by Donna White
“Okay, plan B,” she whispered.
She pulled the box out of the case and found the center piece. “Now. Take this one and pull here, and then this one, and this one, and—”
The box fell apart and landed in a heap on her lap. She grabbed the sack of stones and emptied them into her hand and pushed them into her pocket. Without missing a beat, she took the stones she had stolen from the store and put them into the pouch. She searched through the pile and found the center piece.
“Now where are you?” she mumbled as she looked for the next piece. “There you are!”
She put the two pieces together.
“And the next one . . .”
The box started to take shape.
“And . . . shit!” Sam swore under her breath. The box collapsed. Pieces fell on her lap and onto the floor.
There was a knock on the door window. Sam froze. She turned her head and stared. Crazy Bill stared back at her. He grinned a somewhat toothless grin and nodded. “Ah po’ you, ah po’ you,” he repeated. He brought his hands up to his mouth and blew her a kiss.
Sam blinked. “You are one weird dude, Crazy Bill,” she said. She turned her attention back to the box. She gathered the fallen pieces from the floor. Then she fumbled through the pile again, found the center piece, and attached the second, third, and fourth. Finally, the box was near completion. She placed the sack of stones in it and fitted the rest of the pieces. She breathed a sigh of relief.
When the box was safely tucked back inside its protective cover, she got out of the car, closed the door, and pressed the lock button. She patted her pocket, feeling the stones, and walked back to the museum.
Crazy Bill sat under the shade of the overhang, leaning against the glass wall with his knees tucked up to his chest. His head hung over his legs and he looked very much asleep. He opened one eye. “Ah po’ you. Ah po’ you,” he said with a huge smile.
Sam glanced in his direction and paused. She shook her head. Don’t even go there, Sam. Don’t even go there. She walked into the museum and came face to face with Dr. Roget.
“Well, I’m all done, Sam. The display looks great, thanks to you.”
“It was a real pleasure.” Sam gave her a hug and dropped the keys into her purse. “And thanks for coming all the way out here to help us. Be sure to let me know about the loghz box and the stones.”
“Will do, Sam.”
Sam held the door open. Dr. Roget walked out of the museum and went straight to her car. Sam turned and walked back into the museum.
“Sam!”
Her heart raced. “Oh shit. You are so caught, Sam,” she muttered.
She turned around as her dad called out to her from the reception desk. “Come and see this.”
She leaned over the counter.
“Remember that photo I posted of you and the box on the Canadian Archeological Association website? Well, we’ve already got some responses. Look,” he said, pointing to the screen. “Here’s one who says he believes the stones are an unusual form of green apatite found only in Mozambique. And here’s another one who says he’s seen a very similar box in a museum in Botswana. And then there’s . . .”
Sam skimmed over the various comments listed below her picture with the headline, London girl Sam Wallace finds loghz box and rare stones. “What a great find . . .” “Fascinating . . .” “I believe the wood used to make the box is a rare type of mahogany . . .” Finally, she came to one that made her stop short. She gasped and held her hand to her mouth.
“How’s Charlie?” it said.
It was signed “Scott.”
Chapter 28
The friends of our friends are our friends.
~ Congolese proverb
It was the third time that day that Sam had sat on the museum steps, and it was the third time she felt she was really going crazy. She stared at Crazy Bill and a shudder went down her spine. “Great, I’m going to be sitting beside Bill any day now, with my very own tin cup.” Crazy Bill looked back at her, then turned his gaze to two teenage boys walking up the stairs. One, tall, broad shouldered, and with cropped black hair, wore an old AC/DC shirt. The other, who had a smaller build, ran his fingers through his blond hair. Crazy Bill smiled at them.
They paused, looked at Sam, then at each other, shrugged, and continued up the stairs. When they were a couple of steps away from her, they stopped and stared at her.
After an awkward silence the boy with the blond hair cleared his throat. “Are you Sam? Sam Wallace?” he asked as he glanced at her hands.
