CHAPTER FIVE
Maurie!” The tiny voice from her comm snapped at her. “Wake up already. Aren’t you supposed to be the industrious one?”
Maurie retrieved her comm from a pouch in her luggage case and flicked on the screen in response to Great Aunt Mami.
The device still worked in spite of the heavy dust and not being charged for over a week. Great Aunt Mami didn’t often give gifts, but when she did they were high quality. And they came with strings, like not getting a choice about accepting incoming calls from her.
Maurie’s luggage bag hadn’t fared as well. Every seam and decorative bit of edging was caked with reddish-orange dirt. Inside the bag, a fine grit covered all the formerly clean clothing, but Pascaline, true to form, had elected not to include Maurie’s boots, because “they’d get everything else dirty.”
“Good afternoon, Great Aunt,” Maurie answered.
“It’s morning,” Great Aunt Mami said. But of course Great Aunt Mami was inferring she’d been sleeping her life away. Maurie could see that assessment in the way her older relative’s eyes crinkled with a mixture of bemusement and judgment. Clear video images had no chance of transmitting realism when the filter of memory distorted everything.
The full sun beat down on Maurie’s head with her scarf providing little protection. A squint at the upper corner of the comm read 11:58 A.M. Great Aunt Mami looked tired, red-eyed and faded. She also had tied a headscarf on her tight curls, subduing her normal halo of silver-white hair.
“Yes, Great Aunt.” It felt like it should be afternoon already. Maurie had woken early feeling great. No post-hospitalization weakness lingered. Her appetite had been back, her strength had returned, and she had been ready to get back to work.
But the new day had not erased the mess Pascaline had left for her. The price of that water truck would have left a massive hole in the clinic’s operating budget, so, of course, she’d had to cover it. The village headman who had evicted a relative to give her a bed might have smiled and waved away any idea of one of those Sadous paying for the use of his guestroom, but he had nothing to do with the clinic. The man would, she would make sure, be repaid in some handsome way by her family later. The clinic’s costs had been another matter entirely. They couldn’t wait.
Though apparently neither could her family. The mass of messages in her comm from Uncle Benoit were easy enough to ignore. There was no way Grandpere had been draining all the family business funds and hiring back engineers and technicians they’d had to put on half pay. Nobody could afford to do that with the way the oil side of the energy industry had been slumping lately.
Maurie schooled her face into a polite smile for Great Aunt Mami. The video feed would continue while Maurie scrolled through the rest of the backlog of contact attempts in the comm.
Grandpere had sent a message telling her to meet him at some friend’s coastal compound near Buea, a town which she’d had to look up. Her heart had raced just looking at the map. A blinking GPS location marked Buea as partially up Fako. The coastal mountain might only be fourth tallest on the African continent, but that was enough that it’d probably still make her feel queasy to go from this low-lying farm country up to a mountainside town.
Her comm’s wiki said it was a touch over four thousand meters high at the taller of two peaks. That was more than high enough to make her doubt the number. A second wiki she checked had had it as thirteen thousand some feet, and she converted the number. It matched. She still doubted it. That was really tall.
The location was no backcountry area to be a utilities repair mission. So it had to be Sadou Corporation oil and gas business.
Nobody would want to drill through that much extra dirt and rock. She would get a surveyor to find a better, lower location. She was absolutely not going to drill through that massive mountain or even any of the lesser ones in the Cameroon line mountain range.
Great Aunt Mami made an irritated coughing noise.
Oh right. She had better focus on the call. The video-connected light winked out. Maurie blinked. The call had dropped.
Great Aunt Mami never hung up. Certainly she had interruptions and would imperiously announce that you’d be on hold for some unknown period. Her host of vigorous small business owners did have their share of emergencies. And her investigator-accountant-spies on occasion gave her reports on less vigorous co-owners in need of some threatening supernatural wrath. She might leave the call going for an hour while she dealt with an emergent issue.
This was weird.
The Great Aunt Mami who had peered at her on the comm screen hadn’t seemed herself either. Maurie tried to ignore it, but she had nothing else to do while waiting for her transport. The oddness itched at her need to find and solve problems.
But even before the call, the morning had felt strange. Maurie liked helping Grandpere, but she’d had to remind herself of that. His projects were always interesting. He gave her the tricky ones where something wasn’t working right and he didn’t have all the details even of what was wrong, let alone what it would take to fix it. She again had to remind herself that she did like these jobs and had to push herself to get moving to collect whatever medicines she ought to take to complete her recovery and get transportation out.
