A Delicious Mistake (7 page)

She
tightened the cord of her dressing gown. “I
want
to know, Dad.” She got
the words out with a firm finality. Numbness and shock ebbed from her, leaked
out enough to leave room for the anger to sneak in and make an appearance.

David
nodded toward her mother, who sat with her head bowed and her shoulders
slumped. Her quiet sobbing seemed to fill the room. She didn’t stop clutching
her husband’s hand.

Sarah
nodded.

Not here.
That was the
silent message from her father.
Not now.

She
sighed and bit her lower lip.

The
silence stretched on, interrupted only by her mother’s shaky sobs and the
ominous ticking of the grandfather clock in the room by the biggest bookshelf.
Sarah still hadn’t moved. She simply couldn’t bring herself to. She could
barely breathe, let alone function enough to impose movement onto her body.

“There’s
more,” David said finally, his voice quiet and broken and disbelieving.

Both
Sarah and Lucy looked at him. Sarah held her breath. She didn’t say anything
but merely waited with her heats in her throats for yet another piece of
dreadful news. Whatever Sarah might have imagined, nothing could have prepared
her for what her father said next. “They have a prime suspect.”

Sarah
stiffened. “Who is it?”

David
shook his head and looked away as if he couldn’t bring himself to say the
words. But they came out in a low croak. “They say Benjamin Ndlovo might have
done it.”

“David!”
Sitting up, Sarah’s mother stared at her husband as if he had just uttered
blasphemy. “That is ridiculous! Benjamin would never hurt Luke!”

He
glanced at his wife, sadness pulling his face drawn and white. “Wouldn’t he?”

“No,
he wouldn’t,” Lucy said firmly. She wiped at the tears still leaking from her
eyes. “We
know
him.”

“Do
we?” Sarah asked. Her heart ached—every part of her cried out for relief from
the misery welling. Luke gone—taken from them. She wanted to lash out at
someone—at anyone. And her father had just given her a target.

Her
parents looked over at her, mouths open and eyes wide.

Sarah
took a deep breath. The words felt like razor blades in her throat, but she
couldn’t hold them back. “How long has it been since we last saw Benjamin?
Eleven years,” she said before either of her parents could reply. “People
change. Maybe he’s still the same sweet young man we all knew. But maybe he
isn’t. Maybe he’s gotten mixed up in something. Maybe Luke found out. Or maybe
there was a fight. I guess all I’m saying is that you can’t ever really know
someone—and if the police suspect him, they must have a reason.”

It
pained her to speak like that, but what other scenario was there? What if
Benjamin was involved with her brother’s murder? Were they supposed to look the
other way in the name of a past more than a decade in the distance?

After
a few minutes, Sarah’s mother shook her head. “No, I don’t believe it. Benjamin
would never!”

Sarah
sighed. Her mother was clearly in denial. She left her parents to their grief
and went back to her room and to her own sorrow. The rain pounded on the
window, left her room damp and chilled. It poured outside as if the sky itself
had to cry. She let herself fall down into the chair at the desk window. She
didn’t turn on her lights but watched absently as the drops fell out into the
darkened street and splashed onto the glass.

Alone
in the quiet, her thoughts and emotions cradled by the steady patter of the
rain, she let the darkness sooth and clear her mind. Slowly the fog of shock
lifted…and the pain emerged. The tears started then. For Luke. For her parents.
For herself. And for Benjamin.

Silent
and alone in the dark, she cried for hours.

* * *

               
Sarah didn’t know when or how she managed to fall asleep. She certainly didn’t
remember crawling over to the bed, but at some point she must have. She woke a
little before dawn on top of her crumpled sheets and covers. She only vaguely
remembered the sensation of being on the verge of slipping into an exhausted
slumber. But she hadn’t done anything as naïve as hoping to wake and find out
it had all been a bizarre nightmare. The news was still all too real. As was
her pain. It settled into her like a cancer, gnawing at her stomach and at her
bones. It dragged at her. But she forced herself to dress and go on. Luke would
have wanted that.

She
spent the next couple of days juggling her own grief, her mother’s sorrow, and
her father’s impotency. She knew he couldn’t stand knowing he couldn’t jump
onto the next plane to Tanzania. His body wouldn’t survive the stress or the
conditions. But twice she caught him looking at airline schedules on the
computer. While he had regained most of the movement in the left side of his
body, his doctor had warned him against exertion. He had remained confined to a
wheelchair and he was still frail. Not that there would be much for him to
return to in Tanzania. Yes, the Game Lodge was still in the family. But it
wasn’t like they had a funeral to attend. Not yet. The police had insisted on
keeping Luke’s body for now, and Lucy Hutton refused to bury an empty casket.
Sarah could hardly blame her. If it had been her son, she would have wanted to
give the last goodbye to
him
, too, and not to a hollow wooden box.

But
Sarah found something else to keep herself from climbing into the pit of
despair. She had to keep her family and herself together. But she also started
digging. She contacted the police department of Nkorula Lapa and asked to speak
with Tobias Bankole. The Police Chief had been a longtime friend of her
father’s, and he went above and beyond all that was proper to give her the information
in his possession. Granted, he didn’t have much. But he did admit, albeit
reluctantly and with sorrow in his voice, that Benjamin Ndlovo
was
their
prime suspect. The ranger had been the last person to see Luke Hutton alive and
he had waited a suspiciously long time before he put together a search party.
Tourists also reported seeing the two men together earlier, and two insisted
they had not looked as if Benjamin and Luke had even been on speaking terms.

Sarah
found her heart breaking again. But she clenched her teeth and vowed she would
see to it that Luke’s murder never ended up an unsolved case. Even if she had
to drag the truth from Benjamin, she would see that Luke could one day rest in
peace.

