South Seas Shenanigans Read online

  South Seas Shenanigans Copyright © 2017

  Shondra C. Longino. All rights reserved.

  This eBook is intended for personal use only and may not be reproduced, transmitted, or redistributed in any way without the express written consent of the author.

  South Seas Shenanigans is a work of fiction. Any references or similarities to actual events, organizations, real people - living, or dead, or to real locales are intended to give the novel a sense of reality. All other events and characters portrayed are a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Find me on my website: www.abbyvandiver.com

  Follow me on Twitter: @AbbyVandiver

  Facebook: www.facebook.com/authorabbyl.vandiver

  Cover Design by Shondra C. Longino

  Chapter One

  It felt like white-hot-fire was bouncing up and down my arm. My breath came in short quick spurts, I couldn’t keep still, and a half moan/half whimper emitted involuntarily from my throat.

  Awaken from my sleep, I jumped upright, and shook the limb as if I could fling the irritation away.

  “Oh my, God!” I screeched. “What is wrong with me?”

  I hopped out of the bed and hit the light switch to the room. My arm was red, and that burning sensation seemed to be moving up my arm, and using my chest as a bridge, moved through my entire body like shock waves. I hopped over to the bathroom and turned on the shower. But as soon as I stepped in, the burning seemed to spread.

  “Aaargh!” I turned off the water, balled myself up in a corner of the tub and just whimpered. What good is having a Voodoo herbalist as your grandmother-in-law when she’s nowhere around when you’re in need?

  I finally got the strength to move, threw on some sweats and a T-shirt and climbed back into bed.

  “What’s wrong with you, honeybun?” Miss Vivee asked. She waltzed into the room, Mac at her side, they were laughing and having a good time while I was being tortured in one of Dante’s seven circles of hell.

  They had on wetsuits and Miss Vivee had her long braid pinned up to her head. She carried a bag that had flippers and a snorkel sticking out.

  “I didn’t think you’d ever get here,” I moaned. I had called her after the shower hadn’t helped. “My body is on fire.”

  “We were just on our way snorkeling,” Miss Vivee said.

  “Snorkeling?” I scrunched up my face. When did they plan that? Can they even swim? I’d only seen them wading in the water since we’d been here.

  “Yes. Snorkeling,” she confirmed. “And what could have happened to you? We just saw you at the Island BBQ Buffet not even two hours ago.”

  The buffet, filled to the brim with juicy and moist chicken and fish barbecued Fijian style, had a smorgasbord of salads, baked potatoes, tropical fruit salads and desserts. It seemed like a distant memory. A painful memory.

  I had eaten so much from the buffet that I had felt sluggish and had come back to my room to take a nap. Now I was thinking that something I’d stuffed myself with was rebelling.

  “Oh,” Miss Vivee grunted and pointed to the yellow and orange stick plant in the corner. “Where’d that come from?” she asked.

  “I don’t know. I thought maybe you had it delivered,” I dipped my cloth in the bowl of ice water I’d gotten from room service. I was trying to cool my skin down. “It was at the door when I got back from dinner.”

  “Hold out your arm,” Miss Vivee said. “Let me see.”

  I obliged.

  “That’s probably what’s wrong with you,” she said.

  “‘What’ is what’s wrong with me?” I asked. I closed my eyes, trying to will the pain away.

  “That plant. And you wiping yourself with that cloth isn’t helping any either.”

  I threw the cloth to the floor. “What is that?” I looked at the plant.

  “Euphorbia tirucalli,” Miss Vivee said.

  “What?” I said and scrunched my face even more. I didn’t have the patience or wherewithal for her dilly dallying. I just wanted to know what was wrong with me and for her to fix it.

  “Euphorbia tirucalli,” she repeated.

  “I heard you the first time, Miss Vivee,” I said writhing around on the bed. “I just don’t know what that is.”

  “Firestick,” Mac said. “At least that’s what it’s called in some parts of the world.”

  It’s called “Euphorbia tirucalli everywhere,” Miss Vivee said. “That’s its scientific name. Can’t go wrong calling it that.”

