A Whisper of Danger

by Catherine Palmer

  Jess nodded, always both amused and perplexed by her son’s analogies.

  “Okay,” he went on. “Now, see how much I love Nick? The bucket’s full of my feelings. But if we get mad at each other, the hate bucket gets full.” He poured the soapy water into the empty bucket. “The feelings don’t go away, just like the water doesn’t go away. The feelings just get transferred back and forth. The only way I could hate Nick this much—all the way to the top—is if I loved him this much.”

  “I still think when you’re full of hate, you’re empty of love. And that means they’re opposites.”

  “Wrong. See, this is the same water, Mom. It can go right back from the hate bucket into the love bucket and make it just as full as it was before.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Okay, now think about James Wiggins.”

  “Do I have to?”

  Splint laughed at her reaction to the memory of the irritating little boy who had lived in a flat near theirs in London. “This is how deep my feelings go for James Wiggins,” he explained, emptying all but a cup of the soapy water into the copper bowl his mother had brought down from the storage room. He showed her the barely wet bottom of the pail. “See what a small amount of feelings are in the bucket that stands for love? It’s all I can muster. When James is hanging around and trying to be nice, I can sort of semi-like him.”

  “You can remotely, slightly like him.”

  Splint chuckled as he poured the trickle of water into the second bucket. “Once in a rare while there might be the slender, barely negligible chance that I’d like him. But even when I don’t like him, all I can make myself feel is a sort of inert apathy. See?”

  “Inert apathy?” Jess repeated as she looked into the second bucket.

  “I can’t hate James Wiggins the way I can hate Nick, Mom. My feelings aren’t full enough. So, it’s just like Mama Hannah said. If you really, truly hate somebody, then that means you once really, truly loved them. And you could love them that much again.”

  “Oh, is that so?”

  “Yeah, that’s so! Who is it you hate, Mom?”

  Jess glanced at Hannah. The old woman was rubbing a rag over the green tray and humming under her breath.

  “I hate dust and dirt and cobwebs and rust,” Jess said quickly. “Now, let’s head back up those stairs and see what else we can bring down from the storeroom. The sooner we make Uchungu House into a home, the better I’ll feel about living here.”

  “If there’s a hammock up there, can I bring it? Could we hang it up on the verandah?” Splint was already halfway through the door.

  “If there is one and the bugs haven’t eaten it, we’ll hang it this afternoon.”

  She could hear her son’s yippees as she started into the house.

  “I have thought of one thing, toto,” Hannah said, her focus trained on the brass tray.

  Jess stopped in the arched doorway. “What’s that, Mama Hannah?”

  “I have remembered that someone else knew Dr. bin Yusuf. Someone who wanted something very precious from him.” She turned to Jess. “Hunky Wallace.”

  SIX

  “I don’t know why you won’t let me go out on the boat with Hunky Wallace,” Splinter said from the backseat as his mother drove the Renault down the bumpy road to Zanzibar town the next morning. “You won’t let me do anything. I guess I might as well give up all hope of ever becoming an independent man. I should just tie myself to your apron strings and let you drag me around behind you for the rest of my life.”

  “I don’t wear an apron,” she said.

  She and Hannah, who sat next to her, had been discussing what supplies they needed for the house. Sure, they were having a great time, Splinter thought. They had spent the whole afternoon and evening the day before lugging things down from the storeroom and cleaning them off. Late into the night, Splint had heard his mother walking from room to room and setting up different objects. Decorating.

  “I don’t see why I can’t go with Mama Hannah to the market!” Splinter spoke up. “I could help her carry all that stuff you’re telling her to buy.”

  “You’re coming with me, Splint.” Her voice had a note of finality that made it useless to argue. But that didn’t keep him from trying.

  “To the house of the dead guy’s sister? Wow, that sounds like a blast. At least with Mama Hannah I’d see some interesting people. In the market I might even find some shells for my collection. You never know, Mom. That collection I’m building could be worth a lot of money some day. A museum might pay a fortune for it.”

