Until the Day I Die

by Carpenter, Emily

  What an idiot I’ve been. What a selfish, bullheaded idiot. If I’d listened to her, we’d be home now.

  “Chickadees!” Lach calls out in a singsong voice, and a fresh wave of adrenaline washes over me again. Sharp, hot pinpricks, like I’m being electrocuted.

  He’s trying to figure out which way we went. Looking for footprints on the trail or broken branches or something. I don’t know if the guy’s any kind of tracker, but if he is, I’m hoping our signs are too hard to read in the dark.

  We stay still, and after what seems like forever, he jogs away, back in the direction he came. I count three hundred Mississippis, then shake Jess gently.

  “Are you hit? Did he hit you?”

  “No, he missed and I just dropped. But why did he shoot Deirdre? Why did he shoot me?”

  I shake my head. “I don’t know. But we need to stop and think about our next step. We don’t know this island, but he does.”

  “Should we stay here? Or go?”

  “Stay, I think. At least for a little longer.”

  We’re in a good spot. Thick undergrowth obscures the small depression, hiding us from the path. I don’t see a flashlight or hear any animal noises, only the distant rumble of thunder. It sounds like it’s a ways off, but I don’t know how fast storms travel across a tiny island in the middle of the Caribbean. We’ve had showers here, at least one or two every afternoon, but not a full-on storm. Yet.

  “I almost forgot. I got this.” Jessalyn fumbles with something, a green battery light glows, and then there’s a crackle. Lach’s walkie. “Hello? Hello? Is anybody out there?”

  A voice crackles back. “Dimitri here. Who’s this?”

  She presses the button again, but I snatch the walkie from her and start searching frantically for the power button. “They can track these things,” I whisper.

  Where the hell is the goddamn button? I work in tech, for the love of God.

  A female’s voice comes through the walkie, low and modulated. “Jessalyn? Is that you?”

  I freeze, and Jess puts her hand on my leg.

  “Jessalyn?” Antonia says. “Is everything all right up there? Where’s Lach?”

  In the dark, our eyes meet.

  I press the button. “Antonia?”

  “Who’s this?”

  “Erin Gaines.”

  “Erin? Is everything all right?” Her voice is breathy. Light. I’m not fooled.

  I suck in a long, deep breath and let it out. Jess sends me the smallest nod.

  “No, Antonia. As a matter of fact, everything is not all right. But there’s no time to go into it now. Right now all I’m going to say is you better get your goddamn ducks in a row—call your lawyer, shred documents, wipe hard drives—because this is the end of the road.”

  She doesn’t answer. My fingers have begun to tingle.

  “RJ for Antonia,” comes a different voice.

  “Go,” Antonia says.

  “What’s your twenty?”

  “Studio C.”

  “I’ll meet you there in a second to pick up the yoga mats.”

  “Over.”

  And then she’s gone. I stare at the screen, wanting to scream. To smash this stupid walkie to powder.

  “Erin?” It’s Jess. “You really think she planned this?”

  I flash to Antonia’s wide eyes and pink-flushed face. The privileged young heiress, given the world and the attending belief that she’s above its rules. I sat there in her office, listened to her pitch, amused by the combination of her naïveté and boldness. And maybe impressed by it a little bit, too, if I’m being honest. Because I’ve always gravitated to ambitious women who prefer to apologize rather than ask permission.

  But maybe she knew that. Maybe she was just flattering me. I’ve been reading people a long time. Spotting potential, knowing who’s going to be a smart hire and who’ll be a drain on the team. Determining which investor is leading me on and which is worth having one more drink with.

  But she showered me with compliments, and I fell for it. In service of my ego, I overlooked the glaring breaches of privacy, the wildly inappropriate offer of the alternative L’Élu, and gave the princess a pass. But she knew what she was doing from the moment she came strolling into the dining room to fetch me. She knew.

  Oh, hell yes. Antonia Erdman is the ringmaster of this circus.

  “Erin?” Jess says.

