T h e S h a d e s o f P a r a d i s e
a novel
by
J. Alvin Read
T h e S h a d e s o f P a r a d i s e
Part One
CHAPTER ONE
February 1997
Beth Tierney peered through the window as more than thirty thousand feet below the Gulf Coast slipped behind and, for the first time in thirty-five years of life, she was beyond the continental limits of the United States. It was a little frightening: back there was her whole existence and she was leaving it, not on a two-week holiday, but really leaving it on a spur of the moment decision, after a lifetime of weighing carefully every choice. As a child, she excelled in school then continued on through graduate school to earn a Master’s of Science. Later, she advanced to a prestigious position, invested wisely and participated in community activities, yet when a series of crises struck taking her parents and career, she found that what remained was a dry, empty nothingness. For all those years of effort, sacrifice and planning there should have been something more that remained, something of meaning that would endure through the worst of times, to buoy her with purpose and direction, but there wasn’t. When put to the test, the sum of all she had been and done resulted in a failed attempt at life.
She needed out – and this was it: her brand new beginning.
Through all of her four and one half years of graduate school, Vermont had felt like a foreign place. She had
constantly encountered people whose speech was so strange as to be practically unintelligible and with food and customs fascinatingly different from Wisconsin’s. But Costa Rica wasn’t prim and proper New England: it was a totally foreign, sizzling-hot Latin culture, her new world and where she would finally begin to live – in a place so different from home it seemed anything was possible. Beth didn’t want to miss any of it. She wanted to see it all and do it all: improve her Spanish, learn how to dance the meringue, the salsa – all those hip-swaying sexy dances – eat spicy foods and tour the country from one end to the other.
According to information she’d downloaded from the Internet, Costa Ricans were friendly, not at all like New
England where everyone seemed to delight in giving misleading directions to strangers. And down there too, somewhere below all that blinding white puffiness, situated on ‘her beach’ in the tiny Caribbean pueblo of Chauita, would be Cabañas Arrecifes, her own little treasure unearthed by exploring every Costa Rican WEB site she could find. She pulled the Cabañas Arrecifes brochure from her bag and smoothed it flat across her knees, marveling at its tranquil beauty, not to mention her good fortune for finding it. It seemed too exotic, too intensely beautiful to be more than fantasy, yet there it was, photographed in living color. She pictured herself in each scene. There she would be, lounging in a hammock slung between palms while turquoise water lapped the white sand, or perhaps in the other picture, seated at the bamboo beachfront bar sipping a cocktail and chatting with the smiling waiter. Or she could be snuggled into bed inside one of the thatched cabanas with the breaking surf lulling her to sleep. The center photograph, the largest, was of smiling tourists bathing on the white-sand beach with a colorful sailboat plying the water behind. “That’s me,” she whispered. “No more high heels or business suits for you, Lady Tierney. You’re moving to Bikini-town.”
Outside, amazing things were happening: in the engines the liquefied, then refined remains of solar energy collected by a forest millions of years ago were converting into heat, then kinetic energy, at such a rate as to hurl them through the air at six hundred-fifty miles per hour. Wow! She could just envision and, at odd moments when they passed through a wisp of cloud, actually see the air divide as the wing, driven at such immense speed, cut through it to create at its upper surface a void that literally sucked the tremendous weight of the aircraft to over thirty thousand feet above the ground – five miles, wow!
A voice among the muted babble in the rows behind reminded her of her singular regret over walking out on life: Mrs.
Leonard. Dear old Mrs. Leonard was a true, dear and steadfast friend and neighbor and the only person to remain loyal through all the trouble. As a child, Beth and her friends feared the old woman and were banned from her yard. Even bent at the waist, head buried deep among flowers, she could still somehow sense the presence of any trespasser. It was a mystical talent that earned her the nickname, 'the seeing butt'. Time did its thing and turned that all about. She grew up and, next door, the seeing butt became like one of the family. She taught Beth and her mother secrets of gardening that resulted in a fragrant band of flowers encircling their yard – from which mischievous children were banned. There were piano lessons, each Tuesday and Thursday for six continuous years in which Beth learned that the old woman had an ear for more than simply children in her garden and in her teenage years, when parental opinions were viewed with suspicion, she would listen with an understanding ear and offered sage advice. And now, she was Beth's only friend.
