The Atlas of Forgotten Places

by Jenny D. Williams

  Speculation would get her nowhere. What she needed was evidence, hard proof. If Lily had been investigating the illegal ivory trade, she couldn’t have been working alone. Lily would have needed allies, people who could ask probing questions, who had access to information and to the possessors of that information.

  Christoph? She dismissed him almost at once; he’d seemed genuinely shocked at Lily’s disappearance, and he hadn’t said anything about Lily being privy to sensitive information. But at least he might know who else she’d talked to, who she spent her time with.

  Sabine called his phone but he didn’t pick up, and, with newfound caution, she decided against leaving a voice mail. She sat a little longer in the chair outside the kiosk, watching the street, still quiet on this Saturday after Christmas. Two children passed, giggling and whispering with their eyes on her; then a man pushing a bicycle to which a dozen yellow jerry cans had been tied with rope. Sabine remembered suddenly that she’d promised Steve she would print out his flyer and post it around town; she hadn’t even checked her e-mail, she was so fixated on ivory. Now she’d have to wait until the power was back on. The low-bellied growl of an engine announced an incoming boda, and Sabine caught a glimpse of the gaudily decorated motorcycle as it rumbled past, the driver wearing oversized sunglasses, his passenger—a woman in a gray skirt and white blouse—sitting sidesaddle on the cushion behind him, legs crossed at the ankles.

  As clear as a chime, a question rang through her mind: how did Lily leave the Mission the morning of December second? If she met a friend or an informant, whoever it was could have picked her up in a car; there was no way of knowing. But if Lily was backpacking and planning to take a bus, she wouldn’t have walked all that way in the dark—the Mission was nearly three miles from the station in town. Taxis didn’t exist in Kitgum as far as Sabine knew. Lily would almost certainly have organized a boda. In fact, she probably had a regular driver, someone who brought her to and from the office, someone she could trust to drive safely.

  Again, Sabine thought of Christoph: he must have seen Lily get dropped off or picked up at the Bomah; he might even know the driver’s name. It didn’t seem like much of a lead, but right now, it was the best she had.

  * * *

  That had been hours ago. Now Sabine patted her face dry with a towel, the candlelight flickering in the foggy mirror—foggy by age and uncleanliness, not by steam, as the hot water still wasn’t on. The blurriness softened her features, took away the years. She considered her reflection: not pretty, like Hannah; handsome, maybe. As a girl she’d been jealous of her older sister’s effortless charm and the rewards it garnered—extra sweets from visiting aunts and uncles, attention from boys, a natural likeability. Hannah’s prettiness wasn’t so extreme as to be intimidating, and she was too shy to be mistaken for haughty in the way of other women who were aware of their own allure. Sabine had recognized quickly that she would never be Hannah’s equal in looks, and so she pursued excellence in other endeavors: school, sports, service. The longer she told herself it didn’t matter, the truer it became. She was so focused on her work that things like makeup and hairstyles became extraneous. Fashion was irrelevant; what would she do with high heels in a refugee camp? And spending most of her life in countries across Africa meant that she was viewed, even by other expats, as a white woman first, and only after that as a woman, period: someone whose features might be evaluated individually and as a whole for qualities of attractiveness.

  Now, at forty-two, she examined her cheekbones, the arc of her eyebrows, the line of her jaw. What did Christoph think of this face? When he’d commented on the shape of her mouth—had he imagined kissing her? That schoolgirlish flutter she’d felt ruffled through her chest again. The men she’d dated in Marburg told her she was “hard to read,” as if the wrinkles around her eyes ought to spell out happy or sad or bored or aroused. She’d told them, If you want to know what I’m thinking, just ask. But when they did, they never seemed to like the answer.

  In the courtyard, Christoph was sitting at the same table where she’d found him that morning, but with a beer instead of a newspaper. He saw her and waved her over. He seemed distressed; she felt an instinct to comfort him, to place her hand upon his knee.

