A Death on the Island Read online

  I needed to get back out to the recycling bin and see for myself. After several clues that had led to nothing but wasted time, I didn’t have very high expectations. However, as much as I wanted to stay in the sitting room and wait for the police to show up and solve everything, I couldn’t ignore my hunch. Something about Samuel smelled fishy, and it wasn’t his lobster puffs.

  Chapter 16

  I needed to follow up on my hunch alone, but no one was supposed to wander off by themselves. Greg had made a joke earlier in the evening about whether or not we could go to the bathroom by ourselves or not, but now it wasn’t so funny. Everyone was using the restroom in pairs like girlfriends on a night out. And no matter how long I sat in the sitting room and stewed, I couldn’t come up with an excuse that would buy me even five minutes of alone time. After all, Holly had only been left alone for a few minutes when the killer got to her. No one was willing to take the same risk.

  Needing to use the restroom was the only thing that would guarantee I could leave the room and close myself in the bathroom alone—granted, with two other guests standing just outside the door. However, the half bath on the first floor had a large frosted window. If the window opened, perhaps I could slip out of it, run around the house to the recycle bins, and then slip back in the window without anyone knowing. Then, if the hunch ending up being a dead end, as I was very certain it would be, no one would know that I’d suspected Samuel. But if the hunch led somewhere, perhaps to the killer, then everyone would be grateful and no one would care that I’d snuck off by myself.

  Mrs. Harris had finally fallen asleep after a long period of staring silently at the fireplace, which had set the rest of the guests on edge, so I knew it was time. As casually as possible, I stood up, smoothed down my dress, and whispered towards Shanda and Ward—the two I’d chosen as my bathroom companions because they were both much too polite to knock on the door if it seemed I was taking an inordinately long time to use the restroom—that I needed to use the bathroom. Ward looked awkwardly from me to his wife, but Shanda jumped up immediately, grabbing Ward’s arm and lifting him to his feet.

  I smiled at them in gratitude, but before we could leave the room, Jimmy lifted himself from his spot by the window and followed us. “I actually need to use the restroom, as well. Mind if I tag along?”

  “The more, the merrier,” Shanda said, speaking for the group, though I definitely didn’t share her opinion on the matter.

  So, the four of us set out together, everyone searching the hallways and nervously passing doorways as if we were expecting the killer to lunge into the hallway wearing a black mask and wielding a butcher knife. Though, to be fair, that could have been the case. No one knew who the killer was, and therefore, no one knew what their modus operandi was. Or, at least, no one alive knew.

  I offered to let Jimmy use the restroom first, not wanting to make him wait to use the restroom until I could run halfway around the house and then crawl back in a window, but Jimmy, always the gentleman, insisted that I go first. Not wanting to draw attention to myself, I conceded and walked inside.

  Immediately, I moved to the window at the back of the room. The sill was a foot off the ground, and the window was nearly four feet tall, definitely large enough for me to fit through if I could manage to open it. I felt around the edges for a latch, even standing precariously on the toilet to reach the top of the frame. Finally, after what felt like five minutes, I found a tiny lever on the bottom right corner. I sighed, annoyed at myself for missing it and wasting so much time, and then pushed it down. The window made a loud popping noise as the suction was lost and it cracked open. I winced and waited, hoping no one outside the door had heard the noise. I could hear their easy conversation still going, Ward talking to Shanda about their vegetable garden at home—he was rightfully nervous that their crops were being drowned by all the rain—so I continued, pushing on the window until it slid open an inch. For a second, I was nervous that was as far as the window would open, however, a few strong pushes later and the window had fully opened, leaving a two-foot gap for me to slip through.

  It was still raining outside, the sky a muddied gray from the clouds, so I grabbed a towel from the linen cabinet and threw it over my head. I really only needed to worry about keeping my hair dry. My clothes were still slightly damp from when we’d all been outside the first time after discovering Holly’s body, so as long as I toweled off once I got back inside the house, no one would notice. I was halfway through the window when I remembered my shoes. I slipped the muddied heels off and set them in the bathroom. This excursion would be easier, and much faster, barefoot.

