by Cate Holahan
Ryan chuckled. The guy had an instant likability and a folksy British accent, if there was such a thing. The ability to be instantly appealing must have been one of those things that separated celebrities from ordinary people. “Thanks for agreeing to meet.”
“No problem. Appreciate if you’d keep my name out of it, though. The tabloids would have a field day, me staying next to a woman who fell off a ship.”
Ryan could imagine the tacky headlines: Dying to Meet Daniel? Jumping for His Love. “I’ll keep it quiet, though you might need to submit sealed testimony if you have anything relevant.”
The actor grimaced. “All right then. So . . .”
“So you were in the neighboring room?”
“Yeah. I met this girl in Miami and we thought, why not steal away to the Bahamas for the weekend? No one will know.” Daniel rolled his eyes. “Murphy’s Law, right?”
He joined Ryan at the plane display and selected a blue-and-white one. He checked out the price tag with an overacted version of shock. “Might have picked the wrong place.” He put the plane back on its shelf and walked over to a row of trucks. “Anyway, pity what happened to that woman. Young mom and all that.”
Ryan followed him to a display of equally expensive mini–motor vehicles. “Did you see anything?”
“I didn’t see her fall, but I was out on the balcony a few minutes before the news said she went over. I heard some things.”
“Like vomiting?”
The actor arched a single eyebrow, another talent possessed by few other than on screen performers. “No, mate. Nothing like that.” Daniel picked up a red fire truck with a ladder attached. He brought the ladder up and down, playing or, more likely, testing the toy’s structural integrity. “Boat was going. Maybe it drowned out the sound of someone cooking pavement pizza. But I don’t know. I could hear talking.”
Daniel turned the truck over and returned it to the shelf. “Isn’t there anything in this store that wasn’t carved by Tiffany’s?” He shook his head. Ryan wasn’t in the mood to laugh at any more jokes. He wanted details.
A camera clicked. Ryan turned to see the woman with the baby framing them in a cell phone shot. Daniel flashed a big grin. “My mate’s helping me select a present for my nephew Ed’s birthday. Mind not posting that? It’ll spoil the surprise.”
She blushed. “Oh, I’m sorry. I just can’t believe it’s you.”
“How about we pose for a shot, love, and you delete that one?”
The woman nearly bounced on her toes. She made a big show of erasing the former image, jostling the baby against her chest as she did. The child seemed more of a prop in this surreal situation than a real, live human being.
Daniel stood beside her. He draped an arm around her shoulders, took the phone with his free hand, and then extended his arm to take the pic. He turned a shoulder away from the camera so that his face was angled in a three-quarter profile. The woman pulled her chin into her neck as she smiled. Ryan could guess who would look better in the photo.
Daniel clicked and handed back the camera.
“You just made my year,” the woman said. Coming from someone who’d made a life within the last few months, the comment sounded odd.
Daniel maintained the big, Hollywood grin. “Who wouldn’t want to be photographed with such a beautiful pair of girls?”
The woman laughed—a giddy, teenage sound. “Thank you.”
“Better get on with the shopping.” He directed his voice at Ryan. “Last time you saw Ed, mate, what was he into?”
“Huh?” Ryan realized as his grunt slipped out that Ed had to be Daniel’s nephew and he was supposed to be the man’s friend, not a private investigator. “Puppets, maybe?”
The woman fiddled with her phone as she walked from the store. Her pic would undoubtedly be on social media within the next ten minutes. It might end up on TMZ within the hour. Daniel Matthew Ready for a Baby? Ryan had witnessed tonight’s celebrity gossip in the making.
“Sorry about that.” Daniel spoke under his breath. “Acting’s like politics. Got to kiss the nippers.” His face grew serious. “Now that she’s gone, I did want to tell you one thing.” He scratched his neck. “Probably should have told the Bahamian police, but there was no way they were going to keep my name out of it. Anything for a quid, right?”
Ryan didn’t like how this guy dragged everything out like a bad soap opera episode. He gestured for him to continue.
“There was a man with the woman who fell before she went overboard. I heard a voice.”
