Leaving Annalise (Katie & Annalise Book 2)

by Pamela Fagan Hutchins

  I dropped my ear to his heart, speaking rapidly in time to its comforting beat. “Oh, Nick, I didn’t do great. I was so scared, and a tree fell and bashed in the window where there were no shutters except I tried to put up plywood, and Annalise saved me by slamming the door, and I’ve been asleep for nearly two days, not to mention the voodoo palm reader telling me I’m the Empress, and all I could think about was that I was trapped here and I couldn’t get to you, couldn’t let you know I was alive, and that nothing was real anymore without you here.”

  Nick looked at me as if everything I had said made perfect sense. “I’m here now. Where’s that smile?”

  I gave him one, a real one, an “I’m so happy my husband is here” smile. He picked me up and carried me into our bedroom, and we spent the next few hours under the mosquito netting, finding the rest of the way back to each other.

  We woke the next day to Queen’s “Under Pressure.”

  I sat up in a panic. “What’s that?”

  “My new ring tone.”

  Apparently, cell service had been restored. Nick answered. It was his attorney, Mary, calling to let him know the court had issued some instructions. He put her on speakerphone. The news was not great.

  “Judge Nichols has given Derek a six-month period to prove his fitness as a parent if he passes the paternity test.”

  “What do we do now?” Nick asked.

  “You sit tight in Corpus Christi,” Mary answered. Which was hard to do from St. Marcos, but I decided not to cloud the issue. “Any reason to doubt he’ll pass the test?”

  “Unfortunately, no,” Nick said.

  “Then expect to be in Corpus at least another six months, maybe longer. The court can decide to extend the evaluation period. It’s even possible that at the end of the evaluation, you could win custody but Derek would have continued visitation.”

  “That’s not even what he wants!” Nick exclaimed.

  “Maybe for the right amount, Derek would give up his rights as a father permanently,” Mary suggested.

  Nick and I stared into each other’s eyes. I said, “I’d hate to spend the money Teresa left for Taylor’s future that way. The best thing for Taylor is for us to keep Derek from getting custody of him. But I think we’d spend far less money in six months than it would take now to make him go away.”

  Nick nodded. “The risk is worth it.”

  Mary said, “It’s your call. There is a value, though, to avoiding the negative impact this will have on your life.”

  Man, she had that part right. But that was the impact on us, two grown-ups. We had to think about Taylor. I had to start thinking about Taylor.

  I sucked in my bottom lip, then said, “We’re OK, Mary.”

  We thanked her and said our goodbyes. Nick hung up the phone and gripped both of my hands. “Six months, Katie. That’s a long time. If you need to stay here, we’ll make it work.”

  I flicked my hair behind my shoulder. “Nick Kovacs, do you want me to be your wife or not?”

  He frowned. “I thought you already were.”

  “Well, wives and husbands should live together.” I took full credit for my change of heart and left out the “according to my new friend the psychic” part. “Let’s get the hell out of here. I’ll find a house sitter, and we’ll put Annalise on the market.”

  Nick shook his head. “You don’t need to sell her.”

  Truthfully, the thought of parting with Annalise made me feel sick, and I wasn’t sure how much of that feeling was coming from me and how much from the jumbie. But I also wasn’t a halfway kind of girl. Or woman. “We don’t really know if we are ever going to be able to—or want to—come back. It could take a long time to find the right buyer. Let’s plan for the worst and hope for the best.”

  Now Nick made my arguments from a week ago back to me. “But it’s your house . . . it’s more than that, it’s her . . . and you worked so hard . . . you gave up your career . . . you moved halfway around the world . . . you spent so much of your money . . .”

  I stuck my face up to his, almost nose to very prominent nose. “You are home to me. Annalise is a house, and money is only money.”

  His smile was as wide as the Gulf Coast, crooked and sure. “I love you.” He pulled me into his lap in one swift motion.

  I tried to ignore the sensation of dark, unhappy eyes watching us.

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  Despite our dramatic decision to depart, we didn’t get anywhere in a hurry. Things started smoothly enough, though. We tackled the little issue of the tree in the music room early the next morning.