  Taking a deep breath, I slipped through the window and ran headlong into the storm.

  * * *

  As my bare feet squished into the soft earth, mud squelching up between my toes, I was reminded of running through rainstorms as a kid. Page and I would splash through the full gutters and slide into mud puddles, despite our mom’s warnings. For the briefest of seconds, I smiled, remembering how carefree I’d felt, relishing the cool raindrops landing on my arms and legs. Then, I remembered why I was outside in the rain, and my smile faded.

  The rain had slowed down, which gave me hope that Shep would be able to make his way out to the mansion sooner than originally thought. While I did want to solve the murder, I also would have been fine leaving and solving it from home. Being trapped inside a house with a murderer was a bit more than I’d bargained for when Holly had blackmailed me into coming to the party. I’d been expecting awkward dinner conversation and dubious looks from the locals when I explained that I was still planning to reopen the bed and breakfast, despite the murders that had occurred on the property. But to step into yet another murder mystery? That had been unexpected.

  The clock in the sitting room had read just after midnight when I’d left, but I wouldn’t have guessed that based on the sky. It was bright—unusually so for being so late—almost as if the sun were hiding just behind the storm clouds, not gone, but merely covered. It made wandering around outside by myself a bit more bearable. Now that the rain wasn’t cutting sideways and the wind had died down to a grumble rather than a roar, I could look around and observe my surroundings. I looked out across the long, rolling grounds towards the black puddle that was the ocean. It looked like nothing more than soft waves from a distance, though I knew the waves were strong enough to overturn even the most expert sailor.

  Before moving to the island, the ocean had always been my safe place. After a tough week at work, I’d drive the hour down to the coast and sit by the water. The beautiful thing about south Texas is that every season is a good time to lie out on the beach. In the spring and summer, you can tan on your beach towel and then cool off in the surf, and in the autumn and winter, you can throw on a light jacket, grab a book, and read to the rhythmic ebb and flow of the waves. After living on Sunrise Island, though, I craved solid ground.

  Between bodies buried in the sand, fighting and killing a murderer on the beach, and hurricane season, I was beginning to rethink my devotion to the ocean. Perhaps the next time I decided to uproot my life, I’d aim up north. The mountains seemed nice, and I would love to experience a good snowfall.

  As I rounded the corner of the house and moved towards the side door that led to the kitchen, and therefore, Holly’s body, my thoughts refocused on the task at hand. When we had called him, Shep had instructed us to leave Holly’s body in the recycling bin to avoid contaminating the crime scene. The recycling bin was pushed up against the house underneath a narrow overhang, and was therefore protected from the rain, so leaving her outside was as good an option as any. Although, everyone had felt rather guilty returning inside and leaving her in the plastic container like a piece of trash. At least Robert Baines had been murdered inside and was covered with a sheet. Although the outcome was the same—death—Robert’s seemed a bit more dignified.

  The boxes I’d only briefly noticed earlier would be under Holly’s body. I needed to get a good l
ook at them, see if there was anything distinctive or unusual about them, all while not disturbing Holly’s body in the slightest. Not only did I not want to contaminate the scene with my DNA and fingerprints and end up becoming a suspect, but I also didn’t want to destroy other evidence that could point to the rightful killer.

  It felt silly to risk so much to take a peek at some boxes, but my gut told me something wasn’t right. Samuel had said he’d been at the mansion all day cooking, but if that were true, what had the boxes been for? Holly said she’d grabbed a lobster puff out of one of the boxes, but Samuel had been serving them on silver platters. Why would he have stored them in to-go boxes between cooking them and serving them, and if he had been storing them in to-go boxes, why would he recycle all of the boxes when there were still lobster puffs in the kitchen? None of it made any sense.

