Sweet Paradise by Gene Desrochers (most read books in the world of all time .txt) 📕

Thoughts of the women in his family he actually knew swirled in his head. Aunt Hill had always been distant, formal. She was family and greeted him with her own brand of enthusiasm, but underneath she was cold as white marble. She avoided the sun, but her skin remained a hue or two darker than Herbie’s. He possessed the true colonial European look. Who lived on a tropical island their entire life only to shun the sun? But he had some warmth for his Aunt Hill. She was never cruel to him like papa. She never defended his father’s abuse, but he sensed her loyalty was to papa.

Grandma, on the other hand, had helped Junior. She had sent him off to boarding school and college in a place where he’d fit in. He didn’t function in New England schools. Too formal. He needed the relaxed atmosphere of the South. Grandma Francine knew and respected that. For all practical and emotional purposes, she was his mother. He was damned if he was going to let her disappear without digging up every grave on this island if he needed to. At least that’s what he used to think.

Now, his respect for her had begun to slip. He had learned things about all of them. Heroes were people, too, it turned out. When you looked closer, your so-called protector was often the same person who set you up to need protecting. Besides, she’d also avoided telling him about his mother. She’d claimed not to know her last name or where she was from. Junior wondered if Gertrude was even her real first name.

As he tried to imagine what his mother looked like, he fell into an exhausted sleep on the cold tile.

Chapter 7

Walter Pickering, a man who never seemed to sleep, woke me at nine. I trudged down the hallway to the bathroom and showered next to a stateside tourist who wouldn’t stop yapping about how authentic The West Indian Manner was.

“The place is so real. I feel like I’m in the mess with the locals, you know?” He kept on about how this trip was on his bucket list and he was running out of time. “So’s Charlize Theron, but I think that ship has sailed.”

As I left my room, I paused to admire Christina’s World once again. A dark underpinning beneath the midday glare of a relentless sun.

Why was Christina on the ground? Was she hurt? Was she tired? And the streaks of gray. You couldn’t accurately judge the woman’s age. She had a slender figure and a dress that could be worn by a woman anywhere from fifteen to fifty. Even more intriguing, an open-minded person might ask if Christina was even a woman.

Then there’s the house. Is it deserted? What’s that ladder on the side? Are they painting or patching the roof? The place looked like a tinderbox ready to explode into flames if a stray ember grazed it.

Christina’s longing seeped through the back of her head, like a second face. No need to see her eyes, her mouth, or her curled lip. The crush of her shape and the way she stretched toward the distant farm told you everything. It also told you that whatever she longed for would always be just out of reach.

I fingered the top edge of the frame and leaned in, searching for someone in the window of the farmhouse. Only shadows greeted me. Empty shadows. Such darkness on a golden canvas. No one there. Christina was alone.

After an egg sandwich prepared by “Silent” Marge, a name I’d secretly given the nearly mute co-owner of the guesthouse, I hoofed it over to my office. I figured I’d put a clean coat of paint on the door, but a police officer was there. He said they had a few more forensic matters to take care of before I could have it back. The island shrug was his response when I asked exactly when he expected my office to be released. Loosely translated, this meant he didn’t know and didn’t care.

“You know you are not supposed to hold the crime scene for any length of time after the crime scene guys are finished. Back where I used to live ... ”

He waved me off. “I don’t know nothing about that, but I was told to keep it clear. Check?”

Admittedly, I was cynical about police specifically and the government’s use of our money in general. We needed the police and my office had to be properly vetted before I could return, but it was my office and my rent money going down the drain. I clenched my jaw as I turned to leave.

Watching all those years when my father, Terry, drank too much and made a fool of himself taught me something about discretion, especially around cops. Terry had wound up very close to a felony conviction. It should have been a felony, after all, since he clobbered a fellow bar patron over the head with a beer bottle. The guy needed twenty-six stitches and nearly lost sight in his right eye from a stray shard. A damned talented and expensive attorney my maternal grandfather paid for had negotiated a misdemeanor. My parents had promised to pay him back, but never managed to.

I never heard from or spoke to my grandfather again after moving to St. Croix in 1994. None of us did, including my mother. Patrice Montague’s father had principles to replace family. Mom never forgave her dad for that.

The tension in my household, which had always been high, permanently ratcheted up to a ten out of ten that year. For some reason Patrice loved Terry and willingly gave up her family to stay with him. To her, “Till death do us part,” was literal.

The stack of hundreds Harold had handed me the day before bulged contentedly in my front pocket. A real retainer. Legitimate private-detecting. Dana Goode, the reporter who’d helped