Carolyn G. Hart_Henrie O_01 Read online

  The rental car smelled like stale cigars. I had all the windows down despite the late-afternoon August heat and humidity-sodden air. I hadn’t been to the South Carolina Low Country in some: years. Not, in fact, since 1979 when I’d covered the aftermath of Hurricane David, which had left 78 dead and caused nearly half a billion dollars in damages. Hurricane Hugo had killed 21 when it struck a decade later. Worse was to come. The most devastating natural disaster in United States history was Hurricane Andrew. Striking in the early morning hours of late August 1992, this ferocious storm killed 38 while cutting a swath of destruction across the southern tip of Florida, obliterating 25,000 homes and causing $20 billion in damages and another $10 billion in clean-up costs. Experts had long feared that a hurricane on this scale would wreak havoc along the heavily populated corridor running from the tip of Florida all the way to Washington, D.C., but forecasting has become so expert that evacuation measures worked well in saving lives.

  I glanced down at the sheet containing directions. I’d received the sheet in a Federal Express packet that morning at the hotel. My flights had been uneventful, St. Louis to Atlanta, Atlanta to Charleston. I’d had plenty of time to refuse to undertake excursions down memory lane and to speculate about what lay ahead. The directions I’d been sent showed the route to follow, but they shed no light on what to expect at journey’s end. Simply a two-sentence note in Chase’s unmistakable, backward-slanted handwriting:

  You’ve always had an uncanny ability to sniff out the truth, Henrie O. I’m counting on you. Chase.

  I fiddled with the static-ridden radio, caught the latest news—cesspool politics dominated the election with heated charges and countercharges over crime and welfare issues; more Americans out of work as Labor Day approached; Tropical Storm Derek churned toward the Caribbean, picking up speed, and was predicted to reach hurricane status by tomorrow—and enjoyed the occasional glimpse of herons and snowy egrets in patches of lush marsh. Once off the interstate I was grateful for the map as I followed first one, then another and another and another pine-shrouded blacktop, each more distant from habitation, more remote. I almost missed the final turnoff, but at the last minute braked and wheeled to my right into Coffin Point Lane. Gray dust swirled up from beneath my wheels. I blinked and coughed. This track could scarcely count as a road. It was just two deep ruts in the gray dirt. Long-leaf pines towered overhead, blocking out the hazy sunlight. Resurrection ferns poked into the dusky lane, slapping against the car. Several miles farther on the track plunged out from beneath the pines to run beside a lagoon. A tawny red doe and her two half-grown fawns, feasting on the leaves of a sweet myrtle bush, turned startled eyes toward me. I slammed on my brakes, and they bolted into the pine-woods.

  I came to the end of the lane, literally, about two hundred yards farther on. And this curious odyssey turned curiouser indeed. The weathered Low Country shack on pilings was to be expected, as was the narrow planked pier extending into the salt marsh and out to the lime-green water of the sound. But the row of cars parked at the end of the lane looked as out of place in this remote marshland as tinsel stars tacked to an evergreen. A blue BMW, a Ford van, a rust-spotted Plymouth, a cream Mercedes sedan, a black Porsche, a yellow classic MG, a red Maserati, and a jade Jaguar. So much for “Buy American” among these drivers.

  There was not a soul to be seen. No one near the cars. No one on the pier. No one on the sagging porch of the house. Not a living person other than me moved in that heavy hot air. But my instructions had been precise. This was as far as I would go by automobile. Passage across the water would come next.

  I rolled up the windows and locked the car, retrieved my bags from the trunk, and walked toward the pier. Swirling clouds of no-see-ums attacked my bare face and arms, and I knew there would soon be prickly red welts.

  I dug into my carry-on bag for some skin lotion to discourage the frenzied insects, slapped it on my arms, then paced up and down the narrow pier. Sweat trickled down my face. A stiff breeze stirred my hair, but the air was so oppressive that it only made me more uncomfortable. Fifteen minutes passed. Then I heard, faintly, the pop-pop-pop of an outboard motor. I waited at the end of the pier, shielding my eyes from the late-afternoon sun and looked out across the whitecapped sound.

