Sleepwalker (Nightwatcher #2)(121)

What am I now, all these years later?

Inhuman?

Adding a straw and the obligatory paper umbrella to the doctored rum runner, Carrie smiles, certain that her plan is going to work.

I thought the same thing the last couple of times, and I was wrong.

The first candidate she’d found, about two months ago, hadn’t been alone after all. That was a close call. Before the female tourist Carrie had selected could lift her doctored daiquiri to her lips, a pair of friends—the woman’s roommates on the Carousel, it turned out—burst into the bar to join her, toting bags from a souvenir shop down the street.

Carrie managed to accidentally-on-purpose knock over the glass, spilling the drug-laced slush all over the bar. She made the woman a fresh drink on the house, along with two more for her friends, and when the Carousel set sail, the tipsy threesome were all aboard.

A few weeks later, she saw her chance again.

Another solo woman at the bar, one who bore enough of a resemblance to Carrie that it just might be possible. Her name was Beth and she was the chatty type. She had just survived an ugly divorce, she said, with no children, and was on her cruise to celebrate leaving behind her old life in rural Maine to start fresh in New Orleans, where she didn’t know a soul.

Perfect, Carrie thought. But this time, before she could reach into her pocket to add the powder to the frozen pi?a colada she was mixing, Jimmy Bolt, the Big Iguana’s owner, materialized.

“Hey, Jane,” he said, “I need you to stay on till closing tonight, okay?”

Of course she said yes. You don’t mess with Jimmy. Ever. About anything.

She learned that years ago, not long after she came to work for him and foolishly—fleetingly—got caught up in his charismatic web.

Theirs wasn’t a full-blown affair, by any means. It lasted only a couple of months. She told him nothing about herself; asked nothing about him in return. She knew he was married, one of the most powerful men on the island, and had his share of shady connections, not to mention plenty of enemies—a fact Carrie is actually counting on now.

On the day Beth from rural Maine crossed Carrie’s path, Jimmy stuck around just long enough for her to change her mind about the second pi?a colada.

“I think I’m going to go hit the casino back on the ship,” she told Carrie as she left. “I’m feeling lucky today.”

You have no idea how lucky you are, Carrie thought, and that night, instead of sailing away in Beth’s cabin, Carrie was mopping someone’s vomit from the bar floor at closing.

Really, that was okay. Patience is a virtue—one that was uncharacteristically in short supply when she was living in New York as Carrie Robinson MacKenna a decade ago. But that was due, in part, to the hormonal injections when she and Mack were trying to conceive.

Thank goodness she’s long-since gotten back to her methodical old self.

“Here you go.” She slides the drink across the bar to Molly. “I just need to see your ship ID.”

“Oh. Right.” Molly reaches into her large straw tote and pulls out a plastic card dangling from a lanyard patterned in the Carousel’s signature purple and gold colors.

Carrie takes the card from her and glances at it as Molly sips from the straw.

Along with the name of the ship and the embedded code that will be scanned for re-boarding, the card bears passenger’s name, Molly Temple, her disembark date—tomorrow—and her lifeboat assembly station.

“Great, I just need your cabin number,” Carrie tells her easily, then holds her breath, praying the generous rum in the first drink—and the first couple of sips Molly’s taken from this one—impaired her better judgment.

Yep:

“It’s 10533,” Molly tells her, thus confirming—as Carrie had already suspected—that she’s staying in one of the ship’s new studio rooms—tiny inside cabins that accommodate just one passenger. No frills. No roommates.

No problem, mon, as they like to say here in the islands that are soon to become mere specks on the horizon in the Carousel’s wake.

“Oooh, I love your bracelet.” Molly has caught sight of the unusual silver and blue bangle on Carrie’s wrist, a constant source of compliments. “Is that topaz?”

“Larimar. It’s a Caribbean gemstone.”

“It’s beautiful. I don’t think I’ve ever seen it before. Where did you get it?”

“Punta Cana.”

She’d visited only once, recklessly daring to leave this island on a clandestine private yacht trip with Jimmy at the height of their affair. The vendor who sold her the bracelet had assured her that it was real larimar, not the plastic imitations that are rampant in tourist traps. He used a lighter to prove it, holding a flame to the stone to show her how durable it was.

“The real thing won’t melt,” he told Carrie, “or burn. The real thing, you can’t destroy.”

She liked that.

She bought it.

She wears it every day.

If Jimmy ever noticed, he probably thinks that’s because it’s a treasured memento of their time together. It isn’t. For Carrie, it’s a reminder that some things in this ever-precarious world can’t be destroyed.

“I’d love to bring a bracelet like that back for my mom,” Molly tells Carrie. “She just lost my dad a few months ago, and I’ve been looking for a souvenir for her. Where is Punta Cana? Is that one of the shops down the road?”