“I have to go,” she said. “The taxi is waiting.”

Dawson smiled to himself, knowing the real reason was that Gifty would rather not be left alone with him.

“Bye, Darko,” Gifty said. “Consider my idea, okay?”

He didn’t answer. Christine saw her to the taxi and returned once her mother had left. She squeezed Dawson’s shoulder.

“She doesn’t mean any harm,” she said. “She just has her beliefs. She’s of a different generation.”

“And a different planet,” Dawson muttered sourly.

Christine gave him a soft but emphatic whack on the back of his head.

“Ouch.” He rubbed his scalp. “That hurt.”

“Apologize.”

“Okay, sorry.”

Hosiah appeared in the kitchen door naked as the day he was born.

“I’m ready, Mama!”

She laughed. “Come on, you rascal.”

She scooped him up under her arm, and he squealed with laughter and kicked his legs like a pair of drumsticks.

“Still true, though,” Dawson called after her. He loved having the last word. “Definitely from another planet.”

8

ONCE HOSIAH HAD GONE to bed, Dawson and Christine sat down to dinner and he broke the news to her.

“What?” She dropped her fork. “Ketanu. Why does it have to be you?”

“None of the other guys speak Ewe.”

“Wait a minute,” Christine said fiercely. “Ketanu is in the Volta Region. Don’t they have their own CID people in Ho?”

“Minister of Health personally called Chief Super and told him he wants an Accra detective to go up.” Dawson shrugged and chortled. “Apparently the honorable minister thinks we’re superior.”

Christine let her breath out like steam escaping a valve. “How long do you think you’ll be there?”

“Two weeks, maybe? It could be more. I don’t know how complicated this case is going to be.”

“Can’t you refuse to go?”

“Sure, and Lartey sack me on the spot? Right now’s no time to be out of work.”

She frowned. “I don’t like that man.”

“I know. You’ve made it plain.”

“A murder in Ketanu?” Christine said, ignoring his dry comment. “Isn’t that rare in a place like that?”

“Has to be.”

Christine seemed lost in thought for a moment.

“What you thinking?” Dawson asked.

“Just wondering. Dark, do you think… do you think this is a chance for you to reinvestigate what happened to your mother? She went to Ketanu and never came back, right? Maybe you might come across a missed clue or something. You know what I mean?”

“I do. And you read my mind.”

“You mean you’ll look into it?” Christine said eagerly.

“Yes, I will. If that last dream I had means anything, I have to do it.”

Dawson packed a small suitcase and put it in the trunk of the Corolla along with a cricket bat, his only weapon. Detectives in Ghana did not carry firearms.

He turned in and slept poorly, thrashing about and dreaming he was chasing Gifty around Ketanu’s village square waving a butcher’s knife while Hosiah trailed behind begging him to slow down, panting and wheezing until he fell to the ground with exhaustion.

His eyes popped open, and he sat up sucking air into his chest. Yet another nightmare. Sometimes they recurred night after night for weeks. Other times they left him alone to sleep in peace. He got out of bed. Christine didn’t wake up. She could sleep through a thunderstorm, whereas the smallest nocturnal murmur from Hosiah’s room would have Dawson out of bed like a bullet out the barrel.

He went to the kitchen for a drink of water, then moved to the sitting room and sat in an armchair with his head resting in the palm of his right hand. Dawson was an insomniac just like his mother had been. For her, it had started after Cairo’s accident.

Please God, turn back the clock and let me do everything over.

That had been Mama’s prayer. She could shake off neither the replaying of the accident in her mind nor the torture of self-blame. She never again slept a restful night. Darko often heard her, and occasionally Papa, tending to Cairo-turning him in bed, giving him sips of water, keeping him clean. One night Darko padded after Mama and found her in the sitting room silhouetted against the moonlit window with her head bowed in her hands like a collapsed stalk of maize.

She was so still it frightened him.

“Mama?”

She jumped. “Darko. What are you doing up?”

He came to her. “I couldn’t sleep. Are you sick, Mama?”

“No, my love. I’m all right.” She lifted him onto her lap. “Sometimes we grown-ups think too much at night.”

“You’re thinking about Cairo, aren’t you?”

“Yes,” she said. Her tears moistened his neck.

“Mama?”

“Yes, Darko.”

“You take care of Cairo and I’ll take care of you, okay?”

She kissed him. “All right, sweetie. Thank you.”

He suddenly had an idea. “I’m going to make you feel better right now. Wait here, okay?”

He skipped off her lap and trotted to his room. Mama had given him an eight-note kalimba for his last birthday. It was a small handheld wood box mounted with long metal strips of different lengths. Plucking them with fingers and thumb produced harplike tones that lingered beautifully and died out slowly. He had tinkered with it a little bit, but he was no master yet. He went back to the sitting room with kalimba in hand, switched the table lamp on, and hopped onto Mama’s lap again.

“I’m going to play you a tune. Ready?”

She was delighted and charmed. “Yes, I’m ready.”

He had a false start. “No, wait, wait.”

He tried again, and this time the soft notes more or less made out “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star.”

He remembered that night clear as crystal and thought of it as the closest of moments with Mama. It was about six months afterward that Auntie Osewa wrote with wonderful news. After years of being barren, she had become pregnant. She asked Mama and all the family to pray that the pregnancy would carry through successfully and bring a child into the world, preferably a son.

After another seven months, collective prayers were apparently answered in the affirmative. Osewa had given birth to a baby boy they had named Alifoe. She invited Mama up for the celebrations. Mama hesitated at first, worried about leaving Cairo, but Papa urged her to go. Cairo had been doing well at the time. Papa would stay home with him and Darko. It would only be for two or three days.

So Mama left for Ketanu and stayed for five days with Auntie Osewa, Uncle Kweku, and Alifoe, who was a beautiful and healthy baby. When Mama returned home to Accra, she told stories of how every family member loved to hold and cuddle him.

Mama must have enjoyed her visit tremendously, because three months later she went back to Ketanu. Six days passed, eight, and then ten. Mama didn’t return. Darko and Cairo began to fret.

“When is Mama coming home?”

“Soon,” Papa replied, which was meaningless.

After another two days, however, Papa was as worried as his two sons were. Like most people in Ketanu, Auntie Osewa and Uncle Kweku did not have a phone, and so Papa had no choice but to take a trip up. He asked one of his two sisters to stay with the boys while he was gone.

When he got to Ketanu, Auntie Osewa and Uncle Kweku warmly welcomed him but wondered why he hadn’t come with Beatrice.

“What?” Papa said. “Beatrice is not here with you?”

Auntie Osewa and Uncle Kweku were dumbstruck. “She was here for only four days,” they said. Osewa told Papa she had accompanied Beatrice to the tro-tro stop to say good-bye to her when she was leaving.

“Did she tell you for certain that she was headed for Accra?” Papa asked.

“But of course,” Auntie Osewa said. “Where else would she be going?”

They stood staring at each other in astonishment. Somewhere between Ketanu and Accra, Mama had disappeared.