Death Delights (11 page)

I couldn’t quite take it in at first. Les O’Neil from the council had pleasure in informing me that I’d won second prize in the local section of the art competition and this letter was my invitation to the official opening next week where I would receive my certificate and a cheque for $150. For a few moments I was absurdly pleased with myself and I stuck the letter up on the fridge where I could see it. I wanted to ring and tell Charlie, but felt too self-conscious about making such a boast. It was the first win I’d had in a long, long time.

With a lighter energy, I turned back to the job in hand, and put the two files, my lost sister’s and Jacinta’s, in the bottom of the built-in wardrobe in my little bedroom, picked up another box piled high with paper, cleared a spot at the table in the main room, and made a start on it. On the very top was a large folder containing glossy black and white police photographs of the white wooden railings that used to run alongside the roadway in Springbrook when we were kids. I knew these long shots and close-ups off by heart: the scraped marks on the posts, incomprehensible to a casual observer, were as clear to me as if I’d seen the whole incident. I hadn’t looked at them in many years. I studied the first one again. It showed gouge marks on a wooden railing where the metal badge on the fender of a car had collided violently with the timber of the railing —the gouge marks left by the suspect vehicle when it skidded and struck the railings of the fence. The car had then reversed into a tree on the rear passenger side and accelerated away. Rosie had been snatched off the street in front of our house by ‘a person or persons unknown’. Mrs Bower, the vicar’s wife, had run from the rectory on the corner of the T-junction at one end of our street when she’d heard the crash. It had all been too fast for her, she said in her witness statement, and she hadn’t seen anything. What
was
known was the fact that the height of the fenders back and front and the marks they had both left on the white fence and on the tree behind, were consistent with the suspect vehicle being a 1967 or ’68 Holden sedan. We knew for a fact that it was tan and white, with some sort of badge on the back fender and at least one decorative stud in the shape of a chrome-plated, five-pointed star probably fixed to the front fender. We knew this because the Crime Scene police found the fat silver star in the dirt on the roadway among the scattered paint flakes. It was likely to be one of several decorating the chrome.

Because of the contents of all these folders and manila envelopes, I’d come to know a great deal more about that Holden sedan. The paint flakes gave us more information: they told us that the vehicle had undergone several changes of colour from the time it had come off the assembly line. Like the levels of an archeological dig, microscopic examination of the paint layers gave us the history of the car’s colour changes. Starting off with one of Holden’s standard colours of those years—a pale blue enamel—it had later been spray-painted a dark blue and only after that did it acquire the two-toned tan and white of the top coat. In spite of a massive police search, that car was never found. It simply vanished, together with my sister, off the face of the earth.

I pulled out another of the photographs showing a flashlight photo of the tree the car had backed into, with a long indentation cutting transversely across its trunk, revealing splintered, sappy wood. In a smaller manila envelope were the earlier drawings I’d made from the photographs, showing possible interpretations of the marks left on the tree by the shield-shaped badge. I’d spent a long time trying to match this and had concluded that it was most likely a car rally badge. Car clubs and rally clubs are still popular and there must have been hundreds of different badges around in the ’seventies. These days, windscreen stickers are used instead. In the early days when I was first examining this physical evidence, I used to look at that star as if it were the mark of the Beast itself because I knew it came from
that
car, and in that car at the time of impact was my beautiful terrified little sister. I used to hold the star in the palm of my hand and close my eyes like I’d heard psychics did, willing myself to know where the car was now, where Rosie was. But all I ever saw was the darkness of my own failure.

Under my sketches were photographs of the tyre marks left near the roadside as well as pictures of the plaster casts made up from their indentations. Tyre marks are like fingerprints. Every little imperfection in the manufacturing process, every notch or cut created by usage, leaves a distinctive mark in the rubber, and a corresponding imprint in soft soil. No tyre, even those from the same batch, is exactly the same as any other. When that is taken into account, together with the tyre’s unique pattern of wear, a profile is produced that is unique. But I had little hope of ever deriving anything useful from those tyres now. After all these years, they would no longer be in existence.

