Killed in Kruger

by Denise M. Hartman

  She felt in all the crevices of the suitcase and turned out the pockets of all his pants, feeling like a thief. She stacked the clothes inside again and withdrew the calendar from the pocket. Perhaps he had made a note of a place he’d dropped off the film. After Rian Minnaar’s talk, she didn’t feel very hopeful about finding the film intact or any memory cards from the digital. It was so frustrating. It would be nice to have Phillip’s work displayed one last time as a memorial to him. Such a shame for him to be cut down in the middle of his life. Tabitha caught herself. Don’t go there; don’t want to spend the afternoon in tears. The calendar indicated another interview with a tour operator for tomorrow afternoon at Skukuza camp, so she’d need to head back today or early tomorrow. She noticed a notation in the margin from the previous week. KGR 79. What did that mean? It had nothing to do with film. It wasn’t a phone number. Maybe a mile marker in the park?

  Tabitha loaded the few rolls of film she had shot into a plastic bag and ran out to the truck to find the E-6 lab. Tabitha took the M-4 Highway, which was a main street running through town. After a few blocks, she turned down a side street. She shifted late and the bakkie lurched. A yellow light flared in front of her, but she had too much momentum to stop. As she proceeded, a car turned out into her path. Tabitha jammed on the brakes. Tires screeched and pulled the bakkie to one side. Adrenaline slammed her pulse into overdrive. In slow motion, she swerved but not far enough. Wham. She just barely clipped the back fender of the green Toyota. Everything on the seat was flung onto the floorboards as she lurched to a stop. The other car had stopped short in the middle of the intersection.

  The African man got out, screaming at her in some language she didn’t understand. Tabitha stood there feeling herself shaking inside, and didn’t say anything. The damage was minimal, but she imagined that the insurance companies would have to get involved. She did not have the money for a deductible.

  Finally he said something she understood. “You lady. Look what you have done to my car!”

  Something snapped in Tabitha. “You came out on a yellow light.”

  They started arguing, not listening to one another, voices raised. Cars were honking on both sides and traffic trickled through the intersection around them. The man seemed like he enjoyed a good argument, but Tabitha had righteous indignation on her side. She wasn’t driving well, but it had been her light.

  “I’m going to call the police,” she said, thinking of Rian Minaar. She hadn’t gotten the new chip to work in her mobile phone yet, but it seemed the thing to say.

  The man’s face went blank. He started muttering in the language from earlier and walked over to his car door. Tabitha assumed he was going for paperwork and went to find hers.

  The Toyota lurched into traffic and took off.

  Tabitha exhaled the breath she’d been holding and proceeded with more caution.

  She pulled into the film processing center’s parking lot and tried to calm herself. All the car debris living in the truck had rained down onto the floor. Her rolls of film were buried in their plastic zip bag. As she restored order to the chaos, she realized two rolls of film were lying on the floor. She counted the ones in the bag. Her five and the one of Phillip’s she’d found in the vest were there. The two on the floor had slid out from under the seat in her near collision. Well, hallelujah. Maybe she’d have some of Phillip’s pictures yet. Three of his rolls!

  She marked the rolls and took them into the processor with a sense of satisfaction. Just maybe some good shots would be on these rolls. She’d know in a couple days.

  <><><>

  Tabitha decided to get back out to the park, and loaded up the bakkie to head out. Hauling Phillip’s things in and out added two extra trips to do the luggage transfer, but everyone had warned her not to leave anything in the car. She already knew this. Her baby face took years off of her not-very-advanced twenty-six, so people tended to underestimate her. She was used to that, though.

  The drive back to the park threatened rain from the low clouds, but only sprinkles materialized. She stopped to pay her entrance fee at the Crocodile Bridge entry. The tall thatched shop offered maps and trinkets for tourists. She scooted over to Lower Sabie camp to see if any vacancies had opened up. The river Sabie ran along one side of the camp. A small grouping of round yellow cabins nestled on half the campgrounds, leaving room for tents and campers at the other.

