Sunbaked

by Junie Coffey

  “OK!” said Alice into the microphone. “Representing our local bank, the Loan Sharks!” A team of five bank employees in crisp, blue corporate T-shirts clapped their hands enthusiastically. The crowd of spectators cheered them loudly.

  “From Pineapple Cay Comprehensive School, twelve equally fierce competitors: the High School Girls’ Sailing Team and the High School Boys’ Sailing Team! Yeah!” The girls and boys hooted at one another from their positions on opposite sides of the lawn. Their teenage supporters shouted and clapped and stamped their feet in an effort to drown the other side out. Alice watched, smiling for a moment, then raised her hand to ask for quiet.

  “We also have the Smooth Harbour Raiders, and team Family Business is representing three generations of the Dixon family, from right here in Coconut Cove!” The crowd cheered enthusiastically.

  “From Matthews Bonefish Lodge, we welcome the Sole Sisters and Their Token Male.” Five middle-aged women and a young man—all in Matthews Bonefish Lodge khaki T-shirts and broad-brimmed sun hats—hooted and laughed. Nina guessed they were the nonfishing spouses of Ted’s clients having some fun while their partners were out fishing.

  “The God Squad is representing the Saint Mark’s Church youth group.” Alice continued to shout out the names of the competitors. “From the Pineapple Cay Brewing Company, the Brew Crew! Welcome, also, to Scottie and the Hotties, the Clues Brothers, and the Pleasure Hunters!” Three groups of yachties raised their arms and howled as their team names were called.

  “Finally, we have the Wrecking Crew and . . . Peanut Butter on Toast.” Alice paused for a second, studying the paper in front of her quizzically, then looked up at the crowd again, smiling broadly.

  Lance Redmond and the rest of the too-cool-for-school Beer Commercial howled ironically in their matching black T-shirts when Alice introduced the Wrecking Crew, and then they immediately resumed their poses in the lying on the grass tableau they had formed upon slinking casually onto the lawn during the children’s performance. Pansy clapped enthusiastically, and Danish howled without irony, hands clasped in a victory salute above his head, when Alice read their team name. Several members of the Beer Commercial snickered contemptuously.

  Like the Wrecking Crew showed any great depth of imagination. What is Lance doing here? Nina wondered. If you were having a torrid affair with a married woman and her kidnappers were threatening to kill her if a ransom wasn’t paid, would you be lying back on the grass with your friends, sipping a latte? And if you were the kidnapper, wouldn’t you have other things on your to-do list for the day?

  “Good luck to all competitors, large and small!” said Alice from the stage. She glanced over to where Kiki was supervising the youngest children, who were now clutching the handles of plastic buckets in their small fists and running around in random directions under the trees, looking for things on their lists.

  “Here are the rules of the game,” continued Alice. “There are eight clues in all. Each will lead you to the next clue on the list. At each location, you will find a stash of gold coins—not real—and the next clue. Please take one coin only and write down the clue, leaving the original for the next team that comes along. Please refrain from using the Internet to solve the clues. This is all for fun and for a good cause, after all, right?” She paused for a moment, then continued.

  “We will do four clues today and four tomorrow. Each team will be timed, so when you have collected the last gold coin for today, hurry back here to get your time recorded. The team that collects all eight gold coins in the shortest time wins. We’re grateful to the Plantation Inn for providing our grand prize of dinner in their award-winning dining room. We’re also grateful to Joe’s Boat and Golf Cart Rentals for providing boats and golf carts for teams who don’t have access to them. Please let him know if you need either as soon as I’m finished. You’ll be venturing beyond the town limits tomorrow, so be prepared. Without further ado, see you all back here at one o’clock sharp!”

  Pansy went off to do the treasure hunt, face painting, and bouncy ship with her kids. Danish followed Alice into the museum, looking over her shoulder at her clipboard and trying to be helpful. Nina strolled around the lawn for a while, then sat down on the stone wall with a complimentary cup of coffee to watch the children run around the lawn, excitedly picking up white stones and seagull feathers and one of the hundred or so pennies that had been conspicuously placed for them to find. A police officer in his khaki uniform and cap stood watch over the proceedings, patiently signing his autograph over and over as one after another of the children approached him, clutching their treasure-hunt clue sheet and a pencil.

