An Isolated Incident (3 page)

Tuesday, 7 April

AustraliaToday.com

‘Beautiful Bella' viciously mauled

May Norman

7 April 2015

A ‘terribly mauled' body found yesterday by a traveller taking a roadside cigarette break has been identified as that of Bella Michaels, a 25-year-old aged-care worker from Strathdee, in south-western New South Wales. Ms Michaels had been missing for a little over two days when emergency services received a call from a distressed Melbourne man reporting his gruesome find.

‘The gentleman stopped at an expanse of grass and scrub just past the Strathdee exit heading south. His intention was to stretch his legs and have a cigarette while his kids were sleeping in the car. It's a lucky thing they didn't wake up and decide to come look for Daddy,' a police spokesman said this morning.

Local police arrived at the scene to find a body which an officer who had known Ms Michaels recognised as hers. Official identification was later made by Ms Michaels' sister.

Police are so far declining to reveal how Ms Michaels died or whether she had been sexually assaulted, but unconfirmed reports from those on the scene suggest she was, in the words of the man who found the body, ‘terribly mauled'. Detective Sergeant John Brandis, who is leading the investigation, would not comment on whether this mauling may have occurred after death, but locals point to the presence of many wild dogs and cats in the area and the fact that the body may have been out in the open since Friday night.

Ms Michaels was last seen leaving Strathdee Haven, the nursing home where she worked, just after 5 pm on Friday. Her car was parked less than a three-minute walk away, but she never reached it. Staff and residents at Strathdee Haven are ‘in shock, just absolutely stunned', according to manager Cathryn Charles. ‘She was an essential part of the team here, always going above and beyond and always with a smile on her face. It beggars belief that this could've happened to her, and right here on our doorstep it seems.'

Det. Brandis said that so far door-to-door interviewing in the area Ms Michaels disappeared from has turned up nothing, but that the canvassing will continue. ‘It was a very short walk, in daylight, along a quiet residential street. If there was a struggle or commotion of any kind, someone must have seen or heard it.'

Police are also appealing for motorists who may have noticed stopped vehicles or any suspicious behaviour on the Hume Highway between Gundagai and Holbrook between 6 pm Friday and 6 am Saturday to contact the Strathdee police or Crime Stoppers.

I
didn't sleep the promised ten hours but I slept almost seven, which was a damn near-miracle given the circumstances. As soon as I was conscious I was thinking about Bella and what they'd done to her. Yeah,
they
. It was never a question to me. Not after I'd seen her, you know?

When my mum died it took months before I woke up knowing she was dead. Every morning there'd be this sweet, sleepy moment in which the world was as it always had been before the truth crashed in. It was like that after Nate left me, too. I'd wake up and for a second be sure he was beside me. But that didn't happen with Bella. I woke and straight away I saw her face as it'd been in the morgue.

(The first time I ever saw Bella's face I told Mum it looked like she'd been bashed because her skull was all lopsided and she had scratches on one cheek and there were patches of blue over her weird little bald brows. Mum laughed and said that being born is the roughest thing most of us'll ever go through.)

I dragged myself out to the kitchen. Nate was at the table drinking coffee, reading from the screen of his phone. He flicked it off, shoved it into the front pocket of his jeans, came and kissed the top of my head, cradled me like that for a long, lovely moment. Without asking whether I wanted it, he went ahead and made me coffee and it was exactly the right temperature, exactly the right milky sweetness.

He waited until I'd drunk about half and then covered my hands with his. ‘So, what's the story? What have the cops said?'

His hands seemed to muffle the grief and horror a little. I felt like the weight of them on mine would stop that terrible shaking demon from taking me over again.

‘She left work on Friday a bit after five. Said bye to everyone inside and off she went, just like normal. Three hours later a nurse arriving for her shift noticed Bella's car on the street. She thought it was weird and tried to call her, got no answer. On her break, around eleven, the nurse went to her own car to grab something and saw Bella's was still there. She tried her again and had such a bad feeling about her not answering that she looked up Bella's emergency contact, me, and called to see if everything was okay. I was at work and then didn't bother checking my messages before I crashed out – and – and –'

‘Hey, hey.' Nate stroked his thumb over my hand. ‘Breathe, babe. Come on, big breaths. Good girl, that's it.'