  She stood in line in the trailer-turned-office. She was behind a group of German travelers asking in broken English for a complicated array of rooms.

  When it was her turn, Tabitha asked, “What rooms do you have available tonight?”

  “Oh, mademoiselle.” An African woman behind the counter surveyed a paper chart. “You have a reservation I am hoping.”

  “For tomorrow night.”

  “If you come back at 5:30, I will put your name here on the list and see if some cancellations have occurred. We are having a big group tonight, but tomorrow they will be departing.”

  Just Tabitha’s luck to get here behind a bus full of tourists, but she’d taken a risk coming a day early. She hung around the patio outside the tiny camp shop for the next hour, organizing her notes and getting questions ready for her interview with the safari lodge manager in the morning. Her laptop had enough juice for her to do a rough draft of a story that was due next week. When her battery warning light began to blink, she snapped the lid down.

  Concentration was a struggle with Uncle Phillip somewhere on ice. She shivered at the thought. Tabitha shook herself mentally, stood and stretched. He had walked these grounds; someone had seen him here. Unaware that her workbag strap had wrapped around her ankle, she took a step across the patio, dragging the bag behind her. She tried to laugh at herself as she extricated her leg. Some things were only funny when you had a friend to laugh with. Phillip would have been a fun travel companion, not to mention he was always a cheerleader for her writing. She inhaled and exhaled slowly.

  It was too soon to go try to check in, so she strolled the spongy grass grounds that circled the few little rondavels on the campground. She saw two women in park uniforms with a cart moving out of a cabin. The cleaning crew?

  Tabitha approached. One woman was slender and tall. The other contrasted with her, bulging plumply out of her uniform. Both wore headscarves with matching light green uniform dresses.

  Tabitha approached. “Excuse me, I have a question.”

  The tall one turned to her and smiled. The plump one frowned and kept working on the porch. “My uncle stayed here last week, and all his stuff was left in his room. He disappeared.”

  “Yes, yes. I remember this. We had to clear it out for new guests who were coming. Yes.” Her headscarf wobbled as she nodded.

  Finally, someone had actually seen him. “Was anything of his left here at the camp?”

  “No, no. We gave everything to our director.” She shook her head and clucked her tongue.

  “It’s just that two small bags, thermal ones, are missing.” Tabitha used her hands to show the size.

  The woman crossed her arms over her chest. “No, no. We followed the procedures, ma’am. Why do people keep asking about this man?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Last week, a man came and was asking questions about the missing guest.”

  “Who?” Tabitha held her breath. Was someone looking for clues to what happened to Phillip?

  “I do not know his name. A thin man. He looked rough. He said he was from another camp, but I didn’t recognize him and he didn’t have on a uniform. He wanted to know had anyone from the park or the police come to see this man, your uncle. I told him not that I know. He wanted to see his things, but we’d given them to the hospitality director already. Now, I must work, ma’am.” She turned away and went into the cabin.

  Tabitha stood for a moment, pondering this information. Were park authorities tracking down what had happened? They weren’t sharing information with her if they were. Or had Phillip gotten mixed u
p in something unsavory?

  The sweeping stopped. “I saw him.”

  Tabitha looked up at the plump woman on the porch. “My uncle?”

  She looked Tabitha in the face. “I saw him one day with the man who causes trouble for the park in the papers, having tea at the restaurant.” The woman’s tone contained disapproval.

  Tabitha racked her brain. Who could this be? “Do you know the man’s name?” The woman shook her head, fidgeting with her broom. Tabitha couldn’t recall the name of the conservationist, only the organization. “Is it the man from the Schopenhauer group?”

  The woman rewarded her with a grim nod. “Yes, I think so. The American, I think. They seemed in deep discussion.”

  “Could you hear what they were talking about?”

