Lost Girls (19 page)

Route National 2 was a timeline of Haiti’s prosperity. The evidence of good years, when housing and utilities were being built for the people, and the bad years, when construction came to an abrupt halt. All along the highway the treeless land was dotted with half-completed houses, all of them occupied by desperate-looking children. Women washed clothes where mules drank from aqueducts; open gutters along the road flowed with raw sewage. Roadwork itself had been funded, then abandoned, following revelations of corruption; the skeletons of old machinery rusted in their tracks, scavenged for every hose and gauge and lever and pipe that could be pried away with a board or crowbar.

Colonel Deaken seemed distracted; he was a man going through the motions, Sherry thought, was not really there in spirit. They were only minutes from Pétionville when he suddenly had to get out of the vehicle to make a call. Perhaps it was official business but Sherry couldn’t help but wonder what Deaken had to say that couldn’t be said in front of them. Soon afterward, he began to question Carol Bishop about her daughter.

When Carol told him the girl was dead in a morgue in Jamaica, he was clearly surprised. He hadn’t known. No one had told him. Then he asked them about their stay in the Dominican Republic the night before. He wanted to know if anyone had accompanied them to the border and was waiting for them on the other side.

Sherry in the backseat was thinking about Brigham, suddenly wishing she’d been more sensitive to his concern for her safety. She didn’t like it when people handled things or thought for her or tried to protect her, and she knew that in being defensive of her independence, she might also have been ignoring his valid warning.

Sherry folded her hands in her lap, body rocking in the back as the jeep encountered potholes.

They say when you lose something you gain something else, lose a sense and gain another, or at least that another might become more acute. Sherry had a thing for people’s vibes, or so her friends always said. She could pull them out of the air like text, and she was wondering now what it was that was bothering her so about Colonel Deaken.

When he asked them to turn over their cell phones, Sherry knew.

“…was clear in my conversation with Interpol that neither of you would be permitted to communicate with anyone until you were back across the border. This was for my sake, because I was taking a risk in meeting you.”

Sherry didn’t buy it. Not for a minute. Something was wrong.

This time she listened to Brigham.

The road to Morne Mansinte was as primitive as in the days it had been forged to haul cannons up the mountain. Packed dirt and shell, it was little wider than a modern SUV, with an incline from sea level to 3,000 feet in just under two miles. There was nothing to protect a careless driver from the eroding edges that would send a vehicle plummeting to the bottom of a crevice.

Not that the road to Morne Mansinte was heavily traveled by vehicles. Mansinte was a destination for the sick and the dead, a ramshackle community of primitive shacks owned by coffin makers and grave diggers and the parish houngan, who lived next to the cemetery.

Hettie Baker had rarely visited Morne Mansinte since marrying Pioche, though her ancestors had lived in the harbor for two centuries and had never taken a remedy but those prescribed by a houngan. It was Pioche’s wish that their daughter receive an education and the advantages of foreign missionaries and aid workers like the ones World Freedom sent into the village. Pioche had often repeated his desire that they would one day send Yousy away from this island of death and desperation.

Pioche was the exception to Haiti’s predominantly unskilled population. He was a graduate of the State University of Haiti and one of a handful of Haitians chosen by Reynolds Metals to learn strip mining in the southern peninsula in 1979. The bauxite mines folded in 1986 and Reynolds moved out, leaving Pioche unemployed, but, as a skilled blast engineer, he found work from time to time.

Pioche would likely have continued to earn a decent living—even by Haitian standards—operating heavy equipment for foreign interests in Haiti, but Pioche did not want his daughter growing up in the dangerous streets of Port-au-Prince or Cap Haitien or Les Cayes. He wanted to raise her as far from the political turmoil as possible and Tiburon harbor, the seaside village of his wife, Hettie’s, ancestors, was about as far from civilization in Haiti as one could get.

Pioche’s fear of mobs and bullets wasn’t all he wanted to protect Yousy from. He wanted her to concentrate on what lay beyond the shores of Haiti. He wanted her to break away from the tradition of superstition. He wanted her to realize there were other worlds to explore, and he wanted her to understand the world as a whole before she attempted to understand and identify with her heritage. So Hettie raised Yousy as a Christian while Pioche drove the countryside in search of work. He was a hardworking man, took any job he could find, many of them menial. Hettie knew he had sacrificed dreams of his own to see that his daughter would not struggle as he had always done. She accepted the few days a month she got to see him, and true to his wish made sure that Yousy reached Port-à-Piment for a Jesuit education. And she tried her best to shield Yousy from the old ways and the old beliefs, though she herself wasn’t a convert. She still believed in voodoo.

She could still see Pioche sitting on their bed with his father’s picture on his lap or playing with Yousy or leaning over the open hood of his old pickup truck.

