Trouble in Paradise Read online

  Could our bartender friend have walked down to the beach and been picked up by a boat? The Leaky Sieve, maybe? If he had, there was no way for us to follow him.

  “Hey, you know what?” Joe said suddenly.

  “What?”

  “Maybe there’s another mill somewhere.”

  I was stunned. “You know, little brother—you might just have something there!”

  What was it I’d read on the plane, in that National Park Service pamphlet? Something about an old sugar mill at the bottom of a trail? I’d circled the page, I remembered that—but the name of the trail escaped me.

  One thing was for sure, though—if the Jeep had been going to the other sugar mill, it would have turned right at the fork in the road, heading for the Centerline Road.

  That was where the trail started, at the top of the mountain. It was the only way to get to the sugar mill ruins, except by water. Even if they’d gone that way, we had no choice but to approach by land.

  “Back to the fork in the road!” I said. Joe and I sprang into action, doing wheelies on our scooters and heading back the way we’d come. We made a sharp left at the fork, then headed up into the mountains.

  It was very dark, and we’d never traveled this road before. Our scooters couldn’t get up the steep parts very fast. And the road was really narrow, too—hemmed in by rocky mountainside on one side, and sheer cliffs on the other.

  We hadn’t gone more than a mile when we realized there was a car approaching from behind us. It was gaining on us quickly, and we must have been clear in their headlights.

  Soon they’d have to slow down, I thought. Because there was no room on the left for us to get out of the way. And on the right, only a sheer drop through the jungle, who knew how far? We couldn’t see a thing down there.

  The car slowed down as it got within about fifty feet. I was relieved. At least they saw us. Now they’d just have to be patient, until we reached a spot where we could pull over and let them pass.

  All of a sudden there was a screech of tires as the car quickly sped up.

  “They’re coming right for us!” Joe yelled.

  As if I couldn’t see that.

  We were going as fast as we could, but the car was gaining on us in a hurry.

  “Noooo!” we both screamed.

  The car was right on us now. I looked back for one brief instant—just to see the face of the person who was about to kill us.

  It was none other than Cap’n—good old Corbin St. Clare!

  And sitting next to him, looking as terrified as a ghost, was Jenna!

  Was she being kidnapped too? They’d already threatened her life once. They must have found out she’d talked to me!

  Or was she on their side?

  I looked back to the road, and just in time, leaned into another hairpin turn.

  We gained a foot or two on the car, but only for a moment. Then the car’s front bumper hit our rear wheels, crushing our scooters into scrap metal.

  Joe and I were tossed into the air. We tumbled head over heels, landed hard at the edge of the road, then went right over the edge of the cliff.

  9.

  The Pirates’ Lair

  Everything hurt. I mean everything. I opened my eyes and I couldn’t see a thing. For a second I thought I was dead, or at least blind, but then I realized there was a palm leaf covering my face.

  I pulled it off me (ah, my arms still worked) and there was the full moon, and the stars, and the tops of the trees.

  I was lying on the ground, and my feet were propped against a tree trunk.

  “Frank?” I called out.

  “Oohhhh …”

  He was alive, at least. The sound came from my right. I turned my head painfully in that direction, and there he was, caught between the twin trunks of a huge tree. His feet were higher than his head.

  “You okay?”

  “No. You?”

  “No.”

  “Can you get up?”

  “I … think so,” I said.

  Then I tried. It was slow going, since I had to test every body part first to be sure it wasn’t broken. I could feel all the black and blue marks on my legs and arms, and I could only imagine what my face looked like. There was a huge bump on my forehead, for sure, from the rock or tree or whatever it was that got me in the face.

  “I’m up,” I said finally, as I steadied my feet on the steep ground.

  “Well, then, come and help me!”

  “I’m on my way, bro.”

  I had to find hand- and footholds, or I’d have slid right down into the darkness. Painfully, slowly, I got to Frank and was able to turn him right side up.

  “You okay?” I asked him.

  “Ow,” he said. “Do I look okay?”

  His face was black with dirt, and he had a cut on his ear that was probably going to need stitches. “You’ve looked better,” I said.

  “Well, I feel like crud.”

  “Me too, but we’d better get back up there if we want to catch those dirtbags.”

  We helped each other climb back up to the road. Pieces of our scooters were strewn everywhere. But at least our attackers were nowhere in sight.

  “Maybe we could hitch a ride,” Frank suggested.

  I looked back at the dark road, lit only by moonlight filtering through the trees. “Not much traffic. We’d better start walking.”

  Walking was slow, especially since we were going mostly uphill. But it was good for our sore muscles. After a while, I hardly noticed the pain in my arms, legs, and head.

  It took us about fifteen minutes to walk to the junction of our road and the Central Highway. We didn’t see one single car the whole time. Traffic on St. John’s lesser roads was pretty scarce after dark.

  There was a sign at the junction: REEF BAY TRAIL-HEAD, 1/2 MILE.

  “Reef Bay! That’s it!” Frank said excitedly.

  “That’s what?”

  “That’s where the other sugar mill ruins are—at the bottom of that trail!”

  We started jogging, picking up the pace. We both knew there was no time to lose.