  The Redoubt and the bakery were packed with people, so Nina walked home and fixed herself a sandwich for lunch. She was back at the museum, slathered in sunblock and ready to begin, at one o’clock. She met up with Andrew, Pansy, and Danish just as Alice was climbing onto the stage with the microphone in her hand.

  “All right, everyone.” An expectant hush fell over the crowd. “Here is your first clue: ‘Cad Empire.’ I will spell it out for you: c-a-d-e-m-p-i-r-e. Good luck!”

  “What the hell?” said Danish. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  Pansy took a pencil and a hardback notebook out of her bag and wrote out the clue. All four of them sat on the grass and stared at it in silence for a moment. They heard a rustle in the crowd and looked up to see the Sole Sisters and Their Token Male hurrying out of the yard and down the street.

  “You’ve got to be kidding me,” said Nina.

  “We could just follow them,” said Danish.

  “There’s no fun in that!” said Pansy.

  “Cad Empire. What could that possibly mean on Pineapple Cay?” said Nina “The government office building?”

  “Barry Bassett’s development office?” said Danish. “There is a trailer parked on his land on the road into Ted’s camp.”

  “I don’t think Alice and Kiki would come up with something like that,” said Nina. They all looked at the sheet of paper again.

  “I think it’s an anagram,” said Andrew.

  “A what?” said Danish.

  “The letters are scrambled. We have to unscramble them to get the clue,” said Andrew.

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake!” said Pansy. “There must be five hundred different possible combinations!”

  “I need another coffee if I’m going to strain my brain like that,” said Nina. Crossword puzzles and word games of any kind bored her, although she knew they were good for keeping the mind sharp. “Anyone else?” Andrew and Pansy raised their hands, and Nina collected three cups from the smiling woman at the Plantation Inn table.

  “Is Michel here?” Nina asked her. “I know he’s a member of the museum’s board of governors, and I thought he might be around today.”

  “He was called away on urgent business,” said the coffee lady. “He’s gone off island.”

  Nina rejoined the group, wondering what kind of urgent business would make Michel Poitras leave Pineapple Cay suddenly. Could it have something to do with Tiffany Bassett? She watched two other teams hustle out of the museum grounds, heading toward the main street. She focused on the paper again.

  “I’ve got it!” said Andrew. “It’s carpe diem!”

  “That isn’t even English!” said Danish huffily.

  “Seize the day,” said Pansy.

  “Yeah, Andrew! So, what does that have to do with Pineapple Cay or sunken ships?” said Nina. “Seize the day. Somewhere on the east side of the island where you can see the sun rise?”

  “Hey!” said Danish, jumping to his feet. “There’s a boat at the marina . . . I saw it coming into the harbor yesterday when I stopped in for happy hour. That was the name on the stern! Let’s go!” They scrambled to their feet and set off at a trot toward the marina, leaving a number of teams on the grass gazing after them. As they stepped onto the floating docks, they passed The Pleasure Hunters heading the other way, looking rather pleased with themselves as they
sang out cheery hellos and hurried off to find the next clue.

  There were about thirty boats tied up in the marina. Nina, Pansy, Andrew, and Danish walked quickly up and down the floating docks. On the last dock, they found it. Two couples were sitting in lawn chairs on the deck of the boat, cool beverages in their hands. The sun was well over the yardarm, and they were well into their cups, chuckling away. The ladies wore neon-colored T-shirts and khaki shorts. One man sported a bushy white beard, and the other wore a loud flowered shirt.

  “Congratulations!” said one of the women. “Good for you!”

  “Now, captain’s rules,” said the man with the bushy beard from his chair. “You’ve each got to down an immobilizer made from my own secret recipe before I’ll give you the coin.” He gestured to an upturned cooler topped with several rows of plastic shooter glasses filled with a bright-red liquid.

  “What in nature is that shade of red?” Nina wondered out loud.

