Rebel Island - By Rick Riordan Page 0,2

tempted to throw up on the marshal’s shoes.

“What brings you here, Longoria?” I asked. “Collecting seashells?”

“I don’t need your interference, son. Not this time.”

Thunder crackled over the Gulf. Storm clouds were piling up, turning the air to a wet stew of salt and electricity.

The hotel manager lumbered over with our bags. He stopped when he saw Longoria’s hand resting on his sidearm. “Uh, problem, gentlemen?”

“There was,” I said. “Two years ago. Never found the body, did they, Longoria?”

The marshal’s eyes glinted. “I heard you quit detective work.”

“Sure. Didn’t you get an invitation to the retirement party?”

He stepped so close I could smell the lemon starch sweating out of his clothes. “Who hired you?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Longoria. I’m here on my honeymoon.”

I pointed behind me. Maia and Garrett were just coming up the dock—Maia eight and a half months pregnant, Garrett a bilateral amputee.

Funny, Longoria didn’t look too convinced by my honeymoon story.

“Hey, Marshal,” the hotel manager said. I tried to remember his name. Chris Something-or-other. He was a former pro surfer, tan and well-built, but I doubted he’d dealt with many conflicts worse than deciding what kind of beer to buy on the mainland. “Mr. Navarre isn’t—I mean, they have a reservation, sir. They’re friends with the owner.”

Longoria seemed to weigh his options. The ferry was already pulling out for Aransas Pass. The next boat wouldn’t come until tomorrow afternoon. That meant he could shoot me, throw me off the dock or leave me alone. I’m sure the first two options had their appeal.

“Bad storm coming,” he told me. “I’d make it a one-night honeymoon and get off this island.”

Then he turned and headed toward the hotel, the first few splatters of rain making buckshot patterns on the boards at his feet.

“Old friend?” Maia asked.

“Something like that.” I looked at Garrett accusingly.

“Hey, little bro, you can’t blame me for that. Is there any place in Texas where you don’t stumble across some cop you’ve pissed off?”

He had a point. Besides, there were plenty of other things I could blame my brother for.

We followed the hotel manager up the clamshell path toward a place I had sworn never to revisit.

Rebel Island was a mile long. Most of that was a thin strip of beach and cordgrass that stretched north like a comet’s tail. The southern end was half a mile wide—just big enough for the lighthouse and the rambling old hotel that had once been home to the island’s most infamous owner.

My father used to relish the island’s history. Every summer when we came here, he’d tell me the stories. To my horror, as I got older, I actually found myself interested in them.

Inconveniently placed near the mouth of Aransas Bay, the island had needled its way into local history like a sticker burr. In the early 1800s, Jean Laffitte had used its treacherous sandbars to lure Spanish ships into the shallows, where they floundered and became easy prey. Laffitte had supposedly buried a treasure here, too, in a grove of live oaks, but if there had ever been live oaks on the island, hurricanes had scoured them away long ago. The only trees now were a dozen palmettos, which according to legend had been planted by Colonel Duncan Bray.

Bray had fought at the final land battle of the Civil War—Palmito Ranch, two hundred miles south. The last irony in a war filled with ironies, Palmito Ranch had been a Confederate victory. Bray considered it the definitive word on the war’s outcome. He planted palmetto saplings from the battlefield on his family’s island, refused to speak of Lee’s surrender or Juneteenth or any of the other new realities. He shot at federal troops who attempted to talk to him about repairing his lighthouse, and he lived the rest of his life in voluntary exile on what he considered the last patch of Confederate soil. The island got its name from him. He wasn’t the last crazy rebel to own the place.

Bray’s house, now the Rebel Island Hotel, was a three-story French Second Empire. It had a mansard roof like reptile skin and cedar-slatted walls painted an odd color that mirrored the sea—sometimes blue, sometimes green or gray. The oldest wooden structure in Aransas County, it had weathered half a dozen hurricanes.

Good karma, our friend Alex had told me, right before he bought the place. At the time, I’d felt like I was watching somebody buy my childhood—nightmares and all.

The lobby smelled of sandalwood and straw mats. Seashells