Free Redemption Key (A Dani Britton Thriller) by S.G. Redling Page A

Dani. So she’d just flown a thousand miles up the East Coast to an island she knew nothing about to crash a party she wasn’t invited to in order to find a woman somehow related to Choo-Choo to ask if he was okay.
    If the Feds had a problem with that, they could go fuck themselves.
    Jackson had been right about getting around the island. Even at night, she’d been able to hitch a ride in no time. A golden-tanned family with a matching Golden Lab didn’t hesitate to let her climb into their Jeep. They’d heard about the party she mentioned, and Dani could hear a distant twinge of disappointment that they hadn’t been invited and didn’t know exactly where it was. Instead they dropped her at a little market that looked like it had been airlifted from the Deep South circa 1950, charmingly rustic with bins of fruits and vegetables on the porch, and several old bikes with woven baskets leaning unlocked against the railing.
    The illusion took a hit when Dani saw the shelves stocked with fourteen dollar jars of English lemon curd, exotic tapenades, and wines she couldn’t pronounce. She ventured to the high woodencounter in the back and found a straight-backed old woman with enough New England crust to be an extra on
Murder, She Wrote
.
    “Of course there are Charbaneauxs on the Vineyard. Always have been. If you want to find them tonight you’ve come to the right place. That way.” She pointed to her left.
    “Could you be a little less specific?” Dani deadpanned.
    “I could, but that wouldn’t be very neighborly. Keep walking that way. You’ll hear the music. It’s a wonderful celebration.” Her smile could have been sarcastic, or maybe the mirth had been worn away by the years. “Too bad you’re here at the end of it.”
    “I’ll make a note for next year.”
    Dani’s mood soured as she hiked the narrow roads winding through the darkness in the general direction the old woman had pointed. The houses, if they could be called that, got larger and farther off the road the longer she walked, but she could hear music rolling toward her so she figured she had to be close. Of course
close
didn’t really count when none of the roads she ventured onto led to anything but more roads and fewer houses, the last of the sunlight vanishing behind the scrubby pines.
    She berated herself for the stupidity of this plan. She was going to wind up lost on a tiny island. When something rustled in the shadows of the biggest rhododendron bushes she had ever seen, she started berating herself for not checking to see if Martha’s Vineyard had any wolves or wildcats protected in its well-preserved bosom. She had just decided to turn around and try to find her way back to the little market when a Range Rover roared around the bend, illuminating the road ahead—a road lined as far as the eye could see with matching Range Rovers. That was a very good sign.
    By the time Dani made it up the winding drive she was glad she’d taken up running. Despite what she’d seen on the map, this didn’t feel like a small island. The house—again, an understatement—sprawled across a wide, sloping expanse, porches layered three and four levelsdeep toward what smelled like water in the distance. Lanterns hung everywhere, casting warm shadows over a crowd that danced and drank and laughed. African drum music kept bodies swaying around waiters laden with trays of something that smelled delicious.
    Dani had chosen to live in Florida because she thought it was as far from her Oklahoma childhood lifestyle as she could get. She had been wrong. This house, this island, felt like another planet to her.
    Planet Choo-Choo.
    She didn’t spy anyone as beautiful as her friend, but as a whole, the crowd possessed that same long-limbed elegance, that ownership of the air around them that had always set Choo-Choo apart from the simply fine-looking. This wasn’t the sleek fashion and glittering jewelry of Miami; the colors were muted, the fabrics stylishly