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??t cooperate today. Should be fine tomorrow,” he said as though he was personally responsible for the storm.
“No problem. We got to see one of the two fellows you directed us to,” Remi said.
“Oh, good. Which one?”
“Tom.”
“He’s a character, isn’t he? Did you get anything useful out of him?” Manchester asked, draining his bottle.
“Just a shaggy-dog story about giants.”
“Ah, yes, the giants. A local tradition. Everyone knows someone who’s seen them, but when you start trying to nail the story down, it gets slipperier than a greased eel.”
“Tom said he’s seen them.”
“Of course he has. I mean, I’m sure he’s seen something he thought was a giant. A shadow in the rain forest. An unexplained blur. He doesn’t mean any harm. But did he know anything about your bay or the sunken ruins?”
Sam shook his head. “Regrettably, no. All he did was talk about people disappearing because of cannibal giants.”
Manchester signaled to the waiter for two beers and then raised an eyebrow at Remi. “And what would you like?”
“I’ll stick with water. The heat dehydrates me.”
Manchester called the waiter over to relay Remi’s request and then settled back in his chair. “So cannibal giants are running amok in the hills. I’ve heard that old wives’ tale since I was a boy and the funny thing is how enduring the story is. Coming in the dead of night and snatching the unwary. I always wondered how the legend started. There’s variations of it on most of the surrounding islands as well.”
When the waiter arrived with the drinks, Manchester ordered a seafood feast for them all that could feed ten people. They took their time eating as Manchester plowed through helping after helping with the commitment of a bulldog. When they finished, Sam turned the conversation to the gold mine.
“You mentioned the mine last night. How long has it been in operation?”
“On and off for a dozen years. Up until recently, it hasn’t done anything—ever since what we call the social unrest happened.”
“I never associated Guadalcanal with gold, for some reason.”
“Most Americans don’t. The only reason they’ve heard of the island is because of the big offensive against the Japanese in World War Two. But gold has been one of our defining characteristics—it’s how the Solomon Islands got their name.”
“Really?” Sam said.
“Yes. When the Spanish arrived in the sixteenth century, they found gold at the mouth of the Mataniko River. Their leader, an explorer named Álvaro de Mendaña de Neira, came to the unusual conclusion that this was one of the areas that the biblical King Solomon must have gotten some of his legendary gold from and named us after him. Let’s just say for an explorer, his sense of geography might have been a little off.”
“That’s funny,” Remi said. “Truth is stranger than fiction.”
Sam leaned forward. “Just to put our questions to rest, what do you make of Tom’s stories?”
“Well, people do go missing, and it seems like such incidents have been increasing, but I’m not sure what that means. It’s probably that the usual culprits are getting them—accidents, drownings, crocodiles—and that our reporting has gotten better so we’re tracking the disappearances more accurately. But it’s hardly an epidemic. We’re talking maybe twenty people a year. Hard to survive as a cannibal on that calorie count, I’d think.”
“I take it you’re not in the ‘giants are everywhere’ camp?” Remi asked.
“Tom’s a very nice bloke, but I prefer to stick to the physically possible, or at least probable. I’ll leave the unicorns and leprechauns to others.”
“What about his contention that certain areas of the island are cursed?”
“What does that mean? Because there’s more crocodiles in certain bays and near rivers there’s a curse? Or that because some of the inland cave systems are so treacherous that people disappear near them, never to be heard from again? For every curse, I can come up with a plausible explanation, and I don’t require flights of fancy to do it.”
“We were thinking about heading up to the gold mine tomorrow after we meet with Rubo.”
“Assuming he’s still alive and hasn’t washed away. As for the mine, there’s not a lot to see. It was closed down recently due to flooding and hasn’t reopened.”
“We’re running out of things to do in our off time. Where are these caves with all the giants located?”