He shook his head. "Airstrip closes at dusk, you know. We're staying with Carla's agent." He grinned. "I couldn't talk her into a room in a local hotel."

"No," said Ellen, disgusted with herself for blushing. "That you couldn't."

"Why don't you take the New Providence—Whiskey Cay boat?" Louisa asked. She seemed somehow to be pleading. "I take the boat each night."

"Why would we take the boat?" Hoagie smiled. "I have to get the old crate home, can't leave it here in Nassau."

Louisa looked into Ellen's eyes. "The cards," she murmured, "say take the boat."

Ellen felt a chill but answered, "I'm with him."

***

The houngan had not a proper tonelle, which some I would call a church.

But he did have Clarence's house, a two-room shack not far from Masthead Point. And he had a choir, and its leader, a houngenikon woman, dressed in white with a red bandanna, whom he had cured of headaches many years before.

By the bed in which Clarence's children ordinarily slept, she and Papa Jacques had laid rows of rum, whiskey, and vermouth bottles, all full, alternating with cloth-covered bundles and white porcelain pots. In them lived the loas and the spirits of the dead. A hen, tethered by a foot, cackled, pecked, and fouled the splintered floor.

Papa Jacques's société had gathered, some from Whiskey Cay and others by fishing boat from nearby islets. There were thirty sweating people jammed into the rickety little room.

Papa Jacques stepped outside in the moonlight. He shook his asson at the moon, rattled the gourd, and tinkled the tiny silver bell hanging from it.

He moved back inside and surveyed his congregation. It was a société less versed in vaudou ways than his followers in Haiti, but just as devout.

He took a deep breath, set the rhythm with the gourd. It was not like his tonelle in Port-au-Prince, but he had what he needed: the congregation, the spirits, and the wanga.

His houngenikon caught the rhythm of the gourd. In her high, clear voice she began the chant:

Maître Agwe, where are you?

Don't you see I'm on the reef?

I've a rudder in my hand....

Papa Jacques began the dance in a wild martinique, and within minutes the congregation was in a frenzy: empty-eyed women in bandannas making wild, impossible leaps across the floor; stiff-faced puppet men in straw hats, staggering but never falling; steel drums singing, tubas wailing, and all the while the houngan's asson keeping time.

When the dance was at its peak, he hung the wanga from the cabin's center post.

It was one of Michael Brody's shirts, stolen by a devotee from his washerwoman's line that day.

The houngan fingered his shark's-tooth necklace, sent his mind beneath the sea, and went into a trance himself.

***