I sat back, reminiscing. Thinking about the quiet leafy street I’d lived in back then had started a rush of powerful memories. On one side was the local headmaster’s residence. He had three children, several years older than me and Rosie. On the other side lived Snotty Kirkwood and I clearly remembered his freckled face and tufty hair and the dark hydrangea bushes that ran down the side of his house, perfect to hide in. I’d had a crush on his sister in Third Grade and I tried to remember her name. The only other kids in our street belonged to Rev Bower and his wife who lived down at the corner, but they were always away at boarding school and never a part of the kids’ community. Mrs Bower had a vague, anxious manner and was always looking at us as if she didn’t quite remember who we were, even though we lived only a few doors away.

It was a long time since I’d allowed my mother any head space and, for a moment, I was nearly drawn into revisiting my family home, my father in his office, my mother fumbling around trying to make dinner. As soon as my memory saw the glass of wine in her hand, a shutter came down fast.

I gathered up the photographs and replaced them in their envelopes. I put everything back in the box and leaned my elbows on the table. I noticed one envelope still lying beside the pile in the box and I thought again of the empty envelope among Nesbitt’s gear. I picked it up and shoved it in with the others. I heard someone banging on the door and went to it, peering out the back window to see who it was before opening it.

‘Hi, Dad.’

Greg’s lanky seventeen-year-old frame filled the doorway, his light, bronze-flecked eyes like his mother’s, now wary and self-conscious, looking away as he stood fiddling with the keys to the old Corolla he’d bought last birthday with some help from me.

‘Come in, son,’ I said, stepping back to allow him to pass me. His hair was plastered flat with whatever gel it needed to kill the curl. He hated his hair. He walked in leaving the door open and looked around. I felt the tension in him ease.

‘This isn’t too bad,’ he observed, walking to the table where all my stuff was piled. He glanced at it, then turned to me. ‘Please, Dad,’ he rushed on, ‘I can’t stay with Mum. You know what she’s like. I know she tries to be helpful but it just…’ He threw the keys down on the table. ‘I know she’ll be hurt but I just have to get out of there. I’ve come to stay.’ I glanced outside and saw that he’d brought an overnight bag with him, left lying on the paving outside.

Greg went to the fridge, paused and turned round to me. ‘How come you won second prize in an art competition?’

‘I entered a painting. The judges must’ve liked it.’

‘You didn’t say anything about it.’ He raised his eyebrows and opened the fridge, peering in with adolescent hope, slamming it closed again on my pathetic bachelor collection of left-over take-away, various cheeses and a half bottle of flat ginger beer. I knew the bread was two days old.

‘I can make you a jaffle,’ I offered. ‘Toasted cheese.’ Greg nodded and I set about buttering the bread on both sides, slicing cheese and switching the electric jaffle iron on to heat up while he went outside and brought his bag in.

‘I haven’t got much room here,’ I said, while the jaffle toasted. ‘There’s this room’—I indicated the living area in which we were standing, with its neat little kitchen area that folded away behind louvred cupboards—‘my bedroom and that poky little room in here.’ I showed him the other bedroom, to the right of the tiny bathroom, stacked almost floor to ceiling with my boxes and folders. Greg looked it up and down.

‘If you get rid of your stuff,’ he said, ‘there’ll be enough room in here. I can leave the big stuff with Mum.’

We walked outside and sat in the paved area on the kitchen furniture I’d dragged out there. As soon as the jaffle was ready I went in and turned it out on a plate for him.

‘Do you want anything to drink?’ I asked. ‘Tea? Coffee?’

My son shook his head and fell on the jaffle as if he hadn’t eaten for days.

‘What does your mother think about you moving here full-time?’ I asked, already knowing the answer.

Greg gave me a look. Then continued to demolish the toasted bread and cheese, wincing a little as molten cheese dripped down his chin.

‘She’s a great lady, Mum,’ Greg said when he’d finished eating, ‘in her way. But I want to live with you. It’s weird without you. It’s like when Jacinta first went. Real quiet as if we were all waiting for something to happen.’

‘We were,’ I said. ‘We still are.’

Greg moved to say something, then stopped.

‘Go on,’ I said, ‘say it.’

He shook his head.

‘You were going to ask me if I thought Jacinta was still alive.’

‘Well,’ he capitulated, ‘do you?’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘as it happens.’ We sat a while in silence after that, Greg going back inside and making himself another jaffle, and pouring himself the last of my milk. I made a mental note to remember to buy some more before I went to bed tonight. He came back out, towering over me and then collapsing into his chair, folding himself up like some great skinny pelican, all elbows and angles and flapping long limbs.

