Afoot on St. Croix (Mystery in the Islands)

by Hale, Rebecca M.

  It would have been just him, Mira, and her four—delicious—children.

  He tapped the pocket that held his wallet, sensing the weight of the ring still tucked inside. He would be putting that gold band back on after all, he thought ruefully.

  Now, he was going to have to do something unpleasant.

  But it was sure to be tasty.

  Mira had always had such delicate, delectable-looking feet.

  ~ 73 ~

  Familiar Footwear

  WITH THE SPEECHES finally completed, the Transfer Day crowds rapidly shifted to the lunch area, forming long lines behind the buffet-style tables that had been set up earlier. The hungry hordes chatted with anticipation, eagerly waiting for their turn at the lineup of heated metal pans.

  But for Charlie Baker, the fragrant West Indian food held no allure. The stomach-churning experience of the earlier boat ride, combined with the disappointment of yet another missed meeting, had completely sapped his appetite.

  He had scoured every inch of the grounds looking for Jessie, closely studying well over a hundred teenage girls, to no avail. He had been scowled at, frowned upon, and outright threatened for his suspicious leering.

  Something had happened to prevent her from coming, or, more likely he thought with chagrin, she had changed her mind.

  Dejected, he walked toward the parking lot.

  •

  NEAR THE PLANTATION’S front entrance, Charlie spied a taxi van that was about to pull out onto the main road. Waving his arms in the air, he chugged down the hill, flagging the driver.

  “Christiansted?” Charlie asked as the man from Nevis rolled down his window.

  “Hop in,” he replied, cheerfully flicking a chicken charm hanging from his rearview mirror.

  Wrenching open the handle for the passenger-side door, Charlie slid the metal panel far enough back on its rusty rollers so that he could climb inside.

  The vehicle already held several riders, including a broad-shouldered man with a familiar round face who made room for Charlie on the front bench seat.

  “Hello, my friend,” the air-conditioner salesman said as Charlie crawled inside and shoved the door shut.

  Blinking to adjust his eyesight, it took Charlie a moment to recognize his seatmate from the seaplane. “Hello again,” he replied after making the connection.

  He nodded a welcome and then wrinkled his nose. A peculiar aroma emanated from the rear seats. Craning his neck to look behind his bench, he found himself face to yellowed, wrinkled face with the old woman from the boardwalk.

  Gedda cracked a toothless smile as Charlie quickly returned his gaze to the front.

  The van drove off down the mahogany-lined road, trailed a short distance away by a dark-haired girl on a moped.

  •

  THIRTY MINUTES LATER, the van pulled into its slot on the King Street straightaway in downtown Christiansted. The last passenger to get in, Charlie was the first one out. After disembarking, he walked around to the driver’s door to pay the fare.

  The man from Nevis leaned out his front window, making sure to flash each payment to the drivers jealously watching from the alley.

  Charlie handed over his contribution and then shuffled to the curb, not sure where to go or what to do next. The rain had temporarily stopped, but he had seen more than enough of the boardwalk’s attractions, particularly, he thought with a shudder, the Danish fort.

  Charlie was about to head back to the Comanche when he noticed the old woman hobbling away from the van. In her left hand, she carried a worn plastic bag.

  His eyes were immediately drawn to a sharp, pointed object sticking out of the bag’s open top—the emerald-green heel of a woman’s shoe.

  “Wait!” Charlie called out, but Gedda only moved faster. Despite her stilted movements, she quickly crossed through the park and set off down the boardwalk.

  Perplexed, Charlie chased after her.

  He was so engrossed in the old woman’s green shoe that he didn’t see the teenage girl parking her moped by the Scale House. Puzzling over her father’s strange behavior, Jessie followed after him and Gedda.

  As Charlie passed the rainbow-decorated diner a few hundred yards later, he similarly failed to observe the three children seated inside eating key lime pie.

