Adrift on St. John (9 page)

Wincing in anticipation, I pulled open the door and released the interior’s icy blast. My breath began to crystallize
within my chest, and an icicle, I felt certain, was forming off the tip of my nose. Shivering, I hustled inside.

The administrative suite was the central hub of the resort’s business activities. It occupied a large room that had been partitioned with five-foot-high prefab walls into a half dozen office cubicles. Within each cell sat one or more of Vivian’s busy worker bees, tapping away at their computer keyboards, speaking softly into their telephone headsets, or otherwise performing the essential functions that kept the resort running smoothly.

The office buzz fell silent as I slipped behind the cloth wall that demarcated Vivian’s corner space. A few heads poked up over the top of the dividers, watching suspiciously as I slid into the seat behind her desk.

“I…uh…just need to check on something,” I offered with an awkward shrug.

There was no use trying to disguise my actions. These were all Vivian’s people—local hires who reported to her directly. She would be informed of my visit as soon as I was out of earshot. Likely, several of them were texting her my whereabouts that very instant.

The chair groaned as I swiveled around to survey the surface of the desk. Per Vivian’s exacting standards, everything on her workstation was laid out in a neat and tidy arrangement: a pair of pens lay precisely placed in parallel with the stapler, while a stack of paperwork sat center stage, waiting to be processed.

I paused to admire a photo of her six-year-old son, Hamilton, displayed at a forty-five-degree angle on the desk’s far left side. There wasn’t a speck of dust on the frame; it looked as if it had been polished that very morning.

The first numbing pricks of frostbite brought me back to the purpose of my visit, and I turned my attention to the drawer where Vivian kept the resort’s confidential personnel files. After plucking a bobby pin from a small plastic
kiosk sitting on a nearby bookcase, I unfolded it and fed it into the keyhole.

“Not my first time performing this maneuver,” I muttered to myself as still more obvious stares emerged over the top of the cubicles.

Gently, I twisted the slender metal rod, searching the interior of the lock for its tumbler. After a quick toggle of the bobby pin, there was a slight releasing
click
of moving metal, and the drawer rolled open.

One of the onlookers picked up a telephone receiver and began to dial as I blew a warming breath on my fingers and started thumbing through the files.

The interior of the desk was as precisely ordered as the top. It took only a few seconds to find the paper tab labeled with the hand-printed name “Sheridan, Hannah.” I pulled the folder out of the drawer and eagerly flipped it open.

My loud sigh of disappointment reached all of the room’s listening ears.

The folder was completely empty.

On the opposite side of Vivian’s frost-covered window, the resort’s maintenance activities were proceeding through their regular daily schedule. Across the lawn from the administrative building, a group of dark-skinned men crouched beneath a row of bushes, trimming and weeding the shrubbery.

The resort’s ground crew had been at it since daybreak; this was their fifth targeted location of the morning. They had started the shift with vigor and enthusiasm, but as the sun rose and the muggy heat intensified, their movements had grown more and more languid. There was only so much fight the human body could put up against such an oppressive environment.

At last, the group’s leader stood and waived his hand in a circle over his head, signaling the end of the pruning session. Manto began loading the gardening tools onto the
short bed of a modified golf cart while his men reached for their water bottles. There was still more to do—there was always more to do—but it would soon be too hot to continue.

Manto and his ground crew waged a never-ending battle against the encroaching jungle that surrounded the resort. The front lines pitted the men’s rusty metal shears against a dense foliage of invading tendrils whose reaching grasp could progress several inches over the course of a single day. The vegetation resumed its guerrilla assault the moment the men packed up their gear.

One day, Manto thought wearily, the jungle would be victorious.

He wiped the cleanest section of his shirt across his eyes and mouth. A grimy layer of the island’s black volcanic earth covered his skin and clothing. His feet steamed inside his floppy oversized boots; his arms ached from the constant hacking motion of the hoe.

Manto reached for the throbbing muscles at the small of his back as he glanced across the field at the fogged glass on the first floor of the administrative building. Despite his aches and pains, the sight of the resort’s head manager seated in the chair behind Vivian’s desk caused him to momentarily forget his exhaustion.

“Hmm,” he mused curiously as he reached a grubby finger up to the flat round of his nose and tapped its smushed center.

Vivian had stomped past the ground crew half an hour earlier. She’d been in an unusually foul mood, even by her standards. Presumably, it was the young woman bouncing along beside Vivian that had soured her demeanor—the girl in the spinning sundress had been asking a lot of questions about the resort.

In response to Manto’s raised eyebrows, Vivian had jerked her head at the girl and spit out a curt one-word explanation.

“Peen-ello-pee.”

Manto’s brown face creased into a broad smile. He ran his tongue across the top row of his ragged yellow teeth.
The cheery plump of his cheeks pillowed out over the flat skin above his mouth.

He shook his head as Pen jimmied the lock on the filing cabinet-sized drawer beneath Vivian’s desk.

“Pin, Pin, Pin,”
he rumbled into a loud guffaw.
“Viv iz nut goin’ to bey happ-ee about dis.”

The two women were constantly spatting at each other, and Manto loved to egg them on. Their daily fights provided endless fodder for the resort’s numerous gossiping tongues. He took a mental note to ask Vivian about Pen’s unauthorized pillaging of her desk—that would be sure to provoke an entertaining reaction.

