Roots of Misfortune

by Seth Pevey

  “Ok, what did she study?” Felix asked.

  The mother’s brow furrowed a bit. “She was about to start a PhD. At Loyola. A doctorate of Theology. A very diligent student, our Min Ji. Always with her books. She was very interested in the Church.”

  Melancon jotted a few hardscrabble notes on his pad and continued. “When you say she was interested in the Church, what do you mean?”

  The father pointed at a row of pictures across the room. “Church,” he said.

  “May I?” Melancon asked, standing up. He walked over to the far wall and saw the same beautiful young girl from the picture that Father Kim had showed him. Here she was playing badminton with the church in the background. Here she was holding a palm frond on a long-ago Easter Sunday. Here she was as a young child in Sunday school, the same mischievous grin on her face that would later blossom into beauty.

  “Is there anything more you can tell me? I’ve heard that maybe she had some kind of a falling out with the church?” Felix pressed. Melancon badly wanted to raise a hand to tell the boy to be cautious, but he felt that might be too obvious.

  “Falling out?” the woman seemed to be searching her brain for the turn of phrase, leafing through her mental list of the nonsense that were English idioms.

  “Min Ji loved church. But she was also interested in other religions. Theology student, as I told you. She had been…what is the correct word…she had been experimenting with other churches. She said she was not sure she had found the correct one. Min Ji liked to try new things. Usually only for a short time and then quit. She skateboarded for six months. Played guitar for two months. She studied Spanish for two weeks once and then threw away the textbook we bought her.”

  Melancon nodded his head. “But she always stuck with the Catholic Church?”

  The old Korean man leaned ever more forward, his face filled with a strange energy. He watched Melancon’s eyes as he commenced a lengthy salvo of words, the lion’s share of them launched from the back of his throat, powered by phlegm and desperation. Some deep part of Melancon could understand them in a way that went beyond language and its barriers.

  “My husband says that Min Ji has a…strange personality. I’m not sure the word in English. Hold on a moment please.” She pulled out a small little tablet and began typing into it. “Hmm that doesn’t seem right. Min Ji was very…Sanguinary…or, it says here, Barbarous perhaps?”

  “I think you mean to say she has a wild streak,” Felix said.

  “Ahh, yes yes, a wild streak. You are quite right detective.” She seemed relieved that the point had been communicated, and the briefest of smiles flashed across her lips. “My husband says that Min Ji was quite a naughty child. Though I disagree. I think she was simply…very free. Free in a way that our generation has trouble to understand. My husband thinks that this wild streak, as you call it, may have gotten her into trouble finally. Last we heard from friends that Min Ji had gotten a job of some kind. But no one would tell us anything more than that. So…what did you find? What was her job?”

  Melancon felt a thousand fumbling words surging up his throat and past his tongue, but he held them back, tied them to the mast and prepared to sail through the storm. If only he could shape them into something edible before they came out, like cutting the burnt bits off a Christmas dinner that has long since been ruined.

  “She was volunteering at a soup kitchen,” Felix cut in.

  Melancon flashed a challenging look at his young charge, but the parents were already nodding. The mother’s mouth made a little “O” shape that was equal parts surprise and joy. She translated for the father, whose face knotted with pride for a brief moment.

  “That sounds like our Min Ji,” she was already saying. There was no going back now.

  “Ma’am, do you mind if we take a look around Min Ji’s room? It would really help us get a feel for who she was. And we might even be able to scare up a clue or two.”

  The old folks looked at each other, transmitting those married couple signals invisibly in the air. The father said something decisive and then the mother translated.

  “Of course, it is just at the end of the hall.”

  Melancon could sense that they were disappointed. They had expected something more of this interview. Some clarifying statement or question that would suddenly sort out all the trouble. They were hoping that Melancon would tell them it had all been a misunderstanding and their girl had just gone on a mission trip to build houses in Mexico. But he couldn’t tell them that. In fact, he couldn’t tell them anything. So instead, he offered a limp string of assurances.

