Adrift on St. John

by Rebecca Hale

  Once more, Fred blinked his beady lizard eyes, this time in placid agreement.

  With a shrug, I turned my attention to a heavy manila envelope that had been lying beneath the sheaf of red-flagged papers. Both sides of the package were stamped in red ink with the word CONFIDENTIAL.

  Another tedious missive from the head office, I thought, estimating the heft of the contents as I slid my fingers beneath the envelope’s end flap.

  My resort was one of the largest vacation properties on St. John, but it was a minor player in the parent company’s worldwide holdings, several star rankings below its most prestigious resorts. We were but a minor blip on their radar, which in part explained why my surreptitious substitution into this relatively obscure management position had gone undetected all this time.

  Vivian handled the bulk of our correspondence with the headquarters up in the States, keeping me safely out of the loop. In the four years since I’d taken up Miss Hoffstra’s station, she’d received the regular ream of standard-issue memos and a few information packets generically addressed to the resort manager. Only a small handful of personalized acquisition proposals had been specifically designated for her input.

  This package had the overall feel of the last category. Tilting the envelope toward its now open end, I slid out a portfolio of glossy promotional materials.

  The bulk of the content looked as if it had been put together by an outside consultant—I recognized the handiwork from a real estate stint I’d done early on in my legal career. Apparently, the resort’s parent company was considering another land development proposal.

  “Lots of pretty pictures of people on a beach,” I yawned to Fred—but I cut it short as my eyes scanned the contents of the cover letter. This proposal was for a new resort on St. John.

  “Oh no,” I groaned, my earlier anxiety resurging as I glanced across the balcony railing at the munching iguana.

  Fred issued his all-knowing I’m-way-ahead-of-you stare.

  I rubbed my forehead wearily. There’d been rumors that something like this might be coming. Our tiny island was about to receive a visit from a boatful of fancy-pants executives, and I, no doubt, would be on the hook as hostess to shepherd them around.

  “What property are they looking at?” I mumbled as I flipped open the embossed folder and fished out the summary sheet. I suspected I already knew the answer.

  “Maho Bay,” I confirmed as I read the description of the targeted land.

  I drifted slowly off into my thoughts, which Fred always seemed perfectly capable of reading without any verbal translations.

  The plight of the Maho Bay land parcel had been the talk of the island for the last several months—that it had been put up for sale was no secret. The multi-acre plot included a beautiful stretch of beachfront property along the island’s undeveloped north shore. It was surrounded on all sides by a national park that encompassed almost two-thirds of the island’s landmass.

  For the last thirty years, Maho Bay had been leased to an eco-resort, one renowned throughout the Caribbean for its environmental stewardship and innovative design. It had a unique setup, visually different from any of the island’s other accommodations.

  To minimize the camp’s footprint on the heavily forested property, all of its buildings, including a hundred-plus individual screened tents, were constructed on platforms raised ten to twenty feet above the ground. The tents were connected by a network of elevated walkways to protect the natural flora that thrived beneath.

  The resort was popular with vacationing families as well as the tree-hugger hippie set. Its staff acted as camp counselors, providing a constant lineup of activities: arts and crafts, nature walks, and water sports. The resort also found favor with the budget conscious; the rustic lodgings were some of the most affordable on the island.

  All of this, it seemed, would soon be gone. The eco-resort’s current lease was set to expire at the end of the year, and the proprietors had been unable to negotiate an extension. A few months from now, the campground would be closed for good.

  The Maho Bay property had hit the real estate listings last spring—igniting an uproar of public protest. The eco-resort and its quirky proprietors were beloved by most of St. John’s permanent residents. Few welcomed the prospect of a high-end resort complex taking over this pristine stretch of the island.

  Shaking my head, I returned my attention to the brochure, wondering how our home office planned to compete for what was sure to be a pricey bid. Maho Bay would be far more expensive than any other transaction they’d attempted during my tenure. I didn’t think they had that kind of cash to throw around.