But then Pioche was murdered and someone left a voodoo poppet on his body and now there was no one to save his soul but the old houngan of Morne Mansinte. Hettie had worried plenty about whether or not Tam-Tam Boy would even agree to Pioche’s cleansing after all the years of avoiding him, but there had been no choice but to ask him. This was not something she could bring to the Jesuits’ door. The Jesuits would not understand the power of the poppet, would not believe that Pioche’s soul could be enslaved by a bocor for all time.

She looked out the window. The harbor was green and the waters lapped gently on soft white beaches. Neighbors would have normally come and gone by now; there was always something to eat in Hettie’s cottage, corn porridge and fried plantains, salted fish and beans and rice. Not everyone had the extra money Pioche managed to provide for her to put food on the table, but Hettie’s neighbors hadn’t been as inclined to stop by as when Pioche was alive.

Of course the reason was that in Haiti when people were murdered their bodies didn’t get returned. Most were left in the streets or disposed of to deprive the victim’s family of a burial. Whoever had killed Pioche and dumped his body in front of his house had wanted to send a message not only to Hettie but to the entire village. Whatever Pioche had seen or heard that was enough to get him killed was also enough to buy anyone else their own bullet and poppet. Hettie knew that her neighbors were reluctant to be around her because she was the person most likely to know Pioche’s secrets.

Etienne, her cousin’s young boyfriend, didn’t care. Etienne sold wild plantains in Port-à-Piment and drove Yousy to the Jesuit school when Pioche was not around. He had been good enough to put Pioche’s body in the back of his little pickup truck and take him up the mountain road to Morne Mansinte, where the houngan consented to cleanse it of the curse. Each night for nine nights the houngan communed with Pioche. In three days Pioche would be taken through the gates to the cemetery and laid at last in holy ground, behind the protection of Papa Ghede’s black cross.

Hettie knew that Pioche wouldn’t have approved of her taking his body to the old houngan. But Pioche couldn’t have known he’d end up dead with a poppet on his chest or that his body would be thrown in front of his door as a warning. Pioche would have wanted Hettie to do anything she could to protect herself and Yousy from harm, and he must surely know now that Tam-Tam Boy had laid hands upon him in his temple, that there really was more to the old man than meets the eye. How else could Tam-Tam Boy have known about Amaud’s photograph if he hadn’t spoken to Pioche himself?

This wasn’t what she’d wanted, it wasn’t what Pioche wanted, but then Pioche got himself killed and now she had to think for both of them; she had to protect Yousy and get her to the United States once she was certain that Pioche’s soul was safe.

She looked out the window.

Etienne would be dropping off Yousy very soon. It was her first day back at school since Pioche’s body had been found.

Hettie had made corn pudding, her daughter’s favorite meal. She hoped that they would soon have a new beginning, hoped that once Pioche was buried they could begin to reclaim their lives.

Evenings had always been a time for them alone. Yousy liked to recount her day with the Jesuits and show Hettie the marks on her school papers that Hettie didn’t understand. Sometimes she would teach Yousy to sew or Yousy would read to her or play music on her radio. Sometimes they would walk the beach and Hettie would tell Yousy about nights with her own mother walking the beach or sitting under the stars.

She didn’t know what to expect of her tonight. Yousy was different from most thirteen-year-olds—older, but not in the way of city-raised thirteen-year-olds wearied by poverty, not because she had been driven to forage and become a caretaker for younger siblings like so many barely old enough to take care of themselves. Yousy’s wisdom was in her eyes; she seemed to understand things at times that were not yet apparent to Hettie. Yousy, for instance, was far less interested in the voodoo poppet found on Pioche’s chest than in the paper stuffed in his mouth. Hettie thought it curious that she had kept it and, though she couldn’t know for sure, felt certain Yousy had shared it with her friend Linda, the aid worker from World Freedom, because Linda had endless questions about where Pioche had been working before he was killed.

Hettie stepped onto the little terrace Pioche had made behind their cottage and swept the sand away with her broom. Pioche was always bringing bricks and things home from job sites and adding little improvements to their cottage. Pioche had been the best thing about Haiti, Hettie had always believed, the most wonderful thing the island had ever given to her. Haiti wouldn’t be the same without him. And with Yousy in America, what would be left?

She wondered how long $4,800 would last Yousy in Miami.

“Mom.” The door opened and Yousy walked into the cottage.

Hettie turned to see Yousy and the thin brown dog following her through the door.

“Yousy, you mustn’t let that dog in the house.”

“Chaser is behaved, Mama.”

“You’ve named it!”

“It’s a she, Mama.”

“Dogs don’t belong in houses, Yousy.”

