A GRIPPING INTERNATIONAL THRILLER
When mining engineer Daniel Hannaford moves to the Caribbean to the island of Lucaya, he hopes for a fresh start. But a chance encounter at an elite party pulls him into a deadly world of corruption and power. Witnessing a brutal crime by the son of a ruthless billionaire, Daniele and Brianna - a young Jamaican woman - are thrust into a perilous struggle for survival. As danger looms from Lucaya to Britain, they must navigate a treacherous web of deceit, justice, and fate. J Michael Bailey delivers a riveting tale of ambition, betrayal, and redemption in this pulse-pounding thriller.
What ‘could have been’ never is when dreams are scattered at dawn.
It is only the exceptional and the courageous who rediscover them in days of sunlight and in the brilliance of a purposeful life. His tragedy was to have a sealed box full of such dreams but never the courage to turn the key. Indecision had always been his true calling; the things that mattered most often resulted always eluding him.
Daniel Hannaford was frequently numbed by a sense of loss and loneliness. It had been this way since his mother had quite literally vanished from his life and he had ended up in a Catholic boarding school far from the sunshine of Australia. Incarcerated in a foreign and often bitterly cold country and isolated from everything he had ever known, he’d seen his childhood and innocence slowly and irrevocably stolen.
Grieving and suffering unwarranted feelings of guilt over his mother’s disappearance, he often travelled in the company of anxiety and fear instilled by the nightmares fed by crippled human beings calling themselves the servants of God. These were the men commissioned to care for the boys at the school; instead, they plucked the souls from their young prey, leaving many on a long and lonely journey into darkness.
Daniel appeared not to hear his wife when she came from inside carrying a stained-speckled wooden tray with two mugs of coffee and a plate of biscotti. She had baked them the previous day from a recipe her mother had brought to Australia the year of the Queen’s coronation. That was sixty-four years ago. Her mother and father were now resting in a Sydney suburban cemetery, thousands of miles from the mountain village in the Campania region east of Napoli where Mario and Anna De Luca had been born.
“You’re not brooding again, I hope? I’ll go back inside again if you are,” she warned, and then gave him one of the special smiles radiating her genuine love for him. She briefly lost her balance as she was placing the tray on the table and Daniel reached out to gently steady her. Some of the coffee from the mugs spilled, adding to the collection of other stains on the tray.
Pia would be sixty-one in a few weeks, three years younger than her husband. She was concerned she was already displaying signs of old age, a looming yet unavoidable condition that occasionally petrified her just as much as any terminal disease. She was tall for a woman of southern Italian heritage, and slim besides. Even now she remained extremely elegant like a wealthy Milanese. There was certainly nothing to indicate she was the daughter of impoverished contadini who’d arrived in Australia with no money and limited education.
Most days she was content with her life, except on occasion when feelings of sadness coupled with a degree ofbanger would suddenly overwhelm her. This was when she would imagine how her life could have been, one of true purpose and meaning. She had always had an abundance of love to share, but Daniel had seemed to struggle with the concept from the time they first met. This was not to say he did not love her. She knew that he did in his way, very much so. Several years after they were married though, she began to realize that because love and affection had been absent from his early life, it was difficult for him to process and express his emotions when he was older. Instead, he had smotheredbthese feelings in order to survive what sixty years later would be considered a truly brutal way of raising vulnerable young children.
Sighing, Pia sat on one of the wicker chairs on the expansive pine deck that encircled the house outside.
She was looking out over the shimmering crystal water of Twofold Bay. It was perfectly framed by eucalyptus and a range of hills cascading from the Great Dividing Range, formed three hundred million years ago when Australia collided with what are now parts of South America and New Zealand.
They had met briefly in 1978, at a Bob Dylan concert in Perth where both attended Curtin University. He was four months from graduating as a mining engineer, and she was completing her Bachelor of Nursing degree.
