Eden (19 page)

“Take a guess,” I said.

“You . . .” He looked distant, eyes flickering over the wallpaper peeling beside me. “You sent it out west with the truckies. You paid a cleaner. You fed the fish. You dug a hole. They were putting flash apartments up on the North Shore like they were walling off the coast against the fucking Japs. She’d be someone’s concrete mix.”

I slapped my notebook on my thigh. There was no way I was convincing North Shore Metro to start digging under the houses of millionaires.

“Girl like Sunday. Man, it’d be a stretch to bother. You’d have tossed her out into the street.”

“Hmm,” I said. “No one did, though. I’ve got no Jane Does that even come close.”

Bobby looked at the girl sitting on the bed, examining her split ends. “Bridget here’s gonna settle your bill.”

I got up. Bobby saluted me as he headed toward the door. He went through it, then leaned back, squinted at me.

“Think she had a little sidekick named Kimmy or Jimmy or something. Some little short ass with a big mouth always talking. Might be able to point you somewhere.”

I was going to tell him thanks, but he disappeared. I headed after him to leave and Bridget the girl with the impressive cold sore put a hand on my chest.

“Oh, right, yeah.” I dug out my wallet.

“He said five.”

“Right.”

She smiled at me, tucked the notes into her back pocket. I knew she’d hold back a few notes but Bobby had probably factored that in. She put a finger into the gap between my shirt buttons and tickled the eagle on my chest. “You in a rush to go?”

“Desperate rush.” I took her hand down, gave it a little squeeze, and slipped around her. “But you be good, baby.”

“Never,” she laughed. I jogged down the dark stairs.

T
hey took lots of breaks on Rye’s Farm. Eadie liked it. There was something comforting in the monotony of her tasks—the shoveling, shoveling, shoveling, carrying, carrying, carrying—the way her breathing would synchronize to the task, come fast or slow as her limbs worked like the cogs in a clock. Pea gave Eadie instructions and she followed them. There were no decisions. She could see the appeal of this kind of work for someone who disliked pressure, deadlines, the weighing of options and outcomes.

The breaks fueled those tired hours, gave her mind coal to burn. Eadie kept her eye on the men and women who walked by her stalls, stopped to check the animals, led cows through for checkups or borrowed bits of rope. A look. A sigh. The fiddling of fingers. Eadie began to make a catalog of twitches. She was in no way attached to the idea that Jackie and Nick were going to hand her the key one of these idle afternoons when they’d had enough of being her prey, so she kept the pendant camera trained on anyone who passed, made excuses to go out into the bays to record conversations, snippets, jargon, nicknames. She knew any of the girls or boys in Jackie’s happy family could be the game-changer, the loose-lips, the Big One.

Eadie knew that being a successful killer was mostly due to sophisticated acting skills. The same organization, discipline and order required to make it in Hollywood. Most of the killers she’d found difficult to hunt—either for her night-time games or her day job—were such convincing actors that even the last seconds of their lives had made her question who the real person was behind the mask.

Eadie knew the game was hard to play and that it couldn’t be played forever. She needed her weekend to slip away, to let her mask fall, to release a little of her bloodlust on a worthy foe, Harry Ratchett. But whoever had killed the girls was here, on the farm, and they couldn’t keep up the game forever. She was determined to catch the slip when it happened. A laugh hacked up too late. A tear faked or a crooked smile.

So for that reason Eadie followed whenever Pea came and banged on the side of the shed she was working in, walked over the dirt toward the sunbaked picnic tables in the wake of the old woman’s squat frame. The first three or four breaks of the day were smokos only. She would bum a couple of tokes from Skylar if she was around or sit peeling labels off the beer bottles while the others talked, picked at each other, laughed. Ramble on. Eadie would see and record it all.