  I realize she’s been waiting for my answer. “Yes,” I say. “I think she definitely planned this.” I tell her about Antonia’s proposition to me in her office back at Hidden Sands. About finding the bread tie that Agnes used in her hair and the bone that could’ve been human. When I say that I think Lach probably killed Agnes, too, and that she wasn’t the first, Jess scoffs.

  “That’s crazy. Utterly batshit crazy,” she says. “Why would Antonia want anyone dead? Why would she want us dead?”

  “I don’t know.” I think for a second. “But Deirdre was running a massage operation. Sex work. Her family gave her a choice—quit or lose them. But maybe she refused to stop. Maybe her family sent her here and paid Antonia to deal with her.”

  Jess doesn’t comment. But I am suddenly, horribly, overcome by the truth: I am the major shareholder of Jax. And I just announced I want to sell, long before the big payday we all planned for. I screwed up everyone’s plan to get rich. So someone must have decided to get rid of me—Ben or Sabine, Gigi or Arch, Layton.

  One of them wants to kill me.

  Jess speaks, her voice small and scared. “What are we going to do?”

  “We’re going to solve the problem,” I reply numbly.

  Because that’s what I do. I solve problems. Lach may be a lecherous guy with a gun, but still, at his core, he is nothing more than a problem. Anything I’ve ever done as a businesswoman—positioning Jax, strategizing ways to ensure that the company survives the cutthroat world of technology—will be useful to me now. If I can just keep my fear under control.

  “Okay,” I say. “They can track this walkie. Which means we have to ditch it. But that’ll help us. It’ll be a decoy.”

  “Where?” she asks.

  I don’t answer right away. There’s this thing you always hear in the startup business: “Build it and they will come.” It’s bullshit advice, for the most part; customers aren’t going to go somewhere they don’t want to go, use some service they don’t really want. But the point is a lot of folks do stuff on reflex, and I think the concept might apply here. I think Lach might be that essentially uncreative person who will assume that we’ll head someplace we’ve already been.

  We stay off the trail, clambering through the underbrush and, after about forty-five minutes, manage to locate the meadow. On the far edge, set just inside the line of trees, three dark mounds rise up in the moonlight. Our shelters are still standing, which I guess means we did a passable job of building them. Up close, Deirdre’s is the most impressive. I remember her weaving some palm leaves into a kind of decorative pattern and laying it out like a welcome mat at the opening.

  She’d beckoned Lach with a crook of her finger, and he’d sidled closer to inspect her handiwork. As they stood beside her shelter, he’d let a hand touch her shoulder, then drop down to her bottom. The memory makes me sick. He’d known then that he was going to shoot her.

  “Do it,” Jess says.

  Just as thunder rumbles over us, and the skies release a torrent of rain, I toss the walkie into Deirdre’s shelter. Then I yell above the noise.

  “Remember when we first got to camp, there was a bunch of supplies on the picnic tables? Supplies that Lach hadn’t brought in? There’s somebody else out here, maybe in another house or a warehouse or something, delivering food and equipment directly to the L’Élu groups.”

  Jess nods. “I was just thinking that. And there’s no way they regularly bring up people who are really detoxing without some kind of access to a clinic or a doctor. Addicts who are in withdrawal would need some kind of real medical help. There’s go
t to be a building close to us.”

  I grab her arm. “When I first arrived, my concierge told me there used to be a sugarcane plantation on this island. This field must’ve been one of the sugarcane fields.”

  “Okay.”

  “And if there was a plantation, there may be a house.” I think for a moment. “It’ll be on a high point. Maybe overlooking the other side of the island. A base camp for storage, communication, and medical supplies. Hopefully there’ll be a phone or a computer there too. I want to contact my daughter, let her know what’s happening, and warn her not to talk to anyone at Jax. Is there anyone on your end you trust?”

  Even in the rain and dark I can see her face is grim, jaw set firmly. “No.”

  “All right, then, we’ll try for Shorie.”

  The rain slows us down, and we walk for another half hour, tromping through the wet foliage, our feet sucking in the mud. I don’t see any sign of any building, much less a house. Maybe we should rethink our plan. I don’t say anything, but I know Jess is thinking the same thing, because when we come to a huge spreading kapok tree with thick branches and high, ridged roots like buttresses, she stops.