  Nick operated the chainsaw and I removed the chunks. As we uncovered the window opening, I saw that the wind and tree had wrenched the window frame out. The exposed concrete blocks under the frame had crumbled.

  “This is odd,” I said when Nick turned off the saw. “I thought the whole house was made out of cinder block filled with poured concrete. These blocks aren’t filled, here by the window.” I pointed to pieces of pulverized block on the floor.

  Nick looked down inside the block wall with me. “Sure enough.”

  I pushed on the edge of a block and it crumbled under my hand. Something glinted in the sunlight. “What’s that?”

  Nick had seen it, too. He took a closer look. “Rebar, maybe?”

  “Too shiny.” I stuck my hand into the opening, then thought better of it. Centipedes and all, ew. I went into the great room and retrieved the fireplace poker. I hadn’t used it for a fire yet, but it seemed perfect for sticking down narrow dark holes. I inserted it and heard an intriguing clink.

  “Not concrete, anyway,” I said, and continued probing. I felt something loose, so I used the claw side of the poker and pried the edge of it up, then carefully dragged it out of the hole after a few false starts. A dirty round object tumbled over the top of the block and landed on the tile floor. I scooped it up in my hand. It was narrow, metallic, and seriously scratched up.

  “I’m going to clean it,” I told Nick.

  He followed me into the kitchen, where I moistened a kitchen towel and scrubbed at the concrete dust and dirt. As the layers of yuck came off, I saw gold, a latch, and engraving. It was a pocket watch, and despite the grit and grime, it was newer than I would have guessed. Definitely not an antique. I couldn’t get the latch to release, though.

  “Let me try,” Nick said.

  I handed it to him, and he cleaned the concrete out of the cracks with the tip of a steak knife, then pried the two round sides away from each other. It opened slowly, a clamshell hiding its pearl.

  Inside on the right was an exquisite clock face with roman numerals marking the 12, 3, 6, and 9. The time read 11:29, and the second hand was frozen in place. On the left was a picture. A remarkably well preserved picture, given that it had been buried inside a wall for ten years. A dark-skinned woman with straightened hair was posed for a studio portrait with two young girls wearing cornrow braids. One girl looked maybe ten, and the other five.

  A slow smile stole up the corners of my mouth. “Nick, you are holding ‘my treasures’ in your hand.”

  “Meaning?” he asked, scraping more gunk out of the ridges and valleys of the pocket watch.

  “Jacoby told me there was a rumor going around that the original owner buried his treasures in the walls of this house. He thinks we’ve been the victims of fortune hunters. But I don’t think it was that kind of treasure at all.” I took the watch from his hand and snapped it shut, and I rubbed my thumb across the engraved words on its front. My Treasures. I opened it to the picture.

  He joined me now in the smile. “Somehow we need to get that word out on the criminal grapevine ASAP.”

  “Yah mon.”

  “It’s a good-looking watch.” He handed it to me.

  “That it is. And just think, the fortune hunters were only one cinder block away from finding it on their last attempt. I’ll be back in a moment.” I went to my jewelry box in our bedroom and pulled out a jeweler case that hel
d a brooch my Grandma Connell had given me. I nestled the watch in the satin lining beside the brooch and snapped the lid shut.

  I rejoined Nick, and we finished up our work in the music room and set upon our next Herculean task: chainsawing our way out of the rainforest. It took the rest of a full and sweaty day. It wasn’t an experience I would care to repeat, but we felt able to leap tall buildings in a single bound by the time we were through.

  Afterwards, we drove to Ava’s, passing plenty of houses that didn’t have roofs anymore. A telephone pole had fallen through the roof of a house only a mile away from Ava’s. Those that had roofs sometimes didn’t have windows. Still others had lost trees. And everywhere, everywhere the brilliant colors of plant life had disappeared, as if the island had been scorched down to the bare brown earth.

  When we arrived at Ava’s, we found her grilling all the meat from her refrigerator and drinking piña coladas from a pitcher. “Everything spoil unless I use it up now,” she explained. “I just got back from the funeral, and I need something to take my mind off things.” She shook her small caramel fist at the innocent-looking night sky that was clear and twinkling with a million stars.

