“Hey, dinner’s ready! Come and get it, hungry people.”
Keri was holding a saucepan containing something brown and steamy. Sara smiled, finding the girl’s enthusiasm infectious. As she and Joe went into the kitchen, she resolved to find whatever was served up delicious. Fortunately, Keri’s alleged ‘vegetarian gumbo’ was pretty good. As they finished up the last of the beer, Sara found herself relaxing and feeling more positive. She had had just enough to drink, she decided.
“Gumbo doesn’t have to have any meat in it! Or fish! Just the holy trinity of vegetables,” Keri said.
The young woman was engaged in a vigorous defense of her recipe, with Joe and Ryan taking the opposite view.
“Holy trinity?” Sara asked, to try and deflect what might become an actual, and very dumb, argument.
“The holy trinity—onions, naturally,” explained Keri, counting them off on her fingers, “celery, and of course, bell peppers. Okay, so I had to use different peppers here, but it’s the same.”
“You can’t just change a classic recipe and then say it’s the same,” Joe argued, gesturing with his beer bottle for emphasis. “It’s like saying you can have a cheeseburger without cheese.”
“Or a Murder She Wrote without a murder,” chipped in Ryan.
Keri rolled her eyes and served out the last of the food before opening a Coke for herself. She was the only one not drinking alcohol, Sara noticed, and she wondered if that was one of the problems Keri had mentioned. Then she was distracted by a movement outside the window. She stood up, swaying slightly, and glimpsed a hint of blue vanishing into the deep green of the jungle. It had been a shirt, she decided, probably a man’s shirt.
“I think somebody’s lurking around outside, guys. Maybe a thief or a vandal?”
They all trooped outside when she explained what she had seen, or thought she had seen. At first, nobody could see any evidence of the intruder. Keri asked if it mattered whether somebody had been nosing around.
“Technically, this whole area is private land—our land, as much as anyone’s,” Joe pointed out. “And there’s quite a lot of stuff around to steal if anybody is that way inclined. There should be security, but that’s another thing that’s not happened.”
The two couples split up to search more quickly, but there was no evidence of wrongdoing. They did, however, find a large hole in the fence surrounding the complex. Ryan and Keri called the Hansens over to the bungalow, where they found a dead, black cockerel under the kitchen window. The bird’s head had almost been ripped off. But, as Joe pointed out, there was no blood spatter, suggesting it had been killed elsewhere.
“Either we’ve annoyed the local voodoo priestess, or they’re offering us a free chicken for the next lot of gumbo,” Ryan said finally.
Nobody laughed.
“Could be a bird of prey that dropped it,” Joe suggested but did not sound convinced. “A sea eagle or something like that?”
“How about feral cats?” Sara asked. “Don’t a lot of these islands have a cat problem?”
“Not to mention rats,” Joe added. “There could be any number of innocent explanations. But none of them seem likely after what you saw. And that hole in the fence was definitely man-made.”
“Should we call the cops?” Keri asked. “I mean, isn’t this a threat? As well as being awful and disgusting.”
“Yeah, I guess so,” said Sara, looking to Joe for confirmation. “It should be reported.”
“I’ll call them, for what it’s worth, and attach a picture,” said Joe, taking a close-up snapshot on his phone. “And tomorrow I’ll track down Laplace and ask him what the hell is going on.”
It suddenly seemed late, and Sara remembered that the tropical twilight came down very quickly. She had read that the suddenness of nightfall alarmed those unused to it. All at once, she felt isolated when they went back into the bungalow. Joe called the police, and they listened to him answer a series of questions.
“No, we didn’t see anyone kill the cockerel… No, it wasn’t our property… We did see someone running away… well, my wife thinks she saw… Okay.”
He ended the call and looked at the others ruefully.
“There’ll be an officer along in the morning. They said that there’s nothing to worry about, and it was probably just someone’s dinner that got carried off by a large gull or something.”
Sara didn’t think that sounded very convincing but said nothing. It was another odd, unwelcome development that suggested Sainte Isabel was a much more complicated place than she had believed.
