Undeniable Proof

“More like cursed.”

Willa had anxiously looked over her shoulder, half expecting to see Landry.

“Running from something, huh?”

“Not that it’s any of your business, but I’m trying to get away from my ex-boyfriend, if you must know.” She’d touched the bruise on her cheek that she’d gotten when the safe house the cops had put her in had been attacked.

Gator had given her a slow knowing nod, reached for the cash she’d offered him and hadn’t tried to talk her out of it.

But clearly he hadn’t wanted to bring her out here. Nor did he seem to want to leave her here. She thought about asking him why as he paused, then started the outboard.

“Send word by a fisherman or anyone heading to the mainland and I’ll come get you,” he said, his gaze softening. “Even if it’s in the middle of the night.”

Why would she want to leave in the middle of the night? His look said it wouldn’t be long before she couldn’t wait to get out off the island.

He touched the brim of his cap and turned the bow back the way they’d come. At least she thought it was the way they’d come.

She picked up the suitcases from the pier and started toward the villa, figuring she would come back for the box with her paints and art supplies. She couldn’t help but wonder what Gator would have said if he knew the truth.

That she was the only witness to the cold-blooded murder of a police officer named Zeke Hartung.

Make that missing witness.

The story, complete with sensational headlines, had been splashed across every South Florida paper followed quickly she didn’t doubt by the attack at the safe house and the death of two more officers.

As she looked up at the villa, she wondered if there was any place safe enough or far away from civilization to elude Landry Jones. If it wasn’t Cape Diablo, then no place existed.

The sound of the boat’s motor died off into the distance. She looked back once but the boat had already disappeared from sight. All she could see were mangrove islands on one horizon and the endless Gulf of Mexico on the other.

She couldn’t remember ever feeling so isolated, so alone—not even in the middle of South Dakota, miles from the nearest town. Surely all the people looking for her would have a hard time finding her. But she didn’t delude herself. She wouldn’t be safe until Landry Jones was behind bars.

Willa stopped in front of the villa. She could hear the waves lapping at the dock and the wind whispering in the palms, but also the faint sound of music.

She looked up again to see an elderly woman through the sheer curtains. The woman wore a white gown and appeared to be waltzing to the music with an invisible partner.

“Hello.”

Willa jumped at the sound of the male voice next to her, making her drop one of the suitcases.

“Here let me take that.” He stepped around her and picked up the suitcase and reached for the second one. “I thought I heard a boat.”

She could only stare at him, her heart thundering in her chest. She’d been told there were four apartments in the villa, all vacant when she’d inquired.

“Sorry. I didn’t mean to scare you,” the man said. He appeared to be in his early thirties, blond, blue-eyed and tan—her original idea of what Florida men should all look like. “What’s your apartment number?”

“Three.”

“Then you’re right up there.” He pointed through an arch. She could see a wrought iron railing, a blood-red riot of bougainvillea flowers climbing the wall behind it and a weathered door with a 3 painted crudely on it.

He took the other suitcase from her and carrying both, headed through the archway into a tiled courtyard. She started to turn back to retrieve the box with her painting supplies from the dock. “I’ll get that for you,” he said.

Still a little unsteady after the boat ride, she decided to let him and followed him through the archway, seeing that she was right—there was a pool. Unfortunately it was dark and murky, apparently abandoned years ago but never drained.

“I’m Odell Grady,” he said over his shoulder. “That’s my apartment over there.” He motioned across the pool to what had once been the pool house, she guessed.

“How many tenants are there?”

“Just you and me right now. Unless you count the old gal up there.” He motioned to a third-floor tower section of the villa where she’d seen the woman dancing. “She’s grandfathered in, so to speak.”

He stopped partway up the stairs and turned to look back at her. “You were warned about her, weren’t you?”

She hadn’t been warned about anything except the isolation and no one to meet her at the dock, but she wasn’t worried about some elderly woman who waltzed with a phantom lover. Odell was another story altogether.

