Eden (14 page)

Read Eden Online

Authors: Candice Fox

BOOK: Eden
8.57Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
“What do they talk about?”
“They fight a lot. They’re either fighting or talking about how in love they are.”
“The mean sweet cycle,” Eden said.
“What?”
“They abuse you 90 percent of the time, shower you with affection 10 percent of the time. Classic abuser behavior. You hang in for the 10 percent because it’s kind of a reward for all your hard work.”
“Boring,” I yawned. “Sounds easier to be single.”
“Not for these girls. They’re afraid of being alone. No self-confidence.”
We sat watching Juno work on the video. He felt our gaze, writhed.
“I just don’t get why the brother would hide this video,” Juno said. “It’s sick.”
“There’s no telling,” I said. “Might have thought it was Keely and didn’t want a bunch of cops watching her. I’ve seen it before. Family hides the victim’s past, even to the detriment of the case.”
Juno clicked away, minimizing things, drawing up other programs.
I put an arm over the back of the couch and Eden glanced at it beside her, irritated.
“Your dad wants to see you,” I murmured.
“How’s all that going?”
“Fine. A little trip down memory lane required.”
“Is that what this is all about?” She reached over and poked the scrape on my face, the yellow bruise fading now, almost gone. It was rare to be touched by her.
“Ow. Yes.”
“How is he?”
“He’s all right.”
“How’re you?”
“Don’t start on me. How’re you?”
“Oh, you know. It’s a hard place.” She sipped her wine, rolled it in her mouth. “Lots of pricks out there. They get bored. Pick on each other. Nothing I haven’t seen before. It’s high school dynamics. Cliques. Alliances. Fringe dwellers.”
“And you’re on the fringe?”
“Me and the girl. She might be next. I worry about her. She’s not bright. She’s like a happy rabbit, bouncing around, looking very much like prey.”
“Someone’s idea of tasty. You managed to get a proper look around yet?”
“Not yet. A couple of restless souls about at night.”
“Oh yes, I saw that. We both saw that. You’ve got a good swing there.”
“Shoulda been a cricketer.”
“So where from here?”
“I want to get into the kill sheds. Out the back, into the grasslands. Tomorrow night maybe. They have a bonfire on Saturdays. I’d have stayed if I didn’t need the batteries changed. No one seems to be bothered that I’m coming and going—they think I’m sorting out my divorce and looking for a better job, and they’re happy at the idea that I might leave. The girl, though. She thinks I’m off having some big adventure. I don’t want her to tag along. Next time there’s a bonfire I’d like to stay,” she said.
“You thought about checking the pigpens for samples? Sending some bloods back? I saw a documentary on this guy in the States, this pig farmer.”
“These pigs are pretty domestic,” she said. “He sells them to Coles. It’s not the way I’d operate. A stupid move if you ask me, feeding your victims to pigs. The thing sits there with your evidence inside it waiting for someone to come along, trip on a finger bone in the mud. Stupid.”
I sat watching her face. She was casting a critical eye over Juno as he worked. I wondered what she did with her bodies. I wondered where the six men I knew she and Eric had killed had ended up, if they might be found someday, if I might live to see Eden arrested for what she truly was. A beautiful taker of lives. I only half-wanted to know why she did it. At what point had she and Eric decided that they would follow through on their dark fantasies of personally issued justice? Did she carry on the dark life now that Eric was gone? Had her underworld father taught her how to do it?
The doorbell rang and Eden buzzed the delivery girl up. She brought bags of steaming curry-smelling boxes to the table.
“What is this?” I said as Eden unpacked the bags, lifted lids on dishes laden with vegetables I didn’t recognize. Nothing smelled familiar.
“Ethiopian.” Juno ducked his head.
“Ethiopian?”
“You said I should order anything.”
“You get told you can order anything and
Ethiopian
is the first thing that comes to mind?”
“It’s all right.” Eden gathered some hot flat bread out of a paper bag. “You’ll like it. Here. Have some of that. Mix it with that.”
Juno let a long breath out of his body as Eden dished out the food. I saw his chest deflate and his tiny stomach bulge. There was sweat in the ringlet curls in his temples. I sat staring at him.
“
Ethiopian?”
“Give him a break,” Eden laughed. “He’s only a boy.”
