Leaving Annalise (Katie & Annalise Book 2)

by Pamela Fagan Hutchins

  “Leave me alone, Bart,” I said. I caught sight of Ava just fifteen feet away. She’d found Trevor and the flavor of the week and was deep in conversation. I started toward them.

  “Stop,” Bart said. “I need to tell you something.”

  “Can’t it wait?” I said, closing my eyes. Nick was right. I should never have come back here without him. What was I thinking?

  “I heard you left him.” Bart reached a hand toward my face.

  I blocked it. “Left him? You mean Nick? No, I didn’t.”

  I stalked across the bar toward Ava. Her eyes widened at my glower and she clutched my arm hard and introduced me to a tall blonde who looked far too corn-fed for Trevor’s taste. No leather or spandex, no stilettos, no slits up to there. Something about her seemed almost likeable, but it made me cringe at the same time.

  Ava said, “Here she is. Katie, this is Trevor’s friend Nancy. Nancy, Katie.”

  “Hello, Trevor. Nice to meet you, Nancy.”

  Nancy leaned toward me, her blue eyes eager. “You’re the one Bart talks about?”

  I closed my eyes and prayed for deliverance, then opened them and said, “It’s possible.”

  She stepped closer and grabbed my arms. In a giddy voice, she said, “Bart is my brother!”

  That could explain the cringe factor. I looked at Ava. Her mouth formed a perfect O.

  Trevor said, “Nancy, why don’t you let us talk business for a moment.”

  “I’ll get us some fresh drinks,” she said, and hurried off, quite the eager beaver.

  Ava closed the gap left in the circle by Nancy’s departure. “Trevor want us to come to his studio in New York and cut a demo.”

  Trevor sipped his drink, then said, “Your sound is unique. Great harmonies and the mixture of island and,” he waved his drink at me, “not.” Whatever that meant. “It would be better if you wrote your own songs, but I have a few I think you could do.”

  Nick writes music, I thought. Nick. Why did I feel like crying instead of cheering? I managed to say, “Wow, that’s great.”

  Ava narrowed her eyes at me, but Trevor nodded, oblivious to my reaction.

  “So we’ll block a few days for you soon.” To Ava he added, “I’ll be in touch.”

  “Irie,” Ava replied, which roughly translates to “everything is great” in proper English. Speak for yourself, I thought.

  “Thank you,” I added, but I was the odd man out, the one whose answer was irrelevant to the proceedings. I wanted to go home.

  Nancy returned with a drink for Trevor, then turned back to me and in two steps had deftly separated me from the flock. I bumped into a chair behind me and realized I was trapped.

  “So, you’re dating my brother,” she said, blasting me with a shot of rum breath.

  “No. I’m married to Nick. I used to date your brother.”

  It took a moment to sink in. She brought her fist up to her mouth and pressed it against her lips. She shook her head. Her hand dropped. “Well, that changes things. My apologies. Can I ask you something?”

  I tried to think of a polite way to say no, but she mistook my pause for a yes.

  “Has Bart seemed OK to you? Like, I mean, oh, I don’t know, has he acted normal?”

  I was too late to hold in my guffaw. “Are you kidding me? He’s completely different from the guy I met. Everything he’s done in the last few months is strange. He needs a shower and a change of clothes, a haircut, a shave, a long nap, and possibly a trip to Betty Ford. His eyes are weird. He wrecked his car. He stole my phone. He shows up uninvited and stoned. I could go on. Is that enough?”

  Nancy bit her fingernail and I saw that all her nails were quick-short and her cuticles red. “I thought so. He only got the trust money for his restaurant after he finished rehab at Promises last time, so I was worried this would happen again.”

  “Whoa, trust money? Rehab? I’m not in this loop.”

  She leaned so close our heads were almost touching. More fumes for me, goody. “Bart’s always gotten by on his looks and charm, but when he got heavily into coke, my parents invoked a clause in our family trust that cut off his funds until he cleaned up.” Almost as an aside she said, “Our grandparents were loaded.” I nodded like I was in the know, but I was stunned. “He spent six weeks in rehab in Malibu. That’s how he knows Trevor, because one of Trevor’s musicians was there. That snake guy, Slither. As soon as Bart started getting checks again, he headed down here.”