  ~ 74 ~

  Treacherous Assistance

  AFTER AN EXHAUSTIVE search, Mira finally left the Comanche’s attic room. Skirting the edge of the second floor balcony, she took a set of exterior stairs down to the front alley. Feeling increasingly desperate, she sped around the corner to the taxi stand.

  She was about to ask the drivers if they’d seen a girl fitting Jessie’s description when she heard a familiar voice in her left ear. Adam Rock’s deep baritone was soothing and yet, at the same time, strangely unnerving.

  “Mira,” he said calmly. “I hope you haven’t had second thoughts.”

  “It’s Jessie,” she replied, spinning around. “She’s run off.” She threw her hands in the air. “I can’t find her.”

  Rock nodded across the park. “I might have seen your daughter heading toward the fort just a few minutes ago. The girl looked like the one in the picture you showed me the other night. She’s about fifteen with short brown hair, right?”

  Mira immediately set off toward the park’s green space. The salesman chugged after her, trying to catch up, as the skies began to darken with the arrival of the second squall.

  By the time they neared the fort’s front gates, splattering drops were smacking against the building’s metal roof.

  Rock listened to the constant, repetitive sound and murmured to himself.

  “Perfect dinner music.”

  •

  MIRA DASHED INTO the fort’s sloping courtyard. The brick surface was quickly growing slick from the rain. A scan of the fenced-off area revealed it to be empty. Shaking her head in frustration, Mira looked back at Rock, who had just staggered inside behind her.

  “Let’s try in there,” he said, pointing toward the pyramid of white-painted steps leading into the main building.

  Mira nodded her agreement, and the duo slipped and slid their way across the incline and up the short flight of stairs into the protection of the central arched hallway.

  Once inside, Mira resumed her search, immediately setting off down the first corridor with Rock closely trailing behind.

  The windows to the interior courtyard were curtained with liquid sheets of rain, leaving the unlit corridor dreary and dark. The dampness seeped inward, coating the stone surfaces with a film of moisture. Everywhere, it seemed, there was the echoing staccato of rain.

  Mira reached the corner of the building, finding no sign of Jessie. She paused in the hallway, trying to decide where to look next. The narrow stairs to the basement dropped down to her left, while the upper holding cells, including the room where Alexander Hamilton’s mother had once been imprisoned, stretched off to her right. She was about to veer toward the latter when Rock stepped beside her.

  He reached into his coat pocket and pulled out a pack of cigarettes he’d purchased a few hours earlier. Still in its protective plastic wrapping, the contents had remained dry. Peeling off the wrapper, he slid out a cigarette and offered it to Mira.

  “Yes, thank you,” she said, smiling weakly as she rolled the slender stick between her fingers.

  Rock dug in his suit pockets and fished out a lighter. “Please, allow me,” he said as she placed the cigarette in her mouth.

  With a round thumb, he flicked the ignition switch and waved the resulting flame beneath the cigarette’s paper end.

  Closing her eyes, Mira sucked air through the lit embers, causing the tip to glow bright red. A sweet scent enveloped her, as if someone had just spritzed her with perfume. The flowery aroma gradually dissipated, replaced by a slow, even tapping sound—Rock’s fingertips dru
mming in time with the raindrops, amplifying the effect.

  A moment later, the cigarette dropped from Mira’s fingers. Her knees buckled beneath her, and she swooned, falling backward.

  Rock caught her in his arms and gently laid her on the floor.

  He gazed down at her feet, encased in the green high-heeled shoes, his eyes honing in on the slender toes peeking out through the opening at the point.

  “Oh, Mira,” he said with a hungry sigh. “You always had such wonderful toes.”

  • • •

  INSIDE THE FIRST floor of the Comanche Hotel, the wooden man sitting behind the reception desk looked up with alarm.

  The clerk rose from his seat, as if he had somehow sensed the ravenous zeal of the beast dismantling his victim inside the Danish fort a short distance away.

