Saving Grace (Katie & Annalise Book 1) (6 page)

We drove away from Baptiste’s Bluff and back into the rainforest half an hour later. My equilibrium was on the mend, enough that the beauty of the flowers swept me in again. They seemed now like tributes to my parents. Memorial arrangements. The rainforest didn’t just do my eyes good, it made me feel closer to Mom and Dad. I hated driving away.

“You know, my friend give a guided tour of the rainforest. He shuttle his group right from the Peacock Flower. You should go with him tomorrow. I’ma call and tell him you’re coming.”

“Hiking? I’m not a hiker. I’m a great driver, though. Is there a driving tour?”

“Nope. He a botanist, and you just hush now and go with him. It change your life.”

This whole trip already felt life-changing, and I’d only arrived twenty-four hours ago.

I succumbed to a fit of honesty. “That’s why I’m here, you know. To change my life. Or I’m supposed to be, anyway, as much as I can in a week. My brother pretty much insisted. He thinks I drink too much. I’m trying to look past symptoms to the source. It’s not the alcohol. It’s my parents. My bad choices. Pining after the wrong guy. Yadda yadda.” I trailed off, embarrassed about the words I couldn’t stuff back into the place from whence they came.

My confession didn’t faze Ava. “Most everybody running from something when they come here. Most of the time they got to figure out whether they running from the right thing, or the wrong thing follow them here.”

Her statement was deep. I was through with deep for the day, so I stayed quiet.

Ava didn’t. “Didn’t you say your father an alcoholic? I think I read that it a genetic trait,” she said.

“Yeah. Maybe.” Except I wasn’t an alcoholic.

“Lotta people that move here become alcoholics,” she said. “It a tough environment to quit drinking in.”

“I’ve kinda noticed that.” At least she hadn’t focused on my pining away for the wrong guy, but I was ready to be done with the topic of Katie’s problems altogether. We were almost back to town. “Where am I taking you?” I asked.

“Take me to my place so I can change. I have a date later, but I looking for company until then.”

“You’re not singing tonight?” I asked.

“Not officially.”

Whatever that meant.

We pulled up to Ava’s house and she beckoned me inside. It was small, but clean. Cute, with mostly wicker furniture and fluffy white cushions. I puttered around looking at her photographs until she came out of her bedroom in a shiny turquoise baby-doll-type dress with a keyhole neckline. She wore high-heeled white thongs that echoed the keyhole in the leatherwork across the top of her foot.

“Is this who I think it is?” I asked, pointing at a picture of a younger Ava with a gorgeous and recognizable actor.

“Yeah, I went to school with him at NYU. Don’t tell anyone I said so, but he gay. All the really good-looking ones gay.” She put a tube of lip gloss into her white handbag. “Ready?”

“Depends on what I need to be ready for, but, in general, I am ready to depart.”

“You sound like a lawyer.”

“Actually, I
am
a lawyer.”

“Oh, that explain a lot,” she said in a tone of voice that implied I had a lot to explain for.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah. But what am I supposed to be ready for?”

“To sing.”

I busted out laughing. “That’s random. And no, I’m not ready for that.”

“Fine. Then let we go to the casino. They have a free food bar and free drinks.”

Nothing to argue with there, so I didn’t.

After a stop at my hotel that took far longer than it should have when I got caught up in answering work emails, we arrived at the Porcus Marinus Casino. The casino was on the south shore, adjacent to a touristy resort of the same name and across the street from a flat white sand beach. The full moon was reflected on the surface of the undulating water. On our side of the road was a giant bunker-like building and the biggest parking lot on the entire island. We walked up the steps to the bunker and passed under a huge banner over the door that announced, “Karaoke Night.”

“Karaoke night?” I asked Ava, my eyes narrowed.

“It fate,” she said.

We stepped inside, and I immediately coughed. A cigarette haze hovered up against the high ceilings of the casino. For the first time since I’d arrived on St. Marcos, I got a sense of permanent midnight. No windows. Plenty of noise, though, the white noise of the jangling bells of slot machines and the roars erupting as if on regular cues from the craps tables.

