Leaving Annalise (Katie & Annalise Book 2) (8 page)

Early one morning a few days later, I swung my truck up toward Annalise to check on the previous day’s progress, with Oso riding shotgun. I was steering with one hand and holding my precious cup of King’s coffee in the other—I had become addicted to my morning dose of the local brew—and cursing Ava with every drop I spilled. She had woken me up at 2:30 a.m. to tell me she’d talked Trevor into a do-over, information that could have waited for a better time, like between dawn and dusk. Oso wagged his tail every time I blurted out an expletive.

When we made it up to the house, I found Rashidi cleaning a bowl and spoon in the laundry-room basin.

“Good morning, Rasta man. Do you have the day off?” I asked.

“And a pleasant good morning to you,” Rashidi said, ruffling Oso’s ears. Rashidi was the one who found my six dogs for me originally, and it was he that selected Oso to act as my protector. They had a special bond. “Yah mon. No tourists, no students. I a free man.”

“Want to join me on a mission of stealth?”

“I all about stealth. And missions dem. Me and my good friend Tom Cruise. What this mission, if I choose to accept it?”

“Egg hinted that I should make a trip out to Junior’s new job site. Something to do with my missing tile.”

“Uh oh. If Junior involved, it gotta be no good.”

“My thinking exactly. Just let me check on yesterday’s work first.”

Fifteen minutes later, we got in the truck and Oso vaulted into the bed, which he was happy about. He loves to feel the breeze on his nose from back there.

“So when Not-Bart coming back on island?” Rashidi asked, as we drove back toward Town down the rainforest road.

“A month. His sister is almost through with basic training, and then Nick hands his nephew off to his parents. He keeps asking me when
I’m
coming
there,
and he’s so damn calm about it. I don’t think he completely understands why it is impossible for me to leave in the middle of this construction nightmare.”

“Not such a bad thing, to have someone what want to see you.” He chuptzed low, a rueful rather than a derisive sound, then said, “Ava ’bout through with me.”

I didn’t know how to respond, so I let silence take over. She hadn’t said so, but I’d noticed Ava losing interest in fidelity again. Someday she’d look back and regret tossing Rashidi aside, I was sure. He was not only smart, motivated, and kind, but he was loyal and easy on the eye. He’d just had the misfortune to fall for a girl with a restless heart. Rashidi really liked Ava—the flesh and blood woman, not just the bombshell that every other man on the island liked. The funny, insecure girl with the giving heart.

I turned the radio on and we drove into a one-hundred-percent Local neighborhood in the center of the island, listening to The Jam Band sing “Man Terrible.” Rashidi sang along word for word. I had an address for Junior’s job site, but there were no street signs in that part of Town. “Good thing I with you,” Rashidi said. “You be lost and unwelcome without me.”

The most important characteristic of anyone on St. Marcos is whether or not you’re bahn yah, and my flaw of birthplace was compounded by my lack of pigmentation. I didn’t blend well. Stealth, indeed.

We pulled up to a peach-colored one-story house with rebar sticking up off its flat, sloped roof. Locals tend to leave room for expansion as cash permits, so it’s a familiar sight. A truck was parked in the driveway, a big newish midnight-blue Silverado that belonged to none other than Junior.

“Well, we in the right place,” Rashidi said.

“Yah mon,” I said, and Rashidi laughed. “Let’s make us a little less obvious.” I pulled past two more rebar-topped houses and turned left at the corner. When I was sure I was out of sight, I parked. “I’ll be right back.”

I got out, leash in hand, and snapped it to Oso’s collar, then let down the tailgate and he jumped out. Rashidi’s door opened and shut.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“Tom Cruise don’t wait in the truck.”

“Come along then, Tom.”

He patted Oso’s head. We cut through the side and back yards of the houses between us and Pumpy’s place.

“Excellent specimen of frangipani in flower,” Rashidi said, pointing at a tree in the yard of the eggshell-blue house on the corner. “Nice avocado tree, almost ready to go to fruit,” he said as we stole across the yard of the seafoam-green house next to it. I rolled my eyes. Ever the botanist.

As we slunk up to the peach house’s front window, I had a clear view into the living room and eating area. Behind them we could see the kitchen and what would probably become an office. The open floor plan was common, but it wasn’t the layout that caught my eye. It was the bright and shiny new eighteen-by-eighteen-inch faux travertine porcelain floor tile throughout that did, tile identical to that which I had purchased for Annalise. Not only that, but there were still a few boxes of it against the living room wall.

Rashidi chuptzed. “He t’iefin’ you.” When Rashidi gets upset, his accent thickens. This phrasing was near-homicidal for the peaceful Rastafarian.

