A Whisper of Danger (2 page)

“This has nothing to do with your father!” Tentacles of anger reached up inside her at the memory of that man. “This is about Ahmed Abdullah bin Yusuf, the professor who taught me how to sketch and paint a long time ago when I lived in Tanzania.”

“Oh.” Crestfallen, the boy started swinging the loose end of the vacuum-cleaner hose.

“So, anyway.” Jess tried to resume her gentle revelation of the news. “You were a baby when I started taking lessons from Dr. bin Yusuf in Dar es Salaam. Hannah moved in with us, and she took care of you during the day while I was getting my education. When you were four, we left Africa and moved here to London. After I worked for a couple of years painting greeting cards and calendars, I met James Perrott.”

“Why are you telling me all this stuff? I know James writes Kima the Monkey books, and you illustrate them, and you’re getting ready to start
Kima the Monkey and the Irritable Impala
, and you don’t know where you’re going to find an impala to sketch, and you hope they have one at Regent’s Park Zoo, and—”

“Splinter!” Jess gripped the beam. “I got a letter from a lawyer telling me that my old art teacher got very sick and died and left me his house on Zanzibar Island. I’ve decided to move there.”

The violet eyes blinked. “With me?”

“Of course with you. I wouldn’t leave you here alone. It’s a big, old house. There’s lots of room.”

“Why would your art teacher will you his house? Didn’t he have a wife? Didn’t he have kids?”

“Dr. bin Yusuf didn’t have a family. To tell you the truth, I’m not sure why he left his house to me, Splint. I know I’m his most commercially successful student, and I use a lot of his methods in my paintings. I always admired his work. He thought my technique was strong, too, and he was proud of what I’ve accomplished. But I think his decision to give me the house had something to do with the fact that we became very close when I was his student. In a way, he was like a father to me. Maybe he felt I was the daughter he never had.”

“So what makes you think I want to live in some dead guy’s house in Africa?”

Jess forced down the urge to admonish her son for disrespecting the man she had revered. This wasn’t the time for a lecture. “We’ll have fun in Zanzibar,” she said. “Mama Hannah’s going to move in with us. She’ll keep an eye on you while I paint.”

“Mom, I’m ten years old. I don’t need a babysitter!”

“Mama Hannah’s not a babysitter. She’s like a grandma. You loved her when you were little.”

“A grandma! I don’t need some old lady looking out for me.”

“Hannah’s coming, and that’s settled. You’ll like her, I promise. I’m going to start illustrating the impala book as soon as we get there. James thinks we can work out the details by phone and fax. My editor’s not thrilled with the idea of my moving so far away, but I told her I can paint with more authenticity if I’m living in Africa. An old car comes with the house. I’ll be able to drive you into town to school.”

“School? You mean we’re going to live there forever? Like for the rest of our lives? What about Nick? What about my bed and all my stuff? I don’t want to move to Africa. I like it here.”

“We’ll live right beside the ocean.” She gave her voice the beckoning quality that sometimes worked on him. “White sand. Snorkeling. You’ll be able to swim every day. You can look for shells. You can climb coconut palms.”

“But I don’t want to leave Nick. He’s my best friend.”

“You and Nick can be pen pals.” She leaned over and whispered in his ear. “You can send him letters about your sunken ship.”

“Sunken ship!”

“Dr. bin Yusuf told me about it years ago. There’s supposed to be a wrecked ship near the reef. Sometimes gold coins wash ashore.”

“You mean I might find treasure on the beach?”

“You never know. The main thing is you’ll be breathing fresh air, and you won’t have to go away to boarding school next term like we’d thought. We’ll eat mangoes and bananas every day. We’ll even see real monkeys.”

“Whoa! I gotta tell Nick.” He jumped to the floor, leapt neatly over the ornament shards, and spun around in midair. “When are we going?”

“About a week.”

“Wahoo!” He pumped his fists toward the ceiling and threw back his head. “Zanzibar!”

Tearing off his Aqua-Lung, Splinter raced for the attic door. The football fell to the floor and bounced away with the vacuum-cleaner hose still attached. As she lowered herself to the chair, Jess heard her son’s bare feet pound down the stairs.

She stepped onto the floor and picked her way through the broken ornaments to the attic door. Taking a deep breath, she stepped out onto the landing and shut the door firmly. The past was far behind. The future beckoned.

Zanzibar.

O
NE

Splinter chewed on the cap of his ballpoint pen, working the blue plastic around inside his mouth and flicking the clip in and out like a lizard’s tongue. He had been in Zanzibar only five hours, and already amazing things were happening. He couldn’t wait any longer to write to his buddy Nick back in London.

After smoothing a sheet of lined notebook paper on the café table, he began to write:

Dear Nick,

Africa is awesome. First, you ride for nine hours on an airplane. Every time you push the overhead button, the stewardess comes and brings you a blanket or a pillow or a magazine. You can push the button all you want until your mom makes you stop.

Then your plane lands in a city called Dar es Salaam. It’s nothing like London. You could get lost there, believe me. After your mom calls the police and they find you, you get on a—

“Mom?” Splinter lifted his head. “How do you spell
hydrofoil
?”

