Adrift on St. John

by Rebecca Hale

  That had led to the best four years of my life, I summed up as I glanced across my office to the balcony doors and the tropical surroundings beyond. I wasn’t giving up this gig without a fight.

  Once more, I replayed the morning’s conversation in my head. Try as I might, I couldn’t dismiss the interaction as one of luckless coincidence.

  “Hannah Sheridan,” I repeated warily.

  The young woman’s presence here at the resort was meant to send me a message, to provoke a reaction. Someone—most likely, my large friend from Miami—had sent her here.

  I slid behind my desk, pulled open the bottom drawer, and retrieved my not-so-secret bottle of Cruzan rum. After a deep steadying gulp, I marched resolutely to the door of my office.

  The next step was to figure out why.

  7

  Government House

  A short distance offshore from St. John, a white catamaran motored across the Pillsbury Sound, heading toward St. Thomas. The current splashed against the red-painted lettering on the side of the boat and the words that read WATER TAXI.

  Twenty minutes later, the vessel angled around the island’s craggy bottom lip into Charlotte Amalie’s protected harbor. Slowing to an idle, the boat pulled into an open slot along the waterfront near the mint green block of the Legislature Building.

  The brawny captain swung himself down from the upper deck and tossed a heavy rope around the nearest concrete piling. Following the rope onto shore, he pulled the boat up against the side of the wharf. With expertise gained from years of repetition, he quickly cinched a knot in the line and slipped a lock around the mooring.

  His boat secured, the captain set off across the shoreline’s main thoroughfare. Selecting a narrow road heading inland, he tromped up the incline through the downtown area, his worn flip-flop sandals popping against the rough asphalt. Past Fort Christian’s bright red edifice, he veered right to cut through the edge of Charlotte Amalie’s primary public green-space, the Emancipation Garden.

  At the opposite side of the park, the captain’s path turned sharply steeper. A sheen of sweat broke out across his dark chiseled face as he labored another block up the hill to his destination.

  Built in the 1860s, the three-story Government House held the main offices for the Territory’s governor and much of his cabinet. The ornately decorated interior showcased several paintings by Pissarro, a native of the island. A white iron railing formed a delicate trim around the building’s front porch and balcony, which looked out across the hillside to the cruise ships docking in the harbor below.

  The captain wiped a dingy handkerchief against his brow as he skipped up a short flight of red-carpeted steps into a wood-paneled foyer. He was recognized at once by the receptionist, who ushered him toward a mahogany staircase leading to the building’s second floor. At the top of the stairs, she led him down a hallway into the governor’s well-appointed office.

  Wordlessly, the captain took a seat at a small oval table, next to the governor’s other guest, who had arrived a few minutes earlier. The receptionist discreetly departed, shutting the office door behind her.

  The governor waited until he heard the receptionist’s footsteps treading down the staircase before he opened the meeting.

  “Thank you both for coming this afternoon,” his deep, gravelly voice intoned.

  Then, he turned toward the first guest and asked with thoughtful curiosity, “Please, tell me more about this Amina Princess.”

  8

  The Empty Folder

  I cracked open the door to my office and, after confirming that the hallway outside was clear of the perplexing Hannah Sheridan, headed for the exit at the end of the corridor. A concrete stairwell attached to the outside of the building led down to the first floor and the resort’s main administrative suite.

  Generally, I avoided Vivian’s frigid lair of purposeful efficiency, lest she use the opportunity to coerce me into doing some manner of substantive work. But, given that she would be tied up with Hannah’s orientation on the opposite side of the resort for at least another hour, I proceeded without hesitation into her office suite—for once, without first conjuring up a ready excuse as to why I was immediately needed elsewhere.

  I wrapped my fingers around the door handle and steeled myself for entry. Vivian controlled the thermostat on the opposite side of the glass. For a person who’d been born in the tropics, the woman had an unnaturally strong preference for cold environments.

