
“Let me see that report,” Ava said.
I handed it to her. There wasn’t much to see. One car accident, off a cliff and into the rocks below. Driver and passenger deceased. My parents.
Without lifting her eyes from the paper, Ava asked, “What make you so sure their deaths not an accident?”
“I’m not sure. I’m a big believer in intuition, and it’s just a feeling I have, from little things that don’t make sense. Like how my mom always wore my grandmother’s wedding ring, but the police never found it. Not on her, and not in her stuff at the hotel. I thought that was odd. Plus, I talked to my parents that night. They’d been to dinner, and they were on their way back to the Peacock Flower. They called me while they were driving. They sounded great. And then they were dead.” Shit. My eyes started leaking.
“OK, OK. It says here your dad was pretty drunk.” Her speech had become more formal. More Yank.
“Yes, that’s the other thing that bothers me. My father was a recovered alcoholic. He didn’t sound drunk when I was on the phone with them. And I can’t picture my mother just standing by letting him drink.” Mom had wrangled kindergartners for twenty years, a job she liked to say made wrangling my father a cakewalk. She was two parts tender and two parts steely resolve. Only the surprise gift of Collin had derailed her plans to become a lawyer.
“Maybe she didn’t know?” Ava suggested.
“Maybe. I don’t know. Anything’s possible.” I made a confession. “That’s what my brother thinks. Collin. He’s a police officer. When my parents first died, he called and talked to an officer here. Collin said he was nice, he was helpful, and that he said they see it all the time on St. Marcos, tourists driving drunk and getting into bad situations. Collin thought maybe Dad had relapsed and was hiding it—the drinking—from my mom.”
Ava put her hand on my forearm. “I hate to say it, Katie, but tourists and drunk drivers are the same thing to us.”
That didn’t help my leaky eyes. “But your friend acted so weird. Don’t you think so?”
She looked at me, and her eyes were soft and sad. “The officer on this case that died? Michael Jacoby? He was Darren’s brother. His kid brother.”
“I’m sorry. Oh my God, I’m so sorry. I’m making everything about me. I—”
A sharp rap on the window behind my head cut me short. I yelped and jumped in my seat, banging my head into the roof. Ava gasped, too.
I turned to see Darren Jacoby’s broad face framed in my window. I started to roll it down but the buttons didn’t respond. Only then did I realize that we were sitting in a hot car without the windows down or air conditioner on. I inserted the keys and cranked the engine, then rolled the window down.
Ava leaned across me, pure Local again. “Jacoby, you scare us good.”
He didn’t smile. “I wanted to tell her,” he looked directly at me, “to tell you, that I sorry about your parents. I know it hard to lose someone you love. I know it make you ask questions. But my brother a good cop, and I trust him. If he say they die in a car accident, that what happened.” He had switched back to Local speech again.
“I’m sorry about your brother,” I said.
He inclined his head, eyes down, then met mine again. “Good day, Ms. Connell.”
I rolled the window up again as he walked away. I was more confused now than I’d been before I came to the station. It would be best to let it go, to trust Collin’s judgment, to look for peace instead of trouble. I knew that. I normally trusted Collin completely, too. But he’d had girl trouble right before Mom and Dad died. His fiancée had dumped him for a woman, and he was just not himself then, distracted with his own stuff. If I had doubts, then I owed it to my parents to do this. I had let them down for a year, letting everything else be more important than my intuition, than them, and as long as a shred of doubt remained in me, I had to keep going.
I backed out of my parking spot and put the car in drive.
Chapter Nine
Fifteen minutes later, Ava and I sat in front of the desk of a Mr. Paul Walker at 32 King’s Cross Street. His office was a long narrow room with walls and floors of red brick. Probably an alley or breezeway once upon a time. It was squeezed in between a thrift store and an abandoned record store that still had dust-covered albums on display and an air of shame about it, of failure. I wondered if there were any treasures hidden in its depths. Probably not.
Walker had gone to the back of his space to a mini-refrigerator, from which he fetched two bottles of water. He used the sleeve of his shirt to wipe down the bottles and tops as he came back across the uneven floor between us. The walls squeezed in behind him, squirting him forward, or so my eyes told me. It was a house of mirrors at a low-rent carnival in here.
“So tell me about the case, Ms. Connell,” Walker said as he handed the waters across the desk to us, then sat.
I’d only worked closely with one other investigator before: Nick. What a contrast Walker was to him. Walker’s belly looked about five months pregnant under his Cruzan Rum t-shirt. Sweat was beaded on his forehead. His whole office smelled in need of a shower. If I’d have had a handkerchief with me, I would have held it to my face—after I cleaned my water bottle. I set the bottle down on the floor beside me.
