An Isolated Incident (7 page)

They pulled into the hotel car park. May's heart rate was back to normal, but her chest ached and she couldn't seem to stop swallowing. ‘Look,' she said. ‘What if it wasn't this bloke, or if . . . I mean, whoever killed –'

‘Wasn't Rox.'

‘But how can –'

‘Can't say more, you know that. But trust me that it wasn't him. Like I said, he's harmless.'

‘Okay, but . . .' He was looking at her as though she were a child refusing to believe in the absence of the werewolf in the wardrobe. ‘What if it wasn't this Rox guy? Just now, I mean. I didn't get a good look at the car. It could have been . . .'

He sighed, grabbed his phone off the dash, dialled, smiled at her as he spoke. ‘Rox, Riley here. Yeah, yeah, shut up for a sec and listen. You been out making a nuisance of yerself? You know what I mean. Hollering and kerb-crawling? Scaring girls.'

May sat still, hot all over. The tinny braying from the other end of the phone scratched at her spine.

Riley guffawed, shook his head. ‘You're a right grub, mate. Need to cut that shit out, yeah? I mean it. If I catch you creeping around like that I'll – You better believe it . . . I'll . . . Yeah, yeah. Just keep your dirty thoughts to yourself from now on.' He slid the phone into his pocket. ‘Okay?'

‘What?' May said.

‘Definitely Rox. And he's nothing to worry about.'

‘If you say so.' She opened the door, put her feet on the ground.

‘But hey, just 'cause he's harmless doesn't mean it's safe for you to be running alone like that. Especially at night. Good-looking girl, no phone, no nothing. Not real smart given the current circumstances.'

‘Okay. Sorry.'

‘I'm not having a go. You do what you like, free country and all that. Just that we don't want another Bella Michaels on our hands, do we?'

‘No.' She got out of the car. ‘Thanks for the lift,' she said, thinking
inside inside inside inside
.

‘Not a problem. You stay safe now.'

May closed the door and then jumped and fell back against it when she saw the body wrapped in plastic poking out from underneath the bonnet of the four-wheel drive next to where she stood.

‘You right?' Riley called from inside his car and she blinked and saw it was only a lazily dumped bag of garbage. She felt his eyes on her back and more eyes digging into her from inside the hotel reception. She couldn't bear to walk all the way across the car park to get to the path to her room. She cut across the metre-wide strip of pebbles and native plants, shuddered as fronds tickled her ankles like soft strands of hair.

AustraliaToday.com

Sister pleads for help in finding Bella's killer

May Norman

8 April 2015

The grief-stricken sister of murdered Strathdee woman Bella Michaels has pleaded for public help to bring the 25-year-old's killer or killers to justice.

Standing between homicide detectives outside Strathdee police station, Chris Rogers' voice broke as she responded to a journalist's question about how she felt on identifying her sister's body. ‘You seem to be a human being. Try imagining what it would feel like for you. Then understand that this feeling will never go away. That moment when I saw her, it's forever. It's part of me now.' She then began to sob and appeared to lose her balance and stumble towards the microphone stand before a female police officer steadied her and led her back inside the station.

After Ms Rogers departed, Detective Sergeant John Brandis continued the conference by briefing the assembled media on the facts of the case. Police believe Ms Michaels was murdered on Friday night or in the early hours of Saturday morning after being abducted outside the nursing home where she worked. Her body was found near a highway exit on Monday morning.

Det. Brandis confirmed that Ms Michaels was sexually assaulted multiple times in the hours before her death and said that it is possible more than one person was involved in those assaults.

Responding to questions, Det. Brandis said police had interviewed ‘a number of people' in relation to the crime, including several local residents with records of physical or sexual assault, but that they had yet to identify any suspects.

Before she gave the answer that resulted in her breaking down, Ms Rogers had read from a prepared statement. ‘All who knew Bella are shattered by her death,' the statement said. ‘Words can't come close to describing the hell we're experiencing knowing that her last moments were likely full of suffering.

‘Bella was a gentle, sweet soul who worked hard, cared deeply for her patients and was adored by her family and friends.

‘We will miss her every minute of every day.

