Page 15 of Troubles in Paradise
Two seconds later (so much for the rules), there’s a response:It’s okay, I’m grounded anyway, plus there’s been drama at home.
Drama?Ayers texts.At homemeaning with Huck? This is unusual.
Too much to text,Maia says.Call me later.
Lateris Saturday at noon. It takes everything Ayers has to get out of bed, take a shower (her hair is in the first stages of dreadlocks), and make herself eat a piece of toast at her tiny kitchen table. She fights to keep the toast down. Something is up with her; this isn’t just emotional distress. After all, Ayers hiked the Reef Bay Trail only two days after Rosie died.
Ayers checks her arms and legs, praying that she has overlooked some kind of weird bite or sting that would explain this. She’d gone backpacking all over the world with her parents when she was growing up, and she’d witnessed travelers in the throes of all kinds of exotic ailments. There was a pretty, blond college student doing a gap year in Nepal who nearly died of giardia, a couple of Israeli kids in India who had leishmaniasis that they thought they’d gotten from sand flies on Goa, and in Thailand, they’d met a family who had been infested with sea lice.
Leptospirosis? A guy Ayers knows down here contracted that from cleaning palm rats out of traps.
Ayers is making herself sicker just thinking about this.Stop thinking about it!She texts Maia.You busy?
A second later, Ayers’s phone rings; her screen saysNutand lights up with a picture of Maia at Carnival a few years ago, her face painted royal blue and crimson.
“Hi,” Ayers says. “Whatcha doin’?”
“Decorating my new room,” Maia says. “Or, as Gramps calls it, ‘moving the mess.’”
“New room? Are you…”
“Taking Mama’s room,” Maia says. “I’ve slept in here the past two nights.” She pauses. “The sheets still smell like her. How long do you think that will last?”
Ayers’s heart feels like a dying rose shedding its petals. “Oh, Nut,” she says.
“I worry I’m gonna make the smell disappear faster by sleeping in the bed and that one night it won’t smell like her, it will smell like me. But I don’t have a choice because Irene is sleeping in my room.”
“Irene?”
“Yeah,” Maia says. “Have you not heard? Baker didn’t call you?”
Baker hasnotcalled her, which she finds strange, since he’s supposedly so keen on celebrating her “newfound freedom,” but she figures he’s been busy getting settled in, and, frankly, she’s relieved that he hasn’t asked to see her. “No,” Ayers says. “Heard what?”
Maia sighs like an adult. “Well, they lost the villa in Little Cinnamon.”
This news propels Ayers out of her chair and over to the front window. It’s another beautiful day in paradise; things are happening out there while Ayers convalesces. “Lost the…lost the villa? What are you talking about?”
“Gramps said it was tax trouble. But I heard him and Irene talking about the FBI. I think my dad was into something illegal.”
Ayers’s stomach lurches. She collapses onto the sofa. Hidden underneath it are all of Rosie’s journals. Ayers had discovered the journals buried in Rosie’s dresser and she’d…absconded with them, taking them from Huck’s house. They were Ayers’s own private archaeological find, no less precious or revelatory to Ayers than the Dead Sea Scrolls or dinosaur bones. These journalstold Rosie’s story,one Ayers didn’t know, and Ayers was Rosie’s best friend. Ayers found herself compelled to binge on them but she’d made herself read slowly and carefully. She’d made herselfsavorthem.
In the final two volumes are passages in which Rosie described Russ telling her outright back in 2016 that his company, Ascension, sold the lots in Little Cinnamon to fictional entities—shell companies. He admitted to Rosie that Ascension was in the business of hiding money, laundering money. And then, in the very last pages of the journal, Rosie wrote about how Russ had informed his boss, Todd Croft, that he was leaving the company and how Todd Croft had shown up at La Tapa and threatened Rosie.
Six weeks later, both Russ and Rosie were dead.
Now the FBI knows and the villa is gone? Ayers’s thoughts are all over the place. Do the FBI agents think Todd Croft killed Russ and Rosie, or do they think it was, in fact, a lightning strike? Ayers remembered hearing thunder that morning. So it was a lightning strike—simple, impossible bad luck. But the scene Rosie described with Todd Croft was…alarming.
The villa is gone.
Ayers can’t help but wonder what this means for Baker. Obviously, if there’s no place for him to live, then he’s going back to Houston.
Ayers feels a deep, crushing disappointment, worse even than her pain about the broken engagement. Baker will leave—if he even arrived in the first place. And what about Cash? Will he leave too?
Ayers brings her mind back to the present. “So Irene is living with you guys?” she says. “For how long?”
“Until she gets back on her feet,” Maia says. She lowers her voice. “I think Gramps is happy. He cut my grounding down to a week.”
“Won’t Irene go back to Iowa?”
