A Whisper of Danger

by Catherine Palmer

  Hunky had brought her a bundle of mail from the Zanzibar post office that morning. A letter from James Perrott was filled with snippets of verse from the author’s new proposal, Kima the Monkey and the Jealous Jackal. James had wanted to know if Jess liked his idea. Did she think a jackal would make a good character? Jackals were carnivores, he reminded her. Would they run into the problem they’d had with Hungry Hyena, who had been more interested in eating poor Kima than in resolving his own problems? Did Jess think she could paint a jackal? Would the creature be vivid or boring? On and on. James Perrott had never been known for concise writing.

  Jess loved the fact that her life was regaining a sense of normalcy. She was working steadily. Communication with the business world wasn’t proving as difficult as she had feared. Splint was staying busy and mostly happy. Bills were being paid; food was on the table; school would be starting soon.

  Other than the looming specter of an unsolved murder and the disconcerting presence of a long-lost husband, things were fairly average. She had to laugh at the image.

  “Where am I in my walk?” she repeated Hannah’s question. “Well, I’m in the middle of a murder investigation and a hunt for sunken treasure. But you know what? I’m all right, Mama Hannah. Yesterday I was up in my room alone, and I . . . I sort of just gave up. I realized I couldn’t be the lord of my own life anymore. It wasn’t working. I’ve been so hard and angry.”

  “Bitter.”

  “I’ve been choking on bitterness.”

  “Choking nearly to the death of your heart.” Hannah studied the line of palm trees growing on the edge of the cliff. When she spoke again, her voice was filled with emotion. “I thank God he has opened your eyes at last. Many years ago, you gave your life to Christ, toto. At that time, I believed you were born into his kingdom. Do you remember it?”

  “Yes,” Jess whispered. “I was very young, but through your words I came to understand my own sin and my need for forgiveness. You taught me how to surrender my will and submit to Christ. After that, I believed I was growing, Mama Hannah. But then . . . then I met Rick.”

  “Ehh.”

  “I guess I stopped growing.”

  “Even the children of God can permit sin to creep back into their hearts. Like small vines from a bitter root, the unforgiveness wrapped around you. I saw this. Many times . . . many times, I have begged God to release you from these vines.”

  “He has, Mama Hannah.”

  “Has he? Have you forgiven your husband?”

  Jess cringed at words she still could not accept. “I’ve forgiven Rick. But I can’t think of him as my husband. I can’t think of him as Splint’s father. I can’t let him back into my life.”

  “He is in your life already.”

  “Then I can’t let him into my heart.”

  “What holds you away? Memories of the past?”

  “Fear of the future. I don’t know what life would be like with Rick. I can’t imagine us ever . . . ever . . .”

  She was lying. She knew it even as she spoke. Not only could she imagine it, she had imagined it. Now she faced the truth—even as she struggled with the concept—that she could easily picture herself in Rick’s life—and in his arms. Though she tried to repress the images that had been sneaking into her mind for weeks, she had to admit that she could see herself and Rick together again, loving each other, building a home, creating a family. In spite of herself, she was as drawn to those images as she ever had been. But look what had come of her childish trust in the future!

  “It scares me,” she said finally. “I can give up my anger. I can let go of the bitterness. I think I’ve even forgiven Rick. But I’m too scared to place any hope in a life with him.”

  “Remember, toto. We are called to place our hope in Christ. Solomon, that wise king, wrote, ‘Hope deferred makes the heart sick, but when dreams come true, there is life and joy.’ I believe there is life and joy ahead for you. But I think you must put the hope in the right place. As the apostle Paul told that young boy, Timothy: ‘Our hope is in the living God, who is the Savior of all people, and particularly of those who believe.’”

  Again, Jess had to smile at Hannah’s beloved words. To Hannah, the Bible was always so real. She called Solomon “that wise king.” Timothy was always “that young boy.” Job was “the poor man Satan attacked.” David was “the man God loved.” These people walked through her life and spoke messages as real and vivid as those of any living person. Hannah breathed the Bible. Scriptures, prayer, and fellowship with other Christians were her nourishment. If only Jess could follow her example.

