Chapter 18. Missing!
There was the flight from London, the train from Nairobi, and the matatu from Kisumu before Moses was back in Shinyalu. He spotted Jiddy at the bike stand when he arrived in the early afternoon and asked him for help getting his bag and the coffee table out to the house.
"We can stop off and see Rosy on the way," he said.
"They're gone, Stump," Jiddy declared.
"What do you mean 'gone'?" Moses asked, assuming that the children must be out 'exploring' again.
"Really gone," Jiddy added. "They must a sneaked out in the middle of the night, the day after you left. I went by that morning and no one was there.
They're gone ... just like that."
Even with travel time, Moses had only been away for six days. That meant the others had been gone for five. It still seemed a long time for Amy to be away without telling anyone. And why hadn't she said anything to him before he left?
Moses tried not to worry, focussing his mind on work and on final touches to the house; but days passed and still no one returned. Then, about two weeks later, he saw someone putting paint on Amy's house. He rode the bike up into the yard to enquire.
"Hey there! Do you know where Amy is?" he shouted up to the tall thin man on the step ladder.
"Amy Walker? No, can't say that I do," the man called down from his perch.
"You know she doesn't live here anymore, don't you?"
"Doesn't live here? No way!" Moses exclaimed. "She has to live here. She has a bunch of kids to take care of. My sister's one of them."
"I'm the new owner," the man said as he descended the steps. "Bought this place nearly a month ago. I paid cash. The papers are in the house."
A month ago? That would have been before Moses left for London. Why hadn't Amy said anything to him about it?
Moses tried to be tactful but firm in questioning the older man. He was shown the bill of sale, and was advised to check with the Lands Department in Kakamega if he wanted further proof. The tall man, the one who considered himself to be the new owner, insisted that he had seen no one answering Josephat's description when dealing with Amy, and he had no idea where she and the children had gone. He had heard about the property the same day Amy had listed it with an agent in Kakamega. The price was so good that he snapped it up immediately. He appeared to be a property speculator, probably put onto the give away price by the agent himself.
On checking with local matatu drivers, Moses learned that Amy and the children had left before sun-up, the day after he had caught the train to Nairobi.
That was the same day Jiddy had noticed them missing. The driver remembered Amy and her brood because they were almost a full load in themselves. He had taken them to the railway station in Kisumu, and had assumed that they were just going on an excursion to Nairobi.
"They were sneaking away all right," Moses said to Jiddy. "The train doesn't leave Kisumu until late in the afternoon. It's the only one out of there each day. They didn't need to be at the station so early. So why were they sneaking off?"
The two young men had no answers. They went to Kisumu, where the station master checked his records and found that he had, indeed, sold tickets for Amy and eight children on the train to Nairobi that same day. No one named Josephat was on the records, and no one matching that description had been seen at the station that day or any other in recent memory.
Despite the lack of evidence, Moses and Jiddy were still convinced that Josephat was involved. Moses reported them missing, but the police could see nothing sinister in a local selling up and moving to Nairobi; so they paid Moses little heed.
But for the next two years, he and Jiddy never stopped talking it up around the village. The fact that Josephat never returned during that time was enough to convince most people that the boys were probably right. But nothing could be done without more evidence.
Had Amy and Rosy been willing victims, or were they under a spel ? For his part, Moses was convinced Josephat had been using traditional magic on all of them and had been doing so for quite some time. He believed that it had led to them being lured away, possibly to their deaths.
"They would never have left without telling me," he argued repeatedly.