There is a Land (A Libète Limyè Mystery) Page 12

  — Done in by his drink? she says.

  — It looks that way, says the unknown one. Prosper remains quiet.

  Libète crosses her arms, holds herself, begins to cry. She knew him but a few days, and yet!

  — Cover him then, Magdala says, turning away and shaking her head. Prosper lays the old man’s straw hat over his face. She wraps Libète in her arm while her own tears fall. The stupid old fool, she spits under her breath. There will have to be a funeral, Magdala says, this time so all can hear. It will be modest, but we will not let him go without. I’ll take care of the preparations.

  — Who’ll pay for that? says the unknown man. Not the funeral society! That’s for members only.

  Magdala glares at the young man, who shrinks back. If you had a few more years, you might actually know what you’re talking about! You’d know that when he was here, Mesye Dorsinus gave freely whenever others passed away. And generously.

  Junior mimes again, this time summoning an invisible string about his neck.

  — Ah! Jeune says, patting his son’s arm. Of course! What about the old man’s fabled gold, huh? We tolerated his boasting for years. The pouch! He reaches for the collar of Dorsinus’ shirt and begins feeling underneath it. Where is it?

  — Don’t disrespect the dead! Magdala snaps. Her eyes burn with new fire, and she swats Jeune hard: he is the one who would see her son hang, who desecrates her old friend’s body.

  — Even in death the fool robs us, Jeune mutters while holding Magdala at bay. Check his pockets, he orders. Prosper swallows, his eyes bouncing between Magdala and Jeune. He does as Jeune says.

  — Don’t disrespect the–

  — Ay! A mabouya! Jeune shouts. There, at your feet!

  Libète looks down and lets out a yelp. All leap back, her included. What is that thing? she cries.

  Slinking from beneath the corpse was a lizard striped in yellow and black over its brown scales. It moved tentatively, like it too was intoxicated by night and was now forced to confront the astringent day.

  — That’s a bad sign, Prosper says. A bad, bad sign! Jeune grabs Dorsinus’s hat.

  — Hey, leave that there! Libète shouts.

  Jeune glowers and grabs the lizard with the hat held in his hand. The creature thrashes in his grip, but he takes it and rushes down the hill without another word.

  The mime, with sunken, scared eyes, points a trembling finger at the girl. All of them turned to look at Libète, and she shrinks under the weight of their stares. She doesn’t understand.

  She stormed off.

  She had almost blurted “Fools, all of you!” but managed to keep the lid on the jar. This is what I get. I open up, I suffer.

  Libète detected Magdala following her at a distance, but she refused to look over her shoulder. At least I won’t be trapped in this forsaken place much longer. The thought was little consolation as she trudged on alone.

  Libète reached Magdala’s home first. She busied herself in the yard feeding the chickens, and Magdala walked past Libète. I must prepare for the service, the woman said sideways, not able to look at the girl. Magdala set to preparing a fire, laying out charcoal beneath her old iron pot.

  Libète wanted to cry. What just happened there?

  Silence.

  — Madanm Magdala, please. Tell me.

  — It’s nothing. Nothing. She said the word a third time. She opened her mouth again, but closed it. Magdala reached for a bundle of dry grasses and laid them alongside the charcoal, lit a match, and let the tinder catch and crinkle and blacken.

  — The men believe it is a baka.

  — A baka?

  — A baka.

  — Well, what the hell is that?

  Magdala looked over her shoulder before speaking in a low voice. It’s a dark creature. Used by someone to enrich herself. At the expense of another. In the night, the creature sucks wealth away, stealing it for the owner. Jeune went to kill the lizard properly. To cast it into the dark for good.

  Libète rubbed her tired eyes. How?

  — Cut it. Send it down a latrine, probably. Magdala stared at her and after a beat, spoke. Was that your baka?

  — You really think . . . you think that I . . .

  — Is it yours?

  — No. No!

  — Well, we’ll know soon enough. Once it’s dead, the owner will die too.

