Junior put his hand to his chin and got very still again. “Yeah, it is different here. What used to hang on that wall with the masks?”
Harold puffed his cheeks and made a farting sound with his lips, then said, “Oh yeah. Man, it used to have a really big painting of our rum plantation done by this semi-famous artist in the eighteen-hundreds. A landscape of the production facilities in St. Croix. Barrels of rum being hauled away for shipment by workers. I’m guessing, but maybe Mama got tired of it.”
“So, is the rest of the house the same?”
Harold opened the mosquito net covering the bed and plopped down. “Who cares, man?”
Junior examined a wooden chest at the foot of the bed. A quilt lay neatly folded on top. Junior put the quilt on the edge of the bed, revealing a scene of men being hauled away in chains on the lid.
“I never saw this before either. Seems kinda dark for Grandma to have in her bedroom, don’t you think, Uncle Har?”
Harold didn’t respond. He stared up at a ceiling fan, which sported large palm-frond shaped blades.
“I’m hot.” He got up on his knees and pulled the cord. The fan began a lazy arc, and the room cooled. I cracked the window to the right of the ample balcony.
A table with four chairs around it filled the balcony. “Did you guys ever eat meals out here?” I asked.
“Once in a while,” Junior said as he examined the inside of the trunk. “Usually, we’d sit and drink iced tea or tamarind water and play cards. I remember that. Hey, I found something.”
He handed me a photo-copied article. It was entitled, “The Price We Pay.” Below the title, written in black ink and underlined, it said, who does she think she is? As I submerged myself in the words, I heard the distant sound of Harold speaking to Junior. Then, Harold wiggled my shoulder.
“Come on, man, let’s go. I hear them in the driveway. We gotta go.” The mosquito net was already back in perfect position, waiting for Francine to return to her clean bedroom. We scrambled out the door and down the stairs. We hit the living room. I bumped into Junior, who bumped Harold just as Herbie strutted through the front door followed by Hillary.
“What was that?” Herbie said, throwing up his hands. “Why did we go there again?”
“Hon ... ” Hillary stopped and looked at us all as we gaped at them.
I caught a glimpse of the bow leaning against the wall outside. The others seemed tongue-tied, so I jumped in.
“Hi,” I said, waving like an idiot. “I’m, uh, back. Harold invited me over to show me some archery skills. Right, Harry?”
“What’s he doing back here?” Herbie directed the question at Harold.
“I invited him.”
The two siblings stared at me like I was a roach they hadn’t yet decided to squash or spray with Raid.
Junior leapt into the chasm of silence. “Hey, why are y’all back so early?”
Herbie dropped a leather two-toned man-purse on an immaculate ottoman then emitted a huff of disgust. Hillary strutted by in high heels like a flapper on the runway, and shouted into the kitchen.
“Wilma! Wilma! I need something to eat, pronto! Wilma!”
Wilma yelled back, “Thirty minutes! I still be cookin’. You and Mr. Bacon eatin’?”
“No, I need something now!” Hillary said. “I feel faint.”
She melted onto the nearest chaise lounge. It felt like a photographic moment, so I pretended to send a text, and instead snapped a photo of Hillary’s reverie. She had her arm across her forehead, her other arm hanging over the lip of the aqua-colored lounge chair. Even her hair looked eerily similar to a photo of Rita Hayworth I’d once seen in a book. Other than Francine’s bedroom upstairs, this house had me feeling more and more like I had entered the roaring world of Jay Gatsby.
“God, what a fiasco. Honestly, Herbie, why do we indulge these pedantic politicians? They can’t even provide a decent meal at these luncheons.”
“Hmmm. Yes darling, I believe that’s because we need them for our financial interests. If this guy continues to push up wages, we’ll have to raise prices and our sales took ... ” Herbie stopped abruptly. “Let’s talk about this some other time. We have people.”
“I’m not a person,” Junior said with disgust. “I’m your son. I want to find my grandmother. While we’re at it, I want to know more about the business.”
