“Oh, yeah, I forgot. I was going into Port Morant to pick up a part for the car, but I can do that next week. Zeb said there was no rush.”
“Miss Mac say she want to start moving at seven o’clock on Saturday morning, the day after the closing, so I coming early for the key.”
Eric slid onto the barstool opposite Shad and put both hands flat on the counter. “Pour me a scotch, please, a Johnnie Walker Black.”
“I know you making joke,” Shad said without moving his finger off the page. “You don’t drink hard liquor since your birthday party last year.”
“And the next is right now.”
Eric admitted he wouldn’t be able to sleep tonight without a shot. “All I can think about is Friday the thirteenth,” he growled, “closing day on Miss Mac’s land. I can’t even wrap my head around it. It seems so final, sheesh, Miss Mac moving away . . .” The American screwed up his mouth like a purse string, trying not to get emotional, Shad could see. “I’m going to miss the old gal. She’s been the best neighbor a man could have. I hate to tear her house down—I have a lot of memories in it. Remember how I stayed with her for the year while we were building the hotel? She’d have a hot meal ready for me every night, whatever I told her that morning I wanted. And she was terrific with Simone when she got off the island, weak from dehydration. It was Miss Mac who brought her back to life before she left. She’s a saint, that woman, grumpy sometimes, but a saint.”
Shad served him the scotch and sat down on his stool. “The price of progress, boss, but I going to miss her, too. Me and her go way back to elementary school. She never wanted me to leave school, you know, and she beg Granny to keep me in school because I was bright, but I had to leave because Granny couldn’t do the embroidery work anymore, you know. I had to start fishing with Uncle Obediah to earn little something.” Shad put the book away in his library drawer, his chest heavy.
“And even when I came back from the penitentiary, Miss Mac never try to make me feel worthless, you know. She just kept telling me that I must finish up my learning. And when I need to sign all them papers you and Danny gave me to be a partner, it was she who made sure I could read all the hard words, told me how to pronounce them and look them up in the dictionary. You right, we going to miss her bad.”
“I just hope she’s happy in Port Antonio with Horace.”
“If anything, boss”—Shad smiled quietly—“she can come back and live with us in the hotel.”
While Eric nursed his scotch, Shad served Tri and Solomon at the other end of the bar, they, too, bemoaning the village’s loss of Meredith MacKenzie.
“Now that is a woman I always admire,” Tri said while Shad poured white rum into his glass. “She was strict, but she teach plenty children around here, and she manage her life by herself.”
Solomon agreed. “Bring up her son to be a lawyer all by herself.”
“Horace still going to run the campsite on the island?” Tri asked Shad. “Didn’t you tell us he was going to put up tents and rent them out?”
“Yes, he and his business partner starting work on it next month. They leasing the island from us.” It was the first time the bartender had used the word us in reference to the new hotel, and it sounded so good he was going to use it more often from now on.
While Shad was washing up at the sink and Eric was finishing his scotch, Beth walked, almost ran, into the bar, her face twisted with worry. She never came into the bar at night except for a party, wouldn’t come unless something bad had happened, and Shad held on to the edge of the sink, waiting for the news.
“Good night, Mistah Eric,” she said between pants. Her eyes skidded from the boss to her baby father.
“Evening, Beth.” Eric’s forehead lowered over his brows, and when she kept panting, he asked what the matter was.
“Is Eve.” She looked at her husband.
Shad’s hand went to his scalp. He’d forgotten everything about the child. “Oh, God,” he groaned.
“What about her?” Eric said, glancing at his bartender. “I thought you were going to bring her back after your lunch break. Didn’t you take her up—”
“She not at the Delgados’?” Shad asked.
Beth shook her head.
“Where is she?” Eric thundered, standing up.
Beth looked up at him. “We don’t exactly know, suh. She was—”
“What you mean?” Shad interrupted her. “Joella and her friends was supposed to walk her home before dark. Joella and Winston promise me they would look after her.”
