Adrift on St. John

by Rebecca Hale

  Every year, as the November 23 anniversary of St. John’s 1733 revolt approaches, commemorations of the event fill the calendar, culminating in a public march to the site where the attacks began, at the original Danish fort overlooking Coral Bay. Of late, the dramatic story of the Amina Slave Princess has infiltrated these festivities. She has become a community icon, worshipped with the reverence of a patron saint.

  Hannah Sheridan arrived on the island just as this annual frenzy was beginning to build, and our new employee quickly became caught up in the local whirlwind of obsession with the Princess and her tragic death. Somewhere in the midst of this melee and confusion, she set off down the murky path that would culminate in her disappearance.

  In a way, it was the public’s fixation with this historic figure that pulled Hannah from the water taxi into the waters of the Pillsbury Sound.

  It certainly wasn’t the ghostly hand of the Slave Princess. After the events of the last twenty-four hours, of this, I was certain: while the Amina revolt of 1733 was real enough, the Amina Slave Princess herself was nothing more than a vivid figment of someone’s imagination.

  4

  A Disturbing Introduction

  As I sat there at the Dumpster table on the morning after Hannah’s disappearance, swirling the straw through my melting daiquiri, my thoughts drifted back to the day our pesky employee first arrived on St. John.

  It was the end of October—a Monday—not that the start of any given workweek signified more than a different digit on the calendar. Here in the lazy vacationland aura of the resort, each new day looked pretty much the same as the one that came before it. The only change of any significance would occur with the next drenching rainstorm, and its respite, however temporary, from the oppressive heat.

  I woke that muggy morning in my resort-appointed quarters—an older one-bedroom condo unit that was scheduled for renovations in about six months’ time—swatting at the high-pitched drone of a gnat hovering near my forehead.

  We were nearing the sweltering end to the watch and wait of hurricane season. A couple of storms had come close to grazing the Virgins, but it looked as if we would make it through this year’s danger months unscathed.

  The smothering humidity was torture enough. The stagnant air and heavy listless heat had dampened the energy of all but the island’s insect inhabitants. Even the tiny yellow-chested bananaquits that typically twittered along the treetops in nonstop frenetic harmony had lost some of their pep.

  With effort, I pulled myself out of bed. After shrugging on a white T-shirt and the cleanest pair of khaki-colored capri pants I could find in my dresser, I staggered across the resort to my office.

  There’s a lot to be said for a job of actionless supervision. I’d grown comfortably careless in my leisurely lifestyle, delegating most of the resort’s day-to-day operation to my assistant, Vivian.

  Having clocked another late-night session at the Crunchy Carrot’s Dumpster table, I decided a low-key start was on order—one that would allow plenty of recuperation time from the hangover pounding against the inside of my forehead.

  A quiet morning on the couch inside my office should do the trick, I thought as I stumbled down the dimly lit hallway on the second floor of the administrative building.

  It was with rueful surprise, then, that I found a young woman in a brightly colored sundress waiting outside my office. I stifled a yawn into the half-drunk paper cup of coffee I’d picked up on my way past the breakfast bar and braced my still sleeping brain for the mental rigors of conversation.

  The woman pushed a curly tangle of dark hair from her face to expose a timid smile. Nervously, she gripped the pouch of a blue nylon satchel slung over her right shoulder. Then she stepped forward and grabbed hold of my coffee-free hand.

  “Good morning, Mrs. Hoffstra.”

  Her voice hesitated with a bashful tic as I took another swallow from my paper cup.

  “I’m Hannah, Hannah Sheridan. I’m supposed to start work for you today.”

  I nearly choked as the liquid clogged my throat. Hannah Sheridan? Surely, I hadn’t heard her correctly.

  “It’s Pen, just Pen,” I replied hoarsely. My vocal cords rasped as I gasped out the short response. “And I’m definitely not anybody’s missus.”

  I drained the last drop from my wilting paper cup and warily surveyed the resort’s new employee. She was a tall slender girl in her early twenties with creamy cocoa-colored skin that showcased high cheekbones and emerald green eyes. It was a beautiful, exotic look, the result, I suspected, of a mixed-race heritage.

