Evil Unearthed: Chapter 2

Chapter Two

"Jesus, Mary and Joseph!" If there was one thing that Kathleen O'Dell hated, it was an unreliable internet connection. Her livelihood depended on speedy interaction with that vast web of bits and bytes, and when it was spotty, she found herself dropping her cool business persona and becoming again the bad-tempered girl she had been all through childhood. What was worse, she found herself using expressions which did not become the power suits and the professional demeanour she usually wore, but which rather belonged in the kitchen of her grandmother as that mistress of many expletives burned her finger on the steam coming from the kettle on a misty Belfast morning.

Restarting her laptop for what seemed like the hundredth time, Kathleen looked around the wicker-infested and umbrella-dotted patio of The French Leaf cafe: the only eating and drinking establishment available in the single hotel which served the transient tourist population of the island of Port French Leave. It had never come under the auspices of any of the major resort corporations, and perhaps rightly so, for it seemed that Port French Leave was where tourists vacationed when they could not afford to travel to the more well-known havens of sun and fun in the tropics. Given its out-of-the-way nature therefore, Kathleen reflected that she should be grateful for small favours; the fact that this cafe even had wireless internet for its customers was something of a miracle.

"Alright," she said to the blinking cursor on her computer screen. "Let's try this again, shall we?"

"Computer troubles, Miss O'Dell?" Chris, the young waiter she had come to know during her stay here was beside her.

"Oh," she said, "just the usual."

"Well," he said, a mischievous smile playing across his tanned and well-honed features, "you'd better get ready. Her Ladyship's winged chariot is descending as we speak!"

"No! She told me she wouldn't be arriving for another week!"

"Well, you know Miss Desmond. She's nothing if not surprising!"

Kathleen knew this better than Chris, who, if truth be told, only saw Miss Desmond on her occasional visits here when she was transacting business to do with the land she owned across the channel on the Desmonds' ancestral island of Maljardin. Kathleen, on the other hand, was aware of Julia Desmond's oddities in a far more personal way, for she was both her old school friend and her executive assistant. Julia had taken her under her wing at university, introducing her to eligible young men and making sure that her bookish tendencies did not allow her to lead too solitary an existence. They had met in a Business Administration class at Cambridge, and though Kathleen had been a scholarship student and would typically not have been included in Julia's social circle of heirs and heiresses to vast fortunes, Julia had seen something in her that she liked and wished to cultivate, and soon they were fast friends, Julia taking refuge from the business world in Kathleen's book-filled study, and Kathleen learning all she could from Julia about how to be a successful woman in the corporate world while still maintaining one's sanity.

She recalled those years now as she sipped her drink and clicked her way through her work. She had arrived at Cambridge a studious and serious girl with eyes only for art and literature, and had only signed up for the Business Administration course to please her father. He had shown a grudging pride when she had won the scholarship to study English Literature, but he had made sure to impress upon her the vital importance of having knowledge of what he called "real life" as well.

"I know you love your books, Kat," he had said, "but most of those writers were starving paupers, and I'll not see my girl end up that way if any words of mine can stop it."

Thus, she had lived a strange sort of double life: Business student one minute, English student the next. By the time she had finished her undergraduate studies, she was looking forward to a blissfully business-free Master's program where she would do her thesis on Chaucer's dream-vision poetry. However, that was when opportunity had come knocking in the form of Julia Desmond. She had stated that she was in need of an assistant now that she was taking over the management of her family's considerable business holdings, and though the bells of Cambridge were ringing in her ears, her father's admonitory words drowned them out, for Kathleen knew that the sum of money that Julia was offering was something which she would be an utter fool to pass up. So here she was, ten years later, using her knowledge of art and literature to link images and words with the Desmond name around the world, and wearing her businesswoman's persona more often than that of the bookish young girl she once had been.

"I'll let you know when she's coming. Okay?" Chris had played lookout for her in the past, and Kathleen now exchanged a conspiratorial glance with him, letting him know that he was again on duty.

While she waited, she sat back and surveyed the latest plans that the architect had sent her. She knew something of architecture having once had a fiancé in the business, and she thought that these plans were the best she had seen yet. Of course, they wouldn't pass muster until Julia herself had looked at them, but Kathleen resolved to pitch them for all she was worth. The Chateau Xanadu was going to be the most modern, convenient and pleasurable hotel in the whole of the Caribbean if she had anything to say about it. It was to be built on the ruins of the Desmond ancestral home on Maljardin, that home having been made largely uninhabitable when a mysterious fire engulfed it sometime in 1970. When she had first glimpsed those picturesque walls with their mullioned windows and massive, vine-covered stones still standing, Kathleen had been loath to destroy their rugged grandeur; therefore, she had convinced Julia to retain at least something of the outer shell of the castellated structure while blending it with a sleek modern look.

However, the plans were the least of her worries. Ever since she had been here, she had worked as closely as she could with those in charge of excavating the inner portions of the chateau, and in the last few weeks, strange finds had been made. A month ago, they had rescued a beautifully-carved wooden box filled with nothing but sand for which no one could find a purpose. Then three weeks ago, they had found a blood-stained locket and some Tarot cards. For some unaccountable reason, Kathleen had asked to keep the cards. She had felt that they were lucky somehow. In fact, they now went everywhere with her, nestled protectively in her briefcase next to her cell phone. As for the locket, no one could make a decision as to what should be done with it, so it had remained with Bill Temple, the head foreman on the job. Kathleen had instructed him to keep it until Miss Desmond should inspect it herself.

