A Whisper of Danger (14 page)

Who had murdered Dr. bin Yusuf? As hard as she tried to put it out of her mind, Jess found herself turning the question over and over.

Hunky Wallace might have done it to get access to the shipwreck.

Omar Hafidh might have done it to get Uchungu House for his mother. Or he might have done it in anger when he found out she wasn’t getting the house.

Solomon Mazrui might have done it, though Jess had no idea why.

Or someone else might have done it.

Did it even matter?

Jess knew she could drive herself crazy trying to figure out who had killed her mentor. So she forced her mind to other things and decided to attack the house with a passion. Though she still wasn’t sure how she would pay Miriamu, she assigned the young woman a long list of chores. While she and Miriamu worked at scrubbing, polishing, painting, and arranging, Hannah kept Splint entertained.

Solomon, enigmatic as ever, agreed to cut down the tall weeds around the house’s foundation and to pull down and burn the vines that were creeping up the walls. He said nothing about his experiences with the police. Instead he seemed grateful to have been given something to keep himself occupied. Now and then Jess spotted him hauling huge empty clay pots out of the storage shed near the house or mowing the patch of coarse grass in the front yard or raking the gravel in the drive.

As though he were a cadet and she a drill sergeant, he reported his progress to her several times a day. But the detailed work orders he was fulfilling didn’t come from her. Solomon followed some inner set of plans that demanded accomplishment—as though he had been setting goals for years and had never been allowed to meet them.

He placed clay pots all around the huge verandah, upstairs and down. He lined the walkways with them and set them along the fence by the cliff. Slowly he began to fill each pot with rich soil and ornate tropical plants— bird-of-paradise, split-leaf philodendron, poinsettia, hibiscus. Miriamu told Jess he was taking the plants from secret places on the island where they grew naturally. She said Solomon could make anything grow. Dr. bin Yusuf had kept him so busy restoring Uchungu House, he hadn’t had time to work with his plants. Solomon had not been happy about that.

Unhappy enough to murder his employer? Over plants? In the week following Jess’s visit to Dr. bin Yusuf ’s sister, the police came out to the house three times. They searched, asked questions to which nobody had answers, took a few items for investigation, and went away again. Determined not to stew over the situation, Jess decided to transform the house from a barren set of rooms into a warm and welcoming haven for her family.

She and Miriamu unlocked every door and inventoried the contents of each room. It turned out that Dr. bin Yusuf had not only filled storage rooms with native handicrafts, he had saved every tidbit of art he had ever produced. In the room Solomon had called the library, Jess found rough pencil sketches, lumps of half-molded clay, and stacks of canvases. Some of the canvases revealed completed paintings. Others were unfinished drafts—blocked-out skeletons of works that had never come to fruition.

And the sculptures. She’d had no idea her mentor worked not only in clay and marble but also in wood, metal, even paper. Once again, some of the pieces were beautiful and deserving of a place in the finest gallery. Others looked crude and twisted, as though Dr. bin Yusuf ’s dreams had turned into nightmares.

Near the small gas-powered refrigerator in the kitchen, Jess tacked up lists of her own dreams for each section of the house. New cushions for the chairs. Tablecloths. Curtains. A sofa. A rack for sweaters and hats. An outdoor shower to rinse off sand and seawater. More shelves in every room. Electricity. And a telephone. Definitely a phone. Jess knew her dreams would have to wait until more money came in, but she liked passing by her set of lists each morning. They spoke of hope.

Of course, she couldn’t deny the realities of her fears—for Splinter, for Hannah, even for herself. There were times when confusion almost consumed her. Her most troubled thoughts centered in one area, like a sea urchin whose black spikes radiated doubt, dread, and despair. The center of her turmoil was Rick McTaggart.

As hard as she tried, Jess could not make sense of the disruption the man had caused in her life. Why did she wake each morning before sunrise and listen—with her heart pounding against her ribs—for the sound of two trucks and a motorcycle roaring up the driveway of Uchungu House? Why couldn’t she stop herself from sliding out of bed and tiptoeing to the edge of the verandah to hide in the purple-pink shadows? Why did she wait, holding her breath, for the moment when Rick took off his helmet and raked a hand through his mop of brown hair? He always lifted his head and searched the windows of her bedroom. Always. She made sure he never saw her.

Every morning she lingered on the verandah until he had shrugged out of his jacket and hung it on the handlebar of his cycle. She waited until he had peeled off his T-shirt, slung a towel over one shoulder, and ambled to the cliff-side stairway. When he was gone, she loathed herself for having watched him.

She told herself she did it to remember how much she despised him and to rub salt in her wounds so they would stay fresh and raw. She wanted to keep her anger as it had always been—hot, alive, and easily touched off. She wanted to remind herself how much she hated the man who had cut at the core of her soul.

Instead, his voice haunted her.

“What I did to you was wrong, Jessie. I’m not asking you to deny that. I’m asking you to forgive me. . . . Forgiveness means you stop feeling resentment toward the person who hurt you. You stop being bitter. You stop letting the past affect how you live in the present. When you forgive me, it will change you.”

Did she want to change? Of course not. Things were just fine. She had Splint. Her home. Her art.

“You may not want to be healed, Jessie, but I do.”

Healed? Could broken lives be put back together, shattered hearts mended, lost years restored? The whole concept was ridiculous, Jess told herself again and again. Forgiving Rick would not make one iota of difference in her life.

