Wife of the Gods (7 page)

Gifty turned her palms upward and gesticulated. “We are trapped.
National Health will
not
pay for this. None of us is rich.
We just don’t have the money, plain and simple. And this dreamy
idea that someday you’re going to save up to that level – why,
Darko, by the time that day comes around, if ever, Hosiah may be in
terrible
shape. Don’t you see what I’m saying? My goodness,
you barely have any
choice
but to try an alternative. You
owe
it to Hosiah. I know you love him. Now act on it.”

Dawson closed his eyes, his jaw clasping and unclasping as he
rubbed his left palm hard with his right thumb. He hated this. He
hated the bind they were in, hated his mother-in-law pointing it
out so eloquently, hated her intrusion…

“Mama, I’m ready!” Hosiah yelled from the bedroom.

“I’m coming, Hosiah.” Christine got up, and so abruptly did her
mother.

“I have to go,” she said. “The taxi is waiting.”

Dawson smiled to himself, knowing the real reason was that Gifty
would rather not be left alone with him.

“Bye, Darko,” Gifty said. “Consider my idea, okay?”

He didn’t answer. Christine saw her to the taxi and returned
once her mother had left. She squeezed Dawson’s shoulder.

“She doesn’t mean any harm,” she said. “She just has her
beliefs. She’s of a different generation.”

“And a different planet,” Dawson muttered sourly.

Christine gave him a soft but emphatic whack on the back of his
head.

“Ouch.” He rubbed his scalp. “That hurt.”

“Apologize.”

“Okay, sorry.”

Hosiah appeared in the kitchen door naked as the day he was
born.

“I’m ready, Mama!”

She laughed. “Come on, you rascal.”

She scooped him up under her arm, and he squealed with laughter
and kicked his legs like a pair of drumsticks.

“Still true, though,” Dawson called after her. He loved having
the last word. “Definitely from another planet.”

∨
Wife of the Gods
∧

O
nce Hosiah had gone
to bed, Dawson and Christine sat down to dinner and he broke the
news to her.

“What?” She dropped her fork.
“Ketanu
. Why does it have
to be you?”

“None of the other guys speak Ewe.”

“Wait a minute,” Christine said fiercely. “Ketanu is in the
Volta Region. Don’t they have their own CID people in Ho?”

“Minister of Health personally called Chief Super and told him
he wants an Accra detective to go up.” Dawson shrugged and
chortled. “Apparently the honorable minister thinks we’re
superior.”

Christine let her breath out like steam escaping a valve. “How
long do you think you’ll be there?”

“Two weeks, maybe? It could be more. I don’t know how
complicated this case is going to be.”

“Can’t you refuse to go?”

“Sure, and Lartey sack me on the spot? Right now’s no time to be
out of work.”

She frowned. “I don’t like that man.”

“I know. You’ve made it plain.”

“A murder in Ketanu?” Christine said, ignoring his dry comment.
“Isn’t that rare in a place like that?”

“Has to be.”

Christine seemed lost in thought for a moment.

“What you thinking?” Dawson asked.

“Just wondering. Dark, do you think…do you think this is a
chance for you to reinvestigate what happened to your mother? She
went to Ketanu and never came back, right? Maybe you might come
across a missed clue or something. You know what I mean?”

“I do. And you read my mind.”

“You mean you’ll look into it?” Christine said eagerly.

“Yes, I will. If that last dream I had means anything, I
have
to do it.”

♦

Dawson packed a small suitcase and put it in the trunk of the
Corolla along with a cricket bat, his only weapon. Detectives in
Ghana did not carry firearms.

He turned in and slept poorly, thrashing about and dreaming he
was chasing Gifty around Ketanu’s village square waving a butcher’s
knife while Hosiah trailed behind begging him to slow down, panting
and wheezing until he fell to the ground with exhaustion.

His eyes popped open, and he sat up sucking air into his chest.
Yet another nightmare. Sometimes they recurred night after night
for weeks. Other times they left him alone to sleep in peace. He
got out of bed. Christine didn’t wake up. She could sleep through a
thunderstorm, whereas the smallest nocturnal murmur from Hosiah’s
room would have Dawson out of bed like a bullet out the barrel.