Her seat suddenly dropped away like the floor of an elevator, sparking a tiny flash of terror that a chime for the fasten seat belts sign, an accompanying change in engine pitch and a reassuringly smiling stewardess combined to alleviate. Pressing her nose to the window, Beth squinted into the brilliance. Regardless of the speed, they seemed to drift, gradually settling into a cavernous ravine between towering mountains of feathery-white billowing vapor whose size dwarfed the airplane to a mere speck. Sunlight glared, then glared again like flashbulbs igniting before her eyes as the plane sliced through fringes of cloud; then all was gray and the world of space and objects was lost to a nether world where relative speed was non-existent, an in-between place devoid of features, with no up, down,, here nor there. How good it would be to emerge and find that the previous year hadn’t happened. All right then, but where then might she find herself? Would it still be today with all memory of the previous year erased, or would it be a year earlier, before it all began? It was an interesting question, but one thing was certain: she wouldn’t be on a plane to Costa Rica. She’d be back in her office in Green Bay, still deluding herself that Mr.
Andreesen secretly adored her and considered her work indispensable.
Finally on the ground and settled in for the long bus ride to the Caribbean coast, Beth reclined her seat and sighed comfortably. She wondered at the strange system of streets without names, buildings without addresses and whether she would ever be able to understand Spanish spoken so rapidly. If she couldn’t speak with anyone, how would she get along? And how was she to find things even if she did understand, like bus terminals for example, if there were no addresses or street names?
Locations, Erika had explained were identified by citing directions from the closest landmark and she knew none of them. The fact was she was a little frightened. Maybe she wouldn’t be able to function in this strange Latin culture, but going back would be giving in and she couldn’t do that. There certainly was nothing compelling back in The States: no career, no retirement program, no friends except Mrs. Leonard, and not a house either – sold that. The old neighborhood had lost that familiar home feeling that had always made everywhere else seem wrong. She had no parents, no husband, no children, no life – nothing, nothing at all. No, scared she could handle: she was staying.
It seemed inconceivable that, just over a year earlier, she had been snug in a comfortable life: a fat cat, on top of the world with a well-calculated life’s course plotted. How quickly a life can crumble away! The first blow came on January fourteenth more than a year ago when, like a house of cards in a tempest, her career blew away. Even the weather had been awful. For nine straight days, an Arctic storm had straddled the border between Alaska and Canada’s Northwest Territories, refusing to move. It pulled the jet stream south in a deep arc across the face of North America. Driven before it, a massive volume of subzero Arctic air moved unmercifully southward, becoming stationary over the Midwestern States. Temperatures dropped to record lows, day after endless day. Beth had begun to wonder if it might not be the dawning of a new ice age. The morning of the fourteenth, a biting north wind bore down upon the city. It whistled in quick, cold, and nasty from the north,
across the frozen bay. Around the buildings of downtown, the stiff wind swirled, creating confusing eddies that lifted glistening blizzards from snow banks, blinding pedestrians, and snatching away hats. In the narrow canyons of avenues, the bitter air channeled again gathering speed as it resumed its southbound rush.
She should have turned around and gone back to bed when she opened the garage door and the neighbor’s dog didn’t come out to bark. Every living thing with half a brain was hidden away from a razor sharp wind whose bite was capable of freezing flesh beneath fur and overcoats alike. Half of the office staff wouldn’t be in, but she was intrepid even when her car just groaned, draining power from a frozen battery. She valiantly pounded the steering wheel and said the magic words: “start, damn you, start,” and her mother’s hand-me-down caught. Innocently unaware of what awaited, she blew a column of frozen breath towards the windshield in grateful relief.
