The Children

The adventure of the lost heirs be-gins when Shay and her friend Giustinia run into Harena at the Fleur des Îles café.

- Andrea Lee

This happens in the early two-thousands, at the same time that a criminal at large on Anjavavy Island is cutting off people’s heads. The mysterious beheadings are not connected to the events recounted here, except to establish the lawlessness that is always present behind the dazzling Anjavavy panorama of sugar-white beaches and cobalt sea. The crimes begin to surface one hot January morning, as a French hotel manager is taking his predawn constitutional along Rokely Bay and spies through a mist of sand flies something just above the tide line that looks like an unhusked coconut. It turns out to be a human head, one that was last seen on the shoulders of a part-time sweeper at the Frenchman’s hotel.

In the next months, four more severed heads are discovered, hideously marooned near grounded pirogues, on paths through the sugarcane, and even on the rocks that are used by villagers as public toilets. The victims are all men from various Malagasy tribes: Antandroy, Tsimihety, Sakalava—night watchmen and groundskeepers of so low a status that no one bribes the island gendarmerie into investigating their deaths.