He went to the kitchen for a drink of water, then moved to the
sitting room and sat in an armchair with his head resting in the
palm of his right hand. Dawson was an insomniac just like his
mother had been. For her, it had started after Cairo’s
accident.

Please God, turn back the clock and let me do everything
over
.

That had been Mama’s prayer. She could shake off neither the
replaying of the accident in her mind nor the torture of
self-blame. She never again slept a restful night. Darko often
heard her, and occasionally Papa, tending to Cairo – turning him in
bed, giving him sips of water, keeping him clean. One night Darko
padded after Mama and found her in the sitting room silhouetted
against the moonlit window with her head bowed in her hands like a
collapsed stalk of maize.

She was so still it frightened him.

“Mama?”

She jumped. “Darko. What are you doing up?”

He came to her. “I couldn’t sleep. Are you sick, Mama?”

“No, my love. I’m all right.” She lifted him onto her lap.
“Sometimes we grown-ups think too much at night.”

“You’re thinking about Cairo, aren’t you?”

“Yes,” she said. Her tears moistened his neck.

“Mama?”

“Yes, Darko.”

“You take care of Cairo and I’ll take care of you, okay?”

She kissed him. “All right, sweetie. Thank you.”

He suddenly had an idea. “I’m going to make you feel better
right now. Wait here, okay?”

He skipped off her lap and trotted to his room. Mama had given
him an eight-note
kalimba
for his last birthday. It was a
small handheld wood box mounted with long metal strips of different
lengths. Plucking them with fingers and thumb produced harplike
tones that lingered beautifully and died out slowly. He had
tinkered with it a little bit, but he was no master yet. He went
back to the sitting room with kalimba in hand, switched the table
lamp on, and hopped onto Mama’s lap again.

“I’m going to play you a tune. Ready?”

She was delighted and charmed. “Yes, I’m ready.”

He had a false start. “No, wait, wait.”

He tried again, and this time the soft notes more or less made
out “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star.”

♦

He remembered that night clear as crystal and thought of it as
the closest of moments with Mama. It was about six months afterward
that Auntie Osewa wrote with wonderful news. After years of being
barren, she had become pregnant. She asked Mama and all the family
to pray that the pregnancy would carry through successfully and
bring a child into the world, preferably a son.

After another seven months, collective prayers were apparently
answered in the affirmative. Osewa had given birth to a baby boy
they had named Alifoe. She invited Mama up for the celebrations.
Mama hesitated at first, worried about leaving Cairo, but Papa
urged her to go. Cairo had been doing well at the time. Papa would
stay home with him and Darko. It would only be for two or three
days.

So Mama left for Ketanu and stayed for five days with Auntie
Osewa, Uncle Kweku, and Alifoe, who was a beautiful and healthy
baby. When Mama returned home to Accra, she told stories of how
every family member loved to hold and cuddle him.

Mama must have enjoyed her visit tremendously, because three
months later she went back to Ketanu. Six days passed, eight, and
then ten. Mama didn’t return. Darko and Cairo began to fret.

“When is Mama coming home?”

“Soon,” Papa replied, which was meaningless.

After another two days, however, Papa was as worried as his two
sons were. Like most people in Ketanu, Auntie Osewa and Uncle Kweku
did not have a phone, and so Papa had no choice but to take a trip
up. He asked one of his two sisters to stay with the boys while he
was gone.

When he got to Ketanu, Auntie Osewa and Uncle Kweku warmly
welcomed him but wondered why he hadn’t come with Beatrice.

“What?” Papa said. “Beatrice is not here with you?”

Auntie Osewa and Uncle Kweku were dumbstruck. “She was here for
only four days,” they said. Osewa told Papa she had accompanied
Beatrice to the tro-tro stop to say good-bye to her when she was
leaving.

“Did she tell you for certain that she was headed for Accra?”
Papa asked.

“But of course,” Auntie Osewa said. “Where else would she be
going?”

They stood staring at each other in astonishment. Somewhere
between Ketanu and Accra, Mama had disappeared.

