“You found Georgia and Travis?” David asked.
She nodded gravely.
“You found the bodies?” Sean asked.
“I did,” Vanessa said. “Lew and Jay came quickly down to the beach, then the others…and then the Bahamian authorities.”
“Let me see if I’ve got this straight, though,” Sean said. “Georgia and Travis were found dead. Georgia had been running down the beach. Where was Travis?”
“No one knew,” Vanessa said.
“Then why didn’t you look for him?” Sean asked.
“Frankly, we thought he was part of a huge prank being pulled on Georgia. Jay was aggravated with him. We did go down the beach—Lew, Jay and I—and there was nothing there. Except—”
“Except?” Liam asked.
“The sand where we later found the two had been churned up. It looked as if maybe there had been something stuck in the sand.”
“And that didn’t bother you?” Sean asked.
“We were filming a horror movie. We thought that someone was playing an elaborate prank, and, as I said, that Travis was involved in the prank. I’m afraid that a lot of pranks are carried out on film sets,” Vanessa said evenly. She took a deep breath. “Anyway, Georgia was in terror—she wasn’t going to stay on the island. She was having an absolute fit, so Carlos said that he could take her into Miami and head back first thing in the morning. We all thought it was best. But Georgia and Travis were found on the beach, and Carlos and the boat disappeared.”
“I’m not sure there’s much of a mystery there,” Sean said. “Apparently, Carlos stole the boat after he killed the two.”
“I don’t believe it, not for a minute,” Vanessa said. “The police, the Coast Guard, the FBI—every known agency looked for the boat and Carlos, but it was as if they had vanished. What you don’t understand is that Carlos Roca wasn’t capable of doing something so horrible. He was one of the most gentle people I’ve ever met.”
“I wasn’t in on the investigation, but I do remember it,” Liam said. “And I’m sorry to tell you this, but most of those law-enforcement agencies believe that Carlos Roca did murder the two young people and steal the boat.”
“I don’t care what they believe!” Vanessa said.
She was surprised when Sean said, “Of course, there’s another scenario. Someone else hijacked the boat, someone who might have already taken Travis. That person either killed Carlos first to take control of Georgia or had Carlos knocked out somewhere. Then did the grisly deed on the island and dumped Carlos in the Atlantic.”
David leaned forward. “Okay, here’s the curious part—where was Travis? Had he been killed and his body hidden? And was it possible for someone to have killed him, hidden his body and managed to go after Carlos and Georgia in the boat, get back to the island without being seen, find the one body, stage the gruesome death scene, and then get rid of Carlos? And how, with the alarm that must have gone out, could they have gotten away with the boat? Everyone in the Bahamas, South Florida and all of the Caribbean would have been on the alert.”
“Well, stealing the boat, gassing it up, changing it—that seems the easiest part of it,” Sean said.
“I agree with you—where Travis was when the whole thing started would be a nice piece of the riddle.”
“Dead,” Vanessa said softly.
“Probably dead, but where? And how was he killed, and then not found until later?” Sean mused.
“These are the questions everyone has asked time and time again, and they haven’t found the answers. But they aren’t people who know the legends, know the area—”
“Snacks and beer!” Katie announced cheerfully from the hallway.
She set nachos with steaming cheese and other ingredients on the coffee table and passed around the tray she carried with ice-cold beer bottles.
Vanessa accepted a beer with a gaze that said both “Thanks” and “How could you have left me alone in here?”
Katie smiled. “I know you all,” Katie said, sitting, “and there isn’t a better mystery out there!”
“I have a lot of work to do now,” Liam said. “And it’s a bad time, a very bad time, at the station.”
“Nothing has been decided,” Sean said.
“We’ve all agreed to talk about it. We’ve talked about focusing on a number of mysteries and legends, but we haven’t decided what our focus is going to be,” David said. “It’s Sean’s decision. I am gung-ho on the idea of pooling our resources and working locally, but Sean’s been doing the budget, mapping and research, so it’s his decision.”
“Yes, but if you’re thinking about the story, I ought to be on the trip,” Liam said. He looked at Vanessa. “It hasn’t occurred to you to be afraid? The killer or killers were never caught. They might still be out there,” he said.
