But Daddy went right on with his experiments, in spite of her opposition.
On her cot in the lamp lit guest room of the Vallière rectory, Mildred stared at the ceiling. Daddy… if you can hear me, please tell me what made me run away from Sam this evening and try to destroy myself at the river. Please, Daddy. I'm frightened.
Closing her eyes, she tried to concentrate. She didn't have to know where he was, although being able to think of him in specific surroundings usually helped. It was—she looked at her watch—quarter to three in the morning now. He would be in bed somewhere. Somewhere in a village like this one? She formed a mental image of him on a cot like the one she was using, but asleep with his eyes closed.
Daddy… Daddy… can you hear me?
Something was coming through. Something.
Daddy? Yes, but not Daddy alone. Daddy and someone else. As if she had dialed a telephone number and some kind of mix-up had caused two phones to ring.
21
The bustling proprietor
of the Pension Calman,
Victor Vieux,
is standing at his little bar
quietly mixing himself a drink.
To his astonishment,
Dr. Roger Laurence Bell
suddenly walks in
from the street.
It is seven o'clock of a sultry Port-au-Prince evening.
"Dr. Bell!
Then Marie was not mistaken.
She did see you here earlier!"
"I could not stay.
I had to go right out again, Victor."
"So you are back.
And did you find your bocor in the mountains?"
"I found him."
"Good.
But your daughter was here
with Sam Norman.
They went to Legrun to look for you
and have not returned yet."
"My daughter? What are you saying, Victor?"
"That she was here with Sam Norman.
They learned you had gone
to visit Margal
and went after you."
"Oh my God," Dr. Bell whispers.
The two men face each other.
Victor searches the others countenance
for clues.
Dr. Bell seems stricken.
"Oh my God," Bell whispers again,
then turns abruptly and goes stumbling
up the stairs to his room,
where he flings himself on the bed.
He closes his eyes,
concentrates so fiercely on what he is doing
that his teeth draw blood
from his lip.
"Milly," Dr. Bell whispers, "listen to me.
For God's sake hear me.
You must not go to that place.
I am not there. I am in Port-au-Prince.
Come back, Milly.
Don't go to Legrun!
A devil dwells
in that ghastly place!"
But he is not getting through to her.
He will have to try again,
later tonight,
when conditions may be better.
He throws a few possessions
into a small suitcase
and hurries downstairs again,
where Victor Vieux still stands at the bar.
"Victor, I cannot stay.
I merely stopped by for some clothes.
I am to be the guest of a friend
for awhile."
"Here in the city?"
"Yes, Victor. Here in the city.
I called on him this afternoon
and was invited to stay at his home."
"Perhaps I know him."
"Later, Victor.
I haven't time now."
And Dr. Bell hurries to the door.
Victor calls after him.
"Dr. Bell! Can I drive you?
I am doing nothing just now."
"No, no, Victor.
I will walk."
Strange, Victor thinks
as his guest disappears
along the cobbled driveway.
Why wouldn't he tell me
where he is going?
22
Sam awoke with a feeling that something was wrong, then realized what it was and relaxed in bed with a distinct sensation of relief. He had gone to sleep with the lamp burning. The room was now dark. So with the wick turned low, a breath of air from the partly open window had blown the flame out. Or the lamp had run out of oil.
Wondering how his roommate was doing, he listened for the sound of her breathing. Strange. The sound was in the room all right, but not in that part of the room where her cot was.
He sat up, straining to see in the darkness. A pale shape stood near the door—Mildred in white pajamas, with her back to him.
She opened the door, walked out into the front room, and quietly closed the door after her. There was only a faint metallic click from the latch.
Oh no, Sam thought. Not again.
He had gone to bed in his underwear. Why carry pajamas on a wilderness journey such as this? For slippers, he was using the only footgear he had with him: the sneakers he had worn all day. They were on the floor beside his cot. Pulling them on, he reached the door in four long strides.
The front room was dark. Françoise had left no lamp burning there. But again, Mildred's white pajamas revealed her whereabouts. She was at the door that led out to the yard. As he watched her, she stepped out and closed that behind her, too.
Sam crossed the room and silently opened the door again. Stood there watching her go along the walk to the tall wooden gate. In the moonlight he could see her clearly, and she walked like one asleep or drugged. At the gate she halted. It was closed.
She spread its wings far enough for her to slip between them, then turned and swung them together again. Why was she so carefully closing everything behind her? To create a mystery when her absence was discovered? A ghostly figure in the moon glow, she turned to her right and went gliding down the road.
The river again, Sam thought, and somehow was not surprised.
But, damn it, he had no intention of following her down through the village at this hour, just to see what she would try to do at the river. Reaching the gate, he yanked it open and broke into a run. Caught up with her and grabbed her arm.
"Milly! Wake up!"
Her eyes opened and she stood there staring at him, shaking so violently he thought she must be having some kind of seizure. She struggled for breath. He was afraid he was hurting her, yet reluctant to let go for fear she might run away and lead him on a wild chase through the sleeping village.
