Sun, Sand, Murder Read online

  The same few families—the Faulkners, Pickerings, Vanterpools, Creques, Lloyds, and a handful of others—live, laugh, love, cry, and die in the same homes as generations of their ancestors before them. My parents still live in the same three rooms that at one time housed them, me, and my nine brothers and sisters in crowded chaos. I now live on the edge of town in a house I built the year before I married Icilda Faulkner, a four-room bungalow that most people in town view as striving and “putting on airs.”

  The four decades of my life have seen only two great changes in The Settlement. The first was the building of the power plant in 1977. The plant’s two Caterpillar diesel engines standing on a concrete floor in a metal building supply Anegada’s power needs on a somewhat intermittent basis tied to their age and state of repair. Jimmy Lloyd, Kevin Faulkner, and I split shifts as the plant operators. If the Caterpillars are working, it is a good opportunity to get eight hours of sleep. The construction of the power plant meant no more kerosene lanterns and stoves fired with torchwood gathered from the interior. There is actually a streetlight in The Settlement now. People have refrigerators. The blue light of television sets can be seen in some homes at night, with a satellite TV dish, that ultimate mark of civilization, perched atop the tin roof.

  The second great change to The Settlement in my lifetime was construction of the Aubrey M. Vanterpool Administration Building and Community Center. In the spring of 1989, a small bulldozer, barged over from Tortola, clanked from the government dock up the main lane of The Settlement to push an acre clear of thorn and cactus. The next barge brought concrete blocks, a cement mixer, and a crew from the Department of Public Works, who constructed the only two-story building on the island, housing the police station and its never-used cell, our doctorless clinic, the single pickup truck of the fire brigade, and the administrator’s office, where Pamela Pickering and De White Rasta awaited my arrival.

  * * *

  The limestone dust kicked up by the Land Rover’s entry into the yard had not dissipated when Pamela Pickering, big hipped and wide eyed, erupted from the front entrance. She was followed closely by De White Rasta, as agitated as I had ever seen him. On this day, even his constant ganja high seemed insufficient to maintain his cool.

  “Teddy, what you gon’ do about the dead man out there?” Pamela gestured generally in the direction of Spanish Camp. De Rasta cringed behind her.

  “I’m going to get some water and the clinic first aid kit and De Rasta and I are going to Spanish Camp to check it out.”

  The whites of De Rasta’s bloodshot eyes grew wide and he gave an emphatic negative shake of his dirty blond dreadlocks. “Mon, I-mon not go back to where dat dead mon be lie-ens. I-mon nah go back deh ever again. Dat place fulla duppies.”

  I suspected the Rastafarian ghosts, the “duppies,” that De White Rasta had seen had more to do with his cannabis intake than his eyesight. “Rasta, how will I find the man without you?” I reasoned.

  “I-mon report as de law require. I done wit it.”

  “You black up today, Rasta?” I asked. I already knew the correct answer, “yes,” as De White Rasta hardly missed an hour, let alone a day, without toking up. And I already knew the answer I would receive, an emphatic denial.

  “No, mon. Why you fe galang so? I-mon don’ touch de ganja. I-mon only smoke de shag. Ganja be illegal.” The degree of De Rasta’s indignation was matched only by the size of his lie. He burned more herb than a forest fire in Jamaica.

  “If you haven’t been smoking ganja, you didn’t just imagine a dead man. If a man is dead, it could be foul play. Since you found the dead man, I have to treat you as a possible suspect. That means keeping my eye on you. So you can either come with me or I can lock you in the holding cell.”

  “Jah know I-mon nah harm de mon. Jah know I-mon go for a bit a peace an’ quiet up dere an’ just find dis mon. Sight? Why do dis to I, Teddy?” De Rasta whined.

  “What will it be, Rasta?” I said, deciding further reasoning would be wasted effort.

  De Rasta sighed a heavy sigh. “Okay, I and I go and I-mon show where de dead mon at. But dat all. I-mon not goin’ in dat duppie place.”

  I went inside the police station and filled a plastic jug with water, put it in a backpack, and added the first aid kit from the clinic. When I came outside, De Rasta was lolling in the passenger seat of the Land Rover.

