Why You Were Taken (23 page)

Kirsten looks at his face, wants to touch it, but all of a sudden he grabs her arms and throws her to the ground. As she opens her eyes a body crashes down onto the pavement next to her, where she had been standing. In slow motion she watches black oil spread towards her, and just before it reaches her, Seth pulls her away from it and to her feet.

The dead man on the ground is young, twenty-something, black-clad with waxed spiky hair and smudged eyes. He lies with his mouth open towards the sky, a leg bent at an awkward angle. Seth bends over the warm body and searches his pockets. Kirsten wants to ask him what he is doing but her voice doesn’t seem to be working. Seth doesn’t find a wallet. He sees the glint of a locket, and looks inside: the smallest green rabbit glows at him.

  ‘Fuck,’ he says, ‘fuck!’ He rips the locket off, pockets it, grabs Kirsten’s hand, and they peel off into a charcoal alley.

A few blocks south, out-of-breath Kirsten manages to flag down a cab. Before they get into the car, Seth makes a point of checking the cab-driver’s licence.

  ‘You’re good at it,’ puffs Kirsten as they climb inside.

  ‘Good at what?’

  ‘Being paranoid.’

  ‘Ha.’

Kirsten gives the driver the address of The Office.

  ‘I wouldn’t have –’ she motions to the driver, ‘checked.’

  ‘Ja, well, it comes naturally.’

  ‘Being paranoid comes naturally?’

  ‘Yip.’

  ‘Bad childhood?’

  ‘Is any childhood not bad?’

  Kirsten hesitates. ‘I’d like to think so.’

  ‘Yours?’ he asks.

  ‘Actually, to be honest, I don’t remember a lot of my childhood, especially early on.’

  ‘Me neither. Our brains are programmed to forget bad stuff.’

  ‘So you’re a glass-half-empty kind of guy.’

He shrugs. ‘Depends what’s in the glass.’

Kirsten fidgets, plays with the ring on her finger, desperate to tell him about the microchip, knowing that every minute it stays in his head is a minute’s advantage they’ve lost, but she has to weigh up the consequences. Just another half hour, she thinks, till I can show him some proof. Till then I need him to stick around. Instead she tells him about Keke.

Seth watches Kirsten talk, recognises himself in the anxious motions of her hands, the spinning of the ring on her finger. He feels impelled to do the same, but denies the urge. He pops a pill instead. She watches him do this, and without thinking, reaches for her own pills. She keeps forgetting to take them. She snaps the cap off the bottle, but before she can take one he grabs it out of her hand.

  ‘What is this?’ he demands.

She is shocked. ‘Um,’ she says, ‘a prenatal supplement.’

  Seth studies the label:
Dr Van der Heever
, it says,
PN supp 1 per day.

  ‘Prenatal?’ he asks, ‘so, you’re …’

  ‘Yes. Well, no. Been trying for a long time. No dice.’

  ‘Where did you get this from?’

  ‘Take it easy,’ she says, ‘my boyfriend filled it for me. He’s a doctor.’

  ‘I hate doctors,’ says Seth.

  ‘So do I. Ironically.’

  Seth pockets the pills. Kirsten lets him.

  ‘How long have you known this guy?’

  ‘James?’ she laughs. ‘Forever.’

  ‘How long?’

  ‘Thirteen years longer than I’ve known you.’

Betty/Barbara had said to not trust even the people you love. And James had hidden the letter from her. She didn’t know what it meant, and she wished Marmalade was with them, but there was a little tapping, a little whirring in her brain, warning her to be careful.

They arrive at The Office and take the stairs to stay out of view. Kirsten leads Seth to Keke’s regular office.

  ‘Keke!’ she shouts, looking around. The room doesn’t look right: it’s in its normal mess but it doesn’t have the right colour. It feels like cold water is rushing over her body.

‘Has someone been here?’ asks Seth, looking at the open drawers and floor white with paper.

  ‘It’s difficult to say. It is usually – messy – but something doesn’t taste right.’

  ‘Excuse me?’

  Kirsten checks the safe; it’s empty. Keke’s Tile is gone.

  ‘Maybe something spooked her and she ran for it,’ says Kirsten, more to reassure herself than anything else. ‘Maybe she’s hiding out, waiting for to hear from us.’