Shortly after Daniel finished his degree, he headed to Jamaica to gain valuable work experience for twelve months at Kaiser Bauxite in Discovery Bay, half an hour by road from Ocho Rios. Jamaica had been the largest producer of bauxite in the world until recently when they relinquished that position to Australia, yet which had still much to learn from the tiny Caribbean nation.
Meeting her again by chance in a coffee shop in Perth on his return to Australia, Daniel had asked Pia out and they had started dating. Seven months later they were married at the Victorian-Gothic Town Hall in Perth. The wedding was a small affair. Neither had family to invite, just half a dozen friends from their university days. Without contemplating thoughts of a honeymoon, they left immediately for the Northern Territory where Daniel had accepted a job in Nhulunby, the site of the world’s largest bauxite deposits. Pia also found her first job at the Gove Hospital, about four kilometres from the mine.
They remained thirty-five years on the Gove Peninsula, living in a pleasant suburb until, quite out of the blue, when in 2014 Daniel was offered a job in the Caribbean by an old school friend. Daniel was sixty-one at the time but had never once contemplated early retirement. However, they were both beginning to tire of living in the Northern Territory. It was much too hot and there was very little to do in a remote mining town except work and go to the pub, or occasionally to thevlocal RSL club. Occasionally they flew off to Darwin for long weekends, and returned to Perth a couple of times a year if for no other reason than to reconnect with so-called civilization. Until recently, three or four days of city life was all theyneeded, after which they were happy to return home to Nhulunby. It was only when they began approaching retirement years, they decided they wanted more from life.
They had bought a house south of Eden, a small rural town in New South Wales they’d enjoyed visiting on one of their rare holidays. They loved the cooler weather of the Sapphire Coast. The house was only five minutes from the nearest beach and a number of national parks with plenty of bush walks. And they were also still far enough away from the big-city life they both disliked so much, yet closer to the amenities that had been lacking in Nhulunby. Pia was only fifty-eight when they finally flew to New South Wales to move into their new home. She hoped to find some part-time work at one of the doctor’s offices in Eden but was pleased to be leaving her hectic and often stressful life as Director of Nursing in what had become a very busy hospital.
Despite having more time alone to regret what she had wanted most in life, Pia still chose to remain in Eden when Daniel left Australia for the island of Lucaya, six hundred miles southeast of Miami. He had negotiated a contract including six weeks’ annual leave, which was more than sufficient to head back to Australia to spend time with Pia. Anyway, it was only going to be for two years, three at most, after which he might be content to retire and potter around the house.
Daniel pulled out a chair and sat next to Pia, and they remained quite content in silence for a while. A warm breeze wafted the late afternoon calls of bellbirds, and they watched the aerobatics of the grey and pink galahs, first swooping thensuddenly banking before climbing in perfect formation. It was late April and the weather was unusually warm, with just a few weeks remaining before the onset of winter. He drummed his fingers on top of the table, forgetting how much thisannoyed Pia – it was a habit that told her his mind was elsewhere. She was quite concerned about him in these moments of cognitive absence. It was not something she had ever recognized in him until his return from the Caribbean the previous year.
Perhaps he was developing dementia, she occasionally worried. God forbid. What would she do, how would she cope? He appeared the same. He was still a handsome, solidly built man standing at 5’8,” as he was when they had firstmet at the Dylan concert in Perth. He also remained the same solitary man in his relationship with the outside world, always striving to achieve perfection through hard work, while selfishly guarding his time off allowing few to invade hisprivacy.
Daniel eventually returned Pia’s smile, yet it overshadowed his enduring guilt for not providing what he knew she had always wanted. His inability to escape his inner isolation made it impossible to express the tenderness or love shedeserved.
Another flock of galahs rolled in flight and landed in the field next door and started pecking through the grass. He barely saw them. His mind drifted elsewhere, back to the Caribbean where gentle trade winds brushed a pearl-drop paradise of islands. Dark histories were hidden there... now including his own. It was there that everything had changed for Daniel.