by Ted Bernard
For any good that I myself have done unto myself? O, no! Alas,
I rather hate myself. For hateful deeds committed by myself.
I am a villain. Yet I lie. I am not …
… Something, something, something.
Ah ha, I tell her, basking more in Katherine, the English teacher’s daughter. She returns to the couch, a pen and paper in hand. Let’s make a list. It runs to fifty items, including the big rally on Sunday, more nights like last, appointing captains to handle the crowds, applying for a permit, more nights like last, speakers and bands, contacting faculty and staff, calling a strike, condensing the Morse findings, preparing press releases, Lara’s call and Flintwinch follow up, more nights like last, cornering Tulkinghorn, what to do about Samantha, our Plan B, life after Blackwood, more nights like last …
I promise to help Samantha and to coax CNRD faculty into the mix. “Tell Hannah, Astrid, Zachary, José and the others I will not dock their absence Monday.”
“Ha,” she laughs. “But you’re expecting us in class Tuesday?”
“Yes, if there is a Tuesday.”
When we had finished the wine and cleared the dishes, she dimmed the lights and turned from the business at hand to the dream at heart. Moving from dreaming to doing meant transgressing will, each of us. Who would make a move? “To go back to … what were their names … Rosencrantz and Gildenstern?” she asked. “Would not the public good or value of our pathway to the bedroom outweigh whatever transgressions may be committed?”
“Clever,” I said. “Shakespeare again. Things did not end well for Hamlet.”
“You are not Hamlet,” she noted with a rosy look. She took my hand. We strolled, my arm around her waist, her hips sashaying, the few steps down the hallway and to the right.
4
In the fetid air and darkness at the north end of the F.D. Roosevelt Airport in Oranjestad, Saint Eustatius, Adrienne Foster, Lara Hedlund, Eduardo Bailey, and Mario Postma prepared to board a Cessna 185, an aircraft built in 1980-something with uncountable hours in its belly and balding tires. With Lara’s assistance, Adrienne sandwiched herself into the rearmost of the six-seater. She scrutinized its Dutch pilot, Jaap van Buskirk. Eduardo had assured her that van Buskirk was okay. “Dat Jaap, 'im a don gorgon,” Eduardo explained. Van Buskirk came to Saint Eustatius from Enschede in the mid-nineties. He owned the plane, the one and only aircraft of Antilles Passages Ltd., his company.
Once everyone belted themselves into the shabby compartment, twisting round from the pilot’s seat, Jaap greeted them. He went through a checklist of security and safety measures, especially in the event of an emergency landing in water. “Much as I wish it did, this damn aircraft cannot float. Can you believe that? So, if we have to ditch at sea,” he pointed to his left and continued, “a self-inflating raft will deploy right there and you must scramble into it before you become shark bait. Just kidding about the sharks,” he added, pausing. “Partly.”
“How long will the flight take?” Adrienne asked.
“I don’t know. I’ve never flown it before,” he replied. “Where is it we’re going?”
“No mon, you joke!” Eduardo called out.
“Exposed again. Well, to be honest, Adrienne, we should be in the air for about one hour-and-a-half. Visibility is perfect and I don’t expect turbulence. So, relax, and as they say, enjoy the flight. What comes next doesn’t sound much like fun to me.”
Within ten minutes they were airborne, heading west-northwest, leveling off at 4,000 feet.
~
Adrienne had recruited Eduardo, Mario, and Jaap in just the past few days. Knowing every sordid detail of Adrienne’s story, Eduardo, the middle-aged fishing captain of Jamaican heritage, had enthusiastically volunteered. Mario Postma, a strapping man-child of nineteen, the brother of Camilla and near neighbor of Eduardo Bailey, brought brawn to the venture. Japp, who fancied himself Robin Hood of the Netherlands Antilles, offered Adrienne a cut rate. He would stay with the aircraft and be ready for a quick departure. Lara was here to prop up Adrienne physically and emotionally. She also brought skills nobody else possessed.
They landed without fanfare at Cyril E. King International Airport and taxied to a ramshackle single story building at the western end of the tarmac. Everyone disembarked. Jaap and Mario hauled three duffle bags into an awaiting van. It was 9:46 PM.