  As I neared the small alcove where the door and the recycling bin was located, I heard a rustling noise. Immediately I froze and turned towards the bushes on my right, scanning the leaves for any sign of unusual movement, but I saw nothing. Then, I heard the noise again, only this time I recognized that the noise was coming from somewhere up ahead. Slowly, I moved along the side of the house, assuming I was about to stumble upon the particularly gruesome sight of a raccoon or opossum messing with Holly’s body. However, as I rounded the final corner that brought the recycling bin into full view, I saw a person bent over the bin, their arms inside of it, rifling around.

  My heart sputtered in my chest. Was I looking at the killer? Had they come back to ensure they’d completed the job or had they left something incriminating behind? Should I turn around and run back to the bathroom, pretend as if I’d never stepped foot outside the moderately safer sitting room?

  Before I could answer any of these questions, the person stood up and turned around, a stack of white boxes in their arms.

  “Jimmy?” I asked, my fear draining away, replaced by confusion.

  His face had gone almost as white as the boxes he was carrying, except for a single smear of something brown above his eyebrow. As I stared at the smudge, though, the horrifying truth settled upon me. It was a red stain. Blood. Holly’s blood.

  “What are you doing?” I asked, subconsciously taking a step backwards, putting more space between us.

  I’d left Jimmy outside the bathroom door. How had he turned up here? It had taken me over an hour to think up the plan to sneak out the bathroom window, so how had he managed to do it another way? Somewhere in the back of my brain the thought of an evil twin popped up, but I quickly tamped it down, remembering this was real life and not the telenovela I’d watched while studying Spanish in college.

  “Now, hold on a minute,” Jimmy said, shifting the boxes so he was holding them with one hand, the other held out towards me, palm up. “I know this looks bad.”

  He was right. This looked really bad.

  Now, I understood in that moment that I, too, had come back to the recycling bin where Holly’s body was. That I, too, had snuck away from the group on my own. However, I also understood that I was not the one removing evidence from the scene of a murder. I was not the one tampering with a crime scene and putting a murder investigation at jeopardy.

  “We aren’t supposed to touch anything,” I said, aware that I sounded like a child about to tattle on their peer. “Shep instructed us to leave everything alone until he got here.”

  “I know,” Jimmy said, wedging the boxes even further under his arm, holding them tightly to his side. “I know, and I’m sure you’re confused right now, but there is an explanation.”

  I was vaguely aware of Jimmy stumbling his way through a clumsy explanation, but I couldn’t focus on his words after I read the boxes beneath his arms. Written in firetruck red font down the side of the boxes were three words.

  Jimmy’s Daily Catch.

  They were to-go boxes from Jimmy’s restaurant. Why was Samuel’s food in boxes from Jimmy’s restaurant? Why were to-go boxes from Jimmy’s restaurant under Holly’s body, and why was Jimmy pulling them out of the recycling bin?

  I took another step back, and Jimmy stopped talking, his eyes narrowing at me.

  “You aren’t listening,” he said, stepping towards me. “You’re nervous, and you shouldn’t be. I swear this isn’t what you think.”

  The truth was I didn’t know what I thought. I was still trying to piece it together. All night long, I’d been concocting theories and following up on leads, only to be proven wrong over and over. Even now, I’d come to the recycling bins to gather evidence against Samuel, yet I was met with Jimmy holding an armful of evidence.

  “I’m friends with Samuel,” Jimmy said.

  He spewed the words out quickly as though he’d already been through all of this once before. His head was cocked to the side in the same way Page cocked hers when she was repeating instructions to Blaire. Suddenly, I had a deep, aching pain in my chest. I missed my sister and my niece and my house and the crazy old lady in the attic and the normalcy of my life. I didn’t want to be solving a murder. I wanted to be at home.

  Jimmy continued, and I tried my best to focus on his voice and ignore the nagging beat of my heart in my chest. “We go way back, and Samuel needed the money, but his cooking skills aren’t exactly up to snuff. Why he started a catering company, I’ll never know. But anyway, he wanted this gig, and he asked if I could whip up the food for him, so I did. It wasn’t a big deal at the time, but that was, of course, before people started dying. When I found Holly earlier, I noticed she was lying on boxes from my restaurant, and I knew that would look suspicious, so I snuck out here to grab them. I know it looks bad, but I was just trying to save the police time. If they waste time following up on me as a suspect, they could miss the opportunity to catch the real killer. You know what I’m saying?”