  Splint could see that his mom was paying zero attention to him. She and Hannah were trying to read street signs and navigate the car down narrow alleys toward Changa Bazaar. Suddenly Splint spotted an open-timbered building that Solomon had pointed out on their earlier trip.

  “There’s the House of Spices!” he shouted. “Turn here! Turn here!”

  His mom swerved onto the right street just ahead of a taxi. What would she do without him? He let out a sigh.

  “I’ll pick you up right here in an hour,” she told Hannah. “If I’m late, just wait. It means I got hung up.”

  “Or lost,” Splint muttered under his breath.

  As the car pulled away from Hannah, he waved at her through the back window. He had to admit, she was pretty neat for an old lady with holes in her earlobes and a dent in her forehead. She’d taught him to sing in Swahili and hunt for clams. This afternoon they were going to make rockets out of mango seeds. She had promised.

  Hannah knew about a lot of things. Best of all, she didn’t worry, she didn’t gripe, she wasn’t bossy. Not like his mom.

  “You know, Hunky Wallace’s boat stays inside the reef the whole time he’s diving,” Splint said, draping his arms over the front seat. “They never go anywhere dangerous. Plus, he has a whole crew of men who would watch out for me.”

  When she didn’t respond, he decided maybe she was weakening. “They’re hunting for treasure, Mom,” he went on. “In our bay! I bet Nick’s mom would let him go. And Nick’s not even as good a swimmer as I am. I wouldn’t fall in. I’d just wait on deck to see what they brought up.”

  “No, Splint.” That little muscle in the side of her jaw was jumping up and down.

  “Rick would be there. He likes me. He’d make sure—”

  “I said no, Splint! You’re not to go anywhere near Hunky Wallace or Rick McTaggart, and that’s final.”

  “You’re the strictest, meanest—”

  “And you’re the most persistent, tenacious—”

  “Why don’t you like Hunky? He’s cool. He said I could go out on the boat with him. He said he wouldn’t mind a bit.”

  “When did he say that? When did you talk to him?”

  Uh-oh. Now he’d blown it. She was going to come unglued if he confessed.

  “Spencer Thornton, when did you talk to that man about going out on his boat?”

  He let out a breath. It never did any good to lie to his mom. He’d tried plenty of times. It was like she had some kind of lie-detecting radar on the top of her head.

  “I went down to the beach this morning when his trucks came in,” he admitted in a low voice.

  “What? I told you to stay away—”

  “I just wanted to say hi. Rick was there. Did you know he’s going to work with Hunky every day from now on? They have a contract. Rick’s not a treasure hunter. He’s a scientist. He knows the names of all my shells. Plus, he said he’d show me how to catch an octopus. If you’d just give him half a chance, you’d like him a lot.”

  Splint ventured a glance at his mom. Her face was red. Not a good sign. She was pulling the car to a stop at the edge of the street beside a large white building. Things looked about as bad as they ever got.

  “Spencer, honey.” When she turned around, her eyes weren’t spitting fire as he’d expected. Instead, they were red-rimmed, and her lips were trembling. It was like she was about to cry. He’d never seen his mom cry.

 
“Listen to me, sweetheart,” she whispered. “I know you want to have fun, and I promise you will. But not with Hunky Wallace and Rick McTaggart. They’re grown men. They’re strangers. Please trust me, okay?”

  What could a guy say to eyes brimming over with tears? It wasn’t fair. Still, even though his mom was sniffling, Splint made up his mind that he wasn’t about to agree to stay away from the one and only real true treasure hunt of his entire life.

  “Don’t worry, Mom.” He patted her hand. “I’m going to be fine.”

  She nodded. “I’m counting on you to obey me, Splint.”

  Fortunately he didn’t have to reply. They got out of the car and walked up to the door. Splint hammered on the thick wood. Just when he had decided nobody was home, the door opened.

  A truly bizarre-looking man stared down at him. At first Splint thought he was African, because he had tight curly hair and dark skin. But then he noticed that the fellow’s hair was deep brown, not black, and his skin was the color of caramel toffees. Even weirder, he had green eyes.

