by Gaby Triana
Behind her, standing on the edge of the boat, holding the end of the fishing spear in her hand, pushing the sharp end through Syndia’s neck, was Nottie. Who was not dead. Not in the least. She’d taken a bruising at some point, sure, but otherwise, she was very much alive. Saving my ass…
“I thought…” I couldn’t form words. “I thought…”
Syndia rolled off my body and landed on her back like a harpooned starfish, as Nottie yanked the tip of the spear from her neck. I didn’t know what in Jesus’s name was going on, if I was the next to die, or what. But then, the old woman threw the spear on top of Syndia’s chest for good measure and watched as the blood drained from her body.
Here we were, the maiden, the mother, and the crone from my grandmother’s drawings in her book of shadows. And the crone had prevailed.
When Nottie sat her shaking body down on the floor of the boat, only then could I draw a breath. “I thought you were dead. I thought you were…” Shock prevented me from forming a coherent thought, but she got the point.
Wiping sweat from her face, she pointed at the cabin underneath the wheelhouse. “I wouldn’t help her bring in that man from the pool. She threatened to kill me. She hit me with that hammer, so I run off.”
“In the storm?”
“Yes. Been here since this morning.”
“In this boat?”
“In this boat.”
“But why…why…” I fumbled for words, drawing in my knees. “Why would you help me?”
“Miss Whitaker, for fifty years I worked for this family. Heard the stories. When I began caring for Miss Violet, her senile mind would forget itself and she’d tell me things she wasn’t supposed to tell no one.”
“What did she tell you?” I asked.
“What didn’t she tell me.” Nottie scoffed. “The more details I heard, the more I knew I was in danger just for knowing them, but I couldn’t go. I needed the money.” The rain started coming down in sheets just then, washing Syndia’s blood like she was one of her fish down by the shed. The bite of salt in the air was strong but felt good. It felt like the storm was over.
“Did you know about their family business?”
“The front or the real one?”
“The real one,” I replied.
“I never participated but I knew. They thought it was a secret with all their locked doors but I knew. I cleaned this damned place. Every damn day. The evidence was everywhere. I knew they was operating a house of cards. Only a matter of time before it came down. Your grandma cursed this land.”
“So I heard.”
“I heard it, too. I was there.”
“I’m sorry, what?” I leaned my ear to her.
“With my own ears. I was there. It set off years of misfortune,” Nottie said, looking off into the inlet. “But I’ll always be grateful to her.”
She was there and heard the words? Who was she? “You heard my grandmother?” I asked. “Why? How?”
“Because.” She wiped the sweat from her forehead and ran her hand across her skirt. “I was eight years old the day Leanne Drudge left Key West. She couldn’t fit her bicycle in the truck, so she gave it to me. It was blue. Nobody ever given me anything before.” She looked dreamily at the overcast sky. “I never forgot that.”
TWENTY-FIVE
Nottie Francis Parker never wanted to be a nurse.
She’d dreamed of moving to New York City and becoming a ballet dancer. She’d dreamed of singing like Ella Fitzgerald to presidents and dignitaries all over the world and of living in a mansion with great gas lanterns out front and palm trees as tall as a three-story buildings.
But life was tough in Key West for her parents, and she was often alone. While they worked, she played with sticks in the street and chased after her older brother who wanted nothing to do with her and everything to do with the girls from the next street over. She often stood in front of Leanne Drudge’s house and stared at it, because it was pink like the inside of a conch shell. Because a baby lived there.
Because the house was pretty.
The thing about being a lonely child, however, was that you saw it all.
She’d witnessed how Mrs. McCardle had talked to Mrs. Drudge, saw the police officer the day he’d knocked on her door to give her the bad news, heard the crying coming from the open window, and smelled the burnt garlic and shrimp.
Sometimes, she’d see my grandmother dancing around in nothing but her birthday suit through those windows, late at night, while playing “catch me if you can” with Mr. Drudge. But it was a playful game between them, and he always kissed her at the end. That always made her smile, since her parents never played that way.
Nottie told me all this while sitting out by the dock a week after the storm hit. Six days after police and investigators tore this property apart after I’d showed them what the banyan tree had revealed. I never said I’d found the gold, because that would’ve been untrue. They’d told me, because it was legally on Syndia Duarte’s property, it belonged to the family. But when they’d contacted Duarte’s siblings without giving any details, other than to let them know their sister had died during the storm, nobody wanted anything to do with her.
They knew, Nottie told me.
