The Monster's Daughter Read online

  THE MONSTER’S DAUGHTER

  Copyright © 2016 by Michelle Pretorius

  First Melville House Printing: July 2016

  Melville House Publishing

  46 John Street

  Brooklyn, NY 11201

  and

  8 Blackstock Mews

  Islington

  London N4 2BT

  mhpbooks. com facebook. com/ mhpbooks @melvillehouse

  Ebook ISBN 978-1-61219-539-1

  Design by Marina Drukman

  v3.1

  For Steve

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  1: Thursday December 9, 2010

  2: Thursday December 9, 2010

  3: Friday December 10, 2010

  4: Saturday December 11, 2010

  5: Sunday December 12, 2010

  6: Monday December 13, 2010

  7: Tuesday December 14, 2010

  8: Wednesday December 15, 2010

  9: Thursday December 16, 2010

  10: Friday December 17, 2010

  11: Saturday December 18, 2010

  12: Sunday December 19, 2010

  13: Monday December 20, 2010

  14: Tuesday December 21, 2010

  15: Wednesday December 22, 2010

  16: Thursday December 23, 2010

  17: Saturday December 25, 2010

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  1

  Thursday

  DECEMBER 9, 2010

  To get to Unie from Johannesburg, take the N1 highway to Cape Town and veer onto the N12 Southwest. The road is little more than a faded line in the savannah, pockmarked with cracks and potholes, heat rising off it in undulating wisps. Black women walk on the red dirt shoulder from farm to shantytown, babies tied to their backs in bright blankets, while children, some barely able to walk, clutch at their mothers’ wide skirts. Sleek cars fitted with radar detectors thunder past them at irregular intervals, stirring dead air in their wake.

  Ten kilometers past the exit, traffic came to an abrupt halt, discordant horns provoking others in response. A BMW had flipped on its side, the front crumpled like silver wrapping paper on Christmas morning. Shattered glass sparkled on the blacktop. A middle-aged man lay in the road, clutching his head between his hands, his cropped blond hair streaked with blood that seeped through his fingers, staining the cuffs of his dress shirt. The old semi the BMW had collided with stood unscathed a few meters away, Nigerian rap blaring from its speakers.

  Constable Alet Berg had seen this scene many times since she’d transferred to Unie. From the skid marks it was obvious the BMW had been going at one hell of a speed. Stuck behind the semi, his view of oncoming traffic obscured, the driver had probably decided to overtake on the left, going onto the shoulder of the road. Only after he pulled out did he see the people walking there, their lives teetering on his next move. He hit the brakes, jerked the wheel, prayed he’d avoid hitting the truck. But, he didn’t.

  Alet knelt down next to the man lying in the road. “Sir, can you hear me? Meneer?” His shoulders jerked in response, a sob escaping his lips, his gaze fixed on where Sergeant Johannes Mathebe crouched next to the wreck.

  Mathebe’s droopy brown eyes scanned the interior. “There are people in the car.” He strained to open the door. The bent frame of the BMW resisted his efforts.

  “Are they …?”

  Mathebe looked back at Alet, slowly shaking his head. The semi driver yelled into his cell above the rap music, gesturing wildly with his free hand.

  “Turn that off,” Mathebe yelled.

  A rapid exchange followed between the two men in a language Alet didn’t understand. Xhosa? Maybe Zulu? She forgot which Mathebe was. The semi driver swept both arms through the air, shooing Mathebe away and climbed into the cab. Distant sirens replaced the heavy bass. Only an hour after the accident was called in, a record speed for that time of year.

  Alet turned her attention to the man on the blacktop. “What is your name, sir?”

  “Schutte,” came the muted reply.

  “Who was in the car with you, Mr. Schutte?”

  Tears mixed with blood, running down his face in diluted crimson rivulets. “My wife. The baby, Hentie.” Schutte tried to push himself off the ground. “They’re okay, hey?”

  Alet bit the inside of her cheek. “Stay still, Mr. Schutte. We’re doing what we can.”

