by K C Ames
She became even more confused. She panicked when she saw a blond-haired body, facedown in the water, wearing pink silk pajamas, slowly floating towards her. She noticed the bright orange nail polish. She again tried to get out of the pool, but realized she was inside a large, silo-like structure with flat walls, impossible to climb. She looked up, but above her was pitch-darkness. She felt her body going into full panic mode, hyperventilating, swallowing water until she coughed and gagged.
She was desperately trying to figure out how to get out the water—there wasn’t a way out. She looked back towards the body, blonde hair floating around it like a bright yellow aura.
It was slowly floating in closer and closer to where she was wading in the water helplessly. Suddenly, she heard a loud, guttural grunting sound. It was terrifying, and it was becoming louder and louder as the body floated closer and closer to her.
Dana tried to figure out what she was hearing and who was making that sound. Was it a scream? No, it was a howl? It was animalistic. Wait, was that... Napoleon? The howler money that lived out in the woods on the other side of the wall of her property. It was Napoleon, and boom—she awakened from a horrible nightmare.
She sat up on her bed, straight and stiff like an ironing board.
Her heart was beating so fast, it hurt. She was sweating. She could feel her T-shirt damp from it. And she felt nervous and scared, but slowly those feelings began to dissipate as she realized it was just a nightmare and she was awake safe and sound in her own bed with Wally looking at her like she had lost her mind.
That was when she heard the howler monkey barking at the moon again, and she smiled. It was the howler money they named Napoleon because he was short but feisty, which reminded Dana and Courtney of the French despot.
Thank goodness. She had never been so happy to hear those monkey sounds that had jarred her awake from that awful nightmare.
There were several types of monkeys living in the Costa Rican woods. The howler monkey was the most abundant around Mariposa Beach, and also the loudest.
They looked cute as a button, but at night they liked to emit these loud grunting howls that Dana swore could be heard from miles away.
Napoleon lived so close to her property that his howls would jolt a person out of a bed, thinking King Kong was right outside, waiting to snatch them from bed à la Fay Wray.
Dana had become accustomed to the howls. It was like people living by railroad tracks. After a while, they couldn’t even tell a train was going by even though it was shaking and rattling the entire house.
Same thing with the howler monkeys, but on that night, during that nightmare, she was grateful that Napoleon’s howls had snapped her from her frightening slumber.
She wanted to think Napoleon knew she was having a horrible nightmare, so he howled even louder than usual to wake her up.
“Thanks, Nap,” she said out loud as she stood by the window, getting some fresh air. It was pitch-dark outside, but she looked out towards the forest where Napoleon and his fellow monkeys seemed to have quite the heated debate about something. It made her think of her best friend, Courtney, and how much she missed her.
It had been Courtney who had anointed the big howler monkey with the name of Napoleon and who had a love-hate relationship with the loud monkeys.
“They were here first,” Dana liked to remind her.
Dana smiled at the memory and went back to bed.
She woke up at six a.m., but she felt exhausted. Between the nightmare, the howling all night, and Wally hogging up half the bed, she had gotten very little sleep.
She figured it would be a rough night. The images of the dead body she had found seemed to have been etched into her brain. It was an image she would probably never get out of her head.
The visit from Detective Picado didn’t help matters, either. He left her feeling stressed out and anxious. She hated to admit it, but Picado got to her.
Dana always strived to be a positive person, always trying to find good in people even when it might be tough to do so.
So she tried to see things from Picado’s perspective. Sure, he was a surly man, but that was just his nature. A lot of surly types in the world. Despite having the personality of a honey badger, he was a seasoned detective with over twenty years of experience on the job who had probably seen so much of the ugliness that humans could inflict on each other that it was not surprising he wasn’t the most empathetic person.
Dana figured you had to somewhat disconnect in order to do his job for so many years. It was not surprising that he did not suffer fools or mince words. And he’d become hardened by his job. Dana assumed he must see and think the worst in people because in that business, he saw so much of it.
But after her third encounter with the detective, and try as hard as she may to look at things from his perspective, she finally had decided she did not like him, and that was that.
Sure, he was good at his job, but he was a jerk. Plain and simple. It was pointless trying to season a steak that had gone bad. You just threw it out. So that’s what she did with his snarky comments, his glares, and threats. Dana tossed them out to the ether as soon as he left. Or at least that’s what she tried to do.
She felt relieved to find out that Picado had plans to get out to the island to interview the cast and crew of the show, so he wouldn’t be around town for a day or two. It would be a nice break from the reality that someone had murdered Rose Budd. Dana’s only encounter with the self-described model and social media influencer had been awful, but still the poor woman was so young, just in her early twenties, and now she was dead. It was hard to fathom. Dana also wondered what would happen with the production of the reality television show.
Could the show really go on amidst a murder investigation of one of their cast members?
