Rebel Island (20 page)

Jose and Imelda went off to distribute their high-cuisine
breakfast, which left Maia and me alone in the dining area, munching stale saltines and watching the rain make claw marks on the window.

“Drugs,” Maia said. “Someday maybe I’ll hear about a case that doesn’t involve drugs.”

We both knew the odds of that were long. It didn’t matter if you worked with runaways, prostitutes, politicians, murderers or socialites. Drugs were as omnipresent as sex and greed.

“Chris Stowall used his manager’s job to make some extra money on the side,” I told her. “He was mad at Alex for closing the hotel because his revenue stream was about to dry up. The twenty thousand from the boathouse—that was Chris’s life savings. He was getting ready to make a break for the mainland and disappear, as soon as he delivered Calavera to Longoria and Lindy. Chris stood to make an extra fifty grand from that. He figured he’d try to milk Chase and his friends, too. Get a little more money that way.”

“You don’t think he fabricated the Calavera story?”

“No. The email was real. Chris found it, somehow he realized what it meant. But I think he found something else, too. Something that really startled him.”

I told Maia about the statue in Alex’s room—the lady who looked like Rachel Brazos. I told her about my conversations with Lindy, who apparently had never visited the island before.

“Lindy’s wife,” Maia said. “You think that was a statue of her.”

I nodded. “She ran away. Now that I’m getting to know Benjamin Lindy a little better, I can’t blame her. I think she came here. The man who ran the hotel back in those days, Mr. Eli, he would’ve taken her in without question. She fell in love with Mr. Huff. She had another child, Alex. She died when Alex was young. I don’t know how. But I think that statue is of Alex’s mother.”

Maia shook her head. “Hell of a coincidence.”

“Not really,” I said. “Welcome to South Texas.”

I remembered what Lindy had said about the whole area being a close-knit community. Mr. Eli had said something similar, back when I was a kid:
South Texas is just too small a place. Everyone is connected somehow.

Running into someone you knew, someone you were related to without realizing it—that was commonplace. The bloodlines in South Texas were as twisted as the barbed wire.

“Chris would’ve assumed the statue was Rachel Brazos,” I said. “He’d probably seen her picture in the media many times.”

“And that would’ve convinced him Alex Huff was Calavera,” Maia said. “He may have been right for the wrong reasons.”

I thought about that. Rachel Brazos and her two young daughters had died by mistake. I still had trouble believing Alex was a cold-blooded killer, but if he’d seen Rachel’s picture in the paper after the explosion, and realized who she was…That might be enough to cause remorse even in a man like Calavera.

“Perhaps Alex is gone,” Maia said. “Maybe he found a way off the island. When he left last night and gave Garrett that envelope…it sounded like he knew he wasn’t coming back.”

I wanted to believe her. If Calavera was gone, we were safe. Maybe.

“You really think that?”

“No,” Maia sighed. Her facial color seemed better this morning. She’d managed the stairs all right, over my protests, but still, the idea of her packing bags or moving around at all made me nervous.

“Imelda helped me pack,” she said. “She seemed distracted. I mean…even considering.”

“You need to rest,” I said. “We’ll get you back upstairs. Safer up there.”

She stared at the rain as it practiced pointillism on the window. “I’m tired of lying down. Tres, I think you should talk to her.”

“Imelda?”

“She wanted to tell me something, but she wouldn’t. Or couldn’t. You should talk to her.”

“I’m not leaving you by yourself.”

“Please. I’m a big girl.”

I looked at her belly.

“That’s
not
what I meant, Tres. Find Imelda. See if she’ll talk to you.”

“Maia—”

“I’m perfectly fine. Besides, I’m not sure upstairs is any safer.”

“Meaning?”

She gave me a reproachful look: the same look she always gives me whenever I try to protect her.

“Tres, we both know that wire is a timing mechanism. What if Calavera wasn’t interested specifically in Lane? What if there are
other
bombs?”

By the time I caught up with Imelda, she was in the kitchen,
salvaging linen from the floodwater. It seemed a hopeless task. She’d made a mountain of soggy napkins in the sink. Now she stood with her back to me, spreading out a tablecloth that looked like the Shroud of Turin.

My eyes drifted to the freezer room, then to the cellar door. I didn’t know if Chris Stowall and Jesse Longoria’s bodies were still in their respective places. I couldn’t see…or smell any change. That was fine by me.

“Imelda,” I said.

She turned toward me with a soft gasp. Her apron was sprinkled with brown stains. Her hair was tied back in a bun, but strands of it were coming unraveled, like a yarn ball a cat had been playing with.

“Señor, I didn’t hear you.”

I pulled myself up on the butcher block counter. “Maia thought I should talk to you.”

Imelda folded the tablecloth over her arm. “Is Señora Navarre well?”

“She’s worried about you. She thought you might have something to tell me.”

