It Happened on St. John: A Tale of the Island

By Wilson Roberts

It Happened on St. John is a love letter to one of the world’s loveliest and most unique communities in one of the world’s loveliest and most unique places. Known locally as Love City, St. John is the smallest and most undeveloped of the three main islands of the United States Virgin Islands. The events in Wilson Roberts’ most recent novel take place months before Hurricanes Irma and Maria ripped through the Caribbean with fearsome winds and tides, tearing communities to pieces and leaving shattered homes and lives in its wake.
It Happened on St. John is a tale of a community united to fight the schemes of con-artists threatening to develop an unsustainable marina in the Coral Bay section of the island. It is a tale of a community where people put aside small differences to help one another in the face of adversities. It is a tale of a community of music and music makers, artists, artisans and tradespeople, business people, of people from all walks of life.
It Happened on St. John is a tale for everyone who knows life on a tropical island can approximate perfection. It is a tale for everyone who has wondered what they might find, should they reinvent themselves on a 20-square mile Caribbean land mass. It is a tale for everyone who would like to believe that most people have in their hearts sparks of generosity ready to burst into flame. It is a tale for everyone who wonders if some mysteries can ever be solved.
It Happened on St. John is a tale for everyone who loves St. John, for everyone who knows someone who loves St. John, for everyone who understands what it is to love a place, any place, for everyone who understands what it is to love their community. It is a tale for everyone who understands that a beloved community cannot be allowed to perish, whether due to greed and ignorance, or due to wind, fire and rain.
It Happened on St. John is the second novel in Wilson Roberts’ St. John trilogy. It is a tale of the island before Hurricanes Irma and Maria. It tells of the calm before those terrible storms, a time when people did not realize they lived in that calm, a time before the winds that rose to form Irma started with a small eddy of dust in the Sahara that blew into a boy’s face and filled his eyes.
It Happened on St. John is a tale filled with characters and scenes and events that readers will not easily forget.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wilder Publications, Inc.
• Release date: Jun 1, 2020
• ISBN: 9781515445401

Book preview

Part One

IF WHAT HAPPENED was murder and not a disappearance, planned or involuntary, some people on St. John speculate that French Jack was responsible for what happened to Ashlee Baker and Howard Winslow. A burly and dark bearded shade-tree mechanic who years earlier sailed into Coral Bay on a boat that looked as though a single raindrop might sink it, he vanished the same week as the murders or disappearances. Some locals, West Indians and ex-pats from the States and Europe, claim to have heard tales of French Jack tending bar in Santo Domingo, diving for sunken treasure off Anegada, working in construction on Martinique, and doing various kinds of labor in Denver, Miami and Jersey City.

Known on St. John as French Jack, after his boat, Le Jacques, he was kept busy by people who took their cars to his shop in the potholed bare ground between the rear of Skinny Legs Bar and Grill and the sheds and rusting shipping containers that make up the Coral Bay Marina. He was inexpensive by St. John standards and had a greasy black thumb that kept old, rusted and dented island cars running in conditions of repair that would not pass inspection almost anywhere back up in the States. When not working, he sat at Skinny’s bar, drank and told stories no one believed but which enthralled all his listeners both in content and in style. He was, it is still said, one of the best storytellers ever to pass through Coral Bay.

Others say if there were murders, Zinga could be involved. A West Indian carpenter and mouth harp player, a retired member of the SEAL Team, Zinga always wore shirts with three pockets sewed on each side of the placket for his harmonicas. He was outspoken in his dislike for the Baker and Winslow, especially after the fire. No one who suspected his involvement criticized him for it. Many praised him.

Zinga is a moral and upright man, Miss Anna Fenmire, owner of the Coral Bay Deli will still tell anyone who suggests he might have something to do with forced disappearances, let alone murders. While few on St. John disagree with her characterization of his upright nature, some, knowing of Zinga’s moral integrity, credit that very quality for their suspicions that he may well have been a possible actor in whatever happened. Of course, Miss Anna having at least once threatened Baker and Winslow with a long and sharp kitchen knife was not overlooked by Stephanie Hodge and Captain Leland Fenmire, the police officers trying to piece together what may have happened the two con artists.

