The Rhythm of the August Rain (8 page)

“We would wear white. You ever see those people? . . . No? You not on that side of the island and you don't go to Kingston, that's why. They wear turbans on their head, so you don't see the dreadlocks.”

“Why do Rastas do that, grow their hair long and let it get—?” Shannon asked, waving a hand over her own head, thinking of Eve's question.

“You ever hear of Samuel one, verse eleven? They was talking about Samson. When his mother was asking Jah to give her a son, she promise that her child will serve God all the days of his life and that no razor shall come upon his head. And Jah give her a powerful son. But he meet a woman called Delilah, and she cut off him hair and cut off him strength, and he get weak after that. Rasta believe that hair is strength. Jah give us our hair, and I and I not supposed to cut it.”

She nodded, juggling mentally—translating the patois, scribbling in her notebook, thinking of the next question. “Why did you leave the Bongo community?”

“It was too strictlike, and I and I more of an independent type, you know? Too much strictness tie up I and I mind and spirit.”

Ras Walker bent his head to the shoe again, but Shannon had one more question. “I noticed those drums in the back.” She closed her notebook. “Do you play them?”

“Sometimes. But my son play better than me. He teach drumming.”

After taking photographs of the shoemaker over his metal repair boot and beside the flag, Shannon walked back to the car. She had a lot to think about, she realized, a lot more research to do, including beginning to look into Katlyn's disappearance.

“Do either of you know where Gordon Gap is?” she asked Carlton and Shad when they were under way. The two men discussed the location and decided that, no, it wasn't Gordon Town near Kingston, and, yes, it must be the village in the hills above Oracabessa, about thirty miles west of Largo.

“You know somebody up there?” Shad wanted to know.

“No, but I want to make some inquiries.”

“We finish for the day?” Carlton asked.

“Yes, all done,” Shannon said. “Shad, would you like to have lunch with me?”

“Sure, man, like how my kitchen at home cold now.”

Before Carlton left them at Lambert's, Shannon arranged to pay him weekly, and he agreed to pick her up at ten the next morning. All was quiet in the Delgados' house when she and Shad walked in, only the wooden floors creaking under them in the midday warmth. Bertha was in the kitchen polishing silver, the chocolate Lab stretched out on the cool tiles beside her.

“Miss Jennifer take the children to Carel Beach to swim and Eve gone with them,” Bertha reported. “You hungry?”

While she was making their lunch, the housekeeper talked about her own daughter, who'd been a teenager when Shannon had seen her last. “She working in a hospital in Baltimore, doing nursing. She making plenty money. I don't see her for three years now.”

“Don't you miss her?” Shannon asked.

The woman looked up in surprise. “Every month she send money for me to build my own house—it worth the missing.” Bertha laid out the lunch and left them in the kitchen.

“This morning—it was helpful to you?” Shad bit into his tuna sandwich.

“A good start, but there's so much history and philosophy behind the whole Rasta thing, I hope I can do it justice. There's a big difference between reading about it and talking to Rastas in person, you know.”

“One interview at a time, right?”

“It's more complicated than that, though. There's something else I need to be doing at the same time.”

“Just let me know and I tell Carlton to take us there.”

Shannon set down her sandwich. “Remember I asked about Gordon Gap? That's my other reason for being here.”

“What you mean?”

“I'm looking for—something happened to a Canadian woman over thirty years ago and my editor wants me to find out what happened to her. She came down to Jamaica to learn about the music and dance here. She was my editor's friend, and from what Angie—that's my editor—says, she was a sweet woman, in her late twenties, who was a bit naive, kind of idealistic. She came from a poor family and went to college on a scholarship, majoring in fine arts—that means like painting and dance and so on. Angie said she was really caring, always had a stray dog or cat she was taking care of, a good-hearted person. Before she came down to Jamaica, she was working in a store that sold dance clothes and she was teaching modern dance in a studio in Toronto. She'd always loved reggae music, and she started talking about coming to Jamaica to learn more about the dances down here. Her plan was to go back to Toronto and teach them.”

