Adrift on St. John (40 page)

It was with great relief that I finally pushed open the door to the condo late Wednesday afternoon. It felt like an eternity had passed since I’d left it that morning to meet Charlie and his Jeep.

I walked wearily across the living room, intent on getting out of my swimsuit and into a hot shower as quickly as possible. Midway around the backside of the couch, however, I stopped. Something felt amiss—something other than my salty swimsuit and the disturbing image of Conrad in his Slave Princess costume now imprinted on my brain.

I scanned the area, searching for the out-of-place item. My eyes passed over the glass-top coffee table and the expiring wicker chair, finally landing on the kitchen counter and the pen lying on its surface next to the blank pad of paper.

Crossing the room, I reached out for the pen. Slowly, I turned it over in my hands. The interior rod was cocked to its on position, as if someone had held it, intending to write a message.

Lightly tapping the tip of the pen against my lips, I walked into the bedroom. After a moment of hesitation,
I pulled open the top drawer. It was empty—Jeff’s spare shirt was gone.

My wordless boyfriend, I mused with chagrin, had left his good-bye.

With a sigh, I trudged to the shower, desperately trying to ignore the doleful tweets of the bananaquits sadly swooping about my head.

60

Vivian leaned tiredly against the reception desk’s front counter. After several hours of filling in for room cleaning, laundry service, and otherwise dealing with frustrated guests, she was exhausted.

She hadn’t seen Hannah Sheridan—or Penelope Hoffstra, for that matter—since returning from Coral Bay that morning. Vivian was ready to wash her hands of both women, although at this moment, Hannah was at the top of her list of people she would like to throttle.

According to the reports she’d picked up from her two-way radio, her missing crew members were still running around the island, chasing down rumored sightings of the Slave Princess.

“Slave Preen-cess,”
Vivian muttered bitterly under her breath.
“If Eye ever git mye hands on yewe…”

She looked up as the computer programmer leaned over the reception desk and placed a chubby hand on its counter. All of her venom and pent-up frustration immediately transferred to his portly figure.

In the midst of the day’s chaos, she had temporarily forgotten about the man who had arranged for Hamilton’s and
her transfer to St. John—and the payment he had required in return.

“You found everything you needed?” she asked stolidly, trying without success to keep the loathing tone from her voice.

“Yes, I did,” he replied with a nervous glance around the reception area. “I’d like to be on tonight’s water taxi.” He cleared his throat uncomfortably. “If you can arrange it.”

Vivian grunted tensely. “Of course.”

She flipped through the sheets attached to her clipboard and then looked up at him suspiciously. “I already have your reservation.”

“You do?” he asked uneasily.

Shuffling feet crept toward the counter as a bent, broken figure hobbled down the hallway from the break room. Beulah’s bony face peeked around the edge of the front desk.

Her hoarse voice whispered loudly,
“What-ter taxi…what-ter taxi…ohhh, no…”

A startled expression crossed the programmer’s face as Beulah sidled up next to Vivian.

“Eye doon nut lyke thuh what-ter taxi…”

The programmer stared in disbelief at the name tag pinned to the front of the old woman’s frayed shirtdress. He shook his head, blinked, and then read it again.

Beulah…surely not. This decrepit creature couldn’t be
his
Beulah—not Beulah Shah, the woman who had paid for his Maho Bay services.

But as he stood there next to the reception counter, the woman’s ragged face fixed on his thick neck. A constricting pressure clamped down on his chest, squeezing the air from his lungs. As her gaze lifted, and their eyes met, his doubts left him. This was, indeed, Beulah Shah.

The programmer stepped back from the counter, gulping in a deep breath.

He’d had some bizarre clients in his day—that was the nature of his employment—but
never
one quite as unexpected
as this. And never, he thought grumpily, had one locked him in a cellar overnight. He wiped his wrist across his sweating brow as he turned away from the reception desk.

This would be the last time he took on a project for Ms. Beulah Shah.

“What-ter taxi…what-ter taxi…ohhh, no…”

Vivian gave Beulah a sideways glance and pursed her lips, but the old woman continued her lament, her dark eyes intensely focused on the back of the retreating computer programmer.

“Beeg sheep go down slowe…Small sheep go down fest…”

Vivian rolled her eyes. “We haven’t lost anyone yet,” she said sarcastically.

“Ack, Eye doon nut lyke the what-ter taxi…”

With a sigh, Vivian scribbled Beulah’s name on her clipboard, adding her to the list of the night’s water taxi passengers.