And another noise. In the background, I could just make out the voice of a DJ giving the crowd a hard sell on karaoke. “Who’ll be next? What about you, pretty lady? Or you, sir, over there in the shirt you stole off Jimmy Buffett?”

Ava gave me a little push between the shoulder blades in the direction of the stage. The place was packed, and it wasn’t even nine o’clock yet. We weaved through bleary West Indians and a few stumbling tourists. Most of them looked like they’d have done better spending their money on a decent meal or some fresh clothes.

An eerie and unwelcome recognition hit me. The Porcus Marinus was no different from the brief glimpse I’d gotten of the inside of the Eldorado casino in Shreveport. I shook it off. It was different. A world away, different. Nothing to be ashamed of, different. I pushed my chin higher in the air.

When we reached the stage, Ava didn’t break stride. She swept past me to the DJ. “Miss Ava,” he said into his mike. A few people in the crowd clapped and hooted. “What’ll it be tonight, sexy lady?”

“Hit me with some No Doubt, some Fugees, and,” she turned to me, “what else?”

“I’m from Texas. Give me Dixie Chicks and Miranda Lambert.”

The DJ said, “Miranda what?”

“Never mind. Dixie Chicks.”

“They those three blonde girls?” he asked.

I was sure they’d love that description, but they’d fared better than Miranda, anyway. “Yes.”

“Yah, I got them.”

Ava threw her pocketbook into the DJ booth like it was a frisbee. I walked over and set mine on his counter. “Is this OK?” I asked him.

He had already loaded No Doubt’s “Underneath It All” track and was grooving his head in time to the music coming through the speakers and the headphone he wore over the ear closest to me. He didn’t look my way. His eyes were glued to Ava.

“What the hell,” I said, and made my way to a table in front of the stage to watch her.

“Hunh UH,” she said into the microphone. “You get that bana to the stage, girl.” Her accent had thickened.

Now the small crowd cheered louder.

“Great,” I said to myself. “I’m the continental foil. The buffoon tourist.”

“I not getting any younger up here,” Ava said, one hand on cocked hip. Hyeah.

I sighed and walked to the stage in the white sundress I’d been wearing since I first got dressed that morning, climbed the three steps of doom, and joined her in front of the black backdrop. I was all right angles and sharp corners next to her vavavoom and curves. If you’re going to go out, go out in style, I thought, and I put my chin back up.

Now the crowd joined Ava as she whooped and clapped for me. She handed me the microphone and pointed at the monitor. “Sing,” she commanded.

So I sang. Then she sang, then we sang together, and it was astonishing. My twangy voice, able to reach the highest notes but too thin alone, interlaced and thickened when combined with her deeper, more soulful voice. I harmonized with her, backed her, then she returned the favor. I relaxed and imagined that my edges had rounded, at least a bit. This was fun.

We left the stage twenty minutes later to a standing ovation, which counted even though it was only ten drunk men and one little blue-haired lady who’d gotten lost on her way back to the slot machines from the bathroom.

“Now who brave enough to follow that?” the DJ asked. The crowd yelled back at him, “Not me, no way, no sir.” He put a playlist on, shot us two thumbs up, and went on a break.

I collapsed into my chair. “Champagne,” I told the waitress who had followed us to our table.

“Me, too,” Ava said.

She scribbled our order and strolled off, giving me the best demonstration of slowing down to lime a little that I’d seen yet.

“We rock, Katie Connell,” Ava said. “And damn, you’re even taller on stage.”

I hadn’t sung except in the car and shower in years. I felt electrified. Alive in a way practicing law didn’t make me, that was for sure. “We kick ass,” I said, then giggled. Kick ass. Like I ever said that.

“Yah mon,” Ava said.

