Africaville: A Novel

Part One

Woods Bluff

Dogtrot Fever

Nova Scotia, 1918

Newborns are never afflicted with the malady. The swollen tongue, the reddish throat, the raw cough seem to afflict only babies older than six months. By the spring, in the village situated on a small knuckle-shaped peninsula just north of Halifax, all five of the stricken babies have now developed a high fever.

Having no luck with sweet milk and lemon bitter, worried mothers administer castor oil mixed with camphor, then a tea of beer’s root steeped with beech ash and clover. When desperate, they even place a few charms under the mattresses of the beds where the stricken babies lie crying.

Nothing works.

In mid-April, with three more babies now suffering from the malady, health department nurses visit the village, their faces frozen even before they have examined a single new case. Why our children? several mothers standing in the yard of one house want to know. Hadn’t Halifax already given enough babies in the fire that leveled ten square blocks of the city months before, when the munitions ship exploded in the harbor? Then again, those had been white babies. No colored babies had died in that explosion. Was it now Woods Bluff’s turn to lose infants? And if so, how many—five, ten, all twenty-two?

The following week, after two of the feverish babies die, the mothers turn to the grandmothers, though many are leery of this option. Already several grandmothers have suggested that since the home remedies haven’t worked, and since neither nurse nor doctor has useful medicines, the afflicted infants must be bad-luck babies.

It is an expression the mothers haven’t heard since they were children, though the fear of having a bad-luck baby has terrorized mothers on the bluff as far back as 1790. That was the year the first groups of cabins sprang up across the bluff, displacing the foxes, hare, and moose that ran through the thick Christmas ferns and sheep laurel. Back when no medicine could reinvigorate a baby whose body had begun to show the outline of bones, smothering was sometimes recommended. Take no action, and bad luck might infect the entire village. Best to end the child’s suffering midday, when injurious spirits would likely be bedside, feeding on the moisture of a weak baby’s last breaths.

Yet several mothers are unconvinced the deceased infants are bad-luck babies.

And even if the now-suffering babies are saddled with bad luck, who’s to say those old tales of smothering are true? Had anyone actually seen a mother place a blanket or pillow over a child’s face? And most important for these new cases: by what evidence will we make the diagnosis?

The grandmothers have ready answers. For several descendants of the Virginian who came up to Nova Scotia in 1772 as a messenger in the British army, a feverish baby had to be put to sleep if its father had recently had a limb severed above the knee or elbow. Death was also imminent if the baby’s fever came during the same month as the mother’s birthday. For the granddaughter of the Congolese woman who, in 1785, dressed as a man, sailed into Halifax Harbour on a ship out of Lisbon, Portugal, a feverish baby had to be smothered if the newborn was smaller than a man’s hand.

And for the largest group of grandmothers, those descended from the nearly two hundred Jamaicans who landed in Halifax Harbour in 1788 after being expelled by British soldiers from their island villages for fomenting rebellion, a feverish baby’s fate was sealed if the child coughed up blood during the same month a traveling man arrived on your stoop selling quill turpentine, goat leather, or gunpowder. Hadn’t such a vendor made the rounds in Woods Bluff the month before? Why continue to nurse such a child? Death already had a square toe on the baby’s throat. It was only a matter of days, a week maybe, if the baby were a girl.

The mothers nod as they listen to the explanations, but over the next weeks only one baby is smothered, although Lovee Mills denies doing it. Near the beginning of May, however, another mother on the bluff seriously considers taking the grandmothers’ advice about ending her baby’s suffering. Her afflicted child is the cousin of the first baby that developed the fever. Adding to the mother’s exasperation are the noisy groups of neighbors that have been gathering outside her home each day at sunset, a few of them knocking on the door and asking outright if the bad-luck baby had been relieved of its worldly suffering.

By now the malady has a name. It refers to the style of cabin where the woman and her extended family live. A dogtrot cabin’s construction—two rooms connected by a short breezeway in the middle—had confounded the villagers for years. Some suspected the man who built the cabin wanted a reminder of his home in Virginia. But a breezeway in a dwelling in Nova Scotia? Pure stupidity.

And now living in the cabin has caused two babies to get sick. Many blame the parents and the other members of the large extended family that lives there. Tight living made sense in 1782, they say, but this is 1918. If parents, grown children, and grandchildren are going to continue to jungle up in quarters that tight, what was the use of leaving prison? Even in the best families, sleeping foot to head too long breeds animosity. And if lies, jealousy, and ill will erupt easily in close quarters, why not a virulent fever?

