Death In Paradise

by Carolyn G. Hart

  She turned dark, haunted eyes toward me. “Just ten minutes. That’s all he was gone Saturday afternoon. I think he went to where he thought Miss CeeCee was—but she wasn’t there. And Johnnie was scared to death. Kidnapping!” She leaned forward, her face angry and vengeful. “That Lester Mackey, I never liked him. Talked so soft you’d think it

  was a rattlesnake slithering by. Not like a man. You talk to him.”

  The road was twisty but well-graded and the underbrush was thinned on either side. I pulled into a turnaround drive in front of the white two-story vacation home that had once belonged to Belle Ericcson.

  The drive was empty except for my rental car. The blinds were closed. Nobody home. That wasn’t surprising on a cool March weekday afternoon. It was nice for my purposes, though I couldn’t expect to learn much after all this time.

  I pictured a Mercedes curving up the drive, pulling to a stop, the door opening—

  Although the house crowned a bluff, it was well screened from the road by a tall, thick hedge. It was extremely secluded here. The stucco home had clean, spare Mediterranean lines, a red tile roof and windows, windows, windows.

  I followed a flagstone path along the east side of the house to the terrace that overlooked a private bay. Canvas covers shrouded the deck furniture. The patio umbrellas were tucked shut. A steep path led down the bluff to a boathouse and pier.

  The terrace was in shadow, the late afternoon sun blocked by cedars to the west.

  I walked across the flagstones, occasional leaves crackling underfoot. The floor-to-ceiling windows were masked by interior blinds, now closed.

  I found a space at the end of one set of blinds and peered into the huge living room. The dusky, untenanted room gave no hint of the life and death drama it had seen.

  I continued around the house and saw, on the west side, garages and separate quarters.

  Anyone wishing to wait unseen could easily park on the west side of the house. Cedars screened a large parking area from the front drive.

  Seven years ago CeeCee had arrived, opened the car door—and the kidnappers appeared.

  There was no evidence of a struggle, no blood, her purse in the passenger seat apparently untouched.

  Were the kidnappers armed?

  Either armed—or armed with a story plausible enough to persuade her to come with them.

  That was possible, of course, could account for the lack of struggle. A report of an emergency, an illness. “Your mother’s been hurt in a car wreck. She’s in the hospital in Denison…”

  CeeCee had not—at that point—resisted.

  The Mercedes—door open, keys in the ignition—was the closest link to her, made this driveway the last certain place she’d been.

  The sun slanted through the blackjack, touched an early-blooming redbud. It was lovely and peaceful—and unutterably sinister.

  Deputy Dexter Pierson drew in a lungful of smoke, coughed, and rasped, his voice hoarse and rough, “It stank. The whole damn thing stank. Worse than fish guts in August.”

  He glared at me pugnaciously from behind a paper-laden desk, his pockmarked face dangerously red. His office was small, four fake knotty pine walls and an old wooden desk. The grainy computer screen looked out of place.

  “What do you mean?” I edged my chair a little closer to the open window and the small stream of fresh air.

  His quick green eyes flickered from me to the window. “Yeah, smells like shit in here, don’t it? I keep trying to quit.” He stubbed the cigarette in an overflowing ashtray and the acrid smell of burning joined the fuggy odor of smoke. “Yeah. My wife says nobody smokes anymore but butts.” He gave a whoop of laughter that ended in a cough. “Used to

  be the big clue, didn’t it? A cigarette butt. Or maybe a button. Or a strand of hair. What was it in the Lindbergh kidnapping? A piece of a ladder? Well, nobody left anything around for us when they grabbed CeeCee Burke—if anybody grabbed her.”

  I looked at him in surprise. “Her car was found with the door open, her purse on the passenger seat, a ransom note came the next day. What else could it be?”

  He clasped his hands behind his head, tilted back in his swivel chair, and stared moodily at a lopsided bulletin board decorated with a half-dozen yellowed Far Side cartoons. “We got crime around here. Sure. Guy gets drunk, beats his wife. Kids break into a store, steal cash and cigarettes and beer. We keep a close eye on some dudes, the ones who watch and see when the city people are gone, then break in and loot the houses. We smashed a pretty big burglary ring a couple of years ago. Every few years, we get a run of rapes. That don’t happen too often. Country people have dogs and guns. But big-time kidnapping for ransom? No, ma’am.”

