Heaven Is High (6 page)

And finding her pregnant scotched that, Barbara thought. She asked Binnie how and when she had learned to swim well enough to jump off the yacht and swim to shore at Miami Beach.

This time Martin answered without waiting for Binnie to sign. She nodded as he told how Domonic had made her and her mother dive for abalone and conch for the restaurant trade. Her mother and Anaia had swum a lot in Belize, sometimes down deep by the reefs. Her mother had taught Binnie.

After she asked Binnie a few more questions, Martin said, “Barbara, she's written a lot of the things you're asking about. Pretty much all she can remember about her mother. How Domonic used Binnie as hostage whenever he sent her mother out to shop or anything. After her mother got sick, she became the hostage and Binnie was sent out to the market. It's all in the notes she made for me, a notebook full of them.”

“Okay, fair enough. I'll read the material, and if I have more questions we'll get back to them. One more for now. Binnie, do you resemble your mother?”

Binnie looked taken aback by the question, surprised and very unhappy. It was a tough one, Barbara knew. Few people saw their own resemblance to family members, likenesses others recognized at a glance. But it was more than just that, she realized, watching Binnie struggle with the question.

She started to sign, stopped, and looked at her hands miserably. After a moment, she signed again, not looking at Barbara or Martin. When her hands became silent, Martin reached out for one and held it.

In a low voice he said, “She doesn't know. Her mother had turned into an old, destroyed woman by the time Binnie reached puberty. They were about the same size, that's all she can tell you.” His voice dropped even lower. “Her mother died, probably of AIDS, before she reached forty.”

Tears were on Binnie's cheeks, and Martin said, “Why don't you go up and get that notebook for Barbara?” He kissed her hand before releasing it. Without a glance at either of them, Binnie rose and walked rapidly from the room with her head lowered

“She needs a couple of minutes,” Martin said.

Barbara could only agree. “When she's ready, I'd like to take some pictures,” she said. “I'm going to try to get in touch with her grandfather and hope he's more humane with his granddaughter than he was with his daughter. I want to try to enlist his help in establishing her identity, her right to refuse deportation to Haiti.”

Hope flared in his eyes but faded quickly. “There's not enough time, is there? Find him, send him pictures, write or telephone him. Just not enough time.”

“I'll prepare another document, a letter to the immigration office in Eugene. It's a request for an extension of the deadline in which to locate the necessary documents. I'll use my father's office stationery. As imposing as that is, and as prestigious as the firm is, it should make them hesitate to deny the request. Or at the very least make them decide to pass it on to superiors for a response.”

He nodded and then said, “You'll be buying some time, maybe. Barbara, if nothing works, if they come after her hard, I won't let them take her. I won't let her go to that hellhole and suffer what her mother suffered. I'll kill her first, and then turn the gun on myself. That's just the way it is.”

“We won't let her go back, Martin. We're in this together and we won't let them send her back.”

He studied her face, then stood and held out his hand to her. When he released her hand, Barbara reached into her briefcase for her camera.

Binnie returned with her hair brushed, her face washed, and without a trace of tears. She had put on lipstick. She looked ready to do battle, ready to swim to shore again.

6

Barbara did not linger at Frank's house any longer than good manners and her conscience demanded that night. She wanted to get home in time to call Bailey and to read Binnie's notes. As soon as she arrived, she checked her windows and the back door. Bailey had installed new locks, and he had left a small piece of Scotch tape on each of the old sash windows. If the window had been raised, the tape would reveal it.

Developing paranoia? she asked silently, and her answer was swift: You bet I am. All the tape was intact. It was not yet ten and she placed her call to Bailey.

He grumbled when she asked him to come around as early as he could. “Barbara, give me a break. Stuff takes just a little bit of time, you know.”

“I have a roll of film I want developed and prints made as soon as possible. Your guy can do it. One-day service, same-day service, in fact.”

“Jeez,” he said. “Nine o'clock.”

