Escape From Fear (10 page)

But months before his death, the prince had fathered a baby girl. She was born in the bush, and he named her Princess Alia. That baby girl grew up strong and proud like her father. She was a princess of the Aquambo, here on St. Jan, and she became mother to my grandmother's grandmother's grandmother's grandmother.

 

For a long moment all the sounds of boat horns, of people chatting, of music blaring from the restaurants seemed to fade. Nothing remained except the drama of Cimmaron's final words. Then, softly, Forrest asked, “So you and I are descended from an African prince?”

“We are, indeed,” Cimmaron replied. “You are a prince. Of royal blood. Never forget that.” As she stood, tall and regal, Jack could almost imagine a crown on her head, except an African princess wouldn't have worn a crown.

The story was still resonating inside Jack's head, filling it with dark images, when Cimmaron announced, “It was good to meet you all, but now I must go.”

“But I thought we could have more time!” Forrest protested, clutching her hand.

“Actually, we're on our way hoping to see a hawksbill turtle nesting, and you're welcome to join us,”

Steven offered.

“No, I must leave. But I'll see you again, Forrest.”

Forrest's eyes narrowed as he asked, “When? How?”

“Soon. Don't detain me now. Remember, I told you I have an important job to do.” Her eyes bore into Forrest, who nodded reluctantly. “Goodbye, Dr. Landon. Mr. Landon,” she said, shaking their hands. “Ashley, Jack, I'm sorry to go so suddenly. I will call in the morning, Forrest, and we can decide more. Until tomorrow.”

As suddenly as Cinderella leaving the ball, Cimmaron gave a final wave to the children and disappeared down the sidewalk. Forrest watched her retreating figure.

“Forrest,” Olivia said gently, “are you all right?”

“Don't worry about me,” he answered, his voice strangely steady. “Didn't you hear what she said about the people I came from? I can deal with anything.”

“I
t was nice of Denise to let us use her Jeep tonight,” Ashley said.

“It isn't Denise's Jeep. It belongs to the Park Service, and Mom's here on park business,” Jack reminded her. “But yeah, Denise is nice. Very cool lady. You ought to be more like her.”

“What do you mean? What's wrong with the way I am?” Ashley demanded.

“Oh, only everything,” Jack teased.

Ashley reached across Forrest to punch Jack. Forrest didn't react, not even when Ashley's and Jack's arms crisscrossed him and got all jumbled up as they escalated into a mock battle. Forrest seemed to have sunk deeply into his own worries, frowning, his lips moving as though he were arguing with himself.

“Don't fight back there, you two,” Steven ordered. “I don't need the distraction. I'm having a hard enough time remembering to drive on the wrong side of the road.” Although a full moon had begun to rise over the rim of the island, the twisting North Shore Road was only dimly lit, creating a tangle of moon shadows on the surface. Steven's hands gripped the wheel.

“It's not the wrong side of the road for the people of St. John,” Jack answered. “If they came to Wyoming, they'd think
we
were driving on the wrong side.”

Olivia turned to face the kids in the back seat, pointing a warning finger first at Jack and then at Ashley, a wordless signal that meant, “Settle down.” Which they did, after rolling their eyes at one another.

“You need to realize that seeing a hawksbill nesting is a rare treat.” Olivia told them. “The numbers of hawksbills has declined drastically. It's not just that their habitats are being destroyed because the coral reefs are dying. There's an even bigger threat: Poaching.”

“Poaching?” Forrest asked, frowning. “You mean like poached eggs?”

Jack couldn't help himself—he hooted. So Forrest IV didn't know everything after all, in spite of his expensive education! He thought “poached” meant an alternative to fried or scrambled. “Poaching,” Jack explained when he could stop laughing, “is like when Robin Hood and his Merry Men hunted deer on the king's lands. They were taking something illegally—hunting in a place they weren't allowed to.”

“And poaching is especially bad,” Ashley chimed in, “when people steal species that are endangered.”

Poor Forrest, he must have felt bombarded because right then Olivia went into her lecture mode. “It's bad enough when poachers steal the turtle eggs,” she said. “Even though buying and selling them is illegal, there are, unfortunately, a lot of people who like to eat those eggs. What's worse is when poachers take female hawksbills right off the beach while they're trying to nest. Once female turtles start laying eggs, they'll stay in one place for an hour or two until they're finished, so they're really vulnerable. It's easy to capture them then.”

“What do poachers steal them for?” Forrest asked. “Turtle soup?”

“Well, that too, but it's only a very small part of their value. It's the hawksbills' carapaces that poachers want,” Olivia told him. “In other words, the turtles' shells. Tortoiseshell. It gets made into jewelry and eyeglass frames and earrings and such, and it sells on the black market for $50 to $60 per pound. In Japan, as much as $100 a pound.”