“If you like peace and quiet, you definitely came to the right place,” he said as he scaled the stairs. “That’s why I came here. How about you?” He’d reached the landing and stopped next to one of the doors to turn to look back at her.

“Peace and quiet,” she agreed as she topped the stairs. She wondered if it would be possible to get either with Odell Grady around.

He nodded, openly studying her. He had put down the suitcases just outside the door and held out his hand.

It took her a moment to realize he was waiting for the key to open her door.

“Thank you. I can take it from here.”

He seemed to hesitate, then looked embarrassed. “Sorry, didn’t mean to come on so strong. This place gets to you after a while. I hadn’t realized what it would be like, not talking to another human being.”

“How long have you been here?”

“Too long obviously. I’ve been talking your ear off, sorry.” He stepped back, giving her space. “I’ll get your other package.” He turned and trotted down the stairs.

She opened the apartment door but didn’t enter, instead watching him, worrying.

Odell returned with the box. “It’s pretty heavy. Want me to set it inside?”

“Thank you.” She let him enter but stayed outside until he’d put the box down and came back out.

He must have seen how uncomfortable she was having him in her apartment. Actually being pretty much alone on the island with him—since she doubted the elderly woman upstairs would be much help if she needed it.

“So, welcome to Cape Diablo,” Odell said, dusting off his hands on his shorts. He met her gaze. He didn’t look dangerous, but then she’d thought the same thing of Landry Jones, hadn’t she.

“If you need anything, I’ll be right down there pounding on my manual typewriter. I’m a writer,” he said walking backward a few steps. “Fiction.”

She relaxed a little and felt guilty for the rude way she’d reacted to his kindness.

“How about you?”

“You mean what I do for a living?” she asked, giving herself time to come up with an answer. “I’ve been a waitress, a barmaid, a receptionist, a grocery clerk. Right now I’m just taking a break to figure out what I want to do.”

“Been there,” he said. “You’re still young. You’ll figure it out.” He cocked his head at her. “You look like an…artist to me.” He must have seen her shocked expression because he laughed. “No, I’m not psychic. The box lid came open and I saw all your art supplies.”

The box had come open? Not with the amount of tape she’d used. “It’s just a hobby.”

“Yeah, that’s how my writing is. I just hope to turn it into something more,” he said, and looked toward the Gulf. “This would be a great place to paint.” He turned back to her. “I’d love to see your work.”

“I don’t let anyone see it,” she said too quickly. “It’s just…embarrassing at this point.”

He laughed. “Probably the same reason I don’t let anyone read my work.” Another song drifted on the breeze. He glanced toward the third floor where the elderly woman was dancing again. “If you weren’t crazy when you came here, you will be.”

“I’m sorry. How long did you say you’ve been here?”

“Just since this afternoon, but long enough to go stir-crazy, although not as crazy as some people.” He made a face and cocked his head toward the tower, making a circle with his finger next to his temple.

Since this afternoon? So he’d arrived only a little earlier than she had. She felt a chill at the thought that someone had found out where she was going and Odell had been sent to wait for her.

“Thank you again for your help.”

He smiled and nodded. “My pleasure.”

Almost apologetically she turned away from him. She picked up her suitcases and stepped inside the apartment. As she started to close the door, he called from the stairs, “Hey, I never caught your name.”

“Will—Willie.” It was out before she could call it back. She was tired and just wanted to be left alone and she hadn’t thought before she’d spoken or she would have given him the name she’d planned to use. Too late for that.

“Short for something?” he asked turning on the stairs.

She was forced back out on the balcony to keep from yelling her answer. “Actually, it’s a nickname. My real name is Cara Wilson. My friends started calling me Willie and it stuck.”

“Cara,” he said. “That’s a pretty name. But Willie suits you.”

She smiled nervously and gave him a nod as she stepped back into her apartment and closed the door, leaning against it, feeling like a fool.

She concluded Odell was more lonely than anything else. Nosy and lonely. Unless she was wrong about him—the way she’d been wrong about Landry Jones. To think she had almost gotten in the car with Landry.

