An Isolated Incident (4 page)

There were a couple of other neighbours after that. I don't remember the details of their visits, just that from each of them, or at least from the combination of them, came thick waves of warmth and worry and curiosity and a pity so heavy I began to feel that I was the one who'd been brutalised.

Then in the early afternoon one of Bella's co-workers, Vicky, came and I snapped out of it. I'd only met Vicky a couple of times: once at the nursing home when I went to see Bella and once when Bella popped around here on the way to some function, and Vicky sat in my living room and chatted to me about her cat while Bella went through my shoe collection searching for a pair to match her new black-satin capri pants.

On the day after they found Bella's body, Vicky sat in my kitchen and told me that when she was sixteen, her nineteen-year-old brother had been stabbed to death after intervening in a street fight down in Melbourne. I don't think she said it as blunt as that. I don't remember the words she used, just the change in atmosphere. She didn't say much else I don't think. Maybe told me about how missed Bella would be at work. It didn't matter. Nothing about her mattered except for the fact she was another person who knew what it was like to find themselves in the middle of a true crime book. I could've sat and looked at her all day and night – this plain, pale-haired thirty-year-old who had survived that, walked out of those pages, gone on long enough to have become ordinary again.

Around eight, a couple of hours after the last guest had left, I started crying and couldn't stop. Nate rubbed my back for a while and then he gave me a couple of the pills that'd worked so well the night before and tucked me into bed.

Next thing I knew I was dying. That's the only way I can say it: I woke up and I was dying. It was pitch black – blacker than I've ever known night to be – and there was something on my chest crushing the life out of me. My arms and legs wouldn't move. I couldn't scream. It was like my body was dead already, just waiting for my mind to catch up.

I don't know how long it lasted, but I know when it stopped because I could see the green fluoro 4.42 and hear Nate's gurgling snore and feel that my skin was wet. I rolled over, locking Nate down beneath my arm and leg. I forced my breath into the rhythm of his. I slept and woke and slept like that until daylight.

Wednesday, 8 April

‘Thank fuck for that,' May muttered, spotting the Strathdee exit sign. Her body and head had ached even before the five hours on the road. Three nights of sobbing instead of sleeping will do that to you. And then the torture of the drive: nothing to see but
endless grass, sometimes with cows or horses scattered over it, road trains alternately tailgating and slowing to under forty kilometres per hour, and all of it in her shitty twenty-year-old Hyundai that revved out and shook whenever she went over a hundred.

Her motel, the cheaper of the two options in Strathdee, was less than a minute's drive into town. The ‘Air-con, FOXSports, Tea & Coffee, Inspection Welcome' sign was draped with black crepe paper. May checked in, used the toilet, put the kettle on and then listened for the twentieth time to Craig's voicemail and almost,
almost
deleted it this time. ‘Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you,' she said to him and herself and the slow-boiling piece of shit plastic kettle. She started to dial into her message bank again, but the kettle clicked off and saved her. She dumped four of the hotel's coffee sachets in her travel mug, filled it with water and headed back to the car.

She drove past a pub whose car park was a quarter full despite it being not yet 11 am, a car rental office, a service station with a single fuel pump. Next to the service station was a preschool and across the road Strathdee Medical Centre. From there both sides of the road were lined with fibro houses with front yards twice the size of May's Sydney terrace house. As she got closer to the centre of town, every third, then second house was brick, then she clunked over a railway crossing, noted the sign indicating the police station was one left and one right turn away, drove past a takeaway chicken shop and a Salvation Army store and was abruptly in the town centre.

It was like the centre of every Australian country town she'd ever visited. An immaculate park with drought-defying green grass and seasonally impossible purple and yellow pansies peeking from the edges of the winding cobblestone path leading to a war memorial cenotaph in the centre. Across the road a TAB, a small pub advertising ‘Counter Meals, KENO and Historic Murals', a Chinese restaurant, a ye olde tea shop attached to the Strathdee Local History Museum, a bakery and a newsagency. There was no one on the footpath except a water-delivery man in tight shorts and sweat-soaked t-shirt backing into an unmarked shopfront and a teenage girl pushing a double stroller past the TAB.

Although she had a green light, she stopped briefly at the intersection. There were no other vehicles in sight, only the spires of three churches, a Woolworths sign with an arrow pointing left, a sign directing travellers to the Happy Stay Inn (the motel too expensive for May's tight-arse employer) and, already, the sign pointing the way to the exit onto the road to Melbourne.

