Last to die

Rene was checking her reflection in the rearview mirror, putting up her hair for the long and hot ride ahead of them. Jack averted his eyes when she caught him staring, though she didn’t seem to mind the attention.

With a bobby pin in her mouth she asked, “When are you going to get around to asking me?”

“Asking you what?”

“The question that must be on your mind: Why didn’t Sally leave one red cent of her forty-six million dollars to her darling sister, Rene?”

Jack removed his dusty Australian-style hat and wiped the sweat from the back of his neck with a banda

“What are you waiting for?”

“Honestly, my plan was to give it a day or two, get to know you a little, so I could tell if you were lying or not. Then I was going to ask.”

She cut her eyes and said, “You think you’re going to get to know me that well, do you?”

“No, I wasn’t implying-I’m a pretty quick study, is what I’m trying to say.”

She seemed amused by his embarrassment. She took his hand and said, “Put your finger right here, would you, please?”

Jack pressed his finger to the center of a long, twisted braid at the back of her head. Rene tied it all together with a colorful piece of rope, the kind he’d seen African women selling on the streets of Korhogo. In seconds, she’d completely transformed her look, and somehow it came as no surprise to Jack that she was just as striking with all that hair tucked up under her hat.

She looked at Jack and asked, “Should I tell you now?”

“Tell me what?”

“About me and Sally. And her will.”

“Now’s good.”

“You sure? I can wait, if you think you’ll be a better judge of my truth telling after we’ve bounced all the way back to Korhogo together.”

She was clearly poking fun at his “plan.” He said, “I’ll assume the risk. Go ahead.”

She took a breath, adopting a more serious air. “Truth is, Sally and I had a little falling out.”

“How little?”

“Actually, not so little. We were barely speaking to each other after she left Africa.”

“What happened?”

“Things were great while she was here. Everybody at Children First loved her. Two sisters working side by side for a good cause, fighting against the use of children as slave labor in the cocoa fields. I was truly sad when she decided to leave, and I thought I understood. Till about two months later. That’s when I found out Sally was getting married.”

“To her millionaire husband.”

“Not just any millionaire. Sally’s mega-millionaire actually owns a cocoa plantation that hires child slaves.”

“I had no idea,” he said, shaking his head. “Wow. You must have felt totally betrayed.”

“I was furious.”

“Are you still?”

“In hindsight, I realize that Sally was so screwed up over the murder of her daughter. Like I said before, she tried everything from working for charity to marrying for money. Nothing made her happy.”

“Except for maybe one thing,” said Jack.

“What’s that?”

“Based on her will, I’d say revenge.”

Their eyes met and held. Finally she said, “You’re the first person I’ve talked to about this. I don’t even think Sally’s estate lawyer knows everything.”

“Thank you for telling me. I was hoping that if I came all this way I’d get to the truth.”

“Maybe it’s time I got to the truth, too. The whole truth.”

“How do you mean?”

“I was thinking about what you said yesterday, how you wondered if Sally might have reached such a low point in her life that she hired someone to shoot her. Other than myself, I can think of only one other person who would have known her well enough to answer that question.”

“I’m listening.”

A sparkle came to her eye, as if she were suddenly energized. “How’d you like to meet Sally’s rich ex-husband?”

“I thought he lived in France.”

“He’s French, but he lives here most of the year.”

“You can arrange a meeting?”

“No promises, but with your friend Theo tagging along, I think we can pull off just about anything. Brains, beauty, brawn. How can we miss?”

“I know which of us is the brawn. So that must make me-”

“The baggage,” she said with a wink, as if to confirm that she was two of the three. “Now go get your brawny friend. Time’s a-wasting.”

Thirty-four

The road south was paved all the way to Man, a city of about 150,000 people in a breathtaking geographical setting. It was called the “town of eighteen peaks,” perhaps an overly romantic appellation for a confusing and frankly unattractive collection of urban districts that were spread across a valley and surrounded by mountains. Jack had no preconceived notion of West African cities, but Man reminded him of something else entirely, a place he just couldn’t put his finger on, until Theo spoke up.

“Like a shitty Colorado town without all the white people.”

They spent the night in Man, then set out in the morning for the coffee and cocoa farming region in western Côte d’Ivoire. The air had been scrubbed clean by an early shower, one last tropical blast at the tail end of a seven-month rainy season. Driving at the higher altitudes was a pleasant change from the dusty trek across the baked northern grasslands, but it wasn’t as beautiful as Jack had imagined it. High, forest-strewn ridges offered some insight into how the entire region had looked years earlier, before logging and agriculture claimed the rain forests.

“Are we there yet?” asked Theo.

Jack and Rene were in front, Theo in back. Theo flashed him a big grin in the rearview mirror, revealing not his teeth but the wedge of an orange that for some childish reason made Jack laugh. It reminded Jack of something Nate would have done, which made him think of Kelsey, which made him feel slightly guilty for having discreetly but frequently admired the shape of Rene’s legs since leaving Man. It got him to thinking that maybe he wasn’t interested in Kelsey after all. Maybe she’d simply managed to breathe life into a part of himself that he’d left for dead with his divorce.

Good thing we nipped it in the bud, he thought. Perhaps it was no coincidence that he’d jumped at the chance to leave the country at the first sign of anything serious between them.

“About another half hour,” said Rene.

Theo grumbled and went back to sleep. Over the next few miles, the road turned into dirt tracks. All signs of forest disappeared, giving way to row after row of cultivated cacao trees. Thousands of them stretched for miles up the hills and into the valley, each one about twenty feet tall with large, glossy green leaves.

“Slow down,” said Rene.

Jack cut his speed to a crawl as she pointed to a group of workers in the field. The team leaders were shirtless young men, each of them armed with a long pole that had a mitten-shaped knife at the end. It was their job to select the ripe cacao pods, slice them off the tree, and let them fall to the ground. Behind them were even younger-looking men, more likely boys, machete in hand and a cigarette clenched between their teeth as they performed the stoop-labor ritual of gathering the pods and cracking them open for a handful of cocoa beans.

“That boy over there,” she said. “Probably no more than ten years old.”

Again, Jack thought of Nate. “Where do these kids come from?”

“All over. Mali, Burkina Faso. The poorest countries you can imagine.”

“How do they get here?”

“Sometimes they’re stolen. Usually they’re tricked. Locateurs-recruiters-will go to bus stations, city markets, wherever, and promise these kids the good life. It’s all a con. That team of five over there-Sally’s ex-husband probably paid some locateur sixty bucks for the lot of them.”

“This is his plantation?”

“One of his. One of twenty thousand.”

“Twenty thousand?” he said with surprise.