She was sleek, expensive and a status symbol. Like Rich’s third wife, Leontyne.
Rich himself now had an American accent, a perma-tan and a very expensive haircut, which was supposed to make him look like a silver fox. In fact he more closely resembled an ageing ferret, but he had enough money for that not to bother Leontyne.
He wasn’t very demanding in the bedroom – prostate problems – and he was a generous husband, even though he was paying alimony to two previous wives.
It was their second visit to Bendita Cruz in the autumn – Rich said he had to have a bit of real sun before facing a New York winter – but the first time they were going to be in Mexico for the Day of the Dead. Their holiday this year had been delayed by some negotiations Rich had been involved in with the latest sexy teen sensation he had found on YouTube.
“It’s a bore, babe, but he’s going to be the next Justin Bieber,” he had explained to his wife.
Since they had arrived in the marina, he had been making it up to her. It was just a pity everyone else found him so repugnant. But they all loved Leontyne in Bendita Cruz. The marina staff remembered her from the year before and how they had wondered then how she could put up with a man like Rich.
“She doesn’t seem like a gold-digger,” they would say. “Too nice.”
“And too good for him.”
This autumn there was a new assistant manager at the marina who was particularly smitten with Leontyne. Maybe it was because she began to see her husband through Chilo’s eyes, but Leontyne was becoming critical of the way he treated other people.
“I don’t know what you see in that dago,” said Rich. “Greasy-looking devil, like all these Mexicans.”
He was grumpier and nastier than his wife had ever known him. Maybe because his YouTube sensation was proving awkward to mould to his will and Rich was spending a lot of his holiday on his smartphone. Maybe because he really was jealous of Chilo, who was as physically fit as Rich was flabby, and had a full head of black curls.
“Do you have to be so unpleasant?” asked Leontyne. “Chilo is a perfect gentleman – and why are you suddenly so against Mexicans? You were very enthusiastic about coming down here again.”
“I like Mexico,” said Rich. “I like the heat, the food and the tequila. I even like the music. I never said I liked Mexicans, though, did I?”
They were sitting in a restaurant on the seafront, one of the upmarket venues that had sprung up recently in Bendita Cruz. It was getting further and further from its roots as a fishing village but was not yet completely spoiled; unlike Puerto Vallarta, it had no airport.
Rich had ordered fish tacos – good Mexican peasant food made with locally caught mahi-mahi – but he ate them with a bottle of the best Chablis the restaurant could provide. Leontyne picked at her shrimp and avocado salad and drank papaya juice.
“Sweet Jesus, he’s followed us here!” said Rich, pointing to a nearby table, where the man from the marina was also eating his lunch.
Leontyne blushed under her bronzed skin.
“I suppose he has a lunch break like anyone else. Or maybe it’s his day off? I’m sure it’s a coincidence.”
But she smiled at Chilo and gave him a little wave, while her husband glowered.
As they set off back to the boat, someone lurched into their path, knocking them both off balance. There was a real danger that all three of them would end up in an unseemly tangle of limbs on the cobbled street. But in an instant, Chilo was beside them, steadying Leontyne on her strappy high heels and brushing dust off Rich’s cotton jacket.
“Get your fucking hands off me, you filthy wop!” growled Rich, reverting to the accent and vocabulary of his childhood.
Chilo flinched. “Are you okay, Senora Samson?” he asked. “Take no notice of Juan Luis – he is a village character, not . . . not quite right in the head you understand.”
Juan Luis was joining in the brushing down, much to Rich’s disgust, who threw him off roughly.
“May every day be the thirteenth of the month for you,” said Juan Luis, wandering off, whistling tunelessly.
“Bloody psycho!” muttered Rich. “All right, all right, we don’t need you fussing round. She’s okay, aren’t you, babe?” His American accent was returning.
They walked back to the Peabody in silence, both a bit shaken. Chilo watched them go, his handsome face inscrutable.
The cruising community was a loose-knit one, but one thing they had in common was a distrust of wealthy amateurs like the Samsons who had paid crew and staff to look after them. Many were retired couples who had dreamed of using their savings to buy a boat and sail round the world and were now living the dream.
Others were youngsters travelling in their gap years before university. In between were those who had somehow managed to chuck in their jobs, some selling houses to buy their boats and raise young families aboard ship.
They met up with each other in different marinas and on various islands, sometimes teaming up to take a boat through the Panama Canal or to celebrate a birth or a wedding on a beach. To swap bits of equipment or outgrown baby clothes or just pieces of gossip and sea-lore. There was an easy camaraderie that Leontyne envied. She and Rich had few people they could count as friends, either in New York or when cruising: just one or two couples with boats as expensive as theirs, and she suspected that didn’t count as either real friendship or really travelling the sea.
No one who would look out for their boat if they went away. Among the real community a boat owner might leave a vessel for some months to go back “home” and work for a few months to get enough money to finance the next leg of the trip. The boat would be locked but there was always someone to look out for it and make sure it wasn’t damaged by a freak storm outside hurricane season.
