Returning the cowboy hat to its owner, I began carrying the ladies’ luggage up to their suite.
~ ~ ~
WITH THE SUITCASES safely delivered, I retreated to the entertainment pavilion.
Maya met me on the short flight of steps leading down to the pool. As she pushed her hair back from her face, I could see she was distraught.
“What’s wrong?” I asked, fearing the sum Romeo had stolen from the cash register was greater than my initial estimate.
“It’s Jesús,” she whispered, her husky voice strangely fragile.
Instinctively, I took a step back. I wasn’t ready to face her husband, much less discuss his role in the events from the previous evening.
But then, for the first time, I realized Jesús might have been drugged too. My thoughts suddenly shifted from aversion to concern.
“Is he sick?”
Maya shook her head. “I don’t know. I haven’t been able to find him. He didn’t come back to our room last night.”
Several possible scenarios ran through my mind, but none of them matched Maya’s fearful conclusion.
“Mr. Glenn, that spirit from the ravine must have taken him.” She glanced over her shoulder at the pool deck. “Just like she did with all the others.”
Chapter 22
Whoops and Hollers
THE FOUR ELDERLY women hiked up the stairs to their top floor suite at Our Island Inn.
Oliver had warned them about the steps, but they’d assured him they wanted the unit with the best view. They weren’t disappointed. The ladies gathered on the balcony to catch their breaths and gaze out at the sea. From their sky-high perch, they could see for miles – blue sky met blue water and, creeping up from below, a dense jungle green.
While ardent supporters of their home state, the women couldn’t help but murmur in agreement when Millicent touched the brim of her hat and summed up the scene.
“You just don’t see that in Kansas.”
~ ~ ~
ONCE INSIDE THE suite, the women began the ritual of unpacking and freshening up. There were coos of appreciation for the gift basket on the kitchen counter and the individually wrapped lilac-scented soaps in the shared bathroom. Showering and sunscreen application soon followed, accompanied, of course, by the chatter that ensued among lifelong friends.
Mary shook out a floral print dress and slipped it onto a closet hangar.
“What did you think of our innkeepers? It was nice to finally meet Oliver in person after all of our emails back and forth.”
Kate emerged from the restroom with a towel wrapped around her head. “The gentlemen were both so kind and courteous. I feel that we’re in good hands.”
From the couch in the suite’s small living room, Maude added a saucy comment. “That Glenn sure is cute!”
As always, Millicent was the bearer of harsh truths. “He’s too young for you.”
“Oh, I don’t know about that…” The group’s eternal optimist, Maude took a sip from the rum punch glass she’d carried up from the reception.
Millicent poked her head through the doorway to deliver the knockout blow. “And he’s gay.”
“Oh, my,” Mary gasped. She looked up from her suitcase. “Are you sure? Should we change hotels?”
Kate rolled her eyes and began combing her wet hair. Maude laughed, nearly choking on her drink.
Millicent delivered the rebuke.
“Why in the world would you say a thing like that?”
~ ~ ~
THE CARIBBEAN VACATION was off to a fabulous start.
The Golden Girls had flown down from Miami the day before, landing on one of the larger islands to the north. They’d spent their first night at a hotel near the airport, getting their feet wet, so to speak.
After a restful night’s sleep, they’d set off that morning for the ferry. Despite their advanced age, the women were in good physical shape and easily steered their roll-around suitcases down the pier to the boat dock.
Each item of luggage reflected its owner’s personality. Kate’s piece was covered with colorful bumper stickers. Mary’s powder blue case was un-scuffed and impeccably neat. Maude’s worn unit had been reinforced with twine and duck tape, measures that seemed unlikely to last the entire trip. Lastly, Millicent had affixed plastic bull horns to the top end of her roll-around, the décor designed to match her cowboy hat.
After a thrilling half-hour ferry ride that included numerous references to the Titanic – with Maude posing on the side railing in an attempt to emulate a scene from the famous movie and Millicent grimly opining on the vessel’s chances of sinking – they arrived at their intended destination.
The rental car was their next big challenge.
Maude won the coveted spot as the designated driver. In the weeks before the trip, she had practiced driving on the left hand side of the road using her son’s tractor and a series of orange construction cones laid out across an unused cornfield.
Millicent had lobbied hard for the driving position, but without the tractor experience on her resume, she’d come in a distant second. She took up the front passenger seat, where she could at least provide navigational guidance and other helpful, if unsolicited, advice.
As the jeep turned onto the drive leading up to the inn and began the ascent, Millicent cautioned, “Don’t let off the gas or this thing will slide backward.”
Her next comment inspired the whoops and hollers that had startled Glenn in the parking lot above.
“Oh, for Heaven’s sake, put the pedal to the metal or we’ll never get up this hill!”
Chapter 23
Not Dead Yet
GIVEN THE EXCITEMENT of their recent travels, the Golden Girls decided to spend their first afternoon on the island resting up and recuperating at the inn. After a pleasant lunch in the shade of the pavilion, the ladies retired to their suite to take leisurely and distinguished naps.
Except for Millicent.
