Jean Thomas - Lethal Affair

“I know, but I’d rather breathe the warm, outside air.”

“Why?”

“Because,” she explained, her head practically hanging out the window, “it carries such wonderful scents. Can you smell them? The cinnamon, the nutmeg and that sweet fragrance...that’s frangipani. I saw it growing at the villa. They’re enough to make you drunk on them.”

“If you say so,” Casey said. Personally, he’d much rather be inhaling Brenna’s own faint, flowery scent, which he’d been enjoying with a sensual freedom before she’d opened the window.

Maybe she was drunk. That might explain why, after traveling another mile down the road, she cried out, “Pull over!”

God Almighty, was he about to hit a goat? The nuisances seemed to be wandering everywhere on the island, often in the road. Casey dutifully parked at the side of the highway, where he was reminded that scents weren’t enough for Brenna.

“What now?”

“The flamboyant tree over there! Isn’t it magnificent?”

“Yeah,” he agreed. The tree was in full bloom, like a crimson torch. Why hadn’t he remembered that scents alone wouldn’t satisfy her? Brenna lived for color. It was a heady wine for her.

Casey recalled how she never wore drab colors if she could help it. And even on those rare, formal occasions, like her gallery showings, when she wore a form-fitting black dress that emphasized her hips and breasts, she’d always managed to accent it with a bright neck scarf or a carefully selected piece of jewelry.

You remember too much about her, McBride. Not healthy. Not when you’re no longer a couple.

He needed to stop being aware of her beside him. Needed to stop thinking about her and Bradley. He had no right to any jealousy. Concern, yes. Because, like her brother, he didn’t trust Marcus Bradley and Brenna’s living arrangement with him. Just that. Nothing else, he ordered himself.

They moved on up the highway, Brenna switching from flowers to birds. Scarlet ibises, a blue tanager, jeweled hummingbirds. They were as plentiful as the flowers.

Or they were until she instructed him to leave the highway for the road that would take them up into the highlands.

“Where are they?” she wondered. “All the flowers and birds?”

She was right. There was suddenly none of them in evidence. The contrast between the shore highway behind them and the road here was startling, with its dark, shadowed green growth close on either side of them. Like an impenetrable jungle, Casey thought.

Brenna was silent now as they traveled along the gloomy tunnel. Even the engine seemed quieter to him.

“It’s...weird, isn’t it?” she finally remarked. “Not the same St. Sebastian at all.”

“Another one, anyhow. Ah, here we go. Sunshine up ahead again.”

The Toyota emerged from the dim passage that was the road into the open. The change should have been encouraging, cheerful even. Somehow, it wasn’t.

The thick forest was still off to their left, but on the right the land had been cleared away to accommodate expansive fields. They must have once grown crops, but now they were nothing but weeds.

“What’s left of an old sugar plantation, I bet,” Brenna said. “I read in the guidebook that in the slave days the island once exported a lot of sugar.”

Casey had slowed the car to a crawl. “Understandable,” he responded. “But with the land no longer cultivated, what’s with the fence?”

It was not an old fence. It was a modern, high cyclone fence that seemed to enclose the entire property. He stopped the Toyota in front of a pair of padlocked gates.

Behind them, in the distance up a narrow driveway, was a galleried mansion from another century. Shuttered, it looked abandoned and decaying.

“They called a place like that the great house in the plantation days,” she said.

“Yeah, but why would the security of a fence and locked gates be necessary now? It’s odd.”

“It’s eerie, is what it is. Come on, Casey,” she urged with a shudder, “let’s go on.”

He didn’t argue with her. He sent the silver chariot, as she’d referred to it back at the airport, along the road again.

The route began to climb, winding into the first of the highlands. The vegetation thinned again here.

Rounding a bend, Casey sighted what seemed to be a small, dilapidated general store at the side of the road. He pulled into the gravel parking lot in front of it.

“Why are we stopping here?” Brenna wanted to know.

“I’m thirsty. Let’s see if we can get a couple of bottles of water. And while we’re at it, maybe some answers.”

Chapter 3

The area was modest in size, but every foot of it was crammed from floor to ceiling with merchandise. Had there been time for it, Brenna would have treated herself to a tour of those shelves. Mixed in with a jumble of modern products were such old-fashioned wares as rolls of fly paper and dust-coated, metal electric fans.

A curtain of beads hung in a doorway at the rear. Suddenly it rattled, parting for a young black man who appeared from a back room wearing one of the island’s famous smiles and a head of dyed orange hair.

“Welcome to de store,” he greeted them. “What can I git for you?”

Brenna knew that St. Sebastian had been British owned before it was granted the independence it had requested. This explained the English that was spoken by the native population, although with a flavor of its own possessing a melodic cadence she loved to hear. This young man’s speech was a strong example of that.

“We’d like two bottles of water,” Casey said. “Cold, please, if you have them.”

“What you tink? We don’t have cold here?” Chuckling, he turned away, removed a pair of bottled waters from a cooler and placed them on the counter he stood behind.

Casey paid for them and handed one of the bottles to Brenna.

“De steel band, dey play tonight in Georgetown. Dey something when dey come togedder. Tickets don’t cost you much.”

“Maybe another time,” Casey said. “But there is something I’d like to ask.”

“Sure.”

“We passed this old plantation back down the road. The one with the high fence around it. What can you tell us about it?”

The exuberant smile on the clerk’s face vanished. He was no longer looking at them. His gaze had shifted to something behind them.

Mystified, Brenna turned. An equally puzzled Casey also twisted around. No one else had entered the store. She figured the clerk must be staring through the front window at what was outside.

And this, she convinced herself, was another car that hadn’t been there when she and Casey arrived. It was parked directly across the way at the side of the road, an old sedan as dark a green as the deeply shadowed stretch of jungle she’d been grateful to leave behind them.

The window on the driver’s side of the car had been lowered, revealing the figure at the wheel. He was looking in their direction, a man with a Nordic face, a buzz cut, and cold, blue eyes.

Brenna and Casey faced the clerk again, waiting for the answer to Casey’s question. His dark gaze turned reluctantly back to them.

“Mon, we don’t talk about dat place.”

“Why is that?” Casey persisted.

“You givin’ me too much worry,” he mumbled.

They were clearly being dismissed.

The green sedan was gone when they left the store.

“What was that all about?” Brenna wondered when they’d settled themselves in their own car. “The guy was spooked. You could see it in his face.”

Casey shook his head. “Dunno. Maybe our mystery plantation is haunted, and the guy in the green heap is its ghost.”

“With old legends in the West Indies so common, that’s not so funny.”