The Jumbie House Read online

  Accolades for the Katie & Annalise Series

  2011 Winner of the Houston Writers Guild Novel Contest

  2010 Winner of the Writers League of Texas Romance Contest

  2012 Winner of the Houston Writers Guild Ghost Story Contest

  “An exciting tale that combines twisting investigative and legal subplots with a character seeking redemption…an exhilarating mystery with a touch of voodoo.” – Midwest Book Review Bookwatch

  “A lively romantic mystery that will likely leave readers eagerly awaiting a sequel.” – Kirkus Reviews

  “A riveting drama with plenty of twists and turns for an exciting read, highly recommended.” – Small Press Bookwatch

  “Katie is the first character I have absolutely fallen in love with since Stephanie Plum!”

  – Stephanie Swindell, bookstore owner

  The Jumbie House

  A Short Story Outtake from Leaving Annalise

  Pamela Fagan Hutchins

  SkipJack Publishing

  Houston

  The Jumbie House Copyright © 2014 by Pamela Fagan Hutchins.

  This book was produced using PressBooks.com.

  Dedication

  To my Nick, who goes by the name Eric.

  Contents

  Accolades for the Katie & Annalise Series

  Dedication

  Foreword

  1. The Jumbie House: A Short Story Outtake from Leaving Annalise

  About the Author

  Books by the Author

  Acknowledgements

  Foreword

  The Jumbie House is a work of fiction. Period. Any resemblance to actual persons, places, things, or events is just a lucky coincidence.

  1

  The Jumbie House: A Short Story Outtake from Leaving Annalise

  After our estate sale, I cleaned up the remaining items, stacking unwanted paintings and chipped vases in the garage as I listened to the Dixie Chicks’s album Home over and over. It sounded as mournful as I felt. My husband and I were leaving our island home for Texas the next day, and our house was not happy about it.

  We lived in—I might as well just say it and get it out there—a jumbie house in the rainforest. Jumbie as in voodoo spirit. Yeah, right. I know. I didn’t believe it either at first. I promise I’m not some crazy woman who needs her head shrunk. Living at Annalise just showed me there’s more out there than our first five senses can detect. Maybe it comes from living near the water, but when I moved to St. Marcos to dry myself out and get over Nick, I discovered a sort of sixth sense that makes me aware of things. Things that were almost undetectable back when I lived in Dallas, like someone had hit the mute button. But on St. Marcos, by the sea, I can hear them, feel them. I could feel her—the house, Annalise. And right then she felt like a teenage girl with her sulk on.

  “I’m going to miss you, Annalise. I’m really, really sorry about this,” I said aloud.

  I discovered Annalise on a guided rainforest hike when she was just was an abandoned shell, like I was. I guess you could say we saved each other. But, still, wouldn’t Annalise, if she were human—a living woman—do the same as me, now? Nick wanted me to go back to the states with him so we could raise his orphaned nephew. It was the right thing to do. It was the only thing to do. Wasn’t it?

  Nick walked in and some of the melancholy lifted. “Ask me how it went,” he said.

  I raised my eyebrows. He could never tell a story without making sure he had an eager audience first. Nick had visited the airport, which currently was only running local flights since a Category Four hurricane came through the island ten days ago. It hadn’t so much as nicked Annalise’s fortress, but the airport was damaged, and the major air carriers wouldn’t resume operations for weeks.

  “How did it go?” I asked.

  “Great! If you worked for LIAT Airlines, you’d be $100 richer right now. And all you’d have to do is let one slightly oversized dog sail past the cargo scales tomorrow. Which you would, of course, because of the $100.” He tipped his shoulders back and puffed out his chest.

  “Thank God,” I said. We had feared Poco Oso, my giant young German shepherd, would be stuck in the islands forever because I’d hand fed him too many jerky treats. Noticing Nick’s stance, I added, “And thank you, baby,” trying to hide my smirk. I walked toward the side door to give the dogs their night feeding and share the good news, and a Milkbone, with Oso.

