Palms, Paradise, Poison

By John Keyse-Walker

Sea, storm, superstition . . . Constable Teddy Creque investigates a death with seemingly supernatural causes in this witty, atmospheric mystery set on a Caribbean island paradise. 

"The battle between rational, supernatural, and criminal provides a tropical treat like no other" - Kirkus Reviews Starred Review

Constable Teddy Creque, the sole police officer on the tiny, sun-soaked island of Anegada, is used to weathering storms. So when Hurricane Leatha hits the Caribbean with brutal force, his main concern is keeping the island's two hundred residents safe. Teddy expects the power to go out. He expects the phone lines to go down. But he doesn't expect the radioed message from the Royal Virgin Islands Police Force headquarters, informing him of a dangerous escaped prisoner. Queen Ya-Ya is a practitioner of ancient Afro-Cuban rites - and rumor has it she can kill with magic. Teddy doesn't believe in magic, and when he easily recaptures the dignified, imposing Queen Ya-Ya, he doesn't believe his prisoner is dangerous either. But when she mysteriously kills a man from inside her locked cell, before vanishing once more into the night, Teddy is forced to reconsider . . . This page-turning mystery from award-winning author John Keyse-Walker takes readers on an exciting journey from the storm-tossed British Virgin Islands to the heart of Cuba, and is a perfect pick for readers who like their mysteries international, atmospheric and adventurous.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Severn House
• Release date: Dec 1, 2021
• ISBN: 9781448306282

John Keyse-Walker

John Keyse-Walker practiced law for thirty years, representing business and individual clients, educational institutions and government entities. He is an avid salt- and freshwater angler, a tennis player, kayaker and an accomplished cook. He lives in Ohio with his wife. Sun, Sand, Murder, the first book in the Teddy Creque mystery series, won the Minotaur Books/Mystery Writers of America First Crime Novel Award.

Book preview

ONE

‘A hurricane is like a wanton woman,’ my Dada used to say. ‘You are never quite the same after being in the path of one.’

My Dada thought a lot – correction, thinks a lot – about women. I guess that’s why I, and my nine brothers and sisters, are here. I must confess that I inherited that characteristic from him. Women frequently occupy my thoughts, though less now than in the past. I like to think that my woman troubles are over, having settled down with Jeanne Trengrouse.

But a troublesome, wanton woman has risen to prominence in my thoughts during the last seventy-two hours: Leatha. That name, which I had not heard until three days ago, now occupies all my waking moments, a malevolent danger to me, to my family, to my friends and neighbors. Because, you see, Leatha is a hurricane, a killer of men, a destroyer of homes, a visitation of horror upon the otherwise placid region of the eastern Caribbean. And Anegada, my island home, is squarely in her path.

‘Teddy, Teddy, you got to come look at this,’ Pamela Pickering called from across the hall, her voice elevated far above its usual piercing level to be heard over the din of the weather outside. Even now, just on the fringe of the storm, the skies had darkened to a muddy twilight, copious rain slashed against the walls and metal roof, and a moan like an endless ambulance siren drowned out all other sound with its relentless tone.

I thought about ignoring Pamela’s summons. As Anegada’s administrator and one of only three government officials on the island, Pamela is easily alarmed under the best of conditions. With Hurricane Leatha’s track becoming more likely to collide with Anegada with each passing hour, Pamela’s level of anxiety had climbed exponentially. She was, as my Dada would say, as nervous as a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs.

I had plenty to do that morning besides holding Pamela’s hand. As the sole police constable on Anegada, my plate was more than full. With the help of our administrative assistant, Anthony Wedderburn, the last forty-eight hours had been devoted to checking up on some of the old folks in their homes; putting up plywood on the windows of Anegada’s combined police station and administration building; doing the same for my own and Anthony’s homes; making certain there were adequate emergency supplies of food and water cached at three different locations in The Settlement; and doing the thousand and one other tasks that fall to the police when Mother Nature sends one of her nasty daughters to wreak havoc on a tiny island.

In the short hours before Leatha would strike, there was still much to do. I had just slipped into my office to check for messages from Royal Virgin Islands Police Force headquarters in Road Town, on Tortola, before going on to the next must-do job. No messages. Road Town and headquarters must have been too occupied with their own preparations to concern themselves with backwater Anegada. So, we were on our own. That made a moment for Pamela, and, after all, in the past she had made time for me. Hell, she had once saved my life.

