For the first time, I felt far away from my previous life. Peace had found me, at least externally. Only time would tell if it would penetrate my soul.
We swam, wordless, for almost an hour, up and down the beach, back closer to shore and over the coral reef, then over the white sands between the rocks. Fish still avoided us, though once in a while one would swim up to me, then dart away when I reached out to touch it. I wondered if they would eat out of my hand, but I had no food to pursue the answer.
Finally, we drifted in to shore between two piles of rocks obviously cleared out of the bay to facilitate swimming and snorkeling.
“I wonder what time it is,” Carolyn said as we walked out of the water. She was even more attractive now, dripping wet like a Sports Illustrated swimsuit model, her tiny green bikini concealing very little.
“One o’clock,” I replied without hesitation.
“How do you know? You aren’t wearing a watch.”
“Take my word for it, I know.”
I always know. Whether it was a talent or a curse, I have an internal clock that is never more than five minutes off. I don’t know how it works, but it does.
“I promised I’d meet my mother for lunch. Better go, since I’m late already. See you at dinner.” She slipped off the fins and scurried away. I watched her for a minute, trying to develop an interest, because she was obviously interested in me. But every time I looked at her, I thought of the pale woman at the dinner table and realized that she attracted me much more. But in a strange way.
Carolyn was certainly attractive, small and lithe and tan, with a very fine nose and a clear complexion. And she was friendly, with a very extraverted personality. But there was something missing for me, I wasn’t sure what. And there was a strange feeling when I stared at her, as though I’d known her somewhere before.
“Hi.” The voice was tiny, as was its source. I looked down. Sitting on a rock beside the water’s edge was the young girl at my table the night before, the young girl that I also felt I knew somehow.
“Hi yourself,” I said.
“Take me snorkeling, please.” She was holding a mask, snorkel, and fins, drawing pictures in the sand with her right foot. The picture looked a little like a pyramid.
“Your mother should do that.”
“They won’t let her.”
“Who won’t?”
“You know—they.”
I knew in general who they were, so I didn’t pursue my question. “Why not?” I asked instead.
“I don’t know. They never let my mother do anything. Or me either, for that matter.”
“They let you rent the snorkel and fins.”
She shook her head. “I did that myself. You can charge it to your room on the ship, you know. They didn’t think of that when they let me keep my key.”
I’ll bet they didn’t, I thought, suspecting that they didn’t know where she was at the moment, either.
“Ran off from them, did you?” I asked.
She nodded. “They’re creeps, you know.”
Of course, the correct thing to do would be to take her back to her mother, who was probably worried about her. On the other hand, people, even kids, came on cruises to have fun. She wasn’t having any fun, and I could change that. There wasn’t anything dangerous about taking her out a few feet into the water. At least not for her. As for me, I’d taken a few risks in my life and always come out ahead. So far.
I felt a bond between us, and a part of me wanted to develop it further. What was going on? This was not a part of me I was familiar with. I didn’t particularly like kids.
But the more I thought about it, the more inappropriate it seemed in our present day for a grown man to take a ten-year-old girl he didn’t know snorkeling without her mother’s permission.
“What’s your name?” I asked.
“Are you going to take me snorkeling?”
“I wish I could, but your mother and her friends wouldn’t like it.”
“They’re not my friends,” she scoffed. “I hate them!”
“I don’t blame you, but it still wouldn’t be right for me to take you.”
“Are you afraid of them?”
I said nothing, but she stared at me and finally said, almost in disbelief, “You’re not, are you?”
I still didn’t answer.
“You really aren’t afraid of them, are you? You’re the first person I’ve ever met who wasn’t, except my grandmother, of course. She’s not afraid of anyone.”
“That would agree with my assessment of her,” I said.
“Well, if you’re not going to take me, I’ll go ask someone else.”
“You didn’t tell me your name,” I said.
“Eme,” she said, very seriously.
I watched her for a moment, but she offered nothing else and no other explanation. A ten-year-old is not very talented at deception, and I could read in her eyes that she was going out in the water alone. There was much more in her eyes that I couldn’t read, but I knew it would do no good to ask.
“And your mother?”
“Eve.” She hesitated, then ran off.
As I had expected, she didn’t ask anyone to go with her. Standing behind some rocks, trying to stay out of sight at least a little bit, I watched her.
She swam naturally, as effortlessly and sleekly as a dolphin. Most kids take a few minutes to become accustomed to the snorkel, but she breathed through it as though she had been born with it. She even dived to the bottom, clearing the tube when she surfaced. At first I was nervous, but the longer I watched, the more I realized that she was in absolutely no danger.
After about half an hour, she slipped out of the water. I didn’t really try to hide, but she ignored me as she walked by. For the first time in my adult life, I felt as though I had missed something by not having a child. I tried to control these thoughts, without success, and I suddenly wished I had a daughter. It wasn’t too late, of course—I was only thirty-five—but even in my retirement it would be too dangerous for me to have a child. I had too many enemies. Enemies for a lifetime, maybe beyond.