  “Oh, my.” I couldn’t think of anything else to say.

  She knocked back a slug of her drink. “Hey, here’s my card. Call me if you need to, if, oh, I don’t know, I just want someone down here to have it.”

  I took the card and stuck it in my handbag. “I will. Thanks.”

  “I love Bart to death, I really do. He’s my big brother, what can I say? I came down a year ago, and it seemed like he really had it together. The restaurant was a huge success. Now I hear that people think someone was murdered at the restaurant. It’s all gotten so seedy. He keeps telling me it’s all still going great, but I don’t believe him.”

  Her words were slurred, but the irony of her current state of intoxication while talking about her brother’s addictions was lost on her.

  “You shouldn’t,” I said. “Listen, Nancy, are you here with Trevor?”

  Her eyes dulled with liquor and confusion. “I am. Sort of. Why?”

  It was none of my business. She was a big girl. Trevor was about to possibly produce a record for Ava and me. Shut up, Katie, I thought.

  “Just curious,” I said. “But you should be careful in the islands. Being an outsider and all. Well, anyway, I have to run. Nice talking to you. Good luck with . . . everything.”

  She looked fragile suddenly, corruptible. She gulped from the glass in her hand. Rum punch of some sort, from the look of it. Painkiller, probably. And then something ugly and painful jolted me. I was looking at a vision of my old self. I wanted to tell her to run, but I had no idea where to send her to escape herself.

  I needed more air than that dark, smoky bar could provide, even one open to the boardwalk on one whole side. Ava had decamped to parts unknown, but she would have to take care of herself. I all but sprinted out the door.

  Chapter Thirty-four

  I burst out of the Boardwalk Bar into the street, which was crowded with Jump Up revelers. I stepped off the curb and was swept into a torrent of humanity. I fought my way against the current, bumping into people, stepping on toes, apologizing to glaring faces. The stilt legs of a mocko jumbie dancer sliced by me and I looked up to see its masked face under a pointed hat staring down, judging me, finding me lacking.

  Suddenly the crowd broke around two young men performing wildly, their legs sweeping, hands hitting the ground, their crazy dance much like the martial arts training of my childhood. I knew this dance. Capoeira. It was becoming something of a craze on island. The music from their boom box was fast and thumping and drowned out the crowd. I stood mesmerized for a few moments before the river pushed me onward.

  The capoeira music faded and a thousand sounds competed for primacy in a dead heat.

  “Cane, sweet sugar cane, get you sugar cane,” a vendor yelled from beside a trailer loaded with a cane roller and a towering pile of sugar cane.

  Sweaty bodies pressed into me, stole my air, robbed me of my line of sight. I panicked. This was a mob. I could die here without Nick even knowing where I was and how much I missed him. How sorry I was.

  I broke free from the crowd and stumbled to my hands and knees on the grassy lawn of St. Ann’s Catholic Church, beyond the reach of the melee and just inside the impenetrable darkness past the glow of the streetlight. I retched, but nothing came up. I couldn’t remember if I’d eaten anything that day. I heard footsteps close by. A graveyard loomed between the church and me.

  “You lost, miss?”

  I gasped and scrambled to my feet to see a woman to my left, very close. She was tiny, barely five feet tall, and
wrapped in layers of scarves. Her face peeked out, but in the dark I couldn’t see it.

  “Miss? I ask if you lost.”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Come,” she said, beckoning me, brusque and certain.

  I followed, relieved to be told what to do. She led me down an alley toward a lighted side entrance to the building across from the church. The smell of overheated bodies was replaced with overripe garbage. She paused at the open door and light flickered through an orange beaded curtain.

  “I help you find your way,” she said, and pushed the beads aside just enough to slip her slight frame through them.