Sam pulled her sleeves over her rope burns. “Yeah, I am. Who wants to know?”
The teen continued. “You’re the one in the photo. With the stones, right?”
Sam shook her head. “Photo? What?” At last she realized what he was talking about. “Yeah. That’s me. Who wants to know?”
“I’m Scott. Scott Romo. I saw your photo on the Canadian Archeological Association website this morning. You were holding a box and four green stones.”
Sam did a double take. “Scott? As in ‘How’s Charlie?’ Scott?”
“Yeah, that’s me.”
Sam inhaled sharply. She blinked. “Holy shit. This cannot be happening. This cannot be happening.”
Scott continued. “We were wondering. Well, not really wondering. We . . . well—”
“Get to the point, Scotty. There’s four stones in the photo, and she has rope burns around her wrists. It couldn’t be more obvious.” He stared down at Sam. “I’m Bruce. And—”
“Oh, my God. Bruce. The angel. You’re the one who helped Charlie.”
Bruce laughed.
She turned to Scott. “And you’re the one who gave Charlie the stone to give to Kony. Charlie told me all about you.”
Scott looked relieved. “Yes. That’s us.”
Bruce nodded. “Okay. So everyone knows each other. Let’s get on with it. Tell us, how’s Charlie?”
Sam looked around. “I don’t know. It’s been a couple of days since I saw him. But let’s go somewhere private where we can talk. I need you to explain some things to me. About the stones, that is. And I can tell you everything I know.”
“Yeah,” Scott said while Bruce nodded.
Sam led the way into the museum, then into the empty staff room, and closed the door behind them. “You first,” she said as she sat down. “Right from the beginning.”
Bruce and Scott each took a seat across from her.
Scott told the story of the stones, starting from where he had found them in the hands of a skeleton to the very end when he had given Charlie the final stone and disappeared. He also told the story Blandine had shared with him that night, when he saw the same stones on her necklace at the hotel; about the woman who wept over a fire and a spirit who gave her and her two children each a set of stones. When Scott didn’t know certain details, Bruce added the necessary information. All the while Sam listened intently, interrupting with only an occasional “Oh, my!” or “You have got to be kidding!” or “Now that makes sense.”
After telling the story, Scott and Bruce leaned back in their chairs and grinned.
“Kinda weird, eh?” Bruce said.
“Yeah. Real weird.” Sam nodded. “But how did you know the stones in my box were the same as the stones in your sack?”
“Wasn’t hard,” Scott replied. “I just did a close-up of the photo on the website and noticed a thin line of silver over the green polished surface. And we saw the marks on your wrists and figured they probably came from a rope, tied tight. LRA style. You know. Pretty easy to figure it out, especially with there being only four stones in your hand.”
“Yeah, good thinking,” Sam said. “But what were you doing on the Canadian Archeological Association website?”
“My dad’s an archeologist and, well, I like checking things out on there now and then.”
“Oh.”
“So we told our parents we were staying at each other’s house for the night, hopped on the next Greyh
ound bus from Toronto to London, took a city bus, and here we are. Now tell us, what happened when the stone took you to Uganda?”
Sam told her story. She began with her discovery of the box and the stones, and then told Scott and Bruce about finding herself in a mud hut with Eseza tied to a pole. She recalled the fear she had felt when a commander said she would be given as a “gift” to a general in Sudan, and she spoke of watching Naboth being tied to a tree, beaten and bloodied and unable to move. Sam wondered aloud if he was still alive. When she described the moment she and Eseza escaped in the truck and the encounter with the crocodile on the river, Scott and Bruce shook their heads in amazement.
“You are one tough woman, Sam,” Bruce said with a smile.
A hint of red came to Sam’s cheeks. She continued. “We walked and walked on through the day and into the night, and that’s when I met Charlie. He told me all about you guys, and he called you”—she tilted her head toward Bruce—“his ‘angel’.”
Bruce chuckled.
