Marty Ambrose - Mango Bay 01 - Peril in Paradise (11 page)

As I climbed out of Rusty, that uneasy feeling
returned. Something was off-kilter.

I glanced around my RV site. Nothing looked amiss.
But as I moved toward my Airstream, the feeling grew
into a wave of apprehension that swept through me.
Stark and vivid. My palms began to sweat, my heart
beat a little faster. What was wrong?

Then I saw it.

I gasped and covered my mouth so I wouldn’t
scream.

A large, white egret was lying dead across my picnic
table.

After a few moments of complete immobilization, I
stumbled into my Airstream, grabbed Kong, and called
Wanda Sue. I don’t know what I said, but she arrived
within minutes.

“Mallie, what’s going on? Are you okay?” She banged
on the Airstream screen door.

Cautiously, I emerged and pointed at the picnic table.

“Oh, my goodness” She grimaced.

“Is it … uh … dead?” I swallowed hard. These
words echoed with distressing familiarity. At least this
time, it was only a bird.

“I think so” She prodded the limp, still form.

“But how? … I mean, could it have had a heart attack or stroke or something? Do birds have those kinds
of things happen to them?” I knew the answer but, for
some reason, unless Wanda Sue actually said it, I could
pretend that it wasn’t true.

“Nah. Looks like it was shot.”

There went that illusion. “A practical joke?”

“Not likely.” Her face looked grim-or at least as
somber as Wanda Sue’s sunny features could appear.
The bright pink tube top and flowered Capri pants
didn’t help much either.

“That means … someone must’ve killed it and put it on my picnic table,” I said the words slowly, hesitantly.
“But why?”

Wanda Sue transferred her gaze to me. “Can’t say,
honey.”

A cold knot formed in my stomach. “What should
we do with it?” I mumbled.

“I’ll call Pop Pop Welch at maintenance. He’ll know
what to do.” She disappeared inside the Airstream. While
she was in there, I clutched Kong to my chest and
avoided looking at the dead egret.

Wanda Sue came out again. “Pop Pop said he’d be
here ASAP.”

Half an hour later, a golf cart slowly rolled up, Pop
Pop Welch at the wheel. Eighty if he were a day, Pop Pop
had two arthritic knees, a heart condition, and cataracts.
He shuffled toward the picnic table, mumbling to himself on the way.

“What do you think?” Wanda Sue asked.

Pop Pop lifted a wing. It flopped down. “Deader than
a doornail.” He produced a newspaper from his back
pocket and scooped up the bird. “Let’s take it to the office and we’ll call animal control to dispose of it.”

Wanda Sue nodded. Then she turned to me. “I’ll be
back in a jiffy. You hang in there.”

The two of them revved off in the golf cart, leaving
Kong and me standing there in the growing darkness. I
looked out over the Gulf and saw only a thin yellow
line where the sun had set. I shivered.

“Kong, let’s hook up the Airstream and get the heck out of here-put a thousand miles between us and this
stupid island.” He licked my face.

I need to get out of here. Run far, far away. The freedom of the road beckoned. I’d been going south for the
last five years, and now I could start moving west. A
whole part of the country stretched out there just waiting
to be discovered.

“I can’t even if I wanted to.” I sighed and buried my
face in Kong’s soft fur. “Detective Billie said I couldn’t
leave the area till the case was solved” Why was I speaking to my dog?

Get a grip. I parked him and myself on one of the
lounge chairs outside my Airstream, facing out toward
the Gulf. The breeze had settled into a soft whisper.
Waves rolled in, moving over the sand with barely a
murmur. But off to the west, clouds still blackened the
sky like a deadly mask ready to reveal itself when the
time was right.

Maybe when the mask was stripped away, the sky
would open up with a torrent of rain. Or maybe not. I
had no way of knowing.

It was safe to say that the dead bird wasn’t a jokeno one I’d met on the island thus far had a sense of humor that twisted, except maybe Anita. She had Charles
Addams’ cartoons pinned to the bulletin board in her
office, and seemed particularly fond of the one where a
man in a car was fiendishly encouraging another driver to pass him on a blind curve as an oncoming truck, in
the opposite lane, barreled toward the poor, unsuspecting driver. Funny. Real funny.

Depraved humor aside, I couldn’t quite see Anita
killing a bird for fun. For a pack of cigarettes maybe,
but she didn’t seem in short supply of them.