  The motorboat rode low in the water and its paint job had seen better days, but the stocky black man at the stern handled it with casual competence. As the boat knocked up against the pier, he tied up, then stepped out of the boat and climbed the ladder. The rickety pier quivered as he scrambled up to stand beside me.

  “Miz Collins?” He was a muscular man who looked like he worked outdoors, his T-shirt tight against a muscular chest, his dungarees faded and stained.

  I nodded.

  Without another word, his heavy face somber and unfriendly, he picked up my bags. He tucked both under one arm and descended the ladder.

  I looked after him thoughtfully as he stowed the luggage. He knew my name. That meant he had to be the person instructed to convey me to the island. But I didn’t like his scarcely veiled hostility, and I didn’t much like the entire appearance of this venture, the expensive cars haphazardly parked in this isolated, godforsaken wilderness, the slapdash provision for the transference of guests. It created an aura that didn’t reek of welcome.

  What kind of gathering was in progress? What the hell was Chase up to?

  The boatman looked up at me. I could see the sweat beading his face, the wetness of his shirt against his skin. “Miz Collins?” His deep voice was impatient.

  “Who are you?” I asked abruptly.

  I thought at first that he wasn’t going to answer. Finally, sullenly, he said, “Frank Hudson. I work for Mr. Prescott—when he comes ’round. I’m supposed to take you over to the island.”

  Hudson. That was the name in my packet of information. I started down the ladder.

  He made no move to offer a helping hand. I didn’t need help, and, in fact, I resent the automatic assumption that everyone past fifty requires assistance in physical efforts, but I was a little surprised nonetheless. I reached the bottom rung and stepped onto the boat.

  As I settled into the backseat, he cast off.

  “Whom do the cars belong to?” I looked back at the array of expensive vehicles.

  “The others.”

  “What others?” He might not want to talk, but that didn’t discourage me in the slightest. I’ve been asking questions for most of my lifetime.

  “The people going over to the island. You’re the last.”

  I felt a flicker of irritation. I’d asked Chase, of course, why he needed help, and he’d said only that I would find out. He said he wanted me because I had an instinct for truth. What kind of truth was he seeking? And why here, so far from the sophisticated world where he moved with so much power? I knew something about his life, of course. It would have been hard not to: twice chosen Time Man of the Year, the subject of countless admiring articles in Fortune and the Wall Street Journal. I knew he owned a number of homes: an old one—a monument to rapacious aggrandizement—in Newport, a cottage in Carmel, an estate in Atlanta, a brownstone in New York, a flat in London. I’d never read about an island home. But, for all I knew, this was some kind of exclusive resort. That would be very much like Chase.

  I looked across the sound. I thought perhaps I saw a green smudge of land against the horizon, low and lumpy.

  I shaded my eyes. “How far is it?”

  “’Bout six miles.”

  “You can only get there by boat?”

  “Yeah.”

  I looked at Frank Hudson’s back. His shoulders were hunched. There was no sense of holiday pleasure here. I wished I could see his face. Why was he angry?

  The boat picked up speed, spanked across the whitecaps. I raised my voice to be heard over the engine. “So there are no cars on the island?”

  Hudson eased up on the throttle and looked briefly, contemptuously, back at me. “No cars. No phones. No TV. Nothing.”

&nb
sp; “Is everything brought in by boat? People, supplies, newspapers?”

  “Or it don’t come.” He pulled down on the bill of his cap, shading his hostile eyes.

  “Who lives there?” I shifted a little in my seat. The Naugahyde upholstery was patched and a little lumpy. But the boat was well cared for, clean and tidy.

  “Nobody. Not now.” The deep voice sounded angrier. “I don’t call comin’ a few weeks at a time livin’ there. ’Course he can do what he wants, can’t he? He owns the island, every inch of it. That’s what he said when he bought it and started to build. Said he could do what he wanted, where he wanted.”

  I knew there were many small, privately owned islands off the coast, most of them serving as hunting preserves. I looked across the water with growing interest. A private island. With only Chase and his chosen guests.

  Hudson shoved the throttle forward; the engine rose to a roar.

