Our Island Inn (Quirky Tales from the Caribbean) (17 page)

The inspector crossed the room,
touching the picture frame as he passed. It was his nightly ritual.

~
~ ~

THE FILE PACKET sent up a
poof of dust as Pickering dropped it onto the kitchen table. He dug around in a cabinet by the sink, selected a can of dog food, and cut open the lid.

“Smells horrible,” he said
, spooning the mush into a dish.

Cla
rice wagged her tail. She chomped her mouth, eagerly anticipating the meal.

“You’re right,” Pickering conceded. “Not as bad as what we dealt with earlier.”

With a grunt, he set the dish on the floor and left the dog to slurp up her dinner. The inspector was famished, but he was too tired to eat.

Pickering pulled out the
table’s lone chair and collapsed into its rusted metal seat. Reaching for the file packet, he spread the contents across the table’s flat surface. Each folder was labeled with the same handwriting that marked the packet cover.

He
turned the empty packet so that he could read the carefully printed letters.

“
Parrot Ridge.”

~
~ ~

THE INEVITABLE COMPARISONS
to the inn’s previous crime scene had circulated the station earlier that evening. From the moment word went out that a chopped-up body half-eaten by birds had been recovered from the beach below the ridge, the department’s junior deputies began drawing straws for who would be stuck with the unenviable task of assisting the morgue in the autopsy.

As Pickering
sat at his desk, waiting on hold with a telephone plastered against his ear, he listened to the surrounding chatter. The office gossip was filled with obvious embellishments and fabrications about the original case. He couldn’t help but think that an event of such notoriety generated a false sense of familiarity with the actual record.

During the several hours he’d spent at the station that night, he’d heard at least four, maybe five variations on the tale
of Parrot Ridge.

Over the course of
the last fifteen years, details had inevitably been muddled as facts mingled with fiction. Given the artistic license often employed in island storytelling, by now the truth had likely been warped beyond recognition.

He
’d decided to go back to the source.

~
~ ~

PICKERING RUBBED HIS
temples, remembering the elderly inspector who had handled the original case. The man had been his mentor, an officer that Pickering had worked hard to emulate. His endorsement was the most prominent department commendation hanging on Pickering’s wall.

Dead now for almost a decade, the previous inspector’s notes
were all that remained of his observations of the scene at the inn and the related suspects and witnesses.

Pickering
began thumbing through the manila folders. The filed papers had become brittle from time and exposure to the island’s humidity. The ink had faded in some spots, blurred in others, but the writing was still mostly legible.

As
he reviewed the documents, he could almost hear the other man speaking. The familiar handwriting conveyed the elderly inspector’s direct tone and folksy demeanor. Reading between the lines, he began to get his first inklings of what his mentor suspected had happened, but could not prove.

Pickering
cringed at the implications.

THE
PREVIOUS INNKEEPERS were a husband and wife team who moved down to the island from Texas.

The husband was a big personality, the loudest voice in any room. A successful businessman in the Stat
es, he thought he’d spotted a unique entrepreneurial opportunity in the Caribbean and decided to seize it.

Prior to his purchase and development of the
lot, no one had ever tried to build on Parrot Ridge. The steep hill combined with the reinforced foundation that would be required for any structure positioned at the top had dissuaded all thought of it.

The husband was undaunted by the challenge.
The asserted difficulties of the task only added to the project’s allure. In his mind, there was no impediment he couldn’t overcome, no hurdle he couldn’t surmount.

The
wife played second fiddle to her domineering spouse. She was a petite woman, demure and rigidly polite. The husband viewed her as an accessory, one to which he paid little attention. She had provided him with a son, a pale sickly boy but an heir nonetheless, thus fulfilling her matrimonial duty. With that feat accomplished and his genetic seed replicated – albeit in somewhat muted form – he had moved on to other romantic interests.

She was cowed by
her husband’s boisterous personality, an accepting minion to his philandering ways – or so he thought.

~
~ ~

THE WHISPERS BEGAN
not long after the inn opened.

According to the rampant island rumor mill, the husband
had taken up with a number of young drifters and male guests of willing persuasion. If the salacious speculations were to be believed, Parrot Ridge had been scarred by the kind of hedonistic activities that hadn’t been seen on the island since the Europeans occupied it during the Colonial Era.

The wife tur
ned a blind eye to her husband’s indiscretions, focusing instead on nursing her son through his many illnesses. She pretended to ignore his cheating ways – until he entered into a flagrant relationship with a man who worked at the inn.

The
elderly inspector had been unable to confirm the third party’s identity, but he had left enough breadcrumbs in his annotations for Pickering to follow his train of thought.

His mentor had deduced that the
romantic liaison that incited the wife’s violent tirade was between her husband and the restaurant’s sous-chef, who was, in turn, the husband of the restaurant’s head cook.

No one could have anticipated the fury
that was unleashed during the ensuing kitchen argument – least of all, the stabbed spouse.

~
~ ~

THE CASE FILE detailed the oft
-cited account of the mortally wounded man lurching out of the restaurant kitchen and staggering to his death in the middle of the deck dining area.

