“We’d heard the stories, of course,” said Mr. Wong. “But none of them stayed very long. It doesn’t happen nearly as often these days.”
“Good thing too,” said Mrs. Wong. “It’s a stupid and dangerous thing to do. It’s not like boating around the lagoon on Prince William Island. This is the open sea. There are dangerous tides. I’m not surprised they never found that girl’s body. The sea around here is treacherous.”
“It must be quite a thing to commute back and forth every day. Have you never thought about building an apartment at the back of the shop, so you can spend the night here?”
Like Gabrielle, Mr. Wong seemed alarmed by the idea. Mrs. Wong just laughed.
“People already think we’re crazy enough to be running this gift shop out here. If we turned into hermits, they would really question our sanity. We need our life on Prince William Island in order to stay connected to friends and family.”
“Your family in particular,” said Mr. Wong.
Her booming laugh rang out again. “That’s right. My family thought I’d lost the plot when I married Evan here and we set up shop-keeping. Still, I was forty-two at the time and you know what they say about beggars not being choosers.”
Eulalie glanced at Mr. Wong to see how he reacted to being described as a beggar’s choice, but he had lowered his eyes.
Eulalie wandered over to a display of balloons. She tapped one of the ghost balloons. “These are so cute and clever. I suppose you two have never seen any actual ghosts?”
“We’ve never stayed here at night,” said Mr. Wong. “Maybe if we had, we might have…”
“Stuff and nonsense!” Mrs. Wong talked right over him. “Ghosts, indeed. Whatever next?”
“You don’t believe in the haunting of Monk’s Cay, Mrs. Wong?”
“I do not. There’s a reasonable explanation for all the odd things that happen here on this island.”
“Like what, dear?” asked Mr. Wong.
“Well, I don’t know, do I? All I know is that they’re not caused by ghosts. Ghosts don’t exist. It’s something else… it must be.”
“What about that funny feeling you sometimes get in the evenings when we’re locking up for the night? You said it feels like someone is watching you.”
Mrs. Wong snorted. “Probably one of the tourists. Look, I’m not saying I’d love to spend the night here. Clearly it would be a bit creepy with the ruins right there and my imagination going into overdrive, but that doesn’t mean I would meet an actual ghost.”
“What about people?”
Both of the Wongs turned to look at Eulalie.
“What do you mean?”
“Have you ever noticed people who had no business being here? People staying on the island after the last ferry left, or still being here in the morning before the first ferry arrived? Or perhaps people coming and going during the night?”
Mrs. Wong’s honking laugh broke out. “Good gracious me, no. What can you possibly mean? We’ve never seen anything like that, have we Evan? And we’ve been here more than seven years now.”
Eulalie looked at her husband. “Mr. Wong?” she said. “You look as though you want to say something?”
He rubbed a forefinger up and down the side of his nose.
“We’ve had that problem with stock disappearing overnight, dear. Don’t forget that. Someone must be doing it.”
“That’s utter nonsense, dear, and you know it. Most of those incidents were miscalculations on our part. And with all the strangers who come and go on this island all day long, it’s hardly surprising that things go missing sometimes.”
“The tearoom has experienced stock theft too,” said Eulalie.
“There you go then,” said Mrs. Wong as though this proved her point. “Just day-to-day pilfering. We need to keep a closer eye on our stockroom, that’s all.”
“But remember that one time when we had just taken inventory before we closed up for the night, and the next morning we found some boxes missing?”
“What was in the boxes?” asked Eulalie.
“Nothing. They were just boxes. We used them for moving stuff back and forth on the ferry. One minute they were there, and the next minute…”
“Oh, do shut up, dear.” Mrs. Wong gave him an indulgent glance. “If I’ve told you once, I’ve told you a thousand times – you counted wrong. Who do you imagine would be here overnight on this island? If you had seen what I’ve seen…” She stopped abruptly, as though reluctant to continue.
“So, you do think there is something uncanny here on Monk’s Cay, Mrs. Wong?”