  The sun slid behind a heavy bank of clouds. It was still hot, August, Low Country hot, but now the day had turned gray and ominous, the clouds edged by crimson. In the heavy, moisture-laden air the throb of the motorboat sounded like the buzz of an angry wasp.

  Then I saw the island, dark and vividly green, low against the murky horizon. An isolated patch of land with no link to the mainland and therefore no connection with the sprawling, powerful empire of Chase Prescott, media magnate.

  This was a Chase Prescott I didn’t know. What had happened to make the information mogul of America leave behind all the trappings of power? Chase seeking respite? That was at odds with everything I remembered. No matter how much he enjoyed drama, Chase surely wasn’t recalling the reclusive, nerve-ridden decline of Joseph Pulitzer, who had spent his final years in a tower with foot-thick walls where he still suffered acute pain from the smallest of noises.

  As we grew nearer, the boat bouncing on the short, choppy waves, I could see the ripple of spartina grass. The tide was coming in. Dense and impenetrable undergrowth choked the towering pines. There was no sight of a house or a dock. The island must have appeared just the same—fecund, wild, forbidding—to a party of seventeenth-century Spanish adventurers or to a brigantine filled with pirates.

  Abruptly, as if reading my mind, Frank Hudson slowed his boat. “The house is at the other end of the island. You can’t see it from here.”

  The motorboat turned south. Across the glistening, thick spartina grass of the marsh, I saw the low-lying land, the snarled tendrils of vines and ferns and bushes, a toppled pine, its trunk gashed by lightning.

  It wasn’t hospitable. In no way did it evoke the image of a South Sea island, where life is easy and languorous. “Did Mr. Prescott have the house built or was it there when he bought the island?”

  “Built it.”

  “I would imagine that brought in quite a bit of money to the local economy.” I tried to envision the many, many barges it would take to haul in everything needed for the kind of house Chase would want. Barges and workmen.

  “Yeah.” But the answer was a harsh sound in his throat.

  “Do you live on the island?”

  Hudson’s hands, large, work-worn hands, tightened on the wheel. “Not anymore. Not since Mr. Prescott took it.”

  “Did he make you move?” Now I understood that anger. “Didn’t he have to pay for your property?”

  Explosive rage burned in the dark eyes that looked back at me. “White men always have papers. The papers said the island belonged to some people up north. They came down to hunt a couple of times a year. It didn’t matter how long we’d lived there. They tore our houses down and made us move to the mainland. Us and the Willetts and the Browns and the Jorys. Oh, he gave us some money—for relocation”—the word was savage—“but it ain’t the same. It’ll never be the same.”

  It was abruptly cooler beneath the darkened sky. The skin on my bare arms prickled.

  “Does the island have a name?” I asked.

  The waves slapped against the hull. Blackbirds cawed. Hudson’s heavy shoulders shook. I realized he was laughing. “Oh, yes’m. It has a name. Mr. Prescott don’t like it. He calls it Prescott Island. But that’s not the real name.”

  “What is it?” I grabbed a railing as the boat picked up speed.

  “Dead Man’s Island.” His deep voice resounded with satisfaction.

  I stared at the dense, forbidding tangle of growth.

  Dead Man’s Island. There had to be a reason.

  “Why?”

  Hudson, too, was watching the island slide by. “Everybody still talks about it—and it was almost a hundred years ago. The big storm. The biggest one ever. After it was over, they come to the island to see how it went here. You know what they found”—eyes darker than coal searched mine—“when they come over? Not a living soul. Everybody drowned. Every last one of them. The bodies—swollen and smelly—they was snagged in the trees and caught in the brush. Up there on the high ground, the ground where Mr. Prescott built his house. Before that storm this was Fortune Island. But from that day to this ain’t nobody called it nothing but Dead Man’s Island.”

  I shivered. From the sudden breeze, of course.

  But in my heart I knew better. My Irish mother would have said a goose had walked across my grave.

  2

  Opulence.

  That was my immediate judgment.

