by R. R. Banks
What the hell was going on here?
Lucille’s eyes cut into me across the sand and I had to force myself to slow down as I approached.
“Put down the gun,” I demanded.
Lucille lifted her arm, directing the barrel at me.
“No,” she said.
“Lucille, I’ve done a lot of things and I’m sure that there are plenty of others that I’m going to do, but please don’t tempt me. I’d like to think that I’m above hitting a woman.”
There was a creaking sound, a loud Carol Burnette-style Tarzan yell, and something came swinging out of the tree line. I saw a man kick Lucille in the back, flattening her to her belly on the sand. The man jumped down from the vine that he had been swinging on to land beside her and glared down at Lucille with his hands planted on his hips.
“I’m not,” he said.
“Me, either.”
A dark-haired woman around Hunter’s age leapt into the air and landed over Lucille, pinning her to the ground. The man who had kicked her flung himself over the woman. Edwin had made it up to us and toppled over forward, stretching himself across the man’s back.
“Does that count as a geodesic dome?” Eleanor asked.
I looked over my shoulder and saw the man that Hunter had been fighting lying flat on his face. He wasn’t moving, but I could see his back rising and falling with breaths so I knew that he wasn’t dead. Hunter stepped up beside Eleanor and wrapped an arm around her waist, cuddling her close.
“I’ll count it.”
“We need to get her somewhere secure until we can turn her over to the police,” I said.
“You can’t do that,” Lucille said, her voice strained by the weight of the people still laying on her. “If you hand me over to the police, then you’re going down, too.”
“Gavin?” Eleanor said.
I turned to look at her and Hunter and saw them staring back at me with questions in their eyes. There was nothing that I could say. I wanted to. I wanted to defend myself, but I knew that I couldn’t. What Lucille said was right. Making sure that she got what she deserved meant having to tell them what I had done, but right then it seemed worth it. Just as I had told Lucille, I didn’t want to be a part of this anymore. Any of it. It was time that I put this part of my career behind me, and if that meant answering for what I had done, then that was what I was going to have to do.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t know you. It was just a job.”
“So, we made it easy for you,” Hunter spat.
I shook my head.
“No,” I said. “I didn’t realize who Eleanor was when you climbed up on my boat. By the time that I did…”
I trailed off. There was really nothing that I could say to justify what I had done. I looked at Eleanor and saw tears trickling down her cheeks. Right then I knew that I had been completely wrong about her, and that it wasn’t that I couldn’t like her, it was that I wouldn’t allow myself to. Now I was seeing her without the perceptions that had colored me for so long, but it was too late. The damage had already been done.
“What do we do with her?” Hunter asked, gesturing at Lucille. “And with them?”
His jaw was set firmly and I could see that he was just trying to get through this, ignoring the reality of what he had just learned. I looked behind me and saw the three men still lying on the ground. One was starting to groan, but none was looking like they were ready to jump up and start fighting again any time soon. That didn’t mean, however, that they wouldn’t be eventually. We needed to make sure that they were somewhere where they wouldn’t be a danger to us until we could get the police to the island.
“Help me move them,” I said. I dangled upside down to look at the people piled on top of Lucille. “You just stay right there. We’ll be back for her.”
****
Eleanor
He came back.
That’s all I could think about as I helped drag Virgil’s two cronies up the rocks toward the small cavern.
He came back.
I knew that Gavin had been hired by Lucille to kidnap me and that as soon as he had the opportunity to, he abandoned Hunter and me on the island to fend for ourselves, but somehow that didn’t impact me as much as the simple fact that he had come back. He didn’t have to. He had found Edwin on the other island and had the technology that he needed to get back to the mainland and just put all of it behind him. But he hadn’t. Instead, he chose to come back to the island for us. That meant far more.
I knew what it was like to be put into a situation that seemed impossible. It occurred to me that I knew nothing about Gavin, and had put no effort into knowing anything about Gavin. I didn’t know what had happened to him in his past or what he could have been going through that would have brought him to this place in his life, yet I had judged the living hell out of him. If there was anything that I should understand, it would be the feeling of desperation knowing that your past was still completely controlling your life. I felt a sense of sympathy toward Gavin and it made my heart ache to think about what was going to happen to him when the police came for Lucille and Virgil.
We tucked the men into the cavern and started back down the rocks for Lucille and Virgil. The pile climbed off of Lucille and she immediately jumped to her feet, ready to run. Noah and Hunter grabbed onto her arms and Gavin scooped her legs up to keep control of her as they carried her up toward the cavern. The men were piled in the small space in such a way that she wouldn’t be able to climb over or around them to get to the entrance to the tunnels and even if she did, we had taken away all of her electronics, meaning that she would be trying to get through the cavern in the dark. The plan was to shove Virgil into the front of the space, effectively sandwiching her in. It had its functional benefits, but I preferred to think that it was just a little bit of torture to carry her over until she got to jail.