On the tarmac, Adrienne embraced Jacinta Chapman, Morse’s chambermaid, and shook hands with the others: Noah Collens, reporter for the Virgin Islands Daily Register; Madame Bérénice DuVernay, a tall, buxom, colorfully dressed psychic medium with Haitian roots; Detective Wesley Rollins; and Officer Robby Clarke. She introduced her flight mates. Lieutenant Rollins explained the limits of his jurisdiction and their timeframe. “I have taken this initiative without official sanction of my superiors. They know what we are trying to do, but they’re not convinced we can be successful. They have given us until 5:00 AM. You must be off the island by that time or they will have my head.”
Adrienne sketched out her plan, going over every detail and every assignment, referring often to an architectural layout of the villa and its grounds. They reviewed roles and she answered questions. She decided that they were as ready as they could be. She, Lara, Eduardo, Mario, Jacinta, Noah Collens, and Madame DuVernay climbed aboard the van. Japp and Detective Rollins waved them off.
At the wheel, Officer Clarke sped north, then westward and climbed upward toward the villa overlooking Bartley Bay. Adrienne shuddered at the memory of this winding road sixteen days earlier. The hushed atmosphere in the van, which seemed to be oscillating at higher and higher amplitudes, began to reek. Adrienne had become inured to the odor of unadulterated human sweat, of unwashed clothing and beings. Wherever people gathered it was the ambient scent of St. Eustatius. It had come to seem natural. But this was something else. It was suffocating. It was the fragrance of fear.
At the villa’s gate, Jacinta jumped out of the van to accomplish three crucial tasks: she punched a code into the lock to open the gate. She slipped into the empty guard house and cut off power to the security system at the villa. She failed to accomplish her third task to neutralize the Rottweilers. Barking ferociously and rising on their back legs to press against the guardhouse, they trapped her. A backup plan kicked-in. Officer Clarke cautiously opened his door, withdrew a weapon from his belt, and crept toward the rear of the van. He chirped to distract the dogs. They turned and raced toward him. With two quick bolts from his stun gun, the dogs dropped in their tracks ten feet from the van. Jacinta cautiously exited the guard house and ran to the van almost colliding with Lara on her way out. She handed Lara a zip-lock bag. Lara rushed to the dogs’ side. Flashing back to her days as a Hedlund Labs assistant, she jabbed each dog in the shoulder with a half-cc of Succinycholine chloride, a muscle blocker that would keep them down for several hours.
“Now to have such success with the man of the hour,” she mumbled to herself as she returned to the van. She made ready her second syringe.
They arrived at the villa, coasted to the back door. To her relief, Adrienne could see no interior lights. Nausea erupted in her: the very sight of the place. Jacinta stepped out of the van and crept to the kitchen door. She unlocked and opened it. She paused, listening. Palpably holding their collective breaths in the van, the others saw Jacinta’s high sign. They disembarked and fell in line. Mario and Eduardo laid out the duffels. Everyone gathered round for wordless distribution of garb and props. In twelve minutes, the party, except for Jacinta and Madame DuVernay, now dressed uniformly in black from head to toe, looked like so many cat burglars about to heist a bank. In fact, a bank heist of global proportions might well have described the mission. With Jacinta at the lead and Madame DuVernay in her flowing skirts and magnificent headdress trailing the rear, the seven moved soundlessly into the kitchen. They waited while Jacinta crept into the pantry to cut off the villa’s power. Each then activated headlamps and followed Jacinta across the great room toward the maste
r suite.
Here, the plan began to go wrong. It was not only Murphy’s Law at work, but ever the emergence of dynamically interacting and unexpected surprises, Jasper Morse’s proclivities and behavior not the least among them. Adrienne’s carefully scripted narrative of a haunting experience so profound that it would goad the suspect into blurting his culpability and guilt went awry in the first few minutes.
On a signal from Adrienne, Eduardo and Mario, switched off their headlamps and stealthily opened the master bedroom door. They crept hesitantly toward the bed. Lara followed. She tiptoed across the room and into the bathroom, closing the door behind her. Mario’s job was to drag Morse from the bed and pin him to the floor for Eduardo to administer the restraints. In haste and in absolute darkness, Mario slipped on a throw rug and lunged onto the bed. He took hold of the first appendage he encountered. In response, an ear-piercing scream that could only have emitted from the larynx of a young female so unnerved Mario that he released the leg. He rolled off the bed. The woman ejected like a cruise missile. She bolted for the door, knocking Eduardo to the floor, himself stunned and confused. Across the bed, Morse came to life with a string of Appalachian curses, “GOL DAMN, FUCKIN' WOMAN. WHAT IN MUTH'RFUCKIN' HUSSEIN OBAMA’S NAME YOU DOIN? GIT BACK IN HERE, YOU SASSY BITCH!”
