Chapter 14

By the time they came to get here, Jean had decided that death was not so bad.

She would be with her mother and her aunt and being hungry and tired and thirsty would all be over.

Her mother believed that there was a better life and they would all be together with Jesus Christ and Jean believed that also.

With her heart and her soul.

She only hoped that when death did come to her, it would be swift. Like the bullet in the head that Victor kept threatening her with. That no one would douse her with gasoline and set her on fire, like they did to Jimmy’s cousin. Or electrocute her. Or choke her until her tongue, purple and swollen, hung out of her mouth.

She was still praying with Victor opened the door.

He eyed her with suspicion and then ordered her to move.

She limped up to him, dragging her foot behind her. It didn’t prevent Victor from shoving her out the door and into the car.

Matthew was sitting in the front seat. He handed her a glass of water and a plastic dish of chick peas. “Eat,” he instructed, as though she needed an order. She gulped the water down and chewed the peas with gusto.

“We don’t want you to pass out before you find those stones,” Victor said roughly as he snapped the glass partition shut and started the car.

She wasn’t going to find the stones and she knew this. But, at least, she would die with a full stomach.

They dropped her at the river bank, which was deserted. Night was falling and it had begun to darken. Matthew stayed in the car, while Victor followed her. He stood, shining a flashlight in her direction and then he threw a shovel at her, missing her head by mere inches.

“Do you remember where you were?”

She peered nervously at her surroundings. How could she tell? The sand looked all the same. She wasn’t even sure if she would remember what the rocks looked like.

“Start there,” Victor pointed a few feet away. “And I’ll be watching you.”

Watching her? Like there was someplace to go with her foot aching? Like she could run.

She would never run again.

Dragging the shovel, she hobbled over to the end of the bank and began to dig. She couldn’t go too deeply. She didn’t think the stones would be buried under layers and layers of dirt. And how would she even recognize them? In the middle of all those soil, they would just look like more mud. She was just humoring Victor and Matthew as she added minutes to her life.

She looked up and saw Victor watching her. After a few moments, he sat down, but he never took his eyes off of her.

Nothing.

An hour later, still nothing. Maybe she had dug them up and she just hadn’t recognized them. Darkness fell over the river bank and the flashlight batteries grew dim. But Jean kept digging anyway.

“You need to find that coltan,” Victor said.

Didn’t he think she wanted to find the coltan? Didn’t he realize that she wanted nothing more?

“They got my wife,” Victor blurted out suddenly.

Jean stopped digging.

“Keep working!” he bellowed. She dug around the rocks. “That’s right. They got my wife. And they’re going to keep her until I deliver the stones. Do you know what that means?”

Jean wasn’t sure if she was supposed to answer or not.

“Do you know what that means?” he screamed at her.

“No,” Jean mumbled.

“Because of a brat like you, a girl who isn’t worth the air she breathes, whose life could be snuffed out in a minute, and should be snuffed out in a minute, who is nothing but a filthy witch child, some poor man’s mistake, my wife is suffering!”

“I’m sorry,” Jean’s voice broke. And she was sorry, but not for Victor.

“Well, you should be sorry. Those darn rebels. They have no mercy at all. I’m going to get something to eat. Do you remember where I parked the car?”

Jean nodded.

“It’s not far away, so I’ll be back very soon. I’ll bring you some more batteries.” For a moment Jean thought he was going to offer to bring her some food, or at least another glass of water. “If you try to get away, if you head for the woods, I’ll come after you. I’ll put a bullet in your other foot, and then you’ll really be a cripple. You understand?”

Jean nodded again, surprised that he hadn’t threatened to put a bullet in her head. That would come later.

“Do you understand?” he repeated loudly.

“Yes,” she muttered.

He walked away, leaving her in the darkness. She was tempted to give up, but he might still be watching her. And maybe he’d get mad and shoot her in her foot, just for fun. So she kept digging.

Although her effort was half hearted. She was doomed and she knew it.

She thought about what Victor said, about her being worthless, about being some poor man’s mistake. Maybe it was all true. If she should die, who would even know the difference? Just one more body thrown to the side of the road.