Will she do it? someone in the crowd that has arrived at the dogtrot cabin this evening asks.

If you mean smother the child, she had better, another replies. Or else one of us will.

The cabin’s odd construction had also puzzled several of the rebellious Jamaicans who arrived in Halifax Harbour in 1788. Of course, by the time they first saw the odd dwelling, their minds had been addled by two years of confinement in the military prison on the western edge of Halifax. It took that long before Canadian military commanders believed they had sorted out which of the prisoners were combatants or abettors, and which were mere residents of the Jamaican villages torched by British soldiers.

The wait had been a horror in the cramped underground magazine and provisions spaces.

Eighty-two prisoners were moved to cells aboveground. From this group, squads of men were conscripted to repair damaged sections of the Citadel, help guard the city against French soldiers raiding its perimeter, and do road repair. One warm October day, a group of men on a road detail snuck off to walk the foot trails of Woods Bluff.

Most of the men had heard by then that the money being sent from London and Jamaica to house the prisoners had slowed to a trickle. With no firm offer yet from the government of Sierra Leone to accept them and their families, the men walked the trails looking for the cabin where military officials said a few families would soon be offered housing.

The first two families released from prison and driven by mule wagon out to the bluff never learned what happened to the family from Virginia that had lived there. But with the almanac predicting a heavy snowstorm within the week, they set about gathering dried grass and mud and fieldstones to repair the roof, chink the gaps in the logs, and mend the chimney. The men and women had their freedom. But they were facing a winter on their own in a cold, unfamiliar place. To them, this oddly built cabin seemed a present from God.

With the fever threatening another baby, villagers in 1918 have a different view of the dogtrot cabin. After hearing that the infant suffering inside the dwelling was not smothered but died on its own, they want nothing more to do with the cabin. Fearful that it is harboring bad air that might kill another baby, they chase out the families living there and set the cabin ablaze.

But what had their actions accomplished, the villagers wonder one afternoon in June, when word spreads that little Kath Ella Sebolt, who lives at 68 Dempsey Road, has developed the fever.

By now seven babies have died.

Fearing her daughter might be the eighth child to die of the fever, Kath Ella Sebolt’s mother, Shirley, goes in search of the handmade dolls she had purchased the previous winter. All ten of the dolls made by the neighborhood leatherworker were imitations of the Lucky Beatrice doll that had been fought over by a platoon of fathers in a pistol-shooting contest at the most recent Pictou County Exposition. What can it hurt, Shirley Sebolt figures, to slide her daughter’s doll under the bed where her daughter suffers?

That evening Kath Ella’s fever breaks. The next morning Shirley carries the doll to a house down the road. The next afternoon, similar dolls are slipped under other beds all across the village.

Could be the fever just tired itself out, George Sebolt tells a neighbor visiting with the news that his previously ailing infant has sucked down a full bottle of milk. And maybe the nurses are bringing better medicine.

No, Shirley insists. That lucky doll under the bed did the trick.

Kath Ella Sebolt’s doll is made of dark-brown nettle-cloth and has whalebone-button eyes. Its hair is fashioned from the tassels of a freemason’s cap. Its burgundy dress matches burgundy shoes made from the leather upholstery of discarded car seats excavated from the municipal dump, which by the eve of Kath Ella’s tenth birthday has nearly reached the southwestern edge of Woods Bluff.

It becomes customary for Woods Bluff girls reaching their tenth birthday to present their handmade dolls to a younger girl in the neighborhood. A gesture of thanks, mothers tell their daughters, because you dodged a death with the fever. The evening before Kath Ella’s birthday party, she puts new ribbons in her doll’s hair and dresses the doll in its freshly washed jumper. But several hours before the party, the doll goes missing.

Fine if you don’t want to give it away, Shirley says after retrieving the doll from under the mattress of Kath Ella’s bed. But I won’t let you hide it.

With that, Shirley places the doll on the shelf beside Kath Ella’s bed.

Several years later, on this warm spring afternoon of Friday, March 17, 1933, Kath Ella lies across her bed surrounded by her schoolbooks, while Kiendra Penncampbell, who lives down the road, sits on the floor with the doll in her lap.

Didn’t you hear me talking to you just now? Kiendra says.

Didn’t you see me writing just now? Kath Ella replies.

You always get the highest marks. Why are you studying French?

I’m not studying French. I’m using the book to hold my paper while I write this.