“My parents were on St. Marcos for a week last year. They came here for their fortieth anniversary. They had a great time, and they called me every day.” A twinge of guilt shot through me as I remembered the irritation I’d felt at seeing their number on my phone. People I loved interrupting a life I didn’t, and I was irritated with them. “They did all the normal tourist things. They took a catamaran out to one of the cays. They hiked in the rainforest. They went to a secluded beach to snorkel. It was like they recaptured their youth here. They even called me one day and said they’d walked up on two people having sex on the beach, literally. My mom giggled like a teenage girl when she told me about it, some big bushy-haired blond man and a tiny black woman, she told me. But she loved it. She loved everything about the trip.”
Get to the point, Katie. Funny how eloquent I could be about other people’s problems, but how awkward about my own. I finished the rest of my story without diving off into irrelevant detail.
Walker’s eyes lasered my face while I talked. When I finished, he remained silent, slowly tapping his pen against his lips.
“Mr. Walker? Do you have any questions?” I asked.
“Oh. Sorry. You remind me of someone I used to know,” he said. His comment crawled across my skin like a scorpion. “Yes, just a few questions to help me get started. Before your parents died, where did the
y have dinner?”
I remembered this. They had loved the restaurant and returned to it for their last dinner. “Fortuna’s. Do you know of it?”
“Yes, it’s a very popular place.”
My eyes strayed to the framed NYPD ten-year service award on the wall over his left shoulder. Beside it hung the obligatory island fishing picture, Walker and an equally large black man and even larger blond man standing on the stern deck of a boat named Big Kahuna, the three of them together hefting a huge marlin.
Ava spoke for the first time since we’d all exchanged greetings at the beginning of the meeting. “Baptiste’s Bluff not exactly on the way from the restaurant to the hotel.”
Walker ignored her and continued speaking to me. “Did they go anywhere else that you know of that last night?”
“Not that I know of.”
“The casino? A moonlight stroll on the beach, perhaps?”
“I’m sorry, I just don’t know. I have the accident report from the police, though. And they said the coroner might have a report, too.” I held out the police file, and he took it, opened it, and set it in front of him.
“OK, I’ll get that from the coroner.”
“Also,” I hesitated, looked at Ava, then plowed ahead. “The officer that investigated their deaths died shortly after them. You can see on the report that a different officer signed it than the one who investigated. I don’t know if that means anything, but—”
Walker cut me off. “I’ll look into it. All right.” He glanced down at the opened file and the police report on his desk. “I think I have everything I need from you. There’s a five-hundred-dollar retainer, to get started.”
I needed to do this, but was just writing this man a check and trusting him to look into it enough? Would spending the insurance money I hadn’t needed make me feel less guilty? I wanted to call Nick and ask his advice. I wanted to run out the front door. I wanted a rum punch. I wanted Mom and Dad back. I swallowed hard and pulled out my checkbook.
As I wrote him a check, he continued to talk. “My case load is very heavy right now. I know I can’t get to this for a few weeks. It’s not an emergency, after all, as your parents are already dead.”
Another skin-crawling moment. He was right, though. Crass, but right. I set the check on the desk with my business card on top of it and used my fingertips to push them across to him. They dug a trail of clean through the dust on his desk.
“Well, thank you, Ms. Connell. I’ll be in touch,” he said, grabbing the check before my fingertips left it.
As Ava and I stood up to depart, he said, “Oh, one last thing. It’s better for me if I talk to the potential witnesses fresh. It interferes with my investigation when my client tries to do it first herself. So, if you please, let me do what you have hired me to do, and you enjoy the rest of your stay on our lovely island.”
“Fine,” I said.
And we left, as fast as I could get out of there.
Chapter Ten
Ava and I traipsed down the sidewalk, silent as an old married couple instead of two women who had known each other for fifteen hours. I still walked ahead of her, but I was slowing down. From life, though, not from limin’.
When we reached the car, Ava put both her palms flat on the roof. “Tell me you hungry and ready for a cocktail.” She brought one forearm in front of her face and looked at an imaginary watch. “Yep, definitely time for a late lunch.”
“I need to see Baptiste’s Bluff,” I said. “I just need to see it. I don’t think I can turn this over to Walker and let it go without seeing it for myself.”
Ava struck a stage pose, putting her bent arms in the air, all ten fingers pointing to the sky, and gestured from her shoulder in a rhythmic emphasis. “Well, of course you need to see it.” She dropped her dramatic stance and leaned toward me. “And I take you, but you gonna have a flying fish sandwich in one hand and a Red Stripe in the other when we get there.” She pointed to a street ahead and to the left. “Drive, and go that way.”
After we got back into the hot Malibu, we drove out of town along the winding north shore, blue on our right, green on our left. We rolled the windows down and let our hair blow. I needed a hurricane to blow my storm system out and into the sea air, but a strong coastal breeze would do for now. We passed a marina. The smell of diesel and dead fish were overwhelming for a moment, and I exhaled through my nose. I pulled some of the hair out of my mouth that the wind had blown in and took a sip from the water bottle I’d brought from Walker’s office. The same bottle I had given a punishing rubdown with a Sani-Wipe from my purse once we’d gotten into the car.
