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mystery that’s been hanging over my head for thirty-five years. I want you to take it on because you know Jamaica better than anyone I know.”
    Shannon had leaned back in her chair, shaking her head. “It’s been fourteen years, Angie, and I only used to make brief visits. I still have some connections there, but I—”
    â€œListen to me first before you decide, please .” Angie had looked down at the onyx ring she was rubbing. “I want you to find out whatever you can about a woman named Katlyn Carrington. She was my best friend. We went through high school and college together. Kate -lyn, but without an e . Write it down.”
    Jotting down the name, Shannon had continued to protest. “I’m not sure I’ll be able to get anywhere with it. It would be easy for a person to disappear in Jamaica and never be heard from again—all those mountains—and the country can be a difficult place for a foreigner to burrow into. Remember, I was just a photographer when I was there. Looking for a missing person is going to require more inside access than I’ve ever had. I can try my best, but—”
    â€œYou’re my only hope,” the editor had said with begging eyes, a woman who wasn’t used to begging anybody for anything. “I have absolutely no contacts in Jamaica, zilch, zero.”
    â€œTell me about her, anyway.” Shannon sighed.
    â€œShe was a dancer, only twenty-seven years old, an exquisite dancer, and she wanted to start her own school here in Toronto. She wanted it to be—different, multiethnic—and since she loved Caribbean music, she decided to move to Jamaica to study traditional dance, so she could integrate it into her new studio. That was back in the seventies, when there was very little black anything here in Canada other than Afros, but Katlyn was always the idealist in our group. She loved Bob Marley, you know, and believed everyone should live together and be happy. So, off she went to Jamaica and ended up renting a room in a town called Gordon Gap. I’ll never forget the name because I was dating a guy named Gordon at the time. Anyway, she wrote me a couple of times to say she was loving it, the whole experience, and she was learning a lot about the original music and dances of the island. That was in the days of pen and paper, remember, so mail took a while to go back and forth.
    â€œShe was in Gordon Gap for about six months when she started having a relationship with a man, a Rastafarian man. ‘A man among men,’ she wrote me. She left the house where she was staying, and nobody heard from her for almost a year. No letters, nada. Then, she turns up outside a hospital one morning, dying, literally, and her family in Toronto hears that she’s . . . dead .”
    Angie voice had dived to a whisper on the last word, still incredulous after all the years. “Her parents didn’t have a lot of money and they weren’t very—very, well, educated, but they were just distraught. Her father flew down to get the body—but, lo and behold, the body had disappeared from the hospital morgue the night after her death.”
    â€œI can’t imagine. What did he do then?”
    â€œWell, her father wasn’t the sharpest pencil in the box, you know, so he didn’t get very far with the authorities down there. He just came back to Canada and I think he wrote a few letters, but nothing really came of it. Both he and Katlyn’s mother grieved themselves to death after that.”
    â€œWhich hospital did she show up at, do you know?”
    â€œI think he told me once, he might have, anyway, but I cannot for the life of me remember the name now.”
    â€œWhat did the police have to say? They must have filed a report.”
    â€œI called the police headquarters myself, a bunch of times, but I always reached a dead end. They passed me from one department to another, one cop’s