Marcia Talley - Without a Grave

Night sounds surrounded me. The clack-clack-clack of hermit crabs scrabbling through the bushes, the wheep-wheep of a nighthawk, the ooh-wah-hoo-o-o of a mourning dove who apparently couldn’t sleep either.

Something startled a bird, and he flapped his way out of the trees. I squinted into the dark trying to see where it’d gone, when a moving light caught my eye. Hawksbill settlement was unusually dark, its generators, like ours, silenced for the night. Yet someone was moving around over there.

As I stared at the light, it divided, became two. Two became three, flittering like fireflies in the vicinity of the pier at the Tamarind Tree Resort. I wondered if the boys were skinny dipping and I shuddered. Don’t go swimming at night. That’s when the big fish come in to feed. A grizzled live-aboard had given me that advice one languid afternoon at Pete’s Pub in Little Harbour. But the big fish come by day, too, especially if you chum the water.

Still wearing the blanket, I went in search of the binoculars. Where had I put the damn things? Clutching the doorframe with one hand, I bumbled into the kitchen, ran my hands along the counter, the refrigerator, the table, another counter. I found the binoculars where I’d left them, next to the radio.

Thinking I should have laid a trail of breadcrumbs, it took me a minute or two to retrace my steps. When I got back to the porch, I put the binoculars to my eyes and stared across the harbor. There were more lights now. With magnification I could see three distinct lights that I figured were flashlights, and two other bright beams that could have been the headlights on a golf cart.

A light flashed, went out, flashed again. This time, it was near the end of the pier. Somebody was going swimming tonight. I squinted and diddled with the focus dial on the binoculars. No, two somebodies. An individual standing on the pier shone a light on the ladder as two swimmers, first one and then the other, climbed into the water. Meanwhile, lights wavered and jiggled as people moved up and down the beach.

Some sort of party? If so, where was the music?

With the binoculars trained on one line of lights, I ended up looking at the runway again. More lights on, then off, as the golf cart turned and drove away.

A chilling thought: Was I witnessing what Frank and Sally had observed on another moonless night?

I wondered if the view would be better from Molly’s porch, and whether she was still awake.

I fumbled my way into the bedroom, picked my shorts up off the floor, and pulled them on under my nightshirt. I slipped into my Crocs and collected my flashlight. I crashed around the bedroom until I found my iPhone where I’d left it on the bedside table, hoping for a call from Paul, and stuck it in my pocket.

I could have awakened the dead with all the noise I made thrashing through the underbrush, but since Molly and I were the only residents at present, it didn’t seem to matter.

At Molly’s cottage, a single light still burned in her bedroom window. I stood on the sand under it, a hand of thatch palm tickling my chin. ‘Molly!’

Molly’s worried face appeared like a Halloween mask in the window. ‘Hannah! What the heck are you doing out there?’

‘Come out on your porch. There’s something going on at the Tamarind Tree Resort that I think you need to see.’

While Molly slipped into a bathrobe, I walked around her house and climbed the steps on to her porch. By the time her glass doors slid open, I was already checking out the activity across the way. ‘There’s more lights, now,’ I whispered. ‘I think they’re lining them up along the runway.’ I turned to my friend in the dark. ‘Crazy bastards are going to land a plane! I’d bet my IRA on it!’

Molly carried binoculars, too. ‘Something similar was going on a couple of weeks ago, but it wasn’t as clear an evening then. The only thing I was sure of was the plane landing. That was hard to miss.’

‘A couple of weeks ago? When was that exactly?’

‘About the time…’ she gasped. ‘Oh, Hannah, how can I have been so dense? This must have been what Frank Parker saw!’ She laid the binoculars in her lap. ‘It’s got to be drugs. Why else would you try to land an airplane in the middle of nowhere in the dead of night. Like dropping an elephant on a postage stamp.’

‘And why tonight?’ she continued, raising the binoculars to her eyes for another look.

‘I think that’s easy.’ I picked up my iPhone, brought up the screen, and flicked open the moon phase web application. I tapped in the date. The crescent moon would appear tomorrow. And twenty-eight days ago, on August 1…

I rotated the display so Molly could see it. ‘No moon. A good night to be out if you’re up to mischief. You can’t see Poinciana Cove from Hawksbill settlement, and they probably think nobody’s at home over here. The power being out is a bonus. You can count on most people sticking close to home, at least until the power comes back on.’

I set my iPhone down on the table where the display eerily illuminated a polished conch shell. ‘Do you have pencil and paper?’

Molly rose from her chair. ‘I’ll go get it.’

‘My inclination is to hop in Pro Bono and toot on over there,’ I said, only half in jest.

‘Oh, that would be a grand idea!’ Molly scolded. ‘They’d hear us coming the minute we left your dock!’ She returned a few minutes later with a candlestick, balanced it carefully on the porch rail and settled into her chair, the notebook on her lap. ‘When did you first notice the lights?’

‘Ten fifteen, or thereabouts.’

Molly’s pencil moved across the page. ‘How many lights, and what did they seem to be doing?’

As Molly wrote, I tried to recall everything I’d seen from the porch of Windswept before coming over to wake her up. Between the two of us, we recorded a timeline all the way up to 11:08 p.m. at which point my cellphone battery died and the digital clock on its face winked out.

So I’m not exactly sure what time it was when we first heard the drone of an engine.

I picked up my binoculars, ready for action. ‘Here comes the plane!’

The hum of the engine became a thrum. From the volume and direction of the sound, I figured the pilot was navigating along the island chain, aided by lights in the settlements below. I wondered if he depended on those lights, or if he had a GPS. If not, his job would be tricky, as large portions of the islands would be darker than usual tonight.

To be on the safe side, I blew out the candle just as the airplane buzzed the tops of Molly’s trees, aiming for the makeshift runway less than half a mile away.

‘Damn! I wish these things would stop wiggling.’ Molly leaned forward, elbows propped up on the porch rail, trying to stabilize the binoculars. ‘What are they doing now?’

‘The plane’s on the ground. Wait a minute! They’ve started up some sort of portable generator light. I can almost make out…’

‘I got it now. What are those people doing?’

We watched, transfixed, as six or seven men swarmed over the runway removing packages from the airplane, loading them on a dune buggy, and driving them down to the beach.

‘It is drugs,’ I said. ‘Gotta be. Cocaine, most likely. Hell! I wish I had a night-vision camera!’

‘Shouldn’t we call somebody?’

‘Even if the power were on, we couldn’t use the radio, or we’d tip them off.’ I reached for my iPhone. ‘Oh, damn. Not much use without a charger.’

‘What are they doing with the packages?’

‘They’re stashing them underwater.’ I told Molly about my visit to the pier, and about the rectangular impressions I’d seen in the sea grass.