“I knew it—obeah!” Danny exclaimed. “Jesus—”
“Let me tell you something, Mistah Savior,” Gecko said, pointing the vicious finger at Danny again. “You not going to mess up our plans, you hear me? I going to make sure Janet get her visa even if I have to pay plenty money for it. We still having our business in America, and I going to be in charge.” She spat on the tiles. “So all of you have to dead because I don’t take no prisoners. Just shoot him, Man-Up!”
The skinny man put his hand up. “I tell you, I don’t want no killing in my house.”
“You too damn coward,” Gecko retorted. “If I woulda know you was so coward—just shoot him, Man-Up!”
“Shoot if you think you bad,” Lambert roared, twisting the gun deeper between the woman’s braids.
“Don’t shoot,” Batsman called, glancing from his prisoners to Gecko. “You could dead, Franchette, or he could miss and kill Janet.”
“Leave him, Bertie,” Lambert’s prisoner yelled.
“The boss say I must shoot,” Man-Up answered, cocking the gun. He took aim, the pink tip of his tongue sliding out of his mouth. Suddenly, a screeching wail sliced through the room.
“What that?” Gecko screamed. The bloodcurdling alarm rotated its shrill invasion, only a few feet away, it sounded like.
Man-Up covered one ear. “What the blood claat—”
Everything happened quick-quick after that, Shad told Beth later, just like you were taking one-one photographs. Sarah darted behind Man-Up and kicked him hard behind one knee, sending him crumpling to the floor. Her arms had shot up high like a football player who’d scored a goal, showing a flash of white breast, before she ran behind Lambert. She snatched off Janet’s wig and delivered a blow to her jaw that sent the seamstress flying out the door. At that, Shad and Danny leaped up together, their wrists still bound. Danny kicked Batsman in the groin and Shad kicked him on his arm, knocking the gun out of his hand and sending the youth to the floor. And just as the skinny man reached for the gun, Danny grabbed him with his free hand and Shad picked up the gun with his free hand. And it wasn’t over yet, because Man-Up rolled over and fired toward the four men in their tight huddle, and Franchette and the thin man screamed at the same time, the sounds of gun and pain exploding over the siren.
Blood sprouted from the man’s shirtsleeve, and he held his arm. “Bumba, you shoot me!” he yelled at nobody and everybody.
Shad jammed the gun against Batsman’s scalp, the scalp that had been almost clean shaven in Roper’s kitchen when he’d appeared with the two women and the baby.
“Man-Up, take your pick,” Shad shouted. “You can shoot again and kill either Lizard’s woman or his little brother, maybe both. And you know Lizard coming for you then, and it going to be a long, slow death. Which one you want to dead first, girlfriend or brother?”
CHAPTER FIFTY
* * *
Securing her easel with one hand, Sarah swooped a line of acrylic up the large page Roper had given her. She held her breath with the boldness, the bigness of it. After several more stripes, she dabbed her brush in the dark green paint on the palette and started feathering in the narrow leaves springing from the stalks. Her subject was the bamboo grove encircling her patio. Once unsightly to her, she now welcomed the privacy it afforded from passing cars and the curiosity of strangers and journalists who wanted to see the Englishwoman who was kidnapped.
She missed her sea grape tree. She thought of it often, saw its flat, red-veined leaves outside her cell window, wondered who would look at it now. Who would learn what it taught about perseverance and survival, about living behind a wall of jagged glass? Maybe a dog, she decided, a dog grateful for its shade.
The fluttering in her chest hadn’t stopped yet, although she could feel it starting to slow with her painting. Her hand holding the brush was only shaking a little. It felt good to paint again, her way, she knew now, to soothe the anxiety that had plagued her for two decades. Since her release the day before, there’d been no rest. Even the bedside lamp that stayed on all night hadn’t helped her to sleep. When she did doze toward morning, she’d dreamed of being buried alive in a coffin lined with a pink sheet, and she’d awakened suddenly and moaned into her pillow.
There was no escaping the reminders. Every minute of her ordeal was replayed either in her head or in her reluctant words. Earlier that morning, Sonja had come to tell her that a Sergeant Neville Myers was there to see her. The man was waiting for her with a young corporal who’d lugged all her baggage into the living room. Squeezed into his uniform and squeaky shoes, the sergeant had spent an hour asking her questions, the corporal taking notes, and she’d tried to be patient. She’d shown him her sketches of the room where she’d been held captive, but he didn’t seem interested. He seemed to have other things in mind.
“And you say you didn’t know these men before they took you in the car?” he’d asked her twice.
“I’m totally sure,” she’d snapped the second time.
When the sergeant got to his feet, Sarah had jumped up. “Why didn’t you come looking for me? In England—”
“No one reported you missing,” Myers had said, and shrugged, as arrogant as any London copper. As soon as they left, she’d returned to her room and set up to paint as far from the ringing phone as possible. There was nothing she could do about the swirling thoughts but try to paint them away.
“Visitors?” a hesitant voice said behind her. It was Danny at the open door to her bedroom. He was barefooted, his face and arms sweaty.
