Sacrifices (6 page)

Louise walks up from the city taxi, the leafy streets of Newlands growing darker as the sun sinks behind the mountain. She inhales bougainvillea from a bush winding through the barbed wire and electric fence that surrounds a large house, an anonymous fortress like the Lane’s, and her feet crush the flesh-like blooms.

She’s dreading getting home and having to deal with her mother’s desperation. When her phone vibrates in her pocket she almost ignores it, sure it’s Denise Solomons pestering her for news. But she sees
PRIVATE NUMBER on the face of her phone and takes the call.

“Yes?”

“Lou? Lou?” Lyndall shouting through the clamor of yelling voices.

“Lynnie?”

“Lou, you gotta get me out here, Lou. You gotta get me out.”

“Lyndall, just calm down, okay?”

“I didn’t do it, Lou. I wasn’t even there, in Chris’s room. I was in town.”

“Swear to me, Lynnie.”

“I swear, Lou. I swear.”

And, even though she knows she shouldn’t, Louise believes him.

“Lyndall, I’ve found out I can come and visit you in Pollsmoor tomorrow, okay? Then we can talk.”

“Lou, there’s shit going down in here.” An eruption of shouting, the sound of the phone being dropped and bumped. Then Lyndall is back. “Promise me if I die here tonight you bury me Muslim. Promise me.”

“Lyndall, for fuck’s sake calm down. You’re not going to die.”

“Promise me, Lou!”

“Okay, I promise,” she says and the connection is broken.

This new incarnation of her brother, the skull-cap wearing Mustafa, was about a year old. Finding Allah had done nothing to temper his
tik
habit, and Louise dismissed this conversion as just another way for Lyndall to piss off the world.

She arrives at the Lane’s house, scans the road for media and when she spots none she uses the control on her keychain to open the gate. Walking down the driveway she sees that the crime scene cleaners have gone, the doors to the pool house are closed and the curtains drawn.

Avoiding the Lane’s house, she cuts past the garage toward the backyard. The roller door is lifted, the garage empty of Michael’s BMW and Beverley’s Pajero.

Louise ducks under the washing lines, free of laundry today, and heads toward the cottage, but when she sees the back door of the big house standing open, she surrenders to an impulse and walks into the kitchen.

It has been years since she’s stepped into this room, but nothing has changed. She can’t stop herself from sitting down at the table, the surface—lovingly waxed by her mother with lavender-scented polish—familiar beneath her finger tips.

At this table, in the winter of Louise’s seventh birthday,
Michael Lane had read her
Through the Looking-Glass
. Every night for a month, after eating dinner with her mother and Lynnie in the cottage, she’d bathed, put on her PJs and dressing gown and presented herself at the kitchen door of the big house at 7:00 p.m. exactly, clutching the hardcover book with the old black and white illustrations that was her birthday gift from Michael.

Each night he’d opened the door for her and seated her at the kitchen table, making the offer of hot chocolate which she’d politely accepted. He got the kettle boiling and, as he closed the door to the living room, muffling the babble of the TV, she’d glimpsed Beverley and Chris sitting glued to the box, watching American sitcoms with fakey laugh tracks, the tube washing their pale, blank faces.

Her mother and Lynnie were doing the same thing in the cottage, but their small TV was tuned to the dramas on the Afrikaans channel: overheated tales of love and loss and betrayal.

Michael spooned chocolate into two mugs and added hot water, the earthenware chiming as he stirred the powder.
Placing the two steaming mugs on the table, bits of dark chocolate orbiting on the foamy surface, he asked Louise about her day at school.

Then Michael had opened the book and continued from where he’d left off the previous night, his beautiful voice transporting Louise into the strange and wonderful world
Alice discovered when she traveled through the looking-glass. The closing of the book each night, another chapter closer to the story’s end, had filled her with a creeping sense of desolation.