I stood and gaped at Pumpy and Junior, who were seated side by side at a folding table in the eating area. Junior was wearing his red, green, and yellow Rastafarian winter skullcap so old it had a big patched hole in it. I guess he was ready in case we had a sudden spate of subzero temperatures. I ducked out of their line of vision and peeked around the window just enough to see them. Junior wrote something, whipped his hand from right to left, and handed a rectangular paper to Pumpy—a rectangular paper known the world over by its shape. A check.

Damn the luck.

Pumpy took it, then they stood and shook hands with clasped arms. They walked toward the door.

“Let’s get out of here,” I whispered, and Rashidi and I sprinted back to the trunk. I didn’t bother to put Oso in the bed, just opened my door and said, “Up, boy,” and climbed in behind him. Rashidi was already buckled in by the time I got in my seat.

“Well, looks like I have to fire another contractor. Do you think I should make a police report?”

“Nah, cop you get probably Pumpy’s first cousin.”

“You’re right.”

Rashidi shook his head. “Girl, you gonna need an awful big piece of paper for the list of enemies dem you makin’, and true dat.”

True dat, indeed.

It was my birthday, but I had blocked out the big three six. I’d decided I wasn’t doing my birthday that year, so it was as good a day as any to move into Annalise. Luckily I had already moved most of my furniture in, since the entire Caribbean Sea had been falling from the sky for the past twenty-four hours. I’d had to swim upstream just to get there from Ava’s that morning. It seemed as if all the forces of nature, including my jumbie house, were conspiring to test my mettle. I stuffed another towel against the threshold to the kitchen door as the wind pushed water over it and ran to change the bowl under the dripping ceiling in the master bedroom.

I wanted help. And a break from everything going wrong that possibly could. I didn’t need another island holiday to stop work on my house. I could live without any more mysterious holes appearing in my walls or roses appearing in my truck. And I could stand to see the love of my life, who was still in Texas with a business and a baby while I was stuck in the tropics battling the elements.

I missed Nick. On my worst days it seemed like I’d dreamed his whole visit up. He’d been rock solid every day since then, but still. Absence makes the heart grow fonder and the head grow crazier. I crawled up on the marble countertop with a box of dishes and transferred fiesta plates of three sizes into the glass-fronted dark cherry cabinets.

“Why are you making it so hard, you big dumb house? I thought you wanted me here,” I scolded. Annalise had told me we could save each other, right in front of Rashidi on my first visit to the house. Not in so many words, but clear enough that he and I both understood.

I opened a box of utensils and put them in the drawers I’d cleaned and lined with shelf paper the day before. If I expected an answer from my ghostly friend, I didn’t get one. Annalise was pouting like a child. A very big, very spoiled child. I hadn’t even seen her face since the day we rushed Crazy to the hospital. I bent down to open another box. Crystal wine glasses and big-mouthed margarita glasses from my old drinking life in Dallas. Ugh.

I’d thought I would have an easier time with my alcohol-free lifestyle with Bart out of my life, and it was true that helped, but being lonely didn’t. Especially since I spent three nights a week in bars performing. Most club owners tried to ply Ava and me with booze, hoping we’d forget to collect our cash at the end of the night.

I pushed the box of glasses aside and moved on to the next one. Water glasses and coffee cups. Much better. I carried it over to the cabinet next to the sink and moved my large multicolored coffee mugs into the cabinet above the dishwasher with a little too much force. The noise made me feel better, though, and allowed me to take out a little healthy frustration. Between Nick describing his efforts to thwart Derek and every last adorable thing Taylor did, I was getting jealous. I wanted him to be with me, to think about me, and to talk about me. To help me with my house, like a normal boyfriend would. But he wasn’t a normal boyfriend. He was Uncle Nick.

Come hell or high water, though, Nick and I were going to see each other in less than four days. He had tickets to the island, hallelujah! But first I had to deal with the house. Alone. Because despite my best efforts, I hadn’t found anyone who could—or would—come help me.

I had tried last week to talk my big brother into coming to St. Marcos to help me get the house ready and move in. Lucky Collin is my in loco parentis, but he’d said, “No can do, sis. I’m moving, too.”

“What?!?” I shrieked into the phone.

“Thank you, I didn’t need that eardrum anyway,” my brother said. “I signed on with the New Mexico state police. Gonna be part of their clandestine lab team busting up drug farms, putting the bad guys in the pokey.”

“Umm, congratulations. But what the hell am I going to do now? You were my only hope.”