  “Do you store all that information in your head?” I asked. Those little brain teasers she did sure were working, if only she’d put that brain power to work for me. I was now hanging over the side of the bed, head nearly touching the floor. Maybe blood rushing to it would soothe my nerve endings. Anything to try and make the pain go away.

  “Here. Let me help you,” Mac said, lifting my head, he swung the upper part of my torso back onto the bed.

  “Of course I don’t have all that information stored in my head,” Miss Vivee said and huffed. “Why would I want to randomly store information about a poisonous plant from the other side of the world?”

  “Poisonous!” I screeched. I tried to hop out the bed, tangled up in the sheets I tumbled onto the floor with a thud! Scrambling, I popped up and ran to the bathroom. “Am I going to die?” I asked her. I stuck my face into the mirror and stared at my reflection. I guess I wanted to see how I looked dying. “How long do I have? Don’t you have an antidote or something?” I said, fear evident in my voice.

  “Why would I bring an antidote for a poisonous plant that only grows over here? I’m on my honeymoon.”

  Oh. My. God. Really?

  Now I was going to die before I even got a chance to do what I came to do. Tears welled in my eyes.

  And Bay! Oh my gosh. I thought about my wonderful, handsome fiancé. I’m never going to marry Bay.

  I felt panic rising up from my stomach into my throat and I started to gag. I bent over the toilet and tried to cough out my fear, and throw up the poison.

  “Oh good Lord,” Miss Vivee said. She came and stood at the bathroom door. “What in the tarnation is wrong with you?”

  “I’m dying,” I cried, choking as the words erupted from my trembling lips.

  Wasn’t it obvious?

  “Oh pshaw!” Miss Vivee said. “Everybody’s gonna die.” She waved her hand dismissing me. “You don’t see me going around acting like that and I’m closer to death’s door than you are.”

  “No you’re not,” I said, my eyes big. “You haven’t been poisoned.”

  “I can’t talk to her when she’s like this,” Miss Vivee said to Mac. “See if you can’t help the poor child.”

  Mac came into the bathroom and offered a helping hand. He gingerly wrapped his rubber clad arm around mine, and led me, knees buckling, out of the bathroom and back to bed.

  “You’re not going to die,” Mac said covering half of me up with the tangled sheet and patting me on top of my head. “At least not from this.”

  “Miss Vivee said that plant was poisonous,” I said sniffing back my tears. I cut an eye toward her. “Is it poisonous, Mac?”

  Had this old woman lied to me?

  “That plant-“

  “Euphorbia tirucalli,” Miss Vivee interjected. She sat down in a chair adjacent to me.

  “Yes that,” Mac gave a nod acknowledging Miss Vivee’s name for it. “It can be poisonous, but only if ingested. It can also cause blindness, if you get it in your eyes. But it looks to me that you only got it on your skin. And if that’s the case, it only causes severe irritation.”

  “Only?” I moaned.

  “You didn’t eat any of it, did you?” Miss Vivee peeked
around Mac at me.

  “No!” I squealed. “Why would I eat a plant?”

  “Never know with you,” she mumbled. “So, redness and a burning sensation is about all you’ll probably get.” Miss Vivee gave a nod. “Your arm’s burning, right?”

  Couldn’t she tell my whole body was on fire?

  I let out a snort.

  Then I thought about when I had gotten the plant. “If that’s the case, Mac,” I said relieved about my reprieve from a death sentence. “I’m not the only one that’s going to be suffering from it.”

  “What do you mean, dear?” He sat down on the bed and gave me a grandfatherly look.

  “I gave a cutting of it to Madda Crawford.”

  “Mad Cow?” Miss Vivee said.

  “What?” I shook my hand. She must’ve not understood me. “I said Madda Crawford. She stopped by just as I was picking it up. Said it was so beautiful, and asked if she could have a clipping of it.”

  “She took it in her hands?” Miss Vivee asked, she looked at me out the side of her eye as if she didn’t believe what I was saying.