No, the dead bird was a warning. The murderer was
warning me to back off the case.

Okay, take stock of the situation, I told myself. I
couldn’t run, and there was no place to hide. Sure, the
old Mallie would’ve hit the road and not looked back.
But something had happened to me the last few days
and I knew I couldn’t do that. The only way to handle
this situation was head on. I had to be strong.

I closed my eyes and took a few calming breaths,
wishing I knew how to do Sandy’s TM.

Just then, Kong let out a couple of short, loud barks.
My eyes snapped open. I turned around and saw Wanda
Sue’s familiar mile-high beehive hair approaching.

“You okay?”

“I … I think so”

“Should we call Detective Billie?” She strolled toward Kong and me, and he responded by growling low
in his throat. I whispered soothing words into his ears
and he stopped.

“No” If I told him what happened, that would be the
end of my involvement in the murder case. He wouldn’t
give me so much as a one-line press release. And it’s possible he wouldn’t believe me anyway. He didn’t
trust me. Hell, he hardly knew me.

Wanda Sue hesitated. “All right. But if anything else
happens, I’m calling him.” She sat down in the lounge
chair next to me.

The outside lights of my neighbors’ million-dollar
motorhome flipped on.

I eyed the gorgeous, sleek testament to RV technology. “I don’t suppose they saw anything.”

“The Clarks? Ha”

“Is that their name?” Needless to say, I still didn’t
know what they looked like. “They’ve never come out
of their RV.”

“Honeymooners” Wanda Sue’s laughter rang out in
a light, feminine trill. One of those Southern laughs that
ran a full scale and then some. It felt sort of nice-like
balm on my spirits after the recent trauma.

“Lucky them” I pushed the image of the dead egret
out of my mind.

Silence descended on us as we watched those looming clouds off in the gulf.

“I heard that Everett went whining and complaining to
Nick Billie about you” She gave an exclamation of disgust. “That old man is meaner than a snake and uglier
than a porcupine.”

I sat up slowly. “Just how mean do you think he is?”

She imitated my movement. “Honey, I see where
you’re going. And if you ask me, he’s capable of killing man or bird. Yessiree” She dragged out the last word as
if it were the last note in an aria. “He once elbowed a
man at Whiteside’s who picked up the last tin of Mabel’s favorite cat food, and he used a BB gun to shoot
some bunnies that were eating on his hibiscus bushes.
Can you imagine that?”

“He could kill a bird-especially if he’d thought it
would scare me” My mind began to race. “He told me
that he had some kind running feud with Hillman about
the boundary line between their properties. Not to mention Mabel”

“His cat?” She exhaled loudly. “Now I love my own
precious little kitty-Riley-love him to pieces. But he
ain’t a person. Old Everett treats that creature like a feline princess. If you ask me, that’s plum unhealthy.”

Kong barked in agreement. I agreed with his agreement.

“Are you sure you don’t want to talk to Detective Billie about that dead bird?”

“I’m sure”

“If that’s what you want to do, I’ll go along with it.”
She leaned over and gave me a brief hug. “But you need
to be careful”

She was right. Whoever killed that bird, whether it
was Everett or not, didn’t like the fact that I was writing stories about Hillman’s murder. And now he’s
watching me.

Oh, goody.

We sat there a good long time, without speaking. The
sky suddenly seemed to grow even darker.

The next morning, I awoke to the sound of tapping
on the side of my Airstream. I moaned. It had been a
long, restless night and I didn’t feel like getting up.

The tapping continued. Kong opened his eyes from
where he lay on my pillow and began yapping. We both
staggered toward the door and I peeped out the window.

Outside was an older man with teak-colored skin and
a mostly bald head, sporting a gold stud in his left ear.
He wore a black T-shirt with the word “enigma”
splashed across the front and a pair of jeans. In spite of
the casual dress and the earring, he looked like an aging
professor-scruffy, yet scholarly.

“Who is it?” I asked, straightening my poodle pajama top and matching pants.

“Sam. I’m a friend of your Aunt Lily’s.”

I exhaled in relief and swung open the door. Kong
stationed himself between my feet and treated the intruder with his most menacing growl. Of course, the
sound would hardly strike terror in the heart of anyone
without a pacemaker and triple by-pass, but Kong did
his best to protect me.