“Uncanny?” She gave Eulalie a pitying look. “My dear girl, I’ve seen things here that would turn your blood to ice. But, like I said, I do have an active imagination. It’s not ghosts or anything like that. I don’t believe in ghosts. I refuse to believe in them. All I know is that many have tried to spend the night here, and none have succeeded. Do we really need to ask why? I can tell you one thing for sure – no one is staying overnight on this island to pilfer a few bits and pieces from us and from the tearoom. If anything is disappearing, it’s happening during the day.”
Mr. Wong had to bow to this logic. “I’m sure you’re right, dear. You usually are.”
She slapped him on the shoulder and laughed. “And don’t you forget it.”
Eulalie thanked the Wongs and left the gift shop, where things were beginning to get busier as the next ferry was due.
She wanted to walk the ruins on her own, in the friendly light of an ordinary mid-morning. It annoyed her that the thought of doing so filled her with a low-grade dread. It was the dream, of course.
Whenever she had dreams like that, they haunted her for days afterwards. Depending on how bad they were, they could turn her into a jittery mess of nerves.
This had been an especially bad one.
It was scary to realize her how her sympathetic nervous system and limbic responses could shut down like that. If it weren’t for the cat, she didn’t like to think how it might have ended.
The cat.
She remembered its soft paw batting insistently against her cheek. The tiny pinprick of pain from a claw when she didn’t respond. The sapphire eyes boring into her head. The solid weight of him lying on her chest. The purr that seemed to awaken an answering vibration in her own chest.
Eulalie looked up and realized she was standing right in amongst the ruins. When had that happened?
She realized that her heart had stopped pounding and the clamminess was gone from her skin. The feeling of dread had subsided into a distant echo. It was like being back inside her own skin again.
She looked around to orient herself. To the west, she could see the raised, flat patch of land where the execution had taken place. The sight of it did not bring her out in a cold sweat. It was as though she were remembering something she had watched on television.
That was where the gibbet had stood. There was the block on which Brother Francis had stood to deliver his condemnation. There was the path Brother Sebastian had been led along to face his accuser.
She kept walking.
It wasn’t the memory of that long-ago school visit that enabled her to know which way to turn to reach the monks’ cells – the tiny, narrow bedchambers they had slept in. It wasn’t the school visit that had taught her to turn right at the end of this corridor in order to reach the refectory where they had eaten their meals, or that the cloisters were on the other side of this courtyard. She remembered it from her dream.
Eulalie walked along the path that she knew would take her to the chapel where the monks had worshipped five times a day. She looked inside briefly. It was well preserved and had been recently restored. The chapel was one of the main attractions of Monk’s Cay. Services were still held there on Sunday mornings.
Eulalie kept walking past the chapel to the far side of the ruins where the ground became sandy and bare.
This was the northeastern tip of the island, and her knowledge of the terrain told her that that ther
e should be nothing but rocky cliffs here. She walked on for a few minutes and saw that she was correct. The cliffs were jagged and inhospitable, dropping straight down into a heaving sea. There was nowhere to moor a boat here. The way the waves churned indicated the hidden presence of several jagged rocks under the surface of the water. That part of the island was completely inaccessible. You couldn’t approach it by boat or by swimming. Any attempt to do so would be suicide.
Eulalie climbed a sloping cliff to reach what she suspected was the highest point on the island. From here, she could see the deep gorge that bisected the island from its one sandy beach all the way to these immovable rocky cliffs that stretched more than halfway around the island. The gorge was overgrown with forest – the same forest she and Fleur had hiked through. And that was it. That was Monk’s Cay.
One sandy strip of beach, a deep gorge completely covered in rainforest, a mighty ring of cliffs, and a flat, sandy plateau where the ruins still stood and that was now also home to the gift shop and tearoom.
“If I were a smuggler,” Eulalie said to herself. “What would attract me to this place?”
There were a few obvious answers. The ghost legend was an asset that kept everyone away at night. People like Marcia Wong might condemn it as a load of nonsense, but she was very much in the minority. Most of the Prince William Islanders were true believers.
