Adrift on St. John (2 page)

Each day, a lumbering fleet of ferryboats shuttled the workers back and forth across the Pillsbury Sound, dropping them off in Cruz Bay on the west end of St. John in the morning, returning them to Red Hook on the east side of St. Thomas in the evening. Occasionally, circumstances arose that prevented one or more of the workers from making it to the last departing ferry, so their employer arranged for their passage back to St. Thomas on one of the private water taxis that filled in the late-night gaps in the ferry schedule.

Beulah had hobbled down to the pier just as the water taxi pulled up to the dock. She was the one who had reported
the delay of the third passenger, the captain remembered with an irritated
thunk
of his thumb against the side of the boat. That girl had better hurry up. She was throwing off the entire night’s schedule.

The old woman appeared distressed by her impending ride on the water taxi. Her bony face was drawn and pinched, her dark skin tinted with a grayish hue of concern. She crossed her arms over her chest and cupped her hands around the pointed tips of her frail shoulders.

“Ohhhh, no…”
she muttered, her voice rhythmic in its lilting Caribbean dialect.
“What-ter taxi…what-ter taxi…ohhh, no…”

The maid shook her head, as if trying to rid her mind of an unpleasant image. Her stiff, arthritic hands reached up and fretfully pulled on the frizzled gray wisps of her hair. Her muttering voice continued its singsong lament.
“Eye doon nut lyke thuh what-ter taxi…”

Crazy old bag doesn’t like my water taxi, the captain silently translated and rolled his eyes. The corners of his mouth curled into a slight grimace. She could bloody well swim across to Red Hook, then.

The captain slapped one of his muscular hands against the top of the nearest railing. His fingers wrapped around the curve of the piped trim; his smooth ebony skin stretched across the healthy bulge of his bicep.

What was keeping that woman? He couldn’t afford to wait much longer.

A slender female figure sprinted across the resort’s manicured grounds, her path marked by the soft glow of the intermittent lanterns that lined the concrete curb of the trail. The soles of her sandals slapped against the walkway’s red brick surface as she passed through a cluster of villas and headed toward the wooden dock where, she hoped, the water taxi would still be waiting.

The woman clutched the handle of a small blue satchel in her left hand. The nylon bag swung wildly back and forth
as she sped around a corner, startling a large iguana whose three-foot length skittered beneath the nearest hydrangea. From the safety of the bush, the giant lizard rose up on its crooked front legs and billowed out the frilly collar of loose skin that hung beneath its stubby neck.

The creature’s affronted gesture was lost on the woman who had so rudely interrupted its nighttime stroll; she was already twenty yards farther down the path.

The air was moist with the forecast of a coming rain; its heavy, damp presence blanketed the resort. As the trail opened out onto a sloping green lawn, the storm’s first sprinkling drops began to fall, pattering like the light drumroll of fingertips across the woman’s shoulders, spattering over the cinnamon sun-kissed tops of her feet, dotting the flowering spin of her chiffon sundress.

A member of the grounds crew drove up beside her in one of the resort’s ubiquitous motorized golf carts. He motioned for her to climb into the passenger seat beside him.

“Don’t worry, Hannah,” he assured her with a wink as the cart whizzed off down the path. “He will wait.”

The captain huffed a sigh of relief when he saw the golf cart carrying his last passenger motoring down the dock.

“Come on, then,” he bellowed as the cart screeched to a halt beside the boat.

Hannah clambered out of the cart’s front passenger seat and lunged toward the edge of the water taxi. The captain grabbed her forearm as she stepped off the pier and firmly pulled her into the swaying boat. She quickly took a seat on the back bench in between the other two passengers.

Still clutching the nylon satchel, Hannah took in a deep breath and pushed back the sweaty mass of her curly dark hair. She ran her hands over the rumpled folds of her dress, trying to smooth out the wrinkles as she worked to calm her racing pulse.

The captain wasted no time in departing. Revving the engine, he steered the boat toward the mouth of the cove.

The black silk of the water lapped at the pointed prongs of the catamaran’s bow, drawing the boat into the slippery crease of its thick, sensuous folds. Despite the glow of the numerous lights affixed to the masthead, sides, and stern, the misting darkness quickly swallowed the vessel whole.

As the boat’s rudder met the rougher sea of the Pillsbury Sound, the hoarse voice of the elderly cleaning woman rose above the humming
pat-a-tat-tat
of the motor. Her dry, blistered lips smacked against the ending consonant of each syllable, making her thickly accented words difficult to distinguish.

After several repetitions, Hannah managed to make out the woman’s mournful refrain. She closed her eyes as the small boat bounced across the current, but the old woman’s haunting, singsong voice filled her ears with its chilling chant.

1

The old woman had been right to worry. The water taxi reportedly sprang a leak halfway across the channel to St. Thomas and sank before the nearest Coast Guard vessel could reach it. The captain, the miraculously buoyant computer programmer, and the elderly cleaning woman had all survived by clinging on to the side of a hastily deployed inflatable raft. But the third passenger, Hannah Sheridan—a recent employee at my resort—had vanished into the sea.