She made a pot of coffee and took a cup to her office to read Binnie's notes, more a journal than just notes, but in no particular order, no chronological order. She had written about various incidents and memories as they occurred to her or when Martin asked questions. As Barbara read, her stomach twisted and her head began to ache. Over and over, she stood, walked from her office to pace the cramped rooms, and returned, resumed.

What was portrayed in the pages was a life of degradation, humiliation, deprivation, pain, and fear. It was also the story of an intelligent woman with formidable courage and determination to save her daughter.

For several minutes after turning the last page over Barbara sat with her eyes closed, trying to banish the images that had forced their way into her head. She didn't blame Martin. Death would be better than such a life.

Finally she turned on her computer and began to write a narrative, a chronological reordering of the jumbled account.

The pirates had sailed the freighter around Jamaica to an isolated stretch of the coast, where they anchored the ship offshore and began to unload crates into several small boats that went ashore. They were at it when there was gunfire ashore. Domonic and another man, Louis, pushed Shala into a small boat and headed out to sea with her. They ended up in Haiti.

There was a shack, one big room with a kitchen at one end, a bedroom, and another closetlike room that had shelves as if at one time it had been a pantry. Shala and Binnie were to inhabit that room until Shala's death. The two men often fought and at some point the fight got violent and afterward Louis was gone. Shala had not known if he had been killed or if he ran away.

Domonic was obsessed with newspapers for weeks, until there was an article in an English-language paper that he made Shala read to him. The pirates had been ambushed onshore that night, and they had all been killed. Seven tons of marijuana had been seized by the government. No mention was made of Domonic and Louis, or of Shala. It was assumed that everyone aboard the freighter before the attack had been murdered. Soon after the article appeared, Domonic made Shala write to her father and plead for her rescue. When the man sent by her father denounced her, Domonic beat her severely.

The other newspapers were in Spanish,
The Caribbean News
and
Island News.
The English-language one had come from Jamaica.

Domonic began to exploit Shala, charging men to have sex with her in his bed. She had become a domestic and sexual slave. One of the men gave her a little extra money each time, and she hoarded her coins until, when Binnie was about three, she took her stash of money to a nun and begged her to buy a book of ASL. Few nuns would even talk to her, but treated her as a dirty, diseased whore until she finally found one who listened and agreed. As soon as she had the book, she began to teach Binnie to sign. She taught her to read the newspapers she managed to scrounge, and used the margins and whatever scraps of paper she could find for Binnie to practice writing and do math. Along the way Binnie also learned Spanish although Shala taught her English. When Domonic sent Shala to market, he kept Binnie locked in their room. Shala was afraid to go to the police. They were corrupt and she feared that they themselves might seize her and rape her. Domonic's threat to kill Binnie if she didn't return promptly when she went outside the shack was enough to keep her imprisoned. At night, he sent Shala into the room and locked them both in. There, in the dark, whispering so he would not hear, Shala taught Binnie all she could remember from her own education at a convent and two years at the university.

There had been a large plantation, where she and her sister had lived, and there had been a house in Belize City. At the plantation there had been servants and many orchids on a wide verandah. After their mother died, when Shala was ten and Anaia twelve, their father sent them to a convent boarding school. The sisters had inherited money from their mother, enough to leave the school and their father's house when they were seventeen, and to attend the university. He had denounced Anaia when she married an American, and he had tried to force Shala to leave school and to marry the man he had chosen for her.

When Shala became too ill to carry out Domonic's orders, he locked her in the room and made Binnie go to the market and to continue diving for the abalone and conch. It wasn't in the notes, but Barbara added: After Shala died, he no longer had a hostage to force Binnie to do his bidding and, believing in the curse, he was afraid to touch her or to let others touch her in his house. He decided to sell her.

Barbara shuddered and left her desk again, refilled her cup, and reluctantly returned. When Binnie's accounts swam to mind, she shook her head and said under her breath, “That part's over and done with. Let it go, damn it.”