The siblings knew the horrors and did right to stay far away.
They never wanted part of the curse or the family “business.”
The historians came out of the woodwork, however. They all wanted to know. They wanted to meet the granddaughter of the famous boat captain who’d died offshore in 1951, who everyone was almost certain had been pirated by the Havana Ferryboat Captain who’d claimed to find gold that night, though nobody could prove anything. They knew, as Nana had known, that such a captain would never have had a boating accident.
Eight months after my back had healed, after the surgery to repair the tear in my lung, after a few court hearings, the gold rightfully became mine.
I knocked on the door to Nottie’s new apartment to tell her I’d share it with her fifty-fifty. After all, she’d saved my life, but she wouldn’t accept it. “I’ll take enough to live comfortable, Miss Ellie. I’m seventy-five. A simple woman. Don’t need to live in a mansion anymore.”
And so she’d accepted twenty thousand.
Out of ten million.
A simple woman indeed.
That same day on the bench, she’d told me it’d been Luis’s body lying on the dining table. The one I’d seen when trying to spy through the cat door inside the secret passageway. Syndia had gone out in the storm to get Luis and bring him inside before he got buried in debris and disaster relief workers found him. She’d planned on getting rid of his body before the storm was over, same as with my body, but I’d been too stubborn to die.
The inn was declared a total loss. Once the McCardle family signed away rights to it, it also went to the state, and there I was able to buy it on auction. But I couldn’t live in it the way it was. Hell no. That place had been hell on earth for so many, but since the day Syndia was killed, there’d been a certain peace on the property.
I’d lingered a while, opening myself up to energy, activity, and spirits.
None to be found.
Though I’d replaced my Zoloft but still hadn’t started taking it, the only dreams I’d had had been of my grandparents sharing a kiss out on the dock. Mayai had given me a knowing smile once or twice, but that was it.
No darkness, no evil, no curse.
This house, as from a famous movie line involving poltergeists, is clean.
I wasn’t afraid to live there. But first I had it razed and rebuilt it over the next year and a half while living in a rented apartment off Duval. Every day I drove over to the new house to watch it be built. I made sure they incorporated my grandfather’s mosaic mural right in the dining room as a featured piece, and mason workers were even able to rebuild the broken moon sculpture.
That would go in my garden. My herb garden I’d cultiva
ted using Nana’s instructions in her book of shadows. I wasn’t sure what to do with them once they’d grown, but I’d learn. I’d made friends with a woman down at a new age shop in town, and she’d told me what all the medicinal properties of the herbs were, how to dry them, make mojo bags, infuse them with intention, even cook with them to bring out the best in my life.
Before this, I had no idea this lifestyle even existed. By some standards, I was considered an eclectic witch by the shop owner’s spiritual friends, but mostly, I still felt like myself. Only a new and improved Ellie. A more powerful Ellie.
An Ellie now connected to her true self.
So connected, in fact, that I couldn’t get enough information about the island’s difficult past and sometimes filled in as ghost tour guide when Sunset Spooks Ghost Tours needed a substitute. I loved taking tourists around spooky Key West at night, telling them all about the weird former residents, the Calusa, the piles of bones, the shipwrecks, and the female ghosts who waited for their seafaring husbands to come home.
No longer the healthy skeptic, I knew Luis would’ve been proud of me.
The ghosts didn’t bother me anymore. They were simply a part of the landscape, their voices in tune with my daily rhythm. I found, if I asked them politely to stay away when I wasn’t in the mood to deal with them, that they would.
Key West had become my new home. With its tourists, its history, its roosters running rampant everywhere, its chocolate-covered coconut patties, its key lime pie, its weird but rich, laidback culture, I knew I could live here my whole life. So when the house was finally finished, I didn’t rent it out like I’d originally planned, I invited my mother to come down and live with me.
She politely refused, said she couldn’t live in a house that’d been built over so much tragedy. She didn’t quite get it when I explained that that tragedy had been necessary to release the curse, that now only peace, love, and light lived there.
But it was okay.
She would come to visit soon, she told me.
On the last day of construction, I turned on my gas lanterns, made homemade lemonade and sat out on the front porch on my brand new rocking chair, watching the sun go down in the distance.
Nottie had come to christen the home with me. We clinked glasses and she closed her eyes. “This good lemonade, Miss Ellie.”
“I learned from the best.” I smiled. Setting the glass of lemonade down on a certain little mosaic table between our two chairs, I stood and picked up the sign I’d commissioned downtown earlier this week. “Want to help me hang it?”