Herbie threw up his hands. “Always with you and the business. Don’t worry, when the time is right, we’ll teach you the business.”
“Why? I’m going to school as you asked. I’m studying engineering so I can make our processes better. Shouldn’t I have some idea if those processes are going to even exist when I graduate?”
Hillary took her hand from her forehead, leaving a red blotch on her lily-white skin. “Must you boys always bicker about this? Can’t we just teach the boy about the business already? What’s the harm, Herbie?”
Herbie glared at me then pursed his lips. “Once again, we should discuss when we are not,” he paused, “entertaining.”
I was desperate to read the article we’d swiped. Maybe it was the reading Wilma had mentioned. Junior and I would need to have our own private conversation. I motioned to Harold that I’d like to go outside and shoot some more.
“Where do you think you’re going?” Herbie spat as we headed to the French doors.
I started to speak, but Harold held up his hand. “Please, allow me. Herbert.” He cleared his throat. “Once again, this is not your house. You do not decide who I can bring or not bring onto the archery range, into this living room, or anywhere else, although I promise to keep my guests out of your boudoir and our chaste sister’s quarters as well. We wouldn’t want anyone stumbling on any bones in the closet, would we?”
“Boys! I’m famished. Herbie, be a dear and bug Wilma to hurry something along. Herbie!” Hillary’s shouting broke the spell of hatred flowing between the brothers. Junior merely stared at the ground, kicking at the corner of the piano. “Junior! Stop kicking at my piano this instant.”
Once on the archery field, Harold made a show of demonstrating proper technique, but instead of talking about archery, he and I discussed the close call and my burning questions. Through the French doors, Junior gesticulated as he presumably renewed his onslaught about his lack of involvement in the family business or his grandmother’s whereabouts.
Throwing a faint nod toward the house, I asked, “So, what’s he on about?”
“Who, Junior? Every few months since he turned fifteen he goes on a kick about learning the business, but what he doesn’t realize is that none of us really know the business. Mama saw to that. Herbie’s at the rum distillery a lot, but from what I understand he’s more of a figurehead. Throws social events, runs the charitable arm.” He aimed quickly, pulled the string back till his hand touched the corner of his mouth and released. The arrow whizzed and plunked in the gold area next to two others he’d shot earlier. He held the bow out. “You try again, but keep talking. We need to make it look good, since old Herbie is eyeing us right now.” I started to turn, but Harold stopped me. “Don’t look, man!”
While I studied the smooth surface of the composite bow, I asked, “So none of you know anything?”
“Nope. Well, Herbie’s been snooping. Digging up financial info I think. It’s a privately held corporation, so there’s no official filings, but online there’s always speculation. Mama doesn’t bring much home, she keeps her important documents at her office. The way I understand it, we make rum and have some small interests in molasses and cane sugar, but not much at this point. Mostly, the fields have been bought by larger guys. I think cane is making some kind of comeback lately because it’s healthier than corn syrup.”
I nocked the arrow and aimed. I was scared to touch my face with the string, but pulled it so close the little hairs from the string tickled my lip. “Which is where?”
“Nisky Center
is one place, and she has an office at the distillery, as well.”
Nisky Center had cropped up in my last investigation involving the daughter of the billionaire owner of major real estate developers, Payne and Wedgefield. Their offices were also there.
“Can we get in?” I asked.
He pressed my hand against my face. “You need to actually touch skin. Also, relax your grip on the string. Two fingers below and one on top, like this.” He moved my fingers then tapped the back of my hand. “See, too tense. Relax.”
I slid the arrow forward and shook my hand out, then gripped the string again.
Harold pushed up on my arm. “Elbow up.”
He stepped back and nodded. I aimed low as he’d told me. The arrow flew, a faint hissing sound and a satisfying plunk. Blue.
Harold clapped me on the back. “Not bad.”
“You need to find a way into her office,” I said.
