The Witchdoctor's Bones

by Lisa de Nikolits

  Sofie and Marika were crying loudly while the other women were horrified and quiet. The men were transfixed and motionless.

  The bleeding finally stopped and Charisse hacked up thick green bile.

  Thaalu looked at Brianna. “It will end soon,” he said, and sure enough, Charisse stopped shaking and writhing and began to quieten. Then she opened her eyes wide, gave a gurgling gasp and flopped back, motionless.

  “She is dead now,” Thaalu announced bluntly.

  “Do something!” Brianna screamed. “She can’t be dead. We’re on holiday. You don’t die on holiday. She’s my best friend.” She began to cry hysterically, her breath coming in gulps.

  Kate rushed over to her. “Don’t look anymore,” she said and hugged Brianna tight. “Come now, come now, come with me, over here.” Brianna leaned into her and wailed.

  “What on earth happened here?” Richard said. “What happened? She’s dead for God’s sake. How did this happen? Someone close her eyes, for God’s sake.”

  The others began to slowly turn away in shock.

  “Kate,” Marika said, “I’ve got some medication I travel with, to help me with flying. It’s a normal tranquilizer. I think we should give Brianna a couple, what do you think?”

  “Good idea,” Kate agreed and Marika trotted off, returning with the pills.

  “Bree,” Kate said softly, “these are tranquilizers. You’re not allergic to them are you?”

  Brianna shook her head, sobbing so intensely she was hardly able to breathe.

  “We want you to take two,” Marika told her and she tried to wipe the blood off Brianna with a cloth. “A terrible thing has happened, please my dear, you need to take them.”

  Brianna shivered and she continued to cry but she swallowed the pills.

  “Good girl,” Kate stroked her back. “Keep breathing slowly.”

  “Do not touch the body,” Thaalu said sharply, in response to Richard’s suggestion that they close Charisse’s eyes. “They must do a proper autopsy in Walvis Bay. This girl did not die of natural causes.” His statement was greeted with shouts of horror.

  “What are you saying?” Helen demanded, “That one of us killed her? That’s impossible. We’re civilized people here.”

  Thaalu regarded her evenly. He was not, Kate reflected, how she’d imagined a Bushman to be. She had thought he would be ancient and tiny, toothless and wrinkled like a prune while Thaalu was lean, graceful and elegant.

  “There is no such thing as a truly civilized man in the way you like to think there is. We all have the potential to kill each other and sometimes, for reasons known only to ourselves, we do. We need to cover the body.” He conferred with Jono who opened the side door of the bus and pulled out a thick plastic ground sheet which Thaalu spread on the ground next to Charisse.

  “Now,” he instructed Jono, Richard and Harrison, “we’ll each take a side of her mattress and put it with her on top of the sheet.”

  They lifted Charisse carefully and Thaalu folded the sheet over her and covered her up. “I need something to secure her. Do any of you have rope or tape?”

  “I have rope,” Jono said.

  Thaalu secured Charisse’s body in the back of the bakkie and the group were even more shaken by the sight of the body bag than they had been by Charisse’s wide-eyed dead stare.

  “Here’s what I will do,” Thaalu announced, “I’m going to drive her to Walvis Bay. Does her friend want to come with me or continue with you?”

  “Of course I want to go with her!” Brianna shouted. “How can you even ask such a thing?” She was still crying but less hysterically.

  “Then you need to get your things and the dead girl’s too, all her papers and her passport.”

  Kate helped Brianna gather her and Charisse’s belongings off the bus and put them in the back of the van with Charisse. At the sight of her friend’s body, Brianna began to sob again and Kate led her to the front of the tiny truck and put her inside.

  “Wait for me,” she said to Brianna and went back to Thaalu and Jono.

  “I’m coming with you to Walvis Bay,” she said to Thaalu, who had taken off his bloodied T-shirt, and was pulling on a clean one that Jono had just handed him. “Jono, you’re in Solitare overnight and you’ll be in Walvis Bay tomorrow? You can pick me up there. Thaalu, may I come?”

