The Complete H-Series of The Eulalie Park Mysteries

by Fiona Snyckers

  “I felt so guilty about last night. When I woke up and turned on my phone, I found a bunch of messages from Peter from the night before. I made such a fool of myself – drinking all those cocktails and passing out at the bar. Apparently, he looked everywhere for me. He was really worried, and I felt so bad.”

  “So, to make amends, you gave him twenty-five-thousand dollars?”

  “Not exactly, but it’s true that we had been discussing the investment for ages…”

  “You haven’t even known him for ages.”

  “Will you stop? Let me tell this my way. We’d been talking about the investment for days, and we were going to discuss it some more last night. Then I flaked on him and he was frantic with worry. When he came around here this morning it seemed like the only decent thing I could do was to give him the money to invest like I’d half-promised anyway.”

  Eulalie’s lips tightened. She couldn’t believe that her strategy had gone so wrong. In trying to keep Fleur and Pringle apart, she had pushed Fleur right into his trap.

  “Look,” she said. “You’re obviously concerned about the money. Get on the phone to your bank right now and reverse the transaction while there’s still time. If Peter turns up with a reasonable explanation, you can simply make the payment again.”

  Fleur was silent.

  “What is it?” said Eulalie. “What’s wrong? It’s the sensible thing to do. Electronic payments can usually be reversed within twenty-four hours.”

  “It wasn’t an electronic payment.”

  “A check then. It can be stopped.”

  “It wasn’t a check either.”

  The back of Eulalie’s neck prickled. “What do you mean? You couldn’t possibly have…”

  “You know how Peter has been having such trouble with his stupid bank here on Prince William Island? I told you about it. His money is all tied up in England and they’ve been creating difficulties to prevent him from accessing it. It was no good for me to make the payment electronically because he wouldn’t be able to get at it. So, this morning at eight o’clock when my bank opened, we went and withdrew the money in cash and I gave it all to him.”

  Eulalie had to turn away for a moment to hide her irritation. She turned back when she could control her voice.

  “You realize that your own bank has probably got you flagged as a drug dealer now?”

  “It may have been a little unorthodox, but…”

  “And now he has disappeared with the money.”

  “He hasn’t disappeared! There must be a reasonable explanation for…”

  “Then why did you call me?” Eulalie’s voice rose. “Why did I come out of a meeting to find nine frantic messages from you? He has only been gone a couple of hours. Why are you so worried? Is it because you know in your heart that he’s a conman who has stolen your money?”

  She saw anger flare in Fleur’s eyes and braced herself for a fight. Fleur’s temper was legendary – as epic and out of control as her flaming red hair would suggest.

  Then the anger died, and she seemed to fold in on herself. She sank onto a bar stool and began to cry.

  “Chérie! Don’t cry. He’s not worth it.” Eulalie rushed to embrace Fleur.

  “I’m such a fool,” she sobbed. “I deserve everything that’s happened to me. It’s all my fault.”

  “No, no. You have done nothing wrong, ma belle. All you are guilty of is opening your heart and trusting someone. The only person to blame is him.”

  “What if we’re wrong and he walks through that door at any moment?”

  “We’re not wrong,” said Eulalie. “Just this morning I had a Skype conversation with Lady Mary Coke – the woman he had a relationship with before you. He was calling himself Sir Richard Trevisian then. He made off with fifty thousand pounds of her money, so you have got off relatively lightly.”

  Fleur sobbed even harder. “I thought I loved him. I thought he loved me. I thought this was it – we were going to be together forever. I hated you for the way you looked at him – so suspiciously. I knew what you were thinking. I knew what everyone would say. That it was too soon. That I didn’t know anything about him. But it felt so right, Eulalie. My heart told me I could trust him. And now you’re telling me he’s just some c-common conman.”

  “He’s a very uncommon conman. That’s what makes him so successful. He researches his targets before he arranges to meet them accidentally. He knew all about your parents. He knew about your trust fund. That was his goal all along.”

