Island Casualty

by D. R. Ransdell

  “I suppose you’re vying for the job instead.”

  We reached the entrance to the taverna where a stream of tourists from one of the luxury hotels was being herded inside.

  “No, of course not! But Hari doesn’t deserve to have his life fabricated.”

  “Can’t you forget about your precious friend for once?”

  “Rachel, since this is my last night on Amiros, I’ve got to get things straightened out. I need closure to this mess. I need to feel right about things.”

  “It’s all about what you need, isn’t it?”

  “What do you mean by that?” I asked as I followed her into the foyer.

  She faced me, bristling. “Whenever we’re alone, there are three people in the room: You and me and at least one dead person.”

  She marched into the dining room before I was coherent enough to think of a reply.

  Chapter Twenty Nine

  I handed Joey the brown sack. “I brought you some ice cream.”

  My brother took out the Styrofoam container and wrestled with the lid. “Strawberry and chocolate. My favorites.” He spooned his first bite. “Want some?”

  “No appetite.”

  “Sorry to be leaving Amiros?”

  “No.”

  He slurped. “Why not?”

  I leaned against the back of the chair. “Rachel and I went to Soumba’s office this afternoon. Hari died in a boating accident. Soumba admitted to writing the suicide note. He claimed he wanted to prevent the islanders from worrying and the tourists from going to some other island instead of Amiros.”

  Joey savored another spoonful. “Soumba’s explanation is possible.”

  “He denies his daughter was engaged to Hari.”

  “Maybe he didn’t know. Didn’t Hari come down here to ask Soumba’s permission? Granted, in today’s world, it’s a formality.”

  I was silent so long that Joey looked up from his treat. “What’s wrong? You’re less cheerful than a funeral director.”

  “Soumba had more to do with Hari’s death than he’s letting on.”

  “Hari was messing with his daughter, who happened to be half the man’s age. It’s logical that Soumba was upset.” Joey scraped the Styrofoam.

  “You’re just going to sit there eating ice cream?”

  He set the container down. “No, it’s too cold. I’ll take a break. Look, you don’t have daughters who will turn into teenagers. I’ve got two of them. In a few years, you’ll probably have to restrain me from killing their boyfriends.”

  I pounded my right fist into my left palm. “Soumba shouldn’t have faked evidence. That’s the last thing he should have done. It’s immoral.”

  “You’re right, Andy.” He pointed to my shirt pocket. “Give me a cigarette.”

  “You’re in a hospital!”

  “I’ll stand by the window.”

  “You’re not supposed to move around.”

  Painfully, slowly, he moved his feet around to the side of the bed. “Do you want me to get yelled at for smoking in the room? Shut the door.”

  I obeyed. We puffed as furtively as we had when we were in our early twenties but still living at home.

  “We should quit,” I said.

  “I will if you will. But not here. Back in California.”

  I had bigger problems than nicotine. “Soumba doesn’t want you to press charges against his wife.”

  Joey returned to the bed and to his ice cream. By now he’d reached the chocolate part, which had gotten drippy. “I wasn’t planning to.”

  “The woman almost killed you!”

  “I thank God that she didn’t get either of us. The woman is so far gone she’ll never come back again. That’s punishment enough.”

  “Why am I the only one upset about all this?”

  “All what, Andy? A woman who tried to kill you but failed? A father trying to protect his daughter? No matter how ill-conceived, these incidents don’t concern you anymore. You’re right. You need to get back to Squid Bay so that you can crawl back into your cocoon. You’re so entrenched in your own world that you have no idea how the rest of us operate.” He leaned against the pillow, tired out. “I’m sorry. I wasn’t trying to lecture. I realize that you want absolutes. You think of the world as black and white. That’s why you don’t keep girlfriends, Andy. One little thing goes wrong, one little black mark, and you run the other way. You never try to work things out.”

  His words hurt because his accusations were accurate. I’d always been a runner. I didn’t even know why.