“That's not so much money,” Forrest murmured.

“It is for some people. And as hawksbills get more scarce, the price of their shells just keeps rising.”

“My mother has—” Forrest began, then stopped.

Jack figured he'd been about to say that his mother owned tortoiseshell earrings or glasses frames or whatever, then decided not to.

Or maybe Forrest stopped because just at that moment, an old blue Chevy passed them on the right and raced into the night. Jack caught only a glimpse of the back of the driver's head—lots of hair, wild and unruly. Cimmaron? Maybe Forrest had seen the driver's face as she roared past.

Steven said, “We'll take a flashlight so we can find our way down to Jumbie Beach, but once we get there we have to turn it off. Lights make turtles disoriented. If they see artificial lights, they turn around and go back into the ocean without laying their eggs.”

“There's a big moon up there,” Ashley pointed out. “We might not even need a flashlight.”

“We'll take it anyway. Once the turtle is done nesting, we can use the light. It won't bother her then. Now, you guys start checking for mile marker 3. That's where we're supposed to pull off and park.”

Almost before he'd finished saying that, Ashley shouted, “There it is. Mile marker 3.”

Steven swerved the Jeep into a small parking area at the side of the road and turned off the motor. After they piled out of the Jeep, they used their flashlight to guide them down the wooden steps to Jumbie Beach. When Jack saw the moonlight reflecting in the water of Jumbie Bay, it looked so inviting that he wanted to rip off his sandals and run splashing into the surf.

“OK everyone, stay back,” his mother warned. “We're only going to the edge of these trees. We don't want to scare away any turtles that might show up.”

“What if the turtles don't come?” Ashley asked. “How long are we going to wait to see if they get here? If they don't come, can we go wading?”

“Not tonight,” Steven told her. “Tomorrow I'll take all of you snorkeling at Trunk Bay, where there's a wonderful coral reef. No matter what happens here tonight, we'll go to Trunk Bay tomorrow—promise!”

Ashley sighed loudly, then hunkered down at the foot of a tree where shadows would hide her from any approaching turtles. Forrest moved a little apart from the family, still absorbed in his own worries. Crouching down, he became part of the tree line. Jack thought about sitting near him, then decided Forrest wanted to be alone. His parents seemed to sense it as well, since they didn't pry. They let Forrest know where they were, then left him to his own thoughts.

It wasn't a bad way to spend a couple of hours, Jack decided. Water lapped the sandy beach, the moon continued to glide through a dark sky punctuated with constellations, and the bugs weren't too bothersome—although Ashley always attracted a lot more bugs than Jack did. He could hear her slapping her arms in the dark until their mother whispered for her to be still.

The night couldn't have been any quieter, no sounds but the water sliding onto shore and sliding back, and the call of a single night bird who didn't seem to know it was bedtime. That, plus a bit of rustling that Jack couldn't identify. It seemed to come first from one side of him, then the other, then from behind, as though some animal were circling through the brush.

Ashley leaned close to him, whispering, “Did you hear that? It's the Jumbies. This is their beach.”

“Don't be dumb,” Jack whispered back. “It's probably a couple of mongooses looking for people to bite.”

“Well, thanks!” she said half aloud. “That makes me feel a whole lot better!”

“Shhh!
” Olivia hissed.

Jack kept straining his eyes to look for turtles. Even though he was just inside the tree line, he had a good view of the beach. The part right ahead of him was pure, clean sand, smoothed by the waves, but to the left of that, a number of good-size rocks lined the shore. When he stared at them glistening in the moonlight as the waves surged forward, he could almost convince himself that the rocks were moving. A couple of times he thought one of them might be a turtle, but he knew turtles wouldn't emerge on the rocky part of the beach—they needed open sand where they could dig their nests.

Ashley stretched her arms over her head so high that her shoulders popped in their sockets. Leaning over, she murmured, “How long have we been here?”

Jack glanced at the luminescent dial on the face of his watch. “Two hours and six minutes.”

“My bottom hurts. I think it's gone completely numb. Do you think Forrest is OK?” she whispered.

“Yeah. He just wants to be alone.”

“You're all right with Forrest's…you know….”

Although it was dark, Jack understood what she was asking. Was he OK about Forrest's list? “Yes,” he answered at last. “I guess it'll all work out. We don't really know what she's up to, so none of it's our fault, right?”

“Right,” Ashley agreed. She didn't sound convinced.

Suddenly he felt Ashley's hand, clawlike, on his arm. Silently, she pointed to a serpentine head held high out of the surf. A turtle! Lumbering slowly, clumsily, it emerged from the surf to make its way up onto the beach, leaving turtle tracks in the sand.

