Eden (26 page)

“Girl,” she said again, “you’ve got the wrong idea.”

Skylar looked at her eyes, fat tears rolling down her round cheeks. They lay down together in the gloom, back to back, and let the thunder roll them into an exhausted slumber.

 

I
like to eat when I’m researching. The selection spread before me at the Police Evidence Archives Department in Chatswood was nightmarish stuff for most health nuts. An empty McDonald’s sitting right across the street from the huge double doors was a trap I fell willingly into.

There was one other investigator in the records room when I arrived, and my fatty feast drew a scowl I cheerfully ignored. An attendant in the box watching a television set on top of a filing cabinet was enjoying the company of a large desk fan. The rules at PEAD are that you’re supposed to wear white gloves to flip through the records, but I forwent the rule and just napkined my fingers extra before flipping pages.

I knew a bit about Tom Savet. Stuff I’d heard over the years in bored-cop small talk. He and another guy had been called to a house in Epping in the early sixties to look at a bloody bathroom and help the old war vet who owned the place find his missing wife. Savet glanced around the scene for about five minutes, they said, and found a boot print on the kitchen floor. It was too big for the vet and had a heavy leftward lean.

From this Savet deduced that a guy named Richard Kea, a known junkie and petty thief, had been responsible. Kea limped on his left leg from a kneecap he’d had knocked in for bad debts. Twenty-five minutes later, at Kea’s basement apartment three blocks away, Savet had squeezed a confession out of the guy with a pair of pointy-nose pliers. Eighteen minutes after that they had confirmation of a body in a pipe near Yarra Bay and Kea in the back of a paddy wagon. Wham, bam, initial report to bagged body in under an hour. Now that was some Sherlock Holmes shit right there.

Savet started his record streak by nailing Kea and then went on to mark himself as the top missing persons man in Sydney. The case that got him all the press was that of eight-year-old Elizabeth Kingsley from Neutral Bay. Lizzie had been walking home from netball practice in the fading light of a winter evening, through the quiet suburban streets behind the beach, when she’d vanished. Reports of a red van in the area came up as a dodgy lead but distracted the public in the initial weeks of the investigation. Within twenty-four hours of being handed the case, Savet had turned Lizzie’s bones up in a barrel of acid on the ground floor of a warehouse in Dubbo, of all places. The girl was a long way from home. They nailed a truck driver for the murder. After that, everything Savet touched turned to gold.

People ignored Savet’s friendships with some of Sydney’s nastiest personalities, including Alec “Caesar” Steel when he was at the height of his reign of terror. Most people assumed Savet kept underworld connections to aid his uncanny instincts in digging up bones. They might have been right. I was determined to find out.

I looked over Savet’s major case files. There were twenty-six in total. Lizzie Kingsley was his youngest. She looked up at me from the yellowed pages with her frizzy-doll haircut and chubby white cheeks, a netball clutched under her arm. Savet’s work on the case was meticulous. I admired his organization, his strict chronology and easy prose through interviews, underlining key phrases, posing questions to himself. The autopsy reports, scene diagrams, and suspect lists were all there, numbered, cataloged. You’re supposed to keep your records like this, so that someone can easily pick up where you left off if you’re reassigned.

His work made me think of my own, which at the best of times was spread throughout my car and littered around my kitchen countertop, barely legible, half of it on the back of envelopes and crowded around the edges of electricity bills. Savet left no path unexplored, took nothing for granted, and documented everything. He spoke to people who looked unrelated to the case, and from there he drew the most minute but often critical clues.

Tom Savet was a textbook kind of guy. Maybe he’d been leaning on Caesar for some pocket money in the drug trade for a little while there, but there was no evidence of anything but a casual liaison. When Caesar was gunned down by persons unknown in a cellar in Darlinghurst in the late seventies Savet didn’t comment to the media, and he didn’t attend the funeral. The man had never appeared in any internal investigations, even when the eighties brought a firestorm to every New South Wales policeman or woman who’d ever brushed up against a biker in the street. I doubted Savet had anything to do with Sunday White, whether the two had ever even met. But I wanted to look into every possible avenue before I started speculating about what was most likely Sunday’s demise—her lifestyle.

