Deadly Harvest A Detective Kubu Mystery - By Michael Stanley Page 0,1
He would come back drunk, and Dikeledi wished they could lock the door of the room where she and the boys slept. Putting it out of her mind, she jumped up and started to clear up the dishes. The pap had burned, and the pot would be hard to clean. As she scoured it, she worried about her sister. It was really late now, and a ten-year-old girl shouldn’t be out.
AT FIRST DIKELEDI COULDN’T sleep. When she did eventually drift off, her sleep was fitful, and she muttered and tossed, disturbing the boys lying alongside her on the same thin foam rubber mattress. Suddenly she sat straight up and screamed. The oldest boy reacted at once, covering her mouth with his hand. If they woke Constance or Tole, they’d all get a beating. Dikeledi struggled free.
“Oh God,” she said. “It was so awful, so real. I was lying on a table, tied down. It was dark but I saw a knife. A huge knife. It stabbed down, here and here and here.” She pointed to parts of her body. “Oh God!” She started to sob.
“It was only a bad dream, Dikeledi. It’s okay. Careful, or you’ll wake them.”
Dikeledi just shook her head and went on crying.
THE NEXT MORNING THERE was still no sign of Lesego. Dikeledi left early, tense with worry, and walked to the café in town where she had a part-time job, serving customers for tips and a few pula. Slipping out at about eleven, she walked to Lesego’s school, which had its morning break then, and found two of Lesego’s friends. They both told the same story: Lesego left straight from school to go shopping. No one had seen her since. Dikeledi hurried back to work, sick with fear.
She left the café as early as she could, determined to persuade her aunt to go to the police. Perhaps it was not too late.
“Go away, Dikeledi,” Constance snapped. “Lesego probably skipped school and knows what’ll happen to her when she gets back home.”
Dikeledi tried again and received a slap for her trouble, so for the moment she gave up and started on her chores.
By the next day it was clear that Lesego wasn’t coming back, and Constance gave in to Dikeledi’s pleading. She brought Dikeledi with her to the police, as if to prove her concern to the girl.
The duty constable listened to the full story before he asked any questions.
“Has she ever done this before? Disappeared for a few days?”
“Never. Now she’s run off with my money. That’s the thanks you get. I took the girls in when their mother died of AIDS. What could I do? They had no father, either. At least no one who’d claim them.” Her hand tightened on Dikeledi’s shoulder as if she thought she might also vanish. “And this is the thanks I get. She runs away with my money!”
“How much money did she take?”
“Twenty pula.”
The constable frowned. “She won’t get far on that.”
Constance glared at him. “Twenty pula is a lot of money to me!”
The constable nodded. “So you believe she ran away from home. Where would she go? Does she have other relatives here?”
Constance shrugged. “Everyone has relatives. I don’t know.”
“Have you asked them if they’ve seen her?”
“Tole—that’s my man—asked around. He knows everyone. No one’s seen her.”
The constable had run out of questions. “I’ll file a missing-persons report.”
Dikeledi burst out, “Please, can you look for her? I’m sure something awful has happened. Something really awful. I’m so scared.” Tears ran down her face.
“Don’t worry, Dikeledi,” the constable said. “We’ll look very hard. We’ll find her. The police here are very good. We’ll find her for you.”
As he watched them go, the constable wondered if they would find the girl or if she even wanted to be found. Maybe she had run away from the hard-faced Koma woman. But perhaps the sister was right. It wouldn’t be the first time something awful had happened in Mochudi.
THE NEXT DAY DIKELEDI slipped away from work early and went home past the police station. The same constable was on duty, and she asked him whether they had found anything.
“We asked at the school. They said she was there that day, then she left to buy some things and walk home.”
Dikeledi nodded. She knew this.
“We found a shopkeeper who remembers her. She wouldn’t buy sweet potatoes even though they were big and fresh. But she bought other stuff. Then she left.”