That looks like a letter. Are you writing to some boy? Kiendra frowns. Is it Omar Platt? It better not be.

I am not writing to Omar Platt. I am writing a composition Mrs. Eatten says I have to write for the ladies who give the VMO scholarships. Kath Ella holds up the page. See?

Kiendra rises to her knees, leans forward, and stares at the page. Several shades of brown darker than Kath Ella, she wears two long braids that reach to her shoulders. Her school outfits, hand-me-downs her mother gets from the women whose houses she cleans, are always well coordinated. No plaids or prints or stripes, she only wears solid colors. She arrived at school several days last week wearing the same blue skirt, but with a different blue blouse. The green dress she wears this afternoon is faded and threadbare, the loud green socks too thick for the warm weather.

We don’t have school for a whole week, Kiendra says, sitting back down. You have plenty of time to write to the committee. Have some fun today, why don’t you?

I will. Just give me a few minutes of quiet, pretty please.

Kath Ella writes with her brow furrowed, hoping Kiendra will get the hint. She ignored the tapping at the window earlier, suspecting Kiendra had come over to show off some trashy thing she had picked up on Cornhead Beach or at the municipal dump, where she often scavenges with her brother. Or else Kiendra was there to show off some new rock she found. Why the girl litters her room with rocks in a village where stones are plentiful is anybody’s guess. At the window, Kiendra must have seen that Kath Ella was working. Still, she lifted the window higher and climbed inside.

Kiendra is right that Kath Ella has plenty of time to complete her composition. Although Mrs. Eatten is making the whole class of seniors write a composition, everyone knows that only the students who do well in the interviews will be asked to submit their compositions to the scholarship committee of the Victorian Maternal Order.

For the last three years, with money dried up all over Canada, no student graduating from Woods Bluff Elementary and Secondary has gone off to a residential college. Word this year is that three students might get a scholarship. Imagining herself dressed in a wool skirt walking the leafy campus of Saint Agnes Rectory or Halifax College makes Kath Ella beam with joy. But what she wants badly is to attend the Teachers Seminary in Toronto. Her father, George, says it makes him tired as a bull-ox to imagine his daughter as a traveling gal, like the ones she reads about in books. With relatives who uprooted themselves from Jamaica and Trinidad, not to mention those who left Halifax for unknown parts in 1822, why would a Sebolt child want to travel far from home?

The first paragraphs of Kath Ella’s composition for the scholarship are her attempt to answer that question. But the task has not been as easy as writing about whether she prefers spearmint or peppermint wax candies, or which prime ministers of Canada she admires the most. This question is personal. She does not like revealing herself to strangers, especially people who do not live on the bluff. The ladies at the VMO already know that she is poor. Why else would she want the scholarship? She suspects they would like to hear how getting far from Woods Bluff would be beneficial to her life. Her father should understand that, too. Talking with other neighborhood men who are also angry about the municipal dump expanding toward Woods Bluff, George says it is not always the air from the municipal dump that people smell. He says though his neighbors may be hardworking, the bluff itself sometimes stinks badly of poverty.

What I was asking you just now, Kiendra says, undoing the last of the doll’s four hair braids, is whether you are going to the jamboree tomorrow.

Of course, silly, Kath Ella says. I’m helping Mr. Ovits judge the tumbling contests.

The girls will be happy. They are sick of you winning most of the blue ribbons.

If I didn’t volunteer, I probably wouldn’t go.

I’ll bet you would go, if only to see what prank the boys do this year. Remember last year when they glued a whole ream of colored construction paper on Mr. Geedish’s Ford?

Kath Ella laughs. The man yelled so loud, I was afraid he was going to burst a throat vein.

I don’t know why he was so torn up. The car cleaned up nicely. Kiendra scoots closer to the bed. I have an idea.

Imagine that.

How about this year the girls do a prank?

Halt the bus right there. I am getting off.

But wait. Let me finish.

Halt the bus, I said. You are finished.

Kath Ella begins another paragraph, hoping the soothing task of combing the doll’s horsehair tresses will keep Kiendra’s grumbling from escalating into a full-on hissy fit, like the one she threw in her yard last Sunday before church. The trouble was that Kiendra had just learned that she had to spend all five days of the school vacation helping her mother, Rosa, clean houses. Given the shrieking Kiendra did, it is clear that shrill noises still do not bother her like they do several other teenagers on the bluff who survived the fever.