“You’re the big girl who had to move down to the islands all by yourself and buy that house. You’ll figure it out. How come your boyfriend isn’t helping you?” There was an edge of sarcasm in his voice that made me wary.

“He can’t come.”

“Not much of a boyfriend then, is he? But it was him that drove you down there in the first place, after all.”

Yeah, more than an edge.

“Collin, he’s different than you think. You’ll see.”

“I still think you’re taking a big risk. Speaking of big risks, did I tell you I’m moving into the Taos house?”

“What? That’s great.”

The house in Taos had belonged to our parents, and it had always been special to Collin. I’d have said good for him any other time. I tried once more. “You haven’t even come down here to see me, you know. It’s been nearly a year. You could be here to celebrate my birthday with me.”

I could almost see his “talk to the hand” gesture as he cut me off. “Happy early birthday, little sis. Find yourself another Huckleberry this time. Or you can come here and help me move.”

A tremendously bad idea. We clicked off.

I’d also tried to rope Rashidi into the job, but he was at a hydroponic-farming conference in Florida learning how to fertilize plants with fish poo, nuggets of information gold he could bring back to his students at UVI. Great, but no help.

The only thing Ava had to offer was moral support. She was bad ass with a machete when she chose to be. But she could find almost any excuse to get out of manual labor, and when I asked her to help me move in, she suddenly needed to help her parents in their pool-supply store, serve meals to the homeless, and gather alms for the poor. Ten to one her nails would look fantastic next time I saw her.

I forced my mind back to the present and ripped open a box I hoped held cereal bowls, since it was the very last box and I had yet to come across them. It did. I started stacking them on cabinet shelves until I had done all I could for the time being. I looked out the window at the storm. It was already gloomy, a rainy midafternoon. I prayed to the god of power companies, “Please don’t let the WAPA guys flake out.” Up until then, the power had been supplied by a portable generator and my shower was courtesy of a water pump connected to it. The light came from drop lamps on long extension cords that I carried around with me. I was more than ready to leave the dark ages.

The next task on my list was a doozie: cistern inspection. I decided to call Nick before I got started. Someone had to know why I was never seen again, just in case.

He answered on the first ring. “Hi, beautiful. Happy birthday.”

“Thanks.” I skipped the preliminaries and got straight to it. “I have to go down into the cisterns to check that they’re filling. I’m a little scared.”

“That’s nuts. Can’t Egg do it?”

“Egg’s grandmother passed away, and he won’t be back from Trinidad for a week. I can’t get any of the guys to do anything other than the work Crazy has on the lists. If one more person says to me ‘It not me job, mon’ or ‘That not what the Crazy boss man tell me to do,’ I am going to commit a serious crime.”

“Why do you have to check them, anyway? If you’ve got water, they’re working.”

“Crazy made me promise. He said we have to check them when they’re partway full because it’s a big house with a huge swimming pool and we need all five chambers to fill, or I’m not going to have enough water.” It was $350 per truckload for water, something I knew because Crazy had made me fill the pool as soon the tile work was finished to protect it. It had taken ten truckloads. “At the rate the rain is falling, they’ll be full by dusk. It’s now or never.”

“I wish I was there.”

Him and me both. “It’s gonna be OK. All I have to do is go down into the center cistern under the dining room. The other four are connected through openings in each of its walls. I’ll stick my measuring stick over into each one, and if it comes back wet, there’s water. If you don’t hear from me in an hour, call Ava and have her send in the cavalry.”

He promised he would.

We hung up. I took several cleansing breaths and traded in my flip-flop sandals for water socks. I jammed a hard hat on my head. It had a snazzy head lamp, and I switched it on. I doused myself with Cutter extra-strength mosquito repellent. I put on an orange lifejacket and tightened the straps, then positioned my drop light near the hatch in the center of the dining room floor.

I kept breathing in through my nose, like Mom taught me to do when I feel panicky. I was almost ready.

I picked up a six-foot-long contractor’s measuring stick in one hand and dragged my one-woman inflatable raft to the open hatch. When I looped the raft’s side rope around my hand, I ran into my first snag. Too big.

“Spit in a well bucket,” I said.

That made me smile. I had no idea what the expression meant, but Dad had always said it when something went wrong. I let air out of the raft until it was small enough to fit through the hole, then I followed it down the ladder and into an incredible roar.

I hadn’t expected the noise, but it made sense. Water was cascading from the sky into my rooftop catchments, through the pipes, and falling fifteen feet to the five connected cisterns. My head vibrated with the sound.

