Saving Grace (Katie & Annalise Book 1) (5 page)

Fifteen minutes later, Ava and I sat in front of the desk of a Mr. Paul Walker at 32 King’s Cross Street. His office was a long narrow room with walls and floors of red brick. Probably an alley or breezeway once upon a time. It was squeezed in between a thrift store and an abandoned record store that still had dust-covered albums on display and an air of shame about it, of failure. I wondered if there were any treasures hidden in its depths. Probably not.

Walker had gone to the back of his space to a mini-refrigerator, from which he fetched two bottles of water. He used the sleeve of his shirt to wipe down the bottles and tops as he came back across the uneven floor between us. The walls squeezed in behind him, squirting him forward, or so my eyes told me. It was a house of mirrors at a low-rent carnival in here.

“So tell me about the case, Ms. Connell,” Walker said as he handed the waters across the desk to us, then sat.

I’d only worked closely with one other investigator before: Nick. What a contrast Walker was to him. Walker’s belly looked about five months pregnant under his Cruzan Rum t-shirt. Sweat was beaded on his forehead. His whole office smelled in need of a shower. If I’d have had a handkerchief with me, I would have held it to my face—after I cleaned my water bottle. I set the bottle down on the floor beside me.

“My parents were on St. Marcos for a week last year. They came here for their fortieth anniversary. They had a great time, and they called me every day.” A twinge of guilt shot through me as I remembered the irritation I’d felt at seeing their number on my phone. People I loved interrupting a life I didn’t, and I was irritated with
them
. “They did all the normal tourist things. They took a catamaran out to one of the cays. They hiked in the rainforest. They went to a secluded beach to snorkel. It was like they recaptured their youth here. They even called me one day and said they’d walked up on two people having sex on the beach, literally. My mom giggled like a teenage girl when she told me about it, some big bushy-haired blond man and a tiny black woman, she told me. But she loved it. She loved everything about the trip.”

Get to the point, Katie. Funny how eloquent I could be about other people’s problems, but how awkward about my own. I finished the rest of my story without diving off into irrelevant detail.

Walker’s eyes lasered my face while I talked. When I finished, he remained silent, slowly tapping his pen against his lips.

“Mr. Walker? Do you have any questions?” I asked.

“Oh. Sorry. You remind me of someone I used to know,” he said. His comment crawled across my skin like a scorpion. “Yes, just a few questions to help me get started. Before your parents died, where did they have dinner?”

I remembered this. They had loved the restaurant and returned to it for their last dinner. “Fortuna’s. Do you know of it?”

“Yes, it’s a very popular place.”

My eyes strayed to the framed NYPD ten-year service award on the wall over his left shoulder. Beside it hung the obligatory island fishing picture, Walker and an equally large black man and even larger blond man standing on the stern deck of a boat named
Big Kahuna
, the three of them together hefting a huge marlin.

Ava spoke for the first time since we’d all exchanged greetings at the beginning of the meeting. “Baptiste’s Bluff not exactly on the way from the restaurant to the hotel.”

Walker ignored her and continued speaking to me. “Did they go anywhere else that you know of that last night?”

“Not that I know of.”

“The casino? A moonlight stroll on the beach, perhaps?”

“I’m sorry, I just don’t know. I have the accident report from the police, though. And they said the coroner might have a report, too.” I held out the police file, and he took it, opened it, and set it in front of him.

“OK, I’ll get that from the coroner.”

“Also,” I hesitated, looked at Ava, then plowed ahead. “The officer that investigated their deaths died shortly after them. You can see on the report that a different officer signed it than the one who investigated. I don’t know if that means anything, but—”

Walker cut me off. “I’ll look into it. All right.” He glanced down at the opened file and the police report on his desk. “I think I have everything I need from you. There’s a five-hundred-dollar retainer, to get started.”

I needed to do this, but was just writing this man a check and trusting him to look into it enough? Would spending the insurance money I hadn’t needed make me feel less guilty? I wanted to call Nick and ask his advice. I wanted to run out the front door. I wanted a rum punch. I wanted Mom and Dad back. I swallowed hard and pulled out my checkbook.

As I wrote him a check, he continued to talk. “My case load is very heavy right now. I know I can’t get to this for a few weeks. It’s not an emergency, after all, as your parents are already dead.”