  “Well. No. Come to think of it she had a plastic bag all ready to put it in.”

  “It’s the sap that causes the reaction, you know,” Miss Vivee said.

  “No. I didn’t know,” I said, tears starting to flow down my cheek. “How would I know that?”

  “That Mad Cow played a prank on you. She knew it would get you as soon as you cut it.”

  “Why do you keep calling her mad cow?” I said. “Her name is Mad-da. Madda Crawford.”

  “Short for mad cow in my book,” Miss Vivee said and pursed her lips. “She’s demented. And a prankster.”

  “I think that might be true,” Mac said.

  “Ain’t no thinking to it,” Miss Vivee said. “You heard what Avvy and Temo told us. All the goings on around here. The fire in the lovo being doused, missing oars for the kayaks. She’s behind all of it.”

  “No one can prove that,” Mac said.

  “OOOohh.” I started to bawl. “This pain is killing me.”

  “I can,” Miss Vivee said. “And now I’ll have to. She’s ruined my honeymoon, and that pain is killing Logan.”

  “And there’s nothing we can do about that now, either.” Mac shook his head.

  “She’s killing Logan!” Miss Vivee said as if she actually cared. She stood up and stomped her foot. “So. I’m killing her.” She headed out of the room. “Wished I’d brought my snake gun.” Standing in the doorway, she looked back at me, and then to Mac. “C’mon, Mac. Let’s go take care of that woman Georgia style.”

  Georgia style?

  I hadn’t the faintest idea what that meant, but I knew I wasn’t letting Miss Vivee out of my sight without her first giving me something to take the pain away. With all the plants around, she had to be able to whip up some kind of concoction to cure me.

  “Wait!” I squawked, stopping her before she got too far away from me. “You gotta make this stuff go away.”

  “Shower. That’s all you can do.” She shook her head. “If only I had access to my greenhouse . . .”

  “I already took a shower,” I squealed, octaves higher than my regular voice. “It didn’t help.”

  “You probably just spread the sap around like you were doing with that cloth. You must’ve just let the water run over you.” She looked at me and spoke sternly. “Listen to what I say. Soap and water for fifteen minutes. Shouldn’t be any soap left when you’re done. Scrub hard. Got it?” she nodded at me and I attempted a nod back. “Now, you think you can handle that?”

  I nodded again. A little more umph this time.

  “If not, I can get in that shower with you and scrub you down myself.”

  I closed my eyes. What a thought.

  “No. I can do it,” I assured her.

  “And no more accepting gifts from strangers,” Miss Vivee said. “Looks like your mother would have taught you better.”

  “Shower. Soap. Scrub,” I said. “Got it.” No need of bringing my mother into it. “Then it’ll stop burning. The pain will go away. Right?” She nodded. I took in a breath, happy that an end was in sight.

  “You’re gonna have to wait it out, though” she said. “It ain’t no instant, miracle cure.”

  “Wait it out?” I screeched again. “How long?”

  “A loooong while.” She looked at me, no sympathy in her eyes. “So, stop being such a baby and just suck it up.”

  Chapter Two

  So I did suck it up. With the help of Bay.

  Thank goodness for Verizon’s international traveling plan. I could call him on my cell and talk as long as I wanted. He was coming in two days, I knew that, but I needed to hear his voice to make it through the rest of the night.

  But before I called Bay and whined to him, I showered. I scrubbed so hard I probably took off a layer of skin. Then I pitched everything – towel, sheets, pillowcases, and my clothes – into a pile in the middle of the floor and called housekeeping to come and get them. “Burn them,” I warned and told them that they should come wearing long sleeves and latex gloves. I didn’t know what I’d gotten that sap on.

  I downed four 200mg Advil tablets, and called room service and ordered some tea. I’d fabricate my own healing potion, even if it did include modern convention. Then I took my foot and slid that godforsaken plant into the farthest corner of the room.

  I stared at that stupid plant and decided it was time to find out about my prickly nemesis. I plopped down on the striped down bed, pulled out my iPhone and Googled “firestick.” I got pages of Amazon Fire TV stick info.

