Chapter Three

An empty barrel sitting on the dock beside Alex Greenwood’s boat slip became a perch to wait on. Like the day before, the midday sun beat against Laney’s skin. She wore khaki hiking shorts and a sleeveless cotton shirt and a lacy black bra. Staying cool in this heat was proving difficult. She hoped that Marquis Island would be more pleasant. Instead of her purse, she stuffed a number of items into a backpack: a change of clothes, some granola bars and beef jerky, just in case, and three bottles of water. This was intended to be a day trip, but you never knew what the weather might be like in this part of the world. She’d been stranded there once, and wanted to be prepared.

To remain accurate to her cover story, she carried her camera on a strap that went around her neck. Taking pictures could be an excellent diversion should the conversation with her guide lag.

At half past noon, Alex Greenwood and his boat, Princess Sea Bird, pulled into the boat slip.

“You ready?”

“I’m here!” she said with a sunny smile, as she let the man help her into his boat. What had once been covered with fishing nets and his equipment was now cleaned out and washed down. Two deck chairs sat where the nets had been, under a small canopy.

“Make yourself at home,” he said. “I’ll get us started. Trip should take about two hours.”

***

Alex Greenwood’s boat landed at a broken down dock about three o’clock. The fisherman tied up to a piling, and helped Laney to the shady beach. She’d noticed sometime earlier that he cleaned up rather nicely. Wearing a fresh and much newer t-shirt and baggy shorts, he could have easily been a tourist, not a fisherman taking a few hours off in the middle of a day. If he trimmed up his unkempt hair and scruffy beard, he might even be handsome.

The hike up the beach was more strenuous than Laney remembered it. With Erik and their friends, it had taken place during a stormy night when getting undercover was of utmost importance. Now her legs felt a little weak by the time she and the fisherman made it through the rocks and the tall grasses and spotted the estate house some yards beyond. It was a welcome sight and one she remembered with a pang of grief she’d not felt since her trip to Marquis began. She remembered Erik leading his party of friends to the safety of the house the night they were stranded on the beach. She knew that the imprint of his easy dominance would linger on her psyche forever.

Although her body ached from the lengthy trek, once they finally landed on the cool verandah that surrounded the ancient estate house, her excitement was suddenly revived. Memories of the sexual deviance she submitted to there came swarming back to her as she inspected the old place. With every turn along the porches, and as they moved into the house and surveyed the rooms, the images of Sandra, Elise, Matthew, Jason, Erik and herself playing games of sadomasochism returned to her. Raw hedonistic feelings clung to her body like the vines that covered half the house. Although the estate was practically a ruin three years before, it still seemed substantial then, hardly as fragile as it seemed now… now it was becoming part of the jungle, the roof and verandah sagging into the soft ground beneath it. Most of the windows were broken out and most of the furnishings that were durable enough to be usable before had been picked over by island scavengers, who must have slipped in and out by boat on those nights when there was no one to keep watch over the island’s only safe port.

White tattered curtains danced in the open windows—the breeze was still sumptuously fragrant, just as Laney remembered it. In places, the plaster had peeled away to the raw boards beneath. She moved through the dining, living room and into the library, where the infamousMarquis Book of Pleasureonce resided. The library shelves were half-empty now with some of the contents ransacked, books strewn everywhere on the library floor. She shuddered, as the thought of that astounding book returned to her mind. She hoped she’d have an opportunity to hunt it down, but with the fisherman hovering close, she continued her inspection movi