I watched as the men fought the wiggling Lucille up to the top of the ridge. Suddenly she kicked and Gavin lost control of one of her legs. Her flailing caused them to drop her and Lucille scrambled away from them. I rushed across the sand, ready to help, but within five steps Lucille and her shoes lost their footing and she tumbled over the edge of the rocks into the water below. There was a moment of tense silence and then I heard a scream of anger that told me she survived the fall.
A laugh had just bubbled out of my mouth when I saw movement out of the corner of my eye. I heard a gasp and turned to see Virgil get to his feet. He launched for the helicopter pilot and grabbed him, scooping Lucille’s cast-aside gun into his hand and pressing it to the man’s temple. He started dragging the pilot toward the helicopter and I knew that if he got to it, he would be gone. I rushed toward him, the sand shooting up behind my feet as I dug them down as hard as I could. Virgil caught sight of me and I saw him turn, the gun pointed at my chest.
“Auntie!”
I heard Noah’s scream at the same time that I heard the explosion of the gun. I felt a hot pain and my body fell to the ground without my control. Virgil shoved the pilot into the helicopter and the blades started spinning, causing air to press down on me and make it harder to breathe. The last thing I saw was them rise into the sky and Virgil reach across the pilot to grab the controls, stalling the blades and causing the copter to tumble down toward the waves. I laughed as the darkness closed in around me.
The sea monster and I are finally friends.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Hunter
Three weeks later…
I looked up at the sound of the rapping on my door, realizing that though I had been reading through the pages stacked on my desk in front of me for at least two hours, nothing had really sunk in. I dropped the page I was holding, took off my glasses, and rubbed into my eyes with my fingers.
“Yeah?” I said.
The door opened and I opened my eyes. Snow was peering around the door at me, her body out of the room.
“She’s awake.”
I got to my feet and ran acros
s my office, joining her and Noah in the hallway. We rushed through the Royal and Company office building in silence and jumped into the back of Noah’s limo. He was ordering the driver to go before the door was even closed behind me. Within minutes we were pulling into the parking lot of the small exclusive hospital where Eleanor had been in a coma since we got off the island. The nurse sitting at the front desk ushered us through the front door and we ran down the hallway and rode the elevator up to her private suite. I tried to ignore the surroundings. That wasn’t what I wanted to be thinking about. Not right now.
The door to Eleanor’s suite was closed and Noah knocked on it lightly as we approached. A stern-faced nurse opened the door and glared out at us.
“Mrs. McIntire shouldn’t be disturbed right now,” she said.
“It’s not ‘Mrs.,’” Eleanor’s voice called from inside the suite, “and they are not disturbing me. Let them in.”
“You really aren’t in the condition to---” the nurse started.
“Let them in,” Eleanor ordered, shutting her down.
Huffing and puffing as if to make absolutely sure that we were aware of her disgust, the nurse stepped out of the way and opened the door wide enough for us to go inside. It wasn’t the first time that I had been in the suite. In fact, I had spent the first several days that she was in it sitting by her bedside. It still had the same effect on me that it had the first time I saw it. Lavishly appointed in rich hues and heavy dark wooden furniture, the first room of the suite looked much more like a luxurious hotel than it did a hospital. This funneled into a short hallway that led past a bathroom bigger and nicer than the one that I had in my own apartment, and then into the actual treatment room.
Though it had some of the features that I would expect to see in a hospital room, it was still wearing a hotel costume and I had the same uncomfortable feeling that I had each of the other times that I walked into the room. It seemed excessive, unnecessary. Yet at the same time, I was happy that she was comfortable and being given the care that she needed during the fragile days that she had just persevered through.
Eleanor was sitting up in a reclining position on the large bed, her back propped up what looked like a dozen plush pillows. She was wearing a light pink satin robe rather than the classic hospital gown, her hair was brushed smooth over her shoulders, and she was wearing fresh makeup. Despite all of this, however, she looked distinctly tired and smaller than she had on the island. Noah and Snow both rushed to the sides of the bed, taking turns leaning over to kiss Eleanor on her cheeks and squeeze her hands.
“It’s so good to see you awake,” Snow murmured to her.
“I love you,” Noah whispered, giving her another kiss.
I hovered near the door, not knowing what to do. When Snow told me that Eleanor had finally woken up, I hadn’t hesitated for even a second. Not a single thought crossed my mind that I shouldn’t be there with her. Now that I was standing here looking at her, though, I didn’t know how to act or what to say. Everything was rushing back to me and I was having a difficult time coping with it all. I was starting to back out of the room when I heard her voice.
“Hunter?”
I looked up and saw Noah and Snow exchange glances.
“Are you hungry?” Noah asked Eleanor. “We’re going to go to the café and grab a celebratory snack. It’s time to get your strength back up. We can’t have you just lying around in bed all the time.”
