I ate a plate of vegetables and salad, which was all that I could tolerate after all the biltong I’d eaten at Moller’s. Emma ordered fish and salad. Halfway through our meal the manager returned with a scrap of paper in his hand.
‘She still works for Aventura at the Bela-Bela resort. They also have a spa.’ He gave the note to Emma. ‘She’s married now, her surname is Posthumus. These are the numbers.’
Emma thanked him.
‘She was very good with the guests. I was sorry to see her go.’
‘What sort of work did she do?’
‘Beauty therapist. You know, herbal baths, massage, thalasso treatments, full-body mud wraps …’
‘When did she leave?’
‘How far away is Bela-Bela?’
‘Quite a way. Just over three hundred kilos. The shortest route is via Groblersdal and Marble Hall.’
‘Thanks a lot.’
He excused himself and Emma took out her cell phone and began to call Bela-Bela.
When we left it was already dark.
‘This is going to be a long day, Lemmer, I hope you don’t mind,’ said Emma. She sounded weary.
‘I don’t mind.’
‘I could drive if you like …’
‘That’s not necessary.’
‘We can sleep late tomorrow. There’s nothing more I can do.’
And then what? I wanted to ask her. Would she go back to Cape Town and wait until Cobie de Villiers came out of hiding? Did she hope someone like Wolhuter would keep her informed?
She switched on the roof light, took out the sheet of paper again and made notes. Then she turned the light off and leaned back in her seat. She sat silent for so long that I thought she was asleep. But then I saw that her eyes were open. She was staring out at the pitch-black night and the bright beam of the halogen lights ahead.
Melanie Posthumus sat on the couch of the staff house in the Bela-Bela resort with a child on her lap.
‘This is Jolanie. She’s two,’ she said happily when Emma enquired.
‘That’s an unusual name,’ said Emma.
‘We made an anagram with my hubby’s name and mine. His name is Johan; he’s got a function on tonight. He’s the catering manager and it’s that time of the year, you know. But we call her Jollie, she’s so full of sunshine, see.’
At first glance Melanie was pretty – black hair, blue eyes and a flawless complexion. The sweet Cupid’s bow of her red lips was like a constant invitation. She spoke in the accent of Johannesburg’s Afrikaans suburbia, with the exaggerated inflection that turned an ‘a’ into an ‘o’. Her use of ‘anagram’ was not a good sign either.
‘I’ll make us something to drink in a sec. First I’ve got to get Jollie to sleep, she’s lekker tired and if it gets past her bedtime she gets her second wind and, as Johan always says, then it’s pyjama drill on the gravy yard shift.’
‘I know this isn’t a good time,’ said Emma.
‘No, don’t worry about that, you’ve come so far and I’m very curious. How do you know Cobie? I was very cross with him for ages, but you can’t stay cross for ever. You have to get closure and go on with your life, you must follow your destiny.’ She nodded at the sleepy-eyed child on her lap. ‘It’s like Brad and Angelina. They had to wait before they found each other.’
‘It’s a long story. I knew Cobie many years ago.’
‘Like in boyfriend and girlfriend?’
‘No, no, as in family.’
‘I was just about to say, not you too …’
‘I’m trying to trace him.’
‘Family? That’s funny, you know, he told me he was an orphan, that he didn’t have any family.’
‘Maybe it’s not the same Cobie that I knew. That’s what I’m trying to find out,’ Emma said with extreme patience. I wondered how disappointed she felt that her ‘brother’ might have been in love with this little bird of a woman.
‘Oh, OK, I was just saying …’
‘I’m trying to talk to everyone that knew him. I need to know for sure.’
‘Like closure.’ Melanie nodded her head sympathetically. ‘I understand completely.’
Suddenly Emma’s phone rang shrilly. The baby’s eyes opened and her face crumpled in dismay. ‘I’m so sorry,’ said Emma and pressed the button to turn it off.
Jollie-Jolanie’s eyes drooped slowly shut.
‘You got to know him when he was working at Heuningklip?’ Emma asked in a low voice as she replaced the cell phone in her bag.
Only when she used the word the second time did I realise she meant ‘serendipity’.
‘Yes it is,’ said Emma with a straight face.
‘So, we began to chat. Actually, you know, I’m a terrible chatterbox and this good-looking ou was so shy and quiet and then he took out the spare and it was flat too! So then we went in his pick-up to the BP beside the resort and I asked him where he worked and what he did and so on. When he said Heuningklip, I couldn’t stop asking questions, because everybody knows about Stef Moller. He’s this billionaire that bought all these farms and made them nice, but nobody knows where his money came from and he lives in this little old house and he doesn’t talk. And Cobie said Stef is this amazing person that just wants to heal the land so nature can balance and I said “how does that work?” and then Cobie began to explain. And that’s when I fell in love, when he talked about the veld and the animals and the economy and you could see the real Cobus, the one behind the shyness. I asked him what is his favourite animal and he said “the honey badger”. So I said why and we sat there in his pick-up on the road beside Dolfie and he told me stories about the honey badgers and he talked with his body like this, his eyes and hands and all.’
Melanie’s blue eyes shone and she looked at the baby on her lap with a tinge of guilt. The child’s eyes were shut and her mouth, a duplicate of her mother’s, was open.
Melanie’s voice dropped an octave when she saw that the child was asleep. She wiped the moisture out of her eyes. ‘That’s when I fell in love. And then he just went off. But I’ve got closure.’
‘How long did you see each other?’
‘Seven months.’
Emma encouraged her with a nod.
‘At first Cobie was so shy. I waited a whole week after the flat tyre, and when I heard nothing from him I took him a gift pack from the Badplaas chemist shop to say thank you. He was back in his shell again, so I said doesn’t a girl get coffee on this farm. I saw he didn’t have proper curtains even in his little house and I said I would make him some, but he said no, he didn’t need them. A woman just knows when an ou likes her and I could see him looking at me behind that shyness and so I knew I just needed to be patient. So I drove out there the next Saturday and measured the windows and went through to Nelspruit and bought some pretty yellow material that was nice and cheerful. The next weekend he helped me to hang it up and then I said, “You can say thank you now,” and when he held me his whole body was shaking. I think it was his first time.’
It was after eleven when we drove back to Mohlolobe, four hundred kilometres on the Nl via Polokwane and then right on the R71. For a long time Emma just sat staring. Before Tzaneen her head drooped slowly to her shoulder and she slept, too tired to do battle with all the ghosts.