Some of my new ones were waiting just beyond the rocks when I turned to go back to the ship. One of them grabbed her, firmly but not too roughly, I noticed. The other two stepped in front of me. I wasn’t nervous. There were too many other passengers around, at least for now. Besides, although I preferred to work more subtly, I knew I could handle myself against these brutes if I had to.
“What do you think you’re doing?” the one with the large belly asked. Close up, I could see he had a gold star earring in both ears. His nose was crooked, and a scar slashed across the right side of his face and down into his nostril. His eyes were empty of everything but cruelty. I had met many men whose only emotion was hatred, but I had never looked into the eyes of anyone with no emotions. Cruelty is not an emotion, but a type of behavior. It might be caused by an emotion, but it is not an emotion itself. And in this man, I instinctively knew that cruelty was a habit.
“Making sure her swim went okay,” I replied finally.
“Why?”
“Because no one else seemed to care.”
“Listen to me clearly. You are never to take any interest in that girl again. She is off-limits.”
“No one tells me who I can talk to,” I replied calmly, not showing my irritation.
“I do.”
I stared at him. “No one,” I repeated, then walked away toward my hammock and my clothes.
Instincts are hard to control, and they die hard. As I passed him, he tried to grab my shoulder, probably to s
pin me around. But I had anticipated he would do something like that and twisted away quickly, leaving him unbalanced. Unfortunately, he was next to a rock, and when he stepped forward to regain his balance, he stumbled over the rock and fell, banging his head against another rock. He said nothing in response to the pain, but stared at me with such an evil glare that I felt even more annoyed. He definitely wouldn’t like me getting the best of him.
I reached down to help him up, but he scowled and jumped up.
“Sometimes it’s better to keep your hands to yourself,” I said as I walked away from him.
He said and did nothing, but I could feel his cold stare on my back as I left.
CHAPTER TWO
Dinner was formal that night, and I suspected that was the reason conversation lagged at our table. With only one previous meal under our belts, we felt a little uneasy in our black suits, dinner jackets, and formal gowns.
Eme and Eve were already seated when I arrived, and neither paid any attention to me. I looked their way occasionally, but they continued to quietly peruse the menu. Everyone else arrived shortly.
“Did anyone else go snorkeling?” Carolyn asked as we received our soup, a delicious lobster bisque.
“Scott and I went for a long time,” Carolyn continued when no one volunteered anything. “The water was great—I can’t believe how clear it was. And the fish! I’ve never seen fish that color except in an aquarium.”
Carolyn could certainly talk and she didn’t stop there, but my mind tuned her out as I thought about the fish on our snorkeling trip. I realized that I had enjoyed the swim with her. Was it because she couldn’t talk as much underwater?
One of the thugs left after he’d eaten the entrée. It wasn’t the one who had confronted me on Vacation Cays and ended up with the dented head, but the tallest and thinnest of the three. As he passed my side of the table, he intentionally ignored me. I had a premonition of danger, and when the conversation at our table faded and not even Carolyn was able to keep it going, I excused myself early and went to the show, slipping my steak knife into my pocket before I left.
The show was two comedians who weren’t funny, so I left midway through and returned to my room.
The moment I stood in front of my door I sensed something wrong. Again, it would be difficult to explain why, but I knew that my steward, George, had not been the only person in the room while I was gone.
I doubted that I would be attacked until I shut the door behind me, so obviously the assailant would have to be in hiding. I pictured the room. The bathroom door was just to the right of the entrance—a good place to hide. It would also be possible to hide in one of the two closets, or under the bed. Otherwise, he would have to be on the veranda. Since the steward closed the curtains at night, that would be an excellent place.
The veranda would be my choice. It allowed the victim to take a shower, relax, and get into bed before the attack. Wait until I was asleep, then strike. Of course, to do that, he had to make sure the glass door was unlocked.
I opened the door and stepped inside. The bathroom door was open just a crack and the light was on, just as I had left it. It was unlikely that he would try to hide in a fully lit room, but it was possible, so I checked the doors to the two closets on my left, opened one carefully without completely turning my back to the bathroom and hung up my coat. I took the steak knife out of my pocket and kept it in my hand. The other closet door I left alone. I did not want to do too much out of the ordinary and raise his suspicions, in case he was monitoring my movements. Besides, the second closet had my two suitcases on its floor, eliminating most of the floor space, so it would be a difficult place to hide in.
I went into the bathroom, fully alert. It was empty. One thing about cruise ships, there aren’t any tricky places to hide in the bathroom. Not if you’re over a foot tall.
Two choices left. Under the bed and on the veranda. The curtains had been shut by my steward and my bed turned down. I couldn’t see the veranda, even though it was softly lit, nor could I see under the bed. I hadn’t changed my original guess that he was on the veranda, but I still needed to check under the bed.
