Afoot on St. Croix (Mystery in the Islands) (7 page)

An Eerie Intuition

ABOUT A HUNDRED
yards off the Christiansted boardwalk, a woman in a black cloak and headscarf walked down the narrow hallway on the top attic level of the Comanche Hotel. The green high-heeled shoes on her feet tapped lightly against the wooden floor as she entered room seventeen, turned, and locked the door behind her.

With her two youngest children secured in the hotel’s second-floor office, playing under the watchful eye of their babysitter, the woman had plenty of time to take care of the afternoon’s business, collect her kids, and get back home before her husband returned from work. If everything went according to plan, he need never know that she’d been to Christiansted that day—much less with whom she’d been meeting.

After flicking the wall switch for the ceiling fan, the woman circled the room’s perimeter, opening the windows on the two exterior walls. The meager cross breeze added little ventilation to the stuffy room, but she didn’t mind the heat. She had specifically requested this unit knowing it was likely to be warm.

She’d chosen this location for its quiet isolation from the rest of the hotel, which was, in any event, only partly occupied. Despite the Comanche’s unique historical niche, it had a tough time competing with the other boardwalk-area hotels for the island’s dwindling numbers of tourists.

Dusting her hands together, the woman approached a wooden wardrobe pushed against the tallest interior wall. She pulled open the swinging doors of the wardrobe’s upper compartment, unhooked her cloak, and hung it inside. Untying her scarf, she looped it over the bar of another hanger. Then she closed the doors, pressing the slats to hook the inner latch.

Smoothing out the length of her tailored green dress, the woman turned to check her reflection in a decorative wall-mounted mirror. Pivoting, she tugged at the tight-fitting silk fabric to pull the seams into alignment.

Satisfied with the dress adjustments, she shifted her attention to her makeup. Stepping into the bathroom, she removed several small containers from her purse and set them on the edge of the sink. After dotting her nose and cheeks with powder, she used an eyeliner pen to expertly trace the contours of her lids. Next came the lipstick, which she rolled slowly around the edge of her mouth, coating the surface with a deep-red paste. As a final touch, she picked up a small glass vial shaped in a seashell design and spritzed a fine mist of perfume against her neck and wrists.

The woman gazed at her reflection and nodded with approval before reflexively arching her eyebrows. She’d forgotten one important item.

Reaching back into her purse, she fished out a foil-wrapped pack of breath mints. She popped a disc onto her tongue and swirled it around, waiting for the sharp wintergreen flavor to mask the residual nicotine from her earlier smoke in the courtyard.

Charlie, she remembered, had always hated the smell of cigarettes on her breath.

•

STROLLING INTO THE
bedroom, the woman reached behind her head and unclasped a pin that had been holding her hair up in a bun. She shook her head, sending a honey-brown mane cascading down past her shoulders. After a few smoothing strokes with her brush, she gathered her hair into a looser knot and reattached the clip. She gave the hairdo a quick check in the mirror, pulling out a few wispy strands around her forehead for seductive effect.

There, she thought, pleased with her appearance. I’m ready.

•

WITH A SIGH,
the woman moved to take a seat on the bed. But as she crossed the room, she felt a slight breeze whisper against the back of her neck.

She froze in place, struck by an unexpected shudder.

Goose bumps prickled her skin as an odd sensation swept over her psyche, a sudden inkling that something in her world had just been knocked off kilter. Somehow, her life’s neat, rigid order had been thrown into disarray.

Perplexed, she paced a slow circle through the room, her green heels clicking on the floor’s wooden planks.

“It’s nothing,” she said, trying to calm her nerves.

There were dozens of routine explanations for the errant breeze: the ceiling fan, the open windows, perhaps there was a hidden vent in the ceiling—anything could have caused the airflow disturbance.

But even as she tried to rationalize away her unease, she knew her apprehension was about more than a vagrant puff of wind.

She couldn’t shake the eerie intuition that a figure from her past had just arrived on the island.

Someone other than her troublesome ex-husband.

Adam Rock

A SHORT DISTANCE
away, on the second floor of the coral-pink hotel, Adam Rock rolled his suitcase along a humid corridor, searching the numbered doors for his assigned room.

Rock dabbed a handkerchief across his sweating brow. The air in the hallway was not much cooler than that outside the building. As he weaved from left to right, peering at the marked doorways, he carried on a one-sided conversation with the hotel’s manager.

“Let me install just one of my machines,” he muttered wearily. “You’ll see. You won’t be able to pry your guests away from it. You can charge extra for the room. We’ll call it the Refrigerator Suite.”

Breathing heavily, he paused outside a corner unit and checked the number hanging from the entrance.

