Shadowkiller (25 page)

“Did you notice which ones? I'm already sick of fast food.”

“So am I.”

The girls, naturally, are not. Much to their delight, they'd eaten breakfast at McDonald's and lunch at Arby's, something they get to do maybe once or twice a year back home in the land of healthy snacks and organic everything.

Allison pulls out her iPhone and taps on a search engine app. “I'll see what's around here.”

“There's a children's museum around here,” Hudson tells her, consulting her atlas.

“I meant restaurants.”

“I know! I mean for after dinner, Mommy.”

“After dinner we're all going to bed,” Mack informs her.

“But I wanted to go sightseeing!”

“Stop whining, Hudson!”

“Don't snap at her, Mack!” Allison immediately regrets contradicting him in front of the kids, something they both try never to do. But her nerves are fraying fast—and so are everyone else's.

To his credit, Mack apologizes. “I know you're just excited to be here, right, Huddy?”

She nods vigorously.

“We'll have to make sure we come back another time.”

“Promise, Daddy?”

“Promise.”

“You mean we'll come back to Cleveland?” Hudson sounds like an attorney repeating a witness's testimony for the court record.

“Sure.” He looks at Allison. “Right, Mommy?”

“Sure, Daddy.” She rolls her eyes. “Why not? Another fourteen-hour drive to Cleveland will be a breeze.”

“Hudson told me it wasn't supposed to take fourteen hours,” Madison speaks up, and her sister nods vigorously.

“My atlas said it was s'posed to be less than nine.”

“That's not allowing for stops,” Allison points out. They'd made quite a few—several for the bathroom, a couple for more coffee to keep the drivers alert, and of course, breaks for breakfast and lunch.

“It's not allowing for holiday weekend traffic, either,” Mack puts in, braking and flipping on the left signal and waiting to make what looks like an impossible turn onto the highway.

Traffic, traffic, and more traffic—even here.

They thought they'd seen the worst of it this morning near the junction with Interstate 81, which branched off south toward Hershey. But they hit another massive crunch near the outlet malls of Grove City. Then they were stuck for over two hours behind a pileup involving a jackknifed tractor-trailer just north of Youngstown.

So much for her theory that the Midwest would be uncrowded. It isn't here in suburban Cleveland, anyway. Probably farther west.

Mack finally makes a right turn, then a U-turn at the next light—an illegal one, but Allison bites her tongue. She gazes out the window as reminders of her old life fly past. A field of corn, a parking lot carnival, grocery and retail store chains you don't see in the Northeast: Kroger's, Von Maur, Cracker Barrel . . .

“Crackers! I love crackers!” Hudson shouts, seeing the sign. “Can we go there?”

Allison's mind tumbles back to her own childhood. Her friend Tammy Connolly's mom was a waitress at the local Cracker Barrel restaurant. Once in a while, Allison and Tammy visited her there, and she would buy them old-fashioned candy buttons from the country store at the front of the restaurant.

“Might as well. What do you think, Allie?”

“Hmm?” She gives Mack a blank look.

“Cracker Barrel. Should we eat there?”

She nods, toying with the iPhone in her hand, wondering what ever happened to Tammy.

“Too bad it's on the left-hand side of the road.” Shaking his head, Mack brakes and puts on the turn signal in the face of an endless stream of oncoming traffic.

Maybe I should look up Tammy
, Allison thinks. She wouldn't want to actually
see
her, of course—they'd have nothing in common after all these years. She's just curious, now that the memories are trickling in, about where life has taken her old friend.

Before she can change her mind, she types “Tammy Connolly, Nebraska,” into the phone's open search engine.

The query comes back with thousands of results, as she'd expected. But the top one seems to fit. There's a Tamara Connolly Pratt, age thirty-five, living in Ashland, a small town between Omaha and Lincoln.

Of course, they'll be driving right past there tomorrow and have a reservation to spend the night nearby, at the famous Cornhusker Hotel in Lincoln.

