Our Island Inn (Quirky Tales from the Caribbean) (23 page)

~
~ ~

PICKERING
WAITED THROUGH a lengthy silence before prompting the reverend to continue. “But it didn’t end there.”

“
No,” the reverend finally replied. “Olivia’s husband walked into the kitchen from the parking lot, and he jumped forward to protect Jesús. You know that he and Jesús were…”

Pickering
grunted his acknowledgement. He was beginning to wonder how such a small handful of people could be engaged in so many tangled relationships.

“
The husband charged up to Simmee and hollered at her to put down the knife.” The reverend raised his hand, demonstrating her lax grip. “She began to drop her arm.”

Su
ddenly, he clenched his fist and thrust it forward. “But that knife took on a mind of its own. The blade caught the husband in the chest and sliced right through him.”

The reverend’s hand fell to his lap. “
Simmee stood there with her mouth hanging open. I don’t think she realized what had happened, but I had a side angle view. Olivia had moved in behind Simmee. She grabbed hold of the handle and thrust the blade into her husband’s stomach.”

The
reverend paused before adding a last observation.

“
The man staggered out onto the pool deck, gasping and spewing blood everywhere. He knocked this ceramic parrot off the counter by the cash register. The thing cracked when it hit the ground. Olivia was far more upset about that broken parrot than she was about killing her husband.”

~
~ ~

PICKERING
RUBBED HIS chin, envisioning the revised scene.

“Olivia didn’t jump off the deck railing…”

“No,” the reverend said sadly. “That was Simmee. She twisted an ankle in the fall, but her main injury wasn’t physical.” He tapped the side of his head. “She was never the same after that night. She didn’t kill the man, but it was impossible for her mind to reconcile reality with what she’d seen – the knife lunging forward in her hand like that. Her personality split apart. It broke her.”

He swallowed. “
I broke her.”

Pickering
glanced out the home’s front window. During her mental illness, Simmee had been known to wander off into the woods for days at a time. He found it difficult to imagine anyone could have survived in the jungle all these years, but he had to ask. “Is she still out there?”

The reverend
was similarly skeptical. “Elsie thinks so,” he said dubiously. “She leaves food out for her mother. She wants to bring her back home. I keep telling the girl, Simmee left us long ago.”

Pickering stood from the couch.
He’d heard all he could stomach in one session, but he still had a few unanswered questions.

“What happened to the body on the beach? The man who called himself Romeo?
Why was he killed?”

The reverend looked at the floor
, evading both the inspector’s gaze and the question.

“
The night her husband died, Olivia told your predecessor that the stabbing was an accident. The story was a mutually beneficial arrangement. It protected everyone involved, including me. I never thought I’d hear from her again – until she sold the property to those two men and they built the new inn. The next thing I knew, Maya and Jesús had applied for the cooking position. That’s when this recent trouble began.”

Tired from the long confession, the reverend’s shoulders sagged with exhaustion.

“Olivia knew about Maya and her jars. She thought that was the perfect way to get rid of husband number two. I couldn’t very well complain. She made it clear she would ruin me if I caused any problems. I sent Elsie to work at the inn to keep an eye on them.”

Pickering
cut in testily. “And to the police station – to keep an eye on me.”

“It wasn’t enough to prevent t
his tragedy…to stop the curse.” The reverend’s voice dropped to a shamed whisper. “I called Olivia last night to tell her about that boy. The moment I saw his body, I knew this was all coming to an end. She flew down this morning. She should be at the inn now. You can go arrest her if you like.”

He put his head in his hands.

“Orlando, the hounds are coming for me. I’ve suffered enough for my sins. Leave me be.”

The inspector stared at the broken man slumped on the couch.

Without another word, Pickering turned and strode out the door.

~
~ ~

THE REVEREND
WALKED to the window to watch Pickering’s truck roll off down the drive.

A voice with a thick Spanish accent called out from the rear bedrooms.

“The coast is clear?”

Fresh from a
shower, Jesús strolled into the living room wearing only a towel wrapped around his waist.

OLIVIA TOOK A seat on the pool deck’s far northwest table while Elsie disappeared into the restaurant’s kitchen to prepare the tea.

C
louds sank heavy in the sky. From the elevated perch on Parrot Ridge, the feathery white blobs looked close enough to touch.

Moments later,
Elsie brought out the tea service and placed it in front of her guest. The tray held a dainty cup and saucer, an assortment of packaged teas, a pile of sugar packets, a plate of lemon wedges, and a pitcher of hot water – the last item having been tainted by a colorless hallucinogenic.

Olivia selected a tea bag, opened
its wrapper, and placed it in the cup. Tilting the pitcher, she poured hot water over the bag. Then she dropped her hands to her lap and waited for the tea to steep.

She sat upright in the chair, her ankles crossed on the ground beneath
her. While she remained wary of her server, her thoughts drifted back to her earlier life on the island.

“I was so miserable when I lived here, I
never really appreciated the view.”

Olivia
glanced down at the cup. Using the string attached to the tea bag, she dunked the leaves up and down in the hot water. When she determined that the brew had reached the right consistency, she set the bag on the side of the saucer. Then she selected a lemon wedge and squeezed its juice into the mix.

“All I could think about was how to get away.”