“They do in America,” Yousy said dispassionately.

Hettie didn’t answer. There was no answer to a girl who lost her father a week ago.

“She is very smart, Mama, do you want to see her sit?”

“I want to see it out of here. And what would people say if they saw a dog come into our house, Yousy? I’ll tell you what they would say. They would say those Bakers think they are like royalty giving roof and food to a scavenging mongrel.”

Hettie sat down heavily next to Yousy, pulled the big hairpin Pioche had made of whalebone from Yousy’s hair and watched it fall to her daughter’s shoulders. She hadn’t stopped wearing it since the day Pioche was murdered. The dog looked up at both of them, tail wagging, eyes moving between them. “Of course we haven’t seen a neighbor all week so maybe we shouldn’t care what they think,” she added tiredly.

Yousy’s face softened. It was the first expression of any kind that Hettie had seen all week. Hettie put her arms around the girl and held her as the dog looked on. “We’re going to be all right, Miss Yousy,” Hattie said. “We’re going to be all right, I promise you.”

She pushed Yousy away and looked into her eyes. “Your father was a very good man, Yousy. More special than you could ever know.”

Yousy began to cry and Hettie pulled her to her shoulder. “No more tears, my Yousy, no more tears now. Pioche will rest peacefully soon and when his spirit rises in a year and day, we will take it with us to Miami, what do you say?”

Yousy looked up at her, looked in her eyes for the truth, and when she saw it she smiled. “Really, Mama?”

“Really,” Hettie said firmly, “but you mustn’t talk about it. Do you understand how important that is? How important when I say that you must tell no one? Talk is bad in Haiti. Bad things happen to those who talk.”

Yousy nodded.

Hettie smiled down at her, and stood.

“We must get ready to visit your father soon, but first I will check with Etienne to make sure he will take us tonight. You promise me you will stay in if I let the dog be with you?”

Yousy nodded. “I will stay in,” she said. “I promise.”

Yousy picked up a tattered copy of
Time
magazine and lay down next to the dog, using a lime green cassette player for her pillow. The cassette function had never worked, but Yousy caught FM waves from the Dominican and Jamaica and sometimes Cuba when conditions were right.

The dog was cute, Hettie thought, cute and smart and playful; it was the kind of thing Pioche would have approved of. Hettie had first seen it under her sleeping daughter on the brick terrace the first night she returned from delivering Pioche’s body to the houngan. The dog had been hanging around their door waiting for Yousy to wake each morning and now today after school.

This wasn’t the time to take anything else away from her. Let the neighbors talk. She was sure they talked enough as it was.

Morne Mansinte was as dissimilar from Tiburon harbor as night was from day, Hettie recalled—as all villagers surely recalled—her first trip to Mansinte as a child and the terror that accompanied that steep climb to the cemetery. To a mere child what lay above the serene ocean harbor was dark and mysterious. The bags of bones and magic spells, the row of wooden coffins leaning against the cemetery fence, sometimes waiting for bodies yet unknown. As children they used to compare the lengths of coffins to their size, but any laughter as they played the game veiled a fear that one of the coffins was really their own.

The road hugged walls of volcanic rock that twisted upward. Etienne inched the old Toyota carrying them and Yousy slowly up the mountainside.

“Do you know what I heard today?”

“No, Etienne, but I know you will tell me.” Hettie looked out the window.

“There is a story…” He hesitated.

Hettie smiled weakly. There was always a story in Haiti. In other lands they called it the grapevine, in Haiti they called it telejaw. For a country widely lacking electricity and telephones, word managed to travel quite efficiently. Rumors moved on the tongue of every truck driver and merchant, social workers and nuns and policemen and missionaries. It went down every road and across every mountain until what was said in the east was known by nightfall in the west.

“The lady who cooks for the Jesuits, Mrs. Lambert, her son works for the drug police in Port-au-Prince.”

Hettie nodded, eyes on roots clutching at the mountainside above them.

“He is in charge of maintaining their computers.” Etienne nodded, hands gripping the vibrating wheel. “His boss called him today and told him to look up the name of a woman. She was on a passenger list coming by bus to Haiti from the Dominican Republic. He said the woman was on the Internet. She is like a mambo from the United States. A white mambo.”

“Speak plainly,” Hettie said, “and keep your eyes on the road.”

“She touches the dead.”

Hettie looked at Etienne.

He shrugged. “I am only telling you what Mrs. Lambert said.”

Hettie looked up to see a basket of bones hanging from the limb of a mapou.

The mapou are sacred trees in Haiti, and the spirits of ancestors are believed to dwell in their roots. The few that were left standing in Haiti the villagers feared to burn. Offerings to the spirits are commonly tied to their branches.