Damien Carter, a bartender at Aqua Bistro, after consuming a large share of his wares, has been heard hinting that no one should overlook Bethany Wren, manager of the free medical clinic in the old Departures building. He reminds his listeners that there was something dodgy in her background, pointing to the coincidence of both Bethany and one of the possible victims hailing from the same region of the Carolina mountains, and citing rumors growing out of Bethany’s own comments of a dark history back in the mystery shrouded hills from which she came. Other people thinking of her possible involvement in the disappearances mention her central role in another kidnapping and attempted murder.

Other possible suspects include 80 year-old Hardware Ev, saxophone player and member of the bar band The Four Skins, consisting of four bald octogenarian men. Also frequently mentioned are other ex-patriots from the States and Europe who have over the years settled on St. John, living in houses, apartments and on boats in the harbor, along with Hispanic immigrants from other islands who come to the island to find work and, with luck, passage to the mainland United States. Many members of this varied group of St. John residents daily congregate beneath the banyan tree behind Miss Anna’s deli to discuss and debate people and events affecting Coral Bay. Discussions can be humorous, heated, lewd, serious, quiet, or loud. They are often detailed and reflective.

There is no local government in the Virgin Islands. St. Croix, St. Thomas and St. John and the smaller islands and cays are subject to the whims of a governor and fifteen legislators, many of them often more focused on private agendas that have little to do with the well-being of their constituents and the islands. Informal groups, like a cluster of interested people meeting beneath a banyan tree in Coral Bay, become a kind of de facto town council, expressing and at times acting privately and quietly in the interests of a particular island community. Governing, Miss Anna Fenmire once said, is sometimes best left to the people, not the government.

As often happens in small communities where real news is rare and exciting events sparse, on St. John there were almost as many theories about the fate of two people no one liked as there were people theorizing. Amid gossip, theories and idle speculation about the fortunes of Ashlee Baker and Howard Winslow, no one was outraged by any possibility. In Coral Bay there was no sadness or cold indifference to their disappearance and many people enjoyed imagining terrible things happening to them. Most agreed that whatever happened, the speculations about their fates provided wonderful gossip.

One

MISS ANNA FENMIRE was nervous. It was February; the high point of St. John’s tourist season and the Coral Bay Deli was too busy for her to be wasting time worrying about the two Americans. Ashlee Baker and Howard Winslow stood on the road looking toward her. She knew what the two so-called developers wanted. It enraged and worried her, stoking her fears that some members of her long dead husband Luther’s family would agree with the two so-called developers. While Miss Anna was sure most of the Fenmires would side with her, a few would surely be tempted by Baker and Winslow’s plans. She would have sleepless nights until the Fenmires agreed to formally sign over to her the plot of family land the deli occupied. What worried Miss Anna was whether the Fenmires who would like to see the land sold had enough influence over the others to delay or even deny deeding her the land. She hoped the affection Luther’s relatives had for his memory would prevail over any faction of family that would argue for selling the land to Baker and Winslow. Still, with Luther gone there would be no one to speak for her with the kind of authority he had carried with his extended clan.

Putting down the bowl in which she was mixing egg salad, she picked up a ten inch carving knife and stomped across the front porch and stood in her parking lot, waving it over her head.

You people get out of here. Move on.

Ashlee Baker laughed. She was thin, white as paper and Miss Anna was sure she could see the veins on her arms and legs, perhaps even her bones. Gesturing with a half raised middle finger, she looked at Miss Anna and spoke with a nasal Carolina mountain accent. You’re part of the past, old woman. St. John’s changing, ready for greater things than your beat up old building catering to people living on broken down old boats and shacks in the woods. Without all the fuckface interfering assholes around here, we could have been the future of Coral Bay.

Miss Anna, not five feet tall and in her mid-seventies, felt her whole being shake with rage. Raising the knife as if to throw it, she took a step toward the woman, eyes fixed on her neck. She’s half invisible, she thought. If I did throw this knife at her it would probably pass through her like a bird through the air.

 Alarmed, the woman stepped back. And your food sucks.

Howard Winslow, tall and muscular, blonde with a long pony-tail hanging under his reversed baseball cap, stepped forward. Watch it old woman. We could have you arrested for threatening us with a deadly weapon.

Maybe I should call the cops. Baker took a cell phone from her purse and started to punch the screen.

Winslow, knowing the captain of the St. John police detachment was a Fenmire, grabbed Baker’s hand and wrenched the phone from her grasp. Not now. We don’t want trouble with local cops. With narrowed eyes, he scowled at Miss Anna. Don’t think we’re fooling around, old woman. We’ve got plans to bring culture to Coral Bay.