Twelve years later, sitting in the gathering darkness of this vast kitchen, Louise appreciates the irony of Michael reading her Lewis Carroll’s book, and wonders if he’d done it knowingly, if the parallels with the brown servant’s child stepping each day through the mirror into the wonderland of white privilege were too rich for him to resist. 

Lane parks his car in the garage—no sign of Beverley’s Pajero—and enters the house through the door that leads to the kitchen. It’s almost night and the lights are off. He stands in the gloom, listening for signals of his son’s presence. All he hears is the Southeaster nagging at a loose roof tile. As his eyes become accustomed to the murk, Lane realizes that he’s not alone—Louise Solomons sits at the kitchen table, watching him.

“Hell, Lou, you nearly gave me a heart attack,” he says, reaching for the wall switch, igniting the LEDs that fill the room with hard blue light.

Louise fixes him with a level stare. She’s always managed to disconcert him, this reserved, hidden girl and when he’s with her he senses an unspoken disappointment: that he’d been the keeper of the door to a new life; a door he’d opened a crack, then closed in her face.

“Michael, I need you to be honest with me,” she says.

“Of course, Lou.”

Giving her his back he crosses to the fridge, gets two blocks of ice from the freezer and drops them into a cut glass tumbler. Lifting a bottle of Lagavulin from the cupboard he pours a generous tot of single malt over the cubes, hearing them whisper and crackle. He takes a slug, letting it wash his mouth, feeling the peaty whiskey warm his gut.

“What’s on your mind?” Lane asks, leaning against the kitchen counter.

“Tell me what really happened last night.”

He sips, trying to keep his face free of the anxiety that has hold of his entrails. “What do you mean? You know what happened.”

Louise shakes her head, her eyes fixed on his, and he has a hard time holding her gaze. “There’s no way Lynnie did it, Michael.”

“I know you don’t want to believe it, Louise. It’s a terrible thing.”

She frees him from those eyes for a moment as she stares at her small hands with their unvarnished, pruned nails, fingertips stroking the wood of the table. Then she looks up at him again.

“I’ve always trusted you, Michael.”

“I’m glad to hear that,” he says, hearing an echo of his dead father’s pomposity in his voice.

“But Bev . . . not so much.”
Louise holds up a hand. “Ja, I know you’re going to defend her. That’s your job, isn’t it?” She produces something vaguely resembling a smile. It quickly evaporates and she says, “Remember that day Chris grabbed me? In the pool house?”

Lane nods, swirling the whiskey in the tumbler, the melting ice tolling softly against the glass.

“He would have raped me, Michael, if you hadn’t come in when you did.”

“Jesus, Lou, that’s taking it a bit far. He was just a stupid kid who let his hormones overwhelm him.”

She shakes her head. “He would’ve. And I saw what Bev did, how she handled my mom and me. How she made it all go away, and even made me feel that it was my fault, somehow.”

“Of course it wasn’t your fault.”

“No. No, it wasn’t. And you should’ve done something then, with your son. Like you should’ve when Chris and his buddies nearly killed that black guy last year.”

Lane buys himself time by taking a sip of
Scotch, the alcohol suddenly bitter to his tongue. “What do you know about that?”

Louise shrugs. “My mother’s jacked into the domestic worker grapevine, Michael, and you know how they gossip.” 

“You told that cop about it, didn’t you? Perils?”

“Yes.” She fixes her gaze on him and he can feel a bead of sweat break free from his armpit and trace a cold trail down his ribs. “What I’m thinking is that you and Beverley are covering up for Chris again.”

“Lou, where are you going with this?”

“I believe Christopher killed that girl. Lyndall wasn’t anywhere near here. But Beverley came up with a plan, didn’t she, Michael? And you went along with it, just like before.”

Lane puts his glass down and tries to speak with an authority he doesn’t feel. “Louise, God knows we’re all stretched to the limit, but what you’re saying is dangerous. I think you should go now.”