  Reaching beneath the counter, he removed a wooden staff, his thick hands wrapping around the pole in a powerful iron grip. Wielding the crude weapon like an axe, he passed through to the alley, pulled the hood of his jacket up over his head, and lumbered off into the rain.

  •

  MINUTES LATER, THE clerk’s heavy footsteps tread up the mahogany-lined path leading to the fort. The wet wind swirled through the leafy canopy, whispering down an unheeded warning.

  Charging through the front gates, he followed the familiar path across the sloping courtyard and up the front steps into the main building. At the end of the central arched corridor, he turned left down the side hallway, his bulging eyes sweeping the stone interior for any sign of the cloven-hoofed creature and his hapless victim.

  An orchestra of dripping water echoed through the dark structure as rivulets of rain ran through the intricate drainage system of gutters and pipes, down to the lower portion of the sea-facing wall where it dumped into the sea.

  The deafening noise roared through the brick courtyard as the clerk turned to leave, his clothing soaked—and his heart aching with sadness.

  His search had turned up nothing but a woman’s green high-heeled shoe.

  ~ 75 ~

  The Reunion

  CHARLIE BAKER TROTTED down the boardwalk, trying to catch up to the old woman and her plastic bag of shoes. Rain began to dump out of the sky, sending a cascade of water running off the front of his baseball cap. Shielding the brim, he increased his pace, but Gedda’s crippled form soon disappeared in the distance.

  As Charlie neared the walkway’s western terminus, the hag was nowhere to be seen.

  Soaked to the skin, he turned a slow circle. His gaze stopped on the empty lot across from the seaplane hangar, where he’d seen the old woman when he arrived on St. Croix the day before. The area was strewn with trash and several damp chickens, but there was no indication of human activity.

  Next door, however, he caught a glimpse of the woman’s rusted-out shopping cart parked by the abandoned nightclub.

  Cautiously advancing on the structure’s concrete shell, Charlie peered through one of the gaping windows. There, in the middle of the dusty floor, lay the old woman’s plastic bag, stuffed with a collection of green high-heeled shoes.

  After looking over his shoulder, Charlie crawled through the window and shuffled over to the bag. Kneeling, he sifted through the contents, removed three identical pairs of shoes, and set them on the ground.

  He selected one from the pile and flipped it over in his hands, studying the sole.

  It was a knockoff, a cheap replica of the expensive pair he’d once found in Mira’s closet. Holding the shoe against his left combat boot for comparison, he confirmed the size was a rough fit for his feet.

  These were the shoes he had woken up wearing after his encounters with his ex-wife—the shoes he had subsequently thrown away in the hotel room trash bin. The hag must have pulled them from the Dumpsters where the Comanche staff deposited their garbage.

  Standing, Charlie reset his baseball cap. He stared down at the heap of women’s footwear, reflecting on the bizarre encounters they represented.

  He’d had his share of wild nights in the Caribbean. He and his fellow expats on St. John had played a number of off-color pranks over the years—but none of those antics had come anywhere close to this.

  Charlie stroked his chin, puzzling. He still couldn’t figure out why, after all this time, Mira had lured him back to Santa Cruz in the first place. Why had she called, out of the blue, to invite him to the Thanksgiving get-together?

  It couldn’t have been just to torture him. It made no sense.

  •

  HE THOUGHT BACK to the second incident, which had occurred a few weeks after the Thanksgiving episode. He’d returned to St. John to attend to his construction business, but as soon as he could take a break, he’d hopped on a flight to St. Croix. He was determined to figure out why Mira had been on the island and how she had managed to render him unconscious and dump him at the fort.

  Not long after the adventurous seaplane landing—the spear fisherman was beginning to ramp up his lobster-hunting activities—Charlie received a phone call from Mira. When Charlie demanded an explanation for their Thanksgiving encounter, she suggested they meet at the Comanche Hotel, where, she promised, she would explain everything.