“Sure, I would.”
Together, we held up the wooden sign while I hammered a single nail in a column, then carefully hung the wooden plaque over it. I stepped back to look at it. In the evening light with the lantern light casting a warm glow over the wood, the sign was perfect:
CASA DE LOS CAYOS
Est. 1923
The year my great-grandmother had purchased the original home.
Taking a few photos of it with my phone, I smiled, satisfied with the way it looked. Then, stepping back up the porch steps and sinking into the rocking chair, I picked my lemonade back up, sipping as we watched the cars roll by. Bacon purred up against my legs. I reached down to scratch his head. “I got nothin’, buddy. Nothin’.”
Life was perfect, idyllic, the way it’d been in Nana’s tales.
In a way, I guess I’d always lived on this tropical island under the sun, even before my feet had ever touched down on it. My childhood dreams had shown me my future and what could be. My soul had always lived at Casa de los Cayos—first as Mayai, then as Nana, now as Ellie Whitaker.
It’d just been waiting to come home.
Acknowledgements
I’d like to thank Ted Messimer (Southernmost Ted) of the Key West Ghost and Mysteries Tour for answering research questions. If you happen to be in Key West, make sure to take his informational and fun ghost tours—they’re awesome!
I’d also like to thank Jonathan Maberry for a wonderful and inspirational quote for the ISLAND OF BONES book cover. Jonathan, you ROCK!
My critique group— Stephanie Hairston, Danielle Joseph, Christina Diaz Gonzalez, Alex Flinn, and Curtis Sponsler—for providing insightful feedback, especially on that pesky first chapter.
To my Street Team readers, a hearty thanks for reviewing!
And finally, an extra special shout-out to my one and only, Curtis Sponsler (again), for the totally awesome book cover, for the meals made when I couldn’t stop typing, for the kids driven when I couldn’t stop editing, and for the hand-fed chocolate when I couldn’t sleep until this damn thing was finished. I love you, Bebe.
About The Author
GABY TRIANA is the award-winning author of YA novels, Cakespell, Wake the Hollow, Summer of Yesterday, Riding the Universe, The Temptress Four, Cubanita, and Backstage Pass, as well as 40+ ghostwritten novels for best-selling authors. Originally a 4th grade teacher, Gaby earned Teacher of the Year in 2000, wrote her first middle grade manuscript called Freddie and the Biltmore Ghost, then left teaching to launch a full-time writing career. She went on to publish with HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, and Entangled, win an IRA Teen Choice Award, ALA Best Paperback Award, and Hispanic Magazine’s Good Reads of 2008. She now writes about ghosts, haunted places, and abandoned locations. When she's not obsessing over Halloween or Christmas, she's taking her family to Disney World, the Grand Canyon, LA, New York, or Key West. Gaby dreams of living in the forests of New England one day but for the meantime resides in sunny Miami with her family, a dog, and four cats.
Follow Gaby at www.GabyTriana.com and subscribe to her newsletter and GhostHost, the Podcast! on the website.
Also By Gaby Triana
Paranormal Young Adult:
WAKE THE HOLLOW
Contemporary Young Adult:
CAKESPELL
SUMMER OF YESTERDAY
RIDING THE UNIVERSE
THE TEMPTRESS FOUR
CUBANITA
BACKSTAGE PASS
Author Links
Website: www.GabyTriana.com
Facebook: Gaby Triana
Instagram: @gabytriana
Twitter: @gabytriana
A Note To My Readers:
Hey! Guess what? I’m now a hybrid author. That’s a new term in the publishing world that means some of my books are published traditionally by the “Big 5” publishers in NYC (HarperCollins and Simon & Schuster for my YA books, for example), while some are published through Gaby Triana Books, my own imprint at Alienhead Press.
Most readers don’t care where a book is published, as long as it’s entertaining and well-written. However, being a hybrid author means hiring my own editor, copyeditor, proofreader, cover artist, and marketing team to make this book happen. Which means…if you enjoyed this novel, please take a moment to rate it on Goodreads and/or the online store you purchased it from (Amazon, iTunes, Kobo, Barnes & Noble). Reviews mean everything to us! So does word-of-mouth. Without these two, we can’t continue to bring more books to more readers, and nobody wants that.
Reviewing takes one minute. A quick few words and/or rating will go a long way. Every little bit helps, so I can continue to write quality stories for my fans. Thank you guys so much!
Love, Gaby