Paradise Cursed – Snippet 3
CHAPTER 1
Present Day – Jamaica Harbor
Escaping the ship’s dining quarters and the heavy aroma of roasted beef, I briskly flexed my shoulders to loosen my mood. The ache refused to let go of me, touching off a string of colorful expletives.
After sitting at a table all morning to interview a paltry number of applicants better suited for swabbing a deck than hoisting a sail, my reward was a caffeine buzz that set my teeth on edge. My muscles needed a good workout, my stomach needed a hot meal plus an afternoon reviver. And before the next over-confident, under-skilled sailor popped up the gangway, I needed to fill my pipe with the sweet flavor of rum tobacco and enjoy a smoke.
Once on the foredeck, I paced leeward and gazed deep into tranquil Jamaican waters. A soothing color, turquoise. In short time the lyrical sway of a calm sea can lighten even the darkest mood. Today, however, the sea’s magic struck a gloomier note.
The sun shone at such an angle that my own reflection stared up at me, and what caught me off guard was the hoard of individuals gathered behind me among the waves, in rows of watery images. Row after row after row, each stretching from prow to stern, every person a friend or compatriot or loved one.
Every one of them dead.
I’d outlived so many, but the memories usually hit me one at a time. The sight of that solemn gathering charged so suddenly at my emotions that my eyes burned with unshed tears. My jaw trembled. My knees buckled. If I hadn’t been leaning on the taffrail, I might have ended in a lump of quivering flesh upon the deck.
Then as suddenly as it came, the vision vanished. I blinked. I sucked fresh air into my lungs and braved a second look. This time I saw nothing in the water except my favorite pipe bobbing over the waves.
Knowing when my mind or body has had enough stress, and acting on that salient knowledge, has prevented me from losing an arm. Or an eye. This curse of immortality I’ve dealt with for nigh on three centuries is most often quiescent, slowly honing my senses the way a weak fruit acid burnishes tooth enamel. Occasionally, my curse demands agility and, at all times, keen awareness. Unlike a gecko that can lose its tail and grow another, I cannot reproduce lost appendages.
Vital organs, however, that’s a different matter entirely. Heart, lungs, liver, each has received a “deadly” setback from bullet or blade only to boomerang into prime health before an hour passes.
Relax now, I chided. Or at least shove your feelings inside where they won’t scare away the few sailors who do have merit. Again I drew the sweet solace of ocean air deep into my lungs and let the sea enfold me in its soothing embrace.
The Caribbean and I have traveled together through a thousand storms. We’ve laughed together, and loved, and killed. She’s as familiar to me as the face in my bathroom mirror, yet she remains fickle. A friend one moment, a raging foe the next, she cannot be trusted. Trust, in fact, is an attitude I rarely experience.
With the vision gone, the sea reflected a cerulean sky as brilliant as any I’d seen in my years of sailing, the most promising sky any sailor could want at the start of a new voyage. The buzz of a motor launch drew my eyes toward the pier at Montego Bay, where a big honking ocean liner blocked my view. The approaching launch would dispatch new crew candidates along with more Stowaways—passengers who sleep over the night before we set sail.
I returned to the dining quarters.
“Without a first mate,” I yelled to no one in particular, “we cannot set sail tomorrow.” The nearest person in hearing range was Cookie, christened Charles Key, the only mate loyal enough to sail with me time and again. Oh, and the new quartermaster. “We also need three more able seamen, a bos’n—”
“And a galley slave, Cap’n.” Sweat beads shone on Cookie’s brilliantly bald head as he laid out a pan of yeast rolls to rise on the polished teak bar-top.
“You cannot be telling me you need help preparing meals for forty-seven passengers,” I called to his retreating back as he returned to his stove. Actually, we’d taken on several young men who’d be of more use in the galley than on deck.
“Er, Captain McKinsey,” piped the quartermaster, “it was forty-nine passengers at last count, plus the crew, sir.”
Regarding the chap, I tried to recall his name. Bart? Burt? Burke. Older than any other crew member except Cookie—and myself, of course—Burke was thin as a pipe-cleaner, blind as a mole without his spectacles, and had never quarter-mastered on a tall ship, or on any ship. The bloke’s only qualification was three years as a U.S. Army clerk. As usual, we were too shorthanded to be picky.
He glanced from his computer screen to the manifest on his clipboard as if willing the sums to magically multiply.
“Don’t fret the number of passengers,” I said. “We broke even at forty-five.”
Burke gave me the look. Of all his annoying qualities, Burke’s I-can’t-believe-you’re-such-a-moron look was most likely to get him tossed overboard.
“Here comes the next one.” Glancing at his watch, he nodded stiffly toward the door and the sound of the launch’s engine idling as it neared the ship.
Minutes later, a preppy-looking fellow about five-foot-ten in sailor whites—fit, neat, perhaps twenty-five years old—strode into the dining hall carrying a folded newspaper.
“Captain McKinsey?” He glanced around, settling his gaze on me, then strode confidently onward.
I checked the clipboard notation Burke had thrust at me. “You’re Jason Graham?”
“Jase.”
A firm enough handshake. Our lady passengers would appreciate his cocky demeanor. If the bloke could handle a ship, he was as good as hired.
When I motioned for him to join me at a linen-covered table, he flipped a chair round and straddled it. Cookie brought a steaming pot of rich black Jamaican coffee, and after talking with Jase Graham for five minutes I was keen to offer him the position as first mate at top scale. He was clearly a more experienced sailor than his youth suggested, and from his manner I judged him bold enough to handle a crew—but then he asked the dreaded question.
“What’s with the rumor about a curse?”
There it was. The damned dastardly tittle-tattle that had ousted the Sarah Jane from previous ports o’ call at Grenada, Saint Martin and Nassau. With a side-glance at Burke, busy with his numbers, I topped up my cup then returned Graham’s grin with my steeliest gaze.
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