Our waitress sauntered back toward us, bearing two drinks on a tray. As she passed a small round-topped table on the other side of the karaoke area, a woman reached out and grabbed her free arm. Her voice cut through the crowd’s noise.

“Where is my drink? I ordered it five minutes ago,”

“I bring it shortly,” the waitress said, and removed her arm from the woman’s grasp.

“I want my drink immediately. This is ridiculous. Where’s your supervisor?” the woman demanded, her accent identifying her as a resident of New York or thereabouts.

The waitress nodded, smiled, and said, “Oh, yes, ma’am, it will be right out.”

She resumed walking toward us, even slower this time. When she reached us, Ava said to her, “Wah, someone think she special.”

“For true,” the waitress agreed. “She ’bout to get real t’irsty.”

She placed our drinks on the table and left. “What I tell you?” Ava said to me.

“I’m limin’, I’m limin’,” I said.

We drank our champagne from plastic cups with leaping blue dolphins on the side. I took a sip and the bubbles tickled my nose. I giggled again. I never drank this stuff. I never giggled. “Salud,” I said, raising my glass. Ava and I bounced our cups off each other’s, splashing champagne on our arms. More giggles.

“Is this chair taken?” a deep voice asked. One of our fans, maybe? His broad shoulders blocked out the sun, yowza. Except there was no sun in the casino. It blocked out the light from the cheesy light fixtures. The backlighting around the voice’s head hid his face.

Ava recognized the voice, though. “Jacoby, sit down, meh son.” She patted the padded Naugahyde seat next to her. Small island.

Darren Jacoby, still in his police uniform, sat down facing Ava, and the two locals traded cheek kisses. He had looked pretty good for a moment, in the dark.

“Hi, Ms. Connell,” he said over his shoulder.

He really didn’t seem to want to call me Katie. Oh, well. “Hello, Officer Jacoby.”

“I can’t stay long,” he said to Ava. “I’m on duty. My shift end at ten. Just making the rounds when I see you. What you doing?”

“We went to the private investigator you recommended,” I said to his profile.

He looked back at me, expressionless. “Well, I hope that turn out well for you. When you go back to the states?”

He was so not subtle. “Five days,” I said.

“Be careful, then.” He turned all his attention back to Ava. “Do you want to hang out later? I got
Love and Basketball
on DVD.”

Oh, jeez, even less subtle. He might as well rent a billboard.

“Oh, Jacoby, I can’t. I have a date.”

His jaw bulged and anger flashed in his eyes so fast I almost didn’t catch it. “Always somebody, ain’t it, Ava?” The jaw relaxed. The big shoulders shrank. “Well, another time.”

“Of course,” she said.

“I’ll just be going, then.”

He and Ava cheek-kissed again, he turned and bowed his head at me, and he ambled away, a double for a grizzly bear from the back. He didn’t like me much, but I still hurt for him.

Ava made a sad face. “He that way forever. He don’t give up easy.” She pulled out her phone and said, “I better check on my date.” A few clicks later, she said, “Guy booked into a room here, up on the hill. A suite. Ooo la la.”

“Will I get to meet him?” I asked.

“No. He very private about us.” She pointed to the third finger of her left hand and mouthed the word “married.” “He not even contact me himself. It like I having a thing with his assistant, Eduardo.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, because I didn’t know what else to say. It sounded pretty smarmy and awful to me.

“Oh, it’s no problem,” Ava said, and shooed the imaginary problem away with her hand. “He’s a senator. People know him. It’s a small island.”

So I’d noticed.

I thought of how I felt when Nick ignored me in public. And I wasn’t even “having a thing” with him. Jacoby wasn’t with Ava, either, but that didn’t seem to keep him from having big emotions about her date. “But doesn’t it hurt your feelings?”

Ava pursed her lips. “I don’t love him, Katie. He nice, and he trying to get a pilot here for a TV show, starring yours truly. We get what we want from each other. I like rich better than powerful, anyway, and he not rich.” She took another sip of champagne.

