port.
No sign of anyone.
I scurried on my belly for the edge of the jungle. In the shelter of the bushes and trees, I got to my feet. Then I snuck through the thick foliage until the cove came into view again.
From my new position, I had a full, wide view.
Off to the right, perhaps a hundred yards beyond the anchored cabin cruiser, a dock jutted out from the shore. Floating at the end of the dock were two dinghies. One of them had probably been used to transport people (Matt and the woman?) ashore from the anchored cruiser. The other looked a lot like our dinghy.
I’d last seen it heading north, Wesley aboard, when he was making his getaway after splitting open Andrew’s head.
He must’ve brought our dinghy here, and docked it.
I hardly got a chance to think about the dinghies, though, because the house suddenly caught my attention.
For my high-school graduation present, just last summer, my parents took me on a special trip.
It started with spending a week in Memphis, Tennessee.
There, I almost got trampled to death by a mob of spectators in the lobby of the Peabody Hotel when I tried to catch a glimpse of the damn ducks that march through twice a day. I almost got scared to death when we visited the Civil Rights Museum at the old Lorraine Motel where Martin Luther King got shot. My white parents and I were pretty much the only people of that shade roaming through the museum, which seems to be a monument to the evils of the white man.
Memphis wasn’t all bad, though. It had delicious barbeque and fabulous music. Every night, we walked from our hotel to Beale Street, where the blues were born. Beale Street was great.
While staying in Memphis, we also visited Elvis’s home, Graceland.
The house on the cove didn’t remind me of Graceland.
No, this house was what I’d imagined Graceland would be like: a huge plantation-style mansion.
Graceland had turned out to be smaller, more modern than I’d expected. But I had a chance to see plenty of actual plantation houses after leaving Memphis.
My real graduation present wasn’t the visit to Memphis, but a trip down Old Man River on an authentic paddlewheel steamboat, the Mississippi Queen. (For one thing, I’m a big fan of Mark Twain.) We spent six days and nights on the river, and ended up in New Orleans.
Along the way, we stopped at places like Vicksburg and Natchez. And visited God-only-knows how many antebellum homes. These were plantation houses built in the period before the War Between the States. Big old hunchers, usually three storys high, full of narrow stairways and tiny rooms, their outsides loaded with columns, balconies and verandas.
They were very interesting until you’d been through about two of them. After that, they mostly looked alike. (Mom is big on antiques and Dad is a Civil War buff, so they were happy as pigs in slop. My fondness for Mark Twain didn’t extend far enough, though, to cover endless, dreary tours of mansions.) The deal is, the white mansion beyond the cove looked as if it had been plucked off the grounds of an old cotton or tobacco plantation on the Mississippi, and plonked down here.
I gaped at it, stunned.
What the hell was an ante-bellum mansion doing on a little lost island like this one?
My imagination told me that a Southern Gentleman had settled here, long ago. Maybe he’d lost his original plantation house during the War Between the States (most of them went up in smoke, though you wouldn’t think so if you ever got pushed into touring them), so he’d sailed to this island to start over again—far from the Yankees— and built this home in the image of the one he’d lost.
Sort of a romantic notion, and probably wrong.
Maybe it was built in the 1980s by a rich guy with a weird fondness for Scarlett O'Hara (or Rhett).
I kept staring at it from my hiding place at the edge of the jungle.
I would’ve been pretty thrilled to find any house at all.
But this!
I felt as if I’d taken one small step into The Twilight Zone. All I needed was Connie to give me the “doo-de- do-do” music and her Serling intro—One Rupert Conway, eighteen, took a little walk along the beach one day in search of his missing ladies. Instead of finding the ladies, he found himself venturing into a strange land ruled by the limits of the imagination…
I stared at the mansion for a long time.
It had probably been the home of Matt and the woman I’d found in the lagoon. Just as the cabin cruiser and one of the dinghies must’ve been theirs.
Theirs until Wesley came along.
He had taken everything from them: their home, their boats, their lives.
And then he’d taken over.
All his, now.
Maybe he’d brought us to this island—killed our men and captured our women—because he wanted belles for his cotillions.
Or servants for his mansion.
Or slaves.
Recon
After watching for a long time and seeing nobody, I made my way through the jungle. I moved cautiously, stopping often to check around and listen. Usually, I stayed away from the cove. Every so often, though, I snuck closer to it for another look.
I saw nobody: not on the cabin cruiser, not on the dinghies or dock, not in the water or along the shore, not in or around the mansion. Nowhere.
Nor did I hear any voices or other sounds, such as pounding, that would tell of people nearby. Of course, it would’ve taken some major noise to reach me through all the squawks and squeals and shrieks from the birds and other animals. (Some of the shrieks sounded almost human, but I figured they probably came from birds.) Finally, when I took a left and snuck toward the cove, I came to a lawn instead of the shoreline—a broad field of grass that led to the rear of the mansion. The lawn looked as if it had been well-kept until recently. It needed a mowing.
At the far side of the lawn was a red tractor mower. It didn’t seem to belong there. The way things looked, someone might’ve started to cut the grass, but quit before getting very far and never got a chance to put the tractor away.
Off beyond it, past the side of the house, were a couple of brick outbuildings. One had an open door large enough for the mower to fit through.
I couldn’t see what was inside. Just a small, empty space near the front—probably where the mower should go.
In places where you keep your lawn mower, you usually store other equipment and tools. Things like shovels, picks, pruning shears, hammers, saws…
Axes.
My heart pounded a little faster.
This could be the place where Wesley had gotten hold of the ax.
Maybe the rope, too. The rope he’d used for hanging Keith.
He’d strung Keith up during our first night on the island. So he must’ve come here immediately after blowing up the yacht. Is that when he killed Matt and the woman?
No. Impossible. Neither of them had been dead that long. Matt had probably been alive for most of the first week—killed only when they needed a body to double for Wesley. And the woman must’ve been killed the very same night I found her body in the lagoon.
Wesley had probably held both of them captive from Day One until their deaths.
