Leaving Annalise (Katie & Annalise Book 2) (20 page)

The next morning I tried to book travel off island for us, but the airport was closed. I called Nick, who was in Town putting up fliers for our estate sale. We knew getting back to Texas was not going to be simple right after a hurricane, but I couldn’t help but feel a flicker of panic.

“American won’t even resume flights until their terminal is repaired, which could be months,” I told him.

“We can try to hire a boat captain,” Nick said. “I’d suggest we call Bill, but he told me he was taking the
Wild Irish Kate
straight up to Florida when he left here to pick up his boss.”

By midday, we hadn’t found any boat captains on St. Marcos willing to work during the post-hurricane bonus holiday. I tried some of the smaller airlines that flew from island to island, thinking that the damaged terminal might not affect them as much as it did the major airlines. And it really didn’t matter where we flew to, as long as we could eventually get somewhere with a connecting flight to the states. By the third airline, a human answered the phone. LIAT, an airline Locals described as “Leave Islands Any Time they want to,” was resuming flights the next day, assuming they still wanted to when tomorrow came. I crossed my fingers and booked us on a flight to Aruba with Oso. My protector and Taylor’s BFF could not be left behind, but the rest of the pack would stay to guard Annalise.

As I hung up, the agent said, “Mind your dog don’t weigh no more than a hunner pound with he kennel.” We hung up.

“All set,” I called from the kitchen to Nick in the garage. “You don’t think Oso and his kennel are over one hundred pounds, do you?”

Nick walked into the kitchen. “About one twenty, I’d say. Why?”

“Oh, no! He’s over the weight limit to fly.” My heart sank from diaphragm to bellybutton level.

Nick shook his head. “Don’t worry. I’ll handle it.”

“Really?” I couldn’t bear leaving Oso there.

“No problem,” he said, and swatted my behind. I could play that game. I popped him with a dishtowel and he chased me to the bedroom. I won.

All the next day, we prepared for our sale. The big house was far from full, but we’d been acquiring furniture at a fairly decent clip all summer long, in addition to what I’d brought from Texas. What we’d accumulated a little at a time had added up fast. Whatever we didn’t sell or decide to take, we would leave with the house for a buyer to deal with—when we found one.

Cars were lined up at our gate at seven the next morning, honking. We had run an ad in the
St. Marcos Daily Source
announcing that the sale would begin at eight, but the people of St. Marcos love nothing more than a good estate sale. We ignored them as we did our last-minute preparations and slammed down King’s coffee.

At seven forty-five we opened the gate to muttered complaints and long, drawn-out chuptzes, and the posturing and haggling began at once. I hated that part, but Nick loved it.

The sale went on for hours, and friends and acquaintances showed up, too. Egg even brought Crazy out to wish us well, but they couldn’t stay. By midday the sale had become an impromptu pool party, and we finally shut the gate and counted our money.

“Ten thousand dollars? Not bad at all,” I said. It helped that we’d sold all the office furniture and the mahogany bedroom set we got before the wedding. “How about we use our guests to help us clean out the refrigerator?”

“Good idea.”

We carried a smorgasbord down to the pool, where a month before we’d been married. It was a bittersweet gathering. Some of our wedding guests were there again, although not Ava. She’d informed me that she would be taking Jacoby’s grandmother to the doctor, and that she didn’t do goodbyes. I missed Rashidi fiercely. I couldn’t even think about Jacoby. It was just too much.

Ms. Ruthie made a brief appearance. “You tell that boy I love him,” she said, her face tight and her tone stern. She embraced both of us and marched back to her golden car. I bit my lip.

Our mood grew increasingly somber and it spread to our friends, who packed up and began to take their leave. The goodbyes felt anticlimactic and mechanical, but I did my best.

Over the next few hours, Nick worked outside while I cleaned up the aftermath of the sale to the Dixie Chicks’ mournful album
Home.
I played it over and over like a dirge for our life on the island.

“I’m going to miss you, Annalise. I’m really, really sorry about this,” I said aloud.

The house remained still, silent, and morose, but I knew if she was going to mope, there was nothing I could do about it. I reminded myself for the zillionth time that I was doing the right thing.

Later that evening, while we had supper on the back patio, we watched the bats come out from under the eaves. Afterward, we threw away our paper plates and tidied up the kitchen for the last time. My pulse sounded in my ears and our feet echoed as we walked the long hall to the bedroom. I took a soak in the claw-footed tub, then put away everything but what I’d need in the morning. All our bags were packed and ready.

As we got into bed and turned out the lights, Nick brought up the cash from the sale.

