He smiled. Muscles bunching in his cheeks.
She sat across from him, clutching her carry-on bag and a sheaf of medical papers.
"I have my return ticket, and all the necessary inoculations." She slid the papers across. Her left arm still ached from the injections.
The inspector laughed, a low chuckle. "That's for your country to worry about, when you return." He rose, came around the desk toward her, and for a moment she thought they were done, but no.
He was looking at her carry-on bag. "Sorry-o. May I?"
She swallowed. "Of course."
He took everything out one item at a time, laying them on his desk. When he came to the Virgin in-flight magazine, she felt her throat constrict. It was her good fortune, however, that the inspector had already seen this issue. He gave it only a cursory glance. "Excellent article about the wine country in France, yes?"
He placed the magazine on his desk alongside her rumpled folds of clothes and assorted toiletries.
He surveyed the selection in front of him. "Only this?"
"I'm just here for two nights. I fly out again on Sunday. It's all there in the letter." She had explained this to the clerk at the consulate, how she'd won a ticket to anywhere, had always dreamed of Africa. She'd filled in all the necessary forms, had paid the necessary fees, had received the letter of invitation, as required, which Customs and Immigration had duly stamped.
Inspector Ribadu smiled at her. "Sightseeing, is it?"
She nodded.
"The Yankari Highlands, I imagine? To see the water buffaloes and baboons? Perhaps luck will smile and you will catch sight of some lions, very rare. This is West Africa, madam. We don't have the big-game safaris you might see elsewhere. But we do still have a few lions left, yes. And some hyenas. It's funny, madam. Visitors so often worry about lions, but it's the hyenas of this world one needs to watch for. They hunt in packs, hyenas. Lions hunt in prides. I like that," he said. "Calling them prides. No one ever speaks about a ‘pride of hyenas.' Have you noticed that?"
"I hadn't, no."
"Wikki Warm Springs. Those are in Yankari as well. Very beautiful. I imagine you will be visiting Wikki during your stay?"
"I'm hoping to, yes."
"Ah, but that would be impossible. The Yankari Highlands are very remote. Much too far for the short time you have. Indeed, madam, I'm surprised you didn't know this before you came. With the short time you have available to you, you'll be lucky to get out of Lagos."
Lucky to get out of Lagos.
Was that a veiled threat? She slid her hand into her skirt pocket. She had a fold of naira bills within easy reach, enough for an emergency but probably not enough for a bribe. But farther down, tightly folded in a small pouch she'd sewn into the lining of her skirt pocket: an American $100 bill.
The international currency.
"Corruption at Murtala Muhammed Airport in Lagos has been brought under control. Do not, under any circumstances, offer bribes to airport officials."
Every travel advisory had stressed this, but is that what the inspector was fishing for? A payoff? She extracted the folded bill, slipped it into the palm of her hand.
"Such a shame," he said. "You have a visa valid for thirty days, but are only staying two nights. No husband?"
"No husband."
"So... who supports you? You have a father, yes?"
"I support me."
"I see. In what line of work, madam?"
"I'm an editor—a copy editor. Grammar. Fact-checking.
Indexes. That sort of thing."
"I see. A journalist, then? Here to do another story on the Heartbreak of Africa?"
"I'm not here on any kind of assignment. I'm here as a tourist."
"But you do work for magazines?" He picked up the in-flight publication. "Perhaps you are only pretending to be a tourist, to avoid the paperwork required of journalists? The visas and such."
"No!" she said, a little too quickly. "No, not magazines."
She saw him catch this, her sharp reaction, but he didn't connect the flash of panic to the magazine he was holding in his hand. He put it to one side absentmindedly.
"Newspapers, then?"
"Books, mainly. Biographies. It's—it's nothing."
"How can something be nothing? I suspect you are being too modest, madam. We all have our stories to tell, don't we? We all have our secrets. Sometimes the smallest detail can be of the utmost importance, don't you think?" He looked again at her belongings neatly arranged on his desk, the tampons and T-shirts, the tightly rolled socks. "No camera," he said.
"Sorry?"
"No camera. A tourist with no camera. When I see such a thing, it... concerns me."
"My cellphone," she said. "It takes pictures."
"You came all the way to Africa to take photographs with a phone?"
"I was—I was going to buy a camera when I got to the hotel."
He turned back to the landing form that had been stapled into her passport. "Ah, yes. The Ambassador Hotel in Ikeja. It's very near here. You can see it from the airport. Splendid accommodations. I'm sure they will have shops which sell cameras and such, so that you may"—he searched for the right word
—"immortalize
your time here in Lagos." His smile softened, and he began placing her belongings back into her bag, starting with the in-flight magazine, flat along the bottom.
He'd missed it.
No explosives, no narcotics, no stash of money. It was something more combustible than that. And he'd missed it.
She quietly pushed the folded $100 bill back into her pocket pouch, unnoticed, as he finished zipping up her carry-on.
"There you go, madam. Enjoy your stay."
"Thank you. I will." She gathered up her bag, stuffed her medical papers into the side of her bag, hurried to leave.
"Madam?"
"Yes?"
"One last thing. Tell me, you hear of this problem we have in Nigeria? With 419?"
CHAPTER 7
This is what her father had told her as he was leaving. This is what Laura's dad had said the last time they ever met. "You, I love."
Why would he say that?
"You, I love."
She hadn't heard that turn of phrase in years.
Sergeant Brisebois accepted another cup of tea from Mrs.
Curtis, who said, "It must be very difficult for you, dealing with this sort of thing every day. I'm so sorry."
Laura's mom, apologizing to a police officer for her husband's death.
—Is the wife a suspect?—The wife is always a suspect.