“H-y-d . . . oh, honey, just guess.”

Splinter frowned. His mom’s hand was shaking as she stirred her tea. He’d never seen her face so white. The rest of her looked okay, though. She had on a blue blouse, a denim skirt, and a pair of sandals. After the hydrofoil ride, she had brushed her hair. It was bouncing around her chin as usual.

She had told him she had something called jet lag. She said as soon as Hannah came in on the afternoon hydrofoil from Dar es Salaam, they could all go out to the new house, and everything would be better. Splinter shrugged and went back to his letter.

—hydrafol. It’s like a boat with huge metal fins under it that lift the hull when it goes fast. It travels on top of the water from Dar es Salaam to Zanzibar—twenty-two miles. Mom told me not to dangle over the side anymore unless I wanted to become dinner for a shark.

Zanzibar is a very old town with hundreds of winding streets. Africans, Arabs, Indians, and Europeans live here. Mom said the Arabs used to ship slaves, ivory, and gold out of Zanzibar. Now the island people grow cloves. In Zanzibar, you can get even more lost than in Dar es Salaam. Your mom can get lost, too.

After she figures out how to read the map, you might talk her into buying you a lamp just like Aladdin’s, but without the genie. I also got a cool model of a boat called a dhow. You can see the sultan’s palace and the house where David Livingstone used to stay before he went exploring. Mom said to stay close to her, and I know why. We passed a witch doctor’s shop, and we walked down a lane called Suicide Alley. Then we ran into a group of people, and my mom used to know some of them. Right in front of them, she—

“Mom, how do you spell
barf
?” Splinter tapped his pen on the notebook. “You know—upchuck, ralph, spew—”

“Splinter, what are you writing?”

“I’m telling Nick what happened when you got jet lag a few minutes ago.”

His mom blotted her forehead with her napkin. “Maybe it was the hydrofoil. Maybe I was seasick.”

“Lucky thing that guy helped you up off the street.” Splinter chewed on the pen cap for a moment. The man had been awfully nice, he thought, considering the circumstances. Not everybody would mop you up with his own handkerchief and then carry you to a table at an outdoor café where you could rest. Especially not after you tossed your cookies all over his shoes.

Splinter studied his mother as she took a sip of her tea. It wasn’t like her to whack somebody over the head with a camera bag. It seemed a particularly mean thing to do to a guy trying to help you. But that’s what she had done— hauled off and smacked him and then yelled at him to get his hands off her and leave her alone.

She told Splinter it was jet lag. He hoped it wasn’t contagious.

Splinter bent over his letter.

—barfed. Now we are having tea at an outdoor café. I can see a cockroach right by my mom’s foot. This is the most fun I’ve had in a long time. I’m going to like Zanzibar. Write soon.

He signed the letter with the practiced flourish of an artist. At the bottom of the letter he sketched a picture of the model
dhow
he had bought. It had triangular sails and a wooden hull. He couldn’t wait to put it into the ocean and see if it would float.

While his mother sorted through the piles of official papers documenting ownership of the old house, Splint penciled a cartoon of her losing her breakfast. Nick would get a kick out of that.

It turned out to be quite a good drawing. His mom was clutching her stomach and crying out, “Oh! Oh!” in a little balloon beside her head. The man who helped her was bent over, one arm supporting her shoulders. His balloon said, “It’s okay, Jessie. It’s okay.”

Splint frowned. How had the man known his mom’s name? He turned the memory of that moment over in his mind. Very strange. There was some kind of magic here in Zanzibar. He could feel it.

He tore off a clean page and began making a copy of the cartoon to hang in his new bedroom.

Jessica Thornton had never seen a more welcome sight than the small figure of Hannah Wambua waving from the bridge of the hydrofoil late that afternoon. The morning had been an earthly image of hell. She and Splinter had gotten hopelessly lost in the winding alleys of old Zanzibar town. Despite the fact that they were late to the lawyer’s office, Mr. Patel had kept them waiting an hour for the scheduled meeting. The house deed, though official, looked like it came from a Monopoly game. Mr. Patel had hinted at problems that might crop up. Something about the autopsy report and possible litigation from someone who was rumored to be considering contesting Dr. bin Yusuf ’s will.

“Autopsy report?” Jess had queried. “I thought he died of cancer.”

“Not to worry, not to worry!” Mr. Patel had assured her. “Everything will be fine.”

But how could she not worry? As the morning slipped by, things had only gotten worse. Dr. bin Yusuf ’s car had not been parked at the café as promised. The telephone-company supervisor had informed Jess that phone lines did not extend to the part of the island where her house was located. It was too isolated. At the post office, she had learned that her mail would have to go to a box in Zanzibar town. The house was too remote.

Even shopping for supplies had turned into a major endeavor. Groceries, she had discovered, could not be purchased at a single store. Meat came from one tiny shop; vegetables and fruit were stocked in a collection of market stalls. Sundries such as toilet paper, household cleaners, and brooms had to be purchased from a variety of little booths tucked here and there along the winding alleys. Comparison shopping was unheard of, and there was no such thing as a fixed price.

“Is that Mama Hannah?” Splinter asked as the hydrofoil drifted into port. “She’s not very big.”