The sender’s location for Grandpere’s message was on the highway between Buea and the city of Douala. Her spam filter had a bunch of reply-all messages from her aunts and uncles in response to Uncle Benoit. She ignored them. Uncle Benoit also wanted to speak with her. She tried to reach her cousin Pascaline, but she didn’t answer. Maurie left a message on the house phone system with her status. If her cousin didn’t delete it, someone else in the extended family might call and help. She didn’t explicitly ask for money, but she was sure any aunt or uncle who heard it would hear that part of the request.
“Money, money, mountain money, curses, curses, mountain curses.” It was her imagination, Maurie was absolutely sure.
There couldn’t have been a ghost snake sliding between vendor stalls in the open market and laughing. She saw tire tracks marking the snakeskin just before a teen huckster selling roast peanuts walked straight through the spirit.
It wasn’t there. Snakes don’t laugh. They don’t have the mouths and throats for it. They certainly don’t have goatskin hand drums accompanying their half hiss half chant.
The mostly unintelligible jumble ended in a refrain. “Curses of money and money of curses, yours, yours, yours!”
Maurie’s comm vibrated to the beat of the spirit dance. The drumbeat syncopation to the snake hiss was only her comm’s message notice ringtone. Grandpere wasn’t one to deal with comm systems himself, but he had his aide resending her the same terse instructions to come. The woman seemed to have set it for a ten-second auto-repeat. Maurie blocked it, and switched over to a new incoming call from Great Aunt Mami.
“Where are you, child?” The alert in the corner of Maurie’s screen warned her that her camera was being operated remotely. Maurie gritted her teeth and tolerated it.
“A village Pascaline found near our last work site. The place is named Wangai. They had a doctor.” Maurie reconsidered the accuracy of her statement. “Or rather they had a clinic and some, well, not exactly nurses, but…” Maurie glanced around. The few locals she’s spoken with thought very highly of the orderlies working at the “hospital,” as they’d referred to the one-room cement clinic building. “I’m alive, and the care was just fine, okay?”
Great Aunt Mami’s expression grew alarmed. She had personal experience with less than credentialed medical care, Maurie remembered.
“Where’s your chart? Did you get a copy? Did they use medical charts at all?” The questions came rapid fire.
Maurie sent her great aunt the file. Ms. Oumarou had kept paper charts, and when Maurie’d gone back to the clinic first thing this morning, it had been easy to snap photos with her comm to make an electronic copy. And when she couldn’t find that doctor Pascaline had mentioned, she’d found an administrator instead and worked to resolve the bill.
And Maurie had already sent her medical file along with all the symptoms she could recall and her current vitals to a very good doctor in Douala. The man had many years of medical experience. He’d been able to discreetly verify that her recovery was real. If he’d also implied that there may have been a fair amount of nonstandard aspects to her treatment and that she may experience a few long-term side effects from one of the medications whose timely use had most likely saved her life, Maurie had elected not to complain about it.
Great Aunt Mami made concerned noises. She likely was also forwarding Maurie’s file to a doctor of her own. Great Aunt Mami started reading it to herself without letting Maurie end the call.
Maurie ate her sandwich. The baguette tasted slightly stale, but the roasted meat was good quality. It proved to be a tough cut of beef, not goat. She’d watched it being slow roasted on the open fire and shaved off the spit into her open bread. The spicy sauce ladled over top hinted of harissa and chita pepper. She chewed slowly to enjoy the perfect blend of flavor and heat. Here on the edge of the marketplace, Maurie could see several vendors walking the market selling food. There was a girl selling fresh makala. Maurie had a good spot under the mango tree nearest to the bus passenger pickup, but she might be able to get the girl’s attention and call her over.
Great Aunt Mami kept reading.
Maurie didn’t tell her great aunt that she’d already gotten her second opinion. Great Aunt Mami’s fretting gave her time to eat, and Maurie felt like she could swallow an entire goat herself without being full. So after the sandwich she had three makala. The perfectly crisped outsides stuck out in spikes and bumps like cartoon asteroids and the soft chewy interiors filled her belly nicely.
Leaving the clinic building and checking out had proved to be two completely unassociated things here where on occasion the sick could outnumber the beds, and as a person with the connections to procure a bed of her own, Maurie didn’t entirely fault Ms. Oumarou for denying her reentry as soon as she’d been able to walk as far as the outhouse and back on her own.
A friend of Grandpere’s managed the government’s health services. The Sadou family did energy work, mostly. If she’d died maybe they’d have branched into medical a little bit, but it wouldn’t be polite to go around challenging the bush clinic’s practices. Especially after they had, probably, saved her life.
And she did feel really good. The word in the village was that everyone associated with the clinic trusted Ms. Oumarou implicitly.
“She’s a witch lady.” Pascaline had whispered in her ear, not quietly enough. Pascaline had said it in English, which not everyone spoke, but it was hardly a mystery language. “Mami-Wata,” she’d added, which just made it worse. Now Maurie could never come back here or Ms. Oumarou might poison her on general principle. Few people liked being referred to as having mystical curse powers even if excellence in healing and prosperity sometimes came with it in the folklore.
