Lost Girls (14 page)

The sun was setting on the beach at Boca Chica. Carol Bishop sat cross-legged drawing circles in the wet sand. Robert, her husband, was in Colorado Springs, or so their daughter Theresa had said on the phone last evening. Bob was spending more and more time on the road, even though the CEO could easily have remained at the home office in Chicago.

He was breaking down, she thought. He was tasking instead of enjoying the fruit of his labor. He was giving up on the life they had worked so long and hard to achieve. She thought about their Oak Park home, their dream home with the empty pink room where their younger daughter once slept. It wouldn’t be long before he gave up on her, too, she knew. It had been a month since she’d been back to the United States. Not that there was anything she could do about it. Jill was somewhere on this island. She couldn’t bring herself to leave Jill behind. Their lives, so fundamentally family-oriented before Jill had disappeared, had begun to dissolve before their eyes.

A Dominican radio station playing salsa wafted across the hot beach. Somewhere in the background another radio station broadcast weather and news from nearby Jamaica.

Carol was tanned nut-brown from a summer in the intense Caribbean sun. Her fingernails and toenails, once meticulously manicured, were clipped close, split and dirty with sand. She did little else these days but walk the city streets and marketplace where her daughter went missing and the shorelines along the beaches, in her threadbare sandals, showing flyers with her daughter’s picture, speaking to anyone who would give her the time of day.

They called her
madre de la muchacha perdida,
the Lost Girl’s mother.

It had been a season now since Jill disappeared. She would never forget that night. Not for as long as she lived.

The captain had arranged a quiet exploration of the ship. The crew made subtle announcements over the hundreds of speakers onboard. Staff cabins were searched by officers, retail shops were checked to see if Jill Bishop’s guest card had been scanned, digital images were downloaded from cameras at embarkation ramps and restaurants and decks and casinos, assembled for future investigators to study. But three days later, not a trace of Jill remained beyond the morning she was filmed leaving the ship for Santo Domingo.

The FBI boarded the ship in Miami, but a day and a night of cold questioning left Carol still wanting real answers. She boarded a plane back to Santo Domingo and had not left the island since.

She heard laughter but did not look up.

Her daughter had been right here, right in this city of two million people, and no one saw her disappear? The answer was still here, she thought. Not back in the States or onboard the
Constellation,
where the charismatic Italian captain would be charming his current round of passengers.

“…found in the waters off the eastern coast of Jamaica is reported to be that of a young Caucasian female. Sources inside the Jamaica Constabulary say that while the cause of death has not yet been determined, they are treating the case as a drowning. In other news, a gangland shooting in Spanish Town left…”

Carol looked for the source of the broadcast and saw an Asian couple fussing over a boom box between toddling children.

She got to her feet and looked around, unsure of what to do next. Then she started to run.

Tam-Tam Boy brushed flies from cloudy eyes with gnarled fingers that stank of fish and rotten eggs. He dipped them into a rusty Campbell’s soup can, crouched over the body, and painted a yellow line down the center of the dead man’s forehead, then across his nose and mouth, bisecting his face. He dipped the fingers again and continued down the dead man’s chest across his stomach to his abdomen, where he painted a yellow circle around a black bullet hole. Tam-Tam Boy patted the ground until he found a sardine tin of coagulating blood and used it to make red fingertip dots inside the circle.

The dead man was naked except for a pair of gray briefs. Tam-Tam Boy set down the tin, picked up one of the dead man’s hands, and threw back his head, eyes staring vacantly toward the stars. A man opposite Tam-Tam Boy beat on an old goatskin drum. Three hounsis began to rise and dance, shaking their bodies, white dresses billowing, scarves knotted on top of their heads. They stamped about barefoot in the sandy dirt around the fire, heads rolling from side to side. One shook a gourd-shaped rattle filled with dried corn.

“Do you see him?” the woman sitting next to Tam-Tam Boy asked. “Is he going to come tonight?”

She was wearing a green Nike sweat suit and red-and-white Reeboks. She wore cheap costume bangles on one wrist and a fake gold chain around her neck. The old houngan ignored her, placing one hand over the circle of red dots on the man’s stomach, pressing fingers into the bloated skin. Firelight reflected off his oily black face as he concentrated, eyes creamy white and opaque. His free hand clutched the hand of the dead man.

“Pioche lukin atchu now,” Tam-Tam Boy said. “Him tell mi seh yuh look for a picture of a statue.”

“Picture?”

The old man cocked his head to one side, as if straining to hear. “Pioche is looking at a picture. A man in front of a statue,” he said slowly.

The woman looked confused. The only picture of a statue she knew about was the one of Pioche’s father, Amaud. The statue was Christopher Columbus and it stood in the harbor of Port-au-Prince before being torn down and thrown in the harbor by mobs in 1987. But why would her dead husband care about a picture? Why now?”

The woman in the sweat suit looked on helplessly. “Who did this, Tam-Tam Boy? Who killed my husband? Why did they desecrate his body?”