The ghost had also been an attraction for a while, causing reckless teenagers to abandon what little common sense they might have had and come out here on a dare.
There hadn’t been much of that since Jessica had gone missing.
Could that be a motive for murder – to make Jessica disappear as an example to others who might get too curious about this place?
It didn’t seem likely.
The sheer inaccessibility of Monk’s Cay was both an attraction and a disadvantage. On the one hand, you could hide something in the forest for years without fear of discovery. On the other, it was a logistical nightmare to get anything in or out.
“If I were a smuggler,” Eulalie asked herself again. “How would I use lights to signal my colleagues that it was time to make a drop-off or a pick-up?”
Her ears had pricked up earlier when Mr. Wong had mentioned the generators. She had often wondered where the island got its electricity from. Some of the cays were serviced by undersea cables that provided them with electricity, telephone lines, and internet. If Monk’s Cay was serviced by generators, then it really would be completely isolated at night when those were switched off.
Eulalie turned and ran lightly down the promontory she was standing on. She wanted to take a look at those generators.
Following her nose, she walked back through the ruins and down the long slope that led to the gift shop and tearoom. She walked a wide circle around those, not wanting to be accosted by Gabrielle or the Wongs.
There was a low brick building about three hundred feet from the men’s and women’s bathrooms. If that didn’t house the generators, she would be very surprised.
The closer she got to the building, the more she could hear a low roaring sound that told her she was correct. The generators purred like well-behaved cats. It was a sophisticated sound, one that spoke of superior technology and workmanship.
Eulalie opened the door and went inside. It was a safe, well-lit space. These were modern generators and no expense had been spared on their specs.
Each generator was controlled by a touchscreen computerized board that kept a record of when each generator had been switched on and off.
Eulalie scrolled back a couple of weeks and saw regular seven-thirty switch-ons and six pm switch-offs.
There was nothing in between.
If the smugglers weren’t using the generators, how were they powering their lights overnight? Could the lights be battery operated?
“Maybe UFOs have their own power source.”
Grinning to herself, Eulalie stepped out of the building and latched it behind her. Then she jumped as a scream split the air.
Eulalie broke into a run, sprinting up the hill all the way to the gift shop. A crowd of people were already gathering outside.
By the time she reached the entrance, Marcia Wong rushed out, wringing her hands.
“It’s Evan,” she said. “I think he’s dead.”
Chapter 19
“What happened?” asked Eulalie. “Where is he?”
Marcia pointed to the back of the gift shop with a hand that shook.
“He’s in there. He just collapsed. Someone is trying to help him. I panicked and ran out.”
Groups of tourists were standing around in shock. Many had abandoned the items they had been looking at and left the shop, as though to escape the contagion of death.
Mrs. Wong led Eulalie to a back office where her husband lay face up on the floor. A young woman crouched over him. Eulalie opened her mouth to order he away until she saw the she was performing CPR.
She dropped to her knees next to the woman. “Can I help?”
“Has someone called for help?” The woman kept up a steady rhythm of chest compressions.
“The ferry’s coming in,” said Eulalie. “There’ll be a paramedic on board with a medical kit.”
“This man needs a defibrillator.” She looked down at Mr. Wong’s wide, staring eyes. “Needed. He needed a defibrillator.”
A distressed sound made them both turn around.
“Evan!” Mrs. Wong had tears running down her face. “It can’t be too late. It can’t be.”
The young woman stopped her chest compressions and leaned down to blow two rescue breaths into the man’s mouth, pinching his nose shut. Then she sat up again to resume the compressions.
“Did he have a heart attack?” Eulalie asked.
“I don’t know. I’m just a final-year medical student. All I know is that his heart and breathing stopped. I don’t know the cause.”
“His hands are wet,” Eulalie noticed. She jumped to her feet and looked around the room. Mrs. Wong followed her with wild, darting eyes. A small galley kitchen abutted onto the office.