The malady raged longest in Kiendra, but she also does not suffer the occasional headaches that plague Kath Ella. Her doctor says, however, that her fever may have harmed her brain in other ways. Kiendra’s mother disagrees. Rosa says her daughter has a sound brain, but sometimes doesn’t use it properly. Starting all this mess out here in your father’s yard is a waste of time, Rosa had said as she jerked Kiendra’s arm and directed her toward the road. Hard work next week will keep you out of devilment.

Kiendra has parted the doll’s hair into two sections, and on one side she has finished a fat braid. Will you at least let me tell you what happened to Old Mister? Kiendra asks, tying a ribbon bow at the end of the braid.

Who is Old Mister?

The man who lived in a house my mother cleans. He fell out of bed the other day. Hit the floor flat as a teacake. The son came running out to the backyard, where Momma was beating rugs. She helped haul Old Mister off the floor and back onto the bed. Old Mister only lived to see two more sunups. The son and his wife are moving into the house next week. I haven’t seen their baby, but I helped carry in the crib. The baby must be a girl because I saw a little pink peek-a-boo bonnet and the play-pretties. That’s how I got my idea for the prank.

That again?

See, while everybody is at the jamboree, we could sneak downtown to the house.

And do what?

Steal the play-pretties.

How many?

All of them. Then after we take the play-pretties out of the crib, we’ll leave this doll there. Wouldn’t that be a hoot?

It wouldn’t be a hoot if we got snookered.

We won’t get snookered.

You might not but I would. Whoever discovers the doll in the crib will soon find out it belongs to me.

You’ll say you loaned the doll to me. I’ll say one of the boys stole the doll. One of the boys must have overheard me say where the family hides the door key. This is a boy’s prank. They’ll never believe a girl would do this.

Where is the house?

In the South End. I could tell you the address, but you probably wouldn’t know it. You don’t get out and about in Halifax like I do.

The smirk on Kiendra’s face as she combs the hair on the other side of the doll’s head irritates Kath Ella. She feels envy every time Kiendra mentions another day of riding the bus by herself to meet her mother at some house in a strange part of the city. There would be hell to pay if Kath Ella took the bus unaccompanied by her sister or another neighborhood girl. Kiendra is correct to say she knows the city better than any of the other girls on the bluff. But does she have to brag about it all the time? I think your idea is ludicrous, Kath Ella says. Now, will you please leave so I can get back to work?

For your information, I was getting ready to leave anyway, Kiendra says. I’m only staying because I have to finish this last plait.

Kath Ella returns to her composition feeling herself getting more annoyed with each new sentence she writes. Instead of finishing the last braid, Kiendra fiddles with a loose button on the doll’s dress. Kiendra was there in the rear of the classroom yesterday with the lower-level students when Mrs. Eatten had given stern instructions that they were to be quiet while the graduating students completed the four booklets of the scholarship examination. Only five students would be going downtown to the scholarship interview. Midway through the hour and a half, giddy about having completed the science and the grammar booklets, Kath Ella had peeked at the nearby desk where Betty Addison sat. Betty Addison and her sister, who are nearly light enough to pass for white, were always going on about how they would not spend their futures scrubbing floors. Kath Ella did not plan to either.

Betty had also finished the first two booklets. And she had finished the questions in the civics booklet and seemed to be working on the geometry problems. Kath Ella had not dared peek again but she could sense Betty there with her head down, biting her lip as she usually did when drawing a triangle or a rhombus.

Betty Addison will probably get a scholarship. So will Buddy Caulden. Kath Ella is certain she needs an excellent composition to ensure she gets the third one. Why on earth had she allowed Kiendra to crawl in through the window? Even more exasperating is the thought of how easily she gave in to Kiendra’s begging to play with the doll. She should have left the doll up on the shelf with the eleven volumes of her Lucy Kirchner in the Mountains books. There used to be twelve. A few years ago, Kath Ella was certain she saw Kiendra slip the first book of the series into her jacket. Had the doll been smaller, Kiendra probably would have tried to steal it, too. Before her tenth birthday, Kath Ella had considered passing her doll to Kiendra. But by then the boys had started to tease the two of them about spending so much time together. You and Kiendra are joined at the lips, one of the boys joked.

