“Figures,” he said. “Don’t his plays usually end with people betrayed, insane, or just plain dead?”
“Only the comedies,” she replied instantly.
They grinned at each other and set off again. Rudy was some distance ahead now, but he was wearing a lurid green and yellow shirt that stood out even against the tropical foliage.
“I hope these jokers can be reasoned with,” Joe said over his shoulder. “In most movies, this would be where we walk into a trap and get tied to a stake or something.”
Sara was hardly listening. Instead, she was looking up at the branches that arched over the rudimentary pathway. Birds moved now and then, crashing through leaves and branches. Loud screeches and squawks came from all sides, or very nearly. But just above and to the right of them was a zone of silence, a place where no bird sang and nothing seemed to move. Except now and again, when the sun rippled through the foliage, she could almost make out a small, misshapen form leaping from bough to bough.
Do I believe? Or am I going crazy?
All things considered, she decided that she would rather believe in the supernatural than that she was losing her mind. And what had happened to Lomax? Sara felt sure it was the same thing that had happened to Randy Hobart. The image of the specter’s sword emerging from the detective’s chest sprang into her mind, and she shuddered despite the cloying, moist heat.
“Looks like we’re here,” Joe said.
Rudy was still, holding up one hand to warn the Hansens to stop. Sara and Joe stood silently, just behind and flanking Rudy. Beyond the young man in the bright shirt was a clearing, of sorts. At first, it just looked like a patch of jungle devoid of trees, but lush with tall tropical plants. But then Sara recalled what she’d learned about Fort Vauban. Here and there, she could make out straight lines under the greenery. A mass in the center she had first taken for a hillock was, she guessed, a tumbled mass of stone blocks. And on top of it, stood a small group of people, looking down at the strangers. There were three or four—it was hard to tell, as they were half-concealed by foliage.
Rudy took a few paces forward, gesturing the Hansens to stay put. Then he started talking loudly in what Sara assumed was the local French dialect. She made out ‘bonjou’ instead of ‘bonjour’ and a few other words. She made a mental note to take language lessons, if only to acquire a few basic phrases.
“You may speak English.”
The clear voice cut through Rudy’s prepared speech and silenced the cab driver. He looked over his shoulder at Joe, shrugged, then started speaking again.
“These people came to invest in our island,” Rudy said, gesturing at the Americans. “They gave local people jobs, planned to bring visitors here to stay, people who will spend money, tell their friends about the friendly and beautiful Sainte Isabel. But instead of welcome, these good people were persecuted. They come to this assembly to protest at this injustice.”
“The free people will hear this plea.”
The voice from the top of the mound was, Sara decided, probably that of a woman. She looked at Joe, hesitating, but he nodded. This was not like the business negotiations he was used to. She was the one with the people skills, as he always said. She stepped forward to stand alongside Rudy and looked at the people above her.
“Things are—I mean, it is as our friend says,” she called, trying not to shout but aware that her words needed to carry about ten yards. “We did not seek to offend or insult anyone, merely to create an enterprise that will benefit everyone. And we ask that you do not hinder us in our… our efforts.”
There was no immediate reply, but Sara became aware of the fact that the people on the mound were not alone. Here and there, around the edge of the roughly circular clearing, faces were looking on through the undergrowth. There might be twenty or more boucaniers in total. If things went south, there could be no hope of escape. Joe’s machete was not going to save them.
“Please help us!” Sara added, taking another step toward the mound. “It was our dream, to come to this beautiful island and make a home here. We only want to… to fit in, to live in peace with our neighbors!”
No one spoke for several seconds, during which time the bird calls and rustling of branches seemed to become very loud. Again, Sara glimpsed a small creature running along a bough, up and to her left, partway around the edge of the clearing. She followed it with her eyes. Then the person on the mound spoke again, saying a single word that sounded like ‘tan’.
“She wants us to wait,” Rudy said. “She’s coming down. That could be a good sign. She never talks to outsiders face to face, so people say.”
