Rebel Island

Ty shuddered. “All right, I’m just saying—”

The old man, Benjamin Lindy, appeared at the end of the corridor. “You gentlemen coming or not?”

The old man gave Chase the creeps, but he tried for a light tone. “Yeah…uh, sir. We’re on the way.”

Mr. Lindy scowled, but he started down the hall.

“We’ve got to play along,” Chase said. “And for Christ’s sake, Ty, stop looking like you’re going to throw up.”

“I feel like that.”

“Well, don’t. Nobody else here knows shit about what’s going on. I want to keep it that way.”

“What about the dead cop?” Markie asked. “And Chris Stowall?”

“We’ll figure it out,” Chase said. “Believe me. Stowall is not going to fuck with me again.”

He led his friends to the parlor. Anger made red spots dance in front of his eyes. He’d been played for a fool. This whole setup sucked. But he was going to make the best of it. He would come out of this weekend in one piece, even if he was the only one who did.

7

Even when I was a child, the hotel’s parlor was decorated in dead fish. A five-foot-long marlin curved over the fireplace. Redfish and bass lined the walls. Their frozen eyes and gasping mouths used to scare the hell out of me—almost as much as the hotel’s owner.

Every time we arrived at the hotel, my parents would make me sit with them in the parlor while they “caught up” with Mr. Eli. Garrett was excused from this ritual, theoretically because he was helping Alex Huff with the luggage, which I resented to no end.

Mr. Eli had bought the hotel at public auction after federal agents seized it from its previous owner, a Thirties bootlegger who had been South Texas’s answer to Al Capone.

Eli was eccentric in a different way. He was an old bachelor who never wore anything but pajamas and a Turkish bathrobe and slippers. He smelled faintly of lilacs. His skin was milky, his hair as black as an oil slick, and he had a strange mustache shaped like a seagull’s wings on his upper lip. Years later, I realized that he must’ve been gay—one of those men who choose, for whatever reason, to live in a climate as hospitable to them as the Arctic is to a tropical plant. That wasn’t what scared me. It was the fact that he seemed able to read minds. He would look at me with his watery green eyes and say “I believe young Tres is thirsty for lemonade,” or “I see you had a hard year at school,” or “Don’t worry about Alex. He means well.” Whatever happened to be troubling me at the moment.

In all, Mr. Eli seemed like the sort of man my father would detest, but my father always showed him the greatest deference.

On our last visit to Rebel Island as a family, Mr. Eli greeted my father in his usual manner. “Sheriff Navarre, shot anyone lately?”

“Not lately, sir,” my father replied. Whether it was true or not, I didn’t know.

We sat in the parlor with all the glassy-eyed fish staring down at us. My mother told Mr. Eli he was looking well. In truth the old man looked paler and thinner every summer, but he accepted the compliment with a nod. My father and Mr. Eli talked about the weather and fishing conditions. Mr. Eli seemed to know everything about the sea, though as far as I could tell he never set foot outside the hotel.

After a while, Mr. Eli asked what we would like to drink, and my father requested whiskey.

“Jack,” my mother chided. “Remember?”

I didn’t know what she was talking about, but apparently my father did. His face flushed. He could be a scary man, my father. His huge girth was intimidating enough, and when he got angry his eyes were as bright as a hawk’s.

“I’ll have a drink with our host,” he told my mother.

“Jack, you promised.”

My father rose from his chair. The air in the room was as sharp as broken glass. He turned to Mr. Eli and said, “If you’ll excuse me, sir.”

Once he left, my mother muttered a quick apology to Mr. Eli. “I’d better go, ah, talk to him. Tres, stay here, will you?”

That was the last thing I wanted—but my mother left me alone with Mr. Eli.

The old man smiled so his seagull mustache seemed to spread its wings. “Let’s get you a soda.”

He called for the maid, an elderly African American woman named Delilah. She brought me a Coke over ice with a maraschino cherry. Delilah had scars on the inside of her wrists, crisscrossed swollen pink lines like Chinese words. I’d asked my father about those scars once, and he’d told me that Mr. Eli had saved Delilah’s life. He wouldn’t explain how.

I sat on the sofa, drinking my soda and trying not to look at Mr. Eli. I wanted to leave, but my mother had ordered me to stay here. For once, I hoped Mr. Eli would read my mind: take pity on me and tell me to go away.

“Alex fixed the fishing boat,” he said. “Perhaps he can take you out.”

“Maybe,” I said halfheartedly.

“You don’t like Alex,” Mr. Eli said. “But you must be patient with him.”

“Why?”

Mr. Eli nodded. “Fair question. Alex and his father have had a hard life, Tres. A lot of tragedy. But they’re good people. Loyal and compassionate.”

I couldn’t believe Mr. Eli was talking about the same kid who stuck bottle rockets in my shorts.