“This is it,” he said gratefully. Heat exhaustion had drained all his energy. He felt as if he couldn’t have walked another step.

Rock slid his key into the slot and turned the knob, eagerly anticipating a refreshing chill on his sweat-soaked cheeks. He pushed open the door and leaned into the room, hoping for a blast of cool air.

He was sorely disappointed. The room was hotter than the hallway.

Pulling his suitcase inside, Rock glared despondently at the silent air-conditioning unit mounted on the wall beneath the room’s corner window. After a quick scan of the machine’s exterior, he flipped open the control panel and began fiddling with the dials and switches, to no avail.

“Come on, please,” he begged. “Give a guy a break.”

Rock knelt to the floor. Twisting his neck, he tried to see through a gap in the machine’s underside framing, but even from that angle, it was impossible for him to determine what had disabled the interior components.

As a last resort, he pulled the electrical plug from the wall, counted to ten, and then reinserted the plug into its socket.

There was no response. It seemed nothing could wake the machine.

Frustrated, Rock slammed his hand against the metal facing.

“Worthless piece of junk.”

Just then, a slight hum began to rattle from deep inside the cooling unit.

•

WITH THE TEMPERATURE
in the room slowly beginning to drop, Adam Rock set his roll-around luggage on a chair, unzipped the main compartment, and propped open the lid. He removed a pair of neatly pressed chinos, a mint-green golf shirt, and a clean pair of socks. Carefully, he laid the clean clothing on the edge of the bed.

Unhooking a few more notches on his shirt collar, he wandered into the bathroom. He grinned at his reflection in the mirror, his face boyish despite the fringe of gray, before turning on the sink faucet and ducking his head beneath a stream of cold water.

Feeling semi-refreshed, Rock returned to the bedroom. He took a seat on the corner of the bed and gently untied the laces of his dress shoes. Swinging his right foot up onto his left knee, he pulled off the shoe and then the sweaty sock.

“Ahh.” He sighed with relief, wiggling his toes.

The air conditioner was finally starting to kick in. The system generated far more noise than air, but at this point, even the faint whisper of a cooling breeze received a joyful welcome.

Dropping his bare foot to the carpet, Rock lifted his left leg and began to remove its lower coverings. After a few jerks and wiggles, the shoe popped off and dropped to the floor. With his fingers, he pushed the sock’s upper hem down toward his ankle, exposing the top of a stiff skin-colored prosthetic. A few more tugs revealed the full shape of a plastic foot.

Rock slid the cuff of his slacks up toward his knee in order to better access his leg’s junction with the artificial limb. Grunting and groaning, he unhooked the straps and buckles of a large brace. Once the fittings began to loosen, he firmly gripped the false foot and rotated it sideways until, with a sucking
pop
, it released from his body.

Rock let out a second sigh of relief as he held the stump of his left leg up to the air vent.

“That’s much better,” he said, collapsing backward onto the bedspread.

Closing his eyes, he positioned his lower appendages to receive the full force of the anemic air vent: the regular human foot and the stump, which terminated in a hard circular structure that had been hidden by the prosthetic—a cloven two-toed piece of keratin in the shape of a goat’s hoof.

The Thanksgiving Surprise

CHARLIE BAKER CONTINUED
his slow, increasingly anxious pace down the boardwalk toward the sugar mill bar. A few feet from the bar’s round coral stone tower, he stepped off the boardwalk and onto the path that led to the Comanche Hotel.

Staring across the gravel courtyard, he straightened his cap and thunked his thumb against the brim.

If she stayed true to her word—a big if, in Charlie’s view—Mira would be waiting for him in a room on the hotel’s top floor. He could only hope that, this time, she had brought the children with her.

After ten years of minimal interaction, he was about to have his third meeting with Mira in under six months. The first had taken place the previous Thanksgiving, the second earlier that spring. Both instances had ended disastrously—for Charlie anyway.

He had dim hopes for today’s rendezvous. If this encounter didn’t go well, he was not inclined to make himself available for a fourth.

Charlie walked over to a nearby picnic table and pulled out his return plane ticket. The paper’s top edge was crumpled from his constant fiddling. He had a seat reserved on the first flight back to St. Thomas the following morning. From there, he would take the ferry over to St. John and be home by early afternoon.

Soon, this would all be over. He would finally be able to put this sad chapter of his life behind him.

He gave the front end of his baseball cap another reassuring
thwack
.

At least, that was his plan. Where Mira was concerned, he’d learned to expect the unexpected.

• • •

IT HAD STARTED
out so promising, the recent thaw in their relations.

The first contact had come in the form of a phone call. After all their time apart, it had taken Charlie several seconds to process the identity of the woman on the other end of the line. The number was blocked, and her voice hadn’t immediately registered—the stranger had sounded only distantly familiar.