“I’m a little concerned about the money. We did advertise in the paper, and we had a lot of people we didn’t know up here,” he said.

There were people on our quasi-third-world island who would go to great lengths for that kind of cash, and notice of an estate sale generally meant an untended house. Not only was the cash attractive, but the items left in the house would appeal to a certain class of person as well. And we weren’t parting as friends with some of our neighbors, including Junior and Pumpy, Bart, the many friends of the crooked investigator I sent off Baptiste’s Bluff in my old truck, and those of Jeffrey Bonds and Lisa Nesbitt, whom I’d helped land in jail for murder. Tonight was the last chance for some of them to bid us farewell in their own special ways.

“It hadn’t occurred to me. And it’s dark as pitch out there now.” I thought for a minute. “Well, we’ve got the dogs and the flare gun.” I wasn’t so sure Annalise was on our side right then, so I left her off the list. “The gate is shut. We’ll be fine, right?”

Nick nodded. “I’ll hide the money in my closet. I didn’t mean to scare you.”

Right then, the quiet night vanished and a hot wind gusted through our open windows, whipping the curtains into a froth of seafoam-green gauze. I swallowed and looked at Nick in surprise. He gripped my hand and returned the expression.

We lay wide-eyed in the dark while the minute hand clicked forward as if through a vat of molasses. The wind grew stronger and built to a howl, but no rain came. Objects inside the house shifted, banged, and fell to the floor. We heard a thud in the living room and something crashed upstairs. I prayed the wind was the culprit. If it was anything else, the storm was blowing too loud for us to hear it.

The dogs howled, then barked, and finally started growling in a frenzy. Were they scared of the wind? Or was something out there? The night visits from the red Senepol cattle and the scrubby horses that roamed the hills didn’t bother them anymore.

The bed felt like it was about to go airborne and the edges of the cotton sheets floated like poltergeists. I clutched at Nick’s hand as if it would tether me down.

“Are you sure you locked up?” I asked for the sixth time.

“You know I am.”

“Let’s push the furniture against the door.”

Nick sprang up to move the armoire. I fell in beside him and pushed with all my might, reassuring myself that no one could get to us through the windows, since our room was on the second floor. On a calm night, a determined house-breaker might climb a ladder to the balcony, but not in this wind. We blockaded the door to the hallway with two chests of drawers in front of the armoire and got back in bed. That was all we could do.

We must have fallen asleep, because I woke up in the middle of the night with my back against the headboard and my left hand holding Nick’s right. Something was wrong. Nick woke, too.

“The lights,” I said to him. “We left them on in the bathroom and now they’re out. If we lost power, the generator should have come on.”

“Do you want me to go outside and check it?” he asked.

“No! Let’s stay here.” We huddled close.

Many uneasy hours later, we awoke to a peaceful tropical morning that belied the night before. It was late. Neither of our phone’s alarms had gone off, which I didn’t understand, but I didn’t have time to dwell on it. We had survived the night, we were relieved and exhausted, but if we were going to make our plane, we had to put it in high gear.

I went to turn on the bathroom light and nothing happened. Still no power. Great.

“Do you want me to see if I can fix it?” Nick asked.

“No time, I’ll be fine,” I said.

We threw on our clothes, grabbed our bags, and ran for the garage with Oso trotting behind us. I yanked open the door to the truck and cried out.

“What is it?” Nick called.

I scooped up a thorny pile of black roses and threw them to the floor behind me. One of the thorns dug into my thumb and a bright red drop of blood welled up. “Damn Bart left me a present and I cut my thumb on it. I’m OK.” I stared at the blood for a second.

“It’s a good thing we’re leaving, Katie, because I swear to God I’d kill him, and you’d have to visit me in prison for the rest of our lives.”

“I’d help you,” I said.

I shoved Oso into the cab and went to say goodbye to the other dogs.

“I’m going to miss you guys.”

They barely acknowledged me. They had worked hard all night long.

I climbed in the passenger side and Nick backed the truck down the driveway toward our lane, but then slammed on the brakes. All the construction scaffolding that had been carefully stacked against the house lay across the driveway, blocking our path.

We jumped out and Nick called me over to his side of the truck. He hefted a corner of the scaffolding platform and pointed at a machete, a patched Rasta cap, and a drying pool of what looked like blood on the ground.

“Holy Moses,” I breathed.

“Annalise may not want us to go, but it looks like she isn’t going to let anyone hurt us, either.”

“The cap,” I said. “It looks like Junior’s.”