On the night that his world ended, Heinrich was on watch. Watch was Heinrich’s most hated of all jobs because he learned nothing from it, and Bear told him he must always be learning if he wanted to have a good life. When he attended Bear’s meetings or barged into the houses of men who owed Caesar or rounded up gamblers for the fights, even when he chased whores into the back alleys of the Cross and cornered them and wrung a little information about their johns out of them, he always learned something. How to make a girl cry. How to duck a good swing. What a broken bone sounded like. How to make someone agree to something that was entirely bad for them, and do so in a way that made them happy, made them laugh and slap your back and order you drinks.
But once a week on watch nights, Heinrich was alone on the porch of the house in Darlinghurst and he was not allowed to read by the light of a candle, so he learned nothing. He would sit on the old leather couch there with one hand on a cat or a dog, and he would stare at the street, the abandoned lot across the road, the wire fencing, the town houses beyond that, the pub on the corner—watch it all descend into the late hours. Watch nights were long nights. The moon shrunk against the burned orange sky, saying good-bye, leaving him to rot.
When he spotted the figure walking toward the house from the pub, Heinrich got up from the couch and stood on the steps. When the light of a street lamp fell on her, Heinrich felt a mixture of anger and relief surge through him. He turned, walked back up onto the porch, and pretended to be distracted by the cotton strings hanging from the splits in the couch. Sunday wasn’t dressed for the weather, but she hardly ever was. She never seemed to be cold. She came up onto the porch and hoisted herself onto the wooden rail.
“Long time no see, Dogboy.”
“Where the hell have you been?” Heinrich gave her a look-over, from her head right down to her feet, the way Bear had taught him to do when he wanted someone to feel small. “It’s been weeks. Don’t you live here anymore?”
“I don’t live anywhere, man. You know that.”
“You sure seem to live here when it suits you. Bet you’re here to raid the cupboards. Take my blankets. Take whatever cash you can scrape outta the bottom of my pockets.”
“I never scrape no cash off you. It’s all you can do to give it to me.”
“What a lie.”
“You know you love me,” she laughed, came and sat beside him. She smelled like wine and flowers tonight. Like a party. Like rooms full of people, sour breath, laughter, sweat. Her eyes glittered in the dark, too big for her head. Her hair was everywhere. Heinrich decided to stop looking at her. She scratched around in her little cloth bag and lit a joint.
“Gimme that.” He took it from her, dragged half of it up in pure spite.
“How’s Bear?”
“Busy.”
“The big Shark?”
Sunday had always called Caesar the Shark. His teeth frightened her, the way he laughed his phony angry laugh with his head snapped back and they all showed, right to the rear of the deep pink hole, rows of them, white and pointed, bone crunchers. She’d whispered to Heinrich at night about it in those early days. He’d shushed her and told her to get off him and go to sleep.
“Won’t be back tonight. Where you been?”
“Fine.”
“I said where, not how.” Heinrich gave her back the joint, watched the way her lips gathered around it, wet like rose petals. “I look for you everywhere I go.”
“That’s kind of nice.”
“I don’t know what you’re doing. When you’ll be back. If you’ll ever be back. Why you ain’t here with me.”
“What am I gonna do here waiting for you, Dogboy?” she snorted, smoke rushing from her nose. “Drink tea in the kitchen? Sweep the greenhouse? Read penny mysteries? I ain’t your wife. I’m your sister, mister.”
“You’re supposed to be waiting for when we get enough cash to get outta here. Go up north where it’s warm. Buy a bookshop, like we talked about.”
She laughed. The sound echoed in the street, a tinkle of glass carving the cold air. Heinrich felt his face grow hot.
“I’m always surprised when I come see you. It’s always a shock.”
“What is, for chrissake?”
“How you can still be such a child when there’s so much darkness around you.”
“I ain’t no child.”
“Maybe what happened to you stopped you from growing,” she murmured, the joint glowing red against her long fingers. “Maybe you froze in the fire. Someone’s lost baby forever. Sometimes I wish I could go back to that time on the beach. Be the baby again. A wet and cold thing Bear gathered up. That was the last time he touched me, you know. There’s something nice about being abandoned and then being saved. I do it whenever I can, but it’s never the same.”