She dials Keke’s number, and they both jump when a disembodied voice starts singing from underneath the desk. Elvis Presley:
A Little Less Conversation
. Kirsten scrabbles around on the floor, and she finds Keke’s phone.

  ‘Fuck,’ she says again. Keke would leave a lot of things behind in a hurry, but never her phone. ‘They’ve taken her.’

All her contacts. More importantly: her SugarApp.

Seth scrunches up his face. ‘Elvis?’ he says, ‘really?’

While she is on the floor she spots the Beckoning Cat flash drive. Thank God, she thinks, they didn’t know it was a drive. She holds it up to Seth, pushes its belly to reveal the tail. ‘They left her flash drive.’ He takes it from her, plugs it into his Tile.

Kirsten uses her pocketknife to unlock the fridge. As soon as she opens the door she sees Keke’s insulin kit and there is another wave of cold water. She shuts her eyelids against the glow of the refrigerator, wishing the insulin away, but it’s there again when she opens them. She puts it on the desk in front of Seth.

  ‘We’ve got seven hours to find her.’

  ‘Hey?’

  ‘Seven hours to go,’ she says, ‘before Keke … gets really sick without her insulin.’ She says ‘really sick’ but what she means is: ‘die’ – she just can’t say it out loud.

  ‘She’s diabetic?’ he asks. Kirsten doesn’t answer. She sits back down on the floor and closes her eyes for a while. After a few minutes Seth is kneeling down in front of her. He touches her gently on the shoulder. It buzzes.

  ‘Kirsten?’ he says. ‘I think we’ve got something.’

THE SEVEN

THAT WERE TAKEN

26

Johannesburg, 2021

There are two folders on Keke’s
Maneki Neko
flash drive. The first one is called ‘The Seven That Were Taken’ and has seven old, scanned and archived newspaper articles, dated from 1991. The second folder – ‘R.I.P.’ – contains four recent PDFs from Echo.news

They start with the folder called R.I.P. Kirsten recognises the first article immediately. She had read it a week or so before at her shoot at the aquarium, about Betty/Barbara being found dead in her flat.

  ‘This is – was – her,’ says Kirsten. ‘The crazy woman who gave me the key.’

  ‘The key?’ asks Seth.

  ‘The key that opened the safety deposit box at the seed bank that had the list in it. Look at the date of her birth, the colours are backwards.’

  Seth frowns at her. ‘You are truly odd.’

  ‘Look,’ she says, and shows him that Betty/Barbara’s date of birth is backwards in the third line of numbers on the list.

  ‘So the one date is our birth date,’ he says. ‘What is the other?’

They open the next article. It’s about a well-known composer, found dead in his bathtub, by his lover. Drowned, it said, apparent suicide, or accident, although the lover wouldn’t accept it, said they had everything to live for. They were about to be garried: a trip to Paris planned for spring, after an intimate wedding in Paternoster. On finding the blue body, the lover had smashed up the apartment, destroying any evidence that may have existed. He swears foul play: Blanco’s most prized possession was missing: an antique ivory piano key from a Roger Williams piano. It had been his proposal gift. He required sedation, and was not being treated as a suspect. The musician was dead, their future washed away in a couple of inches of waxy grey liquid (Cold Dishwater).

  ‘It could have been suicide,’ says Seth.

  ‘He was first on the list.’

Seth hesitates, then opens the next document. A picture of a blonde woman laughing into the camera comes up on screen.
Top executive dies in front of toddler son.
The story is about a high-flyer corporate who accidentally ingested peanut matter – the source unknown – and went into anaphylactic shock and died in the kids’ park down the road from her office. The people at the park had tried to resuscitate her but her airways were swollen closed and CPR wasn’t successful. The white-haired child was taken in first by the paramedics, then the policewoman on the case, and eventually collected by the husband who had unplugged on the golf course and had heard about his wife’s death on the radio on the way home from the pub. The fourth article was Soraya’s organ failure. He had felt a connection to Soraya. Coincidence?

They move on to the second folder; there is a picture of an awkward little boy, a toddler, dressed in a brown suit, sitting on a piano stool in front of a baby grand.
Baby Beethoven Kidnapped
, reads the headline.

  ‘The drowned composer,’ says Kirsten.