The twins were trying to squirm their way out of the dining room. Warren had returned from the kitchen with a bag of Cheez Puffs, was fuming, as Warren was wont to do. And Laura? Laura was replaying it over and over in her mind: the last thing her father would ever say to her.
"You, I love."
Brisebois had asked whether Laura's father was on medication, had been told no, not even Advil. He was now going over apparent incongruities in the route Laura's father had followed earlier that night. "Mrs. Curtis—may I call you Helen?—in situations like this, we like to compile a record of the last twenty-four hours." He had a map of the city open on the coffee table. "Your husband worked in the east rail yards, here, on Blackfoot Trail. Is that correct?"
Her mother nodded.
"But the accident occurred at Ogden Road. As near as I can tell, he was going the wrong way. Do you suppose he forgot something, had turned around, was heading home?"
"Maybe. I don't know."
Warren cut in. "Don't you think she's had enough for one night?"
"Of course," said Sergeant Brisebois. He finished the last of his tea, stood up and was buttoning his jacket when he asked, almost in passing, "Helen, you don't suppose there was any reason your husband might have felt his life was in danger, do you?"
Warren snorted. "Dad? Don't be ridiculous."
Their mother looked at the officer, tilted her head at the question. "Why would you ask such a thing?"
"No reason. It's just—The speed he was travelling, it seemed excessive. The medical examiner will perform an autopsy; it's standard in a case like this. They'll check blood levels for alcohol, look for lesions in the heart or evidence of a brain seizure. Perhaps your husband simply fell asleep. You said he was having trouble in the nights before this happened. Insomnia?"
Their mother nodded. "I'd often hear him up in the middle of the night, microwaving milk to help him sleep." She looked over at Henry's chair, then drifted again into that in-between world."Maybe that's all this is," said Brisebois as he pulled on his cap.
"A case of driver fatigue. It's just that—there's a phenomenon we call scrub marks. These occur
inside
a tire track. When a vehicle is going at high speed and is then turned, forcibly, against its own forward momentum—even if the brakes
aren't
applied, there's this internal tension that occurs. You can see it: the vehicle is going one way, but the tires are being pulled another. We found very distinct scrub marks in the treads where your husband's car left the road.
Now, if someone falls asleep, then suddenly wakes up and cranks the wheel, that will create scrub marks. But if that had been the case, your husband would have been trying to steer his vehicle back
onto
the road; the scrub marks would pull him
toward
the bridge.
But your husband's treads pull in the opposite direction. Away from the bridge, toward the embankment."
Brisebois had released these details like depth charges and was watching their reactions carefully. The mother looked baffled. The son was eating Cheez Puffs from a bag and scowling. The daughter hadn't flinched, barely seemed to be breathing.
"So Dad was disoriented," said Warren irritably. He licked his fingers, now stained with orange. "He steered the wrong way.
What's your point?"
"We found a second set of tire tracks. This second set is back, higher on the road, halfway up. Those tracks stop long before the bridge."
Warren leaned in. "You think someone ran him off the road?"
"It's possible."
"I should have known! There's no way Dad would have been driving that fast! He was always a legal-speed-limi t sort of guy. And the injuries he had, those were..." Warren's voice trailed off.
Laura turned to her brother. "You saw Dad? You saw the—"
"Someone had to. And it sure as shit wasn't going to be Mom."
He glared at his sister. "What the hell took you so long, anyway? I had to come all the way in from Springbank. You're just up the hill; you can walk down, for Christ's sake."
She'd been working late and had switched her phone to voicemail because her father had taken to calling her in the middle of the night when he couldn't sleep. She'd had a deadline to meet and hadn't been picking up, and he never left a message. Just a series of clicks. It was only while she was brushing her teeth and had pushed
PLAY
that she heard, not her father's voice, but her mother's.
"Laura, pick up... please."
Laura's father: laid out under the sickly green of fluorescent light."You went?" she said. "You saw Dad?"
Warren didn't answer, wouldn't look at her, was keeping his eyes locked on the police officer instead, was refusing to blink, was denying sadness a foothold, was opting instead, and as always, for anger.And in that moment, the years fell away—fell like feathers in a pillow fight and there he was, her older brother. Her big brother.
Warren Curtis, staring down the mean girls, forcing them to apologize to his little sister. Warren, sneaking into a slasher flick with Laura in tow, squeezing her arm, whispering at crucial moments,
"Look away, look away
now!
"
Laura tried to catch her brothers eye. She wanted to mouth
"thank you" to him the way his wife had whispered "hello" to her, but he wouldn't look, couldn't look.
If he did, he would start to cry
, she thought.
And he can't let that happen. He can't. Because once it starts, it never ends.
"So that's what this is?" Warren asked the officer. "Some asshole joy riders figuring it would be fun to chase an old man down a hill?
You better find those fuckers before I do."
"Language," their mother admonished, drifting back into the conversation.
Warren ignored her. "For Christ's sake, officer. I've watched
C.S.I.
Can't you run the tires through some sort of database, find these assholes?"
"Tire treads aren't like fingerprints," said Brisebois. "They change, constantly. You're dealing with rubber, which is a soft compound. A week later, even a day, and the tread marks will have been altered. A tire picks up a rock, loses a bit of rubber, forms a new crack, and the marks change. That said, yes, we can match marks that are
consistent
with a certain tire. But it's not like there's a central registry for tire treads. We can't find a vehicle based solely on its tires."
Laura turned to the picture window, saw the living room reflected back on itself. Her brother and her mother. The officer and herself. Her father, no longer there.
Language. Conceals as much as it reveals.
"You, I love."
Why would he say that?
CHAPTER 8
Mist on green waters. Children, waiting. Once the men had finished, the little ones would be called. They would scramble down with their buckets to collect the smaller fish that had been missed. That call would come soon; the men were moving quickly through tidal waters, backs bent, pulling hard on the nets.