by Cave, Hugh
"Such as? What were you writing in the notebook all evening after being gone all day?"
His nakedness did not protect him from a flashing look of anger. "She told you that?"
He shrugged. "I asked her if you were worried about me. She said no, you were writing in a notebook."
"I was writing down"—the words came sharply, with defiance—"what Sister Merle said to me."
"So you went there."
"Certainly I went there! Will, I won't be put through an inquisition at this time of night. I'm going to sleep."
He sat there in silence while she turned her back to him, then he put out the light and went to bed himself. He was tired, his body was one dull ache, yet he could not sleep.
So, after all his warnings, she had hired some hungry taxi man to take her, perhaps not for the first time, to that devil-woman in the Cockpit—that obeah bitch who was almost certainly responsible for Juan Cerrado's death and Sam Norman's disappearance.
What kind of woman had he been married to all these years?
It was nearly two in the afternoon when he awoke. The other bed was empty, of course. A warm shower rid his body of some of its aches and, dressed, he went through the house looking for Vicky. He must talk to her again about what she was doing.
But the house was empty.
Ten minutes later, while he was rummaging in the fridge for something to eat, Ima Williams came in carrying her brightly colored shopping bag.
"How are you feeling, Mr. Will?"
"As if I spent the night in a cave."
She was not amused. "I've brought you some pears." Opening the bag, she showed him a dozen or more plump green avocados. "They're good for you at a time like this, and easy on your stomach."
He sat at the kitchen table and watched her peel and halve two of them at the counter. When she brought them to him, he said, "Do you know where my wife is?"
"She went out before nine o'clock, Mr. Will."
"Did she say where to?"
"I suppose you know where she went yesterday." Ima shook her head. "No, Mr. Will. That is, not for sure."
"She called on Sister Merle. And I think if we question some of the taxi men, we'll find she has been there before."
The housekeeper stood still as a dark statue, gazing at him. "Mr. Will, I suspected she had been there."
"Did you? Why?"
"Last night something happened to me. I was talking to the loa and Sister Merle came between us. And then, Mr. Will, when I thought I was going to die, my door opened and your wife came into my room. She stood beside the bed where I was lying, and she said something to me. Something like—didn't I know she would warn Sister Merle about me."
"So my wife is already a pupil of that damned woman," Will said bitterly. "Do you suppose she has gone there again today?"
"If Sister Merle commanded her to."
He stopped a spoonful of avocado at his lips and scowled at her. "What do you mean by that, Ima?'
"Mr. Will, you have been giving that woman trouble. Keith Mowatt is in the hospital. Emmanuel Bignall and Nevil Walters are in the lockup. I think she must have been very glad when your wife came calling, and would want her to come again. Yes, I am sure of it. She must hate you very much for all the trouble you have caused her."
He did not want to be drawn into that, he decided. "Have you seen Ken today?"
"Not yet. I suppose he is as tired as you must be." Ken, on their return to the house just before daylight, had refused to use Sam Norman's bedroom and gone home in his taxi. "But I think he will come this afternoon," Ima went on. "After all, you still have not found Mr. Norman."
In less than an hour the taxi man arrived, with an even longer face than Will had expected. Coming into the house, he said at once, "Will, do you know where your wife is?"
"I suspect."
"You know she went there yesterday? And before?" Will nodded.
"This is bad," Ken said. "I don't like it. Sister Merle is a clever woman. Clever enough, maybe, to find out from your wife what we are doing or planning."
"I agree," Will said. "So from now on I'll make sure my wife doesn't learn anything. But I can't keep her away from there. She has a mind of her own."
They sat for a time, discussing what to do next in the search for Sam Norman. Their one remaining hope, Ken felt, was to talk to the two men in the Christiana lockup, if the police would permit it.
"Will they permit it, Ken?"
"We can only ask them. After what happened in the cave, they at least know we are doing our best."