  He jolted forward in the chair, grabbed at his cigarette pack. “That whole deal was as fishy as a bass derby. I kept trying to tell the feds it didn’t compute—but would they listen to a hayseed deputy? So”—he lifted his round shoulders in a sardonic shrug—“so screw ’em.”

  “I’ll listen.”

  His red cheeks puffed in a pugnacious frown. “Okay. I got a theory. ’Course, I’ll be up front with you. There’s a big damn hole in it—because somebody picked up the ransom money and if my idea’s right, that shouldn’t’ve happened. But here’s my take. She did it herself.”

  I suppose my face reflected utter surprise.

  “I’ll tell you, lady, suicide takes a funny tack now and then. A lot of times people’ll go to a hell of an effort to make it look like an accident. I think that’s what happened here. Because I been a deputy for twenty-two years and my

  brother’s a homicide cop in Dallas, so I’m not the new boy in town when it comes to murder. Even if we’re not talking murder and kidnapping. But I’ve never known anybody to be snatched—then murdered with a painkiller. Never.”

  “Painkiller?” I was learning one new fact after another. “But I understood her body was found in the lake, two days after she disappeared.”

  “Yeah. She drowned. But she’d had enough narcotic to drop an elephant.”

  “That wasn’t publicly revealed.”

  “Nope. The sheriff sat on that. Thought it might be useful.”

  “Maybe the kidnappers fed her something with a narcotic. To keep her quiet.”

  “Lady, this wasn’t just a tablet or two. She’d had a bottle’s worth. No way it wouldn’t kill her. And that’s a weird way to kill somebody. Most kidnappers shoot somebody, crack ’em over the head, hell, bury ’em alive. No, the minute we got the autopsy report, I told ’em it was suicide. She dropped the Express Mail envelope in a slot on her way here. When she got up here Friday night, she set it up to look like she’d been kidnapped, then took a rowboat out on the lake, drank a bottle of wine laced with the stuff, waited till it spaced her out, then rolled overboard.”

  “Was a rowboat missing from the Ericcson dock?”

  “As a matter of fact”—his voice oozed confidence—“there was a boat missing. It was found drifting near a public ramp.”

  “But the ransom money was picked up.”

  “Picked up? Maybe. Maybe not. Look at it this way, lady. The money was gone by the time cops checked it out.” His tone was sardonic. “Listen, how do we know any of the crap the family told us was true? Did they call us in when they got the ‘kidnapper’s’ note? Hell, no. We didn’t even know there’d been this ‘kidnapping’ until a fisherman pulled her body up on Monday. She had on a silver bracelet with her name and it rang a bell with one of our troopers. He’d given her a ticket once. We ID’d her quick. We went out to the house and got this cock-and-bull story. I never did believe it.”

  “But the money.” I wondered about Pierson’s blood pressure. His entire face glistened like burnished copper.

  “Yeah.” His tone was grudging. “The goddamned money. Two hundred thousand in fifties and hundreds. In a shoe box. Miz Ericcson followed the directions. She got this dude out of the east to take the shoe box to the old cemetery in Gainesville. I mean, can you believe that? A cemet
ery! If they’d called us, we could have sewn it up tighter than a bulldogged calf. But no, they don’t call anybody, they get the cash from a bank in Dallas and give it to this dude to deliver to the cemetery at midnight that Sunday.”

  I’d not known the details. As I said, Richard and I never discussed it. The news coverage didn’t include information about the ransom drop.

  When the story broke, Richard was identified simply as a friend of the family who had delivered the ransom.

  “Midnight!” Pierson snorted. “Why didn’t she throw in clanking chains and a buzz saw!”

  “But the money was taken.”

  “Sure. Hell, yes. The dude tucked it behind the Beckleman mausoleum and the cops got there on Monday afternoon. More than twenty-four hours! Sure, it was gone. Anybody could have gotten it. Kids out there necking and they see this dude hide a shoe box at midnight. Or next day somebody drops out there to decorate a grave. Somebody in the family, for that matter. Those damn people. Nobody’d look at you straight.”