I stood with my head one foot below the hole and blew the raft back up until I was light-headed and my breathing was shallow. I didn’t want to think about what might be down there with me in the noisy dark. Frogs. Centipedes. The creature from the black lagoon. At least there weren’t water moccasins on St. Marcos.

I took another step down the ladder. With each step, the roar grew louder. My feet were now eight feet below the dining room floor, and the raft was dangling another five feet below me. It wasn’t like I was plunging to the center of the earth, I reassured myself. I started talking myself through Annalise’s floor plan to keep myself calm. The cisterns were level with the basement, which was built into the side of a hill. The basement was half cisterns and half patio rooms that looked out onto the pool and deck. The cisterns were inside the hill, behind the patio rooms. One was under the kitchen, another below the music room, the center one was under the dining room, and two were below the foyer and the office.

The rope to the raft went slack. I took two more steps down the ladder, then three. My feet were under water, cold water.

“Just rainwater,” I whispered. “Perfectly clean.”

Dark water terrifies me. I focused on the thought of Crazy and his crew bleaching out the cisterns and cleaning them with pressure hoses. Crazy had made me come into the caverns to take a look when they were finished.

“Clean enough to eat from,” he’d said.

Not by my standards, I’d thought.

We had kept the cisterns plugged until Crazy was ready. A month ago, he’d given the order to open the intake pipes, and the wait had begun. Only it hadn’t rained until this week. So the water was fresh. Just rainwater, I told myself again. That’s all.

I eased myself into the raft. I knew I had to do this right. I couldn’t fall in and submerge my lamp, or I’d have to find my way out of the depths of hell with only one tiny square of light above me to lead me back to the ladder. If that happened, I wouldn’t have to worry about drowning or getting trapped down there, because I would have a massive cardiac infarction and die.

The raft rocked violently as I entered it, but stayed upright. I puffed out a huge exhale and gave myself a push off the cement bottom with my stick. I was Jonah. Or Pinocchio. The roar of water swallowed my nervous laugh. I gave myself another tiny push.

The beam from my headlamp was weak and I couldn’t see the walls around me, but I knew they were there. I’d just give myself a few pushes until I came to a wall—assuming I didn’t spin myself in endless circles—and then I could feel my way along it. I shuddered. I wasn’t touching anything with my hands. I would have to navigate around the room sans feeling.

Bump.

I screamed.

But it was only the raft hitting the first wall. I willed my racing heart to slow. Get a grip, Katie, get a grip. I used the stick to push myself along the wall, looking for a cut in the concrete. I didn’t see it until I was practically nose to nose with the gap. If the water had been any higher, I could have floated into the next chamber and never known I’d changed rooms. A huge lump formed in my throat.

“Annalise? Are you there? I could use some company.”

Only the roar of the water answered. Anger flickered inside me. I let it rage in me for a few moments, but it was a dangerous emotion. I closed my eyes and red turned from orange to brown and then black. I opened them and the color didn’t change.

All right then, time to check for water in the next cistern. I pulled my measuring stick out of the water and suddenly realized I’d made a tactical error. I wasn’t going to be able to see a waterline on a wet stick in the near dark.

The gears in my brain froze. A crippling impulse to get the hell out of there came over me. The darkness moved closer in. The space was shrinking.

NO, I thought. It’s not, Katie, it’s not.

My hands were shaking so much my stick scratched against the raft. I grabbed one hand with the other, still clutching the stick. OK, think. Think think think.

The solution wasn’t hard. In fact, it was so easy I felt foolish. I reached the stick across into the other cavern and extended the stick downward sharply. I felt soft resistance when it splashed the water.

My breath came in a rush. I was fine. I was doing this. I
could
do this. I pushed off the bottom again with the stick, keeping the raft against the wall. The scritchy rubbing sensation of stick against floor comforted me.

Bump.

A corner. I maneuvered the raft around it without losing contact with the wall, then started moving forward again. I came to the next opening. I poked my stick over the ledge and smacked it downward.

It connected with water.

Two down. Two to go. I was working this like a boss. A champ. A hoss. A butt-kicking Amazon rainforest goddess. I remembered my palm-reader dream—no, a butt-kicking empress.

I came to the next cavern. Extend, lower, splash. Onward.

I came to the last cavern, the one under the music room, if I’d kept my bearings. Extend, lower, air. Thwack—my stick hit the inside of the wall of the cavern. It took me by surprise and I lost my balance. The raft shifted out as my body shifted in. There was nowhere to catch myself, and I fell across the ledge, hard. The raft shot out from under me and the cold water sucked my legs and torso into its grasp. A surge of water pushed at me, shoving me farther onto the ledge. I screamed, short and shrill. The sound echoed from the cistern in front of me.