by HC Michaels
So, he’d avoided the police in Greece, only to run right into them here on Sunshine Bloody Island. Nobody got murdered here. It was ridiculous.
The police had let him go after an hour. They’d had to. They had absolutely no proof. Or a motive. Or even any clue as to what they were doing. They even asked where he was when his mother died. His own mother! Did they think he killed her, too?
Dickheads.
Unfortunately, he had no solid alibi for the night before. He’d gone outside his father’s apartment to wait for Tessa. When she didn’t show, he’d headed to the restaurant precinct on the marina to see what other action was going on. It was so bloody middle-aged down there. Just a bunch of old fucks drinking Chardonnay.
So, he’d moved on to Eagle Beach, hoping there’d be someone there under the age of fifty. He was so worked up by that stage he would’ve settled for someone under sixty.
It was the same deal there. This island was a freaking ghost town at night. No wonder Mykonos was so popular with tourists. That place went all night. It was actually busier than it was during the day.
Tino swung his legs out of bed and yawned.
Thank God his mother’s funeral was tomorrow. He’d have to see if there were any flights out of here straight after that. He could be back behind the bar at Mykonos by the end of the week.
Bliss.
Let Elvira stay and hold their father’s hand. He’d had enough of looking at the tortured expression on her face.
He’d do what he did best when things got tough.
He’d run.
If he ran fast enough, he might just be able to outrun his troubles all together.
Being Tino was so overrated. It was time to be Kosta again.
Kosta had so much more fun
Elvira sat down at the lunch table, deciding her mother’s funeral had been the saddest thing she’d seen in her life.
Not just because of the loss of her mother, but because of the pathetic gathering it had been.
There were five mourners and one of them didn’t even know her mother. Amelia was too young to remember her.
Paul wasn’t exactly mourning her, either. He’d tolerated her (as he tolerated everyone) but they weren’t exactly close. Well, not since she’d moved to Queensland. Before that, he’d seemed to respect her a whole lot more.
So, that left only three mourners in total. It would have been four if this mysterious Logan had turned up. But then again, his lack of presence showed how much he really cared. No matter how handsome and charming he might be, Elvira didn’t trust him. Why would a guy his age want to hang out with a couple of old people?
Her mum had been a great cook. Had it been her home-cooked meals he’d been after? Or was it their luxury apartment he had his eyes on? Far more likely, she decided.
She let out a deep sigh. Three mourners for a woman who’d spent her life surrounded by people. How depressing.
Was a small funeral really what she’d wanted? She’d bet that was Logan’s idea, just like the cremation, even though her father had denied it.
The funeral conductor had been a woman in her fifties with bleached hair and a warm smile. She had a soothing voice and her words flowed from her mouth like a stream of honey.
She said all the usual things that are said at a funeral, then asked the family if anyone wanted to say anything.
Tino and her father had firmly shaken their heads. Deciding it was completely unacceptable for nobody to speak, Elvira had stood and given a short speech about how much she’d loved her mother.
As she’d talked, she’d begun to wonder if she really had loved her. She thought she did, but the more she spoke, the more those feelings struggled to surface over the strength of her feelings of abandonment and betrayal. Her mother had left her when she’d needed her most. She’d been selfish. Or was she just looking after herself? Was that the same thing?
She didn’t say any of this of course, sticking to more acceptable phrases like loving mother, loyal wife and will be sadly missed.
It was a fairly pathetic speech, but at least she’d said something. Her mother might not have been perfect, but she deserved far more than silence from her family at her farewell.
“You spoke beautiful,” her father said, seating himself beside her.
Elvira smiled back at him while dabbing at her eyes with her napkin. Her father’s compliments were rare, and she was grateful to receive one.
“What time can we get the ashes?” asked Tino, looking at his phone from the other side of the table.
“You got somewhere to be?” asked Elvira.
She felt Paul’s hand on her back. She knew what he was doing—steadying her, trying to keep her calm, always petrified of there being an argument at the table.
“Four o’clock,” said their father.
“So, there’s no chance of taking the boat out with the ashes today then?” Tino put his phone on the table and huffed.
“We were lucky to be able to get them today,” Elvira reminded him. “It usually takes a couple of days. Sometimes longer.”
This was the reason they were out to lunch. Rather than return to Proserpine the following day, the funeral director had said they could come back at the end of the day and collect the ashes. For an extra fee, of course.
“Tomorrow, we take the boat,” their father said. “When are you leaving?”
“My boss needs me back,” Tino said. “He’s short staffed.”
Elvira drew breath to say something, and again felt Paul’s hand on her back, the pressure a little firmer this time.
She glared at Paul, resentful of his interference. If she wanted to have a go at her brother, then why couldn’t she?
“I’m hungry,” wailed Amelia.
“Have some bread, sweetheart,” said Paul, reaching for a piece out of the basket on the centre of the table.
Elvira wished for the seventeenth time that day that she’d brought Tessa with them. She could’ve taken Amelia back on the earlier ferry. But she’d seen the look on Tessa’s face when she suggested it. Clearly, she hadn’t relished the idea of spending the day with Tino.
