Stalking Ivory (23 page)

Jade shut the lid and started to walk away. She stopped. Something about the box itself caught her attention. It was exactly the same size, shape, and construction as the ones she’d seen in the cache that held the ammunition.
Coincidence?
Maybe she did just happen to pack her beauty kit in an old munitions box, but Jade was more inclined to take it as further evidence that Claudia, at least, was connected to the boxes now hidden in the cache.

After looking through everything else, Jade started for Mercedes’ tent. Jelani had found the gold coin on the floor there. While the girl certainly didn’t seem to be capable of this sort of planning, her parents might be using her as a means to smuggle additional materials. Jade noted that she’d never been in Mercedes’ tent before.

The interior’s simplicity struck Jade most. She’d expected the young woman to have several boxes of clothes, a large cosmetics box, and some sort of camp vanity table. Instead, the tent appeared as spartan as Vogelsanger’s. A few books, all in German, lay on a small, collapsible table next to a folding chair. A cracked mirror hung above a washbasin, and a single hairbrush had been placed next to the basin.

“Sam, you’re not going to believe this,” she said as she stepped out of the tent.

“Believe what?” snapped an irate female voice.

Jade stared straight into the angry face of Liesel Mueller.

“F
RAU
M
UELLER,”
Jade said as she struggled to explain her presence in their camp, much less in their tents. Mercedes clutched the peroxide blonde’s arm, swaying as though she might drop at any moment. Jade decided to take the offensive. She rushed forward and embraced Liesel’s hand in hers. “I’m so glad to see you both alive and safe. I’ve been terribly worried about you.”

Liesel pulled back and yanked her hand from Jade’s. The knee-jerk reaction nearly dropped Mercedes on her backside. “What means this? What is this worry about us?”

“Here, now,” said Sam. “You’ll make Miss Mercedes fall, Mrs. Mueller. Let me help her.” Sam gallantly took the young woman’s arm and led her to her tent, leaving Jade to deal with the suspicious Liesel. “She’s all yours,” he whispered out of one side of his mouth.

Jade decided not to try to explain Jelani’s abduction, or her and Sam’s own trials, as justification for her supposed concern. After all, if Liesel was involved, she already knew about it. Besides, answering Liesel’s questions gave the German woman the upper hand, and Jade intended for this to be her own interrogation.

“Has something happened to Mercedes? Is she injured? She looks so pale.” Jade kept a sincere expression plastered on her face, arching her brows, tilting her head, and leaning forward. “And you, you poor dear,” she added, once again taking Liesel’s hand, “you look exhausted. Shouldn’t you sit down and tell me all about it?”

Liesel didn’t buy into Jade’s routine. “I do not want to sit down!” she snapped as she again retrieved her hand. This time she wrapped her arms around her chest and tucked her hands underneath, out of Jade’s grasp. She stared at Mercedes’ tent. “What is that man doing? He should not be alone
mit
her in her tent.”

Jade realized that she was not making any headway with this tactic. She stood up straight, rested one hand on her bowstring and the other on her hip. “Mr. Featherstone is a gentleman. He is not going to hurt her or take advantage of her, Liesel. Now, what happened? I came here looking for Harry and find the entire camp deserted.” She pointed to the rebuilt
boma
wall. “An entire side of your barricade has been rebuilt, so something happened, and I’m not leaving until I get an answer.”

Liesel shifted her weight from one foot to the other as though trying to decide what to do. At that time, Sam returned from Mercedes’ tent, his body erect, the slight limp lending a bit of dignity to his purposeful stride. Whether it was due to Jade’s more direct demand or to Sam’s presence, Jade wasn’t sure, but Liesel relaxed her grip on herself and answered them.

“We are all of us for von Gretchmar and his wife looking,” said Liesel. “Eric, he is gone, too.”

“How long have they been missing?” asked Jade.

Liesel hugged herself again and shrugged, her head down. “Since late yesterday afternoon. Otto, he says, ‘Come, Claudia, Mercedes, we take a walk.’ He called Mercedes sweet names like a doting papa, but Mercedes did not want to go. Her father, he is not happy at that, but Claudia, she tells him to leave the girl alone.”

