Rebel Island (Tres Navarre #7)(3)

“Something like that.” I looked at Garrett accusingly.

“Hey, little bro, you can’t blame me for that. Is there any place in Texas where you don’t stumble across some cop you’ve pissed off?”

He had a point. Besides, there were plenty of other things I could blame my brother for.

We followed the hotel manager up the clamshell path toward a place I had sworn never to revisit.

Rebel Island was a mile long. Most of that was a thin strip of beach and cordgrass that stretched north like a comet’s tail. The southern end was half a mile wide—just big enough for the lighthouse and the rambling old hotel that had once been home to the island’s most infamous owner.

My father used to relish the island’s history. Every summer when we came here, he’d tell me the stories. To my horror, as I got older, I actually found myself interested in them.

Inconveniently placed near the mouth of Aransas Bay, the island had needled its way into local history like a sticker burr. In the early 1800s, Jean Laffitte had used its treacherous sandbars to lure Spanish ships into the shallows, where they floundered and became easy prey. Laffitte had supposedly buried a treasure here, too, in a grove of live oaks, but if there had ever been live oaks on the island, hurricanes had scoured them away long ago. The only trees now were a dozen palmettos, which according to legend had been planted by Colonel Duncan Bray.

Bray had fought at the final land battle of the Civil War—Palmito Ranch, two hundred miles south. The last irony in a war filled with ironies, Palmito Ranch had been a Confederate victory. Bray considered it the definitive word on the war’s outcome. He planted palmetto saplings from the battlefield on his family’s island, refused to speak of Lee’s surrender or Juneteenth or any of the other new realities. He shot at federal troops who attempted to talk to him about repairing his lighthouse, and he lived the rest of his life in voluntary exile on what he considered the last patch of Confederate soil. The island got its name from him. He wasn’t the last crazy rebel to own the place.

Bray’s house, now the Rebel Island Hotel, was a three-story French Second Empire. It had a mansard roof like reptile skin and cedar-slatted walls painted an odd color that mirrored the sea—sometimes blue, sometimes green or gray. The oldest wooden structure in Aransas County, it had weathered half a dozen hurricanes.

Good karma, our friend Alex had told me, right before he bought the place. At the time, I’d felt like I was watching somebody buy my childhood—nightmares and all.

The lobby smelled of sandalwood and straw mats. Seashells in nets decorated the walls. In one corner, a Latina maid was trying to calm down a guest—a middle-aged blond woman whose eyes were red from crying. Chris the manager excused himself to go help. The blonde was saying something about a gun and her ex-husband. I really didn’t want to know.

A college-aged guy in a UT football jersey came stomping down the staircase with a bottle of José Cuervo and a fistful of limes. He asked an older gentleman reading a newspaper on the sofa if the ferry had already left. The old man said he thought it had. The kid cursed and bounded back upstairs.

Outside, thunder rumbled. The whole building rattled.

“Remind me again,” I told Garrett. “A quiet honeymoon? Way too early for hurricane season?”

“What, little bro, now global warming is my fault?”

“I think the building is charming,” Maia said.

“See?” Garrett said. “Alex! Yo!”

Alex Huff grinned crookedly as he came around the front desk. The hotel owner gave Garrett a bear hug, lifting him out of his wheelchair before setting him back down again. The whole sight was pretty disturbing.

“Damn, Garrett!” Alex said. “Have you gotten taller?”

“Eat me, Huff. You remember Tres. And this is Maia, his better half.”

Alex and I shook hands. He had a grip like a pecan cracker. He hadn’t gotten any prettier in the past few years. His face was scarred from acne. His wiry blond hair and the wild light in his eyes always made me wonder if he slept with his finger in a light socket.

“Yeah, Tres,” he said, pulling me closer. “Need to ask you a favor later, all right?”

That immediately made me wary, but before I could say anything—like hell, no, for instance—Alex’s attention moved on. He gave Maia a hug, admired her third-trimester belly. “Honeymoon, huh? Not a moment too soon.”

“They weren’t gonna take a honeymoon at all.” Garrett wagged a finger at me. “I told Tres, ‘That’s no way to treat a lady. I’ll set the whole thing up for you.’”

“Yeah,” I grumbled. “And then he said, ‘By the way, I’m coming along.’”

Alex and Garrett both laughed like this was a good joke. I wished it was.

Maia squeezed my hand.

“Well, I guess you lovebirds want to see your room.” Alex winked at me. “Garrett’s right next door. I hope that’s okay.”

He ran up the stairs before I could hit him. Garrett cackled and slid out of his chair, then followed Alex, climbing on his hands.

Maia and I got the Colonel’s Suite, a second-floor corner bedroom with a parlor and a bay window looking out at the lighthouse.

The octagonal brick tower was seventy feet tall, so no matter what floor of the hotel you were on, the lighthouse loomed overhead. It dated from the 1850s. It hadn’t worked in fifty years. As a kid, looking up at the glassed-in top, I’d imagined that the beacon light would mysteriously flicker on. It never happened. But I never got tired of watching for it.