  “Sorry I missed your call earlier,” he said. “Did you find out anything about Lily?”

  Circumspect, she said, “I’m not sure yet.” She took a seat just as the waitress came by to take their orders.

  After the waitress left, Christoph leaned forward. “I have to admit, when you said this morning that you were here during the war, I was impressed.”

  She fanned away a blush. “Kitgum was my last assignment. I lived in Africa eighteen years altogether.”

  “Long time. Why did you leave? Burnout?”

  “In a manner of speaking.”

  “It gets to you, doesn’t it? Just today…” He pressed the heels of his palms against his eyes, and Sabine noticed a slit in his shirt, near the shoulder. “You know about mob justice, I’m sure,” he said. “There was a crowd in the road when we were driving back from Ogili. Christ, I thought they were going to kill the guy. I tried to break it up, but…”

  He paused, and Sabine’s breath hitched. “You tried?” she said. He’d said it like it was nothing, like anyone would have done the same.

  “Didn’t matter. The police came and took the guy away.” He shook his head as if to throw off the memory. “Anyway—you said you might have a lead about Lily? Did someone hear from her?”

  Sabine’s beer arrived, and she waited until the waitress had left before continuing. “Nothing so tangible. I was hoping you’d know whether she had a regular boda driver—maybe the person she would have called to take her to the bus station that morning.”

  Christoph blanched. “Of course.”

  “You know him?” Her heart leaped.

  “My assistant, Rose—the woman you saw this morning. Her … boyfriend, fiancé, I don’t know. His name’s Ocen. He was Lily’s driver. I didn’t even think of it until now.” His expression turned puzzled. “Strange, I asked Rose about Lily, and she didn’t say anything, either.”

  “Could you ask again?” She tried to temper her eagerness; it might come to nothing. “If I could talk to him, it would be a huge help.”

  He hesitated, then evidently came to a decision and tapped out a short message on his phone. “She usually answers pretty fast.”

  There was something odd in his tone, Sabine thought, but she said, “I appreciate it.”

  A woman approached their table—a mzungu, Sabine saw, perhaps fifty years old, with red hair and a hefty shoulder bag. Sabine had a flash of recognition and remembered seeing the woman last night when she arrived.

  “Hello,” the woman said cheerfully as she flopped her bag on the dirt and stuck out her hand. “I’m Linda.”

  “Sabine,” she said.

  “Lily’s aunt,” Christoph added.

  “Oh?” Linda said, sitting. Her smile was wide and easy, and her ebullience extended outward, along with her girth. “Did Lily have a good time in Bunyonyi?”

  Sabine’s heart raced. “Is that where she went?”

  “I thought…” Linda looked between them, still smiling, though doubt tugged at the edges of her mouth. “Or was it Murchison?”

  When Christoph spoke, his voice was low. “She never showed up for her flight home.”

  It took a few seconds for the implication to sink in. Linda inhaled sharply. “Oh!”

  Christoph’s phone buzzed and he checked the message. “Rose says she’ll ask him tomorrow.”

  “Ask who what?” Linda said.

  “Lily’s boda driver,” Sabine said. “I’m hoping he’ll know which bus she took.”

  Linda was nodding, a bit dazed. Her eyes wandered, and abruptly she sobered. “Look—do you see that guy?”

  Christoph turned his head. “Where?”

  “At the gate.” Linda fixed her gaze on Sabine and said, “I’m being followed.”
>
  Sabine looked toward the Bomah gates and noticed a figure there: a man, hands in pockets. He turned away and disappeared. “He left,” she said.

  “He’ll be back.” Linda seemed confident.

  Sabine’s doubtful look caused Linda to purse her lips. “Let me tell you: I was in Sudan for two years before here, off and on. It’s chaos up there, you know?” Her voice suggested a trace of Nordic heritage—Swedish, perhaps? She leaned forward conspiratorially. “Kitgum is chaos, too, but they watch you. I’ve never experienced surveillance like I have here. I only crossed the border to document the cases that have been reported here, but…” She glanced toward the gate.