‘What is it, Pamela?’ I asked from the doorway of her office, directly across the hall from mine. Anthony Wedderburn, known because of his former ganja habit and dreadlocks as De White Rasta, joined me in the doorway. Pamela was seated at her desk, the otherworldly blue light from her Acer computer screen backlighting her solid frame and shock of unruly curls. She turned and, for the first time in all the years I had known her, I saw terror in her eyes.

‘Look.’ That was all she could muster, with a shake of her lopsided Afro toward the screen. I’d never heard her speak just a single word without attaching it to a long string of others.

De Rasta and I stepped to her side. On the screen of her PC, still the only government computer on Anegada thanks to Road Town’s view that those of us on the sister islands had no need for meaningful contact with the outside world, was a radar shot of Puerto Rico and points east. On the Atlantic side of the Puerto Rican Commonwealth, the sprinkle of islands forming the US and British Virgin Islands was topped on its northern edge by the amoebic shape of Anegada. Cycling out in the great ocean to the east was a helical nebula a hundred – no, a thousand – times the size of our island, with spinning arms thrusting in all directions. The radar pulsed through a time-lapse series of frames, the spiral blot growing with each as it marched west, the arms dark green and yellow, the body orange, red, then purple-black at its twisting core.

‘Teddy, they say it a category three, maybe goin’ to four, Teddy. With winds a hunnerd-twenty, hunnerd-thirty miles an hour, an’ a surge, a storm surge of six feet, eight feet.’ Pamela’s words tripped over one another now. ‘My house, Teddy, that kinda surge take my house under, your house, Anthony’s house. Your babies, Teddy, oh, all the babies!’

‘Whoa, whoa, Pamela,’ I said, placing my hands on her shoulders and looking directly into her eyes. Anthony stepped close, too, and shot me a glance of concern. ‘The storm is not here yet. It could turn. You know how unpredictable these things are. Get a grip on yourself. We need to get ready so if it does hit, we – everyone, everyone’s babies – come out all right.’

Pamela’s eyes had not wavered an inch from my own. I thought I saw the panic depart from them. Her shoulders relaxed, not much but some, beneath my grip, enough for me to take a longer look at the radar screen.

The future track of Hurricane Leatha, in the past few days a harmless wobble through the mid-Atlantic, was projected out as a gray cone, with dates and times marked by hashes along the cone’s edge. A dashed line ran through the center of the anticipated path. The line impaled Anegada along the island’s entire length. If the hashes were accurate, the time of impact of the eye would be noon, less than five hours away. I turned to De Rasta and saw the realization hit. He probably saw the same thing, looking at me. The safety and welfare of the two hundred souls on Anegada were in our hands. And in the hands of God.

God and I had had some rough patches lately. It had started with my admitted straying from both my marriage vows and from attendance at the Methodist Church, the island’s principal house of worship. Unlike the generations in the Book of Genesis, I was unsure which one begat the other, but they seemed somehow linked, at least at the time. Then came the horrible events culminating in the death of my wife Icilda, and the near-loss of my own life. If that hadn’t done enough to sever my relationship with the Big Guy, I had made sure to finish the job with my spiral into booze and dissolution after those misfortunes. I didn’t blame Him. I just didn’t believe in Him any more.

With the help of Pamela Pickering and De White Rasta, I had been able to claw my way back from the drinking and the despair. But there had still been no God in my life.

Then Jeanne Trengrouse came, and filled the cavernous hole in my heart and soul. She, like all good women of the Virgin Islands, is a churchgoer. And if I wanted to be with her, I’d best return to being a churchgoer, too, she had explained to me in gentle, but by no means uncertain, terms.

So now I was back in God’s house every Sunday, with Jeanne, her son Jemmy, and my Kevin and Tamia at my side, Madda and Dada in the pew in front, the slightly effeminate Pastor Lloyd in the pulpit. Some Sundays his sermon was a collection of platitudes; on others it was a spate of fire and brimstone. Neither the former nor the latter had any effect on my estrangement from Him. But at least I was convinced to believe He was there, to recover part of what had been lost in the dark days past.

