Adrift on St. John (22 page)

All evidence of Cruz Bay evaporated into the surge of vegetation, and a quiet stillness fell in around the car. Despite the headlights that had clicked on up front, the vehicle’s flat rolling motion had the eerie feel of a creature creeping stealthily along the road, hoping to avoid detection.

I was immune, I told myself, to the restless spirits the local West Indians imagined inhabited these dark woods—to the vinelike arms that dropped down from the treetops with the coming of nightfall. But as I sat with growing discomfort in the town car’s rear seat, I felt an unwanted shiver skim across my shoulders.

The driver slowed to a snail’s pace as he struggled to squeeze the car’s long line around the tight curves of uneven asphalt. The road was much more suited for vehicles with shorter axles, like the rental Jeeps that sped through here with terrifying frenzy, or those with elevation and extra engine power, like the truck taxis that navigated the steep hairpins with relative ease.

The chauffeur’s white gloves gripped the leather-wrapped steering wheel as we traveled deeper into the road’s knotted
corkscrew. I wasn’t sure what type of driving conditions he was accustomed to, but I suspected this was one of his first forays into St. John’s national park.

As the bottom of the front bumper scraped against a steep curving upswing in the pavement, I found myself hoping he wasn’t taking me on my
last
.

I sighed with more relief than I cared to admit when the trees pulled back from the road at Caneel Bay’s front gates. The driver paused briefly in the stone-flanked left-hand lane before a uniformed attendant inside the turreted guard station pushed a button, activating a lever that raised a red and white striped barrier to let us through.

The place hadn’t changed much since the days of its founder, Laurance Rockefeller. Its modern-day updates were carefully disguised behind the original rustic elegance.

Rockefeller had designed his resort as an escapist retreat, a back-to-nature experience intentionally isolated from the stress of everyday life. Even today, over fifty years after it first opened, the individual guest rooms didn’t have telephone lines to the outside. Low one-story cabins were sprinkled across the property, their earth-toned facades fading into the landscape of flowering shrubs and low-lying trees.

Whereas my resort was set up in a typical generic Caribbean style, the kind you could find on almost any island between here and Miami, Caneel was unique, and decidedly upscale—the nightly price was almost double that for my establishment.

As part of the leasing arrangement with the park service, Caneel was required to hold open a portion of its beachfront to the public. For those willing to ignore the disapproving looks of the staff and paying guests, the snorkeling off Caneel’s west-facing beach was some of the best on the island—although when I’d brought Jeff to the spot, he’d been spooked by the stingrays that patrolled the reef, and he quickly abandoned for the shore.

The gray phantomlike creatures had a habit of sneaking
up on snorkelers. They seemed to enjoy causing a fright as they crowded in on the humans’ floating flippers—I know Jeff’s panicked retreat had given me quite a chuckle.

The stingrays weren’t the only wild creatures at Caneel that had tormented Jeff. He’d been equally leery of the rabbit-eared donkeys that roamed the grounds. The furry beasts trekked all over the island, but they appeared to use Caneel’s vast manicured acreage as their home base. Their fast lips munched down leaves, grass, and whatever food guests left unguarded for more than thirty seconds. On our trip, they’d made off with three-fourths of Jeff’s brown bag lunch.

My previous trips to Caneel Bay had been far more pleasant in nature, I reflected with a short grin as the town car motored past the guest parking lot and veered right toward a six-foot rock wall blooming with bougainvilleas.

But my humorous mood evaporated with the memory.

We had to be nearing the meeting point. One way or the other, I was finally about to come face to face with Hank Sheridan.

The town car motored slowly past the crumbling remains of the manor house from Caneel’s 1700s-era plantation. Perched on a short rise, the dwelling was optimally positioned both for the widest view of the bay and for catching as much of the ocean breeze as possible.

A wide flight of stone steps led to the main level, which, like the rest of the ruins scattered across the island, was missing much of its upper half. The stone walls were all that remained, the roof, doors, and window coverings having long since disintegrated.

A testament to the creativity of those early builders, each wall was constructed from piles of volcanic rocks and sun-cured coral. The various shapes and sizes were pieced together like a master puzzle, and then fixed in position with a gritty sand-based mortar.

Beyond the manor house, just over the crest of the hill,
we slowed to a halt next to a much larger, bulkier, and far more intact ruin. The late afternoon sun blazed across the clearing, its near horizontal angle glowing against the gray stone walls, scattering on the rough surface of the embedded stones.

Once more, the driver jumped out of his seat to assist me.

“Please wait for Mr. Sheridan by the sugar mill ruins,” he said with the same stiff and maddeningly uninformative decorum.

After stepping out of the backseat, I watched from the side of the road as the town car drove off into the resort.

“That’s
Miss Hoffstra
to you, buddy,” I muttered with a sigh.

26

During my chauffeured drive from the resort to Caneel, a slight turbulence had begun to ripple through the island’s upper atmosphere. A brooding cloud mass dominated the skyline to the east, a giant billboard forecasting the evening’s coming rain.

Weather moved across these islands like a checkerboard, hopping from one to the next in a predictable hopscotch fashion. The storm would be on top of us within the next few hours.

I glanced down at my silk dress and high-heeled shoes.

“Should have worn a raincoat and sneakers,” I sighed with a grimace.