  An onslaught of sirens and horns overpowered her words. Cars, trucks, and a donkey cart lazily moved onto the skirt of the road to make way for the ambulance. Alet and Mathebe were pushed out of the way as the emergency services descended like locusts. The police were reduced to coaxing traffic past the accident. The corpses of Schutte’s wife and son were laid out on the blacktop, covered with a sheet, while men in dark uniforms barked instructions. They lifted the still-crying Schutte onto a gurney. As if crying would help.

  Alet’s eyes lingered on the small bundle in the road as sirens faded, the ambulance taking the turnoff to George, the nearest town with a hospital.

  Heat rose through the soles of Alet’s boots as they waited for a tow truck to remove the wreck. An African taxi, an old Volkswagen combi filled with paying passengers, honked at the people in its way, then stopped abruptly to squeeze in a few more before speeding past. Gawkers hung out of sedan windows, straining to get a look at the carnage. At their destinations they would tell friends and lovers about what they’d seen, reveling in the excitement of gazing upon the dead.

  The air inside the white police van was oppressive. Dark stains showed under Alet’s arms and down the back of her police uniform. She rolled the window down, the reflection of her round face disappearing by degrees.

  “I’ve been here six months now, right?”

  Mathebe nodded as he got into the driver’s seat. He kept one hand on the steering wheel, stubby fingers gripping tightly, the other hand taking a handkerchief out of his pocket to wipe his forehead.

  “So when are they going to fix the fokken air-conditioning?”

  Mathebe shot her a disapproving look, his nostrils flaring. He opened his mouth to speak, but changed his mind, shifting in his seat. The man had the soul of a Calvinist minister. They drove in silence, avoiding the fraught two-step of political correctness that seemed to mire most of their interactions. Alet stared at the barren earth and dry bushes bleeding into monotony, as repetitive as the days since she was transferred here from Johannesburg. Unie was what she imagined purgatory would be like. Not that she believed in that sort of thing, but still.

  A kilometer after the turnoff, the road snaked up into the mountains. Mathebe handled the sharp curves with the expertise of a lifetime in the Western Cape, his muscular limbs performing a coordinated dance as the speedometer stayed above 120 kilometers an hour. Unie appeared in the expanse below. Where nothing and fokol got together and grew six feet high, Alet thought. Though it was surrounded by mountains, the town itself was flat and dusty, with only two tarred roads. One side of town was populated by white buildings with thatched roofs and spacious yards, the other side with the pink, blue, and lime-green walls of the tightly packed location. “Quaint” was the best description one travel website could muster. Unie had one bank, a farmers’ co-op, two churches, and four liquor stores. At least they had their priorities straight.

  Mathebe turned onto Kerk Street and pulled up to the police station. A group of black teenagers huddled in front of the convenience store across the street, music droning from a boom box on the ground among them. One of the girls looked up as Alet got out of the van. Her eyes were dull, her lips smeared with red lipstick. On the brick wall behind her hung a faded poster demanding
STOP VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN AND CHILDREN. The national campaign against gender-based violence, now in its last throes, had kicked off with great pomp and circumstance fifteen days earlier, local school children marching in the street carrying placards hand-painted with shaky exclamations. The town had settled back into banality by evening.

  Young boys leaned against the store, watching with big eyes as older kids smoked. A white pickup truck pulled up, shifting their attention. They swarmed the white faces that got out. “Please, Mies. Please, Baas,” the chorus echoed, holding out cupped hands. “I’m hungry.” The farmer threw them loose change. The boys fought among themselves, grabbing and shoving, the little ones crying when they were left with nothing. The victors would buy sweets. Nobody ever shared.

  Alet turned to Mathebe. “So, who’s writing this one up?”

  “It is your turn,” Mathebe said as he walked up the station’s stone steps. It was a small, single-story building in the area’s Cape Dutch style, its ornate rounded gables and curlicues compensating for its modesty. A South African flag hung limp from a pole in front of the station, its Y-shaped pattern sun-bleached.