It was late morning on the island, only a handful of hours after the water taxi’s mysterious sinking, and I was already midway through my second cocktail. I sat on a white plastic lawn chair at a table outside a local dive bar called the Crunchy Carrot, waiting for news of the accident to filter through the porous island community of Cruz Bay.

My name is Penelope Hoffstra—at least that’s what’s printed on the nameplate that sits atop my desk at the resort. It’s just plain Pen to everyone here on the island.

It’s been four years now since I moved down to St. John, making me a veteran among the island’s resident “Continentals”—a constantly rotating pool of pale-faced immigrants from the upper forty-eight.

There’s no shortage of stateside applicants seeking jobs down here in the Virgins. The promise of an idyllic island lifestyle draws individuals from every social class and background. Once they arrive at their dream location, however, few make it longer than a year.

They all start out the same: so full of hope, so sure they’ve found paradise. After a couple of weeks, maybe a month or two, it begins to fall apart.

Some discover they actually miss all the mainland conveniences they’d come here to escape. Others run out of money—this isn’t an easy place to earn a living, and a dollar doesn’t go very far in the way of rent or groceries. Many find themselves feeling trapped on the island’s meager landmass, confined by the surrounding acres of uninhabitable sea.

For a small number of us, though, somehow it just fits. As for me, I’ll never feel at home anywhere else.

I flew down here on a whim, lured by the promise of an exotic, stress-free existence in the tropics. It was an impetuous act, spurred by an unusual relocation proposal from an admittedly questionable source. But before I could talk myself out of it, I’d hopped a flight and disappeared into this tiny U.S. territory ringing the eastern edge of the Caribbean.

The gamble had paid off. I’d never once regretted the decision. My only goal had been to make my time in the islands last for as long as possible.

I picked up my plastic cup from the table and stirred a straw through the liquored strawberry concoction inside. The fruity mixture retained just enough ice to resist the straw’s swirling path and to sweat a coating of moisture on the cup’s outer surface. I dabbed the end of the plastic tube into the fast melting slurry, watching as its frozen thickness dissipated in the rising morning heat.

You could still smell the aftermath of the heavy rains from the night before, a rinsing sheet of water that had freshened the streets and wiped clean the beaches, erasing my
footsteps and obliterating all evidence of my last meeting with the missing Hannah Sheridan.

I leaned back in the lawn chair as a black rooster with colorful red and blue plumes strutted by on skinny yellow legs. Behind me, a scantily clad waitress in short shorts hefted a bag of refuse into a blue Dumpster located a few feet behind my table. Her cropped T-shirt was emblazoned with the bar’s name and the image of a long skinny carrot.

My newfound exotic existence, as it turned out, frequently involved lengthy spells watching the foot, vehicle, and chicken traffic of Cruz Bay pass by my seat here at the Crunchy Carrot.

As the executive manager of one of St. John’s larger resorts, I had a great deal of leeway, geographically speaking, on where I conducted business, and I typically spent several hours each day here at the Dumpster table. As a makeshift office, it had a lot to offer.

First off, the table’s proximity to the trash bin meant that it was almost always left vacant by the island’s scent-sensitive tourists, reserving plenty of seating space for the scent-diminished expat community. To be honest, the smell coming from the Dumpster wasn’t anywhere near as offensive as that emanating from some of my sweaty compatriots. After much experimentation, I’d learned to strategically position myself upwind of both.

A little odor discomfort was a small price to pay for keeping up to date on the local gossip. The Dumpster table was
the
place to get the latest island news. Every informational tidbit of any significance passed through this central transit point.

In addition, I thought as I took another sip from the plastic cup, the Crunchy Carrot’s policy of serving us expats on a loosely calculated bar tab made the food and drink at this slightly unaesthetic location the best deal in town.

Finally, the Dumpster table offered the certain prospect of camaraderie—you’d never sit solo for long. If nothing else, you could always count on the company of Richard, a
free-roaming rooster who seemed particularly fond of the Carrot’s greasy French fries.

It was from this spot that I reflected on the night’s events and waited for the local reaction to Hannah’s disappearance.

A wildfire of whispers had already begun to burn through the island’s sparse population. Speculative rustlings rippled in the ocean breeze, spoken softly so as not to frighten the tourists, but voiced loud enough for anyone who was listening to hear.

I’d passed several clusters of cleaning staff, groundskeepers, and hospitality workers on my way through the resort that morning, each one a serious circle of quiet conversation. I’d tried not to meet the questioning faces that glanced up at me as I walked by, forcing out a solemn sigh to assure them of my inner sadness—all too aware of how quickly the worm of suspicion might turn in my direction.

I’d taken one of the island’s many truck taxis into town from the resort, riding in the back bed of a cherry red heavy-duty pickup truck that had been outfitted with a canvas canopy and rows of plastic-cushioned benches. The driver had stopped several times along the route, parking in parallel with similarly decked-out trucks coming from the opposite direction. It had been pointless to protest the delay—on such a newsworthy day, these two- to five-minute stops were almost obligatory.