Just Fall (19 page)

“I was in love with him.”

“So you were sleeping with Doug while you were sleeping with me?”

Jason gave a guilty nod.

“The whole time we were together?” She couldn’t help the shrillness that crept into her voice.

“Even before.”

“Oh. And how do you think your betrothed will feel about all this? Or don’t you intend to tell her?”

“Ellie, I just want to make sense of it…Things seemed simpler then…and—”

“And what? You lied to me! To yourself! And now you want to lie to what’s-her-name, Olivia? For pity’s sake, if you’re gay, you’re gay. Live your life.”

“I don’t know what I am. Doug’s the only man I was ever with…”

“So what the fuck are you doing
here,
Jason? You’re engaged to another woman, to whom you haven’t come clean, but you dropped by to—what? Humiliate me? Get some kind of absolution? What is your point?”

“I don’t know…” He looked genuinely miserable, and for a brief second Ellie almost felt sorry for him. Almost. “I don’t want to live a lie anymore. We were together, the three of us—”

“No! Let’s be clear. The only person in a threesome was you. And the only one in the dark was me! I was the stupid idiot who was the butt of the joke! Did you and Doug laugh at me together?”

“It wasn’t like that!”

“No? Go fuck yourself.”

Ellie felt rage rise like bile in her throat. The first time in her life she had thought she was in love and it was all bullshit. She felt nauseous as she realized he
had
picked Doug over her—just way before she thought. Even sicker, as she realized the depth and breadth of her own stupid self-deception.

“I think you ought to go.”

“Ellie…”

“What do you want from me? I loved you! I’ve never loved anyone else. And you decide that you want to ‘come clean’? Why? So you feel better and I feel like shit?”

“You loved him too—” Jason staggered to his feet.

“I didn’t! I never did! He was your best friend, so I accepted him…Get out, Jason! I can’t stand the sight of you—”

“I want you to understand…I cared about you too, Ellie, I really did—”

“If you had cared about me, you wouldn’t have lied to me. You wouldn’t have started up with me when you were already fucking Doug.”

Jason began to snivel. “I’m so messed up!”

“Well, don’t look at me. I have nothing to offer you. Get out!”

Jason didn’t move. Something in Ellie snapped. “Go! Go ask your precious fiancée for understanding! See if she can help.”

Jason just stood there, limp and sobbing.

“Oh, I see. You’re not going to tell her. You’re confessing to me so you don’t have to. What a fucking coward you are! If you have any feelings for this girl, tell her. Don’t destroy her down the road, when you suddenly decide to live in truth. Don’t do to her what you did to me.”

She shoved him.

“Ellie, come on, just let me talk to you—”

“No!” She pushed him again.

The tip of her knife nicked his jaw. She hadn’t even realized she still gripped it. He touched the blood on his chin in wonder, then stretched his glistening fingertips toward her, grabbing at her T-shirt.

“But Ellie, I need you to—”

“It’s too late, Jason! There’s nothing I can give you. Go! Just go, goddamn it!”

And then it all got crazy. She stormed past him, elbowing him aside, sick of the sight of him. She flung open the front door, kept shoving him back toward it, desperate to be rid of him. Finally, in the doorway, Jason dropped to his knees, scrabbling at her, trying to grasp her around the waist. Struggling to get away, Ellie pitched right over him and fell. Face planted. She felt her nose erupt in blood. She dropped the knife and swiped at the blood. She tried to crawl down the hallway, away from him, but Jason pulled her back, her cheek scraping along the carpeting. He kept bleating her name.

“Stop! Let me go!” She grabbed for the knife and he did too. In the struggle her hip was sliced. Blossomed a crescent moon of blood.

She tore away from his grasp and scrambled to her feet. He grabbed at her again. Ellie shoved him, frantic to be away from him.

“Stop it! Leave me alone!”

“What the devil’s going on?” A neighbor appeared on the stairway, peering up, frowning.

