by Marie Moore
Tears ran down my face.
“Don’t sob, Sidney,” Jay said in the darkness. “I can hear you sobbing. Get some sleep, Angel. There’s nothing you can do for Mabel now. I have some aspirin in my shaving kit if you want one.”
I didn’t answer. If I took more aspirin than I had already taken, I’d have to call 911. And there was no 911.
When Jay’s deep snoring began, I crawled out of bed and slipped my shoes back on. Then I slid the zipper down carefully, grabbed a flashlight from its holder, and stepping into the darkness, quietly closed the tent behind me.
The moonlight was bright on the path outside the tent. I took a deep breath and decided I would be much safer with the flashlight off. It would have been smart to include Jay in my reconnaissance, but I knew he would never go for it. Not only that, he would try to stop me.
“Curiosity killed the cat” my mother often says to me. Maybe, but slipping along the edge of the path in the moonlight, alert to every sound, this little kitty planned to be ever so careful.
Mabel’s death certainly appeared to be an accident. Still, someone must surely be breathing a little easier, I thought, now that Mabel was out of the way. I intended to discover what Mabel meant when she told me that “something in this camp is rotten.” If Mabel could find out, so could I. I felt I owed her that much.
* * *
Picking my way along the path, I walked as quickly as I dared, sticking to the shadows as much as possible. There was no one else out. Everyone seemed to have turned in for the night as instructed
I knew there would be guards somewhere, but guessed that they made regular rounds. Every now and then, as I slipped from shadow to shadow, I stopped to listen. Nothing. No sounds of men, or of beasts beyond the faint rustlings of birds. Only the wind and the buzzing of insects. I was afraid of wild animals, of course, but even more afraid of people. I concocted a story to explain my midnight stroll if I got caught.
I wore the thin, dark gray shirt and black jeans that Jay said made me look like a burglar. It was the perfect outfit for my mission, but not exactly warm. The temperature had plunged with the setting of the sun and the night was cold.
My goal was to check out the office in the main tent. I had noticed in the afternoon, while enjoying my leisurely lunch with Fernando, that Mabel had taken a super long time returning each time she visited the ladies’ room off the dining area. At first I wondered if she was ill, but she seemed completely fine, looking no more out of sorts than usual. So then I wondered why it took her so long to return from the bathroom. Visiting the ladies room myself, I spotted a door marked “office” in a partitioned wall right next to it. My bet was that Mabel had spent all that extra time in the office, not in the restroom. So what had brought Mabel to the office again and again?
The office. That was where I intended to search while the camp slept.
Silently scooting through the night, I cautiously passed the other tents and turned a corner, headed for the main tent. The camp was so hushed that I could hear the faint sounds my own feet made on the sandy path.
It was all silent. Too silent.
Something was wrong.
There should have been some sort of night sounds. There were none. Insects, birds, animals were all around me, but they were still.
Wild creatures fall silent at the approach of man.
Someone was coming.
I saw a faint beam of light on the path behind me.
I sprinted up the final steps to the main tent and ducked behind a post just ahead of the guard. He moved like a phantom on the path below me, but there was nothing ethereal about him. He was a dark, husky man, not quite as big as Vincent, and he was thoroughly and efficiently inspecting the underbrush lining the path with the beam of his light as he made his rounds. His uniform looked almost paramilitary. The moon shone on the barrel of his rifle.
Lucky. That’s what I was. I was just seconds ahead of him. He had almost caught me. I stood motionless behind the post long after I thought he had moved on. Then I stole through the dark dining area toward the office.
There was no lock on the office door. I entered and closed it softly behind me before I switched on my flashlight. After a quick search through a small desk and a file cabinet, I thought I knew why the office was not locked. There was nothing worth locking up. All I could find was a bunch of invoices for groceries.
So what had brought Mabel to this room again and again?
I began to worry that whatever she had found here had been removed after her death.
Frustrated, I sat in the desk chair and tried to think it out. I started going through the files again, this time more methodically. I was looking for a tip-off, a pattern, something false. Whatever clue was hidden in the files might not be obvious, I thought, but there must be something.
I had almost given up when I suddenly realized what Mabel had found. It had been there all along, hidden cleverly in plain sight, in black and white, before me all the time. Eagerly scanning paper after paper in the beam of my flash, I was so intent on reading that I didn’t hear what must have been footsteps approaching in the hallway. The sound of a toilet flushing in the adjacent men’s room nearly gave me heart failure.
Switching off my light, I stuffed some of the invoices under my shirt, closed the drawer, and had only just slid behind the door as it opened.
A strong beam of light from the guard’s big flash swung around the room, highlighting the filing cabinet where I had been standing seconds earlier.
The guard did not step into the room, so he never saw me behind the door. If he had, I would have been toast. Lucky again.
Apparently satisfied, he switched off his light, pulled the door closed, and continued his rounds. I heard his footsteps receding toward the dining room.
As soon as I thought he was really gone, I followed suit. As my mother would say, I was out of there before you could say Jack Robinson.