Then her shuddering subsided and she began to cry.
"Come on," Sam said quietly. "Let's go back."
With an arm around her waist, he led her to the rectory, through the yard and the front room to the bedroom they were sharing. The room was really dark after the moonlight outside. Because his cot was nearer the door than hers, he led her to it and eased her onto it. "Sit still now while I light the lamp."
With the lamp burning and its wick turned up, he saw that her face was wet with tears and stiff with fright. Sitting beside her, he held her hand. "What happened? A dream?"
"Oh, God, Sam, I don't know," she whispered.
"Where were you going? The river?"
She nodded slowly.
"Why? Do you know why?"
"Someone told me to. Told me I had to."
"The same as before, hey? When you left me at the post office?"
"Yes."
"You didn't remember leaving me at the post office. Do you remember leaving this room?"
"Yes, I remember everything."
"Did you blow the lamp out?"
"Yes."
"How do you account for knowing what you did this time, when you didn't before?" he asked gently, trying not to frighten her.
"It—the voice in my head was stronger this time. I was trying—was thinking of Daddy when this ot
her presence interfered, telling me I had to go back to the river. Oh, Sam, I'm scared!" Sobbing, she turned and clung to him, pressing her face against his shoulder.
Sam sat there holding her, saying nothing, waiting for her to exorcise her own demons and regain control of herself. It took a good five minutes.
She said then, "What am I to do, Sam? If it happens again—"
"It isn't going to happen again. Not that way, anyhow. We were lucky. You must have made some sound that woke me up. This time I'm going to have an arm around you."
She looked at him.
"We won't get much sleep, two of us on a cot this narrow," Sam said, "but as far as I'm concerned, it's the only way. What do you say?"
She hesitated only briefly before nodding.
"You get next to the wall," he said. "Then you'll have to crawl over me to get out."
She got into bed, and he squirmed in beside her, drawing the blanket up over them both because the night air was decidedly cool. After some experimenting, they found a position of reasonable comfort, her head on Sam's right shoulder and his right arm around her.
What, Sam wondered, would Daddy say?
Mildred was the first to fall asleep. Sam lay there on his back, eyes open, his right hand gently pressing her against him. She had moved once more just before dozing off, crossing her right arm over his chest and gripping his left shoulder while she burrowed into him. Burrowing for what? he wondered. Protection, or something else? The adjustment had brought his right hand in contact with her breast and it was a nice thing to be holding, he decided. His thoughts traveled back to another night in Haiti when he had slept with a woman for the first time. Not of necessity, as now, but for a livelier reason.
After his violent invasion of Kay Gilbert's room at the Jacmel pension, there had been a truce between them, a wait-and-see-how-we-feel kind of thing, for weeks. The friendship had developed in other ways, but not that one. Then, one night, they had driven out to a tonnelle near Ganthier, in the Cul de Sac, to attend a service to Zaca.
Ganthier was a miserably poor village surrounded by sand and cactus, and the hounfor of Papa Lélio was one seldom visited by tourists. The tourists were taken to voodoo ceremonies in or near the capital where the rituals staged for their benefit were genuine enough in appearance but less so in substance. Like the difference between a Gaugin painting and a photograph of one.
That night at Lélio's, the god of country farmers had come in response to the houngan's summons. With the drums throbbing and a dance proceeding in his honor, Zaca walked about the tonnelle with great dignity, dressed in his usual blue denim pants and shirt, wearing the traditional tasseled bag over one shoulder and carrying a machete. Every so often, he dug a hole in the earthen floor and planted a seed or two. All very much down Sam's alley, this service with its agricultural symbolism, and he watched it with intense interest.
Because he found it fascinating, so did Kay, she being that kind of woman.
Then, damn it, a tour limousine from the capital had arrived and its driver had ushered half a dozen visitors into the tonnelle, and the service ended. A planting ceremony was out of the question for sightseers, Papa Lélio must have thought. They expected something more sensational. And since they were here with money and could not be rudely ordered to leave in any case …
Sam and Kay had departed. "Now what'll we do?" Sam grumbled on their way back to Port. "It's too late to go dancing anywhere. Damn. I wanted to see that ceremony, too. My workers in Jacmel have great respect for Zaca."
"Let's just go back to the Calman and talk, Sam."
"You mean it?" The notion that an attractive woman might want just to sit and talk with Sam Norman was not easy for him to accept.
"I mean it."
It was a little after eleven when they arrived at the pension. Normally on a night out together they would have rolled in well after midnight, had a nightcap at Victor's self-service bar, then gone up to their separate rooms. That night, Sam mixed the nightcaps and they sat in the big front room which Victor laughingly called his salon. In bamboo chairs a yard apart, they faced each other.
"Since I wasn't able to learn about Zaca," Kay said, sipping her rum and soda, "suppose you tell me something about you."
"Oh, come on!"
"No, I'm serious. We've been out together half a dozen times now. I even went to Jacmel with you. But I don't know very much about you, Sam. For starters, where were you born?"