Mario and Edwardo regained their senses, rose up off the floor, honed in on Morse. Together, like synchronized Olympic divers, they plunged into the bed. Lara peeked out of the bathroom to witness a wild scrum on a king-sized bed, pillows flying, bed covers obscuring the particulars, no way to predict the outcome.
A generously proportioned Afro-Caribbean teenage girl, stitchless as the day she was born, broke into the hallway in unmitigated fear. She sprinted into the great room. Officer Clarke, helping Madame DuVernay with the séance table, turned just in time to avoid a collision with the streaking nude. Having no other intent than to prevent a head butting, Officer Clarke opened his arms, wrapped them around the fugitive, and toppled to the tile, his headlamp smashed and shunted away to oblivion. Clarke, never the quickest study on the squad, concluded something was amiss. A naked runaway was part of no plan he remembered. He wrestled with the screaming, flailing, unadorned girl, finally grabbing her left arm and pinning it to her back. “Gimme some light,” he ordered of no one in particular.
As if in response to his command, the house lit up like a Christmas tree. Squinting in the light, Officer Clarke looked down at his quarry. He convulsed at the recognition. “Rose Clarke! Ah, wha’ de fuckery, dis? Girl, wha’ you doin' here? Oh no, it canno' be! You sketel-bomb, you. You been banging dat ol' man in dere!” Still stunned, the officer wanted to pummel his sister but instead threw his head back, and screamed, “When mama heah 'bout dis, yo rass gonna be deep in pain. 'N believe me, she gonna get all da details. Guarantee dat. Now, get up 'fore I beat yu to 'n inch o' yu life.”
Adrienne took a moment to collect her wits. She ordered Jacinta to find some clothes for the officer’s sister. “And figure out how to cut off these emergency lights.”
Back in the bedroom, it took ten minutes for Eduardo and Mario to untangle themselves and subdue Morse. Screaming bloody hell, he did not yield kindly. Finally, they handcuffed him and slapped on the leg restraints, dragged him into the bathroom, and plunked him onto the toilet. Lara pulled down his pajama bottoms. Astonished at the sight of his horse dick, she gasped. Mario and Eduardo looked the other way, as if what they had seen was a picture from a bestiary. Keeping her cool, Lara turned her attention to his backside. After dabbing his cheek with alcohol, she summarily emptied the syringe of its dose of Lorazepam.
With a confidence she did not feel, she told the others that the tranquilizer would take twenty minutes to fully subdue the man. She had no idea that Morse had already ingested his daily nitrate-based tablets for chest pain and irregular heartbeat, an alpha blocker capsule for BPH, a 100 mg tablet of Sildenafil (Viagra), four Jack Daniels sours, and a half-bottle of Bordeaux. Within five minutes he had transmogrified from an indomitable pit bull to a drooling, semi-comatose poodle. Lara cursed. “Shit, he’s fainted.” She reached for her stethoscope and blood pressure cuff. “Shit again: 85 over 50.” She took no time to explain. She rushed into the great room looking for Adrienne, now occupied with Jacinta and Officer Clarke restraining and clothing his writhing sister.
“This is the person who just screamed and ran from the bedroom.” Lara stated in a rising interrogatory tone.
“Not only that,” Adrienne replied. “She is Officer Clarke’s sister. And she’s only thirteen.”
“Christ! Here’s something we could never have foreseen.”
“There’s the understatement of the year.”
“What will you do with her?”
“Gonna lock dat dutty gyal in da pantry,” interjected Officer Clarke, pointing across the kitchen. “Shameful 'ho, shackin' up with somebody her gran'daddy age.” With that, he dragged his sister, now wrapped in an oversized raincoat, across the kitchen floor. He thrust her into the pantry and slammed the door. Parked in front of the door, he declared, “I ain’t leaving heah 'til we take her to the Charlotte Amalie po-lice station.”
Curses emitted from the pantry.
“You coppah pig, Robert! Fyah fi yu.”
“You de pig, Rosie.”
Adrienne ignored the exchange and said, “Let’s get back to work so we can begin Act II. Hopefully it will turn out better than Act I.”
