by Cave, Hugh
"Under the driver's seat, he said."
"Good. No one will ever be sure what—"
The man at the wheel broke in with a hissed, "Get ready!" Ahead, the yellow bus with its twenty-eight occupants had entered Dead Man's Curve.
The driver of the car tightened his grip on its wheel. The man at his side sat straighter and sucked in a breath. "Now?"
"Now!"
In the bus, the floor under the driver's seat erupted with a roar. The seat shot upward in a tangle of metal and plastic. With his hands torn from the wheel by the force of the blast, Calvin had no time even to give his agony a voice before his head became a crimson smear on the vehicle's roof. Out of control at the worst possible moment, the bus failed to round the curve and went soaring into space.
With its driver dead and its cargo of screaming men, women, and children tossed about like figures of straw, the vehicle turned end over end as it fell the nine hundred feet to the stream below. There it crashed among stream-bed boulders with force enough to make it an instant coffin for its occupants. If any survived the impact by being lucky enough to have others cushion the shock for them, they perished in the flames that shot from the ruptured gas tank to engulf the wreckage.
On the road above, the two men in the Cortina gazed down at what they had accomplished, then smiled at each other and touched hands. "Our leader will be pleased," the driver said. "For a contribution such as this he may even take us to the Eye for communion with the master."
3
August 1990
HE HAD ARRIVED EARLY,BUT NOT BY MUCH. ALL aglitter in the Caribbean sunlight, the plane he had come to meet was even now descending over the white-capped waters of the harbor. Due in at 3:30, it was ten minutes ahead of schedule.
An omen, undoubtedly. Miss Edith Craig had even beaten the clock to confront him. He had better prepare for the worst.
At St. Alban's airport, the place to watch an incoming plane was the second-floor Waving Gallery. He had gone directly to it. Now he stepped to the railing.
Behind the approaching metal gull, the island's cloud-capped Morgan Mountains bulked ominously against an otherwise cloudless sky. Thinking of the scouts, he looked at them and asked the silent question again. Eight young boy scouts and their new scoutmaster had been missing among those wild peaks for eight days now, in a trail-less wilderness that had swallowed careless explorers in the past. He, Peter Sheldon, had been the last to talk to them when they sought his permission to climb though Armadale's mountainside coffee fields to begin their grand adventure.
He could see them now, trudging happily up the main coffee track, turning to wave to him as he stood watching them from the old Great House veranda. "We'll bring you back a picture of the Devil's Pit if we can find it," one bright lad with a camera had promised. "That is, if old devil don't catch us and carry us down into it." A joke, of course. They weren't the type to believe that old mountain tale. But most of Armadale's workers believed it, and some had predicted disaster.
Eight days. The whole island now held its breath, waiting for news.
He watched the plane land and taxi to a stop. It was from Miami, but the woman he was to meet had begun her journey in England. Studying the passengers as they descended to the tarmac, he failed to spot anyone who fitted his mental picture of a daughter of Philip Craig.
Her letters had told him almost nothing—only that with the shockingly sudden death of her father in London, she was now the owner of Armadale and therefore his employer. "I'll fill you in on the rest when I arrive. And don't worry about my recognizing you at the airport, because I have several photos of you taken on the plantation by my father. I shall look for a man of about thirty years"—good guess, that—"six feet two or three, with rather untidy blond hair and an equally untidy mustache. It might help, though, if you were to wear something a touch out of the ordinary, such as—well, what? Shall we say a red handkerchief in your jacket pocket?"
On his way downstairs to the customs exit where he would first make contact with her, Peter touched the folded bit of red cloth in the pocket of his tan jacket.
It was not a handkerchief. Where could he have found a red handkerchief at Armadale? He'd snipped it from a bandu donated with a smile by his forty-year-old housekeeper. Hehad donned a red tie, too, though grimly aware that he wouldn't have worn either a tieor a pocket adornment—or, for that matter, even a jacket—had he been going to the airport on any ordinary errand.