“Not sure that’s possible. She’s got security, and it’s completely stand alone.”
“What’s that mean?”
“It’s not officially the company office. It’s really her own private office in a separate part of the building. The company has a whole floor...hey, man, it doesn’t matter. What I’m saying is the woman had some kind of paranoia. She didn’t tell anyone much of the gory details about the rum and sugar cane business. Herbie wants in, more to see how much money we have coming than that he gives a shit about the actual day-to-day business. Me, I like liming although if I got to, I’ll go to work. Hillary, well, she’s definitely not the laboring kind.”
“Isn’t Francine getting pretty old? Doesn’t she need someone who knows the business to take over?”
“I think that’s what has them worried,” he said, pointing at the now deserted French doors.
Patting my pocket, I said, “What about this article?”
“Doesn’t ring a bell. Hey, man, read the thing. I’m more into doing than reading. You research and let me know what we oughta do next. Cool? Aren’t you the detective guy in this organization?”
I couldn’t argue with that. I needed to start acting like I knew what the hell I was doing. The only problem was, what little I knew about the sugar business suggested you could be dead before you made it.
“All right, I’m heading home to do some light reading. I’ll also run some searches on the company and your mother.”
“That’ll be a blast. I’m gonna keep shooting. Later, dude.” He picked up the bow and shot another bullseye.
When I got by the koi pond, I looked down at the fish, all swimming in close proximity I imagined Harold standing over the clear water, his arrow aimed at one of those beautiful, clueless creatures. How easy it would be for him, from any distance.
Chapter 9
Back at the guesthouse , on the veranda I munched on carry-out pizza and sipped lemonade. A vague need to guzzle Guinness in the late afternoon had dominated my end-of-the-day thoughts over the last week. Budgetary constraints in the country of Boise demanded the villagers accept lemonade or water as the new national beverage. The sugar would keep me from falling asleep, but it did not fill my belly like a stout.
The article from Francine’s room was about slavery. Anti-slavery. Not a subject I expected to find in the trunk of an octogenarian leader of a sugar cane empire going back generations. I was no historian, but it was a safe bet that a white family in the Caribbean making rum and sugar for more than two-hundred years had made much of their fortune on the backs of West Africans.
The article detailed the damage done to Africans forcibly taken from their homelands in Ghana, Angola, and Nigeria, then brought to colonial islands like St. Thomas, St. Croix, and Jamaica. Far more slaves had been transported to the Caribbean and other outlying colonies than to the United States. Jamaica alone accounted for over 1.2 million captured slaves, according to the stats cited in the article.
Islands were brutal, isolated places, which was why England and other wealthy countries had a hard time getting anyone to move here. Among slaves brought to the Caribbean, mortality was high and human reproduction low. In the United States, slaves had better working conditions, lived longer, and reproduced, so fewer needed to be imported. Thus, more slaves were brought to the Caribbean to replenish the voracious appetite of sugar mills, which devoured the workers when the foreman wasn’t fast enough to chop off a slave’s arm before his entire body was sucked into the mill.
Some of the information shocked me, as I had never really studied my African maternal grandmother’s roots or considered that the famed slavery in the southern United States was only a minor part of a much larger system. Francine had highlighted a passage.
Slavery was about economics. Slaves were chattel, as much property as the conveyor belt on an assembly line or the cotton gin. In ending slavery, property was annexed from people who had paid good money for what they owned and, in many cases for slave-owners who did not own the means of production, their sole source of income was in leasing out their slaves to perform tasks for others in the community. Abolition was a taking without compensation, as surely as taking someone’s home or land. In some instances, a small compensation was given to the slave owners, but not nearly enough in most owners’ opinions. Abolition bankrupted many slave-holders.
In the next paragraph, a single sentence was not only highlighted, but underlined in black ink and an asterisk had been penned in the margin beside it: If the slave owners felt cheated, imagine how the slaves felt.