  “Do you think they’ll let Esteban go free now that they’ve got the money?” I asked.

  “If they were going to let him go, then why take Jenna?”

  “I see your point. So you think they’ll get rid of them both, to cover their tracks?”

  Frank was silent for a moment as he thought about that grim possibility. “Not if we get there in time to stop them.”

  Ah, but time was ticking by, and it was a good thing a truck came by and gave us a ride to the trailhead.

  The driver, a young local guy who did landscaping for the wealthy owners of island vacation homes, asked us if we were sure we wanted to be dropped off at the trailhead, seeing that it was after dark. (We couldn’t share with him our reasons for wanting to be there.) “That trail’s been closed for two weeks now,” he said.

  “Making the sugar mill ruins a perfect hideout,” Frank whispered in my ear.

  I pointed to a pair of cars parked in the small roadside parking area. “That’s our lift home,” I told our driver.

  “Tha’s cool, mon. Nice seein’ y’all.” He took off, and his truck disappeared down the road.

  One of the parked cars, a gray sedan, had a badly dented front bumper. “That’s the one that ran us down,” I said.

  The other was the black Jeep we’d followed out of Cruz Bay.

  “They’re here, all right!” Frank said excitedly. “Let’s go after them!”

  “Do you think we should call for backup before we start down the trail?” I asked.

  We whipped out our cell phones, but of course, we were in another dead zone. “Too late,” I said.

  So, no backup. We were totally on our own, facing a gang of kidnappers who had already tried to kill us twice. They’d failed both times, but I wasn’t sure I liked our chances of surviving a third attempt.

  “Joe,” Frank said, “that car that tried to run us down—do you
think they knew it was us?”

  “I guess so,” I said. “Or do you think they were just in a hurry and didn’t care who they ran down?”

  “No. But maybe they didn’t know we were still here until that moment when they saw us in their headlights. I mean, it’s true, they had Jenna—but she thought we were leaving the island, so they couldn’t have found out from her.”

  “Either way, they know now that we’re here,” I said, “and that’s bad.”

  “Correction,” he said. “They think we died going over that cliff. And that’s good.”

  He was right. They hadn’t even stopped to check whether they’d killed us, so they must have felt pretty sure they had.

  “Enough time wasted,” I said. “Let’s get going.”

  We headed down the trail and into the thick, dark jungle. I heard animals scuttling around the ground, hunting for prey, or trying to escape predators.

  We were hunters too—but we had no weapons. If we did succeed in catching up with our band of kidnappers, how exactly were we going to foil their escape?

  When Frank had asked me about it, I’d told him I’d come up with something.

  What was I thinking? I didn’t have a clue. I could only hope for some last-minute inspiration to strike. Remembering my pocket flashlight, I pulled it out and flicked it on.

  A few of the trees we passed had identifying markers tacked up on them by the National Park Service. One in particular caught my eye: the strangler fig.

  According to the sign, the tree actually starts life as a vine that creeps up the trunk of some other poor tree. The strangler sends down roots from the air, and they wind around the trunk of the original tree. Sooner or later, the strangled tree dies, and the parasite strangler fig is all that’s left.

  It reminded me of how criminals work—greedily squeezing the life out of innocent people who are just minding their own business. It made me angry, and if I wasn’t hurting so badly, I would have given that strangler fig a good kick in the trunk.

  Another tree that caught my eye was the monkey-no-climb tree, also known as a monkey puzzle tree—and I could see why. The entire trunk was dotted with sharp little bumps, like spikes. If I was a monkey, I would have picked some other tree to climb for sure.

  After about half an hour, I was really getting tired. It had been an exhausting couple of days, and I was beginning to think we’d never catch up to those thugs in time to stop them from killing their captives and getting away.

  I needed to stop and rest for a few minutes, but of course, there was no time for resting—not with two innocent lives at stake.

  Just as I felt like I was going to collapse, I heard the sound of rushing water up ahead. A moment later, we came to a beautiful waterfall. It gushed out of a rock and went tumbling into a perfect swimming hole.

  “Awesome!” I said, emptying my pockets before jumping in. The cold water was the perfect tonic for everything that was ailing me.

  Frank plunged in too—and at least for a minute, we experienced what a paradise this island could really be, when you weren’t in a life-and-death struggle with bad guys.

  A minute was all we could spare, though. Too bad. I would have loved to spend the whole night there at that waterfall—the whole week, in fact.

  “We’ve got to come back here!” I said.

  “Hey, look!” Frank said, pointing to something on the side of the rock where the waterfall emerged. “Petroglyphs,” he said. “Ancient rock paintings.”

  “Whoa. You think they’re from the Stone Age?”

  “Probably pre-Columbian Indians,” he said.

  Who was I to argue? Frank’s the one who remembers every last thing in every single textbook he ever read.

  We took off again, following the trail as it wound downhill toward the beach and the old sugar mill ruins.

  About ten minutes later, we started to hear sounds ahead in the distance—human voices! If we had any lingering doubts about whether we were on the right track, they disappeared in that instant.

  “Come on!” Frank said, quickening his steps. “They’re still here!”

