A Delicious Mistake Read online

  One hand tightly pressed to her mouth, her mother shook her head. Tears streamed down her cheeks and blurred her green eyes.

  The click of the phone as her father hung up brought Sarah back. She turned to her father. To her horror, she saw tears glistening in his eyes, too. He didn’t let them fall, but they were there—shiny and taunting her with a lurking terrible truth. Sarah swallowed against the tightness in her throat and put out a hand to the nearest bookcase to hold herself up. Something had happened. She could only think about Luke. Then she wondered if that was wrong—had something happened to Benjamin? No. Impossible. Both men were fine. Perfect. Wonderful. Having a marvelous time together in Africa. Weren’t they? She stared at her parents.

  David pushed his wheelchair closer to the couch and reached out to take his wife’s hand. She clutched at his fingers and held on tight, as if holding onto him was the only thing keeping her world together.

  “What’s happening?” Sarah asked again, her voice going slightly shrill with mounting hysteria as she looked from her father to her mother and back again.

  Her father took a shaky breath. “It’s your brother,” he began. His voice was rough with barely contained grief. “He’s dead.”

  Sarah’s world collapsed. Her mind went blank. She just couldn’t process it. She found herself rooted to the carpet, unable to take a step forward or back. It felt like her life suddenly had no direction to go in, like the whole universe had essentially frozen. She couldn’t find the tears just yet. She blinked and knew with a distant part of her mind that she must be in too much of a shock.

  She had no idea how much time passed in that chilling paralysis where time and space and heart and blood seemed to stop and freeze. When she finally found her voice again, it sounded far away to her own ears. “How?”

  Her father looked at her with a blank stare like he could hardly believe this had happened. “He was murdered.”

  If Sarah had thought she was in shock before, now she had been pushed somewhere beyond that. A sizzle washed through her, followed by a hollow numbness. It was as if her father had just spoken to her in a foreign language and not only she did not understand him but she had never even heard such words before. It felt too absurd, too cruelly grotesque to be even remotely real. How could this be? Luke had been running in the grass with her only a few minutes ago.

  Her insides grew cold as she realized what the dream had been. Foreboding, an omen. Possibly it had even been her brother saying goodbye to her in his own way. Luke always did things in his very own way. Or he had done. Thinking about him in the past tense sent a horrible shiver all down her spine.

  “How?” She got the word out with a stutter.

  Her father hesitated. He threw a look at his distraught wife and then he looked back to Sarah. He shook his head. “It’s best if you don’t know.”

  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 S
arah 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.

  She had adopted the coping mechanism of centering herself in anger. Whenever the grief became so much that she couldn’t breathe with the fierceness of it, she would call up the anger and hatred she had inside. It was the only way she could keep herself from trying to imagine what Luke must have gone through in his final moments. Tobias Bankole had told her what his father couldn’t—Luke hadn’t been just murdered, he had been mutilated. When she’d been told that truth, she’d had to hang up to rush to the bathroom to throw up. She hadn’t told her mother. And she hadn’t told her fathe
r that she knew, although she planned to do it one day. It wasn’t right for him to carry the burden of this knowledge alone.

  But not today.

  Today, she had more pressing matters at hand. Snapping her leather bag shut with more force than was required, she glanced around her room to make certain she had not missed anything. Whoever was responsible for what had happened to her brother was going to pay. Dearly.

  Just like Bankole, she had very little to go on, but her intuition told her she needed to make this trip. She hoped she would discover Benjamin Ndlovo was innocent, but since he was the police’s prime suspect, she would make him hers, too. She didn’t know what she was going to say to him, she wasn’t even sure she would find the strength to speak to him when she finally had him standing in front of her.

  However, there was one thing Sarah knew for certain. She was actually grieving for two people. The murderer had robbed her of her brother and quite possibly of a good friend. She wasn’t sure she would ever to be able to look at Benjamin in the same way she once had—certainly not as a girl who adored an older boy. Whether he was involved with the murder or not, this might forever taint her relationship with him. A touch of blame flared in her heart that somehow Benjamin hadn’t protected Luke, as he once had when the two men were both boys. She knew that she was being unfair, but she couldn’t help it. She hated everything that happened. She mourned, too, for the Africa from her childhood.

  In one night, with one phone call, Sarah had lost her past, her present, and possibly her future. Once she got to the bottom of this, when she returned to England, her Africa—the land of innocent enchantment—would be lost to her forever. She would never set foot within its borders again.

  She sat on the edge of her bed and looked at her packed bag and suitcase. For a second the energy she had clung to left her. She allowed herself a moment to feel her loss to its deepest core. There was nothing she wanted more than to be able to run across the plains of the Serengeti again. To be a gazebra again. To write the name of Benjamin Ndlovo in her diary again and gush over him to the unresponsive pages that held all of her deepest secrets. To sleep under the stars, although back then she had complained to no end and made a huge fuss whenever her father and brother would take her along to one of their frequent safari expeditions. How she wished now that she had appreciated those excursions more. Stupid, spoiled brat that she had been.