  — It was a mabouya, Madanm Magdala, a lizard. I don’t know anything about such business.

  — You swear?

  — How can you even ask me this?

  — How can I not? I’ve known you two days, Sophia. You show up with Dorsinus. You don’t say a word about who you are, where you’re from, where you’re going. Like some, some vagabond. A criminal! And then speaking up in that meeting, like you know what’s best for Foche! I heard tell! And now Dorsinus ends up dead, his gold stolen . . .

  Libète stretched out her arms. Search me! Tears fell down her cheeks. Search me, then! I’ve nothing to hide!

  — Then tell me who you are.

  — I can’t! I can’t! Please, I beg you, don’t ask me that.

  — My life is hard here. I’ve all but lost my only son. All of Foche blames me for what Félix has done. And now my ‘niece’ has caused Dorsinus’s death by witchcraft! I tell you, word has already spread through Foche. Everyone–everyone–is wondering whether that creature was yours.

  — Then let them think it.

  — You are making things difficult for me. Imposib.

  Libète went inside to collect her few things. She was still covered in blood from the delivery but had only dirty items to change into. She came back outside. I’ll head right back down the mountain, then.

  Magdala watched the girl limp off, alone and bedraggled.

  The woman’s heart cracked.

  It ached.

  For she had searched Libète. She had seen her fullness, her depth, in unguarded moments of both peace and crisis. She knew that the girl couldn’t be behind such a dark thing, but the doubt remained. Magdala placed water above the flames. But could she bear to take on the added disfavor from keeping Sophia? After Félix and his stubborn, thieving ways had already taxed her so much?

  — Don’t go, Sophia, she called. Please don’t!

  But Libète trudged on. The girl knew the absolute importance of velocity in such departures–direction and force–but in truth, in the moment, she knew not where to go.

  There is no sense of time in the dark.

  Cast into a perpetual twilight in the old cinema in Bwa Nèf, she tries to lie across three chairs pushed together. Deep sleep proves impossible.

  Numbness is what she longs for now. The state her ncle existed in for so many years. Floating through the brutal world in a fog. She had snuck beer and kleren before, just tastes, and now longed for the temporary forgetfulness she had not experienced but knew they could bring.

  Though hunger grips her, she cannot bring herself to eat. Lolo’s food sits before her, just beside her book bag. She feels she doesn’t deserve it. Not a bite. Is this denial out of penance? Or maybe solidarity with the dead, those who hunger no more? She does not know, for she feels she does not know herself anymore.

  There are so many questions she wished Lolo had answered. Where specifically had he been? After the reunion with Jak and Stephanie, where would they all hide? And of course, lurking under it all was the most important question: how did he have insight into Benoit’s plotting?

  Her mind is so exhausted it cannot do the labor necessary to piece the different fragments together.

  The answers matter little to her now, anyway.

  Didi is a soul-hollowed husk. Her life and her kindness, vanished.

  Since the death of Libète’s mother–a memory distant in both time and place–Libète had not felt a hurt like this, that so grasps her insides and registers a dull pain that lingers behind her breastbone. Her tears flow. And they flow. And they flow.

  Motes of light showed around the edges of the door.
Libète rubbed her eyes, wanting to claw them out to get at the tiredness that seemed to linger just behind. She got up and floated about the room. The light was meager enough that her eyes could adjust to the dark, and she could see hollow shapes, lines, support pillars, and chairs lying around the room. Her mind nearly untethered from her action. There was a hint of madness to her thoughts, and she tugged and stroked her braids as she made the rounds.

  She rubbed her eyes, harder now. There was a curious new source of golden light that rose from the center of the floor and poked through the bars her fingers made.

  Before her was a new creature made of leaves and bark and branch.

  Libète recoiled with such a start that she tumbled backward, falling to the ground. This trick of her mind, this Visitor, lurched toward Libète with the grace of a palm blowing in the wind. Libète saw it had arms and legs affixed to a solid oaken body, with articulated fingers made from twigs, and roots for toes. The light bathing the room bloomed from a hole in the Visitor’s chest like a knot in a tree, and the Visitor reached out its hand toward Libète. Everything the light touched turned to flora, and within moments the room resembled a dense rainforest.