  “Don’t worry. I’m sure Min Ji is just a bit too wrapped up in her studies and volunteering. Maybe she is staying with a friend.”

  The woman knew damn well his words were meaningless. She looked like she had seen a thing or two. A sharpness to her eyes. Melancon put her at around sixty. That meant she was too young to remember the bombs of the Korean War, but that she had probably been born into the rubble made by them. A hardscrabble life will inoculate a person against bullshit, Melancon well knew. That hope had gone out of her eyes now. She looked older, pained, and more hunched as she stood up from her chair.

  Felix stood up as well. “You said it has been how long since you’ve seen her?”

  “It has only been about four days. She lived here with us but would often spend the night with friends, in their dorms, about half the week so that the girls could all study together. Her cell phone has not been on. The school has no idea where she is and none of her friends will tell us anything.”

  The detectives looked at each other, nodded at the couple. They followed the old mother into the back of the house. Her limp made their progress slow. As she pushed open the door at the end of the hall, Melancon could make out that the waterworks were about to start.

  “Excuse me,” she said. “Just let me know if there is anything else you need.” She wiped the back of her hand across her eyes and was gone.

  The room they found was unremarkable in all ways but one. Unlike the rest of the house, which seemed to have a method to its organization, a neatness to its layout, this young woman’s room looked like a storm had blown through it. Books were piled haphazardly at the foot of the bed, the waste bin had long since overflowed with tissue paper and diet soda cans, and there was a sedimentary layer of clothes covering all the furniture.

  “Wild streak indeed,” Felix said, brushing a few yoga pants off the dresser so he could see the pictures there, which featured the same lovely girl at summer camp, in a taekwondo outfit, and as always, in the church pew.

  Melancon watched Felix poke around for a minute. The boy was changing, that much was clear, and the older detective wasn’t entirely sure he approved of the man he was becoming. He liked to fancy himself a good judge of character, and one of the things that had stuck out most clearly about Felix, at least at first, was his complete earnestness in all things.

  But now the detective wasn’t so sure. Lately he’d been witnessing the ease with which the young man was learning to lie, to deceive, to manipulate. He wondered how much of it had been latent in Felix all along, and how much he, as the leader of this operation, might be responsible for teaching the wrong lessons.

  “You’re getting pretty good at telling stories, Felix. A soup kitchen?”

  The young man paused in his excavations and looked at the detective. “Yeah…I guess you’re right,” he admitted, with that uncertain twist of the neck. “Beats telling the truth I guess.”

  “Just don’t go forgetting what the truth actually is. That’s kind of your job, after all.”

  A sober nod. He dug for several more minutes, finding nothing but the typical accoutrement of a young woman.

  “Pull open that drawer on the bottom,” Melancon said. “And make sure we put everything back in its place.”

  Felix did as he was told, his eyes going wide as he looked down into the drawer.

  “There is something here,” he said, and held
it aloft for the detective to see. Together they inspected it: A small, red bag of velvety leather, of lambskin maybe.

  They turned on another lamp and held it under the bulb. Something bulged from inside and the top was cinched with a small piece of hemp.

  “Well,” Melancon said and nodded towards the sack. The boy struggled with the hemp knot, finally working a finger under it and pulling it off entirely. Then, out into David Melancon’s outstretched palm, he poured the contents—two small spheres of earthy brown.

  Twin balls the color of delta soil. Rough to the touch as a man’s two-day stubble. The smell was exotic, earthy, herbal. It was a scent full of memory, like the one you might get from opening your spice cabinet for the first time in years. For the first time after your wife had left you and you had to learn to cook for yourself, Melancon thought.

  “Looks like a black man’s testicles to me,” Felix said. He smiled but didn’t laugh. It seemed like a puerile comment from an immature boy at first, until Melancon focused his eyes and saw the truth to it. The two little balls did appear about the size and shape of manhood itself, and the color was the same kind of mahogany richness of African skin.