There was an awful lot of reminiscing going on among the people on Rye’s Farm, Eadie noticed, as though they were in the wake of some great party and all the guests of honor had packed up and left. There was a lot of talk about high school, the last great event in their lives, when no one had developed a habit and power was something seized through weight and strength alone—and not by money. Eadie would listen, cleaning under her fingernails with a corner of a plastic label, letting the pendant do the looking. Someone would get an iPhone going with music. Pearl Jam. Always Pearl Jam.

Today the topic seemed to be people who had come and who were gladly gone. Eadie edged onto the very end of the bench, one ass-cheek all that was needed, and started digging a hole in the dust with her boot, grinding the lumps of green manure falling from the grooves in her tread.

“. . . with a fucking beard,” someone was saying, words forced through dry laughter. “A fucking blond beard, real light, from here to here. Boys were calling her the Pirate.”

Everyone sniggering. Eadie wondered whether she should snigger along, then decided it was best to attempt to remain invisible. Pea sat down across from her and struggled with a lighter, fat hands quivering, the shakes.

“That foam hair removal shit is ten bucks a bottle. Fuck. There’s no excuse. No fucking excuse.”

“Keely was blond like that. Furry blond arms.”

Eadie perked up, managed a glance at the speaker. A woman of many layers. Metallica T-shirt over tank top over neon-colored Kmart sports bra. Checkered boxer shorts beneath denim shorts beneath layers of chain and leather and cotton holding things up, pulling things down. Eadie thought her name was Maz. A name cutup and beat down and given to an undersized infant who grew into an oversized woman. Most of them had one-syllable names. Except, of course, for her. The outsider. The rug-muncher.

“Keely. Ooh. Ooh,” Maz gave a shudder. Everyone laughed.

“Not your all-time fav, Maz.”

“I so regret not getting that girl’s teeth,” Maz smiled. “All I wanted was her fucking teeth. I just wanted to be able to say she never got away from me. At least not in one piece.”

“God, you’re bad.”

“You’re a bad, bad girl.”

“What did she do?” Eadie asked. Everyone turned. Eadie squinted in the light, tried to feign humility.

“She was an uppity little slut who never knew when to keep her mouth shut.” Maz leaned as she spoke, showing gray teeth. “Not unlike some little blow-ins I’ve met of late.”

“Keely borrowed a few of Maz’s things,” someone sniggered. “Borrowed them, fucking, forever.”

“Slippery fingers. Nobody likes a slippery finger.”

“Well, maybe some people do.”

Everyone laughed. Eadie felt a nudge and only just managed to keep herself from falling off the edge of the bench.

“I should’a borrowed a piece of that girl’s brain while I had the chance. Borrowed it permanently.”

“I saw something on the news about her,” someone frowned. “Like they’re after her. The cops. They want to talk to her.”

Eadie cracked her knuckles, one at a time. The speaker was a waif named Sal, one of the cleverer of the bunch. Eadie wasn’t surprised Sal had watched the news. She had the intelligence to be interested in it. But if Eadie were lucky, Sal wouldn’t be the type to watch regularly, wouldn’t have put together the pieces and calculated that three of Jackie Rye’s past residents were missing, ask why the police hadn’t been sniffing around. Eadie had been banking on the residents of Rye’s Farm being so transient that few of them would have been there at the same time as all three missing girls. It was better if no one knew the police were looking for the missing girls. Whoever was responsible might decide to burrow or bail before Eadie had managed to get hold of them.

“Keely was on the news?” Maz frowned.

“Yeah.”

“Why?”

“I think they said, like, she’s missin’ or somefink.”

Eadie wiped at a bead of sweat on her temple.

“Missing? Since when? Since she took off from here with my fucking DVDs?”

“I don’t know. Didn’t watch that close.”

“I hope she’s dead.”

A moan of appreciation went up from the table, broke into laughs.

“Aw, come on. No, you don’t.”

“Yes, I do.”

“Not really though.”

“Don’t tell me what I fucking mean.”