“Please, señor, if you wouldn’t sit on the counter. Jose is very fussy—”

“How did you lose your children, Imelda?”

Silence. She picked up a knife and set it in the sink. “It was five years ago. In Nuevo Laredo.”

“You lived in Nuevo Laredo?”

I tried not to sound surprised. These days, living in Nuevo Laredo was like sailing on the
Titanic.
For the past decade, the border town had been tearing itself apart as rival drug lords fought for control. Police, journalists, judges—all were gunned down on a regular basis.

“It was a
repriso,
” Imelda murmured. “Jose did nothing wrong. He was a simple cook. But…someone believed he told the police something…It isn’t important now. So many killed for no reason. A wrong look. A wrong word.” Her voice was heavy with old grief. “They killed my children. When we came here, we had nothing. Mr. Huff took us in. We owe him everything.”

“Which would make it hard to speak against him.”

She held my eyes. She seemed to be struggling with something even heavier than the death of her children, some burden she was not sure she could carry.

“I understand you found a staircase,” she said at last.

“You knew about it?”

She set down her tablecloth. She smoothed the flood-stained linen. “You can live here for many years, and still the walls surprise you. Now you must excuse me, señor.”

After she’d gone I stared at the pile of wet napkins in the sink for several minutes before I realized what was bothering me.

The walls surprise you.
I got up and headed for the collapsed bedroom that Alex Huff had cordoned off on the first floor—the bedroom that would be catty-corner below Lane’s, at the bottom of the secret stairwell.

34

Garrett found Lane in Chris Stowall’s bedroom, which
didn’t make him too happy. She was sitting on the bed, looking through a journal. She’d changed clothes: jeans, a white T-shirt, slip-on shoes. A lot more practical for a hurricane, but Garrett didn’t remember anything but dresses in her closet upstairs. Then it occurred to him she’d borrowed the shirt and jeans from Chris Stowall’s wardrobe. She was wearing a dead man’s clothes.

“His diary?” Garrett asked.

Lane seemed to have trouble focusing on him. “Yes. It was just lying here.”

He wheeled himself over, feeling like an intruder. He’d hardly known Chris Stowall at all, but he was jealous of the way Lane ran her hands over his diary pages. Chris and she had a long history together. Garrett had known her only one day. That was the hardest part, whenever he met a woman—getting past the ghosts.

“I was thinking about taking the journal,” she said. “I don’t know what I’d do with it, but…it’s all that’s left of him.”

“Give it to his folks?” Garrett suggested.

Lane winced. “His mother would shut the door in my face. Or worse.”

“Then leave it. Somebody found my diary after I was dead, I hope they’d burn it.”

“That incriminating?”

“I don’t keep a diary, darlin’.”

She looked down at the last page of writing, traced her finger over a drawing of a wave. “Chris wanted to do so many things. None of them ever happened.”

“Did he choose the room you’d stay in?”

“I suppose. It was just an open room. Why?”

Garrett shifted in his chair. “That guy you saw in your closet? Tres thinks he was there for a reason. He found a wire, see. It might’ve been part of a bomb.”

“A bomb.”

“Yeah.” Garrett felt guilty, heaping this on Lane after all the other crap she’d been through. “My little bro, you know, he was just wondering—”

“Why a bomber would target my room.”

“Something like that.”

She closed the journal. She’d pulled her hair back in a ponytail, and Garrett liked the way it looked. He could see more of her face, her silver sand dollar earrings. She had a beautiful neck, smooth and white.

“Garrett, I’ve got skeletons in the closet. But Calavera isn’t one of them. I don’t know why he would bother with me.”

“I figured it was crazy.”

“But you had to ask.”

“So these skeletons in your closet…it’s not just your ex-husband, huh?”

“I don’t keep a diary, either.”

“Fair enough.” He stared at the pocket of her T-shirt
—Chris’s
T-shirt. It was decorated with a green crab and the words
Mike’s Bar, Matamoros.
He and Alex had been there once. They’d borrowed the Navarre family sedan, told Garrett’s parents they were going into Corpus Christi for the day to search for a used car for Alex. Instead, they’d driven to the border for a few drinks. The memory weighed on Garrett like a lead apron.

“I need your advice,” he told Lane.

“My advice? You hardly know me.”

But Garrett felt like he knew her as well as he needed. He didn’t know why, but he had no trouble talking to her, and he figured Lane must feel the same way. After all, she’d told him all about the murder her ex-husband had committed, that awful night they’d dragged the immigrant’s body into the woods. Maybe with a person like Lane, you didn’t need to keep a diary. She was a better place to record your thoughts.

“I want to know what to do,” he admitted. He brought out the letter Alex had left for him, and told her what it said.