Jason turned, lurched toward her. When Ellie remembered it later, she was never quite sure if she had pushed him, just a little, or if he had simply lost his footing before he pitched down the stairs. Ellie’s neighbor jumped back to avoid him as he tumbled. There was a hollow, reverberant
crack.

“Oh my God. Oh my God. What happened?” Jason’s body lay sprawled at the foot of the stairs. The neighbor’s face was ashen. “Are you okay?”

Ellie burst into tears. Even as she did, though, a small, private part of her brain began to spin. She felt both in the moment and—bizarrely—like she was watching herself from a distance. Her hysterical sobbing was real, but so was her spiraling sense of guilt and fear. She stared down at Jason’s motionless body. She had done that. This was her fault. “My ex showed up drunk…attacked me…call 911.”

Ellie told the police, Jason’s parents, her neighbor, and all her friends the identical story. That Jason had shown up uninvited, clearly wasted. That she had given him some water and tried to send him on his way. But he had insisted on his love for her, swore to her that he was engaged but had realized it was the biggest mistake of his life. That he wanted her back. When she’d told him she had moved on in her life, he had become enraged. He had attacked her. She’d acted in pure self-defense, and was devastated by the entire encounter. She adopted a pious tone at this point in the story. Of course she had loved him, once, long ago. But they were just kids at the time. It was so tragic that he turned to violence when she rebuffed him.

Jason’s blood alcohol level bore out her story. As did the snippet of their exchange the neighbor had witnessed—Jason pursuing Ellie, her pleading with him to leave her alone. And there was Ellie’s broken nose and bruised face, the knife wound along the curve of her hip, his bloody prints on her shirt. Ironically, even Jason’s fiancée’s story contributed to the picture Ellie painted: Jason had called Olivia, drunk and incoherent, to tell her he would be late meeting her, that he had unfinished business with an old friend, but there was a darkness in his tone that she had never heard before, one that had frightened her.

Ellie began to believe her own fabrications. She shut down the truth about Jason and Doug, the deception and betrayal.

But she knew it was a small, leaking poison in her, this secret. The bitter shame, the horror of its ending, the pride-salving, ugly lies, all seeped and festered deep in her soul.

Detective Lucien Broussard is not happy. Two murders in two days. Both expat Americans, although Lucien is hard-pressed to find a single connection between them. He reviews what he knows about Louise Butler. She was sixty-three years old at the time of her unfortunate acquaintance with a bullet. She had been a resident of St. Lucia for almost forty years and had owned and operated her small hotel in Vieux Fort for thirty. Lucien studies the pictures of the beautiful young waif that Louise had been, photographs a quick Internet search has turned up in connection with her abduction back in the States years ago. He finds them hard to reconcile with the bloated mountain of flesh he has just seen. Time can be cruel.

Two murdered Americans in two days, even if they were residents of the island and not tourists. Incredibly bad for business. Bonnaire is rabid; Lucien has to come up with some answers soon.

One killed with a knife, one with a gun. One mutilated after death, the other not. One murdered in a luxury hotel that ran along the most exclusive stretch of beach on the island, the other in a dumpy bed-and-breakfast in the small town of Vieux Fort. One victim reportedly seen with a blond American, the other, no particular link to a blonde of any kind. Lou was found by a middle-aged couple from Nebraska who had traveled to the island for a second honeymoon. They had come to Lou’s straight from the airport, and were at first surprised to find the hotel empty, then horrified to stumble upon the dead proprietress.

Lucien reflects on his next steps. He has been a cop long enough to know that people mostly kill people they know. He decides to head back to Vieux Fort and ask some more questions.

Lucien spends five hours interviewing street vendors and locals. He encounters a not-unexpected resistance to his questions. Tensions have been high in Vieux Fort; with a police crackdown on illegal street vendors in play, Lucien knows he is the enemy. And then there is the angry group, furious about the authorities perceived indifference to the island’s four missing boys. Their discontent roils and spreads. Lucien begins to fear their anger will billow into something violent. But the angry mutterings dip and simmer in the face of Lucien’s quite genuine and shared frustration.

