Adrift on St. John by Rebecca Hale Page B

nothing.
    Alden was a tall, lean lumbering man whose wild, unkempt beard conveyed the wooly look of someone who camped for a living. The top of his head, in contrast, he kept closely shaved.
    After many years of experimentation, he’d determined that this was the optimal grooming combination for the island’s hot, humid conditions. He couldn’t care less that his friends told him he looked like a coconut on a stick.
    Together, Alden and his wife, Sherry, had opened the Maho Bay eco-resort back in the early 1970s. They’d started with fewer than twenty elevated tree house tents, but the concept had proved so successful that the resort now boasted over a hundred units. The eco-minded campground was known throughout the Caribbean for its environmentally sensitive footprint as well as its close proximity to St. John’s seven-thousand-acre national park.
    The resort’s infrastructure was laid out along a labyrinth of stairs, ladders, and elevated walkways that the guests navigated to reach their treetop lodging quarters. Each tent unit sat atop stilts similar to the ones beneath Alden’s cabin. The walls of the tents were covered with interlocking screens and thick waterproof canvas—barriers that were, despiteall bug-proofing attempts, still easily breached by the tiny gnatlike no-see-ums.
    Meanwhile, the nefarious pair beneath the desk had finished up with Alden’s left leg and had begun planning their attack on his right one.
    The campground’s network of stairs and elevated walkways led down the hillside toward Maho Bay’s scenic beach. The round, protruding bulge of Mary’s Point curved out from the northwest side of the area, sheltering it from the larger waves that sometimes hit St. John’s north shore. The calm water was safe and easy for kids of all ages to swim in and explore, a perfect fit for the family-friendly camp.
    Alden, Sherry, and their crew of similarly minded outdoor enthusiasts provided a daily offering of water sports and arts and crafts activities, frequently supplemented by nighttime gatherings and star-gazing programs. Meals were served throughout the day, cafeteria style, in a circular restaurant with a partially tented open-air roof.
    Alden leaned back in his chair, squinting his left eye. He thought he felt the slight twinge of an itch somewhere on his body. His hand reached down and brushed against his right leg, but his thoughts drifted elsewhere.
    Hovering about a foot off the floor, the naughty pair of no-see-ums continued their feast.
    The eco-resort boasted some of the island’s least-expensive lodging. The nightly rates weren’t cheap, by any means, but they were far less than that of the rest of the available vacation housing. Given the camp’s greater financial accessibility, it hosted a much broader range of visitor types than seen at the island’s pricier establishments.
    Alden and his crew were an easygoing, laid-back bunch, and he generally managed to get along with all of his guests, no matter how strange or bizarre the personality. Any problems arising in that department he left to his wife,Sherry. In their thirty years of running the eco-resort, no one had ever dared to cross her.
    Alden preferred to sit back and observe. After decades of practice, he had developed a keen eye for outliers—that’s the term he used to describe his more eclectic guests. These were folks who seemed to float along, oddly detached from the regular threads of society.
    Outliers, as carefully defined by Alden’s well-honed analysis, lived by a different set of rules than the rest of the campground’s patrons—their “unique” lifestyle choices frequently warranted extra staff attention. They marched to their own drummer, so to speak, in a way that was both frustratingly unpredictable for his role as site manager and maddeningly intriguing for his far more dominant biologist persona.
    Conrad Corsair—outlier exhibit number one, Alden thought as he scrolled through a list of guests who