CHAPTER 74
I rang the doorbell with shaking fingers. I had no idea what I was going to find on the inside, or whether the people on the inside would even want to see me. I stared at the mezuzah next to the front door while I waited.
“I’m not sure about this,” Mike said, one last time, in my ear. He’d been saying it for the last twenty minutes, in the taxi, as we’d driven here.
“I’m not sure either,” I whispered back, “but we have to do it.” As I said that, the door opened and a teenage girl stood there.
“What?” she asked in a snappy tone.
“Hi. I . . . I . . . My name is Becca Thorne and this is Mike Wooldridge. We’ve come from South Africa and we wanted to know if your dad was in?”
“My dad?”
“Well, sorry, I’m just making an assumption that he is, but I’m looking for Pierre Van der Merwe,” I said quickly.
The girl looked at me and put her hand on her hip. “Yeah. That’s my dad,” she said slightly venomously, and then rolled her eyes.
“Who’s at the door?” I heard a man’s voice.
The girl shook her head and rolled her eyes some more, in case we were not aware that she was a sulky teen with a bad attitude. “Just some people for you,” she said. She walked back into the house, dragging her feet down the passage.
I looked at the staircase in front of us as I heard feet coming down it. The feet turned into ankles, knees, a torso, and finally an entire body. “Hey, where are you going?” he asked, as the teen slunk into one of the rooms.
“Watching TV,” she said.
“Not until you’ve helped your mom with the dishes,” he said.
“God, this is so unfair. It’s a Sunday; it’s not my fault you guys decided to have a dinner party last night.”
“Now!” her dad said, in that voice that is terrifying to teenagers. The voice that lets them know they’re about to get an iPhone confiscated.
I heard a sigh and then a stomp. “Fine!” She marched down the corridor and burst through the door at the end.
“Sorry.” The man turned to us and my heart thumped. “What can I do for you?” he asked.
“Uh . . . I am Becca Thorne and this is Mike Wooldridge. Mike is from Willow Bay, in Sou—”
“Has something happened to her?” His eyes widened. “Is she, uh . . . ?”
“No, no. She’s fine. She’s totally fine,” I stated, and then I stopped. “Actually, she’s not fine. At all,” I said. “In fact, she is anything but fine. She goes wandering around, almost every day, looking for you. Mike has to fetch her from the beach, people’s houses and even from the side of the highway once.”
“God.” He put his hands to his face.
“All she talks about is you, and she wants to see you so badly and to meet her grandchildren for the first time and . . .”
He hung his head and looked at his feet, as if he didn’t want me to see the emotion on his face.
“Your mother isn’t well. The nurses at the home don’t think she has much time left,” I said.
At that, he stepped outside and pulled the door closed behind him. “I . . . I don’t want my children to hear about this.”
I nodded at him.
“Thing is,” he started, “she and my dad disowned me when I got married. I didn’t do anything but fall in love with the wrong person, in their eyes. I never wanted this rift between us. They did, not me. And it really hurt me, for years and years.”
“I don’t think your mom wanted it either, and now that your dad is gone . . .” Suddenly, I wondered if he even knew about this. Clearly, he did.
“I heard that. I didn’t go to the funeral.”