I searched through the autopsy reports of each of Savet’s victims. I read his notes on each closing interview, before the perpetrator was handed over to the court system. I read Savet’s personnel record twice and spent the afternoon in the newspaper room reading up on the press coverage of his work.

I was losing interest in Savet. My motivation plummeted when I looked over at the television in the attendant’s box and saw a frazzled and track-marked Ashley Benfield falling into the arms of her blubbering parents at Sydney airport. I checked my phone. The captain had called me four times and many of the numbers under his I recognized as press.

I got up to leave and began lumping photographs of victims into their respective files. My legs felt heavy from hours of sitting. I picked up a photograph from the floor and sat looking at it as I worked my legs under the table, trying to get rid of the pins and needles in my feet. The girl in the photograph was Bonnie Melich. Her boyfriend had bludgeoned her to death when he discovered she was cheating with her boss. Her body was discovered in a torched car in the bush near Botany, not far from the airport.

I looked at the girl in the photograph. She was a gorgeous olive-skinned creature, unusually tall, standing in the doorway of the Lord Nelson in the Rocks with a basket of roses in her slender arms. I knew the place well, had begun plenty of pub crawls there in my cadet years. It was a good place for stag nights, too. You could make a lot of noise. The sandstone walls contained a good deal of ruckus.

I’d passed through that doorway where she stood hundreds of times. Could almost feel it around me as I looked at the girl. Smell the house-made beer. Bonnie Melich’s head was almost touching the top of the doorframe, though. Legs like stilts. I wondered how tall she was. I looked over at the autopsy report. Five nine. I looked at the girl in the photograph, then back at the autopsy report.

T
hey’d moved the bonfire site out into the back fields to dispose of some of the bracken and branches brought down in the storm. It was going to be big. Something about a big fire was magnetic to people, exciting, dangerous, even though the men had lumped stones in a huge circle around the pit to contain it, to stop it wandering into the bush.

As the sun sunk low behind the caravans Eadie sat watching the men build the woodpile up until it towered above them, a strange sense of foreboding in her chest. She hadn’t seen Skylar all day, had looked for her at Jackie’s van and in the breakfast area, even down at the public phone on the corner which she frequented, constantly out of credit. She knew the girl would come to the fire. Everyone had at some point that afternoon, to load coolers or spread out rugs, to admire the woodpile. Girls sunbaked in the warm fading light, their white bellies lolling on towels, passing oversized Coke bottles around a circle.

Skye came in the calm blue of twilight, Jackie at her side. The busted mouth gave her a worn and aged look. She hadn’t bothered with her hair, and it hung greasy and long about her shoulders. She went over to Eadie, and Jackie gave her a warning glance.

The two women stood side by side watching the men squeezing newspaper into the base of the pyre.

“I feel like we need to talk,” Eadie said. Skylar didn’t answer. Her eyes were on her feet. The girl wiped at her swollen eye and Eadie turned away, pretended not to notice.

“I can get you out of here. But you need to tell me how.”

“Let’s go to your place,” Skylar said. Eadie chewed her lip. She wanted to keep an eye on Jackie and Nick in case they pulled anything at the bonfire. It would be crowded. Dark. Everyone would be distracted by the flames. Nick sat watching her from a milk crate. But the girl looked on the edge. Eadie didn’t want her running off into the bush to be alone, or hitching a ride into town. Whatever she was going to witness tonight, she would need to do it with Skylar by her side.

The bush was pitch black, silhouetted against a red sky. Eadie put her arm around the girl and held her close.

“Come on,” she said. “I think I’ve got some Coolers back there.”

 

 

Juno stung. It was an all-body ache beginning in his brain and reaching right down into the pit of his bowels, flaring out at his fingertips like the licking of flames. He would grit his teeth and wince against the ache, but it was right there on time, always, whenever he remembered Eden Archer’s door. Rejection, without so much as a word to soften the blow.

