“Just got in from Moresby?” He turned the key, put the vehicle into gear.
“That’s right.”
“Which mission are you with?”
“The Lutherans.”
“Whereabouts?”
“In Wape…er.”
“Wapeladanga? Father Albion?”
“I think so. Yes, of course. I’m sorry, I’m not too on the ball.”
“Understandable. You may not get up there for a day or two, I’m afraid. The S.I.L. lost a plane, and they’re flying in another from Oz.”
Oz: Australia. Lost, as in crash. As in, the plane they’d apparently intended Linda to get into. “There isn’t a car?”
The man had a nice laugh, even though it was at her expense. “The only way you’d get a car up there is if you lifted it in by helicopter or had it portaged a piece at a time. No roads.” He glanced over to see if she understood, but she must have looked lost, or near to breaking down, because his grin faded and he put out his hand—slowly, as if to a frightened child. “Terribly sorry, don’t know what’s happened to my manners. The name’s Gordon Hugh-Kendrick.”
She shook his callused palm. “Linda McDonald. Are you with one of the missions, then?”
“Oh no, no. Just a civil servant. Government employee. Glorified clerk.” He pronounced it clark. Circling the last of the terminal buildings, they came out on what was identifiably a road. “You’ll need a place to stay. You can contact the mission on the radio tonight and ask for instructions.”
“If you think that’s best.” Her voice wavered a bit.
“Happens all the time.”
“It must, if the airport is always deserted.”
One eyebrow lifted. “In fact, I’ve never seen it like this, not during the day. Must be something going on in town.”
And with that, they cleared a corner and the jeep stood on its nose to avoid plowing into Mardi Gras. The closest ranks of onlookers weren’t particularly colorful, being composed of children wearing nothing but a length of cord around their protuberant bellies and drably clothed women with heavy string bags hanging off their foreheads—bilums, they were called. But toward the center of the crowd came the men, and although some wore grubbier versions of what Gordon Hugh-Kendrick had on—and half a dozen displayed the Air Niugini uniform, which accounted for the deserted terminal—others wore skirts made of brilliant leaves, magnificent headdresses, face paint, and elaborate necklaces. Most of these figures had some object strung through their noses as well: bright feathers, long twigs, curling pig tusks, a yellow pencil. Linda gaped, and wondered aloud if a parade had just broken up.
“Why, the dress? Oh no, they just like to wear their best when they come to town. Gudai, yupela.” Mr. Hugh-Kendrick was greeting a tiny man with intensely black skin and a hugely ornate wig. “Watpo algeta dispela manmeri i stap hia?”
The man turned to glare, revealing a wide moustache studded with brilliant yellow feathers—and his fierceness split into a huge, betel-stained grin. “Eh, Gordon pren! Langtaim mipela no see yupela.” He shifted the stone axe he was carrying into his left hand, thrusting his right through the window. Gordon shook it vigorously, and the two exchanged greetings in a language that Linda did not think was Pidgin, although at that speed, she could not have been sure. Eventually Gordon turned to her.
“Do you speak Pidgin?”
“Liklik tasol.” Only a little.
Introductions were made, then to her surprise, Gordon waved the feather-man around to the back. Half a dozen others climbed in as well, squatting down on her suitcases, admiring the pink hair rollers, giving off a powerful miasma of wood smoke, damp, and primal maleness. Each one carried some deadly object, be it stone axe, spear, or bow and arrow—or a combination, such as the two-headed weapon that passed alarmingly close to her nose, with a lovingly polished wedge of black stone on one side and a viciously sharp claw-like object on the other.
Half the men wore shorts, the others nothing but leaves, and it was difficult to know how to greet them without confronting portions of their anatomy an Indiana girl was not accustomed to greet. So she focused on their hair decorations, which ranged from one man’s short afro threaded with feathers and bright flowers to his neighbor’s three-foot-wide crescent-shaped hat made of matted hair, shells, and black, glossy feathers. Gordon announced her name to his passengers, politely nudged a quiver of arrows away from her face, and put the jeep back into gear.
