Paradise Island Read online

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  * * * * *

  For old friends.

  As always, a big thank-you to Cousin Kiki.

  This is a work of fiction. All characters, names, places and events are products of the author’s imagination. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Paradise Island

  Copyright © 2018 by Moebooks

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced or used in any way without the express written permission of the author.

  Cover art by Custom Covers, www.coverkicks.com

  * * * * *

  Chapter 1

  “I didn’t kill my husband.”

  “I see,” the compact little man said. He sounded only mildly interested, and in fact was fully engaged with the controls of a small electronic gadget, and not the woman. He was facing away from her, fiddling with a video camera on a tripod. He looked slightly confused, but not disturbed in any way. (The confusion was for the camera, not the woman.) When he finally had it running and had checked the viewfinder to make sure he had a clear shot of her face, he took his seat behind the desk and faced her.

  “And when did your husband pass over?” he asked, settling into his professional role as a paranormal investigator.

  “About two months ago. The police have investigated. They cleared me.”

  Edson Darby-Deaver tried to look encouraging.

  “The problem is that Alan thinks I killed him.”

  He nodded wisely. “And Alan is . . . ?”

  “My husband.”

  Ed murmured, “Ah, yes,” trying to sound interested.

  So it was going to be one of those. The sunlight from the window opposite the desk reflected off his round, wire-rimmed glasses, so Mrs. Jessamine Pissarro may have missed the wince that passed over his face. Ed hoped so. His clients, he believed, never knew what he was thinking until they read his final report. It was better that way. It wouldn’t do for them to see it if he doubted them, and on the other hand, he never wanted to terrify them until he was sure of his findings.

  But that particular day he was tired. Ten days’ wandering around in the wilderness looking for Big Foot with the crew and fellow investigators of his reality show had exhausted (and annoyed) him, and he’d only gotten back home the day before yesterday. Still, he shouldn’t have winced. It was unprofessional.

  “Yes, I see,” he said, pulling himself together. “Your husband remains trapped on this plane of existence because he believes he was murdered. He craves justice. Yes, we see these cases from time to time.”

  As if she hadn’t heard him, she whispered, “He thinks I killed him.” Her deep blue eyes slowly drowned in tears. She was a beautiful woman, and as she began to weep, she compulsively hid her face behind her hands. Like all naturally beautiful people, emotion had only made her more attractive, and her eyes were only magnified and highlighted by the shining tears, but still she hid herself. A woman who has come to rely on her beauty will guard it at all cost.

  Ed, as always, was immobilized. In his professional capacity he’d been confronted by many hysterical females, and he’d never learned to handle them well. Some of his colleagues not only handled them well, but had learned to capitalize on their distress, quoting their fees at the precise moment when emotion trumped logic, but not Ed. Still, he no longer reacted by making lame excuses and moving rapidly out of the room, so he’d made personal progress.

  The import of what he’d said finally penetrated, and the lady lowered her hands and looked at him. “Really?”

  “Oh, yes. Quite common.”

  “And you’re able to . . . fix it? To get them to move on?”

  In answer to her question, Ed gave her a confident look, but he made no promises. A paranormal investigator never makes promises. Instead, he leaned forward and pulled up a tissue from the box that was always on his desk and handed it to her. She smiled tremulously as she took it from him, barely brushing his fingertips as she did, then she mitered it over her index finger and dabbed judiciously around her eyes, careful of her make-up. She needn’t have worried; even her lipstick was still perfect – creamy, moist-looking, just a half-shade darker than the blush on her cheeks.

  They were alone in his home office; in fact, alone in his house. It was their first consultation, and she had offered him a check as a retainer before she’d even told him what she wanted. A big, fat whopper of a check. More than he ever asked of new clients. He had given it a glance and set it aside, but the thing disturbed him. It lay there just at the edge of his vision shouting zeroes at him. Somehow that much money seemed more like a bribe than a fee.

  It would be nice to endorse that check, but he hadn’t decided yet whether or not to take her case. The kind of people who consulted Ed came in the door talking about extraordinary things – hauntings, evil spells, possessions – and quite frankly, some of them were crackpots. Ghost groupies. People who thought that since Ed was a paranormal investigator he’d believe anything. Well, they couldn’t have been more wrong. Ed was skeptical, he was not greedy for fees, and he was serious about ghosts. He resented people who thought they were fun, and he was suspicious of rich ladies who wanted to stir up a little excitement in their lives and were willing to pay for it. Somehow the enormity of the check put him on guard.

  So he was still evaluating Mrs. Pissarro, deciding if she was one of those, while at the same time admitting to himself with his usual rigid fairness that her beauty had already prejudiced him against her. She was too lovely, too well dressed, too pampered-looking.

  Doing the basic math that all humans can’t help but do, he knew he would never have had a chance with this woman. Not today, not twenty years ago when he’d been at his best, in his mid-30s prime, and absolutely positively not in high school. Teenaged girls like the one she’d been routinely shredded teenaged boys with single, derisive laughs. The damage to the boy was deep and permanent and the empowerment to the girl was addicting. They went on to become women just like Jessamine Pissarro. She was around thirty years old now, and Ed wondered just how savagely she’d fight the effects of aging when the time came . . . soon.