Miss Anna laughed. I’ve heard that before. Coral Bay has a fine culture, one that fools like you will never understand.

Lowering the knife, she turned her back and returned to the deli, a small blue frame building with pink gingerbread trim on the Coral Harbor side of Route 107. Behind the building a large yard runs down to the bay in the middle of which a small stage rises a foot above the ground, and a dozen picnic tables, along with rickety wood and plastic chairs sit beneath the spreading branches of an ancient banyan tree. Sea grapes and palms line the narrow beach where the yard ends. The kitchen window perfectly frames the banyan. Beyond, in the sun-speckled waters of Coral Harbor, sailboats bounce and sway at their moorings.

Luther Fenmire, a member of a venerable Coral Bay family, met Anna Martinez during Carnival when he was eighteen and she was a twenty year-old immigrant from the Dominican Republic working for her aunt cleaning villas on St. John. During Carnival a year later they married. Shortly after the wedding, and with permission from siblings, cousins, parents, aunts and uncles, Anna and Luther built on family land the building now housing the deli.

When Luther first proposed the idea of the building, she told him, I do not care what the building is for or what you may do with it, but do no harm to that tree, and you must put a window right here. She stood on the site and framed the tree with a rectangle made with the fingers of both hands. Ever since she has insisted to anyone who comments on the banyan’s size that it is larger than the giant banyan of Parque Central in her home town of Jarabacoa, Dominican Republic.

At first the building was Luther’s workshop and the banyan tree continued to serve as the community center it had been for generations, a place where West Indian fisherman came to trade, gossip and sell their catch, and where others gathered to talk, smoke, drink a few beers and conduct informal business. More recently a few women and expatriates joined in, sitting on four boulders large enough to hold several them, on rough benches, old chairs and donated couches and furniture scavenged from roadside dumpsters. Latecomers were often left to sit on the ground.

When Luther died, Miss Anna rented the building to a family of Pakistanis who operated a convenience store. When they moved to a larger building, she let it to Andrew Fenmire, Luther’s fourth cousin who used the space to repair televisions and small appliances. Like the Pakistanis, Andrew moved on and for ten or more years she rented it to a series of businesses; an automobile repair shop, a hairdresser, an eccentric and shady French couple from Martinique who read tarot cards, predicted the futures of couples determined to marry by reading tea leaves, palms and, with the use of a huge red framed magnifying glass, their irises. That business failed after several years when none of the prophecies proved accurate. It was followed by a used book store, a wholesale beer and wine outlet, and a real estate office. The final renter was a retired detective from the Boston Police Department who put in a large galley kitchen behind the window looking out on the banyan tree. She sold hamburgers and other sandwiches and salads, homemade soups and stews, beer, wine, marijuana and cocaine. She was successful and the place was always filled with customers, until the Virgin Islands police shut her down and carted her away.

For five years the building was vacant. One day as Miss Anna was driving past it on her way into Cruz Bay to visit a sister, she noticed with dismay its peeling paint and sagging porch. On her way home she stopped at Paradise Lumber and Hardware, picked out new paint and hired Zinga, who was buying supplies to fix his own sagging porch. Two months later Miss Anna opened her Coral Bay Deli, the building’s most successful business and the site of a weekly open mic which filled her deli and yard each Tuesday evening with musicians and their appreciative audiences.

Her business thrived for several years. Then pressures began to mount as development began turning the once remote and rural Coral Bay community into a small town. At that point a few members of the Fenmire family started thinking seriously about the financial rewards that might come with increased commercial usage of their commonly held land, including the possibilities of selling large portions of it to developers talking of golf courses, hotels, marinas and shopping malls. With Luther gone, and with this small group of Fenmires agitating for greater commercial development of their land, Miss Anna’s concerns grew. Ever conscious of her status as an outsider, a transplant from a far off island who had married into the family, she began to worry about her future. Most members of Luther’s extended family had assured her the deli and the land it stood upon was hers for as long as she wanted to use it. Others would drop hints to the contrary; some speaking in her presence about how perfect a site for a hotel the deli’s waterfront land would be, especially with a golf course on the flat portions of the valley across the road.