Liesel twisted her upper body towards the
boma
entrance and pointed. “Otto told Claudia the walk would be good for Mercedes, so,
natürlich
, she goes and so does Claudia. When Eric comes back from hunting later and finds they have taken Mercedes out of the camp, he is angry and curses. He does not think she should be here, and he hates Otto because Otto will not let him marry Mercedes. Eric, he storms out of camp alone and does not come back. They were not returned this morning. Harry told
everyone
to look, so we go look.”

“And Mercedes?” asked Sam gently.

“We found Mercedes off the trail collapsed in the bushes. When Harry asked her what had happened, she cried hysterically, so I brought her back.”

Jade and Sam exchanged questioning glances. “Why didn’t Harry go with Vogelsanger when he stormed off yesterday?” asked Jade.

Liesel flapped an arm angrily towards the forest. “Harry was with
mein
Heinrich hunting. That is all they talk about, the elephant, and the ivory, and the
grosse
trophy.” She sighed and pouted, her lower lip sticking out like a child’s. “That is all those men think of. Eric, he has his ivory, so he leaves them and goes to hunt something else. That is why he comes back sooner than Harry and Heinrich.”

Jade suspected that Liesel resented her personal attractions’ taking second place to a pachyderm, and she seemed more distraught over not having some man’s attention than the fact that two of her companions were still missing. Jade continued to pry the story from her. “When Harry and your husband returned, did you tell them what had happened?”

“No!” Liesel tossed her white-yellow hair, the color of sun-bleached straw. “Harry did not ask me, so I did not say. Maybe I was in my tent.”

Jade felt her impatience rising at this self-centered woman. She tried one last time. “When
did
you tell him?”

“I heard Harry bellow for Otto and Eric several times after he comes back. I think it was nearly dark, but I pay no attention. I am angry. Then, when I come out for dinner, he asks me if I know where they are. I said I thought they went for a walk.”

“But by then the sun had set and it was too hard to do a proper search, right?” added Sam. Liesel shrugged again, a noncommittal answer at best. “Where was Hascombe when you last saw him?”

Liesel looked around as though she expected to see some clues to his location within the compound. “I think he was just following that big elephant trail, the one where Harry gets caught in the trap.”

“Could you get any sense out of Mercedes?” Jade asked Sam.

He shook his head. “She wouldn’t stop crying, so I poured a glass of water for her from her pitcher. By the time I’d turned around, she’d fallen asleep on her cot. Or maybe she passed out—I don’t know.”

Jade nodded towards the tent. “You had better stay with her, Liesel. We’ll try to find Harry and the others.” After Liesel disappeared into Mercedes’ tent, Jade turned to Sam. “Did she say anything?”

“Only some hysterical ravings in German. I tried to memorize what I could. Something that sounded like ‘air log’ and the other started with ‘harem.’”

“Harem?” Jade’s black brows shot up in surprise. “Are you sure?”

“Pretty sure. Hard to miss that word. The entire thing sounded like
‘Harem skla-vuh.’
”

Jade closed her eyes and repeated the phrases to herself several times, trying to put them in context. Whatever had happened, it was something traumatic. But Mercedes hadn’t been visibly injured. Had she been deceived?
Deception, lies.
“Air log, air log. Maybe she was saying
‘Er log,’
which means ‘He lied.’ I can’t think of anything else for ‘harem,’ but I’m pretty sure
‘Sklave’
is ‘slave.’ If so, then—”

“Then she was saying ‘harem slave,’” finished Sam. “So who lied to her and why would it involve a harem slave?” As he said the last part, his face cleared as though he understood.

“Right,” said Jade. “Considering Jelani’s experience, I think someone was threatening to sell her off north as well. A pretty thing like that would be worth a lot.”

Sam inspected Jade from boot to hat. “Hmm, makes me wonder why he didn’t sell you.”

Jade exhaled a loud
pssh
to indicate her skepticism. “I’m not exactly the compliant type, which I imagine severely lowers the price. Come on. Let’s go find Harry. Liesel said he was following the trail where we snared him. Our secret return is as good as blown wide open anyway.”

“Yes,” agreed Sam as they left the compound, “but their secret isn’t.”

B
Y THE TIME
they’d reached the eastern base of Sokorte Guda, Jade felt as if she’d done a forced march across most of Africa. She rubbed her injured knee and figured Sam must feel just about as bad as she did.

“Let’s stop for a minute,” she said.