After a few minutes on the highway heading south, a flash of unnaturally bright colours to the left caught her eye. She pulled to the side, checked for traffic behind her and reversed back to the bursts of pink and yellow. Surprising that there was no other media there, given the police press conference wasn't until one. Possible that no one outside of the region was bothering with anything other than phoners. That's all she'd be doing if her unprecedented disaster of a love-life hadn't prompted her to insist on driving down to this fly-shit-speck of a town to report first-hand on the story. The fact her own hastily written, phone-researched piece on the body's discovery had been the site's most shared that day made it an easy sell.

But that meant, of course, that the competition's stories on the body were probably just as popular and that they, too, had sent their best crime reporters/most-desperate-to-get-out-of-town fuck-ups to get on-the-ground colour. In which case, the lack of media at the body-dump site meant that they'd been and gone and were now back in town talking to – and alienating for all future reporters – the dead woman's family and friends, in which case, shit.

May slung her camera over her neck, grabbed her notebook and strode out towards the shrine she'd seen from the road.

A secluded field
, she wrote. No. It was neither a field, nor particularly secluded. Cars zipped by at the rate of ten to twelve a minute. There was no fence, just a gappy line of ghost gums close to the road and then patchy grass and the odd spindly tree for seventy metres or so, before another line of gums battled against being absorbed by fair-dinkum, deep and dark outback bushland. She made a note to ask why the killer hadn't dragged the body that little bit further and dumped it in there, where it likely would've turned to compost undisturbed, rather than leave it out here in this . . .
low-key picnic spot for travellers on the road from –

No, not a picnic spot, though a faded family-size KFC bucket and a Fanta can stomped into the grass suggested it was sometimes used as such. But no flaking wooden table or coin-operated barbecue plate or grimy toilet block. Not even a single blanket-sized patch of ground uncorrupted by weeds or rocky dirt or disconnected tree roots rising up like mummified knees.

A football-field sized expanse of grass and dirt, not so much hidden from the road as revealed in snatches.
Snatches? Christ . . .
revealed in strips
. That was worse. She was so off her game. Fucking fuck fuck fuck fucking Craig. Fuck.

May shoved the notebook into her bag and raised her camera. At the spot where, as far as she could work out from police reports, the body had been found she took care to take shots from every possible angle and distance, stopping every minute or so to wipe the sweat off her face and camera lens. The sun was relentless, the air unmoving. The grass – the exact type
of which she'd have to look up later (Craig would know what kind, the nerdy fucker) – brushed her ankles and deposited straw-coloured seeds on the uncovered tops of her feet. Her mouth felt gritty with dirt.

The shrine that had caught her attention from the road had been erected not at the place the body was found, but a few metres away against one of the anorexic, anaemic trees between the road line and the bush. Flowers – five bouquets of the type bought from a roadside stall, two flash-looking florist arrangements in ribboned boxes, fourteen scattered single blooms which may recently have been bound by the pink ribbon flipping its way towards the road. A pot plant, wilting. A smiley-face helium balloon on a stick, lodged in a child's pale green sippy cup. A larger balloon, screaming
I MISS YOU!!!
tied around the trunk.
RIP BELLA
on pink card in a foggy plastic sleeve. Five candles, two of them never lit, one of them with
BELLA
carved crudely into its white wax. Two small teddy bears, a plush bunny, a sequinned butterfly pinned to a ribbon tied to a branch.
BELLA MICHAELS 1990–2015 GOODBYE ANGEL
etched into the tree, shallow enough that the tree would slough it off before long.
YOU WILL BURN IN HELL MURDEROUS FUCKERS WHO DID THIS TO AN ANGEL ON EARTH
written on the trunk in what appeared to be liquid paper. Beneath it, in green paint:
unless i find you first then youll burn rite here scum.
It'd been twelve hours since police had reopened the site to the public.

She should've been here last night, instead of flopping around on her bed sobbing like a heartbroken teenager. Might've got pics of some kind of impromptu vigil and interviews with local mourners instead of a snot-streaked pillow and tissue-chafed nose. Fuck.

The hotel bed – a double but smaller than any she'd slept in since childhood – flashed in her mind. The thought of spending another night weeping, this time in that grim little room with the bar fridge clicking on and off and the air-con thrumming and the cheap pillowcase scratching her already chafed nose caused a flutter of panic in her chest. She could drop into the medical centre she'd noticed on her way through town, get a script for some sleeping pills like the ones her mother had depended on during that terrible year when May's father left and her grandmother died and the house was sold from under them. May couldn't remember the name of those pills but she had never forgotten the way her mum went from being there to not, fifteen minutes after taking them. No gentle drifting off, eyes fluttering, pauses between words growing longer and longer. It was a split-second, impossible to see coming. Awake, then gone. It had infuriated May to have her mother check out so purposefully and completely.
What if I need to ask you something? What if something goes wrong?
she would say whenever she caught her mother slipping the pill down her throat.
It can wait. You'll cope
, her mum would say then tuck herself in bed and wait for oblivion.

