“Why?” Samuel said. “What have I done?”

“Come on,” Gyamfi said, taking him by the arm. “Let’s go.”

He marched the protesting Samuel out.

“He will talk,” Fiti said.

“Why are you so convinced he did it?” Dawson said. “Just because of the condoms?”

“‘Just because’?” Fiti snapped. “Nothing is ‘just because,’ D.I. Dawson. I suspect him because so far he is the one with the strongest motive and he also had very good opportunity. Don’t believe what comes out of this boy’s mouth. You don’t know him the way I know him. He is one of the biggest liars I’ve ever seen.”

“Isaac Kutu also had opportunity,” Dawson pointed out, “and he may in fact have been the very last person with Gladys.”

Fiti shook his head vigorously. “But, no. Isaac would have no good reason to kill her. Gladys was his passport to getting his herbal medicines licensed, don’t you see? Who knows, maybe he was even going to make a lot of money through her.”

Unless, Dawson thought, she planned to sideline him. Was that the kind of person Gladys had been?

17

NUNANA HAD BEEN MORE shocked by Gladys’s death than she had let on. This “old bag of bones,” as she sometimes called herself, maintained a tough exterior, belying the distress she really felt, and she did it for Efia. The poor thing was shattered enough without seeing her elder fall apart. Yesterday, Nunana had sat Efia down under a shady mango tree and given her a talking-to.

“Gladys has left us to join our forefathers,” she said. “I know you loved her like a sister, Efia, and I know you are sad, but have you ever heard the saying that the true character of a person is revealed when something terrible happens? You have strength. You just have to let it come out. Gladys is gone and now the beat of the drum is different, and so you must change your steps according to the new rhythm.”

Nunana had had great respect for Gladys when she was alive and maybe even more now that she was dead. Nunana had had an eerie fear that something terrible like this was going to happen. As clever as Gladys was and as much as she knew about that horrible AIDS sickness, she did not realize how much she was scaring Togbe Adzima, and when that man was scared, he lashed out. That’s what had made Nunana fearful of what might come next. She did not believe Togbe had laid his own hand on Gladys, but she was certain he had cursed her through the forest god and in that way brought on her death.

Nunana was one of Togbe Adzima’s trokosi, and to that she was resigned. She would be here in Bedome till the day she died. She didn’t say Togbe was good or bad. He was just Togbe, a fact of life like the sun rose and rain fell. He shouted at the wives, he shouted at everything, even goats and chickens. Nunana was yelled at too, but as the senior wife, she did earn a certain level of respect from him.

For one thing, she was the only one allowed to clean his room. No one else was permitted in his hut except by his express invitation. She made his bed every day. It was a thin foam mattress falling apart and supported on planks of wood lying on plastic crates. She swept the room. He had few clothes, but she knew which ones were clean and which ones were ready to be washed.

Hidden in the bottom of Togbe Adzima’s box of gin and schnapps was a locked, rusty tin. At least it was supposed to be hidden, but like most women, Nunana could find anything that a man thought he was concealing. When she had first discovered it, more than six months ago, she’d quickly put it back and felt flustered and guilty, but its being locked had made her all the more curious. What was the metal she heard when she gently shook the tin? Jewelry? Coins? Maybe some gold?

She had forgotten about it for a while until last night. Togbe had got drunk, stumbled over his own feet, and fallen on the floor of his hut. He had lain there for a while, eyes half closed and bloodshot, foul mouth open and saliva trickling from one corner.

Nunana had picked him up and pulled him onto the bed. He would never know or remember. She had just been set to leave Togbe’s hut when she saw the mystery tin on the floor. Drunk as he was, Togbe must have accidentally left it out.

Nunana had looked over at him to be sure he was completely unaware, and then she had tried the tin. Open. Hand shaking a little, she had examined the contents. Safety pins, a few cedi coins, a watch, and a silver bracelet. Again, she’d glanced at Togbe and then at the door of the hut to make sure no one was coming in.

The watch meant little to Nunana, but the bracelet was really beautiful. She had never seen anything like it. Even in the poor light of the hut, it had glinted and sparkled when she turned it this way and that.

Where did he get this?

She’d jumped as she heard Togbe stir, and hurriedly she’d put the bracelet back, closed the tin, and returned it to its so-called hiding place.

It had been only four days since Efia had discovered Gladys dead, and the memory of it was still too vivid to bear. Every so often, it stabbed Efia like a red-hot dagger and she jumped visibly. The first morning after that awful day, she had risen with a leaden heart to begin chores. She could barely move, as though she had suddenly aged to a hundred. The night before, her daughter, Ama, had found her staring vacantly into the distance when she should have been attending to the meal she was cooking for Togbe. Tears were streaming down Efia’s cheeks.

“Mama?” Ama said. “Mama, don’t cry. Please don’t cry.”

They had embraced, and soon both of them were quietly weeping, until Togbe Adzima spotted them and yelled at them for doing nothing when they should have been working.

Efia would never think of the forest in the same way. Now it seemed like a place of darkness and wickedness, and she walked through it with a new wariness. She couldn’t bear to go back to the plantain grove where she had found Gladys dead. There was another one just about as plentiful, but it was farther into the forest, and Efia had been to it only once.

She thought she remembered the way well enough, but within a few minutes, Efia realized she was lost. She wiped her forehead with her palm and flicked the moisture away, sweating from both the pitiless afternoon heat and annoyance at herself. She stopped and looked around, trying to figure out where she was. The forest was particularly thick here-foot-snarling undergrowth, dense clumps of bushes, and tall, exuberant trees.

Efia heard something. It might have been an animal, but she wasn’t certain. Following the direction of the sound, she thought she saw a bit of a clearing ahead to her left. She made her way there and found she had been right-the area was relatively free from the dense vegetation she had just tackled. Someone had recently set a fire, and it was still smoldering.

Efia heard that same sound again, this time closer. It sounded like the moan of a woman. She was just about to step into the clearing when she saw something that made her draw in her breath sharply and jump back.

There was a little hut-actually it was nothing more than four wooden sticks a couple meters in length with a roof of woven branches. Underneath that were two people lying on the ground. He was on top of her, hips moving rhythmically. They were dressed, but her garments were pushed up to her waist and his trousers were undone to free his loins, and she had opened her thighs to receive him.

Efia backed away, revolted, her hand clamped over her mouth. In the forest? She almost threw up. It was offensive, horrible. People should never, ever do this in the forest. The gods would be furious, and so they should be.

A second realization struck Efia before she even had time to recover from the initial revulsion. She knew who the two people were. The man was Isaac Kutu. The woman was… what was her name? She was a cocoa farmer, she and her husband. She groped for the name and found it in a corner of her memory.