Free Grand Cayman Slam by Randy Striker Page B

leaving the tourist traps like Cayman Kai behind.
    I was beginning to find it all very discouraging. For an island only twenty miles long and eight miles wide, there was one hell of a lot of open shoreline and an equal amount of inland forest. And we didn’t have much time—only thirty-six more hours, if the kidnappers stuck to their word. It seemed like an impossible task. We needed more to go on. It was a time for fast work, and following hunches if need be. But I didn’t even have enough information to form a hunch.
    “What were you and Lady James talkin’ about when I came up in the car?” O’Davis asked suddenly.
    “She invited me to dinner—but I already told you that.”
    “It’s jest that you mentioned you knew Sir Conan to be a womanizer. It’s a popular topic of conversation with her. But she usually waits until she knows ya a bit longer—an hour or so.”
    “No. She didn’t tell me. It came from some accidental original research I was doing.”
    He tilted his head in question. So I told him about my meeting with Diacona Ebanks and the scene in her apartment.
    “Could have been rather awkward, Yank, had he seen you—bein’ invited to his lawn party and all.”
    “I got the impression that he would have acted as if it had never happened.”
    “Aye, ya might be right. Most Englishmen got a skin like an elephant. Robots.”
    “You think Sir Conan might have been involved with Cynthia Rothchild?”
    “It crossed me mind. I mentioned it to her two days before she died. She got quite huffy. She said absolutely not. Hard to imagine Lady James letting her stay had they been makin’ the creature with two backs.”
    At Governors Creek we passed a fleet of native-built commercial boats where, for four hundred years, the turtle ships have been kept at anchor. Black men, sweating in the sun, worked in the rigging and wove nets. Ratty houses in the background were painted bright blue and conch pink. Some of them still had roofs of thatch. An emaciated dog stumbled through the March heat, looking for shade.
    O’Davis nodded toward a hatchet-shaped point of land beyond.
    “That’s Head of Barkers. Ya wondered about the landward horizon ya saw through the telescope.”
    “That’s it?”
    “Aye. That an’ the little curve of peninsula before ya get to West Bay.”
    “Can you get in a little closer?”
    “We’ll slip in through the reef at the point an’ run right up the shore.”
    The Irishman pointed the old boat in, and at a heart-stopping forty miles an hour we rode the surf toward the reef. As accustomed as I am to running coral shoals, I didn’t see the narrow cut between the deadly staghorn until we were right on it. We banked left, then right, on a twisting path that took us safely in beyond the surf line, then ran parallel between shore and reef over the white sand shallows. A big ray exploded off before us, and a couple of sharks were black shapes lancing off at an angle.
    “Houses out here are mostly islanders,” O’Davis explained as we roared along. “The turtle farm is down around Boatswains Bay, an’ they have a wee school, too.”
    “But Tommy James had a tutor?”
    “Aye. Cynthia. And he attended one of the private schools back in England, I suppose. One o’ them places where bloodlines are considered before grades and hasn’t closed since the Vikings invaded.” The Irishman thought for a moment. “But if the lad was ta have island mates, I suppose most of them lived out here.”
    “But other English kids live on the island, don’t they?”
    “Sure, sure. A brattish lot, fer the most part. Money does it to ’em, I suppose.”
    “Or maybe it’s just that you’re Irish and can’t be expected to be impartial.”
    “Possible,” he said wryly. “That’s jest possible.”
    Ahead, the sprinkling of small houses gave way to a ragged coastline of volcanic rock that protruded from the surf like teeth. Upon a bluff above the shore a rolling lawn and fence were shaded by a