  Eyes fixed in terror on the Visitor, Libète could see the creature had a shorter body, round, with bold braids made of plaited vines atop her head. It was a startling likeness–she resembled Didi.

  Didi. Libète swiped at the air in front of her, an attempt to ward off the approaching Visitor, and she repeated the gesture time and again. Suddenly, holes within the concrete floor formed. The Visitor’s face contorted in fearful surprise. Thorned tendrils shot through the crumbling ground and snapped around the Visitor’s limbs, bringing her to her hands and knees. Libète tried to back farther away, into the new brush that had claimed the room, but the distance she imposed between them only seemed to give the vines more strength as they wrapped around the Visitor’s limbs and crept farther, moving toward the light in the Visitor’s chest. When they reached it, they extinguished whatever lay within. The Visitor became immobilized, her ruddied bark frozen in pain even as the tips of her branches reached out to prick Libète’s skin, as if to offer a caressing, understanding touch.

  Libète screamed.

  She was off the ground, rushing to the metal door. Pounding, shouting, Ed m! until her voice settled into quiet sobs. Help me, help me, help me . . .

  She turned around and the light was gone, the new vegetation vanished as quickly as it had spread. She breathed heavily. The emptiness had returned. She noticed the edges of the door let in faint light.

  She screamed and pounded again with a series of futile slaps. At the instant her last slap landed, the door gave a furious shake. She stepped back, marveling at the power in her hands before another pull came, and another. The door was straining against the lock, and Libète wondered if she should hide. Had the police found her? Were they ripping the door off its hinges so they could take her and cast her into more darkness?

  She heard muffled voices, and cursing. The door lurched again and she saw there was a hook fixed near one of its hinges. The nearby cement turned to dust that danced in the widening band of light.

  And then it happened. With a furious crash, the door shot outward and down but was held hovering at an odd angle by the still-intact lock and chain.

  And there, among it all, were Stephanie and Jak, each poking their faces into the open doorway that out led to Impasse Chavannes, Bwa Nèf, and the unknown.

  She had walked until she knew she was safely out of Magdala’s view–and Foche’s. She pushed down thoughts of what would come next like plugging holes in a sinking ship–pills nearly gone, new accusations of theft and murder, not a friend in the world, no store of food. The ship already seemed to be taking on water too fast to save it. If she could get away, she’d have to again rely on strangers’ hospitality. But would any in this place, on this mountain, on other mountains, give her anything? And if she went elsewhere, might she ever be found again by the friends who she hoped sought her?

  She had stowed her few possessions in the crevice before climbing up the sloped rock face to take her current place on a boulder. She slipped her hand in warily at first, and then sneered. A hand caught in here, Jeune had said. Needing severing? She huffed. Nonsense. The odds of rock shifting were close to nothing. She extracted her notebook and pen from the crack where she’d hidden them the day prior and pushed her nearly empty bag in deep, so that they were hardly visible.

  Atop the boulder half-buried in earth, she looked out on the sprawling land. The dried and distorted pages of the notebook sat in her lap. The pen in her hand began to scrawl furious words. Creating an account. Recording her experiences, all of the secrets, all of the revelations. Capturing it in writing made it finite and somehow validated the pain and loss.

  Seeing her experience reduced to a set of letters put in a particular order on a physical page gave her pause. What a difference between the endless sheet of white and those few, blue strokes of her pen! The vastness of her hopes and likes and vanities and hardship reduced to a serif here, a loop there, another capital letter starting another chain of meaning of which she was master.

  She couldn’t help but look to the last page, to see if it was still there. A set of digits, laid down months before, plucked from Jak’s memory. She had reversed their true order–a last-ditch effort in case they were discovered. If only she had never encountered the Numbers at all. Would everything she had suffered these past months have been prevented? She could never know.