Eadie chewed her knuckles. There was no denying Sal had a few more biscuits in her packet than the other girls at the table, but that didn’t count for much if her basic danger warning system was faulty. Sal was wandering into dangerous territory, and only Eadie, it seemed, could see the water rippling. Warning Sal was impossible. She glanced at the breakfast sheds and saw Jackie and Nick there, hunched and smoking.

“I wonder if she’s in trouble or someone’s reported her gone.” Sal picked at the splintered tabletop, oblivious.

Maz had a bone and wasn’t letting it go. “I’m really fucking interested in how you think I’m some kind of dog no good for her word. Because I’ve never done nothing to make people think that. I always follow through.”

“Yeah, you know, but people talk sometimes.”

“You saying I’m all talk?”

“Jesus, you need to calm down a bit.” Sal squinted in the light.

“I mean what I say I mean.” Maz boasted. “They say they know where she is?”

“No. They just said they’re looking. There was a mug shot. A description. A reward, maybe. I dun remember.”

“Dead. Dead in the ground.”

“Oh, Maz!”

“What?”

“Well, what if she is dead? And you said you wished it?” Sal pleaded.

“Then I hope that. I hope that and worse. I hope some fucking piece of shit from out the back of fucking Bankstown put her in a van and gave her what she needed and then put her in the ground and gave the world what it needed.” Maz looked around for encouragement. The women laughed. Pea gave up on the lighter, threw it over her shoulder into the dirt, and held her hand out to the girl beside her.

“No, you don’t.”

“Oh my God. Somebody put a leash on this bitch, please.” Maz’s face was taut as nylon.

“Plenty of people steal shit,” Sal said. “You don’t know what made her do it, maybe she, like, she had some kind of reason, you know, that nobody knew about . . .”

“You’re stealing my good air right now, Sal,” Pea said, exhaling blue into the thin white air. “You need to give it up before someone knocks your block off.”

An interesting move by Pea, Eadie thought. She’d got the impression so far that Pea enjoyed a good bullying session. No one was as they appeared. Sal herself had perked right up to her full height, the bones in her throat shifting up and down as she swallowed, apparently excited by the challenge of exerting her morality onto the group.

“You know sometimes you have to, like, give people the benefit of the doubt. People, you know. People can . . .” Sal was on the edge of something, Eadie could see. Something prophetic. Opinion changing. Something informed. But she didn’t have the words. Hadn’t been raised with the words. All she had in her mind were pictures of fairness and hard work and reward. Moving pictures, mental films she had made of a better world. “Maybe, like, she. Maybe if you’d forgiven her, you . . .”

Eadie watched Maz attack Sal, and to prevent herself from getting up, going for Maz, stopping the brutality and blowing her cover, she took pains to catalog just how very many tiny gestures and surrenders and facilitations were needed in the other women at the table for Maz to be able to do what she did to Sal. Eadie counted, one, two, three, nothing moving but her eyes, as the woman between Maz and Sal swiftly got up and stepped back, clearing the path. She watched as Pea leaned to her left, nudging Sal forward when she tried to lean back away from Maz’s hands, watched as the three women on her own side of the table got up and moved around behind the fray, blocking Sal’s exit.

Eadie let her eyes drift away as the beating progressed, to the horizon, to the stalking silhouettes in the heat haze, who stopped at the noise of the screaming, turned, looked, folded their arms, the way men will stop to appreciate a sunset, witnessing nature at its finest. Eadie remained seated. Bent a little to watch Maz’s boot going up and coming down. Thought about the science of blood coated in dust, how it formed little balls, why it didn’t soak into the earth right away, how long it took for blood to do that. Eadie witnessed, and Eadie said nothing. She put her hands on the table as they dragged Sal away toward the hose by the stables and only looked down at them when she felt the heat of Pea’s cigarette near her fingers. The old woman was watching, too.

“All right.” Pea flicked ash onto the blood-wet earth. “Back to it.”