Beside her, he found a blade: Venezuelan military issue, with the initials J.R. scratched into the rubber grip.
Keene had enough experience with battlefield injuries that he didn’t try to think about how to save her; not here, far from even so much as a well-stocked first-aid kit. He felt tears moisten his cheeks.
“Can you hear me, Selene?”
She seemed to know he was there beside her. Without opening her eyes, she roused herself enough to lift her left hand, stretching it toward him. In her fingers, she gripped the artifact.
Keene could not have cared less about the mysterious piece of technology that had been scraped up by Oilstar’s test drill in the Dragon’s Mouth. As far as he was concerned, it was the cause of all of the death around him. McKendry, the members of Green Impact, and now Selene.
She pushed harder. “Take it,” she said, and he did. “Up to you now,” she whispered. “Oilstar’s fault. Stop—”
Then she did stop: breathing and living.
Keene felt the sharp edges of the object in his left hand, felt the temperature of his palm drop as it sucked the heat from his skin. He wanted to fling the damned piece of junk into the steamy jungle, where it would sink into a caño or be overgrown with weeds. But to Selene it had been worth dying for…and Frikkie seemed to believe it was worth the price of murder.
With his right hand, Keene picked up the knife that had killed the woman he had begun to love. “Rest in peace, Selene,” he said, testing its weight in his hand. “I promise I’ll take care of Oilstar.”
34
On her way to The Traffic Light, Peta’s pager buzzed.
She ignored it at first.
The restaurant where she’d been headed was so named because the owners had imported and erected what had, until recently, been the only traffic light on the island. The traffic light didn’t work, nor was it meant to do so. It was a curiosity, intended for no other purpose than to direct people to stop and sample the food. Of course, the truth was that the place was already so popular with the locals that they had all the customers they could handle.
After months of eating only because it was mealtime, finally, tonight, Peta had been looking forward to stopping in at The Traffic Light and eating Maggie’s oildown. She had never been good at making the Grenadian national stew of breadfruit cooked in coconut milk with salted meat and vegetables, mostly callaloo, and lots of seasoning, but she loved to eat it. Especially now, in early August, when lobster season was in full swing and Maggie could be persuaded to throw in the occasional tail.
That was the way Arthur had liked it best too.
The two of them had shared oildown at The Traffic Light once a month. The meal was followed by a monthly evening of poetry. Since Maggie would not accept payment from either of them, they submitted to the poetry in exchange for the meal. Arthur didn’t mind. In fact, he occasionally read some of his own scribbles to an enthusiastic audience. Peta only half listened, dreaming on a full stomach about Captain Bligh enduring a mutiny because he had used essential water for his breadfruit saplings instead of giving it to his crew.
The pager buzzed again insistently.
Peta pulled to the side of the road and checked the number. It was her service. Everyone’s service, really, since it was the only halfway efficient one on the island.
Hoping it was something that could be taken care of over the phone, she grabbed the cell phone from her purse and called in.
“One of your patients called. A girl. Patty Grant. She says a man’s been knifed in her house. Something to do with Carnival. Says the house is in the bushes and hard to find, so she’ll send her brother out to the road to flag you down.”
Though she didn’t recognize the name, Peta made a note of the address, apparently a shanty in the rain forest, on the road to the Grand E´ tang, the island’s dormant volcano.
She sighed heavily. So much for oildown.
The whole island was only twenty by twelve miles. As the crow flies, the house was probably no more than six or eight miles away, but it would take her the better part of an hour to get there. The road through the rain-forested mountain was far and away the best on the island. The problem was getting to it. Most of the secondary roads barely deserved the name. They were often unpaved, and those that were had more potholes than pavement. They wound like coiled vipers through the countryside, almost as if to make up for the fact that there were no poisonous snakes on the island.
Hungry, she reached into her pocket for a protein bar and settled into the driving, marveling as she always did at the spectacular landscape and the variety of fruit there. The rain forest around her contained an astonishing mixture of trees: breadfruit and banana, cinnamon and nutmeg—the island’s most famous spice—clove, coconut palm, mango, cocoa, apple, soursop, cashew, avocado, plum. And more. Papaya. Orange. The list of edibles was endless.
For those whose taste ran to meat, there were all manner of animals, some of them unique to the region. The forest hid the armadillo or tatoo, the manicou or opossum, not to speak of the Mona monkey—an island delicacy.
Through her open window, Peta could feel the increasing humidity and hear the song of exotic night birds. For too long, she had claimed to be too busy to climb the trails. Too busy trying not to think.
She passed a house where several young men and women were partially dressed in brightly colored satins. Carnival dancers preparing for the next day’s parade.
Carnival season in Grenada was joyous for some, anathema to others. There was dancing in the streets and strange business afoot as gangs of young locals, faces painted with tar, created equal parts of music and mayhem. They wore masks and devil costumes soaked in a combination of charcoal and engine oil and jumped out at you, pulling you close to dance with them and leaving you smeared with greasy black residue.
As a child, she had been terrified of them. They represented both the devil and the priesthood, warning in both personas of hell and damnation, yet promising redemption, too, to those who did not thwart them. As an adult, she avoided them where possible and wore old clothes throughout Carnival in case she ran into them anyway.
The Jab Jab Molassi.
Another all-male club, she thought, recalling Arthur’s tales of his years among them.
It took her a minute to remember the last time she had participated in the parade, or any of the revelry of Grenada’s late-summer festival. She had told herself that she didn’t have time for that, either. In truth, neither the activities nor the hedonism held any appeal, but at this time of year, they were hard to avoid. As July became August, the people of Grenada geared up for the days of revelry as if they were readying for war.
Beginning with the Rainbow Festival in St. Andrew’s, during the first weekend in August, big tents mushroomed around the island for the steel-band and calypso competitions. Because the calypsos were, in the main, politically based, the lyrics inevitably spawned more fights than were usual on the island and, under cover of Carnival’s loose attitude, more assaults on tourist.
This year however, there were fewer political songs, and many more that stretched the moral boundaries of the island. Watching the frenzy mount and the competition grow ever fiercer, Peta could not but wonder how many—or how few—Grenadians remembered that Carnival was supposed to be about Lent. It had been easier to remember when it coincided with the Lenten season. Once the influx of summer tourists induced a change to August, none but the most religious among the revelers gave much thought to its origins.