  “It will be a bit of a tight squeeze in the front of the cab but yes, that would be helpful.”

  “Let me get my camera bag,” Kate told them. “I’m going to leave the rest of my stuff here.”

  “It’s good of you to go,” Helen said, and the others agreed when they heard the plan.

  “It will take us some time to get out of this sand,” Thaalu said to Kate when he got in and started up the van, “but hopefully, once we are on the good roads, it will not take us too long to get to Walvis Bay.”

  Horrific circumstances aside, Kate could not help but notice the beautiful and harmonious way that Thaalu spoke.

  She stroked Brianna’s hair and settled down for a long drive. She would use the time to try and figure out what had happened.

  Back at the bus, a fierce argument had broken out. “But why do we need to go straight to Solitaire?” Jasmine protested. “There’s nothing there except a camp ground and famous apple pie, you said so yourself, Jono. Meanwhile here we are, at one of the highlights of our trip and now we’re going to leave without seeing a thing. All I am asking is that we stay here for an hour, see the sights and then go. I’m sorry about what happened to Charisse but it’s unlikely I’ll ever be here in my life again and I really want to see more of Sossusvlei, especially the salt pan and petrified trees.This is one of the main reasons I booked this trip.”

  “You are disgusting,” Sofie was accusing, “a girl is dead and all you can think of is yourself. You never liked Charisse anyway, we all knew.”

  “Don’t call Jasmine names,” Mia said. “She can say whatever she finks. Oh God, I could use a drink.”

  “And all you want to do is get drunk and lie around doing nothing,” Sofie bit back.

  “Careful now,” Richard warned. “We’ve had a horrid time of it but there’s no need for us to start attacking one another.”

  “Start?” the usually calm Gisela shrieked. “What do you mean start? A girl’s been murdered, and by one of us. It’s gone way beyond ‘start’ if you ask me.”

  “Now, we do not know for sure that she was murdered,” Jono said. “I would suggest we wait for the autopsy results before we jump to any conclusions.”

  “But Thaalu said…” Helen began.

  “I know what Thaalu said,” Jono said, “but he is not a doctor and he is not always right.”

  “How do you know?” Richard fired. “Why, has he been wrong about a murder before? Is this like a common thing, to be right or wrong about a dead body on a holiday trip?”

  “Eish, everybody,” Jono held up his hands, “please try to remain calm. I know this is a terrible thing. I really do. But we have to stay calm.” His look pleaded with them.

  At that point another small van drove up and a man got out wearing the same uniform as Thaalu. He walked up to Jono and shook his hand. They conversed in Xhosa and Jono turned back to the group.

  “This is Charles. Thaalu radioed him to come here in case there was anybody who still wanted to do the walk.”

  “I do,” Jasmine said immediately.

  “And me,” Helen echoed.

  “Anybody else?” Jono asked. “It might be a good thing, help to calm us down.”

  “Yes, a walk after a murder is always calming,” Richard said, sarcastically. “Mia, what do you want to do?”

  “Let’s go for the bleedin’ walk,” Mia said with a shrug.

  “We’ll go too,” Gisela said, pointing to Eva and Marika.

  “Me too,” Lena said.

&nb
sp; “Lena, we are not going on the walk remember,” Stepfan said.

  Lena looked at him curiously. “Stay if you like. I’m going.”

  Stepfan glared at her with quiet fury, turned on his heel and limped off.

  “Come with me, ladies and gentlemen,” Charles said. “Climb onto the back of that little truck over there, which we call a ‘bakkie.’ There’s room in the front for two of you.”

  “Hold on tight.” He shouted out his window once they were settled and he pulled off at high speed.

  “You’d never think we had just witnessed a murder,” Eva whispered to Marika. “Here we are, taking a drive like nothing happened. I feel very odd. I don’t know what to think.”

  Marika agreed. “Who poisoned Charisse? I agree with the Bushman, it must have been poison. It was like she was vomiting up her insides. It was the most terrible thing I’ve ever seen. I’ve never even seen a dead body before. I don’t know if it’s right for us to be going on this walk but what else could we do? Go to Solitaire and sit around, waiting for tomorrow? No, it’s better we keep ourselves busy.”

