Heartman: A Missing Girl, A Broken Man, A Race Against Time Read Online Free Page A

“little” islands. It was fair to say there was no love lost between the two peoples when it came to the hierarchy of our individual atolls.
    My uncle Gabe was distrusting by nature and I could tell that he was not impressed by the possibility of me being employed by the wealthy Jamaican politician. I watched the old man sit back in his old armchair and prepared myself for a grilling.
    “The alderman, what the hell kinda work a man like Earl Linney got fo’ you? You ain’t an airplane engineer and you know nuttin’ ’bout pol’tics,” Gabe snapped at me sharply.
    I didn’t reply and quickly skirted over my uncle’s aggressive questioning, changing tack a little and perhaps digging a bigger hole for myself at the same time as I offered up a little more information to him as to the real nature of my new job offer.
    “Gabe, you read ’bout a young woman from Montpelier go missing a short while back? Name’s Stella Hopkins?” I asked him gingerly, then wished that I hadn’t.
    “We heard,” Aunt Pearl interrupted. “Pastor at our church, he got us pray’in fo’ her. You axe me, that poor ting she in the ground.”
    “Nobody knows that, Pearl; just cus she not been around, don’t mean she dead,” Gabe growled back at his wife.
    “Well, you tell me where that girl walking ’bout then?” Pearl was having none of her husband’s bullishness. Nevertheless, my uncle Gabe continued to make his point.
    “Woman, it ain’t fo’ lack a tongue that a horse can’t talk. Ain’t no good sayin’ that she’s dead when you don’t know a damn ting.”
    “Well, I read ’bout that poor child in that paper you go poking through every night. She ain’t been seen fo’ over a week, where she be then, you tell me?”
    Gabe sat in silence, knowing better than to continue the argument with Aunt Pearl, a battle of words in which he would not be finally victorious.
    Pearl picked up my empty bowl with one hand and placed a plate of fried eggs in front of me with her other. She had sliced some bread that she had recently baked and put it onto another, smaller tea plate along with the butter dish.
    “Help yourself, I’ll bring you some coffee,” she said, her finger pointing at the bread and butter as she spoke.
    “Thanks, Aunt Pearl, my belly sure is grateful to you.” I soft-soaped the old lady and began to tuck into my breakfast.
    Pearl walked back to the kitchen sink, shaking her head and mumbling to herself ’bout how my uncle Gabe had “hard ears”, that he didn’t listen to her. I could see her point of view, but Gabe’s sixty-three years had made him wise. He was a thinker, calm, reflective. Everything his dead brother, my papa, wasn’t.
    “He wants me to ask around this area, but kinda on the sly, Gabe, if you know what I mean?”
    “Oh, I know what you mean. But you needs to be axing yo’self, why’s the man need you to do his donkey work on the sly, Joseph? He’s a big enough fella, he should be doing his own sniffing around if you axe me. Someting stinks to high heaven ’bout the whole story.”
    Gabe was on a roll, there was no way I was going to get him off of his soapbox. I was regretting that I’d ever opened my big mouth.
    “An’ another ting. If Linney wants this Hopkins girl finding, then you tell me why he not gone to the police?”
    My uncle Gabe was fishing for the truth. But I had none to give him; I could only offer up what the shady councillor had already told me. As I retold the alderman’s tale to my uncle, I felt his words were already making a liar out of me.
    “Linney said that he’d been to the local law, Gabe, says they’ve come up with nothing. The man knew I’d been on the force back home on Barbados, thought I may be able to help. Poke around without upsetting folk. He said he was prepared to pay me well fo’ that kinda help.”
    “Yeah, is that so . . . You know that’s the first ting I’d be worrying ’bout if I was you. When a man offers you big money fo’