From her brief encounter with the producer, Russ Donnelly, she didn’t doubt that was what he would want to do. The show must go on. After all, a one-day delay in the production schedule would cost him thousands of dollars.
Picado was heading over to the island, and Dana cracked a smile, wondering how those two honey badgers would fare with each other.
Fourteen
Dana walked out to her veranda. It was a beautiful morning. The rains seemed to be in check. It was one of those mornings when she regretted starting a business so soon after moving to town.
She would much rather go snorkeling or go on a hike or practice on her surfing that she had been learning from Big Mike, or go off-roading in Big Red, but she was headed out to her store.
Well, no duh, dummy, she told herself, who wouldn’t want to do those things instead of working?
She liked to work and keep busy. She knew how blessed she was to be living in a tropical paradise in a beautiful home, that she inherited debt-free. She had left San Francisco with a nice nest egg after the divorce.
California was a community property state, which meant the law presumed all property acquired during the marriage was owned equally by both spouses, so the marital property was divided equally. Yay for California, Dana had thought many times during her divorce.
Not like she didn’t deserve it. She had been there from the start when he was just another dorm-living programmer at Stanford and she was the breadwinner when he worked eighteen-hour days for peanuts and the dream that his stock options would amount to something. It was like being married to a poker player.
For every Facebook and Google, there is Myspace and AltaVista. And even more start-ups that never even made it out of the starting gate.
Besides, she could have taken her cheating ex to the cleaners when determining spousal support, but she just wanted him out of her life.
All she wanted from him was her fair share and then to be rid of the philandering lout from her life forever.
So the divorce, although stressful and contentious, had been rather fast and quick.
Dana smiled, remembering how she used that song from the musical South Pacific, “I’m Gonna Wash Tha
t Man Right Outa My Hair,” as her wake-up alarm tone during that ugly time in her life.
She had also been good with her money and had made some wise investments, so although she wasn’t rich by any stretch of the imagination, she was more fortunate than most. The cost of living between San Francisco—one of the most expensive cities in the world to live in—and Mariposa Beach would probably break her calculator if she tried to figure out the cost-of-living differences between the two, so she was doing just fine.
But she wasn’t about to sit around on the beach at thirty-five. She mulled using her journalism skills to become a travel or Costa Rica expat blogger and vlogger, but she discounted doing that because she really didn’t have that self-promotional personality to do well in that younger persons’ game of being a YouTuber.
It was interesting. She thought about how that world of social media and entertainment was dominated by people like Rose Budd and Robbie Gibbons or any of the other castaways filming on the island, who seemed shameless when it came to self-promotion.
A small bookstore and coffee shop were more up her alley.
When she first opened up her bookstore, it had been slow. Most tourists read on their Kindles or on iPads and smart phones. Most travelers nowadays didn’t really buy paper books that they must haul around back and forth from home to their vacation destination, especially now that airlines charged a fee for everything. Books added weight to luggage that could tip the scale in having to cough up more money to the airline.
Dana figured soon enough the airlines would install a credit card reader on the door of the tiny bathroom in their airplanes.
Logic also told her that the local market in town wasn’t big enough to keep the bookstore in the black, but then her greedy landlord jammed Mindy up, so she moved her cafe into the bookstore. And it had been fantastic.
Books, bagels, and lattes went along like a house on fire. There was a reason you could find a Starbucks inside a Barnes and Noble.
Dana also implemented some new strategies to drum up more business for the books part of the store. She started a lending program, becoming a sort of library where people could rent books and even a fully loaded e-reader for the duration of their trip.
The loaded e-reader became a big hit. People could choose a pre-loaded e-reader based on their favorite genre or author. She had their credit card on file, so if they stole or damaged the e-reader, she could charge them for it.
It had become a popular service, so kept adding more Kindles, Nooks, and Kobo e-readers available for rent. And she had even had requests for a French Bookeen and the German Tolino e-readers.
“You’re lucky,” she told herself out loud as she thought about how well things were working out for her.
“Are you talking to me, Doña Dana?”
The voice of Ramón, who was down below working on the garden, startled her. He must have heard her talking to herself, giving herself these little morning pep talks. She blushed.
“No, I’m just talking to myself again,” she said, looking down from her second-floor deck, feeling embarrassed.
Ramón smiled and waved at her and got on with his work. Dana laughed. He must think I’m cuckoo. She went back inside to shower and get ready for the day.
Dana left the house and drove into town. She parked and greeted the parking lot guard, José Luis, who greeted her cheerily. “Good morning, Doña Dana. Are you okay?” he asked her, a worried look on his face.
“I’m fine, José Luis, thank you.” She smiled and made her way to her store.
One local waved at her from the street. “Are you doing okay?”
Hmm, word is traveling fast about me finding that dead body, Dana thought as she reassured her too that she was fine.