The conversation that followed was far too rapid-fire for her kindergarten-level Pidgin, but by the time they had cleared the crowd, Gordon had found out what was going on in the town.
“It would appear that a white man has been found dead.”
“Oh, how awful! What happened?”
“They’re saying it’s murder, although it sounds to me like a climbing accident. They found him at the base of a cliff.”
“Murder! Is there a lot…I mean, is murder commonplace here?”
That sparked another over-the-shoulder discussion before he replied. “None of these gentlemen can remember when the last waitpela was killed.”
“And you don’t remember it happening?”
He gave her a startled look, then his face cleared. “The last murder, you mean? Oh, I’ve only been in the highlands for a few weeks—certainly there hasn’t been one in that time. But you can ask Mrs. Carver. She’d know if anyone does.”
“Who is Mrs. Carver?”
He turned hard down a street and braked in front of a low, wide building with a rusting tin roof. The door opened and out stepped a rangy six-foot-tall woman with graying brown hair, hands on her hips and a scowl on her face.
“That’s Mrs. Carver.” The innocent phrase suggested a joke, hidden deep. “Maggie. This is her boarding house.”
Linda’s heart sank at the lack of welcome in the woman’s posture—but to her surprise, Gordon jumped out to trot up the stairs, seize the man-sized hand, and kiss it. The woman melted instantly into a near-simper; Gordon was no stranger here.
An assortment of passengers tumbled out of the back, each holding his weapon in one hand and something of Linda’s in the other. They meandered toward the house to heap the bags near the steps before climbing back inside the jeep. Gordon turned Linda over to the woman, politely refused her offer of tea, then walked back to the car amidst a hail of Pidgin.
Linda stood on the graveled walk in front of this nondescript house, the air spiced with the foreign odors of rain and smoke and jungle, and watched the spattered vehicle drive away. Just before it rounded the corner, a tanned arm in a blue sleeve emerged from the yellow jeep, two fingers raised like the touch of a hat-brim. It was a gesture of casual farewell rather than permanent goodbye. Obscurely comforted, she took a deep lungful of this foreign air and turned to meet the next challenge.
—
Things were indeed sorted out, as her knight-errant had promised. Mrs. Carver proved more maternal than Linda’s own mother (though that wasn’t saying much). She ordered the rooftop hot water tank stoked so Linda could shower, fed the newcomer a meal of rice and some stewed meat, then sent her to bed, assuring Linda in a broad Australian accent that she’d make radio contact with Linda’s mission when they came on that night. Twelve hours later, Linda woke to a cool, misty morning, the smell of cook-fires and diesel fumes in the air, the singing of children outside her window, and a mechanical thumping from somewhere in the building. A delicate green lizard hung from the ceiling beside the light fixture.
Downstairs, she found six guests dawdling over toast and eggs. Introductions were brisk: an American missionary couple on their way to a month in New Zealand, a trio of Catholic priests headed for a conference in Goroka, and a breezy Australian with ingrained grime under his nails and a proprietary attitude toward Mrs. Carver. This last held out his hand for Linda to shake. “G’day, name’s Barry. I service the planes here.”
It was on the tip of her tongue to ask, Including the one that went down? but she was saved from that faux pas by
the American woman.
“Did you hear about our murder?”
“I heard a man died, but I thought it was an accident.”
The reply came from Barry. “They’ve got the bloke on ice until the coroner can get here from Moresby, but since no one seems to know what he was doing up there, and since he’s got important friends, they’re playing it safe.”
“I’m so sorry, I didn’t realize he was a friend of yours.”
“God, no. He worked for the mines.”
“Do they know what happened?” But what “they” knew proved little more than what Linda’s rescuer had learned from his passengers the previous evening: a man named Dale Lawrence was found by some locals, at the base of a cliff a hundred yards from the road, his head bashed in. Lawrence had been in the highlands about five months, had worked in the upper Sepik River area before that, and nobody much liked him.