Sam plopped down on a fallen cedar tree and rested the Enfield across his lap. “If you insist.” He reached for his canteen, took a swig, and passed it to Jade. “I haven’t seen anyone yet. Are you sure they came this way?”

Jade wiped her mouth on her sleeve and handed the canteen back to Sam. “There’s been so much traffic on these trails, I’m not sure what I’m tracking anymore. They may have split up at one point. You’d think that if Harry and his crew were anywhere around, we’d at least hear them calling for the von Gretchmars.”

“What do you think about Vogelsanger storming off like that?” Sam asked. “Did he follow after Otto and kill him and his wife?” When Jade stared at him, he explained, “Old Prussian sense of honor. He loves Mercedes; he hates Otto; they duel; he kills him.”

Jade shrugged, feeling tired and burdened. It seemed eons ago that she’d walked these same trails looking for the magnificent titans of the forest to capture on film. Her only thoughts then had been of trip wires and flash powder, her only goal to understand the elephant herds. Of course, she’d promised to investigate poaching, but in her wildest dreams she’d never thought she’d see anything. The mountain stood too remotely secluded to be bothered by poachers, who, in her mind, were lazy beings who surely wouldn’t want to cross the deserts that surrounded Marsabit, like an island in a dry ocean.

But Jade was a woman of her word, and once she’d seen evidence, she’d intended to follow through with her promise: Now how many had paid a price for her promise: Chiumbo and Jelani close to death, and Beverly’s baby at risk? But one death was not on her shoulders: the executed soldier. And even though Blaney Percival had not asked her to find the soldier’s killer, she knew the poaching and the execution were linked, two pieces of the same puzzle.

Well, Beverly, Jelani, and the others were out of danger now, safely on the way to Archer’s Post. She would not hold herself responsible for Sam. He kept at her heels like some faithful hound at his own insistence, not hers. She frowned.
I’m not being fair. He put his life at risk, too, and not just for me, but for Jelani.

Blast!
If his purpose was to make her more cautious than she’d have been on her own, then it was working. She longed to be free of all tethers, to have no one to account for, to track down every last poacher and shoot him with his own arrow. After this was over, she planned to run off somewhere far away from friends who followed her like the herd followed that matriarch.

The matriarch!
Jade suddenly had a mental image of the old cow as she had uncovered the poachers’ pit trap on the southern side of this very crater. “Sam, what if it was Vogelsanger who lied? Think about it. Maybe he never really wanted to marry Mercedes. Maybe he always planned to sell her off.”

“That’s a thought. Should we look at the cache for them?”

Jade shook her head.
The pit.
Maybe that was where she’d find the von Gretchmars. If Eric Vogelsanger had killed Otto, he might have tossed his body into the pit, perhaps even tried to stick Mercedes in there before she escaped. She’d have to look. In the meantime, she had Sam to worry about. He’d continue to stick to her if she didn’t do something about it, and she really didn’t want another person hurt on her account.

“We should split up, Sam. We have a better chance of running into Harry if we do.”

Sam stood his ground. “Nope. I can just imagine what harebrained scheme you’d hatch up. I’d probably find you riding an elephant or something. I am on you like a tick on a dog.”

Jade sighed.
Just what I need, an overprotective tick. And where in the blazes is Boguli?
She scanned the forest, looking for his gaunt frame among the tree trunks.
Maybe he didn’t make it back.
The thought distressed her. She counted on his help, and she respected the aging nomad and hated to think he might have ceased to exist.

At the trail split, Jade gave up on the pit and suggested they proceed towards the poachers’ cache. Von Gretchmar and his wife might have gone that way, in which case Harry might also have tracked them that far. They had advanced a quarter of a mile when they heard approaching footsteps.

Sam grabbed Jade’s arm and pulled her into the forest’s protective shadows. They darted behind the trees and hoped they were hidden from view. While she waited, Jade’s mind played over the three possibilities. These could be the poachers walking back to the cache, it could be Harry and his men, or it could be von Gretchmar and Claudia. Each possibility called for its own course of action. The first one required that they stay hidden; the second allowed them to stop Harry and relay what they knew. But if it was Otto and his wife? Jade pulled out an arrow and readied her bow.

Her mind alternated between the persona of a stalker and that of a prey as she waited. She was not prepared for the sight that actually emerged onto the main trail.