At least Elvira didn’t have to worry about Tessa and Tino continuing with their relationship if the mere thought of spending the day with him repulsed Tessa so much. Things really had soured since that photograph was taken…
They could have left Amelia behind with Tessa, she supposed. But it just didn’t seem right for Amelia to miss her grandmother’s funeral, no matter how little she’d known her.
They’d really had no other option than to take her with them and leave Tessa behind. It was all Tino’s fault. Again.
“Do you need me to organise the boat?” Paul asked her father.
“I’ve booked a dinghy,” her father said.
Elvira dropped her napkin on her lap and sat up tall in her seat. “You’re sending Mum off in a dinghy?”
This was unbelievable. When her father had said they’d be scattering the ashes from a boat, she’d pictured something a little more luxurious than a dinghy.
“Elvira,” her father cautioned.
“Were there no yachts available?” she asked. “Didn’t you say Logan works on one of those things?”
Her father nodded. “He works on one. But it not his boat.”
“Then couldn’t we have hired one?” she asked.
“Do you know how to sail a big boat?” Her father raised his eyebrows.
Elvira shook her head. “They come with skippers, don’t they?”
“I don’t want no skippy!” Her father slammed his palms on the table.
“Skipper.” She couldn’t help but correct him.
“This is just for family,” her father said. “No skipper, no nobody, just us.”
She crossed her arms and glared. “Who’s going to sail the boat then? Logan?”
“Tino.” Her father nodded proudly at his son.
“Tino? Since when do you know how to sail a boat?” She looked at him, shaking her hea
d. She wasn’t about to put her daughter on a boat with her brother responsible for all their lives.
“I learnt in Greece.” He shrugged. “It’s not that hard.”
“How many people does it fit?” she asked her father.
“Six. And there’s five of us.” Her father looked down at the table. “Six if Logan come, too.”
Elvira was certain she could feel smoke coming out of her ears. “You said just family, Dad.”
“Your mother loved Logan like a son.” Her father shook his head. “He family to us.”
“It would be kind of weird to have him there,” said Tino. “You know, for us. And he didn’t even show up today.”
Elvira’s jaw dropped. Tino was backing her up on this?
“Okay.” Her father let out a long, tired sigh. “Logan no coming then. Maybe he working anyway. Like today. Some people have jobs, you know.”
This did little to clear the smoke from Elvira’s ears. Of course, her father would back down when his beloved son requested it. And to be fair, the only people sitting at this table who didn’t have a job were Amelia and her father himself.
“There will only be four of us,” Elvira said, not willing to be so compliant. “I’m leaving Amelia behind.”
Amelia stopped chewing her bread at the sound of her name.
“Would you like to come with us tomorrow or stay with Tessa?” she asked Amelia, knowing what her answer would be.
“Tess-ahhh.” Amelia jiggled in her chair. “Tessa, Tessa, Tess-ahh!”
Elvira smiled.
“No!” Her father pushed back his chair and stood. “She come with us. We are family.”
“It’s okay.” Paul put a hand on Elvira’s knee. ‘I’ll be there, too. I’ll take care of Amelia so you can focus on what you need to do.”
“Tessa!” Amelia climbed out of her chair and stood, mimicking her grandfather’s posture. “I want Tess-ahhh.’
“Bring Tessa with you,” said Tino, looking slightly amused. “We have an extra seat.”
“You’d like that, would you?” snapped Elvira. “Well, I’ve got news for you. It’s not what she’d like. She wasn’t exactly keen to come with us today, thanks to you.”
“I don’t have a problem with her.” Tino shrugged. “We’re all grown-ups.”
“Amelia’s not,” said Elvira, lifting Amelia back onto her seat. “She doesn’t need to witness any more tension than she has already.”
“Thought she’d be used to that in your house,” muttered Tino.
“Excuse me?” Elvira glared at her brother. “How dare you comment on what goes on in my house.”
Tino held up his hands as if he were innocent.
She shook her head. “I can’t believe you think I’d put my daughter on a boat with you at the helm.”
“Why don’t we order?” Paul suggested. “The calamari looks great. Has everyone had a chance to look at the menu?”
They all picked up their menus with false enthusiasm and studied them as if they contained the winning lotto numbers.
Elvira decided that her mother’s funeral hadn’t been the most depressing thing she’d seen in her life.
This lunch was.
Tessa lay by the resort pool, pretending she was enjoying herself. She’d braved going there despite what had happened, needing to be around people. It was just too quiet back at the pool at the apartment.
She didn’t swim, though. The idea of swimming in a pool that had a dead body floating in it so recently was too creepy to bear no matter how strong the chlorine.
She tried to read a book on her Kindle, but found that instead of containing sentences, it only contained words. She just couldn’t seem to make sense of them. She may as well be reading a dictionary.
Elvira had initially asked her to go with them to Proserpine, but by some miracle had changed her mind. Tessa had been horrified by the idea. Spending a whole day with Tino wasn’t her idea of fun. The guy was a psycho. She needed to stay as far away from him as possible.