When Mrs. Carver came in with Linda’s breakfast, Barry’s flow of information cut abruptly off. After the landlady left, he leaned over and lowered his voice. “Maggie doesn’t like it when waitpelas are rude to her staff. This Lawrence fella was here a coupla days—this was three, four months ago—and after she kicked him out, we heard he’d been in trouble up in the Sepik.”
“What kind of trouble?”
Barry looked uncomfortable. “Well, not him, exactly. Seems a friend of his attacked a woman there. A local.”
“Attacked?”
“Raped. And killed her.”
“Killed her?” Linda squeaked. “Did the police catch him?” What was done with foreign criminals here? Were they handed over to the Australians? Or tried by a jury of men wearing tusks through their septums?
“Sure. Though of course nothing happened.”
“Why on earth not?”
“He worked security, for the mines.” Barry saw that more explanation was needed. “Brutal bastards, all of ’em, pardon my French. ’Course, he said he was an engineer, but I’ve never met an engineer who wore a gun. Name was Abrams. He and Lawrence and another fella—Turner? No, Taylor, I think—they all stood up for each other. And wasn’t there something about a pen-knife? Ah, right—fancy little silver thing they found in the corner of the woman’s hut, like it’d been kicked there. It belonged to Abrams, but all three of them swore it’d been stolen the week before. The kiap couldn’t prove otherwise.”
Kiap. Linda’s stateside training offered a translation: cop—singular or plural. “So he just went free—Abrams did?”
“Not for long. The mine’s lawyer bailed him out of the kalabus, but a coupla weeks later he went missing. They figured it was the girl’s relatives, took ’em in for questioning, big palaver for a while, all kinds of accusations flying. They found him eventually in a place it was unlikely the family’d have got to, and it looked like an accident though the body was…well, it was hard to tell. Anyway, nothing much came of it except the other two, Lawrence and Taylor, were sent out of the Sepik area. Girl’s name was something flowery. Hibiscus? No: Jasmin.”
One fatal injury, and now another a few months later. Linda thought of those stone-headed weapons bobbing around the jeep, and shuddered. What kind of place had she come to?
7:00
Brendan
Brendan Atcheson narrowed his eyes into slits, then tried raising his chin. No, he still didn’t look anything like Jason Bourne. He just looked like a stupid squinting teenager.
Nothing about the figure in the bathroom mirror was heroic or sexy, or even very manly. Except maybe his height. And his chest wasn’t too bad, between the pec muscles and the beginning of some hair. Not that you could show off a bare chest at school. With a shirt on, he had to be the least sexy person at Guadalupe Middle School, and that included the teachers. (Even Mr. Kendrick was sexy and he was, like, ancient.)
Still, it was weird, because Brendan was pretty sure that when girls giggled, it meant they thought a guy was hot, and girls sometimes giggled around him.
Not Mina Santos, of course. Mina didn’t giggle, and she didn’t seem to find him hot. Then again, why should she? So clumsy he’d trip over his own feet (except on the basketball court) and with a mind that went completely blank when he stood in front of someone like Mina. So he scowled. And according to the mirror, it wasn’t even a sexy scowl. Plus his ears stood out and his beard was pitiful.
But at least he didn’t have to ride on the Big Yellow School Bus anymore. So humiliating to be the only eighth-grader on board. (It still pissed him off that he couldn’t use Jock’s gift toward a better bike, but Sir would’ve known.) Well, maybe a few others still took the bus. But none of Brendan Atcheson’s friends.
The face in the mirror jeered at that. Yeah, like you have friends. He didn’t. (Other than Jock, of course.) The only place he wasn’t the Invisible Boy was on the court. If he got snatched away like the Cuomo girl, nobody’d even notice until the next game. And the other players would be just as happy to have him gone—until they looked at the scoreboard. Just like people were going to notice Brendan Atcheson once he and Jock moved from plans to action. Soon, soon.