A group calling itself Summer’s End had already lost its battle to develop waterfront land in Coral Bay. Its plans for a marina for mega-yachts far too large for the bay and shopping malls designed to cater to the super-rich aboard those yachts, along with several hotels and other assorted businesses were rejected by several Federal agencies. Once Summer’s End’s ecologically, economically and socially disastrous plans were defeated, most of Coral Bay’s residents were relieved that their environment had been protected. However, Miss Anna knew that withthe horrific political situation in the States, especially an administration hostile to ecological truth, it was clear the agencies instrumental in their defeat, including the Environmental Protection Agency and the Army Corps of Engineers,were being staffed by the new President with people hostile to environmental realities and community preferences.

The people from Summer’s End could return with the same plans and have them approved by those newly reconstituted agencies. Worse, people like Ashlee Baker and Howard Winslow might yet succeed. The few among the Fenmires tempted by fancies of new wealth were elated. Miss Anna’s dreams were troubled.

Two

CORAL BAY has a unique culture on St. John, perhaps unique in the world. A community of West Indians, Hispanic immigrants looking for work and a gateway to the U. S. mainland, ex-patriots from the States and Europe, and an annual influx of snowbirds, the island caters to tourists looking for the authentic St. John. Eight miles from Cruz Bay, the largest settlement on the island—8 Tuff Miles, as attested by those who run the annual race from Cruz Bay to Coral Bay—Coral Bay’s inhabitants think of themselves as unlike those of St. John’s busier and glitzier enclaves. There is a sense of community in Coral Bay, its people taking pride in knowing and helping one another whenever there is need, banding together to fight threats to its environment and culture. Large segments of the community had united in the recent fight to defeat the Summer’s End plan to build a marina that many believed would be a disaster for Coral Bay designed for 200 and 300 foot luxury yachts. It was a battle that resulted in the formation personal bonds that lasted far beyond the immediate threat posed by the doomed marina.

Coral Bay has a number of bars and restaurants regularly filled by both locals and tourists: Skinny Legs, Aqua Bistro, Indigo, Oasis, the British Pub, Concordia, Shipwreck and Dante’s Landing are among the most popular. In addition to food and drink, they provide venues for local bands and individual musicians, including the Coral Bay Hot Club, Chris Carsel, Lauren and BoMagnie, and The Four Skins.

Dante’s Landing is one of the most popular. Set on the waterside, it is housed in a large pentagonal frame building resembling a giant gazebo. A twelve foot in diameter circular bar sits at its center, surrounded by tables and several picnic benches. A long narrow dinghy dock reaches twenty feet into Coral Bay at about one o’clock from its front entrance. With Skinny’s, the Bistro and Shipwreck, Dante’s shares a rotating clientele of locals who welcome and entertain tourists seeking out the distinct beauty and social atmosphere of Coral Bay.

WONDERING WHO the woman was and trying not to stare at her, Lew Russell watched Pamela Brown cross the floor toward the center of Dante’s Landing. Her flip-flops clapping against the pressure-treated 2x6 planks of the floor. She walked toward the center of the restaurant. Reaching the bar, she rested her elbow atop it. Robert Palmer, the bartender stood with his back to her, restocking the liquor shelves behind the bar. The television hanging from a post behind him and above three stacked rows of liquor bottles was on mute, the new President’s mouth flapping silently as he waved his hands, almost flailing them. Lew’s eyes were briefly caught by the pictures and he felt sure from the President’s expressions and frenetic movements that he was lying. He turned away and looked at Pamela. Still leaning on the bar, she cleared her throat, obviously trying to attract Robert’s attention.

He guessed her to be somewhere between her late forties and early fifties. Her thick, deep brown hair was carefully maintained and flowed down her back. She moved with a rare grace across the floor, her loose blouse and colorful skirt flowing with her. Sighing, he sat up straight, the better to show his swimmer’s body, still trim at nearly eighty. Bald, with large ears he had once carefully covered with long gone thick sun-blond hair, he took pride in his physique. He glanced around the room to give the impression he had not been staring at and evaluating her.

Stephanie Hodge, an off-duty detective with the Virgin Islands Police Department, was sitting in a position at the bar from which she could easily survey the room. Even when not working she adhered to the habit she had picked up at the Florida State Police Academy, never taking any situation for granted, always looking and evaluating the people and activities in her surroundings. Her uncle, Leland Fenmire, the Captain in charge of the St. John Command of the Virgin Island Police Department, had sent her to the academy during her first year on the police force. Hair in corn rows over her blue-black scalp, the former Miss St. John wore tan slacks, a light blue shirt and expensive running shoes. The day she was hired Leland told her she had to be ready to run at any time.

