Adrift on St. John

by Rebecca Hale

  Standing in the midst of the ruins, I couldn’t help but wonder what the place had been like during the colonial era. Caneel Bay had housed one of St. John’s few successful sugar plantations. By all accounts, it was the site of some of the fiercest fighting at the start of the 1733 Slave Revolt.

  Unlike the rest of St. John, the majority of Caneel’s slave population was from non-Amina tribes. Wary of the rebels’ plans of dominance, a large portion of Caneel’s slaves had declined to rise up against their owners. Warnings had been discreetly whispered to nearby plantation families, giving several time to flee.

  A small collection of farmers and non-Amina slaves had set up bunkers here at Caneel, while wives and children were whisked to a larger cay offshore where they could be safely ferried across the channel to St. Thomas. Cannons positioned at Caneel’s front gates had provided enough firepower to hold off and repel the Amina warriors. After a lengthy standoff, the rebels had eventually retreated into the woods.

  My thoughts were still drifting through the ruins’ history as I left the boiler room and continued farther inside the sugar mill’s sprawling compound, whose extensive network took up much of the gradual slope of the hillside. A few steps later, I wandered into a smaller two-story rectangular space positioned behind the boiler room that had, perhaps, once served as a storage area.

  Caneel’s diligent grounds crew kept the rest of the resort in a state of highly manicured alignment, but this spot had somehow escaped their meticulous attention. Shielded from view behind eighteen-foot-high stone walls, the jungle’s ever-reaching tentacles had flourished and multiplied.

  Thick vines threaded their suckers into the porous stone substrate, inextricably embedding themselves into the grooves and crevices. Spiny clumps of tropical palms and other deciduous plants had sprung up across the floor. More sank their roots into the narrow one-inch ledges that formed between slipping portions of rock, augering their unrelenting green fingers into the crumbling masonry.

  I stood in the shadowed darkness, the thriving vegetation curling up around my feet, the storm brewing over my head, waiting for the enigmatic Hank Sheridan to reveal himself.

  The plant-dominated silence was suddenly interrupted by the crunching of footsteps on the opposite side of the storage room’s ocean-facing wall.

  Sheridan, I thought as I eased across the pebbled floor, inching toward a rectangular-shaped portal near the origin of the sound.

  Slowly shifting my weight, I leaned forward into the portal so that I could peer down its length to where it opened into the side of a larger cavelike tunnel built into the lower elevation on the hillside below. My cheek pressed against the cool rock surface as I listened for another movement on the opposite side.

  The same shiver I’d felt inside the town car reemerged in a line of goose pimples that tingled from my shoulders down to the small of my back.

  “Hey,” a man whispered.

  The word echoed through the rock-walled chamber, clear and distinct, as if the speaker were standing right next to me.

  “What are you doing in here?” he asked.

  My mouth went dry as I spun my head back toward the storage room.

  “I’ve been looking all over for you.”

  He wasn’t speaking to me, I realized as another voice replied. It came from an older man; his hoarse, hushed tone transmitted a deep-seated terror.

  “Thees afta’noon…”

  “Josiah, you’re shaking,” the first speaker said with concern. “What’s got into you? What happened this afternoon?”

  The older man cleared his throat in a ragged heaving sound that conveyed his emotional upheaval.

  “Late thees afta’noon, Eye wuz out…out on thuh Point…”

  “Ohhh.” I could hear the first man’s shudder. His nervous words tumbled over one another as his voice sped up. “Say no more. You know I don’t go out there, not in the daylight or the dark. That place is…” He drew in a sharp breath. “That place is haunted.”

  The delicate fronds of a fern brushed against the back of my leg, tickling my skin, but I dared not move for fear I’d knock a stray pebble that would give away my position. I held my breath as the older man moaned.

  “Eye’d been workin’ there all day…settin’ up for the weddin’ t’morrow mornin’…”

  The troublesome fern was beginning to cause an itch. I glanced down at the persistent plant and sized up the frond’s reach—just a half step forward would do the trick. Digging my hands into the sides of the rock wall, I slid my shoe farther into the slope of the portal’s passage, away from the fern’s clinging grasp.