  “Wait.” Nick’s tone stopped me short. “Don’t go outside yet.”

  “What’s outside, Nick?” I asked.

  “Trust me. It’s nothing, and I’ll take care of it.”

  “Which is it: nothing, or something you’ll take care of?”

  Nick looked back and forth from me to the door—me,the churning waters of Scylla, it, the rock face of Charybdis—and spoke. “The dogs found Sheila.”

  In addition to Oso, we had five watchdogs up at our remote house. Or we had, until Sheila disappeared a few days ago, only to return and drop dead that morning right as we’d parted with a coffee table for $25 that should have brought twice that much. She was swollen with stings from African bees. The rainforest wasn’t for the faint of heart.

  “What do you mean, ‘found her’?” I probed.

  “Well, the dogs think they’re in the Fiji Islands instead of the West Indies.”

  It took me a moment, but when understanding dawned, it dawned like a strobe light. “They’re eating Sheila?” My turkey and Swiss sandwich churned against the mango in my stomach.

  “Past tense. She’s pretty far gone. I’m sorry, Katie.”

  The prickly feeling in my face meant the pale between my freckles had turned pasty. I sank onto the bed and put my head in my hands. Nick sat beside me. We held onto each other for several quiet moments.

  “Are you going to bury her?” I asked into his chest.

  “We sold the shovel this morning,” he replied.

  I remembered. The man who’d bought it had said, “Five dollah, me son, and not a penny more, or you be stealin’ food from the mout’ of me chirrun dem.”

  For some reason, that was the thing that brought on my tears. “We can’t just leave her there,” I protested, chagrined at the shrill tremor in my voice. Softer, I added, “Or what’s left of her.”

  “I’ll cover her up so nothing else can get at her,” Nick promised as he stroked my hair.

  I wiped my eyes and nodded. Nick went out to deal with Sheila and the cannibals. Annalise was still and quiet. Some help you are, I thought.

  I fought against the image of the dogs over Sheila’s body; it was too horrifying. Sheila had mothered Oso when I first got him. I flinched as I heard a thud and a crack outside. Nick must have dropped something over Sheila. Rocks or bricks, maybe.

  I tried to be rational: these were island dogs, one step removed from wild, not house pets.It wasn’t as if they’d killed her to eat her. She just happened to be available. But no matter how I tried to spin it for myself, at the end of the day, they ate their friend. What a way to end our last day here.

  Later that evening, while we had supper on the back patio, I watched the bats come out from under the eaves, each island sparrow stopping at the pool for a sip of water before flitting off into the night. It sounded from the whir of their beating wings like there were thousands of them. I had always appreciated their appetite for mosquitoes, and I found them achingly beautiful tonight. My nerves settled as the macabre vision of Sheila faded. Only twelve hours until our plane departed, ours and Oso’s. The other four guard dogs would stay here with the house sitters and Annalise until she sold.

  We threw away our paper plates and tidied up the kitchen for the last time. My pulse sounded in my ears as we walked the long hall to our bedroom, a
nother final exercise. I took a soak in our claw-footed tub, then put away everything but what I’d need in the morning. All our bags were packed and ready.

  As we got into bed, Nick brought up the cash.

  “Are you at all concerned about the money from the sale? We did advertise in the paper, and we had a lot of people we didn’t know up here,” he said. He ran his hand from the front to the back of his dark hair several times, his nervous tell.

  We’d made nearly eighteen thousand dollars that day. There were people on this quasi-third-world island who would go to great lengths for that kind of cash, and notice of an estate sale generally meant an untended house. Not only was the cash attractive, but the items left in the house would appeal to a certain class of person as well. And we weren’t parting as friends with some of our island neighbors. Faces flashed in my mind of some of the less savory contractors that I had fired, of my ex-boyfriend Gene who hadn’t liked being dumped when Nick showed up on St. Marcos, of the many friends of Pumpy, a former senatorial aide whom I had helped land in jail for murder. Tonight was the last chance for some of them to bid us farewell in their own special ways.