Someone was walking towards her. At first Jean thought it was Victor but she realized soon enough that the form was smaller and almost seemed to float, like a ghost.

Maybe her mother had come to get her.

Jean dropped the shovel and stood very still as she stared at the figure dressed in white. “Mama?” she whispered.

It wasn’t her mother. It was a woman whom Jean had never seen before. Jean couldn’t tell her age in the darkness but she was tall and thin and had an angular, sharp face with high cheekbones.

Jean stood watching her, wondering if she were in any danger, wondering where Victor was, wondering if Victor would be angry, as though Jean could control a woman wandering in the dark on the river bank.

Maybe it was Victor’s wife and Victor had sent her to say it was all okay.

“Are you the witch child?” the woman asked.

Jean shook her head.

“But you are,” the woman insisted. “I saw you here that day.”

Maybe she saw something else, Jean thought, maybe she saw me drop the stones.

“Can you help me?” The woman stooped down and Jean realized that she was quite old. “I have money.” The woman reached her wrinkled hand down the front of her blouse and drew out a soiled handkerchief, which was tightly knotted. Slowly she untied the material and took out several coins. “I can pay you.”

“I don’t have any power,” Jean whispered.

“You lie!” the woman shouted.

Jean looked up, wondering if Victor had heard and expecting him to appear any moment, aiming the pistol and shooting them both.

“But then again,” the woman said, quite resigned. “You’re a witch child and witches lie all the time.”

Jean wanted to say that if she were a witch child she wouldn’t be digging in the dark, tired, thirsty, hungry.

“I’m an old woman. This is my last chance. Will you help me?”

“I can’t.”

The woman seemed very angry then. Jean didn’t want to make anymore people angry. “What do you want?” she asked.

“I want you to help me the way you helped Ruth.”

“Who’s Ruth?”

“You know,” the woman was very irritated. “You cast a spell on her just yesterday afternoon. She was having trouble with her mother-in-law.”

Jean continued to dig very slowly (in case Victor was watching). “And now her mother-in-law is nice?” Probably just having a good day, Jean thought.

“No, her mother-in-law is still mean. But Ruth doesn’t care. Because,” the woman looked around and Jean couldn’t help but wonder what the woman would do if Victor suddenly appeared on the scene, “she’s come into some good fortune.”

Jean stopped digging. She felt cold all over. “What do you mean?”

“Someone left her a lot of money, a distant cousin. She’s going to move out of her mother-in-law’s house and get a home of her own.”

“And when did this happen?” Jean asked in a soft, squeaky voice.

“Yesterday, right after you cast the spell. She went home and someone told her about the good news. So, do you think you could do that for me?”

Jean paused, thinking how quiet it was on the river bank. How long would it be before Victor heard them talking?

Jean did not want Victor to hear them talking.

“Go,” she said to the woman. “I’ll help you after you leave.”

“You’ll cast a spell?” the woman asked hopefully.

“I promise that I’ll do the same thing for you that I did for Ruth.”

“Thank you,” the woman squeezed Jean’s hand with her own gnarled fingers and vanished as mysteriously as she had come.

And, because Jean was a person of her word, she quickly prayed for the woman, trying hard to remember exactly what she had said the day before. But Jean knew exactly why Ruth had come into good fortune. And it had nothing whatsoever to do with a distant cousin.

Ruth had found the coltan.

Jean picked up the shovel again and pretended to dig. She had never hoped to find the stones buried in the sand, but now she knew that was sheer impossibility. The question she grappled with was what to do.

Her impulse was to tell Victor and Matthew. They would certainly deal with Ruth, whose good fortune would come to an abrupt end when she encountered the greedy men.

But Jean didn’t know if that was to her advantage. She thought that they might keep Jean alive until the coltan were found. Maybe. But once they had the stones, they would probably kill Jean and Ruth, especially if they had to pass the coltan on to someone else. Hadn’t Victor said that the men who were waiting for the stones had no mercy?