“Where is she?” Eric demanded.
“They don’t know where she is.” Beth’s eyes implored forgiveness. “She was with them, and then they say she went with Jethro to see something. And when I get home from work, Joella tell me they hadn’t come back yet. So we walk up and down looking, but nobody see them.” Beth looked from Shad to Eric and back.
“The Jeep!” Eric called, yanking the keys from their nail on the wall.
“Solomon,” Shad yelled over the partition behind him. “You can manage the bar for me? We gone to look for Eve.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
* * *
Eric pressed the accelerator, then the brakes, careening down Lambert’s driveway, hoping Shad and Beth were hanging on in the open back of the Jeep. Beside him, Shannon was ramrod straight in the passenger seat, one hand gripping the door’s armrest.
“We’ll find her,” she said, her hope making him feel worse. “It’s a small village.”
He remembered telling her once that crimes could happen easily in Jamaica—the networks of mountain roads and drug gangs and depraved youngsters could prove unyielding to an outsider. Eric grasped the wheel tighter, knowing he was overreacting, that his fear was making him irrational. By the time he hit the bottom of the driveway, he was almost calm, but then the guilt came back, followed by anger at Shad for letting him down, followed by the knowledge that he was ultimately responsible. “I’m sorry that—”
“There’s nothing to worry about, I’m sure,” Shannon said quickly. “She’s good at taking care of herself. She’s had a lot of practice.” In the light under the dash, he could see Shannon’s fingers gripping the tops of her thighs.
“Honestly, I thought she was with you by now. I had to go to get my—”
“And I thought she was still with you—or Shad.” No judgment was in her voice, but he felt it. “Where are we going first?”
“Shad’s house—she could be back there already.”
Eric speeded down the empty main road and turned onto a side lane, roaring up to Shad’s house, where Joella and Winston were sitting under the verandah’s bare bulb. They jumped up when the Jeep stopped.
As Eric climbed out, Shannon flew to the gate. “Hi, I’m Eve’s mother. Has she come back yet?”
“No, not yet,” Joella said meekly.
“And they never said anything about where they were going?” Eric asked.
“No.”
“What Eve and Jethro say about what they was going to do?” Shad called from the back of the pickup, throwing out his hand, chastising her. “They must have tell you something.”
“They was talking over there”—Joella pointed to one side of the verandah—“then they come and tell us they going.”
“Pshaw, man,” Shad insisted and hit his knee, “you promise me you was going to walk her back to the Delgados’. Why you didn’t do it? I think I could trust you. Now, look what—”
“Jethro said they soon come back, suh,” Winston interjected. “He said he going to show her something and bring her back.”
“Lord, have mercy.” Shad sucked his teeth.
“Jethro have any friends?” Beth queried, leaning in front of Shad.
“He tight with Naar,” Winston replied.
Naar’s house was on Bartow Lane off the square, a house with two lights on either side of the verandah. When Eric blew the horn, a thin woman said that the teenager was inside watching TV. Bare-chested, the boy appeared
and said a good evening and, no, he didn’t know where Jethro was and hadn’t seen him all day. His hair was braided tightly on one side and fluffed out on the other, as if someone was in the middle of plaiting it.
“He must be home by now,” Naar added, and gave them directions.
The road to Jethro’s house was behind the village, the part off the grid. Thank God, Eric breathed, clicking on his high beams, there was a half-moon tonight, the road as remote as a country road could be. The Jeep’s lights stayed stubbornly low and askew, one beam showing the road right in front, the other the road up ahead, and he sucked his teeth as best an American could, irritated at himself for not fixing them. Dense foliage crowded in, hiding the thousand frogs and their belly honks. Naar’s vague directions led them past a few houses, most in darkness, all nothing but lumps in the night’s gloom. The road ended when the mountain rose like a black wall in front of them.
“Shit,” Eric groaned. He started turning the Jeep around in the narrow space.
“It’s got to be one of those houses we passed,” Shannon said, putting one hand on his bare arm. It was a touch he remembered, the long fingers soft and cool.
