Jayla had declined dinner with Waksit that evening. Room service delivered soup and a salad to her room and she read the second half of a paperback novel that she’d started at home and had tossed into her carry-on bag before leaving D.C. The book had been a blessed distraction from her father’s death and the trip she would take to the Sepik River. She was sorry to see the story end and wished she’d brought a second book with her. Maybe it was just as well. She was physically and mentally exhausted and needed a deep sleep, if that were possible.
The following morning, her body rested—but mentally fatigued—she took a taxi to the airport where she joined nineteen other passengers on an Airlines PNG DeHavilland Twin Otter turbojet aircraft for the two-hour flight to the town of Wewak, in the Sepik region. It had been years since she’d set foot there and the anticipation was both exciting and anxiety-provoking.
She was going to see firsthand the destruction of her father’s four acres. Would it provide an answer to why he’d been brutally slain? She hoped so. She’d second-guessed her decision to travel to the Sepik more than once since making her reservation. But it had to be done. The emotional upheaval that his murder had created in her, and the mystery of why someone had ravaged the patch of land on which he grew and cultivated his plants, had now been replaced by a more cognitive determination to understand who was responsible.
The plane encountered turbulence from the moment it lifted off from the Port Moresby airport, and Jayla, who’d never been afraid of flying, gripped the armrests of her seat for almost the entire flight. Looking out the plane’s window she could see the mysterious Sepik River curling through the dense jungle like a writhing snake, its myriad indigenous tribes the keepers of PNG’s deepest, darkest secrets. Although she had been born and raised in the more urban atmosphere of Port Moresby, Jayla felt a link to the remote region, home to her mother’s ancestors.
A windy rainstorm caused the pilot to abandon his first attempt at a landing and to go around again, slamming the plane down on the runway on his second try. Jayla stood on shaky legs as she joined other deplaning passengers. The rain had suddenly stopped, and a hot sun replaced it, the humidity causing perspiration to instantly soak through her blouse and run freely down her face as she walked to the small building that served as a terminal.
She hadn’t made plans beyond booking the flight, and knew that she would have to hire a driver to take her to the village of Pagwi, where her father’s land was located. But she first checked on return flights to Port Moresby. The last flight of the day departed at six that evening. She reserved a seat, left the terminal, and approached a young man standing next to a battered maroon sedan with white hand-lettered “Taxi” on its doors. After some haggling they reached an agreement on the fare to Pagwi, and Jayla settled in the rear seat for the bumpy ride over a deeply rutted road, during which the driver sang unfamiliar songs in a loud voice, blissfully unaware of people crossing in his way who had to hurry to safety. When they pulled into the center of the village the driver asked if she wanted him to wait to take her back to Wewak. “No taxis here,” he said in his Melanesian Pidgin language, or Tok Pisin as it was known throughout Papua New Guinea. “No ride back.”
“How much will it cost for you to wait for, say, two hours?”
He gave her a price, to which she agreed.
“Your English is pretty good,” she said. “How much for you to come with me to translate?”
She accepted the sum he requested.
She was glad that she’d reconsidered staying overnight in Wewak. She was used to heat and humidity in Washington’s summers, but the air in Pagwi felt as though the small town was engulfed in a steam room. Mosquitoes, called natnats by the natives, buzzed about her head and bit her ankles, causing her to silently curse her decision to wear a dress. Slacks and socks would have been a more prudent choice.
The man who’d watched over her father’s property was Walter Tagobe. Using the taxi driver’s services, she asked villagers where Tagobe could be found, aware that she was being scrutinized by everyone she passed, especially by some of the tribesmen who were nearly naked except for their loincloths. A few directed comments to her which she was sure were suggestive, and her discomfort level increased as she sought someone who could direct her to Tagobe’s home. She stopped a woman whose breasts were barely covered by some sort of fur and repeated Tagobe’s name. The woman pointed to a hut on stilts above a stream on the fringe of the village, just beyond an outdoor market in which women wove skirts and baskets known as bilum bags, and men hawked vividly colored ceremonial masks and even a few head hunter’s skulls. One woman pounded the pulp of the sago palms to make sak-sak, a popular dish. Others sold crude necklaces and bracelets made of pig tusks and shells, or headdresses fashioned from bird-of-paradise feathers. Young men, their groins and buttocks barely concealed, pressed close; one played a bamboo mouth harp, hoping that Jayla would reward him with money. Some of the young men’s backs testified to their initiation into the crocodile legend. The sight caused Jayla to wince as she imagined the pain they must have suffered.
She reached the house and looked up the rickety set of steps made of irregular-shaped pieces of wood tied together by heavy lengths of rope. As she was about to ascend to the open door ten steps above, a woman appeared in the doorway.
“I’m looking for Walter Tagobe,” Jayla said.