  Despite these impressions, Ed tried hard to be fair-minded. Working to ignore the eyes, the little-nothing dress that draped her beautiful body and the intoxicating appeal of her distress, Ed concentrated on her problem.

  As paranormal dilemmas went, hers was run-of-the-mill: confused dead entity, not knowing how it got that way (dead), and somehow still managing to grope around in the world of the living, wreaking havoc, etc., etc. Ed saw that kind of thing all the time. Still, Jessamine Pissarro did not, and he tried to keep that in mind as he began to probe with questions. She seemed more composed now, but if she began to deteriorate, he had plenty of Kleenex.

  “Why is it that your husband might think you killed him?” he asked, picking up a pen and making a few meaningless doodles on a notepad. They both knew the video camera was running, but eye contact could furth
er unnerve emotional people, and in the best of situations Ed, found it uncomfortable.

  “I was holding the gun when it went off.”

  Ed stopped doodling. “Excuse me?”

  “We were struggling for the gun.” Frustrated, she artlessly waved the tissue in the air and for the first time, Ed noticed that it wasn’t very wet. “I guess I have to begin at the beginning. I thought you’d know all this. It was all over the news for weeks. My God, it was a media obsession for a while. I thought the reporters would never stop following me around. They would have been camping out on my front lawn if I didn’t live in a gated community with a guard to keep them out.”

  Ed put the pen down, sat back and waited while she gathered her thoughts.

  Her voice became bitter as she quoted: “‘Violence in exclusive enclave on Paradise Island.’ ‘Suspicious death of local businessman.’ ‘Society wife shoots restauranteur husband, claims it was an accident.’ ‘He was suicidal! I was trying to stop him!’ sobbing wife declares. ‘I loved my husband! I was only trying to save him!’” She looked at Ed miserably. “I was trying to save him.”

  Something stirred in Ed’s memory. “I was in Oregon during that time. We were doing a shoot for my reality show, Haunt or Hoax? Big Foot. Deep woods. You know the kind of thing.”

  “I think I missed that episode.”

  “It hasn’t aired yet. But we were out of touch for a while – no cell reception, no television, no newspapers. When I got back, one of my neighbors came to the door with muffins and demanded that I make coffee so she could ‘catch me up on things.’”

  Jessamine gave him a teary smile. “That’s nice. It’s good to have friends.”

  “I suppose so,” Ed said drily. What Trixie Dare had really wanted was to find out all about Ed’s TV project, especially his handsome costar, but somehow amid the maelstrom of Southern charm, he hadn’t been able to do much of the talking. “I’m afraid I wasn’t paying much attention to her.” In fact, he never paid any attention to Trixie. It only encouraged her. “But please continue, Mrs. Pissarro.”

  “Jessamine,” she said charmingly. “I guess there’s not much else to say. You see, Alan’s business . . . there’s so much competition at the beaches now . . . and of course, there had been problems with his ex-wife. There were reasons for him to be depressed. And I wasn’t the cause of the divorce! The marriage had been falling apart for years. I guess when he fell in love with me, it was just the final push to end it and start his life over again. With me.”

  Ed didn’t say anything, and when he glanced up, she wasn’t looking at him. Her voice went down a notch as she went on talking quickly, all the while staring at the shield over the kneehole of the desk. “I thought he was moody because of the divorce; it dragged on and on, and once it was final, he insisted we marry kind of . . . well, quickly. After that, I expected him to be happier, but somehow, he never was. I don’t know what he expected of me. Maybe he thought I’d change everything, but how can you change things when the problems are internal? I did everything I could, but I could never . . . lift him up. He had a darkness about him, and I began to realize he must have always been like that. No matter how happy anybody tried to make him, he might have ended up the same way . . . wanting to end it all.”

  She looked at him to see how he was taking it, and he gave her a noncommittal nod and murmured, “I see. Go on.”

  She threw up her hands and cried, “Oh, it’s all so difficult! I was sure you’d know all this already. I wasn’t prepared to talk about that part of it. Not the details. All about Wendy – his ex-wife – and my stepchildren. I just wanted help in dealing with him.”

  “Let’s focus on that,” Ed said briskly. If her husband’s death had been so extensively covered in the press, he could find out the details for himself, online. And there was always Trixie, he thought dismally. “When did your husband first appear to you? After his passing, I mean. And in what form? For instance, did you only feel he was near, or did you actually see him?”

  She looked confused. “I saw him. I think. I was half-asleep, and I couldn’t seem to focus my eyes on him. But it wasn’t a dream! I woke up in a cold sweat, my heart was hammering, like my body already knew before my brain began to wake up, and he was just there, standing beside the bed, looking down at me. He didn’t say anything. He just . . . he looked angry.”