“There’s water running in here,” said Eulalie from the kitchen. “The tap is still on.”
Mrs. Wong stepped forward to switch it off, but Eulalie stopped her. “Better not. Until we know what happened here, we have to preserve the scene. The police will be here as soon as they can launch a motorboat launched. Has someone called them?”
“One of the customers.” Mrs. Wong nodded vigorously. “I showed him where to stand to get a signal. He called the ferry office and the police.”
“Then the paramedic will be here any minute.”
Mrs. Wong’s eyes kept being drawn to a backdoor that led outside.
“What’s out there?”
“That leads to the stock room. I’m wondering why the door is open. I do hope Evan wasn’t lifting heavy boxes. If I told him once, I told him a thousand times to let me help him with moving anything heavy.”
“What’s this?” Eulalie walked up to a metal control box with its door hanging open.
“That’s the box for the electricity. Evan was always fiddling with it, trying to figure out why we had so many outages.”
“There’s a naked wire here, Mrs. Wong. If your husband touched this, it could well have caused cardiac arrest.”
“Really?” Mrs. Wong looked inside the box and glanced over both her shoulders. “I suppose that could be it.”
They walked back to the office. The medical student still knelt next to Mr. Wong but had stopped her CPR attempt.
“I’m sorry, Ma’am. There’s nothing more I can do.”
Mrs. Wong’s eyes darted to the door again. “That’s okay, dear. I’m sure you did everything you could. Oh, Evan. Why did you have to be such a fool? Why couldn’t you have left everything as it was?”
“Could he have been electrocuted?” Eulalie asked.
The young woman frowned.
“It’s possible. Yes, it’s very possible. Electr
ocution is usually diagnosed by circumstance rather than physical symptoms.”
“There’s an open electricity box outside with an exposed wire. And his hands are wet.”
“There’s one place I can look.” She unbuttoned Evan Wong’s shirt and pulled it to one side to expose his right armpit. Then she leaned in so close her nose was almost touching his skin. She sat back with an exhale.
“It’s not conclusive, but I think I can see some redness here. When an electric shock burns through the body, it sometimes creates reddish flash marks in certain areas of the body, like the axilla.”
“The armpit?” asked Eulalie.
“That’s right. But that exposed wire is the biggest indicator. They might find more signs on macroscopic examination of the heart during autopsy, but even then, not necessarily.”
Eulalie glanced around, hoping Mrs. Wong wasn’t finding this conversation distressing. She was nowhere to be seen.
“Mrs. Wong?”
Eulalie went to the open door where Marcia Wong could be seen staring down the slope that led to the generators and then to the forest.
“The paramedic will come from the other side,” Eulalie said, indicating the front of the gift shop.
“I know, I know. I was just… I can’t believe he’s gone. Why couldn’t he have left well enough alone?”
“You say your husband frequently fiddled with the electrical control box?”
“What? Oh, yes. He did. He was always fiddling. Didn’t want to leave it up to the professionals.”
A commotion inside the gift shop made them turn around.
“The paramedic,” said Eulalie. “At last.”
The paramedic went straight to Evan Wong to check for vital signs. The medical student filled him in on what had happened so far.
“How long did you keep up the compressions and breaths?”
“Forty-five minutes. I timed it on my phone. I got nothing.”
“Unfortunately, this man is deceased. How long after the exposure to electricity did you begin CPR?”
“I’m not sure. I was standing in the gift shop, looking at the little pots of lavender sugar when I heard – we all heard – a thumping noise, as though something had fallen. Then we heard this man’s wife starting to scream. Some of us rushed to the front to see what was happening. He was lying on the floor as you see him now, but rigid. I didn’t go forward at once. I waited to see if there was anyone else who knew what they were doing. There wasn’t anyone, so I asked this lady if I could begin CPR and she said yes.” She rubbed a finger over her upper lip. “Do you think if I’d been faster… if I’d started CPR sooner…?”
The Eulalie Park Mysteries Box Set 1 Page 59