 You want to get ahead it’s best to remember that you’ll always be on-duty, even when you’re off-duty, he told her. You won’t be in uniform when you’re off, but always look professional and always be alert. Unlike most of the cops she worked with, Stephanie agreed with his advice.

At twenty-nine, she balanced the air of formality she believed her job demanded of her with the easy going style of Coral Bay, where she had been born and raised. She knew its people well, black and white, and was on good terms with most of them. Even some of the ganja farmers selling their product at local gatherings would wave to her, call out, wish her good morning, good afternoon, good evening in the warm St. Johnian way.

With a smile that her aunt Anna Fenmire once described as a sudden burst of sunlight in the night sky, she turned and saw Lew watching Pamela. Their eyes met and he could almost hear her silent laughter as she shook her right forefinger at him, as if scolding a willful child. He shrugged, grinned and fashioned a clearly false air of contrition. It required a delicate touch to look and appreciate an attractive woman without seeming to be the horny professional lifeguard he had once been, each year shifting between the Jersey Shore and Florida beaches with the changing seasons.

Years before his arrival on St. John, on a hot late July afternoon, a group of young woman had paraded down the beach in Shipbottom on New Jersey’s Long Beach Island. Wearing sheer and brightly colored shirts over their bikinis, they passed close to the high white chair where he sat watching swimmers and body surfers. It was five days after his fifty-second birthday, and he had pulled himself further upright than usual to accentuate his chest and tight abs. Tall, with swimmer’s muscles, his fringe hair thin and gray over his ears, his nearly bald crown deeply tanned, he spread his muscled arms along the top back of his chair and made it clear that he was both watching the young women and keeping an eye on children scampering around in the breaking and receding surf. They had seemed to be passing by without noticing him when one of the women turned, waved and yelled, Nice day, gramps.

Forcing a smile, he had given her a listless wave in return. Up until that moment, he had thought he was inured to the invisibility of aging men to the eyes of lovely young women, joking to the younger lifeguards that he preferred the mothers and grandmothers of the high school and college age women they pursued, but hearing utter dismissiveness in the tone of the remark from the lovely brunette passing by had jolted his confidence. He had decided in that moment that his life on the beach was over.

Two weeks later he was at sea with a friend who was delivering a sailboat to St. John. After an eight month journey down the inland waterway, with stops in Charleston and Savannah, and on to explore the Bahamas, the Turks and Caicos, and west side of Puerto Rico, they had cruised into Coral Bay. After a day ashore he decided to stay.

Taking his 1950 Martin D-28 and a duffel bag containing all his clothes and possessions, he rented a campsite at Cinnamon Bay where he had stayed until he found and moved onto The Betsy, an abandoned sailboat wrecked and washed ashore among the mangroves several years earlier during a hurricane. Its mast broken off at the base, its motor rusted and useless, Lew bought the boat for five hundred dollars, spent a thousand to have it hauled out of the mud and mangroves and had it tied to a mooring ball in the middle of Coral Harbor. He painted the interior of the cabin, bought a generator, a twelve volt refrigerator, a ten inch black and white television, years later adding a CD/DVD player and, recently, LED lighting and a solar panel large enough to power them all.

Now, sitting at a table in Dante’s Landing, he watched Pamela Brown. She was barefoot and wore a loose white blouse hanging over her skirt, her hair ruffled by the breeze coming from the blue/green waters of Coral Bay a few feet beyond the bar and restaurant. She cleared her throat again. Robert, busy with his restocking, seemed not to notice. Turning, Pamela looked toward a narrow dock stretched from the right edge of Dante’s Landing forty feet into the bay. Lew Russell followed her gaze and saw a skinny blonde kid of about ten wearing a tee shirt and bathing suit struggling to hold an orange rubber dinghy to a piling. A black kid about the same age and size with tee shirt and jeans ran down the dock and jumped in the boat. Seconds later they were headed toward the open Caribbean and she watched the little boat bouncing on the water.

Can I help you? Robert said at last, moving from the shelf to the bar where she sat.

I hope so. I need a job, she said and extended her hand. My name’s Pamela Brown.

Robert Palmer. He took it and they shook.

Running the fingers of her left hand through her hair, eyes fixed beyond the bar shelves lined with bottles, she pointed toward the speeding dinghy, the sound of its motor quickly fading. They looked so carefree.

St. John’s a safe place for free-range child-raising, Robert said. What kind of job?

Must be fun for the kids. She turned