Scott smiled. “Some angel,” he said.
“But he couldn’t tell me much about the stones. I wanted to know how they worked so I could figure out a way to get back, but he couldn’t tell me anything—just that one time, Scott, you knew you were going to leave and you told Charlie to give the last stone to Kony. And he also—”
“And did he?” Bruce said. “Did he give the stone to Kony?”
“Yeah. He said he did. He said that the stones had the power to change people. That they changed you, Scott. He said . . . he said you were ‘stupid’ at first, and that while you were in Uganda you learned how to think and weren’t stupid anymore.”
“Really?” Scott said. “He really said that?”
“Yeah.”
Bruce laughed.
“And he said the same thing about you, too.”
Bruce stopped laughing. The boys stared at each other and shrugged.
“But that was all I could learn about the stones. I had to leave with Eseza ’cause the Arrow Boys had banned her from the community. They said she couldn’t be trusted since she had lied to them and had been sent to spy on them by Kony.”
“Arrow Boys?” Bruce asked.
“A group that’s fighting Kony. From what I could see, they were mainly teenage boys. There was Peter, and then Jonasan—he was the leader. I think so, anyway. And Michael Jackson.”
“Michael Jackson? Like the singer?” Scott asked.
“Yeah, same name, different guy. And they were heading out to the LRA camp that night, the night Eseza and I left, and they were going to rescue their friend Naboth, the boy I told you was tied to the tree.”
“But”—Bruce’s brow furrowed in concern—“how many were going?”
“I don’t know. Eseza told him he was foolish to go. She believed Naboth was dead by then, and there was no use in going to the camp. And she warned Charlie they didn’t have a chance against a whole army, but he wouldn’t listen.”
Scott and Bruce stared at each other. Both shared the same anxious look.
“But what about weapons? Do they have anything? Guns? Bows and arrows? Anything?” Bruce asked.
“They had bows and arrows, but no, the only guns I saw were at the LRA camp. Mainly AK-47s, a few old rifles, maybe stuff left over from the cold war. You know, stuff like that.”
Scott and Bruce exchanged curious glances.
“How do you—?” Bruce asked.
“You mean how would I know anything about guns? It comes from paintballing. My dad and I go out a lot and, well, I sort of developed this interest in guns. That’s all.”
Bruce stood. “I don’t know about you, but I think we need to go back there now. We’ve got Charlie and these Arrow Boys heading off to the LRA camp, and the Arrow Boys obviously don’t know what they’re up against. Either that, or they have some sorta kamikaze mission going on. But if Charlie’s going on it, he must have a good reason. It’s not like Charlie to be stupid like that. That was our job.”
Scott laughed. “But there’s one thing that’s bugging me about all of this,” he said. “You said Charlie gave Kony the stone. What’s happened to Kony? He’s still out there. He’s still taking kids. He hasn’t changed.”
The room was silent. Sam cleared her throat. “You know how the older adults get, the harder it is to get them to change?”
Bruce and Scott nodded.
“I had a grandpa who always insisted that the only way to write to someone was the old-fashioned snail mail way. Even when I showed him how easy it was to use a computer and e-mail people and get a response right away, he still insisted on writing letters by hand and spending money on stamps. It absolutely bugged me. Anyway, the point I’m trying to make is that adults don’t change. Well, not as easily, anyway. And Kony’s an adult, right?”
“In other words, you’re saying we can’t rely on the stones to change Kony,” Scott said.
“Exactly.”
“Then it was all for nothing—Charlie giving the stone to Kony, I mean. It couldn’t have been all that easy, you know?”
“But what she says makes sense,” Bruce said. “That woman, the one in the museum with the necklace. I often wondered about that. She’s had the stones for years and she’s gotta have held one at least once, but she’s obviously never gone anywhere ’cause all five stones are there, right?”
“Good point,” said Sam. “It was the same with Dr. Roget, this woman who came to set up the Egyptian displays today. I saw her hold a stone, wrap her fingers around it and everything, but nothing happened.”