After finishing the eleven-page article, I gazed at downtown Charlotte Amalie. A smattering of old, wooden homes dotted the flats at the bottom of the hill. They stretched away. Above it all, slightly to my right, sat Government House. A white, colonial structure that housed the sitting governor, Abioseh “Abbey” James. The intricate balconies and majestic placement jumped out from the rabble of galvanized roofs and utilitarian architecture.
I flipped the stapled pages to a photograph of a plantation home in Cuba in all its aristocratic glory. Holding up the photo, I compared the real colonial structure on the hill in front of me to the picture. Although I didn’t know the history of Government House, I suspected it was a plantation owner’s dream: top of the hill, looking down on all the peons.
An article on slavery. I kept coming back to one question: why? Why would Francine Bacon give a rat’s ass about slavery at this point? Junior and Harold never mentioned her interest. Either they were holding out or she didn’t share her hobby with them. Did she share it with Kendal? And what about the asterisked sentence?
Marge was into computers. When you considered it, computers and a nearly mute person fit together nicely. She could communicate with her fingers, like sign language. In an effort to capture the millennial market, three months earlier, I had suggested Lucy go ahead and install wi-fi in the building. In true Virgin Islands fashion, the install had sputtered at the starting line, needing a replacement router twice before the service finally worked. After a mere nine weeks, they printed new flyers saying they had “free wi-fi.” Marge updated the website, and I witnessed two couples under twenty-five roaming around the grounds a week later. One of them even had hacker-hair: purple tips on green roots.
I ran a quick search on my iPad for Bacon Sugar and Rum. Sure enough, in both St. Thomas and more extensively in St. Croix and Puerto Rico, they had employed slave labor before it was outlawed in the mid-1800s.
Did anyone still grow sugar cane? I thought sugar cane had been done in by beet sugar in the nineteenth century. What were they producing rum and sugar from now in the Bacon business? Again, the internet answered quickly and easily. Cane sugar was all the rage and the finest rum still fermented from Caribbean cane, at least that’s the notion pushed by the marketing.
Corn syrup and other sweeteners were on the decline as once again, good old cane sugar had weathered the economic hurricanes and roared back in the last twenty years. Out in California places advertised Mex
ican Coca-Cola because it was made with cane sugar instead of corn syrup.
My phone rang.
“I TOLD THEM. I TOLD ‘em,” Junior said dejectedly. “If we’d started looking sooner.”
“We don’t know that it’s her. Not yet,” I said.
Junior let his head loll to the right until he gazed drunkenly at Harold from the waiting room chair. Despite his dejection, his speech came in clear, certain tones.
“It’s her.”
“Will you two shut up!” Herbie growled. “How would our mother have washed up on Hassel Island? It’s just some half-eaten body.”
A technician came out of the hospital morgue, cleared her throat, then said, “This way, please. Are all of you family?”
“No,” said Herbie pointing at me. “He’s not coming in. He’s not a member of this family.”
Junior started to protest. I waved him off, settling into the waiting room chair. The white walls and chilly air made me shudder. When no one returned for over ten minutes I knew they had located Francine Bacon.
Farther down the sterile hallway a fat white guy sprawled in a chair, thumbing through a newspaper. He had a beard, but then again so did every hipster who could grow facial hair in the last five years. I trotted out to the parking lot, locating a blue Toyota Rav-4 five minutes later. After jotting down the license plate number, I returned to the waiting room. Fat guy gone.
My knee throbbed, but I couldn’t stop pacing. Who was that guy? I was itching for a beer, but I didn’t want to leave before they came out.
Twenty-five minutes later, Junior and Harold lumbered out, eyes red, cheeks flushed. Junior’s pale face had blotches matching his sunburned arms. Neither man seemed much in the mood for talking. Harold, Junior and I drove straight to a boat slip. A man in khaki shorts and a baby blue tee stood next to a white fishing boat with the moniker “High Hopes, St. Thomas, USVI” stenciled across the rear end above two large motors.
Sweet Paradise Page 7