She had downed several glasses of iced tea with her meal and felt far too invigorated for sleep. As a rule, she preferred not to nap. There were too many things she wanted to do with her limited time left on earth. She couldn’t waste precious hours lazing about.
Millicent slapped on her cowboy hat and sunglasses, slung her binoculars around her neck, and bid goodbye to her fellow travelers. As she set off to explore Parrot Ridge, she muttered her oft-cited mantra.
“I can sleep when I’m dead!”
~ ~ ~
MILLICENT HAD NO particular plans for her wanderings, other than an intention to limit her geographic range to the top of the hill. She felt certain her knees wouldn’t make it down – much less back up – the inn’s driveway.
She circled the main building, taking stock of the overall layout. The square concrete block that housed the rental units and the owner’s apartment occupied almost all of the level land, and she had to scramble over the rear retaining wall to make it around the structure.
Finding nothing of interest at the back of the building, Millicent returned to the front. The slope had been terraced down to the entertainment pavilion and, consequently, was much easier to navigate.
She spent several minutes admiring the landscaping, noting with approval the variety of tropical flowers that had been planted in the raised beds. Then she tucked her sunglasses into her shirt pocket and brought the binoculars to her face.
Looking up at the main building, she trained the magnifying lenses on the balconies attached to the west-facing wall. She panned over a pair of poodles asleep in the shade outside the owner’s apartment and a young West Indian woman shaking out a throw rug on the porch adjacent to the building’s lowest corner. Otherwise, most of the rental units appeared vacant. That was what she had expected. Oliver had indicated that the inn was typically quiet during the week and then tended to fill up on the weekends.
Pivoting in place, Millicent shifted her focus down to the ravine. She marveled at the marked difference between the recent landscaping surrounding
the inn and the dense vegetation that started just below the manicured summit. Moving over the jungle to the water’s edge, she picked up a swarm of seagulls circling above a tiny beach.
“The birds are probably hunting the fish swimming in that coral,” she mused. “I wonder if there’s any way to get down there.”
She was about to zoom in closer, but a drop of sweat ran across her nose, disrupting her view. She pulled her face away from the rubber nosepiece, reached into her pocket for a handkerchief – and in the process spied a scene of far greater interest in her near periphery.
The innkeepers had converged under the pavilion, between the bar’s counter and the foot of the pool. The fact that the two men were meeting was unremarkable. They probably touched base several times a day to discuss various operational matters.
What caught Millicent’s eye was the tension in the pair’s body language. They appeared to be having some sort of disagreement.
Oliver’s exasperated voice floated up the hill, confirming her suspicions.
“What do you mean, we’re shorthanded in the kitchen? What happened to Jesús? He can’t simply have vanished overnight!”
Instantly intrigued, Millicent crept toward the property’s lower level, hoping to listen in on the conversation.
Chapter 24
A Practical Woman
MILLICENT WAS A practical woman.
That was her motto.
She didn’t eat foods that were spicy, salty or deep-fried. She preferred meals where the individual components could be easily identified. Gelatinous, minced or ground up items were off the menu, sausage being allowed by exception, but only with good references and after close inspection.
She had no use for late night comedians. She went to bed early and was the first one up the next morning. She rested her head on a single pillow, never two, and slept six and a half hours, no more, no less.
She came from a long line of practical ancestors. Practicality was in her genes – she would be the first to tell you.
Her cowboy hat, she considered a sun-shielding necessity, despite the difficulties she’d encountered stowing it on the plane. The cow horns affixed to her suitcase she defended as a means of efficiently identifying her luggage.
Millicent would admit to indulgence in only one area of whimsy, and even this, she maintained, furthered an underlying practical purpose.
She fancied herself an amateur detective.
She was well versed in the art. She had watched every police procedural and mystery show on television and had read voraciously in the corresponding literary genres. Her favorite series was Matlock, a 1980s legal drama starring Andy Griffith as a criminal defense attorney. She had seen all the episodes, most of them multiple times, and she considered the lead character to be her sleuthing role model. In Millicent’s view, Ben Matlock was the gold standard for ferreting out and interpreting suspicious behavior.
As a result of her diligent study, Millicent had acquired a vast knowledge of the bizarre ways in which a person might be murdered and the body subsequently disposed of – information she often shared with her friends.
A recent example had occurred that morning on the ferry ride to the island. At a lull in the conversation, Millicent had offered up her latest gory anecdote.
“I read about this case in the Caribbean where a woman cut up her victims and pickled them in jars.”
As usual, this topic drew a chorus of mutters and groans.
Maude impishly ignored the others’ pleading looks and encouraged Millicent to tell more. “Interesting. What did this culinary killer do with all those jars of human flesh?”
“Stored them in the pantry,” Millicent replied, eager to elaborate. “She stuck labels on the jars. The paper hid most of the recognizable body parts. To the casual observer, it looked like a shelf of preserves.” She tipped her cowboy hat in a nod. “That’s one way to hide a body. I bet that’s what Matlock would say.”
Millicent peered inquisitively at her listeners. “What do you think about that, eh?”
Of the three, Mary found these spontaneous tidbits the most disturbing. Covering her ears, she squealed her frequent response.