  “I’m sorry. What did you say your name was?” The words stumbled over my sleep-numbed tongue.

  “Hannah…Sheridan,” she repeated, slowly measuring out each word.

  Her face bore an honest expression, as if she hadn’t noticed the disturbing effect of her introduction.

  I coughed loudly at the confirmation. The throbbing in my head intensified, this time from an entirely nonalcoholic source.

  “Hi-umm, yep, good morning,” I replied, tugging my hand free from her grip as my mind struggled to process the information. “Nice to meet you—Hannah.”

  I unlocked the door and held it open for her.

  “Please, come into my office,” I said, still puzzling as she sped past me through the entrance.

  A slight breeze eddied in her wake. In the long hot history of the Caribbean, no one had ever walked with the fast-paced vigor of this Hannah Sheridan.

  I followed my unexpected visitor through the door, my feet shuffling across the floor at a much slower, more island-appropriate pace. Tossing my crumpled cup into a trash can, I motioned for her to take a seat on the couch at the far side of the room.

  “You’ll have to bear with me for a moment,” I mumbled as I riffled through the papers scattered across my desktop, a maneuver meant only to buy myself a moment to regroup.

  It was a coincidence, I told myself. The name had to be a coincidence.

  Hannah spun a tight pivot in front of the couch; then, smoothing the folds of her dress, she dropped neatly onto the middle cushion. Despite her shy, diffident manner, she was as bright-eyed and bushy-tailed as they come.

  I returned her ardent gaze with a skeptical one. My mouth flattened into an unpleasant grimace, only partly due to the bitter residue I’d sucked down with the last gulp of coffee.

  Any second now, I thought, she’ll drop the act—and give me the real reason she’s sought me out.

  I drew in my breath as Hannah leaned forward in her seat.

  “You were a lawyer before you came to St. John, weren’t you?”

  My gut clinched queasily. Aside from the one slipup to Conrad on the ferryboat four years earlier, I hadn’t divulged that information to anyone else on the island.

  Who was this woman, I wondered silently, and what did she want from me?

  “My uncle told me,” she added simply, as if this explained her unique fountain of information.

  “Your—uncle?” I asked weakly.

  “Yes.” Her forehead crinkled in confusion. “I thought you knew him?”

  She paused and then opened her mouth as if she was about to continue, but I cut her off.

  “Yes, well…” I said, patting my hands once more across the disarray of papers, trying to suppress my growing panic. I didn’t need to hear any more about her omniscient relative. I could think of only one man who knew about my lawyer past—only one man who would have sent a Hannah Sheridan to the resort to see me.

  “I’m sure we have your orientation materials here somewhere. Let me see if Vivian can track them down.”

  Hannah shifted her weight toward the back of the couch, crossing her legs as she studied me curiously. “Do you miss it?” she asked, her green eyes flickering with interest.

  “Miss what?” I replied quickly, my pulse accelerating.

  “Practicing law,” she supplied with an innocent blink of her eyes.

  With a weak smile, I picked up the receiver from the
telephone on the right side of my desk and pushed a quick-dial button that rang through to Vivian. I needed to get Hannah Sheridan—or whoever the heck she really was—out of my office as quickly as possible.

  “Yes?” a steady female voice answered on the other end of the line.

  Vivian was a short-statured woman of solid build, stern demeanor, and skin the deep espresso brown of roasted coffee beans. She’d grown up in the Bahamas, an island chain that, she never tired of telling me, greatly surpassed the Virgins in natural beauty and splendor.

  “So, uh, Vivian, I have one of the new employees here in my office. A Hannah Sheridan…?” I let the end of the sentence trail off into a hopeful half question as I glanced uneasily across the room at my couch.

  After a long moment of silence, she issued a stiff, “Yes?”

  It was a typical Vivian response, one that conveyed the full brunt of her frostiness. She wasn’t about to volunteer a single syllable more than absolutely necessary. She never did; the woman lived to make me suffer.