  “I’m looking for the sister of Ahmed Abdullah bin Yusuf,” Splint’s mom told him.

  “Yes, she is here. Please come in.”

  When the man held the door open, Splint felt the urge to take his mom’s hand and run in the other direction. This guy could be a criminal for all anybody knew. He was broad-shouldered and tall. He had a bare chest, muscles rippling everywhere, nothing but a blue-checkered cloth wrapped around his waist, hanging down to his ankles— and he kept looking Splint’s mom up and down, up and down.

  Instead of doing all the things she had taught her son to do in dangerous situations—stop, drop, and roll . . . yell for help . . . scream and run—she flushed a bright pink and walked after the man straight into the courtyard of his house. This was the woman who had cautioned her son a billion gazillion times to be careful around strangers?

  Irked, Splint followed her. The house wasn’t that different from Uchungu House, he decided, except that maybe five families lived in it. Little kids were crawling all over the place, and laundry hung in eight rows across the open courtyard. The place smelled like a barbecue grill. Fragrant but smoky. Splint decided he didn’t like it.

  The green-eyed man led them across the courtyard and through the doorway of a dark little room. A woman dressed all in black from her head to her toes crouched on the floor in the cool shadows. Splint saw that she was knitting a blue blanket. Her whole head and face were covered by a black veil, and as hard as Splint looked, he couldn’t even see her eyes.

  “This is Fatima Hafidh, the sister of Ahmed Abdullah bin Yusuf.” The muscle man held out a hand in the direction of the black figure on the floor. “She is my mother. I am her son, Omar Hafidh. She does not speak English.”

  Splint looked around the bare room and decided he wouldn’t want to trade places with this lady. To live under a black hood all your life . . . to not know English . . .

  “Mrs. Hafidh, my name is Jessica Thornton.” Splint’s mom took a chair and motioned for him to do the same. “Many years ago in Dar es Salaam I knew your brother. I’m the new owner of Uchungu House.”

  The muscle man, Omar, stiffened up like he’d been hit. He spoke to his mother for several minutes—a lot longer than it would take to translate what had been said.

  “Why have you come here?” Omar asked.

  Splint watched his mom put on a smile. “I wanted to meet your mother. I wanted her to know how much I respected her brother. I was Dr. bin Yusuf ’s student many years ago, and I admire his work very much.”

  “You were his lover?” Omar demanded.

  Splint wanted to smack the guy. From the look in his mom’s eyes, she felt the same. “Lover? Me? No! Of course not. No, I was just his student.” She took a deep breath and went on. “I really didn’t know him very well at all. Not personally, anyway. I’ve been trying to understand why he left Uchungu House to me. And . . . and I thought maybe you or your mother had been to the house to see him before he died. Maybe you spoke to him about it?”

  “We do not ever go to Uchungu House. We are not welcome there.”

  Omar turned and talked to his mother for a long time again. Splint swung his legs back and forth and tried to think of a way to convince his mom to let him go out on the boat with Hunky Wallace. After all, it wasn’t every day a boy had a sunken treasure ship in his own front yard. Besides, what was so bad about Hunky? He was friendly. He knew how to treat a kid with respect.

  So did Rick McTaggart. Splint liked Rick even better than he liked Hunky. It might be fun to be a scientist. A marine biologist. The sound of the words turned over nicely in his brain.

  “My mother wishes to know what it is you desire from us,” Omar said to his visitor.

  “Well . . . I . . . I thought maybe there was something in the house you might want. A keepsake of your uncle. You know, there’s a lot of art still in the house.”

  “The legacy of a cruel man.”

  “Cruel? I can’t imagine that. Dr. bin Yusuf was always kind to his students. He treated us like . . . like his children.”

  The woman in black uttered a string of loud Swahili words that told Splint she understood English perfectly well. And she didn’t like the idea that her brother had been kind to other people—and not to her. It occurred to Splint that she probably had expected Uchungu House to be hers one day. Wasn’t that the way it usually worked when someone died?