He watched as his fingers ran thoughtfully along his jawline. Should he shave? He’d done it just two days ago, but his face was so smooth, it might have been two minutes. With hair as dark as his, you’d think he’d need to shave every day. He probably would eventually. (Maybe twice on nights he had a date.)
Yeah, right. He’d be dead long before he had either a beard or a date.
7:02
Olivia
Olivia Mendez pushed the cruiser’s rear-view mirror back into position, satisfied there weren’t any scraps of breakfast between her teeth. She checked the car for loose possessions (protein-bar wrappers scattered across a police cruiser’s dash looked so professional) and got out, dragging the duty belt after her.
Male uniformed officers tended to drive wearing everything but their nightsticks, but getting into the cruiser ten minutes ago had been a sharp reminder of how all those handles used to leave bruises along the bottom of her rib cage. Was it because she had hips? Or because she was six inches shorter than anyone else in the Department?
Anyway, after this morning’s jab she’d hastily unbuckled the belt, grateful that these days she was usually in plainclothes.
But not today. After lengthy discussion and much heart-searching, Linda decided that she wanted Olivia front and center, rather than moving quietly around the edges of the school as she’d done much of the past fifteen weeks, and in her uniform rather than plainclothes. So Olivia drove the cruiser—which she’d run through the car wash yesterday—and parked in a prominent spot in front of Guadalupe Middle School.
Buckles fastened, radio on, nightstick retrieved and dropped through its loop, Olivia wiggled the belt into place as she looked around her. Kids were piling off the early bus, still looking sleepy. Across the road, a field crew was already bending over their labors, planting out…broccoli, maybe? No one she recognized from this distance, but she waved anyway, then turned back to the hodge-podge of buildings that made up Guadalupe.
What did it say about her life that she was actually looking forward to the day? You’re a sad case, Sergeant Mendez.
And yet, as she crossed the driveway in front of the school, she found she was enjoying the return of the cop swagger. And, she realized, the excuse the uniform gave to poke her nose into everyone’s business.
But seeing as how she wasn’t entirely comfortable with the Big Bad Cop routine, maybe she’d pop into the library and see if the Parents’ Club had the coffee machine on.
There was nothing that said Friendly and Casual Neighborhood Authority like a cop with a cup.
7:03
Mina
Mina Santos had three mirrors in her bedroom, and they all showed a different person.
The one she was looking at now, hanging on the back of the door, showed a Nice Girl—at least, down to her ankles where the boots started. Long black braid, orange T-shirt, plaid skirt that reached her knees, black tight
s. Pretty much the same girl it showed last year, and the year before: a girl so short and fresh-faced, you’d think she was a child if you didn’t notice her chest. (One reason she wore baggy shirts at school.)
The dressing table mirror, the one with the circle of bright light to help her judge when she had more makeup than Mâmân would permit, showed Mina her too-large nose, coarse pores, and (oh, God!) what threatened to become a moustache.
The third mirror was on the wall next to the closet. Not much bigger than an iPad and surrounded by a pretty enameled frame, the mirror itself was so old its glass was dim, with freckles along the edges. It had belonged to her grandmother, who’d received it as a present for her thirteenth birthday back in Tehran. It was about the only thing Mâmân had from that whole family, and she gave it to Mina last year, when she turned thirteen.
At the time, Mina thought that was sweet. Then she worked out that two months later, her grandmother had not only been married, but pregnant, too. Mina didn’t look at this third mirror much now. It had a way of showing her the face of a grown woman, which was more than a little creepy.
Anyway: three mirrors, and none of them gave her the same truth as the mirrors at school.
Mina sometimes thought that she and Sofia should just change bodies (Sofe had been like a sister for years, though now it was complicated). That would make Mina as strong as she felt and force people to look up at her, and let Sofia be small enough to ignore, like she wanted.
As if Sofe had heard her thoughts Mina’s phone gave its Sofia-cheep. Mina picked it up and read:
Bus stinx like old sox reeeelly looking forward to high school and boys with cars yasss!!!