“Hi, I’m Mallie.”

“Nice to meet you. Lily’s told me a lot about you”
He held up a box of donuts.

A slow smile spread across my face. “I can see that”

“She’s a lady of inestimable talents .. ” He pulled
out two styrofoam cups from a white paper bag.

I inhaled in delight. Coffee. Lovely, black coffee.
The wonderful aroma filled the air and drew me toward
it as if it were a java magnet and I was a polarized, caffeine-starved zombie.

“How about we sit out here and enjoy the sunrise?”
Sam set the box on my red-checkered-cloth-covered
picnic table.

“Lovely” I scanned the horizon to the east and noticed the sun had risen a fair distance in the sky already.
I wish I could’ve completely blamed the restless night,
but the truth is I’ve always been a late riser. Those people who are up with the birds, chipper and singing at
dawn, always struck me as slightly demented.

“How long have you known my great aunt?” I took a
deep swallow of my coffee and let it flow through my
veins. Wonderful. The sleep fog began to clear from
my mind. I seated myself on the picnic table bench.

“Nearly twenty-five years” He seated himself across
from me. “I drifted around a bit after Vietnam and, eventually, found myself on Coral Island without a job, little
money, and a drinking problem.”

“Oh” What else could I say? Sam certainly didn’t
waste any time hiding behind platitudes and nice aphorisms.

“Lily was the only person who’d give me job-if I
got off the addiction to adult beverages. She’s like that.
Kind. But tough in the right sort of way.”

“I know.” I bit into my first donut of the day. Crispy on the outside, all soft and squishy on the inside. Yum.

“And when she loves you, it’s forever,” Sam added.

I stopped chewing. What was he saying?

He laughed. “It’s not like that. Lily’s affections were
engaged elsewhere. We’re friends. But sometimes that’s
an even deeper relationship.”

I started chewing again. I knew how much Aunt Lily
loved Uncle Benjamin-he died in the Korean War, and
she never married again. I’d always thought it was incredibly romantic that she loved only one man her
whole life. So different from my own superficial, lighthearted, hit-and-run relationships.

I took another swig of coffee. “I guess she told you
I’m doing a series of stories on Jack Hillman-“

“And that you found his body” His eyes searched my
face. Light gray searchlights peering into my soul. I
lowered my eyes.

“Yeah” I peered into the dark liquid inside my coffee
cup. “It was … horrible.” Images of the body flashed
through my mind again. The blood. The unseeing eyes.
The knife.

“I can imagine.” His voice was quiet.

Reaching for another donut, I cleared my head. “I
really shouldn’t have two, but I can’t resist.”

Sam sipped his coffee and merely smiled.

“Anyway, I’m writing these stories on Hillman and
getting conflicting information.”

“Few people are one-dimensional,” Sam commented.

“True. “

“Including you.”

I gave a short, self-deprecating laugh. “I’m pretty
much a what-you-see-is-what-you-get kind of girl.”

“I doubt that.”

“I usually take things as they come and not give ‘em
a second thought.” Until I became a murder suspect.

Sam focused a direct glance on me again. “Maybe
you’ve changed”

“Maybe.” I didn’t want to think about that.

“How can I help you?”

“Aunt Lily told me you were `the man’.”

He laughed. “Because I’m so wise?”

“Not exactly.”

“Because I’ve see death in the war?”

“Not really.”

His brows rose.

“It’s because you’re in everybody’s house fixing
things-“

“Snooping around?”

I grinned.

He grinned back. “I never snoop. But I can’t deny
that people tell me things that they wouldn’t reveal to
their closest friends. It makes sense. I’m in their house,
seeing the private details of their lives. Handymen are
like bartenders-we’re a receptive audience often to
lonely people, and we need their … patronage”

“Did you ever do any work for Hillman?”

“Only a plumbing job-and he was out of town”

“Darn” I sighed. “You know, Hillman was a real jerk the day I met him, but I’ve come to see that he wasn’t
like that all the time. He did some good things in his
life too. And nobody seems to know or even care-“

“And you think delving into the `real’ Hillman will
lead you to the murderer.”

“Well … yes.”

“For your newspaper?”

I nodded, crossing my fingers under the table at
telling the partial lie. Or at least not giving him the
whole truth that I was also a suspect.