After three weeks, there had yet to be any grotesque impalements, explosions, incinerations, creative poisonings, strangulations, drownings, or gruesome murders of any kind. Not even so much as a simple shooting or stabbing.
But then again, isn’t that the way things are supposed to be on a tropical island resort? Arthur Giles had always assumed so. At least, that was before serial killer Jacqueline Bossart had tricked him into helping administer her sick game of murder on the Westlake Estate. Before she’d eventually cursed him to an apparent lifetime of horrors. And not long after that, he’d been involved in a similar copycat murder plot on Rue Manor, pretty much cementing the validity of Jacqueline’s curse.
Giles had come to expect that every job he took would end in some sort of horrible game of homicide where the other potential victims were forced to solve the crime or die next. Every day since he’d taken this new job, he expected to wake up to a body torn to pieces by a jet ski or someone melted in a tub of acid. Expecting such things was not an easy way to work. Or live, for that matter.
He had come from a simple background, a working-class family in Wales. His only desire had been to serve others, to elevate the quality of lives around him. And after getting a degree from the world’s most renowned school for butlers, he’d worked a string of prestigious jobs all over the world. His life had been going quite well—until his ill-fated decision to accept the head butler position on the Westlake Estate, that is.
But that’s why Giles had taken this new job as head of servant staff on the Avondale Resort. There was no way it could possibly happen again way out here on some tiny, remote island in the middle of the Caribbean. It just wasn’t possible. Not even his family could track him down here.
The job itself was different from those that he’d grown to love. It was beneath him, in a way. Not beneath him as a person, but more so merely beneath his level of training and experience. He’d much rather still be a regular butler or house manager of a typical estate again, but alas, his last two jobs of that nature had obviously not ended well. He had survived both times. There was that, at least. And, anyway, working on the Avondale Resort was actually not quite as different as he’d first suspected it would be.
The resort itself had a unique hook. A hook that had made the job more appealing to Giles than other tropical resorts would have been. A hook that had indeed made the resort more than a little ecstatic to hire a man with Giles’s résumé.
The Avondale Resort’s tagline was “Classic Luxury in a Tropical Paradise.” Unlike most tropical resorts, which housed guests in bungalows, large commercial hotel complexes, faux rustic huts, and other assorted clichéd tropical dwellings, the Avondale Resort housed all of its guests in a traditional European-style mansion, one more likely to be spotted tucked away in the English countryside than on a Caribbean island. And that was the appeal: guests got the best of both worlds. World-class luxurious service and accommodations packaged with a tropical island getaway. It was on a small, private island so isolated that the only way to get there was via a two-hour ferry from the nearest Caribbean island with an airport of any kind.
The island still had everything people would want from a tropical getaway: white sand beaches, palm trees, all-inclusive drink and food service, several infinity pools overlooking magnificent ocean landscapes, jet skis, boats, complimentary snorkeling gear, beachside dinners, lush tropical foliage surrounding well-maintained walking paths lit by torches, and, of course, plenty of beautiful sunshine and great weather. Couple that with living quarters in the form of a massive mansion sitting on the island’s highest point, offering breathtaking views of the ocean, sunrises, and sunsets, and the remote nature of the getaway itself, and the result was a pretty unique and successful vacation formula.
And so far, the job had been better than Giles had expected. For one, nobody was dying a horrific death. But furthermore, the island was so isolated, so cut off from the rest of the world, he was actually starting to believe that the curse wouldn’t, or couldn’t, follow him all the way out there. He was starting to think he might actually be free from the awful curse Jacqueline Bossart had placed on him.
There had been a time, a few weeks after the murders on Rue Manor, when he’d even considered just abandoning the service profession altogether. But he couldn’t bring himself to do it. It was what he loved to do; it was who he was. It was the only thing he was truly great at. And he wasn’t going to let two psychopathic killers run him off and change his identity.
Even if it somehow, impossibly, happened to him again for a third time, he still likely wouldn’t switch professions. He’d decided that during his second week working on the Avondale Resort: he was a butler through and through. He wouldn’t ever let anything or anyone change that about him.
Little did he know then, but that new resolution was about to be tested by the sickest mind yet.