Really Dead

The foot was already there when Esther’s crew arrived on location. They called me in and I got there before seven.

  BEAR

  If we still had the discs down here I could go through them to see if any of the stationary cameras caught someone putting the foot in the water, but Albert took those discs up to Toronto in the last shipment.

  ME

  But didn’t you say you made copies?

  BEAR

  Only of selected shots.

  ME

  Who selects them?

  BEAR

  Dan.

  HARD CUT TO BLACK.

  Thrust into complete darkness it took a few minutes for my eyes to adjust. It wasn’t the darkness that told me we’d had a power failure though, it was my ears. I recognized the silence — a complete lack of electronic sound.

  “Who’s got a flashlight?” Esther asked.

  “I do,” Pam answered and then I heard a zipper unzipping.

  “We should probably call it a night anyway.” Rob’s chair scraped on the patio stones.

  Pam turned her flashlight on and held it under her chin, the beam washed up over her face. “What time should I come over tomorrow, Ria? My call’s at noon.”

  “Nine?” I hoped that Dad would still be at home.

  “Okay.” Pam lifted her small canvas backpack up from under the table (the same backpack I’d seen her slip the gift from Rob into earlier). “I call shotgun.”

  “Who’s got wheels?” Esther asked.

  “Bear does,” Pam offered.

  Walking side by side, all of us using the beam from Pam’s flashlight to lead the way, we walked through the dark lobby of the hotel as two Butler employees began lighting candles on the reception desk.

  “I’ll drive Ria’s cart for her, she’s never driven the island at night,” Rob said as he started down the front steps of the hotel.

  Did he want some time alone with me? Why? After seeing the kiss he and Pam had shared the only logical answer to that question was that he had something to tell me that he didn’t want to say in front of everyone else.

  “Then either you or Esther are going to have to drive, Pam.” Bear stopped at the top of the steps. “I need to go check on the generators. It looks like we might need them tomorrow. I’ll grab one of the groundskeeper’s carts later.”

  “That means you’re driving, Esther.” Pam took the steps two at a time. “I don’t drive at night around here. The one time I did I ran over a land crab and the crunching sound it made was gross! Those things are like a nocturnal army of hard bodied spiders on steroids.”

  “I’m not driving! Remember? I don’t have my licence.”

  “Like you’re going to get pulled over and asked for your licence, insurance, and ownership!” Pam scoffed. “These aren’t real roads and the golf carts aren’t real cars.”

  “And I’m really not driving.” Esther said firmly.

  So much for getting a chance to talk to Rob. “You go with them, Rob. I’ll be okay.”

  They quickly loaded their equipment into one of the two golf carts parked near the front doors of the hotel and drove off, all three of them wishing me and Bear a goodnight.

  “I lied.” Bear said quietly.

  “You what?”

  “I made an untruthful statement that was intended to deceive others.”

  “Thanks for the definition. So, what untruthful statement did you make?”

  “I don’t have to check on the generators. I wanted to talk to you alone. Mind giving me a lift? I can walk down to the crew quarters from your place.”

  He didn’t say another word until we were out of earshot of any of the hotel rooms. In fact, the first thing I heard, other than the whine of the almost-engine, was the sound of a land crab being crunched under the tires of the golf cart.

  “There are some cameras that nobody knows about.”

  “Where?” I hoped he wasn’t going to say the secret cameras were hidden in my villa.

  “In Judy and Ted’s rooms.”

  “Why?”

  “We had them in all of the contestant’s rooms. Dan wanted to see if anybody hooked up.”

  “He wouldn’t be able to put that on TV, though, would he? Aren’t there censorship rules or something?” Not to mention invasion of privacy rules.

  “Editing is a beautiful thing. They could put something together that could go to air. But nobody hooked up.”

  “What happens to the discs when the show’s over? Does James erase them?”

  “James doesn’t know about them. Those cameras were Dan’s babies. Sometimes working for two bosses can get a bit tricky. On this shoot it’s like walking a tightrope. Dan keeps the discs. Something happened in Ted’s room that night, but I don’t want you to misunderstand it.”

