Really Dead Read online

  “And when this production’s over?”

  “We’ll both move on. Don’t look at me that way! Everybody does it on location shoots.”

  “If everybody jumped off a cliff would you do that, too?”

  “Stop acting like my mother.”

  I somehow resisted the urge to tell him that he should stop acting like a spoiled brat. “Are you and Victoria going to get divorced?”

  “I don’t know. We’ve scheduled a meeting for when I get back, but I’ve heard that she’s hired a pitbull of a divorce lawyer. They’re probably coming up with a game plan to clean me out.”

  “I’m sorry, James. Really.” It wasn’t the time to once again tell him that I thought he’d never really appreciated how lucky he was to have Victoria.

  He walked over to the side of the bed and stood in front of me. He looked like he was about to cry. “Can we be friends? I could really use a friend right now.”

  I smiled up at him. No matter what, he’d always be my brother and I’d never stop loving him. He looked so stressed. Some of the worry wrinkles across his forehead softened when he smiled back at me. But I had to wonder if it was just his marital problems that were making him so tense. Mandy didn’t give me the chance to ask.

  “Jamie! Dan’s on the phone for you,” she called up from the bottom of the stairs.

  “I’d better take that,” he said with a sigh as he walked to the door. He’d almost closed the door behind himself when he popped his head back into the room. “Oh, yeah, how did the week with Glenn go?”

  “It was good.” I mentally ended that sentence with one more word — mostly. Most of our time together had been good, verging on great even. But the bad time at the end of the week had taken the shine off of some of that good. James, however, was the last person I’d discuss it with.

  I let myself fall back on the bed and stared up at the ceiling fan as it spun around above me. The bed was too comfortable. I knew I’d fall into a deep sleep if I didn’t get up and soon. James had mentioned something about going over to the island for dinner and I definitely didn’t want to miss that, not that I really cared about seeing the island. I wanted to see Rob and told myself that that desire came solely from my concern for James and whatever he’d gotten himself into.

  I unpacked what little I had. After many tries I gave up trying to get an Internet connection on my notebook. I tried to check my voicemail on my cellphone but it wasn’t getting any reception. Fighting sleep was getting harder to do by the minute so I decided to have a quick shower. The combination of the cold water and the stunning view from my open-air shower woke me up a bit. Wrapped in a towel, I lay on one of the lounge chairs on my balcony to drip dry. My eyelids lowered with the setting sun.

  Stars were sparkling like diamonds scattered across the black velvet Caribbean sky when my eyes opened. I heard the rhythmic clang-clang-clang of halyards banging against a mast somewhere close by. Forgetting that I’d been wearing only a towel I stood up without holding it and it promptly fell to the ground. My instinct was to grab it immediately but then I adopted James’ attitude of why not? No one could see me. My balcony, the whole villa in fact, wasn’t overlooked by any other building. The only other villa in the bay was somewhere to my right, but if I couldn’t see it neither it nor its occupants could see me. I walked over to the railing and saw the source of the halyard noises. A sailboat had anchored in the bay. Its interior lights weren’t on but its mast, bow, and stern lights were; they swayed back and forth in time with the gentle waves. I could faintly see some lights on one of the islands in the distance. The glorious feeling of isolation from most of the world was momentarily spoiled when a car’s headlights beamed up and over the hill we’d crested when we were driving in from the harbour. Its high-beams ran over the villa for a split second and then raced down the road that snaked along the island, finally pointing up and disappearing over the next hill.

  I leaned over the railing and looked to my left to see if any lights were on in the main building of the villa. It was dark. Only the pool was lit up. Damn. I’d missed going for dinner on the island, missed seeing Rob.

  When James had said that everyone did it, everyone had affairs or temporary relationships while on location, had that everyone included Rob?

  A wave of impatience rolled through me. I wanted to get going. But I couldn’t very well swim to Soursop, especially in light of the fact that I had no idea where it was. I tried lying down on the bed to see if I could get a few more hours sleep. The ceiling fan clicked every other turn. A cricket chirped incessantly just outside the window. Isolation wasn’t as quiet as it was cracked up to be. Then I heard noises that made me move quickly.