  “They didn’t need the money,” I said dryly. There are people to whom two hundred thousand is pin money. Belle’s family members fit that description.

  He shrugged. “Maybe not. But who the hell should be surprised when we check it out after the body’s found and the shoe box is gone! Plenty of candidates. Maybe the dude who delivered the shoe box came back. Maybe he never left it.”

  “No.” My answer was swift and harsh.

  He looked at me sharply. His green eyes brightened. “Oh, hey. Collins. You’re Mrs. Collins. That was the dude’s name.”

  “Yes.” My throat felt tight. Yes, that was the dude’s name.

  “So what’s your game, Mrs. Collins?”

  I gave him stare for stare. “My husband Richard came here six years ago to talk to Johnnie Rodriguez. Then Richard went to Hawaii to see Belle Ericcson. He fell to his death from the terrace of her home. On April first.” I stopped, bent my head. It still hurt so damn much and the pain throbbed anew, as if Richard had just died. I took a deep breath. “This week I received an anonymous message saying he was pushed.”

  Pierson kneaded his hand against his red cheek. “And Johnnie drowned that year.” His tone was speculative. “So, what are you going to do?”

  “Go to Hawaii.” Yes, I was going to go to Kauai and claw my way into Belle Ericcson’s home, do whatever I had to do, fight whomever I had to fight.

  Pierson shook loose another cigarette, lit it, but his eyes never left my face, calculating, bright, hard eyes. “You know something, lady? If I was you, I’d be damn careful.”

  five

  The jeep squealed to a stop. I stared at the bar swung across the road and the stark sign:

  NO TRESPASSING

  I’d known the way would be barred. This was simply the first challenge.

  I jumped down. The dark red dirt glistened greasily. The cane growing on either side of the narrow lane rustled in the light breeze. The cane was so tall, I stood in dusky shadow. Despite the languorous warmth of the air, I shivered.

  I pushed the bar wide, jumped back into the jeep. When I drove past the barrier, I didn’t stop to close it. Not because I was impatient. I kept going, driving faster and faster, red dust boiling from beneath the wheels, because if I drove slowly, I might turn back. I might not have the courage to persevere.

  Fear rode with me.

  Not only the bone weakening fear of danger. I knew danger awaited me at journey’s end. Yes, I was afraid. But not simply of danger. I was tormented by a more complex fear, webbed like the silky strands spun by an industrious spider, a tendril of terror, a strand of anxiety, a wisp of apprehension, a thread of fright, all combining in a tremulous mélange of dread.

  Oh, dear God, what was I going to learn at journey’s end?

  In the innermost recesses of my heart, I knew that I feared not so much learning the truth of Richard’s death as the truth of his life.

  What, finally, had Belle Ericcson meant to my husband? And could I bear to know that truth?

  But I had to go on. A quick memory glittered in my mind, bright as a diamond: the softness of Richard’s eyes on our fifth wedding anniversary; his eager smile as I unwrapped his present, a slim book of Millay’s sonnets. I remembered, too, with a heart-wrenching clarity, the exquisite passion in our union that starry night.

  Now the field of cane was behind me and the rusty red road began to climb, curving and twining, clinging to the edge of the rising escarpment.

  Up and up and up. The cliff fell sharply away from the rutted roadway. Jutting up from the sides of the valley were trees and ferns so intensely green they glittered like sunlit prisms of jade, vivid enough to make the eyes wince and seek relief in the arch of softly blue sky.

  I eased the pressure on the accelerator as I came around a curve. The road widened just enough for an outlook. Abruptly I braked, pulled to my right and stopped. I turned off the motor. My chest ached as if I’d run up that rising road.

  No sound broke the quiet. I looked out over the valley to another ridge and beyond it to another and another. This was

  a Hawaii far removed from the bustle of Honolulu, wild and open, no sign of people or habitations, only rocky cliffs and emerald valleys.

  Kauai is called the Garden Isle with good reason. It is pastoral still with an innocence and simplicity that I had to delve back to a child’s memory of rural France for comparison: narrow blacktopped roads and cars traveling sedately; towns, not cities; sweeps of rolling land unspoiled by high-rises. Kauai has yet to be consumed by the tourism that has devoured Oahu. Travelers come here in search of breathtaking loveliness and peace.

