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  So it’s not just the animals that vie for center stage in the theater of my words. It’s also the jumbies. And let’s meet one now, in an excerpt from my novel Discovering Katie.

  ~~~

  Chapter Six: Finding Annalise

  Excerpt from the novel Discovering Katie:

  I guess you could say I chose to drown the sorrow of my unrequited love in a hundred and ten acres of bush and six thousand square feet of partly-finished house in a tropical island rainforest.

  Her name was Annalise, or rather, Estate Annalise. A crook had begun to build her years before and abandoned her, half-complete, when the Feds invited him to spend time in one of their correctional institutions. Word has it that he told his friends he was going to visit his mother. The next thing you know, his picture was on the cover of the San Juan Star. “St. Marcos Man Convicted as Drug Kingpin,” the headline blared. This explained his boat, plane, and houses on several islands; just another Caribbean success story, so to speak.

  Annalise, the house he built and left, was a jumbie house. A jumbie, in West Indian folk magic like voodoo or Santeria, is a ghost or spirit.

  Completely bonkers, right? Only it wasn’t.

  I discovered Annalise while I was on a trip to St. Marcos. My name is Katie Connell—a good Irish Catholic name for a Baptist girl from Texas—and I have the red hair, pale skin, volatile temper, and family history of alcoholism you’d expect. I ran to St. Marcos to spend two weeks at a spa there as a form of self-rehabilitation. AA may work for most people, but I don’t do group activities very well. Besides, I’d merely been drinking too much for too long a time; I was not an alcoholic.

  The only thing I wanted from St. Marcos was serenity, and to prove to my brother Collin that I could give up Bloody Marys for two whole weeks. Finding Annalise was an accident. Or maybe it was fate.

  So, there I was on St. Marcos, at a resort that promised a wide variety of island adventures for the guests that weren’t into the chichi spa services. Guests like me. I laced up my boots and set out for a guided hike in the rainforest led by Rashidi Johns. It sounded like the kind of “take me away from myself” adventure I needed.

  Rashidi was a botanist by education, an entrepreneur by nature, and a Rastafarian by faith. His neatly-tied dreadlocks hung all the way to his waist. He was lean from his vegetarian life, but strong. The female hikers found him exotic and appreciated his dark physique. Due to his popularity, the group I joined for the morning hike was sizable.

  Rashidi walked through the tittering throng, checking us for appropriate clothing, footwear, sunscreen, bug spray, hats, and hydration. He sent a few women back for supplies, and one or two he delicately queried about their constitutions and health.

  “The rainforest on St. Marcos is one of the most beautiful places in the world, but it is rugged, ladies, and it be harsh.” His calypso accent was thick, but understandable. “There may be some of you that would enjoy it more with a drivin’ tour. These hills are steep. The sun is brutal. There are centipedes as long as me foot.” Someone laughed. “I not jokin’ you, ladies. You will see beautiful trees, blossoms and vines, but dey can reach out with their t’orns and stickers and tear your soft skin. They grow t’ick togedder, so at times I will be using this,” he patted the machete strung across his hip, “to clear a path for us to get t’rough. You ain’t going to make me sad if you decide this hike is not for you. I can only carry one of you out if you get hurt or fall to our tropical heat, so leave now if you gonna be leavin’.”

  One portly older woman, who was already sweating profusely and sporting beet-red cheeks, opted out. The rest of us fell in line whispering and shuffle-footed behind Rashidi as he continued his commentary.

  The scenery was gorgeous, and like nothing I had ever seen. We hiked up a steep, winding path. The trees were tall, with the leaves clustered like a canopy over our heads. At ground level was bush, sparse on the cleared path, but thick up to its edge. As best as I can explain it, bush is whatever grows near the ground: bushes, ferns with giant leaves, weeds, flowers, small trees, and grasses. Rashidi described it all, but I didn’t hear most of it. I was concentrating on the challenge of breathing in through my nose and out through my mouth, and on keeping my mind free of him. Of Nick.

  The incline winded me, and I scowled at the memories and effect of my recent debauched lifestyle. The burning in my lungs began to feel good; it burned out the bush in me and cleared a path for me to find my way.

  We had been hiking for nearly two hours when Rashidi gave us a hydration break and announced that we were nearing the turnaround point, which would be a special treat: a modern ruin. He explained that a bad man, a thief and a thug, had built a beautiful mansion in paradise, named her Annalise, and then left her forsaken and half-complete. No one had ever finished her and the rainforest had moved fast to claim her. Wild horses roamed her halls, colonies of bats filled her eaves, and who knows what lived below her in the depths of her cisterns. We would eat our lunch there, then turn back for the—much easier, he promised—hike down.

  When the forest parted to reveal Annalise, we all drew in a breath. She was amazing: tall, austere, and a bit frightening. Our group grew tense. What woman doesn’t love going to an open house? And here we were, visiting a mysterious mansion with a romantic history in a tropical rainforest. Ooo la la.