I tucked my hair behind my ear. Pilot for a TV show? Her senator Guy had to be my drinking buddy from my flight in. I decided not to mention it, since he’d hit on me relentlessly. Hey, if their arrangement didn’t bother Ava, I wasn’t going to let it bother me. Maybe I’d be happier if I was as dispassionate as she was. Maybe. But probably not.

“So, who’s the wrong guy, anyway?” she said.

“What?” I asked, thinking for a moment we were still talking about Guy with a capital G.

“The one you not supposed to pine for.”

Ah, him. I signaled the waitress for more champagne. Then, carefully, I picked my way through the story, trying not to set off any landmines that would blow up my fragile Nick-peace.

Ava said, “You better off without him. I’ma take care of you, and find you a man to keep your mind occupied this week.”

“No men, Ava.”

“Huh. So you gonna pine? Looks like you not running from him too hard.”

“No pining. I’m running. Really.”

Ava didn’t look convinced. “If you say so, Katie. If you say so.”

The disturbing alarm ringtone on my iPhone blared in my ear at 6:30 a.m.

“Damn it, Ava,” I said.

I shut it off and got dressed. Ava had insisted I do this rainforest hike, and I’d eventually caved. She called her friend Rashidi to sign me up, and he made room for me. Apparently he had quite a waiting list, but would do anything for Ava. How just like everybody else of him.

When I got to the rally point in front of the resort, it took only one glance at Rashidi to understand why he stayed overbooked. He was exotic, with a lean, dark physique. He wore neatly-tied dreadlocks that hung all the way to his waist. Maybe Ava ought to give him a second look. He made Guy seem a trifle effeminate.

Rashidi walked through the tittering mass of mostly female hikers, checking us for appropriate clothing, footwear, sunscreen, bug spray, hats, and hydration. He sent a few women back to their rooms and the hotel gift shop for supplies, and one or two he delicately queried about their constitutions and health.

“The rainforest on St. Marcos one of the most beautiful places in the world, but it rugged, ladies, and it harsh.” His Calypso accent was thick, much thicker than Ava’s, with his “th” sounding like “t” and all the g’s and d’s dropped from the end of his words, but he was understandable. “There may be some of you would enjoy it more with a drivin’ tour.” Me! Would it be wrong to raise my hand? I thought.

“These hills steep. The sun rough. There be centipedes as long as me foot.” Someone laughed. “I not jokin’ you, ladies and gentlemen. You will see beautiful trees, blossoms and vines, but they can reach out with their thorns and stickers and tear your soft skin. They grow thick together, so at times I be using this,” he patted the machete strung across his hip, “to clear a path for us to get through. You ain’t gonna make me sad if you decide this hike not for you. I can only carry one of you out if you get hurt or fall to our tropical heat, so leave now if you gonna be leavin’.”

One portly woman with tightly curled gray hair, who was already sweating profusely and sporting beet-red cheeks, opted out. The rest of us fell in line whispering and shuffle-footing as Rashidi continued his commentary. When he finished, we filed onto the shuttle bus for the ride to the rainforest. As he walked up the center aisle of the shuttle, he stopped at me.

“You Ava’s red-haired Katie?” he asked.

“Guilty,” I said.

He sucked his teeth, a sound I’d heard a few times in the last two days. “Chuptzing,” Ava had called it, when I asked her last night. A derisive noise. Hopefully intended for Ava, not me.

I smiled hopefully, and he grinned and said, “That girl a problem. Welcome, Katie.”

We drove to the west end of the island along oceanside roads and then cut up into the hills. The driver parked the shuttle in front of a restored two-story plantation home that was now a museum. Its whitewashed boards stood in stark contrast to the green of the forest surrounding it. A vegetable garden beside the house gave way to a stand of banana trees, the bunches of fruit bowing them over. Rashidi said they were called babyfingers because the bananas were short and stubby.