Would he like to meet up with her and the kids on St. Croix for the Thanksgiving holiday week, she’d asked pleasantly.

“Mira?” he’d replied incredulously. “Is that you?”

“Yes, Charlie, of course it’s me.”

He was completely thrown by the request. She’d spoken as if they had the type of healthy relationship common to many divorced couples, the kind in which the parental exchange of children happened routinely and without much hassle or difficulty.

He let out a short cough, trying to clear his head. There was something odd about Mira’s voice. He couldn’t quite put his finger on it. The pitch seemed a little off. But as she repeated the question, he quickly dismissed his concerns.

“Ab . . . absolutely,” he’d stuttered in disbelief. “That . . . that would be wonderful.”

The kids, he’d thought with elation. I’m finally going to see the kids.

•

MIRA COULD NOT
have thrown out a more tempting lure. The severed relationship with his children was Charlie’s greatest regret, his life’s unending shame.

In the ten years since Mira’s departure, his only exchanges with his ex-wife had been through tersely written letters and, more recently, the occasional e-mail. In that correspondence, the child-custody arrangement was the only matter they had discussed.

Charlie had soon regretted his quick signing of the divorce settlement. The terms severely limited his ability to negotiate for access to the children, and Mira had made it clear he was not allowed to communicate with them by phone. It was a detached, sparing relationship, one that held him apart, firmly at a distance.

Up until her recent Thanksgiving offer, Mira had steadfastly refused to bring the kids back to the Caribbean. The onus was on Charlie to travel up to the States to see them.

And therein lay his complicity in the deplorable matter.

Perhaps it was an inherent reluctance to return to his hometown or the fear of the difficulties he might encounter once he got there, but despite purchasing several airline tickets to Minnesota over the course of the past decade, Charlie had never managed to board a departing plane.

Some excuse, it seemed, always got in the way. Construction emergencies cropped up at the last minute; inclement weather generated a string of flight cancelations; or a perfect day at the beach won out over twelve hours in a cramped airplane seat.

Eventually, the slew of missed opportunities piled up, higher and higher, until the time lapse itself became an additional, overwhelming impediment.

•

CHARLIE WAS A
failure as a father, and he knew it.

He had heard his friends and neighbors on St. John whisper about his parental shortcomings. It happened in bars, busy restaurants, the grocery store—places where the speakers probably thought the surrounding ambient noise would drown out their voices.

“He’s a nice guy,” the line would go, always followed by the same damning commentary. “But it’s a shame about his kids. He just abandoned them . . .”

In Charlie’s opinion, the situation was far more complicated than that summation implied. To his credit, he had never missed a child support payment. Even when he experienced occasional cash-flow problems, he made sure the check went out, registered mail, in plenty of time to reach Minnesota by the first of each month. Financially speaking, he had checked all the boxes for fatherly responsibility.

But the physical separation was a crime all the same, an unintended and yet wholly foreseeable consequence of his actions—or lack thereof.

For that, he bore the burden of his full share of the guilt.

•

SO, WHILE MIRA’S
invitation to meet up for Thanksgiving had caught Charlie completely off guard, he had immediately jumped at the offer.

After all this time, he’d thought, he would have a chance to make amends.

Of course, he had known the visit might go badly, and that his children, now teenagers, might hate him or, worse, refuse to come at all. In the weeks leading up to that Thanksgiving trip, he had worried nonstop about the holiday get-together: where they would stay, what restaurants he would take them to, what activities would be best suited for the group.

Most of all, he was terrified of how the kids would react in their initial meeting.

Charlie had no idea what he was in for.

He’d been totally unprepared for the ambush that took place.

•

“SANTA CRUZ,” CHARLIE
muttered bitterly as he stood in the gravel courtyard, remembering his fateful Thanksgiving adventure on St. Croix.

He glanced down at his cutoff camo shorts, hairy shins, and beat-up combat boots. He was dressed far differently for this journey than the debacle last November.

Gone were the pressed khaki shorts, the crisp white T-shirt, and the new leather sandals he’d purchased in the hopes of making a good impression. He’d ditched those tourist-mimicking clothes in the back of his closet when he’d returned home from the first errant trip to St. Croix.

Today, he’d gone for the familiar comfort of his workingman’s armor. This was not meant to be a cordial visit. He was prepared to do battle.

He gripped the shoulder straps of his backpack, feeling the reassuring weight of the contents he’d packed inside. Gripping the brim of his cap, he shoved it firmly down onto his head. He was focused, alert, and resolute.

This time he was ready for whatever Santa Cruz—or Mira—had to throw at him.