“Let we go back and ask,” Shad called. He sounded nervous, perhaps because of the darkness behind.
A few reverses and hard turns later, Eric headed up the road, slower this time, until they arrived at a house that loomed to their right behind a low hedge. Yellow light from a lantern lit an interior room, the two front windows glowing like a Halloween pumpkin. As soon as they stopped, Shad leaped out of the back and knocked on the front door. They heard his polite inquiry when a man opened the door, a lamp glowing on a table behind him. The man pointed farther up the lane.
After Shad had jumped back into the Jeep, he leaned over Eric’s shoulder. “That was Brother Michael’s house. I didn’t even know he live out here. He say that Jethro and his mother live a few chains down the road, a house with a wooden fence.”
Shannon’s hands now rested limply in her lap, as if she was forcing herself to relax. “Please, please, let her be there,” she whispered. Resisting the urge to say something soothing, Eric changed into first gear and started forward, stopping at a dark cottage behind a wood fence. He kept the motor running as Shad clambered out of the Jeep.
“Don’t step on no frogs,” Beth called.
Shad knocked twice on the front door before someone opened a window and beamed a flashlight straight at him.
“Ay, man,” Shad called, holding up an arm against the light.
“Who there?” a woman’s growly voice said.
To Shad’s answer, the woman coughed and spat through the window, shining the flashlight down to look at the spit. “Yes, is Jethro house,” she snapped. “What you want?”
When Shad replied, the woman left the window, the light from the flashlight moving around the little house, bouncing off furniture and a framed picture of Jesus. After a few minutes, an hour to Eric, the front door creaked open. They could see the woman’s head above the flashlight shaking in answer to another question from Shad, then some muffled words before she closed the door. Shad returned to Eric’s side of the Jeep and slapped the door.
“That was Jethro grandma. She said he don’t come home all day.”
“Any idea where he is?” Eric asked.
“She don’t know.” Shad climbed into the back. “She say he stay out late sometimes.”
“Oh, God.” The soft cry from Shannon made Eric catch his breath. She buried her face in her hands and leaned toward him, releasing her fear in sobs. He put his arm around her and pulled her toward him, feeling the weight she’d been carrying—the years of bringing up Eve alone. It was as if the nights she’d stayed awake with a crying baby, the days she’d struggled with diaper bags and tantrums, the parent-teacher meetings she’d attended alone, had suddenly become real to him.
“Why is she doing this?” She was sniffling, her voice muffled by his shirt. “Where did I go wrong?”
“You haven’t done anything wrong.”
“It hasn’t been easy,” she said between sobs, turning her head so he could hear her, “but I thought I was managing. But, dammit, things have gone so wrong. She hardly talks to me, she hates my guts, I know it. Now she’s started stealing, a shopkeeper is calling me, and I’m going down to get her.” She turned her head into his shirt and let out a wail. “I’m a terrible mother!”
He waited for her to let it out, the noise of the Jeep’s motor encircling them. When he lifted her chin, her tears dampened his hand. “Don’t ever let me hear you say that again, you hear me? You’re a great mother.”
She sniffed. “But look what she’s—”
“We’ll find her, don’t worry.” He stroked her soft hair. She looked as fragile as on that first night he’d seen her lying on the lounge chair staring up at the stars. He kissed her wet cheek. “And she’ll be safe.”
Shannon sat up straight, wiping her nose with the back of her hand. “You’re right.”
He started back to the village square. “We’re going to the police. There’s nothing more we can do at this point.” He turned and yelled to Shad. “I’m going to Port Antonio, to the station. You coming or you want me to drop you off?”
“We coming with you, man. My cousin is a police, remember?”
Eric swung onto a shortcut, an unpaved road that angled west toward the main road and Port Antonio, all the worse for the years since he’d taken it. Thick bushes crowded in on both sides, and he’d just slowed down for another pothole, cursing the National Works Agency under his breath for neglecting Largo’s roads, when Shannon touched his arm.