  Pamela intercepted me on the way to the vehicle. “Shall I radio the deputy commissioner’s office and let them know about the dead man?” Pamela’s earlier panic had evolved into salacious excitement. Her eyes shone at the prospect of participation in an event that might be notable on Anegada for years to come.

  “Wait until I see if there is anything to this. Who knows what De Rasta has actually been smoking?” A flicker of disappointment crossed Pamela’s face.

  I eased the Land Rover through the gate and turned east, cruising slowly through The Settlement. In less than a minute we had traversed the paved road and continued onto the seldom-used sand path toward Spanish Camp. I turned toward De Rasta.

  “Tell me exactly what you saw, Anthony. And cut the Rasta bull about duppies.”

  “Ghosts are as real as you and me, Teddy,” De White Rasta said, his fake Jamaican patois replaced with an Eton-Oxford accent. I had heard De Rasta’s speech undergo this transformation many times before but it still disconcerted me every time he made the verbal leap from Caribbean rustic to English aristocrat.

  The first time De White Rasta had carried out his linguistic about-face for my benefit was when I was a neophyte special constable, commissioned for only six months. In one of the few communications my superior, the deputy commissioner, saw fit to make to me in two decades, I was warned of De White Rasta’s impending arrival on Anegada. Specifically, I was told to expect “Anthony Wedderburn, white male, age twenty-two years, weight eleven stone, height five feet nine inches, eyes blue, hair blond, affects Rastafarian speech and appearance, including dreadlocks. Born Essex, UK. He is a frequent user of marijuana and has been expelled from a number of islands in Her Majesty’s Commonwealth, most recently Barbados, without criminal charge. He is the son of a member of the House of Lords. His conduct is to be regulated so as to prevent harm to himself or others but is not otherwise to be interfered with.”

  In those days, as a brand-new special constable, I took myself and the job quite seriously. Consequently, I met Anthony Wedderburn two days after the message, when the fuel barge on which he had hitched a ride nudged up to the government dock at Setting Point. Carrying his worldly possessions in a burlap crocus bag, he stepped ashore smelling of ganja and goat, with a hint of diesel from his nap on the barge deck. His unfocused blue eyes drifted slowly left to right, then settled on my uniform shirt. “Big bout yah beef, I-mon yah brudda, no trouble,” Anthony assured me. “Seen? I-mon shake out dis place soon. I-mon jus’ a sufferer try’n to survive.”

  “Mr. Wedderburn, I am not your brother, any more than a white boy from Essex is a Rastafarian,” I said. “But I am not here to make trouble for you. Anegada is a small place and we all need to get along. You won’t have trouble from me if I don’t have trouble from you.”

  The Rastafarian speech disappeared and De Rasta beamed a winning smile. “That is very sporting of you, old man. I plan only a short stay to take in the sights. You will have no trouble from me, because, you see, I am a friend to all mankind. I can assure you that you will not even know I am here.” He shambled off the dock, looked both ways upon touching land, and randomly headed toward the West End.

  Anthony Wedderburn had spent the years since that day drifting about the island, stoned on spliff and bothering no one. He ate what food he could cadge from belongers and tourists, wore cast-off clothing, and slept wherever he found himself at sunset. As the old millennium turned into the new, word arrived from London that his father had died. De White Rasta inherited the title of Lord Wedderburn, but he did not even leave for the funeral. I do not know where he got his ganja, but he never
grew any on Anegada and never attempted to sell or give any to anyone here. At first we Anegadians made fun of him, naming him De White Rasta and joking about his appearance and speech, but he ultimately became a part of the fabric of our island life. He always spoke to everyone in his Rastafarian patois, except for me on those occasions when we were alone. I never let anyone here know of his origins.

  “And if there were no ghosts at Spanish Camp before, the spirit of the poor devil I found out there this morning will certainly haunt the place from now on,” De Rasta continued.

  “What were you doing out at Spanish Camp?”

  “Sometimes I sleep at Flash of Beauty.”