So I cannot say I said, or even thought, a prayer when I saw the image of that apocalyptic beast headed to Anegada on the radar screen, and heard its brutish howl through the battened doors and windows. Pamela made up for me, dropping from her desk chair to her knees before the angry monster pulsing on her computer monitor, folding her hands and crying, ‘Lord Jesus and God the Father, save us and our homes from this unholy terror!’

As if in answer, the PC screen went blank and the lights went out.

TWO

One thing you must understand about the lights going out in Anegada – it happens regularly, in the best of conditions. While modern city dwellers see the loss of electric power as an indication the wolves will be at the door within the hour, hardly a week goes by on Anegada without an involuntary journey back to the times of candles, kerosene lanterns, and going to bed when the sun sets. The simple electric grid of the island, relying as it does on two aging diesel generators, is constantly on the brink of collapse. When it finally does, we Anegadians take it in our stride.

Just as Pamela, Anthony and I did now. Pamela rose from her prayer posture and fished in her desk drawer for a torch. Soon its yellow light supplemented the dim illumination seeping in around the edges of the plywood sheets nailed to the window frames.

The loss of power had the odd effect of calming Pamela, I guess because we’re so used to the electricity going out that it brought a suggestion of normalcy to our otherwise unusual, and dangerous, situation. And it didn’t hurt that the power failure extinguished the frightening picture of the approaching storm from her computer screen. ‘Teddy, it look bad for us,’ she said.

‘We’ll make it through,’ Anthony assured her. I remembered he had, during his ganja-addled Rasta days, weathered Hurricane Hugo in the hull of a wrecked sailboat on the island’s north shore, with nothing more than a supply of rolling papers and a baggie of Jamaican Pineapple Kush for company and sustenance.

‘We have to get ready.’ I spoke with more confidence than I felt. ‘First, let’s see if the landline to Road Town is still working.’

Anthony lifted the black desk phone receiver, placed it next to his ear for a tick, and returned it to its cradle, shaking his head.

‘All right,’ I said. ‘I guess communication with the outside world will be by CB radio, on the battery back-up. This storm should make getting anything through on it pretty dicey.’

I switched on the CB beside Pamela’s computer and was rewarded with a popcorn cascade of static on Channel 16, the channel everybody uses and monitors on Anegada. Then, in a few seconds of clarity, I heard one of the Soares girls at Neptune’s Treasure asking her cousin in The Settlement if she had any extra plywood. The answer was ‘no’, but someone else listening in said that they had four extra sheets and would bring them by in ten minutes, confirming that the CB, and the Anegada good-neighbor attitude, were functioning.

‘OK, Anthony, you need to get down the street and bring a few of the older folks in to ride out the storm. If it hits as a category four, some of the old houses won’t stand up to it. Bring in Lucas and Minnie George, Tom and Sue Vanterpool, and Ellis Lloyd. I’ll take the Land Rover to pick up the Widow Faulkner and her wheelchair.’ I peered at my watch in the gloom. ‘Let’s try to have everyone back here in half an hour, by eight o’clock.’

‘Mayday, mayday, mayday.’ The CB crackled like a torchwood bonfire, and then completely devolved into static. After thirty seconds, the call resumed. ‘Motor vessel Isabella, two miles southwest of Setting Point, engines dead, taking on water over the stern …’ A scream of static wiped out the rest of the call.

Pamela Pickering had found a handful of candle stubs and was lighting them one by one. Even though all the windows and doors of the administration building were tightly battened against the storm, the flames of the candles wavered as threads of the keening tempest beyond the walls found their way inside. The candle flames leaned southwest to northeast, matching the attitude of the loblolly tree outside the building, and the coconut palms from Anegada to Virgin Gorda, Jost van Dyke, Tortola, Vieques, and, I suspected, points far beyond.