  Ed nodded. “How did you know it wasn’t a dream?”

  “I just did!” She began to look trapped. “And he’s been taking things. His own things.”

  “What kind of things?”

  “His car key, for one. We couldn’t find the key to his car. That was after he tried to kill me while I was driving it.”

  Startled, Ed sat up. Now they were getting somewhere. “Tell me about that.”

  “Well, I decided I had to drive his car. If I didn’t, it would just sit in the garage and rot. So one day I took his car out to go to the grocery store. I was driving along and everything was fine, when the car suddenly headed straight for a tree, all by itself. When I finally managed to get control back and get back on the road, I was terribly shaken. You can imagine.”

  “Yes, of course,” he said. He was watching her closely, wondering why she seemed so emotionally blunted. She was describing a near-death experience, after all. Was she one of those rare people who can put up a mental block against a terrifying event in their past?

  As if she noticed, she ratcheted herself up. “It was horrible! I pulled over until I could stop shaking, and then I turned right around and drove back home and put the car away and hung up the key by the garage door, where it always goes. The next time I looked for it, it was gone! We had to get another one from the dealership.”

  “We?”

  “Tiffany and I. My stepdaughter.”

  “So you became friendly with your stepdaughter?”

  “Not really. We’re on speaking terms, but there’s a lot of suppressed anger there. As a gesture of friendship, I told Tiffany she could have her father’s car if she wanted it. Seeing it in the garage, just sitting there, was upsetting me. I began to feel like it was alive, threatening me, waiting to get at me again. I knew Alan would never hurt Tiffany; she’d be safe in that car. It was a way of reaching out to her, you know? Well, when she said she’d like to have it, I couldn’t find the key. She managed to get another one from the dealership, and I signed the car over to her, and then,” she said in a suddenly wondering way, “I found Alan’s key! It was right there, on the hook by the door, where he always left it. I guess that must mean he’s glad Tiffany has the car. I mean, that must be why he gave the key back – because he wants her to have it. Do you think that’s what it means?”

  Ed made a noncommittal murmur.

  “It must be,” she went on, deciding for herself.

  Odd, he was thinking. She was emotionally engaged when talking about the missing key – a relatively benign thing – but when she had described nearly being killed in a runaway car, she had seemed calmer. This woman just wasn’t adding up. He probed again.

  “Have his appearances stopped since then? When was this? When you found the car key, I mean.”

  “Just yesterday. It was the last straw. It’s why I called for an appointment with you. It unnerved me, like he was poking at me, making these stupid little things happen over and over again until he drove me over the edge. Just when I’d begin to settle down, something else would happen. But maybe it means something else, the car key coming back like that. Maybe it was a good thing.”

  “It’s impossible to say, at this stage. Mrs. Pissarro – ”

  “Jessamine.”

  “Jessamine. I know this has been a confusing time for you. The only reason I opted for a meeting here in my office is that I’ve been very busy myself, collating the results of my recent expedition and preparing my final analysis, but you sounded so desperate over the phone that I decided to make an exception. I see now that may have been a mistake. Normally I prefer to interview new clients in their
homes, where they are more comfortable, even if it happens to be the site of the haunting. I think your recall might be better if we conducted our next interview in your house, and you could show me what’s been happening, exactly where it happened. I must warn you, though, that it may be difficult for you. It may even precipitate another incident with your husband. However, I think it may be necessary. My clients tend to have total recall when they’re describing their experiences in situ, and so far, I’m finding you a bit . . . inconsistent. Would you be willing to go along with that? I could come to your house this afternoon, or even follow you home now.”

  “Is that really necessary?” She seemed more distressed than ever.

  It was not the reaction he had hoped for. People who were desperate for help were willing to do almost anything. Now he doubted her more than ever, and he decided it was time to level with her, up to a point. “I know that your situation is convoluted – a divorce, angry stepchildren, media pressure – and I’m willing to take all that into account, but if we are going to proceed, I must have total honesty from you. Mrs. Pissarro, why are you here?”

  Her eyes glossed over with tears again, and tragedy softened her features. “You don’t believe me.”

  He folded his hands on the desk with unnecessary precision. He was going to give her the benefit of the doubt, but he chose his next words carefully. “I see before me a woman who is obviously in the grip of strong emotions. And the situation you describe certainly would cause that. But the issues here are so large and compelling that anyone would be overwhelmed by them. I’m wondering if – ”

  “You’re wondering if I’m losing my mind. You think I’m some kind of a nut. Is that it?”

  He gazed into her eyes and smiled. “Of course not. The human mind is complicated, and it reacts to pressure in unexpected ways. Have you discussed these things with a grief counsellor? A priest?”

  “I can’t talk to anybody about it,” she said huskily. “You’re a ghost guy, and even you think I’m crazy.”

  “Jessamine,” he said, using her first name very deliberately, “I do not think you’re crazy. I think you’ve been under a terrible strain, and before I begin a paranormal investigation, it would be best to eliminate all the other possibilities. I urge you to consult a professional counselor.”