Lost Girls

by George D. Shuman

  “He’s here,” Carol whispered, rising to her feet.

  “Colonel Deaken?” she asked softly, putting out a hand.

  Deaken nodded, shook the hand, and walked to a seat in a corner facing the door. A fire exit behind him had a sign across it: SANS ISSUE.

  “Mrs. Moore?” He reached for Sherry’s hand.

  “Miss,” she said.

  “I know of Mrs. Bishop,” he said tiredly, “but you are?” His voice was friendly enough, but the question seemed abrupt.

  “I’m a spiritual friend of Mrs. Bishop’s.”

  “Spiritual,” he said, looking at her oddly. “Like a priest or a minister.”

  “Something more mystical, I would say.”

  “And you want to meet the wife of the murdered man found in Tiburon.”

  “We were hoping to convince the dead man’s widow to let us pay our respects to the body,” Sherry clarified. “As you know, this man might have seen Mrs. Bishop’s daughter before he was killed.”

  “Our people are mostly voudon, Mrs. Bishop. If the body is being cleansed by a priest, they may not let you near it.”

  “We can at least convey our regrets to the widow.”

  “Yes,” he said. “I told Interpol I would try.

  “I’m sorry, Miss Moore,” the colonel said hesitantly, “but you have a problem with your sight, yes?”

  “I do,” she said, cheerfully. “I am blind, Colonel.”

  Something told Sherry he already knew.

  The colonel clasped his hands together. “The village of Tiburon is to the extreme southwest. There is one road to it from Les Cayes that follows our southern coastline. It is susceptible to mudslides and washouts this time of year, but the government keeps it maintained for the most part. President Préval has made a pledge to the advancement of safe tourism in Haiti.” He hinted at sarcasm. “If we leave now we will reach Tiburon before midnight.”

  “Just let me use the ladies’ room and make a call,” Sherry said.

  23

  HAITI

  Aleksandra sat in the dirt, staring at the wooden door of her cell. She was alone now. All the other cells were empty.

  They would kill her soon. She knew what the man drilling holes was going to do. She had seen the demolition of bridges and caves in Afghanistan when she was still in the army. She knew too that Bedard was enjoying all this.

  The day she had arrived at the castle, Aleksandra had managed to disarm one of Bedard’s guards when they were pulling her from the truck. She’d gotten an arm around the man’s neck and shoved the barrel of his pistol under his chin, and was backing away from the others toward the fence when Bedard stepped past his men.

  The others were immobilized, rifles wavering, not knowing what to do.

  Bedard simply pulled his pistol and shot the guard who was shielding her. As the weight of the dead man’s body slipped from her grasp, the others raised rifles and Bedard walked up to her and took the gun from her hand.

  Aleksandra counted that moment as the biggest mistake of her life. She should have shot him. If she’d known then what she knew now, she would have emptied the clip in him and gladly sacrificed her life doing it.

  Bedard had her taken to the red room afterward, the first of many experiences in the chair in the months to come. The more she hid her pain, the more he seemed to enjoy torturing her. It became a contest of wills. A challenge of who was in control of the situation. He vowed to her then and there she would die a slow death. That he intended her to suffer the knowledge that he was master and he alone would choose the time and place she would die. She knew he enjoyed the idea of letting her think about the explosion.

  As a young woman she could not have imagined this fate. None of them could have. It was too much to believe that men could be so evil.

  She remembered the day Bedard shot the man in green pants and left him to die outside their door. Poor Jill Bishop had not known what was going on. Aleksandra was terrified that they were going to kill them both. But Bedard had read the note with her name on it—before he stuffed it in the dead man’s mouth—and took her to the red room and strapped her to the chair. And he raped her every orifice with an electric cattle prod until she passed out.

  She remembered the fiery sting of ammonia swabs stuck up her nose, her burning eyes. She remembered the unwelcome feeling of regaining consciousness, she knew that what awaited her above this plateau of semi-awareness was not good.

  Then something felt as if it had detached from the center of her being, and it came rising through her pain-racked body toward her head, collecting all the good in her before it took flight and this thing she imagined was her soul, the best of her memories and talents and deeds.

  Bedard shook her, laid his ear to her lips, thinking he might at last have gone too far. But the thing rising through Aleksandra was not her soul, it was her spirit, and with every ounce of remaining energy she lunged and sank her teeth into his neck, tearing flesh to get at his carotid artery.

  Bedard managed to pull himself away in time, but she took meat and plenty of it. The one-eyed man stumbled away from her. She could sense his alarm, hands to his throat as he went for the door. It was an hour before he returned, his neck completely wrapped in heavy gauze. He had brought vise grips with him and she remembered screaming as he shoved harsh ammonia swabs up her nose and then began to take out her teeth one by one. Bedard did not want her to pass out again. He would not let her miss a moment of the pain. After that, Aleksandra was no longer allowed to stand in Bedard’s presence. He made her crawl on all fours like a dog everywhere she went. He had given her to all the men in the compound. He told her he knew she wanted to die, but he was still master of her fate.

  She was weak. She could only eat bread soaked in water.

  But Aleksandra was still alive and Bedard was still wrong.

  She did not want to die. She wanted to kill him.

  It would have been so easy to let go. But every time she considered it she thought about Jill and the red-haired girl on the ship and all the other women who had endured this cellar. She knew there were bodies here too. She remembered the nights the trucks had come and gone. She had heard the women’s whimpers and soft voices from the air vent in her cell. She had heard them being brought into the cellar and she had heard their screams from the red room. But she also remembered the nights when the trucks came and there was nothing but silence. The men unloading at the door, carrying their burdens deep into the recesses of the old castle’s foundation. The next day the guards would come with bags of lime on hand trucks.

  Whatever had prompted the traffickers to abandon this place, she couldn’t know. Not for sure. But she had a feeling that young Jill Bishop’s kidnapping had much to do with it. The backlash of Bishop’s disappearance might have been more than the traffickers anticipated.

  It was a small consolation, she thought, the traffickers would only move to another location, but she wished at least that Jill might have known she was responsible for closing this horrible compound down.

  Aleksandra looked around the cell and thought about the explosives being placed throughout the cellar. She worried for her friend Jill, but at the same time was glad that she was gone. At least the young girl would live to see another day.

  24

  HAITI

  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 throu
gh 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.

  25

  HAITI

  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 Het
tie 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.