Aha. Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the fairest of them all? I covered my smile with my cup. So that’s what had her dander up. Ava had a great deal of confidence about men, but it was hard to blame her. She based it on experience. My resistance to Bart had slipped a little, especially now that I realized I had Ava’s goat. The mirror was telling her someone else was fairest in the land, even if only for a moment. I took another slug of painkiller.
Bart’s cheeks splotched with pink. “Nice to meet you, Ava.”
“Nobody giving me a straight answer,” Ava complained.
“He asked me to introduce him to Katie,” Emily said. “So . . .”
“Hunh,” Ava said. She looked over at me. Grudgingly she said, “Well, she kinda cute.” Then Ava grinned. “For a red-haired man-hater. You’re a brave man, Bart. I like that. I gonna be there for that lunch. You be needing lots of help.”
“Avaaaaa,” I said, but the other three were laughing, which turned into chatting, and then into time to go back to the stage, ten minutes late, and only because the manager was standing onstage and tapping his wrist, where he would have worn a wristwatch if he weren’t in the islands.
Bart sat with Emily the rest of the night. Two other men joined them, presumably his friends. I sensed Bart’s eyes on me, and I kept mine anywhere but on him. He was likeable. Handsome. His sparkly eyes were cute when he looked at me, as if he were interested. In me. Maybe he would be good for me. For my self-confidence. I didn’t have to fall in love with him to let him bring us lunch.
So what was this resistance inside me about? It felt almost like guilt. Like I was cheating on my own feelings, feelings for someone dark, sensitive, and difficult, someone far away that I couldn’t have.
I let Bart catch my eye, and he smiled at me. It was a nice smile. I’d come to St. Marcos to escape the feelings that were sabotaging my life. I told the reluctant Katie to damn well smile back at him, and she did.
Chapter Thirty-two
Emily’s moaning woke me up. Her first morning on St. Marcos was painful because of all the painkillers she drank the night before. She had stumbled from her temporary sleeping quarters on the living room couch and into my bedroom, all of ten steps away, her face white as the powdery sand on Turtle Beach. It was my first night on my new futon, and I’d hoped to sleep a little while longer. I turned toward the wall.
“Help,” she said, and flopped onto the futon beside me. “Someone poisoned me.”
“Her name is Emily. I’ll beat her up for you, if you’d like,” I said, my words muffled by the pillow I partially buried my face in. Waves of pain were pounding my head like a mallet to a bass drum. Yeah, right, painkillers. “I think she’s the same Emily who was too drunk to figure out how to get out of the back seat of my truck last night.”
Emily ignored my comment. “Is it safe to drink the water?” she croaked.
“Ugh. Ava,” I yelled. “Ava!”
“Ain’t no Ava here. Go away,” Ava’s voice answered.
“Ava, did you get that frog problem fixed? Emily wants some water.”
“If Ava here, she’d tell you to hush your mouth. Drink or don’t drink. If you hurtin’, frogs don’t matter.”
“Frog problem?” Emily asked. “What does that mean?”
“Infested cistern. I recommend bottled water. Which we don’t have.” Bottled water meant waking up and driving to the store. Oso whined to go out. The whole universe had aligned against me. Might as well give in to my fate. “Shit.” I shoved Emily toward the edge of the futon. “Uppy uppy.”
I met Ava coming out the door to her bedroom, and Oso ran into the back of my legs.
“I make eggs. It the only cure,” she said.
“I’ll run out for bottled water. Do we need anything else?”
“Probably. My head hurt too bad to think,” Ava said.
“Serves you right for giving us painkillers.”
Half an hour later, Ava and I tag-teamed Emily, who was sitting with her face in her hands at the dining table, her shellacked bed head sky-high and flattened on one side. She had changed from her drawstring Easter-plaid sleep pants and matching white sleep shirt into more plaid, this time darker blues and reds, on her walking shorts. The shirt appeared to be the one she’d spent the night in.
