RIDDLES IN DEATH

CHIEF AKE

At first, it was a whimper, as faint as the distant trickles emanating from the shower. But it was audible enough to have disturbed his peaceful sleep. Bleary-eyed, he surveyed the room. The bedsheets on the mattress felt unusually coarse on the other side, reminiscent of the restlessness of a disturbed sleeper. Then it struck him- that disturbed sleeper.

Emmanuella, his wife, was infamous for her dramatics, a spectacle he was not in the mood to entertain that night. Although her anxious demeanor had been palpable, he chose to disregard her theatrics as they retired to bed. She had a knack for conjuring up antics, to bring him back to conversing terms without an apology. He had resolved not to succumb to her manipulations anymore. He remembered how she wouldn’t stop nagging and snapping at everyone when he married Ogechi, his third wife. Maybe this is her trying to blackmail his emotions for announcing that Funmilayo has agreed to marry him.

He dragged himself up from bed and plodded to the bathroom door. A few steps from the soundproof door, he noticed his dresser was ajar. A small bottle lay on its side, with its cover abandoned a few spaces away. Some whitish content had spilled from it, but his discovery coincided with another faint moan. He decided to proceed to the shower.

As he moved closer to the soundproof door, he discovered that the trickles were a façade. The gushing intensity of the shower permeated the room. Ake’s heart galloped as he bolted towards the bathroom. Upon entry, he noticed her white towel, crumpled and forsaken on the floor. Her slippers lay strewn beside the bathtub. There Emmanuella lay in the bathtub, her body splayed in an eerily peaceful pose. Ake’s breath hitched in his throat as he edged closer.

His fingers quivered as they pressed against her wrist. Her glowing skin had paled to a silhouette. His shoulders drooped as he realized that her uneasiness might have been a moment of genuine need, but he had ignored her.

He lifted her hand and let it fall again. He arranged her body as he had found it. It seemed like she had been struck by something that sent her into an oblivious kind of sleep. He called an ambulance for precaution — perhaps he was only imagining things, and Emma wasn’t dead. He glided towards the window, a bridge between the spacious balcony and his antique-filled living room. The nocturnal symphony of hooting owls and chirping crickets echoed in the stillness. The night sky was unmarred by the touch of dawn.

The clock’s hands, like weary sentinels, stood at four and twelve. Justine, his first wife, and his children were blissfully unaware of the darkness that had descended. He chose to leave them tangled in their bliss.

He stumbled into his living room and collapsed into the beige MontBlanc sofa. He waited for the ambulance, his eyes tethered to the phone, willing it to rupture the oppressive silence. He craved an ally so much at this lonely hour.

Ade came to mind in moments like this. He had been his friend and lawyer for many years. He dialed Ade.

“Hello, Ade. It’s Ake. Emmanuella…she’s…I fear…”

He couldn’t determine which quivered more, between his wrist and voice. He could hear the agitation in Ade’s voice at the other end.

“Please talk to me, Ake,” pleaded Ade, steadying his voice.

“I need you to come right away.”

The lawyer’s voice reassured him, “Chief, keep your nerves. I’m en route. Do not tamper with anything. Wait for the ambulance.”

Ake nodded into the void, a sense of relief washing over him. His mind wandered, lost between the vibrant hues and the greyish details surrounding Emmanuella in life and death.

A surge of anger coursed within him. Couldn’t Emmanuella be a normal woman for once? She had a mind of her own and defied everyone, a fact even his egoistic first wife was quick to acknowledge. They all cower at her melodramas.

What attracted him to his wives were his instincts for fair women with arcs sticking out from their rear. It was the one thing Justine had sparingly that warranted him taking another wife, coupled with her inability to give him a male child.

Emma had not been unaware of her outstanding curvy features. It had endowed her with a buoyant self-esteem that Chief Ake couldn’t bend at will to suit his desires. After they had their son, Ikenna, it was clear she was her own woman, only needing a virile man to copulate with her. Their son had been her world, and even though she was the only wife he allowed to move into his bedroom, she denied him access to further conjugal rights. He had made his intentions about marrying Funmilayo as loud and clear.

A loud knock at the door interrupted his reverie. Two sturdy figures dressed in casual white tank tops and blue denim appeared at his doorway.

“Ade, please come in”, Chief Ake had muffled his surprise at the appearance of the second man because he could remember inviting only his friend.

Ade introduced the second man as Lando, his private investigator, and he brought him along to clear the Chief’s integrity, knowing that before long, words would get out that Emmanuella had died in his bathtub.

The loud knock woke Justine. She walked to the living room. She was shocked to see strangers in their living room with Chief, whose somber demeanor was visible. No one needed to tell her that something grave had happened.

Chief beckoned her to follow them. His bedroom was disheveled, and she assumed that Chief had finally summoned the courage to give his beloved wife a whooping. But she suspected it was something more sinister.

JUSTINE

The door slammed shut, and Justine let out a sigh of relief. In the quiet of her room, surrounded by the chaos of her emotions, she found solace. This was her haven, the only place she could show emotions.

Tears, real and fake, had dried, and in its place was anger.

“Chief”, she called out to no one, shaking her head in disappointment.

Truly, man is insatiable. No amount of money or number of women was enough!

“Who would have thought that my husband, Chief Ake, would marry more wives? The very man that spent two years chasing me after I graduated from UniPort”, she pondered aloud.

Her head filled with stale memories. Futile. She was past the hurt or maybe she assumed she had.