  “I’ll try,” she said. “I’ll try to put my hope in Christ. I guess he’ll show me what to do about Rick.”

  “Of course he will show you.” Hannah’s brown eyes twinkled. “Perhaps he is doing so already. Look now, the boy comes with his father.”

  Jess glanced in the direction of Hannah’s gaze. Rick was striding across the lawn, Splinter draped across his back like a lanky Ichabod Crane on his horse. The boy had his head thrown back toward the sunlight, and he was laughing at the man’s efforts to tote the weighty burden toward the house. In all her life, Jess had never seen her son so filled with joy.

  “Mom!” he shouted, spotting her and giving a wave. “Mom, you’ve got to come down to the boat! Guess what? We found the real mother lode! The captain’s quarters! We came all the way back to get you. We need you.”

  “They need you,” Hannah said, giving Jess a soft smile. “You need them. God knows this. And he will supply all your needs from his many riches in glory, because of what Christ Jesus has done for us.”

  Jess kissed the dark chocolate cheek. Hannah had been more than her caretaker all these years. She was her mentor. Her friend. Her mother.

  “I love you, Mama Hannah,” she said.

  “Ehh,” the old woman said. “Go now, toto. Your family calls you.”

  THIRTEEN

  Something about Jessie was different. Rick noticed it immediately— in the way she carried herself, in the way she spoke to Splinter, in the way she looked at Rick. And she did look at him. Often.

  Even though he had prayed Jessie would come out onto the diving boat again, he hadn’t really believed he could talk her into it. Splinter had taken care of that, convincing his mom that the salvage project needed her artistic skills if history were to be recorded accurately. The kid’s powers of persuasion were impressive. By the time Splint had finished, Rick himself was convinced that the sunken ship was the discovery of the century.

  So here Jessie was in the boat, lounging on one of the padded benches with her sketch pad propped on her knees. A big straw hat with a yellow scarf tied around the band shaded her eyes. A filmy sea green tunic, its hem drifting around the deck in the soft breeze, covered her bathing suit. Her slender arms curved over the white paper as she rendered a faithful copy of the wine bottle that had just been brought up from the captain’s quarters. And her long legs with their delicate toes . . . it was about all Rick could do to force himself to concentrate on his diagram of the shipwreck.

  “What did you tell me you call this kind of glass?” Jessie asked, lifting her head and fixing him with those mesmerizing violet eyes. “It’s so strange the way it’s shedding.”

  “Onion skin. Glass that’s been aging underwater for years peels off in layers like an onion.”

  “I’m finding it hard to sketch.” She held her drawing at arm’s length. “These pictures I’m doing for you aren’t going to be displayed in public anywhere, are they?”

  “I’ll be using them for research purposes.”

  “Why don’t you just take photographs?”

  “That’s the way I’ve always done it. I take pictures first on-site underwater, and then I shoot the artifacts again up here. But it’s never as good as a sketch.” He left his maps and charts to join her on the bench. “Your pencil captures things my camera can’t. Your artist’s eye notices details a photograph would miss. See this ridge in the glass? Coul
d be nothing—an insignificant bubble. Or it could be a mark made by the glassblower. Something like that can teach us a lot. On your sketch, you’ve shaded in the ridge. In a photograph, it would blend right into the bottle’s surface. I’d miss it.”

  Jessie turned the wine bottle around. In spite of a thin crust of coral on the bottom and a couple of barnacles, the artifact had a hypnotic quality. Its peeling glass captured the afternoon sunlight and scattered marbles of green light across her bare legs.

  “I would feel a lot better if I could label my sketch,” she said. “For example, see how the bottle’s lip juts out right here, but on the other side it’s uneven? I can’t really show that in the drawing.”

  “Write down all the details you observe. Anything we can add to the provenance will help.”

  “Provenance?”

  “To an archaeologist, provenance is more important than a chest full of gold bars. Provenance is what we call any artifact that helps us authenticate a find and identify its origin. If I can use something to help me accurately date a site, it’s invaluable.”

  “Like that vase I found?”