  The extra six inches brought me closer to the portal’s perpendicular connection to the tunnel. Trying not to topple over, I tilted my head around the corner so that I could look down the tunnel’s length.

  The huddled shadows of two men crouched at the far end, near the opening to an interior courtyard located deeper inside the ruins. The orange glow of the looming sunset filtered through the courtyard’s crumbling walls, blinding the men to my face in the tunnel’s dark corner.

  The younger of the pair stood with his eyes squeezed shut, his hands clamped down over his ears. The older man stood facing him, the whites of his eyes bulging out of his ruddy face, his voice steadily rising in strength and volume. Now that Josiah had started telling his story, he would not be stopped.

  “Eye wuz almost dun wit the gazebo…twist’in thuh last bolts inta place…Sum leaves had blown onto the spot where the chairs were goin’ in the morning, so Eye grabbed my rake. Eye wanted to git out of there before the sun set, but Eye couldn’t leave before Eye wuz finished…”

  I looked away for a moment, feeling guilty for listening in on this private conversation. A tiny gecko hanging on the wall met my gaze, the slim razor of its body melding seamlessly into the collage of ancient stones. I was about to backtrack through the storage room to the road outside when Josiah’s voice surged louder, his tone pitching with terror.

  “She walked out of thuh forest. She…she…she was wit’ a bunch of dun-keys. Eye think she put a hex on one of them. Then, Eye felt hur…Eye felt hur staring at me. Hur eyes burned a mark on my chest. Eye can feel it steel.”

  Blinking to refocus, I returned my gaze to the tunnel as Josiah pulled open his shirt and pointed in anguish at his torso. I could see no evidence of the scar, but the surface of his skin writhed as if it were being tormented by the searing point of a poker.

  “She…she…she…waz standing on thuh point, on thuh edge of Turtle Point, near thuh shoreline, just above thuh rocks.”

  Josiah yanked his shirt back over his chest as he finished the story. “She had thick curl-ley hair, and she wore an am-u-let around hur neck.” He held up his hands, arching his fingers to connect them into a circle. “Een thuh shape of thuh sun.”

  The other man cringed as Josiah leaned closer toward him. “She waz an Ameena.”

  Just then, a third voice—one I’d last heard four years ago at the Miami airport—whispered in my left ear. A plump hand wrapped around my upper arm and pulled me into the storage room.

  “Penelope, it’s not polite to eavesdrop.”

  27

  Hank Sheridan

  Mustering my dignity, I tried to swallow the instinctive yelp that leapt into my throat. In the storage area behind me, a man’s rumbling chuckle bounced eerily off the room’s stone surfaces.

  The gecko skittered down the wall in a hasty departure, quickly followed by a scuffling at the end of the tunnel, signifying the exit of the grounds crew members to whom I’d been listening.

  I turned to face the large man who’d sneaked up behind me and muttered a wary welcome.

  “Mr. Sheridan, I presume.”

  I couldn’t keep the sarcastic edge from my voice. We both knew that wasn’t his real name—any more than Penelope Hoffstra was mine. Of course, it was to my disadvantage that he knew far more about me than I about him.

  “Call me Hank,” he replied with a whimsical eyebrow
pump.

  I stepped gingerly around him toward the middle of the storage area, feeling once more ill at ease in the room’s dark confines—but this time my discomfort had nothing to do with the encroaching greenery.

  “It’s been a while…Hank,” I said with an unappreciative grimace.

  Hank—although I had difficulty calling him that with a straight face—looked exactly the same as he had when I last saw him that rainy afternoon at the Miami airport.

  He was clothed in a similar outfit of golf shirt and chinos, both of which were clean and recently laundered but bearing the imprints of his current perspiration. His skin had a puffy, pillowy consistency, overlaid with a layer of dampness. It was as if his body was an immense swollen sponge that, with the slightest squeeze of heat, would ooze out several ounces of sweat.

