“You’ve done the right thing, Auntie,” he said. “Now tell me everything. I’m ready to listen to you.”

Osewa turned to one side, arms folded across her chest. Dawson watched her in profile as she stared at an unidentified point somewhere in the distance. She was silent for a long time, and the calls of forest birds filled the void until she began to speak.

“I was collecting firewood when I saw Gladys and Samuel talking to each other at the edge of the forest,” she began. “Then I heard Isaac calling out and saw him walk up to them and begin to argue with Samuel. I heard their voices, but from where I was standing, I couldn’t hear much of what they were saying. Still, I guessed he was telling Samuel to go away and leave Gladys alone.”

Osewa turned back to face Isaac, and now she addressed him directly.

“I didn’t know why you told Samuel to go away, Isaac. Maybe you thought he was dangerous or troubling Gladys. But I was worried, because Samuel was not really a bad person, and so I was thinking to myself, Why has Isaac told the boy to go away? Is it because he likes Gladys and doesn’t want another man near her?

“So I just watched you and Gladys talking and talking, and I was wondering what you could be conversing about for so long. And sometimes you were smiling, Isaac, as though you were enjoying her company so very much. I saw how close to you she was standing. One time she touched your arm, and another time I saw her laugh and I knew it was a laugh of desire for you, because I too am a woman.

“Then you left her and went back to your compound, and she went on her way back toward Ketanu and I was still wondering, wondering, because you always told me you were only working with Gladys on your medicines, so why did it seem that the two of you were so attracted to each other? When you had returned to your compound, I went after Gladys. I had to run because by now she was far ahead on the footpath to Ketanu.

“When I caught up with her, I greeted her and she was nice to me. And while we were talking, I kept thinking how beautiful she was. And I asked her how everything was going in her study of natural medicines. She told me everything was fine. And then she told me something I didn’t like at all. She said she was trying to convince you, Isaac, to go to Accra with her to work with those doctors there. But really, I knew what she was trying to do. She was trying to take you away for herself and keep you in Accra.”

“Osewa, no,” Isaac said sadly. “She wasn’t trying to do that.”

“Maybe you didn’t know that, my love. But that was what she was trying to do and I had to stop her. While I was talking with her, I was thinking to poison her. Maybe just to make her sick enough to want to leave Ketanu and never come back. I told her I could show her a place in the forest with some medicinal herbs, and I’m sorry, Isaac, I lied and said I knew which one you used to cure the AIDS. She was very eager to see it, and I took her to the plantain grove.

“When I got there, I was trying to think of a way to poison her, but time was going, the sun was about to sleep, Gladys wanted to leave, and she kept asking me which was the medicine to cure AIDS. I showed her a plant I didn’t even know, and she began to laugh at me, saying that she didn’t think that was it. And the more she talked, the angrier I became that she was telling me all these things she was planning to do for you. She even said she was going to make the Ministry of Health get you a nice guesthouse, and that’s when I knew for sure that she wanted to live with you in that house. I wanted to tell her that you belonged to me, not to anyone else, that she couldn’t have you.”

Osewa turned to Dawson. “Isaac is everything to me in this world. He gave me everything. His very touch the first day I met him was like nothing I had known. He gave me the love I never had from Kweku or anyone else, and most of all he blessed me with a beautiful son. Do you know how much I wanted a son, Darko? Do you know how I felt when I saw women with two, three, four beautiful children while I had none?”

“I know it was painful for you, Auntie,” Dawson said. “What did you do to Gladys?”

“I attacked her. I wanted to hurt her. We fell on the ground and she started to scream. I squeezed her neck to make her quiet, and she was looking up at me while I was doing it. She was struggling and I wanted her to stop, so I kept squeezing. Her neck was very soft. And when she stopped breathing, I felt sorry for her, and I didn’t know what to do, so I just tried to make her more comfortable by moving her underneath a palm tree. And I rearranged her skirt and blouse so they were nice and neat again.”

Osewa turned her palms up and looked at them as if she was seeing them for the first time. “I couldn’t let her take away my treasure, that’s what you have to understand. Not Gladys, nor any other woman.”

“Even your own sister,” Dawson said.

Osewa drew in her breath so sharply it made a sound of asphyxiation. Her right hand, fingers spread, went to her chest. She stood frozen. Dawson moved in close.

“Where did you bury my mother?”

He grasped her arm, but she threw it off and sprang away like a bush rabbit.

“Don’t touch me!” she snapped. Her eyes blazed like red-hot embers. “You’re just like her. Even your laugh is like hers. She was always better than me, that woman. Ever since we were children. And then she would rub it in my face. She had everything. She lived in Accra, she was more beautiful, she had you and Cairo while I was barren, and then she wanted Isaac for herself as well.”

Her chest was heaving and her hands were trembling.

“Isaac looked at Mama that day we came to see you,” Dawson said, “and she looked back at him. I saw it, and so did you, and you knew what it meant.”

“Yes. That she wanted him. She was going to get him.”

“When you said you had been outside setting the traps for the rabbits,” Dawson said, “you really went to see Isaac, because you were afraid that something was going on between him and Mama, and you desperately wanted Isaac to reassure you that it wasn’t so.”

“Yes.” She looked admiringly at Dawson for a moment. “How do you know everything? Then, when your mother came to see us just after Alifoe was born, a farmer mentioned to me that he had seen Beatrice go into Isaac’s compound and that she had spent a long time there. And then I knew Beatrice was in love with Isaac, because if that wasn’t the case, she would have told me she had gone to see him, maybe for some healing, but she didn’t. She did not say one word about it.

“She came back to Ketanu again, and this time I challenged her. I asked her, ‘Beatrice, I know you have been secretly going to see Isaac Kutu. Why are you doing that?’ She told me she feared that she might have offended the gods in some way and that’s why they had taken Cairo’s legs away, that perhaps she needed to be purified, and so that was why she had visited Isaac’s compound. And I asked her, Why not just find a healer in Accra to purify her? Do you know what she answered? She said that no one made her feel the way Isaac did. She said she just felt so happy when she was with him.

“And then your mother confessed something to me and begged me never to tell anyone. And I said, All right, I won’t tell anyone. She told me she often dreamed that she was standing with seven or eight women who were Isaac’s wives, and one by one they died around her. They just fell down on the ground one after the other and left only Beatrice standing. Once they were all dead, she became Isaac’s new wife.” Auntie Osewa shuddered. “That’s when I realized.”

“Realized what, Auntie Osewa?”

“Boniface Kutu had been right that one of my sisters was a witch, only he chose the wrong sister. It wasn’t Akua who needed to be tried. It was Beatrice. She was the witch. It was Beatrice who had stolen my womb from me.”