  “There’s something alien about the sand dunes,” Eva said, looking around at the vast red dunes that lay like enormous ships of sand anchored in an isolated harbour, shadowed by the passing clouds. “They’re how I’d imagine the pyramids to be. Huge. Inscrutable entities that hold timeless secrets we’ll never know.”

  The early morning clouds thinned, making way for patches of powder blue sky. The air was quiet and cool and the dawn mist was backed away, like a curtain being pulled off-stage.

  The bakkie came to a halt and Charles got out.

  “This is where we start our walk,” he announced and he led them across to the dunes. The landscape was spectacular: thick, thorny bush-like acacias fought with tall veldt grasses among the twisted stone carcasses of dead black trees that had been sculpted by the weather and time.

  The dense scrub opened to reveal flat white pans burnt and bleached by the kiln of the sun, and broken into puzzle pieces by the freezing nights.

  “I’m sorry Kate’s missing this,” Eva said to Gisela. “She would have been photographing everything and beaming from ear to ear.”

  “Yes. I’m still so shocked by what happened. Do you really think Charisse was murdered? I can’t believe anyone here would do such a thing, do you?”

  “How about Lena?” Eva suggested, stepping carefully across white clay-like stones that crumbled beneath her feet. “Charisse was making a fool of her with Stepfan, maybe she’d had enough?”

  “Not a chance in a million years.” Gisela snapped, and looked around quickly to make sure Lena had not heard, but Lena was up ahead with Charles. “Get that thought out of your mind this second. Lena’s a lady and the only fool was Stepfan. If you ask me, it was Jasmine. She hated Charisse, I’d bet it was her.”

  “Jasmine?” Eva was astonished. “Why?”

  “Because for some reason, and I don’t know why, she hated Charisse. You heard how she spoke to her and she was the one who shone the light on Stepfan and Charisse.”

  “Shining a torch on two naked people in a swimming pool is one thing, murder is quite another. Oh, let’s admit it, we’ve got no idea who did it or why. Maybe Stepfan killed her because she ended it after they got caught in the pool and he was angry, although I don’t know who ended it, do you? But I don’t think he would be that violent, do you?”

  “I have no answers except to say that he’s a most unpleasant, horrible man,” Gisela said.

  Up ahead the group was paying careful attention to what Charles was saying while Rydell, unnoticed, brought up the rear. His level of distress had plummeted to new depths, even for him, and he was muttering to himself.

  “Stupid, stupid, stupid,” he repeated, a mantra of self-hatred. “Why were you so stupid? You should have found another way. The room for error was too wide. But we never drink from each other’s water, never. It’s a rule. That stupid girl, it’s her fault, she broke the rule, it’s her fault, not mine. She wasn’t meant to die, I don’t understand why she died, there wasn’t enough poison to kill a person, I just wanted to get him out of the picture, throw him off course, have him get off the bus so he’d have to recover somewhere for a while. Anything, as long as he was distracted from Treasure. Why did that stupid girl have to die? I never get things like that wrong. There’s no way anyone can prove anything, I got rid of all the water bottles but how am I going to stop him now? I can’t do the same thing again but I’ve got to get rid of him, he keeps getting closer to her, I can see that. I’ll have to find another way.”

  Rydell’s lightweight cotton trousers and long-sleeved shirt filled with the breeze while his large floppy khaki hat was firmly tied under his chin. He glared at Harrison, up ahead, running around shirtless.

  He caught up to the group who was watching Charles unearth a baboon spider by lifting the door to its nest in the sand. The spider poked out cautious feelers, expecting prey but finding nothing.

  Rydell waited until the others had walked ahead and when he was sure no one was watching, he kicked heavy sand onto the spider’s trapdoor and brought his heel down hard on the mound, stamping a few times for good measure.

  “Eensy weensy spider, down goes the spout. Die, die, die!”