‘So I never got the message until the morning. There was another one by then – from her boss – Bel hadn't show up for work. I went round to her place, but there was no answer. I called the police. They said wait. I waited. I kept calling her all day. Called her friends. At the end of the day I called the police again. They filed a report. Told me she'd probably turn up, red-faced about causing all this trouble when she'd just gone off for a weekend with her fella.'

‘Who's her fella?' Nate asked and it was only a split-second but I saw it, the violence. It was good to be reminded. I took my hands out from under his. I did it casually, picked up my coffee cup and took a sip and left my hands wrapped around its hard warmth.

‘She doesn't have one. They just assumed. Talked about her like she's some other girl. Some idiot who takes off from work without telling anyone. As if she would.'

‘World's youngest grandma,' he said, smiling.

We used to call her that, me and Nate, back when we'd get pissed and make messes and she would bustle in, clean up and lecture us about responsibility.

Nate touched my hand. ‘And then what?'

‘Then yesterday morning there was a cop at my door . . . They said she'd probably been out there since Friday night. It rained so much over the weekend. Nobody stopping by the roadside for a piss or a picnic.'

Nate sucked in his breath. I knew he was imagining her, lying out in the rain, knew he was worrying about how cold and scared she must've been and then remembering she wasn't feeling anything by then. The quick double-punch of horror and gratitude.

‘Do you know how . . . On the news they said she was . . .' He held out his hands, helpless.

I told him what the police had told me. I didn't spare him any details, because they had not spared me and I suppose I wanted to share the pain of it. But now, well, I am reluctant to repeat it, to tell you the truth. Bad enough to have heard it all from my own mouth that morning. Bad enough that I saw what they left behind, and heard what the coroner made of that mess. Bad enough to glimpse the newspaper headlines as I rush through the shopping centre on my way to the supermarket. Bad enough to guess at what the blokes in the pub are whispering in between saying, so loudly, ‘How you doing, love?' Bad enough that when I try to sleep the images come so hard and fast they feel like memories. Bad enough I can't go a night without dreaming some of it, all of it, the things being done to her and the men doing it almost almost almost showing their faces so that I hope for these horror shows to come again because
this
time I might catch a glimpse, see whose fists and cocks and knees and forearms they are. Worse, worse, worse than bad, the goddamn vivid guesswork of my mind, which has spent too many hours watching crime shows, too many nights reading true-crime stories. Bad enough I must see inside my own mind flashes of suffering that look like fucking
NCIS
, sound like
Underbelly
, feel like a boot coming down on my chest. And if that sounds good to you then go ahead and read the goddamn coroner's report and look up those obscene photos for yourself. I'm not your pornographer.

Nate was still and silent through the worst of it, but when I told him the police had no suspects, he cracked his knuckles, clicked his neck back and forward. ‘Hope I find those fuckers first,' he said. ‘Gunna do worse to them than they did to her.'

‘Please don't.'

He cracked his knuckles again. ‘You think they deserve to live?'

‘I think I deserve not to have a husband in jail for murder.'

He looked at me then, properly. ‘Babe,' he said, ‘I'm not your husband.'

‘You know what I mean,' I said. ‘You know I need you to be . . . okay.'

He looked at me for a long time. I don't know if he was thinking of the past, or of Bella, or of his woman up in Sydney. ‘I'm sorry,' he said. ‘I'm okay.'

There were a lot of visitors that first day. First full day I knew she was dead. Each sat at the kitchen table with me, looking out the window to the driveway, saying goodbye and take care and call if you need as the next car pulled up. I don't think they'd coordinated it or anything; it just happened that way. It shocked me a bit, how many people came. Nowadays I have to think of it more darkly. I have to think that half of them were rubbernecking or trying to get in on the tragedy. Weird how many people do that. Makes me sick that I know about it, that looking back I have to assume that's what was going on. But at the time what I kept thinking was,
Miss Popularity, aren't you, Bella! Look at all these people coming around. Listen to all the sweet things they're saying about you
. I remember saying to Nate that I hope she knew how many people thought she was the shit.

