27. MIDDAY: TRAIL OF CLUES
Dax
I don’t even think Ava notices we’re at the tree house until I bring her inside the kitchen hut and sit her down in a chair. I place some sliced fruit in front of her with a cup full of water and then go to the counter to get some pork.
“Seriously?” I’m staring at a naked carcass. “It’s not enough that I gave them almost the entire boar, they had to steal some of ours?”
“No one stole any. I ate it,” Roxy says, and Ava jumps at the sound of her voice.
I say, “You ate it? You expect me to believe you ate an entire butt of a pig?”
“I was starving, okay?” she says with a glare. “It’s not like you’ve been around the last few days so I had to fend for myself, and you know I’m not very good at it.”
I hear the accusing tone in her voice, and it strikes a nerve. “Well, you know the saying you are what you eat? I guess it’s pretty accurate in this case.”
“Are you calling me a pig?” she asks, her voice raised one octave.
“I’m just calling it like I see it. Come on, Ava, let’s go catch some fish.” I walk over to her while keeping Roxy in view to watch for any retaliation.
Ava gives me a weak smile and then says, “I just want to go up to my room.”
Ava walks out of the kitchen, and it’s like she’s taking half my heart with her. I follow her up the long ladder to my dad’s old room, expecting her to ask me to stay with her, but she acts like I’m not even there.
I’m at a loss for words, so I stand in the doorway and watch her sit down in the middle of the floor and dump out the contents of her backpack. I know she’s upset and angry, but I don’t expect her to fling the sketchpad against the wall where it lands in a crumpled heap at one corner of the room.
I open my mouth to say something, but then stop. She’s pulled a photograph out of her wallet and studies it for a few seconds before she stands and wedges the corner of the photo in between a crack in the wood above the sink. She turns her back to me to head for the shower room, pulling her shirt over her head on the way.
My feet are in cement. What I want and what I think she wants are dueling inside my head. I want to stay to make sure she’s okay, hold her in my arms, and kiss all her pain away. But maybe she wants to be alone. There are so many reasons for her to be angry with me so I go, ignoring the guilt and the feeling that I’m abandoning her. It’s like I helped rip her heart wide open, and now I’m leaving her to bleed to death because I have no idea how to stop the hemorrhaging.
Roxy is sitting near the fire pit, weaving a sun hat from small strips of palm leaves when she hears me approach.
“What’s wrong, Prince Charming?” she says, without even a hint of a smile. “Trouble in your little kingdom paradise?”
I want to jab her with a wicked comeback like I always do, but I stop myself. This is a first. Instead, I say, “Ava’s really upset and what she probably needs is to talk to another girl. Maybe you could try to remember what it’s like to have your heart broken and, you know—give her hug, a sympathetic eye roll, and a few jaw drops before trash talking into oblivion the jerk that did this to her.”
“Well, the last part should be easy; I have plenty of nasty things I’m dying to tell her about you.” She doesn’t look up, but an evil grin contorts her face.
“I’m sure that’s true,” I say, “but the hard part will be for you not to melt into a pile of green smoke when her tears touch your skin, or there’ll be nothing left of you but your pointed hat and broom.” I couldn’t help it. It slipped out. “And just for the record, I’m only partly to blame for her despair.”
Her eyes dart to me then, but they aren’t filled with anger. She looks surprised by my confession, as if a small piece of empathy managed to crack its way through her ice-cold heart.
“I’m going to the beach. I’ll be back in a while,” I tell her. “Please stay here and keep an eye on Ava until I come back. I know you won’t do it for me, but maybe you will for her.” Then I turn and walk away.
I’m halfway to the beach when I notice the bright spot of yellow on the forest floor. I pick it up and hold it between my fingers. The yellow feather is out of place on this side of the island. This particular Bird of Paradise species is all but extinct on the island because the Lambai tribe uses the tail feathers in their head dresses. I shove it in my pocket and continue to the beach.
The fish are playing a game of hide and seek in my favorite fishing spot, but I wait patiently until one finally appears. Success! I lift the fish out of the water and notice something sparkle in the sand below the surface of the water. I pick it up and examine it for a half a second before my blood turns to ice in my veins. It is Ava’s clover bracelet. And there’s only one explanation for how it wound up here. This is the perfect place to watch the cave without being seen. I know because it is the exact spot I sat on numerous occasions to read Ava’s journal. Zoron!