It wasn’t like Juno had never been rejected before. He had, plenty of times. High school had been a half-decade-long rejection of his body and his soul, a slow and meticulous inventory of all the ways in which he didn’t fit with anyone who mattered, even the weird kids, the Goths, the computer nerds, and the drama geeks. He was far too ginger to ever fit in with the Goths, but he’d always liked their dark side, their hatred. Juno called up that old familiar hatred now as he watched Eden on the screen sitting in the caravan with the girl, Skylar.

Juno had begun to think that Eden might be able to see that he didn’t belong in the throwaway box. That, like her, he was different. He was valuable. Then the door had swung shut, taking only seconds in real life but in Juno’s mind hours. A slow rejection of his soul.

The girl was braiding Eden’s hair as the older woman sat on the floor by the bed. Juno leaned back against the wall of the van, shook his head, tried to pry loose the emotion from his gaze.
She means nothing to you. She’s just a cold and beautiful animal.

Juno wrenched open the van and drank in the cold night air. He needed to look at the sky.

 

 

Eadie picked at the carpet, her legs bent in the narrow space between the end of the bed and the wall of the bathroom annex. The girl’s braid wasn’t so tight this time. Her touch was almost gentle. Now and then the girl sipped from the West Coast Cooler at her side, her mouth making a seal on the glass rim and then popping when she drew a breath. The girl gathered strands from behind her ear, made her shiver.

“No man should ever lay his hand on you,” she said. No answer came. The girl took her hands from her hair. Eadie licked her lips and carried on.

“No man, no person, should ever tell you what you’re worth. I’ve been alone a long time, and you need to know that being alone is not . . . It’ll never . . .”

Eadie reached for the back of her neck, under her ear, where she felt a small but intense sting. She felt a lump, and then the carpet hard and scratchy under her nose as she slumped to the floor. She tried to right herself, exhaled in the dust. There was darkness.

 

 

The lights blasted into Hades’ bedroom, through his eyes, into his skull. The old man rolled out of bed, steadied himself on the floor, blinked against the stark white light that filled the room. Then the horn began. He heard a guttural groan leave his mouth. The horn came in one long deafening blast, then fell into a series of uneven hoots. Hades pulled open the drawer of his bedside table and reached into the darkness there.

Outside, the gray Commodore was pulled up to within inches of the knitting-needle rabbit, rigged with deer lights over its rusted frame. Adam White was leaning out the window, an elbow on the sill. Hades walked up to the driver’s door, reached in, and wrenched the man from his seat.

His fists were frail, arthritic, and full of badly healed fractures. But Hades still knew how to use them. The pain felt good. He lifted White by the collar of his shirt and punched him down again.
Try to put him into the ground
, Bear had always said.
Imagine you can bury him with your throw
.
Clench just before impact. Good. And again.
Bear had kept his promise, had taught him how to punch, stood over him while he gave it to a pimp with sticky fingers. But the big man had never been able to teach him when to stop.

Hades felt the old tingles of the Silence at the edges of his being, like a warm body threatening to envelop him in its embrace. He stood and breathed, looked down at the camera strapped to the man’s chest, a black eye watching him. He put a boot in the camera and felt it crunch under him, felt White’s breath leave him as his rib cage deflated.

“Put that on your fucking wireless,” Hades snarled.

White was laughing. Hades took the pistol from his pocket and put it into the man’s cheek so hard he felt the teeth beneath the blood-splattered flesh. He held him by the neck, pinned to the ground like a snake.

“I appreciate well-orchestrated mind games,” the old man said, breathing hard, trying to push back the Silence as it crept forward like a flood. “Oh, I do. But after a time you show some respect and finish a man.”

“I know what you did, Hades.”

“You don’t know shit.”

“I’m gonna haunt you,” White laughed, a loose tooth bending with his lip as he spoke. “I’m gonna haunt you like her ghost. Like my mother’s ghost.”

Hades saw that his hands were shaking, but he could not stop them. His right gripped the gun tighter and tighter, pulling down like a vise, and while his mind protested his fingers moved as though driven by some invisible force. He held White against the ground and looked at his eyes and saw Sunday there for the first time—her cheeky grin, the wildness there that had no explanation, that had no cure. Hades squeezed and squeezed, and at the same time his mind screamed out for his fingers to stop their pressure. There was sweat on the gun trigger. His skin slid.