Now as he stood outside customs in the sweltering August heat, peering through an unwashed window at passengers beginning to trickle through from immigration, he felt a tightening in his stomach.
Five years. For five years you performed to the absolute best of your ability a managerial job you dearly loved, rebuilding a ruinate coffee plantation into one of the finest on an island noted for the quality of its mountain coffee. For five years you labored harder and longer than anyone else on the payroll, yet loving the challenge. Now, with your mouth dry and your stomach in knots, you were waiting to greet a woman you had never seen who could wipe you out with a mere signing of some legal document.
Damn it, where was she? Failing again to pick out any woman who might conceivably be Philip Craig's daughter, he moved along to the door through which she would have to make her exit.
People began coming out, led by skycaps with piled-high luggage carts. Most were obviously island residents; the heat of August was not a tourist attraction. He paid almost no attention when a youngish white couple came through the doorway, glancing about as though in search of someone.
Abruptly halting, the woman peered at Peter and said to her companion, Alton, hold on. I believe I've found him." The man obediently stopped and told their skycap to wait.
Wearing a beige dress of some lightweight, linen-like material, the woman stepped toward Peter. Her eyes and hair were the rich golden brown of a cacao pod. Her mouth formed a quizzical but most attractive smile.
"Peter? Peter Sheldon?"
It wasn't possible, he told himself. Philip Craig had been sixty-nine when he died, and she couldn't be more than twenty-five. He was almost afraid to accept her hand. "Are you Miss Craig?"
She smiled again. It seemed she smiled easily, and for that he was grateful, feeling the way he did about her being here at all. "Didn't Daddy ever tell you about me?"
"Yes, of course, but—"
"It doesn't matter." She turned her head. "Alton?"
Leaving the skycap and their luggage—four large leather bags that seemed to indicate a longish stay on the island—her companion came forward.
"Mr. Sheldon, this is Mr. Preble, my fiancé. There wasn't time to let you know he was coming. We didn't decide until the last minute."
About Peter's height, Alton Preble had a long face and was too thin. He shook hands without enthusiasm. "Is it always this hot here?"
"In summer, on the coast. We'll be out of it soon."
"The sooner the better, I don't mind telling you."
"Let's go, then." With a nod to the waiting skycap, Peter led them through the parking area to Armadale's pale blue station wagon. There he tipped the fellow, unlocked the back, and had the luggage neatly stowed before the two from England caught up with him.
When he swung wide the doors to let out some of the Pent-up heat, Edith Craig slid onto the seat beside the driver's while her fiancé, frowning, squeezed in behind her. It was not a large car. The government had long since ruled that large cars were dangerous on the island's roads, many of which resembled roller-coaster tracks and were barely two lanes wide. The knees of Edith Craig's unhappy fiancé were Close to his chin when at last he got himself settled.
Peter tossed his jacket onto the empty side of the backseat. His tie followed, and he unfastened the top two buttons of his shirt. His glance at Preble invited the Englishman to do the same, but the thin man merely gazed at him in silence. With a mental shrug Peter slid in behind the wheel.
The airport occupied the tip of a peninsula, and Miss Craig se
emed genuinely interested in her surroundings as he drove out to the main road. For a time she gazed across the harbor at the city on their left; then she turned with apparent pleasure to the boisterous open sea on the right. "I had no idea St. Alban was such an attractive island, Mr. Sheldon," she said.
"I'm glad to hear you think so, Miss Craig."
"It's damned hot, Edith," her fiancé complained in a petulant growl.
Peter glanced into the rearview mirror. "Why not take your coat off, Mr. Preble? We've a way to go along the coast before we start climbing."
"Thanks. I can wait."
Edith Craig's laughter was soft and brief. "Alton is a London barrister, Mr. Sheldon."
"I see."
So the banker's daughter was to marry a lawyer, Peter thought. Armadale's future—and his own—looked bleak indeed. Why the hell couldn't she have chosen a farmer?
