A Whisper of Danger (31 page)

“Here’s the church,” he announced with obvious pride. “You can’t imagine how hard it is to speak out for Christ in a Muslim environment like Dar es Salaam. But God has really blessed Daniel’s efforts. And you should hear my little brother preach. Sometimes he out-hollers the muezzins on the minarets of the local mosque.”

Jess chuckled as she led Splint and Hannah into the small, whitewashed building. Dan—a younger, shorter, and much more ebullient version of Rick—greeted her with warm enthusiasm. His wife and children scattered on the benches, mingling easily with the mixture of Africans, Indians, and Europeans who made up the congregation. Gradually the church filled to capacity, and the service began.

Jess had not been in a church for years, and she had almost forgotten the warmth and acceptance such a gathering could bring. Her bitterness had kept her away. Now, in the presence of other believers, her heart swelled with hope, peace, even joy. The hymns lifted her spirit and beckoned her into worship; the prayers brought her into close communion with Christ; the message stirred her.

Rick had been right. Daniel McTaggart could really preach. Unfortunately for Splint, the sermon was in Swahili. The ten-year-old concentrated for a while, and then he began to fidget. Jess did her best to translate the sermon— a retelling of Christ’s parable of the prodigal son and its message of the heavenly Father’s love for those who return to his arms.

Jess herself had been a wayward child, she realized as she pulled a piece of paper from her purse and began to sketch. Her drawings had always entertained Splint, and now with her renderings of the wheel spokes and the iron bar she had found at the new wreck site, she hoped the wiggly boy would settle down. Splinter had been in church only a handful of times in his life. The rituals so familiar to her were novel to him, and they would take some getting used to.

It bothered Jess to recognize in her son the consequences of her own self-centeredness. Whereas Hannah had molded and taught the four Thornton
totos
in the path of the Lord, Splint knew next to nothing about the Bible and the Good News it contained. As much as Jess loved her son, she had failed him in this most important facet of his upbringing. And all because of her own hardened heart.

As the service was ending, the first cracks of thunder echoed outside the little church. Rain began to pelt the corrugated tin roof and splatter on the sandy dirt of the courtyard. A bolt of lightning lit up the gray sky with a brilliant golden flash. Splint grabbed his mother’s hand.

“Mom!”

“It’s okay, honey,” she whispered as they walked down the central aisle. “It’s just a tropical thunderstorm.”

“What if there’s a hurricane? What if a tidal wave washes over us? Did you ever think about that? A tidal wave could travel all the way from India and sweep us all right out to sea.”

“Splint, you’re letting your imagination run away with you. To my knowledge, there has never been a tidal wave in the recorded history of East Africa.”

“There’s always a first time.”

Jess was grateful when Rick slung an arm around the boy’s shoulder. “Hey, buddy, after lunch how would you like to see my laboratory?”

“Really?” Eyes shining, Splint turned to Jess. “Did you hear that, Mom? Rick said he’d take me to his lab!”

“Jessie?” Rick asked. “Would that be all right with you?”

“It would take his mind off the storm. Sure.” She gave a little shrug. “I’d like to see the lab myself.”

Rick’s smile broadened. “It’s a deal.”

“Mom made a couple of new sketches for you, Rick.” Splinter held out the page. “Look, it’s a wheel. And some kind of a bar-thingy with a block stuck on one end of it.”

Rick took the sketch and studied it for almost a minute as the storm raged outside the little church. When he lifted his head, his eyes were narrowed in confusion. “Jess, I don’t remember anything like these in the stuff we’ve hoisted up. When did you see them?”

“Yesterday. The new site.”

“New site?” Splint cut in. “What new site? Mom, you didn’t tell me there was a new site.”

“I picked them up out of the sand,” she told Rick. “But I left coral markers so you could plot them on your chart. I was very careful about that.”

“Where are they now? These artifacts?”

“I must have dropped them when the eel attacked me. Rick . . . why are you looking at me like that?”

“Do you know what you’ve sketched here, Jessie?”

She studied her own drawings for a moment. “Well, I thought that first picture was probably a wheel. I mean, it has spokes and an axle. If you welded a metal rim around the edge, you could use it on a cart or a wagon.”

He ran one finger over the sketch. “You’ve placed small double-barbed hooks at the end of each spoke.”

“Yes. They were pretty corroded, but that’s what I saw.”

“This is no wheel, Jessie. This is what we call an iron necklace. Its purpose was control, confinement, and torture.” He touched the other picture. “And this is a branding iron. It was created for one purpose—to burn an owner’s mark into bare flesh.”

Her heartbeat hammering in her ears, she looked into his eyes. “What are you telling me, Rick?”

“I’m telling you our wrecked ship didn’t carry a cargo of gold. It didn’t have tea or spices or uncut gemstones, either. The ship that sank in your bay had a human cargo, Jessie.”

A chill poured through her. “Slaves.”

Splint decided tropical storms were for the birds. In fact, the whole day was turning into one gigantic drip. Sure, it had started out great—a pocket full of artifacts he had extracted from the conglomerate, a ride on the hydrofoil, the promise of a look at Rick’s laboratory. Even the church service had been sort of interesting.

Rick’s brother had preached the whole sermon in Swahili, but the singing had been fun. It was cool to see all the different kinds of people mixed together. And something had changed Splint’s mom—he didn’t know if it was Hannah or Rick or Zanzibar—but he knew she was calmer and happier. Maybe it was God. Anyway, Splint would go to church every day if he thought it would bring that pretty smile to his mom’s face.