‘I do believe your sister is still alive,’ I said. ‘It’s a gut feeling. I know a lot of people would say I’m refusing to face the truth. But the truth is that no one knows. There are many more runaways than murder victims every year. The odds are in my favour. I think somehow Jass has made another life for herself.’

I stopped, thinking what sort of life a fifteen-year-old girl could have made for herself. I needed to turn my thoughts around. ‘I’m involved in an investigation,’ I warned him.

‘Yeah, Mum said. Those guys who got cut.’

I looked at him. I didn’t want to frighten him, but for some reason I couldn’t let this cool, adolescent minimisation go past without saying something. ‘Greg,’ I said, ‘they didn’t just get cut. Whoever kills them cuts all their external sex organs right off. Penis, scrotum, the works. Plus inflicts deep lacerations to a major artery. They bleed to death in minutes.’

He looked at me and I wondered if I’d made a moralising blunder.

‘Mum reckons it’s about time men start to cop it. It’s always women who get hacked up, she said. She said men had it coming to them.’

He looked at me and I could see the pain in his eyes. His mother’s hostility towards me had been a constant in the household he grew up in. For years, Greg had breathed air heavy with resentment against men. No doubt Genevieve had good reasons much of the time. I was not a model husband or father. But I had been sober for fifteen of our eighteen years together although Genevieve could never acknowledge that, preferring to blame all her woes on me. I brought my attention back to my son. ‘Statistically,’ I said, not wanting to put her down in her son’s eyes, yet not wanting to go along with her shit, ‘she has a point.’

‘I’m not crazy to hear her points lately,’ said Greg, looking away. ‘Especially the ones that put men down all the time.’ He gave me a hard look when he said that, forbidding me any further comment, so I made him yet another jaffle and he chomped into it like a ravenous creature. I watched the way the shadows in his temple changed at the movement and the way his jaw lifted, and the lovely pure line of it. I looked around for something to sketch on, but there was nothing suitable and I resolved to buy charcoal and drawing paper next time I went into the city.

‘Just because I’m on leave at the moment,’ I told him, returning to the conversation in hand, ‘doesn’t mean I’m here much. You know I’m working with Bob Edwards. You’ll end up spending a lot of time on your own. And you’re not used to that.’

‘Cool, Dad. That’s great. That suits me heaps.’ He swallowed the last of the jaffle and for the first time since he’d arrived, he grinned. ‘I can really turn the sound system up.’

‘You’ll have to think seriously about this move,’ I continued. ‘Whether you can study here successfully or not. It’s much more convenient for you at’—I nearly said ‘home’ but couldn’t quite manage that word now—‘at your mother’s place—your nice big room, your desk. Everything laid on.’ My mobile rang from inside and I went to get it, then chickened out. I was pretty sure it would be Genevieve.

‘Aren’t you going to get it?’ Greg said as I walked back out again. He can’t bear leaving a phone unanswered, fearing that he’s going to miss out on the message that will change his life forever.

‘No,’ I said, ‘I’m not.’ I smiled at him, at this long, lovely youth, my first-born son. Inside, the phone suddenly stopped. There were things I wanted to say to him, but I could not. I had no skill in this sort of thing. Maybe Genevieve had a point or two and there was a lot I didn’t know. More than I’d like to admit to myself. ‘I’ll come over on the weekend,’ I said instead. ‘And help you move some stuff. We can do it in stages. And now, you’d better ring your mother. Tell her where you are.’

‘Won’t you? She’ll just yell at me.’

‘She’ll do exactly the same to me. It’s your decision. Your life. Your phone call.’

‘How come you talk like you know everything?’ he said angrily as he stomped inside. And I could hear his mother. I was suddenly reminded of a childhood scene with my father, where I said almost exactly the same words to him, but try as I might, I couldn’t remember what the situation had been. I could see myself standing in front of him, yelling, and him freezing me with his look of utter contempt. Then the memory abruptly stopped and I was left there, listening to my own son trying to explain something to the mother who didn’t want to hear it. I could hear Greg’s voice becoming more distressed, then more placatory. Eventually, he came outside, holding the phone out to me. ‘She wants to talk to you.’ Slowly, I took it.