Homing by Henrietta Rose-Innes Read Free Book Online Page A

now it was happening again.
    She’d packed her bag and soon was heading out, before the rush-hour traffic hit. It was easy enough to break away: Daniela had few commitments, apart from Thom himself. There was little need for her to work. She’d studied interior design, long ago, but she’d been out of it so long, she wouldn’t know how to begin again. Thom was older, with family money as well as a partnership in an architecture firm. She’d met him when she was young, straight out of college, and they’d married quickly. He’d always supported them financially. It’s what they both wanted.
    The car radio helped. Its tunes and chatter loosened the small stone of dread that lodged in her chest on days like this. She turned it on as she left Cape Town, the buildings giving way on either side to the broader contours of the countryside. The car was a new one, a convertible, and she wasn’t used to it yet: her hands seemed too small on the steering wheel, as if barely holding on, her feet just reaching the pedals. She was a petite, pretty woman, with black eyes and long, silky hair. Thom could pick her up and carry her easily, like a child.
    The place, near Sutherland, was a longer drive than she’d realised, and the sun had already set by the time she checked in and collected the key to her chalet. In the dark, she hardly saw the surroundings, was glad only to collapse onto the double bed, into sheets that looked like they were cast-offs from the farm family’s own beds, but very clean. The places she chose for these trips were good, but not luxurious. When she checked her cellphone there was no reception.
    She lay for a while staring up at the thatch ceiling, wondering what he was doing, whether he’d come home yet. When he was feeling this way, he sometimes stayed out drinking for hours. She worried that things might be getting worse, his depressions more frequent. Perhaps they should try the pills again.
    With difficulty, Daniela turned her thoughts away, directing them into a small box, one containing a few considered images. She thought about the flat. They were redoing the lounge. New paint: matte or gloss? There would be different upholstery for the lounge furniture; new cushion covers. The couch was still unworn, but it would need to be re-covered to match the look. She had to choose fabric. Sea green, she thought. With pale-gold trim.
    Eventually, sleep seeped in through a crack in the lid of her quiet thoughts, and she was gone.
    In the morning, Daniela emerged to find that she was very far from anything, in a flat, dry landscape. The actual farmhouse was almost invisible behind a clump of bluegum trees. One or two other chalets perched near the main building, but hers was out on the edge, and naked without a shield of trees. Disconcerting: in the night, she had imagined herself not so distant from other sleeping people.
    A faint, straight track came past from the direction of the farmhouse, with a tin arrow on a pole, pointing towards a ridge in the middle distance. The arrow said OLD LEOPARD TRAP in white-painted letters.
    The path was much the same texture as the bare ground on either side, and mostly distinguished by its different colour: silvery blonde against khaki. Caused, Daniela supposed, by feet scuffing the crust in a place where rain seldom disturbed it.
    There was no particular reason to walk on the path rather than beside it, but she obeyed the arrow and kept to the paler strip. She was wearing thin-soled shoes – Italian leather, a gift from Thom – but perhaps it wasn’t far to go.
    When the path split, another signpost led her left, onto the low ridge. Coming up the rise, she nearly walked right past the trap, it was so well camouflaged; but the path stopped short and so did she. At last she divined the heap of stones to one side of the path: coffin-shaped, open at one end. It reminded her of those cases of grit that caddis-fly larvae build, but giant-sized.
    It was a puzzle, set but