  “Here’s my advice,” Joey continued. “Forget about what happened here. Dwell on how lucky we were.”

  “What if Hari didn’t die in an accident?”

  “Even if Soumba put a round of bullets in Hari’s chest, so what? He’s the police chief. Do you think Lascar and Petros would arrest their boss? Anyway, it doesn’t matter. Soumba is not dangerous.”

  “Not until his daughter has another boyfriend.”

  Joey shrugged, wincing through the pain of moving his shoulders.

  “You don’t care, do you?” I asked.

  My brother pounded the bed with his free hand. “You think I don’t care about Hari? You’re right. I never met the guy, and now he’s dead. It’s too late for him, so I only care about you and Rachel. And Nikos and Eleni. And their kids. Eleni brought them by this afternoon and they cheered me right up.”

  “You’re changing the subject.”

  “Be realistic. Stop being a meddler and get out of town. You can’t help anyone here.”

  “Letta should at least know what’s going on.”

  “Maybe someday. Not right now. Her father’s all she’s got.”

  I stared blankly.

  “Don’t feel so bad, Andy. It’s out of your control.” He slurped the last bit of chocolate. “I know you’re upset. You wanted to help Hari, and now you’d like to help Letta. Since you’ve already done all you can for them, you have to help yourself. Let it go.”

  He’d told me the same thing after I’d lost Louloudi. Night after night, he’d become a broken record, “Let it go, let it go.” I knew he was right, but that didn’t mean I could take his advice. Instead I had a broken record of my own: Because you’re selfish and stupid, it’s all your fault.

  “Andy,” he said gently. “Enough. Move on.”

  “I’ll try.”

  He shook his head until the movement made him wince. “Trying is good enough most of the time. But not now. You must move forward.”

  “I know.”

  “Do you, Andy? Do you really?”

  I nodded but I avoided his eyes.

  He set down the empty container. “Go! You have better things to do tonight than talk to me.”

  I leaned over and gave him a gentle hug. “See you back in California. Thanks for saving my life.”

  “Don’t expect it to become a habit.”

  The door had blown open. As I headed through it, I missed knocking into Soumba by a couple of inches.

  “Hello,” I said.

  Soumba nodded, but he didn’t smile. He pushed past me and strode into the room.

  ***

  By the time Rachel finished playing at the taverna and we got back to Eleni’s, our hosts were waiting for us on the porch for a farewell nightcap. Eleni opened a package from the local bakery while Rachel sank into one of the empty chairs and pulled me down beside her.

  “You look more worn out than when you first got here,” Nikos told me as he tossed me his pack of cigarettes. “Your friends are going to laugh at you.”

  I thought about mentioning that my one true friend was in a hospital downtown, but I refrained. “I already told you. No more vacations.”

  “You shouldn’t let a few life-threatening situations stop you. Where’s your sense of adventure?” Nikos handed me a beer. From the empties on the table, I could tell he was ahead of me.

  “It’s been a rough day,” I said.

  “How is your brother doing?” Ele
ni asked sharply.

  “Pretty well. He’s not the problem.”

  “What then?”

  “To start with, Rachel nearly got us thrown in jail.”

  Nikos popped open another beer and drank a third of it in one slug. “Rachel! You’re usually so quiet.”

  She didn’t look up from the cigarette she was lighting. “Andy exaggerates.”

  “I do not.” I recounted Soumba’s confession about the faked suicide note.

  Eleni cut pieces of baklava and doled them out on paper plates. “The islanders worry each time they learn of a catastrophe. The sea provides their livelihood, yet they are quick to blame her.”

  “Your police chief fabricated evidence,” I said.

  Eleni extended napkins.

  “The strategy is unsophisticated,” said Nikos, “but it works. Here there’s a delicate eco-balance. It’s not so easy to keep everything at the right levels.”

  “It’s a funny situation. That’s all,” I said.