Kath Ella is patient with Kiendra. She knows the bond between the two of them runs deeper than the substance of a silly joke. That fact should be obvious to the boys who at least pretend to respect Kath Ella and Kiendra’s place of honor during the ceremony held every November at the graves of the seven infants who died of dogtrot fever. Kiendra rarely dressed properly for the chilly air that often hung over the cemetery during the ceremony. Though Kath Ella appreciates the accolades she gets for being the first child to survive the malady, she finds it an unearned honor to stand near the graves, stealing heat from the girl who fought the longest against the fever. Last November with her mother sick in bed for nearly two weeks, Kiendra stood for the entire ceremony with her eyes cast down at the frozen soil. Despite the doctor’s assurance that her mother would be up and about soon, Kiendra had apparently asked God every night to take her life instead of her mother’s.

That news revealed a selfless side of Kiendra that Kath Ella had never seen before. She always assumed that most of the prayers spoken in the Penncampbell home were done for Kiendra’s benefit. On Monday morning, having seen Rosa at the bus stop coughing and sucking on a peppermint candy, she decided to accompany Kiendra home from school to try to find out if Kiendra was worrying again about her mother’s health. But that was before getting to school and being told by Mrs. Eatten that the scholarship exam this year would be given before the school recess.

Kath Ella finishes another paragraph of her composition, realizing that, with the stress of preparing for the scholarship exam this week, she has barely spent a minute with Kiendra. Her guilt about that is probably the reason she let Kiendra climb in through the window.

Half an hour later, Luela, Kath Ella’s older sister, enters the bedroom. At the bureau mirror Luela admires herself, wearing one of the refurbished hats Mrs. Breakstone, from down the hill, has been selling at the baseball games. The recent winter has lightened Luela’s skin nearly to the color of her younger sister. The color of toasted almonds, she likes to say.

Shirley says this chapeau looks good on me, Luela says, fussing with the fabric flower on the side of the hat. Anybody here agree?

No, she didn’t say that, Kiendra says. Your mother told you to stop coming out there bothering her.

Shirley did not say that.

Yes, she did, Kiendra says. I heard her. And she told you to come in here and take off her hat. Kiendra scoots closer to the bed. Why don’t we do it, Kath Ella?

Luela shakes her head. What silliness are the two of you up to now? she asks as she lowers the hat gently into a cardboard box.

That’s for me and Kath Ella to know, Kiendra says. And for you not to.

Luela marches across the room. I will never understand why your mother lets you out of the house by yourself, she says, looking down at Kiendra. I imagine Rosa is already mad at you for all the fidgeting you did in church last Sunday. And now you want to get into some devilment? Give me the doll.

Kiendra tries to scoot away, but Luela has grabbed one of the doll’s braids. Let go this minute, Miss Kay, she tells Kiendra. Or I will send you home.

Luela places the doll back on the shelf and returns to the bureau. Don’t give me that hurt puppy face, she says, tossing a clamshell bracelet to Kiendra. You’re not fooling anybody.

With a wide grin, Kiendra rattles the bracelet as she waves to Luela, who walks out of the bedroom. Most of the quarter-size shells on the bracelet are chipped. But any old bangle suits a girl whose child fever had her thrashing so badly one evening that she cut her wrist on the rusty rods of an iron headboard. Kiendra adjusts the bracelet on her wrist so that it covers the mess of tiny scars.

After several minutes of trying to get Kath Ella’s attention, Kiendra stands. Are you coming with me to do a prank or not?

No chance, Miss Kay.

Kiendra takes off the bracelet and drops it onto the bed. Yesterday, I saw you reading Betty Addison’s answers during the test, she says. You’re not supposed to cheat.

I wasn’t cheating.

I saw what I saw.

So?

So what if I tell?

When Kiendra reaches for the bracelet again, Kath Ella picks it up. You can play with this some other time, she says and slips the bracelet onto her wrist. But I really must finish my schoolwork.

Kath Ella opens her French textbook, but only pretends to read as Kiendra climbs out the window. Maybe she ought to accompany Kiendra downtown. But if she does go she will know why. Despite what her sister says, she does not often fool herself when it comes to Kiendra. She would not go downtown because she is afraid Kiendra would snitch on her. Kiendra knows how much getting the scholarship means to her. She would never destroy that. It would be because her being there would help keep Kiendra from getting into too much harm. If she does go downtown, she will not go inside the house. If anyone asks, she can say she had no idea Kiendra had carried in the doll.

Unlike in the North End neighborhood of Halifax, where the blast from the munitions ship explosion in December of 1917 leveled all the mature trees, in the South End, the trees are large and leafy. On this sunny Saturday afternoon, two ancient maples shade the back patio of a two-story brick house on quiet Henry Street.