“Di white ooman she call out to im. She is in a cage. She want im to take a message for er. She want im to help er escape. Pioche try to help her escape. Di ooman with Baron Samedi’s mark on her face.”

Tam-Tam Boy removed the hand that was rubbing the dead man’s stomach and held it out.

“Pioche gave the ooman some ting, but di one-eyed man is coming, di one-eyed man see im,” Tam-Tam Boy cried out in a strange high voice, “run, run.” The old man shook his head. “But Pioche not run. Him say lef di ooman alone, but di one-eyed man he point di gun and Pioche be shot dead.”

Tam-Tam Boy shook his head violently, eyes growing wider; he squeezed the hand harder and tears formed as he spoke. “Now Pioche see a young girl, di child with di long white pin in er hair. She is standing in front of a blue shantee, wit bricks all around on di ground.”

“It is our daughter, Yousy,” the woman in the Nike sweat suit said.

The woman began to bawl, but Tam-Tam Boy suddenly put a finger to his ear. “Shhhhhh!” he silenced her, grabbing her arm and pointing across the fire. “Pioche want to talk to you!” he cried out. “Pioche is here!”

One of the hounsis froze mid-dance, clutching her stomach exactly where Pioche had been shot. A moment later she stumbled forward, pivoting her hips until her torso was nearly horizontal with Pioche’s widow’s face, pointing down at the ground in front of her.

Pioche’s widow looked up, tears running down her cheeks into the neck of her sweat suit.

“I wait with Papa Ghede by the gates of the crossroads.” The voice of the hounsi was deep and sounded something like her husband, Pioche, had sounded in life—before he was shot dead and his body dumped in front her house in the village. Pioche’s widow looked up at the spirit of her undead husband and his eyes looked just like Pioche’s eyes looking back.

“What mean you say about the picture, Pioche? What mean you say about your father, Amaud?” she cried out to the hounsi.

“Me waiting by the crossroads.” The hounsi wagged a finger at her. “Me waiting with Papa Ghede.”

The widow swooned.

Tam-Tam Boy picked up a cloth bag and sprinkled salt over the dead man’s stomach. Then he spread his spindly arms and stood. “It be done for tonight,” he said.

“What does he want?” The widow got to her feet, wiping dirt from her sweatpants, running to catch up to the old houngan. “What does it mean?”

The old man turned. “Where is the statue picture?”

“Over our bed. Pioche’s father, but he is long dead,” the widow said.

“This is what Pioche wants you to see,” the houngan said, shaking his head and setting out across the path once more.

Tam-Tam Boy nodded. “Look behind the picture and tell no one what you found, not for a year and a day or it be gone away from you.”

He turned and looked at her.

“Pioche will be back four more nights but then he must make the journey with Papa Ghede.”

He held out a trembling hand, the distant firelight reflecting off his cloudy eyes.

The widow fished gourds out of an old kerchief, pushed the money into the houngan’s hand, and blew her nose noisily, stuffing the kerchief back in a pocket. “Thank you.” She squeezed the old man’s hand. “Thank you.”

Wild dogs slinked through shadows along the path between sloped shanties. The smell of dead animals mingled with sweat and a splash of Old Spice someone gave to the houngan as payment for a remedy. The houngan shuffled along the dusty path to a rickety shanty. Pioche’s widow went the opposite way, down a steep hill to a narrow dirt road.

A young man and long-haired girl waited for her by a rusting white Toyota. Behind it a sprinkle of lights marked the village of Tiburon on the coast.

It had been five days since her husband’s body had been tossed in front of their house. She remembered the morning the crowd gathered around her door, slowly parting for her to see the body in the street. Pioche lay on his back in the decaying palm fronds, flies swarming the slippery entrails protruding from his stomach. A small pencil and paper were stuffed in his mouth. A poppet in the shape of a man had been pinned on his chest. The casing of an expended bullet had been pushed into the fabric of the doll’s stomach.

Hettie had kept her daughter in the house all that day. Policemen did not arrive until late the second day. They seemed nervous and wore ill-fitting uniforms. By then Hettie had brought Pioche into the house and removed the paper and pencil from his mouth, undressed him and cleaned the dirt and blood from his body.

Neither of the policemen touched the body or examined the bullet wound closely; they didn’t seem to care about the pencil and paper that Hettie had taken from his mouth. They didn’t touch the voodoo doll with the bullet casing in its stomach. There would be no arrests. Pioche, like all Haitians it was presumed, had invited his own death.

Hettie waited another day before she got up the nerve to leave the house, before she could convince herself that whoever had done this to Pioche was not coming back to kill her or her daughter. That was when she asked her cousin’s boyfriend, Etienne, to put Pioche’s body in the back of his pickup truck and take it to the old houngan Tam-Tam Boy. Perhaps, she’d thought, Pioche’s body could be cleansed of the desecration and that way she might protect his soul after death and his body from being exhumed as a zombie.