***
“Is she really keeping watch?” Joe asked, looking at the bedroom door. “Armed and ready for action?”
Sara laughed as she slid under the covers, snuggled up to him. It was just after midnight, and the Hansens had decided to go to bed. Keri had declared that she wouldn’t sleep if there was someone lurking around. Ryan had whined a little, then gone off to sleep alone. Sara had tried and failed to persuade Keri to get some shuteye.
“I told her the doors and windows seemed pretty secure. She said she was going to sit up with a speargun in case there were more intruders.”
Joe absorbed the information that Keri was sitting in the kitchen, in pitch darkness, with a loaded weapon.
“Don’t worry,” Sara went on, squeezing him somewhere intimate. “She hasn’t been drinking, after all. I bet if you whistle a happy tune when you go to the bathroom, she probably won’t shoot you. What are the odds if she tried? Speargun, no light, she probably wouldn’t score a direct hit.”
“That’s very reassuring,” he said.
“You could just end up pinned to the fridge by your spleen,” Sara went on. “No biggie.”
Joe sighed.
“Ryan really knows how to pick ‘em. I think I preferred the one who did aromatherapy for pets. Though Keri is a major improvement over the one who didn’t believe in using deodorant and the one who thought the moon landings were faked.”
Since Joe had mentioned his old friend, Sara decided to ask what she thought of as the Ryan Question.
“Honey,” she began. “It’s not Keri I’ve got a problem with. Everybody has a friend their partner doesn’t like much. You don’t like Beverley, for instance.”
“Hey!” Joe protested. “She’s okay, she’s just kind of—you know, strident. And she’s drunk a lot of the time.”
“I rest my case,” Sara said. “Point is, I just don’t get you and Ryan. It’s like some dumb buddy movie rather than a real friendship—two mismatched guys having adventures. Not even a well-written movie. You’ve got nothing in common, you hardly ever talk about the old days in college. Heck, you hardly ever talk at all, he just hangs around. With us. And yet he has lots of dumb jock buddies, doesn’t he? He can go and get drunk with them, push girls into swimming pools, throw up in plant pots, all that stuff. So why does he want to be with us all the time?”
She felt Joe tense within her arms and wondered if he would simply become defensive, as had happened so often before when she had asked why they were friends.
“Sara, we go back a long way. And he doesn’t have any real friends other than me, just those dumb jocks he sometimes parties with. He knows you don’t like him, and… Hey, can’t we just get along for a couple of weeks?”
Put like that, it sounded sensible. But she still sensed there was another dimension to the friendship she did not understand. Ryan was just the kind of guy Joe normally despised—a man with no drive, no work ethic, rudderless and self-indulgent. So why remain friends?
“Are you too soft-hearted to tell him you can’t be friends anymore?” she asked, cuddling him closer. “Is that it? You a big softie?”
The tension in Joe’s muscles seemed to increase. She could not see his face but could imagine familiar frown lines forming. Again, she had failed to get at some truth she was sure he was keeping from her. Something about Ryan.
“Can’t we just get some sleep?” he asked, disentangling himself fro
m her and turning over. “Big day tomorrow. We’re here to work, remember.”
Sara rolled over onto her back and stared upwards, not feeling very tired despite the long journey, the swim, and the sea air. A few minutes later, she heard voices next door, then giggling, and finally a series of rhythmic noises that told her exactly what Ryan and Keri were doing.
“Good news,” she whispered at Joe. “We can safely assume she’s not holding the speargun anymore.”
Joe did not reply.
***
Sara woke to a full moon streaming through the bedroom window. It silvered the whole room with its light, made the place seem unreal, magical. She reached out instinctively for Joe, felt his side of the bed was empty and cold. He had been gone for a while. She sat up, listening. There was no sound. Ryan and Keri were asleep at last, or at least no longer in the throes of passion.