The words worked like Adderall in Ryan’s brain, shutting off the noise about celebrities, fame, and overpriced, imported toys. “You mean like ten minutes before or moments?”
“If the time on the news is right, less than a minute.”
“So you heard this man, but you didn’t see him at all?”
Daniel gave a sheepish look. “To be frank, the prior night, the dead woman and I guess her husband had been intimate on the balcony. They’d gotten it on right up against the railing and I’d caught some of it, unintentionally. I didn’t want to interrupt a second time. All I’d need, you know? Someone blogging that I’m a voyeur. Anyway, when I heard them talking, kind of animated like, I went back inside.”
“When did you go inside?”
“It was 7:27. I know because I remember thinking it was a good thing they’d made me go in since I had less than three minutes to make my dinner reservation.”
“You sure it was 7:27 when you heard the guy?”
“Yes. Just a minute before the news said she fell.”
Ryan felt the hairs prickle on the back of his neck. This was it. Proof that Ana hadn’t committed suicide or fallen accidentally. Someone had been in the room with her. But who? Michael? An assassin dressed as a member of the cleaning staff?
Ana had to have known the person or at least thought they had a right to be in the room. She had opened the door for them at 6:58 and spent nearly thirty minutes with them.
“I know I should have come forward sooner. I just kind of convinced myself that it wasn’t important, you know?” Daniel rubbed his palm over his spiky hair. “I thought that, since people saw the husband on deck, maybe I imagined it or something. I was happy when you called because I could get this off my chest.”
“Did you hear a struggle?”
“No. I would have come forward with something like that. She was just talking with the guy. Not excited or anything. Just a conversation. I heard what the bloke said too . . .”
Daniel trailed off, waiting for some kind of cue. Dramatic pauses were for the stage. The awe of the man’s presence had officially worn off.
“Out with it,” Ryan said.
Daniel cleared his throat. “He said, ‘That was never the plan.’”
32
August 29
Golden rays stretched over the turquoise sea. I thought of Sophia as I watched the sunrise from my balcony, sipping tea. Alone. Was she having a nice time with Eve? Did she miss me?
Through the glass door, I could see Tom facedown on the sheets like the chalk outline at a crime scene. He hadn’t come to bed until nearly sunrise. I didn’t plan to disturb him. If Tom slept in, I wouldn’t need to invent an excuse to leave him on the beach while I checked out a “return trip” sailing excursion.
Warm, citrusy liquid slipped down my throat and tumbled into my gut. I felt better. Aside from a momentary stomach pang spurred from the rancid smell of whatever passed as the in-room coffee, I hadn’t suffered any bellyaches. The Sea-Bands around my wrist had to be helping. Or perhaps the view had calmed my nerves. The water beneath the ship was clear and warm looking. Almost still. I could jump into this sea.
My belly grumbled. First, I needed food. I had to consume enough calories for a very long swim. I tiptoed back into the room and grabbed the backpack carrying all my clothes for the weekend. I emptied it onto the desk in the room, leaving only my passport, cruise ticket, room key, and a couple hundred dollars in a Ziploc
bag: everything I needed to spend a day at the beach and reboard the boat. I donned my bikini and then slipped a gauzy mesh tunic over it, careful not to disturb anything close to the bed as I dressed. Tom’s snore followed me out the door.
In the dining hall, I inhaled pancakes the way a runner loads up on pasta before a big race. After waiting fifteen minutes to be sure the meal would stay down, I squeezed into a full elevator bound for the ship’s bowels. The exit was on the second level.
The crew took about an hour to check that all leaving passengers were carrying passports and excursion tickets. Their thoroughness worried me. If my ship checked passengers off a manifest and demanded ID, why wouldn’t another boat out of the same port? Could day-cruise ships really be so much more lax than their larger counterparts?
I tried not to think about it as I walked through a metal detector separating the gangplank and the cement dock leading to the mainland. The coyotes had never failed to smuggle my parents in the country. Keeping them there had been the problem.