  Wincing in anticipation, I pulled open the door and released the interior’s icy blast. My breath began to crystallize within my chest, and an icicle, I felt certain, was forming off the tip of my nose. Shivering, I hustled inside.

  The administrative suite was the central hub of the resort’s business activities. It occupied a large room that had been partitioned with five-foot-high prefab walls into a half dozen office cubicles. Within each cell sat one or more of Vivian’s busy worker bees, tapping away at their computer keyboards, speaking softly into their telephone headsets, or otherwise performing the essential functions that kept the resort running smoothly.

  The office buzz fell silent as I slipped behind the cloth wall that demarcated Vivian’s corner space. A few heads poked up over the top of the dividers, watching suspiciously as I slid into the seat behind her desk.

  “I…uh…just need to check on something,” I offered with an awkward shrug.

  There was no use trying to disguise my actions. These were all Vivian’s people—local hires who reported to her directly. She would be informed of my visit as soon as I was out of earshot. Likely, several of them were texting her my whereabouts that very instant.

  The chair groaned as I swiveled around to survey the surface of the desk. Per Vivian’s exacting standards, everything on her workstation was laid out in a neat and tidy arrangement: a pair of pens lay precisely placed in parallel with the stapler, while a stack of paperwork sat center stage, waiting to be processed.

  I paused to admire a photo of her six-year-old son, Hamilton, displayed at a forty-five-degree angle on the desk’s far left side. There wasn’t a speck of dust on the frame; it looked as if it had been polished that very morning.

  The first numbing pricks of frostbite brought me back to the purpose of my visit, and I turned my attention to the drawer where Vivian kept the resort’s confidential personnel files. After plucking a bobby pin from a small plastic kiosk sitting on a nearby bookcase, I unfolded it and fed it into the keyhole.

  “Not my first time performing this maneuver,” I muttered to myself as still more obvious stares emerged over the top of the cubicles.

  Gently, I twisted the slender metal rod, searching the interior of the lock for its tumbler. After a quick toggle of the bobby pin, there was a slight releasing click of moving metal, and the drawer rolled open.

  One of the onlookers picked up a telephone receiver and began to dial as I blew a warming breath on my fingers and started thumbing through the files.

  The interior of the desk was as precisely ordered as the top. It took only a few seconds to find the paper tab labeled with the hand-printed name “Sheridan, Hannah.” I pulled the folder out of the drawer and eagerly flipped it open.

  My loud sigh of disappointment reached all of the room’s listening ears.

  The folder was completely empty.

  On the opposite side of Vivian’s frost-covered window, the resort’s maintenance activities were proceeding through their regular daily schedule. Across the lawn from the administrative building, a group of dark-skinned men crouched beneath a row of bushes, trimming and weeding the shrubbery.

  The resort’s ground crew had been at it since daybreak; this was their fifth targeted location of the morning. They had started the shift with vigor and enthusiasm, but as the sun rose and the muggy heat intensified, their movements had grown more and more languid. There was only so much fight the human body could put up against such an oppressive environment.

  At last, the group’s leader stood and waive
d his hand in a circle over his head, signaling the end of the pruning session. Manto began loading the gardening tools onto the short bed of a modified golf cart while his men reached for their water bottles. There was still more to do—there was always more to do—but it would soon be too hot to continue.

  Manto and his ground crew waged a never-ending battle against the encroaching jungle that surrounded the resort. The front lines pitted the men’s rusty metal shears against a dense foliage of invading tendrils whose reaching grasp could progress several inches over the course of a single day. The vegetation resumed its guerrilla assault the moment the men packed up their gear.

  One day, Manto thought wearily, the jungle would be victorious.

  He wiped the cleanest section of his shirt across his eyes and mouth. A grimy layer of the island’s black volcanic earth covered his skin and clothing. His feet steamed inside his floppy oversized boots; his arms ached from the constant hacking motion of the hoe.

  Manto reached for the throbbing muscles at the small of his back as he glanced across the field at the fogged glass on the first floor of the administrative building. Despite his aches and pains, the sight of the resort’s head manager seated in the chair behind Vivian’s desk caused him to momentarily forget his exhaustion.

