Afoot on St. Croix (Mystery in the Islands) (21 page)

Into the Jungle

CHARLIE MARCHED NORTH
along the shoreline road, quickly reaching the outskirts of Frederiksted. He kept to the shoulder on a path of gravel and dirt, the finer particulates of which caked his boots before drying and falling away, leaving a dusty brown residue.

A couple of shabby beach bars lined the seafront, each one surrounded by several rotting plastic chairs, most of them upended. Discarded beer bottles and other random pieces of refuse lay strewn about the weedy stretch of sand, an uninviting entrance that discouraged all but the most intrepid bar patrons.

Past a couple of boarded-up cinderblocks, the road ventured into a desolate no-man’s land. An endless expanse of blue water took up the space to Charlie’s left; the dense greenery of the wild interior filled in the right. An increasingly dark, brooding cloud mass swirled above.

About half a mile out of town, Charlie veered inland on the mahogany-lined road he’d seen from Umberto’s boat. His combat boots steadily drying, he left behind the sea and braced himself for the murky unknown awaiting him inside the jungle.

•

A NUMBER OF
vehicles drove by as Charlie plodded along in the shade of the mahoganies. Each transport was loaded with passengers for the festivities at the plantation down the road.

He found himself looking up at each passing car, bus, or van, wondering if one of the faces peering out the side windows belonged to his daughter.

She’d been a young girl when he’d last seen her. Physical features changed so dramatically as children grew older, he hardly knew what he was looking for. He couldn’t help but wonder if he would be able to recognize her.

Even worse, he worried, what if she didn’t recognize him?

Given the steady flow of traffic on this otherwise lightly traveled road, the event was going to be jam-packed. How would they ever find one another in a crowd of people?

With a sigh, he continued on, resolute despite his growing list of concerns.

It felt like he had been waiting an eternity for this moment, for an opportunity like this to arise.

He would know soon enough if it was yet another hoax.

As a boisterous school bus rumbled past, he tried to be optimistic.

“I just hope I don’t end up wearing another green dress.”

•

TEN MINUTES LATER,
the road began a series of sweeping turns, leaving behind the tall mahoganies. With the landscape barrier removed, the jungle closed in on the pavement, pushing Charlie closer to the lane of traffic.

After a few near collisions and several surprised honks, Charlie rounded a corner and found himself within sight of the entrance to the Danish estate. The turn-in was marked with colorful balloons, flags, and several brightly painted banners.

A line of school busses waited with other cars to enter the already filled parking lot. Harried volunteers worked to direct the newcomers into an empty field that was accommodating the overflow.

Hiking up the hill into the estate, Charlie quickly found himself immersed in a festival atmosphere. There were politicians in suits, Danes in tropical linen, and young children dressed in costumes designed for an upcoming performance of traditional dance. He would have suffered from sensory overload, even if he weren’t trying to pick out his daughter from the mix.

He stopped to stare at a group of teenage girls wearing blue-and-white school uniforms. Several of them had light skin and dark brown hair, but as he studied each face, none struck him as familiar. But then again, he couldn’t be sure. It was an impossible task, he thought grimly.

A sturdy West Indian woman noticed him lurking near the girls and gave him a stern stare.

Charlie shrugged sheepishly. “I’m looking for my daughter.”

“What does she look like?” she asked suspiciously.

“I wish I knew.”

•

WITH THE CROWDS
milling about him, Charlie pulled the note from his pocket. Once more, he scanned the pink handwriting. His daughter had given him no instructions about how they were to meet up once he arrived at the Transfer Day celebrations.

After listing the address to the Danish plantation, she’d ended the letter in a simple sign-off.

“Hope to see you soon. Love, Jessie.”

Missing

“JESSIE!”

For the second day in a row, Mira found herself calling out for a missing child.

After packing her own suitcase, she had decided to make the rounds to check on her children’s progress. She stood at the entrance to her oldest daughter’s bedroom, peering inside.

There was no sign of Jessie—or for that matter, any ready-to-go luggage—but the window by the bed stood suspiciously open.

“Jessie!” Mira tried again, half hoping the teenager would step from the closet or pop out from behind the door.

There was no answer. The room was disturbingly still.

Sighing tensely, Mira slid across the unmade bed and stuck her head through the window. In the dirt five feet below, she spied the unmistakable imprints of Jessie-sized footprints. The bushes closest to the house had a few broken branches, creating a narrow trail leading into the forest that surrounded the gated subdivision.