  I said, “I hadn’t thought of it at all. And it’s dark as pitch out there now.” I thought for a minute. “Well, we’ve got the dogs, we’ve got the flare gun, and the gate is shut. We’ll be fine, right?”

  Nick nodded. “I’ll put the money under my pillow. I didn’t mean to scare you,” he said as he peered at me in the dark. I probably looked like a ghost again.

  Right then, the quiet night vanished and the wind gusted through our open windows, whipping the curtains into a froth of sea-foam green gauze. I swallowed and put on my brave smiley face. Nick gripped my hand and returned the expression. Two courageous souls facing the night together.

  I wished we had more than the flare gun for protection, but getting a real gun on St. Marcos practically took a federal order, unless you were willing to buy it on the black market. It wasn’t like we could call 911 if the bad guys did show up. On St. Marcos, no one called the police if they could help it. Cops and perps were nearly indistinguishable. The front page of the St. Marcos Daily Source featured stories every week about bad cops involved in drug trafficking, kidnapping, murder, running guns

  Local friends had told us never to harm an intruder, even if he was armed, because the police would always side with the local. Some even told us to kill the would-be burglar, rapist, kidnapper or murderer, and throw the body over the Wall—a 6,000-foot drop about a mile off the northern shore. Nick and I didn’t think we could go that far, but decided that if we needed help, we would call my friend Rashidi, not the police. Until then, our sole protection would consist of five dogs, an aluminum baseball bat, a jumbie house, and a flare gun.

  We tried to sleep, but lay wild-eyed in the dark while the clock’s minute hand advanced as if wading through a vat of molasses. The wind grew stronger and built to a howl, but no rain came. Objects inside the house shifted, banged, and fell to the floor. We heard a thud in the living room and something crashed upstairs. I prayed the wind was the culprit. If it was anything else, the storm was blowing too loud for us to hear it.

  “If it gets any worse, we’re going to need to shut the windows and close the hurricane shutters again,” I whispered.

  The dogs howled, then barked, and finally growled like crazy. Were they scared of the wind? Or was something out there? The night visits from the Senepol cattle and scrubby island horses that roamed the hills didn’t bother them.

  The bed felt like it was about to go airborne and the sheets already had; the edges of the cotton floated like poltergeists. I clutched at Nick’s hand, as if it would tether me down if I held it tightly enough.

  “Are you sure you locked up?” I asked for the sixth time.

  “You know I am.”

  “Nick, let’s push the furniture against the door.”

  He sprang up to move the armoire. I fell in beside him and pushed with all my might. My brain ticked through our points of vulnerability. No one could get to us in the master bedroom through the windows, since it was suspended in the middle story of the three-level house. A determined house-breaker could get to us with a tall ladder, but not in this wind. The only entrance to our room was the door, and we had just blockaded it with two chests of drawers and an armoire. That was all we could do. We got back in bed and listened to the wind, the dogs, and the bumps in the night, and waited for morning. I prayed that Annalise would forgive us for moving and hold the line if anyone got past the dogs.

  We must have fallen asleep sitting up, because I woke up in the middle of the night with my back against the headboard and my left hand holding Nick’s right. Something was different, and wrong. Nick awoke, too.

  “The lights,” I said to him. “We left them on in the bathroom and now they’re out. And if we lost power, the generator should have come on, but it didn’t.”

  Shit, shit, shit.

  “Do you want me to go outside and check it?” he asked.

  “Absolutely not! Let’s leave the furniture in place and stay here together.” We huddled close. This might be the longest night of my life. Longer even than the night of the hurricane.

  Many uneasy hours later, we woke to a peaceful tropical morning that belied the night before. It was late. Neither of our phone’s alarms had gone off, which I suspected Annalise the electronics-zapper might have had a hand in. When she was happy she was mischievous, and liked to reset clocks and turn on the stereo. She wasn’t happy now, though, so maybe this was her way of making us late? I didn’t have time to dwell on it. We had survived the night, we were relieved and exhausted, and if we were going to make our plane, we had to put it in high gear.