Will thought about it and nodded. "All right. When should we go?"
"I think in the morning, when we are fresh. Because we will have to talk to those men in a special way, Will. They are going to be like Mowatt, sitting there waiting to die. Mowatt is dead, by the way. Have you heard?"
It took a little while for Will to stop staring and shake his head.
"He died last night while we were in the cave," Ken said. "The taxi men in Christiana were talking about it when I stopped in town just now. One of them had just come from taking a fare to the hospital." He stood up. "Be thinking about what we ought to say to those two, will you? It may be our last chance. Shall I come by for you about seven?"
"I'll be ready." Will walked with him to the door. "By the way, how did you find out where Vicky went?"
"The same taxi men. She talked one of the drivers into taking her to Sister Merle. How many times she has been there I don't know, but today he took her again. Sidney Lewis, his name is."
"What's he like?"
Ken shrugged. "Just another fellow trying to make a living in these hard times."
Two hours later Will was sitting on the veranda with a drink, waiting for the housekeeper to tell him supper was ready, when Vicky arrived at the gate in a taxi only a little less ancient than Ken's.
He saw her pay the driver, then stand by the car talking to the fellow for a moment. He solemnly nodded before starting the car again.
Vicky opened the gate, closed it behind her, and came to the veranda with a strut that plainly said her day had been a success.
"Hello," she said. "Am I late for supper? I'm starved."
"No, we waited for you." He looked her over, noting the red earth stains on her sturdy shoes, the sensible denim pants and cotton blouse she wore. It was nearly the same outfit she had worn in Haiti when he found her possessed at the voodoo service. Had she told Sister Merle about her Haitian adventures?
"You've been to the obeah woman again," he said quietly, trying not to sound accusing.
"That's right."
"Want to tell me about it?"
"I'm dying to tell someone."
She had to postpone the recital, however. Ima came at that moment to say supper was on the table.
In the end Vicky told him little, really. Apparently she had learned something of what obeah was basically about—the sorcery involved, the conjurations, the various charms and spells. She told him that much out of pride, he was sure. But when he attempted to delve more deeply, her vagueness baffled him.
"What has she told you about mind control, Vicky? You said you were really interested in that."
"We haven't discussed it yet. Not in depth."
"Yet? You mean you're planning more trips to that house?"
"Of course. I'll be bored to death here if I don't do something stimulating."
"I see." He didn't care anymore, he realized. Now that he had made up his mind about his future with her, what she chose to do with her time was of no interest to him. "Vicky, there's something I have to tell you."
"At least," she said, obviously not listening, "Sister Merle is a woman you can learn from." Poking with her spoon at the soup in her bowl, she frowned and added, "What is this concoction?"
"It's a country chicken soup."
"This isn't chicken," she complained, holding her spoon out to him with a bit of meat on it.
"No, it's pig tail. They use pig tail and chicken feet.
"Where did yo
u have your lunch?"
Making a face, she pushed her soup away. "At Sister Merle's."
"Oh? What did she serve you? Something appropriate to the occasion?"
"She served corned beef out of a can, some bread, and some kind of tea."
"Bush tea?" Some such infusions in Jamaica were known to have curious properties.
"What is bush tea?" Vicky said.
"It's—oh, let it go. I said I have something to tell you."
Turning on her chair, she frowned toward the kitchen door.
"When we get back to Florida, Vicky, I want a divorce."
"The tea did taste bitter, sort of," she said. "It gave me a lift, though."
"Vicky."
"What's keeping that stupid woman? First we get a soup that turns my stomach; now we don't get anything at all!"
He leaned toward her, trying to recapture her attention. "Vicky, are you listening to me at all?"
"No. I'm hungry."
He spoke very slowly now. "I said when we get back to Florida I want a divorce."
"A what?"
"A divorce, Vicky. An end to our marriage. Freedom."