  He left the tunnel’s opening and joined me at the center of the room. There was an unnatural lightness to his gait that was disconcerting in a man of his heft and bulk.

  “Well, Hank, to what do I owe this pleasure?” I asked suspiciously.

  That he had successfully orchestrated my substitution for the original Penelope Hoffstra had been a pleasant surprise. That my presence here on St. John had gone so long without detection was an even greater wonder—but these weren’t the sorts of accomplishments that garnered a great deal of trust.

  The time had come, I suspected, to pay the price for my four-year island vacation.

  Hank strummed his hands across his chest, a thoughtful expression on the glistening folds of his face.

  “I have a favor to ask,” he replied after a moment of contemplation. He fixed me with a serious stare that conveyed my compliance wasn’t optional. Whatever he had in mind, his proposal was one I wouldn’t be allowed to refuse.

  “I was expecting as much.” I sighed with muted resignation. “What, exactly, do you want me to do?”

  “Patience, Pen,” he responded cordially. “First, let’s get in out of this heat.”

  With a heavy hand, he cupped the crook of my elbow and led me outside the storage room and across the stretch of grass to the asphalt. I felt almost invisible beside him; his bulging frame dwarfed my smaller one.

  After circling through the resort, the sedan was now parked pointed in the opposite direction, its motor idling smoothly on the tarmac.

  Still chuckling at his own guile, Hank motioned for the driver to stay at the wheel. He opened the rear passenger door and ushered me through it.

  “Where are we going?” I demanded. Despite his strategic advantage, I wasn’t prepared to be his compliant puppet.

  “I believe you were promised dinner,” he provided blandly.

  As our vehicle sped through the exit lane next to the Caneel Bay guardhouse, he leaned toward my shoulder and asked in a low conspiratorial tone, “Now, Penelope. What do you know about the Native Rights movement?”

  The town car wound its way back out of the national park, the driver’s maneuvering of the steep corners only slightly improved over the earlier inbound trip. I clamped my hand around the leather handle mounted onto the passenger-side door to keep from sliding into the middle on the curves.

  The overreaching jungle was just as spooky the second time around, but I was far more focused on the whispering of my riding companion than that of the trees crowding the road outside our vehicle.

  From the discussion, I gathered that Hank Sheridan—or, more accurately, the man behind that alias—was a businessman of sorts, with contacts and influence spread out across the Caribbean. He provided a wide range of services, of the sort you couldn’t find advertized in the yellow pages. He was like an octopus, with multiple arms worming their way into countless commercial and private matters, all of his activities suitably masked in an inky dark shroud.

  He had come to St. John at the request of one of his clients, a nameless individual (at least as far as I was concerned) who had engaged him to influence the outcome of the pending Maho Bay sale. It was for that task that he was seeking my assistance.

  Pondering this latest development, I rested the back of my head against the leather seat and stared up at the ceiling.

  Of course, I’d known all along that he’d had some sort of hidden agenda for placing me in position at the resort. I was an asset to be brought into play at the appropriate moment, a pawn on someone else’s chessboard, my movements a minor aspect in a much larger scheme—over the four years’ lack of communication, I had preferred to forget that fact. The global economic downturn that had delayed the sale of Maho Bay, I reflected, had likely given me an extra year or two on the island.

  Hank cleared his throat, as if to bring me back to the matter at hand.

  “Okay, let me see what you’ve got,” I said, still grumpy for having been dragged into this ruse but, nonetheless, finding myself intrigued.

  He pulled out a stack of papers from a file that had been tucked into the pocket of the seat back and handed them to me. We hit another turn as I flipped through the pages, and I momentarily lost my grip on the door handle. Sliding across the backseat, I had to scramble to avoid landing in his lap.

  As my weight crashed into him, there was an artificial puff of air, like a balloon losing a fraction of its volume after having been squeezed too tightly. I had the disconcerting sensation that I had run into something other than human tissue; his pillowy girth was apparently made up of a spongy, foamlike substance that was somewhat lighter and stiffer than the real thing.