Back through the darkened hall, past the dining room, down the steps, I raced down the path toward my tent. I paused only when I thought I heard an unusual sound, and as I ran I kept a sharp watch for the beam of a flashlight.
I had almost made it to the tent and was looking back over my shoulder when I collided with someone.
For the second time that night, my heart almost failed me as strong hands gripped my shoulders.
“Sidney,” George demanded, “what do you think you are doing? Why in the hell are you running around all alone in the dark? This is no time or place for jogging. Are you insane?”
Chapter 26
“George!” I said as he released my shoulders, blinking at me in the dim light through his big glasses. He looked more owlish than ever. “How did you get here? Where did you come from? I thought you had gone to the station with the police.”
“Willem came for me. He brought a lawyer. They arranged my release until the inquest. I will have to return then, but since I am staying on in Africa for a while after the tour anyway; that’s not a problem. They all say I’ll be fine because everyone knows it was a horrible accident. They just drove me back, after the police took my statement about ... about Mabel.” His face looked so sorrowful. “I’ll never get over causing her death,” he said, with a catch in his voice, “I didn’t mean to—”
“We all know that, George,” I said, cutting him off, not wanting to hear his sad apology. I felt so bad for him. I knew he must be in agony over what he had done.
“No one is blaming you, George,” I went on. “No one. We all understand that it was a terrible accident. You never meant to harm her. You were trying to save her.”
“That’s kind of you, Sidney. I appreciate you for saying that. I hope everyone sees it that way. I hope they can forgive me.”
I had no answer for that. I had forgiven him, but I knew that my view was not shared by all the others. We started walking again on the path and soon reached the turnoff to my tent.
At the entrance of my tent I said softly, “Are you free to go now, Geor
ge?”
“Yes. Totally. I have been released. The lawyer says that the inquest will only be a formality. I’ll be leaving with the group for Leopard Dance in the morning.”
“You must be exhausted.”
“I am.”
I patted his shoulder as I left him to slip back inside and whispered, “I’ll see you in the morning, George. Try to get some rest.”
Jay was still snoring like a buzz saw beneath his mosquito netting. I crammed the papers I had stolen into my little bag and changed into my pajamas in the dark. I had what I thought might be Mabel’s information, but I was simply too exhausted to think about it anymore until morning. I fell asleep the minute I stretched out on my bed.
* * *
The Rovers turned into the now-familiar road to Leopard Dance just before noon.
When we rolled in from our disastrous excursion to the tented camp, Henrik van der Brugge was standing at the reception pavilion to personally welcome us back.
He must have left our camp much earlier, perhaps even in the middle of the night. Or maybe he had flown home early in the morning. Who knew? Although I had not heard a plane or seen an airstrip at the tented camp, one certainly may have been on the property. It was extensive and we hadn’t seen it all.
Henrik looked fresh, relaxed, and as handsome as ever. Me, not so much, after only a tiny bit of sleep.
I didn’t trust Henrik any more than Jay did, though I still found him mighty attractive. Even so, I had already decided that I wouldn’t be sharing any more intimate dinners with him. Been there, done that.
Rebecca and Winsome stood by his side, serving drinks and offering cold, damp towels for our hands and faces. Both were welcome after the long, hot ride. The Leopard Dance team was working extra hard to make us forget the horror we had experienced by the river, as well as to put us all in happier moods.
Most of the group was clearly ready to move on, too, so when van der Brugge issued an invitation to a special farewell dinner at his house, it was greeted with enthusiasm.
“That’s great!” Chase said, “What time?”
“Around eight o’clock tonight,” he replied, “following your last game drive. You will be driven directly to my home for Sundowners and dinner after you return. Right now, Willem has a simple buffet lunch laid out for you in the dining hall, and then your afternoon is free until the bell rings for the game drive. The spa is open, as is the boutique and the swimming pool. Welcome back, my friends. Please enjoy your day.”
An informal salad and sandwich buffet had been set up. Pleading a headache, I chose a sandwich and a drink, borrowed a book from the library, and took it all straight back to good old Hut No.1. Jay lingered over lunch with the others.
I locked the door and unpacked the little overnight bag, remembering to watch for my lost earring. No earring. I even turned the bag inside out. I’d noticed one of my simple silver hoops missing in the vehicle on the way back to camp and I’d hoped it had ended up in my bag somehow. I could have lost it anywhere—on that ill-fated game walk or in my bed, since I hadn’t taken the time to remove my jewelry before sleeping. It wasn’t valuable but I still hated to lose it.
I took the stolen papers, the book, and my lunch out onto the little deck. The riverbed was quiet, with nothing moving as far as I could see. Jay was going straight from lunch to a spa appointment at 2:00. That gave me just enough private time for my first good look at those papers.
Time, before Mabel’s death, had seemed to pass so slowly, with the rhythm of one lazy, pleasurable day easily flowing into another. After the tragedy, it seemed to have accelerated, shifting into fast-forward. Then it seemed that all anyone wanted was to just get the ill-fated trip over and done with as quickly as possible so we could all return to Cape Town and go our separate ways. Everyone had been extremely polite and pleasant over breakfast—respectful, but clearly distancing themselves, preparing to move on. No one talked about Mabel or what had happened to her. Certainly, no one wanted to be held up by an investigation. I didn’t, either, but I knew I could not ignore what I had found. I felt I owed it to Mabel.