The Day of the Dead celebrations were approaching and the small town was filled with improvised shrines and decorations, each glowing with the bright colours of marigold petals, painted crosses, candles and paper flowers of vivid purples, blues, deep pinks and oranges.
November the 1st was dedicated to dead children, Los Angelitos – “the little angels”.
“Morbid, I call it,” said Rich, who had been drinking even more heavily since the encounter with Chilo and Juan Luis, and did not identify with people who had lost children. After all, he had his boys, healthy and grown up, though he didn’t see them, and a daughter by his second wife, whom he also never saw, but who cost him a lot in maintenance.
But Leontyne thought of their baby that she had miscarried at three and a half months and wanted to visit the cemetery.
The town cemetery was the focus of the Day of the Dead rituals. Although every house had its improvised shrine in honour of ancestors and family members recently passed, it was at the cemetery that the main commemorations took place.
In Bendita Cruz, on the first day of the festival there was dancing, in multicoloured dresses and shirts, before the more macabre images of the day for adult remembrance set in. Leontyne hadn’t known and went to the cemetery dressed in a black sundress and a black straw hat with a pink ribbon.
It broke her heart to see all the little meals laid out on small graves smothered with flowers and photographs of the dead children. Whole families sat and picnicked with their missing loved ones, breaking off every now and again to dance to the haunting music that seemed to be playing all over the town.
And they were kind and hospitable too, approaching her with special dishes and sweets that their children had loved to eat. And they drew her into the dance, holding her hands and smiling at her as if they knew the secrets of her heart and could see that her loss was recent and painful.
They wouldn’t have been so nice if Rich had been here, thought Leontyne.
“Thank goodness she didn’t bring her horrible husband,” they said in Spanish behind their hands.
She went home feeling tender and vulnerable but unexpectedly happy. Only to find her husband very drunk and abusing the staff, who were paid a for
tune to stay on Rich Samson’s boat.
“Where the fuck have you been?” he asked, thrusting his face aggressively into hers. “You been with that dago? I bet you have. Well, I’m not having it.”
“I’ve been to the festival of the dead children,” she said. “And I was happy – till I came back here. Why do you have to spoil everything?”
That night she slept in the spare cabin, which was hardly less luxurious than the master cabin suite. She dreamed of the little girl she would have had, wreathed in marigolds and dancing with the people in the street. Only the little girl had black curls like Chilo’s.
I’m not going to let him take that away from me, she thought when she woke.
Rich rose late and hungover, and had eggs and Bloody Marys for breakfast. The boat’s chef was used to his master’s habits and his temper.
The couple didn’t meet again till the early afternoon; Leontyne went swimming in the pool that had been built at the marina since their last visit. Rich slept and showered and changed into his new Day of the Dead outfit.
One thing they still had in common was a love of dressing up.
Leontyne was going as the elegant skeleton lady Catrina, with a skull mask and an elaborate orange dress trimmed with leaves made out of green silk. Rich was a bit more of a generic skeleton – a disguise that did not fit his stocky figure well – with violently coloured jacket, trousers and hat.
The costumes helped them to tolerate each other, and by the time they left for the cemetery, when it was already beginning to get dark, they had more or less made up the row of the night before.
The dancers were out in force, brightly costumed figures going from house to house and winding through all the streets of the town to the big cemetery. There were so many skeletons and skulls that Leontyne soon got used to it, so that it startled her to see an ordinary face without white paint or a mask.
Once or twice they got dragged inside a house, and invited to admire the memorials made for the dead. In one such house, they saw Juan Luis, holding a bunch of bananas, which he was arranging artistically along with some bright red chillies around the edge of an existing shrine.
“A few sandwiches short of a picnic, that one,” said Rich, a bit too loudly.
“Picnic,” said Juan Luis. “Let’s have a picnic in the rainbow field.”
He made to grab Rich’s arm, but they pulled away and went back out into the street.
Soon after that they got separated. There were so many people dressed like them and it was getting really dark now. The cemetery was all lit up with candles, with an especially large crowd of people round the graves of those who had died in the last year – “the Fresh Dead” they called them.
“Fresh Dead, fresh fish!” someone was shouting. Leontyne thought it was probably Juan Luis.
She couldn’t see Rich but she was sure that a man dancing with her was Chilo. He had curly black hair between his white-painted skull-face and his colourful hat, but it might have been a wig. Her partner fed her candied pumpkin and sugar skulls.
Once Leontyne thought she saw Rich drinking from a bottle of tequila left on one of the graves for a dead man to enjoy. To be fair some locals were doing the same – after all, the dead don’t drink – but she nevertheless felt ashamed of him and turned away.
It was a bizarre night, hot and hectic in spite of the dark, everywhere filled with light and colour chasing away the fear from death. But towards the early hours there was a change in the atmosphere and Leontyne felt a chill at the sight of so many skeletons and skulls in the candlelight. Greetings and embraces that had felt just friendly before now seemed more sinister.
As the festivities wound down, some families left blankets and pillows on graves and Leontyne thought at first they were going to sleep there but it was just in case the dead woke up and needed somewhere more comfortable to sleep than the hard ground, someone explained to her.
