Heaven Is High by Kate Wilhelm Page A

diseased whore until she finally found one who listened and agreed. As soon as she had the book, she began to teach Binnie to sign. She taught her to read the newspapers she managed to scrounge, and used the margins and whatever scraps of paper she could find for Binnie to practice writing and do math. Along the way Binnie also learned Spanish although Shala taught her English. When Domonic sent Shala to market, he kept Binnie locked in their room. Shala was afraid to go to the police. They were corrupt and she feared that they themselves might seize her and rape her. Domonic’s threat to kill Binnie if she didn’t return promptly when she went outside the shack was enough to keep her imprisoned. At night, he sent Shala into the room and locked them both in. There, in the dark, whispering so he would not hear, Shala taught Binnie all she could remember from her own education at a convent and two years at the university.
    There had been a large plantation, where she and her sister had lived, and there had been a house in Belize City. At the plantation there had been servants and many orchids on a wide verandah. After their mother died, when Shala was ten and Anaia twelve, their father sent them to a convent boarding school. The sisters had inherited money from their mother, enough to leave the school and their father’s house when they were seventeen, and to attend the university. He had denounced Anaia when she married an American, and he had tried to force Shala to leave school and to marry the man he had chosen for her.
    When Shala became too ill to carry out Domonic’s orders, he locked her in the room and made Binnie go to the market and to continue diving for the abalone and conch. It wasn’t in the notes, but Barbara added: After Shala died, he no longer had a hostage to force Binnie to do his bidding and, believing in the curse, he was afraid to touch her or to let others touch her in his house. He decided to sell her.
    Barbara shuddered and left her desk again, refilled her cup, and reluctantly returned. When Binnie’s accounts swam to mind, she shook her head and said under her breath, “That part’s over and done with. Let it go, damn it.”
    There were a few clues to follow up on in the notes, in her reordering of them. Shala was seventeen when she went to the university, and Anaia was nineteen. Shala attended for two years, and was nineteen when she fled with her lover. And Anaia had been married by then, between the ages of seventeen and twenty-one. Probably closer to twenty-one, Barbara decided. If Shala had known the American very long it seemed likely that she would have known his surname well enough to remember and include it in the message to her daughter. A possible starting place was to find the American’s name.
    More, Barbara continued, jotting notes as she reasoned. Binnie had swum to the yacht three years ago. Domonic had claimed his kidnapped daughter was a minor, and she might have been. So the three years since her escape plus sixteen, seventeen, possibly eighteen years put the piracy from nineteen to twenty-two years in the past. And assuming that Anaia had married during the year of Shala’s departure meant that the wedding had taken place between twenty and twenty-three years ago. Between 1960 and 1963. The marriage had to be on record somewhere. How many young Belize women had married Americans during that period?
    She had to find that sister, Barbara decided. If the father was still the tyrant who had rejected one daughter and believed the other one dead, the sister might be Binnie’s only hope of finding an ally in Belize. Or Anaia and her father might have become reconciled over the two decades. She might have some influence over him, or influence of her own to wield.
    If they could demonstrate that Shala was already pregnant when Domonic enslaved her, that Shala and her child had been citizens of Belize with relatives still in Belize, it would