Adrift on St. John (10 page)

“What are we up against here, Fred?” I mused, still pondering Hannah’s inauspicious arrival.

Fred blinked cryptically at me. Then, he tore off a nearby leaf and began the slow process of breaking it down with the sharp points of his tiny teeth.

Sighing heavily, I refilled my shot glass and began to flip through the day’s pile of paperwork. Fred’s advice generally became much clearer after a couple doses of Cruzan.

The sheets on the top of the stack had been dropped off earlier by one of Vivian’s minions. A red sticky note cut into the shape of a pointed arrow had been affixed to each paper, indicating where my signature was needed. It was all business as usual: routine approvals for overtime, applications for leaves of absence, and a couple of bills for the water taxi that picked up day workers who’d missed the regular ferry back to Red Hook.

I glanced only briefly at the contents of each page as I scrawled a hurried rendition of “Penelope Hoffstra” next to the sticky-note arrows—the sloppier the signature, the better. I’d never quite got the hang of the original Penelope’s capital “P.”

“Fred,” I said as I finally turned to the last arrow-marked sheet, “why don’t we get you some signature authority?” I spun a wide-tipped autographing pen in my fingers before flourishing it across the paper. “You’d put more care into this than I do.”

Once more, Fred blinked his beady lizard eyes, this time in placid agreement.

With a shrug, I turned my attention to a heavy manila envelope that had been lying beneath the sheaf of red-flagged papers. Both sides of the package were stamped in red ink with the word CONFIDENTIAL.

Another tedious missive from the head office, I thought, estimating the heft of the contents as I slid my fingers beneath the envelope’s end flap.

My resort was one of the largest vacation properties on St. John, but it was a minor player in the parent company’s worldwide holdings, several star rankings below its most prestigious resorts. We were but a minor blip on their radar, which in part explained why my surreptitious substitution into this relatively obscure management position had gone undetected all this time.

Vivian handled the bulk of our correspondence with the headquarters up in the States, keeping me safely out of the loop. In the four years since I’d taken up Miss Hoffstra’s station, she’d received the regular ream of standard-issue memos and a few information packets generically addressed to the resort manager. Only a small handful of personalized acquisition proposals had been specifically designated for her input.

This package had the overall feel of the last category. Tilting the envelope toward its now open end, I slid out a portfolio of glossy promotional materials.

The bulk of the content looked as if it had been put together by an outside consultant—I recognized the handiwork from a real estate stint I’d done early on in my legal career. Apparently, the resort’s parent company was considering another land development proposal.

“Lots of pretty pictures of people on a beach,” I yawned to
Fred—but I cut it short as my eyes scanned the contents of the cover letter. This proposal was for a new resort on St. John.

“Oh no,” I groaned, my earlier anxiety resurging as I glanced across the balcony railing at the munching iguana.

Fred issued his all-knowing I’m-way-ahead-of-you stare.

I rubbed my forehead wearily. There’d been rumors that something like this might be coming. Our tiny island was about to receive a visit from a boatful of fancy-pants executives, and I, no doubt, would be on the hook as hostess to shepherd them around.

“What property are they looking at?” I mumbled as I flipped open the embossed folder and fished out the summary sheet. I suspected I already knew the answer.

“Maho Bay,” I confirmed as I read the description of the targeted land.

I drifted slowly off into my thoughts, which Fred always seemed perfectly capable of reading without any verbal translations.

The plight of the Maho Bay land parcel had been the talk of the island for the last several months—that it had been put up for sale was no secret. The multi-acre plot included a beautiful stretch of beachfront property along the island’s undeveloped north shore. It was surrounded on all sides by a national park that encompassed almost two-thirds of the island’s landmass.

For the last thirty years, Maho Bay had been leased to an eco-resort, one renowned throughout the Caribbean for its environmental stewardship and innovative design. It had a unique setup, visually different from any of the island’s other accommodations.

To minimize the camp’s footprint on the heavily forested property, all of its buildings, including a hundred-plus individual screened tents, were constructed on platforms raised ten to twenty feet above the ground. The tents were connected by a network of elevated walkways to protect the natural flora that thrived beneath.

The resort was popular with vacationing families as well as the tree-hugger hippie set. Its staff acted as camp counselors, providing a constant lineup of activities: arts and crafts, nature walks, and water sports. The resort also found favor with the budget conscious; the rustic lodgings were some of the most affordable on the island.

All of this, it seemed, would soon be gone. The eco-resort’s current lease was set to expire at the end of the year, and the proprietors had been unable to negotiate an extension. A few months from now, the campground would be closed for good.

The Maho Bay property had hit the real estate listings last spring—igniting an uproar of public protest. The eco-resort and its quirky proprietors were beloved by most of St. John’s permanent residents. Few welcomed the prospect of a high-end resort complex taking over this pristine stretch of the island.

Shaking my head, I returned my attention to the brochure, wondering how our home office planned to compete for what was sure to be a pricey bid. Maho Bay would be far more expensive than any other transaction they’d attempted during my tenure. I didn’t think they had that kind of cash to throw around.

Property values on St. John were among the highest in the Caribbean, due in large part to its national park. This massive federal holding made the island’s remaining private land relatively scarce; proximity to the park’s undeveloped beaches further enhanced real estate assessments.