  Flash of Beauty was an old restaurant standing alone atop Loblolly High Point, with a stunning view of Loblolly Bay and the Atlantic beyond. Its owner had expected the dramatic location to draw tourists to snorkel in the pristine waters and eat local food made using authentic recipes. He was wrong. Most vacationers wanted a lounge chair on the closest beach, not a journey to Anegada’s farthest corner. Despite the beauty of Flash of Beauty, it was now a tumbledown derelict on a forgotten beach. It was, however, the end point of the road closest to Spanish Camp.

  “The breeze keeps the no-see-ums away at night,” De Rasta explained. “I got up when the sun rose and noticed there were gulls circling and diving in the area of Spanish Camp. I thought it was probably jacks with a school of bait pushed up against shore, but I noticed there were no pelicans. I thought that was unusual and I had nothing better to do, so I walked down the beach toward the commotion. When I got closer, I could see the gulls were not by the shore at all. They were inland. That probably meant a dead cow, but as long as I had walked that far, I thought I might as well have a look.”

  De Rasta paused, took a deep breath, and then blew it out. “When I turned inland and got to the top of the sand dune, I saw what the gulls were after. Below the dune, maybe a hundred yards toward the salt pond, was a man. Or, I should say, a man’s body. I knew it was a body because, even at that distance, you could see that the gulls had been at him pretty badly.”

  “Did you check the body?”

  “No, I couldn’t bring myself to go any further.”

  “Why not? The man could still be alive.”

  “Trust me, Teddy, he was not alive. And then there were the graves.” De Rasta paled.

  “Graves?”

  “The man was surrounded by dozens and dozens of open graves.”

  Chapter Three

  The uneven path to Loblolly Bay smoothed as we approached Flash of Beauty. The restaurant building, once painted gaudy green, yellow, and red, had now faded to a pale pastel smudge. Storms and vandals had broken the glass out of all its windows. The place had a shipwreck air about it.

  Parking behind the building, De Rasta and I stepped around into the fresh breeze of the bay, a pleasant contrast to the interior of the island. Succulent plants dotted the sand slope down to the high-tide mark. A swath of the purest white sand extended from there to the modest surf. As the water deepened from the surf zone to the broken crust of the Horseshoe Reef, its color changed from clear white, to pale green, to emerald, to sky and then royal blue, and finally to purple-black in the depths outside the reef. The outer edge of the reef at Loblolly Bay marks the beginning of the Anegada Trench, a two-mile-deep chasm, home to humpback whales and white marlins, and the start of the open sea. Sail east from there and the next landfall is Africa.

  “The birds are still there.” De Rasta pointed southeast along the beach. I could barely make out a cloud of minuscule dots, wheeling in the dazzling sun. In the near distance, a set of footprints trailed off toward the birds. The tide was falling, half out already.

  “What time did you leave the beach for The Settlement, Anthony?”

  “It was almost three-quarter tide, incoming.” I had never seen De Rasta wear a watch, so the measure of time in his answer came as no surprise. It had been over four hours since he had started for help.

  “Did you see anyone else around?” The obvious question, but I had not asked it before.

  “I saw no one before I arrived at The Settlement, not here or on the road. Someone had been here, though. There were two sets of footprints when I went down the beach, a set going south and a set of the same coming back north. Bare feet, no shoes. They were small prints, a woman or a small man. The tide must have washed them away.”

  If the owner of the small footprints had walked from the water to the top of the sandbank near Flash of Beauty, it was not noticeable. The wind and the soft sand away from the water made any prints indistinguishable from those made by wild cattle last night or last week’s adventurous tourist seeking seclusion for some naturist sunbathing. There were numerous car and truck tire prints near where we had parked, all equally indistinct.

  “Come on, Anthony.” I shouldered the backpack and started down the beach. De Rasta fell in at my side with a sigh. Twenty minutes walking at a quick pace brought us to a point seaward of the cloud of diving gulls.

  De Rasta stopped and seated himself in the sand. “I am not going back to that graveyard, not now or ever again.”

  I was about to remonstrate but decided it was, after all, my job from here on out. I turned inland, climbing the gentle incline rising away from the beach. Lizards rustled in the dried seaweed as I walked. Waves collided with the reef offshore, their rumble like thunder on the cloudless morning.

