Hurricane by Ken Douglas Page B

she whispered up to Meiko. She had the dinghy between herself and the sun and she loosened her tense muscles as she hung in the water. Her left leg started to cramp up from being scrunched under her bottom for so long in the boat. She was reaching under the water to massage it when she heard the sound of the outboards starting. By the time the cramp was gone, the Germans were, too, their powerful outboards roaring and fading off in the distance, as they headed for the shipyard in Chaguaramas Bay.
    Julie climbed back into the boat, cool, but still thirsty.
    “ We can go now. Right?” Meiko said.
    “ Right,” Julie answered.
    “ I don’t mean just back to the yacht club. I mean out of Trinidad.”
    “ That’s a problem. We can’t sail at night, so we’ll have to wait till morning.”
    “ What do you mean?”
    “ I didn’t want to worry you, but I don’t know how to sail all that well.”
    “ I know that, Mom.”
    “ Hardly at all.”
    “ What?”
    “ Your father and I have only sailed the boat with the guys from the yards. We’ve never been out by ourselves before, and we’ve never sailed at night.”
    “ In three years?”
    “ The boat was in such a mess when we bought it. It took all that time just to get it ready.”
    “ What are we going to do? If we stay in the yacht club that man will come back and take the boat.”
    “ We’ll have to hide out for a day,” Julie said. “ We can do that.”
    “ Where?”
    “ There’s an Island between Trinidad and Venezuela. It used to be a leper colony. Nobody goes there anymore. It’s got a nice bay. We can go there for the night and leave for Grenada in the morning.”
     
    Four hours later Julie was watching the setting sun as it painted the sky orange behind the deserted leper colony on Chacachacare Island. She spent a minute worrying and wondering about the wretched lives the lepers must have lived, so far from family and friends, and yet so close. They were like her, alone, but not alone. They had each other as she had Meiko.
    “ It’s like a little city,” Meiko said. She was sitting opposite Julie in the cockpit and her words broke a five minute silence.
    “ It was abandoned right after they found the cure.”
    “ Anybody live here now?”
    “ No. One time your father and I came out here and the army was doing some kind of exercises on the island. Another time some fishermen had a campfire going, but usually it’s deserted.”
    “ Can you go ashore?”
    “ Sure.”
    “ Have you been?”
    “ Yes. Your father used to like this place. The dormitory where they lived still has all the beds, but they’re all rusted out now. You should see the hospital. High ceiling, stained glass windows, it must have been very nice.”
    Meiko studied the hospital in the fading light and Julie saw her quiver. Three two-story buildings made their way up the hill. They were painted a sort of beige-brown and the roofs were made of corrugated tin, now turning to rust. Trees surrounded the hospital buildings. The patients would have had a perfect view of the bay. It was a hospital, but it was a prison, too.
    “ Pretty buildings for not so pretty people.”
    “ Something like that, but they took good care of them. They had a church and a cinema and the ones that weren’t too sick had their own little houses. Look.” Julie pointed. “Can you see where the old road winds around the island from the doctor’s houses to the hospital?”
    “ It’s all crumbling back into the ocean. It’s a shame.”
    “ I think everybody just wanted to get away from here.”
    They listened to the quiet sounds of the evening breeze and the gentle lapping of the small waves as they splashed against the dinghy trailing behind the boat. In the advancing shadows the hospital across the bay looked peaceful and inviting.
    Julie clasped the coin and bit into her lower lip as her mind raced over everything that had happened in the last day and a half. Finding the bloated body, her