  “What in the hell Felix?”

  “I’d say we’ve gotten to the root of the thing, anyway,” the young man said.

  Melancon smirked. “I know you like to joke when you are scared, Felix. Are you scared now?”

  But Felix didn’t say anything. They both just kept looking, something magnetic about the grimy little globes.

  Melancon nodded finally. “Roots,” he said, staring down into the coarse things. “The girl on the highway was holding roots.”

  The two detectives looked at each other.

  Melancon brought the two roots in his palm closer to his face, right up to his eyes, and wondered to himself just what kind of alien loam they found themselves digging into.

  Six

  Felix sat bouncing a tennis ball off the cypress wood floor of their tiny detective agency. After each thud, the dog would spring into action, leaping up to catch it in his mouth before it could reach the ground. He would then proudly deposit it back in Felix’s lap, tongue wagging in pure joy.

  “He pretty much saved our lives the other day,” Felix said, wiping the crust of slobber off the ball with a rag. “I reckon he deserves a name.”

  Melancon, who had already started drinking again, blew air into his scotch glass and looked up at the dog. “Bouncer?”

  Felix shook his head. “Too much levity.”

  “Too much levity for Felix Herbert? That makes no sense. Ok, then. How about Scrappy?”

  “Well, it sounds an awful lot like crappy. But it does fit. He is nothing if not scrappy. You remember the look on that mugger’s face when we pulled his mask off?”

  They shared a short laugh at the thief’s expense. The man had been paralyzed with terror, begging and pleading for them to call the dog off.

  “He’s your dog Felix. It’s up to you. Just look at him.”

  It was true. Scrappy was fixated on Felix—that shining look of love a dog gets when it has found its master. The tail wagged desperately as he deposited another ball in his new owner’s hand.

  The young man considered the shaggy, nebulous creature.

  “Scrappy Saves Sleuths,” the hypothetical headlines read.

  “Scrappy it is then,” he said, trying it out on the dog a few times.

  Felix liked the name, but he didn’t like the fact that he had a partner who was having scotch for breakfast. While Melancon claimed that it helped him ‘think this all through’, Felix had told the same kind of lies to himself far too often to fall for that old gem.

  But how to broach the subject?

  Go for the root cause. That was the ticket. After all, that is what had helped Felix with his own pill popping: realizing that he had to get to the heart of the problem. The core of his own addiction had been a rudderless lack of direction, but what about Melancon’s?

  The blue eyed, blonde haired girl. The daughter. The lost love.

  “You know…if you wanted to say anything else…about Julie. I’m all ears,” Felix said.

  Melancon stiffened.

  “I just mean…sometimes it helps to talk about this kind of stuff. Maybe it would help a bit more than that bottle, anyway. I’m your friend David.”

  The old detective eased back in his chair and rocked the tension away. “You know, you would have liked her.”

  Felix knew the well-worn path from beginning to end, having traversed it several times himself. Escape, addiction, self-abuse, ruin. But how does a younger man tell an old drinker such a thing? Impossible.

  “I bet I would have. She sounds like something else.”

  How do you tell another person that story? How, at first, you were just off for a lovely walk in the woods. A place filled with blooming flowers and bright sunlight, rising up underfoot just for you. Birds in the trees. A place lambent with a euphoria that few other things could provide.

  “What do you think she would have made of all this Voodoo nonsense?”

  Then you take a wrong turn. Just one. But that one leads to the necessity of another wrong turn. And then another. Then mistakes get less and less innocent until the sun starts to go down and the red eyes begin to peer at you from behind the trees.

  Melancon didn’t answer.

  Was Felix gaining ground? No retreating now, he thought. “I bet she would have told you that you needed to put your best foot forward on this one, partner. Clear your head and really go at it with everything David Melancon has to offer. Because a clear David Melancon is a force to be reckoned with.”