  Fleur wept into her hands.

  Eulalie caught Jethro’s eye and signaled him over.

  “Would it help if I got your money back for you?” she asked.

  She had to repeat the question before it penetrated Fleur’s misery.

  “Yes!” she wailed. “It would help. But it’s long gone by now. You can’t do it, Eulalie. You can’t help me – no one can.”

  “Listen to me, chérie. I’m leaving you here with Jethro. He is going to look after you. I will find this man and if he still has one dollar of your money left, I will get it back for you. That’s a promise.”

  Eulalie turned on her heel and walked out of the coffee shop.

  Another text made Eulalie look down as she reached her Vespa. It was from Chief Macgregor.

  Chief Macgregor: Fire alarm activated at Megamoxy premises. Smoke detected on top floor. Meeting postponed to five o’clock.

  “Huh.”

  Eulalie was impressed. Somehow, the chief had come through. Of course, there was a million to one chance that the smoke and the fire alarm were a coincidence, but she didn’t think so. Chief Macgregor had engineered this, and it had bought her the time she needed.

  This was all the more reason to make sure that the picnic Dr. Autry was planning never happened.

  Eulalie had just started up her Vespa when her phone rang. The number was withheld, which meant it was either a telemarketer or someone connected to her case. She decided not to take the risk of ignoring it and switched off her scooter.

  “Park,” she said shortly.

  “I need to speak to you.”

  It took her a moment to realize that the person was speaking in Guillaumoise – the language of her village. She tensed.

  “Who is this?”

  “You know who it is, Eulalie. Meet me at Robson’s Field in thirty minutes. Come alone. I don’t have to tell you that I’ll know if you don’t.”

  “How will I…?”

  Eulalie stopped speaking when she realized he had hung up.

  It took her three tries to start her Vespa because her hands were shaking so much. She took a breath and tried to visualize warm honey flowing through her body, heating her veins and stilling her tremors.

  Within minutes, she felt calm enough to drive.

  As she headed north on the Coast Road in the opposite direction to Waylon Construction, she tried to empty her mind of everything except her destination. The northern part of the island was the most uninteresting from a scenic point of view. There were no sandy beaches and no dramatic cliff tops. Most of it was just miles and miles of sugarcane plantations.

  Robson’s Field was a failed farm that had been started up by an Englishman shortly after the British took over Prince William Island in 1881. Horatio Robson had staked out a few thousand acres of flat farmland for himself and set about trying to grow crops and raise sheep, in an attempt to prove that Prince William Island was good for something other than sugarcane farming.

  What Robson didn’t realize was that his land was too close to the sea. The earth was brackish and hostile to all plants except for the indigenous scrub that grew there. When his crops failed, and his sheep died, he tried to switch to growing sugarcane, but his land wouldn’t support that either.

  In the end, he had abandoned his farm and moved himself and his family back to England. The local vegetation had slowly reclaimed the farm and now there were just a few tumble-down buildings left to mark Horatio Robson’s failed dream.

  I
t didn’t even occur to Eulalie to take someone with her, or to tell anyone where she was going. The man she was going to meet wanted her to come alone and so she would.

  A twenty-five-minute drive took her to the dirt road turn-off that led to the old farmhouse of Robson’s Field. She puttered down the dirt road, feeling the dust flying into her nose and her mouth. As the farm buildings came into view, she scanned the area, looking for signs of a human presence.

  There was nothing, but then she hadn’t really expected anything.

  She parked her scooter and took off her helmet. Vanity made her want to brush her hair and put on lip gloss, but she knew she was being watched.

  She walked up to the old farmhouse and said to the empty air, “I’m here.”

  “Thank you for coming.”

  She turned as the voice spoke behind her. How had he got there? That was the sort of thing she did. She found that she didn’t like having it done to her.

  Eulalie folded her arms and looked at him. “You have my eyes.”