  “Hmm,” he mused curiously as he reached a grubby finger up to the flat round of his nose and tapped its smushed center.

  Vivian had stomped past the ground crew half an hour earlier. She’d been in an unusually foul mood, even by her standards. Presumably, it was the young woman bouncing along beside Vivian that had soured her demeanor—the girl in the spinning sundress had been asking a lot of questions about the resort.

  In response to Manto’s raised eyebrows, Vivian had jerked her head at the girl and spit out a curt one-word explanation.

  “Peen-ello-pee.”

  Manto’s brown face creased into a broad smile. He ran his tongue across the top row of his ragged yellow teeth. The cheery plump of his cheeks pillowed out over the flat skin above his mouth.

  He shook his head as Pen jimmied the lock on the filing cabinet-sized drawer beneath Vivian’s desk.

  “Pin, Pin, Pin,” he rumbled into a loud guffaw. “Viv iz nut goin’ to bey happ-ee about dis.”

  The two women were constantly spatting at each other, and Manto loved to egg them on. Their daily fights provided endless fodder for the resort’s numerous gossiping tongues. He took a mental note to ask Vivian about Pen’s unauthorized pillaging of her desk—that would be sure to provoke an entertaining reaction.

  Then, he directed his attention to the nearest palm tree and the cluster of plump coconuts tucked beneath the crown of fronds at its top.

  He motioned to one of his workers. The man immediately stripped off his shirt and shoes, tucked a machete into the hem of his pants, and began scaling up the tree’s ribbed trunk.

  Manto watched anxiously as his worker clung precariously to the tree, thirty feet or so above the ground. He wasn’t sure which was more dangerous: the threat of coconuts falling on unsuspecting guests or the risk a machete-whacking worker might accidentally cut off a limb.

  “Aye!” he called up with concern. “Wach’ ya-self up there.”

  The man waved the machete in casual acknowledgement.

  “Hmm.” Manto’s calloused hands gripped nervously at the slight paunch that had begun to thicken his aging waistline. The wrinkled lines etched across his forehead deepened with worry.

  Thwack. Thwack. Thwack.

  A coconut sprang loose from the cluster and dropped slowly through the air, hitting the grass below with a loud thump.

  Yawning, Manto glanced down at his watch. As soon as this grove was de-nutted, he would be off for a quick shower and a change of clothing. His afternoons and evenings he spent driving one of the island’s many truck taxis. His wages supported an extended family that included numerous grandchildren. Even working double shifts, he found it difficult to make ends meet.

  Another coconut bounced across the lawn as Manto turned to stare up at the sky. It was clear and blue at the moment, but he detected a slight change in the atmosphere’s stagnant swelter.

  He’d lived in the Virgins all his life; these islands were in his blood. After seventy years, he knew every culvert, cove, and crumbling stone ruin. The feeling in his bones was a far more accurate predictor than all the fancy radar equipment used by the weatherman on St. Thomas. A heavy brooding storm was gathering in the Atlantic, somewhere off the west coast of Africa, soaking up energy and moisture that it would later dump on the Lesser Antilles.

  “Storm’s komin’,” a scratchy voice whispered in his ear. “A week hout, mey-bey two.”

  With a start, Manto turned to face the frail, bony woman who had sneaked up behind him.

  She wore a loose-hanging cotton jumper, the official uniform for the resort’s large cadre of housecleaners. Her skinny legs poked out from beneath the garment, feeding into rubber-soled sandals that were as oversized as her dress.

  Manto had known Beulah Shah his entire life, ever since they were both small children squirming in the pews at the local Moravian church. Even when Beulah was a little girl, she’d had an unnerving knack for suddenly appearing out of nowhere, noiselessly and without notice.

  She leaned toward him, her wizened face unsettlingly close to his. A stale breath oozed out of her nearly toothless mouth.