The papers I had pocketed in the office of the tented camp were invoices—ordinary invoices, as you might find in any hotel or restaurant manager’s desk, bills written in English for everything from soap and canned goods to fresh produce. What made these particular invoices interesting was the name, address, and logo on the top of each one, plus the money totals on each.
The money amounts were given in U.S. dollars, not South African rand. As Fernando had told me on the banks of the Limpopo, following the collapse of their currency in 2009, Zimbabwe had begun using the U.S. dollar, abandoning their own currency. These invoices, handwritten with the city, Harare, printed at the top along with the date, were each for large amounts of meat and other common provisions, all at high prices. In dollars. A lot of dollars. Thus, the bills appeared to have originated in Zimbabwe.
Even more interesting was the name of the company doing the invoicing, and the clever logo. The printed letterhead read Spieël Provisioners. The company logo said Spieël, and directly under that word, and attached to it, was lëeips—spieël spelled backwards—in a stylized logo much like the one designed for Leopard Dance. I had been told that the principal owner of Spieël was Henrik van der Brugge.
I wasn’t sure what the invoices were for, but I didn’t think they were really for groceries.
Willem, I remembered from our cooking talk, had told me that no provisions ever came from Zimbabwe, only from South Africa.
The answer might be found in the Afrikaans dictionary I now held, the same book that had so interested Mabel. I turned to the “S” section and looked up the word Afrikaans word spieël.
My guess from the look of the logo was correct. In English, it means “mirror.”
The bills were a mirror image of what they actually said. If the bill said the goods were coming from Harare, they were actually going to Harare and so on. I believed that I had found the key to the records of a money-laundering and poaching/smuggling operation. And Mabel must have found it out first.
Just as I was fully exploring that explosive idea, I heard Jay entering the hut. I shoved the invoices under a cushion and sat on it. I wasn’t ready to share my newly hatched theory with anyone, even Jay or the authorities, until I had thought it all through.
“Hi,” Jay said, poking his red head through the opening in the window wall. “I thought I might find you out here. Look at the yummy things I brought you.”
He set a tray with coffee and an array of delightful little treats next to me on the little table.
“How dear of you, Jay! Thank you,” I said, biting into a perfect little scone. “This sure brightens up the afternoon. It was really nice of you to fix this tray for me with all these lovely things and bring it all the way here from the dining hall. What made you think of it?”
“Oh, I’m always thinking of you, Sidney. You just don’t realize it.”
“What’s this?” I said, pulling a small white envelope out from under the platter of treats.
“Oh, that’s nothing, give it to me,” Jay said, trying to grab it.
He was too late. I already had the note out of the envelope. It didn’t take long to read it, and even less time to smell a rat.
I’m sorry you are not feeling well.
Please enjoy this with my compliments.
—Willem
I looked up at Jay, who was laughing.
“I should have known,” I said.
“Well, it was worth a try. I really would have made you a tray myself, Sidney, if I ran a restaurant, but I don’t. Now give me some of that banana bread. It looks good. You aren’t mad, are you?”
“No, Jay, not at you. Only at myself, for being so trusting.”
“I tell you that all the time, hon, but you never listen.”
I could never in a million years explain Jay or our relationship to anyone sane. There’s no point in even trying.
“I’
m not as trusting as you think. I’ve decided that I’m not sure what anyone on this trip is up to or even who they really are. Except you and me, of course.”
He plopped into the chair next to mine on the deck. “No kidding. They all seemed to be on the level when we first met them, but now I don’t know. I can promise you this, lady. Whoever the fakes are, they don’t have much imagination. Who would fake being a travel agent when they could pass themselves off as someone more exciting, like a movie star or fashion designer?”
“I’m glad you brought that up, Jay. I’ve been thinking. Can we talk for a minute about our fellow travelers? We knew almost immediately that Dennis was a phony. We’ll probably never know his real story. But what about the others? Let’s go down the list. Take Wendy and Tilda, for starters. Do you think they are for real?”
“Yep. They are real all right, I know that for a fact. I was subjected to two solid hours of minutia about their agency back on High Street in Piddling on the Green.”
“Jay,” I said, shaking my head and laughing, “that’s not the name of their village.”
“Whatever. It’s something like that. They’re in the clear. They’re real.”
“I completely agree. Scratch Wendy and Tilda.”
We were both silent for a moment.
“Fernando.” Jay spoke his name with his best Italian accent. “What about Fernando, Sidney? I love the idea of suspecting that Italian Romeo.”
“He’s not a Romeo, Jay. He’s nice, and I’m pretty sure he’s legit. He tells tons of funny insider airline stories. He knows the biz.”
Jay rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “True, but stories can be stolen from someone else. Ask him technical questions the next time you get a chance. See if he has any answers.”
I rolled my eyes. “You just want him to be the bad guy,” I said. “Admit it. I think he’s who he says he is, but okay, we’ll check him out further. Who’s next? What about Connie?”