  Graceful, flamboyant trees and grand pillars marked the entrance to her gateless drive. On each side of the overgrown road were tropical fruit trees of every description, and the fragrance was pungent, the air drunk with fermenting mangos and ripening guava, subtly undercut by the aroma of bay leaves. It was a surreal orchard, its orphaned fruit unpicked, the air heavy and still, bees and insects the only thing stirring besides our band of turistas. Overhead, the trees’ branches met in the middle of the road and were covered in vines with trailing pink flowers. The sun shone through the canopy in narrow beams and lit our dim path.

  We climbed up Annalise’s ten uneven front steps and entered through what should have been imposing double doors. We came first into a great room with thirty-five-foot ceilings. My skin prickled, each hair standing to salute Annalise. We gazed up in wonder at her intricate tongue-in-groove cypress ceiling with mahogany beams, her improbable stone fireplace here in the tropics.

  We explored her three stories, room after room unfolding as we discussed what each was to have been. Balcony floors with no railings jutted from two sides of the house. A giant concrete pool hovered partway out of the ground. How could someone put in so much work, build something magnificent, create such hope, and leave her to rot?

  Gradually, ughs replaced the oohs as we discovered that we had to step over horse manure and bat guano in every room. Dead gungalos by the thousands crunched under our feet. One woman put her hand on a wall and ended up with dung between her fingers and gunked into her ostentatious diamond ring, which for some inexplicable reason she’d worn on a rainforest hike. Annalise was not for the faint of heart, and I suppressed my urge to run for a broom. What she could have been was so clear; what she might still be was staggering. I could see it. I could feel it.

  And zing, something hit me hard, just coursed through my head and lungs. A cold, hard, lonely place filled with crap. It was like looking in the mirror. No, it was more than that. It was like someone had whispered it in my ear. It felt personal to me that she was abandoned. Even her name resonated inside me: Annalise. Unbelievably, I had a connection on my Treo, and I Googled the origin of the name—Hebrew for grace, favor. For some reason, reading those words hurt me. Annalise and I could both use some grace. An overpowering urge to make things right by myself and by this house rose up in me. I didn’t see the irrationality of it; I saw the possibility of mutual redemption. Lost in this feeling, I saved the realtor’s name and number from the faded sign by the door into my contacts. It didn’t hurt to type it into my memo app, I told myself.

  Rashidi’s voice broke through my reverie. “Ms. Katie, are you comin’ wit’ us? It gets dark up here
at night, you know.”

  I laughed and started after the group, excitement bubbling up in me from the inside and spilling over in that forgotten sound of joy. I had energy now and a spring in my step. The group was chattering as we hiked out, but I didn’t hear a word. My washing-machine mind was churning again, but instead of Nick, this time it was Annalise spinning through it. It was like she was calling out to me that we were the same, that we could save each other, and my mind answered with a cautious maybe, a tentative “we’ll see.” I stopped to look back each time she came into view, further and further in the distance.

  She was defiantly beautiful and strong, soaring over a sea of green treetops, and behind her, the ocean, which looked like the sky. A view of the world turned upside down. I shivered.

  Rashidi dropped back a half-dozen paces from the group and spoke softly to me. “So, you like the house? I see you talkin’ to her spirit.”

  Did this man take me for a crazy person? Or had my lips moved? If I was talking to her, and I was not sure that I had been, I wasn’t about to affirm my insanity to a stranger. “Talking to her spirit? What, you mean the spirit of the pooping horse?” I said.

  “You make like I crazy, but what that make you? You the one hear the house talkin’ to you,” he said matter-of-factly. “What she say?”

  Instead of answering him, I asked, “Why do you say she’s got a spirit? What do you mean, like a ghost?”

  Rashidi’s speech became more colloquial, his accent thickened, and his eyes sparkled. “Nah, she ain’t got no ghost, she is the spirit. She a beautiful woman, abandoned by a man. How does most beautiful womens act when they scorned? She lonely, and she full of spite.” He grinned. “She lookin’ for a new lover. But most folk too scared of her to take her on. When she don’t like someone, she a mean one. She been known to drop a bad man when he come for no good, hit him with a rock from nowhere, or send centipedes to bite him. When she do like somebody, well, some people say she talk to them. Like she talk to you, Ms. Katie.”

  This made sense to me in a way I could not explain. It wasn’t like I was ever going to have to see Rashidi again, so what the heck, I would tell him what I had heard.

  “She said we are soulmates.” I turned and smiled straight on at him. “In so many words.

  He didn’t bat an eye. “Yah, I t’ought so. Annalise talk to me sometimes, but today I feel her vibrations, and she talkin’ to you. Powerful t’ing. You gonna go back and talk to her again?”

  “Ummmm, maybe,” I said.

  “Let me know if you need a hand. Good to have someone with you what knows the way aroun’.”

  “I might take you up on that.”

  He nodded and caught up with the group, exhorting them to “Breathe in the scent of the flowers, ladies, glory in the beauty of the forest, because we are almost back to civilization, and you may never come this way again.”

  But I knew that I would.