  Jono was frightened. While the others were with Charles, he and Treasure sat under a tree and discussed in whispers what had happened. “Haw! Treasure, I am sick with worry,” Jono admitted, and he snapped a twig into tiny pieces.

  “Was it my food?” Treasure was equally alarmed and her lovely face creased in a worried frown. “Aikona wena, do they think she died from my food?”

  “No, Treasure, you must not worry. She was poisoned. I saw it in the army when I was in Zimbabwe. I thought that yesterday but it was already too late and there was nothing that could be done.”

  “Eish,” Treasure exclaimed in alarm. “What poison? Who would even do such a thing?”

  “Poison from that bush we told them not to touch. I think somebody put it in the water. Kate warned me about a certain person but I thought she was frightened and taking things the wrong way but now I do not know so much.”

  He told Treasure what Kate had told him, about how Rydell wanted Treasure to be his wife, and how angry Rydell was when Treasure and Harrison had returned as friends from their argument.

  “No!” Treasure’s eyes were wide, “Truly not. I can’t believe that. That he would kill somebody. But Jono, he killed Charisse, that has nothing to do with Harrison and me.”

  “Charisse drank all of Harrison’s water yesterday,” Jono explained. “I believe that Rydell poisoned Harrison but the wrong person drank the water. I looked now on the bus, for the empty water bottles but he is clever, they are all gone. I want you to be very careful Treasure, he is a madman.”

  “But what about Harrison? I can take care of myself but what about Harrison? He has no idea. We must tell him.”

  “No, we cannot tell him.” Jono immediately insisted. “We have no proof, this is supposition only. Promise me. Thaalu should not have said anything about poison until we have proof. He will stay with them at the hospital until they have proof and he will phone me. Thaalu is a good man, I thank God it was him who was with us.”

  “I still think we must warn Harrison,” Treasure replied stubbornly. “If this is true, he is in danger.”

  Jono swung around, knelt in front of her and held her by the shoulders. “Treasure, please, please promise me you will not say one single thing to him. You have my word that I will watch Rydell very carefully from now on. You can rely on me and you know that, but please, promise me.”

  “I promise,” Treasure said with reluctance and she looked away. “What a terrible man. You mentioned that he had a crush on me, in the Pick ’n Pay that time, but what gave him the idea I would even look at him? He is very strange, I could see that from the start. He n
ever looks you in the eye and he wears all those clothes, with his shirts buttoned right up and his sleeves pulled right down. And he has that terrible smile, he puts his head to the side like this and he wets his lips and he looks like he knows a terrible secret and now we know this is true, he does. Eish.”

  “You would not have thought any of that if I had not told you,” Jono was cross, “so do not start to see problems now where there are none. I will have to reassure the group but I do not know how I will even begin to do that. Oh, this is such a big trouble. In all my years, I have never had such a tour as this! Why all this bad luck?”

  He stood. “I told you Treasure, I had a bad feeling and now look, it is true. It is because they want to know about muti and terrible things. I should never have discussed any of that with them. But they should never have asked. Eish!”

  He smacked his forehead with the flat of his hand, “I am going for a short walk, I need to think about what to do. I will see you later. I will get back before the others, they still have more than an hour to go.”

  In the small van that hurtled along the asphalt road, Kate was also thinking about the murder. She was convinced Rydell was responsible for what had happened. She had seen him on the bus, he had said he was getting something from under the seat but he must have been poisoning the water. He had meant to poison Harrison but Charisse drank it by mistake.

  Kate found it hard to believe she was driving along a road in Africa with a dead girl lying in the cargo hold behind. She was not sure what she was feeling; she felt weirded out and numb all at the same time. She looked at Bree, wondering if the girl would ever recover from the shock.

  “We’ll be there in four and a half hours,” Thaalu said quietly to Kate who nodded. She was squeezed in between Brianna and Thaalu, with one leg on either side of the gear shift, the cab definitely more suited to two people. Brianna had dozed off and neither Thaalu nor Kate wanted to disturb her.