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“No,” I say more forcefully than I intended. I start to tell them about the article I found, but then the door opens yet again, letting a rush of humid air into the shop and interrupting me mid-sentence. Everyone falls silent when we see who it is.
“What a fucking nightmare,” Frederic mumbles, shaking his head. “There’s a whole mess down the beach road. Who did this?” He looks pointedly around the shop, apparently waiting for one of us to confess, but then barrels ahead, his voice rising. “I can see it now, people calling us Death Island or something like that. The resort can’t survive this.Ican’t survive it!”
Frederic’s head whips around, searching for someone to blame. The only sound is our nervous breathing, until suddenly the shriek of distant sirens cuts through the air.
“Merde. I thought we had more time.” Frederic wrings his hands.
I try to remember the last time I saw him nervous, but I draw a blank.
“I need to talk to the police. You figure out how we explain all this. And,” he says, jutting his chin in Brooke’s direction, “someone get her out of here.”
As soon as Frederic is gone, Neil moves across the dive shop to stand next to Brooke, resting his hand on her shoulder.
“Brooke just had a huge shock,” he says to the rest of us. “She should stay here for now until she’s had a chance to recover.”
I steal a glance at Doug, expecting him to protest, to enforce Frederic’s mandate, but he flicks his eyes toward the floor, avoiding Neil’s pointed stare. Neil’s proposal is met with a round of hesitant nods. Brooke shifts her gaze up to Neil, and I notice something pass between the two of them.
We sit in silence for a moment, our eyes on the shop’s windows, our minds elsewhere.
“Look, are we sure Daniel was murdered? Could it have been an accident?” Doug asks finally, and it’s difficult to ignore the pleading hope in his tone. I know what he’s thinking; we all do. IfDaniel was murdered, the resort is going to suffer. Two deaths in one week—three in a month if you count the woman who fell from Khrum Yai—is too much for the island’s reputation to survive.
“Not unless he just happened to fall on a knife in a back alley,” Brooke responds monotonously.
Her response quickly shuts down that line of questioning.
“So,” she continues, her voice now clear, lacking any indication of the shock she was in moments before. “Should we admit there’s something happening here?”
Her question is met with silence.
“I mean, it could still be a coincidence,” Logan finally says, as if he’s thinking out loud.
“Really?” Brooke asks.
“Yeah. There’s nothing to suggest Daniel’s death is tied to Lucy’s or the woman who fell…” He pauses as if he’s trying to remember her name, and my frustration from earlier boils.
“Jacinta. Her name was Jacinta,” Brooke supplies stonily.
“Right,” Logan continues. “I mean, Lucy and…Jacinta’s deaths were both accidents. Maybe Daniel’s is something different.” He looks around as if inviting us to back him up.
Greta takes him up on it. “True. I mean if there’s a killer out there responsible for Jacinta, Lucy, and Daniel, wouldn’t all three of their deaths look like accidents?”
I swallow nervously, remembering the bruises on Lucy’s neck. But now doesn’t seem like the time to remind them of this.
“Or the person who killed Daniel couldn’t make his murder look like an accident,” Brooke suggests, undeterred. “Maybe they ran out of time and that’s why they left his body in the street.”
Brooke doesn’t seem to understand what Greta and Loganare doing, but the rest of us do. They’re clinging to any possibility that may save us from the repercussions of these deaths. If Daniel’s murder is unrelated, maybe the resort can survive this. We need it to survive. Our lives are here, and without the resort and the tourism stemming from it, we have no way to live on the island. We would have to leave. We would lose everything.
Doug acts as though he doesn’t hear Brooke. “Cass said Daniel’s got a criminal record, right, that he’s skipping parole. I reckon he just got wrapped up in some shady shit here. And…” He pauses for a moment, then pulls out his phone and taps at it, his face creased in thought. “Remember that guy… What was his name? The one who was found with his throat slit a few years back in some alley over on Koh Samui? I can’t find the story, but didn’t the police reckon it was the Thai Mafia, that he was running drugs for them?” He gives up on his phone but doesn’t bother to wait for a response. “I’m sure that was it. Maybe it’s the same deal with Daniel. He looks the type to get caught up in drug dealing.”
Brooke turns on him sharply. “So we’re going to throw some racial profiling into the mix on top of everything else?”
Again, I can hear a different inflection creep into her voice, a somewhat familiar tone that scratches at my neck. But before I can dive into the thought further, Doug retorts.
“That’s not what I meant, and you know it.” A flush creeps up the sides of his neck, and I cringe. I know what he gets like when he feels backed into a corner. “Frederic was right. You shouldn’t be here.” He points his phone at Brooke. “You’re not a staff member. You’re not one of us. You’ll probably be posting about this shit all over Instagram any minute.” His voice rises several octaves in anapparent impression of her. “Koh Sang has perfect weather and fantastic cocktails, but they should really do something about the murder issue. It, like, dulls the whole vibe.”
“Hey,” Neil says, his voice firm. “Look, we’re all stressed. Arguing with one another isn’t going to help. Besides, we need to look at the facts. Three deaths in a month—one clearly a murder—is a bit too much of a coincidence.”
Everyone falls quiet as Neil’s point sinks in.