  But I had not come to Kauai as a tourist seeking its beauty: dazzling gold trees with blooms more yellow than butter, chinaberry trees with clusters of pale pink or soft-azure flowers, magnificent banyans with hundreds of aerial roots; or the endlessly fascinating and awesome sea, crashing with inhuman force against outcroppings of jagged midnight-black lava, eddying in tidal pools behind barrier reefs, running in swift and dangerous currents, sometimes gentle, sometimes deadly.

  I came seeking vengeance, understanding, release.

  As I stared over the tropical growth, overwhelming in its fecundity, my hands gripped the steering wheel so tightly my fingers ached.

  Could I go through with my plan? Did I have the courage to plunge ahead to an uncertain and surely dangerous future?

  It was an odd and singular moment. I’d spent a lifetime as a reporter, seeing much I would have preferred not to see, but always attempting to look with clear and non-judgmental eyes, speaking and writing as honorably as I knew how.

  Now I’d left honor behind. I was prepared to lie, dissemble, employ every wile at my command. What would Richard have thought of me if he could see me now? My Richard, who was always straightforward and honorable.

  Was it because of honor that he had never discussed Belle Ericcson with me?

  Richard and I spent decades together. We knew passion and pain, joy and despair. I closed my eyes and for a moment he was in my mind as clearly as the last time I saw him, his face seamed with lines earned by a lifetime of effort and caring and loss.

  That last view was such a familiar one, one of us departing or arriving. We’d done so much of that in our lives. I’d turned at the last moment before boarding the plane, looked back to see his steady, loving, generous gaze, his chiseled features, his ruddy skin with its age-won creases, his lopsided smile, ironic yet warm. His brown corduroy sports coat hung open. His shirt was a red-and-white houndstooth check. His chino slacks were crisp. We’d stopped on our leisurely walk through the airport at the shoeshine stand and his tasseled loafers glistened a cherry tan. His hand lifted in farewell, that broad, capable, strong hand.

  I’d had no reason to suspect it would be our final farewell. Such an ordinary moment, but even then it was extraordinary because it was Richard and because he, standing there, meant so much to me, the center and heart and joy of my life.

  Now Ri
chard’s face was always and ever in my memory, a talisman against despair and cynicism and hopelessness.

  Faces tell everything you need to know. Do you see laughter or sourness, compassion or disdain, vigor or lassitude? And if the face lacks expression? That speaks, too.

  Just for an instant, I felt Richard was so near, his broad, open face serious and intent, his quick eyes watchful, his generous mouth opening to speak.

  To warn me? To admonish me? To salute me?

  I opened my eyes and the illusion fled and with it all sense of comfort. Would Richard understand the course I’d set?

  But I had to find out the truth. Dig it out, gouge it out, scratch it out, if need be. I couldn’t leave unanswered any question about Richard’s death. Even though I knew my arrival on Kauai served some purpose—dark or benign?—other than discovering what happened when Richard plummeted to his death.

  Who wanted me here? And why?

  Behind this pastoral scene there was a pattern I could not see. Perhaps I should turn back. I felt such a sweep of foreboding that I was shaken. I looked up. Once I reached the mountaintop, I would set forces into motion that I could not control. But control is always illusory. I knew that, could cling to that, but I couldn’t ignore the fact that my actions would have consequences.

  Take what you want, the old adage encourages, but pay for it. That philosophy requires arrogance. I’m not certain we ever know ourselves, but I think I can fairly insist I am not arrogant. No, I won’t confess to arrogance. But I will admit to a passion for truth. And a bone-deep stubbornness. And a wild, unreasoning hatred for injustice.

  Was Richard murdered? I had to know. I was impelled to follow this dark red, empty road because on that mountaintop I would find answers. I was determined, no matter the cost, to have those answers.

  My hand shook as I twisted the key. Yes, dammit, I was scared, scared of what I might find, what I might learn, what might happen to me. The engine snarled to life. I jerked the wheel and gunned the jeep up that steep gradient. I leashed the speed as the curves sharpened. There were no guardrails. Not that a flimsy metal barrier could stop a plunge over the side and a sheer drop of more than a hundred feet.