Hades didn’t hear the car. Or the cop’s footsteps. He heard hurried breath first, then the crunch of gravel as the man slid to a stop, and when he looked up he saw the eye of Frank’s Browning pistol in the blinding light off the side of the car. The cop held up a hand, palm out, fingers splayed.

“Heinrich,” Frank said. “Come on now, old mate.”

“Just in the nick of time, detective,” Adam laughed.

“Put the gun down nice and slow.”

“You had enough time to do your job, boy,” Hades said, his eyes burning in the deer lights. “Now we do things my way.”

The trigger springs groaned.

“I found her,” Frank said, rushing forward. “Listen to me, Hades. I found her.”

The old man struggled to breathe. The trigger spring groaned again as he released his grip.

 

 

The first few moments were simply learning which way was up and which was down, learning the nature of the restraints that bound her wrists and ankles, learning how to think again. She was calling back the voice in her head that told her what to do, and when it returned from out of the redness and the pain it told her not to panic. That was always good advice.

Eadie opened her eyes, blinked while the blood and sweat that had run into them stung, cleared, subsided. She was upside down. Her head had fallen back and was looking downward at her hands. She recognized the concrete steel-rimmed trough that carried the pig entrails from the slaughter row down to the end of the kill house to be processed. Hard wet twine secured her wrists to a hook embedded in the trough. Above her, more twine secured her ankles to an iron rod, splaying her feet. Her whole body could be rotated, rolled along the line as different parts of her were cut away, lopped off, and tossed into plastic crates. Eadie swallowed. She was missing one of her back teeth.

“This is what you call the ultimate hangover,” Pea said.

Eadie turned and took in the woman across her arm. She reminded her of a squat, round soldier. There was a double-barreled shotgun pointed upward and leaning on her shoulder. Skylar stood by, unreadable, her body dwarfed by the oversized plastic apron hanging from her neck and the sty-cleaning gloves on her hands. She was wearing denim workman’s pants taken from the racks in the corner. She looked like the child she was. Eadie breathed in and out, blinking in the pain. She had drugs in her system. Xylazine. Her head and face had been battered. She’d been dragged, she guessed, by the raw feeling of her lower back.

“Have you got any idea who this is?” Pea asked, jerking a thumb at Skylar. Eadie licked her swollen lips, tasted blood and dirt.

“Skye . . .” Eadie tried to find the girl’s eyes. They were locked on the floor. “Skye.”

“This is my fucking kid.”

“Look at me,” Eadie said. She coughed. “Look. Skye.”

“People without kids don’t understand. You try to do the best for them. Always. From the moment they’re born. Skylar’s got everything she needs here,” Pea said, casting her eyes around the enormous room. “Everything she could ever want. She has food, and shelter, and a man who loves her. When he gets old and dies he’ll leave her this place. She’s set up here.”

Eadie panted as the woman approached her. Wondered if her ribs were broken. Her shirt was bunched against her armpits. It itched. How much pulling power did she have in her core right now? How much equilibrium would she have if she righted herself? She calculated the number of paces to the door. The distance her shout would reach. Where was the pendant camera? Probably caught and lifted off her head as she was dragged. Did that mean Juno had called Frank? Was Frank on his way? Eadie let her head hang back and looked at her wrists. They were bound tight, the skin bunched behind the twine. Bunched was good. She could shift the folds of skin under the twine one by one. With enough lubricant. With enough force.

“Pieces of shit like you come in and think you’re offering her a better life,” Pea said. The fat woman crouched by her side, flipped the weapon in her arms. “Try to play Mummy Bear where you’re not wanted—or needed. Your own mother should have told you that sticking your nose in the wrong place will get it broken.”

Eadie had taken a few good knocks to the face, but being upside down magnified the experience. She reeled from the butt of the gun and heard herself wail. It was the first time she’d wanted to cry in years. It wasn’t emotion, no. