Chapter Nineteen
‘What the blazes …?’ Winnie muttered, struggling through the stages from sleep to wakefulness, blinking rapidly to adjust to the stream of sunlight through her open balcony doors.
Realising she was naked, she paused for a second and pressed her hands against her flushed cheeks, because oh my God.
Jesse. One night with him had been so much more than she could’ve guessed it would be, and she’d already guessed it would be something special.
For such a smart-mouthed Australian alpha he’d been unexpectedly tender and then sometimes blissfully not so, setting her skin on fire and making her head spin until she was dizzy, euphoric, drunk on him.
‘Win? Are you awake in there?’ Stella’s voice carried through the door. ‘We’ve got a bit of a situation.’
‘I’m coming,’ she called, dragging on underwear and shorts. ‘What’s happening?’
‘Not really sure,’ Stella said. ‘But we seem to have half of the island in the back garden.’
Winnie finger-combed her hair and dragged it back into a band, then pulled a sunshine-yellow vest over her head as she swung the door open.
Stella peered around her for a second.
‘What?’ Winnie said.
Stella lifted an eyebrow. ‘Just checking.’
‘What are you, my mother?’
‘No, but I will tell your mother unless you give me the lowdown. I heard him chucking bricks last night. If he’d have gone the whole hog and serenaded you he’d have felt my shoe bounce off his head.’
‘You old romantic,’ Winnie teased.
Stella looked at her pointedly. ‘Romance is dead to me.’
She didn’t say it anywhere near lightheartedly enough for Winnie to say anything flippant in reply. ‘He stayed with me last night,’ she whispered instead as they made their way down onto the first landing.
‘About bloody time,’ Stella huffed, then stopped speaking because Frankie ran up the stairs from the ground floor to meet them.
‘I can’t work out what the hell is going on here,’ she said, her face a mask of controlled panic. ‘We need someone who can translate for us quickly.’
‘Panos?’ Winnie said as they reached the ground floor and hurried quickly down the hallway to the kitchen.
‘Tried him, no answer.’
Gav looked up when they came in, already in the kitchen filling any glass he could find with bottled water.
‘One of them fainted,’ he said, looking terrified. ‘I thought water might keep them hydrated, at least.’
‘Good thinking,’ Frankie said, shooting him a smile. Winnie didn’t miss the high spots of colour that appeared in his cheeks as he started moving the glasses onto trays.
She crossed to the kitchen window and peered through the Greek lace that they’d not yet bothered to take down.
‘Holy shit,’ she mumbled. The garden was fuller than if they’d thrown an open invite garden party with free drinks, except everyone was in black and absolutely no one was in a jolly mood.
Some of them were kneeling, some were sobbing and others clutched each other. ‘Has anyone said anything at all?’
‘Not that we can make sense of,’ Frankie said. ‘I hate to say it but I think it might be about the arbutus bush again.’
Gav looked at them all, perplexed. ‘This is all over a garden bush?’
‘It’s not just any old bush.’ Winnie stepped away from the window. ‘It’s sacred to the islanders.’
Gav’s face cleared. ‘Ah, that one.’
Stella looked at him sharply. ‘What do you mean, that one ? Who told you about it?’
‘Panos mentioned something. I couldn’t catch what he meant, but now I see.’ He picked up the tray of glasses. ‘He said you’d set fire to the berries, and that without it the gin would dry up, I think?’
The women exchanged glances. ‘Was anyone else there when he told you this?’
Gav shook his head. ‘Quiet day. Only me and Angelo in the place.’
Stella looked decidedly grim. ‘I’m going to go and try Panos again.’
Handing water around, Winnie tried and failed to find someone who could speak English, because she didn’t have a prayer of understanding the issue in Greek.
They’d all been working on the language in their own ways; Winnie knew basic greetings and informational stuff, Stella knew most of the drinks at the bar and some financial terms, and Frankie could haltingly hold her own in the supermarket.
In no way, shape or form did that equip any of the women for the fast-flowing flood of Greek language washing over them all around the garden.
Spotting a familiar face at last, she caught hold of Hero’s elbow.
‘Winnie,’ the old woman cried, throwing her hands upand then hugging her. Winnie patted her back awkwardly, and then stepped away and tried to look deliberately confused in the hope that Hero would help her to understand.
‘What’s going on?’ she said slowly, even though she knew Hero’s English was as non-existent as her own Greek. ‘Why is everyone here like this?’
Hero threw her hands out towards the twiggy, dead arbutus bush, and then said something else as she looked towards the heavens and crossed herself, and finally she drew a slow finger across her neck and whispered ‘Nekros.’ Closing her eyes, she let her head fall to one side.
‘God,’ Winnie muttered. ‘Nekros? Someone has hurt their neck?’
Mikey Miller had appeared behind her on the grass. ‘Nah. Nekros. It probably means dead.’
Winnie twisted to look at him.
‘Why would it mean that?’
‘Well, for one, she’s just mimed slitting her own throat, and for two, it’s probably like necrophilia – you know, that really weird fetish where people shag dead people?’
He said it as if he’d just said something far plainer, and Winnie found herself both nodding at the linguistic logic but also shaking her head with disgust at the way his mind worked.
‘Thank you, Mikey,’ she muttered. ‘Maybe you should head inside while we try to sort this lot out.’
‘Still no reply from Panos,’ Stella said. ‘Win, can you run and fetch Jesse? He’s our next best hope.’
Winnie hesitated. How do you approach someone who’d just made you feel like he’d hooked the moon just for you and then disappeared when the sun stole over the horizon?
‘I wouldn’t ask if I could think of anyone else,’ Stella said.
Winnie nodded. ‘OK. Give me ten minutes.’
Out of breath from running, she banged hard on Jesse’s door. Even still, her heart banged louder on her ribs.
‘Jesse, it’s me!’ she called. ‘Open the door? Please?’
Nothing.
She thumped it again, this time using both fists. ‘Jesse, for God’s sake. I haven’t come to talk about last night. We never have to say another word about it if that’s the way you want it. Just open the bloody door, will you?’
She waited, but still nothing.
‘Jesse!’ she shouted. ‘You stubborn, stupid man! Why be like this with me? I really need your bloody help and all you can think of is your precious one-night-stand rule! I’m sorry if you wish it hadn’t happened, but don’t ask me to apologise or wish I could turn the clock back and change things because I wouldn’t change one single solitary thing about what happened in my bed last night. ’
‘You’re gonna break the door down if you keep that up much longer.’
She swung around and found him sitting in the easy chair in the shadows, his feet propped on a crate in front of him and a half-empty bottle of brandy in his lap. He was still wearing his clothes from earlier, and by the looks of him he hadn’t been to bed at all.
‘What are you doing sitting out here?’ she asked, more softly.
‘Watching the sun come up,’ he said, placing the brandy down beside his chair and easing his feet down to the floor with a grimace. ‘Thinking. Wondering why the hell you’re banging my door as if the sky’s about to fall in.’
‘Because most of the residents of the island seem to think it is,’ she said, her mind back on message.
‘And they’ve all gathered in the garden back at the villa to wait for it to happen.
Honestly, you should see it. There isn’t a bare patch of earth that someone isn’t kneeling on and crying, and none of us can make any sense of what in God’s name is the matter with everyone.
We’ve tried calling Panos but he seems to have conveniently disappeared off the face of the earth just when we need him most, so I’ve been sent here as a last resort to see if you’ll come and try to shed some light on what’s going on. ’ She paused to draw in a deep breath.
‘Well, not last resort, exactly,’ she added, since that might have sounded rude. ‘As our neighbour.’ She stopped again. ‘And as our friend.’ Another loaded pause. ‘And as my –’
‘Your what?’ he said, still and quiet.
Winnie looked down and sighed. ‘My friend who happened to make love to me once.’
He stood up, dusting his hands down his jeans, not quite meeting her eyes when he spoke. ‘There’s a difference between sex and making love, Winnie. Don’t confuse the two.’
Wow. Thanks for pointing that distinction out. Embarrassment tried to weave its way like thorny tangled weeds around Winnie’s ankles, but she stamped it under the soles of the cowboy boots she’d flung back on to run down the lane.
‘Whatever,’ she said, offhand. ‘It’s just a figure of speech. Call it what you like. Call it fucking, if you like. We did it, and we’re not going to do it again, so let’s both just grow up and get over it. Now will you come and help us, or not?’
She had no clue where those words had come from, and they clearly shocked Jesse as much as they did Winnie.