But I couldn’t, of course, without giving away my suspicions. And if he actually were under the bed, bending over and raising the bedspread to look would put me in a vulnerable position indeed.
Taking my pajamas out of a drawer in the closet, I went into the bathroom and turned on the shower but did not get in. After a couple of minutes, I shut it off and put on my pajamas. I didn’t think he could see in through the curtains any better than I could see out, but I wasn’t going to take any chances.
I had known that he wouldn’t attack as long as I was moving around and apparently alert. Now things began to get dangerous.
I lay down on the bed, picked up The Pillars of Hercules, and pretended to read. After a few minutes, I put it down and turned off the lights. I had a king-sized bed with three pillows, which I arranged lengthwise in the middle of the bed. I covered up this fluffy representation of a human being with a sheet and slipped off the end of the bed as quietly as possible. I had no weapon except for the knife and a bottle of wine on the counter near the veranda. I picked up the wine and knelt at the foot of the bed, still holding the knife.
How long?
If I had known for sure he would come in from the veranda, I would not have worried as much. He couldn’t open the door without me hearing it. But there was still the possibility that he was hiding under either side of the bed, and this concerned me. In the dark I might have trouble reacting in time. I thought about trying to lock the door to the veranda, but once I pulled back the curtains, I would have to move extremely fast. And when he saw the curtains move, I would be in danger, particularly if he had a gun. No, it was better to wait.
His patience was admirable. I knelt at the foot of the bed for over an hour before I heard the soft slide of the veranda door. I looked up and hoped he couldn’t see me. The curtains twitched, then billowed into the room as the wind slipped through the open door. He followed the wind and plunged a knife into the middle pillow almost before I was ready.
Almost.
As his body bent to make the stab, I jumped up and swung the bottle, hitting him but not hard enough to break the bottle. Still, he was stunned enough to take my place on the bed. While he was recovering, I took the knife out of his hand and pulled off the top sheet and wrapped it around him several times, tying it in a knot in front of him. Then I turned on the room light.
It was the man who had left our table early, the slender one. He was awake now, and there was a nasty lump on the back of his head, but little blood. I searched him carefully for other weapons. Nothing.
A bit cocky, weren’t we?
I watched him wake up, but his recovery was slow. He could get out of this make-believe straitjacket if he tried hard enough, but not before I stabbed him, so I wasn’t worried.
Now I would wait.
I ran out of patience in half an hour. I got up and filled a glass with ice and water from the small refrigerator, let it sit a few minutes, then poured it over him. He sputtered and thrashed but didn’t completely wake up. I wondered if he ever would. Had I hit him too hard? Only one way to find out.
I fixed another glass of ice water and drank this one as I continued to wait. Then I fixed a third glass and poured it over him. This time he awoke, cursing and spitting.
“That’s enough,” I told him.
His head turned in my direction and his small eyes focused on me. It was like being appraised by a cobra. His stare was evil and empty.
“Why did you try to kill me?” I asked.
His lips remained closed.
“Not very talkative, are we?” I muttered. “Well,
let me tell you something. You’re alive only because I think you might be useful. The moment I no longer think that, you get to take a swim. I looked at the map earlier today. We could be a few miles from one of the Bahamas, or maybe not. How far can you swim?”
His eyes blinked, but I could detect no hint of nervousness. Obviously, he had no idea what I used to do for a living.
I played with my knife for a few minutes, rubbed my finger along the blade, nodded, and finally asked, “Any thoughts come to you in your moments of contemplation?”
Instead of answering, he somehow managed to leap off the bed and twist out of the sheet simultaneously. It didn’t do him much good. He ended up facing sideways to me and I hit him hard on the back of his neck with the wine bottle. He went down again.
I was getting tired of his attitude. This time I wrapped him in two sheets, one around his body and the second one tightly around his feet. Even if he twisted out of the top one, he would still have to hop while attacking me. I had to believe that this gave me an advantage. Besides, I had both the steak knife and his knife, which gave me two more advantages.
The only problem was that I was becoming sleepy—I guess retirement had gotten to me.
I turned on the television and pulled my chair across the room so that I was as far away from him as possible. In my old profession, you took no chances if you could help it. I watched half a movie before he stirred. I’m not even sure what it was. Something about a woman falling overboard from a yacht and getting amnesia.
I was fighting to keep my eyelids from drooping when I noticed that his eyes were open and staring at me. Like a cat, unblinking.
“Did your second nap help your tongue . . . or your memory?”
“Go to hell,” he muttered.
“Must have. At least you can talk. And in bigger words than I ever expected you to know.”
“Go to hell.”
“A little repetitive, aren’t we?” I said. “Now, I’m going to give you one more chance to answer my question. Why did you try to kill me?”
The Hauntings of Scott Remington Page 2