  “Ooh, Jamie! You’re so big! Do it! Do it! Harder, baby, harder!”

  Mandy sounded like a pretty good actress to me. She was putting on quite the performance, one that kept on going and going and going.

  Given the earlier tension between James and I, I decided not to yell a friendly request — like shut up! Instead, I turned on the lights, pulled on a clean T-shirt and shorts, shoved my feet into my trainers, grabbed my MP3 player, and got going — going anywhere that wasn’t within earshot of James’ bedroom.

  Mandy squealed out another “Baby, you’re the man!” as I let myself out the gate at the top of the stairs. I wished she’d make up her mind — was he a baby or a man?

  My eyes quickly acclimatized to the darkness and I headed down the road we’d driven in on. If the sun had set across the Caribbean from the balcony of my room, I knew it was going to rise on the other side of the island and I planned to find a spot to sit and watch it. I jammed the earbuds into my ears and clicked shuffle on my MP3 player.

  By the time I found the best rock to sit on Michael Bublé was “Feeling Good,” but not in a sexual way, thankfully. As he sang about the new dawn I watched the sun light up the new cloudless day. A family of goats bleated amongst themselves, a rooster crowed, the horns in Michael’s song blared. ZZ Top’s “Legs” pumped me up to power walk back to the villa. Emerson, Lake and Palmer’s “Benny the Bouncer” accompanied me as I did some runs up and down the stairs at the villa. It wasn’t until my seventh trip down that I realized there was a man standing in the great room watching me.

  “Who the fuck are you?” he asked through an open window when I stopped and looked right at him.

  “I’m Ria.” I decided to give as good as I’d just got. “Who the fuck are you?”

  “Dan Shykoff. Where’s Mandy?”

  “Still in bed, I guess.”

  “Oh. Okay. I’ll go get her.” He turned around and walked through the room and out the open doors that led to the covered veranda on the other side of the building.

  James’ partner was staying at the villa, too? It would have been nice if James had warned me.

  I entered the great room by the back door and saw that Dan was leaning over the railing of the veranda at the far end of the room, but he wasn’t saying anything, he was just leaning — offering me an unwanted view of his butt. I decided to check out a different view and looked around the open concept room.

  The ceiling was open to the high rafters. The gourmet kitchen shone. There was a spotlessly clean large glass dining table, surrounded by padded rattan chairs, near the picture windows that opened to the covered veranda and on the other side of the doors to the veranda there was a large seating area furnished with two padded rattan sofas. The smaller seating area across from the kitchen looked like it had been set up to watch the television, but someone had turned it into a mini office; there were files everywhere, a printer, a scanner, and two notebook computers … and Albert’s bag. It was sitting beside the coffee table in front of the couch.

  I heard Mandy giggle and then the sound of water running near Dan.

  “Yoo-hoo! Mandy?” Dan called out, still bent over. “I hate to interruptus your morning coitus, but are you going to be long?”

  “Jesus, Dan! Do you mind?” James’ voice floated up from below the vera
nda.

  “No, I don’t mind at all, but it sounds like you do.”

  With Dan’s attention focused elsewhere, I quickly walked over to the bag, kneeled down, and opened it. It was empty. The garbage can next to it, though, was overflowing with what looked like empty DVD cases.

  Something electronic beeped in the kitchen, making me jerk, and I quickly zipped the bag closed again.

  I jerked for the second, more startling, time when Dan asked, “Was that the coffee machine?” I hadn’t heard him walk into the room. He was standing on the opposite side of the couch from me.

  “I don’t know.” I stood up like a shot and got my first real frontal look at him. He was a slim older man with the kind of protruding belly that looked like he’d swallowed a basketball, probably in his late sixties, deeply tanned, with a small goatee and thick curly white hair that was almost too long, wearing tan loafers and linen pants, and a white silk shirt that had been left open one button too many.

  “Why are you here so early?” James, wearing a terry bathrobe, his hair dripping wet from his interrupted shower, came through the doorway from the pool patio.