“Maybe, although I’ve seen a lot that look just like that.”

“Yeah, but not on the heads of people that hated me.”

“Look,” Nick said, holding up a severed electrical line that ran to the house.

I was pretty sure we’d find sabotage at the generator, too, but we were out of time. I ran back to the house and put my head against the cool yellow plaster like I had so many times before.

“I am so sorry, Annalise. I will find a good family to come live here with you. I promise.”

Silence from the jumbie house. I couldn’t wait for an answer. Nick and I dragged the scaffolding out of the way and got back in the truck. An ice pick of pain stabbed my heart as we went through the gate for the last time. It was done. We were leaving. Oso turned back toward the house and began barking madly, jangling my seriously frayed nerves.

“Wait!” I yelled. Nick slammed on the brakes and Oso yelped. I jumped out of the car and ran back toward the gate, snapping pictures as fast as my iPhone would let me: the lane, the gate, and the house standing serene amidst the ruins of the natural beauty that had been stripped off the island around her. Two wild horses had come up out of the bush and into the yard. I committed it all to memory, knowing I would probably not get another chance to soak in the house that I had brought back to life over the last year, and who had brought me back with her.

“Are you going to be all right?” Nick asked when I climbed back into the truck.

I nodded. “Drive.”

He jammed the truck into gear and stomped on the accelerator, and we lurched forward. I scrolled through the pictures, squinting in the bright morning sunlight to drink them in, one by one. As I clicked to the last picture, something about the one just before it tugged at me, and I went back. A mare and foal were standing in front of Annalise, looking just as I’d seen them moments before, but there was something else. I held the phone farther from me, trying to bring it into focus. And then I saw her.

My hand opened and the iPhone clattered to the floor. Oso whined and shoved his nose under my elbow and my hand flew to my mouth. I turned to look back again at my house, to see what my eyes told me was true but my mind could not believe. Even stripped of leaves, the forest blocked my view.

“What’s the matter?” Nick asked, his eyes on the road as he whipped around a narrow curve.

I picked up my phone again. On the front steps of my house stood a tall black woman in a white blouse and a loose, calf-length plaid skirt. A matching scarf was knotted over her hair. She was looking straight into the camera with somber eyes. One of the dogs was nuzzling her leg. In her right hand, she held Junior’s cap and machete, and in her left, his severed, bloody head by his dreadlocked hair.

I bit my lip and shook my head. My heart ached for the terrifying warrior goddess I had left behind. “Goodbye, Annalise,” I whispered. Then I rolled down the passenger window and threw up.

Nick drove across the island like Mario Andretti in the Monaco Grand Prix, throwing caution and fears about flat tires and side-view mirrors to the wind. Ava was picking up our truck from the parking lot, and as late as we were, she might beat us there.

When we got to the airport, we went to the ticket counter to deal with Oso’s departure. I raised my eyebrows when Nick put two twenty-dollar bills on top of the kennel. Oso’s tail thumped against the inside of the kennel.

“Trust me,” Nick whispered. And sure enough, Oso’s kennel lost a few pounds in the transaction and we sailed through to baggage. But there, we had a problem.

“No way, mon, this kennel way too big,” the baggage handler shouted. “This not me job to lift he.”

Nick begged, pleaded, explained, and bribed. Cash changed hands, but the baggage handler still didn’t budge.

“What’s the problem over here?” a familiar voice inquired.

Nick turned and looked into the face of our favorite contractor.

“Hey, Egg,” he exclaimed. “What are you doing here?”

“Working for the mon,” he said, clasping hands with Nick.

“Can you help us get Oso on the plane?”

Egg grinned. “No problem.” He turned to me and bowed. “Hate to see you go, miss.”

I curtsied back. “I’ll miss you, Egg.”

Oso stuck his nose partway out the breathing slits and I stuck mine against it. Cold. I rubbed his nose with one finger. His eyes sparkled as Egg hauled his kennel away to the makeshift cargo bay. We could see his kennel from the temporary post-hurricane terminal, which was more like a cattle pen by the runway, and heard him barking at the chickens. They squawked and flapped their wings in their wooden crates, and feathers flew everywhere. It was hard to say whether the dog or the chickens would have the worst of it on the flight, but the passengers were bearing the worst of it at the gate between the racket and the smell of chickens and jet fuel.

Nick and I sat pressed together on a bench, our heads back against the wall, our fingers entwined. Almost on time, we got on our plane. As we taxied away, I looked out the window to soak in one more view of the island. The last thing I saw was my yellow house with her red roof, standing alone in a sea of brown.