“What’s that?”
“What, that noise?” He braked to a stop. The thumping of drums, accompanied by discordant chanting, was coming from somewhere.
“Let’s go and talk to them,” Shannon urged. “Maybe they know something.”
“She wouldn’t be there.”
“Let’s do it, anyway.”
Eric turned off the engine. “Hey, man,” he said to Shad, “you hear that?”
“You mean the Rastas singing?”
“Is that what it is?”
“They singing a sankey, one of them religious songs.”
“Shannon wants to check it out.”
“I better come with you. Next thing I have to come find you.” All four climbed out of the Jeep.
“Where’s it coming from?” Shannon asked. Shad pointed to a narrow lane and started toward it holding Beth’s hand. Straining to see the stones and holes, Eric followed behind, Shannon at his side. They’d only gone a few steps when she stumbled.
“You okay?”
“Thanks,” she said, grabbing his outstretched hand. It had been a long time.
When they turned into the lane, they could see a dim light a couple hundred yards ahead. The chanting and drumming got louder, and Eric’s heart started thumping. Breaking into a private religious ceremony was not a good idea. He’d often heard Rasta drumming at night, sometimes saw the head-wrapped Pocomania women walking to their meetings, but he’d never visited a ceremony of either religion, afraid he’d trigger accusations of disrespect or worse. Holding tight to Shannon’s hand, he told himself not to be a coward. He had just as much right to be here as anyone else—but he’d let Shad do the talking. In local situations like this, it was always best to let him handle it.
The light was coming from a kerosene lantern hanging in an open hut beside the road. Sitting in a circle beating drums of all colors and sizes were about eight men, all Rastafarians, it looked like, their locks tucked into a variety of headgear. They were chanting in a slow, sad chorus:
We are worshipping our precious Jah,
Worshipping our precious Jah,
Worshipping our precious Jah,
Till the break of day.
The four newcomers stood in the glare of the lamplight—a familiar man acknowledging them with his eyes—and waited until the last drumbeat sounded.
“You want some
thing?” the man asked, and Eric felt the eyes of the musicians appraising them.
“Greetings, Ras Walker.” Shad dipped his head to the shoemaker. “We was wondering if you—”
“Eve!” shrieked Shannon, tightening her grip on Eric’s hand.
Eric’s eyes raced around the drummers, settling on a slim figure seated between two teenaged boys. Their daughter looked up with startled eyes under her black cap. A smile broke over her face, her hands still resting on top of a drum.
CHAPTER TWELVE
* * *
Shannon settled into the backseat of Carlton’s taxi and rolled down her shirtsleeves. Rastafarian women should cover their head and arms, the craft-market vendor had explained, and the photojournalist had made a note to wear long sleeves on future excursions.
Calm as her actions were, Shannon felt frazzled. She hadn’t slept well. A stew of emotions and thoughts had kept her tossing all night, adding to her heaviness this morning. Eve, on the other hand, seemed to have had no problem and was still fast asleep when Shannon woke her at ten o’clock.
“What?” she’d groaned, turning away from her mother. “I’m sleeping.”
“We’re going down to your father’s. We have to talk, the three of us.” Her daughter hadn’t answered, hadn’t moved. “Get up now. I mean it.”
When they arrived at the bar, Eve was still yawning and Shad reported that Eric was on the cliff planting a young coconut tree. Annoyed (she’d called him only an hour before and they’d agreed to talk to Eve together), Shannon had reminded herself that he’d been sweet to her the night before.
There’d only been time for the obvious questions after Eve had been found. She’d climbed into the Jeep and sat on the brake between them, the knitted cap still on her head.
“Why didn’t you let anyone know where you were going?” Shannon had said through almost-gritted teeth, trying to stay in control for Eric’s sake.
Eve had been talkative for a change. “Jethro was showing me his drum, and then he started teaching me, and then he invited me to come to a drumming class, and—”
The Rhythm of the August Rain Page 9