Wiping the traces of dried tears off her face, Justine sat on her bed. The chaos in the house had died down; the silence was deafening. The house buzzed with murmurs of Emmanuella’s tragic end.

Chief, frantic and desperate for answers, summoned authorities within his disposal as if he could find the answers only he had. Emmanuella died in his room for goodness’ sake.

Justine had put up a good show when the chaos began and was too drained to think straight.

“Maybe Chief finally saw her real color and fought her”, Justine said cynically.

Everything about Emmanuella was dramatic. She loved attention. That was how she wailed all day when Chief boldly declared his plans to marry another wife barely six months after her. He had gone to the village and made swift arrangements. He only had to pay her price and observe a feast, which Justine feels is only an announcement that fortifies the alpha status that the society has attributed to the masculine gender.

“She had always wanted what I had except for my inability to produce a son”

Her death, though tragic, felt like a twisted sort of justice for being the first among other whores that Chief married after. Well, her curvy features couldn’t keep Chief. Neither was the son he desperately wanted.

Amidst the turmoil, the cries of Ikenna from the other room served as a heartbreaking reminder of the innocence lost amid their tangled lives. The poor boy couldn’t understand his mother’s absence, and though Justine longed to cuddle him like he was hers, she dared not.

“I wouldn’t want to disrespect a dead woman’s wishes now, would I?”, she hissed out.

With her head on her pillow, Justine surveyed her room, once filled with memories. She had removed wedding frames and replaced with simple calendars and pictures of flowers. The walls, once adorned with Chief’s favorite colors, were painted over in shades of pale blue, a silent rebellion against his dominance.

Her bed faced a 12-inch flat-screen television, and the fridge sat on the left side of the television. While the bedroom door stood to the left, her wardrobe stood opposite the door to the right side, and her bed sat in the middle. Everything she needed was in the suite.

Justine noticed that with the changes came less frequent visits from the Chief to her room. Perhaps, he was put off by the independence she was asserting.

“I should just leave”, Justine whispered into the silence.

Her mind wanted to leave but her heart couldn’t. Chief Ake was hers from the first day.

They grew from nothing till he became renowned. Renowned for money and women. She turned a blind sight to all the excesses that his lost libido had been causing around the community. She couldn’t leave all she had ever worked for.

The insistent knock shattered the silence, jerking Justine from her reverie. Standing to open the door, she didn’t expect to see Chief’s imposing figure casting a shadow over her. Beside him stood a stranger, their eyes probing and unsettling. She noticed that Lawyer Ade wasn’t with them.

“Justine, can you come over here?”. It was more of an order than a plea.

“We would like to question you”, the stranger chipped in, to clarify.

Nodding, rather than voicing the defiance she so much struggled to keep in, Justine turned to shut her door. As she tried to turn the lock, apprehension crept up her heart with its sharp claws. She remembered the bottle of pills.

That was another reason why she couldn’t leave. Chief’s wives were supposed to desert him in a couple of days, if she used the right portion.

The last click sounded as if to spell her doom. She knew her room would be searched. She knew the portion would be found.

LANDO

Lando took the lead as they headed towards Justine’s room. He twisted the knob, stood at the entrance, and allowed Chief the honor of barging into his wife’s room. Everyone’s room had been searched except Ogechi, who visited her parents.

Justine observed that the somberness in the Chief’s face had given way to a cold and resolute stare. She moved out of the way, and her room succumbed to the cold grasp of the investigator.

A bottle of pills slipped from Justine’s pillow as he rummaged through her belongings, tossing them to the floor. The Chief saw the bottle first. His mouth parted wide, his bulging eyes telling everyone he wasn’t haunted by an apparition but something familiar.

The discovery of the white pill bottle and its uncanny resemblance to the one the Chief had seen in his room earlier all pointed to one fact: Justine might have had a hand in Emmanuella’s demise. The Chief’s eyes met Justine’s pleading ones.

“You wicked woman, now tell me why you poisoned her!” he demanded.

Justine knelt and pleaded, “I can explain the bottle, and it’s not what you think.”

“It better not be,” Chief said.

Chief pulled Lando aside and led him to his room. He showed him the bottle that he had seen earlier. Lando moved closer to the dresser and examined the bottle. The description was elusive, but no one needed to tell a trained eye like his that the white substance wasn’t the original content.

“Maybe Justine was right. Maybe it’s not what Chief thinks,” Lando mused.

Lando pulled out a drawer from the dresser and noticed a brown envelope bearing the stamp of St. Joseph’s Hospital. Finally! A ghost from Emma’s perfect past. It was a doctor’s report detailing Emmanuella’s missed therapy appointments since three years ago, the year she and the Chief had wed.

This explained Emmanuella’s irregular breathing, loss of appetite in the past few days and the change to a short mimic of the brunette hairstyle. Emma had known all along and had lived at no one’s mercy, not even that of a grade four cancer. The substance explained how Emmanuella stayed atop the situation all these years.

The Chief’s eyes dilated and flashed a murderous red. He never truly knew the woman he had married. The pain of betrayal was sharp as he realized that Emmanuella might have used him to fulfill her last wish: have a son, Ikenna.

The question that now haunted him was whether his Justine was also battling with the same disease. It was a question he vowed to find an answer to once the dust of Emmanuella’s saga had settled.

Lando, in a moment of reflection, couldn’t help but acknowledge Emmanuella’s strength. Despite her circumstances, she had remained her own woman through and through.

Written by Oluwaseun Jemima and Dele faith