With the sounds of the Spring Jamboree bands she heard from afar before leaving the bluff still resounding in her head, Kath Ella follows Kiendra across the patio of the house. Inside, they hurry toward a ground-floor bedroom.

Why are you still out there? Kiendra asks Kath Ella, who has halted at the doorway. Come in here with me.

Kath Ella leans her head in. On one plum-colored wall, along with several religious figures, is a framed picture of a young man in a Canadian Forces uniform. Is he the man who died in that four-post bed?

The bright-red object she sees across the room is the shopping bag Kiendra carries with the doll inside. But why is Kiendra standing at the crib? Why hasn’t she put the doll inside the crib?

Kath Ella rushes across the room. We didn’t come to tarry, she says, approaching Kiendra. Take out the play-pretties.

Kath Ella pokes Kiendra in the shoulder, and Kiendra turns around.

Why did you poke me? Kiendra asks. Do it again and I’ll sock you.

The outburst from Kiendra is familiar. But not the odd way Kiendra’s face is contorted. What is the matter with this girl? Why is she looking like she does not recognize her friend? The early evening sunlight streaking in through the window has weakened. In the dimness Kiendra seems to be studying the shiny items nearby on the bureau. Come out of that trance and pay attention to your schoolwork, teachers are constantly telling Kiendra. Yet this does not seem to be one of Kiendra’s schoolhouse trances. Something long hidden within her seems to be showing itself. When Kiendra gives a mischievous smile, Kath Ella recalls the taunts of their schoolmates—Kiendra did it, Kiendra said it, Kiendra took it, Kiendra stole it. Why on earth had she come to this house with Kiendra?

Kath Ella steps around Kiendra and moves to the crib. Something is moving in there. When she looks down, she sees a sleeping baby.

The baby’s soft gurgle brings Kiendra out of her stupor and she turns around. Both girls are quiet, watching the baby’s chest rise and fall.

Never been this close to a white baby before, Kiendra says. Where’s the mother?

Coming back soon, Kath Ella says. We’d better go.

Not yet, Kiendra says. Let’s do the deed first.

I don’t think we should.

Stop being a Scaredy-Louise. Let’s do the deed.

Kiendra reaches into the crib and takes out a string of furry pink cubes. The baby emits a long gurgle. When the infant is quiet again, Kiendra lays the doll into the crib.

The doll doesn’t look funny in there, Kath Ella says.

Think how mad the mother will be, Kiendra says. She turns the doll onto its side, so that its eyes are directed at the baby. That’s funny.

Kath Ella picks up the shopping bag and rushes out of the bedroom. Halfway across the kitchen, she realizes Kiendra is not behind her.

She returns to the bedroom, where Kiendra is holding the baby.

Put that child back, dum-dum.

I wouldn’t hurt her, Kiendra says. She’s a good-luck baby.

Kiendra rocks the child in her arms.

Hearing a door opening at the front of the house, Kath Ella turns, her face feeling hot. She opens a nearby door, but it leads to a closet. At the window, she tugs on the sash. But the window will not budge.

Now you’ve done it, Kath Ella says, returning to the crib.

Not me, Kiendra says, lowering the baby onto the small mattress. I didn’t want to do this. You did.

The man turning the ignition key to start the dark green sedan parked at the curb has wavy hair, just like the soldier in the picture on the bedroom wall of the house from which Kath Ella and Kiendra have been rudely ejected.

Are we going to see the constable, sir? Kath Ella asks from the back seat. Are we?

Be still back there, girl, the man says. I’d appreciate no more words from you.

As the car pulls away from the curb Kath Ella turns toward Kiendra, who is quiet as a church cat. She had talked up a blue streak inside the house when she was being interrogated. The man said he didn’t believe a syllable of her story that she had come into the house because she heard the baby crying, especially after he saw the doll in the crib. If they are going to the constable station, the officers there probably won’t believe Kiendra’s story either.

With each passing city block, the back cabin of the sedan feels more confining. What a relief to realize that the car has not turned off Gottingen Street. When the lights of the city give way to dark forest, Kath Ella leans over toward Kiendra. The man is taking us to our parents, she whispers. What are we going to tell them?

Every few minutes Kath Ella taps Kiendra’s knee. But Kiendra keeps her eyes closed. Soon Kath Ella gives up and stares out the side window into the darkness. Kiendra must be terrified about what her father will do when he learns about this mischief.