  “We can try again in the morning,” she shouts through the downpour and snags a broad leaf from a nearby banana tree.

  We scramble underneath the kapok, then take turns funneling rainwater from the broad leaf into our mouths. After scurrying out into the rain to pee, we settle in for the night, huddling in the space between two sheltering roots. We press close, not so much for warmth, but more from some deep, primal instinct for survival. I don’t think I’ve ever so keenly felt the comfort of another human body against my own.

  “I just don’t understand it.” Jessalyn’s head is against the massive trunk of the tree. “If we could just break it down . . .”

  I shake my head. It’s a simple question, just too horrifying to attempt to answer out loud.

  A setup.

  An execution.

  My conversation with Antonia has come into unbearably sharp focus in the time we’ve been walking in the dark. Someone hired her, paid her, to have the four of us killed. But because I’m the CEO of a successful company, she saw an opportunity and offered me a better deal—L’Élu II, for a couple of thousand dollars more and the possibility of some kind of business partnership. Basically she was double-crossing whomever she’d done business with and didn’t seem to be all that worried about it. But who was that person?

  Ben? Sabine? Layton? Perry’s parents?

  Jess interrupts my thoughts. “So let me get this straight. There are three L’Élus—the real one, the fun one, and the one where you die.”

  “That’s the long and short of it.”

  “What the Sam fuck . . .” She sniffs. “We sure drew the short straw, didn’t we?”

  “We’re going to figure our way out of this, I promise you.”

  She doesn’t answer. We both know I’m cheerleading, that words mean nothing in comparison to Lach and his gun, so I vow to keep my mouth shut until I have a real plan. The only sound now is the rain, and although I have a fleeting thought that one of us should keep watch, I don’t say anything. Both of us will need sleep to keep going.

  “Why are you here?” Jess says, out of the darkness. “Really?”

  “I blacked out and stole a friend’s car, then drove it to a college frat party where I passed out on the lawn.”

  Jessalyn shifts beside me. “You were drinking?”

  “I had one drink.”

  “That’s bullshit. Nobody blacks out after one drink.”

  “They said it could’ve happened because of stress. The next morning, my friends and family have miraculously organized an intervention where they tell me I’m going to Hidden Sands.”

  “Who led this discussion? Who found the resort?”

  I shrug. “I don’t remember. Who told you about Hidden Sands?”

  “My father.” She leaves it at that.

  “The thing I can’t get over,” I say, “is I’m not a big drinker. I mean, yes, I may have had one or two more drinks than normal at a dinner or a party since Perry died. But nothing at all outrageous. It just seems so . . .”

  “So what?”

  “Convenient, I guess. The way it happened . . .” My voice trails off.

  In the dark, I can feel her eyes on me. “You know what happened, don’t you? You think somebody drugged you.”

  I inhale then blow the breath out slowly. “The night before I left, I was googling like crazy. GHB is the big thing now. Liquid ecstasy. It’s really easy to get your hands on. I know it sounds ridiculous. But I do think that. I think somebody roofied me.”

  “That’s interesting,” Jess says. “Because before I came here, I think someone roofied me too.”

  31

  ERIN

  Jessalyn’s body shifts against me, and I wake. The rainforest is transforming from inky black to grayish green. It’s morning—Tuesday, I think. I didn’t really sleep, just dozed a bit all night long, drifting in and out of wakefulness, like I was traveling through a horrible half dream. And now I feel like I’ve awoken in a nightmare.

  I run my hands down my legs. They’re covered in stubbly hair and streaked with mud. Mosquito bites pock the rest of me, even up in my most tender parts. But there are some positives: The rubber band is still holding back my hair. It stopped raining in the night, and under the spreading branches of the kapok tree where we slept, my shirt and hiking shorts dried out almost completely.

  My only question is why Lach hasn’t found us yet. Surely he knows every inch of this island. Is he waiting on something?