I’ve never run so fast in my entire life. My heart pounds with every step. I thrash through the forest dodging the trees with ease. How could I leave Ava alone? Roxy won’t be able to protect her, and that’s assuming she’d even try.
There’s no sign of Roxy or Ava in the kitchen hut, so I sprint to the ladder and climb with stealth to the top. Roxy is standing in the doorway to Ava’s room with her back to me, so I pause to listen.
“So what’s wrong with you?” she asks Ava, and I hear Ava respond from inside.
“I just discovered my boyfriend wasn’t who I thought he was.”
Roxy lets out an insincere laugh. “Well, at least you ended up on an island with another prospect, even if he is annoying most of the time. Maybe not to you—but my brother’s cheerful countenance really gets on my nerves. I had to leave a boyfriend behind too, and look at me, what do I have now? That’s right—nothing but an annoying stepbrother and a bunch of cannibals without a sense of manners or any concept of hygiene.”
Roxy steps into the room and disappears from my sight, but I can still hear what she says to Ava.
“So what’s in your safe-deposit box?” she asks. “Not that it really matters. Because it’ll be gone if no one pays the yearly fee—while you sit here and rot on this island like me.”
“I’m not following you,” Ava says, and I imagine Roxy rolling her eyes, completely annoyed. Not many people can follow what Roxy says. The majority of days she’s in a sour mood and tends to leave out details of a conversation like she’s offering you a riddle that you’re not smart enough to solve.
“The key around your neck.”
“Oh, it’s not real,” Ava says, like she’s trying to clarify a misunderstanding. “My parents gave this to me as a gift when I was sixteen. They had it engraved with—”
“I saw what it says,” Roxy interrupts. “It’s a key to a bank safe-deposit box. The number on your key is one off from mine. They’re together.”
This is startling information. Now I understand Roxy’s reaction to Ava’s necklace when I introduced them. I’d examined the key closely after I removed the chain from around Ava’s neck. On the opposite side of the engraving were five tiny numbers I thought were put there for show. I never got close enough to Roxy to notice she wore a necklace just like it, nor did I care.
“What’s in yours?” Ava asks, and I take one step closer to the door.
“Important papers that are pointless now. My mother gave me this key when I turned twelve,” Roxy says.
“What kind of papers?”
“I never saw them, but my mother said they’re papers proving that my father left me half of his shares to a company. He gave the papers to my mother before he died. So, like I said—pointless. An ocean separates me from this island and my billion-dollar fortune. Now I have nothing left but a life of misery.”
Well, it’s a relief to realize I’m not the only cause of Roxy’s misery. She’s pissed about her long-lost fortune. Three years together on this island and she’s mentioned not so much as a word about i
t.
My mind is spinning with possibilities, and I’m sure Ava’s is too. Finally she asks the question she must think matters most.
“Do you know who your father was?” I can hear the hesitancy in her voice. “Because I was thinking he might also be mine. After my parents died four months ago, I found out I was adopted. I know they adopted me from my aunt, but I haven’t been able to figure out who my biological father was. And my aunt died too, right after I was born.”
I so do not like where this conversation is going—Ava being related to Roxy. Oh, hell no.
“I never met him because he was killed before I was even born, so I’ve only seen pictures,” Roxy says. “And then my mother made the stupidest decision of her life and married Dax’s dad when I was two.”
There’s a hint of bitterness in her voice that rubs me the wrong way. Really? If it weren’t for my dad, she’d have grown up in a motel room, running from town to town. And maybe she wouldn’t have ended up here, but let’s face it, without me, she’d definitely not be alive to sit here now and dis my dad. Damn. She’d be ungrateful if she were the only girl living in a castle on a planet full of hot guys, where money grew on trees and it rained chocolate.
My breath escapes with a soft whoosh. At least they are having a conversation… a normal conversation… so I turn and retreat back down the ladder, but not before I sneak into Roxy’s room and swipe her precious seashell collection.
A quick perusal of the area surrounding the tree house proves useful when I find another yellow feather, confirming my suspicions that Zoron or someone from his tribe has been snooping around. This is not good.
It takes me only a few minutes set a trap made of small vines tied together and wrapped around various trunks six inches off the ground around the entire perimeter of the tree house. I also hang clusters of seashells on the vine to alert me if anyone comes close.