The road to the island was wide enough for several lanes of car traffic, but there wasn’t a single vehicle on it. People, pedal-carriages, and tent stores clogged the artery from the ship to shore. I scanned for anything with a “Return Trips” label. Pedal cart drivers held signs with family names on it. Other men wore caps with the logos of local tourism outfits. They shouted about prices and beaches, each bragging that they alone knew the best spots on the island.
A mahogany-colored man with high cheekbones and a wide smile waved to me from the sidelines. He wore a plain white tee. No logo. “Glass-bottom boat?” The way he drew out the vowels sounded like a song. “Sailing tour?”
“Return Trips Travel?”
He waved me over. “Thirty U.S., take ya to da beach and back to your boat.”
“Are you with Return Trips?”
He waved at another woman behind me. “Glass-bottom boat, sailing tours. The best beaches. Thirty dollars.”
Panic crept into my chest like cold air. There was no sign of Return Trips Travel anywhere. What if the company didn’t exist? What if the whole thing was a scam and that man in Jersey had just stolen five thousand dollars from me? Could I survive in the Bahamas with the two hundred dollars in my Ziploc bag for a month, let alone six?
I continued walking, feeling more frantic with each step. A hand tapped my back. “Excuse me, miss. You da one searchin’ for Return Trips?”
A boy, no older than seventeen, stood behind me. He had darting eyes. His wife-beater tank revealed black tattoos that looked green on his dark complexion.
“Yes. I am.”
“Come.”
My fear about not seeing my smugglers morphed into terror at dealing with them. Just because they had an office in Newark didn’t mean I was dealing with Boy Scouts. I stepped from the young man’s reach.
He looked puzzled. “You require a sailin’ tour, right?”
“I need to know you’re from the agency.”
“You talk to Javier?”
I’d never asked the name of the man in Newark. I’d been so focused on not revealing too much of my information that I hadn’t asked for any. “What does Javier look like?”
The guy shrugged. “I never met ’im. Come see da boat.” He pointed to a mooring beyond the cruise ship terminal. “You’ll feel better.”
I followed behind, trying to stay in view of the passengers still streaming off my ship. I couldn’t spot any sails. When we reached beyond the dock, my guide pointed to a near-black boat shaped like a barracuda with a long, pointy nose. The hull appeared open, a canoe with a steering wheel and instruments where the center bench would have been. Three engines hung off the back.
A man stood behind the wheel, captain’s hat on his head, sandy-blond mustache atop his lip. Sunglasses shielded his eyes. The skin on his arms reminded me of a boiled lobster.
The captain’s sunburnt whiteness shouldn’t have made me feel better, but it did. Bullshit, I knew. Still, I felt myself calming as I followed the tattooed teenager to the safety of someone who looked more like the Skipper on Gilligan’s Island than my TV-skewed image of a hardened criminal.
The captain looked up from a clipboard. “Name?”
It took a moment to swallow my stock answer. “Camilla de Santos.” I spoke with my best impression of my mother’s accent, stressing the second to last syllable of every word.
He scanned my face then checked off something with a pencil. Two young men, each wearing the stained, oversized clothing that announced poverty, sat cross-legged on the boat floor next to some straw bags.
“That’s three.” The captain’s accent was Australian. He addressed the man who’d brought me over. “We’ve five more. Two are coming by boat. Turkish. Another is Jamaican.” He made a twisting motion by his head. “Winston Hardie. He’ll be on the trolley. Then there’s the Chilean family.”
My escort nodded. “Okay, boss.” He ran toward the cruise ship dock.
The captain extended his hand. I grasped it. Instead of shaking, he gripped my arm and pulled me into the boat. “Hello, miss. You speak English?”
The ground rocked beneath my feet. I struggled to regain my balance. “Yes.”
He raised his eyebrows. “You have the American accent. You’ve been to the States, I take it? Overstayed a visa from—let me guess—Venezuela?”
How could he gather so much from one word? I tried again to mimic my mother’s Portuguese-accented English, making my long e sound like an i vowel and adding a ch sound to the letter t. “I need to get back,” I answered. I nid chu git back. “Is there a pass I collect? Where do I meet you in Bimini?”