Then, he directed his attention to the nearest palm tree and the cluster of plump coconuts tucked beneath the crown of fronds at its top.

He motioned to one of his workers. The man immediately stripped off his shirt and shoes, tucked a machete into the hem of his pants, and began scaling up the tree’s ribbed trunk.

Manto watched anxiously as his worker clung precariously to the tree, thirty feet or so above the ground. He wasn’t sure which was more dangerous: the threat of coconuts falling on unsuspecting guests or the risk a machete-whacking worker might accidentally cut off a limb.

“Aye!”
he called up with concern.
“Wach’ ya-self up there.”

The man waved the machete in casual acknowledgement.

“Hmm.” Manto’s calloused hands gripped nervously at the slight paunch that had begun to thicken his aging waistline. The wrinkled lines etched across his forehead deepened with worry.

Thwack. Thwack. Thwack.

A coconut sprang loose from the cluster and dropped slowly through the air, hitting the grass below with a loud
thump
.

Yawning, Manto glanced down at his watch. As soon as this grove was de-nutted, he would be off for a quick shower and a change of clothing. His afternoons and evenings he
spent driving one of the island’s many truck taxis. His wages supported an extended family that included numerous grandchildren. Even working double shifts, he found it difficult to make ends meet.

Another coconut bounced across the lawn as Manto turned to stare up at the sky. It was clear and blue at the moment, but he detected a slight change in the atmosphere’s stagnant swelter.

He’d lived in the Virgins all his life; these islands were in his blood. After seventy years, he knew every culvert, cove, and crumbling stone ruin. The feeling in his bones was a far more accurate predictor than all the fancy radar equipment used by the weatherman on St. Thomas. A heavy brooding storm was gathering in the Atlantic, somewhere off the west coast of Africa, soaking up energy and moisture that it would later dump on the Lesser Antilles.

“Storm’s komin’,”
a scratchy voice whispered in his ear.
“A week hout, mey-bey two.”

With a start, Manto turned to face the frail, bony woman who had sneaked up behind him.

She wore a loose-hanging cotton jumper, the official uniform for the resort’s large cadre of housecleaners. Her skinny legs poked out from beneath the garment, feeding into rubber-soled sandals that were as oversized as her dress.

Manto had known Beulah Shah his entire life, ever since they were both small children squirming in the pews at the local Moravian church. Even when Beulah was a little girl, she’d had an unnerving knack for suddenly appearing out of nowhere, noiselessly and without notice.

She leaned toward him, her wizened face unsettlingly close to his. A stale breath oozed out of her nearly toothless mouth.

“Yes, ma’am,
” Manto replied, gulping as he nodded in agreement with her weather assessment.
“I kin’ feel it too.”

Beulah stared, trancelike, into his brown eyes; then her gaze swept across his sweaty shirt, narrowing in on his throat.

Manto felt his chest constricting, the air stagnating within
his lungs. It was as if she were looking right through his skin, visually clamping off his breathing capacity. After a long moment, he managed to clear his throat and took a wide step backward onto the lawn.

Beulah gave him an odd, spooky smile; then she tottered off down the walk toward the administrative building.

Manto’s eyes followed her frail figure as she crept up to the window beside Vivian’s cubicle. Pen had already vacated the administrative suite, but it appeared something on Vivian’s desk had caught Beulah’s interest.

Manto watched as the old woman pushed up on her tiptoes and pressed her forehead against the glass. He shivered with involuntary apprehension as he wondered what Beulah was up to—before jumping briskly to the side to dodge an incoming coconut.

9

I returned to my office a few hours later with a boxed sandwich from the food kiosk by the pool, still none the wiser about how the recently arrived Hannah Sheridan had found her way into the resort’s employment. I’d left the empty file laid open on Vivian’s desk, a pointed question I felt certain she would understand as soon as she returned to the administrative suite. For the moment, there was nothing left to do but resume my daily routine.

I grabbed the contents of my inbox from the side of my desk and set up camp on the shaded balcony outside my office. After plopping down into a plastic recliner (one I’d “borrowed” several years ago from the pool area), I poured myself a generous shot of rum and offered a toast to Fred, an iguana who spent most of his afternoons in the treetops just beyond my balcony’s railing.

“Alley-oop and down the hatch,” I called into the greenery.

It sometimes took ten minutes or more of searching through the dense foliage before Fred’s long lizard shape jumped out at me from the leafy maze of tree limbs. Once spotted, however, his leathery green body was impossible to ignore.

A ruffling of spines rose like a crown from the top curve
of Fred’s neck and extended along the sharp ridge of his back. The rounded plump of his belly was decorated on either side with swirling circles of lighter and darker shades of green, a color combination that continued into alternating stripes on his tail. A sprinkling of shiny purplish nodules rose up through the skin beneath his stiff shoulders, adorning his chest like medals of honor. When a direct ray of light reflected off his coat, the surface shimmered like an armored chain-mail suit.

He turned his head to look me as I issued the toast. The frozen contours of his angular face transmitted a dignified, regal expression. He was really quite beautiful—for a giant scaly lizard.

Beyond his rugged good looks, Fred, I’d found, was an excellent listener. I sought his counsel on a regular basis. He took his time forming his opinions, but his judgments, once given, were unassailably sound in their logic and reasoning.