  “Funeral? Whose?” I asked. She did look like she’d been crying.

  “Oh, cheese and bread, you didn’t know! That why you not there.”

  Foreboding crept over me. “What happened, Ava?”

  Tears flooded her face, and she shook her head. She swallowed and said, “Jacoby. He die in the storm.”

  “That can’t be! I saw him. He came by a few hours before it hit.”

  “They find his body by his car, outside the projects, where an apartment collapse. His door open, he lights dem on. Just like him, always helping people dem.”

  “But how did he die?”

  She lifted her shoulders and let them drop. “It a hurricane. They say something knock him in the head.”

  “Oh Ava, I am so sorry. And so sad that I missed his service.” I dropped into a lawn chair. Nick put his hands on my shoulders and kneaded them gently. “But why so quick?”

  “That what his grandmother want. She the one who raise him and his brother. Now they both dead,” she said. She slumped into a chair beside me.

  The danger of the storm seemed more real to me now than it had since it hit Annalise. I began to worry about the rest of the people I loved on the island. At least Rashidi was on the western edge of Puerto Rico, out of the storm’s path.

  Finally, I braved the subject of our visit. “We’re headed back to Texas. With Rashidi gone, I have to ask if you could house-sit for a while, take care of the hounds, and let the workers in and out?”

  Nick added, “We’ll pay you.”

  Ava tipped her wrist forward to signify that it was a small thing we asked. She started replaiting her long braids, then said, “Of course I help you. But Annalise not likely to make it easy on you.”

  I chose to ignore that. “Thanks, Ava,” I said.

  “Who look after things when I meet you in New York?”

  “New York?” Nick asked.

  “Um, I’ll tell you about it on the drive, honey. Ava, we’ll play that by ear.” I didn’t have the heart to break it to her. I wouldn’t be going to New York. I’d tell her later.

  Nick and I pulled to a stop outside the house Jacoby grew up in. I hoped we weren’t coming over too late. Lights shone from inside the house, though, which was good, because this couldn’t wait. Although I had only met his grandmother once, I knew I owed her a visit.

  Her house was in the same neighborhood where Rashidi and I had spied on Junior and Pumpy. In the dark I couldn’t tell how her house had withstood the storm. There was no doorbell, so I rapped my knuckles against the frame of the screen door.

  “Ms. Jacoby?” I called.

  In only seconds, a tiny woman came to the door. “Ain’t no Ms. Jacoby here. I Ms. Edmonds. You wanting me, I expect.”

  She looked as I remembered her, and not unlike an unscarved version of my Jump Up psychic. She had on a Sunday go-to-church-type outfit, a black gabardine jacket and matching shirt with big brass buttons. Her posture was erect, but with a slight tremor.

  “I’m Katie Kovacs, and this is my husband Nick. I knew Jacoby, ma’am, and I came to pay my respects.”

  “Nice to meet you, Ms. Edmonds,” Nick said.

  “Likewise. Katie, friend of Ava’s?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Well, you got good manners, Katie. Jacoby tell me about you. Tell me he didn’t like you much at first, but that it turns out you saved Ava, that you good people.”

  A cloak of grief fell over my vision. “I felt the same about him.” As I said the words, my eyes cleared. Oh, Jacoby.

  She pursed her thin lips. “Sometimes it take someone from outside to see what those inside can’t.”

  I nodded, unsure of what she meant.

  “Come here, young lady.” She led me into her dark, tiny kitchen. “When my grandson die, they bring me all his things, from he car and he pockets. Some make sense. Keys, wallet, phone.”

  She waited for a response from me, so I nodded again.

  She opened her freezer and pulled out a large shrink-wrapped frozen fish. “But what you think of this? They say it from he truck, like he gone shopping before the storm.”

  “But Jacoby’s allergic to fish, isn’t he?” He’d told me so at our wedding.

  Ms. Edmonds stabbed her index finger in the air triumphantly and placed the fish back in the freezer. “Deadly allergic. So why he carrying fish?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “Me neither.” She shook her head. “Something to think on, though.” She looked at me, looked into me, and I squirmed.