The captain chuckled. “Bimini is miles away. What are you going to do, swim? Don’t worry. We’ll wait for the rest of guests and then I’ll take you all to Bimini and get you on your U.S. voyage.”
The man in Newark had never said that the sailing tour went to Bimini. I’d assumed that the coyotes gave the passes on another island to distance themselves in case anything went wrong. “I can make my own way to Bimini. If you would give me the tickets, I—”
“Why would you have another way to get there?” The captain looked incredulous.
“I took a cruise here and I was going to go to Bimini with my hu—” I stopped myself. Better to say boyfriend. If I had a husband, he would be either getting smuggled in too or applying for my U.S. visa. “My boyfriend. Can’t I meet you there?”
“No, sweetheart.” He mocked my imitation accent. “You can’t mit mi chere.”
“Why?”
“Because I get paid per head that exits this boat with one of those little carry-ons.” The captain pointed to the straw bags beside my fellow passengers. They looked just like the kind of handwoven totes tourists picked up at local markets. The kind I might have bought myself on a vacation, when I’d had disposable cash. The coyotes had never said anything about a bag.
“What’s in it?”
“Never you mind. No one will bother you.”
I had to mind. Money? Drugs? Guns? Each one carried a different kind of sentence and made me a different kind of criminal. “I need to know what I’m carrying.”
“Go look for yourself.”
I picked up the bag. Its flimsy appearance belied its weight. The thing felt as though it contained a gallon of milk, yet nothing lay inside. I turned it upside down. My fingers brushed the outside. Finally, I brought the bag up to my nose like a drug-sniffing dog. My scent glands didn’t tell me anything, but the close-up view revealed that the bag wasn’t made of straw at all. Each strand was a straw-colored, hollow plastic tube. I could imagine what filled the insides. “Cocaine?”
The captain frowned. He rubbed his index and thumb over his mustache. “Got the trick, did you? No one else will. They’ve never stopped anyone before.”
I put it down. “I can’t take it.”
“Well, then we have a problem, because then I can’t take you. And if I don’t take you, I don’t get paid.”
�
�Drugs weren’t part of the deal.”
The smile vanished. The captain stepped toward me. His chest swelled, a puff adder warning of an imminent strike. His top lip retreated further beneath his mustache. “I don’t think you heard me. I get paid per head and per bag.” A snarl glinted from beneath his mustache. “So everyone on this boat takes a bloody bag.”
The men scooted farther to the side of the vessel, away from the advancing skipper. Their movement told me everything I needed to know about the captain. I should be afraid. But I couldn’t take the bag. How would I swim with it?
“I’m sorry. I just can’t.”
“You’re sorry?” He licked his bottom lip. A callused hand wrapped around my wrist and wrenched it backward. Pain shot up my arm. “You paid for a one-way ticket to the States. I’m that ticket and these are the travel conditions. And if you don’t like it, that’s too bad. This isn’t American Airlines. I’m the captain and you do what I say. You understand?”
If he sprained my arm, I’d never finish the swim. “Please,” I squealed. “I’m not trying to be difficult. I’d planned to jump overboard and swim to Bimini. I need it to look as though I fell off of my ship.”
The sunglasses drew closer to my face. I could see the captain’s dark eyes behind the lenses. “What kind of trouble are you in?”
“My boyfriend is abusive. He needs to think I died.” The lie spat out before fully formulated. Amazing, the things the subconscious could invent under stress.
“So let him think you disappeared.”
“He’ll never stop looking for me.”
“Everyone stops looking. Now sit down.” The hand yanked me to the boat floor. My knees hit metal. I pulled away. He let go and watched as I toppled backward.
The boat rocked. I got back on my knees. “Please. There’s an insurance policy. I need it to pay so my daughter can have a little money. If I just disappear, she’ll get nothing.”
The captain bent to stare at me. I looked straight into his sunglasses. He would see the honesty in my eyes. The desperation. He would believe me.