“Of course.”
He walked across the patio’s flagstones and kissed her upturned cheek. “If you want to paint—”
“No, it’s fine, honestly,” she said, swirling her paintbrush in the jar of water. “Did you walk down?”
“Ran on the beach, needed it.” He sank into a lounge chair and pulled up his shorts.
“Hey, you’re working on the whole page!” he exclaimed softly. She nodded, unable to say that she’d lived every minute in her cell with terror and rage and longing, enough to fill many large sheets now that she was free.
“Sonja tells me the phone is ringing off the hook,” he said. He was trying to sound cheerful, she could tell. “Every newspaper and TV station in the Caribbean and England want to talk to you.”
She shrugged. “I’m not taking any calls, although I had to talk to a man from the British High Commission, from Intelligence or something.”
“You’re a celebrity now. You thought about that? It’ll probably make your paintings more valuable, particularly if you paint a Jamaican series, like you been saying.”
“That’s what Penny said.”
“You spoke to her?”
“And my mother, last night.” She dipped the brush in a blob of lime-yellow and stroked on a few highlights. “They want me to come home right away.”
“Are you leaving?”
“Roper said I could leave or stay as long as I wanted, but I’ll probably go next week. He’s got his painting, the one I—the one of sea grape leaves. The police brought it with my things.”
“Aren’t you going to keep it?”
“Oh, God, no.” She shuddered. “I don’t need any reminders, and it was part of the deal. I think what he really likes is the painting of Man-Up on the back, even though it’s unfinished. He calls it a two-fer.”
“How are you feeling, by the way?”
She pushed at her hair with one hand, the hair she’d decided to keep red. “Not quite the old self yet, but I’ll get there.”
Danny stroked his scalp as he looked down. “Listen, I have to—I want to—I’m sorry I got you mixed up in this.”
“It’s I who should be thanking you. I mean, you bloody well rescued me.”
“But if it hadn’t been for me and my—my—the whole Janet thing, you wouldn’t have gone through this. I didn’t have
a clue what she was up to, honest, but I still feel responsible.”
She squeezed more acrylic onto the palette. “Apology accepted, I suppose.”
“You may not believe me,” he said, leaning forward over clasped hands, his smoky eyes with their yellow circles pleading. “I was really really worried about you. That’s why I came back. I had a hundred things doing in the States, but I couldn’t—like I couldn’t concentrate. I kept thinking about you, wondering why you left—just like that—and where you went to.” He reached out to touch her arm and she drew away, the gesture making him pause.
“I thought—I knew you were mad at me,” he said at last.
“I was.”
“When the housekeeper told me you’d left, I was stunned.”
She lay down her brush. “Stunned? How do you think it felt being kidnapped for no reason, not knowing what you’d done wrong? And I still can’t believe that someone can disappear and nobody look for her. Thank God, Shad kept looking. If it hadn’t been for him—I called him last night to thank him.”
“I was in touch with him—but if I’d thought—”
Heat rose from the base of her spine, steaming into her chest, until she had to stand up to give it space. “Thought what, Danny? That somebody could snatch me right under everybody’s eyes and nobody notice? That you and everybody else could go on with your lives as if nothing had happened? Nobody even reported me missing, did you know that?” She tried to hold her voice down, tried and failed.
“I told Shad—he went to the police—”
“I’ve been locked up in a room, men with guns to my head, my life threatened almost every day.”
She put her hands on her hips and gave herself permission to speak as loudly as she had to. “I waited and waited for somebody, anybody, for Christ’s sake, to come and get me. All I could think was that nobody cared if I lived or died. I thought you’d all forgotten about me. Then I started to imagine all kinds of things, that you’d had me kidnapped—”
“Me?”
“I thought you wanted me out of the way, or those two men you were with when I first met you, maybe, had kidnapped me for—I don’t know—money or something.”
Danny shook his head. “Alphonsus is an Anglican minister, and his brother has a grocery store. Why would you—?”
“Dammit, Danny!” she shouted. “What do you expect? My mind was all over the place. I was in prison, for God’s sake. You have no idea what I’ve been through. I was terrified the whole time. All I had were my thoughts, my suspicions to keep me company. I even thought Roper had me kidnapped because he didn’t want to buy my ticket home.”
“Oh, God, I’m so glad we found you.”
“I could have died and no one—”
“If I’d had any idea—but I swear to you, I thought you’d just—left, you know, because you were angry with me. You had every reason to leave. I’d told you I’d broken off with Janet—then I got back with her. I couldn’t blame you for being angry. I called Penny—”
“Much good it did me.”
“—and she said you hadn’t come back, and that’s when I started to get worried. Then Shad found your passport.” He pulled the dark blue booklet out of his shorts pocket and handed it to her. “He ask me to give it back to you, by the way—and we knew you were still here. That’s why I came back to Largo. I’m just glad we got to you in time.”
She answered by staring at the bamboo, unmoving, and he walked to the edge of the patio and turned around, his forehead knotted.
“Sarah, I want you to tell me the truth.” The great arms were helpless at his sides. “Were you raped?”