  Nikos raised his glass. “Lots of things on the island are funny. Wouldn’t you agree, Rachel?”

  “Amiros has its own culture,” she said. “It’s hard to understand until you’ve been here for a while.”

  “And if you live here, it is hard to understand anything else,” Eleni added.

  I peered into the night. Yards away, a streetlight burned.

  “I know you’re right, but it’s hard to think that way.”

  Eleni plopped another small piece of the honeyed dessert onto Nikos’ plate. “Soumba is trying to take care of his people. He will do anything to accomplish that.”

  “It’s okay for him to make up his own truth?”

  “If he needs to,” said Eleni.

  “You condone his taking the law into his own hands?”

  “What’s your solution, Surfer Boy?” Nikos asked. “Even if it’s wrong, what do you think he’s going to do, turn himself in to himself?”

  I wanted to remind Nikos that I never, ever surfed.

  “There must be some kind of recourse,” I said. “A citizen’s arrest or something.”

  “No,” Eleni said. “There is nothing like that. It has not been necessary. The people would not accept it anyway. Soumba is our guide. The townspeople trust him more than they do the priests.”

  “Even if you could turn him in, how would that solve anything?” Rachel asked. “Hari’s dead anyway, and Agnesa’s out in space somewhere. Do you want Letta to lose the only other person who’s close to her?”

  “I know it seems strange,” Nikos told me. “You’re cosmopolitan as I am. You can’t think like an islander. You wouldn’t even want to.”

  “How can you gloss over this whole situation?”

  Rachel popped to her feet. “If you’re going to whine, you might as well keep it to yourself.”

  She marched off the porch and went upstairs to her apartment. I considered chasing after her but instead turned back to Nikos and his wife.

  “Soumba faked evidence,” I continued. “That’s a criminal act.”

  Eleni and Nikos looked at one another, but my information didn’t perturb them. They were merely deciding what they should say to me.

  “This is Amiros,” Eleni finally said. “Things do not work here the way they might in the rest of the world. You cannot impose your outside values.”

  “Don’t people protest? Don’t they get angry?”

  “They do,” Eleni said slowly, “but only if they think a public official is hurting them.”

  “Soumba made up a story about a dead person.”

  “Which allowed him to close the case and move on,” Nikos said. “You have to think practically.”

  “Okay, what if he’s protecting somebody?”

  Nikos shrugged. “He wouldn’t do it without good reason.”

  “It’s still not right.”

  Nikos and Eleni stared at me with blank faces.

  “Can you define ‘right,’ my friend?” Nikos finally asked, which was finally enough to get me to shut my big mouth for a few minutes.

  Of course I couldn’t define “right.” I thought I could define what “right” wasn’t, but I was afraid to try. Everything I’d said the entire day had somehow turned out to be ridiculous. It was as if I’d gotten up on the wrong side of things and couldn’t find my way back to the bed for a chance to start again. Everyone I knew on Amiros was in synch with a world I couldn’t fathom. Joey had managed it automatically by sizing up the situation and going with the flow.

  I had the feeling that even if I stayed indefinitely, I’d never catch on.

  Nikos offered me another beer, but I hadn’t gotten through the first one. If I didn’t have any wits about me anyway, alcohol would only make things worse. I felt a crawling sensation in my stomach as if I couldn’t get settled. When I’d been in California, all I wanted to do was leave. Now I wanted nothing more than to get back.

  “Consider the whole picture,” Nikos said. “If something happened to Soumba, can you imagine Lascar as police chief? He’s twenty-three.”

  “Isn’t Petros older?”

  “The one who kept falling asleep when he was supposed to be guarding our house?”

  “They could bring in someone from Athens.”

  “Someone who wouldn’t have the faintest idea of how to operate on Amiros,” Nikos continued. “Good call.”

  “Somebody from another island then.”

  “Brilliant,” Nikos said. “All the islands are exactly alike.”