  Her pen gave out while crossing a T, and she cursed. She spun its point on the page until a blue spiral appeared and she could continue committing her thoughts to writing.

  — What are you doing?

  The sound–like a man’s voice, but not quite–made her jump. She snapped the notebook to a close and nearly flung the pen away, like she was caught in an unseemly act. The figure was set against the Sun, so it took Libète a moment to register who stood before her. He was young, maybe her own age, and wore an orange tank top that was tattered and dirty.

  Félix.

  He slid down the hill from behind to look at her squarely. You can write?

  She said nothing.

  — Read?

  Still nothing. She glared at him, not letting a single gap in her armor show.

  — You’re from elsewhere. It was not a question, but a declaration. His hair was overgrown, and was smattered with twigs and other bits of plant detritus. He had a smell too–the scent of labor that hovered over everything here.

  — Leave me be.

  — What’s your name?

  — What’s your name? she asked, even though she knew it.

  He shifted his weight. I saw you. From far away. You looked like you might be crying.

  — I was not.

  — I know that now. Ou bezwen yon bagay? You need something? he asked.

  — Non.

  — But you look like you need something.

  — You look like you need a bath.

  — You’re the one coated, in, what? Is that blood? Are you hurt? His eyes widened. Did you hurt someone?

  This was the wrong thing to say. She stood up, wiped her pants of dirt, and started down the hill, clasping her notebook to her chest. Leave me alone.

  — I’m sorry.

  — I don’t care.

  — My name’s Félix.

  — I know who you are.

  — You look like you need something, he repeated.

  — Why would I want anything from a thief?

  His jaw clenched. He looked down in shame, but up in anger. Fine! He spun, and stomped off and away.

  She felt a tremendous frustration claim her, seethe out of her. Stupid . . . idiotic . . . bah! He had made it a hundred yards when her stomach gurgled its discontent. She did need something. Many things. She returned to the crevice and stuffed her notebook in safely, her pen stowed in its wire spirals. She swapped it for her bag and began to follow Félix.

  He did
n’t notice at first, or didn’t seem to. She trailed behind much of the path while he moved at a steady clip back toward the decrepit fortress. He was already up many of the trail’s switchbacks and the faint incline to its first terrace and collapsed wall when she was certain he realized she was there. She wanted to flee, but instead kept her head to the ground until she stood about twenty feet away. He stared blankly.

  — Because, she murmured, a bit woozy from the exertion. I do . . .

  The last bit was unintelligible, whispered under her breath.

  — What’s that?

  — I do need something, she said.

  — So you insult the giver, eh? Is that your way? Repaying kindness with rudeness?

  She looked him in the eye. Her shame had limits, and she would have none of this. What does someone who steals from his people deserve but disdain?

  — Not all thefts are the same.

  — Says the thief.

  — Look, I don’t need some blan lecturing me.

  — You’re calling me a blan?

  — You’re not from here. Your accent is different. He crossed his arms. I hardly know anyone from Foche who can read.

  — It’s nothing special.

  He rolled his eyes.

  — You want to read? A thought sparked.

  — Of course.

  — How badly?

  He shrugged. Badly.

  — A trade then. You give me some food, a place to stay. Just for a few days. I’ll be leaving soon. I can teach you until then.

  He spit. I have some food–not stolen, he snapped, prematurely answering her questioning thought. And there is a spring, not far, for drinking. Washing. A small one I found. I couldn’t steal from that.

  She lifted her chin. And what about a place to lay my head? Or have you claimed the whole fort?

  He held out his hand with a grand sweep. Many rooms, he said. No roofs. Take your pick, as long as it’s far away from mine.

  — I told you I won’t be staying long.

  — Good. Because I wouldn’t let you.

  — Dakò.

  — Dakò, then.

  She moved in the direction of the spring and they glared at each other all the while. Let me get some of this blood off, she said. And lay my head down. But make no mistake. We are not friends. We are not acquaintances. We are nothing. You watch yourself. Touch my things, touch me, and mwen pral gen san ou sou rad mwen an. I’ll be wearing your blood.