Sonja had asked the same question. The writer’s perky voice had lowered when she placed a bowl of soup in front of Sarah the night before. She’d put one hand on her trembling back and leaned over her shoulder.
“Did anyone—you know—hurt you, Sarah?” she’d asked. “Maybe we should report it.” No one, not her mother, not her father, had ever asked her that before.
The question had come after Roper had apologized for—everything, he said before rushing out of the kitchen. Sonja had sunk into the chair beside her, miserable, explaining that they hadn’t called the police because they were sure she was furious with them, especially with Roper (he can be so damn controlling, the writer had said with tears rolling down her cheeks). They were too embarrassed to try to call her in London, she said. They’d thought she’d call when she was ready. A kidnapping was the last thing on their minds. Everything had been cleaned out of her room, after all, and she’d had reason enough to leave. She’d begged Sarah’s forgiveness and Sarah had said she forgave her, although she hadn’t, part of her still behind the blue wall.
Danny leaned over in front of her, the dove-gray eyes not allowing her to escape the question again. “Talk to me, Sarah. Did he rape you?”
It was her turn to walk away until the bamboo stopped her. She reached out and grabbed two slender stems. The leaves felt stickier and sharper than she’d expected, not rounded and comforting like sea grape leaves.
“No, he didn’t,” she said without turning her head. “He tried, but I wouldn’t let him—I got this enormous—wave of strength, and I—I couldn’t let him do it.” The rage was subsiding, allowing her to breathe even though her voice was shaking. “Got a bit dodgy before you lot came in, but I was fighting and kicking like hell. I told myself that if there was ever a time to die, it was now. If there was ever something I would die for, it was—to protect myself. Nobody would get away with it ever again, not this time. No man would—”
“What do you mean not this time?”
She shook her head wordlessly, the anesthesia of twenty years putting the words to sleep. Danny came up behind her and slipped his arms around her waist. He kissed her long neck gently, like he was blessing her.
“Take all day, all week, all month if you have to, years if you need to, but we’re going to talk about it.”
She turned and buried her face in his still-damp T-shirt, smelling his odor, seeing herself as an egg nestling into his earth. It was her series of paintings come alive, never to be painted but to be lived. And inside of her, she felt a cracking and opening, and sensed the hollowness filling up with a river of tears, heard the sobs of a hysterical teenager, and knew it was finally her turn to make a fuss.
CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE
* * *
The music was sweet, flowing right into Shad’s and Beth’s swaying bodies. She was wearing the orange dress he loved, the one with the neckline he had to snuggle in close to enjoy. All around them, the dance floor—the restaurant reborn—was packed with dancers, even Horace MacKenzie with his date, a buxom woman nobody knew. They were all moving to Ford’s trumpet as he wound through “My Mother’s Eyes,” one of the classics he’d said when he introduced it. Around the bar the fairy lights blinked on and off, almost in time to the music.
“Your cousin Junior playing nice on the guitar,” Beth murmured as she rocked in his arms.
“I promised to run the bar for his next dance party.”
“We should have more dancing here, man.”
Shad looked down at the tops of her breasts glowing orange inside the dress. He drew her closer, glad she was his woman, glad he wouldn’t have to kill Horace or even curse him out. “The boss can’t afford no live music. We lucky tonight.”
“We lucky you alive, you mean.”
“Pshaw, man, I not going nowhere.”
“I should fling away that detective book. It only causing you to get into all this cass-cass confusion. Every few months is another excitement, somebody trying to shoot you or something.” She pulled back and looked at him hard. “You know what would happen to me and the children if you dead?”
“Not a thing, now you making big money at the library.”
“I serious!”
“Just keep going to church and pray
ing for me. You always say prayers is powerful.”
She nestled close and sucked her teeth right in his ear. “Powerful enough to make you get married, you mean.”
She looked at him again, chin down, her no-joke look. “If July come and go and we not married, is trouble, you hear me, Shadrack Myers?”
At the back of the restaurant, the end of the song was approaching with a long final note from Ford’s trumpet. When he finished, the dancers on the floor clapped and hooted.
“Beautiful!” Danny called. Beside him in her aqua dress, Sarah continued clapping after everyone stopped.
“Thanks, folks,” Ford said into the mike, nodding in Sarah’s direction. “We’re going to take a little break now and we’ll be back in ten.”
Shad walked behind the bar to check on Tiger, one of the wayward village men he’d set straight who now did bartending for big parties. Solomon was slouched on Shad’s stool grinning from ear to ear, like he was serving himself as much as he was serving the customers. At the end of the counter, Maisie was selling beef patties and plantain tarts, the cash in a jumble in front of her.
“You need help, Miss Maisie?” Beth called, and the woman beckoned her over.
The bar counter was filling up with thirsty dancers and Tiger raced to fill orders. Rising reluctantly from his stool, Solomon took an order for three beers from a group of young women still swaying to the music. Shad placed the Red Stripes on the counter and Tiger collected the cash.
Making their way through the crowd, Danny and Sarah joined Eric, Lambert, and Jennifer, who were sipping wine at one end of the bar.
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