Killing Jean would pose no problem. People believed she was a witch child and it was necessary to exorcise the devil, who could cause great harm to innocent citizens. And if the witch child should die in the process, well, that was Lucifer’s fault.

They could also kill Ruth, claiming that Jean had transferred her powers to the woman when she had cast the spell. Or Ruth could just disappear and they could start the rumor that she had taken her good fortune and moved away.

At any rate, both Jean and Ruth would soon be dead.

The best thing, Jean decided, was to buy time, to claim she could have dropped the stones further in the woods. They might let her return to the stream and Jean could pretend to look for them. In the meantime, maybe she could figure out a way to escape.

To where?

It didn’t matter—it shouldn’t matter. When she ran away from Asmodeus, she didn’t know about Sister Mary Jude. She only knew that if she didn’t move and move fast, she’d get killed. That hadn’t changed.

But running away from Asmodeus was one thing. Roman had said that the town wouldn’t pursue her when new witches popped up every day. And chances were that Pastor Francis would give up if the search got too hard.

As Victor had said in so many words, what was one girl?

Except Victor and Matthew believed this girl knew the whereabouts of coltan.

Jean wished that she knew what coltan was. She was about to die for stones and she had no idea of why they were valuable.

She heard a noise. She looked up and saw Victor walking toward her. From the grim look on his face, she guessed he wasn’t happy.

He stood there, holding a flashlight, blinding her.

“I’m sorry,” she mumbled. “I can’t find them. I don’t think they’re here.”

“Then where do you think they are?” he asked through gritted teeth.

“Maybe I dropped them further on in the woods. You see, I was thirsty and I didn’t want to drink water from this river. Someone told me that there was a better stream about a mile down the road. So I walked there and I found the stream and the water was cold and—” Jean paused, thinking how much she’d like a sip of that water right about now. “So I may have dropped them there. I can’t be sure.”

Victor didn’t say anything for a few moments. She wondered if he was deciding what to do with her. He obviously couldn’t kill her, not until he knew where she had been, where she might have dropped the stones. But then again, he couldn’t expect her to find the path in the dark, even with all the flashlights in the world.

She wasn’t sure she could trace her steps in the daylight, but that wouldn’t matter anyway.

Since she wasn’t going to find the stones there and she knew that.

“Wait here,” he instructed her, this time leaving her in complete darkness because he took both flashlights with him. Jean sank down on the dirt. She was bone tired and had to fight to keep her eyes open.

Last night she had slept in a nice, cozy bed, believing with all her heart that when the morning came she’d be on her way to the next village and delivered safely into the hands of Sister Mary Jude. It was ridiculous how little time it took for everything to change. In fact when Jean actually thought about it, she had only been on the run for four days.

Jean felt as though she had lived a lifetime.

He wasn’t coming back. Not so soon. Were he and Matthew sitting in the car, trying to decide what to do with her? Would they kill her tonight right here on the river bank and maybe just throw her in the water with the rest of the filth and pollution?

Or would they just leave her bullet ridden body on the banks for everyone to see what happens to a witch child who escapes from prison?

Maybe she should run now. She could go back and hide in the woods.

They would find her. And she had no doubt that Victor was serious when he said he’d shoot her in the other foot. If he didn’t kill her first.

Just let it be fast, she prayed. And let me see my mother and my aunt and my guardian angel and the Blessed Virgin and—

She was dozing when someone jabbed her in the ribs. She snapped up, at first not remembering where she was. The flashlight in her eyes brought it all back.

“Get up,” Victor pulled her. “You’re coming with me.” He grabbed her by the arm and began shoving her up the hill and towards the car. Her foot hurt so much it felt as though it were on fire. She bit her tongue so she wouldn’t scream out in pain.

She didn’t think that Victor would care, in fact, he might even push her harder.

She was surprised to learn that, when she returned to the car, Matthew had left. Probably gone home to his own nice house with the fans and the marble floor and the fluffy beds and the pretty wife and the nicely dressed children.

Victor threw her in the back seat without saying a word and then he started the car.

She knew where she was going. Back to the hut. To spend an uncomfortable night on the cold hard floor.

At least she was alive.