Why You Were Taken by JT Lawrence Read Free Book Online Page B

a cool and gentle hand he propels her by her lower back to a more private area, with brocade curtains and oversized couches. An oil painting of a man with a patchwork blazer and rivets for eyes watches over them.
      ‘Let’s get you out of those dreadful shoes.’
     
     
    *                  *                  *
     
     
    Kirsten opens the folder while Kekeletso watches her. Inside: her parents’ autopsy reports. Keke had removed the photos that had been taken by the forensic team in situ. It was enough that Kirsten had been the one to find them dead, without having to see their death-grimaces again. Not that it made much difference to Kirsten: a picture on glossy paper wouldn’t be much more vivid than the images in her head.
    The reports weren’t long. Kirsten skimmed a few pages describing what she already knew: bullet in brain, bullet in heart. .22 calibre Remingtons: one to stop thinking, one to stop feeling. Fired at arm’s length distance for her mom, half a room for her dad. Her mother had most likely been kneeling there when the killer squeezed a round into her head. Execution style, but face-to-face. The police say it was a botched burglary, but this creep wasn’t a stranger to murder.
    Kirsten scans the medical jargon: entry wound of the mid-forehead; collapsed calvarium with multiple fractures; exit wound of occipital region. Official cause of death: Massive craniocerebral trauma due to gunshot wound.
    On one of the final pages there were diagrams. Similar to what you would find in a biology textbook: line drawings of people dissected lengthways so that you could see their bones and organs. Kirsten was always better with pictures. She strokes the diagrams with her finger, following the coroner’s notes and asides. When she finishes with her father’s she starts on her mother’s. Immediately something looks wrong.
    ‘Do you see it?’ asks Kekeletso. Kirsten had been so absorbed she had almost forgotten Keke was there. She looks up, her finger glued to the illustration of her mother’s abdomen. The ceiling rains cerise spirals down on them.
    ‘She had a … hysterectomy?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘How come I didn’t know that? Did she do it when I was too young to remember?’ This was entirely possible given her sketchy childhood memories.
    ‘Turn to the last page. I found it in her private medical file.’
    Without hesitating, Kirsten locates the last page in the folder and holds it up, pushing the others away. It was a record of an elective surgical procedure undergone by her mother in 1982. A full hysterectomy, five years before Kirsten had been born.
     
     
     

 
     
     
     
     
     
    MAD FURNITURE WHISPERER
     
     
     
     
     
     
    6
    Johannesburg, 2021
     
    Seeing as James was away in Zimbabwe and Kirsten had no grind planned for the day, she decided it was time to do something she had been putting off for too long. She caught a boerepunk- blasting taxi to the south of Johannesburg and took a long, brooding walk from the bus stop to the storage garages in Ormonde.
    As she walked she snapped pictures with her locket. She used to have a superphone with a built-in camera, had a collection of lenses for it, but lugging a phone around when you could snap a Snakewatch on your arm just seemed archaic. Now smartwatches were being replaced with Tiles and Tiles were being replaced with Patches. It seemed impossible to keep up.
    The LocketCam was tiny, smaller than a matchbox, and was really only a lens and a shutter release. She’d get the pictures later from her SkyBox. It was great for scenes like this: an old bus depot painted white by the ratty pigeons that had adopted it as their home; a mechanic’s cheerful advertising mural painted on a brick wall; a poster for a Nigerian doctor with an unpronounceable name who could enlarge your penis, get your ex-lover back, make your breasts grow, make you ‘like what you see in the mirror,’ vaccinate you against The Bug, and