After
the phone call with Chief Bankole, Sarah allowed herself time to think over
what little she had learned. The more she thought about it, the less sense it
made. Why would Benjamin Ndlovo harm Luke? The two had been inseparable ever
since childhood. She hadn’t seen Benjamin in over a decade, but Luke had spoken
of him. Whenever she and Luke had caught up with each other over the phone, it
had been clear that the years apart hadn’t changed or ended their friendship.
If anything, her brother and the Tanzanian man seemed to have grown even
closer. How could an argument between friends lead to murder? Had Benjamin
misled Luke? Or did someone want the blame to fall on Benjamin?

Something
was not right.

The
more she went over the few facts she had and the many conjectures she had
managed to gather, the more Sarah began to entertain the thought that the only
way to shed light upon the whole affair was to take action herself.

The
mere idea, however, chilled her to the core. She hadn’t been to Africa in
eleven years. That seemed like a lifetime when the years between had been her
teenage years. When her father had suffered his ill-fated stroke, her parents
had made the heartbreaking decision to leave Tanzania for good. A stroke was
rarely a one-time event, and they were all too aware of the lack of a
well-equipped medical center in the nearby town of Nkorula Lapa. Her father had
been devastated at having to leave the Hutton Game Lodge behind. He had fought
long and hard to create that a sanctuary in collaboration with the authorities
of the Serengeti National Park and make it a place where the wildlife could be
respected and preserved. But there had been no other choice.

Still,
as deep as her father’s pain had been back then it seemed like nothing compared
to the bone-shattering sorrow of the loss of her brother. Luke had Africa in
his blood, everyone had always said so. To take Luke away from that had been
like taking him away from everything that he was. Sarah hadn’t been too keen on
never seeing Africa again herself, but that had been mostly due to her undying
crush on Benjamin Ndlovo. He had never given her any sign that he returned her
feelings, had never even given her so much as a lingering glance, but that had
never been a deterrent to Sarah. She had adored him.

It
had been a girl’s crush, and Sarah was convinced that she had outgrown it. But
that didn’t make her any less nervous at the thought of seeing him again,
particularly given the circumstances. Would he recognize her? Would she even
recognize him? Would she know the land where she had spent such a large portion
of her life? Would Africa and the endless plains of the Serengeti bring her the
same exhilarating sense of freedom she’d had when she ran with Luke through the
tall grass? Or would it all seem untamed and empty like a lost dream?

It
didn’t seem possible. But nothing seemed possible anymore without Luke in this
world. Africa was not going to be the same without her brother. As for
Benjamin, as much as she tried to remain rational, she couldn’t help but start
to feel something for him alright—anger. Resentment. He was alive while Luke
was dead. If he’d been Luke’s friend, why had he allowed her brother to die?
The beginning of hatred stirred and she held onto it because it was so much
cleaner than feeling the keening loss of Luke. She kept telling herself that
she shouldn’t judge beforehand, that a man was innocent until proven otherwise,
but she couldn’t help it. Chief Bankole was not a superficial man. He didn’t
take his work lightly. If he suspected Benjamin of being involved, then that
meant there was reason for suspicion.

As
terrified as the notion to hop on a plane for the Black Continent made her, the
more she entertained the thought, the more she convinced herself it was the
right thing to do. Until one morning she got up and started packing. She was
going. There was no other way but to see this through, and there was no one
else to do it. Her parents certainly were in no condition to go anywhere,
especially to play detectives.

Except
this wasn’t a game. Luke had been murdered, and that made her stomach churn and
her bones hurt. On those very rare occasions when she allowed herself to stop
and think about it and, more importantly,
feel
it, her brother’s death
still seemed surreal—something far away that simply could not have happened. To
a point, that was true. It
was
far away and it
had
happened in
another universe. Luke had died alone in Tanzania. Away from those who loved
him. Away from
her
.

That
was unthinkable. And unbearable.

The
only way she could think of to even begin to heal would be for her to take
action. The questions she had about Luke’s death had been running around her
head for days, bouncing off the walls of her skull like crazed golf balls.

She
was going to find the answer if it was the last thing she’d ever do in this
life. She was going to confront Benjamin Ndlovo. She would demand explanations.
She would find the truth. And if it turned out that Benjamin
did
have
something to do with Luke’s murder, then by God she would make sure he wished
he had never been born.

She
had a plan and, as it turned out, that was all she needed to feel better—or at
the very least to distract her from all her other emotions so she could at
least function. Having a concrete course of action eased her insurmountable
grief. She had a mission and it gave her the strength she needed—and God knew
she would need plenty of it.

There
was a lot of evil in this world and Sarah knew that she had been brought up
under the proverbial bell jar and sheltered from most of it, until now. She had
always known that there was wrong, but this went beyond everything decent. That
someone would not only willingly harm her brother, but
kill
him seemed
the work of a madman. Luke had had a gentle soul, a fierce heart, and a burning
fire inside of him that crackled to the rhythm of the African sun. All Luke had
ever wanted was to live surrounded by the beauty of the Serengeti. He had
chosen a rural life, administrating their family’s game farm in Tanzania. He
had been content to sleep under the stars, watch over the wildlife and the
trees and the grass, and live without the luxuries of the city. He was a
creature of the savannah, so much so that he had seemed painfully out of place
every time he had come to visit in London, which had mostly happened at
Christmas, and over the past two years or so, not even then.

Sarah
hadn’t seen her brother in over two years. Despite his frequent invitations to
join him for a week or two, she had never gone. She always seemed to have
something better to do, although now she couldn’t for the life of her recall
what the last thing had been that had seemed so damn important at the time.
She’d always thought she’d have another chance—another trip. Now Luke was gone
forever. It brought bile to her throat.