35

Black plastic tarp and boards still blocked the end of the
hall. I ripped them away as best I could. The door itself didn’t look particularly damaged. The knob turned, but it wouldn’t open. I kicked it, gave it shoulder treatment. Nothing. As if it was barricaded from the inside.

I tried to convince myself it didn’t matter. One blocked-off room. One more damaged area in a hotel that was falling apart. So what?

Then I noticed the number on the door:
102.
I was standing in front of the same room my parents and I had always stayed in—the last room they’d ever shared as a married couple.

I remembered at age twelve limping down this hallway, the sole of my right foot burning from a jellyfish sting. I’d been exploring the northern tip of the island, imagining I was hiding from Jean Laffitte’s pirates, when I bravely charged the surf and stepped straight into a blue and red bubble of pain.

My parents weren’t anticipating me back until lunch. They expected me to take care of myself during the mornings. But I hobbled back to room 102, determined not to cry. Halfway down the corridor, I ran into Alex’s father.

I’d only seen him around the island a few times before—cutting planks for a new dock or hammering tiles on the roof. He was a burly man. He had unruly blond hair like his son’s, a scraggly beard, skin the color of saddle leather. His sun-faded clothes and unraveling straw cowboy hat always made me think of Robinson Crusoe. Up close, he smelled like whiskey, not so different from my father’s smell, but Mr. Huff had a more kindly smile. There was an odd light in his eyes—the kind of look a sailor gets from staring too long at a watery horizon, as if the glare of the sun had burned permanently into his corneas.

He took one look at the way I was walking and said, “Jellyfish, eh?”

“Yes, sir.”

A muffled shout came from down the hall—from behind my parents’ door.

Mr. Huff pursed his lips. “Why don’t you come to the kitchen, son? I’ll put some baking soda on that sting.”

“I want to see my parents.” My voice quivered. My foot felt as if it were melting.

“Son, it’s better you didn’t. Sometimes things have to get worse for a long time before they can get better.”

I didn’t know what he was talking about. He put his hand on my shoulder, but I jerked away and continued down the hall.

I heard the yelling. I should’ve known better, but I opened the door.

Little details: the shattered glass on the floor, liquor soaking into the carpet. The cut above my mother’s eye, a streak of blood trickling down her cheekbone. My father’s clenched fist, his gold college ring biting into the white flesh of his fingers.

“Get out!” my mother screamed. And in that heartbeat, I thought she was talking to me.

I turned and ran, the pain in my foot forgotten.

“Tres!” my father yelled.

I knew he was coming after me, but I kept running. I caught a glimpse of Mr. Huff’s face—pain and sympathy in his eyes. But he didn’t try to stop me. He didn’t intervene.

Sometimes things have to get worse for a long time.

Later, after my ill-fated fishing expedition with Alex, my mother found me and brought me back to the hotel room. The broken glass had been cleaned up. The cut on her eye was covered by a butterfly bandage. She treated my foot and tried not to cry as she explained that my father was gone. He’d taken the ferry back to the mainland without us. My mother and he were taking a little vacation from their marriage.

I didn’t understand. In my mind, vacation meant Rebel Island. My dad was already
on
vacation. Where would he go?

Now, thinking back on that day, my foot began to ache again. I pressed my hand against the battered door of room 102 and imagined pushing it open, seeing my parents inside.

Why would Alex block off this room?

Only one way to find out. I turned and headed back toward the stairs.

Lane Sanford was packing, but she closed her suitcase and
latched it when I came in.

“Here to see me or my closet?” she asked.

“Your closet,” I said. “Most popular one in the hotel.”

“Naturally.” She turned her back to me and bundled some clothes, then hesitated. Apparently she realized she needed to put them in the suitcase, but she’d closed it too quickly, and she didn’t want to open it in my presence.

“Did Garrett talk to you?” I asked.

She folded a pink dress. “About the bomb. Yes.”

“You sound pretty calm about it.”

“I don’t believe it,” she said. “That’s why.”

“I can show you the door.”

“Tres, I don’t believe anyone besides my husband would want to kill me. That’s what I mean. And frankly, a bomb isn’t Bobby’s style.”

There was tightness in her voice, like a guitar string tuned an octave too high.

“Were you and Chris Stowall involved?”

She shook her head. “Not the way you mean.”

“In what way, then?”

“I told you. I’d known him since high school. Chris was no angel, but he came from a hard family. He knew how I felt. He would never hurt anyone…”

“Unless?”

She sat on her bed and looked up at me. “It doesn’t matter now.”

“Is that what you told Garrett?”

Her cheeks colored. “I told Garrett I was sorry we’d met like this. I told him Chris was a friend, trying to protect me. Chris offered me shelter. He offered me more help, too. But I refused.”

“What kind of help?”

“To get my husband out of the way.”

“To kill him.”

“I don’t think he could have done it. Not really. But he was angry. He said he knew someone who could.”

“Calavera.”

