Jill Evans for Kennebec7 (#2)
Day 7: Waiting for Ty
It’s day seven since Ty and Lakshmi and Phunamee left with the sea gypsies on two fishing boats to try to find and rescue Seng.
They’re somewhere around the Mergui Archipelago someplace in the Andaman Sea. I’d worry more about the bugger, but I got a sort of message from him last night.
He’s taught me a few things. One is to listen closely to people’s words. The more you let them talk, the closer they get to the core of their truth. Another thing he taught me is that when people you hardly know tell you something incongruous, maybe it’s not from them, but it is for you.
Well, I know that sounds confusing. Let me give you an example. Last night, I was having a drink with my old classmate, Heidi Koenig, at a beach bar in Krabi. We were discussing the latest developments in my investigation of Miranda’s death, and comparing notes about Lakshmi, the bizarre east Indian healer who had been treating Heidi’s aunt.
A Thai tourist came over to buy us a drink. He was a cheerful, chubby guy – middle-aged – and half in the tank. Harmless enough. His friends were watching, egging him on.
“Can buy byootiful womans a drink?”
“Sure, what’s your name?” said I.
“Ty.”
“Oh, you’re Thai,” I grinned.
“Yes, I Ty,” he smiled back, but I noticed that his eyes were looking deeply into mine. “I come back in two day. Don’t worry.”
I stared back at him. Something clicked. He smiled and kept his eyes on mine. “What kind drink you like, Miss? You like Pink Lady?”
“How perceptive,” said Heidi. She had picked up a vibe. “What’s going on here, Jill?”
“I think Ty’s sending me a message.”
She looked at me. Looked at the grinning Thai-Ty. “Oh, come on. This guy?”
“Two days,” I said, holding up two fingers. “Ty’s coming back.”
A little later we were walking on the beach, quietly talking about all the weird things that had happened since Ty and I had arrived in southern Thailand. I told her about the baseball bat one of the SID guys had found in the rocks by the sea, about two-thirds of a mile from where Miranda had fallen. Undoubtedly washed up by the current.
“Phil’s got at least twenty of them in his sports closet,” Heidi said.
“Would we be able to find out whether any are missing?”
“You mean since Miranda’s death?”
“Yeah.”
“I don’t know who would keep count other than Phil himself.”
I mulled it over. “Well, the Thai forensics woman is going to measure the barrel of that bat in relation to Miranda’s skull bone where she was impacted. She’s really good. If there’s any kind of match, we’re gonna have to investigate Phil’s baseball bat collection.”
“Not too many baseball bats in Thailand,” commented Heidi, frowning.
Just then I had a sense of something behind me. I casually glanced back. There was the young couple we had passed a minute or so earlier. They had been hanging on to one another, speaking Dutch or something. Wasn’t sure. They were now laying a blanket out on the sand in a place that was almost totally in shadows despite the moonlight.
But further from the ocean, in the darker shadows where the beach met a fringe of fir trees, there had been another figure. I was almost sure, but it froze when I turned. I turned back to Heidi.
“Maybe we should go back, Heidi.”
She was staring ahead of us. “Do you see who’s coming?
I looked where she was looking, where a pool of light intruded onto the beach from one of the hotels. It was a man of slightly less than average height, squarely built, identifiable as a westerner in the fraction of a second that the hotel light hit him.
“Sandy?” I murmured. It was the faintly robotic gait that I recognized.
“I think so,” Heidi said. “What the heck is he doing here?”
I allowed my glance to slide back again, over my shoulder toward the area where the beach and flora intersected. I saw nothing unusual at first, heard laughter from poolside bar, listened to the waves softly rolling across the sand, and then I saw it.
It was as if one of the dark fir tree trunks had parted. A tall shadow moved away from it. My breath changed as I sucked in more air. I had only seen the man once, but once was enough. His image stayed with me. The shadow swayed the way you might imagine a tall tree would move if it had legs. The way Boris Karloff lurched when he played the Frankenstein monster.
Jill Evans
Krabi, Thailand
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