“Ugh! I wish I wasn’t!”
~ ~ ~
AN INSATIABLE CURIOSITY and a willingness to snoop made for a potent combination. It wasn’t unusual for Millicent to extrapolate her gruesome visions onto the people and places she encountered in everyday life.
A milkman pausing too long after dropping off a delivery soon became a potential criminal casing out a house for later theft; a cheerful smile from a grocery store cashier was quickly twisted into the menacing leer of a serial killer. And in her opinion, the owner of their local gas station had likely stashed numerous dead bodies in the storage tanks at the rear of his lot.
If even a tiny percentage of Millicent’s speculations were to be believed, the crime rate in their rural Midwest town surpassed that of the official verified reports by a factor of at least ten.
For the most part, the Golden Girls humored their friend, but her vivid – and often disturbing – imagination had led the group to conclude that Millicent frequently saw mischief where there was none.
~ ~ ~
THE SKEPTICISM ONLY intensified Millicent’s obsession. Despite urgings from her fellow travelers to give the sleuthing a rest while they were on vacation, she wasn’t about to let her investigative skills go stale in the Caribbean.
So when she spied the innkeepers in the midst of a frosty exchange and heard Oliver’s harried question about the missing sous-chef, there was no stopping her from scampering down to the pavilion to investigate.
It took Millicent less than thirty seconds to reach a row of bushes above the swimming pool. After surveying the available options, she squatted behind a recently transplanted bougainvillea with delicate peach flowers, whipped up her binoculars, and homed in on the pair.
The visual enhancement wasn’t necessary, since she could see and hear across the ten-foot distance without difficulty. If anything, the binocular frames hampered her wider perspective. She almost fell into the bougainvillea when a heavy-set woman stepped into her magnified zone and joined the innkeepers.
It was the inn’s chef, Millicent surmised after regaining her balance. She resumed her hunkered position behind the bush and tilted her left ear, which had slightly better hearing, toward the trio in the pavilion.
“Where is Jesús?” Glenn said, slowly repeating Oliver’s question. He tapped his finger against his chin, struggling to formulate an answer. “Well, ahh…”
Millicent edged forward as she listened to the long pause, receiving several sharp pokes from the bougainvillea. Clearly, this was a man in the midst of desperate invention.
But why was Glenn so reluctant to talk about the missing Jesús? What was he hiding?
Millicent’s morbid creativity kicked into overdrive. Something nefarious must have happened here at the inn.
Oliver sighed impatiently, still waiting for an answer.
The chef opened her mouth, but Glenn jumped in before she could speak. “He went to visit a relative.”
Millicent didn’t need Matlock’s help to discern the meaning behind that comment. With nearly seventy years under her belt, she knew a lie when she heard one.
She sensed Oliver recognized the fib as well, but he had apparently been turning a deaf ear to Glenn’s deceptions for so long, one more made no difference.
The chef seemed startled by Glenn’s statement, but she reluctantly nodded as Glenn embellished the story. “I believe he’s gone to see a cousin…an older gentleman who fell ill and had to be driven to the hospital.”
Oliver crossed his arms over his chest. “So how long are we going to be without a sous-chef?”
Glenn stammered incoherently. “Uh, well, he didn’t say.”
Rolling his eyes, Oliver turned and trudged up the steps to the parking lot. Glenn stood on his tiptoes, watching until he saw his partner enter the reception building. Then he
bent toward the chef, who was shaking her head in dismay.
“Mr. Glenn, Jesús doesn’t have a sick cousin. I told you…” Her voice dropped to a whisper. “He’s been taken.”
“I know, Maya.” He patted her on the shoulder. “We just need to find him.”
His face paled as he added, “and fast.”
~ ~ ~
MILLICENT REMAINED IN her covert position, waiting until the coast was clear before she scurried back up the hill, eager to wake her sleeping comrades and regale them with the mystery she’d stumbled upon after just a few hours at Parrot Ridge.
She congratulated herself on keeping her cover throughout the entire surveillance. She’d picked the perfect hiding spot.
It had completely shielded her from view, that is – as much as an elderly woman in an enormous cowboy hat can be concealed behind a mid-sized bougainvillea bush.
Chapter 25
Take Me
I DON’T KNOW why I lied to Oliver about Jesús.
It was an impulsive response. I regretted the words the moment they left my mouth.
I should have let him know straightaway that Jesús was missing, but I held back. When Maya told me he hadn’t returned to their suite, my first instinct was to hide the information from my partner, not to share it.
I didn’t want to open up a line of questions about the previous night’s debauchery. I feared where that inquiry might lead.
Nothing good could come from a discussion about our sous-chef’s rather unconventional arrangement with his wife – much less, what had gone on between him and me all those other late evenings on the pool deck and in the clearing below.
I still foolishly hoped I could conceal my infidelities.
So when Jesús’ absence became obvious and addressing the topic unavoidable, I created the ridiculous story about his sick uncle, a lie I couldn’t possibly sustain.
I told myself that once Jesús returned, he would go along with whatever I asked him to say.
Our Island Inn (Quirky Tales from the Caribbean) Page 7