There were a few clues to follow up on in the notes, in her reordering of them. Shala was seventeen when she went to the university, and Anaia was nineteen. Shala attended for two years, and was nineteen when she fled with her lover. And Anaia had been married by then, between the ages of seventeen and twenty-one. Probably closer to twenty-one, Barbara decided. If Shala had known the American very long it seemed likely that she would have known his surname well enough to remember and include it in the message to her daughter. A possible starting place was to find the American's name.

More, Barbara continued, jotting notes as she reasoned. Binnie had swum to the yacht three years ago. Domonic had claimed his kidnapped daughter was a minor, and she might have been. So the three years since her escape plus sixteen, seventeen, possibly eighteen years put the piracy from nineteen to twenty-two years in the past. And assuming that Anaia had married during the year of Shala's departure meant that the wedding had taken place between twenty and twenty-three years ago. Between 1960 and 1963. The marriage had to be on record somewhere. How many young Belize women had married Americans during that period?

She had to find that sister, Barbara decided. If the father was still the tyrant who had rejected one daughter and believed the other one dead, the sister might be Binnie's only hope of finding an ally in Belize. Or Anaia and her father might have become reconciled over the two decades. She might have some influence over him, or influence of her own to wield.

If they could demonstrate that Shala was already pregnant when Domonic enslaved her, that Shala and her child had been citizens of Belize with relatives still in Belize, it would quash any charge of kidnapping made by Domonic. But would it be enough to put a hold on deportation? Would they deport Binnie to Haiti or to her legitimate family? Her status as an illegal alien would not be changed. Call her grandfather, Augustus Santos? Plead for help? Reluctantly she nodded. She had to try, even if it was a long shot.

Barbara paced until she was exhausted. She needed expert help, she knew, and there wasn't enough time. Martin was right. There wasn't enough time. Just get a delay, she thought tiredly at last and got ready for bed.

*   *   *

It was a few minutes before nine the next morning when her doorbell rang. Expecting to see Bailey when she opened the door, she was surprised instead to see Nicholson. She did not open the door wider to invite him in.

“Ms. Holloway, may I have a few minutes of your time?” he asked, glancing up and down the street.

“I'm afraid not,” she said. “I'm quite busy this morning. I delivered your message to Mr. Owens and I don't believe we have anything further to discuss.”

“You said something that I took to heart, Ms. Holloway. You asked why I didn't make my proposal to Mr. Owens myself, and at this desperate time for him and his wife, I think you're absolutely right. My problem is that I don't know where to find them.” He smiled and spread his hands wide apart. “If you would be so kind as to give me an address, or even a phone number, that would be most helpful.”

His high-pitched voice irritated her as much as it had before, and now it had acquired a whining tone that made it even more hateful.

“Sorry,” she said. “I'm sure he'll be in touch when they've made up their minds. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'll get back to my own work.”

He held the door open. “Ms. Holloway, it is the duty of law-abiding citizens to assist government investigations if asked to do so and especially officers of the courts, as attorneys are, are even more obliged to render such assistance. It is not a good idea to antagonize any federal agency, to have it recorded in your file, which is shared by all agencies.”

“I'll keep that in mind, Mr. Nicholson. Good day.” She closed her door hard against the resistance of his hand, then went to her window to watch him walk to a parked car, get in, and drive away.

A few minutes later when the bell rang again, she checked at the window before opening her door to Bailey. There was no car parked at the curb except her own this time. Bailey was carrying a beat-up duffel bag partly over his shoulder.

“What's that for?” she asked when he came in.

“My gear,” he said. “Junior detective kit. Cost me twenty-five cereal box tops. I smell coffee.”

“Come on,” she said, going to the kitchen table where she had the carafe and cups ready. “Did you see Nicholson? He wants to know how to locate Martin Owens.”

“Is that who he was?” He pulled his notebook from the duffel bag and made a note.