“Not here,” the woman said.
“Does he live here?”
“Not here.”
“Where did he go?” Jayla asked, aware that a circle of villagers had formed around her. Consumed with curiosity, their garishly painted faces and near-nakedness increased her discomfort.
“Far away. You go now,” the woman said, disappearing inside the home.
Jayla had never seen the acreage that her father had purchased and cultivated, but knew from his description of it that it was close to Pagwi. She turned to the people who surrounded her and asked a young man whose mouth was blood-red, “Do you know where Dr. King grew his crops?”
The man answered with a grin exposing blackened teeth, the result of chewing betel nuts from the areca palm, a popular narcotic enjoyed by tribesmen.
“Dr. King?” Jayla repeated. “Big, tall man, medical doctor?”
The native nodded, his grin becoming wider.
“Do you know where Walter Tagobe is?” the taxi driver asked.
“He go away,” was the answer.
“Where?”
The man shrugged. “Walter, he’s long-long.”
“Long-long?”
He used his index finger to make circles at the side of his head.
“Oh, he’s—he’s loco,” Jayla said. “Can you take me to where the big doctor grew crops? Plants? Plants for medicine?” She pointed to plants growing at her feet.
His face lit up with recognition of what she was saying. He nodded enthusiastically and beckoned her and the taxi driver to follow him.
They walked into the jungle, following a narrow overgrown path that ran alongside a stream on which women fished from dugouts. Other villagers had fallen in behind them. They passed wild sugarcane, breadfruit trees, and myriad palms. At one point her guide stopped and pointed at a crocodile, its huge head and glistening white teeth barely above water. “Puk-puk,” he said, the local term for croc.
They eventually reached her father’s acreage. She knew they were close because of the acrid smell of recently burned plant life; an occasional wisp of smoke still wafted into the oppressive air. Although she had never visited the site before she felt as though she knew it intimately based upon her father’s frequent descriptions of it, and photographs of the plants and herbs growing strong and tall in the jungle heat. Now it was all gone, wiped out by someone.
“Who did this?” she asked her companion.
“Blue eyes,” he said. “Many blue eyes.”
Jayla was surprised. She’d assumed it might have been a neighboring tribe that had destroyed the acreage.
“White men?” she asked.
“Yes,” he said, flashing his vampirelike smile.
“Who were they?”
“Big men,” he said, indicating their height with his hand.
She stepped into the field and picked up pieces of charred plants. Why? She asked herself. Who would benefit from destroying the field?
A machine with large tires had gouged deep, wide troughs in the earth.
She stared at the destroyed field for what seemed a long time before turning and starting back along the path leading to the village, the taxi driver and the young man with the red mouth falling in behind. A dozen native men joined them. As she walked she wondered where Walter Tagobe had gone. Her father had often spoke of him with fondness: “He’s a good man, Jayla, slightly better educated than most of the men in the village. He understands enough English that I can communicate with him.”
Had Tagobe fled because of the field’s ruination, embarrassed that he hadn’t protected it? Or had he been told to leave by those who had destroyed the field, perhaps paid to disappear?
She handed the young man some kina banknotes, and stopped to purchase from an old woman a beautiful necklace made from shells and colorful cassowary feathers, a gift for her nanny, Tabitha. She climbed into the car and her driver delivered her back to the Wewak airport. Her flight back to Port Moresby was considerably less bumpy than the earlier flight had been, and she filled the time consumed with questions, each delivered to her brain only to be replaced by the next, and the next, a jumble of jarring mysteries.
She took a taxi directly to her father’s house where to her surprise Tabitha was in the kitchen preparing herself a late dinner. The old woman immediately broke into tears upon seeing Jayla, and wrapped her pencil-thin arms about the child she had helped to raise.
“I am so sorry about your father.”
“I know how much he meant to you,” Jayla said, disengaging. “He’s left you money in his will.”
“I know, I know. The lawyer, he called me. Dr. Preston was such a good man, a saint. He wanted me to call him by just his first name but I could not do that.”
“He loved you very much,” Jayla said.
She guffawed. “Loved me? Perhaps. But his great love was you. How proud he was of you, your education, your big important job in America.”
“How are you, Tabitha? You’re feeling well?”
She lowered her eyes, as well as her voice. “No, I am not well,” she said. “I have the cancer.”
“Oh, I’m so sorry. Are you being treated?”
“Yes, by a fine doctor, a friend of your father. But your father, he helps me with the pain.” Her face brightened. “No pain when I take his medicine. Your father makes special medicine for me. When I take it, the pain is gone.” She clicked her fingers. “Like magic,” she said. “Like that.” Another click of her fingers.
“The medicine takes away your pain but doesn’t make you sick in other ways?”
“No, no, it is good medicine. Your father, he makes it himself in his laboratory.”