Mr. Eli smoothed a fold in his bathrobe. “Tres, I take in all kinds—all sorts of wounded souls. Enough time on this island can heal most scars eventually. Alex, as far as I know, is the only person who’s ever been born here. That makes him special, in my opinion. I have a feeling someday Alex is going to pay me back many times over.”

“Pay you back for what?” I asked.

Mr. Eli smiled benignly. “I think it’s safe to go to your room now, Tres. 102, as usual, but I’d knock first.”

And so I left Mr. Eli in the parlor. Years afterward, I wondered if he’d been including the Navarre family among the wounded souls he’d invited to Rebel Island. I decided he probably had.

Now, so many years later, the same marlin hung over the mantel. The trophies were a little dustier, but they had the same glassy eyes and surprised expressions, not too different from the half-dozen guests who were milling around the room.

I looked at Alex. “Where’s Chris?”

He chewed his thumbnail. “I’m not sure. Jose, the cook, said he was helping move the body—”

“They moved the body?”

Alex blinked. “Hey, I didn’t—they just—”

“Whose brilliant idea was that?”

Next to me, Garrett tugged on my sleeve. “Yo, little bro. Come here a sec. Alex, man, go get yourself a drink or something.”

Garrett wheeled himself into the hallway and waited for me to follow. “Back off Alex, okay? He’s having a tough time.”

“He’s being evasive,” I said. “And he’s being stupid. His staff just ruined a crime scene.”

“You never liked him, did you?”

“Garrett, that is not the point.”

He wheeled his chair back and forth, digging tracks in the carpet. “Little bro, Alex is having some trouble. I mean, even before tonight. I didn’t ask you down here just for the honeymoon.”

“My brother had a selfish ulterior motive? What a surprise.”

“Yeah, well. The truth is—”

Maia came up behind him and placed her hands on Garrett’s shoulders. She looked better after lying down. The color had returned to her face.

“I hate to interrupt,” she said, glancing inside the parlor, “but it looks like your audience is ready.”

If they were my audience, I needed a warm-up act.

The upset blond lady sat in an armchair. She was wearing pink silk pajamas and hugging a pillow like she was afraid I’d hit her. The three college kids stood at the wet bar, browsing the labels on liquor bottles. There was the redheaded guy, a big bald dude and a skinny Latino kid with nervous eyes and shaggy black hair. Two staff members—the cook and the maid—were casting me worried glances from the steps by the pool table. The only person who seemed at ease was the old man, Benjamin Lindy, immaculate in his charcoal suit, sitting cross-legged on the sofa next to Alex, and even Lindy was looking at me warily, as if I might try to sell him something.

Then there was the storm, which was an audience member as much as any of the people. It resonated in the timbers of the house, making the walls creak and the floor vibrate. There were no outside windows in the room, but I could feel the storm grinding, like a surgeon’s saw cutting into bone.

“So,” I said. “My name is Tres Navarre. I, uh—”

“You a cop?” the redheaded college kid asked.

“No.”

“Then why the hell are you in charge?”

“Nobody said I was in charge.”

“Because he’s a private investigator,” Alex offered.

“Was a private investigator,” I corrected.

“And he knows a lot more than any of us about what to do when there’s a murder.”

The storm kept sawing into the timbers.

The cook raised his hand. “Señor, it was for sure, then, homicidio?”

His accent was borderland Spanish—Laredo, maybe, or Juárez.

“You’re Jose?” I asked. “The one who moved the body?”

He glanced at the maid, then nodded. Something about the way the two of them sat together, leaning toward each other as if for protection, told me they were married. As mad as I was about Jose moving the body, I decided I’d better not berate him too badly in front of his wife.

“All right, Jose,” I said. “You noticed the gunshot wound in Mr. Longoria’s chest?”

“Claro, señor.”

“Did you happen to find a gun when you were in the room?”

“No, señor.”

“Then we can be pretty sure it was murder. A person who commits suicide doesn’t normally hide the weapon after he shoots himself. Besides, Longoria was a U.S. Marshal. He’d rented a room with two beds. There was a pair of cut handcuffs on one bed.”

“A prisoner?” the blond lady asked. “You think he was escorting a prisoner?”

Her tone surprised me. I expected hysterics, but she sounded calm and alert.

“That’s possible,” I admitted.

“But…” She looked around, like she was afraid to say more. “That can’t be it.”

“The young lady is right,” Mr. Lindy said. “It doesn’t make sense. Why would a marshal escort a prisoner here? Rebel Island isn’t on the way to anywhere.”

“I’d like to understand that, too,” I said. “Did any of you see the marshal when he arrived? Was he with anyone?”

No one answered.

Jose and the maid shook their heads.

The redheaded college kid cleared his throat. “So let me get this straight. You’re telling us there’s, like, an escaped fugitive on the island.”

Alex was silently pleading with me to tone it down, to avoid further panic in his hotel.