  The east trade wind was more vigorous when I crested the high dune. From the top, it was possible to see all the way across the island to the roofs of The Settlement and the green hump of Virgin Gorda beyond. The inland side of the dune was a carpet of low sea grape trees, divided by cow paths. Further downslope, the sea grapes tapered off to a dry salt pond. Bare limestone slabs poked above the thin soil in places. Fifty yards away, a clot of gulls squabbled over the torso of a man.

  Even at that distance, I knew that the first aid kit I carried would not be needed. The body sprawled near a backpacker tent pitched on a level sandy patch. An area the size of a cricket field surrounding the tent was pocked with dozens of excavations that gave the appearance of being open graves. Each was a trench slightly wider than a man, as long or longer than a man is tall, and waist-deep. A mound of sand and broken limestone stood at the side of each hole. Whoever was doing the digging had not taken the time to refill any of the holes.

  On the leeward side of the sandbank, the still air throbbed with the iron heat of a foundry. The white sand burned incandescent in the sun. As I approached the body of the man, the smell of baked flesh, not really rotten, stopped me. It was almost as if the corpse were cooking in the heat.

  My life had been relatively free from contact with the dead to this point. My parents and near relatives are all alive. My grandparents were dead and gone before I was out of my infancy. The few funerals I had attended in The Settlement were closed-coffin. The isolated and peaceful lifestyle of Anegada meant that I had not encountered the dead at accidents or crime scenes in my duties as special constable. In short, nothing had prepared me for what I confronted at Spanish Camp.

  The gulls retreated but the body seemed to squirm and almost levitate as I approached. Hundreds of crabs swarmed over the corpse, dissecting it as they fed. A land crab the size of a green coconut sidled away with a pinkie finger that had been clipped off at the first joint. Hermit crabs as small as a dime consumed shreds of flesh torn loose by the gulls.

  Unlike the gulls, the crabs would not withdraw from their feast. I waded into the crawling mass, shouting and kicking them away. For many nights afterward, I had horrible nightmares populated by wave after relentless wave of crabs, green, brown, red, and remorseless, their black eyes impassive as they swarmed over my home.

  I immediately recognized that the gulls and crabs had been consuming the remains of Paul Kelliher, PhD, of Boston University.

  Professor Kelliher was well-known on Anegada. Rumor had it that he was a renowned herpetologist, a skilled academic politician, and a master ob
tainer of grants. For each of the last five winters, while his colleagues in Boston suffered through another season of slushy frozen agony, Professor Kelliher had come to sunny Anegada to study the habits of the endangered Anegada rock iguana. Our indigenous lizard is the size of a cocker spaniel and tastes like chicken, if chicken were covered in gray-green scales. I know this because people here hunted them for food until the few remaining members of the species retreated to the most inaccessible parts of the island. The remote localities where the few rock iguanas remain were where Professor Kelliher spent most of his time. He made only an occasional return to civilization to partake in a three-day bender at the Cow Wreck Beach Bar and Grill. It was not unusual for the professor to disappear into the wild for two or three weeks at a stretch. I rarely encountered him other than at Cow Wreck.

  But here he was now, on his back in the hot sand. A gull had pecked away one of his eyes. His other eye stared blankly at the sun. Most of both his ears had been torn away by the crabs. His arms, spread like those of Jesus on the Cross, terminated in nubs where the fingers had been. He wore a pair of old Nikes, which had probably saved his toes from the crabs; a pair of khaki shorts, which had probably saved his privates; and nothing else.

  There was a bullet entrance wound in his forehead, clean and neat as a widow’s parlor. The bullet had angled upward, taking a huge chunk of the rear of his skull with it when it exited. The missing portion of the skull, like the many other missing parts of Professor Kelliher, had been spirited away by the local fauna.

  I suddenly felt queasy and vomited my breakfast onto the sand an arm’s length away from what remained of the professor’s head. So much for crime scene integrity. The loss of breakfast helped me focus. I realized I had much to do and little to help me accomplish my duties.

  I scanned the surrounding area. There were footprints by the hundreds, all made indistinct by the softness of the sand and the parade of crabs to and from the body. There were no guns, knives, ropes, lead pipes, wrenches, candlesticks, or other objects in the form of ready clues nearby.