  ~~~

  Chapter Seven: Giving Me Hives

  Above: Bees dem, at Annaly.

  After a few productive fits and starts, work ground to a halt at Annaly. This was not the first time I had experienced a work stoppage out there. Work had stopped before when my container arrived from Miami without my construction supplies. Work ceased temporarily when I fired my first general contractor. Work jammed up when my new workers decided to take a long Fourth of July weekend. In fact, it seemed that there was a lot more work stoppage than work startage up at Annaly.

  This time, though, the work stopped because of bees. Yes, bees. Bees as in four very big hives of angry African bees, hives that were affixed overnight to windows, a doorway, and the garage ceiling.

  I did what one normally does when infested by raging bees: flipped out. Then I called a specialist. Possibly I am using the word specialist liberally here, but I did call someone who said that for seven hundred dollars he would rid me of my bee problem. How? I figured don’t ask/don’t tell was the way to go.

  Two days later, I dragged my parents, kids, Cowboy, and our new rottweiler Callia (a rescue from the animal shelter) out to Annaly, where we were excited to see that the bee handler had earned his pay. We were bee-free. Being beeless meant work could resume on the house, or at least that it would require a new reason for work to continue not to occur on the house.

  While we were there, we were greeted by the welcome wagon—five preteen Cruzan boys toting machetes and BB guns who came up out of the bush to say hello. They entertained us with stories of riding their horses and playing hide-and-seek in the house (which they promised not to do any more), and picking mangoes in the valley I now called my own.

  Then an old local guy, whose name I still can’t pronounce, rode up on his horse. ’He had toothless gums and well-worn fatigues, and he offered to teach my kids to ride. We agreed that in exchange, he could continue harvesting and selling mangoes from the trees on Annaly’s grounds.