“Eat the scrambled eggs. I not feeling sorry for you this afternoon when you puny,” Ava said. How Ava had managed to pull herself together and cook breakfast while I was gone was a mystery. She had her false eyelashes and black eyeliner on, and she was working what the good Lord gave her in a stretchy blue denim miniskirt and matching vest that snapped up the front, opened strategically down to there while the skirt rode her thighs up to there, and nipped in at the waist to emphasize her barely contained bana. I was worn out just looking at her.
“We’re not stopping for food,” I warned Emily.
“I can’t,” she wailed.
Ava tsk-tsked. “I told you go easy on the painkillers.”
“I should have listened.” Emily put her head down on her folded forearm. Her voice was muffled. “It was worth it, though. Sort of.”
I set her breakfast down in front of Oso, who had already polished off his kibble. He wolfed the eggs down and wagged his tail, snuffling around the kitchen floor looking for more.
“Time to head out, hangover or not,” I said. I didn’t feel so hot either, truth be told. I had pulled out all the stops before I went to the store just so Emily wouldn’t notice. My hair was in a high, bouncy ponytail. My makeup was light but sufficient to camouflage the dark circles. And my outfit was perky cute: a white sundress with a narrow waist, and some white thong sandals. I wanted Emily to see that the new me had myself in hand, that she wouldn’t have to cover for Katie anymore. Hopefully she’d pass that nugget of information along to Collin, too. Plus there was always the chance that Bart would show up today with a hammer and a picnic basket. Meanwhile, this homeowner had work to do. “I have to see if Junior Samples and crew got to work at a decent hour.” It was nearly ten.
“I gonna catch up with you later,” Ava said.
I turned toward her. “But you don’t have a car.”
“No big t’ing,” she said. “I see you soon-ish.”
Ava somehow got around just fine bumming rides. What she did not do was walk. Anywhere. Not that her house was close enough to Town to make it feasible, but still, she didn’t use her feet to cover the one mile between one end of downtown and the other if she could help it. It got in the way of her sexy, impractical footwear. Her cork-bottomed white platform sandals were a case in point.
Emily did a mini push-up as she stood, leaving her head and torso on the table as long as she could. She grabbed her purse.
“You have a swimsuit, towel, and sunscreen?” I asked her.
“No, why? Do I need it?”
“Always. You’re on vacation. On an island. I’ll get you a towel.”
Ava grabbed sunscreen off her kitchen cabinet. She had informed me the first time we walked the beaches together that she never went out without it. “I black, but I still burn, and I sure don’t want no skin cancer like my grandmother had. Or pruney skin before my time.”
“Here.” Ava tossed it to Emily.
Emily bobbled it, but managed to hang on. “Thanks.”
She walked stiff-legged out of the room, groaning as she did, and returned seconds later clutching a bikini. She stuffed sunscreen and the bathing suit into the beach bag I held open for her. I’d already packed hats and bug spray. We were so prepared we were practically Girl Scouts. If Girl Scouts slammed endless painkillers until two a.m.
Off we went. Or, at least, off Oso and I went while Emily fell asleep in the truck with her head bouncing against the window. Ouch. I had loaded a cooler of bottled water in the back, and I would make sure Emily drank a lot of it. Weren’t the tables turned between us today, though, I thought.
I had to give Emily a little shoulder shake to get her attention when Annalise came into view. She
rubbed her eyes and swayed, then leaned across me to get a better look out the driver’s side window. She gazed at the view across the valley of mango trees and up the manjack-covered hill to Queen Annalise at the summit, surrounded by her royal court of fruit trees.
“Holy shit. I can’t believe you live there.”
“Just a couple of months and I totally will.”
“It’s stunning. Wild and beautiful.” She turned to me. “And isolated. Are you scared, city girl? I mean, to live out here by yourself?”
I knew that Emily had grown up on a ranch, and I doubted living alone at Annalise would have fazed her. But was I scared? I probed and found no traces of fear. “No, I don’t think so. I’m more scared of missing this chance, if that makes sense. I think this place and I are meant for each other.”