But then the storm struck. No matter how everyone tried to reassure Splint, he had no doubt a storm blowing in from the ocean could bring hurricanes and tidal waves and waterspouts and who knew what else? Hurricanes could smash buildings. Waterspouts could sink ships. Tidal waves could wipe out whole towns. He’d read about tidal waves plenty of times in his science-discovery books. As much as he liked diving, he didn’t want to get clobbered by a monster wave.

And what about the lightning? There they all stood in a metal-roofed church building! Talk about asking for trouble! Rain was coming in through the open windows. Wind blew leaves off the trees and slapped them into the walls. Thunder made the whole floor shake.

As if the storm wasn’t bad enough, Rick had just discovered that the wrecked ship probably had been carrying slaves. This had put Hannah into a funk, and she kept muttering things about human sin and the evils of Satan. Rick had decided he needed to inform Hunky of the development, a situation that meant the trip to the laboratory might have to be postponed. After all, Hunky Wallace would not be located easily on a Sunday morning.

The whole group raced out to the parking lot, Splint eyeing the sky every step of the way, searching for the bolt of lightning with his name on it. They were soaked to the skin by the time they all piled into the car. For some dumb reason, Splint’s mom was laughing.

Correction, she was giggling.

In the front seat, Rick brushed her wet hair out of her eyes and wiped a raindrop from the end of her nose. Lo and behold, she leaned over and planted a kiss right smack-dab on his cheek! Then he chuckled and kissed
her
cheek. The next thing Splint knew, they were gazing into each other’s faces like a couple of goo-goo-eyed puppies. It was as bad as one of those mushy movies his mom sometimes watched.

“Hey, can we get this show on the road?” he called from the backseat. He rolled his eyes at Hannah. “You realize what a target we are in a car, don’t you? Lightning loves metal. It races right to it, and
zap!
You’re fried! And a tidal wave? In this car, we’d be at the bottom of the ocean in two seconds flat.”

“Ehh. We must be strong in the Lord,” Hannah said. “Paul told us to give thanks in all things. Did you know my people were able to give thanks even when they were sold into slavery?”

“Give thanks?” Splint jumped as the car chugged to life. He felt like all his nerves were jangling. “Maybe the slaves gave thanks, but how can we be anything but freaked out when we’re on the verge of being swept out to sea in a tropical hurricane?”

“Did I teach you the Swahili song of thanks?” Hannah closed her eyes and gave a hum. “Are you ready?”

“Let us go to heaven,” Splinter finished in the traditional response.

“Asante sana,Yesu.
Asante sana,Yesu.
Asante sana,Yesu, moyoni.

“Asante sana,Yesu.
Asante sana,Yesu.
Asante sana,Yesu, moyoni.”

Splint liked the tune, and the words were easy. Before long he could sing it as well as Hannah.

“What’s it mean?” he asked as Rick pulled the car up to a small street-side restaurant.

“‘Thank you very much, Jesus,’” Hannah translated. “‘Thank you very much, Jesus, in my heart.’”

As he hurried into the restaurant, Splint hummed as loudly as he could in hopes of drowning out his fears. He was counting on things getting a lot better after he was inside looking at a menu full of good food. They weren’t any better at all. The restaurant was an Indian curry joint!

It featured a big buffet with all kinds of unrecognizable stuff—mustard-colored stew with hunks of cauliflower, potatoes, and chicken floating around in it; mounds of fluffy yellow rice; chutneys that looked like something Splint had stirred up in his home science lab; and flat white bread hardly thicker than a sheet of paper. You’d have thought Rick and his mom had just stepped into paradise.

While the storm raged outside, the lovebirds ate and ate, talked and talked, laughed and laughed. It might have been okay if they’d been discussing the slave ship. But Rick had asked about the Kima the Monkey books.

He would say things like, “Did you do one on Kima and the Cranky Coelacanth?”

That totally hilarious comment sent Splint’s mom into gales of giggles. Then she would say something equally hysterical like, “How about Kima and the Elusive Eel?”

Then they’d both guffaw. It was enough to make a kid want to hurl. After lunch, Rick drove them through the rain to his apartment where he could use his telephone to call Hunky. The apartment was pretty cool. It was small with bare white walls and a couple of chairs, a little square table, and a twin bed. Splint wouldn’t have thought much of the place, but Rick had filled his shelves with all kinds of wonderful artifacts—everyone of them labeled and tagged.

“I do not believe we will go home to Uchungu House today,” Hannah said, assessing the storm through Rick’s big window. “The ocean is very rough. The waves are big.”

“Maybe we’ll just stay here with Rick until it blows over,” Splint said. “It would be okay to spend the night here, wouldn’t it, Mom?”

“No, sweetheart. If we have to stay, we’ll take a hotel room.”

“Aw, Mom! Rick wouldn’t mind.”

“Splint.” Her voice held that note of warning.

“Look, Mom, this has been the worst day of my entire life, okay? I mean, I’m expecting a tidal wave any minute. And you and Rick take me to eat curry. And the treasure ship turns out to be a slaver. And now you’re telling me—”

“Someone’s knocking on the door, Splint,” she said. “Now, answer it, please, and stop your griping.”

“Or I’ll give you something to gripe about,” he finished under his breath. Moms didn’t have a clue. They really didn’t.

He pulled open the door. Two tall African men stood in the hallway, the shoulders of their uniforms splattered with raindrops. The one in front studied Splint for a moment.

“Spencer Thornton?” he asked.

Splint backed up. “Yeah.”

“We will take you to the police station in Zanzibar. You must give your fingerprints to check for the possibility of murder.”