Tamara Pratt has a Facebook page. Allison, who does not, is blocked from viewing her photo or any information about her.

She changes her search engine query to “Tamara Connolly Pratt, Ashland, Nebraska,” and is routed to several other sites. One lists an e-mail address.

“Mommy!”

Allison blinks, realizes Mack is pulling into a parking space at the restaurant, and Madison is waiting for her reply to a question she didn't hear.

“What, Maddy?”

“I said, do they have anything besides crackers here?”

“Oh . . . sure they do. They have chicken and French fries and all kinds of things you like.”

“Do they have spaghetti?” she asks, as her little brother grabs a fistful of her long blond hair.

“I don't think so, but—”

“Ouch!” Poor Madison, always so patient, is trying to disentangle her hair from J.J.'s fingers.

“J.J., no!” Allison says sharply.

“Mommy, I really feel like spaghetti.” Madison sounds as though she's going to burst into tears.

“You know what they definitely have?” Allison says quickly. “They have candy. All kinds of candy.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I used to go to Cracker Barrel when I was a little girl. My friend Tammy's mom worked there.”

“
Here?
” Hudson asks, with interest, as they climb out of the car.

“No, it's a chain. There was one in my hometown.”

Predictably, Allison's firstborn is full of questions about that. “Does her mom still work there? Does she get free candy? Can we go see her in your hometown?”

“She's not there anymore. She moved away and we lost touch, but . . . I just found out she's still in Nebraska.”

As she leans into the backseat to get J.J., Allison sees Mack glance at her in surprise.

“I looked her up,” she tells him simply, and puts her son into her husband's outstretched hands.

“I thought you didn't want to do that.”

“I changed my mind.”

“Are we going to go see Tammy when we get to Nebraska, Mommy?” Hudson persists.

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Here, hold my hand. You too, Maddy. This parking lot is crazy. I bet there's going to be a long wait for a table even at this hour.”

As they make their way toward the entrance, with its trademark rows of wooden rocking chairs—most filled with customers waiting for tables—Allison's thoughts drift back to Tammy, her daughter's question echoing in her ears.

Why not?

L
aJuanda's Cuban heritage is rooted in this part of the world, but she's been to the Caribbean only twice in her life. The first time was on her Jamaican honeymoon, when she and Rene toasted their marriage and promised each other they'd return annually. The next—and last—visit was the following year on her anniversary.

“I feel like we belong here,” she told her husband as they sat holding hands on the beach in Negril, watching a bright pink sun sink into the turquoise sea. “There's something about this place that speaks to me.”

“That's because it's in your blood.”

“I'm Cuban, not Jamaican.”

“Cuba is only a hundred miles away from here. I think your subconscious is sensing that you're close to home.”

“Home is Miami. That's the only place I've ever lived.”

“Yes, but you're Caribbean at heart,” Rene pointed out. “You're free-spirited and resilient and full of passion and you live in the moment.”

That was entirely true back then. Still is, on some levels. But life got in the way of her plans to reconnect with her island roots and spend every anniversary barefoot on those sugary sands. Rene decided to go to law school, she made detective, he passed the bar, they wound up with a mortgage and a couple of kids . . .

Now here she is, all alone on a tropical island very much like the one where they'd honeymooned twenty years ago. Rene is back in Coral Gables with the kids, attempting to hold down the fort at home in the midst of trying a grueling case.

“When will you be back?” their oldest son, Ricky, asked when he dropped her off at the airport this afternoon.

“I'm not sure. Maybe tomorrow. Maybe even tonight.”

“
Tonight?
”

Of course not tonight. Even if the island proved to be a dead end, there were no flights back to Miami until tomorrow afternoon.

But with Rene absorbed in his trial, LaJuanda doesn't want her teenagers tempted to take advantage of her absence with a free-for-all. Let them think she might show up at any minute.

“It all depends on how long it takes for me to find out what I need to know,” she told her son, and kissed him good-bye.

Thunderstorms were moving into Miami as they took off, and most of the flight over open water was turbulent.