  I tried to settle deeper into my chair. Somehow I needed to ground myself, but I didn’t have a clue as to how to do so. I didn’t have a clue about anything. I’d rarely felt so inept.

  Eleni tried to lighten things up by asking about my imminent trip, but the conversation fell flat. There was no way out. The best I could do was to start counting the hours before the ferry would take me away.

  “What about that engagement ring?” I finally asked. “Should we give it to Letta or not?”

  Eleni started straightening the table. Nikos caught a mosquito and squished it.

  “Is she better off with it or without it?” I insisted.

  “This is not my area,” said Nikos. “I don’t have an opinion.”

  Eleni stacked the napkins deliberately as if they had a precise order. “I think it is better for you to give her the ring.”

  “Are you sure she’s ready for it?”

  “Whether she is ready or not, the ring came into your possession, so it should go from you to her. The ferry does not leave until eleven, so you will have plenty of time to see her in the morning.”

  “I wouldn’t want to make her more miserable than she already is.”

  Eleni clasped her hands. “Maybe the ring will make her miserable for a few minutes. In the long run, I think she would rather have it. If nothing else, in case she was unsure, she will have proof of Hari’s intentions. That has to be worth something.”

  ***

  I trudged upstairs. I was expecting Rachel to be asleep or pretending to be, but instead she was lying on the bed reading a magazine.

  “Are you mad at me too?”

  She tossed her reading aside. “Nobody’s mad at you. We’re tired of trying to explain. You’re not so clever that you can bring back the dead.”

  “You can avenge a wrongful act. Don’t you think that would make Letta feel better?”

  Rachel reached past me to turn off the lights, leaving us in the grays cast by the streetlight outside. “No, Andy. I don’t think that would make her feel better at all.”

  Rachel didn’t resist when I reached for her, but our lovemaking was like crossing something off a to-do list. Rachel neither resisted nor requested. She let me go through familiar motions but was neutral to them. Instead of cuddling up to me afterwards as she had in the past, she got up and went into the living room. Since she didn’t turn on a light, she stumbled against a stack of cassettes, scattering them. I listened as she opened the refrigerator and popped open a soda
. She came back to the bedroom with a small glass for herself.

  “Not sleepy?” I asked.

  She sat on the edge of the bed, folding her legs underneath her. “You were distant all evening.”

  “I was thinking about my brother. And Soumba. You were kidding just now, weren’t you, about Soumba being Hari’s killer?”

  She took a sip. “What are you going to do, go to the cops in Athens and report him?”

  “Probably.”

  “I’d be worried, Andy, except that nobody in Athens gives a damn about what’s happening on Amiros.”

  “And I’m going to tell Letta the truth. First thing in the morning.”

  “She needs the truth as much as a dead person needs health insurance.”

  “It will be hard for her at first. But can you imagine growing up in such a sheltered environment? No wonder Hari appealed to her.”

  Rachel stretched out her legs and then pulled them back in. “Can’t you forget about Soumba for a while?”

  “What do you want me to think about?”

  “In terms of our relationship, where do I stand?”

  “I enjoyed spending time with you.”

  She flicked an imaginary piece of fuzz off the bed. “That’s the best you can do? When am I going to see you again?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Do you want to see me again?”

  I took her hand, playing with her fingers one by one. “Of course I do. Only I can’t predict when it might happen. I’m not sure where I’ll be another month from now.”

  I wasn’t sure I would feel safe in Squid Bay, so I wasn’t sure how long I would stay there. I wasn’t even sure I’d feel safe anywhere in Southern California. I didn’t know if I could find a job. If I couldn’t find mariachi work, I didn’t know what I might have to start doing instead.

  “You’re saying you have no control over your own life,” Rachel said, pursing her lips.

  “I take things day by day. That’s the only way I can take them.”

  She tapped the pillow with her fist. “I have to pass through L.A. on my way back to Arizona. Should I stop and visit?”

  “I don’t know if I’ll be there or not.”