  “Well that’s not it.”

  As many times as Miss Vivee had said it, I couldn’t remember its scientific name, so I tried “firestick plant.” And up came a picture of that tangled mass of orange-red branches as thick as pencils that lurked in the corner of my room.

  I chose the link that said remedies. It read that the Euphorbia tirucalli was a huge succulent bush with a milky sap that dried fast, and clear, and for best results it needed to be removed from any infected area as fast as possible.

  Yeah, so now I know.

  It said that the dryer it got, the harder it was to remove because it acted like glue.

  I learned that like Miss Vivee’s poisonous plants in her greenhouse, it also had uses in traditional medicine. I couldn’t see how, but I found out that it had been used for treatment of cancer, asthma, earaches, toothaches, tumors, and even warts in different part of the world, none of those places located in the Western Hemisphere, though. And although in my research I did see that firesticks were sold on Amazon, giving it the ability to be found anywhere someone decided to plant it, Wikipedia told me that it was mostly found in Africa, and that it was also native to islands surrounding the continent, the Arabian Peninsula, and other tropical regions.

  It didn’t say one word though about it being in Fiji.

  Miss Vivee had lied to me.

  Stupid plant.

  Had I said that already?

  I didn’t know what I was going to do with it. I hadn’t told the resort staff to pick it up, I didn’t want to inflict any grief on anyone else. I did know, however, what I was going to do to Madda Crawford. She definitely would be hearing from me.

  Mad Cow. How does Miss Vivee come up with these things?

  I looked up symptoms of mad cow disease and found out that people can’t get it, only cows (hence the name?), but they can get a human form of it called variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, which is fatal.

  I wondered did Miss Vivee know that.

  I looked up the symptoms of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease.

  Rapidly progressive dementia, memory loss, personality changes, and hallucinations. Other frequently occurring features include anxiety, depression, paranoia, obsessive-compulsive symptoms, and psychosis . . .

  Psychosis.

  I chuckled. I hadn’t noticed that Madda had any of those symptoms, not that I really knew anything about her. But leave
it to Miss Vivee to relate the disease with Madda Crawford’s shenanigans.

  And then to take up for me. Saying she was going to kill Madda for putting me through so much pain. I shook my head. Most times Miss Vivee treated me so mean, anyone that didn’t know us would think she hated me. But I knew that was far from the truth. I couldn’t even come and work on a dig in Fiji without her following me.

  I got up and wandered out onto the small verandah of my over-water bure and sat down, my feet dangling over the deeper end of the lagoon. The sun was settling down in the sky, “coming to rest in Malolo” as the old Fijian saying went, making the clear blue waters sparkle.

  I was glad I was here despite me getting entangled in Madda Crawford’s puckish antics.

  I came to Fiji because I had decided to go back to work. Well, maybe I had been given a little push about returning to work. The things that my brother, Micah, had said to me when he came for Miss Vivee and Mac’s wedding really stuck with me. I didn’t want him to think poorly of me.

  And I had mentioned going on a dig in Fiji to my mother, so thought I ought to follow through. Although she couldn’t understand why I chose Fiji, I knew it was because she was a biblical archaeologist, and not many (okay, none) of the stories of the Bible happened in the South Seas.

  But Fijian folklore did include a bible story. A “Box of Blessings,” from the temple of King Solomon in Judah, so the story goes, was lost in the waters surrounding the island of Malolo. Fijians believed that the box was still buried in the ocean somewhere between where I sat at Likuliku Lagoon Resort and the island Mana, it was said to be guarded by two giant clams.

  Bet that still wouldn’t get my mother to come here.

  But it was exactly where my work had taken me. I had come full circle.

  I had originally gone to Georgia because of the work I had done in Belize – excavating Maya ruins. I had even become pretty much of an expert in Maya culture (people sometimes even thinking me snooty when I explained that the term “Mayan” is only used when talking about the language, all other references to the people and their history should be termed “Maya.”)