Great Aunt Mami was the obvious exception. The problem with claiming Mami-Wata’s powers for yourself, besides the sheer creepiness factor, was the other side of the folk stories. Mami-Wata’s favor might bring healing and incredible wealth, but, if offended, she withdrew her blessing. Easy come, easy go on steroids. Those cursed by the water spirit lost everything, and so did the cursed one’s whole family, for a very broad definition of family.
Maurie watched the frown deepen as her great aunt scrolled further down her chart. Great Aunt Mami looked unwell.
That gray undertone to her older relative’s normally glowing brown skin bothered her a lot more than her own brush with ill health. She’d been about to ask for a loan to cover the water truck and clinic costs. But, maybe, this wasn’t the best time. Perhaps, Great Aunt Mami might be interested in supplying seed money for some business start-ups in Wangai? The townspeople acted like Pascaline’s water truck delivery was an incredible gift from the uber-wealthy and gracious Sadou family instead of just the stopgap fix it was. There seemed to be a business case for either installing municipal water piping for a further upstream intake or building a more rigorous town water filtration system.
Great Aunt Mami finished reading. Her scowl broke abruptly. “You aren’t going to die,” she announced.
“Yes, Great Aunt,” Maurie agreed.
Great Aunt Mami narrowed her eyes. “You little scamp. You’ve already checked with a doctor yourself, haven’t you?”
“Yes, Great Aunt,” she said again.
Great Aunt Mami harrumphed, but she was pleased. Maurie could tell from the way the corners of the woman’s mouth kept pulling up while she tried to maintain a good scowl. Great Aunt Mami approved of competency.
“I’m having it checked by my doctor anyway. He’s calling now. Stay on the line,” she admonished and switched over, not including Maurie in the second conversation.
Maurie’s comm had continued its drumbeat notifications but on a silent vibrate. Grandpere really wanted her now. Or his aide hated her. Both could be true.
She checked the message headers to see the time stamps and noticed something else. The very first one had been sent to both her and Pascaline, but all the follow-up repeats were to her alone. So Pascaline might already be there, or maybe she’d done something and Grandpere had decided he only wanted Maurie on whatever this new job was. Maurie would bet on Pascaline having done something.
“I’m back,” Great Aunt Mami announced. “And you’re going to die.”
“Okay, Great Aunt,” Maurie said.
Great Aunt Mami rolled her eyes. “Not even a reaction. You’re fine, of course, and I checked with a folklore professor about some of the weird stuff. It’s just a basic blessing invocation and a request that your recently dead ancestors petition any powerful spirits nearby on your behalf. And there’s not a single story of that sort of thing getting anybody immortality. Sorry, kid.”
“How about incredible riches beyond human imagining? Can I have that?” Maurie suggested. Or maybe just a little loan so I can trade in my bus ticket and rent the headman’s car?
“Are you out of money?” Her great aunt opened her mouth and lifted a hand to cover it in feigned surprise. A mean glint shone in the woman’s eyes. “Did the Sadou wonder child make a big mistake?”
Maurie tensed. Great Aunt Mami was more tightfisted than most, but there was an undertone of rage there she hadn’t expected.
“The clinic care wasn’t something I budgeted for, but I’ll be fine,” she said. And she would. She had a bus ticket. What could possibly go wrong?
Other than Grandpere’s assistant completely draining her comm’s battery with nonstop demands for her presence in Buea or any number of other indignities of trying to pass for the sort of person who could safely travel by bus. Maurie changed the block to stop the calls from Grandpere’s numbers entirely. She could change it back when she switched buses at N’goundéré.
“The other day your cousin used a helicopter service that belongs to me,” Great Aunt Mami said. “Picked her right up at a hover because there isn’t a maintained helipad there in Wangai. Do you know how hard it is to keep good pilots when they can make twice as much in Europe? Do you have any idea how hard it is to keep parts in stock and aircraft operating with the amount of heavy grit in the air during dry season?”
“Uh, Great Aunt? It’s me, Maurie. If I can help, just tell me what you need.” Great Aunt Mami did look at her, but then Mami’s focus went distant.
“No,” she said. Great Aunt Mami stared straight through Maurie, and the anger in her expression told Maurie she wasn’t seeing her great niece. “I owe you Sadous nothing. And neither does Fabrice, not after what he’s done. Oh fuck, what he’s done.” Great Aunt Mami blinked fast as though she were holding back tears of rage, or maybe helplessness. “Maurie. You will get your ass to Grandpere immediately and make damned sure Fabrice regrets nothing. I do owe Fabrice.”
The call ended.