Adrift on St. John (25 page)

She stopped and stared at me for a moment before answering.

“Ga mornin, ma’am,’”
she said with a decidedly wary look.

“Hi, er, good morning,” I replied uncomfortably. “I was wondering if you could help me out with something…”

Her right eyebrow cocked suspiciously. Her face crimped skeptically.

I decided to take a more assertive tack.

“Ahem,” I said, straightening my shoulders. I summoned my best Vivian imitation, assuming a stoic, no-nonsense expression and deadening my voice to a monotone command.

“When you clean off the table out there—the one next to the two men with the briefcases—leave this file on the surface.”

She gazed dubiously at the folder I handed her, and then at me. Her eyes flickered whimsically, as if she had recognized the impersonation. Instead of being intimidated, she found the whole scene amusing.

I cleared my throat and then pleaded in the manner that I always ended up using with Vivian. “Please, I need you to be discreet.”

“Dees-creet?”
she repeated dubiously.

“Yes, discreet.” I nodded, cursing myself for acting so impulsively. It was a good thing, I reflected, that Hank wasn’t here to see me bungle this.

But the second strategy apparently worked, as Glenna suddenly relented. I caught the glint of a smile on her face as she picked up a tray, positioned the folder flat on its surface, and covered it with one of the resort’s laundered linen napkins.

I watched from the corner of the kitchen as Glenna shuffled into the dining room.

As luck would have it, I had picked a pro as my accomplice. Not one of the diners seated nearby appeared to notice as she cleared the dishes from the empty table, swept up the crumbs, and re-centered the salt and pepper shakers. If I hadn’t been staring right at her, I would have missed the sleight of hand she used to slide the envelope from her tray onto the clean tablecloth.

She looked across the dining room and winked in my direction before continuing about her duties.

I took a sip of coffee and sat back to see if the ploy would work.

I didn’t have to wait long. As one of the businessmen stood from his chair and brushed the crumbs from his shirt, he noticed the manila folder lying on the next table.

Grinning widely, I looked on as he reached over and, with a guilty glance around the breakfast pavilion, snagged the folder. The look of excitement on his face was easy to read as he pulled out the papers and realized he had scored one of his opponents’ work products.

His gleeful expression soon darkened, however, when he scanned through the information detailed in the memo.

As he pulled out his cell phone and began frantically calling his colleagues, I refilled my cup and headed toward my office for a late-morning session on the balcony.

My scaly confidant clawed his way up the tree as I stretched out in the lawn chair, rinsing down my second cup of coffee with a shot of Cruzan.

“Well, Fred, it couldn’t have been easier,” I boasted over the balcony about my file-transfer experience.

Fred issued a silent but sarcastic blink as I pulled out the piece of paper on which I’d written Hank’s phone number. I was about to start dialing it when a pair of cleaning ladies stopped to chat on the sidewalk below.

Always intrigued by the tidbits of information that floated up to the balcony, I paused to listen.

The women’s conversation quickly transitioned from obligatory greetings to the coming holiday. Not Thanksgiving—that was a minor celebration marked only by expats and tourists. The November 23 commemoration of the 1733 Slave Revolt was nearly upon us, and with it, the annual revival of the tale of the Slave Princess.

It had been a busy couple of weeks for the Princess’s ghost. In my four years on St. John, I couldn’t remember
the Princess ever being credited with a single in-person appearance. However, the man I’d overheard in the Caneel Bay sugar mill ruins was but one of many who had sworn that they’d seen her ghost in recent days.

I took another sip from my shot glass, shaking my head as one of the maids on the sidewalk below launched into her own testimonial. But as the woman continued to elaborate on the Princess’s description, I dropped my cynical stance. Setting down the drink, I leaned my head toward the edge of the balcony.

The woman spoke of a slim young beauty with creamy cocoa-colored skin and dark curly hair that bounced around her shoulders. It was an eerie match to our new employee, Hannah Sheridan.

As the women’s gossip continued to float up toward my chair, I reached once more for the shot glass, struck by a second observation.

I wasn’t the only one to notice the similarities.

31

Later that afternoon, a catamaran powerboat rocked in White Bay’s gentle waters, a few hundred yards off the coast of Jost Van Dyke. After the morning’s intermittent rain, a brief window of sunshine had allowed the dive shop to run its regular Saturday afternoon trip, to the delight of the tourists who had signed up earlier that week—if not all the members of the boat’s crew.

