Rebel Island (Tres Navarre #7)(27)

Her doctor had thought she was crazy for agreeing to this trip. Tres didn’t understand either.

“It’s just Garrett,” Tres had told her. “We can say no. Hell, we should say no.”

But Maia had convinced him to accept. The last few months she’d felt stifled. Not by the house or by her marriage or even by her decision to put her legal career on hold. She felt claustrophobic within her own skin. Just her and the baby, stuck in here for so many months, waiting.

The idea of going somewhere new, seeing a place that was part of Tres’s past, had intrigued her. Especially since it was a place Tres had never mentioned before. Not even once.

“You spent every summer here?” she’d asked.

He nodded reluctantly.

“And…did what?”

“You know. The usual stuff kids do at the beach.”

Maia imagined things from movies and books, or things she’d witnessed at the beach when she was an adult. Her childhood had had no beaches. No family vacations. Her only escape as a child had been climbing the mulberry tree to get away from the misery in her family’s one-room shack, her father’s depression and her brother’s illness.

“I want to see Rebel Island,” she’d decided.

“No,” Tres said. “You really don’t.”

But the more he tried to dissuade her, the more curious and determined she’d become. With Tres, she always felt as if she were fighting to keep hold, always competing with his roots here in Texas, a place she had never understood. She was determined to weave herself into his territory, to be part of his landscape.

Even after all that had happened this weekend, Maia did not regret her choice. She just wished she understood why Tres disliked this old hotel and Alex Huff so much.

Imelda helped her into the suite. She turned down the bed, but Maia didn’t feel like lying down. She walked a slow circuit around the room, steadying her breathing. Water dripped from the ceiling, falling into the cup she’d placed on the dresser. The candle sputtered on the nightstand.

“Señora, do you need anything?”

“Probably many things,” Maia admitted. “Can you tell me how you came here?”

Imelda blinked. “To the hotel, señora? We used to live in Nuevo Laredo. It became too dangerous. We came north to Corpus Christi because I had a cousin there. We were very lucky to find Señor Huff.”

Maia didn’t ask if Imelda and Jose were in the country illegally. In South Texas, she’d learned, that was like asking someone what denomination of Christian they were. It hardly mattered.

“And how did you find Alex Huff?”

Imelda smoothed out the comforter, trying to make the corners perfect. “By chance. Jose had been working construction, but work was slow. We went to the fireworks, for the Fourth of July, to cheer him up. They have fireworks at the beach in Corpus Christi. Señor Huff was there, next to us, and he began telling Jose how the fireworks were made. Jose…he liked Señor Huff immediately. They both liked the fireworks. By the end of the night, Señor Huff had offered us jobs at the hotel.”

From the little Maia had seen of Alex, she could believe he’d do something impulsive like that. Chris Stowall, the manager, had struck her as a similar hardship case Alex had taken in. Still, something about Imelda’s story seemed incomplete.

“Imelda,” Maia said. “Your grandmother—your abuela. What did she dream about your children?”

The maid’s face darkened. “Señora, I should go. The other guests…”

She closed the door behind her so carefully the latch didn’t even click.

Maia stood at the dresser. She looked at the old photo hanging on the wall. It was black-and-white, in a frame made from pieces of driftwood. Tres hadn’t said a word about the photograph, and so at first Maia had paid it no attention. She assumed it was just another rustic decoration, no different than the stuffed fish or the nets with seashells. But when she studied it, she realized the photo was much more.

It showed three men standing at the docks, the mansion looming behind them on a gray morning. The man in the middle had white hair and milky skin. He wore a dark robe over what looked like pajamas, as if he’d just been dragged out of bed. He squinted in the light and his posture was stiff. The man on the left was a little younger, mid-forties perhaps, with a weathered face and sad eyes. He wore a Greek fisherman’s cap and a plaid shirt and faded jeans, and he held a boat line in his hand. He had Alex Huff’s crooked smile and beak nose. Alex’s father, Maia guessed. The third man dominated the picture. He was a large man in a crisp white shirt and dark slacks, eyes as black as gun barrels. He smiled, but there was no kindness in it. His face was flushed from drinking. A lawman—Maia could see that just from his posture, the expression of power. He was used to people getting out of his way. He had Tres’s face—but so different. It was Tres without his sense of humor, his self-doubt or his kindness. Maia had known Tres for years, and this was only the second or third time she’d ever seen a picture of his dead father, Sheriff Jackson Navarre.

Maia wondered why Tres hadn’t even commented on the photo, or tried to remove it from the wall. She doubted it was an accident the picture was hanging here. Perhaps Alex had put it here as a reminder: Our families are tied together. Or maybe something less charitable. Maybe the message was more: You owe me.