Just Fall (11 page)

At least he took me to a town,
she thinks.
He could have driven me anywhere. Done anything to me…

She stops herself. If he wanted to he would have. He still could. She tries to get another glimpse of him in the rearview mirror but, sensing her scrutiny, the driver pulls his dark blue cap lower on his forehead.

His cellphone bleats and he answers, immediately switching into the particularly flavored Creole of the island.

Ellie doesn’t speak Creole, but she strains to pick up words or phrases she can identify, relying on her mostly forgotten high school French. Her ears prick at the phrase “Maison Mary Ann.” She knows “maison” means house and Mary Ann of course was the name of her long-dead sister. The house of Mary Ann? What could that be? What could it mean?

Gold Tooth clicks off the phone.

“What am I to do now?” she asks.

“I’m going to drop you at a hotel. The woman who runs it has a soft spot for a woman in trouble. Check in. Lay low. Stay away from cops. We’ll be in touch. We’ll find you when it’s time.”

“Time for what?”

“For whatever Quinn decides. Since you went off script, he’s coming down here to deal with you himself.”

He pulls over and stops the taxi. Gestures that she should get out of the cab. Points to a small hotel across the street, gaudy paint fading, with a hot-pink neon turtle above the door fizzling and half lit. The sign reads “Lou’s Royal Retreat,” a grandiose name for the run-down establishment. She hesitates.

“Now go. And don’t get stupid and think about getting to the airport again. We have eyes everywhere.”

It is only after she has stumbled from the taxi and is gasping for air on the hot, crowded street that she realizes she is trembling. From exhaustion. From fear. From a sense of helplessness so powerful, she is terrified she will never again in her life feel in control. She is stunned to discover she aches with longing for Rob. She has never been so confused. She stares down at her ridiculous nails, feeling foolish as well as unbearably afraid.

Ellie had run screaming back into the hotel, imprisoned by and stumbling in the full skirts of her wedding gown, but before she encountered someone, anyone, who could help, a sinewy arm looped around her lacy waist and yanked her back outside. She felt the cold steel pressed to her throat and her voice deserted her. She stood frozen, except for the involuntary tremble that ricocheted through her body. She looked and listened intently for any sign of Rob, but it was as if the world had shrunk down to a tiny sphere consisting only of her and this wiry, powerful man with a knife.

She chanced a look at her captor. It was the tall, thin stranger she had seen in the garden with Rob. She strained away from him, forcing the cuff to slide up his arm. She made note of the tattoo peeking from the sleeve of the arm gripping her waist. The tattoo was a skeleton, grotesque limbs akimbo as if it were dancing, an arrow gripped in one bony hand.

His breath tickled her ear. “Do exactly as I tell you. Understand?”

Ellie choked out a soft “Yes.”

“You are going to go back into your party. You will tell everyone that Rob has planned a surprise for you. You have come to say good night on both of your behalf, and then you are meeting him.”

“Where?”

“What?”

“Where am I meeting him?”

“You two were to spend your wedding night at the St. Regis, am I right?”

Ellie nodded.

“I see no reason to change that plan. Make your goodbyes and get there as soon as you can. Or your wedding night will be the night you become a widow.”

He released her then, striding swiftly toward the garden. In an instant he was swallowed by the shadows.

Ellie did as she was told. She managed to keep the smile on her face as she hugged and kissed and said “Goodbye” and “Thank you.” When her father, concerned by the unexpected disappearance of the groom, asked if everything was all right, she nearly broke. Her kind dad, who had fixed so many little-girl problems, could not fix this one. For fuck’s sake, she didn’t even know what this one was. So she told him she loved him, and thanked him again for the wedding, hugging him tightly.

“Take care, Eleanor,” he said gruffly as she released him. “All happiness to you and Rob.” As her father escorted her to the waiting limousine, Ellie wondered if those were the last words she would ever hear him say.

The driver, neat and natty but for his nicotine-stained fingertips, swung open the car door and offered Ellie his arm. He settled her in, deftly arranging the billowing cloud of silk and tulle around her. His dirty fingertips on her pristine white dress should have bothered her, she noted idly. But she felt numb.

“The groom?” the driver asked, his expression carefully professional.

“Meeting us there.”

They drove. The driver had the partition up. A split of champagne rested in a silver ice bucket next to a pair of long-stemmed flutes. Etta James’s ode to love, “At Last,” crooned through the speakers. The thrilling pulse of millions of lives vibrated outside the tinted windows. Ellie had never felt so alone.

They arrived at the St. Regis. The limo driver opened the door for her, and offered an arm to help her out. Light-headed, as if she were moving through a sticky dream, Ellie glided into the lobby, was welcomed by hotel staff and escorted to the elevator, assured by a beaming manager that “Your husband has already checked in and may I offer my congratulations! Please let us know if there is anything you need.”

The elevator doors slid shut. She noticed a loose seed pearl on the bodice of her gown and plucked at it, unleashing a string of beads and sequins that bounced down the frothy waves of her dress. What was stopping her from asking for help? Surely she could have slipped the manager a note? She could still tell someone, couldn’t she? A rising scream caught in her throat and stayed there as the image of Rob’s bloodied face flashed through her mind. She was his lover, his bride. She would do anything to spare him pain.

She exited the elevator and slipped off her white kid-leather high heels. Her toes pinched and she wanted to feel grounded. The carpet in the hallway was plush. The walls were painted a rich orchid color; the glittering light from crystal wall sconces added romance. Antique chests displayed blooming plants. There was a hush, the quiet of money and discretion.

