“She’ll be fifteen next July.”
Elizabeth scribbled her name down on a pad, along with Helvetica’s U.S. number. The agent waved Elizabeth through with her rubber-gloved hand. “It was just procedure. No offense.”
“None taken. Cook luck with your daughter’s career,” said Elizabeth, buttoning her jeans. She had to run to make her connection- American Airlines was as far from International Arrivals as you could possibly get and still be in the same airport. She barely made the plane. American Flight 97 took her into Puerto Rico’s San Juan International, the airline’s Caribbean hub, east of the city, touching down at 8:30 P.M. With no luggage to retrieve, she was in a cab by a quarter to nine and in the lobby of the local Hyatt by 9:15. The flight to Vieques didn’t leave until the following afternoon, so there was time to kill. She immediately placed a call to the Puerto Rico tourist bureau on the off chance that they hadn’t closed for the day. By dumb luck it was not only open for another fifteen minutes, it was also located on the second floor of her hotel. Elizabeth told the clerk, who had a round, smiling face marked by acne, that she had come to collect her complimentary voucher. To which the woman responded by saying she didn’t know what Elizabeth was talking about. Elizabeth showed her the faxed confirmation. “Vieques Island? I don’t think so. What hotel again?” She squinted at the paper. “Inn on the Azure Horizon.”
“I’m sorry, miss. I don’t think they offer things like that.” Elizabeth could feel her heart accelerate. “First off, this isn’t one of our faxes, see? Ours would have our own letterhead.” She produced one of their fax forms with a letterhead displaying palm trees and gulls against a beach. “This one, see, is blank.” She reread the letter. “…won a complimentary stay at the Inn on the Azure Horizon… in celebration of our 20th anniversary.. . No see,” she said, “even that. Azure Horizon’s been out there, oh, maybe ten years tops. So that part’s wrong. I’m not even sure they’re still in business-” Elizabeth was already out the door.
At the Hyatt front desk she found there was a 10:30 P.M. ferry to Vieques from a town called Fajardo. Fajardo was nearly forty miles by the coastal road-a fifty-dollar cab ride with no guarantee she would even make the ferry. Upstairs was a room with a shower, room service and a soft bed. Couldn’t it wait till morning? Of course it couldn’t. What were the odds of getting a fax from anybody from Vieques Island? The place was a microdot on the map, known, among the people she knew, only to the mother of Hans Brinkman, orCould it possibly have been… From the moment she had laid eyes on the email, she hadn’t dared to complete the thought for fear of jinxing it. No, the thing to do was to get to the island as soon as possible, then investigate carefully, methodically, keeping her wits about her. She would refuse to think that she was rushing headlong toward a fate she had been avoiding all her life. Or that someone or something who knew her more completely than she even did herself was giving her an opportunity to use all those talents Hans had once accused her of squandering, just to reach this fate. This destiny. This man. Sure, she would
Beauty, brains and business sense…
She went outside, booked the most roadworthy cab and the youngest driver she could find and told him there was a hundred dollars in it for him if he could get her to Fajardo in time to make the 10:30 ferry. The cabdriver got rid of his cigarette and opened the back door of his 85 Cougar. For the next hour she hung on for dear life as the cab careened down the coastline of Puerto Rico. To distract herself from what she felt would be her sure demise, she turned on the flickering dome light and read what little she had been able to pull off the Internet about Vieques.
Vieques is a small volcanic island lying just off the east coast of Puerto Rico. About three thousand years ago, the first humans reached the place by moving up the island chain. Dating from about 200 B.C. there are records that remarkable Indian cultures lived there. Finally a Frenchman, Le Guillou, clamped a Western colonial hand over it, converting the place to the cultivation of sugar in the name of Spain. Within a short time the trees were gone and the island was planted with cane from coast to coast. It then was traded and raided from hand to hand between imperial powers. In 1898, control of the island passed from Spain to the United States. Conditions remained unchanged on the island until the Second World War.
In 1941, the U.S. Navy took over three quarters of Vieques Island for training and the testing of ordnance. Much of the native population was summarily displaced, and instead the island rocked to the sound of shouted orders and the thunder of bombs, rockets and artillery shells from both aircraft and ships. It was listed as an adjunct to the massive Roosevelt Roads Naval Station on the main island, and hosted Camp Garcia for the Marine Corps, as well as seventeen NAVSTAR departments and twenty-four tenant commands for the Navy, Army and Marines.