  We crawl out from our hiding place to find the forest floor teeming with horned beetles and stick insects and narrow green lizards. Emerging from their hiding places, I guess, just like us, after the downpour. Some kind of birds—parrots maybe—whistle in the trees overhead. I look back at our tree. It’s festooned with orchids, bright pink and white and dotted with dark-wine markings like a native warrior around pollen-yellow centers, sprouting out of every crevice. A fairy tree. A sight that would take my breath away, if I weren’t being chased by a man with a gun.

  The wind carries with it a whiff of a fire. Old or new, I don’t know. But it does make me remember what Grigore told me. Erdman International owns Hidden Sands and three-quarters of Ile Saint Sigo. But there are a few people still living up here, farmers, he said, and fishermen. It sure would be great to run into one right about now. Unless, of course, they turn out to be working for Antonia.

  We take turns peeing; then I take a minute, reorienting my inner compass. I notice Jess is looking at me with an odd expression.

  “You’ve got blood all over your shirt,” she says, her voice edged with horror. “And on your neck. It’s her blood.” She pulls out her shirt, then splays her hands out. “Oh my God. It’s under my nails! He shot her in the heart!”

  “Jess. We need to go.”

  She covers her face with her hands. I think she may be crying.

  I touch her shoulder. “The more we stay on the move, the better our chances of avoiding Lach.”

  She wipes her eyes and gulps in air. “Okay. I’m good. Let’s go.”

  We search for a path, but it turns out we don’t need one, because almost immediately the jungle opens up to reveal that I was spot-on in my speculations last night. There is indeed a jewel in the crown of the former plantation that probably used to rule every social, economic, and political aspect of this island. The big house. From our hiding place under the tree, we’d been less than a quarter of a mile away from it.

  An imposing white coral stone building with a red tile roof, the centuries-old structure is studded with balconies and porticoes and awnings. A series of stone stairs zigzag up the hill and then onto the foundation walls to the grand front entrance. The place looms over the surrounding fields, a vast, honest-to-God mansion, sun bleached and windswept. It’s not pretty—it’s actually kind of ungainly and forbidding—but I think that’s kind o
f the point. It looks the way it does to send a message, one of uncontested privilege. Of timeless wealth and permanence. A worshipful monument to the horrors of colonial exploitation and entitlement.

  Jess studies the place, arms folded. “Fuck this place.”

  I nod. “Yes. Absolutely. Fuck it times a thousand. But we need a computer so I can contact my daughter and the FBI and get the hell off this island, so we’ve got to go in.”

  She squints into the sun. “Do you think anyone’s home?”

  “No idea. Ten to one, though, whoever is in there is connected to Antonia. So we better be invisible.” My gaze sweeps over the facade. The numerous windows opening into numerous rooms. The house is huge. I don’t know how we’re going to sneak through it undetected. Especially in broad daylight. But anything could happen between now and when the sun goes down. We can’t risk wasting any more time.

  We creep around to the back of the house in search of a more unobtrusive entrance than the grand front door. Sure enough, on the far side, we find stairs leading up to a back portico. I notice a small dish affixed to a railing. Satellite internet. Perfect.

  A back door lets us into a wide central hall, and pressed against the back wall, we listen for activity. We’re rewarded with the sounds of a door slam and the clacking of heels above us. Hopefully, they’ll stay upstairs.

  I take in our surroundings. The house, with its rows and rows of wavy-glassed windows, is sun drenched but only minimally decorated. A few antique sofas and tables line the walls of the wide hallway. A scarred, sun-bleached wood floor. Walls papered in faded golds and blues and greens. Carved cornices, heavy moldings, columns, and medallions adorn doorways and the soaring central staircase.

  Jess and I creep down the hall, poking our heads into each room. One room, the floor-to-ceiling windows hung with puddling panels of blue silk, seems to be a living room. There’s an old carved sofa, an inlaid wardrobe, a long wood table, and a few other scattered pieces of furniture. The room next to it is neatly stacked with clear plastic tubs, some empty, others filled with paper towels, toilet paper, and other sundries.

  Jess pulls out a bottle of green bath gel. “Oh my God. Look at this.” She touches the smears of blood on her neck and chest. “We could be in and out in five minutes. Just get the blood off.”