At the time she'd wondered how you could want that – that total absence? How could you want to be unreachable, to remain unknowing all night long? It was less like sleep – which May knew to be filled with interruptions caused by mosquito bites, brothers' snores and farts, suddenly too-heavy blankets or too-loud wind – and more like death. But now that sleep had become the too-rare, too-brief interruption to her pain, she understood. She yearned.

Back out through the trees May photographed the verge where the car must have stopped. There had to have been a car, because there was no other way to get here, unless the killer or killers had somehow persuaded the woman to walk the five kilometres from where she was taken. And it would have to have been persuaded rather than forced because most of the way would have been in full view of passing traffic and at least some of the time in daylight. That's if she'd been brought here directly. May made a note to ask about the timeline at the press conference and headed back to her car.

Leaving the door open in hope of a breeze, she pulled out the tourist map the woman at the hotel reception desk had given her and studied the layout of the town. The road running off the highway exit ramp, John Street, bisected the town from north to south. Her motel was at the northernmost end, the more expensive place right before the Melbourne exit. Most of the west–east running streets cut across John and the parallel Elizabeth Street, forming a neat grid. A few stumpy streets, lanes and cul-de-sacs interrupted the pattern here and there. Wherever you stood in town there was a pub within four blocks. The nursing home where Bella worked was on King Close, a cul-de-sac off Elizabeth Street, close to the southern edge of town. This place, the place where she ended up, was just off the edge of the map, somewhere around the Pizza Genius and Imperial Hotel ads.

With luck, Bella Michaels was unconscious from the beginning and never knew what a drab, uninspiring journey her last one had been nor what an ugly patch of nothingness she bled out onto. With luck, she went from there to not in an instant and was absent for all that followed.

M
y phone rang early. The cops wanted me to come down for another interview before the press conference at one. They offered to send a car but I didn't need that. I had Nate.

A few steps into the police station I stopped and looked around, confused. I knew I'd been there two days before but I recognised nothing. There was a poster advertising Neighbourhood Watch, another explaining about translation and interpretation services. A bench seat covered in navy vinyl, scratched blue and beige floor tiles, a wood veneer counter with thick, clear plastic reaching up to the ceiling. I could've sworn I'd never seen any of it in my life.

Nate touched my shoulder and asked if I was okay. I nodded and stepped towards the counter, but before I could tell young Matt what I was there for he smiled at me and pressed a buzzer and said, ‘Chris. Hello again. Detective Brandis'll be right out.'

A vaguely familiar skinny middle-aged man with thinning brown hair and a too-tight grey suit appeared from behind a door I hadn't noticed.

‘Thanks for coming in,' he said, barely glancing at me, his gaze falling hard on Nate. ‘Brandis,' he said, holding out a hand, which Nate shook while giving his own name. ‘You're the ex-husband?'

‘Bella's brother-in-law,' I said, though it seemed no one was listening.

‘You'll have to wait out here, mate. Or you can take off, if you like. We can get someone to drop Chris home later.'

‘I'll wait.' Nate stepped back to the bench without taking his eyes off Brandis. I was overcome with a sense of protectiveness. It's always been that way. The more he acts like a goddamn macho bikie sergeant the more I worry about him being smashed up and broken.

‘Good-o,' Brandis said. ‘We'll try not to keep her too long.' He led the way back through the door, pushing it shut as soon as I was in the dim hallway. An invisible lock clicked loudly and I flinched in recognition. The smell back there was familiar too: wet dog and mildew underneath a sharp chemical scent like floral toilet cleaner. We turned a corner into a windowless room cluttered with four or five wood veneer desks. A whiteboard on the far wall was mostly covered with a red felt cloth.
HROAT
scrawled in green marker peeped out from the bottom left corner.

‘Chris! Thanks for coming down.' A young bloke with blond hair, thick blond eyebrows and a scaly pink nose rushed at me, placed a meaty hand on my upper back and pushed me towards a door to the right of the whiteboard. We stepped through into a small office which I recognised, but like it was something from a movie I'd seen once rather than a real-world place where I'd sat and talked and cried. The table, chairs, tissue box, blue plastic rubbish bin, black plastic laptop with attached oversized microphone all familiar but seeming to have nothing to do with reality.

‘So how you doing, Chris?' the young one asked when I was seated. His face was all creased up, like he'd been practising concern in front of his mirror all morning.

‘I'm okay. How are you doing? You got someone yet?'

‘Chris, I gotta tell you, we've got nothing.' Brandis opened his hands up as though I might not have understood what ‘nothing' meant otherwise. ‘Jack. Bloody. Shit. No leads. No sightings. No theories. Nothing.'