First was my neighbour on the right, Carrie Smith. Carrie was my age, and a grandmother twice over already. She'd had her eldest, Emma, at sixteen and Emma had her first at fifteen and her second a few months ago. The kids and grandkids and various partners and friends lived with Carrie sometimes and sometimes not. Hers was like a different house from week to week. One week there'd be plastic scooters in the drive and blinding-white nappies flapping on the line and alternating baby cries and toddler giggles from inside, the next, red-eyed slurry teenagers slumped under a smoke haze, hip-hop blasting from stereos of cars parked but never turned off.

Carrie asked how I was and I said I was fine, and then she made tea and showed me pictures of her grandkids on her phone and asked if she could smoke inside and asked if I needed anything and asked if that was Nate's car parked out front and asked, oh, I don't know, a bunch of things that had nothing to do with why she was fussing around my kitchen at nine on a Tuesday morning instead of down at the club flushing her pension down the pokies as usual.

Next was Lisa from across the street. Lisa was in her fifties, an accountant who dressed and spoke like a north coast hippie. She had a daughter Bella's age and a son a few years younger. When she swept through the front door her green, floor-length skirt got caught on the doorjamb and we both ignored the sound of it ripping as though it was a loud, wet fart. Lisa had brought me a loaf-shaped cake on a glass platter. She placed it in the centre of the kitchen table and then wrapped her scrawny, sun-leathered arms around me, pressing my head down into her shoulder.

‘I didn't know what to do,' she told me when I had freed myself. ‘I called my friend Di – she's just the calmest person you'll ever meet and she's got the gift, you know, like second sight – and I asked her and she told me – listen, I know this sounds far out, Chris, I
know
that, but she said that people who die violently can have trouble finding peace and so you might –'

‘Not now.' Nate must've been listening from the bedroom. From the doorway he filled the kitchen. ‘Chris doesn't need talk like that right now.'

Lisa stood, her face flushing pink, her hands fluttering up to the beads looped five or more times around her throat. ‘Nate! Oh, it's
such
a relief to see you, to know that Chris isn't on her own over here.'

‘You made this?' He bent to the cake, sniffed it. ‘Orange?'

‘With fruit picked from my tree this morning.' She returned to my side, patted my hand. ‘And just this once I said to hell with the toxins and put a nice full cup of white sugar in there for you. Situation called for it, I thought.'

‘You going to have some?' Nate asked, but she shook her head.

‘I'll leave you to it.'

‘Thank you,' I think I said.

‘Of course, and if you need
anything
. . .' She shot a look at Nate, who was busy cutting the cake. ‘Or if you want to talk to Di about –'

‘Actually, there is something you could help with. Cops want Chris to speak at a press conference tomorrow and –'

‘Oh, I don't know. Chris, honey, are you sure you're up to it?'

‘They say it'll help,' I told her. ‘People more likely to come forward.'

‘It'll help. And they said she can read from a prepared statement and they'll deal with questions and all that,' Nate said. ‘So what would be good is if you could help with writing something, 'cause I don't have a clue, to be honest. It needs to just say stuff about Bel – personal stuff they said – and just ask for people to tell the police anything they know.'

‘Oh, of course. Consider it done.' She rubbed the top of my arm lightly. ‘I'll put something together and then you can just make any little changes you like tomorrow before the thing. Does that sound okay?'

‘Yeah, appreciate it.'

‘You're a legend, Lis.'

‘Alright. I'll get to it.' She squeezed my arm and left.

Soon as she was out of sight Nate shoved a piece of cake in his gob. He chewed, swallowed. ‘It's good,' he said, but didn't try to make me have some, which I appreciated.