“With God’s grace, I’ve rebuilt my life from the ground up. But there’s still one big hole, and I can’t figure any way to patch it. That hole is our marriage.”

Jess tried her best to shut off the memory of Rick’s words. If there had been any healing in her life, she had done it herself. She had patched her own holes. Sealed off her own heart. Most important, she had blocked off the jagged scar left by her marriage. She wasn’t about to let McTaggart tear into it again.

“Unless there’s something I don’t know, you’re still my wife.”

“There’s a lot you don’t know,” she said out loud as she lit a citronella candle on the courtyard table one evening in preparation for supper. In the last couple of days, she had found it necessary to vocalize her mental arguments. It was the only way she could shut off the constant assault of Rick’s words swirling around and around inside her head.

“Marriage means relationship,” she said to the empty courtyard. “You and I didn’t have one ten years ago, and we certainly don’t have one now. You know little about my past and nothing about my dreams for the future. Most important, you don’t know the woman I’ve become. I’m strong, determined, independent. The sooner you finish your work on the shipwreck and get out of my life again, the better.”

She cocked her hands on her hips and stared at the three neat place settings on the table. Hannah, Splint, and Jess. They made a good team. A family. Starting tomorrow, Jess would get to work on her impala sketches. In two weeks, Splint would start school in Zanzibar town. In another month or two, the police would finish their investigation, Hunky Wallace would move on to a different shipwreck—or maybe go to jail if he turned out to be the killer—and Rick would leave. Things would feel normal. And that would be good.

“Einstein believed in time travel, you know.” Jess heard Splint talking to Hannah as they walked from the yard onto the verandah. His voice drifted through the long narrow rooms almost as clearly as if he had been in the courtyard. He and Hannah had been on the beach all afternoon. Hannah would be tired. Splint would be sandy and sunbaked. Both would be happy.

“Just about every one of Einstein’s theories has been proven,” Splint continued. “He was a genius.”

“As wise as King Solomon? This I cannot believe.”

“Did King Solomon write about relativity and energy and time? I don’t think so, Mama Hannah.”

“Time? Oh yes, he did. ‘There is a time for everything, a season for every activity under heaven. A time to be born and a time to die. A time to plant and a time to harvest. A time to kill and a time to heal.’”

“Whoa, dude,” Splint interjected. “Did King Solomon really think about time way back in the olden days?”

“He thought about time and about many more things.”

Jess straightened a chair and smiled. Hannah held the boy in the palm of her hand. If he wasn’t telling her every thought that poured out of his overactive brain, she was busy teaching him a hundred wonders from her bag of tricks. The tender love blossoming between Hannah and Splint was the one part of coming to Africa that Jess could feel perfectly right about.

“Still, what King Solomon said has nothing to do with time
travel
,” Splint said. “See, Einstein was interested in the past and the future and how we could go back and forth between them.”

“To go into the future before it has happened?” Hannah asked. “How can this be?”

“You’re the one who’s always telling me God knows everything past, present, and future. If he can see the future, then it must have been determined already, right? So that means we could go visit it, right? Huh?”

“Ehh.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means she’s thinking about it.”

Jess jerked at the sound of the deep male voice.
Rick.

“Just because God can see the future,” he said to Splint, “that doesn’t mean he’s already set the whole thing up. If he had, we’d be like little robots. We wouldn’t get to make our own decisions about how we’re going to act and what we’re going to do with ourselves.”

Rick was coming toward Jess through the house. She could hear his voice getting louder and louder. She didn’t want him in her house. He didn’t have permission. He couldn’t.

“God gave us the right to choose,” he said. “Even though he’s the king of the whole universe, God decided to put your future into your own hands. You’re the boss of your life, Splint—unless you decide to give it to him.” He stepped out of the shadows into the late-afternoon light. “Hey, Jessie.”

“Guess what, Mom!” Splint skipped into the courtyard barefoot. He was followed by Hannah and Andrew Mbuti, Rick’s African associate. “Hunky’s crew found the mother lode today! Take a look at this buckle!”

Jess grabbed the back of a chair for support. She couldn’t look at Rick. She didn’t want to see him. Not this close. She studied the corroded black mass in her son’s palm. It didn’t look like a buckle. It didn’t look like anything. But Splinter was dancing around in circles, and Rick was walking ever closer.

“I invited Rick and Andrew to have supper with us, Mom,” Splint sang out. “I asked them if they’d tell me all about the day from sunrise to sunset. Every second of every minute. I knew you’d want to hear about it, too. Mom, just think of the book you and James could do about something this important. Treasure hunting is a ton more interesting than Kima the Monkey. Kids will love it. Rick said he’d talk to me tomorrow down at the beach, but I was sure you wouldn’t mind if he and Andrew came up for dinner. You don’t mind, do you?”

“Spencer Thornton—”

“If I could time travel, I’d go back to the day that ship sank,” Splint went on. “Wouldn’t it be awesome to watch the storm? Rick, do you think the captain was trying to get over the reef? Or do you think he just smashed into it on accident?”

“That’s something I’ll be trying to determine in the next few weeks.”

Jess straightened and took a deep breath. “All right, Splinter. Now go wash your hands, and rinse the salt water out of your swimming trunks.”

“Okay!” The boy raced past her toward the staircase at the back of the courtyard. “What are we having for supper?”

“Fish. Hang up your trunks in the bathroom.” She watched him disappear into his room. “Look in that chest by your bed for clean shorts.”