Saving Grace (Katie & Annalise Book 1) (8 page)

Maybe I couldn’t buy this property to please a spirit, but I could buy it to please Katie Connell. Katie Connell couldn’t have Nick, her parents, or Bloody Marys. So maybe she could have this house. This beautiful house in this beautiful place that Katie really, really wanted.

Because I did. I really, really wanted it.

“I saw you talking to yourself. They say that’s the way to be sure someone smart will always answer,” Doug said, right behind me.

“Oh, you caught me,” I said. I dropped the two mangoes I was holding and picked up my pencil and envelope. “I’ve made a list, and I have some ideas to talk to you about.”

I peppered Doug with more questions about finish-out, the island housing market, and the accessibility of groceries and drugstores from Annalise’s remote location. After he answered my volley of questions, he remarked, “Without construction experience, or, let’s face it, a man around the place, this could be too much. Plus, you’re isolated up here. I don’t mean to scare you, but this part of the island sees some rough types, players in the island drug trade. I could show you other places, beautiful finished houses in safer neighborhoods. If you haven’t been out to the condos on the East End yet, I think you’ll be surprised at how much you’d like them.”

This man was not listening to me. I hate it when that happens.

“Thank you, Doug, I sure do appreciate that,” I said, my Texas accent and phrasing growing more pronounced as my irritation grew. “But I’ve made up my mind. How do I go about making an offer on Annalise?”

He looked stunned. I locked my eyes on his and pulled the brim of my hat further over my face. He raised his eyebrows—skepticism or submission?—and motioned me back to the Rover.

“Let’s go back to my office and put an offer together.”

Ah, he was getting smarter.

On the way back to town, Doug turned into a historian.

“You know why town is called Taino?” He didn’t wait for my answer. “It’s named after the original inhabitants of St. Marcos. Most people just call it Town and spell it with a capital T, though. They put a lot of stock in local, in bahn yah.”

The information was interesting, but I wondered what his point was. If he had a point. I threw in some “uh huhs” again.

“You’ll see a lot of locals with Taino traits: dark skin, wiry hair, short, and thick through the middle, but stocky, not fat. Most of the locals are of African descent, though. There’s a large community of Dominicans, too, and a fair number of Middle Easterners. Caucasian is a minority.”

I thought about it. Taino was its own version of the island soup, kallaloo, that I’d had instead of salad at lunch. Everything thrown in the pot and cooked up together. I liked the soup. I liked the island.

“I’d noticed,” I said.

In the rainforest, “t’ings” were different from Taino, though. Not only was it ten degrees cooler than down in Town, but it was also no kallaloo. The rainforest of St. Marcos was a black West Indian world. A fact about which Doug was becoming more and more direct.

“The only community on St. Marcos where outsiders are truly accepted, especially white outsiders, is the East End. It’s the way things are here. I need you to understand this before I write an offer for you. My conscience and all,” he said, putting his hand on the center of his chest.

I damned him with the ultimate in Texas condescension. “Bless your heart, Doug. I appreciate your concern. And I’ll be fine.”

“All right, then. I’m done trying to talk you out of it.” He pursed his lips. “One last thing. Do you want to see the nearest grocery store?”

Now that sounded like a smart thing to do. “Absolutely.”

Doug took me to a medium-sized grocery called Courtyard. Sure enough, we were the only two people in the place with light pigment. It was astounding to me—humbling, really—that this was the first time in my life I had knowingly experienced minority status. I was a gecko who couldn’t camouflage to match the background.

My minority status wasn’t the only thing to get used to in the Courtyard grocery store. While the store was large, it wasn’t up to stateside standards of cleanliness, nor was it well stocked. The produce section displayed mostly exotic fruits and vegetables that I didn’t know how to cook, and the items that were familiar to me were scarce, limp, and close to rotting. I picked up an item marked “cassava” and another with a label that said “breadfruit.” Completely foreign.

The cassava fell from my hand. I set the breadfruit down. As I knelt to try to pick the cassava up, I bumped into a small woman I hadn’t seen. Actually, I bumped into her walker. She squawked.

“Oh, ma’am, I’m so sorry,” I cried. I stood up quickly and put my hand on her back. “I am such a klutz. I dropped a . . . vegetable . . . and I didn’t see you, and, well, I’m sorry.”

“She’s fine,” a voice behind me said, in a “no thanks to you” sort of way.

A big hand extended the errant cassava in front of me, and when I turned to face him, it was Jacoby.

I took it from him. “Thank you, Officer Jacoby. I am so sorry.”

“Mind yourself around the elders. My grandmother is fragile.”

So warm, so friendly. Not. “Yes, of course.” I remembered my manners. “A pleasant good afternoon to you, ma’am, and to you, Jacoby.”

The ancient wisp of a woman said, “Good afternoon, dear.”

Jacoby said nothing.

I walked away, smarting. It didn’t appear I was growing on Jacoby.

“Did you run into friends?” Doug asked, rejoining me with two bottles of ginger beer.