  It crossed my mind for a split second that possibly this wasn’t a good idea. I had just walked down a dark alley with a stranger to her mysterious lair. The woman weighed all of ninety-five pounds even with her scarves, though, and I was lost and I did need to find my way. No one else was offering to help. I’d just poke my head in, and if things didn’t look kosher, I’d move along. And if I made the wrong call, well, I’d fought my way out of tighter spots before.

  I parted the beads and entered. The room was low-ceilinged, or at least it felt that way with the billowing purple fabric tacked to the ceiling. The waves of purple continued down the walls and pooled at the chipped concrete floor. There were no other doors visible, although somehow it didn’t feel closed off. I wondered if the fabric covered a door, or if it even covered walls at all or merely created the illusion of them. My tongue felt swollen and stuck to the roof of my mouth. I needed water, but something held me back from asking for it.

  On a table in the center of the room were a pair of short, fat candles. Yellow wax pooled around their flames and spilled in slow waterfalls over their rims. They smelled of vanilla, patchouli, and coconut all at once, musky and sensual.

  Really, what was Heather Connell’s good Baptist daughter playing at here, anyway? I had taken leave of my sanity. I needed to make it through this politely and get out of there. I could get on my knees and ask God for forgiveness and answers at bedtime like my mama taught me.

  “Sit,” the woman said, her back still to me.

  Or I could sit.

  I looked at the thick wooden table, confused, then saw a stool tucked under it. I pulled it out and sat.

  She turned and I saw her face for the first time. She was wizened like an orange left in the sun, its skin burnt and leathery. Her multicolored scarves obscured her hair like a nun’s habit, but I imagined it wiry, sparse, and white. She pulled out her own stool and sat down across from me.

  “I Tituba. I help them that lose their way.”

  “I’m Katie.” And this is not The Crucible. Is it? I fought to stay on the right side of the line between reality and fantasy.

  She reached across the table, her thin brown wrist exposed as the drape of gold fabric fell away. “Give me your hand.”

  I held out my hand as if to shake hers, and gasped when she grasped it. Her hands were sinewy and shockingly cold. She grunted and flipped my hand palm up with surprising strength and command, given that she was easily twice my age and half my size.

  “Water hand,” she said. She lifted eyes once brown but now hazy with the cataracts so prevalent in the people of the islands. “Things not always so easy for you.”

  I bit the edge of my bottom lip. Well, of course not. But were they for anyone? I started to ask what water hands meant, then caught myself.

  Her frigid finger traced icy paths across my palm as she perused it, her lips parting and coming back together with little smacks and whistles of breath. I held mine, my heart thumping so loudly I was sure she could hear it.

  “See this? This your heart line. You got a strong heart line.”

  “That’s good, isn’t it?”

  She muttered as she continued to trace, but didn’t answer. “You got a husband.”

  The wedding band was a dead giveaway. “Yes.”

  “And a baby.”

  “No.” I started to change my answer, to explain about Taylor, but I didn’t know how to explain it to myself, really, and by the time I found words, she had already moved on.

  “You pregnant?”

  “No.”

  She pursed her lips, puckering them like she was going to kiss a child. “Well, your heart line say you a nurturer.”

  I’d been called a lot of things in my time—the occupational hazard of being a female attorney—but never a nurturer. “What does that mean?”

  “That you care for others. See how it curve up here toward your pointer finger?”

  “It looks like a machete to me. Could it mean I’m a warrior?”

  “No, child. It mean you take care of dem what need you.”

  Um, no I didn’t. I’d never even wanted to, frightened by the trap of antiquated notions of submission and gender roles. I made a D in home economics on purpose. I fought with my parents because I thought they treated Collin and me differently. I pursued a law degree, became an attorney, moved to the islands, and took on a major build-out by myself. Hell, I solved my own parents’ murders and put their killer over the edge of a cliff. I took pride in my self-image: sharp angles and blunt force, not warm and nurturing.

  So I answered her with great assurance. “Untrue. Even if it is true, it isn’t—because I won’t let it be. You need to do it again,” I said.

  “Your palm speak plain. But we read your cards and see what they say.” She reached into a carpeted satchel at her feet and pulled out a deck of thick cards. They looked as old and worn as she was.