“Don’t lie to me, Michael. Please, not you.”

Her voice breaks and Lane remembers her as a child, sitting at this table in her dressing gown, starved for the scraps of affection he tossed her way, and seeing himself in her eyes Lane understands how far he has strayed from the man he once was, and wonders if he has traveled too far, now, to ever recover.

He hears the rumble of Beverley’s Pajero as it pulls into the garage. The engine cuts and the driver’s door slaps shut.

Her composure restored, Louise stands. “I’m not going to let this go, Michael. I’m not fourteen anymore.”

She steps out the back door, closing it quietly. Her shadow passes the kitchen window and then she’s gone.

“How many Scotches have you had?” his wife asks as she enters the kitchen, dressed in black tights, running shoes and a sweat top, a gym bag slung over her shoulder. Her hair is still damp from the shower at Virgin Active in Claremont.

“This is my first,” Lane says, “and it’ll be my last.”

“We’ve got to hold it together, Mike, okay?”

He nods.

“Be a darling and bring me a glass of wine,” Bev says, dumping her bag on the counter, heading for the living room.

Lane swallows the dregs of his whiskey and finds an open Riesling in the fridge, removes the cork and sniffs the bottle. It smells drinkable so he pours a glass and takes it through.

Bev sits on the couch, in the buttery light of a table lamp, removing her Nikes and white socks, tucking her feet under her. She takes the glass of wine, sipping at it with a small grunt of appreciation.

Lane crosses to the window and stands with his back to his wife, staring out at the mauve dusk, the Southeaster dancing the branches of the mountain cypresses that line the driveway.

“That woman cop came to my office today.”

He watches Beverley’s reflection in the window. She sets her glass down on a side table and plays with a strand of her short hair, the only tell that she is nervous.

“What did she want?”

“To ask me if I had anything to add about last night.”

“And did you?”

“No. I said we’d told her everything.” He turns to Bev. “She knew about that business with Chris last year.”

Beverley laughs. A throaty chuckle, ribald and a little coarse, hinting at the carnality beneath her polished exterior.

“God, how typical.”

“Meaning?”

“She’s on the bloody take, Mike, like they all are.” He crosses his arms, watching her. “Did you see the pantsuit she was wearing last night?” Lane shakes his head. “It was an Armani. Are you telling me a cop can afford one of those suits? That’s three months’ pay for her.”

Lane tries to remember what the woman had worn to the bookstore, flashes on her legs crossing beneath fabric that shone like oil on water.

“So?” he says.

“So, she’s trying to soften you up, looking for an opportunity to put her hand in your pocket.” He stares at Beverley. “Don’t stress about her, Michael. Should there be a problem, which there won’t, a bit of money will smooth it away.”

His wife’s philosophy in a nutshell, Lane thinks.

“Just keep calm, Mike. This will all be behind us in a few days.”

“Beverley, it’s not too late,” he says.

“For what?”

“To tell the truth.”

“Michael . . .”

“Jesus, Bev, what we’re doing to Lyndall is inhuman.”

“We have no choice.”

“Yes, we do have a choice. We can come clean and get Chris some shyster lawyer who’ll plea bargain this whole thing away.”

“Michael, stop. You’re being naïve and you know it. Our son will be sent to prison.”

“He killed that girl.”

“So he should take his punishment? Is that what you’re saying?” Lane doesn’t answer. “Like you took yours?”

“There’s no comparison, Beverley.”

She flies off the couch and he thinks she going to strike him, but she just comes in so close that he can feel a fine spray of spittle on his face when she hisses, “We will never let anything happen to our son. Never. Are you understanding me, Michael?”

A noise gets Lane turning and he sees Christopher standing in the hallway at the foot of the stairs, watching them.

The boy crosses to the kitchen. The fridge door opens and slams shut, and he returns carrying a six-pack of beer, jogging up the stairs, the wood shuddering beneath his weight.