It was early that summer that H.G. Andreesen Consulting relocated to the center section of the converted strip mall, yet the promised conversion remained a far off dream. Mr. Andreesen was now on his third contractor and although the upstairs offices were completed, moving the hammering and sawing to the first floor hadn’t improved things much. And just then, during the worst cold snap of the year, the door to the parking lot was solidly barricaded requiring a long, frozen walk around the block. Every morning of the interminable cold snap with temperatures defiantly remaining well below zero and with a stiff breeze from the bay, Beth pulled her mittens on, snuggled a wool cap tightly over her head, and climbed from the car for the frigid walk. The morning of the fourteenth was no different. After trudging the icy length of the alley, she came to the short slice of side street and Lum’s Chinese restaurant, with its pagoda-like roof, green and red paint and a golden dragon at the door, the first milestone of her daily trek. Around the next corner, the first store in the block-long strip was Vincent’s Hardware, above which the owner lived with his family, a fact appreciated for not having to wallow through foot-deep snow.
Each morning, astride his little tractor, Mr. Vincent would clear freshly fallen snow from the sidewalk along the entire length of the strip.
Adjoining the hardware was South Bay Luncheonette with neon signs adding shimmering highlights of red and green
to twisting rivulets of condensation descending its bay windows. Outside, as she approached the frequently opened glass door, the frigid gusts laced with snow carried the inviting scents of brewing coffee, ham and eggs. By then, she was shivering inside her coat with her chin already trembling, a sure sign her teeth were about to chatter. She did the only sensible thing and followed her nose to sanctuary, joining other harried commuters stomping snow from their shoes while waiting for take-outs.
The place was alive. Busy kitchen sounds mingled with the steady drone of conversations punctuated with laughter, and always in the background Green Bay’s all news radio station. A satisfying feeling of security came from being a member of the busy throng passing through the doors of South Bay, which drove the wheels of Green Bay’s commerce. The other satisfying feeling came from central heat.
Vista Travel, which occupied a space the width of a door and window, appeared tiny and lost sandwiched between the luncheonette and its larger and more prestigious neighbor, Beth’s office. A week earlier, the routine of her morning trudge around the block changed when a poster portraying a Costa Rican beach she simply couldn’t pass without staring at, appeared on an easel in their window. It was a sweeping panorama of a pristine, white sand beach, with aquamarine water and an out of focus frond hanging in the foreground. Words other than ‘Costa Rica’ in large blue lettering across the bottom were unnecessary. The image of serenity manifest that held her spell-bound said it all.
The morning of the fourteenth found her, once again, in the subzero wind enjoying a before-work pause gaping
dreamily at the poster as coffee steamed from its cradle of double-insulated mittens. She easily imagined herself there: rays of a tropical sun warming her skin as an onshore breeze gently lifted her hair. Real coconut oil would melt lusciously into her
skin, making it supple and shiny while baking to a toasty tan. Of course, there would be a good book to read and, possibly even, a piña colada served in a coconut and made with real pineapple. Somehow the captivating poster and, interestingly enough, the bitter cold too combined to bring the sensations of the beach almost close enough that regardless of below-zero wind biting her nose, beneath her overcoat, she was basking in the sun.
Leaving the Caribbean, she crunched her way over the last twenty yards of brittle morning moisture and pushed
through the new revolving doors into the offices of H.G. Andreesen Consulting. The lobby, with its high ceiling and wide reception area, was designed to impress, make a positive statement for H.G. Andreesen. With the entire front wall of glass and the many white outlined rectangles of smudged, gray, yet unpainted, sheet rock for walls, it wasn’t much for lasting impressions. She strode across the lobby, to the women’s room below the stairs. “Good morning, Miss Tierney,” Rebecca Norton, the new administrative assistant said. Her voice was strained, containing a cutting edge of false politeness that caused Beth to turn and look in wonder at the boldness of this young snit. “You should know there are some government officials waiting for you in your office.” Again, the haughty tone. Startled, she stared curiously at the young woman. She knew she wasn’t very well liked by fellow employees who generally considered her to be a mousy, workaholic whose bitching about details that mattered little or not at all to government inspectors. Beth received invitations to social events only when not doing so would be socially uncomfortable, like to the office Christmas party. She knew and accepted the situation; no problem.
Unpopularity was okay, but outright rudeness wasn’t.