“How she disappeared?” Shad narrowed his eyes.

“Angie doesn't know, and I could only find two brief newspaper articles in the
Globe
about her disappearance—about the disappearance of her body from a hospital morgue. The articles never mentioned which hospital.”

Her listener's eyes stretched wide as he put down his sandwich. “What you mean? Her—how her body disappear?”

“That's what I'm supposed to find out. All I know for certain is that she had a Rastafarian boyfriend and left where she was living in Gordon Gap. Then she was found on the steps of some hospital very sick, and after her death her body vanished into thin air. She was an only child, so it must have hit her parents hard when they were told. The father came down, but he couldn't find out anything. Both parents have died, Angie said, but she wants to know what happened.”

“What really happened to her, though?”

“She was young and foolish, I'm thinking. Maybe she fell in love with this fellow—”

“And she get caught up in something like drugs or crime.”

“Something that killed her.”

“And they take her body because they didn't want it examined.”

“Then why did they take her to the hospital at all?” Shannon insisted. “They could have just buried the body after she died. Doesn't make sense, does it?”

Shad dabbed at his mouth with his napkin. “I asking myself, what would I do if my daughter disappear like that? I would hunt under every rock and bush, I'm telling you. But, you know, maybe the father didn't know where to start. Jamaica can be a difficult place to do any business like investigating things. The police busy all the time fighting gunmen, and they don't pay you no mind.” Shad narrowed his eyes. “This kind of job call for somebody who dedicated to it, who understand how to talk to witnesses and look for clues, seen? And even if is a cold case—so they call it on TV—somebody need to finish it off, so living people can get satisfaction, you know?”

“It doesn't seem right, I agree.”

“Like the dead woman just crying out for you to find her resting place, Shannon. I can hear her—you can't hear her?” He tilted his head back. “Shannon, Shad,” he wailed in a high-pitched voice, “come and find me. I'm here, I'm here.”

“You're a trip, Shad.” Shannon shook her head and smiled.

Shad took a sip of his lemonade. “You know where in Gordon Gap she was living, though?”

“Haven't a clue, and I don't know how I'm going to get around to it, with all the research for the article I have to do and the photographs I have to take. It's a big job, eh?”

Shad pushed away from the table, looking smug. “I knew there was some reason I supposed to help you. All I doing in the car now is falling asleep, anyway, because Carlton don't talk much.”

“But now there are two jobs to do. What if we have to go in different directions?”

“No problem, man. Let we just focus on looking for this lady and you can interview any Rastas you find on the way. Plenty Rastas all across Jamaica, and if she have a Rasta boyfriend like you say, my head telling me he was living in a camp near Gordon Gap. We can kill two bird with one stone.”

“Gordon Gap tomorrow, then.”

They discussed Shad's hourly rate for his part in the deal. He was happy for the extra money, he said, because he and Beth were spending all their money on the wedding, and with Joella going off to Titchfield High School in September, the extra cash would come in handy.

“By the way,” Shannon warned him, “you're the only person in Largo I've talked to about Katlyn—that's her name. I don't want anyone to worry about me, and I know they'd try to stop me from looking into it because it could be dangerous. I haven't told Eve because she'd probably end up telling Casey or Jennifer, you know kids. As for Eric, he's bound to try and stop us, and he's going to be negative about the whole thing, but they're paying me extra to find out about the woman, and I—I have to do it.”

“And Beth going to complain that I going to dead before the wedding, so I not telling her neither.”

After Shad left, Shannon went back to her room and turned on her laptop. While it was booting up, she slid open a drawer of the antique desk and removed the photo Angie had given her, the editor looking at it morosely before handing it over. The colors had faded and the serrated edges had started to curl, but nothing could hide the beauty of the young woman who stared back. She was wearing a peasant blouse and squinting into the sun, her oval face framed by long, dark hair and bangs. Under her straight nose was a tentative smile, one that hoped that the world was as kind as she was.

