“No. And Haitians will not be willing to talk to you, but perhaps they will speak to me. I will see what I can learn. People are very frightened now. It is the bokor. It is very dangerous for you to be asking these questions.” She squeezed my hand, then let go. “I have something for you.”
She stood and walked into a room at the back of the house. Solange had fallen asleep leaning against my arm. The house was quiet, though the sound of the drums outside grew ever louder. I wanted to get out of there, and I was tempted to just get up and leave. Finally, Racine returned with a small sachet-like bag on a leather thong. She placed it over my head.
“Do not take this off. This is from La Sirene. She will help you, protect you from the bokor."
I held the bag to my nose and sniffed. It smelled like old seaweed, and I made a face. “What’s in this?”
“Just wear it, and La Sirene will be watching.”
I shook my head. “Who is La Sirene?”
Racine smiled. “La Sirene is the spirit in the sea, and she watches over you. She will protect you from the bokor."
“And what the heck is a bokor?"
“Americans think Vodou is about black magic. This is not so for mambos and hougans. We are healers. But the bokor...” She looked away and lowered her head. She spoke very softly. “He is not a healer.”
I rubbed my hand over my eyes and then thought about Racine’s kindness and concern. “It’s a lot to digest in one night, you know,” I said. “People possessed by spirits, animal sacrifice”—I held up the pouch—“and magic seaweed.” I shook my head and attempted to smile.
She pointed to a painting filled with bright-colored animals standing around a large wooden cross. “Many years ago, when the missionaries in Haiti asked the African slaves to worship the cross that Christ died on, the Africans saw it as symbolic of the Crossroads—the divider between the spirit world and ours. The Europeans were pleased when the Africans accepted the cross, but what they did not realize was that though they and the Africans were looking at the same cross, each was seeing something profoundly different.” She stroked my hair, as if I were a child like the one sleeping between us. “Always remember, Seychelle, you will see what your experience has prepared you to see.”
All the way to the car, Racine kept insisting that Solange was supposed to sleep in the peristil overnight, that the child needed to stay for the full benefit of the lave tete ceremony. The lwa would protect her, Racine said, and she argued it was too dangerous to take her away.
I thanked her profusely for helping the girl, buckled Solange into the Jeep, then turned back to face her.
“Racine, you said you were going to meet someone on board the Miss Agnes. What happened?”
I could barely make out her features in the dark yard, but I could sense how her body tensed. After several seconds of quiet, I thought she wasn’t going to answer my question. When she spoke, finally, her voice was tight with emotion. “It was my sister. She never made it to shore.”
At the stoplight, waiting to turn onto 1-95, I saw Solange staring into the darkness, the fear raw on her face.
“What happened back there?” I asked. “Why did you scream?”
She turned to face me. “I saw him,” she said.
“Who?”
“Le Capitaine.” She turned her head to stare out into the night as the light turned green.
XVIII
As I pulled the Jeep into Jeannie’s yard, I cursed at the sight of the white Suburban with the green lettering. I checked my watch, then winced. It was after ten. I didn’t want to give Rusty Elliot any reason to think I wasn’t taking care of Solange properly, any reason for him to take her away. How the hell was I going to explain bringing her home in a dress splattered with blood?
Racine had handed me a plastic bag with Solange’s shorts and T-shirt as we had passed through the house on our way out, and now I dug around in the back of the Jeep to find them. I figured I would change her clothes before taking her upstairs. It wasn’t only that Rusty was here; Jeannie hadn’t been all that thrilled at my taking the child off to that Voodoo house at night, either. She’d go ballistic, too, if she saw her now.
As I helped Solange unbuckle her seat belt, the porch light went on upstairs, and Jeannie appeared on the landing. “Hey, you. What took you so long? I’ve been trying to entertain Mr. Wonderful up here for a couple of hours now, and he’s been getting more and more charming by the minute. Get yourself and that kid up here.”
Damn. My chance to cover up the evidence had just evaporated. “Okay, we’re coming.”
Rusty came through the door just as we reached the top of the landing. I saw something in the way his face lit up when he saw me that told me he hadn’t come only on business. I was sorry that I was going to disappoint him.
In his green work uniform, with its patches and badges, leather belt and gun, he looked more intimidating than he had in his shorts. This was not a man to play around with.
He looked at Solange. “What the hell happened to this child?” he asked.
She was walking on her own, awake and alert, but in the bright glare of Jeannie’s porch light, it was clear her white dress had red polka dots.
“Calm down,” I said, and as I said it, I couldn’t help but think that those were the exact words Racine had told me less than an hour earlier. “Look at her.” Solange smiled up at me. “See?” I pointed to her smile. “It worked, so don’t gripe.” I smoothed her loose clean hair back from her brow, tucked it into her white headscarf. “And as far as I know, they’re going to eat the chicken.” Rusty’s jaw dropped.
Jeannie pushed Rusty out of the doorway and stood on the landing with her hands on her hips. “What chicken?”
I ignored her, tried to act like it was perfectly normal to come home after ten o’clock at night with a ten-year-old covered in chicken blood. “It’s not really that different from your going to Winn Dixie, when you think about it, except when you buy the chicken there, you don’t risk getting the blood on you.” Rusty hadn’t moved, he just continued to stare at me. Finally he said, “You took this child to some kind of animal sacrifice?”
“Well—”
Jeannie shook her head, took the girl’s hand, and said, “I’ll go wash her up and get her into some clean pajamas.” She fixed me with a stare over the top of Solange’s head and said in a soft voice, “You and I will discuss this later.”
“You didn’t answer me, Miss Sullivan,” Rusty said when Jeannie had disappeared through the door and down the hall. “Did you or did you not take that child to a place where they were engaged in animal sacrifice?”
“Oh Rusty, yes. Yes, I did. Okay? This is South Florida, though. Come on. You’d have a right to be that shocked in Omaha or Wisconsin or somewhere, but not here.”
“She’s got blood on her!” he yelled.
“And she’s Haitian,” I yelled back. “For Pete’s sake, man, down in Miami they’ve got a guy at the courthouse whose job it is to go out and pick the dead chickens up off the sidewalk every morning. Family members leave them when the prisoners are transferred from jail to court. Wake up, man. You’re not in Kansas anymore.”
He crossed his arms, his lips stretched thin. He stared at me for several seconds, letting the silence stretch out. “Are you finished?”
“Yeah, for now.” I stepped around him and walked into Jeannie’s living room.
Rusty followed me. “Seychelle, you don’t seem to understand that I am stretching the regulations very thin even to allow this child to stay in this home.” He reached out and put his hand on my shoulder. “What were you thinking?”