“Face to face is always better for making a deal,” Joe muttered. “See what we’re up against. Who we’re up against.”
The figures on top of the mound moved out of sight. A minute later, they reappeared walking around an overgrown ruin. Now Sara could see that there were just three of them, a woman flanked by two girls. Ages were hard to judge, but the girls looked like pre-teens. Serious older children, intent on their task, casting suspicious glances at the outsiders. They held the woman’s arms and guided her steps.
“She’s blind all right,” Joe whispered. “This is definitely the voodoo priestess, Rudy?”
The cab driver nodded and wiped sweat from his forehead.
Mama Bondurant was tall, at least six feet, and wrapped in a colorful floral dress with white blooms on a red background. She reminded Sara of Keri—both women held themselves well and moved with enviable grace. As the group came closer, Sara saw that the tall woman’s eyes were filmed over with cataracts, blue-white and blank. She felt a sudden pang of pity at the thought of anyone deprived of sight amid so much beauty, never seeing the extraordinary colors of sea and sky, the rich variety of tropical blooms.
“Do not pity me, my child,” said Mama Bondurant, in clear but strongly accented English. “I see more than you might imagine.”
Sara started, then laughed nervously. There was no reason to assume her thoughts were being read. A woman whose status depended in large part on cultivating an air of mystery would have a repertoire of profound remarks for naïve outsiders like herself.
“I didn’t know you were… that is…” Sara stumbled. “Visually impaired.”
“I am blind,” said the tall woman bluntly. “You have the modern American weakness, I see—you do not say what you know to be true, and so the greatest liars find it easier to rise to power in your nation. You know that some of my people took money to harm your business, yes?”
“Yes, we know,” said Joe. “And we want to know what it will cost to call off your dogs.”
The blind eyes turned slowly to face Joe.
“Ah, this is the man who decides, or who thinks he does. But you are plain-speaking, and that is good. Come closer. Sara and Joe Hansen, such ordinary Americans with such good intentions. Let me touch your faces.”
Joe did not move. He was not the most tactile of guys, Sara knew well, but she gripped him by the elbow and urged him to take a few steps. Up close, Mama Bondurant was even more impressive. It was hard to judge her age—she might have been anywhere between forty and sixty. If you ignored the pale, milk-white ovals of the eyes, her face was strikingly beautiful, with full lips, high cheekbones, and an impressive brow under a tightly wound white turban.
“Joe Hansen, you are afraid,” she said. “That is nothing to be ashamed of. But you do not need a weapon to speak to a blind woman.”
Joe looked confused and ashamed and put the machete down onto a moss-covered stone. Then the tall woman reached out two graceful, long-fingered hands, guided by one of her helpers, and began to examine Joe’s face. He flinched slightly but didn’t try to stop her, though Sara knew he must be longing to dash the questing fingers aside as they explored his nose, mouth, chin.
“Interesting,” said Mama Bondurant, then added something in what was presumably Creole French that Sara did not catch. It sounded like ‘gen yon lon braj’. Reverting to English, the woman
added, “You have been fortunate in many ways. Not least in your wife, it is said.”
The woman withdrew her fingers from Joe’s face and turned slightly to face Sara. Again, one of the girls guided fingers to face. Sara was determined not to flinch, to do nothing that might be interpreted as disrespectful. What surprised her most about the touch of the woman’s fingertips was their softness. Mama Bondurant, whatever else she might be, had not done much manual labor.
“I have not had to wash or cook or clean since I was a little girl and lost my sight, Sara Hansen,” said the woman. “And yes, you can tell yourself once more that my words are a lucky guess at your thoughts. That is always the comforting answer.”
Sara stood stock still while the fingers moved over her features, stopped, and resumed their exploration. For the first time, the boucanier woman seemed puzzled, unsure of herself. The two girls flanking the leader exchanged a glance and one murmured something under her breath. The tall woman did not respond, and instead, seemed to speak to herself in Creole. The sentence was too long and complex for Sara to remember it. Then the gentle fingers were no longer touching her flesh. Instead, the tall woman was clutching something that hung around her neck. It was not a monkey charm but a small, square bag made of leather or dark brown cloth.