I teetered slowly from the asphalt into the grass, the tiny pointed spikes on the bottoms of my shoes threatening to sabotage each step. With difficulty, I made it to the entrance of the sugar mill ruins. Seeing no one in the immediate vicinity, I wobbled through the stone archway of the mill’s upper structure.

Inside, I found the cane-crushing arena, which was
designed so that the resulting sugar pulp would flow by gravity through stone troughs into boiler cauldrons in the attached rooms on the hillside below. The remains of a smokestack that had been used to heat the sticky juice towered seven or eight feet above the walls’ top edge.

Standing in the midst of the ruins, I couldn’t help but wonder what the place had been like during the colonial era. Caneel Bay had housed one of St. John’s few successful sugar plantations. By all accounts, it was the site of some of the fiercest fighting at the start of the 1733 Slave Revolt.

Unlike the rest of St. John, the majority of Caneel’s slave population was from non-Amina tribes. Wary of the rebels’ plans of dominance, a large portion of Caneel’s slaves had declined to rise up against their owners. Warnings had been discreetly whispered to nearby plantation families, giving several time to flee.

A small collection of farmers and non-Amina slaves had set up bunkers here at Caneel, while wives and children were whisked to a larger cay offshore where they could be safely ferried across the channel to St. Thomas. Cannons positioned at Caneel’s front gates had provided enough firepower to hold off and repel the Amina warriors. After a lengthy standoff, the rebels had eventually retreated into the woods.

My thoughts were still drifting through the ruins’ history as I left the boiler room and continued farther inside the sugar mill’s sprawling compound, whose extensive network took up much of the gradual slope of the hillside. A few steps later, I wandered into a smaller two-story rectangular space positioned behind the boiler room that had, perhaps, once served as a storage area.

Caneel’s diligent grounds crew kept the rest of the resort in a state of highly manicured alignment, but this spot had somehow escaped their meticulous attention. Shielded from view behind eighteen-foot-high stone walls, the jungle’s ever-reaching tentacles had flourished and multiplied.

Thick vines threaded their suckers into the porous stone
substrate, inextricably embedding themselves into the grooves and crevices. Spiny clumps of tropical palms and other deciduous plants had sprung up across the floor. More sank their roots into the narrow one-inch ledges that formed between slipping portions of rock, augering their unrelenting green fingers into the crumbling masonry.

I stood in the shadowed darkness, the thriving vegetation curling up around my feet, the storm brewing over my head, waiting for the enigmatic Hank Sheridan to reveal himself.

The plant-dominated silence was suddenly interrupted by the crunching of footsteps on the opposite side of the storage room’s ocean-facing wall.

Sheridan, I thought as I eased across the pebbled floor, inching toward a rectangular-shaped portal near the origin of the sound.

Slowly shifting my weight, I leaned forward into the portal so that I could peer down its length to where it opened into the side of a larger cavelike tunnel built into the lower elevation on the hillside below. My cheek pressed against the cool rock surface as I listened for another movement on the opposite side.

The same shiver I’d felt inside the town car reemerged in a line of goose pimples that tingled from my shoulders down to the small of my back.

“Hey,” a man whispered.

The word echoed through the rock-walled chamber, clear and distinct, as if the speaker were standing right next to me.

“What are you doing in here?” he asked.

My mouth went dry as I spun my head back toward the storage room.

“I’ve been looking all over for you.”

He wasn’t speaking to me, I realized as another voice replied. It came from an older man; his hoarse, hushed tone transmitted a deep-seated terror.

“Thees afta’noon…”

“Josiah, you’re shaking,” the first speaker said with concern. “What’s got into you? What happened this afternoon?”

The older man cleared his throat in a ragged heaving sound that conveyed his emotional upheaval.

“Late thees afta’noon, Eye wuz out…out on thuh Point…”

“Ohhh.” I could hear the first man’s shudder. His nervous words tumbled over one another as his voice sped up. “Say no more. You know I don’t go out there, not in the daylight or the dark. That place is…” He drew in a sharp breath. “That place is
haunted
.”

The delicate fronds of a fern brushed against the back of my leg, tickling my skin, but I dared not move for fear I’d knock a stray pebble that would give away my position. I held my breath as the older man moaned.

“Eye’d been workin’ there all day…settin’ up for the weddin’ t’morrow mornin’…”

The troublesome fern was beginning to cause an itch. I glanced down at the persistent plant and sized up the frond’s reach—just a half step forward would do the trick. Digging my hands into the sides of the rock wall, I slid my shoe farther into the slope of the portal’s passage, away from the fern’s clinging grasp.

The extra six inches brought me closer to the portal’s perpendicular connection to the tunnel. Trying not to topple over, I tilted my head around the corner so that I could look down the tunnel’s length.

The huddled shadows of two men crouched at the far end, near the opening to an interior courtyard located deeper inside the ruins. The orange glow of the looming sunset filtered through the courtyard’s crumbling walls, blinding the men to my face in the tunnel’s dark corner.

The younger of the pair stood with his eyes squeezed shut, his hands clamped down over his ears. The older man stood facing him, the whites of his eyes bulging out of his ruddy face, his voice steadily rising in strength and volume. Now that Josiah had started telling his story, he would not be stopped.

“Eye wuz almost dun wit the gazebo…twist’in thuh last bolts inta place…Sum leaves had blown onto the spot
where the chairs were goin’ in the morning, so Eye grabbed my rake. Eye wanted to git out of there before the sun set, but Eye couldn’t leave before Eye wuz finished…”