‘Nothing can ever heal the hurt we're feeling, but we desperately hope that the person or people responsible for taking her from us can be found, both so that justice is done for Bella and so that no one else has to go through this unending pain.

‘It's of utmost importance that anyone with information about the events of that night contact the police immediately. Anyone with information is urged to call Crime Stoppers or the Strathdee police.'

I'd taken the first two nights off work. I could've taken more – Old Grey at the Royal is a softie at heart and God knows I've put enough years in there to have earned some downtime – but why would I want to spend any more time than I have to alone in my bloody house thinking about my poor bloody sister?

Anyway, the pub is more home to me than anywhere else, really. I've worked there, geez, thirteen years? About that, anyway. I started in the kitchen and then moved to the bar once I got my alcohol service card. I know every last in-and-out of the place, could run it, easy, but I've got no desire to. I like my job as is and could happily do it until my legs give out from under me.

A while back the manager at the Imperial tried to get me to come work for him. Cheeky bugger he was, coming in and ordering a beer and then giving me the hard sell right under Grey's nose. He offered me more money and a full weekend off a month and for a day or so I considered it, but in the end I figured why fix what's not broken, you know? Besides, the Imperial is right in the centre of town so they get all the after-five office and shop trade. We're closer to the truck stop, caravan park and motel near the Sydney off-ramp, which means we get most of the stopover traffic. It's not like it was before the bypass, but we still get a good number of truckies and travellers and I do love having a chat with someone from a place I've never been. Even better, a place I've never heard of. You can learn a lot that way.

And, yeah, no denying it at this point: I do have a bit of a thing for truckies, the long-haul variety especially. I mean, physically, most of them could be in better shape, but there's something about thick, sun-wrecked arms and bristly cheeks. Plus the kind of patience it takes to stay on the road ten, twelve, fourteen hours a day, and the skill needed to manoeuvre those monster things in and out of all kinds of nooks and crannies, well, let's just say patience and manoeuvrability in the truck tend to translate quite bloody nicely to the bedroom.

Anyway, turns out tragedy is good for business. I've never seen the place as full as it was that Wednesday night of the week they found Bella. The usual scattering of folks passing through and then half the goddamn town. Honestly, more people than we've had on a weeknight in a decade.

Nobody said anything more than ‘How you holding up, love?' but when I answered that I was okay, I could see the disappointment in their faces. They wanted tears or rage. They wanted details. I could see that, too. I could see that every one of them had read the papers and put real effort into imagining her. Everybody was respectful and sombre when they approached the bar to order, but as soon as they got back to their tables they dropped the act. It was like, ‘How you doing love?' in almost a whisper, but then ten seconds later yahooing with their mates over fuck knows what.

It did hurt a bit, if I'm being honest. I'd known many of them all my life. Janie, who'd been my best mate all through primary but then went off to the Catholic school in Year 7. Her husband Mick, who wet his pants in kindergarten and was a swimming champion in his teens and who almost died of meningitis a few years back. Patrick, who was my kind-of-boyfriend when I was fifteen and who later married wall-eyed, stuttering Jenny, who we all tried hard to like in high school because she was the only person we knew with a pool. Mr and Mrs Creighton, who lived next door to us when we were kids and who I'd never in all these years seen inside the Royal.

At one point this woman I didn't recognise came up and rubbed my arm and started talking like she was my dearest friend. It took me until almost the end of the conversation (though it wasn't long – just her asking how I was holding up and me saying fine and then asking how she was) for it to click that it was Fiona Willard, who told everyone at the Year 6 dance that I was wearing a dress her older sister had donated to the Salvos the previous week.

Very late in the night one of the regulars, Lynn, said my name and looked into my eyes, properly into my eyes. I almost started bawling right then, because I didn't realise until that second that nobody had done that all shift.

‘Listen, love,' she said. She was seventy-three, a widow, came in every night looking like the Queen, drank her body weight in gin and left looking like an unmade bed. ‘Listen. You shouldn't be here.'

‘It's fine,' I said, trying to brush her off, because, seriously, I was going to bawl.

‘No. Listen. The papers said they don't have a clue who done it. So it could be anyone. It could be any of 'em.'