“Not hardly.” I motioned toward the exit. “I’m ready whenever you are.”

I tried to resist looking back at Jacoby as we walked out, but I couldn’t stop myself from stealing a quick glance. I shouldn’t have. Out of uniform and in baggy black jeans, he was even more imposing. He glared at me, the very picture of malevolence. Note to self: Ask Ava what Jacoby has against me.

When we got back into the Rover, Doug handed me a bottle of the ginger beer. “A local soft drink,” he said. “One of the local favorites. It’s like root beer with a ginger bite.”

I took it from him and sipped it. The spice was almost peppery. “Thank you,” I said.

Doug asked, “So, if you were to buy this place, would you get a mortgage or what?”

I cleared my throat. “No. Just cash.”

“Oh, wow, well, that changes things. The owner—a bank that foreclosed on the property—highly prefers cash. This will really help you.”

I didn’t say anything. The bad juju from my Jacoby encounter had messed with my head. You should go back to the resort and sleep on this overnight, I told myself.

Doug said, “Last time I’m going to ask. Wouldn’t you prefer to sleep on this, think it over, and get back to me tomorrow? Annalise will still be there. I’d hate to see you get in over your head.”

What was he thinking? Sleeping on it was a terrible idea.

“I’m a decisive person, Doug. I’m making an offer.”

So I did, and I couldn’t even blame it on rum punch. I didn’t take time for reasoned deliberation. I acted exactly opposite from the way I would counsel my clients. I didn’t seek advice from my new island friends or my loved ones back home. I didn’t do any research or consult any experts. I ignored the implications on my life in Texas. Something about my voodoo-like connection to Annalise offered salvation. Maybe it was crazy, but I believed.

It was an impulsive decision, but hell, there was no way they would accept my lowball offer anyway.

I decided the offer on Annalise should be my little secret. It helped me keep it out of my mind, since at least I wasn’t talking about it to anyone. What I didn’t hide was that I was going to try to remain alcohol-free for the rest of the trip. It seemed right, as if the time had come. Just like the time had been right to make the offer on Annalise.

“It won’t hurt me to dry out for a few days with you,” Ava said. “But the universe hate a vacuum.” She switched to Continental and spoke like she had a clothespin on her nose. “We must replace deprivation with indulgence.”

“Chocolate?” I suggested.

Back to Local. “If I going to suffer, I going to lose weight. I got something better in mind.”

And so we sampled the resort’s spa treatments and “body and mind experiences.” I embraced Ava’s indulgence philosophy and tried every decadent pampering the spa had to offer.

I loved the spa from the moment we stepped through the door. Soft steelpan music seeped out of hidden speakers and a delicious coconut scent tickled my nose. We changed in a locker room reminiscent of my suite’s bathroom, then entered a waiting area where we sipped cucumber water in front of a burbling stone fountain.

I totally got into the treatments, the indulgences on the “body” side of their brochure. If I were naturally the self-indulgent type, I would have someone wash my hair in a garden courtyard while I got a foot massage every day, but my parents had raised me to be too frugal for that. I was worried that my credit card bill would send me into a grand mal seizure, as it was. But as for the “mind,” let’s just say I wouldn’t be joining a Bikram yoga studio anytime soon. All the clearing of the mind stuff just gave me more time to stress out. I said as much to Ava after we walked out of my one and only meditation session.

“It help if you don’t bring your phone in with you,” she said. “He not going to call.”

“What? Who?” I asked.

She rolled her eyes.

Ava was right. About not bringing the phone, and that Nick wasn’t going to call. But Doug might. I snuck another peek at my phone. He had promised to contact me as soon as he heard something. I had promised myself I would patiently wait for him to contact me. I was the epitome of lime. Yeah, right. But I was trying.

After a very full day, we had run out of spa services to sample, so we hit one of the resort’s beaches. And it was there that I finally discovered my personal key to turning off the bedeviling voice in my head: beach walking. My brain rested when my feet were moving, and when I went beyond cell range. The sound of the waves soothed me. The water on my toes was a mother’s kiss, the warm sun on my skin her hug. When we had hiked the length of the two beaches adjacent to the spa, we ventured outward. I swear, we tramped every beach on the island over the next two days. White sand. Brown sand. Lava rock. Water-smoothed pebbles. Miniature mountains of gray boulders. My sedentary and sunless lifestyle was turned on its head. I’d never had a problem with my weight, but lately I’d noticed that all of me was sagging more than it used to. Now my butt was perking up as my head cleared. Bonus.

I spent most of my time with Ava, but not all of it. On one of the days, I sweated through a nerve-wracking lunch alone on the boardwalk downtown, surrounded by enthusiastic drinkers of fruity rum concoctions. I couldn’t even enjoy myself. I was practically chanting “Thou shall not drink” to keep a mango banana daiquiri at bay. The leathery couple at the next table pretended not to be scared of me. It definitely was easier when Ava was there to abstain alongside me. And to remind me to put my phone down. Why hadn’t I heard from Doug?