  Vivian was my right-hand man—or woman, as the case may be. In truth, she practically ran the place all on her own. Any issue requiring substantive study or analysis, I immediately delegated to Vivian. She gruffed and complained constantly, and never missed an opportunity to point out my obvious incompetence, but I suspected she secretly enjoyed the responsibility. The rest of the staff went to her first with their requests, knowing I would immediately rubber-stamp anything that had received her preapproval.

  “Well, uh, are you busy right now?” I asked somewhat testily into the receiver, twirling the phone cord with my fingers.

  I glanced nervously at the woman seated across the room from me. The sooner I dropped this Hannah egg in Vivian’s basket, the better.

  “Yes,” Vivian said slowly and suspiciously, clearly sensing I was about to push some unwanted task in her direction.

  “Can you come up to my office anyway?” An urgency crept into my voice. “Please,” I added, even though it pained me to do so.

  There was another pause during which time I imagined Vivian’s pained expression on the other end of the line. This was followed by a nearly silent grunt, indicating she had lifted her hands, palms upward, in supplication to some unknown deity in the hopes that it might deliver her from the earthly torture of my perpetually unreasonable demands.

  Finally, her voice came back through the line, short but rigidly polite. “I’ll be right there.”

  With a relieved sigh, I set down the receiver. “So, Hannah…” The name struck a constricting chord as it came out. “Have you found your room yet?” I asked with forced breeziness. “I’m sure Vivian can take you there next.”

  “Oh, I’m not staying at the resort,” Hannah replied swiftly, uncrossing her legs as she inched once more toward the edge of the couch.

  She was like a hummingbird, her wings beating a thousand times a minute…draining every last ounce of energy from my bleary-eyed being.

  “I reserved an eco-tent over at Maho Bay. I dropped my bags off there on my way in this morning.” She stood from her seat and stepped anxiously toward my desk. “I hope that’s okay.”

  “Sure, certainly,” I replied lightly, pondering as I leaned back in my chair. I’d never known any of our workers to turn down a free room at the resort for a tent in the woods. But, then again, this was no regular employee. “No problem at all.”

  A sharp knock rapped against the open door frame to my office.

  “Ah, Vivian!” I called out briskly, waving the reluctant woman into my office. “Please, let me introduce you to…” The name hung in my throat. “Hannah Sheridan.”

  Vivian stalked heavily through the door, her square face warily surveying the newcomer.

  Hannah bounced toward her, bumping into a stack of papers on the side of my desk as she crossed the room. “Hi, Vivian,” she said, awkwardly thrusting her hand toward Vivian’s stoic figure.

  “Welcome,” Vivian replied, her flat, even tone unmatched to the sentiment expressed.

  “Vivian will be showing you around today,” I announced boldly, ignoring my assistant’s instantly rebuking stare.

  Hannah slapped her hands together girlishly. “Great! When can we start?”

  She seemed not to notice the revolted expression on Vivian’s face as I hurried the two of them out of my office. No rain could wilt her effusive flower.

  As Hannah skipped down the hallway, her voice floated back to us. “I want to learn as much as I can about the island. I’ve got so many questions for you…”

  Vivian scowled at me with silent but livid recrimination. Then, she spun around and stormed off after Hannah.

  I pressed the door shut and firmly twisted the lock, breathing out a temporary sigh of relief.

  In the four years since my arrival on the island, not a single question had been raised about my assumed identity. My metamorphosis from down-and-out estate lawyer to disheveled and frequently inebriated resort manager had gone off without a hitch—until now.

  How much did this young woman know about my past? The “uncle” she’d mentioned—why had he sent her here, and what did he want?

  Even more important, I thought as I thumped the back of my head against the door, why was she using my name?

  5

  The Amina Record

  In the dusky basement of a New York City library, a wiry little man with thinning gray hair dyed an unnatural shade of reddish brown crept through a dusky maze of bookshelves. Humming softly, he skimmed his fingers over the spines, searching through the overloaded stacks for the Dewey decimal code number scrawled across the scrap of paper he held in his hand. It was a listing for an obscure title he’d found at the computer terminal on the main floor, several levels above.