The group hike started from the parking lot and we crossed the road to pick up the trail into the forest. The scenery was gorgeous. Even the drive yesterday hadn’t done justice to the beauty I experienced once we started walking. On foot, I could hear the macaws calling to each other. I smelled the cloying perfume of the wild orchids. I saw the bright green iguanas that my eyes hadn’t picked out from my vantage point in the driver’s seat.

We hiked up a steep, winding path, and I wished I owned a pair of hiking boots. The trees were tall, their leaves clustered in a canopy over our heads. The bush on the ground was sparse on the cleared path, but thick up to its edge. As best as I could understand it, “bush” referred to whatever grew near the ground: bushes, ferns with giant leaves, weeds, flowers, small trees, and grasses. Rashidi described it all, and I tried to soak it in. Guinea grass and bright red hibiscus. Ginger Thomas flowers and grape-sized gnip fruits. Elephant ears and royal palms. I concentrated on the challenge of breathing in through my nose and out through my mouth, and keeping my mind clear of he-who-I-was-not-to-pine-for. I swiped a long brown seedpod off the lower limb of a vibrant orange flamboyant. The pod looked like a sword, and I swished it in the air a few times, then felt kind of silly.

The incline winded me, and I scowled at the memories and effects of my recent debauched lifestyle. What the hell was I doing to myself? I had to stop this. The burning in my lungs began to feel good; it burned out the bush in me. Maybe it could clear a path for me to find my way.

We had hiked for nearly two hours when Rashidi gave us a hydration break and announced that we were nearing the turnaround point, which would be a special treat: a modern ruin. As we leaned on smooth kapok trees and sucked on our Lululemon water bottles, Rashidi explained that a bad man, a thief, had built a beautiful mansion in paradise ten years before, named her Annalise, and then left her forsaken and half-complete. No one had ever finished her and the rainforest had moved fast to claim her. Wild horses roamed her halls, colonies of bats filled her eaves, and who knows what lived below her in the depths of her cisterns. We would eat our lunch there, then turn back for the hike down.

When the forest parted to reveal Annalise, we all drew in a breath. She was amazing: tall, austere, and a bit frightening. Our group tensed with anticipation. It was like the first day of the annual Parade of Homes, where people stood in lines for the chance to tour the crème de la crème of Dallas real estate, except way better. We were visiting a mysterious mansion with a romantic history in a tropical rainforest. Ooh là là.

Graceful flamboyant trees, fragrant white-flowered frangipanis, and grand pillars marked the entrance to her gateless drive. On each side of the overgrown road, Rashidi pointed out papaya stalks, soursop, and mahogany trees. The fragrance was pungent, the air drunk with fermenting mangos and ripening guava, all subtly undercut by the aroma of bay leaves. It was a surreal orchard, its orphaned fruit unpicked, the air heavy and still, bees and insects the only thing stirring besides our band of turistas. Overhead, the branches met in the middle of the road and were covered in the trailing pink flowers I’d admired the day before, which Rashidi called pink trumpet vines. The sun shone through the canopy in narrow beams and lit our dim path.

A young woman in historic slave garb was standing on the front steps, peering at us from under the hand that shaded her eyes, her gingham skirt whipping in the breeze. She looked familiar. As we came closer, she turned and walked back inside. I turned to ask Rashidi if we were going to tour the inside of the house, but he was talking to a skeletally thin New Yorker who wanted details on the mileage and elevation gain of our hike for her Garmin.

We climbed up Annalise’s ten uneven front steps and entered through the opening that should have had imposing double doors. We came first into a great room with thirty-five-foot ceilings, and my skin prickled, each hair standing to salute Annalise. We gazed up in wonder at her intricate tongue-in-groove cypress ceiling and mahogany beams, her stone fireplace that was so improbable here in the tropics.

We explored her three stories, room after room unfolding as we discussed what each was to have been. Balcony floors with no railings jutted from two sides of the house. A giant concrete pool behind the house hovered partway out of the ground, like a crash-landed spaceship. How could someone put in so much work, build something so magnificent, create such hope, and leave her to rot?

