The Savannah

The Savannah Market

A Saturday morning market on the edge of Queen’s Park Savannah in Port of Spain. Vendors come from across the country — Princes Town, San Fernando, Saint James, Arima. The Harrinarines sell currant rolls and ginger beer. Mrs. Leung sells coconut sweetbread. The Singh stall has the cricket memorabilia, including a photograph signed by Brian Lara. Every stall has a lockbox. Every lockbox has a key. The lockboxes are supposed to keep things safe. They are not, it turns out, always sufficient.

Woodbrook

The neighborhood where Anya lives with her grandmother, in a small house with a back door that opens onto a yard with a samaan tree. From the window of Anya’s bedroom you can hear the Savannah at night when the cars stop, and on the right kind of night, you can hear other things too.

The Botanical Gardens

At the western edge of the Savannah. Tall trees. Deep shadows. The kind of place adults walk through in the afternoon and never at midnight, because at midnight the shadows have a particular texture to them, and not all of it is leaves.

What lives at the edges

The grandmother’s stories. The old things — djablesse, soucouyant, La Diablesse. Names that travel from village to village in different forms across the Caribbean and end up meaning roughly the same kind of warning: a woman who is not a woman. A figure who is not a figure. Something pretending.

The Savannah Sleuths do not, at the start of Book One, believe in any of these things.

By the end of Book One, they do.