But here,
the previous inspector’s carefully recorded notes deviated from the modern day folklore.

The wife hadn’t jumped over the railing or disappeared into the woods.
In fact, she hadn’t been the least bit distraught about her husband’s tragic demise.

She had given her statement, a stone-faced
account of a cooking accident gone awry. According to her narrative, the husband’s life-ending injury was the unfortunate result of a self-inflicted wound.

While
the inspector had doubted the veracity of her story, he’d found no evidence to discount it. Given the knife’s wide use in the restaurant kitchen, there had been multiple fingerprints on its handle. The only other available witnesses to the knife’s insertion were the chef and the sous-chef. They had both corroborated the wife’s version of events.

Sympathetic to
the woman’s duties as a mother and unable to justify detaining her overnight at the police station, he had left the wife at the inn.

When he returned
to Parrot Ridge the next morning, the widow and her son were gone – along with the chef and her husband.

The inspector
eventually learned that the mother and child had returned to the States, well beyond his jurisdiction. The couple who had worked in the kitchen were never seen on the island again.

The property was essentially abandoned.

The inn fell into disrepair, its buildings retaken by the jungle. A hurricane swept through a few years later and destroyed what was left of the remaining structures, leaving only the exposed foundation and a story that grew more gruesomely sensational with each retelling – because of what the inspector discovered when he returned to the inn, the morning after the husband’s murder.

In the restaurant’s kitchen pantry.

PICKERING
SORTED THROUGH the pile of documents from the Parrot Ridge investigation packet and tentatively pulled out the folder related to the restaurant’s kitchen pantry.

Like the others, t
his file bore his mentor’s handwriting. The scrawl on the front tab was slightly shaky, as if reflecting the subject matter contained within.

The husband’s death and likely homicide had been a rare enough event for the sleepy island, particularly in its less developed
era fifteen years ago.

But that
was not what made the case infamous at the police station – and set the standard for gory crime scene clean up and analysis.

~
~ ~

WHEN THE ELDERLY
inspector arrived at the inn the next morning to follow up on his investigation, he discovered the primary suspects had departed. Perplexed, he began exploring the main residence and its surrounding buildings.

He
ran into a few befuddled guests, but found nothing suspicious until he reached the pavilion.

Returning to the scene of the stabbing, the inspector began
a second search of the kitchen. At first glance, it appeared to be a routine culinary galley with a typical pantry attached to its far end.

Pulling out his flashlight, the inspector examined the
pantry’s poorly lit space. One wall had been stocked with rows of glass jars, the kind used for pressurized canning and pickling. Colored labels had been affixed to the jars, but there was no writing on the wraparound papers to identify the containers’ contents.

The inspector had missed
breakfast, and his stomach had started to rumble. Glancing over his shoulder to check that the kitchen was still empty, he unscrewed the lid on what he thought was a jar of peach compote.

He
immediately lost his appetite.

The jar – and dozens more like it –
contained diced chunks of human flesh.

~
~ ~

DURING THE SUBSEQUENT months of
scientific analysis, portions of at least three different victims were identified from the remains that had been pickled and preserved in the jars at Parrot Ridge.

Many of the
morgue staff assigned the unenviable task of parsing through the evidence lost weight during the process. Others quit the job altogether.

Despite the
se forensic efforts, the case soon reached a stalemate, and the elderly inspector announced his retirement. After the episode at Parrot Ridge, he felt he’d seen it all – and far more than he would have preferred.

As for the
husband and wife cooking team presumably responsible for the cannibalistic canning ritual, the pair had disappeared without a trace.

I
nvestigators were unable to locate any pictures of the couple. They had only a vague physical description provided by the reverend, who had glimpsed the duo during his previous visits to the restaurant.

But in the years that followed
, in random occurrences throughout the Caribbean, someone would stumble across a restaurant kitchen pantry with disturbingly similar contents.

And always, the
pantry would be associated with a recently departed chef and sous-chef matching the description of the pair from Parrot Ridge.

The chef was a
quiet West Indian woman who mostly kept to herself. The sous-chef was a dark-skinned Hispanic with a thick accent and a penchant for telling off-color jokes.

CLOSING HIS EYES, Orlando Pickering
tried to imagine the previous inspector sitting on the other side of his kitchen table. It had been many years since he’d last shared dinner with his old mentor, but he could easily envision the scene.

He pictured the
man’s grizzled head with his hair cropped close to the scalp, not unlike the style Pickering now wore. The elderly inspector’s bony hands folded together and then pulled apart, a repetitive motion Pickering had seen hundreds of times during the years they worked together.

It meant that the
man had news to share that was delicate in nature, restricted information that would require discreet handling.

Opening his eyes, Pickering frowned down at the
pile of Parrot Ridge files.

What else had
his mentor wanted to convey that he hadn’t put in the official report?

“What could be worse than the glass jars?”
he muttered out loud.

He suspected he didn’t want to know the answer to that question.

~ ~ ~

PICKERING
THOUGHT BACK to the scene at the beach and the non-bird injuries he’d examined on the body earlier that day.