“The government people can wait for a minute, thank you, Ms. Norton,” Beth retorted and returned to her closet. She pulled off her camel hair overcoat, boots and woolen leggings then turned to study her reflection, nodding, satisfied with her confident professional presentation, although her dead straight hair that bent like a folding ruler when she lifted it was a disappointment. She could just as easily have inherited her father’s slight wave, but it was what it was, so she kept it blunt cut above the shoulders for easy maintenance: and straight across the back – simple. Her only attempt at style was to allow it to curve slightly longer at the sides of her jaw, which compensated for a narrow face. Business suits were meticulously chosen, invariably leaning towards brown with the skirts cut to a half inch above the knee with an off-white blouse and black Pilgrim tie. As much a part of her apparel as her clothes was her suede briefcase, laden with papers. It had been a gift from her father, presented in honor of her master’s in geology that, regardless of how old or battered it became, was a pride to carry. A sudden heart attack claimed his life five years earlier while he was yet in his prime and she only thirty. His loss was a crushing blow, but her pain was nothing as compared with her mother’s. Then, a scant two years later, she was taken from her too, in a death more attributable to broken heart than to anything medically specific. Watching her mother waste away had been agonizing.
Each day, through her very pores another small bit of her soul would slip away until she was but a ghost peering from the deeply recessed eyes of a skeletal body. Beth tried every day to reach her, to offer some small amount of cheer, but death was inevitable, and a welcome relief for both when it came.
Beth found herself alone in the world. Earning, shortly after Mother’s passing, a prestigious upstairs office renewed her focus. She assumed a new pride in herself for her abilities as a geologist. The pride didn’t come so much from the prestige of the office or from having her very own south window to nurture African violets, or even filing cabinets that were hers alone.
It was that the office and position of project engineer were symbolic of the respect she had earned for consistently surpassing expectations and planted her firmly on the highway to success. Each new project became her reason for being and consumed her totally. Career dedicated to H.G. Andreesen, she was comfortable in the knowledge that she was valued for that very carefully considered choice. She, in turn, was thrilled for the opportunity to be an active participant in cleaning up a tiny portion of the nation’s groundwater mess. The term workaholic used behind her back didn’t faze her; she acknowledged it.
Her accusers’ lack of sophistication didn’t allow them to appreciate her love of ecology or that she considered her work to be her entertainment. They all had spouses and family; she applied her devotion to career and the accuracy of her data. Since the bitter ending of her last relationship, more than three years earlier, she’d devoted herself entirely to career. Office popularity mattered not, what did was that her professional approach and quality of work were highly respected and appreciated by those who counted, particularly Herman Andreesen himself.
The government inspectors waiting upstairs would be there to review her data detailing the extent of contamination for a proposed cleanup site. Her figures were dead-on precise, as always, and she was confident the government inspectors were familiar enough with her work to already know the same. Nevertheless, it was a small but necessary step, and she was prepared to do it well and insure that H.G. Andreesen would be selected as the clean-up contractor. “Well, Miss Tierney, you thirty-five year old workaholic,” she recalled saying to her mirrored image, “let’s go convince our government bureaucrats just how desperately they need us.” Slipping on heels and with a tiny adjustment to her skirt, she spun from the closet, closing it with a flick of the wrist.
Two wide staircases framed either side wall of the lobby. For those unable to climb, on the back wall beside the new marble faced reception desk, torn brown paper protectively covered the stainless steel doors of now operating elevators. Beth’s office was in the middle of the easternmost of two green-carpeted corridors. Between the two, were the kitchen, conference rooms and storage closets. It was a good arrangement that afforded every second floor office a window. She climbed the east wall stairs, taking them with a light skip. Her sturdy, sensible, low heels clicked the count: thirty-one stairs, the last thirty-one steps of a safe, structured life.
Coming around the corner, she stopped short. Her office door was open and inside people were moving about.