Sara got up and went to the window. Beyond the reef she could see a wonderful ship, three-masted and in full sail, heading parallel to the shore. It moved just below the newly risen tropical moon. Then she noticed figures on the beach, silhouetted by the pale light dancing on the waves. They seemed to be walking slowly up, toward the bungalow. Toward Sara. She felt their gaze on her, knew she was standing in the moonlight. One of the strangers was much smaller than the rest, and loped along, arms hanging low.
“Joe?”
She turned around at the sound of footsteps outside the room. The bedroom door stood ajar, and she heard the soft impact of a hand pushing it wide open. She took a few steps back toward the bed.
“Joe?”
He walked into the moonlight, emerging from the shadow beyond the door. With him came a smell, or rather a whole panoply of odors—saltwater, seaweed, and something else, the foulness of rotting meat. Joe reached out for her, but she did not want to go to him. Instead, Sara felt afraid. It both was and was not Joe. It was a Joe she had never seen, a hideous version of the man she loved.
She backed off, collided with the windowsill, as he came closer. The window shattered and bony hands clutched her, held her firmly as Joe put his hand on her cheek. As he leaned closer, she tried to turn her head away, knowing what must happen next. Flesh fell away from his face, dropping in rotting lumps, exposing the gleaming bone. His smile became a corpse-grin.
“No!”
“Sara? You okay?”
Joe was looking down at her, one side of his face illuminated with a pale glow. She almost lashed out at him, her fists held up beside her face, panic almost overwhelming. Then she grasped reality, understood that she had just had a vivid nightmare. Joe turned on the light and smiled down at her soothingly. Nothing was wrong. He was just Joe.
“Bad dream?”
“Oh God, yeah,” she groaned. “First night in a strange place, I guess. And the flight to Trinidad.”
Already the details of the dream were vanishing like footprints erased by the tide. She recalled a ship, moonlight, figures moving up the beach. Joe had been involved, somehow. And there had been something small, a dwarf perhaps…
“Gotta love those disturbed sleep patterns,” said Joe. “I’m going for a whizz and then I’m getting a soda. All that beer. Want something?”
“No, thanks,” she said. “I’m fine.”
While he was gone, she looked out of the bedroom window but saw nothing beyond the reef, nothing on the beach. By the time he returned she had forgotten the dream, retaining in her mind nothing more than the flavor of it all.
Sea, moon, ship…
The words ran through her mind like a mantra, until Joe reached out for her and she banished them.
***
The next morning, just after nine, Detective Sergeant Charity Lomax of the Sainte Isabel Constabulary arrived in a jeep. The coat of arms stenciled on the side of the vehicle, Sara noticed, bore the British flag and imperial crown, plus a sailing ship, blue waves, and palm trees. The broken-necked monkey might be the most commonplace symbol on Sainte Isabel, but it seemed that it went unnoticed by officials. Perhaps, Sara wondered, it was seen as a little vulgar or in poor taste by those who actually ran the island.
Lomax was dressed in a bright shirt and denim shorts, with red sneakers. A short, thick-set woman, she did not look like a detective. But she took statements and examined the dead cockerel, which Joe had carefully bagged to prevent it from attracting carrion birds and other local fauna. After a few moments of studying the unlucky fowl, Lomax nodded and wrote something in a notebook.
“And you saw someone running into the bush?” she asked Sara.
“Yes,” Sara said firmly. “I saw a blue shirt, just before the person vanished into the trees. I’m guessing it was a man, but it could have been a woman.”
Lomax nodded again, made another note, then turned to Joe. The officer had, Sara felt, a tendency to talk to her husband as if he was in charge, though she had explained that they were partners in the Pirate Cove resort. On the other hand, she reasoned, Lomax might simply be following procedure by speaking to the guy who filed the report.
“It might be a rather nasty prank,” the officer said. “I doubt that the bird got here by accident, or that its death was accidental. Have you had any previous trouble with the inlanders?”
The question puzzled them all. Seeing their reaction, Lomax looked puzzled.
“You are aware that some people living in the interior don’t like outsiders? It’s a bad attitude, in a place that depends on tourism. But they generally keep themselves to themselves. They usually know better than to upset visitors.”