Turning at last, she gazed at him in hostile silence for a few seconds, then shrugged. "All right," she said. "Maybe you'll even find someone who likes pig tails and chicken feet. That ought to make you ecstatic."
23
The Finding
Emmanual Bignall and Nevil Walters had refused to talk. Now both were in the hospital where Keith Mowatt had died.
Vicky, for six days a daily visitor to the house in the Cockpit, was behaving almost as strangely, Will decided, though he saw too little of her to be sure of his judgment.
Since the word divorce had come into their limited dialogue, he had moved into Sam Norman's unused bedroom. He met his wife at breakfast if she happened to be up. But he no longer told her what Ken and he proposed to do that day. "I don't think I want you telling Sister Merle," was his usual blunt reply when she was interested enough to ask.
Most of the time he also said something like, "For God's sake, Vicky, don't visit that woman again! It's doing you no good!"
Then he would pick up Ken—he was doing that now instead of having the taxi man come to the house—and, of course, Vicky would ignore his pleas and spend her day with the obeah woman.
He ought to take her back to Florida, he thought, before what was happening became irreversible. But he couldn't, not with Sam still missing. Anyway, he didn't know what was happening to Vicky and how much of it was genuine. Dissembling had always been something of an art with her. What she was doing now could easily be, at least in part, a way of getting even for his daring to want a divorce.
On one of the few occasions that they did still try to talk, Will told her what he'd been thinking about their marriage. "If I hadn't gone after you so determinedly, Vicky, I don't believe you would have married anyone at all. The mistake was mine, pressuring you into doing a thing you had no real desire to do. I'm sorry. God knows I've paid for it."
They were having a nightcap in the living room at the time he said this. The electricity was off—a not uncommon occurrence in Christiana—and the only illumination was from a kerosene lamp that Ima had brought to them. As it happened, the light only dimly reached the chair in which Vicky sat, and her face was in near darkness. When she looked at him, he was fascinated by her eyes.
For some reason he found himself back in that house in the Cockpit where Sister Merle, too, had stared at him with eyes that seemed abnormally bright and piercing.
"Do you really think you've paid?" she said.
"What?" Shaken by the way she stared at him, he had forgotten his remark.
"You haven't, you know," she said. "Ah, no, Will Platt—you haven't."
There were other indications that her visits to the obeah woman were strangely affecting her. She was drinking a lot these days, and he noticed she was taking her liquor, usually rum, almost straight. At times she spoke to him in a way that surely would have shocked the good ladies at Lakeside Manor back in Florida. In fact, her choice of words even shocked him, making him wonder if a veneer of some kind, perhaps one that was generations old, were being slowly worn away to expose something surprisingly violent underneath.
And she was actually using, or practicing, some of the things she learned from Sister Merle. He heard her at night, sometimes as late as three or four in the morning, talking to someone in her room. She had to be alone in the room unless she had let some stranger into the house, but she certainly was talking to someone.
Most of the time she spoke in a voice so low he could not distinguish the words, even when he went to her door and stood there listening. But one night he distinctly heard her address someone as Mordecai.
"Mordecai, arise!" she cried out. "Turn to the north, south, east and west. Come to me with. . ."
He thought he heard the phrase "power of demons," but her voice had suddenly become a mumble and he could not be sure.
She was up to something almost every night, and one day when she was out, curiosity or fear drove him to invade her room in search of some answers. He found no answers, but did encounter a puzzling smell of sulphur and discover under some clothes in her dresser an array of small, screw-top jars with cryptic handwritten labels on them.
He did not disturb the jars or challenge her about them. But he was apprehensive.
And then there was the night he awoke at four in the morning and felt he was in some kind of danger, so lay there motionless, listening, waiting for some sound or movement to tell him where and what the danger was.
He became aware that his door was open and someone was standing there. His eyes continued their slow adjustment to the tropic dark, and the someone became Vicky in a dark, long-sleeved dressing gown, looking in at him, her eyes abnormally bright, unblinking.