“Jessie!” she called once more, but this time she didn’t expect a response.

Mira pulled herself back inside the house. Grabbing a pillow from the bed, she threw it across the room in frustration.

Her oldest daughter had run off to find her father—again.

•

JUMPING UP FROM
the bed, Mira paced back and forth across the room, trying to figure out where Jessie might have gone.

She glanced at her watch. It was almost ten o’clock. The day’s first seaplane had already departed. Charlie should be well on his way to St. Thomas by now.

“Good riddance to him,” Mira muttered as she began searching the room for a clue to her daughter’s whereabouts.

She quickly rummaged through the piles of clothing in the bottom of the closet as well as the various boxes and books stuffed beneath the bed. Then she shifted her attention to her daughter’s white-painted dresser. The furniture’s flat top was covered with an assortment of accessories and trinkets. There were hair ribbons, barrettes, little plastic figurines, and, hidden beneath a package of envelopes, a pad of pink paper.

Mira scanned through the items, dismissing each one until she reached the stationery. Fishing the pad of paper out of the stack, she held it up to her face, tilting it to look across the paper’s horizontal surface.

She could just make out the impressions left from a ballpoint pen, which had pressed through from the (now missing) sheets above.

Ripping off the paper, Mira returned to the window. She leaned across the bed to place it in a ray of direct sunlight and squinted at the writing.

The bulk of the text was indecipherable, with press-throughs from previous letters commingling on the page, but the first line had been written on a previously clear space. The words confirmed her suspicions.

“Dear Charlie Baker . . .”

Mira wadded up the paper and tossed it on the floor next to the pillow.

“I should have never let that girl out of my sight.”

•

MIRA RACED ACROSS
the hallway and banged on the closed door to her older son’s room, desperately hoping he hadn’t left with his sister. She was fairly certain Jessie hadn’t shared her father-finding mission with her brother; the two weren’t very close and rarely spent time together. Nevertheless, she let out a sigh of relief when she heard her son’s distinctive shuffle approaching on the tile floor.

A moment later, the door swung open to reveal a teenage boy, a few years younger than his eldest sibling. Short and scruffy, a baseball cap covered his dark brown hair, which he wore in a long cut, the bulk of it tied back in a ponytail at the nape of his neck.

Mira tried to ignore the similarities, but she couldn’t help thinking that he looked more and more like his father every day.

Yawning, the boy held up a small duffel bag, as if anticipating a question about whether or not he was packed for the trip.

“That’s all you’re taking?” she asked, incredulous. “We won’t be back”—she cleared her throat and added the false clarification—“for a very long time.”

He shrugged. Since turning twelve, this had become his most frequent response to questions. He had been mute so long, Mira had almost forgotten the sound of his voice.

“Jack, have you seen Jessie?”

He gave her another silent shrug.

“Did you see her leave?”

He moved his shoulders in an emotive half shrug, as if to say that he couldn’t be held responsible for his sister’s wanderings.

“Do you know where she went?”

This time, all she received was a blank stare.

“All right. Well, be ready to go in . . .”

She stopped speaking as he turned and shut the door.

•

TEENAGERS WERE EVEN
more difficult to deal with than ex-husbands, Mira thought wearily. At this moment, she was in no position to order a grounding or any other punishment—and she suspected her son knew it.

It was going to be far more difficult to leave her second husband than it had been the first.

As she walked down the hallway to the bedroom shared by her two youngest offspring, she sucked in a deep breath, trying to steady her nerves. The taxi van would be here in two hours to take them to Christiansted, where they would be catching the afternoon seaplane to St. Thomas. She would check in on Elena and Hassan and then figure out how to corral Jessie.

The door to the first room on the long hallway was slightly ajar. As she neared, Mira could hear playful shrieks and giggles emanating from within. Those sounds, combined with the telltale crunch of bedsprings, indicated that this pair might need some assistance getting their things together.

She had no idea how much assistance.

As Mira pushed open the door, a flying shirt hit her square across the face.

Once she’d cleared her vision and taken a look at the scene inside the room, she let loose a full-throated howl.

Jessie

MIRA’S OLDEST DAUGHTER
drove her moped onto the grounds of the refurbished Danish estate, weaving around the cars waiting at the entrance. Following the pointing directions of a frazzled Transfer Day volunteer, she motored to a stop beneath a tree next to several other two-wheeled vehicles.