  “Absolutely. I will.”

  We left and I felt unsettled. It made sense that hurricane debris killed Jacoby. I didn’t know how to reconcile his grandmother’s words, though, or the fish. But what could I do about it from Texas? Sorrow clamped my heart like a fist and it struggled to beat.

  I was failing Jacoby, but it was time to go. Being with Nick and Taylor was the right thing to do, the only thing I could do, and the one thing I could not fail at anymore.

  Chapter Thirty-nine

  The next morning I tried to book travel off island for us, but the airport was closed. I called Nick, who was in Town putting up fliers for our estate sale. We knew getting back to Texas was not going to be simple right after a hurricane, but I couldn’t help but feel a flicker of panic.

  “American won’t even resume flights until their terminal is repaired, which could be months,” I told him.

  “We can try to hire a boat captain,” Nick said. “I’d suggest we call Bill, but he told me he was taking the Wild Irish Kate straight up to Florida when he left here to pick up his boss.”

  By midday, we hadn’t found any boat captains on St. Marcos willing to work during the post-hurricane bonus holiday. I tried some of the smaller airlines that flew from island to island, thinking that the damaged terminal might not affect them as much as it did the major airlines. And it really didn’t matter where we flew to, as long as we could eventually get somewhere with a connecting flight to the states. By the third airline, a human answered the phone. LIAT, an airline Locals described as “Leave Islands Any Time they want to,” was resuming flights the next day, assuming they still wanted to when tomorrow came. I crossed my fingers and booked us on a flight to Aruba with Oso. My protector and Taylor’s BFF could not be left behind, but the rest of the pack would stay to guard Annalise.

  As I hung up, the agent said, “Mind your dog don’t weigh no more than a hunner pound with he kennel.” We hung up.

  “All set,” I called from the kitchen to Nick in the garage. “You don’t think Oso and his kennel are over one hundred pounds, do you?”

  Nick walked into the kitchen. “About one twenty, I’d say. Why?”

  “Oh, no! He’s over the weight limit to fly.” My heart sank from diaphragm to bellybutton level.

  Nick shoo
k his head. “Don’t worry. I’ll handle it.”

  “Really?” I couldn’t bear leaving Oso there.

  “No problem,” he said, and swatted my behind. I could play that game. I popped him with a dishtowel and he chased me to the bedroom. I won.

  All the next day, we prepared for our sale. The big house was far from full, but we’d been acquiring furniture at a fairly decent clip all summer long, in addition to what I’d brought from Texas. What we’d accumulated a little at a time had added up fast. Whatever we didn’t sell or decide to take, we would leave with the house for a buyer to deal with—when we found one.

  Cars were lined up at our gate at seven the next morning, honking. We had run an ad in the St. Marcos Daily Source announcing that the sale would begin at eight, but the people of St. Marcos love nothing more than a good estate sale. We ignored them as we did our last-minute preparations and slammed down King’s coffee.

  At seven forty-five we opened the gate to muttered complaints and long, drawn-out chuptzes, and the posturing and haggling began at once. I hated that part, but Nick loved it.

  The sale went on for hours, and friends and acquaintances showed up, too. Egg even brought Crazy out to wish us well, but they couldn’t stay. By midday the sale had become an impromptu pool party, and we finally shut the gate and counted our money.

  “Ten thousand dollars? Not bad at all,” I said. It helped that we’d sold all the office furniture and the mahogany bedroom set we got before the wedding. “How about we use our guests to help us clean out the refrigerator?”

  “Good idea.”

  We carried a smorgasbord down to the pool, where a month before we’d been married. It was a bittersweet gathering. Some of our wedding guests were there again, although not Ava. She’d informed me that she would be taking Jacoby’s grandmother to the doctor, and that she didn’t do goodbyes. I missed Rashidi fiercely. I couldn’t even think about Jacoby. It was just too much.

  Ms. Ruthie made a brief appearance. “You tell that boy I love him,” she said, her face tight and her tone stern. She embraced both of us and marched back to her golden car. I bit my lip.