“Afraid?” she asked softly. “I still have nightmares. I see Georgia alive and screaming, and I see the heads and the arms sticking out of the sand. I remember being terrified of the dark for nearly a year. And then I got very angry, and I finally figured out that I’d probably have nightmares for the rest of my life if I didn’t do something to discover the truth. I think the killer is a coward—he worked in the dark, at night. I think there has to be a way to stand against him. That starts with finding him—and when he’s found, I don’t care if they give him life or the death penalty, just so long as he can never do anything so horrible to anyone else, ever again.”
She stood up. They were going to agree, or they weren’t.
“I’ll let you all talk,” she said. “Katie knows where to find me. Thank you for your time.”
Afraid? Yes, she’d been so afraid….
Her only fear now was that they would say no.
The Happy-Me sat off the coast of Bimini in shallow water. Jenny and Mark Houghton and their friends Gabby and Dale Johnson had planned on camping on the beach, but they had gotten lazy. They hadn’t tied up at the dock because they’d kept the boat in the shallow water, and talked so late that the sun had gone down.
Both retired, the couples motored the short distance to Haunt Island several times a year.
Gabby and Dale had gone to bed, Mark was still topside and Jenny was humming as she put away the last of the dishes. They’d dined on spaghetti and meatballs, heated up in the microwave.
She was startled to hear her husband call her name. “Jenny!”
She nearly dropped the dish in her hand, it had been so quiet. She set it on the counter and hurried up the ladder to the deck. For a moment, it struck her that they might as well be alone in the world. Entirely alone. There were a few stars in a black-velvet sky, and it seemed that there was no horizon, the sea melded with the sky. The lights of the Happy-Me were colorful and brave against the night—and pitiful, as well.
“Hand me the grapple pole there, quickly, Jenny,” Mark said, leaning over the hull and staring into the water.
“What?”
She was concerned. Mark had been given a clean bill of health after having suffered a heart attack on his seventieth birthday, but he thought himself a young man still, at times. And he was acting like a crazy one now.
“That one,” he said, spinning around. There was a grappling hook on a long pole set in its place in metal brackets against the wall of the cabin.
“But, Mark—”
“Please, Jenny, please—there’s someone in the water!”
She heard it then: a gasped and garbled plea for help.
While Mark continued to stare into the water, Jenny reached for the hook, almost ripping it from the wall to bring to Mark.
He stuck it out into the water, calling out, “Here, here, take this, we’ll get you aboard!
“Ah!” he murmured. Jenny saw that someone had the pole and that Mark was managing to pull the person closer to the boat.
“The flashlight, get a flashlight!” Mark said.
Jenny turned to do so. As she did, she heard another gasping sound, and within it a little cry of terror.
She spun around.
The sound was coming from Mark. Because someone…something…was rising from the sea.
It couldn’t be. It was a bony pirate, half-eaten, so it appeared, in rags. Bones and rags, and it was laughing….
“No!” Jenny gasped herself.
The thing reached out and grabbed Mark around the neck. It lifted him and tossed him overboard. Jenny started to scream in protest, horrified for Mark, her companion, friend, lover, husband for all of her life.
And then…
In terror herself. For her own life.
Because now the thing pulled a sword. A fat sword. Maybe it wasn’t a sword. Maybe it was a machete. Maybe it was…
Her last conscious thought was, What the hell does it matter what it is?
It swung in the night.
She never managed to scream. Her windpipe was severed before she could do so. She dropped to the deck, her head dangling from the remnants of her neck.
“Quickly,” said the one to the other, joining him on board. “Quickly. The other two, before they wake up!”
The deck was drenched as they walked across it and down the ladder to the cabin below.
Gabby and Dale never woke up.
For a while, the Happy-Me rolled in the gentle waves of the night, beneath the velvet darkness of the sky.
Then it sank to a shallow grave.
3
Vanessa had the dreams again that night.
They had started the night on the island when Georgia had talked about the monsters, left the island with Carlos—and wound up murdered with her head on the sand.
For the first weeks after the incident, they’d come frequently. They would start with her being Isabella, rising from the sea in her period gown, covered with seaweed.
Vanessa had agreed to play the small role of Isabella, and the day when they had filmed her in the costume had turned out to be fun—after she’d calmed down from being aggravated. There she had been in that gown, floating—a corpse that had come to the surface, about to open its long-dead eyes—and they were supposed to have been filming from beneath her. But in the middle of the shoot, they’d gotten distracted by a school of barracuda, and she’d looked up at last to see that the boat was far away and there was no sign of the others. She was a good swimmer, but the seas were beginning to rise and the gown was heavy. She lay there cursing them, then called out, hoping someone on the boat would hear her.