Chapter 23: Scholarship Examination

Wilson found his women in the ounfò. Nadine was on a couch and Tamara was lying there, apparently asleep, her head in Nadine’s lap.

“She’s really traumatized by what happened, honey,” Nadine whispered tiredly.

“Did she say anything about why she came home?” he whispered back.

“No, I was comforting her and telling her to relax; then she just fell asleep.”

“Maybe the sleep is good. Help her mind heal a bit. I’ll check on...”

Just then, Tamara stretched and yawned; her eyes opened.

“Oh, it’s real; not just a bad dream then,” she sighed.

Nadine kissed her. “No. Tell us what happened, if you’re able to, that is.”

Tamara sighed again. “That was so awful ... Yeah, I can tell you. So, when I woke this morning, I had the most powerful feeling of foreboding I ever had. So when my driver got out of our driveway, I asked him to just drop me off at that fast-food place down near the highway. I told him I was playing hooky today and he laughed and said okay. While I was sitting there nursing a Coke, I got such a headache and suddenly felt like I was outside my body. Then ... then ... Emily ... came to me...”

She fingered the amulet hanging at her neck.

“But it wasn’t Emily anymore. It was Tamara, your manman, Mom. The images were so confusing, like it wasn’t speech or thought—it was urges. Like I had to get home now, and I had to keep small, and I had to do things. It was all a jumble. I ran all the way back here, like a half mile, as fast as I could. My daily running paid off, see? Anyway, while I was running home, things got clearer. Like maybe the other Tamara in me was figuring out how things worked. But there was such a strong feeling of ‘Finally the end comes!’

“Just before I got to the driveway, I saw a car that was blocking it down near the house and saw a woman get out of it, so I hid so she wouldn’t see me. Then I heard two BOOMS, the front door disappeared—so did the guy who was kicking it—and the witch staggered a bit so I guessed that something had hit her, but she stood up again. That gave me the chance to get the car between me and the witch, so I would be kinda close to her. I hid behind the car but I saw that you knew I was there—you looked right at me. Then that urge came on me again; you had to keep her busy talking. So I motioned that to you. And suddenly I knew that Vanessa—I never tasted anything so putrid and rotten and vile as that aura—had a heart implant thing. I just knew it, the urge told me, and knew I could make it burn out. With that thought, I had the most incredible feeling of relief and thanksgiving I ever felt.

“You know about my masers. I had found out that they can short out delicate electronics, even melt it sometimes. Well, I had made a second one and they both have a very high power output. I pointed them at that witch and turned them on. Then she pulled out the gun and the urge came that I needed to make sure she was ... well. I was close enough that they worked on her pretty quickly. When Vanessa fell down, the urge told me to finish what I had started ... and then I heard myself say, ‘Stay back, Cassandra, I need to finish her.’ When the witch died, the Emily/Tamara presence gave me a mental hug and kiss, praised me for being brave and smart, and said she could finally rest peacefully now.

“Manman, that was your own manman!” Tamara wailed. “When she left, she left behind some of her memories. Some are hard to understand, but one was that our ancestry goes back thousands of years to when Granne Erzulie was human, she’s our family’s many-greats grandmother and is now the lwa of kindness and love—so Erzulie Mansur is our ancestor too. Other memories are about what that witch did to Granmanman Tamara. In one of her battles with Vanessa, Tamara damaged Vanessa’s heart somehow. That’s how she knew about the implant. Other memories that Tamara had? I don’t want to look at those memories—at least not yet.”

Nadine was weeping as she listened. “Was Manman with you the whole time you were growing up, then?”

“No ... yes ... no ... oh, maybe not. I can feel that her presence has left me now and I know what it felt like when it happened back at that fast food place—it was nothing like when the lwa mount you—yes, I’ve experienced that; don’t look at me like that, Mother—but I feel the same as I used to, now that her presence is gone from me. So it’s probably no. I’m sure I communed with her spirit through Emily and whenever I think of her, my amulet feels warm. So I know there must be some kind of connection.”