  “How did you get out here?” I asked, trying to buy myself time to process what he’d said.

  “I should be asking you that,” Jimmy said. “Last I saw, you walked into the bathroom.”

  I stared at him, emotionless, waiting for him to answer.

  He laughed nervously. “Shanda and Ward were busy talking about how their summer vegetables were faring in the storm, so when I told them I actually didn’t need to use the restroom that badly, they didn’t notice when I headed down the hallway towards the kitchen rather than back to the sitting room. It was bold, but it seems to have worked as no one has marched out here to demand to know what I’m doing. Except for you, of course.”

  Again, he laughed, and still I stared at him, face blank, trying to remember where he’d been when Robert Baines was murdered.

  Mason and I had overheard him talking with a woman, who I only now realized was Tillie Pelkey, about how he was being blackmailed by Robert Baines. His restaurant was being threatened, and Robert Baines was blackmailing him. But for what? Afterwards, he’d gone back to the party. Or had he? We’d heard him leave the room and walk down the hallway, but I didn’t know where he went after that. What would he be willing to do to save his restaurant? To save his livelihood? Had Robert Baines asked too much of him? Had Jimmy resorted to murder to avoid paying Robert whatever he’d asked?

  He had a solid motive for killing Robert Baines, as did most everyone at the party, but what motive was there to kill Holly? She was there to write a story on Robert Baines, not a local seafood restaurant with a less than stellar reputation with the health department. In fact, Holly had raved about Jimmy’s food all night, though she hadn’t known it was Jimmy’s food. Motive aside, though, Holly’s murder had happened when all of the guests were separated into small groups, and no one had been in the kitchen with her. Jimmy could have been the one to do it. But why?

  It all came back to the boxes, but I wasn’t sure how.

  Then I remembered what Holly had been doing moments before her death. She’d been sweeping glass off the kitchen floor. Richard had been the last one to see her alive, and he’d said that she had asked him where she could dump the glass, and he’
d pointed her to the back door. To the door that lead to the recycling bin.

  I looked down at my feet and noticed, for the first time, small specks of light in the mud, sprinkled across the ground like a light snow fall. Only, it wasn’t snow. It was glass.

  Holly had never made it to the trash can. I looked behind me along the side of the house and saw the dust pan she’d used, discarded and half swallowed in mud. She’d been attacked on her way to the trash can. She’d been assaulted in the midst of a household chore. Unlike me, Holly didn’t go around asking for trouble, she hadn’t been following up on leads and accusing suspects. Being helpful and sweeping up the broken bits of glass had been her downfall.

  Then, I remembered something else.

  When I’d run into Jimmy in the glass hallway, he’d led me back to these trash cans, claiming he’d gone there to throw something away. He said that he’d seen Holly’s body and run, but there was no sign of any trash. The bins were empty and, aside from the scattered shards of glass, there wasn’t any trash on the ground. What had he been throwing away? Or, rather, had he been throwing anything away at all?

  This thought also begged the question, why would Jimmy have thrown something away and then run all the way around the house to get back inside? It had been raining then, much harder than it currently was, and he’d chosen to tromp through the storm rather than go back inside through the kitchen? Why? Perhaps to distance himself from the crime scene?

  “We should get back inside,” I said, taking another step away from Jimmy. “Before everyone starts to worry about us.”

  Jimmy shook his head and smiled, though it didn’t reach his eyes. “No one will be worried. They don’t even know we’re gone.”

  A chill raced down my spine. He was right. I’d only been outside for a touch over five minutes, so at worst, Shanda and Ward thought the lobster puffs had upset my stomach, and were politely waiting outside the door for me to finish. Everyone in the sitting room thought Jimmy went to the bathroom, and everyone at the bathroom thought Jimmy was back in the sitting room. No one was worried about us. No one was looking for us.