The First One

 

It was 9:30 pm and she couldn’t understand why the traffic was outrageous tonight. She recalled that people went shopping on Friday nights. This was the reality of Abuja, the Federal Capital Territory (FCT) of Nigeria. Most of the workers who couldn’t afford living within the city resided on the outskirts of town.

Janet Adeniran was a banker and a widow with two children. She was 41 years old and well paid because she was an accountant at one of the leading banks in the country. She was blessed with a boy and girl. Caroline was the youngest and a dazzling beauty. Kevin was studying Civil Engineering at Federal University of Technology (FUT) Minna.

Janet Adeniran was the daughter of a Nigerian diplomat who had gone to work in Ethiopia and ended up marrying her mother, an Ethiopian. Janet was widowed during a bank robbery at the bank where her husband worked.

Janet will be arriving home soon and the digital clock in her car told her the time was 10:18pm. She was completely zonked out. Once she reached home, she parked in the garage of the duplex and noticed the light in the living room was still on, which was unusual. Caroline loved the dark and hardly left the lights on when she was alone in the living room at night. Janet closed the gates and headed for the entrance of the living room. Janet could hear voices coming from the television. She tried knocking on the door but noticed the door was ajar. This was also unusual of Caroline because she had told her several times to always make sure every entrance and exit remained locked at all times for security reasons.

Janet lost her temper and pulled the door open before rushing into the house to confront Caroline but she froze because what she saw was an image that will haunt her for the rest of her life.