  “My mother says we do not wish to have anything from the house of her brother,” Omar said. “She wishes you to go away now.”

  Splint and his mom stood. “I’m sorry to have troubled you,” she said softly. “I had hoped you could help me to understand.”

  “To understand why Ahmed left Uchungu House to a stranger? Or to understand how he died?”

  “Both.”

  Omar led the way out of the room. “We do not know the answer to either question. My mother has chosen to put her brother’s memory away. She does not wish to think of him. She will not want to see you again.”

  “She won’t.”

  “Inshallah.”

  Splint followed his mom to the car. Inside, she turned the key in the ignition and pulled out into the street. Her knuckles were white on the steering wheel, and her lips formed a tight ashen line.

  “What a creepy guy,” Splint said. “What was that last thing he told you?”

  “Inshallah. It means ‘God willing’ in Arabic.”

  He shivered. “Did you see those weird green eyes of his? That guy gave me the heebie-jeebies.”

  She shook her head. “If looks could kill . . .”

  Who had murdered Dr. bin Yusuf? As hard as she tried to put it out of her mind, Jess found herself turning the question over and over.

  Hunky Wallace might have done it to get access to the shipwreck.

  Omar Hafidh might have done it to get Uchungu House for his mother. Or he might have done it in anger when he found out she wasn’t getting the house.

  Solomon Mazrui might have done it, though Jess had no idea why.

  Or someone else might have done it.

  Did it even matter?

  Jess knew she could drive herself crazy trying to figure out who had killed her mentor. So she forced her mind to other things and decided to attack the house with a passion. Though she still wasn’t sure how she would pay Miriamu, she assigned the young woman a long list of chores. While she and Miriamu worked at scrubbing, polishing, painting, and arranging, Hannah kept Splint entertained.

  Solomon, enigmatic as ever, agreed to cut down the tall weeds around the house’s foundation and to pull down and burn the vines that were creeping up the walls. He said nothing about his experiences with the police. Instead he seemed grateful to have been given something to keep himself occupied. Now and then Jess spotted him hauling huge empty clay pots out of the storage shed near the house or mowing the patch of coarse grass in the front yard or raking the gravel in the drive.

  As though he were a cadet and she a dr
ill sergeant, he reported his progress to her several times a day. But the detailed work orders he was fulfilling didn’t come from her. Solomon followed some inner set of plans that demanded accomplishment—as though he had been setting goals for years and had never been allowed to meet them.

  He placed clay pots all around the huge verandah, upstairs and down. He lined the walkways with them and set them along the fence by the cliff. Slowly he began to fill each pot with rich soil and ornate tropical plants— bird-of-paradise, split-leaf philodendron, poinsettia, hibiscus. Miriamu told Jess he was taking the plants from secret places on the island where they grew naturally. She said Solomon could make anything grow. Dr. bin Yusuf had kept him so busy restoring Uchungu House, he hadn’t had time to work with his plants. Solomon had not been happy about that.

  Unhappy enough to murder his employer? Over plants? In the week following Jess’s visit to Dr. bin Yusuf ’s sister, the police came out to the house three times. They searched, asked questions to which nobody had answers, took a few items for investigation, and went away again. Determined not to stew over the situation, Jess decided to transform the house from a barren set of rooms into a warm and welcoming haven for her family.

  She and Miriamu unlocked every door and inventoried the contents of each room. It turned out that Dr. bin Yusuf had not only filled storage rooms with native handicrafts, he had saved every tidbit of art he had ever produced. In the room Solomon had called the library, Jess found rough pencil sketches, lumps of half-molded clay, and stacks of canvases. Some of the canvases revealed completed paintings. Others were unfinished drafts—blocked-out skeletons of works that had never come to fruition.

  And the sculptures. She’d had no idea her mentor worked not only in clay and marble but also in wood, metal, even paper. Once again, some of the pieces were beautiful and deserving of a place in the finest gallery. Others looked crude and twisted, as though Dr. bin Yusuf ’s dreams had turned into nightmares.