  Alet contemplated the stagnant heat inside the station, air circulated only by a single fan on the charge desk. “I’ll go get lunch first,” she said. “Want anything?”

  Mathebe hesitated in the doorway, then shook his head slowly before going inside.

  “Can I have some service here?” Alet sat down on one of the wrought iron stools that lined the bar at Zebra House, Unie’s only guesthouse. A tabby jumped off the pine countertop and disappeared into the back. The place was empty, tables set up with silverware and condiments in garland-lined buckets, snowmen-adorned specials menus stuck beneath the clear plastic tablecloths. Alet picked up a Cape Town newspaper from the bar. The headlines announced corruption allegations against local municipal officials, tourists attacked while hiking up Table Mountain, and two murders during a home invasion in Simonstown. The paper already carried a tally of road deaths for the holidays and Christmas was still weeks away. Page five showcased a special interview to wrap up the gender violence campaign. There was a picture of a young woman, fair and pink-cheeked, pointing to a patch of trees on the university campus. Her attacker had tried to strangle her, but was scared off by a security guard. There was a sidebar with bullet points on safety, most of which required some sort of male presence and conservative habits. Alet tossed the paper aside.

  “Haaaaai.” Tilly Pienaar, Zebra House’s manager, appeared at the kitchen entrance carrying a case of Black Label beers, her back arched to balance the weight. She got onto the tips of her toes to set the case down on the counter, her cheeks flushing from the effort. Alet rented a flat from Tilly’s mom, Trudie. The rent was cheap and, for the most part, Trudie kept to herself, although Alet often caught her peeping through the main house’s curtains, which inevitably led to pursed lips and high-horse platitudes when their paths crossed in the garden.

  Tilly ducked under the bar, and Alet grabbed one of the cans before Tilly could pop up on the other side.

  Tilly raised an eyebrow. “Jissis. Don’t you think it’s a little early?”

  “It’s five o’clock somewhere.”

  Tilly set the case on the ground to stock the bar fridge. Alet only saw the top of her chin-length chestnut hair as she moved back and forth. Tilly dumped the cardboard packaging in an overfilled trash bin, her whole body straining as she pushed it down.

  “You want food?” Tilly looked back over her shoulder. “You look like shit, by the way.”

  Alet’s reflection fought for a place between the bottles of brandy and cane that lined the bar’s big mirrored panels, the words “soft” and “ineffectual” suddenly creeping into her consciousness. Her hazel eyes were shadowed by purplish half-moons, the product of little sleep and too much junk food from the corner chip shop. The sunburn on her pale cheeks spread all the way to her clavicles, interrupted only by the collar of her shirt. Her long dark hair was pasted in a sweaty mess against her scalp, a visible indent at the edges where her uniform cap had sat.

  Alet grunted and put the cap back on. “What do you mean? It takes work to look this good.”

  Tilly smiled, the skin around her eyes scrunching up. “What happened?”

  “Accident out on the highway. Guy hit a truck.” Alet burped.

  “Don’t they have a rule about drinking in uniform?”

  “You’re going to tell Mathebe?”

  Tilly raised a thin plucked eyebrow. “You know we are like this.” She held up her left hand, crossing her middle and index fingers.

  “He was only upholding the law, you know,” Alet said with a straight face. She imitated Mathebe’s hound dog expression and thick accent. “Ouwa jop is verry serrious.”

  “He stopped me for speeding on an empty road!” Tilly raised her voice in indignation. “Threatened to arrest me. Twice. It’s persecution, I’m telling you.”

  Mathebe never patronized Zebra House and Tilly crossed the street whenever she saw him walking in her direction. This had all happened before Alet transferred to Unie, before she even knew the place existed. At the time, she’d been up in Jo’burg, training for the Special Task Force, trying to prove that she could be one of the elite. That turned out to be a misguided venture. She’d been caught with her pants down, so to speak, demoted for an “indiscretion with a superior.” Instead of dealing with urban hostage situations or protecting foreign dignitaries, she was forced to live in this small town, dealing with stupid little feuds in the middle of nowhere. An elite fokop. Alet wondered if Mathebe knew why she’d been transferred to Unie. The thought that anyone might judge her disgrace really pissed her off.