4
WHEN HE TURNED OFF THE COAST ROAD AT ELEVEN Mile to ascend the corkscrew spirals of Oxton Hill, Peter watched his passengers for their reaction. There were some breathtaking views from this crazy ladder of a road.
Presently, behind them, the sea was a jeweled blue carpet, and scraping the sky ahead were spectacular mountains creased with deep gorges. Then came the awesome, sheer face of Vengeance Cliff, the missing part of which had thundered down to bury an unknown number of settlers at the time when the Great Earthquake had sent the old capital to the bottom of the harbor.
Miss Craig was like a spectator at a tennis match as she tried to absorb it all. But when the station wagon climbed through the mid-mountain town of Ledge, where the road was crowded with country people going about their assorted tasks, she relaxed with a deep sigh of contentment.
"Oh, it's just what I had hoped it would be! Real people doing real things!" she said.
Peter waved to a young man striding barefoot along the roadside, an expert coffee-tree planter who turned up for work when in the mood but almost never when needed. Ah, sister Craig, if only you knew how complex the simple things sometimes are, he thought. The young man, a startling sight with his bare brown chest caked with the road's white limestone dust, grinned and returned the greeting. "Evenin', Mr. Peter!"
"I suppose you know everyone," Edith Craig said.
"I've been at Armadale five years, Miss Craig."
The road swung sharply right to cross what was probably the highest and least safe bridge on the island, causing Edith Craig and her barrister to hold their breath while gazing through its flimsy railing at the swirling stream below. Loose planks clattered under the car's tires like the bars of a xylophone.
"The White River," Peter supplied.
"It's an important stream?" Miss Craig asked.
"Very. And a branch of it starting just under Morgan Peak comes leaping down through the plantation."
"Leaping, Mr. Sheldon?"
"Up there it's a string of wild cascades, mostly inaccessible. It's the source of Armadale's water, however."
"How exciting!" Her enthusiasm was obviously genuine as she swung about to confront her fiancé. "Did you hear that, Alton? I own a river with waterfalls! Oh, I'm going to like Armadale!"
In the rearview mirror Peter saw the man on the backseat make a face. "It won't be your usual English country estate, you know," Preble warned.
"Who cares?"
"Even your father complained of its being at the absolute end of nowhere, and sometimes wondered why he bought it."
"He bought it because he loved it, Alton. We both know that."
The barrister did not answer.
The bridge behind them, the road clawed its way upward now with a vengeance, and for some time there was no comment from the backseat. Curious, Peter glanced into the mirror again. Alton Preble's long face had become nearly as ashen as the dust pluming out behind the car's wheels.
Recognizing familiar symptoms, Peter braked the machine to a stop. "Is something wrong, Mr. Preble?" Something was, of course. But would such a man admit it?
"This ghastly road is making me ill," the man groaned.
"You're carsick?"
"Yes! Oh Lord, yes!"
"It happens to some people. We'd better just sit until it passes. Then maybe you ought to ride in front."
Edith Craig, turning her head, frowned with concern. "I didn't know you suffered from motion sickness, Alton."
"I didn't either, God help me." Fumbling the door open, Preble staggered from the car to a dusty tangle of brush and grass at the road's edge, and began to heave.
Edith opened her door and ran to him. But when she put an arm around him to steady him, he thrust her away.
She stood there watching him for a moment, then slowly returned to the car and took her place beside Peter again. "Does this happen often, Mr. Sheldon?"
"No, but it happens."
"Alton is embarrassed."
"Being carsick is nothing to be ashamed of,Miss Craig. And this road has done more than make people woozy at times. Three years ago a tour bus missed one of these curves and landed down there in White River, killing twenty-eight people."
"My God," Edith Craig breathed.
"It was bringing them to Armadale, where I had promised to show them how your coffee is grown."
Her face almost as ashen as Preble's, Edith Craig closed her eyes for a few seconds, and then turned to gaze at her fiancé. She was shaking her head in sympathy when an alien sound infiltrated the mountain silence, causing her to look up. Peter leaned out the car window on his side and did the same.