For all of three minutes she stood there on the threshold. Then her figure faded and the door closed with an almost silent click.
"Vicky," he began, the next morning at breakfast, "did you come to my room last night?"
"Did I what?"
"Did you come and open my door last night, and stand there looking in at me?"
Her laugh was ugly, and then her voice dripped sarcasm. "Now really, Will—we're planning a divorce." Of course, it could have been a dream.
And of the missing Sam Norman—nothing.
Ken and he had been to Silent Hill twice. Had spent hours searching the now abandoned shack of obeah man Emmanuel Bignall in hope of finding some overlooked clue to tell them Sam had been there. The shack had nothing to reveal.
Then late one afternoon, when they were returning to Christiana after still another fruitless search of the area, Ken Daniels lifted his foot from the gas pedal and said, "Will, look."
Dead tired, Will had been dozing. He opened his eyes. Trees on both sides darkened the road ahead, but he saw a drunken man staggering along its edge.
"Look at what?" he mumbled without interest. It was a Saturday, when in rural Jamaica quantities of rum, beer or stout were consumed, and being unsteady on one's feet was not enough to set one apart.
"That's a white man, Will," the taxi man said, slowing the vehicle to a crawl. Reaching out, he turned on the lights.
The man ahead may have been too intoxicated to have heard them coming, but he lurched around when the lights went on. For a moment he stood rooted on widespread legs, his body and limp arms swaying; his face white in the headlamps' glare. Then with what had to be a desperate effort, even if a drunken one, he threw himself out of the lane of light and into a wall of vegetation beside the road.
"It's Sam!" Will shouted hoarsely. "Ken, it's Sam Norman!"
Ken brought the Land Rover to a jolting stop where the man had vanished, and Will leaped out of it. "Sam!" he yelled, plunging into a tangle of neglected, gone-wild coffee trees. "Sam, wait! It's Will!"
Ken Daniels tore into the tangle behind him.
It was dark here. The coffee was ten feet tall with half i
ts limbs dead and brittle. A maze of broken branches littered the ground. A jagged limb dug into Will's thigh and he stumbled to one knee. Behind him the taxi man sounded like a charging bull but caught up to him and stopped to help him. For a moment there was silence except for the sounds made by the man they were pursuing.
He must have thought the pursuit had been abandoned, for suddenly he too was silent.
"Sam!" Will called. "Can you hear me? It's Will Platt!"
No answer.
"For God's sake, Sam, come back. We only want to help you!"
A sound of slow footsteps, unsteady but approaching. A voice, barely audible though certainly close by. "Will? Is that you?" Not a drunken voice. The speaker was in pain, and weak.
"Over here, Sam. There are two of us, so don't be alarmed."
The footsteps came closer. Will heard the snap of a branch not more than a yard or two away. Then he saw the man stumbling toward him and heard Sam gasping us name, and stepped forward with his heart pounding and arms reaching.
Sam collapsed against him, too exhausted to speak again.
Not until they left the abandoned coffee walk and were approaching the car, Ken on one side of the stumbling man and he on the other, did Will get a close look at Sam's face. It seemed years older than when he had seen it last. Even the growth of hair that all but covered it could not hide the signs of suffering.
"Sam, are you hurt?"
"He shot me, Will."
"Who? Where?"
"Bignall. At his house. But I got away."
"Wait," Will said to Ken Daniels, and they stopped. But the hurt man shook his head.
"Not now. It's only my leg. Get me home first."
When they were helping him up into the Land Rover, Will realized how much weight he had lost and how weak he was. His clothes were the ones he had worn when he went to Silent Hill that day to question Bignall, but they looked now as though he had crawled in them for miles through thorny scrub and over the region's red clay, and no longer came even close to fitting him.
Questions tumbled over one another in Will's mind, but he said only, "Sam, this is Ken Daniels. He's been helping me look for you. No man could have worked harder."