LaJuanda barely noticed. She was absorbed in rereading everything she'd learned about what had happened on Saint Antony after the Carousel, with Molly Temple on board, dropped anchor.

Namely: the explosion that very evening at Jimmy's Big Iguana, a bar not far from the harbor. Eight people were killed, including Jimmy Bolt, the owner. According to published accounts, the local police had confirmed foul play but had no suspects. It seemed that for every local who adored the famously charismatic Jimmy, there was another who despised him—perhaps enough to want him dead.

Apparently, one of his enemies had planted a bomb in a storage room off the bar's kitchen. Had it gone off just an hour earlier, a police officer was quoted as saying, there might have been dozens, perhaps hundreds, of casualties. Jimmy's Big Iguana was popular with cruise ship passengers.

“Luckily, it happened after they were all back on their ships,” the officer told the press.

According to the initial publications, it appeared that the dead included six men and two women, though the remains were badly burned.

She wondered right away about the women, especially when she read that the bodies were too charred to be identified right away. It took a few days for their names to be published in the local papers. When they were, LaJuanda put aside her notion that Molly could have been among them, because all were confirmed as locals. One of the two female victims had stopped at the bar after work with her husband, who'd also been killed; the other was a bartender at the Big Iguana.

LaJuanda couldn't help but think that there was something fishy about the timing of the explosion. What if there had been another body and the investigators had missed it? Or covered it up? The small island police force wasn't entirely corrupt, but it had endured its share of well-publicized scandals in recent years. That would be good reason, LaJuanda decided as the plane landed, to keep a low profile for the time being, rather than approach the local authorities with her suspicion, which is . . .

What, exactly?

All she knows for certain is that Molly Temple got off the Carousel on that island, and she didn't get back on. Someone else did—and shortly after it sailed, there was an explosion on shore.

It might have been a coincidence.

Something told her that it wasn't.

By the time she had cleared customs and stepped into the bedlam outside the airport terminal—which resembled a Quonset hut—LaJuanda was itching to roll up her sleeves and get to work. But first, she had to check into her hotel, a moderately priced resort on the opposite end of the island. She waited in a long line to get a cab, and after a misleadingly breakneck start along the relatively new highway from the airport, the ride slowed to a creep and crawl when they reached a traffic rotary. The driver took a spur that led through the main harbor town, where several anchored cruise ships dwarfed the cluster of low buildings near the pier.

Armed with a map, LaJuanda looked longingly at the turnoff she knew led to the site of the Big Iguana. But it would have to wait. She couldn't conduct an investigation while dragging luggage along with her.

The car bumped along through dusty streets crowded with cars, the occasional dog or chicken, and people who reflected the island's African, British, and Spanish cultural melting pot. At last, they left the town behind and began the climb up a steep coastal road with hairpin curves that made LaJuanda regret having asked the driver to please hurry.

She needn't have bothered. When they reached the hotel, a long line of waiting guests—many of them Americans LaJuanda recognized from her packed flight—snaked through the open-air lobby. Official check-in wasn't until four, and when it got under way—well after that—the line moved at a
torturous
pace.

“Guess we're on island time now,” the man in front of LaJuanda commented.

“Guess so.”

“Are you here for the pharmaceutical sales conference?”

“Yes,” she said, without missing a beat. “You too?”

He nodded. “Guess I'll catch you at the mixer later. Can I buy you a drink? You look like a red wine kind of girl. Or maybe one of those frozen drinks. Do you like rum?”

“Can't stand the stuff.” The lies were just falling off her tongue today, LaJuanda thought with amusement, pushing her hair back with her left hand, making sure he saw her wedding band.

She wasn't above letting a stranger attempt to hit on her when it might lead to information, but she wouldn't waste her time on an out-of-town pharmaceutical salesman who couldn't shed any light on her case.

At last, she was able to get into her room, where she quickly changed her clothes, unpacked her camera, and made it back down here to the harbor before sunset.