“Good for you. This isn’t at all what I expected. You’re going country like me, and I love it. Very courageous.”
For some reason, I shrank from her praise. An image of every drink I’d had in the three days since I’d come back popped into my head. My conscience whispered to me, “You’re still hiding from something, courageous one.” Still, I had kept myself under control. This was the new me, and I was doing fine.
I just said, “Thanks, Emily,” and left it at that.
We rounded the corner to the long driveway and pointed the truck’s nose toward the house, which from this vantage point looked two-story, her third level carved into the hillside and hidden from the front and side-approach views. Her multi-leveled red metal roof absorbed the sun. The windows on the near side ranged from finished white-paned double glass, to broken versions of the same, to empty concrete squares like the doors. A sheet of plywood covered the middle window to a bathroom in the upper story. Four vehicles were crowding the dirt parking area that would someday soon be a real concrete driveway on the near side of Annalise. Junior’s truck was not one of them. I didn’t recognize any of the cars, for that matter.
When I made the offer on Annalise, Doug had told me that I needed a contractor with “the right connections.” That roughly translated into someone who knew how to get people to approve government permits, come to work, stay at work, work while they were there, and not steal. Usually, anyway. So far, Junior had failed to get people here on time and to be here himself, and we were only on day two. But he could be on Annalise-related business elsewhere. Maybe.
“So does this jumbie thing Ava told me about mean your house is haunted?” Emily asked.
I readjusted the neckline of my sleeveless white sundress. “Not haunted in the Amityville Horror sense of the word. I think she has a jumbie, like Ava told you. It’s kind of a voodoo thing here.”
Emily laughed. “Voodoo? The tropical sun has fried your brain.”
I rubbed the soft spots behind Oso’s ears. I’d thought the same thing a few weeks before.
I parked fifteen feet from the row of cars and we disembarked into the middle of a canine convention. They sniffed Oso, soaking in the scents of his adventures from the road. Emily’s painkiller pale had subsided and she crooned to the dogs. I knew this because I saw her lips move. I didn’t actually hear her. Music coming from inside the house was drowning her out. The sound of men’s laughter rose above the music.
Emily and I walked through the side door and into the future kitchen, which of course didn’t look anything like a kitchen yet. We were met by the sight of the workers—who were supposed to be plastering the walls with bleach and water—lounging on the kitchen floor smoking ganja. They were the ones plastered, not the walls. They jumped up and stubbed out their joints when they saw me.
Several of them mumbled at once, “Good morning, Ms. Connell, good morning,” pronouncing my name with an emphasis on the second syllable. Then they fled.
I saw red, and yellow, and orange. So this was what I was expected to pay for when I wasn’t here? Obviously, they hadn’t heard me pull up. Not a surprise in the state they were in, and with Sean Paul’s “Temperature” blaring out of the boom box.
Emily turned to me and whispered, “They’re stoned out of their minds.”
“Yeah, and it’s only their second day,” I said.
Day two! I was getting madder by the second. I knew I should take this up with Junior, not these guys. But where the hell was Junior?
“I’m sorry, Em, but I need to handle this. Would you mind taking a look around by yourself while I make some calls?”
Emily’s hair had fallen a bit and no longer had the side-heavy look from the morning. She was again the picture of competence and aplomb. She agreed, already unsnapping her camera case. She would probably tile my patio and still have time to train all my unruly dogs to fetch and roll over. I knew I didn’t need to worry about her.
I stalked off and fumed. Junior didn’t answer either number I had for him. I left a voicemail on his cell. I kept it brief, but colorfully clear. As I had asked of him, I followed it up with an abbreviated version by text.
I walked back into the kitchen. Emily had moved on, but the workers were back, standing together. The oldest-looking one, who was probably only twenty-five, stepped forward.
“We got a problem with the work, Ms. Connell,” he said.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“Bees dem in the big room, where we put the scaffolding yesterday. We can’t clean there or bees dem get us.” He added, “We told your friend not to go there.”
“Bees?” I’d heard it all now. I didn’t like bees, either, but these were grown men.