After ten minutes of driving, Ava pointed to a hut on the beach.
“Pull over there,” she said.
The hut turned out to be a small take-out restaurant, with a bar and some beach stools. There was no name on it that I could see. Ava slipped off her/my shoes and got out of the car, so I followed suit. We crossed the sand to the nameless hut and were greeted by a couple of dogs.
“Coconut retrievers,” Ava said. She commanded them to get back in a deeper voice than I’d heard her use before, and the dogs obliged, tails wagging.
Ava hailed up the proprietor like an old friend and gave him our order. He stuck out his palm, so I pulled out a twenty. His eyes twinkled, and he held out his other palm. I pulled out a second twenty. He nodded, and I placed one twenty in each. He put the money under the counter in a basket and turned back to his fryers, sucking his cheeks into the space where his teeth used to be. No change. Paradise wasn’t cheap.
Ava hopped onto one of the barstools and faced the sea. I joined her. What a way to grab lunch. I could get used to this. I tucked my feet up onto the support bar around the stool’s legs and put my elbows on my knees, face in my palms.
“Lunch always so expensive on this island?” I asked.
“Yah mon. If you not bahn yah.”
I was indignant. “So he would have charged you less than what he charged me?”
She snorted. “He? No, he a thief. But usually there a local discount.”
Oh well. It wasn’t surprising. I rolled my head, enjoying a few neck cracks. The water was calling to me. “Do you mind if I put my toes in while we wait?” I asked Ava.
“Go ahead. I stay here and call you when our food come out.”
The sand was warm, almost hot. My feet sank in heel first, slowing me down. As I got closer to the waterline, the sand grew firmer and cooler. I didn’t hesitate. I plunged into the water, ankle deep, then knee deep. I pulled the hem of my white sundress up several inches. The water surged against my knees, then rose over them and wetted my thighs. Then it rushed out past my legs again and I felt the breeze move in to dry me off. I could see my toes on the white sandy ocean floor, and I wiggled them. The water came back, lifting me up as it rose. A school of small silver fish darted around me, half on one side of me and half on the other, only inches below the surface.
“Katie,” Ava called. “Food ready.”
I could have stood there for hours. But I walked out of the water, splashing it up with my toes on my last few steps. Imagining my mother, wondering if she’d done the same, if she’d done it right here on this beach. If the old man in the hut looking out at me now had seen her, and from a distance thought I looked familiar to him. Since my teens, people had claimed we could pass for twins. Mom would roll her eyes and say, “From a hundred yards to a myopic septuagenarian.” She was wrong, though. She was far too young to die.
I rejoined Ava, and we carried our greasy wax-paper-wrapped sandwiches and johnnycakes back to the car. Johnnycake is deep-fried bread, the Caribbean equivalent of biscuits to Southerners or sopapillas to Mexicans. Just what my cellulite needed. Except that really, it was lack of exercise in the last five years since I’d quit karate, not too many calories, that was my problem. Ava also had two icy Red Stripes between her fingers.
“How much further?” I asked.
“Ten minutes,” she said.
We
drove another mile along the water, then turned straight inland and upward. I hated leaving the serenity of the shoreline. The last eight minutes of our drive were on rutted dirt roads that shot off into dense bushes every few hundred yards.
“Not a place to explore by yourself,” Ava said, pointing at one of the side roads. “Too isolated.”
“It’s gorgeous up here, though,” I said. In fact, I was shocked at how gorgeous it was. Different from the water, obviously, but different in a good way, a way that was perfect. The trees were taller and met above the road, creating a roof above us and dampening the noise of the surf against sand and rocks only a mile away. I saw a bright flash of feathers in one of the trees.
“Is that a macaw?”
“Yah mon. They live up here.”
I didn’t know if I could ever be as blasé about this flora and fauna as Ava sounded. I soaked it in: orchids more beautiful than hothouse flowers trailing vines of hot pink, pink and orange flamboyants standing tall and proud, reminding me of the mimosa trees back home.
“Turn in here,” Ava said, and I made a sharp right, back in the general direction of the water, but hundreds of feet above it now.
We drove a quarter of a mile, then broke out of the trees. The change in our surroundings was sudden, a ripping away of the quietude of the forest. My mood shifted with it. Who was I kidding? My emotions were raw, and my moods were moving up and down the scales faster than Sarah Brightman in Phantom of the Opera.
“You can park anywhere,” she said.
I pulled to a stop and parked, then shut off the engine and held my breath.
Coming to the place where my parents died was like walking into the painted churches of the Navidad Valley. Our family visited them on a short road trip to La Grange when I was in middle school. In those old wooden churches, I knew I was in the presence of something holy and powerful, and that under their roofs, hardship and blessings walked hand in hand, just as they did here where the rainforest met the cliffs. Where life met death.
Saving Grace (Katie & Annalise Book 1) Page 5