  His teeth flashed white in a grin. “You can have them back if you like.”

  She smiled faintly in return.

  “I’m going to hug you now,” he said. “I know I haven’t earned it, and you can step away if you don’t want it.”

  “You’re right,” Eulalie said. “You haven’t earned it.”

  But she didn’t step away. He brushed a hand over her hair, and then his arms moved around her and folded her against him. For a moment, she held herself stiffly. Then she relaxed against him and let her cheek rest on his chest.

  Eulalie’s eyes prickled fiercely with tears. This was what she had been missing her whole life. Yes, she had had many father figures – uncles who loved her and gave her fatherly affection. But she had never had this – this blood and bone connection from her sire. She breathed in his scent, and thought she recognized it from her dreams.

  Eulalie squeezed her eyes shut and refused to let the tears fall. This was the man who had walked away from her and never come back.

  His breathing was as unsteady as hers.

  He stepped back and sat down on a low crumbling wall, gesturing for her to do the same. Eulalie sat next to him and looked up at her father’s face.

  “I saw you kill him,” she said. “Sawyer Blakely. I saw you shoot that arrow through his chest.”

  A crease appeared between his brows.

  “You saw me…?”

  She shook her head impatiently. “In a dream. I was Sawyer Blakely. I saw you shoot me.”

  “Ah. Of course. You get that from your mother’s side. She would have been a great seer, just as her mother was before her.”

  “And still is.”

  “And still is. I am sorry you saw that. It must have been painful for you. If you saw it happen, you must know that he had a gun in his hand and was raising it to fire at me. It was self-defense.”

  “Yes, I know that. But I also know that you could have put that arrow through any part of his body. You could have put it through the hand holding the gun. You didn’t have to kill him, but you did. I’ve been wondering why.”

  “Did you hear what he said before I shot him?”

  “I did,” said Eulalie. “I know exactly what he was planning. But you can’t go around killing people because you disagree with what they say.”

  “You don’t understand.” Lucien Park hopped off the wall and began to pace. “Sawyer Blakely was the single driving force behind building a theme-park in the forest. He is the one who convinced Megamoxy that a jungle theme-park would only be popular if they built it in the middle of an actual jungle.”

  “Why would he do that?”

  “Because otherwise there wouldn’t have been a job for him. He only gets hired when companies want to develop ecologically sensitive sites. If it were a piece of land with no environmental significance, he would be out of a job. Megamoxy didn’t approach him for this job. He went to them and pitched the forest of Prince William Island as the perfect place for their theme-park. He presented them with artist’s impressions of a cable car running from the cliff down into the forest, of a paved road full of tour buses cutting through the middle of the forest to reach the theme-park. He convinced them that their unique selling point was to have a jungle-themed park inside a real jungle.”

  “Did he give them an idea of what it would cost? The deep forest is one of the most inaccessible places on earth. The sums can’t possibly add up. The costs would have been astronomical.”

  “I suspect that he fudged the cost estimates. Once the project was underway, it wouldn’t be his problem any more. He would already have been paid his fee and be on to the next job by then.”

  “So, he deliberately tried to steer companies towards environmentally sensitive sites to justify his consultant’s fee?”

  “Yes, but it was more than that. I spent three days in the forest with him. He hated the forest like it was a person that was deliberately trying to kill him. He used to ramble on about all the wetlands that had been concreted over as a result of his work. He gloated about rivers he had dammed up, rain forests he had burned down, coastlines he had developed. He actively hated the natural world.”

  “He sounds like a psycho.”

  “He took pleasure in his job, that’s all I can say. Without him there pushing his agenda, Megamoxy would have been looking at cheaper and less complicated sites for their theme-park. He was the one who found Waylon Construction, knowing that their financial difficulties would make it easier for them to overlook the moral issues. He was the one who identified Dominic Chambry as the perfect mole inside the governor’s office. He had been masterminding the whole thing. So, yes. I put an arrow through his black heart, and I don’t regret it. He was going to destroy my home and all the people in it. When he raised his arm to put a bullet through me, I put an arrow through him instead.”

