Chapter 14

Lindy woke up thinking about her sister. She’d tried calling her after her shift, but the phone just rang. Since her divorce – since they were both single again – they’d spent most evenings together. Having a drink out, or watching a DVD, usually at Charlotte’s place because the picture was better there. Getting no reply from Charlotte wasn’t a cause for concern. Sometimes she’d hook up with old school or work friends. Perhaps she’d met a guy, thought Lindy – simultaneously hopeful and terrified at the idea of being completely alone again.

Lying there in bed, awake now, with sunlight illuminating her room through her paper-thin curtains, she suddenly wondered whether Charlotte had had the same reaction to her date with Johan. She’d seemed enthusiastic about her dating again. But perhaps she was just putting on a brave face, being happy for her younger sister despite the prospect of losing her to a boyfriend. Lindy felt terrible. The thought hadn’t occurred to her at all until right now.

“I’m such a selfish idiot,” she said to herself as she sat up in bed and swung her legs onto the mottled brown carpet of her bedroom.

It was 6:35. Too early to try to call Charlotte again. She’d wait till 7:30. Even that was optimistic. Lindy scanned her cupboard for something to wear, gave up and went to make coffee. She set the filter machine boiling and then went to the bathroom. She could hear the water rumbling gently in the kitchen as she peered at her face in the bathroom mirror, inspecting her pores for pimples. Her hair was fairer than her sister’s – especially in summer. In winter it turned dark, but then the summer sun would bleach the ends blonde, and the blonde would creep slowly toward her scalp until the last braai of the season, when it would stop. And then the blonde hair would grow out as winter set in and the sun became scarce, and the cycle from dark to light would begin all over again. Her face was thin and freckled with faint creases in her forehead and around her eyes. She was prettier now than when she was at school. She’d learnt in time how to hide her ears in her hair. At school she was all ears and glasses and braces.

Lindy had always maintained that you could tell how pretty you actually were by the handsomeness of the boys who hit on you. In school it was only the freaks who even spoke to her – the tall, thin, giraffe boys, the ones with festering pimple faces, the wall-eyed buck-teeth maths boffs. But after school she changed. Her facial features seemed to fall into place, her nose was somehow less sharp, and once her braces and glasses were gone, her teeth and eyes were revealed to be sparkling and lovely. It was just her side-mirror ears that remained at odds with her face, but with the help of an understanding hairdresser, they were now hardly noticeable beneath her layered hair. Now men like Johan asked her out – not real knockouts, but well above the average – and it made Lindy feel like the swan in The Ugly Duckling.

She leant in close to the mirror. It was like looking at someone else’s face, someone prettier than herself – and it made her smile.

Early morning was always a glorious time of day for Lindy. She’d have to be at work at 11 a.m., but before then she had a precious few hours all to herself. When talking about it with Charlotte recently, she’d referred to it as “high tide”. The tide, she’d said, recedes each day revealing an array of little creatures – and each creature must survive the sun and the moisture-sapping wind until the sea returns to protect and nourish them. “Low tide” was work and she was a mollusc, and the baking sun was her boss, who treated her like a child.

She was going to savour the last few hours of freedom, before she shifted into survival mode.

Lindy topped her coffee with milk and sugar and wandered to the lounge and was about to turn on the TV – her blurry old CRT – when the phone rang.

“Hello? Yes …”

“Is this Lindy Opperman? My name is Detective Hendriks ...”

As Lindy held the phone to her ear and listened to the news, the hand holding her mug went limp, the hot coffee poured steadily out onto the carpet until it was empty and the mug was just hanging by two fingers, upside down. Then it fell – the handle snapped off as it hit the floor, so neatly, you’d never have guessed it was ever attached.

The detective on the phone wouldn’t tell Lindy very much, and the policeman they sent to pick her up didn’t seem to know any details at all. All Lindy knew was that something bad had happened and that the police had been round to Charlotte’s flat and there’d been no answer.

“Can you not tell me anything?” she pleaded with the driver, and then, letting her frail composure slip, she asked it again. This time her nostrils felt hot and her voice trilled in anger.

Past them rushed the dead frames of plants – once alive, now sapped of life. The driver said nothing, but he would occasionally lift his eyes from the road and glance at the rearview mirror to gauge the situation in the backseat. Lindy’s eyes were streaming tears. She wiped her face, and sniffed deeply.

“You know nothing and you say nothing, which leaves me alone in this car. I’ve tried calling my sister, and there’s no reply. And do you know what the worst part of this situation is? There’s no one else for me to call – no one to tell me to think rationally, or to calm down. Look …”

Lindy held up her phone and began scrolling through contact numbers.

“Allan the Ironman – he made a security gate for me. Alice – she’s a woman from my old work who wants to sell me rusks. Anton – asshole friend of my asshole ex-husband ...

“Have you ever lost someone? I mean to death. Has anyone close to you died? No one ever tells you that you lose that person twice. As if the moment of death was not enough.”

Lindy wiped her face with her sleeve and stared out the window. The driver, though he wasn’t looking, was listening now.