The park’s origins went back to the 1950s when financier and wealthy heir Laurance Rockefeller began purchasing land on a then largely unknown St. John.

Using a private broker to mask his identity, Rockefeller bought up huge tracts from unsuspecting owners—a move that was still controversial among many of the sellers’ descendents, who felt they had been cheated out of their properties’ true values.

Once Rockefeller had acquired as much property as possible along the island’s north shore, he consolidated his land
holdings and donated the bundled plot to the National Park Service, reserving a renewable lease back to the lavish resort he’d built on the parcel’s west end, the site of the former Caneel Bay plantation.

The owners of the Maho Bay property were one of the few landholders who had been able to resist the negotiating power of Rockefeller’s bankers. Sixty years later, the trustees representing these property rights were now ready to cash in. It was hard to imagine any other development prospect in the Caribbean that could match Maho’s unique features.

I reached for the shot glass as I turned to the last page of the prospectus. I wasn’t looking forward to the extra eyes such a high-profile land sale would draw to me and my rum-soaked fiefdom. I wasn’t sure how well my Penelope Hoffstra routine would hold up to the parent company’s corporate diligence committee.

Another swallow of rum helped tamp down my concerns. Vivian would make the necessary arrangements for our soon-to-be-arriving friends in suits. I would just have to hope no one knew enough about the original Penelope Hoffstra to recognize the difference. It would probably be prudent, I reflected somberly, to keep a low profile in the coming weeks.

I dropped the prospectus onto the pile of papers from my inbox, and my focus returned to the troublesome issue of the resort’s new employee.

“Maybe Vivian hadn’t had a chance to put her file together,” I offered to Fred. “Simple as that. Maybe it’s all just a coincidence.”

Fred continued to chew on his leaf. He was still considering the pros and cons of the Maho Bay land deal; he didn’t like to be rushed from one topic to the next.

I took another steadying gulp from my glass. The rum was beginning to numb my Hannah concerns. “Plenty of people have the same name.”

If only she had been a strung-out party girl, like most of kids who came to work for us, the strange happenstance of her name would have been much easier to dismiss.

The bulk of our temporary employees were college students, free spirits looking for a semester’s break from the books. They spent far more time enjoying the island atmosphere than actually working in it.

I shook my head. There was no way to deny it. Simply put, Hannah didn’t fit the mold.

Fred began to carefully back down off his limb, rustling the branches as his stiff, awkward movements caused the tree to sway wildly back and forth.

I glanced at my watch. It was time for his daily afternoon swim at the beach that fronted the resort. Several guests would be lined up along the sand, waiting with their cameras, eager to capture the event on film. Fred, the body-surfing iguana, was something of a legend on the island. He seemed to enjoy his fame; his adoring fans were rarely disappointed with his performance.

As Fred hit the shaded ground below the balcony, I drained the shot glass and set it with a loud
clink
on a small metal table beside my chair. My gaze fell once more onto the prospectus.

“Fred,” I mused aloud as he waddled off down a concrete path leading toward the water, “she’s staying at Maho Bay. Hannah’s staying at the eco-resort.”

The narrow tip of Fred’s long dragonlike tail swished back and forth, a wordless critique of how long it had taken me to finally make the connection.

10

Alden Edwards sat at a short wooden desk in a rustic cabin nestled in the woods on the hillside above Maho Bay.

The floor of the cabin, like that of the other semipermanent structures spread out across the eco-resort, was mounted on stilts made out of thick rounded posts, elevating it fifteen feet or so above the forest floor.

Alden often felt as if he lived in a tree house. It was a boyhood fantasy he had been acting out for almost thirty years.

An abundance of wildlife frequented the open area beneath the cabin. Throughout the day, the jungle of leaves and underbrush rustled with activity. Hermit crabs moseyed past with their slow shell-dragging crawl, tree frogs hopped happily about, and geckos skittered in sporadic stop-and-go sprints.

Several members of the last category ventured up the support posts and sneaked in through openings in the cabin floor’s wooden slats. Once inside, the tiny creatures skimmed fearlessly across the walls, comically pumping their front legs in mock push-ups whenever he glanced up from his desk to watch them.

Then, of course, there was the occasional mongoose
meandering blindly through the leaves, clumsily oblivious to the noisy ruckus it created.

More than once, Alden had leaned out over the edge of his front porch to check an overenthusiastic rummaging on the ground below, just to make sure the campgrounds hadn’t been invaded by a large bear that had somehow managed to migrate to the tropics.

Brought in by the Danish in the 1700s, the island’s now-entrenched mongoose species had been meant to help dampen the mice population inundating the sugarcane fields. Unfortunately, the brown rodentlike beasts hunted primarily during the daytime hours when the mice were tucked in their dens, fast asleep. Three hundred years later, both species continued to thrive in peaceful coexistence.

Overlaying all the crustacean, lizard, and mongoose activity that surrounded the cabin, there was the steady din of insects, ceaselessly chittering and chattering through the trees. These multitudes operated in their own separate kingdom, remaining mostly out of sight as they constructed elaborate nests that hung down from tree limbs and dug intricate underground bunkers that tunneled through the volcanic earth.