  He smiled. “As far as I’m concerned, you hit the real mother lode that day. And you’re the one who noticed the date on the padlock. Anytime you get a hankering to go back down to the wreck, I’ll dive with you. See, I have a tendency to sift through tons of sand so carefully it takes forever. Hunky, on the other hand, uses his airlift to plunge into troves of valuable artifacts, and sometimes he blasts them to smithereens. But you’re trained to look. You really study the world around you. I bet you’d find things the rest of us would miss.”

  “Maybe. All the same, I think I’ll leave the undersea adventures to you guys. I like sketching up here where it’s dry, and I don’t have to wonder if I’m going to come face-to-face with an octopus.”

  “Or a coelacanth.”

  She laughed, and Rick’s heart did a double flip. The woman was beautiful. Enchanting. Magnetizing. When she spoke, her voice ran through him like a warm waterfall. When she gazed at him from beneath those thick dark eyelashes, his skin tingled, and he felt his pulse rate step up to a quick military march. All she had to do was lean close enough to give him a sniff of the entrancing scent of tropical flowers that lingered on her skin, and his mouth went as dry as a washed-up seashell.

  “Speaking of sea creatures,” she said, “do you think Splinter’s okay down there with Andrew?”

  “Andrew Mbuti’s like my own brother. I’d trust the man with my life. I do, in fact. He won’t let anything happen to Splint.”

  “You were always close to your real brother, Daniel. Do you see him very often?”

  “When I’m in Dar es Salaam, I do. I go to his church on Sundays. I’ll see him tomorrow, in fact, and I’ll tell him you asked about him.”

  “What does he think about all this?” she asked. “About us? That we ran into each other again, I mean. Doesn’t he think it’s strange?”

  Rick searched Jessie’s eyes, trying to read the significance of her questions. Us, she had said. Did she think of them as somehow together again? Lord, that would be an answer to my prayers. Give me the words to say. Teach my mouth.

  “Daniel’s a strong Christian,” he said. “He thinks the lives of believers are in God’s hands. He knew I was searching for you, Jessie. He prayed with me about it . . . that I’d find you . . . that you’d be able to forgive me.”

  “Mama Hannah’s been praying about it, too.”

  “That’s three of us, then. Ought to do the job. Remember what Jesus taught his followers? ‘If two of you agree down here on earth concerning anything you ask, my Father in heaven will do it for you. For where two or three gather together because they are mine, I am there among them.’”

  He sat in silence for a moment, waiting for Jessie’s reaction. She had hurled her anger and bitterness at him so often he was steeled to accept it. And he knew the last thing she probably wanted to hear him say was that God had his hand in their relationship.

  Jessie had made one thing abundantly clear: She wanted to hold on to the reins of her own life. They had been ripped away from her once, and she didn’t trust anyone to hold them for her—not even God. Rick understood that, and it tore at his gut that he’d been the one to cause such pain in her life.

  “I’ve been praying about it, too,” she said.

  He couldn’t have been more surprised if she’d poured a bucket of ice water over his head. “You have? You mean, you’ve been praying about . . .” He gestured at himself and Jessie. “Praying about . . . about me finding you? That we . . . you and I . . .”

  “Us,” she said. “I’ve been praying about us. What to do. Where to turn. Mostly I’ve been trying to let go of the past.”

  He raked his fingers through his damp hair. Jessie was different. Something had happened to her. He’d never seen her so calm. So open. Even though he welcomed the change— even though he’d been praying for it from the moment he’d seen Jessie again—it was disconcerting.

  Does this mean what I think it does, Lord? Can it be . . . ? Fearful of reading too much into her behavior, he shook off the thought. I’ll wait, Father. I’ll wait and see what you’re doing.

  “Hunky brought me a bunch of mail this morning,” she said, placing the glass wine bottle back into the saltwater tank. She lifted out the corroded brass handle that once had been attached to a wooden trunk and set it near her sketch pad. “James Perrott wrote to me. He’s the author I work with.”

  “Oh, yeah?” Fear sliced through Rick like a knife. James Perrott. Was she in love with the man? Could he be Splinter’s father?