It might have been Chilo; she had lost track of the different dancers and had been given a fair amount of tequila herself. Faces swam in and out of her vision, all with the gaping horror of a noseless death’s head. She gave up thinking she would find Rich and wobbled unsteadily on her green wedge-heels as she left the cemetery. The candles were almost burnt down and few people remained. She was sure she saw one settling down on a “grave bed” and thought longingly of how she would like to sink down on one.
There was no sign of her husband back on the boat. The staff had gone to bed and Leontyne stripped off her mask and sank into the master bed as wearily as she would have done on a grave. It had been changed with fresh sheets since Rich’s drunken stupor of the night before.
She slept long and well, but when the maid came in with her hot tea the next morning, she sat up and was aware that she was alone in the bed.
“Maria,” she called. “Where is Mr Samson? Did he sleep in the spare cabin?”
“No, madam. He didn’t come home last night.”
Leontyne didn’t worry straightaway. Rich was a bit of a law unto himself. After her shower and breakfast of freshly squeezed oranges and limes, wholewheat toast and coffee, she walked over to the marina offices.
They were attached to the Yacht Club, and the air-conditioned lounge, which Leontyne had scarcely used since their cruiser had its own artificially cooled air.
“Your husband did not come back?” asked the manager. “It was a good party, wasn’t it? Chilo has not showed up for work this morning either.”
Was it then that Leontyne felt the first chill? The first frisson that all was not as it should be?
She was wearing espadrilles this morning and white slacks with a red bikini top and poppy-flowered shirt. Large shades obscured her eyes and hid any trace of a hangover that her breakfast coffee hadn’t chased away.
She retraced her steps to the cemetery with a mounting sense of dread. There were several mound-like shapes on the graves and she uncovered each one, fearful of what she might find. One was Juan Luis, clutching a papaya to his chest like an unyielding teddy bear, and snoring heavily. There were two empty bottles beside him.
The cemetery looked so squalid with all the candle stubs, crushed flowers, squashed fruit and empty bottles. Leontyne hoped that the families would come back in the day and tidy it all up soon.
None of the figures was Rich – or Chilo – and all were definitely alive, if comatose.
By mid-afternoon she was very worried and went back to the manager to get him to call the police.
But it was two days before anyone else was really concerned. Neither Rich nor Chilo had been seen since the Day of the Dead evening.
“You say your husband was jealous of Chilo,” said the officer who had taken Leontyne’s statement.
“A little,” she said, twisting her wedding ring. “It was nothing serious – just a mild flirtation.”
“And do you think Chilo was jealous of your husband?”
“I can’t answer that,” she said. “I scarcely knew him.”
But she had known that Chilo didn’t like her husband, didn’t think him worthy of her.
Gradually, the investigation had morphed from being a missing person’s enquiry into a murder probe.
Leontyne couldn’t believe what was happening. Day after day no news of Rich. She called his cell phone but it was dead. Was he? Should she try to get hold of his mother in an old people’s home in the UK?
And Chilo had not returned to the marina. His family lived in Puerto Vallarta but they had heard nothing from him either.
After a week, the police seemed to have decided that Rich was dead and Chilo was on the run.
“But that makes no sense,” said Leontyne. “If he killed my husband – which I don’t believe for a minute – your theory is he did it to be with me. So why wouldn’t he contact me?”
“He got scared,” said the officer. “There is no other suspect, is there?”
But by morning they had pulled in Juan Luis.
“We can’t get anything out of him,” the
policeman told Leontyne. “He just goes on about the Fresh Dead.”
Two days later she was asked to identify a body.
There was a man in the town called Miguel who had lost his wife just one week before the Day of the Dead festival; she was the freshest of the Fresh Dead, her grave still a mound of newly turned earth. It was one of the ones that had been laid out with pillows and blankets on the night of the festival.
Miguel had cleared the bedding away next morning and hadn’t noticed anything amiss, but when he had returned a week later to put fresh flowers on his Carmelita’s grave, he had seen a foot.
It was a man’s foot and it now stuck out, together with its partner, from under a sheet in the improvised morgue that was a cordoned-off part of the air-conditioned lounge in the Yacht Club.
Leontyne held her breath as the sheet was removed from the other end of the corpse, but the face was still unrecognizable under its white paint.
Even so, she could tell from the hair that it wasn’t Rich. It was Chilo.
“This is not your husband?” said the policeman.
“No. Please – I need the bathroom.”
She ran to the ladies’ room and was sick in the toilet. Leontyne had never seen a corpse before. But she had been braced to look at Rich’s dead body – not Chilo’s.
When she had composed herself, she went back. She was now icily angry; the police must have known this was not the body of a man in his sixties. They had been trying to provoke a reaction.
“Mrs Samson,” said the officer. “Do you know where your husband is?”
“I do not,” she said, trying hard to keep her temper.
“Then you’ll have no objection to our searching your boat?”
“Please do,” she said.
When they found no Rich hiding in any of the cupboards or in the bilges, they emerged regretfully from the Peabody.
“We shall now apply for a warrant to search all the other vessels in the marina,” said the officer in charge. “This is a murder enquiry.”
“How did Chilo die?” she asked quietly.
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