The Sleeping Baobab Tree Read Free Page B

heard. Aunt Kiki disappeared? Why hadn’t Fred told us? Perhaps he didn’t know. I wrote in my black notebook: Aunt Kiki and nine other patients disappeared. Two of them dead. I didn’t know what else to write, so I just lay back thinking.
    Madillo never lets me do that for long. “Hey, Bul-Boo, what are you doing just lying there?” she said.
    “Thinking.”
    Bad answer. I should have known better.
    “About what?”
    “Things.”
    “Stop being irritating, Bul-Boo, just tell me. I won’t stop asking. You know that.”
    I did know that.
    “Ten of Mum’s patients have disappeared,” I explained. “She’s really upset about it. There must be something odd going on, because they’re the very first patients who started with her at the clinic – and two of them are dead. Fred’s Aunt Kiki is one of the ones who’s missing. They just stopped coming to the clinic and now even their families don’t know where they are.”
    Madillo sat up. “Disappeared? Into thin air? That’s terrible. I bet it’s a wizard. A wizard who has been watching the clinic, looking for victims to experiment on.”
    “Oh, Madillo,” I said, already regretting telling her. “Please.”
    “We’ll have to do something,” she said, ignoring me. “He’s probably lining up his next victims, they could be anyone.” She paused for a moment, suddenly realizing what I’d said. “Did you say Aunt Kiki?”
    “Yes.”
    “Oh no, poor Fred. We have to find her quickly, before…”
    “Before nothing,” I said firmly. “There is no wizard. All we need to do is apply logic to this situation.” I had clearly forgotten who I was talking to.
    I turned on the laptop and shut the bedroom door. We have a stuffed sausage dog that we sometimes put across the bottom of the door to hide the light in case anyone checks, but I knew we wouldn’t need it tonight. Mum had other things on her mind.
    I opened Gmail.
    I knew Mum would email that list of names to Dad straight away. She would already have them in her head and wouldn’t need to wait until she was back in the office. I also knew that Dad wouldn’t look at them tonight, because he always works on the theory that if he seems calm it will make Mum calm as well. (He’s wrong about that, because she always knows when he’s pretending to be calm.) Dad uses the same password for everything and I happen to know what it is, so I went into his account and, sure enough, there was the email from Mum. I wrote down the list in my notebook and remembered to mark the email “unread” so he wouldn’t know I’d been in there. Easy.
    Before going offline, I Googled each of the ten names. All that came up were a few Facebook accounts. Sonkwe Banda, who was now dead, was still up there. Madillo, looking over my shoulder, said, “Who’s he? He’s gorgeous.” It was true. He had a beautiful smile. Not the smile of a person who you could imagine being dead. When I told Madillo who he was she went back to bed and covered her head with her sheet.
    Having got nowhere with the names, I had to think of something else I could search for to get the investigation started. Nobody else was going to take a sensible approach to this. Certainly not Madillo.
    I typed in “abductees Lusaka”. Only articles about aliens and Somali pirates came up. So I tried “missing persons Zambia” and then “AIDS survivors Lusaka”. Dad’s agency and Mum’s clinic came up. Others too. Then something on the government’s AIDS programme. Plus lots of statistics on all the people in the world who are dying of the disease. And some good stuff on all the people who are actually alive and well with the disease.
    But nothing that would help me.
    Then, right at the very end of the second page of results there was a link that said: Professor Ratsberg and Doctor Wrath promise hope. I went to the site and saw two shiny smiling men in white coats welcoming me to what they called their Holistic Healing Hope site. They looked American,