Her eyes scanned the street, caught a little of the moon as it bounced off the newly fallen rain. When they found his own they lingered there before falling to his lips.
She was the one who moved. He couldn’t make his limbs work. Her hands wound up into his hair and gripped it, and when he felt the pain it seemed to awaken him and he gave it back, pulled her to him, crushed her. He had to stop her once or twice. Her shaking, hard restless hands in his shirt, her breath in his mouth. She needed him, climbed onto him, pulled his neck. Forced herself against his chest, her lips on his ear. A noose of arms.
After a while, when they were both warm, he held her, rocked her, let her hide her face against his neck. Not being able to see her in the dark didn’t matter, though some part of him ached to put shapes and colors to the skin under his hands—where it stopped being soft and went hard, where it was tight and where it was dry and smooth like sun-warmed stone. He squeezed her ribs and felt the bones bend. The sounds she made were helpless things, whispers, pleads, a sudden cry of want, of fear when he tried to shift. He didn’t want to sleep until she did, but she pulled the rug from the end of the couch up over them and curled her feet around his, and her kisses on the side of his face, on his neck, pulled him away from himself.
“Will you save me?” she whispered.
He opened his mouth to answer her and his face was flooded with light so hard and white it crushed the sound out of him. The porch lights above, the hall lights, all flicked on at once. There were men above him. Sunday was gone.
Heinrich’s first instinct was to roll. He didn’t know what was happening or who was above him in the black, the hoods. But he rolled, and the action saved him. The panels in the porch seemed to explode upward in chips and fragments, getting in his eyes. He covered his head, the sound so loud he missed it, just a thundering in his ears and all around him. They passed over him and into the house.
More gunfire. Heinrich gripped the ground, breathed wood, coughed, and tasted blood in his mouth. All his bones had locked at once. Unlocking them took frantic seconds. He crawled, one leg dragging and useless, threw himself through the front door.
Screaming. One of the girls running out into the kitchen and being cut down. Men rushing out, naked, falling. One of the men in black went to the open bedroom door and Heinrich watched his shoulders shudder as he pumped the room. People wailing, short, sharp. Silent. The next room, a spray. Heinrich pulled himself behind the armchair, heard shouting, Bear’s bellow from across the house.
He tried to get up and bullets pocked the wall behind him, pulled the window down around him in a rain of glass. He cowered in it, pulled his head down against his chest. The blood on his chin, in his nose. Was this dying? The world was turning hard and clicking back into place like a moving picture on a wheel, his body at the center. The gunfire stopped and there was running, and the kitchen windows shook in their frames and glasses fell from the counters.
Heinrich dragged himself across the glass, got up, fell into the doorframe of the back room. There was blood spray and holes all over the walls like black stars. The boy fell into the dark back room, crawled, climbed up the floor as it tilted up before him, a ramp, a ladder without rungs.
Bear was there, under his hands. Shuddering. Wet. Impossibly hot. Heinrich wrapped his arms around the thick heavy head, squeezed it, tried to lift it from the ground.
“Bear! Bear! Bear! Bear!”
He could see two white points glittering in the blackness. Heinrich pushed his face against the big man’s face, felt the hair hard like wires. His fingers found the hole in the fat neck, tried to stem the gushing.
“Anigozanthos,” the old man coughed the words. “Rufus. Ani . . . Ani . . . Ru . . .”
Heinrich howled. The sound came out of him without words, without sobs, just a noise like a siren that started in the pit of his guts and crept up louder and louder until it met the air, made his ears ache. A scream. The big man held him, limp fingers, weak arms around his middle.
“Oh, boy,” Bear said. “Boy.”
Heinrich felt him die like a great mountain crumbling to the earth.

Other books

Target by Lisa Phillips
The Bones of You by Debbie Howells
The Stone Witch by Benjamin Hulme-Cross, Nelson Evergreen
To Sleep Gently by Trent Zelazny
Finding Serenity by Eden Butler
Shaping Destiny by Hmonroe
Growing Pains by Emily Carr