“The second time you lose them is when their memory fades. And you can’t recall their voice or what they used to say each morning as they parted the curtains to get you up for school. Their face becomes a mess of putty – a hideous piecing together. The eyes of an old teacher, the hair of an uncle, the voice of some actor all just prestiked onto a plastic mannequin. Every time you lose a feature, and replace it with a generic equivalent, that person dies again to you. And just try calling in for compassionate leave ten years after your father has died. Try that. And so you get up and get dressed – and it’s like dressing a bag of sand – and you drag yourself in to work, trying not to look at the people in the cars around you as you stop at the robots in case they notice your eyeliner running down your face. And you do your work as best you can. And the next day? The next day you do the same. And the day after that as well, until it’s normal. That’s just the way life is. You can’t take compassionate leave from life. Not for long anyway.”

Lindy paused now and wiped the tears and sweat from below her eyes.

“I saw Charlotte yesterday at lunch. And it feels like every time I imagine her face, I get one thing wrong. It’s like I’m losing her already, just sitting in this car, I’m losing her piece by piece. It’s like this bloody heat is evaporating her from my mind. So if something’s happened to Charlotte, then you might as well not take me back to Kimberley. You might as well leave me in the desert to die.”

Lindy looked up and caught the policeman’s eyes in the rearview mirror. They weren’t sad, as she’d expected them to be.

“Madam, I really don’t know anything about your sister,” he said.

Those were final words – and Lindy didn’t speak again for the rest of the trip. She tried Charlotte’s cell a few more times, then she scrolled through her phone contacts one last time, and finally she just rested her head against the car window and stared out into the desert until her forehead was numb.

The police car wound its way through Upington and out onto the N14. About four kilometres further, the driver pulled off the road to the right where another police car was waiting, its lights flashing.

By now Lindy’s adrenaline had been exhausted – and so was she. Her body felt numb, as though she was somehow watching herself step out of the police car and onto the verge of this desolate highway from above. The detective was standing with one hand on his hip, looking down towards the river. The other hand shielded his eyes from the sun as he scanned the opposite shore and followed the river first upstream and then down. It sparkled invitingly in the quiet morning. He looked to be at least part Khoisan – the yellow tinge to his skin, the slightly narrowed eyes and the stocky thighs were all indicators of his heritage.

“There was a fish eagle right here,” he said as Lindy approached him.

She didn’t respond, but turned her eyes to the sky. There was a distant vapour trail of an airliner and that was all.

He turned to Lindy. “I must apologise for keeping you in the dark about what’s going on – if people are involved and we tell them why we’re coming to fetch them, they often take off. I didn’t think you would, though.”

“Involved?”

“It’s better that I show you,” he said, gesturing for her to follow him as he stepped cautiously off the shoulder and down the slope towards the lush greenery of the river bank.

“This is my third time down here today,” said the detective, groaning as he battled to keep his balance.

It wasn’t easy going, and Lindy couldn’t make out where exactly the detective was taking her. But as they approached the beginnings of the foliage, Lindy noticed that through the shrubs, trees and flowers there was a tunnel of bent and snapped branches – one and a half metres high, perhaps two metres wide – which extended into the brush. Detective Hendriks led her along the tunnel, ducking beneath the dangling boughs. It was suddenly shady and cool. Lindy could now hear the river, the water lazily slapping the reed-lined shore.

And then, there, at the end of the tunnel, in the blinding sunlight, Lindy spotted a car. The bonnet half submerged in the olive-green water, the silver boot sticking ungracefully out of the reeds. She overtook the detective as she recognised the Corolla.

“Please madam, please don’t touch anything – this is still a crime scene.”

Lindy didn’t listen, and before Detective Hendriks could stop her, she had waded into the water, grabbed hold of the driver’s door handle and tugged. The door opened sluggishly, creating eddies of swirling river water around her legs. There was no one inside. Lindy sighed in relief. She’d expected to see her sister’s body slumped in the driver’s seat. Why else do cops fetch you from your house?

“Ma’m,” said Detective Hendriks, pulling on a pair of latex gloves, “please don’t touch anything else. I will show you why I brought you here.”

Lindy was still searching the car for signs of her sister. The Coke bottle of radiator water floated against the passenger window. It was almost empty, and it sent a shiver through Lindy as she pieced the facts together.

Without a body in the car, this looked like a case of a stolen and then abandoned vehicle. The kind of thing that teenagers do when they’re bored. But Lindy knew this old car. It had done almost 300 000 kilometres, and there was no way it would’ve made it all the way to Upington without a radiator top-up. If thieves had taken it, they wouldn’t have known that it would overheat so soon. The gauge had died maybe ten years ago. Without it to warn the thieves, the Corolla would in all likelihood have caught fire somewhere near Groblershoop, and that would’ve been that. The fact that the car was so far from Kimberley, and that the bottle of radiator water was almost empty, meant that Charlotte had been in the car. She had to have been.

“My sister was in the car,” said Lindy, wading back to the shore. Her mind was trying to offer a rational explanation for the evidence she’d seen, but none came.