  At last, Conrad Corsair located the item on a top shelf, several rows removed from its designated location. Standing on his tiptoes, he wiggled the book free from its wedged position, releasing a poof of dust and cobwebs. Yipping out a series of light nasal sneezes, he carried the heavy volume to a small table near the center of the basement and flicked on a reading lamp. The yellowed pages creaked as he flipped the book open to the desired selection.

  Clearing his throat, Conrad glanced around the room to confirm that he was alone. Then, with a slight pump of his eyebrows, he pulled a crumpled packet from the back pocket of his tight-fitting blue jeans and set it on the table. The paper bag rustled as he fished around inside for one of his special self-rolled cigarettes. Once he’d made his selection, he brought the lumpy cylinder to his lips, waved the flame of a lighter beneath the opposite end, and took in a deep doobie-infused breath.

  Exhaling with a relaxed sigh, Conrad unfolded a pair of dime-store reading glasses, slid the frames onto his thin face, and bent his head over the open book.

  As he began to read, the basement’s cramped ceiling faded into the pale arid blue of a cloudless sky. The dingy, graffiti-marked reading table became a dry parched savannah, framed by the purple-mounded humps of distant mountains. A hot, dry African sun burned down on the wide listless plain, wilting the field of grassy reeds, browning the scattering of scrubby, low-slung trees. What few creatures quivered beneath this searing atmosphere flattened themselves against the curve of the earth, seeking even the slightest shadow as a reprieve from the parching heat.

  A young woman’s galloping footsteps suddenly broke through the baking stillness. The calloused soles of her feet slapped against the dusty red dirt as she sprinted headlong across the savannah, hurtling down a narrow goat trail.

  The sizzling sun cooked the smooth surface of the woman’s cocoa brown shoulders, searing the tender scalp beneath her curly mop of dark hair—but the Amina Princess dared not stop to search for shade. Nothing could slow her frantic, fleeing pace.

  The woman’s eyes squeezed shut as she raced across the field. Her pounding legs needed little visual guidance for the path whose every twist and turn was etched into her memory. She rubbed her hands over her pinched eyelids, trying
to blot out the sky’s blazing light, but no amount of blackness would ever erase the scene she had just witnessed. Life as she knew it had come to an abrupt and horrible end.

  * * *

  A few hours earlier, the Princess had risen from a restful night’s sleep. Leaping up from her mat, she’d set off on an early hunt, stalking a guinea fowl through the thickets at the savannah’s edge, not far from her tribe’s encampment. It was her favorite time of day, the crisp morning half-light before everyone else awoke—a moment of solitude that she shared with her wild surroundings.

  She moved with the soundless ease of a lion, her body a weightless spirit slipping noiselessly through the swaying grasses. Her senses came alive as she tracked the bird’s skittish cluck. It didn’t take long for her keen eyes to find its frozen shape, immobilized in the shadows beneath the thorny cover of a mulberry bush, nearly camouflaged by the brown speckled coloring of its feathers.

  Carefully, she aimed the sharp tip of her body-length spear at the guinea’s gangly neck, honing in on the throbbing vein whose rapid tempo provided the only evidence of the bird’s racing pulse.

  In that single moment, the seconds stretched out across the rigid rule of time, and both the Princess and the guinea knew that it was done for.

  A slicing draft whistled through the silence, the sound representing the volume of air displaced by the spear as the weapon drove through the prickly spines and pegged the guinea to the ground.

  The Princess watched as the bird thrashed against the dirt, fruitlessly heaving its weight against the spear’s piercing grasp. She felt no remorse, no pity for the dying creature. It was the natural order of things in the African plains, a matter of survival. She was a hunter, like all of her ancestors who had come before.

  When at last the bird had expired, the Princess pulled the spear’s tip from its anchor in the soil. She twirled the pole in her hands, gingerly threading the dead bird out from the twisted branches. Lifting her prize, she judged the bird’s size and weight. Even her haughty brothers, she thought proudly, would be impressed by her contribution to the morning’s breakfast.