Page 38 of Murder Island

And that was that.

CHAPTER 45

Democratic Republic of the Congo, 1 p.m.

AT MIDDAY, CONDITIONS in the mine were stifling.

One hundred and ten degrees. Eighty-five percent humidity.

Still, parents labored side by side with their children, scraping away at the dirt, prying stone after stone out of the earth, their eyes trained to separate the reddish, brownish treasure from the rest of the deposits that had built up over the last four billion years or so.

Vanda, the mother from the bulldozed village, still had only her spade to work with. Her right hand was now calloused and blistered from digging. Her whole body ached from kneeling and bending, hour after hour, day after day. As she worked, her baby hung on her back, a constant extra fifteen pounds of weight.

Vanda stabbed her blade under a fist-sized stone and worked it free with cracked fingernails. She held it up, spiton it once, and wiped the dirt off the wet corner with her thumb.

A woman next to her in a filthy green blouse reached over and tapped the stone with her own blade.“Takataka,”she said. Garbage.

Vanda tossed the stone into a reject pile and looked for another.

A woman on the other side gasped and tugged at Vanda’s arm. Vanda elbowed the woman away. She had claimed her spot for the day. Nobody was taking it from her.

The woman stood up and started shouting.

Vanda kept on digging, head down. Then she saw the bare feet of other workers moving in close. She looked up and realized that all work in her area had stopped. A circle of workers was closing around her, everybody pointing toward…

The baby!

Vanda grabbed for her son and pulled him down off her back. He was limp. Hot to the touch. Eyes open. Not moving.

Vanda laid him down in the dirt and shook him by the shoulders.“Maji!”she screamed.Water!

Somebody handed her a half-empty bottle. She washed the dust from her baby’s face and dribbled water between his stiff lips. She patted his belly. Squeezed his legs. Rested her cheek against his bare chest.

Then she screamed—so loud it echoed off the stone walls.

The woman in green pulled at Vanda’s shoulders. Vanda shook her off and clung even tighter to her son.

Her dead son.

A loud crack rang out. A ping of dirt kicked up three inches from Vanda’s head. The workers flinched, then looked up.

Hemple was looking down at them from the rim of the pit. His rifle was pointed in their direction. He wiggled the barrel. “Back to work!” he shouted.

It was one of the English sentences they all understood.

The woman in green was joined by four other women, all tall and silent. They formed a wall around Vanda as she wept.

“Njia hii,”the woman in green said softly. This way.

Vanda stood up slowly, holding her baby in her arms. She followed the women to a small hollow in the side of the pit. A young man was scraping at the walls with a pickaxe. The woman in green grabbed him by his belt and pulled him out of the way.

Vanda slipped into the tiny carve out and sat down, pressing her back against the dirt, sheltered from the glare. She wrapped her baby in the folds of her dress, leaving only his face exposed.

She closed his eyes gently with two fingers and rocked him, singing softly in Swahili.

Standing just outside the tiny cave like a human curtain, the four other women swayed their hips and sang with her.

Behind their backs, under the blazing sun, work went on.