Seth opens the other archived articles: they are all stories of abduction.
Toddler Missing,
about a too-blonde two-year-old who could speak 4 different languages. The executive.

 
Has anyone seen Betty Schoeman?
A mug shot of a not-pretty baby dressed in old-fashioned clothes, frowning at the camera. Betty/Barbara.

 
Child Abducted from Nursery School,
reads another, about Jeremy Bond, a two-year-old snatched from a crèche playground just minutes before his parents arrived to collect him.

Seth reads the fifth one:

Saturday Star, July 1991

Toddler Kidnapped While Father Shops

Tragedy struck in the friendly city today in the unlikeliest of places. Young Ben Jacobz (14 months old) escaped his pram in a department store at Green Acres Mall, Port Elizabeth. ‘He was always so fast,’ his mother told us, unable to keep from crying. ‘He started crawling at eight months, was walking by ten. He would just tear around the place like the Duracell bunny.’

Baby Ben managed to toddle out of the store while his father was standing in the queue to pay for some clothes for him. ‘It happened all the time,’ says Mrs Jacobz, ‘his uncle used to call him Now-You. Now you see him, now you don’t.’

  ‘We even tried one of those terrible things,’ said Mr Jacobz. ‘Those toddler leashes, but he would […] throw a tantrum. He hated it.’

  As soon as the boy’s father spotted the empty pram he left the queue and started looking for him. ‘I wasn’t too worried yet,’ he said, ‘Ben did it all the time and we always found him.’ But then he saw a strange woman outside the entrance of the store pick the baby up. ‘I started shouting at her, and at Ben, but she didn’t look at me and hurried off […] and disappeared into the crowd. I started running after them, and that’s when the guards tackled me.’ Mr Jacobz was unknowingly still holding store merchandise when he ran out of the door, setting the alarm off. The security guards, not aware of the kidnapping, saw him ‘make a run for it’ and apprehended him. When he could finally explain the situation the baby was gone.

The police have launched an extensive search. They ask that the public keep a look out for anything suspicious.

  ‘We’re sure they’ll find him and bring him home,’ said Mrs Jacobz. It was then Mr Jacobz broke down weeping.

That had to have been William Soraya. Ben/Bill. They open the last PDF.

The Observer, 21 May 1991

Snatched

Twin tragedy hits small Durban suburb

After a gruelling 48-hour search in uncharacteristically cold weather for the missing Chapman toddlers of Westville, KZN, the South African Police called off the operation as of 2 a.m. this morning. The brown-eyed twins, Samuel and Kate, (3) were last seen in the front garden of their parents’ home before Mrs Anne Chapman moved inside to answer a telemarketing phone call on the landline. Less than a minute later the children had, according to their mother, ‘vanished’.

The search party combed the area, as well as a nearby river where Mrs Chapman purportedly used to take the children to swim and picnic. Anne Chapman, having a record of PPD or post-partum depression, is being questioned despite the divers not finding anything incriminating. Mr Patrick Chapman is standing by his wife, stating they are both ‘extremely anxious’ to find the twins. In a strained voice, on camera, he urged anyone with information to come forward. The SAP, faced with a dearth of any kind of evidence and an already-cold trail, promised they would keep looking, but don’t seem to hold out much hope of finding the children, dead or alive.

Kirsten and Seth stand pale under the fluorescent light in the office, looking at each other, speaking aloud as they process the jolt of information.

  ‘Holy fuck,’ they say at the same time.

  ‘Samuel and Kate,’ says Kirsten. ‘The mad woman – Betty/Barbara – called me Kate.’

  ‘Samuel and Kate, abducted at 3, become Seth and Kirsten.’

  ‘Moved to a different province, and split up.’

Kirsten shakes her head. It doesn’t make any sense.

  ‘Wait, it says ‘brown-eyed.’ She looks into Seth’s blue-green eyes that mirror hers (Sound of the Sea).

  ‘They must have had our irises lasered. Strōma’d the brown out. It’s easy enough to do.’

She thinks of her biological parents, the Chapmans, and feels overwhelmed. What they must have gone through. What she and Seth must have gone through. There is an extreme feeling of loss for the life she should have had, the life that was taken from her. And here he is now, standing in front of her: the missing piece of her puzzle.