A military base, thought Elizabeth. Of course, Rose-Anne Brink-man had told her that. So why was she suddenly feeling so uneasy? In the years following the Cold War things had calmed down according to the article, and a certain amount of tourism had spilled over from Puerto Rico to help replace the vanished sugar industry. But mostly the island was quiet, best known for its mangrove swamps, deserted beaches and wildlife. So what had happened to the military? What had they been up to for the last ten years? When the bulb in the dome light blinked out and refused to come back on, Elizabeth resigned herself to watching the foliage flash by and counting the number of gigantic bugs that smashed against the windshield. She just made the ferry bought a two-dollar ticket and went aboard. Built to accommodate four hundred, the craft was carrying only a few dozen party animals returning to their inns from San Juan’s casinos. Elizabeth left them to their revelry around the Formica bar and went out on deck. The sky was ablaze with stars, the sea smooth as glass. She stayed on deck until the ferry pulled into its terminal in Isabel Segunda. Ahead were the seven-story ruins of a lighthouse and, high on the bill across from the dock, the dark silhouette of a Spanish fortress. The air was warm, nearly 80 degrees, and alive with a high, sweet chirping sound. In her heightened awareness, the sound assaulted her senses. She could still hear it from the terminal rest room, where she had hastened upon docking-the facilities on the ferry had been completely out of the question. “Tree frogs,” said a voice from the next sink. “Coquis,” nodded Elizabeth, a little startled by her own knowledge. “You’ve been down here before,” the woman said. She had metallic red hair, an open, friendly face and severely plucked eyebrows. “No, I haven’t.”
“Let me guess. You work for a zoo? Or you just watch a lot of Animal Planet.” “I don’t know how I knew,” said Elizabeth uneasily, drying her hands. The word coquis had come out of her mouth as though she had heard it a hundred times. “I must have read it on the Internet or something,” she said without conviction; suddenly she realized she had left the Web printouts in the cab. “You work for American?” she asked, noting the airline insignia on the woman’s lapel. “Uh-huh. Puerto Rico’s our hub, and Vieques is my favorite place to escape to. Why?” “Ever heard of the Inn on the Azure Horizon?” The woman frowned. “Doesn’t ring a bell. Is that where you’re staying?” “I thought I was,” said Elizabeth, holding open the door as they left the rest room together. “There seems to be some doubt whether it even exists. You think I’ll be able to get a room tonight somewhere else?” “Here in Isabel? You didn’t make a reservation?” “I kind of took a flyer.”
The woman grinned. “He must be gorgeous.” Elizabeth managed a tight smile. “He is,” she said. He is, he was, he is. “I’m sorry;” said the flight attendant, noting the unease in Elizabeth’s expression. “Really none of my beeswax. It’s just that, you know, it’s usually why women come to the island.” She stuck out her hand. “Mary Blanchard.” Elizabeth hesitated for a fraction of a second, then shook it. “Elizabeth Parker.” Five minutes later, she was sharing a cab with Mary Blanchard and two of her colleagues, one of whom was dead certain she had seen Elizabeth in an in-flight movie just the other week. She wouldn’t take no for an answer. “I know I know your face,” she kept insisting. The three flight attendants amiably rattled on about men and craps tables and asshole passengers, and Mary Blanchard offered to let Elizabeth sleep on the couch in her room at their hotel, a revamped turn-of-the-century French sugar plantation called Casa del Frances. It proved to he a pleasant enough place overlooking the ocean and the town of Esperanza. The owner, Ivor Greeley. a crusty New Englander with a fond-ness for antediluvian slang, realized there was now an extra member in their party and took twenty dollars for his trouble. “I’ll have a unit free tomorrow,” he told Elizabeth. His eyes were lively and brown and he had graying blond hair brushed over a shining bald patch. “You can pay in advance or you can take it on the arches.” Then, in welcoming his new guest, he sent them a complimentary bottle of rum. For the first time in weeks she slept straight through the night. To- ward morning, she dreamed she was floating in a sea of stars. It was heaven, she realized, liquid, oceanic and salty, and then Hans was there with her. The gently rolling water glowed with a million pinpricks of light as he entered. Then he was gone and she was chasing him up a flight of ancient stone stairs, to the heights of El Fortin, where he managed to disappear into a sudden crowd of angry farm animals. Goats were bleating outside her window, a rooster was crowing and she realized she was awake. El Fortfn?