“Loo glass.” Zintle pointed to a wineglass on a sidetable in the bedroom. “Loo glass ibime pha ngasebhafini.” She clicked in irritation and repeated, “That glass was by the bathtub.” Her face clouded. “Ndiyicholile. I touched it. I picked it up with my fingers.”
Vee chewed her lip. Finally she said, “Okay, bring it back where it was. It’s fine, you can hold it,” she cajoled. “Long as you’re the only person who touched it.” Nothing suspicious about a maid’s fingerprints all over a room she regularly cleaned. That’s if anyone cared to check, like the police. If this was a police matter at all, come to think of it.
Pinching it by the stem, Zintle set the glass on the peach-and-cream tiles at the foot of the tub, twisting and turning it around several times. Finally satisfied it was in place, she nodded gravely at Vee, who aimed and snapped.
“That all? Did you move anything else?”
Zintle’s immediate, involuntary nod faltered fast into a shake of the head. Vee narrowed her eyes. Avoiding her gaze, the maid quickly stuffed both lips into her mouth and covered it with a hand, head shaking in emphatic denial.
Then Vee recalled how she’d met Rhonda Greenwood, alive and well, a mere day ago.
“We’ve met before, haven’t we?”
She had turned and looked down, quite a ways, into the bright brown irises of a plump woman, clipboard tamped against her chest by a pair of well-manicured hands. Her face was round, almost unnaturally spherical, and crowned with fine, artificially lightened hair, teased – tortured really – into a bun on top of her head. Her smile could’ve fracked the entire Karoo for free.
Vee smiled back politely. She and Chlöe were fresh off the N1 highway, barely unpacked and sorely disappointed to find they weren’t guests at the main lodge. Boot camp inmates reported at check-in to pick up ‘the drill’, a list of gruelling weekend activities they were expected to jump right into once their bags hit the floor. As she lounged expectantly outside the office, she noticed the woman had looked her over once or twice before speaking up. Her approach was so certain and friendly, Vee twinged for not recalling who she was.
“Hang on a minute …” The woman’s face blanked out, her head taking up a curious bobbing motion, akin to a beach ball on a gentle tide.
“Ummm…” Vee interjected, concern budding after several moments.
The woman’s eyes lit up. “Johnson,” she chirped. “First name was a letter in the alphabet. Bee. Bea for Beatrice? No. Vee. Vee Johnson. You’re a journalist.” Her smile turned on full blast. Her head kept bobbing. “Didn’t comprehend our colonially obsessive tea-drinking, shortbread meant something entirely different in your country. Hated PowerPoint presentations with needless animations. And loved the ocean. Loved it, loved it.”
Vee blinked. “Whoa.”
The nodding and jaw-breaking beam kept going. “People get such a jolt when I do that, but who wouldn’t love that reaction?” Her laugh was tinkly yet full and broad-spirited, much like herself. “I did this course a few years ago, you know, the ones that improve your memory by tapping into alpha waves to increase how much of your brain you use. I know,” she held up a hand, “sounds like utter rubbish but it actually worked. Well, for the most part anyway. When you’re in hospitality you can’t afford to forget names and faces.”
Vee extended her hand with a polite smile, provoking the woman to bright, open laughter as she shook it. “Oh, of course, I’m being silly, you don’t know who I am! Rhonda Greenwood, deputy general manager. I know you from that thing last year …”
Please don’t say the Paulsen trial.
“… the conference centre at Portswood. The Portswood Hotel at the V&A Waterfront. You were there for some journalism training group as was I, well, for a management refresher in my case. A couple of our tea breaks coincided and that’s when we chatted. About shortbread, the silliest of things.”
“Oh yeees!” Vee sighed into a grin. “That was ages ago, early last year. You gave me your grandmother’s recipe for genuine Scottish shortbread, and I gave you my mother’s one for Liberian shortbread.”
Up and down bobbed Rhonda’s head, in agreement, and also because it now appeared to be a tic she had no control over. “Which is more like a muffin isn’t it, and truly scrumptious. How long are you staying with us?”
Vee blinked her way back into the room, the memory of an effervescent Greenwood fading as she looked down at the crumple of human being near her feet. This woman had died with two – possibly more, who knew – great shortbread recipes in her head. This woman, whose alpha-enhanced brain was rotting away along with her everything else, was giving off more and more of That Dead Smell with every passing minute. She gagged, rushing for the door.
“What do we tell the police?” Zintle pressed, scurrying her short, plump legs to keep up. Refreshed by clean air, Vee stopped outside the kitchen and shielded her eyes against the sun, face stern.
“Zintle, you can’t tell the police I was in there with you. Please, okay, no … you really can’t.” Zintle folded her arms. “It won’t be good for me, it won’t be good for you either. I’m a guest. They’ll ask why you told me about it.” And there’s the small matter of those pictures I took.
“But I needed help. You were the only person around.”
“They won’t see it that way.” Vee squeezed Zintle’s arm. “I beg you, don’t. Tell your housekeeping manager or whoever that you just found her, which is true. And if they ask you about moving things, be truthful. You won’t get into any trouble.”
“Where are you going?”
“Back.” Vee pointed in the direction of the wall and made a swooping motion with her hands.
Zintle put her fists on her hips. “You jumped from the other side? Yho, sisi, are you mad? You guys aren’t supposed to come to the lodge.” She paused for a moment, then motioned Vee to wait before heading into the kitchen. She came back a few minutes later with two frosty, unopened soft drinks and sandwiches wrapped in foil. “There’s a party tonight because the conference is ending. There’s a lot of food. They won’t notice.” She smiled as she handed them over. “Thank you.”
“And bless you,” Vee breathed in gratitude.
“Where the bloody hell have you been? I had to fake some serious period pains to get out of today’s nightmare, and you just decide not to pitch up. Guess it beats having to lie.” Chlöe, flushed and cranky, plonked down on the grass next to her. “And what’s our Sunday afternoon viewing like?”
“‘Sisterhood of the Travelling Skanks’. I was hoping to catch the rerun of the next episode of Jacob’s Cross, but clearly Porno Guy doesn’t appreciate how crazy this power struggle’s getting between Jacob and Bola.” Vee handed her one of the sandwiches.
“Is this how pathetic our professional lives have become? Right now we could be chilling in a proper office, having a proper lunch and working on the real assignments we have. But noooo. Because we have the privilege of being the paper’s misfits of choice, nature is our office.” Chlöe waved her hand to indicate the surrounds, making a face so sour at the word ‘nature’ that Vee had to choke down a laugh. “We get to eat tasteless sandwiches on top of a hill and watch racist porn through someone’s window because we have no other entertainment.” She bit into the sandwich and grimaced. “Thank you so much for bringing me here.”
The embankment overlooked a gorgeous expanse of open road, koppie formations and grassland that lay outside the lodge’s enclosure. Within the grounds, though, the vantage point was purely strategic, affording an unobstructed view of a flatscreen TV in one guest’s room. They had never been able to see who the occupant was, but the viewing content had certainly proved illuminating.
“Come on, quit being such a buzzkill,” Vee said. “We both know it’s Nico’s doing