Another skin-crawling moment. He was right, though. Crass, but right. I set the check on the desk with my business card on top of it and used my fingertips to push them across to him. They dug a trail of clean through the dust on his desk.

“Well, thank you, Ms. Connell. I’ll be in touch,” he said, grabbing the check before my fingertips left it.

As Ava and I stood up to depart, he said, “Oh, one last thing. It’s better for me if I talk to the potential witnesses fresh. It interferes with my investigation when my client tries to do it first herself. So, if you please, let me do what you have hired me to do, and you enjoy the rest of your stay on our lovely island.”

“Fine,” I said.

And we left, as fast as I could get out of there.

Ava and I traipsed down the sidewalk, silent as an old married couple instead of two women who had known each other for fifteen hours. I still walked ahead of her, but I was slowing down. From life, though, not from limin’.

When we reached the car, Ava put both her palms flat on the roof. “Tell me you hungry and ready for a cocktail.” She brought one forearm in front of her face and looked at an imaginary watch. “Yep, definitely time for a late lunch.”

“I need to see Baptiste’s Bluff,” I said. “I just need to see it. I don’t think I can turn this over to Walker and let it go without seeing it for myself.”

Ava struck a stage pose, putting her bent arms in the air, all ten fingers pointing to the sky, and gestured from her shoulder in a rhythmic emphasis. “Well, of course you need to see it.” She dropped her dramatic stance and leaned toward me. “And I take you, but you gonna have a flying fish sandwich in one hand and a Red Stripe in the other when we get there.” She pointed to a street ahead and to the left. “Drive, and go that way.”

After we got back into the hot Malibu, we drove out of town along the winding north shore, blue on our right, green on our left. We rolled the windows down and let our hair blow. I needed a hurricane to blow my storm system out and into the sea air, but a strong coastal breeze would do for now. We passed a marina. The smell of diesel and dead fish were overwhelming for a moment, and I exhaled through my nose. I pulled some of the hair out of my mouth that the wind had blown in and took a sip from the water bottle I’d brought from Walker’s office. The same bottle I had given a punishing rubdown with a Sani-Wipe from my purse once we’d gotten into the car.

After ten minutes of driving, Ava pointed to a hut on the beach.

“Pull over there,” she said.

The hut turned out to be a small take-out restaurant, with a bar and some beach stools. There was no name on it that I could see. Ava slipped off her/my shoes and got out of the car, so I followed suit. We crossed the sand to the nameless hut and were greeted by a couple of dogs.

“Coconut retrievers,” Ava said. She commanded them to get back in a deeper voice than I’d heard her use before, and the dogs obliged, tails wagging.

Ava hailed up the proprietor like an old friend and gave him our order. He stuck out his palm, so I pulled out a twenty. His eyes twinkled, and he held out his other palm. I pulled out a second twenty. He nodded, and I placed one twenty in each. He put the money under the counter in a basket and turned back to his fryers, sucking his cheeks into the space where his teeth used to be. No change. Paradise wasn’t cheap.

Ava hopped onto one of the barstools and faced the sea. I joined her. What a way to grab lunch. I could get used to this. I tucked my feet up onto the support bar around the stool’s legs and put my elbows on my knees, face in my palms.

“Lunch always so expensive on this island?” I asked.

“Yah mon. If you not bahn yah.”

I was indignant. “So he would have charged you less than what he charged me?”

She snorted. “He? No, he a thief. But usually there a local discount.”

Oh well. It wasn’t surprising. I rolled my head, enjoying a few neck cracks. The water was calling to me. “Do you mind if I put my toes in while we wait?” I asked Ava.

“Go ahead. I stay here and call you when our food come out.”

The sand was warm, almost hot. My feet sank in heel first, slowing me down. As I got closer to the waterline, the sand grew firmer and cooler. I didn’t hesitate. I plunged into the water, ankle deep, then knee deep. I pulled the hem of my white sundress up several inches. The water surged against my knees, then rose over them and wetted my thighs. Then it rushed out past my legs again and I felt the breeze move in to dry me off. I could see my toes on the white sandy ocean floor, and I wiggled them. The water came back, lifting me up as it rose. A school of small silver fish darted around me, half on one side of me and half on the other, only inches below the surface.