  “Yes, ma’am,” Manto replied, gulping as he nodded in agreement with her weather assessment. “I kin’ feel it too.”

  Beulah stared, trancelike, into his brown eyes; then her gaze swept across his sweaty shirt, narrowing in on his throat.

  Manto felt his chest constricting, the air stagnating within his lungs. It was as if she were looking right through his skin, visually clamping off his breathing capacity. After a long moment, he managed to clear his throat and took a wide step backward onto the lawn.

  Beulah gave him an odd, spooky smile; then she tottered off down the walk toward the administrative building.

  Manto’s eyes followed her frail figure as she crept up to the window beside Vivian’s cubicle. Pen had already vacated the administrative suite, but it appeared something on Vivian’s desk had caught Beulah’s interest.

  Manto watched as the old woman pushed up on her tiptoes and pressed her forehead against the glass. He shivered with involuntary apprehension as he wondered what Beulah was up to—before jumping briskly to the side to dodge an incoming coconut.

  9

  Fred

  I returned to my office a few hours later with a boxed sandwich from the food kiosk by the pool, still none the wiser about how the recently arrived Hannah Sheridan had found her way into the resort’s employment. I’d left the empty file laid open on Vivian’s desk, a pointed question I felt certain she would understand as soon as she returned to the administrative suite. For the moment, there was nothing left to do but resume my daily routine.

  I grabbed the contents of my inbox from the side of my desk and set up camp on the shaded balcony outside my office. After plopping down into a plastic recliner (one I’d “borrowed” several years ago from the pool area), I poured myself a generous shot of rum and offered a toast to Fred, an iguana who spent most of his afternoons in the treetops just beyond my balcony’s railing.

  “Alley-oop and down the hatch,” I called into the greenery.

  It sometimes took ten minutes or more of searching through the dense foliage before Fred’s long lizard shape jumped out at me from the leafy maze of tree limbs. Once spotted, however, his leathery green body was impossible to ignore.

  A ruffling of spines rose like a crown from the top curve of Fred’s neck and extended along the sharp ridge of his back. The rounded plump of his belly was decorated on either side with swirling circles of lighter and darker shades of green, a color combination that continued into alternating stripes on his tail. A sprinkling of shiny purplish nodules rose up through the skin beneath his stiff shoulders, adorning his chest like medals of h
onor. When a direct ray of light reflected off his coat, the surface shimmered like an armored chain-mail suit.

  He turned his head to look me as I issued the toast. The frozen contours of his angular face transmitted a dignified, regal expression. He was really quite beautiful—for a giant scaly lizard.

  Beyond his rugged good looks, Fred, I’d found, was an excellent listener. I sought his counsel on a regular basis. He took his time forming his opinions, but his judgments, once given, were unassailably sound in their logic and reasoning.

  “What are we up against here, Fred?” I mused, still pondering Hannah’s inauspicious arrival.

  Fred blinked cryptically at me. Then, he tore off a nearby leaf and began the slow process of breaking it down with the sharp points of his tiny teeth.

  Sighing heavily, I refilled my shot glass and began to flip through the day’s pile of paperwork. Fred’s advice generally became much clearer after a couple doses of Cruzan.

  The sheets on the top of the stack had been dropped off earlier by one of Vivian’s minions. A red sticky note cut into the shape of a pointed arrow had been affixed to each paper, indicating where my signature was needed. It was all business as usual: routine approvals for overtime, applications for leaves of absence, and a couple of bills for the water taxi that picked up day workers who’d missed the regular ferry back to Red Hook.

  I glanced only briefly at the contents of each page as I scrawled a hurried rendition of “Penelope Hoffstra” next to the sticky-note arrows—the sloppier the signature, the better. I’d never quite got the hang of the original Penelope’s capital “P.”

  “Fred,” I said as I finally turned to the last arrow-marked sheet, “why don’t we get you some signature authority?” I spun a wide-tipped autographing pen in my fingers before flourishing it across the paper. “You’d put more care into this than I do.”