  The massive pale yellow house dominated the ridge. It was in the Georgian colonial style, the two-story central segment balanced by two-story wings on either side. Colonnaded porches extended from every portion. Scarlet bougainvillea cascaded over walls and balconies. But the eye was caught and held by bed after curving bed of roses, roses so vivid, so gorgeous the eye was dazzled: crimson and rose, pink and vermilion, butter yellow and white, primrose and palest ivory, mauve and deep coral. A central fountain, bordered by pink marble, flung a shining column of water skyward. Dark green cypress bordered the flower beds.

  This house and its gardens were a spectacular achievement, a paean to human ingenuity and determination.

  But it was also an aberration.

  Elegance had no place on this wild and untamed island. The Georgian house and its fairy-tale gardens were at war with the luxuriant vines and unchecked shrubbery and encroaching weeds, the unstoppable, uncontrollable fecundity of subtropical land.

  The house was light and bright and airy.

  Behind it loomed the darkness of the vine-choked maritime forest.

  As the motorboat entered the small harbor, a slender, small-boned man in crisp khakis and a short-sleeved sport shirt bustled out onto the pier. This, of course, was a substantial pier, so new the wood was hardly weathered. Midway jutted a covered boat-house.

  Hudson held the boat steady as I climbed up the ladder to the dock.

  The young man on the pier beamed a welcoming smile, but it was as automatic and meaningless as a showgirl’s curved lips. “Mrs. Collins, how lovely to see you. Mr. Prescott asked me to welcome you to Prescott Island. I’m his personal secretary, Burton Andrews.”

  Burton Andrews had a boyish build and a youthful manner, but face-to-face I could see the faint pouches under his eyes and the fine lines on his forehead. His discontented air betrayed that nothing ever quite lived up to his expectations.

  He took my bags, ordered Hudson with, I thought, unnecessary condescension, to be sure to return the following week—“Mr. Prescott said the guests will all be staying for a week. Now, that’s Thursday next, do you understand?”—then chattered as he led the way ashore past the boathouse and the cabin cruiser docked inside. “That’s the Miranda B., just back from her yearly overhaul in Miami. A gorgeous boat. Mahogany trim throughout. I’m sure Mr. Prescott will take everyone for a spin sometime this week. It has a crew of three, but Mr. Prescott’s given them a holiday. He usually does that when he’s in residence on the island. He likes to have as few people here as possible. To be intime, you know. That’s why Hudson’s bringing over the guests. Of course, arriving in Hudson’s old outboard isn’t nearly a
s pleasant as traveling on the Miranda B.”

  Behind us the pop-pop of Hudson’s boat faded. We reached the end of the pier.

  “Mind your step now, Mrs. Collins. It’s six steps down—”

  Did the fool think I couldn’t count?

  “—and the oyster shells can be a little tricky, humpy, vous savez.”

  I didn’t bother to answer. I lengthened my stride. How did Chase put up with this nattering idiot?

  As we walked, Burton Andrews kept up a swift stream of comment in his flat midwestern—Iowa, perhaps—accent, peppered with bad French. “The main house is eight thousand square feet. Every comfort imaginable, bien sûr. Behind it there are separate quarters for the servants and a huge storage building that houses our own gas-powered generator, extra foodstuffs, garden machinery, and supplies. It even has a restaurant-size freezer room. We never lack for anything here on the island. Mr. Prescott expects excellence, and he wants all who stay on Prescott Island—”

  That afforded me a flicker of grim amusement. Prescott Island: Dead Man’s Island. I looked forward to discussing nomenclature with Chase.

  “—to be healed by its special peace. Peace and quiet, that’s what you will find here, Mrs. Collins. The ring of the telephone, the bleat of the fax machine—none of that intrudes here. Peace and quiet and, of course, the ultimate in service. We have a staff that can attend to every need, but the main work—trimming, gardening, thorough cleaning, restocking of supplies—occurs only once each week.” His arm swept out, encompassing the dazzling gardens. “Every Wednesday a crew arrives from Charleston. That makes it possible for six days out of seven to be devoid of irritants. No lawn mowers, no leaf blowers, no hedge trimmers. Instead we have sailing and swimming, books, films, hammocks for siestas. It’s quite heaven on earth, Mrs. Collins. Even for those of us who have to work while we’re here.”