  Alet tipped her head back, emptying the beer can. “Well, if you’re not going to report me, you might as well hand me another.”

  Tilly reached down into the fridge. “They’re all warm.”

  “Doesn’t matter. And the Thursday special.”

  “Maria is only in at four today. It’s saamies or nothing till then.”

  “Fine. Toasted cheese, then.”

  Tilly ducked out under the bar and disappeared through the kitchen doorway. Froth spurted out as soon as Alet pulled the tab on her second beer. She licked it off her index finger. Somewhere in the guesthouse, a phone rang. Tilly’s muffled voice mechanically recited the standard greeting. There was a short pause, followed by a curt, “Please hold.” She marched back into the bar and held out the cordless. “For you.”

  Alet took the handset. “Ja?”

  “Constable Berg. You are needed at the station.” Even though Mathebe had a precise, pedantic way of pronouncing his words when he spoke English, Alet still had trouble understanding him over the phone.

  “Johannes, I told you I’m knocking off for lunch. I’ll get the report done before I book off. Promise, hey.” Alet winked at Tilly and took a sip from the can. There was a brief silence on the line. She imagined Mathebe closing his eyes, the way he always did when she said something that frustrated him, as if he was praying for deliverance before answering.

  “A call came in, Constable.”

  “I’m sure whatever it is can wait for a half hour, Sergeant.”

  Another silence. “A body was found on the Terblanche farm.”

  Boet and Jana Terblanche’s farm was about thirty kilometers west of Unie, off a misanthropic dirt road that cut through the mountain range, high rock faces on one side, sheer drops on the other. The GPS was useless. It didn’t even register that they were on a road. Alet could navigate the area from memory now, but in the beginning she only had directions involving trees and gate-counting. The valley below them, caught between jagged black mountains enveloped by fog, stretched out to where blue sky and green earth were separated by a thin line of nothing. At the foot of the cliffs, brown workers picked peaches in orchards, led sheep to pasture, and tilled the red dirt. Their barefoot children hugged the side of the road when they heard the police van approach. Thin arms waved as it spe
d past, excited chatter and speculation among the smiling faces.

  On her weekly community outreach patrol, Alet usually approached the boulders and turns in the road at a snail’s pace, feeling a hostility radiating from the landscape. But Mathebe sped along the narrow road, only slowing down when they approached a blind curve, honking the horn in warning. The van’s wheels sprayed gravel over the road’s edge. Baboons scattered in the trees below.

  “When were you last here, Constable?” Dark pearls of sweat beaded on Mathebe’s forehead. New sweat on old.

  “Day before yesterday. Everything was fine.”

  Unie had a low crime rate compared to the rest of the country, but the farms were isolated. Cattle thieves abounded, the farmers easy targets. An elderly farmer and his wife were attacked the year before. The attackers took everything they could lay their hands on, after assaulting the couple and tying them up. It was days before neighbors found them. The wife barely survived. Her husband had a heart condition and hadn’t been so lucky.

  “And the workers?” Mathebe kept right at a fork in the road.

  “Nobody mentioned anything.”

  They passed a row of small brick houses with beautifully tended gardens, flowers wilting in the summer heat. An old woman sat outside one of the buildings on an upturned milk crate, her deeply wrinkled face framed by a long white scarf wrapped tight around her hair. Not long ago, one of the coloured women had told her that they refused to speak English because it was the language of the Antichrist. It was the prevailing sentiment in the valley. Mathebe’s Afrikaans wasn’t good, so Alet patrolled the farms by herself. She didn’t mind it. The most serious thing she had to deal with was domestic disturbances on payday, when farmhands bought liter bottles of cheap booze off the back of the smuggler’s pickup. Every farmhouse she stopped at usually had tea and baked goods waiting for her. No wonder she had gained weight.

  “It’s the next gate,” Alet said as they approached a cattle encampment. Bonsmara hides glistened red in the sun as the animals gathered around the feed.