  I kept pace, although I still wondered what we were going to do once we got there.

  I noticed an orange glow in the sky above the trees up ahead. A bonfire, I guessed. We could tell by the light just how close we were getting. We stopped running when we thought we were in earshot.

  The voices were more distinct now—men’s voices, all of them. I knew Frank would be listening for Jenna’s voice, hoping she was still alive.

  I had my doubts. The look on her face in that car had been one of sheer terror.

  We crept closer, hiding behind a fringe of bushes. The light from the bonfire made everything look orange and black. In fact, what we saw as we peeked through those bushes was very like Halloween.

  The ruins of this old sugar mill were in much worse shape than the ones at Leinster Bay. These had liana vines all over them, and they were crumbling into the sand. They rose up as high as the palms, looking eerie in the orange light.

  You could almost imagine ghosts flying out of those empty black holes that had once been windows and doors—just like at the other sugar mill.

  Our gang of kidnappers wasn’t wearing pirate costumes or anything like that—but they were pirates in every other way. They carried knives in their belts, pistols in their holsters, and machetes in their hands.

  And stacked everywhere, all around the ruins, and glowing more brightly than anything else, were piles and piles of gold doubloons and other pirate treasure!

  10.

  Surprise, Surprise

  I felt a triumphant surge of energy go through me. We had survived almost certain death, and now we had found the kidnappers’ secret hideout.

  Somewhere at this remote campsite were Jenna and Esteban—hopefully, both still alive.

  I tried to make out people’s faces in the orange glow. There was a group of about six men clustered around the flames. They were busy eating chicken legs, ripping them apart and throwing the bones into the fire. The grease threw sparks into the air, but no one seemed too worried about the danger of being burned, much less discovered.

  These men knew their fire would not give them away. This side of St. John was completely uninhabited. Their secret campsite was hidden from the world by the mountain on one side, and by the open ocean on the other.

  I recognized two of the six men as the mean-looking ones Jenna had talked about. Her description was pretty good, I have to say. The other four I didn’t recognize. The bartender from the Buccaneer’s Lair was nowhere in sight. Neither was Cap’n, or Jenna, or Esteban Calderon.

  I wondered how long they’d been here, collecting their treasure from the wreck of the Santa Inez.

  I figured that the gang must have set up camp here, knowing that no hikers would be coming their way. No one would disturb their privacy or spy the treasure they were steadily heaping up on the beach.

  I thought about the name of our hotel—how perfectly named it was, considering that these modern-day buccaneers had made it their base in Cruz Bay. Poor Esteban—he’d walked right into the Buccaneer’s Lair, not knowing it really was one!

  Then I thought about Jenna. How could she have worked there the whole time, side by side with that bartender, seeing the kinds of people he hung out with, and not realizing the danger she was in?

  Or maybe she had realized—maybe that was why she’d been so terrified. Maybe that’s why she’d been kidnapped and brought here tonight.

  Innocent until proven guilty …

  Joe and I didn’t say a word to each other as we spied on the gang of pirate-kidnappers. We didn’t make a sound. Our lives, and perhaps the lives of two other people, depended on our total silence.

  I tried to make sense in my mind of what I was seeing, and of what I had seen earlier back on the road. Somehow the gang must have figured out that Joe and I were still on the island.

  How had they known? Had there been someone on the boat with
us, just to make sure we arrived on St. Thomas?

  There must have been. With so much at stake, a gang this size would not have taken any chances.

  Out of the ruins now stepped the hulking figure of Cap’n—Mr. Corbin St. Clare himself. Beside him walked the bartender from the Buccaneer’s Lair, carrying the ransom money in its metal briefcase. He placed it down on a flat stump, snapped it open, and the two of them started counting the loot.

  Joe motioned me away from the scene. I knew what he meant—we needed to talk, but we were too close to make noise. We backed away down the trail about a hundred feet, just far enough to whisper.

  “We’ve got to find Esteban,” he said. “He has to be around here somewhere.”

  “And Jenna, too,” I reminded him.

  “I say we circle the campsite in different directions and meet up on the far side, down by the beach,” he said.

  “And if one of us finds them?”

  “He waits for the other to show up before he does anything.”

  “Excellent. Let’s do it.”

  Joe and I set off into the forest, he to the right of the trail, me to the left. Luckily, there wasn’t much underbrush—just palm trees and spiny bushes rooted in sand and dried seaweed from past storms. It was pretty easy to make headway without making any noise that would alert the gang to our presence.

  My route took me behind the ruins of the sugar mill, heading toward the beach. In between the two, there was a clearing with two lean-tos—shelters made of palm leaves and branches, propped on bamboo poles. Even with the full moon rising, it was dark under the canopy of the trees. But the glow of the bonfire showed me their shapes.

  I crept close to the nearer, larger lean-to and inched along its side so that I could peek inside through the open front.

  Just as I got into position, I heard a voice inside the lean-to that made me freeze in place.

  “Hello, baby—how’re you doing?”

  Jenna!

  For a second, I thought she was talking to me—that’s how close her voice was. I nearly answered her too—but someone else did first.