  The same sequence of events transpired.

  Charlie climbed the four flights of steps, all the way to the top of the building, and entered the stuffy room at the end of the hallway. Inside room seventeen, Mira stood in a green silk dress and the matching shoes—the shoes that had started it all.

  He lobbed outraged questions at his ex-wife as the sweet smell of her perfume swept over him. Her footsteps clicked across the wooden floorboards.

  Tap. Tap. Tap.

  As Mira drew nearer, his vision blurred. The room began to spin, and he struggled to maintain his balance.

  Charlie staggered sideways on the nightclub’s concrete floor. He felt woozy just remembering the experience.

  And then, suddenly, he recalled one more scene from the room at the Comanche.

  He saw Mira’s green-clad figure bending toward him, checking his pulse. Her face neared his, and she whispered something to him.

  Charlie racked his brain. What was she saying?

  His mental image zoomed in on Mira’s red-painted lips as they slowly mouthed the message. An un-interpretable murmur gradually clarified into distinct words.

  “Charlie,” she said softly. “It wasn’t me. I didn’t call you.”

  He pulled out the damp letter from his pants pocket and stared at the smeared pink-ink writing, the realization setting in.

  “Jessie!” he exclaimed.

  Just then, a teenage girl appeared in the doorway. She rushed toward him, tears streaming down her face, arms outstretched.

  “Daddy, it’s me!”

  • • •

  A PAIR OF yellow eyes rose silently over the windowsill. Gedda’s wrinkled face stretched into a gap-toothed smile as she watched the father-daughter reunion.

  ~ 76 ~

  Afoot on St. Croix

  THE RAIN SOAKED the Christiansted boardwalk for several hours, the storm lasting into late afternoon. It was a slow day for tourists, and the brewpub opted to postpone their regular crab race for tomorrow’s sunnier weather.

  Inside the pub’s near-empty eating area, an Italian opera singer waited for his “to go” order of pork chops and French fries. Umberto had just gassed up his boat for a short trip to St. Thomas. He planned to leave, with his two extra passengers, early the following morning.

  •

  THE NEXT DOOR down, at the sugar mill bar, the writer sat beneath the eaves, listening to the bartender mope about his now-former girlfriend. Earlier that day, the sailboat captain had dumped him for a scuba diving instructor.

  “Apparently, this other guy has an apartment with air-conditioning . . .” he moaned despondently.

  •

 
OBLIVIOUS TO THE rain, the salesman strolled past.

  “Never underestimate the importance of proper ventilation and cooling,” Adam Rock mused upon overhearing the bartender’s lament.

  He continued down the boardwalk toward the seaplane hangar, rolling his suitcase behind him. He had a ticket on the day’s last flight out.

  Whistling softly to himself, he strummed his ample belly.

  For the first time in months, he could honestly say that he wasn’t hungry.

  •

  AT THE RAINBOW-DECORATED diner, the chef emerged from the kitchen with the day’s scraps. Hefting his bucket, he marched up the bridge overlooking the lagoon. He swung his bucket over the railing, but the water remained eerily still. The tarpons’ dark shadows circled lethargically, without interest, in the shallows below.

  Peering down through the rain, the chef noticed a faint reddish tinge to the water. And then, in the muddy sand at the bottom of the lagoon, he spied the remnants of a shredded black cloak and a woman’s green high-heeled shoe.

  •

  GEDDA BUMPED ALONG the boardwalk pushing her rusted cart, taking careful note of all these activities.

  Not far from the lagoon, she peered inside the restaurant to where Charlie Baker sat eating a slice of key lime pie at a table with four youngsters, two of them his teenage children.

  At the sound of the incoming seaplane, the old woman turned toward the harbor, watching as the aircraft circled the shoreline, its pilot scanning the water runway for signs of the spear fisherman’s snorkel.

  Her voice cackled into the rain.

  “Children ain’ nuttin but an appetizer.”