‘What’s this,’ she asked herself, ‘who gave permission to whom to enter my office? Rebecca Norton, I’d bet!’ Outside of her opened office, a man and a woman, fellow geologists at H.G. Andreesen, conferred in hushed tones. Slack jawed and staring in her direction, the whispered conversation abruptly ended and, as she approached, the eyes of both flicked nervously. Without returning a word to her offered greeting, both slipped quickly into their respective offices. There wasn’t time to consider what it all meant.
“Ms Beth Tierney?” An unknown woman standing beside her desk fired at her in an accusatory tone.
“Yes, may I help you,” she snapped before taking in the entire scene. Her cabinet had been broken open and a
uniformed officer was intently scanning her files from the bottom drawer, reading project titles to another who transcribed the information onto a clipboard. The remainder of the drawers had been sealed shut. ‘FBI, DO NOT OPEN’ stickers formed X’s over them. Her top desk drawer lay, bent and broken, on the desktop and beside it, her computer in pieces.
“Ms. Tierney, I am agent Paula Hobson with the Federal Bureau of Investigation,” said the woman in the trim, navy blue suit with an ID hung from a light chain about her neck. Her outstretched hand offered a document as she spoke. “He,”
she said nodding to the man with the crowbar, “is my partner, agent Fred Rogers and this is a federal warrant to seize all of your files, personal and professional, paper and electronic. You will surrender your briefcase at this time, Ms. Tierney.”
Herman Andreesen, the founder of the firm, stood behind the agents, gulping and tugging at his tie, but saying nothing. Beth couldn’t understand how he could just stand there while this was happening. She had always counted on him to be able to fix problems, and he had always come through, but now he avoided her attempts at eye contact. Wordlessly, she offered her briefcase to Agent Hobson. The other one, Rogers, she remembered, had frightening eyes that seemed to be his center about which the rest of him moved. They didn’t waver from their focus on her, following every movement, while the rest of his body struggled to remove tightly fitting black gloves.
The following ninety days were a surrealistic dizzying spin through one nightmare after another. She had been named as one of the principal figures in billing fraud perpetuated by H.G. Andreesen Consulting against the US government in an FBI investigation of Super Fund contractors. The specific charges alleged that she conspired with Herman Andreesen to bill the government for work not performed. Beth was stunned to see her name listed as project manager for false projects, which apparently existed only on paper, but complete with data from projects she actually had supervised. Convincingly accurate forgeries of her signature and initials appeared in every appropriate location. The total fraud amounted to more than two million dollars. She was driven home in the caged rear seat of an FBI sedan followed by a caravan of two others and a white van boldly emblazoned with large, black FBI lettering. They pulled up in front of the house with emergency lights flashing and the whole neighborhood watched as she was escorted in, an FBI agent at either arm. Brandishing a search warrant, the agents ransacked everything like a wrecking crew marauding through the house, hauling off her computer and every one of her files –
files capable of proving the charges to be groundless. She sat on the sofa by the front window, defeated, knowing that every gossip in the neighborhood was out there, witness to how old maid Beth Tierney brought shame to the proud memory of Ken and Angela.
Three months into the torture, a call came from chief investigator Rogers informing that she was no longer under investigation. She was to be escorted into the closed, former offices of H.G. Andreesen Consulting and permitted to recover personal possessions. She also appeared at the property clerk’s office in the federal building, downtown to claim the remnants of her home computer and other property removed from the house. Official acknowledgment of her innocence made her feel better, but for only a short while. While the FBI informed her that she was no longer a suspect, they didn’t bother to inform former friends, neighbors or other groundwater consulting firms. In the eyes of most, she carried the stigma of guilt and was viewed with suspicion as a criminal element, someone whispered about, avoided. Her letters of introduction and resumes submitted to consulting firms were returned unopened or with scathing comments attached. Anonymous messages,
condemning her, appeared regularly in her e-mail, people she had known her entire life turned their faces from her, garbage was dumped in her driveway and Mrs. Leonard, her only loyal friend, told of a circulating petition, which demanded that Beth vacate her home. As large as is the United States, the community of groundwater geologists is small and the scandal, complete with Beth’s name as a perpetrator, was common knowledge throughout. To her absolute dismay, came the realization that there was to be no restarting her career, not in Green Bay or any other city. She was unemployable.