  Brow furrowed, I pulled myself back over to my side of the car. I returned my attention to the file, trying not to think about the apparatus I suspected he had strapped around his waist.

  The document was written to read as if it had been drafted by one of the diligence teams inspecting the Maho Bay property. Citing quotes from the recent Native Rights discussions at the Constitutional Convention, the position paper advised against acquiring the Maho Bay property, warning that public reaction against the foreign nature of the purchasing company might lead to insurmountable regulatory and permit hurdles for any future development. The writer even insinuated there was a risk the USVI government might confiscate the land for public use.

  I had always dismissed the assertions of the Native Rights advocates, but, I reflected, their inflammatory rhetoric could be easily misconstrued by outsiders. The herd mentality loomed large over any auction process—no one wanted to get caught holding a lame duck. If a few bidders got cold feet, the rest would begin to second-guess their calculations.

  It might be enough to shave a few hundred thousand off the purchase price, I reasoned, but it was unlikely to completely dissuade potential purchasers.

  “This will certainly get their attention,” I said, looking up from the papers as the town car pulled into the truck-taxi lane next to the ferry building.

  The white-gloved man hopped out the front and discretely handed a wad of cash to the taxi driver who had given up his place for our vehicle. Then, he hurried off down the street toward the Crunchy Carrot, leaving me alone in the car with Sheridan.

  “He’s gone to pick up our dinner. I’ve placed an order for a couple of fish sandwiches,” Sheridan explained with a wink. “I hear they’re rather tasty.”

  For the first time in memory, the idea of one of the Carrot’s fish sandwiches didn’t cause my mouth to water. My stomach had taken a leave of absence—scared off, I suspected, by the shady character seated next to me in the sedan.

  Hank reached into a pocket and pulled out a small disposable cell phone. “Call me once you’ve slipped this into circulation,” he said, nodding at the file. “Let me give you the number.”

  I reached into my purse and dug out a piece of paper, but I found nothing to write with.

  “Do you have a pen?” I asked absentmindedly.

  “I have several Pens…” he replied with a wry smile.

  My head jerked up as he pulled a stylus from the front pocket of his golf shirt. After staring for a moment at his strange, squishy face, I wrote down the number fo
r his cell phone.

  A moment later, the driver reappeared in the distance carrying a take-out sack from the Crunchy Carrot.

  I was still mulling over Hank’s Maho Bay strategy. The packet of papers was unlikely to be the extent of his meddling. I had but a partial picture of his overall plan, I concluded uneasily.

  I was afraid to ask the one question I most feared the answer to—whether this meant the end of my stay on St. John—so I decided to probe the issue indirectly, via the young woman whose recent arrival had nearly blown my cover.

  Releasing a frustrated puff of air, I turned in my seat to face Hank.

  “So,” I asked tensely, “how does Hannah fit into all this?”

  “Who?” he replied with a startled look.

  “Hannah Sheridan,” I repeated warily.

  The troubled expression on his face registered a convincing display of ignorance. He cocked a perplexed eyebrow at me.

  “I thought that was you.”

  28

  The Uncle

  Just past the wooden park sign at the top of the hill overlooking Cruz Bay, a truck taxi turned into Pesce’s gravel driveway to let off a passenger in a flower-print sundress. Hannah Sheridan climbed gracefully out of the truck’s back bed and paid the driver. Then, she skipped past a long black limo parked in the road’s easement and continued up the stone steps leading into the restaurant’s Mediterranean stone building.

  The hostess nodded immediate recognition as soon as Hannah gave her name and directed her through a mahogany-walled bar to the dining area on the flat landing spanning the restaurant’s oceanfront side.

  The tables were, predictably, filled with several out-of-town real estate types. With so many patrons sporting casual business attire and numerous leather-bound portfolios scattered about, the occasional tourists mixed into the crowd looked almost out of place.