“So Manman was the defeat of Vanessa after all ... so fitting,” Nadine mused. “And it was done by technology, not magic. We will need to give thanks to our protecting lwa for their warnings and support, my husband and daughter. But Tamara, are you not traumatized by what you did? Like after what happened with Leger?”

“No, Manman ... What happened here was ... right. And it wasn’t like I was the person who did it to her; I was guided and urged to use my masers like that. Now I feel ... like ... complete? Fulfilled? Yes, like that.”

“Oh, that’s excellent, darling,” Nadine said. “I worry for you. Oh! But how is my poor house?”

“Well, it needs new doors for sure. Some cleanup, but most of that is outside. I think the police should be done by now; let’s look,” Wilson said.

They went outside and the area was empty; even the car that Vanessa had used had been towed away.

Wilson looked around. “I want to call the handyman who fixed up the place to come to do the repairs. Don’t use the front porch; that will need professional cleaning. Your aim was perfect, Nadine. Oh, the FBI agent, Norris, should be back soon. He’s heard my story; I’d like to hear his—what he learned about Vanessa—and see if there are any more people who we have to watch out for.”

About a half hour later, Norris returned. By then Wilson had cleaned up the remains of the blood in the kitchen and sanitized the floor, so except for the door and frame, the kitchen looked normal.

Nadine heard the car pull into the yard, so she waved for Norris to go around to the back.

“Done with the cops?” he asked as he sat at the kitchen table and accepted a cup of coffee as Wilson told him about Vanessa’s likely cause of death.

The family sat at the table with him.

“I heard you were at my school,” Tamara said. “I want to know what happened there.”

“And if you learned any more about Vanessa’s intentions than you heard from us here,” Wilson added.

“Okay, let’s start at the beginning. We did find that she entered through Tampa over a week ago. She had a bogus diplomatic passport but she got the passport control people so confused that she was out of the airport before they could find her. That info came in just about an hour ago; Tampa didn’t know about the Vanessa connection and the passport was in a different name.

“The school. What happened there was sheer coincidence. The Miami police were investigating claims of a possible assault on two school district employees by some kind of invisible ‘aliens,’ so the police invited the FBI to be there too. They thought it was a national security matter. I had told Wilson about that.”

Wilson nodded.

“Well, when we were in the principal’s office, talking to her about Monday’s events, there was a commotion in the outer office; a guy was demanding that the secretary call for Fabienne Bernard, that her parents needed her, and he had a letter signed by them to release her. The secretary told him that the school had no student by that name, so he showed her a picture but it was of a nine- or ten-year-old girl. The secretary pointed out that this was a high school; possibly he was looking for an elementary school.

“I saw, from inside the principal’s office, the man go around the counter. He said to her, ‘Let me look at your student list,’ and then grabbed her arm and pulled her out of her chair and she screamed; that’s when the two cops ran out behind me, grabbed the guy, and wrestled him to the floor. They cuffed him and told him they were charging him for assault, battery, obstruction, you know how they lay on the charges. But that name he asked for? I have a good memory for names and I recalled a certain Bernard family who had arrived on a military medical airlift, a family who my office helped obtain new identities. Wilson and I had just discussed the likelihood that Vanessa was searching for his wife—and Vanessa probably would only know the family’s Haitian names. So I stepped in and took over the arrest.

“I wasn’t sure if the cops loved or hated that. They were damned sure confused. Well, attempted kidnapping is a federal offense too and we had the guy cold, with physical evidence too. I told him that attempted child kidnappers had about a thirty-day life expectancy in prison and he opened right up. To hell with Miranda rights. Oh, I did mention them in passing.