Appearing suddenly through a gap between high crags, a dark speck sped toward them through the cloudless sky.
"Is that a helicopter?"
"Yes, Miss Craig. The army has a few here. They're searching for some boy scouts who are lost in the mountains."
She frowned at the blue-black peaks ahead, close enough now to be impressively wild and overpowering. "Lost? Up there?"
"Long overdue, at any rate. Eight of them set out with their leader eight days ago from our place—your place—to climb to Morgan Peak, then go along the ridge by way of Albert Gap to Blackrock and—" He suddenly realized she could have no idea of what he was talking about. "Anyway, they've disappeared."
She watched the copter grow smaller in the distance. "Is it possible for a person to disappear on an island this size? St. Alban is only a hundred and fifty miles long, isn't it?"
"Miss Craig, the whole Morgan Range above Armadale is as inhospitable as anything in the Caribbean. When escaped slaves took refuge there back in the old days, even English soldiers couldn't get them out."
"I'm afraid I haven't done my homework," she said.
Following the river upstream, the copter vanished behind a distant peak above Armadale. Its mutter lingered briefly in the mountain air, and then the silence returned. Miss Craig's fiancé trudged unsteadily back to the car, his expensive leather shoes creating explosions of dust.
"Better?" Peter asked.
"I hope so."
"Want to ride in front now, do you?"
"No, no. Let's just get this over with." Preble stubbornly sat in back again. "How much farther have we to go?"
"It's thirty miles from the airport to the plantation. We're more than halfway." Peter carefully refrained from adding that the road at times seemed sixty miles long instead of thirty. On pitch-black moonless nights, for instance, or when a tropical deluge triggered a string of mud slides that forced a car to creep along the edge of space.
But after they had passed the dangerous bend known as Dead Man's Curve, where the tourist bus had gone over the brink, the road was no longer difficult, and Preble's face in the mirror showed no increased distress. As the car moved more or less horizontally through scenic Pipers Vale, the Englishman's countenance even took on a look of relief, while Philip Craig's daughter became brightly eager again. She voiced little sounds of delight when children at play in peasant yards waved greetings. Her eyes shone with pleasure as she waved back.
Maybe, just maybe, she would n
ot be selling Armadale, after all.
"These trees along here are coffee, Miss Craig," Peter volunteered.
"Oh? With the green berries?"
"You'll see many more at the plantation, of course. This is small-farmer coffee."
"I thought coffee berries were red."
"When they're ripe. And we call them 'cherries' here."
"I see."
When they had crept across the small bridge at the head of the vale and were climbing again, he turned his head. "Everything all right now, Mr. Preble?"
"Just keep going, please."
"We don't have to.—"
"Please."
"As you say."
Peter had to stop, though, when a woman he knew, coming along a side road from the village of Look Up, called out to him and frantically flapped an arm to catch his attention. Hurrying around the front of the station wagon, she clutched at the driver's door.
"Mr. Peter, did them hear anything from the boys yet?"
"Not that I know of, Bronzie." About thirty-five, she was handsome and straight, with remarkably wide-spaced eyes and gleaming teeth. The nickname referred to the color of her skin, which was the same golden brown as Edith Craig's hair. Her real name was Jessie Dakin. One of Armadale's best workers, at harvest time she was able to pick a bushel and a half of ripe cherries a day, and you could depend on her doing it.
"Mr. Peter—if you hear anything, you will let me know? For sure?"
"Of course, Bronzie. Is Gerald any better?"
"No, squire." Only a few of the workers called him that. The older ones, mostly. "He still talks peculiar. I do wish you could come to see him."
"I'll come as soon as I can. I promise." Peter briefly laid a hand on one of those gripping the door. "And if I hear anything at all about the scouts, I'll of course come at once." When she stepped back from the car, he solemnly returned her nod and drove on.
"Who was that interesting woman?" Edith Craig asked.
"She and her two Sons work for you, Miss Craig. Her husband did, too, until he was killed last year."