  Property values on St. John were among the highest in the Caribbean, due in large part to its national park. This massive federal holding made the island’s remaining private land relatively scarce; proximity to the park’s undeveloped beaches further enhanced real estate assessments.

  The park’s origins went back to the 1950s when financier and wealthy heir Laurance Rockefeller began purchasing land on a then largely unknown St. John.

  Using a private broker to mask his identity, Rockefeller bought up huge tracts from unsuspecting owners—a move that was still controversial among many of the sellers’ descendents, who felt they had been cheated out of their properties’ true values.

  Once Rockefeller had acquired as much property as possible along the island’s north shore, he consolidated his land holdings and donated the bundled plot to the National Park Service, reserving a renewable lease back to the lavish resort he’d built on the parcel’s west end, the site of the former Caneel Bay plantation.

  The owners of the Maho Bay property were one of the few landholders who had been able to resist the negotiating power of Rockefeller’s bankers. Sixty years later, the trustees representing these property rights were now ready to cash in. It was hard to imagine any other development prospect in the Caribbean that could match Maho’s unique features.

  I reached for the shot glass as I turned to the last page of the prospectus. I wasn’t looking forward to the extra eyes such a high-profile land sale would draw to me and my rum-soaked fiefdom. I wasn’t sure how well my Penelope Hoffstra routine would hold up to the parent company’s corporate diligence committee.

  Another swallow of rum helped tamp down my concerns. Vivian would make the necessary arrangements for our soon-to-be-arriving friends in suits. I would just have to hope no one knew enough about the original Penelope Hoffstra to recognize the difference. It would probably be prudent, I reflected somberly, to keep a low profile in the coming weeks.

  I dropped the prospectus onto the pile of papers from my inbox, and my focus returned to the troublesome issue of the resort’s new employee.

  “Maybe Vivian hadn’t had a chance to put her file together,” I offered to Fred. “Simple as that. Maybe it’s all just a coincidence.”

  Fred continued to chew on his leaf. He was still considering the pros and cons of the Maho Bay land deal; he didn’t like to be rushed from one topic to the next.

  I took another steadying gulp from my glass. The rum was beginning to numb my Hannah concerns. “Plenty of people have the same name.”

  If only she had been a strung-out party girl, like most of kids who came to work for us, the strange happenstance of her name would have been much easier to dismiss.

  The bulk of our temporary employees were college students, free spirits looking for a semester’s break from the books. They spent far more time enjoying the island atmosphere than actually working in it.

  I shook my head. There was no way to deny it. Simply put, Hannah didn’t fit the mold.

  Fred began to carefully back down off his limb, rustling the branches as his stiff, awkward movements caused the tree to sway wildly back and forth.

  I glanced at my watch. It was time for his daily afternoon swim at the beach that fronted the resort. Several guests would be lined up along the sand, waiting with their cameras, eager to capture the event on film. Fred, the body
-surfing iguana, was something of a legend on the island. He seemed to enjoy his fame; his adoring fans were rarely disappointed with his performance.

  As Fred hit the shaded ground below the balcony, I drained the shot glass and set it with a loud clink on a small metal table beside my chair. My gaze fell once more onto the prospectus.

  “Fred,” I mused aloud as he waddled off down a concrete path leading toward the water, “she’s staying at Maho Bay. Hannah’s staying at the eco-resort.”

  The narrow tip of Fred’s long dragonlike tail swished back and forth, a wordless critique of how long it had taken me to finally make the connection.

  10

  Maho Bay

  Alden Edwards sat at a short wooden desk in a rustic cabin nestled in the woods on the hillside above Maho Bay.

  The floor of the cabin, like that of the other semipermanent structures spread out across the eco-resort, was mounted on stilts made out of thick rounded posts, elevating it fifteen feet or so above the forest floor.

  Alden often felt as if he lived in a tree house. It was a boyhood fantasy he had been acting out for almost thirty years.

