El Yunque, Puerto Rico, where Laura Morrison’s body was found.
The Irony of Tree Ferns (tentative title)
What is an American woman doing alone in a remote section of
tropical rain forest?
And why is she dead?
In 1942, during the height of World War II, sixteen-year-old Eduardo Colón finds the body of a middle-aged woman in a Puerto Rican rain forest. At first Eduardo resents the woman—identified as an American, Laura Morrison—because her corpse has disrupted his introverted life. But he soon becomes obsessed with learning more, for reasons related to his own impending move to the States. His search, alternately with and without the local police chief’s blessing, leads him to colonial mansions, a bleak coffee estate, and an island known as the Galapagos of the Caribbean. In the process, he must contend with a hermit, a cave-dwelling gypsy, Laura’s brother, and traitors intent on establishing a German submarine base in the Caribbean.
Decades later, Pamela Palmer moves from the U.S. to teach in Puerto Rico and discovers a long-hidden family scandal related to Laura Morrison.
Lake Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, later home of Pamela Palmer.
From her present-day home in northern Idaho, Pamela reminisces about her years in the Caribbean as she adapts to the island and hunts for clues about the unconventional Morrisons. An amateurish detective, she is helped in her search by a hard-boiled reporter and hindered by an arrogant mother-in-law. At the end of her stay, she stumbles on a clue that changes her life.
In a quest that spans a century and two worlds, affecting the lives of several families, the boy and the teacher find answers about the woman in the forest that influence their separate journeys from one culture to another.