  “I don’t want to get into any kind of voodoo stuff,” I said, but I knew those were funny words coming from the woman with the jumbie house.

  She cackled, exposing more gums than teeth. “Wah, you think I’m gonna read your fortune in a vat of chicken blood?” She shuffled the cards, her gnarled fingers more deft than I expected. “Nah, these just tarot cards, play things of chirrun dem. We look at your past, present, and future, like a game.”

  She fanned the cards face down in front of me. Their backs looked like ordinary blue and white playing cards, only they were bigger. I leaned in to get a closer look. The design was a repeating pattern of quarter moons.

  “Pick three cards. Pull the first one forward with your fingers, put it on your left, then pull the next one by it, then the last one to the right. In a row, like.”

  I stared at the cards. This was a trap. I could feel the walls closing in around me, holding me in place while my mind screamed, “Lies and blasphemy! Run like the wind!” But instead of fleeing, I put my fingers on a card in the center of the deck and pulled it to my left like a zombie. I picked a card from the right and moved it to the center. I dragged a card from the left to my right. They were just cards. No biggie. But my pulse insisted otherwise.

  The old woman pushed the other cards back in a pile and set them aside. She flipped over the card to my left. On its face was a very metrosexual angel standing sort of in or beside a stream and pouring liquid from one goblet to another. A two-fisted drinker.

  “Your past,” she said. “Temperance. Moderation something trouble you before, yes?”

  Lack of moderation, more like it. The room was very quiet. Finally, I answered. “It’s been a challenge of mine.” But just because one card was right didn’t mean anything. Lots of people struggle with balance and moderation. The odds were that the ancient crone could make any schmuck believe it fit. I wasn’t going to be that schmuck.

  “The present,” she said, and she flipped the center card, revealing Adam and Eve as naked as the day God made them, with some sort of winged devil over their head. And of course the serpent and the fruit were behind Eve. Poor Eve never gets a break. What woman wants to be defined forevermore by her weakest moment?

  “The Lovers,” she continued. “Ah, I see.”

  “What do you see?”

  “I see why you lost. You have a choice to make.”

  I felt the pull of the damn cards, their siren call. Yes. Lovers. A choice. Annalise’s fac
e, my own like a mirror, Nick’s, Taylor’s. That kind. I put my hands in my lap and they gripped each other fiercely, the fingers of my right hand closing over the blood-warmed gold band on my left.

  She flipped the last card. “The future.” She clucked. “The Empress.”

  The Empress?

  I felt nauseous. The empress had become a joke between Nick and me. The butt-kicking empress of the St. Marcos rainforest, whose man worshipped her, as she well deserved. It had started with our crazy dreams at the same time, and—I made a strangled sound and choked back a sob—a palm reader who had called me an empress. I pinched my own hand, hard. Yes, I was still in the here and now. Or I was pinching myself in a dream.

  I stared at the card. I studied its image. The empress sat in a throne in the middle of a field, a starred crown on her head, a scepter in one hand. She didn’t look quite as ass-kicky as I would have wanted her to, but she wasn’t bad. Maybe there had been something to that dream, after all. The Empress. I could work with that.

  “The empress mother, a creator, a nurturer,” the seer announced. Then she smiled, and it was a smug one. “So, that your future, your path. At least it will be when you choose in the present. But you gotta let go of that anger and quit hiding what important.”

  I couldn’t believe she’d sucked me into it. The Empress was the Nurturer? I rattled my last escape hatch. “I think you read them upside down.”

  “You know I didn’t.”

  I stood up so fast my stool flipped over backwards. I grabbed the rest of the cards and the old woman didn’t flinch. I ripped the top card off the deck and held it for her to see.

  “Strength,” she said.

  “That would work.”

  “It not in your reading.”

  I pulled another.

  “High Priestess.”

  “That’s me.”

  She shook her head. “Not so, according to your cards.”

  I stood in that small room that was growing smaller by the second. When it started to spin, I knew it was time to go. “How much do I owe you?”