‘What in the world would Kevin Faulkner be doing out in weather like this?’ Pamela asked. One of the few true landlubbers in Anegada, even Pamela knew that a boat should not be out in this kind of storm. Kevin Faulkner, my co-worker when I still did shifts at the Anegada power plant, had grown up on boats, fishing with his dada, Willy, from the age of six, and becoming master of the Isabella at age nineteen. It was an important job, one of the most important on Anegada, because the Isabella was the heavy freight hauler for the island. If you wanted gasoline, a new refrigerator, lumber, a car, or a pallet of drywall, it came by way of Isabella’s ponderously slow once-weekly voyage from Tortola. Isabella was owned by my dada, and I occasionally served as a relief captain if Kevin was ill, or otherwise unable to make the weekly trip.

‘I don’t know why he’d be out there,’ I said. ‘He left yesterday morning for the hurricane hole at Paraquita Bay on Tortola. He should have been there by noon, with no reason to risk the boat by leaving the shelter of the anchorage after that.’

‘Do you think VISAR will respond?’ Pamela asked. Virgin Islands Search and Rescue, a group of volunteer boat owners, supplemented the meager marine resources of the Royal Virgin Islands Police Force to rescue boaters in the sister islands and search for those lost at sea. But one of the requirements of VISAR was that volunteers never risk their own safety while trying to save another. The theory was that you should never turn a rescuer into a victim. Because of this, I knew VISAR would not be out in the now fifty-knot winds to answer the mayday from Isabella.

‘No,’ I told Pamela. ‘I suspect Isabella is on her own.’ I didn’t have to tell her that probably meant Kevin Faulkner would be lost at sea, the last in a long line of freighter crews, fishermen, and pleasure boaters to go to their final rest in the apparently benign waters surrounding the coral heads of the Horseshoe Reef off the south and east coasts of Anegada.

Pamela began to weep softly, her tears a glistening trickle in the flickering candlelight, her sobbing barely audible against the shriek of the wind. Her mourning infected me. I thought about playing cricket with Kevin as children at the Anegada School, diving for conch from the anchored Isabella in the shallows off Nutmeg Point, exchanging greetings, tidbits of gossip, and the latest report on the recalcitrant diesels as one of us took over from the other on a shift change at the electric plant. Kevin was not my best friend, but he was a friend, as everyone was among the two hundred souls resident on Anegada. The loss of one of those souls affected us all.

I wasn’t bound by VISAR’s rules and I decided I could not allow Kevin to perish without an effort to save him. I might not succeed, but it was what a friend, or a family member, would do. And weren’t we, after all, members of the same family on this slab of limestone we call home? I would do the same for one of the Soares, the Lloyds, or the Vanterpools, and they would do the same for me.

‘Change of plans, Pamela,’ I began, only to be interrupted by a suddenly clear transmission from the CB.

‘Royal Virgin Islands Police Force Headquarters to all stations.’ The words came through as if the sender were standing beside me. ‘All-ports warning for an inmate escaped from Her Majesty’s Prison. Subject is a non-belonger Cuban national named Marianna Orro, aka Queen Ya-Ya, female, dark black complexion, six feet one inch tall, weight twelve stone, hair black, eyes amber, some straight-line scarring on arms and torso. Last seen wearing an orange prison jumpsuit. Not known to be armed, but should be considered dangerous. All stations detain if located.’ The broadcast was repeated two times, with a torrent of static wiping out the last part of the second repetition.

My madda always said that problems come in threes and I now had the full complement on my plate – an island of two hundred souls relying on me, a friend and fellow islander in peril at sea, and a potentially dangerous escaped prisoner on the loose. Fortunately – if one could use that word about the situation – the chance of the prisoner making her way from Tortola all the way to Anegada in a hurricane was remote. I could push that problem all the way to the far edge of my hypothetical plate.

‘As I said, change of plans. Pamela, we are going to my house to pick up the Lily B, take it on its trailer to Lower Bay, and launch it there. You will drive the trailer out of the ramp after I float the Lily B off, detach the trailer and leave it, and pick up the Widow Faulkner. Anthony, you still head down the street and collect the old folks to shelter here in the administration building.’

‘Teddy, you can’t be goin’ out on the water in this storm,’ Pamela said. Her secondary concern, I guessed, was being left to her own devices in this emergency, but that couldn’t be helped. De Rasta would be able to assist her soon enough.

‘You’ll be fine,’ I said. ‘I’ll show you how to detach the trailer.’

