Trinidad Noir by Lisa Allen-Agostini & Jeanne Mason

Author:Lisa Allen-Agostini & Jeanne Mason [Allen-Agostini, Lisa & Mason, Jeanne]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: ebook, book
ISBN: 9781933354552
Publisher: Akashic Books
Published: 2008-08-02T04:00:00+00:00

I’ve forgotten with all the frantic e-mailing to mention Carmella, my neighbor opposite on the same landing who amounted to a welcoming party—Chinese delicacies passed through a crack in my door the first morning. “Thought you would like these.” Steamed wontons! Why not fried? I leave them for my lunch. Never saw her again for days, except I notice that every time I park my car under her window, she parts her curtains and looks out. Always at the window, peeping. I wonder what she’s seen.

It’s this one boy! He disappeared the day after I arrived in the apartment. Odd that the school has not been shut down. That would give me some peace but it might make it more difficult for me to learn anything. I still feel I will discover something as I sit here on mornings like James Stewart in Rear Window with Grace Kelly. Love those oldies with the stars. There’s no Grace Kelly here. I wanted to be Grace Kelly once.

I sit with my binoculars, not lame like James Stewart. I stare into the assembly hall, keeping a watch on the main gate and playground. I train my binoculars on the tiptop flowering of the palmiste where the blue-gray tanagers and keskidees love to feed on the berries of the flowering royal palm.

I had been doing this the morning after my arrival, when I saw him being picked up by a respectable-looking gentleman in a smart Rover. Not the most common car here, I thought, Japanese dominate with a variety of Nissans. The boy was black and also the gentleman, what I called old-fashioned political type, like the first crooks who stole all the oil money in the ’80s. Of course, then I thought nothing of anything. It is only now, piecing together the stories, that I realize that I was probably the last to have seen him.

I phone Sasha: “I think I was the last to see one of the little boys.” Then, I can’t help myself.

“Take it easy, Pat. Come, come . . .”

“I keep going over the moments and wondering what was in the frame which could tell me now that the man was or was not his father and if the little boy was at all anxious, resisting, being forced, some clue. I wish now it was not just the binoculars but the digital which I could have clicked away on and had the whole scene over and over to examine.” Sasha had given me the digital, bless him. “But as you know, not like me to have any of that ready. Not like me at all. I have just bought my first mobile, cell. As I said, I’m stuck in the middle of the nineteenth century.”

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