∨
Wife of the Gods
∧

A
num Biney, chief
physician at the Volta River Authority Hospital, could perform any
operation, from an appendectomy to a facial reconstruction. He had
to. The hospital served the entire population within a hundred-mile
radius. Dr. Biney had the help of residents from the medical
schools in Accra and Kumasi, but in truth he was on call
twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year.

And over the years he had become known for his skill at
autopsies, much of it self-taught. With only about twelve
pathologists available for the entire country, most of them at
Korle-Bu, it was only natural Dr. Biney had become a
much-sought-after postmortem guru. That would explain why he had a
constant backlog of autopsy cases. He had added on an extra
Wednesday evening to try to catch up.

The single-story cream-and-mahogany buildings of the hospital
were nestled among trees, green lawns, and clipped hedges. Its
sections – the male and female surgical wards, the children’s ward,
and so on – were connected by long open verandas. This was no
scruffy place fallen on hard times. Taking good care of it was
revenue from the Akosombo hydroelectric dam on the Volta River,
just a few kilometers away.

Dr. Biney crossed the expanse of tended grass in front of the
morgue, the only building at the hospital not connected to the
rest. Perhaps logically so: the wards were for the living, the
morgue for the dead. Biney was weary, having been up practically
the whole night with various calls, including one for a victim of a
vehicle crash. He wore exhaustion like his clothes – he was aware
of it, but he didn’t focus on it.

The morning was working up to the sweltering day it would
become, and already the air was close on the skin like a cloak. Dr.
Biney walked past the standby generators that ensured there would
never be a failure of refrigeration in the morgue should there be a
power cut. True, the Akosombo Dam was near, but blackouts did
occur.

He unlocked the rear door and entered the mercifully
air-conditioned morgue, first through the anteroom, where the
bodies were washed, and then to the autopsy room itself. There were
two postmortem tables. On busy days, every day really, Biney would
finish one case and go almost immediately to the second table for
the next.

He looked around for a moment, thinking he really must get the
missing tiles on the wall replaced and get rid of that old defunct
table in the corner that they needed to cart away somewhere.

He went looking for Obodai, the attendant, and found him
scrubbing down the stone floor in front of the gleaming bank of
aluminum storage drawers. There were twenty of them in columns of
four. They were at full capacity and unable to keep up with the
number of bodies arriving weekly. It was time to add some more
drawers.

“Morning, Obodai.”

Obodai stopped his work and practically stood at attention.

“Good morning, sir.” He gave an imperceptible bow, a gesture so
slight one might fail to spot it, but it was there – a show of
eternal deference to his boss. Obodai had been working at the
morgue for ages. He was wizened and wiry, loyal and unflappable.
Whether you needed his assistance at five in the morning or eleven
at night, he would be there. He was always the first to arrive and
the last to leave.

“We’ll be doing the case of the young woman from Volta Region,”
Dr. Biney said. “First priority.”

“Very good, sir. When do you wish to start, sir?”

“We’re waiting for a detective from Accra. He’ll be witnessing.
Should be here soon.”

“Very good, sir. Everything will be ready.”

♦

Approaching Akosombo, Dawson slowed down at the security gate,
but the guards waved him on. They had an instinct about who was
legitimate and who was not.

Just a little way past the gate was the Volta River Authority
Hospital. Dawson parked and went in through an open-walled
reception area. About fifteen patients, some with children, were
waiting to be called in for treatment. As Dawson paused, wondering
where Dr. Biney’s office was, a young woman with a brilliant smile
and expensively braided hair approached him.

“Good morning, sir,” he said. “Are you Detective Inspector
Dawson?”

“Good morning. Yes, that’s me.”

“Welcome to the VRA Hospital, sir.”

Dawson shook hands with her as she introduced herself as
Victoria, Dr. Biney’s administrative assistant.

“He is expecting you,” she said warmly. “Please come this way.
Did you have a safe trip up from Accra?”

He followed Victoria through a double door into the skylit,
air-conditioned corridor within. Dr. Biney’s office was the third
on the left, and his assistant showed Dawson in.

“Dr. Biney, Detective Inspector Dawson has arrived.”