  Tabitha could tell she’d insulted the woman by the look on her face, but she only shook her head and went back to sweeping. So was Phillip just getting acquainted with the conservationist or something else, Tabitha wondered.

  She purchased an Orangina soda at the small shop and walked back over to the reservations trailer. She could see the whole camp from her vantage point, plus the bend in the Sabie river that gave the camp its name. It was tiny compared to the village-like setup of Skukuza. Still, it had a restaurant and a dozen or so rondavels with porch kitchenettes. She wondered what secrets lay here about her uncle that she would never know.

  The news at the camp office was bad.

  “I’m sorry, mademoiselle. Only camping spaces are left for tonight. Do you wish to take one or will you go on?”

  Tabitha thought there was no place to go on to, sort of like her writing career. “I’ll take it.” She wasn’t really prepared to camp, but it beat driving out of the park to a city to find a room. She had Phillip’s sleeping bag she could roll out in the back of the truck.

  “You will be here.” The hostess turned a map and pointed with her pen to a space that would be all Tabitha’s for the night. Great.

  She drove the truck to the place in question, on the edge of the camp. A wire fence ran along one edge of the camp, adorned with a triple strand of barbed wire across the top. It didn’t look as substantial as the high fences of Skukuza. An A-shaped ladder in fact bridged the fence between the camp and the bush about twenty meters from where Tabitha was parked. She eyed it suspiciously, but supposed animals didn’t use stiles.

  The sun had dropped below the horizon and left only a faint gray sky. At the restaurant, Tabitha asked to be seated outside. The camp gates were locked and everyone secured inside. Tabitha had brought a travel book to study as she ate. During her second course featuring fried hake fish, the power blinked, then went out. The darkness and everyone’s sudden cessation of talk made the night noises suddenly come alive in her ears. The sound of insects chirping, wind blowing dry grasses, and distant animal cries echoed. The African servers produced kerosene lanterns and placed them on several tables both inside and on the patio of the restaurant. The romantic candlelit effect kissed the few diners on the patio with a golden light. Tabitha thought it was a great moment. What a romantic time it could have been with Jeffrey.

  “Does the power go out often?” Tabitha asked, as the server sat a plate of roast beef, Yorkshire pudding and potatoes before her.

  “Occasionally we have this problem, miss. It will cause no problem to your meal.”

  “No, I’m not worried about my dinner. Just curious. What causes the outages?”

  “Sometimes it is storms or sometimes it is animals interfering with the lines. A bird pecks at a wire or an elephant knocks down a pole for fun.” He chuckled, then backed away from her table.

  Tabitha ate her dinner, relishing the moment. A crack of lighting tore pink across the sky. Heat lightning, she hoped. It would be a long night in the bed of the truck if it poured. The lightning might just be the answer for the power outage. She finished her supper and tiptoed back to the truck in the dark, thinking about the mamba snake of South Africa. The darkness of the pathway unnerved her but she focused on the lanterns of fellow campers up ahead and reminded herself that there were no trees for the mamba to inhabit.

  She retrieved a flashlight and walked the perimeter of the camping area to get a little exercise. To think about who had been asking questions about Uncle Phillip. Laughter erupted from one of the camping groups around a brais—the South African word for a barbecue—and Tabitha felt wistful for company, for Phillip’s company, for Jeffrey’s company. Stealthy footsteps outside the fence made her turn the light to the wilderness. A flash of movement in the bushes drew her. The light caught on a hyena. It stared back at her, smelling at the air. The fence seemed to shrink to a mere tinfoil barrier. She knew those powerful jaws could crush bones. A snort from the animal made her jump, but the beast trotted out of her beam of light and up the fence line. Tabitha shivered and hurried back to the bakkie, wondering what Phillip had experienced at Lower Sabie.