"Florida. My dad taught agriculture there. Where were you born?"
"Boston. You don't have a southern accent."
"I went to college in Michigan and had to get rid of it in self-defense. You really mean Boston, or a suburb like Brookline or Newton?"
"A Back Bay apartment. Mother was a nurse, Father an intern at the hospital where she worked. They were ahead of their time, living together unmarried. When Mother got pregnant, he wanted an abortion and she didn't. Then he wanted her to marry him, but she wouldn't because he had asked for the abortion. He disappeared before I was born. She never saw him again, and I've never seen him at all." Kay shrugged. "It seems you got into agriculture because of your father and I went into nursing because of my mother. Not very exciting."
"Nothing to talk about," Sam agreed.
"Are your folks still alive?"
"Still in Florida. Dad's in the state department of agriculture now. And your mother?"
"Still nursing. Still in Boston."
Sam finished his drink and looked at her glass, which was also empty. "Another?"
"One more. Only one."
He stood up, frowning at the two glasses in his hands. "You know something, pal? While we've been sitting here discussing our uneventful pasts, we could have been getting that night in Jacmel out of our systems. When I come back with these, let's give it a whirl?"
"All right. I think I have something to tell you."
Sam pivoted to go to the bar, and then stopped. A car had rumbled into the driveway outside. "Oh-oh, the Grovers are back." Mr. and Mrs. Grover, from Akron, were a middle-aged, enthusiastic couple to whom Victor Vieux had introduced him. "They went to that tourist voodoo trap in Carrefour tonight and we'll have to hear all about it. Let's head for the loft!" He put the glasses on a nearby table.
Kay quickly stood up and made for the stairs. "I didn't want another drink, anyway," she said over her shoulder as Sam ascended behind her. "Which room?"
"Mine. I want to show you something."
They went into Sam's room and shut the door. There was only one chair, a wobbly reject from the outdoor dining area in the garden, painted pale green. "Show me what?" Kay said as, with a flourish, he led her to it.
"Huh?"
"You want to show me what?"
"Oh, this." He pulled open the top drawer of his bureau and took out a rolled-up sheet of drawing paper. Slipped off the two rubber bands that encircled it. Unrolled it. Handed it to her.
Kay found herself looking at a drawing done with felt-tipped pens of several colors. It depicted a jeep on a country road, the man at the wheel was embracing the woman beside him. The woman's shapely right leg projected from the vehicle and a peasant sandal dangled precariously from the toes of her right foot.
She laughed until tears flowed. Then she said, "But, hey, I didn't know you were such a talented guy, Sam Norman."
"Wish I were." Sam kicked off his shoes and parked himself on the bed, sitting back against the head board with his hands on his upthrust knees. "What do you have to tell me about Jacmel, pal?"
"We had a man from there at the hospital this week. A man of some standing in the town, I gather. His name was Georges Baptiste. Know him, do you?"
"Big fellow, about fifty?"
"He's a merchant. Nice fellow."
"I asked him if he knew you, and he said yes. He said you're doing a wonderful job out there. But"—she paused, frowning—"I'm not sure I should tell you this, Sam."
"But what?"
"He said you made a big mistake in antagonizing
that voodoo man. The one we ran from that night at the street dance."
"Fenelon," Sam said. "And we didn't run. I just didn't want any confrontation while you were with me."
"When I said I was a friend of yours, this Georges Baptiste told me to warn you. He was dead serious about it. He told me to make you realize you're in danger. Fenelon is one of the most powerful bocors in all Haiti, he said."
Sam looked at her in silence.
"So," she said, "if you didn't have a bottle in your room that night—and you've already said you didn't—the answer to what happened just might be something Fenelon did after seeing us at the bamboche and being reminded how much he hated you. All right?"
"If you believe people like Fenelon have powers."
"Don't you?"
"I'm not convinced."
"Sam," she said, "we've both been in this country a good while. We both came here stone cold to do a job of work, not full of far-out preconceptions. And we've both seen enough to convince us—to convince me, at any rate—that people like Fenelon can be dangerous."
"All right. I'll buy it if you insist."
"What will you do about him?"
"Ease up, I guess. If he's that powerful, my people out there aren't going to stop seeing him. To be truthful, they haven't. He still gets a lot of the money I'm helping them earn."
Silence. Then Kay unrolled the drawing again and restudied it, shaking her head over it with a slowly developing smile on her face. "Sam, this is wonderful. Really. Do me one?"
"That one is for you."
"Thank you. I'm going to have it framed for my room at the hospital." Letting the picture roll itself up again, she rose, put it on the bureau, then walked over to the bed and lay down so that her position approximated the one she had assumed in the jeep that day, her lips under Sam's and one leg outthrust. A little later, Sam reached out to switch off the lamp on the bedside table.
It was their first real sleep-together—you couldn't count that weird night in Jacmel—and they were still in bed at daybreak.
Now the woman in Sam's arms was the daughter of Dr. Roger Bell, and she appeared to be dreaming.
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