Jayla sat at the kitchen table and processed what the sickly old woman had said. As far as she knew her father’s quest to create a more effective pain reliever was still in the formative stage. But here was anecdotal evidence that he’d progressed beyond theory and had succeeded.
“Tabitha,” she said, “do you know whether my father also used the medicine with other people?”
“Oh, yes,” she said. “My friend has terrible pain in the arms and legs. She comes to the clinic and your father gives her the medicine. No pain when she has the medicine. Others, too.”
“I was in the laboratory yesterday with Eugene,” Jayla said.
Tabitha’s expression turned sour. “Mr. Eugene,” she said disparagingly.
“You don’t like him, do you?”
“I should not say that,” she said. “It is none of my business.”
“Eugene told me that my father’s notes, and packages of his medicine that you and your friend took, are missing from the laboratory.”
“I don’t know about that,” she said quickly. “I didn’t take anything.”
“Oh, no, Tabitha,” Jayla said, patting the older woman’s hand. “I know that you didn’t. But someone did. Did father have any visitors recently, men you hadn’t seen before?”
Tabitha thought before saying, “No, no one. But your father, he was—well, he was different lately.”
“How was he different?”
“He was worried. I could see it in his eyes and on his face. I knew that he was worried when he gave me the package for you.”
“A package for me? What package?”
Her answer was to walk from the kitchen, returning minutes later carrying an 8x10 manila envelope sealed with tape. She handed it to Jayla. “Your father, he told me that if anything happened to him I should give this envelope to you, only you and no one else.”
Jayla weighed it in her hands. “Do you know what’s in it?” she asked.
Tabitha shook her head.
Jayla removed the tape and withdrew the envelope’s contents, a letter addressed to her from her father. She fanned through the nine single-spaced pages handwritten in her father’s recognizable tight, small script, and looked at the four small plastic packets of seeds that accompanied the letter.
“You say that my father told you to give this to me in case something happened to him. He must have been fearful that something would. Do you know why he felt this way?”
She shook her head again. “No,” she said, “but he had that worried look on his face, so worried.”
Tabitha offered to make tea or coffee, but Jayla insisted on doing it. When she’d served them tea, and had broken open a package of sugar cookies, she asked what the old woman intended to do. “The house will have to be sold, I’m afraid,” Jayla said.
“I have already arranged to live with my daughter in Koki. She is a good girl.”
“I remember her well,” Jayla said. I’m glad that you spoke with the attorney. He will take care of everything.”
“He is a good man, like your father. You take care, my lovely Jayla. Be well, and find your happiness.”
Jayla and Tabitha rode together in a taxi to Tabitha’s daughter’s house, where Jayla gave Tabitha the necklace she’d bought for her and spent a few minutes catching up with the daughter’s family.
“You can’t stay longer?” the daughter asked when Jayla said that she had to leave.
“No, but thank you. The taxi is waiting for me, and I leave tomorrow for the States. I’m glad that your mother will have a good home with you.”
“She is very sick,” the daughter said as she walked Jayla to the waiting cab.
“Yes, she told me. I wish there was something I could do for her.”
“The medicine your father gave her for the pain is so good. There is no pain when she takes it.”
“Maybe I’ll be able to make that medicine myself one day,” Jayla said.
They embraced, and Jayla rode back to the Grand Papua Hotel where she had dinner in her room and pored over the contents of the envelope Tabitha had given her. The letter was long, and filled with terms of endearment. Professionally, he was ebullient about the advances he’d made in the lab to concoct an effective painkiller. Unlike his missing documentation that traced every aspect of his research in scientific terms, the letter provided a more informal narrative about the progress he’d made and what it might mean to millions of men and women suffering pain.
But there was also an undercurrent of concern about what the future held for him personally. He wrote that in the event something were to happen to him she was to take his notebooks in which he chronicled every step of his research, as well as the myriad packages containing the medicine he’d formulated, and carry on his work. “You know where to find my notebooks in the lab,” he wrote.
“But the notes are gone,” she said aloud, as though speaking to him. “They’re gone!”
Eugene Waksit had insisted on driving Jayla to the airport the following morning for her flight to Sydney, and then on to Washington.
“What will you do now that the clinic and lab are closed?” Jayla asked as they sat in his Range Rover in front of the terminal.
“I haven’t figured that out yet,” he said. “I’ll be leaving here, of course, maybe go back to Australia. No definite plans yet. Maybe I’ll take a trip to Washington someday. If I do I’ll call and you can show me the sights.”
“I’ll be happy to do that, Eugene.”
“It was good seeing you again, Jayla, even though you had to come home under such sad circumstances,” he said as he opened the door for her. As she stepped from the vehicle he kissed her cheek. Travel safe, Jayla.”
She turned and strode into the terminal without looking back.