She sobbed herself to sleep at night, feeling totally alone in a cold and hostile world. Of the secure life she had, there was nothing left. She was without family, friends, husband, children, and apparently without future either. The singular employment opportunity, the result of months of constant searching, was, ironically, with the federal government, evaluating clean-up proposals as an independent consultant. The work could all be done on-line; apparently they preferred her out of sight despite anti-discriminatory hiring regulations and all she could hope to earn would be but a tiny fraction of her former salary.
Worse: the job was mundane, mindless paper shuffling requiring neither inspiration nor creativity.
Three AM found her unable to sleep, surfing the net, trailing thoughtlessly a link she created by joining the words:
‘life, work, and where’ as the root of a WEB search. To play the game, she simply clicked her mouse and page after page of sites appeared, related somehow via electronic reasoning to her three chosen words. Screen images flashed hypnotically to the idle tapping of her finger as her tormented mind sought escape from her dilemma. Another click and, on the screen before her, appeared the same Costa Rican beach scene she had seen in the window of Vista Travel. Her finger caressed the smooth, curving surface of the mouse delaying the next click while the beach and all of its glorious colors filled her eyes. Winter, the FBI, Green Bay, even the loss of career melted away and she was there, running, almost flying, towards the surf in a tiny red
bikini. She began toying with the thought of a two-week vacation, although not taking herself completely seriously, until her breath caught like a hiccup with the realization that Costa Rica could happen, and it didn’t have to be for just two weeks either.
There was not so much as one compelling reason to stay, so why not sell everything, take the stupid on-line consulting job and just GO? With a laptop, she could work anywhere on Earth, and in Costa Rica at least she wouldn’t be vilified at every turn.
CHAPTER TWO
A cacophony of horns, brakes and roar of diesel engines announced their arrival at the Caribbean port city of Limon where the majority of passengers disembarked at the side of the road, finally allowing her a window seat. They were at the outskirts of the city, but it didn’t look like much: mostly a collection of ancient clapboard buildings and unpaved side streets lined with humble homes. The throng walking and riding bicycle was comprised entirely of Black people without any evidence of the minority Ladinos, Native Americans and Whites she had read of. Ahead, the line of cars, trucks and buses inched along, while bicycle traffic threaded its way through at twice their speed, apparently frustrating drivers who fruitlessly blasted away at their horns. Adding to the bedlam, vendors walked beside the bus, hawking through the open windows cold drinks, ice cream, coconut candies, tamales wrapped in banana leaves and a multitude of other foods she intended to try.
The map showed Limon to be on the coast, but a glance down every street failed to provide even a glimpse of the sea.
Then, approaching the tiny airport, she had her first breathtaking view of the Caribbean. There, stretching into the misty distance was a palm lined, sandy beach. It was beyond lovely; its beauty was so utterly heart stopping that she felt flush for it, but something was wrong – missing. It was people! There wasn’t a soul to be seen. It was inconceivable! Where was everyone? The sun was shining, the surf gentle, the colors unimaginable; the sand should be covered with towels and umbrellas, yet it continued in that manner. For the next several hours they drove south, paralleling a coastline that was practically continuous beach backed by coconut palms and, with the exception of driftwood and an occasional dog, it was empty.
Dark was nearly upon them when the bus lurched over rocks and potholes and came to a stop opposite a cantina with a wide covered porch where several dogs lay like melted butter, an occasional tail flip their only sign of life: the heart of the tiny pueblo of Chauita. The streets were of pot-holed soil with the only traffic two cars parked half in the road. There were few people about: a pair of barefoot teenage girls giggling in conversation as they passed, several tourists in swimsuits seated on stools at the counter of a roadside stand where a sign promoted tropical fruit licuados, and an old man, bent under the weight of a wheelbarrow, making his way slowly through the ruts. The bus stop featured a bench at the side of the road with a rickety support of sticks to hold aloft a badly rusted roofing panel for protection from rain and sun. Looking eastward, she saw only a quiet lane with homes and bungalows to let, but no sign of the sea. She thought to wa