Jessie pulled the key from the ignition and gazed down at her machine. None of the others in the parking lineup, she thought proudly, was as lovingly restored as hers.

She’d taken on the project all by herself. A mechanic down the street from the family’s villa had kindly loaned her the necessary tools. Secondhand manuals and instructional videos from the school library had provided technical guidance. Using those resources and her own ingenuity, she’d rebuilt the moped’s engine on her own.

The gas-powered bike had proved to be an invaluable resource during her frequent late-night outings through her bedroom window and, more recently, in her efforts to track down her father and lure him to St. Croix.

Jessie gave the worn leather seat a soft pat as she joined the other Transfer Day arrivals in the walk up the hill toward the estate house.

The childhood keepsakes she’d left behind in her room that morning had given her only momentary pause. She had discarded those items without worry or concern.

It would be far tougher to ever part with her beloved bike.

•

TWIRLING THE MOPED
keys in her hand, Jessie wandered toward the main event area. A series of white tents had been pitched in the grassy lawn in front of the estate house, creating shade from the sun or, more likely, given the dark clouds moving in, protection from the coming rain.

Volunteers unloaded metal chairs from a trailer and unfolded them beneath the tents. A wooden podium had been rolled to the front of the covered seating space; a microphone mounted to the podium was in the process of being connected to a series of speakers.

At the opposite end of the lawn, just below the rise of the hill, still more volunteers were setting up for the post-ceremony lunch. Workers hefted metal pans out of transport vans and arranged the food trays on brackets that allowed for tiny Sterno burners to be slid underneath.

The lunch prep had been positioned out of the direct line of sight of the ceremony seating, but the fragrant smell of numerous home-cooked West Indian dishes floated across the lawn. Only a strong westward wind would keep the tempting odor from tormenting the audience through the morning’s political speeches.

•

IN BETWEEN THESE
two end posts, Jessie mingled with the growing Transfer Day crowds, searching for Charlie Baker.

A few months ago, she’d had only a blurry mental image of her father, unreliable for purposes of picking him out of such a packed group of people. Recently, however, she had tracked down a photo of him in the online records of an island newspaper. As part of a series of stories on St. John’s construction boom, a local journalist had written an article featuring one of Charlie’s work sites. The piece was a few years old, but the accompanying black-and-white picture had clarified Jessie’s childhood recollections.

As she sifted through the colorful sea of faces outside the plantation’s estate house, she knew exactly for whom she was looking—an advantage that she had carefully maintained over her father.

His last image of her was as a five-year-old girl.

In her note to Charlie, Jessie had intentionally left out any details about her current physical description or how they were to connect with one another at the Transfer Day celebrations. She wanted to leave herself plenty of maneuvering room should she decide to bail at the last minute.

Her father was an unknown entity, of whom she had only distant memories—most of them involving key lime pie.

She grinned to herself. The frozen dish at the diner on the boardwalk was still her favorite dessert.

Nevertheless, the fast-melting concoction didn’t provide the type of foundation upon which to build a tower of trust.

•

GROWING UP, JESSIE
had spent a great deal of time wondering what had become of her biological father. His abrupt departure from her life had left her with innumerable, often troubling questions. She would lay awake at night, trying to make sense of his sudden exit—as well as his continued absence.

She pursued the issue with her mother, but Mira’s vague and misleading answers did little to quash her daughter’s growing curiosity.

So, like the moped engine, Jessie had taken it upon herself to investigate the matter.

•

THINKING BACK TO
her childhood, before she was old enough to attend the community school, Jessie remembered that she and her brother had often accompanied their mother on trips to the Christiansted post office.

In each instance, Mira would enter the post office and walk down a wall filled with rows of tiny metal doors until she reached one at the end of the bottom row. Using a key from her purse, she would open the door to access a long narrow box.

Mira would then remove a packet, which she would immediately open and, upon checking the contents—Jessie recalled this part distinctly—smile serenely.

After the post office stop, her mother would usher the group around the corner to a Christiansted bank. There, Mira removed a check from the packet and deposited it with one of the clerks.

Jessie had puzzled, in particular, over this second detail. Why would her mother choose to do business with a bank in town—and not with the financial institution set up by the Muslim community, where her stepfather served on the board of directors and where each of the children eventually registered individual savings accounts for their weekly allowance and other odd job earnings?

Her mother, Jessie eventually concluded, had a secret bank account that her stepfather likely knew nothing about.