Most of the whites of Pamela’s eyes were showing as we drove the quarter mile from the administration building to my house. The sky, usually a fair blue with a smattering of cottony cumulus at this time of year, had the ugly cast of a jaundiced convalescent, with a solid cover of low-hanging clouds all along the horizon. Hanks of sea grape leaves smacked the rear windscreen of the Land Rover even as we drove away from the direction of the wind. The big car buffeted and shook as we crawled along to my house, avoiding branches, boards, and coconuts on the rain-sheeted road.

On the way, in the few seconds my attention was not focused on keeping Pamela and myself alive, I debated whether I should go inside my house to speak to Jeanne and the children. With the windows all boarded shut, they would not know if I didn’t stop in. I could simply take the boat from the yard and leave. I had no doubts about their safety; the house was concrete block, with a roof reinforced with hurricane strapping. Sited on one of Anegada’s highest locations, with an elevation almost twenty feet above sea level, the house’s first floor would never be touched by the predicted storm surge. We had said our goodbyes hours earlier, when the winds were calmer and the storm merely ordinary, but Jeanne knew not to expect to hear from me until the hurricane had passed. I decided she and the children would be less frightened if they didn’t know I was putting myself in a position where I would not be safe.

As we towed the Lily B out of the coral stone driveway, I wondered if I would ever see them again.

THREE

The aging boat ramp at Lower Bay is no picnic in the best of weather, its crumbling bottom of crushed coral and conch shells giving an impression of instability that is not far from the truth. The ramp and the short channel accessing it are protected by a wall of mangroves, but the stubby trees failed to break the wind or prevent the wash of two- to three-foot waves into the ramp. While two- to three-footers are hardly a problem in the open water, I don’t recommend them for unloading a trailered skiff. Somehow, though, I ended up with the Lily B in the water and Pamela Pickering at the wheel of the Land Rover. As I backed the boat off, fighting wind and wave, I gestured to Pamela to pull away. The pounding rain soon concealed her as she drove the RVIPF vehicle toward The Settlement.

The thirty feet of channel seemed difficult enough, with the quartering wind pushing the Lily B toward the shallows on the starboard side, but it was a piece of johnnycake compared to what awaited beyond the pitiful shelter of the mangroves. The open water was a chaotic rush of breaking waves, unusual currents, and a wind that seemed to tear in from, and off to, every direction at once. To keep from being blown off the boat, I hunkered against the center console, eyes just above the solid board and below the Plexiglas windscreen. Any equipment not tied down or safe in a locker was immediately blown overboard – a lobster trap, net floats, a plastic tackle box,

Reviews for Palms, Paradise, Poison

[cathyskye · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I was looking forward to meeting Constable Teddy Creque again, and he did not disappoint. One of the things I've enjoyed about this series is its depiction of the life and culture of a small island in the British Virgin Islands. In Palms, Paradise, Poison, I learned how ancient beliefs are a part of this life and how they can be twisted in the wrong person's hands. This third book in the series has some gorgeous descriptions of the landscape and wildlife on Caribbean islands, and I loved learning about Cayo Saetia, Fidel Castro's favorite little island off the coast of Cuba. The hurricane scenes are powerful and kept me on tenterhooks throughout the beginning of the book. (After reading Ann Cleeves' Vera Stanhope mysteries and now Keyse-Walker's Teddy Creque books, I'm convinced I need to trade in my Jeep for an old Land Rover.)Teddy gets to go on a road trip with Cuban police officer Luz Garcia, and their eventual capture of Queen Ya-Ya does not go smoothly. As interesting as this all is, Palms, Paradise, Poison is also a story of a man reinventing his life after the death of his wife. Teddy Creque wasn't a very admirable man at the beginning of the series, and his wife's death threw him into a downward spiral of depression and alcohol. Now he's met the right woman, and they and their blended family of three children are happy... but is Teddy as reformed as he thinks he is? If temptation arises, will he be able to resist?I enjoyed this book, the hurricane, the travels through Cuba, the apprehension of Queen Ya-Ya, and seeing what Teddy's done with his life since the second book, Beach, Breeze, Bloodshed. Now I'm eager to find out what's next for this constable on a small Caribbean island. Bring it on.(Review copy courtesy of the publisher and Net Galley.)