She shivered at the memory, her gaze skittering over the rooms where she’d be living until Landry was caught. The apartment wasn’t bad. If you liked living in a monastery. The walls had once been painted white, the ceilings were cracked and ten feet high at least. The temperature was nice and cool, though, so that meant the walls were thick.

That was a plus and the place was furnished. Kinda.

Not that any of that mattered. She would be safe here. At least she prayed that was true.

Dragging her suitcases into the bedroom, she was excited to see the wonderful light coming in through the window. She felt a sense of relief. She would be able to paint in here. In fact, she couldn’t wait to get started.

She dragged the box in. As she started to open it, she noticed that the tape was open on one corner and the flap turned back. She ran her finger along the edge of the tape. It had been cut.

Chapter Four

Willa’s heart began to pound a little harder. Someone had cut the tape to look inside the box. Odell? Was it possible he had a knife in the pocket of his shorts? A lot of men in South Dakota carried pocket knives. But in Florida?

Or could it have been someone else? The box had been on the dock unattended for some time while Odell had brought her suitcases up to her room. But who else was there?

She glanced toward the third floor. The music had stopped again. She recalled it stopping before, a break between songs before she saw the elderly woman dancing once again. Was it possible the woman had gone down to the dock to look in Willa’s belongings?

What harm could a curious old woman do anyway? Willa liked that theory better than thinking Odell had purposely cut the tape to see what was in the box. The man was nosy, but whoever had cut the box was looking for something. Looking for her?

But if whoever had looked in the box was here to kill her, then that person already knew she painted. And not even her changed appearance would fool him.

She tried to put the incident out of her mind as she unloaded her painting supplies and set up an easel by the window.

Painting relaxed her, let her escape for a while from the reality of her life, the reality that Landry Jones was still out there on the loose and she was the only witness to the murder.

Until the police captured him, she wasn’t safe. Even when he was caught, she wasn’t sure she would feel safe, possibly ever again.

She stacked up all of her art supplies on the top of the chest of drawers, hoping they would last until she got to leave here. Eventually she would run out of rent money and be forced to leave and get a job.

She moved to the window by the bed and peered out. Through the palms she could see the Gulf of Mexico. It looked endless. How odd not to be able to see land on the horizon. Just water as far as the eye could see. No wonder early man feared sailing to the edge and falling off.

Turning back to the room, she considered making the bed and taking a nap. She’d been running on fear for so long, she felt drained. She needed her life back. All she had to do, she told herself, was stay alive until Landry was caught.

She stared at the empty canvas on her easel. She had to paint. It had been days since she’d gotten the opportunity. She itched to pick up a brush.

Painting had always been her survival. When her father was killed in a tractor accident. When her first love married someone else. When her mother remarried and sold the farm, hacking away the roots that had held Willa in South Dakota.

Willa hurried to catch the last of the day’s light coming in through the palms. She never knew what she was going to paint until she had a brush in her hand and the white empty canvas in front of her.

To her, painting was exploration. A voyage to an unknown part of herself. Her work was a combination of what she saw and what she didn’t. It was a feeling captured like a thought out of thin air.

She set up her paints and went to work, the evening light fading until she was forced to turn on a lamp. It wasn’t until then that she really looked at what she’d been working on—and felt a start.

What had begun as an old building along a narrow street had turned into the street where she’d witnessed the murder. A thin slice of pale light at the back illuminated what could have been a bundle of old rags but what she knew was a body slumped against a stucco wall, the dark BMW sitting at the curb.

She stepped back from the canvas. She’d been so lost in the physical joy of painting, she hadn’t even realized that she’d been reliving the murder.

From this distance, she saw the face behind the windshield of the BMW. It was subtle, almost ghostlike, but definitely a face. Landry Jones’s face. The same one she’d drawn for the police. She remembered the investigators’ strange reactions. When she’d asked if they knew who he was, the detective who’d been questioning her assured her they knew Landry Jones only too well.