Then, last week, had come the strangest find of all. In the depths of the charred and twisted rubble, some tubing and gauges blackened with smoke but still largely intact had been seen. Digging deeper, the men had found a coffin-like structure made of heavy metal and baring a small insignia on its side. It could hardly be seen for its size, but Kathleen had researched it with the Desmond lawyers and had learned that it was the logo for a long since bankrupted organization which specialized in cryonics: the technique of deep-freezing dead bodies in order to bring their owners back to life once cures for their causes of death had been found. It was these mysteries which had prompted her finally to request Julia's presence on a project which Julia had left, save for her power of final approval as the reigning queen of all things Desmond-related, entirely to her discretion.

"It'll require a lot of digging," she had said that day six months ago in her New York office, "and not only of the physical variety. You're going to have to comb through the history of that island and take out all the little dirty bits, leaving the Desmonds with an unsullied reputation. I myself know nothing about it, except of course that it was one of my forefathers who insisted on giving the island its current and most unfortunate name. I assume you know what it means?"

"Maljardin," Kathleen had replied. "Evil garden or garden of evil. Yes. I always wondered why it should have such a name."

"Well, by the time you're done with it, Kat my friend, I want you to turn the garden of evil into the garden of Eden. Understand?"

"Your wish is my command." She had said this with excitement in her voice, but as she had spent more and more time down here, she had come to realize that cleaning up the Desmond reputation was going to be more difficult than Julia had anticipated.

At first, it had been almost impossible to find out anything at all about the Desmond history in these parts, for by all accounts, and there were few enough of these, the Desmonds used Maljardin as a private paradise away from prying eyes, and it had been made clear long ago to all who had any dealings with the family that what happened on Maljardin stayed on Maljardin. Still, no Desmonds at all had been in continuous residence here since the fire, so it was possible with a little perseverance for her to glean a few scraps of history and legend from some of the last people around here to do business with them.

It was Jean Paul Desmond, Julia's father, who had last occupied the cliff-top chateau. He had spent much time there as a boy, for it had been a holding belonging to his own father Armand. Then, inevitably, he had gone away and traveled the world, living the life of a roving businessman and play-boy, and then suddenly it had all changed; suddenly, he had returned home, but this time, he was not alone. Almost poetic accounts were given by those who had known him then of the beautiful wife whom he had brought with him, parading her around Port French Leave as though she were a pirate-captured princess. She had been an up-and-coming stage actress with a grand career ahead of her, but when Erica Carr had met Jean Paul, she had fallen hard for him and they had begun a whirlwind courtship which had culminated in a lavish wedding and, when she became pregnant, their complete and total retirement from the world's fascinated gaze to Jean Paul's private island.

For six months, they had lived in romantic bliss, and then Erica had mysteriously disappeared from Port French Leave society. Then, other disappearances had occurred; Jean Paul's lawyer, Erica's younger sister, a young artist who had been commissioned to paint a portrait of Erica, a young runaway and her mother, a minister and a fortune-telling waitress at this very cafe were among those who had, or were presumed to have, crossed the channel in Jean Paul's supply-boat never to return.

Then the fire had broken out. Some said that they had seen it light up the sky as though it were some baleful star of ill omen, but the strangest thing about it was that with all the people then presumed to be residing in the house, no human remains were discovered, and Jean Paul was rumoured to have been seen some days later leaving in an ambulance-plane and flying north. Some said that a young girl had been with him, but Kathleen had not been able to determine her identity or the certainty of her existence. One thing that all who had seen the plane taking off were sure of was that Jean Paul's mysterious servants Raxl and Quito were with him. Kathleen was intrigued with these two and wanted to learn more about them, but all she had been able to learn was that Raxl had acted as Jean Paul's housekeeper and was a dour and hard-featured woman who dressed in black all the time, and that Quito drove the boat and was the only one with the exception of Jean Paul who could navigate the treacherous channel between here and Maljardin. He was described as a big man who was mute and used a kind of sign language to communicate, but he, along with Raxl, disappeared from the memories of everyone after the ambulance-plane had spirited them away.

Before Jean Paul's time there was little or no history to be found. Apart from the island's having been conquered sometime in the sixteen-hundreds by Jacques Eloi des Mondes, a cavalier and free-looter, there were only whispers and veiled hints of sinister import to be gotten from those who knew something of the history of the garden of evil. Tales of murder and magic, malice and mischief abounded, but no clear chronology of events could she peace together, no matter how deeply she probed.

"The crow flies at midnight!" Chris mouthed the words to her from across the patio, and it was all she could do to keep from laughing.

"The owl hoots at dawn," she mouthed back. "Message received! Thanks!"

Closing the lid of her laptop, she sat back and waited for the spectacle which always attended Julia's arrival in this place so rich with Desmond heritage. The waiters snapped to a special kind of attention, and a path was quickly cleared from the patio gate to the table where she sat. Every time Kathleen saw this, she half-expected rose petals to come raining down upon the flag-stones and envelop tall, blonde-haired and blue-eyed Julia in their cloying scent as though she were a goddess in a Shakespearian play. However, what greeted her instead was her smartly-dressed employer looking tired and plane-rumpled and trying very hard to maintain her composure in the face of the ingratiating attitudes of the cafe staff. This evening was no exception, and when Julia finally arrived at the table, Kathleen could see that she had no politeness left to spare.

"Well," she said brusquely, "this had better be worth the trip!"