Ellie neared the Imperial Suite. Its blood-red doors were wide open. She paused at the lip of the doorway. Rob’s confession, the one she had dismissed as a joke, echoed through her thoughts. She couldn’t make sense of any of this, but at least she owed it to Rob, and to herself, to hear him out, get an explanation. She stepped into the suite.

The entryway to the suite was luxurious, ornate. A gilded table with a black marble top sat in front of a mirrored wall. Her reflection shocked her. She looked deformed. She gasped. Then she realized the huge bouquet of white roses atop the table was merging with the reflection of her wedding dress, distorting her image. She wasn’t hunchbacked after all.

Panels of gold raw silk, also hung with crystal sconces, flanked the mirrored wall. The floor was highly polished marble, so much so it shimmered like ice. Ellie tentatively stepped in. The marble felt cool and slippery under her stockinged feet. There was a soft
thunk
as she dropped her wedding shoes onto the marble table.

Ellie padded into the suite’s living room, every nerve on high alert. The walls were the same blood-red as the doors. The gleaming parquet floor was covered with a black-and-white geometrically patterned rug. Two large round windows had cozy window seats beneath them, heaped with pillows. A cream-colored sofa, also awash in pillows, was flanked by a cushy cream armchair with an ottoman and a pair of side chairs upholstered in soft gray velvet. An ebony coffee table was at the center of this grouping, a crystal vase overflowing with more white roses at its center.

She froze. The wiry man who had grabbed her uncoiled himself from one of the window seats. He gestured toward the bedroom. Through the open door, Ellie could see Rob, slumped on the edge of the four-poster bed, his head in his hands, red silk moiré walls shimmering behind him.

Ellie walked into the bedroom and half turned to close the door, but the wiry man shook his head.

“I would prefer we kept that open, if it’s all the same to you,” he reproved in a mild tone. Ellie did.

She walked to Rob and stood before him. He lifted his eyes to meet hers. The unfathomable sorrow she saw there made her heart break.

The Royal St. Lucia Police are puzzled. Dead bodies show up in hotels on occasion. It is almost inevitable in a relatively poor country whose prime business is tourism. Armed robberies, drug deals gone sour, these things happen. What is puzzling the police, Detective Lucien Broussard in particular, is the peculiar detail of the missing bottom lip of this specific victim.

It isn’t the “message” of any of the known local drug cartels. It was done after death, so that rules out torture. The victim in the hotel room has been identified as Carter Williamson, a local businessman. He may have, regrettably, dealt in counterfeit handbags and sunglasses, but that line of work is not often one that results in death and post-death mutilation. He was thirty-six, an American, born in Atlanta, Georgia. Williamson had been residing in St. Lucia for five years. His home, when Lucien pays a visit, proves to be a modest place, except for the expensive toys (a huge flat-screen, state-of-the-art stereo system, Jet Skis, three motorcycles; his Porsche had been recovered from the hotel’s valet). Poking around the garage, Lucien spots life jackets, nautical rope, and a container of Bombardier Grease, and makes a mental note to check if Williamson owned a boat. Thinking about boats makes Lucien dwell painfully on the missing children. He’s almost certain the four kids have been spirited off the island by boat (they’ve found no bodies on the island and airplane manifests have been checked). He prays the boys are alive, repeating their names—Pierre, Jacob, Sebastien, and now also Olivier—in an expanding litany he has offered up daily to an unhearing God since the first boy disappeared.

Williamson’s girlfriend, when he tracks her down, is also surprisingly modest. An attractive but all-natural girl who works at a local dive shop, she goes by the nickname of “Cookie.” Cookie seems appropriately distraught about Carter’s death, has no idea why her lover had been at the Grande Sucre Hotel. She had been at a friend’s birthday party the day of the murder (a boat cruise around the island where she was surrounded by eleven other women virtually every minute) and proves useless to Lucien’s investigation.

A visit to Williamson’s place of business is no more illuminating. His business partner—another American by the name of Pascal Jarett, a stoner type with white-boy dreads and a pierced eyebrow—opens up expansively when Lucien explains he is not interested in their counterfeit goods and will look the other way (for now) if Pascal is forthcoming with respect to the murder investigation.

While the offer certainly gets Pascal’s attention, he is of little use. He and Carter had been in business together for three years. They had met in a bar six months before that. Became drinking buddies and later business partners. He confirms they have a rich business importing counterfeits (handbags, sunglasses, and the like) from China and peddling them to the gullible tourists who pour in off cruise ships daily. According to Pascal, Carter had been more or less faithful to Cookie (mostly less), but in any event the murdered man had favored the brown-skinned island girls; the idea that Carter had been found in the room of a blond American woman seems to Pascal a head-shaking mystery.

Lucien does not mention the lip; it has been Captain Bonnaire’s decision not to release this salacious tidbit to the media, or anyone else for that matter. The mutilation of the dead man is strictly on a need-to-know basis. The reasoning is simple: They are hoping the culprit will reveal him- or herself, either by (and Lucien prays this will not be the case) leaving another victim, or—when they have the murderer in custody—by his or her knowledge of this private little detail.

Despite the fact that the room had been paid for by an American woman, and despite the fact that Williamson had been seen in the company of a beautiful blonde in the hotel bar before his death, Lucien does not leap to any conclusions. He’s been on the force long enough not to get caught on the obvious or misled by the crumbs someone else wants him to follow.