I looked out at the storm. We could hear the raindrops pummeling the ceiling of the glass dome. Scott said, “Unless it’s a fairly large boat, it won’t last long in this storm.”
I said, “If they won’t let any boats leave from Santorini, we shouldn’t ask anyone here to try it.”
“Is a delay going to make a difference?” Sherebury asked. “I have to talk to the owner. Oh dear.” He put a hand up to his lips. “I guess the day manager is in charge for now. I’m not sure what to do. Our guests won’t want to be connected to something this unfortunate.”
Privacy and being left alone were the desiderata of the clientele. The island prided itself on keeping out paparazzi and any other dregs of the tabloid press. One legend was that in the sixties when one of the loathsome creatures from the most egregiously vile publication had snuck onto the island, he’d been unceremoniously dumped from the top of the castle tower into the sea below. Depending on which version of the ending you believed, he either hit the rocks below and died instantly, or he managed to hit the water but drowned before he could swim to shore, or he landed in the sea, swam to safety, and left, never to return. I preferred to believe the first two stories, but I suspected the latter was closer to the truth.
“What about the damn yacht?” Scott said. “That thing should be able to get through anything.”
Sherebury said, “That’s not my decision to make. I’m sure whoever the new owner of the island is would want this handled discreetly.”
“Sending the yacht for help isn’t discreet?” Scott asked. “Who cares about discreet when there’s a dead body running around.” The English teacher in me did not blurt out a correction to this impossibility.
Sherebury said, “The rich will care no matter what.”
It was true that whatever official investigative group got told and when didn’t matter to the dead guy. He wasn’t going anywhere. But there was a killer loose on the island. That had to be dealt with.
“You could e-mail someone,” I said.
Sherebury said, “I could try it. Although it wasn’t working a few minutes ago, and I’m not sure who I’d e-mail.”
I said, “What difference does it make who you e-mail? You could e-mail my lawyer in America. He’d know who to get in touch with, or he’d find out who the proper authorities are.”
“This thing isn’t wireless,” Sherebury countered.
I said, “Someone on the island must have a wireless computer.”
“Mr. Tudor might have. I can look in his villa later.” He tapped at the computer keys and worked the mouse. After several minutes, he said, “I still can’t get the thing to connect to the Internet.”
“May I try?” I asked. He nodded. I walked around to his side of the desk and looked at the screen. It had the dreaded “Page not found” words scrawled in large letters across the top. I wondered if someone had sabotaged the server. I fiddled with the computer, tried to call up my home screen, my Internet account. I messed with the mouse. It had the kind I hate, embedded in the keyboard between the keys and you. I fiddled and fumed. Nothing.
“We’re cut off from the rest of the world,” Sherebury said. He sounded as if it wouldn’t take much for him to give hysteria a try.
I asked, “How many are on the island now?”
New Year’s is not the high season for the Chaldean Islands. Most of the islands are shut during the nontourist, winter months. Business on Korkasi, however, didn’t fluctuate as wildly with the seasons.
“Maybe twenty. Less than half of the villas are occupied. Most of the help aren’t here. Without the night shift, we’ve only got a few of us who live here on a year-round basis. I’ve tried the radio every few minutes. It’s not working. I guess the backup generators only do so much.”
I said, “Or the murderer planned well and destroyed all communications as part of his plan.”
“That’s frightening,” Scott said. It would have been nice to think that fear was not an option at that point. I wouldn’t have wanted to put it to a vote.
I said, “With fewer help on the island, it cuts down on the number of suspects.”
I’d left our room at nine to meet Scott. The night shift sailed at eight. I figured we could eliminate them as possible killers. Unless he’d been murdered somewhere else and his body moved. Corpse toters? Too gruesome to contemplate right then.
Scott asked, “Is that twenty not counting us or does that include us?”
“Without,” Sherebury said.
“Did you count guards and hangers on?”
Sherebury said, “We have several security guards. I didn’t count them among the guests. We never do. What are we going to do? Nobody is going to get here from Santorini to investigate, if that’s who sends someone. Will whoever they send know how to keep things quiet? Our guests put great value on their privacy. We have to protect that. We can’t have any kind of scandal. We have to be able to control what gets out. We haven’t had a public scandal in years.”
I thought I knew what he was obliquely referring to. Supposedly sometime in the early fifties, there had been another murder. The nineteen-year-old heir to an American industrial fortune had killed his working-class lover and then committed suicide. Supposedly there had been lurid headlines “around the world.” Although why someone in Bombay India would care about a minor European tragedy was beyond me. I suspected gross exaggeration on the headline claim. I’d never heard the incident talked about among the guests on the island. We’d heard the story from the man who suggested the island as a place of respite from the pressures of the world. He thought the possibility of an old romantic love gone awry would add to the allure of the place. I’d seen enough love gone awry in my day. I wasn’t eager for more, but fifty years ago had seemed safely long ago enough.
I said, “Maybe we could use the yacht. If it’s big enough to get through this kind of storm.”
“It’s big,” Scott said, “but I don’t know what the waves would be like outside the harbor.”