  “James is working on our next book. It’s going to be about a jealous jackal. James is great—so funny. I just love him.” She sketched for a moment, a gentle smile playing around her lips.

  Rick watched the play of emotions cross her face with increasing irritation. Maybe he’d been wrong. Maybe it wasn’t God who had softened Jessie’s heart but James Perrott and his letter. Maybe he was why she seemed so at ease. Rick fought a sudden urge to make disparaging remarks about a man who penned children’s poems for a living. The green-eyed monster of jealousy reared its ugly head and assured Rick that the best fate for James Perrott would be a swift punch in his versifying visage.

  “Anyway,” Jessie was saying, “I also got a letter from my sister Tillie. She’s living in Mali, you know? She married a writer.”

  Great, Rick thought. One Thornton sister had taken a writer for a husband. Maybe Jessie wanted to do the same. Could she be leading up to asking Rick for a formal divorce? They’d never gotten around to it, but he knew it would be a simple matter. After all, he had abandoned her ten years ago. What court would deny her petition?

  “Tillie wrote me this long chatty letter,” Jessie went on, sketching the outline of the chest handle. “She’s so happy with Graeme. He sounds like a wonderful man.”

  “And he’s a writer?”

  “That’s how they met. He was researching a book about a Scotsman who explored the Niger River two hundred years ago. Apparently, Tillie was kidnapped briefly by some local tribesmen, and Graeme rescued her.” She paused for a moment. “I’m not sure I have the story exactly right. It’s pretty exciting—escaping from hippos and crocodiles, exploring old gold mines, stealing rare manuscripts, all kinds of crazy things. You’ll have to read it for yourself.”

  “Okay.”

  “But the point is, Tillie told me that when she first met Graeme, he was really angry about some things that had happened to him in his past. Through the course of their relationship, Graeme decided to surrender his anger. Tillie said he asked God to take control of his life, and all that bitterness vanished. You know what she told me?”

  “What?”

  “She and Graeme have been praying for me. So that’s two more. Isn’t that weird? They’ve been praying that I could find a way to let go of my own bitterness. That I could come to some sort of resolution about what happened between you and me ten ye
ars ago.”

  “Are you planning to write back to Tillie soon?”

  “Maybe this evening after supper.”

  “What will you tell her?”

  She let out a breath. “I don’t know, Rick. I think I’ll tell her . . . yes. Yes, God is answering prayers.”

  Trapped in his turmoil—jealousy, fear, confusion—Rick couldn’t formulate an appropriate response. What do you mean? he wanted to ask. Who is James Perrott, and how is God answering prayers, and what’s happening here? What’s going on, Jessie?

  “You know, I think I’ll dive down to the wreck after all,” she said, standing and setting aside her sketch pad. “I want 227 to check on Splint. Would you rig up an air hose for me, Rick?”

  I’d kiss the ground you walk on, Jessie! Just tell me why those eyes are drinking up my heart. Tell me how you feel. Tell me what’s going to happen between us.

  “And if you wouldn’t mind,” she said, slipping out of her tunic, “I’d like to visit Daniel’s church in Dar es Salaam tomorrow. Do you think you could send a cab to meet the hydrofoil in the morning and take Splint and me into town? Mama Hannah will probably come with us, too.”

  “I’ll pick you up myself. Dan’s got a car.”

  “Great. Thanks.”

  “Sure.”

  His brain felt like it had been stung by a Portuguese man-of-war. Numb. Dumb. Paralyzed. He watched Jessie sort through the air hoses herself, select one that fit her mouth, pull on a face mask and weight belt, and climb out onto the diving platform at the back of the boat.

  “I’ll let you know if I find the treasure you’ve been looking for, Rick,” she said.

  With a single backward step, she sank from view and vanished under the teal water of the Indian Ocean.

  Rick stared at the concentric circles spreading out on the calm water. “I’ve already found the treasure I’ve been looking for, Jessie,” he murmured. And the words of King Solomon came to him: “You have ravished my heart, my treasure, my bride. I am overcome by one glance of your eyes, by a single bead of your necklace. How sweet is your love, my treasure, my bride! How much better it is than wine! Your perfume is more fragrant than the richest of spices.”