  Dan turned around and sat on the back of the couch. “I need my morning coffee.”

  “What’s wrong with the coffeemaker at your place?”

  “I don’t know how to work it and my cook won’t be here for another half-hour.”

  “You need a babysitter more than a cook.”

  Dan went over to the coffeemaker and bent down to get his face close to the pot. “How do you know when this thing is done?”

  “When it stops peeing into the pot.” James looked at me and rolled his eyes. “I guess you two have met.”

  “I’ve met her, but I still don’t know who the fuck she is.”

  James ignored Dan and kept his attention on me. “Sleep well? I went up to get you to come with us for dinner but you were comatose.”

  “I slept like a log; right up until someone felt the need to tell the world that you’re the man. Congratulations on that, by the way.”

  “Sorry.” At least he had the decency to blush. “Dan, Ria’s my sister. She’s going to be staying here for a couple of days.”

  “Actually,” I decided it was as good a time as any to tell him of my change in plans, “I’m going to stay at the hotel.”

  “Is this because of … you know …” He was squirming, trying to find the right words that wouldn’t make him look too guilty.

  I didn’t let him off the hook. “Pretty much.”

  “That’ll work,” Dan was still watching the coffeemaker with bizarre fascination. “We can use it. Get Mandy to call over first, like she’s letting some big secret slip. She can say that another Butler is coming to do a surprise assessment of the last two players and then we can get them scrambling and sucking up on tape.”

  “I don’t have anything to do with running the hotels, though.” And I didn’t want to have anything to do with the show they were making.

  “So?” He turned just his head and looked at me. “They don’t have to know that.”

  “She’s not part of the show, Dan.”

  “She will be once she sets foot on the island. Make sure she signs a release before she goes.” He walked away from the coffeemaker when Mandy bounced into the room, wearing only slightly more than she’d been almost wearing in the pool. “Thank Christ, you’re finally here. Get me a cup of coffee, two creams, five sugars. And then I need you to send a couple of emails for me, carbon copied to Winnie.”

  “Okay,” Mandy happily went about her assigned chores.

  What a strange man James had chosen to work with. He made me even more certain that my decision to stay on the island was a good one. “I’m going to go have a shower.”

  “Ria, wait up.” James followed me out to the pool patio. “You don’t have to go …”

  “Yes, I do.” If he wanted to think my only reason for staying at the hotel was to get away from his slutty mistress, so much the better. “And by the way, your partner is a total wingnut.”

  “He prefers to use the word eccentric, but he’s a fucking genius when it comes to distribution deal making.”

  “Where’s his Mandy?”

  “She quit,” he replied a little too quickly. James’ lying face flashed before me for an instant. “But she wasn’t his personal assistant; she was just a production assistant working on the shoot. They hooked up after Dan flew in from LA and she moved into his villa. He’s staying in the one just up the hill.” He was giving me too many details that I hadn’t asked for. “But I guess she didn’t like it or something and she up and left, all of a sudden, without giving any notice or anything. Dan’s secretary’s here, too. She’s worked for him forever, but she refuses to stay in the same building with him so she’s staying on the island.”

  They both sounded like very smart women to me — one wouldn’t stay with him and the other one left him.

  Dan was dictating an email to Mandy when we left, but he stopped just long enough to tell her to give me a release to sign. I read it while James drove.

  “Do I really have to sign this?” I asked James once we’d parked at the yacht harbour.

  “Everyone on the island has to. We’ve got cameras everywhere and if you get caught in a shot we can’t air your image without your permission.”

  “But I don’t want my image aired.”

  “Please, Ria, don’t cause me problems? I’ve already got enough of those. Just sign it and stay away from the cameras and I’ll ask the editors not to use any shots that you show up in, okay?”

  I begrudgingly signed my image away.