A freckled man with a mound of wild frizzy hair sat on the vessel’s lower deck, pressing his face against a pair of binoculars as he watched the passengers who had just jumped overboard paddle ashore to the Soggy Dollar. Each of the swimmers gripped a plastic ziplock baggie holding damp bills that the proprietor of the Dollar would soon hang out to dry on a clothesline behind the counter where he served his famous Painkiller cocktails.

Jeff’s steely blue eyes concentrated on the bobbing life jackets, counting the number over and over again as the group floated toward the beach.

It didn’t take long; the tide carried the bodies inland without much effort. The return trip was a more challenging
task, when the swimmers would be fighting the current with bellies full of alcohol.

As the last bar-goer stumbled onto the sand, Jeff sighed and dropped the binoculars, leaving them to hang from the strap around his neck.

He walked into the boat’s kitchen area and began wiping down the counter next to the sink. After an afternoon of mixing and pouring drinks, a sticky residue of rum and punch coated almost every surface. Shaking his head at the mess, he slowly worked his way down the front of the cabinets beneath the counter. The gummy pool of liquid on the floor, he decided, would have to wait until they returned to the resort, when he’d take a pressure hose to the boat’s entire guest area.

Brushing a grimy hand across his sweating forehead, Jeff returned to the boat’s open back landing and leaned his body against one of the metal side railings.

The sun played soothingly on the rough brown stubble that covered the bottom half of his face as he settled into the boat’s rocking, swaying motion. The waves were a pendulum that swung in time with his inner equilibrium, a comforting rhythm that had been deeply imprinted on his sailor’s soul. He felt more at home on the water than off it.

He glanced across the bow at the furry green mounds of the islands that surrounded the bay. The water acted as a natural scaffold, balancing the boat at what would have been cloud level of the volcanic mountains that rose from the ocean floor, several thousand feet beneath.

He knew it was a rare and beautiful treasure to be taking in this scenic channel, enjoying the watery, rooftop view of the liquid-filled canyon below. No matter how many times he swore he couldn’t take another whining tourist, he’d be a fool to ever give this up.

His mother wrote to him once a week, detailing all the latest gossip from their small New England town. It was a charming place; he didn’t have anything against it. He’d
spent the first twenty-four years of his life there, and the New England coast was where he’d learned to sail.

But his mother never failed to mention the weather—particularly when they’d received a foot or two of snow. He couldn’t ever go back to those icy cold winters, he thought with a shiver.

It was as Jeff reflected on the dramatic climate differences between his hometown and the Caribbean that he noticed a figure seated on one of the boat’s rear benches.

A large, extremely obese man lounged on the plastic cushions. His face was difficult to make out beneath the straw sunhat covering his head and the wide mirrored sunglasses protecting his eyes, but Jeff didn’t recognize the man from the afternoon’s list of passengers. He was oddly unfamiliar.

Jeff puzzled for a moment, his startled emotion barely registering on his otherwise blank expression. He could have sworn he had accounted for all of his human cargo as the swimmers waded onto the beach. He scratched his chin, perplexed, and then shrugged. He must have missed one.

Clearing his throat, Jeff raised a questioning eyebrow at the abandoned passenger and nodded pointedly at the water beyond the boat’s railing.

The man chuckled appreciatively. “I think we both know I’m not cut out for that.”

After eighteen months working for the dive shop, Jeff had seen his share of characters. People from across the U.S. and all over the world had sat on this boat as he attended to their needs, served them drinks, and kept them from unintentionally falling overboard.

He thought he’d seen it all, but there was something strange about this fellow. The guy was studying him intently, not as a deckhand on a boat, not as a paid servant, but as a person of interest.

Jeff found the sensation vaguely unsettling.

The man stroked a swollen hand across the round plump
of his chin before making his next comment—one that drew a flustered blush to Jeff’s typically bland cheeks.

“I hear you’ve been taking nautical classes over on St. Thomas. You looking to captain your own boat one day, son?”

32

The rains resumed early Saturday evening, causing most of the island’s tourists to hole up inside their hotels. Only a handful ventured out to the bars. Many of the truck-taxi drivers called it a night and returned home to their families.

Manto’s half-ton pickup rolled through the unlit streets of Cruz Bay, one of the few vehicles to brave the increasingly torrential conditions. The truck’s wide tires splashed through pothole puddles and streams of overflow from the road’s brimming gutters as rivulets of rain ran down the pink flamingoes and brightly colored parrots painted on the vehicle’s side paneling. The plastic cushions in the back passenger seating area were soaked through, the overhead canopy providing little impediment to a rain of this magnitude and persistence.