  She shoved equipment and luggage around in the back of the truck until she created a cocoon to contain the sleeping bag. Plunking down the truck locks, she wriggled her way from the cab through the communicating window into the covered bed of the truck. Her hips caught in the window and she had a panicked moment of being trapped like a seal, imagining herself flopping in the window all night. A push to further open the glass allowed her to slip through with a thump onto the floor of the truck bed. It would be a fitful night at this rate.

  She settled into the sleeping bag, but she kept looking at the glass on the sides of the truck bed. Now it didn’t seem like such a good idea to lie here in plain sight all night. The night noises made her jump. She shifted the bag up over her head and tried to sleep.

  Chapter 25

  Mhlongo moved carefully, not wanting his footsteps to sound against the loose pebbled earth that made up the roads of Lower Sabie. He’d climbed the stile over the fence. He spotted the yellow bakkie right away. Good fortune was with him, since she was parked on the camping side of the compound. Perhaps she would be in a tent. A smile pulled at the corners of his mouth. She asked too many questions and was pushing in all the wrong places.

  His foot crunched against the earth as he crept up the dark side of the bakkie. No camp site visible—she must be in the truck. Mhlongo pressed his face to the glass of the bed cover. He saw some of the golden hair spilling from a sleeping bag in back. He fingered the knife in his pocket. Her breathing was even, heavy with sleep.

  The glass windows in back were small and would be noisy to break. It would be like trying to kill some animal still in its den. Mhlongo evaluated his options. He eyed the locks on the cab.

  Noisy footsteps scuffed along the path toward him, growing louder.

  Mhlongo ducked around the front end of the truck as some campers shuffled past on their way to clean up at the ablution block.

  It would be okay. He would track her. He would find another opportunity to make this woman disappear so subtly that even Pieter would not notice, he thought as he melted back into the shadows toward the stile and the open dark veldt.

  Chapter 26

  Morning dawned bright and early. Tabitha examined the watch still on her wrist in the confines of her sleeping bag. 6:02 am. A chill in the air made her reluctant to withdraw from her cocoon. The sleeping bag made her feel invisible and safe; for some reason, getting out felt as if it made her vulnerable. Unsafe. She shook herself and was finally driven out by the idea she might get some good game viewing in if she’d get on the road soon.

  A half hour later, she’d pried herself out of the truck and cleaned up at the ablution block, washing her face under the hot tap at the sinks. She was ready to go. The camp stirred with those set on an early safari ride into the bush. The animals, Tabitha had learned, were more active at dawn and at dusk, and so, it seemed, were the campers.

  A red-gold sun warmed the landscape and called out to Tabitha that things weren’t as bad as they seemed. She saw a huge herd of impala crossing the road, as well as a few elephants and a family group of an
other antelope she couldn’t identify for sure. Maybe the nyala, with white stripes on their golden hides. She shot a couple of rolls of film and only killed the engine four times.

  She didn’t bother driving into the main Skukuza camp, but took the side road leading around to the offices. Hopefully someone was early to work, or she might be waiting. The lights were off in the long hallway, but light shone through the windowed office at the other end. Tabitha’s orange sneakers squeaked loudly on the freshly washed linoleum floors. She fidgeted with the papers in her hand, wishing her footsteps were quieter.

  Kindness was busy turning things on as Tabitha entered the office.

  “Good morning,” Kindness sang out to her. The enthusiasm surprised Tabitha. “We’ve been searching for you. The paperwork has come through.”

  Tabitha held up her hand, full of papers. “I’ve already gotten some in Nelspruit. Perhaps we can fax it right away.”

  “Mr. Mpande will be in momentarily. He wants to write a letter to go with the forms.” Kindness had settled behind her desk and appeared to wait for her computer to return to life.

  Tabitha leaned over her. “He will do it this morning, won’t he? I don’t want any more delays.”

  “I’m sure he will. He is anxious to have this finished also.” Kindness nodded and put a hand up to cover her mouth in case she might smile.

  Tabitha gave the details of Mister M’s mortuary and hoped a sad struggle had passed and she could move on. On to what, was another issue.