“Let me show you this,” said Detective Hendriks, opening the boot of the car.

Lindy peered into the darkness of the boot as sunlight crept in. It was empty. Empty except for a dark silver object, the size and shape of a pen lying right at the back on the aged carpet lining. Detective Hendriks reached in and picked it up, holding it delicately between his fingers.

Lindy looked at it, unable to comprehend what it was.

“It’s a bullet,” said Detective Hendriks, “one like I’ve never seen before. Have a look here.”

He held up the tip of the bullet to Lindy and pointed with his little finger at a spiral groove that ran the length of the cylinder. Then he turned it to show Lindy the back. It was hollowed out, much like a pen.

“The grooves force the bullet to rotate in the air, which keeps it from veering off one way or the other. And the hollow – well, that’s the interesting part. Do you know what a sniper bullet looks like?”

Lindy shook her head.

“It looks like a normal bullet, the kind you hunt with. But this one had some sort of propulsion within the bullet itself. Probably chemical, which went inside the hollow middle. And it hit your sister’s car here.” He closed the boot lid to show Lindy the bullet hole. She hadn’t noticed it before because it was right on the edge of the Corolla badge. It had punched a neat ‘o’ at the end of the word.

“The fact that it made it through the boot lid but not through into the car itself means that whoever was shooting at your sister was shooting from the very edge of their range. That’s, I don’t know, maybe six or seven kilometres away. I’m guessing here, because I’ve never seen a long-range bullet like this – so it could be more like ten. That’s more than double the range of a regular sniper rifle, even triple maybe. This is serious shit.”

Lindy’s legs gave way. They’d been shaking all the way down the slope, but now, with the weight of this information, she could no longer stand. She stumbled backwards and landed heavily on her bottom in the muddy grass. She felt dazed.

Detective Hendriks waited for Lindy to gather herself while a motorboat passed at high speed along the river, trailing a waterskier. When the roar of the motor subsided, Detective Hendriks continued.

“I brought you here to ask you whether you know anything at all about where your sister’s gone. Or who she’s running from. The police may not be able to protect her, because against people with guns like this,” he held up the sniper bullet, “there’s not much us small-town cops can do. But if we can find her, we can try to do something for her.”

“What do you mean there’s not much the cops can do?”

“You see this gun?” said Detective Hendriks, pointing to the handgun hanging on his belt, its metal handle scuffed and scratched. “It belongs to the government, along with the bullets inside it. If I fire this gun, and my bullet doesn’t come to rest inside a criminal, the cost to replace that bullet comes out of my pocket.”

“Seriously?”

“Hand on the Bible. I shot at a guy who’d just put a bullet in a co-worker’s leg. He was running all over the place – on drugs. First three bullets missed him, the fourth hit him right in the buttock. So at the end of the month they dock my pay by thirty rand. Ten rand a bullet. The one that took him down, that one the government was glad to pay for. We don’t have a hell of a lot of resources out here.”

He shook his head and turned to the wrecked car.

“I looked this morning and there weren’t any footprints leading away from the car – and there weren’t any up there by the road either. She drove her car down the embankment, into the river, climbed out into the water and swam that way or that way.”

Detective Hendriks turned upriver, then downriver, and squinted into the bright morning light as though in the distance he might see a woman clambering ashore on the other side.

“That was a smart move,” he added.

Detective Hendriks helped Lindy up as she tried to get to her feet. Her bum was damp and muddy.

“Do you know anything about any of this?” he asked.

“Why?” said Lindy. “Why did you bring me here if there’s nothing you can do?”

“I didn’t say there was nothing we could do. We can do a lot. We can find her for one. These cases tend to take a while to process around here, but I was first on the scene this morning and I thought, there’s two ways of doing this.”

He held his hands out toward Lindy, his palms facing up. “I either go back to the station and start filling out forms,” he said, lifting his right hand like a balance scale, “or I call you and we see if in the short time your sister has, we can make a difference.”

“And why do you care?” asked Lindy. As she said it, she realised it sounded racist. As though she were asking why a black policeman would care about a white woman. But that’s not what she meant. It was just a rare thing – to find anyone who cared these days. She softened her frown in an effort to convey the intention of her words, and it seemed to work.

“I just saw this car here, and I saw the bullet and I figured that by the time I’d filled in the case papers your sister would be …” The detective trailed off. “And I also had a sister a long time ago.”

“Thank you, you’re very kind,” said Lindy. “But nothing that Charlotte has ever done could have landed her in so much trouble that she’d drive down a cliff and into a river to escape it. She is stubborn and inquisitive and even cheeky – but there’d be a lot more Oppermans dead or wounded if that was reason to be shot at.”

“Anyone she’s met only recently? Anyone or anything out of the ordinary at all?”

Lindy shook her head as the motorboat roared past again.

“No,” she said, and then reached into her pocket and pulled out her purse. From it she took all the tip money she had left from her last shift – two twenties and two tens. She held the notes out to Detective Hendriks.

“If you do find these guys, the first six are on me.”