Instead, she spent her day debating whether she should go to the police with the information about the assault in Mykonos. Surely, they’d be interested to know that Tino was there at the time? It was important.
But how would Elvira feel about her getting involved in her family’s business? Clearly, she had no love for her brother, but people could be strange like that. It was all right for them to say the most awful things about their relatives, but the minute someone else chimed in, it all turned sour.
When her own brother Darcy started dating Darcy, Tessa had been having a laugh about it with her friends and threw in a comment about how her brother loved himself so much that he hadn’t been happy until he found the female version of himself. One of her friends had shrieked wildly and said Darcy was so stuck up he was practically inside-out. Tessa had immediately unfollowed her on Instagram when she got home. What a bitch!
No doubt, Elvira would feel the same about Tino. If Tessa wanted to keep her job, she’d be best to keep out of this. Besides, would the Australian police even care about a crime that had happened on the other side of the world?
She’d managed to successfully talk herself out of going to the police until she made the mistake of checking her Facebook feed. There was a news story there about the girl who was murdered here on Sunshine Island. She was only nineteen. So young. For some reason Tessa had expected her to be older.
Her name was Lena Markovic and gauging by her photo, she’d been not only attractive but happy. The photo was taken the day she was killed. She was at one of the island’s restaurants with a glass raised in the air, smiling widely at the camera. Her dark hair was streaked with pink and pulled back into a ponytail and she wore a sky-blue dress with spaghetti straps looping across her tanned shoulders.
Tessa wanted to scream at the photo and warn her. Leave the island! Go away! If you stay, you’ll die here! If only that were possible.
Lena had been on the island with two friends, taking a break from their studies at The University of Adelaide. She’d been training to be a nurse. Could there be a more selfless profession? This was a tragedy.
According to the news story, Lena and her friends had dinner at the restaurant at their hotel. Despite the resort pool being closed, they took a bottle of wine to the sun lounges and lay there drinking and talking.
Having had too much to drink, Lena’s friends claimed to have fallen asleep. When they woke, Lena was gone. Assuming she’d gone to their room, they headed back up.
But she wasn’t there. They waited for several hours before calling the police. Unfortunately, the police didn’t take their call particularly seriously. It wasn’t uncommon for drunken young adults who’d been out drinking to go missing, only to return to their hotels in the morning with sheepish looks on their hungover faces as they wondered what the fuss was all about.
Except, Lena didn’t come back. Her friends would never see her again.
Tessa felt so helpless. There was nothing she could do for Lena, but maybe there was something she could do to prevent this happening to another unsuspecting woman.
That was if it actually was Tino who did it. He’d been so affectionate with her in Greece. Could someone capable of such affection also be capable of murder? It seemed so hard to believe.
Maybe this whole thing was just her imagination getting carried away with itself. She did have a tendency to do that. After all, there’d been a moment there in Mykonos when she’d dared to believe that maybe Tino would want to continue some kind of relationship after she left, and that had been a complete fantasy.
She needed to keep a cool head about this. There was no urgency to act now. After all, he wasn’t likely to strike again on the island with the police so hot on his tail.
Tessa picked up her phone, desperate to shake the image of Lena’s smiling face from her memory. What a waste of a life. Whoever had done that to her was pure evil.
She typed Bianca into her search engine. She knew it was a waste of time ev
en before she was presented with a list of irrelevant search results. If only it were so easy to figure out who the hell Bianca was.
She had to get smarter than this. She was starting to get the feeling her life depended on it.
A shadow crossed her lounge and she looked up, squinting.
“Is this seat free?” a deep voice asked.
She nodded, trying not to look too enthusiastic as she reminded herself about her pact not to look at another man again for as long as she lived.
But how was that fair, or even realistic, when a man had the audacity to look like the one standing in front of her right now?
Logan waited for Tessa to give him permission to sit down before he moved.
She hesitated, smiling at him nervously before patting the sun lounge beside her.
“It’s free,” she said.
He stepped out of the line of the sun, and she was once again bathed in light. It bounced off the freckles on her nose and picked up on the highlights in the waves of her hair. Women really didn’t come any more beautiful than this.
“I thought you’d be at the funeral?” She tilted her head, watching closely as he put down his towel and sat beside her.
“And I thought you were coming to the tavern last night.” He winked at her.
“Change of plans,” she said. “I had to look after Millie. I didn’t have your number to let you know. Not that I’m asking for your number!”
She flushed a deep shade of pink and he had to stop himself from reaching out to reassure her that he didn’t mind.
“You can have my number if you like.” He got himself into a comfortable position, tilting his frame to face her. “As long as I can have yours.”
She nodded, although made no move to give it to him.
“My boss needed to talk to me,” he said. “I missed the ferry to Proserpine. I feel awful.”
She looked confused for a moment, then nodded. “Oh, the funeral. Couldn’t your boss have taken you there on his yacht?”
“I wish.” He laughed. “It doesn’t work like that.”
“I’m sure Carina knows you cared,” she said kindly. “There’s more than one way to say goodbye to someone.”