  An abundance of wildlife frequented the open area beneath the cabin. Throughout the day, the jungle of leaves and underbrush rustled with activity. Hermit crabs moseyed past with their slow shell-dragging crawl, tree frogs hopped happily about, and geckos skittered in sporadic stop-and-go sprints.

  Several members of the last category ventured up the support posts and sneaked in through openings in the cabin floor’s wooden slats. Once inside, the tiny creatures skimmed fearlessly across the walls, comically pumping their front legs in mock push-ups whenever he glanced up from his desk to watch them.

  Then, of course, there was the occasional mongoose meandering blindly through the leaves, clumsily oblivious to the noisy ruckus it created.

  More than once, Alden had leaned out over the edge of his front porch to check an overenthusiastic rummaging on the ground below, just to make sure the campgrounds hadn’t been invaded by a large bear that had somehow managed to migrate to the tropics.

  Brought in by the Danish in the 1700s, the island’s now-entrenched mongoose species had been meant to help dampen the mice population inundating the sugarcane fields. Unfortunately, the brown rodentlike beasts hunted primarily during the daytime hours when the mice were tucked in their dens, fast asleep. Three hundred years later, both species continued to thrive in peaceful coexistence.

  Overlaying all the crustacean, lizard, and mongoose activity that surrounded the cabin, there was the steady din of insects, ceaselessly chittering and chattering through the trees. These multitudes operated in their own separate kingdom, remaining mostly out of sight as they constructed elaborate nests that hung down from tree limbs and dug intricate underground bunkers that tunneled through the volcanic earth.

  Of all the creature sounds Alden had come to know and love, it was that of the insects he found most endearing. Their soothing, buzzing hum calmed his nerves each night and sang him off to sleep.

  This fanciful lifestyle was not without its spoilers. While the vast majority of the bug population had no interest in the eco-resort’s human residents, the jungled forest was home to a certain species of biting gnats that posed a constant nuisance. The screens that covered the cabin’s windows were no impediment to these nasty pests.

  Alden kept a can of bug repellent within arm’s reach, and the burnt-out stubs of a half dozen citronella candles filled the counters near his desk. A tattered flyswatter hung from a nail in the door frame, a weapon of last resort.

  Alden hated to be the cause of any living being’s destruction, but he had long since assuaged his conscience when it came to the island’s infamous no-see-ums.

  He scratched absentmindedly at the top of his knobby left knee, brushing a piece of fuzz tickling his skin. Beneath the wooden desk, two of the outlawed insects hung in the air, scheming as they swooped to avoid his large calloused hand.

  Alden didn’t know it yet, but a rash of small red welts had begun to rise on his hairy shin. The line of microscopic bite marks spread from the soft flesh beneath his ankle all the way up to his knee.

  As his hand returned to the desktop, the tiny gnats circled his leg, proudly surveying their work. They weren’t called “no-see-ums” for nothing.

  Alden was a tall, lean lumbering man whose wild, unkempt beard conveyed the wooly look of someone who camped for a living. The top of his head, in contrast, he kept closely shaved.

  After many years of experimentation, he’d determined that this was the optimal grooming combination for the island’s hot, humid conditions. He couldn’t care less that his friends told him he looked like a coconut on a stick.

  Together, Alden and his wife, Sherry, had opened the Maho Bay eco-resort back in the early 1970s. They’d started with fewer than twenty elevated tree house tents, but the concept had proved so successful that the resort now boasted over a hundred units. The eco-minded campground was known throughout the Caribbean for its environmentally sensitive footprint as well as its close proximity to St. John’s seven-thousand-acre national park.

  The resort’s infrastructure was laid out along a labyrinth of stairs, ladders, and elevated walkways that the guests navigated to reach their treetop lodging quarters. Each tent unit sat atop stilts similar to the ones beneath Alden’s cabin. The walls of the tents were covered with interlocking screens and thick waterproof canvas—barriers that were, despite all bug-proofing attempts, still easily breached by the tiny gnatlike no-see-ums.