“I’m sure you’ll be fine.”

61

A shower made the post-Jeff world look a little better, even if I’d had to scrounge around for a clean towel and the water’s temperature had been lukewarm—the resort’s generators were having a hard time keeping up with the demand for hot water.

My bathrobe wrapped around me, I wandered through the living room to the kitchen. The blue nylon satchel lay on the counter where I’d tossed it on my way to the shower. I still hadn’t looked at the papers inside.

Oh boy, I thought as the image of Conrad in his Slave Princess costume flashed across my brain.

First things first, I thought with a shudder. I removed the bottle of Cruzan from its shelf and lifted it toward the light, sizing up the number of remaining shots. I was about to fill my glass when I heard a knock at the door.

I stood there, holding the bottle in the air. After the day I’d had, there was no one I wished to see. But a second rap indicated a level of persistence in the knocker, so, with a sigh, I set the bottle on the counter and crossed to the entryway. Squinting through the peephole, I spied an old crippled woman in a housemaid’s uniform.

Hoping she was there to drop off a clean set of towels, I opened the door.

The maid pushed past me, limping forcefully into the living room. In one hand, she carried a rumpled paper bag. Her feet clunked across the tile floor in oversized rubber sandals as she glanced at the shot glass and the half-empty bottle on the kitchen counter. Then she turned and whispered hoarsely to me.

“Ya look lyke yewe lost somethin’.”

Her thin body was clothed in one of the resort’s standard-issue shirtdresses, but the garment was decidedly more tattered and frayed than those worn by the rest of the women. She had a toothless mouth and frizzled gray wisps of hair. My eyes focused on the name tag pinned to her chest, which read BEULAH.

I leaned sideways as she bent toward me, her brown eyes studying me intently.

I tried to form a reply to her strange introduction, but my throat suddenly dried up. The air died inside my lungs, leaving me with no source of oxygen. I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t move.

“Fat man took ’eem,”
Beulah wheezed. She stepped back and licked her cracked lips, releasing me from her hypnotic hold.

“The fat man?” I asked in bewilderment after gulping in a deep breath. The image that immediately came to my mind couldn’t possibly be the man to which she was referring.

Beulah stretched her hands out into the air and waddled back and forth in front of the kitchen counter. Then she crossed her arms over her chest, tilted her head to one side, and said softly,
“Thuh wone who brought ya here.”

“The fat man took—
who
?” I managed to gasp out through my surprise.

“Your boy,”
she replied.

She raised a bony hand to her head and wiggled her fingers above her thinning scalp. It took me a moment to interpret her gesture; she was mimicking Jeff’s wild, frizzy hair.

“Ya kin steel cat’ch up to heem—if that’s what yewe want.”

I shook my head in confusion, struggling to understand her meaning.

Beulah pointed a knobby finger toward the blue nylon satchel. She sighed, as if disappointed in me.

“You didn’t look een thuh bag.”

Tightly gripping my robe, I turned to the counter and opened the satchel. It contained a file folder with a small sheaf of papers. With a curious glance at Beulah, I pulled out the folder and perused the contents. My eyes passed over sheet after sheet of routine overtime and water taxi expenditures—each one with the same looping signature of Penelope Hoffstra—each one bearing a stamp from a police evidence file.

“Where did Conrad get this?” I asked in amazement.

As I reached the page at the end of the package, my brow furrowed with concern.

It was a log from the water taxi company the resort used, detailing its transfers and pickups. Handwritten in the margin was the number of reimbursements I’d signed for—a number that far exceeded the actual water taxi shuttles. Each trip, individually, cost less than a hundred dollars, but over the course of the last four years, the accumulated bogus runs had tallied to a significant sum.

I thought back to the endless reams of expense reports flagged with red sticky notes, and my hands began to tremble.

Sheridan hadn’t brought me here to help him with the real estate deal. He hadn’t sought me out for my legal expertise. I hadn’t been stashed away all this time in inactive exile; I’d started working for him the minute I stepped foot on the resort.

I dropped the papers back into the nylon satchel, my face paling.

I was nothing but the fall guy for his embezzlement scam.

I remembered his voice from the backseat of the sedan:
I have several Pens.

And now, it seemed, he was about to expand his collection to one frizzy-haired dive shop employee.

Beulah bent toward me once more, her stale breath oozing out of her toothless mouth.

“You’ve gut wone chance, ’fore he disappears for good,”
she said, handing me the paper bag.