  “Mandy called over to say you’d be coming, so they’ll have a room ready for you. She asked for something private.” James led me down a long wooden dock to a beautiful yacht. I recognized the stylized B on the flag it was flying — it was the Butler Hotels’ B. Aunt Patti and Uncle Richard had gone all out with their spending! The yacht was big, really big, shiny black and multi-levelled, and it filled the slip completely. A muscular man in a white nautical uniform (with a Butler B embroidered on the breast pocket of his shirt) came down the steps from the upper saloon and smiled when he saw us. “Good mornin,’ Mr. Butler.”

  “Hi, Malvin. This is my sister, Ria. She needs a ride over to the island.”

  “That’s what I’m here for.” He held his hand out to steady me as I stepped onto the large deck at the stern of the boat. “Welcome onboard.”

  I needed more than Malvin’s firm grip to steady me when I saw Albert coming down from the saloon. He was carrying a large metal case that was labelled Camera Originals. I took the grunting sound that he made when he passed me as a friendly greeting and returned his pleasantries.

  “Nice to see you, too, Albert.” What a jerk.

  “I’ll be coming over later so why don’t we have lunch?” James asked.

  “You’re not coming now?” I wasn’t exactly sure what an executive producer did, but I’d assumed that they’d be there when their show was being shot. Apparently, I’d assumed wrong.

  “No, I’ve got some stuff to do here.”

  I stood on the teak boards of the stern deck and watched James and Albert walk to the small parking lot as Malvin began to untie the ropes. James kept glancing back over his shoulder at me. What was he up to? Through the trees, I could see them both standing by the open back door of the Jeep.

  “I forgot something.” I jumped off the yacht and started running. “Be right back.”

  I ran down the length of the dock, across a grassy section, and then tried to hide behind the widest palm tree I could find. Albert had opened his metal case and James was flattening the empty beige overnight bag into it. When had he put that in the car? It must have been when I was in the shower. And he must have pushed it under the seat so that I wouldn’t see it. One of the first things Rob was going to have to do was give me a crash course in television production. Maybe the way they were moving DVDs around was normal? (I didn’t really believe tha
t — but I wanted to.)

  Malvin was not only normal he was a fountain of information and exceptional tour guide as we bounced over the waves on our way to Soursop. I sat in the thickly padded leather chair next to his in the wheelhouse. He gave me a brief history of the British Virgin Islands, identified the islands we could see, and slowly opened up about some of what he’d seen while working for James. By the time we pulled up to the main dock at Soursop I knew that Albert’s sole function on the production team was to take the discs from the cameras, the camera originals, back to the editors in Toronto. He came down a couple of times a week, spent one night at the hotel, and flew back up to Toronto the next morning. What I really wanted to know, though, was what he brought with him when he came down. Whatever he’d brought, it had stayed with James.

  I also learned that the yacht Malvin was skippering was only used by James, Dan, and special guests of either the production or the hotel. The production staff and hotel employees travelled between Soursop and Virgin Gorda by a private ferry, and I was willing to bet their transportation wasn’t nearly as luxurious as the yacht I was on. Their boat probably didn’t have three bedrooms (Malvin called them staterooms) plus an extra bedroom for the crew, or a galley with every conceivable electronic gadget, or three marble-countered bathrooms — one with a full-sized bathtub, or a personal watercraft stored away under the stern deck, or a lower saloon that was just as nice — if not nicer — than some people’s living rooms.

  “When that crazy British chef came down I took him and his family out for a weekend. They seemed to enjoy that. Took them over to the Indians,” he pointed to the west, “just off Norman Island, and his kids did some snorkelling. If you want to go diving or snorkelling just let me know. For overnight trips my sister comes along as the cook. Mr. Romney said she made him the best conch fritters he ever had. She still be smiling over that!”

  “Nigel Romney stayed here? I thought the hotel wasn’t open for guests yet.”

  “He be here for the show. Episode six — the kitchen challenge.” He chuckled. “Between his yelling and cursing and Miss Ingram’s crying it was quite a commotion. She was filleting a mahi mahi when she found out that it’s a dolphinfish. Mr. Romney kept shouting ‘It’s not fucking Flipper, you idiotic woman!’” He looked at me quizzically. “You’re not part of the show?”