  I hoped the new neighbors, while not exactly the boy-next-door type, would compensate for the bee trauma. Annaly was testing my mettle, surely, but so far I’d stood my ground.

  ~~~

  Chapter Eight: Hi Ho Silver, Away!

  Jeb, may he rest in peace, was the best dog in the world, or at least on the island of St. Croix. We only had him half the time, as we shared custody with my parents. We hadn’t always done that; Jeb used to be solely their dog. He had to start staying with us when my parents were off-island, because he kept leaving Whispering Palms to go on walkabout à la Crocodile Dundee. He would visit neighbors from one end of the island to the other, and eventually someone would drop him at the vet, who was quite adamant that the walkabouts must stop. Cruzans are not great drivers, and Jeb preferred to travel down the center of the roadways.

  At our house, Jeb became Cowboy’s love object. Cowboy, at one year of age and a mere shadow of his future self, already outweighed Jeb by thirty pounds. It was a serious case of tough love. Imagine Cowboy standing at the back door of the house when he would spy Jeb standing fifteen feet away. With one leap, Cowboy would land on Jeb for the Power Hump, a move reminiscent of Tonto mounting his horse from the back by vaulting on. Cowboy would crush Jeb to the floor and they would skid another five feet together and slam into the far wall. Even the impact would not dislodge Cowboy. No wonder Jeb went on walkabout.

  Jeb, if he could have talked, would have told you how very happy he was every time my parents came back to St. Croix and rescued him from Cowboy. I hope his sudden and inexplicable death at the age of eight was in no part caused by Cowboy’s love.

  We miss that dog, all of us do, especially Cowboy.

  ~~~

  Chapter Nine: Rats, and I don’t mean darn.

  Dear Diary,

  The creatures of the field should remain in the field, and not come into my house. Since we moved in (a whole two weeks ago), I have had a problem with rats and mice at Annaly. Well, bats, geckos, frogs, gungalos, and centipedes, too, but for now, I’ll stick to the rodent issue.

  The rats are brazen. If food is left on a counter, they will come out and t’ief it2 right in front of me. I knew we had rats hiding in the chimney because I’d seen one scamper up there to safety. I bought poisons, traps, and sticky paper, but was too squeamish to use them. Hold that thought.

  While I may consider myself the butt-kicking Amazon of the Cruzan rainforest, even I am not about to spend the night alone in Wuthering Heights without a generator or any flashlights. So one night when I had exactly this issue, a perfect storm of unpreparedness if you will, Sasha, Valerie, and baby Marcia came over. Sasha and Valerie are both bahn’yah3 Cruzans, so I thought they could help me with my rat issues, but they were drinking red wine. Red wine and rat traps don’t mix. So we sat up chatting until the wee hours in the great room under the clothesline I had rigged around the four-story-high scaffolding since the drier wasn’t working yet. The laundry blew like flags in the night breeze from the open windows.

  We all played slumber party in the master bedroom, Marcia in her play
pen, the three of us grown-ups sardined in the king-size bed. About five a.m., I heard a thrum like a guitar chord. I roused Valerie. “Do you hear that? It sounds like something is playing with Clark’s guitar.”

  Valerie said, “No, that’s a mouse in the refrigerator something-or-other.”

  How the heck she knew that, lying somewhat drunk in a bed all the way across the big echo-y house, is beyond me. I went to look. Sure enough, she was right. Great.

  I left Sasha and Marcia asleep and made Valerie come with me to the kitchen. I briefly considered going outside to get the dogs—Cowboy, Callia, and my new baby German shepherd, Little Bear—but I realized this was a job for a cat. I posted Juliet4 at the top of the pantry, and we pulled the back top panel off the fridge to let the rodent free while she mewled in interest. We congratulated each other and returned to bed, assuming Juliet would be successful. But one should never assume, right?

  The next night, after we had returned from a “lovely” dinner at Blue Moon on the West End during which Clark had ugly mood swings and Susanne fell asleep, I straightened up the kitchen. I went to the pantry to put up a box of Cheez-Its, and found myself face-to-face with the granddaddy of all bush rats. I handled this well, thank you very much: I screamed my lungs out. Then, I took Juliet back into the kitchen for a second try. I put her up top, grabbed a box of Kraft Shells & Cheese, and shooed the rat out. Juliet didn’t move. I threw the macaroni box. It stunned the rat in midair, and I whacked it again with a box of Duncan Hines brownie mix when it hit the ground.

  “El raton es muerto!” I yelled. I don’t normally speak Spanish and have no idea where this came from.