Gradually, ughs replaced the oohs as we discovered that we had to step over horse manure and bat guano in every room, and an old mattress with God knows what ground into it in the basement. Dead worms by the thousands crunched under our feet. Rashidi called them gungalos. One woman put her hand on a wall and ended up with dung between her fingers and gunked into her ostentatious diamond ring, which, for some inexplicable reason, she’d worn on a rainforest hike. Annalise was not for the faint of heart, and I longed for a broom. What she could have been was so clear; what she might still be was staggering. I could see it. I could feel it.

And
zing
—something hit me hard, just coursed through my head and lungs. A cold, hard, lonely place filled with crap. It was like looking in the mirror. No, it was more than that. It was like someone had whispered it in my ear. It felt personal to me that she was abandoned. Even her name resonated inside me: Annalise. Unbelievably, I had a connection on my iPhone, and I Googled the origin of the name—Hebrew for grace, favor. For some reason, reading those words hurt me. Annalise and I could both use some grace. An overpowering urge to make things right by myself and by this house rose up in me. I didn’t see the irrationality of it; I saw the possibility of mutual redemption. Swept along by a powerful urge, I saved the realtor’s name and number from the faded sign by the door into my contacts. It didn’t hurt to type it in, I told myself.

Rashidi’s voice broke through my reverie. “Ms. Katie, are you comin’ with us? It gets dark up here at night, you know.”

I laughed and started after the group that had left without me noticing, excitement bubbling up in me from the inside and spilling over in that forgotten sound of true joy. I had energy now and a spring in my step. The group was chattering as we hiked out, but I didn’t hear a word. My washing-machine mind was churning again, but instead of Nick, this time it was Annalise spinning through it. It was as if she was calling out to me that we were the same, that we could save each other, and my mind was answering with a cautious maybe, a tentative “we’ll see.” I stopped to look back each time she came into view, farther and farther in the distance.

She was defiantly beautiful and strong, soaring over a sea of green treetops, and behind her, the ocean, which looked like the sky. A view of the world turned upside down. I shivered.

Rashidi dropped back a half-dozen paces from the group and spoke softly to me. “So, you like the house? I see you talkin’ to her spirit.”

Did this man take me for a crazy person? Or had my lips moved? If I was talking to her, and I was not sure that I had been, I wasn’t about to confirm my insanity to a stranger. “Talking to her spirit? What, you mean the spirit of the pooping horse?” I quipped.

“You make like I crazy, but what that make you? You the one hear the house talkin’ to you,” he said matter-of-factly. “What she say?”

Instead of answering him, I asked, “Why do you say she’s got a spirit? What do you mean, like a ghost?”

Rashidi’s speech became more colloquial, his accent thickened, and his eyes sparkled. “Nah, she ain’t got no ghost, she the spirit. She a beautiful woman, abandoned by a man. How does most beautiful women dem act when they scorned? She lonely, and she full of spite.” He grinned. “She lookin’ for a new lover. But most folk too scared of her to take her on. When she don’t like someone, she a mean one. She been known to drop a bad man when he come for no good, hit him with a rock from nowhere, or send centipedes to bite him. When she do like somebody, well, some people say she talk to them. Like she talk to you, Katie.”

This made sense to me in a way I could not explain. It wasn’t as if I was ever going to have to see Rashidi again, so what the heck, I would tell him what I had heard.

“She said we are soul mates.” I turned and smiled straight on at him. “In so many words.”

He didn’t bat an eye. “Yah, I thought so. Annalise talk to me sometimes, but today I feel her vibrations, and she talkin’ to you. Powerful thing. You gonna go back and talk to her again?”

“Ummmm, maybe,” I said.

“Let me know if you need a hand. Good to have someone with you what knows the way aroun’.”

“I might take you up on that.”

He caught up with the group, exhorting them to “Breathe in the scent of the flowers, ladies, glory in the beauty of the forest, because we almost back to civilization, and you may never come this way again.”

But I knew I would.