Noah Collens, who had been listening intently, strolled over in back of Lara. “Speaking of the séance, is the leading man ready?”
Lara jumped at the voice behind her. She turned around to see Collens, looking morose. “Expecting things to continue spiraling sideways?” She asked of him.
“Not going according to Hoyle, shall we say.”
“Well, you’re right. And I’m afraid we’ve got a problem with Morse.”
“Is he dead?” asked Adrienne, jumping to the worst (or was it the best?) of all possible outcomes.
“Not quite.”
Jacinta returned to say she could not figure out how to kill the emergency lighting. It was then she noticed headlight beams piercing the dark driveway.
“Who cou' dat be?” she asked.
Adrienne followed Jacinta’s gaze out the window. “Holy crap, what else could go wrong?”
Jacinta looked blank.
Adrienne became drill sergeant. From Lara’s account, this was her most convincing evidence that Adrienne’s spirit had not been completely broken. “Everybody but Jacinta out of here. NOW! Into the bedroom. Officer Clarke get in the pantry with your sister and muffle her.” Two fragmentary questions zipped across her brain: Did I just order a policeman to hide a fugitive? Did he go willingly?
Collens, Madame DuVernay, and Lara hustled to the master bedroom. Just before hastening there herself, Adrienne issued several sharp commands to Jacinta. On the run, she turned to see a van marked TeddiBear Security Services pull up to the front door.
In the master bathroom, Adrienne, suffering ankle, hip, back, and shoulder pains and a throbbing headache, huddled with the other five. Eduardo propped the shackled Morse on the toilet as he listed first to starboard then to port. They could faintly discern Jacinta in conversation with the security people. At length, they heard the van door slam. There was then a heated exchange, apparently from the kitchen: Jacinta and Clarke. What could have been their history? The vehicle pulled away as the emergency lights dimmed to darkness. Jacinta hurried to the bedroom, knocked, and entered. “Yo, Adrienne,” she called.
It was 12:30 AM. Collens, Lara, and Adrienne gathered at the couch. Adrienne lay flat having tapped out her limited energy.
Lara: “Let’s assume Morse comes back into focus soon. As I remember from my first responder course, sharp drops in blood pressure in response to drugs usually last only a few minutes for someone with normal health.”
Collens: “He’s been out almost an hour. Could his heart be arresting?”
Lara: “I’m no do
ctor. Morse is overweight and past sixty. Probably not in great health. Maybe he simply relaxed and fell asleep.”
Adrienne, weakly: “He does have a heart condition but, believe me, except for his gimpy left arm, the bastard’s a bull.”
Collens: “With the clock ticking, we’ve no choice but to set up for the séance.”
Lara: “Right. Even if it takes two hours to get the confession, we’d still have time to pack up.”
Adrienne: “I can help.”
Lara: “You rest. Save energy for your return from the dead.” She looked toward the kitchen. “Madame DuVernay, come.”
A noisy kerfuffle in the pantry prompted Adrienne to suggest that Lara tranquilize Rose Clarke. Officer Clarke agreed. In a few minutes Rose slept like the child she was meant to be.
The séance was set: three candles at the center of the table, a loaf and a pitcher signifying Adrienne’s and Morse’s last meal together, agarbatti incense wafting an earthy sweetness, music through the sound system, indirect lighting at the screen behind which Adrienne would appear, a large framed picture of Adrienne on a stand next to the table. Sitting at the table: Madame DuVernay, Jacinta to her right; Collens and Lara to her left; the empty chair for Morse directly across from the Madame. She quickly explained how she planned to replicate an actual séance and what to do if Morse proved disruptive. Eduardo was stationed in the darkness to video the proceedings. Mario would assure that Morse behaved himself.
In the bathroom, Lara, Mario and Eduardo were at work reviving Morse with cold compresses and hot coffee. When he could sit up without help and was responding with some coherence and little aggression, Lara alerted the others. Adrienne was on her feet, now flitting about in her gossamer gown, wraith and spectral like the White Lady of Avenel.
Mario and Eduardo escorted Morse to the table. He was tipsy. He growled “What the fuck?” on arrival. They forced him down and strapped him to the back of the chair. Mario removed the handcuffs. Adrienne, behind the darkened screen, felt her chemistry shift. Morse, there, summoning hideous images, sent shudders through her body, itself suffering from long agony, the damnable beast ten feet away. She quelled an urge to take flight.