“It's a hawksbill,” Olivia whispered. “I can't believe it…I was hoping, but…here it is!”

“Shhh!
” Ashley whispered fiercely, happy, it seemed, to shush her mother for once. But then she added, “I wonder if it's our turtle from this morning.”

Halfway between the edge of the water and the trees where the Landons were hiding, the turtle stopped. For a long while it sat on the sand, as though considering whether this would be a good spot to dig a nest.

Jack could see his father changing the setting on his camera—opening the shutter wide so he could take pictures without flash. Any bright light at that moment would have disturbed the turtle enough that she'd turn around and hurry back into the sea—as much as any turtle could hurry.

Slowly, using flippers that looked as long and curved as angel wings, she flung away loose sand. Then, digging with her flippers and rotating her body, she began to hollow out a pit. Time must have been passing because the moon had moved overhead, but the nesting fascinated Jack so much that he could have stayed completely still and watched all night. There were no sounds except the quiet clicking of the shutter as Steven took pictures and the grunting of the turtle as she began to lay her eggs in the pit—plus the rustling that could have been the mongooses.

Then Jack heard a gasp from Forrest, and on the other side of him, an echoing gasp from his sister. Both of them were staring at the waters of Jumbie Bay, where a 20-foot wooden boat drifted silently toward the shore. The front of the boat was crowded with human figures, silhouetted in the moonlight.

“Jumbies,” Ashley cried in fright.

“Quiet!” Steven told her softly. “It's probably just some fishermen, or it could be tourists. Maybe they're looking for turtles, too. Just watch and wait.”

Like a ghost ship, the boat drew closer and closer until it came to rest about 20 feet from shore, where it dropped anchor. Half a dozen dark shapes leaped out of the boat and started toward the shore. If they were ghosts, they should have glided soundlessly across the surface of the water; instead, they splashed noisily through the surf until they reached the beach. Then, calling softly in a language Jack didn't know, they began to run across the sand—right toward the Landons!

“Poachers!” Steven cried under his breath. But the dark shadows paid no attention to the nesting turtle; instead they ran straight for the trees, disappearing into the inky blackness, shadows into shadow.

“What should we do—where's the flashlight?” Olivia cried. In the darkness, as Steven fumbled to connect his flash attachment to his camera, four more dark shapes ran past them, melting into the trees.

Two other people—both men—had jumped out of the boat and were heading straight for the turtle. “Give me a hand with this—it's heavy,” one man said, as he tried to get a hold on one end of the turtle's shell.

“What 'bout dem eggs?” the other man asked, his voice carrying clearly in the night.

“We'll get them next. I love the smell of turtle—smells just like money!”

The men grunted as they lifted the turtle as high as their knees. With bowed backs, they began to make their way toward their wooden vessel.

“They're taking her! No way—stop! Leave her here!” Olivia shouted, leaping up from the blanket.

“Mom, wait! They might have guns!” Ashley screamed. In a flash she was beside her mother, with Steven right behind both of them, grabbing Olivia's arm.

Wrenching her arm free, Olivia cried, “We can't just watch—they'll kill her for the shell!”

Alerted by her cries, the poachers started to run. Curses rained down as they splashed toward the boat, the turtle swinging wildly between them. Jack knew this turtle would die. If the men threw her on the boat, they would wrench the shell from her back and kill her and all the eggs she was still carrying. Taking a step forward, he felt the flashlight beneath his shoe. The light. If he could catch them in the flashlight's beam, he'd be able to see the registration number on the boat and give it to the authorities. In an instant he scooped up the flashlight and fumbled for the switch. His hands felt as stiff as if they'd been held under cold water—why wouldn't his fingers work right? The flashlight tumbled from his hands to the ground, but when he grabbed it once more and commanded himself to calm down, he located the switch and turned it on.

The beam cut the night like a saber. He knew the poachers would flee like cockroaches rather than let anyone get a good look at their faces. But the moment he tried to aim the beam at them, he felt something hit him from behind.

“What?!” Jack stammered. He took a step but found himself reeling—a poacher must have found him, knocking him onto his back. He felt a vise-like grip as a hand attempted to pry the flashlight from his fingers. Then Jack caught a flash of a face in the beam. Forrest. It was Forrest, trying with all his might to wrestle the light away.

“Give…it…to…me!” Forrest said between gritted teeth. He was strong, but Jack punched him with an elbow, rolling free in the cool sand. Forrest fell onto his back but was up on his feet as fast as lightning, lunging once again at Jack.
“Give it up!”
he grunted. Driving at Jack's middle, he pushed him to the ground, landing on top of him with a thud. They flipped, one over the other, and Jack felt his flesh scraping against tree root. Forrest had gone crazy. Nothing made sense.