“So why would these—these inlanders bother us? We just got here!” said Ryan, sounding aggrieved. “We’ve done nothing wrong!”
Lomax seemed to weigh Ryan up before replying to him.
“This whole area is associated with their history, in a way,” she explained. “You see, these people are descended from the old-time buccaneers. This island was their base for decades. Then the French arrived on Sainte Isabel in force to stamp out piracy and there was a massacre. The survivors hid in the jungle, fought a kind of guerilla war. They’ve always had a rather bloody-minded view of laws and governments. They still call themselves les boucaniers—the buccaneers. Why do you think this is called Pirate Cove?”
“They think it’s their territory?” asked Joe, aghast. “That we’ve stolen their land? We have all the relevant paperwork, a proper lease—it’s all in order with the Governor’s office.”
Lomax gave an expressive shrug.
“If I had to guess, they probably believe that this land is not truly yours, Mr. Hansen—that you should not have put up a fence blocking access to the beach. It is a nice beach. I assume they would use it sometimes, perhaps for barbecues, or maybe some of their rituals.”
Sara felt her heart sink and gazed at the wall of greenery that surrounded the resort site. This seemed to be the last piece in the puzzle, the reason why work had fallen so far behind. Laplace had said nothing about a campaign of harassment. Hobart had never even mentioned troublesome locals with a contempt for the law.
So why don’t I feel this is the whole story? Sara wondered. Why do I think there’s another puzzle piece we haven’t seen yet?
“You have been here before, yes?” Lomax asked Joe. “Your local businesspeople, they said nothing about les boucaniers?”
Joe shook his head and said nothing. Sara realized he was too furious to speak, consumed by rage against Hobart and Laplace. His fists were clenched by his sides, his face flushed.
“I am surprised,” said Lomax, and for the first time, she sounded sympathetic, her former briskness softening. “It is a difficult situation. I am sure the authorities will want to help in any way they can. I will make a point of reporting this to the police commissioner when I get back. In person.”
“Why a black cockerel?” asked Keri, who had been unusually quiet since the detective arrived. “Is it a voodoo thing? I’ve seen it in movies, but…”
Keri trailed off and Lomax shrugged again.
; “They call the old slave religion voudon, the Francophones,” she said, putting her notebook away. “We English speakers don’t think much of it, Ms. Pedon, but we are careful not to mention it unless we’re being tactless. In this case, they might be trying to put a genuine curse on you or your project.” She looked back at Joe. “Or they might simply want you to believe that you are cursed, which can have much the same effect. Either way, it’s unpleasant—I’m sorry it happened.”
“Sorry?” Ryan said loudly. Keri put a hand on his arm, but he shook her off. “You’re the police, aren’t you going to do anything? Well, I guess we know why the goddamn British empire isn’t around anymore—you just let any bunch of jerks victimize innocent people. Some police department!”
Lomax put her hands on her broad hips and looked Ryan in the eye.
“Sir, there are precisely five police officers on this island, not including the commissioner, which has a population of nearly three thousand, plus three or four times that number of tourists at the height of the season. If somebody is murdered, we investigate. When a bird dies in mysterious circumstances, we take note of the fact. I will do everything I can.”
Keri had already nudged Ryan in the ribs, and he shut up, eyes downcast.
“Now, if you will excuse me,” Lomax went on, “I have a drug smuggler to interrogate back in Port Louis. If you have any more evidence to report, I will, of course, consider it. And I would strongly suggest you get your security cameras working, as a matter of priority. Mr. Hansen, let me give you my card.”
They watched the detective’s jeep vanish in a cloud of yellowish dust, and Ryan muttered a few curses.
“Okay, so what did she mean by that stuff about phones?” Keri asked.
Joe stared at her, baffled, while Ryan guffawed. Sara stifled a laugh and was about to explain that Francophone simply meant French-speaking, but then saw Keri’s mischievous expression. The girl had managed to relieve the tension a little.
Devil Ship: Supernatural Suspense with Scary & Horrifying Monsters (Devil Ship Series Book 1) Page 4