She finally made it inside at nine o’clock a.m. Amalfi was helping Mindy when the caffeine seekers. Three customers were lined up for their fix, and all three looked at her like she was a zoo animal.
“Good morning, honey, how are you doing?” Mindy asked, sounding worried.
“I got things under control, Doña Dana, if you need some time off,” Amalfi said.
Word about me finding the dead body must have reached the Nicaraguan border by now, Dana thought as she smiled.
“No, I’m fine. I need to keep busy.”
Amalfi was a real sweetheart, and Dana was so happy Carmen had told her that her niece was looking for a new job. She was a trustworthy and responsible employee, and it was Amalfi who opened the store and manned the register and was happy to help with the cafe.
The only drawback was that Amalfi’s English wasn’t the best, and most of the customers were tourists or expats from the US and Canada. But Amalfi had been excited about that, since she could practice her English and get better at it. English was a sought-after skill for the locals working in the tourist-dependent province.
She was also determined to make things even better in her life by going to school part time to get her degree in business—the first in her immediate family to do so. She hoped to one day be a business owner like Dana herself.
Dana loved that about her, so she created a college fund for her and encouraged her to follow her dreams and get her education. She also paid for English lessons with a retired ESL teacher from Texas that lived in nearby Samara.
It wasn’t like the language barriers had been much of an issue with her customers. Dana was there most days, and Mindy and her husband both spoke English. Besides, only a handful of very rude and entitled customers had the chutzpah to complain about a Costa Rican cashier not being able to speak English very well in a Spanish-speaking country like Costa Rica. But it happened. Entitlement is a vile thing.
Dana settled in. Business was slower now that the production team had moved off to the island, but there was still a large contingent that came back and forth from the island to the mainland.
There also seemed to be a bevy of producer types that were staying in an Airbnb in town, and higher up the producer food chain were a few executives staying at the Tranquil Bay Resort. So there always seemed to be at least a few of the production-team people hanging around the bookstore slash cafe.
Dana wondered how the cast and crew were doing with Detective Picado there. She imagined he arrived on the island as welcomed as a tsunami.
She kept glancing around, hoping one of the crewmembers would stop by so she could ask how the Picado storm front was going.
She was ringing up a customer who rented one of the thriller-loaded e-readers. He was a chatty one. Mike Anderson from Chicago, he had introduced himself.
“Wow, so you’re American and you moved here and opened up a business, just like that, huh?”
“Well, sort of... it took cutting through a lot of red tape, and a lot of elbow grease to get things going,” Dana said, smiling.
“It’s my first time visiting Costa Rica. It’s beautiful down here. I can see why you left the rat race to move here.” There was a twinge of jealously in his voice.
“It hasn’t even been a year yet, but I’m liking the slower pace down here compared to San Francisco.”
“So you’re from San Fran,” the man said, referring to San Francisco in a way that made the locals cringe. Only Frisco was worse. She didn’t know when or why San Franciscans took affront over having their city by the bay referred to as San Fran or Frisco, but it had become a thing that even far away in Mariposa Beach she cringed at hearing her home city called by that ghastly name... San Fran.
“You loaded this bad boy with some great stuff. James Patterson, Walter Mosley, James M. Cain, John Sanford, Peter May, Tess Gerritsen—what a lineup.”
Dana smiled. Half the fun was picking which e-books to load on the e-readers.
During the entire conversation, she was waiting for him to ask if she had been the lady who found the dead body, as several strangers and every local that came into the shop had asked her, but to her delight, he didn’t. She missed her normal routine before she found the dead body.
Fifteen
Amalfi was doing her homework for her English lesson that evening. Mindy and Leo were trying to get a jump on closing time by cleaning up the kitchen.
There was only one customer in the store. A tourist from the States was drinking a latte and reading a book while his wife was at a yoga class at Marisol Arias’s studio, which was three doors away.
Dana was in her back office, working on the receipts of the day. She kept glancing at her computer’s monitor. There were six video feeds from her security system.
Benny’s friend, Román Garza, who owned a security company in San José, had set up her home security system and done the same for the bookstore so she had access to a nifty video security system where she could monitor what was going on in just about every nook and cranny of her store and outside.
She had learned the hard way that even in a small beach town community, there were a lot of folks with sticky fingers for paperbacks and the other knickknacks she sold.
She didn’t want to think it was the locals shoplifting, and preferred to think it was just the tourists or someone passing through to the more popular beaches and to Nosara and Samara.
Dana felt Román had gone a bit overboard with his setup, but he was a former spy, so he was on the paranoid side of things.
She remembered when she first met Román that it surprised her that Costa Rica had a spy agency. Costa Rica had famously disbanded its army after its last Civil War back in the late forties, but the country had its own version of the CIA, the Department of Intelligence and Security, or DIS as they were known, and Garza had worked for them for years before going into private security work.