  “But the deal is still going ahead,” Eulalie said. “Megamoxy are having a meeting about it today. It was going to be at midday, but it’s been moved to five o’clock.”

  “Ah.” Lucien smiled. “Your resourceful Chief Macgregor.”

  “He’s not my Chief Macgregor.”

  “You haven’t claimed him yet, but you will. In the meantime, you should find a way to attend that meeting. You should tell them that you know of a low-impact, low-risk site for their theme-park that already has existing roads and infrastructure and can easily be reached from Queen’s Town.”

  “And where is this perfect site?”

  “We’re standing in it.” He spread his arms and turned in a circle. “Robson’s Field is the perfect place for them to build their stupid park. It is no good for farming and it is not ecologically sensitive. If they must build such a monstrosity on Prince William Island, they can build it here, and stay the hell away from the deep forest.”

  “Why do you care?” asked Eulalie. “You left the forest.”

  You left me.

  “Yes, I left, and so did you. Maybe I went further away than you did, but I always came back. I’ve kept an eye on you over the years, Eulalie. I’ve watched you grow up. I secretly helped your grandmother get a lease and then ownership of what is now known as Angel’s Place. I watched you go away to college and then return. I watched you build a life and a career for yourself in Queen’s Town. I watched you make good friends and meet a good man.”

  Eulalie shook her head. She couldn’t believe what she was hearing. The thought of him keeping track of her all those years boggled her mind. And when she remembered how she had grown up longing for a father, it made her angry too.

  “Why didn’t you make contact before now? You could have let us know you were still alive.”

  He paused before answering. “I believed I had forfeited the right to have a relationship with you when I left. I know I was young, but that wasn’t an excuse. I had behaved selfishly. I felt as though I didn’t deserve you.”

  “It wasn’t about you and what you deserved. It was about me and my need to know my fa
ther.”

  “I know that now. That’s part of why I’ve made contact. The other part has to do with saving the forest we both love from being destroyed.”

  There was so much to process, Eulalie knew she would be mulling over this conversation for months to come. But right now, there was one last question that interested her.

  “What about my mother?” she asked. “Where did she go when she left?”

  “I have no idea.” He stared into the distance as though he were gazing back in time. “I know she dreamed of leaving. We talked about it many times, but I had no idea that she would go after she had you. I was shocked when I came back after a year and found that she had left. You were being raised by Angel and I decided to leave well enough alone. I know that was selfish of me. I’ve tried to trace your mother over the years, but without success. It’s as though she vanished from the face of the earth.”

  Chapter 24

  Eulalie’s phone rang as she was on her way back to town.

  She pulled over to take the call.

  “Yes, Chief?”

  “We have an identity on the man calling himself Lord Peter Pringle. His real name is Tom Stubbs. His parents were American, and he grew up in Hong Kong. He went to school with the children of British civil servants, which is probably how he learned to imitate the accent and manner. There’s an international warrant for his arrest. As members of Interpol, we are entitled to enforce it.”

  “Good,” said Eulalie, her mind racing. “That’s great. I think a good time to enforce it would be at five o’clock at this meeting at Megamoxy. You’re allowed to interrupt a business meeting in order to apprehend an international felon, right?”

  “Right.”

  “And you can take me along as police liaison. There’s something I want to say to the meeting.”

  “I need to remind you that you were brought into this case to solve the murder of Sawyer Blakely.”

  “That was self-defense,” she said quickly. “According to my information, Blakely was pulling out a gun to fire at the person who was guiding him through the forest. That person shot him with an arrow. The gun slipped out of Blakely’s hand and down into the undergrowth on the forest floor. It is probably still there, with Blakely’s fingerprints on it. It wouldn’t be proper for me to guide your officers there, but I can organize someone who will.”