Roxy and Ava look surprised when I appear at the doorway. I pull the chair from the corner and make myself at home close to them. Putting my feet up on the bed, I cross them at the ankles.
“Hey. Just checking to make sure you didn’t eat Ava,” I say to Roxy with a smirk I know she’ll hate. “I know how you like your dessert.”
“Very funny,” she snaps. “Let it go. Why don’t you make yourself useful and go hunt something?”
I laugh quietly and then get up to stroll across the room to pick up Ava’s sketchpad from the floor. I set the sketchpad next to the sink and lean over to look at the photo Ava placed there earlier. My heart sucker punches me in the chest.
“What I really want to know,” I hear Ava say, “is why I have a key to a safe-deposit box like you, and what’s in it.”
“Well, I have a better question than that,” I say.
“What is it?” asks Roxy. “Let me guess. Would Ava like you better if you could grow a beard?”
Ava snickers and turns to me, probably expecting me to be ready with a good comeback, but instead I say, “No,” with all seriousness, and hold up the photo. “I was just wondering why Ava has a picture of your mother?”
Roxy gasps and jumps up from the bed to snatch the photo from my hand.
“Where did you get this?” she demands, and when she turns to Ava, a tear rolls down her cheek.
“You’re both mistaken,” Ava says with a shake of her head. “That’s a picture of my aunt Vivianne, my mom’s sister. She died right after I was born so she couldn’t be your—”
“You!” Roxy interrupts, taking a step closer to Ava and pointing an accusing finger in her direction. “You’re the something else.”
Ava and I look at each other with the same confused expression. I make a circle with my finger at the side of my head, and then point to Roxy while her back is still to me.
Roxy plops back down on the hammock bed cross-legged in front of Ava.
“When we left California, I was so upset,” she says. “So a few days into our trip, my mom tried to take my mind off leaving by telling me she had something important to tell me. That’s when she told me why we were running.”
I rush to the chair next to the bed and sit down, eager to hear her story.
“She said my father was business partners with a dangerous man who wanted to buy out my father’s share of the company, but my father refused. Then right after my father was killed, my mother found out she was pregnant with me. She suspected the partner had something to do with my father’s death and was worried he’d come after her next. She said the partner wanted to eliminate her too, assuming that then he’d have all the shares of the company. So she faked her own death, went into hiding, and started a new life under her new identity.”
“What does that have to do with Ava?” I ask, but she ignores me and continues the story.
“She met Dax’s father, Jack, and they got married. Everything was fine until one day, we went shopping. For some reason, she thought someone was following us. She freaked out and convinced Jack that we needed to leave California so—”
“I already told her about that,” I say. “What about Ava?”
“You’re so impatient,” Roxy snaps.
“Wait,” Ava says. “Was it a black Mercedes that was following you?”
“No way!” I say, but Roxy’s eyes widen.
“Yes… but how do you know about the black Mercedes?”
“Because I was being followed by one before I left California,” Ava tells her.
Roxy jumps in. “Shortly after my mother thought she was being followed, I began to notice a black Mercedes when I would get out of school, or see it parked down the street when I went to a friend’s house. When I told her about it, she panicked and took me out of school. We left right after that.”
“Anyway, she told me about the safe-deposit box, and then she said, ‘And there’s something else I need to tell you’. But she never got to finish because that’s when we hit the rocks,” Roxy says with sadness in her voice. “So I think the something else was you. She was going to tell me I had a sister.”
“Are you freaking kidding me?” I say, and then try to stop my brain from exploding.
“Think about it, Ava. They must have been worried about your safety, so they had your parents adopt you. Then, after our father was killed, and Mother knew she was pregnant with me, she decided to run and hide. Your safety-deposit box probably contains papers leaving you the other half of Father’s shares. It totally makes sense.”
That would explain them having the same keys, and Ava’s parents’ house being broken into, and more importantly, it would explain why someone would want her dead.
“What was the name of our father’s business partner?” Ava asks Roxy.
“I don’t remember, Harry something.”
“Oh. My. Gosh. Harry Caruso?”
“Yeah, that sounds right,” she says, and then turns her head to glare at me because I’ve leaned closer. They’d been so involved in solving the mystery, I think they actually forgot I was here.
“Sorry,” I tell her. “I think I need some air.”