“Katie,” Ava called. “Food ready.”

I could have stood there for hours. But I walked out of the water, splashing it up with my toes on my last few steps. Imagining my mother, wondering if she’d done the same, if she’d done it right here on this beach. If the old man in the hut looking out at me now had seen her, and from a distance thought I looked familiar to him. Since my teens, people had claimed we could pass for twins. Mom would roll her eyes and say, “From a hundred yards to a myopic septuagenarian.” She was wrong, though. She was far too young to die.

I rejoined Ava, and we carried our greasy wax-paper-wrapped sandwiches and johnnycakes back to the car. Johnnycake is deep-fried bread, the Caribbean equivalent of biscuits to Southerners or sopapillas to Mexicans. Just what my cellulite needed. Except that really, it was lack of exercise in the last five years since I’d quit karate, not too many calories, that was my problem. Ava also had two icy Red Stripes between her fingers.

“How much further?” I asked.

“Ten minutes,” she said.

We drove another mile along the water, then turned straight inland and upward. I hated leaving the serenity of the shoreline. The last eight minutes of our drive were on rutted dirt roads that shot off into dense bushes every few hundred yards.

“Not a place to explore by yourself,” Ava said, pointing at one of the side roads. “Too isolated.”

“It’s gorgeous up here, though,” I said. In fact, I was shocked at how gorgeous it was. Different from the water, obviously, but different in a good way, a way that was perfect. The trees were taller and met above the road, creating a roof above us and dampening the noise of the surf against sand and rocks only a mile away. I saw a bright flash of feathers in one of the trees.

“Is that a macaw?”

“Yah mon. They live up here.”

I didn’t know if I could ever be as blasé about this flora and fauna as Ava sounded. I soaked it in: orchids more beautiful than hothouse flowers trailing vines of hot pink, pink and orange flamboyants standing tall and proud, reminding me of the mimosa trees back home.

“Turn in here,” Ava said, and I made a sharp right, back in the general direction of the water, but hundreds of feet above it now.

We drove a quarter of a mile, then broke out of the trees. The change in our surroundings was sudden, a ripping away of the quietude of the forest. My mood shifted with it. Who was I kidding? My emotions were raw, and my moods were moving up and down the scales faster than Sarah Brightman in
Phantom of the Opera
.

“You can park anywhere,” she said.

I pulled to a stop and parked, then shut off the engine and held my breath.

Coming to the place where my parents died was like walking into the painted churches of the Navidad Valley. Our family visited them on a short road trip to La Grange when I was in middle school. In those old wooden churches, I knew I was in the presence of something holy and powerful, and that under their roofs, hardship and blessings walked hand in hand, just as they did here where the rainforest met the cliffs. Where life met death.

Ava was already outside, barefoot again, and walking up a rise. I trailed behind her. I wanted to take it all in. I wanted to feel my parents again, and I wanted them to know I had come here, that they had mattered to me. That if I accomplished nothing else on this trip, I would at least say goodbye.

“I love you, Mom and Dad,” I whispered.

Ava crested the hill and in three steps had disappeared. I sped up. As I came over the ridge, I gasped and stepped backward from the sudden vertigo. The ground sloped away for thirty yards, then simply vanished. Beyond was nothing but sky, until it merged with the Caribbean Sea in the distance.

“They not the first to drive off this bluff,” Ava said, and she was solemn.

“Oh my God,” I said, because I couldn’t think of any other words. I sank to the grass. I perched myself on a hummock and tried to gather my thoughts. Why? Why had they come here?

“This place kind of our Lover’s Lane, in a rugged and inaccessible way. Lotta girls I know lost their virginity out here. It also been the site of a few lover’s leaps. It always had this romantic allure people can’t resist.”

I mulled over her words. Was it possible my parents had sought this spot out? A last tryst on their anniversary getaway? I pictured the two of them, holding hands, heads touching. I hoped so. Something in me didn’t believe it, but God, I hoped so.

“Goodbye, Mom and Dad,” I whispered. I closed my eyes again, counted from a hundred backwards, tried to think of nothing, and offered my heart to the sky.