  I missed the turn-off to the road that led to my villa and made a seven-point U-turn — the golf cart’s steering wasn’t the best.

  “Someone went in and took a pair of his shoes the night Kate disappeared. And then she —”

  “She?” I forced myself to pay attention to what I could see of the road.

  Bear didn’t answer me. “She put the shoes back in his closet the next morning, a couple of minutes after Ted left to go watch the dinghy explode.”

  “Who was it?”

  “The image isn’t that clear, and the room lights were off and the camera wasn’t focused on the closet …”

  “Who was it, Bear?” Why was he stalling?

  “Winnie.”

  “Winnie?” Why would Winnie surreptitiously borrow a pair of Ted’s shoes? Then I remembered Donnella’s radio conversation with one of her staff about Ted complaining about sand on his shoes. Sandy shoes weren’t exactly a smoking gun, even if they did give off a hint of smoke.

  “I don’t for a minute believe that Winnie did anything to Kate. Like Pam said, Winnie and Kate got along and Winnie doesn’t make friends easily. But Winnie takes care of Dan, fixes his problems, and we know that he had some sort of problem with Kate that night.”

  I’d already seen Winnie’s problem-solving skills play out in front of me. But would she kill for him? “What about the other cameras, the ones all over the island? Is there some way I could see what’s on them? Maybe they recorded something …”

  “Albert already took all of the footage from that night and the next morning up to Toronto.”

  “But you said the footage was logged. Doesn’t that mean someone watched it all and wrote down exactly what happened in each shot?”

  “It doesn’t work that way. All we log is the date, time, which camera, the scene and take, and a general description of what’s in the shot. If there’s something out of the ordinary the crew makes note of it, but there wasn’t anything like that on the log sheets from that night or the next morning. And there’s no description for the footage from the stationary cameras. The only people who will watch every single frame are the editors — and they’re in Toronto with the discs.”

  “Could a friend of mine look at the discs in Toronto without Dan or James finding out about it?” Even if Bear said there was a way, I had no guarantee that Glenn would be able to fit it into his busy, busy schedule. And even if he did, I had no guarantee that he’d let me know what he’d seen. Apparently, he hadn’t been able to find the time to call me back.

  “I’ll make a call. If my bud, Dex, is slotted into the editing schedule this week he could put something together for your friend, but I’ll have to tell him which bins and folders you’re interested in.”

  “What are tho —”

  A blur of black dashed across the road in front of the golf cart. I slammed on the brakes. The blur stopped moving and took shape — the shape of a lycra clad woman in extremely good shape. Her muscles were so well exercised that they look sculpted. The beams from the pretend headlights on the cart were aimed so low that I couldn’t see her face.

  “Watch where you’re going!” The woman yelled and jogged up to Bear’s side of the cart. “Oh, hi, Bear.” She sounded surp
rised, and pleased, to see him.

  I was just plain surprised to see her.

  “Good evening, Miss Winnie. Out for your evening ambulations?” Bear asked cheerfully. “Dan all tucked in?”

  The woman talking to Bear didn’t look anything like the Winnie I’d met earlier that day. The woman jogging in place beside the golf cart was capable of using muscles she’d shown no sign of having before — her facial muscles. They contracted into a big smile for Bear. Instead of a tight bun, her hair was pulled back in a loose ponytail that hung down to the middle of her back. Her clothing clung to her sculpted body, instead of hanging over it.

  “He left the island a little while ago.”

  “And how many laps have you done since then?”

  “This is my fourth.”

  Bear turned to me. “Winnie’s training for a marathon. She runs laps around the island every night. It probably helps her burn off the frustration known as Dan.”

  Winnie’s smile fell and she nodded at me. “Miss Butler.”

  “Sorry about almost hitting you, Winnie. I didn’t see …”

  “I’ve already contacted mechanical about the power failure.” Winnie, the problem solver, let me know that she had already dealt with the issue that was affecting my ability to see what was on the road in front of me. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ll finish my run.”

