BENEATH THE RED SOIL Episode 2: Dead Girls Don't Ask Questions
KEHINDE AKPORIEN@akporienkehinde866986
16 days ago
The call came at 2:47 a.m.
Adaeze had not slept. She was sitting at her mother's kitchen table with the photograph, the note, and a glass of water she kept forgetting to drink. Her laptop was open. Senator Emmanuel Dike's Wikipedia page glowed in the dark a smiling official portrait, a list of achievements, a man constructed entirely of lies dressed in accomplishment.
Three terms in the Senate. Chairman, Committee on National Security. Philanthropist. Father of four.
She was taking notes when the phone rang.
Unknown number.
She almost didn't answer. But something instinct, or perhaps the same stubborn recklessness her mother had always called her greatest flaw made her pick up.
Silence first. Then breathing. Then a voice, low and deliberate, like someone speaking from the bottom of a well.
"Put the envelope back where you found it."
Adaeze's hand tightened around the phone.
"Who is this?"
"A person who does not want to attend your funeral."
Her eyes moved to the window. The rain had stopped. The street outside was slick and empty and orange under the streetlights. She stood up slowly and stepped back from the glass.
"How do you know about the envelope?"
A pause. Long enough to feel like a warning.
"Your mother asked questions for thirty years and died in a hospital bed. You have been asking questions for six hours." Another pause. "Think about what that means, Adaeze."
The line went dead.
She stood in the kitchen for a long moment, her heart loud in her ears. Then she did what any sensible person would do in her situation.
She booked a bus to Anambra for 6 a.m.
The village of Umueze had not changed.
That was the thing about home it waited for you exactly as you left it, unchanged and quietly accusing. The red earth roads. The compound walls painted the colour of old bone. The smell of burning wood and something sweeter underneath, like the land itself was cooking.
Adaeze arrived just before noon, her small bag on her shoulder and her mother's note folded against her chest like armour.
She remembered the drive her mother had mentioned you were four years old, you cried the whole drive. She had no memory of it. But her body seemed to remember the place, the way bodies sometimes hold what minds let go.
She went first to the old compound where her mother had grown up. It was empty now, the windows dark, the courtyard overtaken by stubborn weeds. But the mango tree was still there. And beside the mango tree, half hidden under years of overgrowth, was the base of the old outdoor kitchen.
Where we buried the red bowl.
She was crouching near the base of the tree, pressing her fingers into the soft earth, when she heard footsteps behind her.
"You look like him, you know."
Adaeze spun around.
An old woman stood at the entrance of the compound. Small, unhurried, wrapped in a dark blue ankara that had faded to the colour of a bruise. Her face was a map of decades deep lines around her mouth, eyes that had seen things and decided to survive them anyway.
She was looking at Adaeze the way people look at ghosts.
"Like who?" Adaeze asked carefully.
"Your father." The old woman stepped into the compound without invitation, leaning on a carved wooden cane.
"Same eyes. Same stupid bravery." She said it without cruelty, almost fondly, the way you describe someone you once loved who got themselves killed.
"You knew him."
"I knew him before he became dangerous to know." She stopped a few feet away and studied Adaeze with unsettling calm. "My name is Mama Ngozi. I have been waiting for you to come. I knew when Chidinma died, you would come. I prayed you would be smarter than your father." A pause. "I see that prayer was not answered."
Despite everything, Adaeze almost smiled. "What do you know about my father?"
Mama Ngozi looked at her for a long moment. Then she looked at the base of the mango tree. Then back at Adaeze.
"I know what is buried there is not just a bowl." She lowered her voice, though there was no one else in the compound. "Your father was a civil servant. An honest one which in 1994 was the same as being a marked man. He found documents. Evidence of contracts signed in blood and public money stolen in billions. He was going to go to the press." She stopped walking.
"Emmanuel Dike found out first."
Adaeze's throat was dry. "What happened?"
"They made it look like armed robbery." Mama Ngozi's voice didn't waver. "Shot him on his way home from work. Took his briefcase. Burned his car." Her eyes hardened. "But your father was smarter than they knew. He had already made copies."
The compound was very quiet.
"The copies are in the ground," Adaeze said slowly.
Mama Ngozi nodded once. "Your mother put them there the night after the funeral. She was going to use them. Then they visited her." Something moved across the old woman's face old grief, old anger. "After that visit, she never spoke of it again. Until now, I suppose."
Adaeze looked at the earth beneath the mango tree.
Thirty years. The evidence had been here for thirty years, sleeping in the red soil of Umueze while a murderer climbed from Senator to kingmaker, while her mother lived in fear in a house with peeling yellow walls, while Adaeze grew up with a ghost for a father and half a story for a life.
"Help me dig," she said.
Mama Ngozi looked at her. Then, slowly, she reached into the folds of her wrapper and produced a small trowel as if she had been carrying it here, waiting, for exactly this moment.
"I have been waiting thirty years to do this," the old woman said quietly. "Let us not waste another minute."
They dug as the afternoon light turned the compound gold.
And three feet down, wrapped in oilcloth gone dark with age, Adaeze's fingers found something hard.
She pulled it free.
It was not a bowl.
It was a metal tin. Sealed. Heavy. And when she pried the lid open with shaking hands, inside wrapped in layers of dry cloth and plastic were documents. Photographs. Cassette tapes. And a handwritten confession signed by three names.
The third name made her blood go cold.
Because it wasn't just Senator Emmanuel Dike.
The second name was a man currently running for President.
And the third name the one that turned the afternoon suddenly dangerous was someone she knew.
Next Episode: Adaeze learns the third name is closer than she thought. And someone followed her to the village.
Who do you think the third name is?
Drop your guesses in the comments!"
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