“Yah mon, for true.” He looked sincere. Or maybe he just looked stoned.
“Show me,” I said.
His eyes widened. “You don’t wanna go in there, miss.”
Yes, yes I did. “We don’t have to get close. Just show me. What’s your name?”
“Egbert,” he said. “People dem call me Egg.”
“Lead the way, Egg.”
I followed Egg around the corner and into the great room, which had been partially transformed by scaffolding that went thirty feet into the air, its pipes extending in all directions like circuitry in a supercomputer.
“Where are the bees?” I asked him.
“In the fireplace,” he said, nodding to the far side of the room. I started toward it and Egg grabbed my arm. He shook his head. Good grief.
“Egg,” I said. But he leaned over and picked up a horse puck. As in manure, with his bare hand, and we had no soap and water. I stifled my urge to hurl. He threw it at the fireplace and stepped back quickly.
A horrible humming sound erupted from the fireplace, followed by first a few, then hundreds of bees. Big bees. Loud bees. A swarm of bees moving as one toward us.
Chapter Thirty-three
“Oh, shit!” I said. I ran into the kitchen with the men and we kept running out into the side yard, and well away from the house. I kept my eyes on the door, but the swarm didn’t follow us outside.
“Where’s Junior? He needs to handle this.”I shook my hand in the direction of the bees.
Egg shrugged and looked away. Great.
I walked back in the kitchen-side door to the house. The buzzing had died down. I ventured into the kitchen. No bees. I sucked in a fortifying breath and searched for the courageous Katie that Emily had just accused me of being, and I poked my head in the great room. Only half a dozen bees still stormed the room outside the chimney. I stepped cautiously into the center of the room, searching for a solution. A humming started again and I tensed, ready to flee, but this time it wasn’t coming from the chimney. It was coming from everywhere—under my feet, from the walls, from the ceiling. Egg appeared at the doorway with two other young men.
“You hear that? You feel that?” Egg asked.
I didn’t bother answering. I was worried about my friend. “Emily?” I yelled. “Emily?” No answer.
“You need to come outta there, miss,” Egg said. “We getting out of here, you come now.”
Yes, I thought. I need to get the hell out. But I stayed rooted i
n place. I watched, entranced, as Egg disappeared from the doorway. I heard the heavy footsteps of the men as they ran for the exits. The vibrations of the hum were massaging my face.
I wasn’t scared. Somehow, suddenly, I knew not to be scared.
Behind me I heard a whoosh, then a roar. I turned toward the sound in slow motion with the walls blurring, my hair lifting and swirling, and saw that the sound was a fire. Flames were consuming the interior of the fireplace and licking outward over the hearth. Now I heard the buzzing again, frantic and loud over the crackle of flame, but no bees swarmed the room.
That’s when I saw her.
She was so beautiful. Younger even than I’d thought, maybe not even twenty years old, and as tall as me. Her black eyes burned into mine. She wore her hair in twin cornrows that circled her head like a crown. Her dark oval face was devoid of all expression. She licked her lips, and her tongue was the color of a bing cherry. Without breaking eye contact with me, she tossed another piece of wood onto the fire, the waist of her blousy white shirt lifting with the movement, then she turned on her bare feet with her full skirt swishing around her calves and walked slowly out of the great room. I lost sight of her as she passed behind the wall to the vast entryway. I craned for one more glimpse. I had a perfect view of the path from the fireplace to the front door past the dining room, but I saw nothing but the solid walls of my house.
“Miss?” I called out. “Miss? Where’d you go?”
I ran after her across the concrete floor, thinking maybe she’d passed through the high-ceilinged entryway and into the study. I looked inside. It was empty except for the gungalos on the floor. She had vanished.
I leaned against the concrete wall with my hand on my throat, looking out the broken study window. The inside of my mouth tasted like ash.
Holy smokes.
Chapter Thirty-four
A tongue licked my hand. Oso. I hugged his head to my thigh. “Good boy.”
Saving Grace (Katie & Annalise Book 1) Page 18