Just her luck that a known criminal had taken an interest in her. She had wanted to ask what other crimes he’d committed but didn’t want to know. Wasn’t murdering a man in cold blood on a St. Pete Beach street enough?

In the painting, Landry was peering out of the darkness not at the body of the man he’d just killed—but at her. She could almost feel the heat of his dark eyes.

She stumbled back from the painting, bumping into the sagging double bed and sitting down on the bare mattress, suddenly exhausted and near tears.

Had she been foolish to think she would be safe anywhere—let alone on this island? She would always be haunted by what had happened that night, would always see Landry Jones’s face, if not in her paintings then in her nightmares.

A tap at the door startled her. She didn’t want to answer it but knew she couldn’t pretend she’d gone out. Another tap.

“Cara? Willie?”

Odell. She groaned. Where had she come up with Cara? “Just a minute.” She glanced around the room as if there might be something lying around that would give away her true identity, but didn’t see anything. She couldn’t help the feeling that she’d already made a mistake that was going to get her in trouble. She couldn’t keep living like this.

She opened the door. “Odell,” she said as if seeing him was a surprise.

“Hi. Sorry to bother you, but I noticed you didn’t bring any food,” he said, looking sheepish. He held out a sandwich wrapped in plastic. “If you don’t want it now, you can eat it later. Turkey and cheese.”

She took the sandwich. “Thank you. It looks…great.” She actually smiled and he seemed to relax. A part of her felt bad about being so unfriendly. Back home in South Dakota her behavior would have been outright rude.

The whisper of fabric made them both turn. All Willa caught was a blur of white.

“She sneaks around here all the time like that, I guess,” Odell said of the elderly woman who passed on the third-floor balcony overhead. “Her name’s Alma Garcia. She was the nanny.”

“The nanny?”

“You don’t know the story of Cape Diablo?” he asked, sounding surprised. “The island is cursed. At least according to local legend. There have always been reports of strange happenings out here, including storms that wash up all kinds of interesting things. For decades it was home to pirates and treasure seekers who looted ships that sank or were sunk just off shore, smugglers and drug runners.”

“Who built the villa?” she asked, unable not to. The place had drawn her from the first glimpse.

“Andres Santiago, a rather notorious pirate and smuggler, and this is where it gets interesting,” Odell said, warming to his story. “Back in the late sixties, early seventies, Andres smuggled guns, drugs, anything profitable in from Central America. The Ten Thousand Islands have always been home to smugglers of all kinds because it is so remote and easy to get lost in.”

She nodded remembering how quickly she’d become lost among the mangrove islands on the way here. “You said he had a nanny?”

Odell nodded. “He lived here with his wife, Medina, and three small children from his first marriage. That wife died in childbirth. Medina was the daughter of a Central American dictator. During a revolt, her father was killed but Andres managed to rescue Medina and a devoted lieutenant named Carlos Lazarro. He brought them both to the island. Carlos still lives in that old boathouse by the pier.” Odell paused. “Do you really want to hear this?”

He didn’t give her time to answer. But she would have said yes even if he had.

“The woman up there, Alma Garcia? She was the nanny for Andres’s children.” He glanced toward the third floor. Only a faint light glowed overhead. “She went crazy after what happened.”

Willa felt a chill. “What happened?”

“First, Andres’s only son drowned in the pool. Then the whole family went missing. No one ever knew what happened to them. Alma and Carlos had been inland that night. When they came home some time after midnight, they discovered everyone gone. There was blood… The authorities suspected foul play, of course, but the case was never solved. That was thirty years ago.”

“How awful.”

“There are lots of theories. Some say Medina’s father’s enemies came and killed the whole family. Others say Andres made it look as if they’d all been killed so he could disappear with his family. In Andres’s will he made provisions for both Alma and Carlos to live on the island for the rest of their lives. That’s why the villa was divided into apartments since the money Andres left has long since run out. A lawyer friend of the family handles everything.”

Willa saw the woman sneak back into her apartment. The front of her white gown was covered with what appeared to be dirt.