Hettie remembered the aid worker from World Freedom who came to see her that night, offering her condolences and asking if Hettie knew where Pioche had been working when he was killed. Everyone in the village knew that Pioche went away to work in the mountains, sometimes for days at a time. Work was very difficult to come by in Haiti, virtually impossible for men without skill, but men such as Pioche were sought out now and then to work in the remote mountain enclaves that belonged to the rich. There were many rich people in the mountains; the homes of former plantation owners had been turned into weekend retreats for the latest government officials and there were estates of textile manufacturers who operated sweatshops in Port-au-Prince and drug barons with their hidden airstrips and convoys of trucks that rumbled along dusty roads to meet the go-fast boats at night along the coast. Pioche was even called to the cities on occasion, to help with bridges and demolish buildings for the government.

People in Haiti didn’t brag about where they worked or how much they earned. Talk was dangerous in Haiti. You went about life minding your own business and in doing so spared yourself and your neighbors from harm. Which was why Pioche had been adamant that Hettie not speak of what he had told her about the women he saw and why Hettie had kept her mouth shut even though the World Freedom aid worker seemed so insistent to know.

Four more nights and Tam-Tam Boy would give her Pioche’s body for burial. And every night until then she would ride with Etienne to the houngan’s temple on Morne Mansinte. She needed Tam-Tam Boy to convince Pioche’s soul to enter the holy ground.

Hettie was angry with Pioche for trying to help the women. Why would he risk his life and those of his family over someone he didn’t even know? Why couldn’t Pioche take his own good advice about minding one’s business?

Nothing seemed quite clear to Hettie since Pioche’s body was found.

She got into the pickup and strained to pull the rusty door closed. The frame squeaked on the axles and road dust filled the cab through holes in the floorboard. One of the truck’s headlights was centered on the narrow mountain road, the other shot up against the bank, illuminating the tangle of roots eroding beneath a half dozen dilapidated shanties.

She thought about Pioche’s father. Pioche never spoke of him, but many times she had seen him take the picture of his father down and cradle it in his lap. She didn’t intrude; she often reflected on her own mother’s picture at night when her husband and daughter were asleep. She’d thought that Pioche must have simply been doing the same. Now she had to wonder if the picture meant something else.

Etienne dropped her and her daughter at their house before midnight. He would be going to the market in Port-à-Piment the following morning to sell plantains. Tomorrow her daughter, Yousy, would go with him, her first day back at the Jesuit school since her father had been killed.

Hettie entered the dark house and felt its emptiness. Something about it had changed.

The picture of Amaud wasn’t a very good one, a yellowing Polaroid taken on his sixtieth birthday in Port-au-Prince. Amaud had worked as a domestic for a wealthy Canadian family. He’d died from a stray bullet during the riots, the same year the picture was taken. The frame around it was several inches too large, crudely made of bamboo and glass. A patch of old cloth was tacked across the cardboard backing. It was the thickness of it that Hettie noticed first. The padding between the glass and cardboard was wide enough to hold fifty pictures of Amaud.

But it wasn’t pictures she found inside. It was money, nearly five thousand dollars. Pioche had been rich! She was rich!

She turned to look out the window: purple sky above Morne Mansinte. It was darker at night than it had ever seemed in her childhood. The poor were now too poor even to burn firewood. All the trees, even the fruit-bearing trees, had been cut for the few measly dollars’ worth of charcoal.

In the mountains, however, the rich owned generators large enough to light a whole village. Haiti was like that, a country of contradictions, the rich as unproportionally rich as the poor were unproportionally poor. One in every eighty thousand lived in opulence, which seemed wrong enough without adding to the fact that they felt entitled to murder the poor.

Pioche hadn’t had to die. All those years Pioche had been sitting on a fortune. Why would he have worked so hard to live in such squalor, to eat fish and fruit off the trees when they could have lived in Les Cayes in virtual splendor?

She turned and looked around the little house, at the image of President Préval on the wall where it could easily be seen. It wasn’t really a photograph but was cut from the front page of the
National Catholic Reporter,
one that Yousy had brought back from the marketplace in Port-à-Piment.

She turned the picture of Amaud over and put the money back in. Then she laid it on the bed and sat next to it.

This had been her own mother’s home, destroyed by countless hurricanes over the years and rebuilt by the fishermen who had been regenerating this village since slaves won their freedom from Napoleon. The collective memories of those fishermen, her mother, herself, were all a bittersweet muddle of happiness and pain. Haiti was as wondrous as it was cruel, its people the same. In the corner on an overturned bucket was a stack of Yousy’s schoolbooks. Hung from a string on the wall where her daughter slept was a poster from USAID. Yousy’s dream was to attend college in the United States. It had been her dream ever since she had begun to attend school with the Jesuits in Port-à-Piment. USAID offered a scholarship program to Haitian children turned sixteen.

Hettie looked at the poster until she could no longer see for her tears. Then she smiled.

Pioche had been thinking about Yousy.