  “You know, there are high school students in the treasure hunt. And a church youth group,” said Pansy.

  “Don’t worry, dear,” said the other woman. “They’ll get candy bars instead.”

  Danish had already downed his drink. He threw back his head and howled at the sun, beating his chest with his fists. “Whoa! That is pure dy-na-mite! Get it in ya, girls, and we’ll win for sure!”

  Nina and Pansy took glasses and sipped them tentatively. Andrew downed his in one go and gasped quietly. It tasted like cinnamon and wood ashes to Nina.

  “Frank’s professional-grade f-bomb! All right then, catch!” said the man with the beard, tossing the coin toward them. Pansy caught it and put it in her bag.

  “You’d better get a move on, Peanut Butter Sandwiches,” he said, half reading their T-shirts. “Four other crews have already been here and gone.”

  “Now, where are you all from?” asked Pansy, apparently more interested in socializing than winning.

  “We’re all from Omaha, Nebraska,” said the second woman. “The most landlocked state in the union. Two retired insurance salesmen and two retired nurses. We learned to sail on Lake Manawa, and now we’re fulfilling a lifelong dream. Living on a sailboat in the Caribbean! Carpe diem!”

  “That’s wonderful!” said Pansy. “What’s been your favorite part so far?” She was in no rush.

  “Well, that’s hard to say,” replied the woman. “Every day is exciting. A new port, new people to talk to. We went scuba diving last week. It was incredible. A lot more exciting than the bottom of the Omaha YMCA swimming pool, where we took our introductory scuba course, let me tell you. From the deck of the boat, you look at the sea, and it looks blue. But when you’re underwater, color is everywhere—the coral, the fish. They look like cartoon characters, painted every color of the rainbow.”

  “Wow,” said Pansy. “That’s so great.”

  Danish shuffled his feet impatiently. “OK, Pansy,” he said, “let’s get going. I don’t want to lose to the Beer Commercial.”

  “Hold it!” said the man in the flowered shirt, making the universal sign for stop with his hand. “You have to answer a skill-testing question before you may leave.” He picked a piece of paper out of a straw sun hat on the table in front of him.

  “Is this part of the treasure hunt?” asked Pansy.

  “It’s part of my afternoon entertainment,” said the man. “The bulging plain brown envelope required to get your passport stamped, as it were. Here is the question: What is the craziest place you’ve ever awakened in the morning?”

  “That’s one of your questions, Marcia,” said one woman to the other.

  “Are you sure you want me to answer that in mixed company?” asked Danish.

  “I’ll go first,” said Andrew quickly. “I worked at the branch of my bank in Yellowknife—in the Northwest Territories in Canada—for two years before Pansy and I met. One weekend a colleague invited me to go caribou hunting with him and his family. We slept out on the ice in an igloo. That was a unique experience for me. It was also surprisingly warm.”

  “Continuing with that theme, before Andrew and I met, I spent a night at the ice hotel in Quebec City with a former boyfriend,” said Pansy. “Even the bed was made of ice. Sorry, honey. He said ‘craziest place,’ not ‘best place’ or ‘favorite place.’” Andrew shrugged.

  “A clarification, please,” said Danish. “How are you defining craziest? I need the parameters.”

  “They mean strangest, Danish,” said Nina, who was unconsciously holding her breath.

  “Well, then, after much deliberation, I would have to say that the strangest, most inexplicable waking experience I have had was in San Francisco, California. I was visiting a friend, and we went out one night. I woke up the next morning in a strange house full of people I didn’t know. My friend was nowhere to be seen. The people who owned the house didn’t seem to know who I was or why I was there, either. They figured I must have met one of their roommates who’d already left for work, but I had no recollection of meeting anyone or going anywhere but to the bar. They were very nice, and they gave me breakfast. Two of them were artists, and their studio was on the top floor. They were dressed in all white, and although they gave me orange juice and a croissant for breakfast, I noticed that the two of them were eating cauliflower with cottage cheese and drinking milk. All white food. Colorless, if you will.