“Whose is it?” I asked.
“Mr. Tudor’s.”
“He won’t mind if we use it,” I said, “he’s dead.”
“But I don’t know who’s in charge right now,” Sherebury said.
“We need to do several things,” I said. “We need to get a message off the island. We need to see if that yacht is capable of sailing through this kind of storm. We need to preserve the crime scene. We need to make sure there are no more killings. We should check to see if there aren’t more victims already.”
“Catch the killer?” Scott asked.
“If he’s unarmed or dead, sure,” I replied.
There was a tremendous “kabloom.” The ground shook. The remaining lights winked out.
With one hand I grabbed for Scott. With the other I clutched at the Lucite top of the registration desk. All three of us steadied ourselves against the violent shaking. It stopped after several seconds.
“An earthquake?” I asked. Violent volcanic eruptions and destructive earthquakes were common enough occurrences on the islands in the Aegean Sea. A flash of red lit the sky in the direction of the castle. We could see only the top of the tower. The rest was hidden by the rise in the ground. The sky continued to glow red, but we saw no flames. Currently our only light was provided by a few battery-operated exit signs, sporadic lightning, and distant emanations from the boats in the harbor. Without the lightning we could see our hands in front of our faces but not much more.
I began to take a step in the direction of the castle when I heard an odd crinkling sound. I looked up. Cracks as big as gashes in the firmament were rapidly spreading throughout the vast glass dome above us. I heard several loud thuds and crashes. Lightning flashed. I saw glass shriven struts sticking up into the sky. A streak of lightning smashed into the peak of the metal.
“Run!” Scott yelled.
When we were halfway to the exit, Sherebury turned back. “Don’t,” I shouted after him.
He ran about three steps to
ward the desk that had his computer on it. He got out the words, “I have to get—” His devotion to technology killed him. A jagged pane of glass, as wide as a Volkswagen, fell, cutting him nearly in two. He wasn’t going to have to worry about any kind of scandal.
I was spared a lengthy examination of his horrific demise at this moment. Scott yanked me forward, and he and I resumed our dash for the nearest exit. Rain and glass seemed to be falling in equal amounts. Thousands of shards and fragments showered down on us, but fortunately none of the larger pieces. We used hands and arms to cover our heads as best we could as we ran. I felt numerous small stings. The sleeves of my jacket were quickly shredding. I barely had time to note slim rivulets of blood starting in several locations. Rain, no longer held back by the glass dome, pelted us relentlessly.
I’ve never run faster.
I didn’t see anyone else during our wild rush, but it was the middle of the night. We heard groaning more ominous than the thunder. Ten feet from the exit I realized that bolts and rivets holding the superstructure together were among the glass shards and pouring rain falling on us. Two feet from safety a mass of rivets hurtled down on us. One smacked into my left hand. It felt like it had been hit with a ball-peen hammer. Blood poured from a nasty gash. Scott got hit with five or six. One thwacked into his forehead. He cried out and fell to his knees. I grabbed him under his armpits, tried to shelter him while I struggled to get him back on his feet and out from under the lethal storm. With my help he staggered toward the exit. It took several more eternal seconds to get us both out of the maddening tempest and into the swirling storm. Once we were outside, the rain drenched us completely in less than five seconds. The wind howled.
Scott shook his head.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
“I think so.” He wiped at the blood on his forehead. His hand smeared it, but the rain quickly washed it away. He swayed. I helped prop him up.
I examined him as best I could. Lights were out and the flashes of lightning illumined the scene only briefly. I said, “I think you need stitches.” I glanced at my hand. The torrent rinsed my hand of his blood. “A doctor should look at both of us.” For several seconds we surveyed the destruction amid the violence of nature. “We’ve got to see if we can help anyone.”
Less than fifteen feet from us, the skeleton of the Atrium teetered. A groan, as if the Earth itself was choosing to die, engulfed us. Metal bits began flying in a thousand directions. We backpedaled for a moment then turned and ran. When we thought we were out of range, we looked back. Some of the metal bars swayed precariously. We retreated a few more steps.
In seconds, with a moan louder than thunder crashing within an inch of your ear, the entire superstructure smashed to the ground. Great iron struts and tons of glass crushed anything in their path. The old cypress trees swayed and fell. The line of pedicars was turned into mostly junk. Only one still had an intact roof, but all of its glass was shattered. I saw large chunks of cement among the shards. One such chunk had incapacitated three of the electric carts. One large beam had crashed into the side of the yacht. Its lights failed. In the next flash of lightning I saw that the beam had opened a great gaping gash down the entire port side of the vessel. It was already listing badly to that side. For several moments we stood in shock and awe at what had been and what had happened. Rain sluiced down both of our faces.
I said, “We’ve got to see if anyone is still alive in that. We’ve got to try and help them.”