“I don’t know.”

“Chris used the same threat on Ty and Markie. He was helping them run drugs, pressuring them for more money. He seemed to like having Calavera as an ace up his sleeve.”

“Chris tried to help me, Tres. He didn’t deserve to die for that.”

The tone of her voice made me wonder if I’d completely misread Stowall’s feelings for her. “You talk about him as if he was a relative.”

She got up and took her suitcase. “The closet is all yours. I’ll take my things to Garrett’s room.”

She said it defiantly, daring me to protest her moving in with Garrett.

“Lane, was Chris your brother?”

The look in her eyes was close to pity, as if she felt sorry for how little I understood the world. “Tres, my married name was Stowall. Chris was my
husband’s
brother. That’s why he knew how much danger I was in.”

The secret stairway was still there. I was kind of hoping it
wouldn’t be, but I was used to not getting what I hoped for.

I thought about Lane Sanford, and how she’d ended up with such an inconvenient room. I wondered if Chris had given her this room for some reason. I was no longer sure what to make of it.

If Chris had made plans to help Lane against his homicidal brother, it made sense that he’d want an escape plan, including a lot of money. I remembered the little pictures Chris had drawn in his journal, the photo of Waikiki Beach on his mirror. Perhaps he still believed he could convince Lane to go with him. In time, he could get her to love him. A surfer’s happily-ever-after. Pretty simplistic. But I couldn’t blame him for holding out hopes for Lane. As near as I could tell, she and Alex Huff were the only ones who’d ever given Chris a chance at a clean slate. Chris had messed things up pretty bad.

I took a deep breath and headed into the stairwell. This time I went down instead of up.

I almost fell through on the third step. It cracked as I put my weight on it and I flailed out, catching something with my hand that turned out to be a large nail. The metal bit into my palm. I could feel it bleeding, but I didn’t want to look. One more souvenir I’d have from my honeymoon—a tetanus shot. I examined the remaining steps with my flashlight and found that they were in pretty bad shape.

I tested each one. Five steps down, two of them broke with a light kick. Finally, I managed to half walk, half wall-climb my way to the bottom, which was still covered in an inch or so of salt water. Unfortunately, there was another secret door. It opened into a closet, which opened into room 102. I didn’t have to look around very long to see the place had been converted for use by a valued member of the hotel family. The assassin Calavera.

“Come in here,” I told Garrett.

He didn’t look too happy about it. I’d ripped down the plastic and boards, and removed the blockade of furniture inside the door, but the floor was still tough to navigate with a wheelchair. Besides, Garrett knew I wouldn’t have asked him to come down here unless I wanted him to see something important and unwelcome.

“Look around,” I told him. “What do you notice?”

I tried not to sound harsh. At least I think I kept my tone pretty cool. But Garrett winced like I was beating him up.

“Some of Alex’s old stuff,” he said. “His board. His fishing gear. That’s the poster I got him in Frisco.”

I resisted the urge to correct him. Nobody who’d ever lived in San Francisco called it
Frisco
any more than natives called San Antonio
San Antone.
There was something improper about it, like calling your mother
Toots.

“What else?” I asked him.

“A refrigerator.”

“The power is off,” I said. “You can open it.”

He looked confused by this statement, but he wheeled over and did as I suggested. Inside was no food. Only chemicals. Bricks of plastic explosives. Coils of copper wire. A selection of pipes and timing devices.

“A bomb maker’s supply cabinet,” I told him. “Notice the security system?”

“What?” Garrett looked dazed.

“The light,” I said. “Look at the refrigerator light.”

He stared at the green metal orb where the light should’ve been. “That looks like a grenade.”

“It is,” I said. “Old drug dealer’s trick. You put a lightbulb cap on the grenade, stick the filaments inside. When the door opens, the electric current hits the explosives. Anyone who comes snooping and doesn’t know to unplug the refrigerator first—”

“Jesus.”

“I almost didn’t unplug it. It occurred to me when my hand was on the handle.”

He looked at me like I was a ghost. “Tres, there’s no way Alex…This can’t be his stuff.”

I didn’t bother to argue. The room spoke for itself.

Garrett picked up something from the workbench. A red plastic guitar pick. It sat there amid timing fuses and pliers and a pile of firing caps. “Alex couldn’t kill people.”

“He was in the army.”

“He was a cook.”

“Not where he started.” I handed him some papers I’d found in the file cabinet—army transcripts. “He had demolition training, but he was transferred out.”

Garrett looked up blankly. “Transferred…why?”

“I don’t know. But he had the skills to make bombs.”

“He made fricking
fireworks
!”

“A good cover for getting some of the supplies he needed.”

Garrett shook his head. “No way. I can’t buy it.”

I’d expected denial. I didn’t push him. There was nothing I could say that was more convincing than just being here, in the place where Alex had fashioned his IEDs.