Elsie drew in her breath as Olivia wrapped her hand around the cup’s handle. Pinky finger extended, she lifted the cup to her lips. She held it there for several seconds before deciding that the tea was too hot to drink.

Elsie
concealed her disappointment as Olivia returned the cup to the saucer.

Trying to be patient, s
he took a seat on the other side of the table. “I remember that night, all those years ago,” she said, hoping to keep Olivia talking. “The night your first husband died.”

Olivia smiled at the memory. “
I was so desperate to get rid of that man. I would have done anything to escape my marriage.”

She raised the cup again, gently blowing on the
liquid’s surface. Pressing her lips to the cup’s rim, she completed her first swallow.

“
I never thought I had it in me to kill a man, but when the opportunity presented itself, I took it.”

Elsie
pictured the scene. As a young girl, she’d watched the event unfold from the far corner of the kitchen – and witnessed the destruction that the act had inflicted upon her mother. The memory had haunted her since childhood.

Olivia
sipped more of the tainted tea. “Sometimes, Elsie, you have to take a chance.”

Elsie
eyed the amount of liquid remaining in the cup, estimating how much of the hallucinogen Olivia had ingested. Then she decided to follow the other woman’s advice. “My aunt said you collect birds.”

“Yes, pretty little ceramic ones.”
Olivia leaned back in her chair, noticeably more relaxed. “I started my collection after I married my first husband. I used to stare at my birds and dream about flying away from my troubles.”

Elsie
recognized her opening. She homed in on the key phrase and said softly, “Fly away.”

Olivia
looked out at the sea, her eyes glazing over as they tracked a pair of gulls crossing the clouded sky. “How nice it would be to fly away…”

S
he took a long unladylike gulp from her cup.

“Just fly away,” Elsie repeated, a little louder this time.

Slowly, Olivia stood and walked to the railing. Elsie followed, carrying her chair with her.

“The sky is so close
today…with the clouds dropping down…it feels like I could just…”

“Fly away,”
Elsie finished for her as she placed the chair next to the railing.

Despite having set up the prop, Elsie watched in amazement as
Olivia kicked off her sandals and climbed onto the seat.

Olivia’s
voice trembled. “Sometimes, all I want to do is fly away.”

She
wrapped her hands over the railing’s top bar and began to hoist herself up. Wavering back and forth, she placed first one bare foot and then the other on the railing.

For a moment
, Elsie wondered if the woman would fall forward or back. But there was only ever one direction Olivia wanted to take. Standing unsteadily on the top bar, she lifted her arms out like wings, leaned into the open space beyond the deck, and tumbled to the ground below.

Thump
.

Elsie look
ed down at Olivia’s body lying motionless in the weeds, wondering if she was dead or just unconscious.

T
he distinction did not matter.

A
white-haired figure emerged from the jungle, grabbed Olivia’s limp manicured hand, and pulled her into the brush.

~
~ ~

ORLANDO
PICKERING IDLED his truck at the bottom of the drive leading up to Our Island Inn.

This was the last place he wanted to be.

Gritting his teeth, he gunned the engine up the hill. At the summit, he pulled into the parking lot and surveyed the two vehicles that had been left there. He glanced at the innkeeper’s jeep and then shifted his attention to the rental vehicle.

Reluctantly, Pickering climbed out of his pickup and approached the rental.

The jeep had been left unlocked. A set of women’s luggage had been stowed in the rear compartment. With Oliver detained at the police station, there would have been no one here to check in this guest.

The inspector
circled to the passenger side and opened the door. Retrieving the rental paperwork from the glove compartment, he found the name of the person who had leased the jeep.

Olivia Hamilton.

Pondering, he returned the paperwork to the jeep and walked down to the pavilion. At a table on the far side of the pool deck, he spied an abandoned tea service.

Someone had attended to the inn’s lone patron.
He had an idea of who that might have been.

Elsie.

With an apprehensive grunt, Pickering descended the pavilion’s outer steps. Squinting at the rough ground below the deck, he thought he detected scuffs in the dirt near the opening to the trail.

The marks might have been caused by
a body being dragged into the woods.

But it was impossible to be sure.

Pickering stared at the clearing. Then he turned toward the stairs, hiked up to the pavilion, and out to his truck.

He would call the man who ran the jeep rental agency and let him know where he could collect his vehicle.

With a last glance at the inn, he backed out of his parking spot and motored off down the drive.

He vowed never
again to set foot on Parrot Ridge.

INSPECTOR PICKERING RETURNED to the police station by mid-afternoon. His absence had been noted, but there were no complaints. As a senior officer working an important case, his schedule wasn’t subject to question.

Pickering
lumbered into the reception area. He was halfway across the room when the woman staffing the front counter flagged him down.

“Inspector
, the team from Parrot Ridge needs to see you.”

Picker
ing strode to the office space at the rear of the building. A junior deputy handed him a packet of folded paper. The man’s face bore a sick pallor.

“Sir, we found this on the pool deck
…” He gulped as if trying to keep down his lunch. “After we finished in the pantry. It was on one of the restaurant tables.”

Pickering
turned the packet over in his hands, noting the name of the innkeeper written on the outside. He unfolded the pages and scanned the contents.

“Is he still in the holding cell
?”