“But that happened to me, too,” Scott said. “I held the stones over and over again when I came back from Uganda with my dad, and nothing happened. It wasn’t until later, after you came back, Bruce, that they took me to Uganda—again.”
“Then maybe they only work when . . . never mind. I have no idea how they work,” Sam said.
“I don’t think it matters if we figure out how they work or not,” Bruce said. “The point is, Charlie’s going back to the LRA camp, and if he gets caught again, he’s dead. And I don’t mean a-bullet-in-the-head dead. I mean they’ll tie him to a tree and torture him for hours until he’s dead. They do that to the kids there, you know?”
Sam closed her eyes. The image of Naboth lying on the ground as the child soldier beat him relentlessly filled her mind. The sound of the stick as it flew through the air and landed with a loud whack resounded in her brain again and again. She pushed the image out of her head. “I know.”
“But we need a plan before we go, right?” Scott asked.
“But what’s to plan?” Sam said. “We don’t know where anyone is, so we don’t know where we’ll land, do we? And we don’t even know what Charlie’s doing right now. It would be horrible to land right in the middle of an escape and foul it all up. The only thing I can be a little sure about is where Eseza is, and that’s the camp for the people who have escaped from Kony. She went there to get her son. And even then, I can’t be a hundred percent sure.”
“You’re right,” Bruce said. “This time we don’t plan anything. But we go and we go as soon as possible, okay?”
“Yep, you’re right,” Scott nodded.
“You got the stones?” Bruce asked.
“Yeah,” Sam said. “I almost lost them, but I’ve got them now. But that’s another story.” She reached into her pocket and pulled out three stones. She passed one to Bruce and one to Scott. They held them in their outstretched hands.
“I miss the guy,” Bruce said, smiling. “But I’m gonna have a word or two with him for calling me stupid.”
“Yeah, me too,” Scott said.
“I miss Eseza too. I hope she’s okay and she found her son. And I hope things are gonna be better for her. Maybe they won’t be as bad as she thinks they’ll be.”
“Well, at least when we get there, things will be a bit better,” Scott said.
“Better?” asked Bruce.
“Yeah, there’ll be the three of us and we’
ll be together.”
“Shall we get going?” Sam asked.
Bruce clutched his stone. “See you there,” he said. He closed his eyes and vanished.
Scott and Sam stared at each other. “That is so cool,” Sam whispered.
Scott held his stone tightly in his fist. “Good luck,” he said. He smiled, and just like Bruce, he vanished before Sam’s eyes.
She took a deep breath. “Well, what have you got to lose, big muzungu Sam?” She wrapped her hand around the stone and the room disappeared. She was back in Uganda.
Chapter 29
Many hands make light work.
~ Tanzanian proverb
Bruce opened his eyes and looked around. A cool wind blew across his face. The moon brought a surreal glow to the bush that surrounded him. He cocked his head and heard the faint rustle of leaves. He leaned forward, not daring to move his feet. The faint outline of a boy running into the bush came into focus until the boy was hidden by the trees. A bare back. Running shoes.
“Charlie?” Bruce whispered.
He looked behind and stared into the darkness.
“Scott? Sam?” he called out quietly. “Where are you?”
* * **
Scott looked from one side of the moonlit clearing to the other. He knelt and surveyed his surroundings. A small mud hut stood to the left of him, a tattered sheet hanging from its door, moving slightly with the breeze that blew across his face. Straight ahead was a vague outline of an opening to a pathway. Scott listened to the breeze as it rustled the leaves. He held his breath. He heard a faint moan and turned his head.
A young boy, about his age, was tied to a tree that stood beside him. His legs were sprawled out before him, while his arms were firmly fastened to his side. His head hung down and his chin rested on his chest. His face was swollen, and his shirt was ripped and stained with blood. Scott wrinkled his nose as he caught the scent of dried blood and something else that emitted a fetid smell. He looked behind him.