  “Are we still on for later?” Bear asked hopefully.

  “Check,” she called out as she ran away into the darkness.

  “Checkmate!” Bear yelled back.

  I pushed down on the accelerator slowly. “You’ve got a date with Winnie?”

  “A chess date but, the powers of lust willing, I’m hoping it’ll turn into a real date. She’s hot!”

  Bear was right about Winnie’s body, but I wasn’t so sure about her personality.

  “I’ve got a thing for older women. If you’re romantically unencumbered feel free to invite me in for a nightcap, I’ve got a free hour before I hook up with Winnie.”

  Older women? Winnie looked old. At least she had when I’d first seen her by the pool. I’d guessed her to be in her mid-fifties. I wasn’t that old! (Close, but not there yet.) To avoid an awkward rejection of his offer, I simply ignored it. “Doesn’t it bother you that the woman you’re trying to date might be involved with Kate’s disappearance?”

  “Winnie’s good people. She’s a lot like James.”

  Even more so if she did end up getting to know Bear in the biblical sense. Like Mandy, he had to be at least twenty years younger than the person he was attracted to.

  “I know what you’re thinking …”

  I doubted that.

  “… you think Winnie used Ted’s shoes to walk on the beach and put the foot in the tidal pool, and you could be right. But if she did do that she did it because Dan ordered her to. Like everyone else around here she needs her job. She’s tied to Dan, but he’s the one directing the action — not her.”

  I found it interesting that so many people saw Dan as some sort of all-powerful being, capable of controlling the women in his life. Having never met Kate I didn’t know if Pam was right about Kate’s innocence and gullibility, but I had met Winnie. She didn’t strike me as being anyone’s puppet. In fact, from the little I had seen of her interactions with Dan, it looked like she had more control of him than he had of her (or himself). Was Bear’s assessment of Winnie’s culpability clouded by lust?

  “Dan’s yanking everybody’s chains on this shoot, including James’. James acts like an exec producer — he usually stays out of the way and handles the business end. But Dan? He’s micromanaging everything and everyone. I can understand why James has been down here for the duration; it’s his first shot at U.S. network and it came at the perfect time for him to escape his domestic troubles back home.”

  “You know about that?” I couldn’t see James opening up about his personal issues to his employees.

  “Ria, there aren’t any secrets on a set.”

  “If that’s true, why doesn’t anyone know what really happened to Kate?”

  “Oh, someone knows. More than one person probably …”

  “Dan and Winnie, right?”

  “Probably. Maybe even another person or two. But they’re not talking. That’s what makes this extra strange. We’re like castaways on this island. All we have is each other all the time, so all we usually talk about is ourselves. The people who are talking are talking about how strange it is that we don’t know what happened. And they’re talking about you and Rob, wondering whether you’re just friends or if you’re friends with benefits.”

  “You’ve all been talking about that?” I’d been talking about it, too, but only to myself and my gecko friend.

  “So? Which one is it?”

  “We’re friends.” Could we even be classified as that? There I went again, struggling to define or label a relationship. “Besides, I think he and Pam …”

  “You noticed that, huh? Yeah, they’re close, but that relationship isn’t what you think. At least, what I think you think it is anyway.”

  “What is it then?”

  Bear smiled and shook his head. “Uh-uh, that’s not for me to say.”

  “I thought you said there were no secrets on a set?”

  “This is an exception to the general rule. It’s private and it’ll stay that way until Pam feels like talking about it. I only know about it by accident. Very few of the others know anything, but they’ve got their suspicions, just like you do.”

  “That sounds like the whole Kate situation — people have their suspicions but only a few of them know the truth.”

  “The truth’s always out there. The trick is to get it into focus.”

  Even with two pillows held tightly over his head, Glenn could still hear Brandon and his friends laughing loudly at whatever they were watching on TV in the living room. Maybe some silence in the condo wouldn’t be such a bad thing after all?