  “We went upstairs after breakfast, and they showed me the piece they were working on. They’d won a big grant from the arts council to do it. The whole floor, except for about three square feet closest to the door, was covered in yellow Post-it Notes with messages scribbled on them in black, blue, or red ink. Things like ‘Dentist appointment 2:00 p.m. Tuesday,’ and ‘I am so happy.’” It looked sort of like a paper wall-to-wall shag carpet.

  “I asked them what it meant, and they said, ‘What do you think it means?’ I asked them how they were going to move it to the gallery or whatever, and they said the process was the art and that they were going to take a picture of it before they cleaned up. They were also writing a daily blog to document the process. I said, ‘Far out,’ and one of them wrote that on a Post-it Note and stuck it on the floor. When I got back to my friend’s place, he said he’d gone home early from the bar and didn’t know any more than I did. Still one of life’s unsolved mysteries.”

  “And I once spent a night in a Mozambican jail,” said Nina. Pansy, Danish, and Andrew all looked at her. “I’ll tell you about it sometime,” said Nina.

  “OK! Very illuminating for all of us, I think,” said the man with the bushy beard. “There’s another team on deck, so here’s your next clue. Ready? Read it to them, Marcia.” One of the women lifted a notebook from her lap and read it out slowly, enunciating each word very carefully.

  “The only place in the world where Saturday comes before Thursday.” She repeated it. They called out their thanks and good-byes and shuffled out of the way to make room for the next team—the girls’ high school sailing crew in their neat red shorts and white golf shirts with the school crest on the pocket.

  Nina, Danish, Pansy, and Andrew hiked up to the small park in front of the police station and sat in the shade on the steps of the bandstand. Danish immediately hopped up and paced in front of them.

  “OK. Let’s get cracking. We’ve got to make up some time here. No more small talk with the locals, Pansy.”

  “Oh, Danish, it’s just for fun and to support the museum. The whole point is to get to know your community. It doesn’t matter if we win,” said Pansy.

  “Yes, it does matter,” said Danish, stopping in front of her. “Don’t you see? This is an opportunity for me to show Alice that I am a potential mate of adequate—no, astonishing—intellect. A worthy companion. That our children could grow up to be astronauts—that I’ve got the right stuff.”

  “Well, I guess it depends what you think the right stuff is,” said Pansy. “My sweet baboo here is smart, but he’s also kind and shows an interest in others. Alice might go for friendly
rather than competitive.” She kissed Andrew on the cheek.

  Nina let her eyes wander across the park to the row of shops on the main street. A shiny, black SUV with tinted windows pulled into a parking spot in front of the post office. Two well-muscled men wearing dark sunglasses got out. They went into the bakery and came out a minute later with cups of coffee in their hands. They sat at a table on the sidewalk under the striped awning and looked around, not talking. One of them looked at Nina and continued to look directly at her until she glanced away.

  “Who are those men in front of the bakery?” she asked.

  “I’ve never seen them before,” said Pansy.

  “Those plates on the SUV are from the main island,” said Andrew. “It must have come over on the mail boat, maybe yesterday when it was in.”

  “What could they be doing here?” asked Nina. “They don’t look like tourists.”

  “OK! Let’s focus!” said Danish as the high school girls’ sailing team ran by, headed toward the school. “The only place in the world where Saturday comes before Thursday,” he repeated.

  Pansy took out her notebook and pencil and wrote it down. They were all quiet for a minute.

  “It can’t be referring to a geographical place name, because you could travel backward or forward in time across the international date line, but not by two days,” said Andrew.

  “So . . . it refers to a state of mind, maybe . . . ,” said Nina, thinking hard but coming up with nothing.

  Danish continued to pace back and forth, looking more stressed out than she’d seen him since they met.

  Suddenly, Pansy jumped up and did a little jig. “I’ve got it! I’ve. Got. It! Saturday comes before Thursday in the dictionary! The letter s comes before t,” she whispered conspiratorially as the Beer Commercial strolled by on their way to the marina, too cool to even walk fast.

  “You’re a genius, Pansy!” said Nina.