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Until the police captured him, she wasn’t safe. Even when he was caught, she wasn’t sure she would feel safe, possibly ever again.
She stacked up all of her art supplies on the top of the chest of drawers, hoping they would last until she got to leave here. Eventually she would run out of rent money and be forced to leave and get a job.
S
he moved to the window by the bed and peered out. Through the palms she could see the Gulf of Mexico. It looked endless. How odd not to be able to see land on the horizon. Just water as far as the eye could see. No wonder early man feared sailing to the edge and falling off.
Turning back to the room, she considered making the bed and taking a nap. She’d been running on fear for so long, she felt drained. She needed her life back. All she had to do, she told herself, was stay alive until Landry was caught.
She stared at the empty canvas on her easel. She had to paint. It had been days since she’d gotten the opportunity. She itched to pick up a brush.
Painting had always been her survival. When her father was killed in a tractor accident. When her first love married someone else. When her mother remarried and sold the farm, hacking away the roots that had held Willa in South Dakota.
Willa hurried to catch the last of the day’s light coming in through the palms. She never knew what she was going to paint until she had a brush in her hand and the white empty canvas in front of her.
To her, painting was exploration. A voyage to an unknown part of herself. Her work was a combination of what she saw and what she didn’t. It was a feeling captured like a thought out of thin air.
She set up her paints and went to work, the evening light fading until she was forced to turn on a lamp. It wasn’t until then that she really looked at what she’d been working on—and felt a start.
What had begun as an old building along a narrow street had turned into the street where she’d witnessed the murder. A thin slice of pale light at the back illuminated what could have been a bundle of old rags but what she knew was a body slumped against a stucco wall, the dark BMW sitting at the curb.
She stepped back from the canvas. She’d been so lost in the physical joy of painting, she hadn’t even realized that she’d been reliving the murder.
From this distance, she saw the face behind the windshield of the BMW. It was subtle, almost ghostlike, but definitely a face. Landry Jones’s face. The same one she’d drawn for the police. She remembered the investigators’ strange reactions. When she’d asked if they knew who he was, the detective who’d been questioning her assured her they knew Landry Jones only too well.
Just her luck that a known criminal had taken an interest in her. She had wanted to ask what other crimes he’d committed but didn’t want to know. Wasn’t murdering a man in cold blood on a St. Pete Beach street enough?
In the painting, Landry was peering out of the darkness not at the body of the man he’d just killed—but at her. She could almost feel the heat of his dark eyes.
She stumbled back from the painting, bumping into the sagging double bed and sitting down on the bare mattress, suddenly exhausted and near tears.
Had she been foolish to think she would be safe anywhere—let alone on this island? She would always be haunted by what had happened that night, would always see Landry Jones’s face, if not in her paintings then in her nightmares.
A tap at the door startled her. She didn’t want to answer it but knew she couldn’t pretend she’d gone out. Another tap.
“Cara? Willie?”
Odell. She groaned. Where had she come up with Cara? “Just a minute.” She glanced around the room as if there might be something lying around that would give away her true identity, but didn’t see anything. She couldn’t help the feeling that she’d already made a mistake that was going to get her in trouble. She couldn’t keep living like this.
She opened the door. “Odell,” she said as if seeing him was a surprise.
“Hi. Sorry to bother you, but I noticed you didn’t bring any food,” he said, looking sheepish. He held out a sandwich wrapped in plastic. “If you don’t want it now, you can eat it later. Turkey and cheese.”
She took the sandwich. “Thank you. It looks…great.” She actually smiled and he seemed to relax. A part of her felt bad about being so unfriendly. Back home in South Dakota her behavior would have been outright rude.
The whisper of fabric made them both turn. All Willa caught was a blur of white.
“She sneaks around here all the time like that, I guess,” Odell said of the elderly woman who passed on the third-floor balcony overhead. “Her name’s Alma Garcia. She was the nanny.”
“The nanny?”
“You don’t know the story of Cape Diablo?” he asked, sounding surprised. “The island is cursed. At least according to local legend. There have always been reports of strange happenings out here, including storms that wash up all kinds of interesting things. For decades it was home to pirates and treasure seekers who looted ships that sank or were sunk just off shore, smugglers and drug runners.”
“Who built the villa?” she asked, unable not to. The place had drawn her from the first glimpse.
“Andres Santiago, a rather notorious pirate and smuggler, and this is where it gets interesting,” Odell said, warming to his story. “Back in the late sixties, early seventies, Andres smuggled guns, drugs, anything profitable in from Central America. The Ten Thousand Islands have always been home to smugglers of all kinds because it is so remote and easy to get lost in.”
She nodded remembering how quickly she’d become lost among the mangrove islands on the way here. “You said he had a nanny?”
