“I was in town, loading goods I’d purchased, and a black cat jumped into my boat. He sat in my seat and stared at me. I didn’t need a cat, so I set him on the dock and left the harbor. The next time I returned, the same damn cat was in my sailboat when I came back. It wouldn’t leave. So, I brought him here. It was on a Tuesday.”
“Where did the second one come from?”
“Same place. Only that time, Monday followed me back from the bar to my boat. I couldn’t say no. I thought maybe he was a friend of Tuesday. It was on Monday.” Hunter took the plate off my lap. “How are you feeling now?”
“Better.” The sensation of weakness wasn’t as noticeable as before. A little food made me feel like a human again, but it didn’t fully recharge my batteries.
“Good.” Hunter rose, collecting the dirty mug off the nightstand. “I’ll come by later to check on you.”
“Hunter,” I said, tucking the strand of hair behind my ear. “Where are you going to sleep tonight?”
He paused at the door. “In the hammock on the porch.”
Guilt that I had taken over his bed ground its teeth at my consciousness. “Tomorrow, you can sleep here, and I’m out there.” I tipped my head toward the window, my eyes landing on the worn-out sofa that looked even less comfortable than the hammock. “Or maybe I can take the couch?”
A relaxed smile crossed Hunter’s face and shook his head. “That’s all right. If I stay inside, it leaves you no privacy. I’m perfectly fine outside.”
Thank goodness. There was no way I could shut my eyes in the open jungle.
“Try to get some rest,” he said before exiting.
Tuesday jumped off the bed and darted through the door after Hunter.
I nestled in the bed, cradling my hands on my chest, and stared at those same paint flakes on the ceiling. This situation—alone on a tropical island with a (so far kind) man—was so surreal. If Tina knew, she would jump up and down, clapping her hands, saying this was the first chapter of my new beginning.
I just hoped that it wasn’t a thriller.
ChapterFive
Darkness lingered outside when I opened my eyes. The steady flame of the kerosene lantern on the nightstand gave off enough light to illuminate the desk. Turning the light’s knob to its highest setting, I rose off the bed. My head wasn’t dizzy, and my energy level seemed to have returned to normal. Sticky sweat covered my skin, and my scalp itched. I’d give anything for a long, hot shower. A bird crooned, and waves calmly lullabied the island and beckoned me to the beach to wash off my filth.
With the lantern in one hand, I walked to the open front door. The encroaching jungle had a mysterious absence of movement with an ocean soundtrack.
A furry body shot between my legs, sending my heart to my throat. I yelped, jumping to the side, as a cat dashed down the stairs and vanished into the inky shadows.
“Stupid ass,” I mumbled, peeking around the door to see whether I woke up Hunter.
The full moon’s silver light outlined Hunter’s tall frame in the ragged hammock, his arms crossed on his chest and his face turned to the forest. A tremor passed over his shoulders, and his hands jerked while his eyebrows pinched together. He shifted his head to the opposite side, the suspended bed swaying ever so slightly. It didn’t look very comfortable to sleep like that and for not the first time I was grateful for his kindness and generosity in allowing me to occupy his bed.
I took a step. A wood plank creaked, and an animal—probably the same cat—yowled somewhere in the woods, making my pulse thunder in my ears. I could wait for the morning. Scratching my head, I retreated into the hut and lay back in bed. After several minutes of staring into nothingness, trying to go back to sleep was out of the question.
Placing the lantern in the center of the table, I looked around the dimmed room. I could snoop, but with Hunter sleeping just outside the door, I was doomed to be caught red-handed and that would be embarrassing. My eyes scanned over the bookshelf, stopping at the spy magazines.
Every Sunday morning, for as long as I could remember, my father worked on magazines, crosswords and logic puzzles with a cup of coffee. His love for logic problems and anagrams had developed as a child when my grandfather had subscribed him to Scientific American. Until age ten, I had often sat on my father’s lap and pretended to work on them with him. When I turned a teenager, he dragged an extra armchair for me into his office, and we worked across from each other at his desk: he on a magazine, me on my Sudoku book.
My father’s ghost settled beside me, readying to look inside the magazines. My throat burned as the old ache flared. Iurged it back into my chest, but it brawled its way out, and I choked on a sob. Pressing my face into my hands, I took slow, controlled breaths through pursed lips, willing myself to calm down.
“It’s just fatigue and exhaustion,” I whispered and rubbed my nose on my shoulder.
Snatching a magazine from the top and getting a pencil off the journal, I took a seat at the table. I flipped it to the page with a puzzle of squares and incomplete triangles, some with and some without dots. The hint under the message suggested using a pigpen cipher from the previous issue. I turned the page. Among ads for spy and deductive classes, I found a cryptographic puzzle with a hint of “movie quote.” Since it was a spy magazine, perhaps it was from a James Bond movie. A martini. Shaken, not stirred. The phrase didn’t match the encoded pattern. I bit the end of the pencil, then pulled it out of my mouth. Yuck. Someone else had already chewed on it.
Back in college, one of my computer science professors spent a great deal of time on cryptography instead of teaching Java language to the class, which was annoying because it was a complete waste of students’ money. He taught us that to solve a cipher was a matter of looking for high-frequency letters and making educated guesses—like anything else in life. I smiled as I wrote my first probable variation in the space next to the puzzle. The money spent on that class was finally about to pay off.
Soon, the lantern flame sputtered, and my scribbled ideas left no room on the page. I needed paper to organize my decoding chaos in an orderly fashion. I tore a few pages from Hunter’s journal—I’d ask for forgiveness tomorrow—and started a complex chart of letter combinations.
Sometime later, the sound of Hunter rattling pots in the kitchen reached my ears. I sat up straight, a magazine page peeling off my face, leaving a wet spot of drool on my cheek. Rubbing my eyes, I glanced around the room, my mind in a haze. Empty of oil, the lantern’s flame had died, and bright light seeped through the cracks of the shutters. Wiping the drool off my chin, I went outside.
Hunter had pinned a torn notebook sheet on the porch post near the steps. In pencil, inside a cartoonish-shaped speech bubble with a tail pointing down, was a handwritten note.