My belly filled with ice water. It could be any of them. The men I'd been serving drinks to, taking roast dinner orders from, telling I'm holding up okay. I don't know why I hadn't thought of it myself. I don't know what I was thinking or why in those days. Jesus. It could be any of them.

I'd not kept whisky in the house since the awful night a couple of weeks after Nate left when I drank a whole bottle and Bella found me the next morning sleeping in my own spew. That was the lowest moment of my life and I promised Bella I would go easy from then on, only drink beer when I was home alone. She would have preferred I didn't drink at all, but she was realistic and understood about harm minimisation. We made a deal about spirits in the house and I'd kept to it ever since.

That third night that I knew Bella was dead I brought home a six-pack of beer and a bottle of Jim Beam. I drank one beer, one slug of bourbon, one beer, one slug of bourbon until there was only bourbon and then I kept drinking straight from the bottle.

I needed noise and distraction, but was scared of news breaks coming on the telly or radio, so I put on an old JJJ Hottest 100 CD. I pulled out my photo albums and looked through them all. I cried a lot. When I got to the wedding album and saw Bella, just a kid still really, but looking like a goddamn model in her pale pink satin mini, and me in my white slinky cocktail dress and there was Nate, one big hand on each of our shoulders, I nearly choked with the sobbing. I tried to call him but got his voicemail. Fuck knows what I said, but I said a lot. I think it was mostly about Bella, but it was possible I mentioned how sick I thought it was that he was up there fucking some other bird when his wife was down here grieving for her baby sister. It's very possible.

I woke in the middle of the night, still sprawled on the floor in front of the open wedding album, my guts heaving. I made it to the toilet just in time. While I was chucking I noticed how sore my neck and back and hips were. I used to drink until I crashed on the floor all the time when I was younger; it never hurt this much. Bella had a sore back most of the time even though she was young and fit. It was her work, all that bending and scrubbing and reaching and lifting. They were meant to use a swinging trolley thing to move the patients but there was only one of those in the whole place and she couldn't stand to leave some poor old bugger lying in their own mess for a minute longer than necessary, so she'd often just do the lifting herself. Most of them weighed less than a case of beer she reckoned. But I worried about her. Once your back goes it's fucked for good, they say.

Her back.
Jesus god help me jesus fuck
her back
oh god what she withstood what
they did to her back. Jesus god fuck.

I cleaned myself up and staggered through to bed. My head was spinning and so I used the trick I remembered from my heaviest drinking days, kept my eyes open and focused on a single spot on the wall. I trusted I'd fall asleep and out of my misery as long as I didn't force my own eyes shut. I stared and stared at the dark spot on the wall and then felt the ice in my guts again as I realised I'd never seen that spot before. My walls are white and I keep them clean, wiping away any scuffs and greasy hand marks as soon as they appear. I would've noticed this before, this dark patch, a dappled, airless football. I hadn't closed the curtains and so the wall was lit by the full moon outside. A clear, light space marred by this terrible bruise.

I couldn't move with terror. I can't explain why. It was only a dark space on my wall but at that moment it felt like my life was about to end.

And then it was gone. Just like that, my wall was clean again. I pushed myself out of bed and touched the wall where the spot had been. It was like touching a hotplate you had no idea was turned on. It took me a second to understand my hand was being burnt and then I pulled back, dropped to my knees. I touched the wall near the floor and it felt like a wall. I reached up and with just my middle finger this time touched the spot that had burnt me. Nothing. I ran my hands up and down that wall and couldn't find the hot spot, the dark spot again. The palm of my left hand still stung with the heat.

I needed to vomit, charged through the doorway, past the kitchen into the bathroom. I didn't quite make it. Messed up the floor and the front of my nightie. I sat in front of the toilet until my heart stopped hammering and my stomach felt calm. Then I cleaned the floor, put my nightie in the wash, had a shower, took some Panadol with a big glass of water. I walked around the house, turned on all the lights, checked all the walls. Silly old drunk, I said to myself, but when I finally got back to bed and closed my eyes I knew with certainty that if I opened them again I would see it there, that impossible bruise.