  We threw on our clothes, grabbed our bags, and ran for the garage where Oso was waiting for us. He was the only one allowed to sleep inside; being mama’s baby has its privileges. We shoved him into the truck’s cab and hustled down the driveway as the other dogs lounged half-asleep in the grass, a pile of rocks marking Sheila’s final resting place behind them. They barely acknowledged our departure. They had worked hard last night.

  Nick backed the truck down the driveway toward our lane, but then slammed on the brakes. All the construction scaffolding that we had left carefully stacked against the side of the house lay across the driveway, blocking our path.

  “Annalise?” I asked.

  “That’s my guess. She really doesn’t want us to go,” he said.

  We jumped out and Nick called me over to his side of the truck. He hefted a corner of the scaffolding platform and pointed at a machete, a patched Rasta cap, and a dried stain of what looked like blood on the ground.

  “Oh my God,” I breathed.

  “She may not want us to go, but it looks like she isn’t going to let anyone hurt us either.”

  “It wasn’t just anyone—it was Junior, that contractor I fired last spring. That’s his cap,” I said. “Annalise hated him. She used to dump his paint cans and move his tools. She scared him off the property last time he was here. Looks like she did it again.”

  Thanks to Annalise, this had only been a near miss. I ran back to the house and put my head against her cool yellow plaster like I had so many times before, and whispered my thanks and farewell.

  “I am so sorry, Annalise. I will find a good family to come live here with you. I promise.”

  Silence from the jumbie house. I couldn’t wait for an answer. Nick and I dragged the scaffolding out of the way and got back in the truck. I felt a sharp pain in my heart as we went through the gate for the last time. It was done. We were leaving. I pressed my body against Nick’s side. Oso turned back toward the house and began barking madly, jangling my seriously frayed nerves.

  “Wait!” I yelled, and Nick slammed on the brakes, making Oso yelp. I jumped out of the car and ran back toward the gate, snapping pictures as fast as my phone’s camera would let me: the lane, the gate, the forest, and the house. The beautiful house. Sunlight had broken through th
e treetops and was warming the backs of a mare and her black colt as they grazed right up beside Annalise’s steps in the front yard. The scent of the fermenting mangoes in the orchard seared itself into my nose. I committed it all to memory, knowing I would probably not get another chance to soak in this house that I had brought back to life over the last two years, and who had brought me back with her.

  “Are you going to be all right?” Nick asked when I climbed back into the truck.

  I nodded. “Drive.”

  He jammed the truck into gear and stomped on the accelerator, and we lurched forward with our tires spinning and gravel spraying behind us. I scrolled through the pictures on my iPHone, squinting in the bright morning sunlight. I drank them in, one by one. As I clicked to the last picture, something about the one just before it tugged at me, and I went back to look at the picture of the horses. The mare and foal were standing in front of Annalise, looking just as I’d seen them moments before, but there was something else. I held the phone further from me, trying to bring it into focus. And then I saw her.

  My hand opened and the iPhone clattered to the floor. Oso whined and shoved his nose under my elbow and my hand flew to my mouth. I turned to look back again at my house, to see what my eyes told me was true but my mind could not believe. Already, the forest was impenetrable and I saw nothing but a wall of green.

  “What’s the matter?” Nick asked, his eyes on the road as he whipped through the narrow opening in the trees.

  I picked up my phone again. Annalise. Annalise? On the front steps of my house stood a tall black woman in a white blouse and loose, calf-length plaid skirt. A matching scarf was knotted over her hair. She looked straight into the camera with somber eyes and no expression as one of our dogs stood beside her, nuzzling her leg. In her right hand, she held Junior’s cap and machete. In her left, she held his severed, bloody head by his dreadlocked hair.