Ike was forbidden to tell anyone the truth about the agent. So he made up a reason for the young man’s impending visit. “My great-grandson from the States is coming,” he had told the elders of the village yesterday after the police chief stopped in. “Chief just wanted to let me know.” Ike had smiled. “You remember my son, Ezekiel, who moved to the States in 1983. It’s his grandson. Luke.”
“That’s nice.” The elders had smiled and nodded and tipped their hats. “Should be a good time, Ike.” Visits like that happened now and then. Mennonite family members coming to Belize from the United States or Canada. No one took much notice.
Which was why no one suspected the truth about today’s visit.
Good thing, Ike thought. He wasn’t sure what the FBI agent would want with him, but the conversation would be secretive, that much he’d been told. Secretive and serious. Ike lifted his face to the sky. He was willing to help. Whatever it took to aid officials in cleaning up the crime that had plagued Belize City in recent years. Today killings happened at an alarming rate, especially in and around the capital city. Robberies and home invasions were symptoms of a bigger problem—the international drug cartel that used Belize as a gateway to Mexico.
The increasing crime in Belize was personal to Ike. His granddaughter, Susan James, and her children—Lizzie and Daniel—had disappeared more than a decade ago. Just after Susan’s husband, Paul David James, left his family in the dead of night. No telling what Paul David was into or why he left. Villagers had their suspicions. Another woman, maybe. Gambling trouble. Whatever happened to Paul David, Ike was almost positive Susan and the children had been victims of a crime.
Ike sighed. Maybe the FBI agent had a lead on their disappearance. Ike would do anything to help with that. He gripped the arms of his rocking chair and stared at the road that wound its way into Lower Barton. These days, he spent most of his time here on the front porch of his thatched-roof home. Rocking back and forth, contemplating the history of the village.
Praying about the future.
He set the chair in motion again. Yes, the disappearance of his family was the darkest time in Ike’s life. He remembered how upset Susan was, and how after her husband left, she and the children stayed indoors most of the time. No one in the village knew what to say or do. Mennonite men didn’t leave their families. They worked hard and helped each other and found a way to stick it out. Ike didn’t know another man who had left his family the way Paul David had. Everyone expected the man to come back.
Instead no one ever saw him or his family again.
Sometime after their disappearance, word returned to Lower Barton that Susan and her children had drowned. A tourist had seen the trio head for the water at a Belizean Beach just south of the city. Right before Ike’s family disappeared.
The conclusion had been sad and simple. Susan and the children had drowned. No telling about Paul David. Terrible thing, people of the village would say when the topic of Paul David, Susan, Lizzie and Daniel came up. Everyone but Ike agreed about what must have happened. Paul David must have run off with another woman, and his family was probably swept away in one of those awful undercurrents. The ones that plagued the eastern coast of Belize when a hurricane was moving through the Caribbean Sea—as it had been the day the three disappeared.
Ike had a different theory, and he was fairly sure that’s why the FBI agent was coming to Lower Barton Creek today. Not to talk to the elders and leaders of the community, but to a tired old man rocking on his front porch.
Because Ike was the keeper of the stories.
In his hands was one of two letters he had written after getting news about his family’s supposed drowning. The first detailed his guess about what had really happened to Susan and her children. That somehow they had been killed, maybe even killed by Paul David. The second letter was to tell his granddaughter and her children the goodbye he never got to say.
Ike opened the first letter and stared at the words meticulously printed across the top. With great care, he had written Concerning my Granddaughter, Susan James.
For the third time that morning, Ike read his letter. Even slower this time, in case there was something he’d missed, something that could still be added. A detail that might help the FBI agent.
To whom it may concern,
In the month before my granddaughter, Susan James, and her children went missing, her husband, Paul David James, left in the middle of the night without warning. A few weeks later, Lower Barton Creek was visited by a strange woman who presented herself as Paul David’s American sister. Aunt Agnes Potter, she called herself. The woman came to the village to give Susan a message: Paul David had started a job in Belize City and he wanted Susan and the children to come visit.
Agnes Potter had red hair and heavy makeup. She was almost giddy, as if she’d known Susan and the children all her life. But Susan had never met the woman. Agnes worked hard to convince Susan to take the trip to Belize City.
That’s strange, right? Why did it matter so much to Agnes Potter?
That wasn’t all. From the moment she met my great-granddaughter, Lizzie James, Aunt Agnes never let her out of her sight. It wasn’t normal. The way she looked at my little great-granddaughter made my skin crawl.
Ike lowered the letter and looked to a far-off spot above a cluster of towering mahogany trees. He should’ve taken charge, sent the woman on her way. Maybe asked her to prove her connection to Paul David. Because something had been off about her.
Instead, Ike had hung back. Sizing up Agnes Potter and letting his suspicions grow.
That afternoon, when Lizzie ran off to join the other children, Agnes had followed.
“Lizzie,” the woman had called out. Agnes never stopped smiling, but her eyes were flat. “Come here, Lizzie! I have something for you.”
Of course sweet little Lizzie had no reason to doubt Agnes Potter’s sincerity. The child had skipped closer and when the strange woman pulled a blond porcelain doll from her bag, Lizzie’s eyes had lit up. Belize didn’t have dolls like that one.
“Really?” Lizzie’s beautiful light blue eyes shone in the sunlight. “For me?”
“Yes.” Agnes put her hands on the child’s shoulders. “For the prettiest girl in Lower Barton.”
Throughout the meal, Ike had watched Agnes from his spot at the end of the table. The woman sat next to Susan and across from Lizzie and Daniel. Before long Susan was spilling her heart to the stranger.
“I miss Paul David, even though he left us,” Susan told the woman. “I keep thinking he’ll come home.”
“That’s just it.” The pitch in Agnes’s voice raised and she talked faster. Like she was nervous. “He would come to you if he could. But he can’t because of his new job. He can’t leave Belize City.” She glanced at Lizzie. “He wants you to come to him.”
Ike tried to be polite as Agnes Potter’s visit came to a close, but every time his eyes met the woman’s, a chill ran down his arms. There was a meanness in her. Ike had seen it. Like she was onto his doubts, and for a fraction of a moment he had seen past the occasional flash of friendliness in her eyes to something else.
The darkest of evil.
Before she left, Agnes worked even harder to convince Susan and the children about visiting Belize City. “Paul David is sorry, Susan,” the woman told Ike’s granddaughter. “He really wants to see you and the children.”