The immediate problem was the near total darkness. One boat in the harbor still had its lights on. The one boat near the castle was on fire, but they were a distance away and the light was barely fitful. We crunched over shards of glass as we rushed to help anyone who might have survived the collapse of the dome. Two of the other guests joined us. Rufus Seymour and Matthew McCue. One of them had a flashlight. For all the help it gave us, we might as well be trying to illumine the dark side of the moon with a single match. Our lack of illumination slowed the hunt. I also wondered why more of the guests and the staff weren’t out helping to look for survivors. The explosion had been massive and the collapse of the dome had made the most titanic noise I ever expected to hear. There had to be more than this number still alive on the island but this was futile speculation for now.
We hunched near the one light, followed it, and peered intently in every direction. Rain gleamed like diamonds hurtling earthward in the beam’s light. There wasn’t much point in examining Sherebury’s body, but we went toward him. There could be others nearby.
His remains were a horrible sight. Before the light swung away from his torso I saw that the surgically straight cut had sliced clean through nearly seven-eighths of his torso. Rain sluiced blood away from his insides. The storm couldn’t do much to erase the image that his death wrought on my brain. I thought about the fact that he undoubtedly had a mom and a dad, perhaps a lover. I realized I didn’t know him. He’d been little more than a blip in my life. Still, it was sad and ghastly. Scott was sick as were two of the others with us. I may have seen death and misery when I was a Marine, but I don’t know how I kept my recent repast down. This was as bad as any of the worst I’d seen. We used one of the tablecloths from the dining room to cover him up. Then we moved on.
The kitchen area contained the remnants of four more employees. I had never seen corpses so mutilated or destruction so violent. The torrential rain was rapidly washing blood from their lifeless forms. We found no one alive. If someone was buried under the collapsed steel struts, we couldn’t see them. The howling storm made it nearly impossible for us to hear any cries for help.
We carried the dead bodies to shelter. We had to be extra careful with Sherebury’s to keep the two halves from completely separating. Before moving him, we wrapped him several times in numerous tablecloths. From under the eaves of Apritzi House, the nearest shelter, we looked back toward the remnants of the Atrium. All of us were soaked and breathing heavily.
I said, “I don’t think there’s anything more to be done here.”
One of the staff, I thought it was Henry Tudor’s valet, had joined us about halfway through our inspection. He said, “This is awful. I’ve never seen a dead body.”
One of the archeologists came running from the direction of the castle. He pulled up to us. “I saw your light. People are fighting the fire inside the castle. We’ve got to help.”
We plowed through the storm toward the massive structure. An orange-and-red glow pulsed beyond the hill between us and it. The light faded then grew again, faded, brightened.
The castle was on the far side of the escarpment from the Atrium. We hurried around the hill. Five minutes later we emerged at the east end of the small bay. Somebody was going to have to build the castle tower again and maybe the whole place. The top half of the tower was gone and the bottom half was in flames. I realized now where the large chunks of cement that had hit the Atrium had come from. Concrete bits of castle tower must have been flung far and high by the explosion. Our rooms and everything in them were gone. As of yet, we saw no flames from the windows of the Great Hall or the library. The destruction of the library with all its irreplaceable first editions would be a horrendous loss. It had the most complete collection of gay books ever published, most first editions. The original owner had made it part of his will that a third of his fortune would be devoted to acquiring every gay book ever published. Those who had inherited or bought the island in turn had kept on with the tradition. Otherwise the money sat unspent in a rigidly controlled account through the Bank of England. The most recent owner had made it a point to check the book searches on the Internet for any title they did not have. When our set of rooms was not occupied in summer, people often took books up to the top of the tower to read. It might not have been equivalent to the destruction of the library at Alexandria, but the world could lose a lot of early gay literature this night.
We rushed forward. In the castle bay, the fire on the one small boat was quickly dying. Behind us,
we could see the boat at the end of the pier the archeologists had been heading for after their encounter with Sherebury The only other boat in the harbor was the listing yacht.
As we neared the castle, I saw that the tower was undoubtedly a total loss. The next nearest villa was a quarter mile away. The wind was blowing from the inland side of the island toward the sea and the worst of the flames were being blown in that direction. It would be unlikely for the conflagration to spread inland. Between the tower and the rest of the castle were the solid oak doors and two-feet-thick walls. Perhaps the rest of the castle could be saved.
Through the shattered stained glass windows of the Great Hall, I saw people inside. We hurried forward.
At the threshold, I said, “Is this safe?” The noise from the storm was so great it was necessary to yell almost directly into Scott’s ear.
“Do we have a choice?” he asked. We did, but we didn’t. We had to help.
Inside the castle we saw at least six people. We joined them in the darkness lit mostly by the glow that leaped through the windows and one doorway from the tower’s inferno.
In one corner of the Great Hall was a standpipe in a hose cabinet. Others had dragged the hose across the floor. It stretched several feet past the threshold of the oaken door. Wayne Craveté, who I’d long ago dismissed as a limp-wristed, useless ditzy gossip, was holding onto the nozzle with a grip firmer than a size queen on a twelve incher. His face was grimed, the back of his hands blistered, his clothes drenched. He made not a noise as he held on. Water was being pumped steadily through the opening onto the ground floor of the tower.
Everyone's Dead But Us Page 3