“You may return to your home,” said Mama Bondurant abruptly. “We have nothing more to speak of on this day.”
The three boucaniers began to walk away. Joe, baffled and angry, shouted after them.
“Is that it? I thought we came here to do a deal?”
Mama Bondurant paused, and her blind face turned toward them again, but this time it was tilted upward, listening intently. Sara heard something moving through the leaves above and behind her. A chittering noise, sharp and angry, came briefly and then faded away.
“You will suffer no more interference from us, Joe Hansen,” said the priestess. “But, likewise, you will receive no protection. Be satisfied with that and go.”
“Protection from what?” Sara asked, stepping forward. “Do you mean Lemaitre and his familiar, his demon?”
The two girl helpers’ eyes widened, and one spat out a word that might well have been a curse. Mama Bondurant shook her head.
“We may speak of him; you should not,” she said. “I can only tell you this. One of you is blessed, the other cursed. It is not clear to me which is which, but you both have hard roads to travel. I will not make your troubles any greater. I ask for nothing. I merely do you a favor, as you call it. Perhaps one day you will do one for me and my people.”
Joe started to speak again, but this time Rudy put a hand on his shoulder and shook his head firmly. Mama Bondurant and her little retinue walked slowly around the mound, moving out of sight. The other boucaniers had already faded into the shadows under the trees. Rudy and the Hansens stood silently for a moment. Then Joe said they might as well get out of the goddamn jungle before the goddamn bugs ate them all alive.
“What was that thing around her neck?” Sara asked Rudy as they turned to go. “Some kind of charm?”
“A gris-gris,” Rudy replied. “Yes, it is a protective charm. You see a few of them around. Sometimes there are sacred writings or symbols inside, sometimes less pleasant things.”
Sara wondered what might have prompted the priestess to seek any kind of protection. The movement in the forest canopy was one obvious reason. And yet Lemaitre, and presumably the pirate’s familiar, were hero-worshipped by the people of the jungle. Or maybe it was just too complicated for an outsider to grasp after just a few days on the island. She asked Rudy if he knew what the woman had said about her and Joe in her own language?
“I did not catch any of it, really,” the cabbie said, apologetically. “I don’t speak the dialect very well. She was too quick for me.”
“No problem, we can always listen again when we get back,” Joe said, taking his phone out of the breast pocket of his short-sleeved shirt.
“It was recording all the while,” he explained. “Guess these guys might not be expecting something so basic. I get the feeling the digital age has passed them by.”
When they reached the cover, cell phone service was resumed and Joe got a message from Ryan. Things were ‘really moving in Washington’, apparently, with Martin Gale’s tamed senator kicking up a stink at the State Department. Ryan added, “The video helped. Tell Sara she looked great.” In the background, they heard Keri, apparently protesting about something, and an unfamiliar voice that was almost drowned out.
“Keri is bored with lying in bed and wants to come back to Sainte Isabel tomorrow,” Ryan said. “Her doctor takes another view. So far, it’s a draw but I think my girl is in for the long haul—after all, they can’t keep her here if she really wants to leave. Check with you later.”
Sara had to smile at the thought of Keri being a handful in a hospital, but as they neared the bungalow, she kept returning to the utterances of the priestess. Joe started making calls, starting with Jimmy the foreman, keen to find out if Mama Bondurant had already put the word out. But so far as he could tell, there had been no change in attitude toward Pirate Cove.
“And those bastards are still out there, treasure hunting,” Joe added bitterly, gesturing at the white ship just off the reef. “I’ve a good mind to go out there and… Well, find somebody to bawl out.”
Rudy had to get back into Port Louis. Sara asked him to wait to help translate the recordings of Mama Bondurant. He seemed reluctant, and she felt guilty about asking him to do more for them. But she offered to take his cab into town straight after, as she needed to do some shopping.