“He said that he was supposed to grab you, Tamara, and when Vanessa got Nadine, she was going to take you both to a remote house she’d rented outside Florida City. To do what, he didn’t know. He said that they’d been casing your place for several days and had followed Tamara to her school; that’s how he knew you went to Edison. He didn’t know that you also went to classes at U of Miami. And he said that you, Wilson, went to work every day like clockwork, at 6:30 a.m. When he got the call that Tamara had left and the plan was to go ahead, he had to wait for the classes to start because he had never gotten a good enough look at you, Tamara, to recognize you well enough to grab you out of a group and that you came by a different car each day that he watched. Vanessa’s thugs knew that simply trying to grab Tamara would be difficult, so they concocted that fake letter.”

“Did he know how Vanessa found out where we lived?” Wilson asked.

“Not a whole lot, except he did tell us that she visited Leger in prison in Haiti a few times and that he knows that Leger’s dead now. So somehow Vanessa got the info about you from Leger.”

“You think there were any more plans against Nadine?”

Norris shook his head. “The quality of these guys she hired shows that she was scraping the bottom. That was slipshod planning for a smash-and-grab attempt at your home and a very stupid kidnapping attempt. She must have been at the end of her resources; we learned that she got pretty well financially tied up in Haiti. Maybe she thought if she could get Nadine to work with her, she could make a comeback. Hey, gotta go; thanks for the coffee and the story. And keep safe, although you seem to do fine on your own.”

They shook hands and Norris left.

Wilson sighed. “Gotta get the repairs started.”

University of Miami, Coral Gables, Florida: mid-November

During the past summer, Tamara had taken two writing courses and she had kept in contact with one of her instructors, Joyce Winters, an English literature doctoral student, who taught part of the creative writing course. Tamara was most concerned about the Clarke exam’s literature question, so she had been writing some sample essays to answer past exam questions and sending them to her instructor to critique. She had met with Winters once in October and it was time for her November meeting.

“Hey, Tamara,” Winters greeted her. “Your last two essays were pretty good.”

Tamara frowned. “Hmmm. Just ‘pretty good’? I want them to be ... excellent.”

“Ha! Grading essays is what I do. Much is very subjective. Your writing is excellent, technically. The grammar, word usage, spelling, sentence structure, all that stuff—that’s as good as any college senior English major or even grad student. The other part, the creative part—that’s what grabs the reader. You could do more there. That’s where the difference between a good essay and a great essay lies. For example, where you wrote on the topic of Moby Dick, here it’s...”

Winters went on to show Tamara some places where her writing could be tightened up and to remove the instances where she overused the passive voice.

“Writing becomes dull when you use the passive voice. When I read it, it makes it sound like the writer is pushing the topic away, distancing himself from the words. It’s a turnoff for creative writing, and even in narrative and expository writing, you should use the passive voice very judiciously.”

“So I need to be more creative in how I deal with the subject,” Tamara said and Winters nodded. “I have an idea. All of the essay questions I tackled could apply to novels other than the one that the question mentions. The essay questions name the novel and say ‘for example’ or ‘as an example.’ Do you think that, in addition to exploring the issue in the named work, I could mention other works and use examples from them to support my reasoning?”

Winters looked at her. “Say now, that’s an interesting idea. Hmmm, if I were grading an essay like that, it would definitely stand out among any others. That would show creativity and analytic abilities too. Why don’t you try that for the next two essays you send me? You just gave me a wonderful idea for the course I’m T.A.-ing in—thank you! And with the holidays coming, let’s meet again the first week of December instead of the second. Let’s check our schedules.”

When Tamara left Winters, her mind was full of possible ways to bring more novels into her essay question responses.

One week later

On Friday a week later, Tamara was at lunch when a commotion broke out around several tables; kids started celebrating loudly. Quickly the news spread through the room and Linda went to a nearby table to find out what the kids were looking at. A few minutes later she came back, told the others to wait a bit, and pulled up a website to display on her tablet.

“Here’s what that was about. This morning there was an article in a newspaper from an Atlanta high school about the Program there. Look, the article in that paper talks about how the Program is a complete failure—none of its objectives can be met. Let’s see ... It says it makes kids suffer psychological damage; everyone’s grades in the school get lowered, and kids have all kinds of problems including assaults and injuries.