“When I got here, I saw her digging,” Odell said. “Local legend has it that Andres Santiago hid a small fortune on this island.”

She felt her eyes widen.

Odell laughed. “If it were true, fortune hunters would have found it over the last thirty years.”

“I’m surprised Alma and Carlos would want to stay here after what happened,” Willa said, seeing the villa so differently now.

“I guess they had nowhere else to go. Alma spends her days creeping around here like some kind of ghost. Carlos is the caretaker but most of the time from what I can tell, he’s on the other side of the island in his boat fishing.” He seemed to notice that she was still holding her sandwich. “You probably want to get that in the fridge and I’ve talked your ear off again. Sorry.”

“No, I enjoyed hearing the story, and thank you for the sandwich.”

He smiled. “Holler if you need anything. And don’t worry about Alma and Carlos. They seem harmless enough.”

“Thanks.” Willa stepped back into her apartment and closed the door. She waited a few moments, until she heard Odell’s footfalls retreat, before she locked the door.

After she put the sandwich in the fridge, she dragged her suitcase over to the marred old chest of drawers and unpacked. At the bottom of her suitcase, she found the sheets and towels she’d brought. She made the bed and hung up the towels in the bathroom, surprised to see there was a huge clawfoot tub.

Some of her fatigue evaporated at the thought of sinking neck-deep into a tub of hot water scented with her favorite bath soap. She popped in the plug and turned on the water. The old pipes groaned and complained but after a few moments, wonderfully warm water began to fill the tub.

Quickly she checked to make sure she’d locked the door before she went back to the bathroom and stripped off her clothing and stepped into the tub.

Everything was going to be all right, she told herself as she immersed herself in the warm water and began to soap her body in the rich lather. From somewhere she heard music again, the song older than the woman on the third floor. Past the music, she heard voices, though too faint to make out the words.

She couldn’t help but think about the story Odell had told her. The history of Cape Diablo and the Santiago family fascinated her. She’d felt something when she’d stepped off the boat and looked up at the crumbling old villa. A sense of mystery. A story unfolding. Or had she sensed something else? The spirits of the lost souls? Or a sense of foreboding as if she’d been drawn to this island for another purpose?

She shivered, wondering again what could have happened to the family and even more intrigued by the woman who’d stayed on upstairs.

Odell certainly was knowledgeable about Cape Diablo. She felt foolish for suspecting him of having other motives for being on the island. And yet, anyone could learn the history of the place. And pretending to be a writer gave him the perfect cover.

She shook her head at the path her mind had taken. She hated that she was suspicious of everyone now.

Finishing her bath, she toweled dry and dressed in a sleeveless nightshirt. She felt better, calmer, back in control somewhat, she thought as she started to wipe the steam from the mirror and was momentarily startled by her own unfamiliar image in the glass.

Her hand went to her short curly auburn hair. It did make her eyes seem larger. Or that could have been the fear.

She picked up the glasses from where she’d left them on the sink. The lenses were clear, but the plastic frames distracted from her face enough to make her look entirely different from the woman she’d been just weeks before.

She touched her hair again, missing the feel of her long, naturally straight blond hair inherited from her Swedish ancestors.

But she would let her hair grow out again. After Landry was caught, after the trial—when it was safe to go back to her life, she told herself, trying hard to believe she could ever reclaim it.

Glancing around the apartment, she decided the first item of business would be to make this place more her own. What little furniture there was had been shoved against each wall.

She grabbed the end of the couch and pulled it away from the wall and saw at once why it had been pushed against the wall as it had been.

There was a sizable hole in the wall behind it.

On closer inspection, she saw that the hole—four inches wide, a good foot high and seemingly endless in depth—had been chipped into the adobe wall. She couldn’t tell how deep it ran. Not without a flashlight.

As she straightened she noticed a scrap of paper on the floor near the hole. She picked it up and saw that it was a piece of a torn photograph. The piece appeared to be part of a face covered with something like a gauzy veil or a film of some kind.