Snow gave a tense laugh that had the one of someone trying to inject levity into a situation that was already far gone. They gave more kisses to Eleanor and scurried out of the room. As she passed, Snow patted me on the arm, a silent show of solidarity. She had seen me struggling over the last three weeks, and though she didn’t know the full extent of how Eleanor had affected me, I knew that our years of friendship had allowed her to empathize with me and want for this all to be resolved.
When they were gone I turned back to stare at Eleanor. She looked back at me hopefully, but I stayed in my place.
“Are you going to come over here?” she asked.
I approached her reluctantly and sat down in one of the heavily cushioned chairs beside her bed.
“How are you feeling?” I asked, my voice somewhat flat.
She nodded.
“Good,” she said. “As good as I can, considering.”
“Good,” I said, nodding. “The doctor said that the wound wasn’t that bad.”
Eleanor shook her head.
“It went through cleanly,” she said. “Apparently like many things, Virgil was nowhere near as good a shot as he thought that he was.”
“Good to hear.”
I’m just going to go ahead and try to find four or five more ways that I can use ‘good’ in this travesty of a conversation.
“What happened to Virgil?” she asked.
“The helicopter wasn’t high enough for the crash to be dangerous. It more landed and fell over. He dragged himself up onto the beach and we put him in the cavern with the other guys.”
“Where is he now?”
“The police came and we told them what happened. Noah went to your safe deposit box and got all of the evidence and turned it over. He’s going to trial and I’m sure he’s going to be away for a very long time.”
“And Lucille?”
“They fished her out of the water and rung her out. She’s fine. In jail, but fine.”
There was a moment of hesitation before she spoke again.
“What about Gavin?”
“He mysteriously disappeared off of the island again.”
“He did?”
She sounded slightly more hopeful.
“Yep. A couple days later the police received a certified letter from him detailing everything that he knew about her.”
Eleanor smiled and reached for my hand, but I pulled it away.
“I’m sorry,” I said, shaking my head. “I can’t, Eleanor.”
I stood up, needing to be further away from her, and her smiled melted.
“What’s wrong?” she asked, though the look in her eyes told me that she already knew what was going through my mind.
“You lied to me,” I said. “How could you not tell me that you’re Noah’s aunt? You made up so much about yourself.”
Her cheeks reddened and she looked away slightly before looking back at me.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m sorry, Hunter. You have to believe that I had my reasons.”
“What reasons could you possibly have?” I asked.
“At Snow and Noah’s wedding, I didn’t want anybody to know who I was. I spent too much time being in the shadow of my family and then my husband.”
“Ex-husband.”
She nodded.
“No one ever saw me. Just me. I wanted to know what it was like to just be someone else. For one night, I didn’t want anybody to think about my family, my marriage, the dissolution thereof, or my money.”
“Your money?” I asked, upset just by the word itself. “Is that really what you think of me? That I would only be interested in your money?”
“It’s not you, Hunter,” Eleanor said. “I told Noah not to tell anyone who I was before I even saw you. I had no idea that I was going to meet someone as incredible as you.”
“And then when you did?” She hesitated and I scoffed, taking another step away from her. “You still lied because all you wanted was a one-night stand.”
“Yes.”
“You’re unbelievable.”
“Well, what do you want me to say?” she asked. “That’s exactly what was on my mind that night. I just wanted one night of attention from someone. Was I really supposed to think that I could find a connection with someone? Especially someone like you? Someone 15 years younger than me, no attachments, no crime boss ex hanging over his head or government agencies breathing down his neck? I was really supposed to think that you had any kind of real attraction to me and would be interested in any kind of real relationship with me?”
/>
“You didn’t even give me a chance.”
“Yes, I did.”
“You tried to seduce me. That’s not the same thing.”
“And you walked away, just like I would have expected.”
“I walked away because I knew exactly who you were.”
Eleanor looked stunned.
“What?” she asked breathlessly.
“I might not have known that you were Noah’s aunt, but I knew who you are. A bored woman looking for someone to make her feel good about herself. A woman who would latch onto any man who gave her attention and use him up, then move on.”
“That’s not true,” Eleanor said, sounding weaker now.
“Yes, it is. You didn’t care who I was. You didn’t care anything about me. And that’s whatever. You had your reasons, even if I think that they are completely asinine. But then what? How about when we were on the cruise? How about when we were running from those guys? You couldn’t tell me the truth?”
“While we were running through the cruise ship?” Eleanor asked incredulously. “You wanted me to pause and give you the story of my life while I was in the midst of running from it?”
“How about when we were on the island? How could you keep lying to me even then? With all of the time that we spent together, with everything that we went through together, how could you just keep lying to me like that?”
“I tried to tell you,” Eleanor said. “I tried so many times.”
“But you didn’t. You just kept adding onto the lie. Even when you knew how much danger we were actually in, you couldn’t be honest with me.”
“I’m sorry, Hunter. I’m so sorry. I don’t know what to say. I don’t know if there’s anything that I can say, but—”