  That one root that catches your ankle and sends you sprawling. That one drunken accident. That one overdose. That one wrecked relationship, lost job. The wolves wait until you are down on your back. And though you never expected it when you began your lovely walk—that stroll with its golden sunshine and chirping magpies—even though you still can’t believe it, lying on your back there in the darkness, the wolves will find your neck.

  But how to tell this story to someone who was already waist deep in the weeds?

  “I….” Melancon began.

  But he never got to finish his thought. There was a dull sound from someplace downstairs. The dog dropped the ball and his nailed feet scrambled across the wooden floor towards the door, where he let out a single bark.

  “Expecting someone?” Melancon said, reaching for his desk drawer.

  “Relax. I just forgot to tell you. Tomás is dropping by, and he is bringing us a lead.”

  “That seems like a big thing to forget?”

  “Well I was hoping I could sort you out before we moved on to business. But here we are.”

  Felix swung open the door and embraced his old friend. Tomás looked younger than he had the last time they’d met. The trip to Guatemala he’d finally taken, combined with retirement from the many responsibilities he’d had at the Herbert estate, seemed to have agreed with him.

  “So good to see you my boy. Ah. Hello detective. How are you sir?”

  Melancon raised his glass.

  It was then that they noticed a dark figure standing shyly behind Tomás. The ex-butler moved aside and gestured towards this new person. She was a tiny woman, her stature only a shade above dwarven. A middle-aged, ebony face peered seriously at them from the doorway. She had big, lovely eyes and a sweep of dark bangs that hung down nearly enough to blind her.

  “May I present Fabiola Azor, currently an au pair at the Bergeron estate.”

  “Hi there,” Felix said.

  Melancon stood. “Ma’am.”

  She curtseyed. Felix couldn’t remember if he’d ever seen a woman do that in real life. Tomás waved her towards a chair. She seemed nervous and ill at ease but she sat with her purse in her lap and turned her big eyes onto Felix.

  Tomás broke the ice. “Ms. Azor is from the island of Hispaniola. Haiti in particular. It has come to my attention that she is an adherent of
the Voodoo religion. She happened to owe me a favor and I thought she might be a potential source of information for you in your quest, Felix. Ms. Azor, Felix Herbert.”

  The young man smiled. Melancon put his drink down and joined them. He sat in a lawn chair opposite the woman and regarded her. “I think she will be a great help,” he said.

  The woman smoothed her dress and looked warily at Scrappy, who had retired to his corner and was now chewing on his ball.

  “So,” Felix began. “I have to admit our ignorance Ms. Azor. We weren’t aware this was even still a thing. Voodoo? I imagine the stereotype and reality are quite different. What are we talking about here? Voodoo dolls and gris gris, zombies? Do you…do you believe in zombies?”

  She smiled uncomfortably.

  “We’re asking all of this,” Melancon broke in, “because one girl is dead and another one is missing. We have reason to believe, at least in the missing girl’s case, that a recent conversion to your…um….church…may have had something to do with her turning up missing.”

  She looked from one detective to the other. “May I please smoke?” she asked.

  Melancon nodded, finished his scotch and put the empty glass in front of her.

  The woman pulled a long, thin stick from her purse and lit it. She blew the smoke from her nostrils and looked off into the clutter of the office.

  “My religion is a peaceful one. It is not like you see on TV. In movies,” she finally said.

  The two detective’s looked at Tomás, who shrugged his shoulders and went to inspect the new dog.

  Felix leaned forward in his chair. “Why don’t you start by giving us some basic information? I mean, I’ve read the Wiki articles, but obviously that is a pretty superficial understanding. What exactly is it that you believe?”

  She bit her lip, tapped the ash in an empty scotch glass on the table between then. “I believe in the spirit world, much the same as Christians do. The Lwa. You might be more comfortable calling them…demons or angels. But we make no distinction. To us they are only the Lwa.”