  Sabine and Christoph exchanged a look; Christoph’s face clearly said, Don’t encourage her. But with illegal ivory still on her mind, Sabine wasn’t so ready to brush the woman off. “You knew Lily, Linda?”

  “Lily!” Linda sighed. “A bright girl, really.”

  “Do you remember anything that might help?”

  While Linda thought, the waitress brought two dishes of chicken stew with rice. Sabine ate rapidly while Christoph merely pushed the food around on his plate.

  “Disillusioned,” Linda said at last, her tone triumphant. “That’s the word. Lily seemed disillusioned.”

  “With aid, you mean?” Sabine said between bites.

  “With the world,” Linda said grandly. “Poor girl. Father gone, no mother, no family…”

  “I’m family.” Sabine’s tone was cutting.

  “Yes, dear, but you were in Germany! There was an entire ocean between you.”

  Sabine couldn’t remember the last time someone had called her dear. She resented Linda’s blunt evaluation of Lily’s de facto orphanhood, but beneath the pique, she saw the truth in the description.

  “Something changed, though,” Linda mused. “At the end of October. Didn’t you notice?” she asked Christoph.

  “Notice what?” Christoph said.

  “Lily. Something changed with her. She became secretive. But not depressed, you know. Purposeful. Determined.”

  Sabine perked up. The end of October: before Miriam told Lily about the ivory? Miriam could have gotten the timing wrong.

  “At first I thought she’d taken a lover,” Linda continued. “She had that look about her, you know.” Her tone was so matter-of-fact that Sabine nearly dropped her beer. She couldn’t help but glance at Christoph, who was—could it be?—blushing. A strange feeling coiled in her stomach.

  “Did you see her with anyone?” Sabine asked, sensing a new lead. She could deal with the strange feeling later.

  “No,” Linda said. “But that doesn’t mean much. She didn’t always come to the Bomah for dinner. She was here, though, the night before she left.”

  “What did you talk about that night?”

  Linda inhaled deeply, as if the past was something she could suck up out of the air. “Mister Mythology over here was going on about the triple conjecture.”

  “Conjunction,” Christoph grumbled.

  Sabine caught his gaze and he smiled, fleetingly, and looked away; the twinge in her stomach returned. Lily was young and attractive; Christoph, the handsome older man. Sabine knew how easy it would have been, how inevitable even, for the two to come together in a town as small and remote as Kitgum. At once she was filled with shame. It fanned hotly across her chest and up the back of her neck. She took a long draft of her beer to help swallow the knot forming in her throat.

  “Oh!” Linda said, eyes widening. “Aboke.” She tapped a finger to her nose. “Lily was asking if we’d heard the story.”

  “Right, I remember,” Christoph said. “The LRA abducted all those girls—over a hundred, weren’t there?—and then one of the Italian nuns tracked them for days into the bush. She ended up rescuing most of them if I recall.”

  “What courage!” Linda said. “Can you imagine?”

  “Lily had the book on her shelf,” Sabine said. “I saw it this morning.”

  “My favorite part was the way they found the rebels,” Linda said. “Following the trail of candy-bar wrappers through the bush.”

  “I just thought of something else,” Christoph said. “The National Memory and Peace Documentation Centre—it’s run by the Refugee Law Project out of Makerere University in Kampala. They opened this spring. The building is just down the road from here, across the soccer field.”

  “It’s a museum?” Sabine asked.

  “They have a library and exhibitions. They also run workshops and events. I use the desks there when I need a change of scenery. I ran into Lily a few times.”

  “Did she say what she was there for?”

  “She never said.” Doubtfully, he added, “Doesn’t sound very promising, does it?”

  “She might have checked out a guidebook. It could be a hint about where she was planning to travel.”

  “They’ll be closed tomorrow,” Linda said, “but you could go by Monday morning.”

  “I’ll do that.”

  The waitress came by to clear their plates. Christoph ordered another beer and turned to Sabine. “You, too? It’s on me.”