By my last day on St. Marcos, the aching desire for just one rum punch—and the shakes that I tried to pretend weren’t happening—was tapering off. Thank God. A shakeless me could talk to my creepy investigator, Walker. I decided to barge in unannounced after breakfast, even though that was practically the middle of the night on St. Marcos. He’d told me that I couldn’t expect results yet, but I needed to look him in the eye one more time before I left so he’d know I was serious about the work I’d hired him to do.

When I got to his office door, I stopped for a moment, gripped by a momentary uncertainty. I surveyed his street front. No shingle hung announcing his place of business. Just the number, 32. Through the window, I saw the back of his head. I heard his voice through the glass pane in the door. He was talking to someone, but I couldn’t tell if he was on the phone or if there was someone in there with him in the back of his office, not visible to me on the street. I leaned close to the glass so I could hear better.

“I said it’s not a problem that I can’t handle. I think you just need to let me worry about my part of the business, and you worry about yours. Have I let you down before?” he was saying, and not quietly.

I froze, ears straining. I was totally wigged out. I put my hand on the doorknob.

“That’s what I thought. Now, if you can just keep your pants zipped, maybe we won’t have any more problems like her.” He swung around in his chair and looked out through the door at me. Now I could see his headset. Telephone.

Damn. He’d seen me eavesdropping. I held steady, then turned the knob and walked in.

“Gotta go,” he said. He reached down and pressed a button on his phone.

“You’re back,” he said.

I stepped fully into the dark office that was much brighter in the afternoon sun. “I am. I leave the island tomorrow, and I just wanted to stop by one more time, in case you’d had time to give any more thought to my case. And to make sure you had my card.” I stood close to his desk and held one out.

He gestured at his desk. Today there were mounds of paper where days before there had been only dust. “No. I’ve only had time to give thought to the cases that are in line before yours.” He lifted one hand in a stop gesture of refusal. “I have your card and your number, though, and I’ll call you when I get to it.”

I put the card back in my purse. “That’s fine. I also realized I forgot to tell you something. Maybe it’s nothing, but the police couldn’t find a ring that my mother always wore. It was a small gold band, with the name Hannah engraved in it. When you talk to the hotel staff, I don’t know, I thought maybe you could ask about it? If you found the ring, it would help me resolve things in my mind. About how they died.”

And then he grinned at me, without any smile in his eyes, like a crocodile’s smile. “Duly noted.”

I took a step back, and then another. “As long as I know my case is on your list and you’ll get to it as soon as you can, that’s all I need to know, then,” I said, and reached behind me, missing the doorknob, groping for it, fumbling, and then grabbing it tight. I twisted and pushed. “Thank you for your help.”

I burst out of the dark space. I could see he was still watching me, so I turned back to him and waved. Idiot, I thought. You’re acting like a brainless beauty queen in a parade. I put my hand back down.

Thinking of Ava’s categories of people on the island, I put him in the “running from” category, and I imagined it was from something no good. That man gave me the creeps. If there were another investigator on St. Marcos, I’d forfeit my retainer with Walker with no regrets and hire someone new. But according to Jacoby, there wasn’t anyone else. I shook off the sensation of those amphibian eyes following me and got back in my car.

That afternoon, I lay draped over a lounge chair on my patio, attempting a siesta. I was on the final day of a spa vacation. It was practically obligatory to try things like afternoon naps, but my type A personality not only wouldn’t nap, it refused even to fake it. I decided solitaire on my phone would suffice as a nap replacement.

The phone rang and brought my game to a halt. My heart shot up into my throat when I saw the number on caller ID, like it was a target I had hit with a sledgehammer in one of those high-striker carnival games, the ones where muscle-bound high school jocks tried to ring the bell at the top of a pole. Ding ding, I was a winner! It was Doug. Finally. This was it. My life was about to change forever. I answered.

“Katie, you’re not going to believe this. I can’t believe it, and I’m so sorry. I’m the listing agent, after all, and I didn’t even know.” His voice sounded more angry than sorry.

Nothing he’d said so far sounded like the words I wanted to hear. I wondered if I hung up the phone whether he would call back with different words. I hovered my index finger over End, but I didn’t press it.

“The bank accepted a different offer. It didn’t even come through me. If they think they’re going to get out of paying my commission just by making an end run and selling this house to somebody’s second cousin, they’re crazy. By the time I got your offer in front of Ms. Nesbitt, she’d already said yes to someone else.”

“Who’s Ms. Nesbitt?” I asked, for something to say.

“The Bank of St. Marcos officer handling the property. The one I had better not learn is getting some kind of kickback on this deal. But I digress.” He paused for me to speak, but I didn’t.

“Katie? Are you there?” he asked.

I sat on the patio of my posh suite in silence, aware of every cell in my body crying out in loss. I was losing, again, losing something else. Something important. Not just a house, or a spirit. I was losing myself.

This time I didn’t pull back when my finger sought the End key.