“Okay,” Rudy grinned. “I’ll give it my best shot, but I can’t promise anything.”
Joe’s cell phone had done a decent job of recording most of the conversation with the priestess. It helped that the woman projected like an actor, or a professional singer. Sara asked Rudy if he knew anything about the woman’s earlier life, but he just shrugged and said she had not always lived on the island.
“There are always rumors,” he observed. “But nobody honestly knows, I guess. Now, let’s hear that first phrase, okay?”
After listening to what Mama Bondurant had said about Joe three or four times, Rudy seemed to make it out. He smiled apologetically when he gave his opinion.
“It probably means nothing, just designed to creep you out, yeah?”
“Just tell us what she said,” Joe insisted, impatiently.
Rudy made a helpless gesture.
“Okay, well, she said that there is a shadow over you.”
Joe and Sara looked at each other.
“Is that all?” Sara asked. “Just a shadow?”
Rudy apologized some more, but Joe snorted in derision.
“Mumbo jumbo, and it didn’t freak me out. What about the stuff she said about Sara?”
Here Rudy had more trouble, putting his ear right up against the phone and frowning in concentration. Eventually, he looked at Sara in a speculative way and said:
“Mwen konnen figi sa a nan rèv mwen yo. I think that’s what she said. Something close to that, anyway.”
Sara raised an eyebrow, waited for him to elaborate.
“She said she has seen your face in her dreams,” Rudy explained. “Unless I got it badly wrong. She has seen your face in her dreams.”
Chapter 12: Under the Shadow
That night, Joe and Sara made love as they lay in each other’s arms listening to the sound of the waves. Over the cove, the swollen tropical moon, still full, cast colorless light over the sea. They talked for a while afterward, then Joe fell into a shallow sleep. Sara wanted to join him, but her mind was whirling with troublesome thoughts.
What if Mama Bondurant did not lift the embargo on people working at the cove? What did the woman’s enigmatic pronouncements mean, if anything? And what would they do if everything collapsed, leaving them destitute? She could go back to working real estate. Joe could, in theory, take a job with a construction firm. They would go back to
the States with their tails between their legs. And there would be bitterness.
He might blame me, she thought. He wouldn’t want to, but part of him would blame me because I had wanted this.
She thought back to the moment she had first seen a picture of Pirate Cove. Randy Hobart had invited a dozen or so prospective investors to a hotel conference room and pitched his ‘once in a lifetime’ deal. The guy had delivered a slick presentation, had a cogent answer for every question, and generally came across as genuine. Sara’s judgment had been out of whack that day.
They had left without making any commitment. But in the days that followed, the image of Pirate Cove, of Sainte Isabel, had haunted Sara. She had not exactly nagged at Joe. But she had dwelt on the notion of building a business in a tropical paradise, with a beautiful climate, low taxes, and a warm ocean to swim in before breakfast.
Joe had been skeptical at first, insisting on running the numbers again and again. But Sara had persisted, and eventually, Joe had taken a few days between jobs to check out the location. He had come back a convert to Hobart’s grand scheme. And so, the Hansens had decided to leave their old lives behind.
“It’s a big gamble, sure,” she had said, never thinking they could lose. “But you get nothing in life without taking a risk now and again.”
Eventually, she drifted off into an uneasy sleep and suffered a recurring nightmare. Again, she found herself plunging into deep, dark water while wearing an elaborate, old-fashioned dress that dragged her down. She woke up drenched in sweat and got up early to shower.
Next morning, Jimmy the foreman turned up with two dozen eager workmen. It was as if, Sara thought, all the doubts and confusion of the last few days had never happened. Men were smiling, joking, even lightly teasing the dour Jimmy. The foreman, for his part, seemed more cheerful than ever before.
“They are not all morons and layabouts,” Jimmy said, surveying his crew. “I daresay they might do an honest day’s work for once—if I watch them carefully.”
Devil Ship: Supernatural Suspense with Scary & Horrifying Monsters (Devil Ship Series Book 1) Page 16