  His frustration at not being able to get in touch with Ria wasn’t doing much to facilitate peaceful slumber either. He’d tried to call her at the hotel ten times. Each time he dialled the hotel’s number he got a busy signal. His six calls to her cellphone went straight through to voicemail, but he’d only left three messages. Call number seventeen was to Cable & Wireless, the only phone company he could find on the Internet that serviced the British Virgin Islands. That call had been answered by a very nice woman who informed him that Soursop was experiencing technical difficulties with its telephone service. In other words, there currently wasn’t any phone service to or from Soursop.

  Brandon and his friends burst into loud male laughter again.

  Glenn flung both pillows onto the floor as he sat up and then tripped over one of them as he made his way to the door without bothering to turn on the lights in his room. All of the lights in the living room were on and he had to squint hard when he opened his bedroom door. “Would you guys mind keeping it down?”

  Brandon leaned his head backwards and talked to Glenn upside down, his blonde curls hanging down the back of the couch. “Sorry, Dad.”

  His friends, their long limbs draped and flopped over the arms and backs of the rest of the living room furniture, all turned to look at Glenn. The coffee table was littered with the remnants of their pizza dinner and numerous empty beer bottles.

  “What’s so funny, anyway?”

  “A&E’s running a Parking Wars marathon and you should see this one lady. She must think she’s on America’s Got Talent or something. She just did a song and dance routine in the Philadelphia Parking Authority office.”

  “Some people will do anything to be famous,” one of the guys said, but Glenn didn’t know who he was.

  Glenn backed into his room and closed the door. Scooping up his pillows, he flopped back into bed. Then he noticed that the little red light on his cellphone was flashing, telling him that he’d received a voicemail.

  The numbers on his phone lit up as he dialled in to his voicemai
l. There was only one message.

  “Hi.” Ria didn’t sound happy. “Glenn, please call me back. I really need your help on this. Thanks.”

  He tried her cellphone first, but again his call went straight to voicemail. Then he dialled the hotel, its number permanently burned into his short-term memory having already dialled it so many times that day. This time his call was answered.

  Ria didn’t do a very good job of hiding her anger, but it dissipated quickly when Glenn told her about his repeated efforts to reach her, all of which had been foiled by technology, not his lack of action.

  “So, are you with me on this, then? Or are you too busy with your white-collar story?”

  “I’m in. What’ve you got?”

  It was hard to keep track of the many names, especially when he couldn’t put faces to most of them. Glenn turned on his bedside lamp and started to jot down notes. “Why would Winnie want her dead, though? And even if she did do it, why would she go to the trouble of putting the foot in such a visible place? Whoever killed Kate hid her body well enough. Why take off a foot like that?”

  “I don’t know. What I’m hoping is that you’ll see something in the footage.”

  “What time are you calling your dad tomorrow?”

  “Nine. Why?”

  “Think he’d mind if I dropped by to listen in? He might be able to give us some insight into the whole mutilation thing.” Doc Butler had a clearer view of human behaviour than any sighted person Glenn had ever met. The trick was learning to ignore Doc’s sarcasm and brusqueness to see the truths he laid bare.

  “He wouldn’t mind at all.”

  “What about that boat explosion? Do you think it has anything to do with Kate?”

  “How’d you hear about that?” Ria sounded surprised.

  “I didn’t hear about it, I saw it. Our entertainment guys are trying to figure out if it’s real.”

  “It’s fake.”

  “It looked pretty real to me. Wasn’t the guy in the boat hurt?” From the few seconds Glenn had seen, it looked as if the man had been blown up right along with the boat.

  “That was a dummy named Albert. And speaking of Albert …” Ria explained who Albert was, why he wasn’t hurt in the explosion, and how she planned to find out what exactly it was that he brought down to James whenever he came to the islands. “Whatever Albert’s up to, he couldn’t have anything to do with Kate’s disappearance. He wasn’t here and he didn’t get here until hours after the foot was found.”