– Find Part 1 here – Chapter list here –
In the days that followed I found myself falling into a routine to break the boredom of this captivity. In other circumstances my situation could have been almost described as idyllic. Sun, beach, sea.
Each morning I would get up and swim in the warm waters of the Gulf Of Mexico. After a light breakfast I would walk up to the airstrip and run up and down the strip half a dozen times. A walk back to the beach house would complete my exercise regime, and would be followed by a shower. Then I would find one of the novels that lined the shelves of our little house.
Annabel seemed quite resigned to the situation, and untroubled by it.
“Mrs. Gravely will sort it out,” she’d say.
She clearly felt the people back at Stoneleigh, the farm, were part of a family that wouldn’t abandon her.
Around mid day Miguel would wander down the beach with one or two supplies for us if things were running short, and just check in on us. He’d replenish the fridge, and comment that there was ‘no news’, but that was the only reference to the fact that we were being held against our will. If we needed anything, from hair conditioner to coffee, he’d retrieve it from his store of supplies.
Miguel had no objections to my exercising the way I did, but made it clear that going further up the island than his house was clearly off limits. There was not more than a hundred yards of island beyond his place, and it was scrub as far as I could make out, with a shipping container acting as a secure store room. The beach up that end was not as sandy and was definitely not as pleasant as what we considered ‘our end of the island’.
With that he’d retire to his house and usually get better acquainted with his bottle of tequila. We had no objection to this, Annabel and I falling into a quiet situation of domestic intimacy.
It wasn’t until the seventh day that my routine faltered. I was running the second length of the runway when I noticed the windsock no longer hanging limply from the flag pole. By the time I completed my sixth length of the runway the wind sock was blowing horizontally. The wind was quite blustery as I walked back to the beach house, white crests on the waves.
When Miguel made his usual appearance he looked quite worried, unshaven and holding his straw hat to his bald head to stop it being blown away, he told us that we should close the windows and push some towels against the foot of the door, as there was going to be quite a wind.
There was a build up of clouds to the east and the waves were building up, streaked with white foam by mid afternoon.
“I’ve not seen it like this here before,” said Annabel.
“I was in a hurricane one year in Jamaica,” I replied. “It was late summer. Like this.”
“How long did it last,” asked Annabel.
“Four days,” I said nervously, remembering the ferocity of the storm. “That was the last late season holiday I booked in the Caribbean.”
— —
The storm continued unabated through the night and the following day Miguel failed to appear. Perhaps it was through some passive aggressive choice, but we chose not to check on him, feeling we didn’t want to cede power to our concerns.
As the winds continued to howl, and eventually the kitchen window blow in and shattered, we huddled on the bed of the little house, waiting out the storm. At one point I stepped out and surveyed the magnificence of the storm.
Out to sea I watched as a yacht, all sails torn away, rushed past landward under bare poles. It must have been only a hundred metres off the beach, but no one seemed to be aboard, and in a matter of minutes it was lost to my view.
Inside Annabel fiddled with the radio and picked up some BBC news about hurricane force weather affecting Cancun, which we estimated to be far to the east. Nonetheless we could easily be in the same weather system. No let up seemed imminent, and the following day we fought the howling wind and succumbed to curiosity and made our way up to Miguel’s beach house.
“Look,” said Annabel as we approached the house. ‘The antenna!”
The thin wire antenna was missing, along with sections of the roof. We hammered on the door, which fell open and revealed a scene of carnage not unlike our own. At first there was no sign of Miguel, but soon enough he found him passed out on the bed, beside two empty bottles of tequila.
“We better find that aerial,” I said, and so began a hunt for the broken apparatus kicking our way through the scrubby undergrowth. Surely it couldn’t be far from where it must have fallen.
Annabel and I combed the area down wind of the place it had stood, searching left and right in the low scrub. At length Annabel found the long pole, and as we dragged it from the grass I glanced further up the island, unfamiliar with this section having heeded Miguels warning never to explore this area. I walked a little further through the rough undergrowth, the wind still strong at my back.
That was when I found the graves.