Shannon shook her head.
Katlyn, Katlyn,
she mused to the woman's image,
you got in over your head, didn't you?

She slipped the photograph into her laptop bag and moved to the armchair next to the window to transcribe her notes. She had just finished sending Angie and Chantrelle emails when she heard Jennifer and the children arriving back. Wayne, the Delgados' five-year-old, was wailing about something. Eve came in a few minutes later in her bathing suit, her nose bright red and her hair more disheveled than ever.

“How was the beach?” Shannon asked.

“I learned to bodysurf.”

“Did you get sunburned? You're kind of—”

“Can I use your bathroom?”

“What's the matter with yours?”

“There's a creepy-crawly thing in the tub.”

A lengthy shower followed, and Shannon was about to knock on the door and tell her not to waste the hot water when her daughter emerged, toweling her hair. “Do you have any gel?”

“I have mousse—and I have an idea.”

“What?”

“You might not like it at first—”

“Then don't tell me.”

“How would you like to take drumming lessons?”

S
hadrack Myers, otherwise a healthy man, didn't have a strong stomach, especially in the backseat of a car. The coast road at least allowed him to gaze at the ocean and gulp sea air, but the trip to Gordon Gap allowed him no escape. The uphill twists from Oracabessa had his head out the back window, trying to think of something other than his stomach, trying to keep up his side of the conversation.

“And Eve is thinking about taking classes from Ras Walker's son,” Shannon was saying from the front.

“Yeah,” Shad gulped. “I know his son—a nice guy, good teacher.”

“I was wondering if you could set that up for me, maybe on your way home?”

“Sure, sure—”

“I can do it,” Carlton said, his first words of the morning. “He live down the road from me.”

“Would you?” Shannon gave the driver one of her smiles. She'd always had pretty, white teeth, Shad thought, teeth that could twist a man's arm to do anything.

To Shad's relief, around the next corner a road sign that drooped to one side welcomed them to Gordon Gap. The tiny village was too small to have a square, but offered an intersection with a bar and a grocery store. When Carlton pulled up at Shad's direction, the backseat passenger almost fell out the door.

“Feeling better, are you?” Shannon teased when she joined him outside the shop.

“Yes, man.” Shad beat his chest. “Nothing like mountain air, you know.”

“Now, tell me why we're going to the grocery first.”

“In a little town like this, just like Largo, the postal agency is inside the grocery store, and the shopkeeper know everything that go on in the town.”

Sure enough, the cranky woman inside served as both the grocery-store owner and the postal clerk.

“I hope you can help us, ma'am,” Shad said. “We inquiring about a lady name—” He turned to his companion.

“Katlyn Carrington,” Shannon put in.

“I don't know anybody with that name,” the store owner said.

“She live here about thirty-five years ago.”

Miss Randall screwed up her lips. “That was before my time, but you can speak to Mistah Thorne. He live round the corner, been here all his life.”

Mr. Thorne was sitting in the shade of an ackee tree playing dominoes with three other elders. It clearly tickled the old man that he could impress his visitors and vanquish his opponents at the same time.

“You see that?” he called out as he smashed down a double three. He looked up at Shad, aged, yellow eyes shining. “What you say about that?”

“Nice, man, nice.”

“We can wait in the car until you're finished,” Shannon said.

“Stay right there.” Thorne pointed to the man on his right. “Robinson going to take a long time to play, his eyes not too good.” Robinson glared at him and back at the dominoes under his nose.

“We was wondering,” Shad said, “if you remember a Canadian lady who lived here about thirty-five years ago. Her name was Katlyn.”

Thorne looked up at the red ackee pods overhead. “Katlyn, Katlyn.” He scrutinized Shad for a second. “What she was doing here?”

“She was living—”

“She was a dancer,” Shannon interjected. “She rented a room or a house here for about six months.”

“A dancer,” Thorne said. “What kind of dancing you talking about?”