  Meanwhile, the nefarious pair beneath the desk had finished up with Alden’s left leg and had begun planning their attack on his right one.

  The campground’s network of stairs and elevated walkways led down the hillside toward Maho Bay’s scenic beach. The round, protruding bulge of Mary’s Point curved out from the northwest side of the area, sheltering it from the larger waves that sometimes hit St. John’s north shore. The calm water was safe and easy for kids of all ages to swim in and explore, a perfect fit for the family-friendly camp.

  Alden, Sherry, and their crew of similarly minded outdoor enthusiasts provided a daily offering of water sports and arts and crafts activities, frequently supplemented by nighttime gatherings and star-gazing programs. Meals were served throughout the day, cafeteria style, in a circular restaurant with a partially tented open-air roof.

  Alden leaned back in his chair, squinting his left eye. He thought he felt the slight twinge of an itch somewhere on his body. His hand reached down and brushed against his right leg, but his thoughts drifted elsewhere.

  Hovering about a foot off the floor, the naughty pair of no-see-ums continued their feast.

  The eco-resort boasted some of the island’s least-expensive lodging. The nightly rates weren’t cheap, by any means, but they were far less than that of the rest of the available vacation housing. Given the camp’s greater financial accessibility, it hosted a much broader range of visitor types than seen at the island’s pricier establishments.

  Alden and his crew were an easygoing, laid-back bunch, and he generally managed to get along with all of his guests, no matter how strange or bizarre the personality. Any problems arising in that department he left to his wife, Sherry. In their thirty years of running the eco-resort, no one had ever dared to cross her.

  Alden preferred to sit back and observe. After decades of practice, he had developed a keen eye for outliers—that’s the term he used to describe his more eclectic guests. These were folks who seemed to float along, oddly detached from the regular threads of society.

  Outliers, as carefully defined by Alden’s well-honed analysis, lived by a different set of rules than the rest of the campground’s patrons—their “unique” lifestyle choices frequently warranted extra staff attention. They marched to their own drummer, so to speak, in a way that was both frustratingly unpredictable for his role as site manager and maddeningly intriguing for his far more dominant biologist persona.

  Conrad C
orsair—outlier exhibit number one, Alden thought as he scrolled through a list of guests who were scheduled to arrive in the coming days.

  Conrad was the sole reason Alden had devised the outlier term in the first place. The crazy hippie from New York had been flying down once a year ever since the eco-resort first opened.

  Alden sighed ruefully. He could already hear the little man’s twangy voice. For some reason, the moment he stepped off the plane, Conrad began layering his sharp New York accent with a strained, drawling affectation.

  “How-dee, Eddy. How’s it hangin’?”

  Alden ran his fingers over the shaved crown of his bald head. He had never been able to convince Conrad—or, for that matter, anyone else on the island after Conrad started the trend—that Edwards was his last and not his first name.

  This was but one of Conrad’s many endearing quirks. Another was that he insisted on referring to the accommodations at the eco-resort as teepee tents. Alden had given up trying to understand why—there wasn’t anything about the units that even remotely resembled the structure of a teepee. Conrad apparently thought the teepee reference made his Maho Bay digs sound more alluring to the ladies.

  Alden groaned and rolled his eyes. To his knowledge, none of Conrad’s persistent pickup lines had ever panned out. And if they had, Alden thought with a cringe, he’d rather not know about it.

  He and Sherry had dealt with countless complaints from the campground’s female guests over the years. The New Yorker’s over-the-top charm could sometimes be a bit too much to take.

  Shaking his head dismissively, Alden slid his eyes across his desk to the day’s stack of mail and the legal-sized envelope that lay on top. He felt his blood pressure begin to rise as he stared at the familiar gold-embossed printing on the return address label. It was the monthly notice from his landlord’s lawyers, repeating, for the umpteenth time, the date of the eco-resort’s coming eviction.