  Sabine flushed under his gaze. “No, thanks. I should get to bed pretty soon. Long day.”

  “Of course,” Linda said.

  When the waitress brought Christoph’s beer a minute later, Sabine paid her bill and rose from the table. “Thanks again for all your help,” she said, avoiding Christoph’s eyes. “It means a lot.”

  “Anything we can do,” Christoph said. “Just say the word.”

  CHAPTER 10

  ROSE

  December 28

  Rose sat with her hand in her lap, conscious of a desire to fidget and trying to fight it. The plastic chair was no more or less comfortable than any other she’d sat in; it was the location that made her edgy. When was the last time she’d come to church? From her pre-abduction years she had hazy memories of long, hot Sunday mornings, secret looks and hand signals between friends, sneaking outside to gossip under the shade of some trees out back. Afterward, life with the rebels had demanded its own kind of religion, and when she returned to Kitgum, she’d been repelled by the idea of a God who could have stood by in silence all those years.

  But last night, before she and James had parted ways, he’d asked her to join them this morning, and despite her reluctance, Rose had agreed. Now she regretted her decision. Already she felt awkward in the large but strangely vacant room built of concrete and void of decoration—a community center from Monday to Saturday and home of the Awesome Glory Pentecostal Church on Sunday. She felt unwelcome among the women who’d greeted each other so warmly then snubbed their noses at her. One woman spat at Rose’s feet when Rose passed her on the way inside. Rose maintained her poise, determined not to let them see her waver. When she sat on the bench, she discretely wiped the saliva from her ankle, where it had landed.

  Agnes was singing with the choir, and it was so strange to see her sister-in-law standing, swaying, praising Him with such enthusiasm, so altered from her pedestrian domestic self. James sat to Rose’s left, leaning forward, his hands clasped in the wide space between his knees. Grace was to her right, with Wilborn in her lap. Isaac was at an age where he could wander with the other children in the yard outside—too old to sit in anyone’s lap, too young to sit politely during worship.

  She wondered what Grace thought of God. The girl was so quiet. Rose noticed a piece of paper sticking out of her pocket: a paper crane. Rose thought of Christoph, and her heart squeezed with the sense of a missed opportunity. She believed that Christoph was a man of his word, but he’d said nothing more about his offer to help her study in Europe since that first conversation in the car. And last night, when he’d sent her the text message about Ocen, she couldn’t bring herself to tell him that Ocen wasn’t around. She didn’t mean to lie; she needed time to evaluate. His message had sparked a swift and dangerous train of thought. Ocen wanted money, after all, and Lily had it. Paddy said that Ocen had come up with a plan
. What was he capable of, the man she loved?

  During the weeks of Ocen’s absence, Rose had thought only of the last fight, the argument over her dowry—but when she was honest with herself, she knew that things had been strained for a month before that. At the end of October there had been a day when he invited her to his hut to spend the night, but when she arrived there was no sign of him; she waited alone until dawn, when he finally arrived, nearly falling off his boda and stinking of waragi. He wouldn’t even look at her. After that Ocen had been moody and distant. She’d taken his sulking for a phase; she knew such things well enough from James. If Ocen needed his privacy, who was she to judge? She herself had secrets she’d never shared with him, truths that would have gouged a rift between them that could never heal. It was only fair that she afford him the same courtesy. Now she wondered: had she chosen wrongly? Were the consequences of Ocen’s covertness more serious than she could have imagined?

  Agnes and the other singers concluded their performance and sat in their designated seats in the front row. The preacher walked slowly to the front of the room where a microphone rested on a crudely built wooden pulpit. Rose was skeptical; she knew this man from town, and he was ordinary and even a little inept. When he stood a moment at the pulpit, however—his two hands resting on the edges, his eyes closed in concentration—he seemed to be gathering some force from the air around him, from the lingering echoes of the choir’s song in the corners of the room. When he opened his mouth to speak, he was transformed.