And let’s not forget, gossip is gossip, enjoyed by most. People like to talk. People want to be heard. They tell some wild stories: The four abducted boys have been stolen by the devil, one old crone swears, she has a magic powder that can bring them back; the American killed at the Grande Sucre was a CIA agent, double-crossed by a Russian informant. It’s all drug-related, insists one old man with a gray Afro, his pocked and scarred arms held out to testify; he should know. A frightened mother clutches her two young children to her side and whispers that she’s heard the missing boys are imprisoned by the angry ghost at Maison Marianne. Did the detective know Marianne was pregnant when she died? She’s stealing boys to replace her own lost child.

Lucien is patient. He speaks to everyone. He listens with considerate attention. He promises to check the drug angle, the political rumors; he assures the scared mother that they have checked Maison Marianne, but even so, promises to do it again.

Each time he is able to bring the topic back around to Lou. He learns that the fat woman was well liked, known for a soft heart and a generous hand, and as he expresses his determination to bring her killer to justice, more tongues are loosened. He finally finds one woman, a beneficiary of Lou’s kindness, who is not only willing to talk, but actually has something of value to say.

The woman, Camille Allard, has a stand on the same street as Lou’s hotel from which she peddles an astounding array of junk: cheap T-shirts bearing the slogan “No Pressure, No Problem, St. Lucia,” plastic sunglasses, rag dolls clothed in the local madras, hats formed from woven banana leaves. Camille also has a black eye, faded now to a purplish bruise. Camille tells Lucien that Lou had taken her in when her boyfriend hit her, didn’t charge her, had been kind. If she can help find who murdered her, it would be a way of repaying that debt.

Lucien asks if she had seen a blond woman the day of Lou’s murder, but Camille is adamant she hadn’t. But she does have something odd to report. The day before, she insists, a taxi had let off a woman—no, not blond, hair very dark. Camille remembered this woman not just because she seemed so agitated but because she had these crazy fake fingernails encrusted with crystals, which Camille considers a stupid American affectation. Camille didn’t see the dark-haired woman enter Lou’s hotel, but she had headed off in that direction.

Lucien presses her: Is she sure the dark-haired woman was American? Yes, she was. How does she know? Did she speak to her? No. But Camille has been selling on this street since she was fifteen; she knows an American when she sees one. And the taxi? Could she give him the color? The model? A Volvo, she thinks, an older model, not new. Blue. With one red door.

The next day, Camille saw the same taxi return. She remembered it because of the one red door. Then Camille beckons him closer and whispers, “The men in the taxi tried to take her, but the American woman went off with Crazy B.” Camille shakes her head.

This revelation only confuses Lucien more. He knows Crazy B (legal name Benjamin Rossier) as a low-level street dealer. Why would the American go with him? Camille shrugs, indifferent to the strange ways of American tourists. Who knows why they do half the things they do?

Lucien scans the street as he walks back to Lou’s hotel. No sign of Crazy B, and the other dealers he might have expected to be working this stretch have also vanished. No surprise really, given the police presence on the street since Lou’s body was found. Lucien nods at the uniformed officer who is standing watch at the hotel and heads in, ducking under the crime scene tape, passing under the flickering neon turtle. He nods at the representative from a local bird sanctuary moving Royal and Ruby into a cage for transfer and makes his way to room 6. Lou’s body is gone—off to the morgue—but the forensics team is still there, dusting for prints, combing the room for any scrap that could be evidence.

Lucien stands in the doorway, watching them work. A breeze lifts the shabby green curtains away from the window; sunlight floods the room and an iridescent blue lizard skitters across the floor and under the bed. Following the lizard’s trajectory, Lucien catches sight of something. He steps into the room, kneels, and peers closely at the shiny object glinting on the floor just under the bed. It is a crystal-studded fake nail.