He opened his mouth to speak and then closed it again. Scrubbing his hands over his face, he shrugged.
‘Lead the way.’
Winnie half ran, half power-walked back to the villa with Jesse a few steps behind, her wooden heels banging loudly enough on the path to startle the swallows resting in the olive trees.
‘Wait up,’ he said, catching hold of her hand just before they reached the villa.
Winnie shook him off, still stung by his remark back at his house.
‘Jesse,’ Gav called out from the garden and raised his hand in greeting when he spotted them out in the lane.
‘I didn’t mean to upset you,’ he murmured, shooting a wave back in Gav’s direction.
‘You didn’t,’ she said shortly. ‘Let’s go in.’
If anything, there were more people in the garden than when she’d left, and alarmingly there were still others straggling across the beach.
‘Jesse.’ Frankie rushed at them with a look of desperation in her eyes. ‘Help!’
He clicked into his role of helpful neighbour, shooting Frankie a reassuring smile and squeezing her shoulder.
‘How long have they all been here?’ he asked, scanning the crowd.
Since not long after you stole away just before dawn, probably, Winnie thought, but swallowed her words and let Frankie do the talking.
‘Since first light. I was doing yoga on the beach like normal and people started to drift across the sand in small groups. I didn’t realise at first that they were actually coming to the villa, I assumed they’d head on past and up the lane.’
‘Let me go and see what I can find out,’ he said, skimming a glance at Winnie before he melted away.
‘Everything all right between you two?’ Frankie watched his back as he picked his way towards the group huddled around the remains of the arbutus bush.
‘Flippin’ marvellous,’ Winnie mumbled.
Even in the midst of the chaos, Frankie picked up Winnie’s mood. ‘I’m not sure if you’re sad or mad, but either way I’m guessing it’s his fault.’
‘I’ll tell you later,’ Winnie sighed. ‘Let’s just try to get to the bottom of this for now.’
Gav walked past them with a jug of iced water to refill people’s glasses.
‘Thanks for helping,’ Winnie said. ‘We can do without anyone else passing out.’
Gav nodded. ‘Shall I bring you both a glass?’ he said, noticing their empty hands. ‘Or maybe you should stand in the shade?’
‘We’re fine, honestly,’ Frankie said as he moved away. Heroically she didn’t add that they’d been living on the island for a while now and had worked out how to live with the weather.
‘Frank, Winnie.’
Stella called them from the kitchen doorway, giving them a subtle nod to come inside. Checking that Jesse wasn’t already heading back with information, they headed indoors.
‘Corinna!’ Winnie caught sight of their latest visitor and greeted her warmly, then belatedly registered that like most of the rest of the islanders, Corinna was dressed in black and had a sombre look around her dark eyes.
‘What is it?’ she asked, stepping back to arm’s length.
‘Ladies, I came as soon as I heard,’ Corinna said, her throaty voice adding gravitas to her words.
Frankie frowned. ‘Heard what?’
Stella sighed, clearly already abreast with the news.
‘It’s our mayor,’ Corinna said, bowing her head. ‘Mayor Manolis. He passed away unexpectedly late last night.’
‘Oh,’ Winnie said, flummoxed by the unexpectedness of the statement. She’d heard his name mentioned a few times in passing but wasn’t really aware of his significance to the islanders.
‘He was so beloved by the island people.’ Corinna spoke so quietly that both Frankie and Winnie had to lean in a little to hear her. ‘Ninety-seven, but as fit as an ox,’ she sniffed. ‘Very few people remember a time when he wasn’t our mayor. He’s always governed us with a strong, peaceful hand.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Frankie said, glancing at Winnie and then Stella as she reached for a tissue and pressed it into Corinna’s hands. ‘I can see it’s very upsetting for everyone.’
Corinna glanced towards the back door, her hands twisting the tissue. ‘The thing you have to understand about the island is that it’s steeped in tradition and ritual. We’re simple people, with traditional family values and, as I’m sure you know by now, deeply held beliefs.’
A sense of unease crept slowly over Winnie as she listened. It was clear that Corinna was working up to saying why what appeared to be the entire population of the island was gathering in their garden.
On that, Jesse opened the kitchen door and stepped inside.
‘Bad news, ladies. The islanders think you killed the mayor.’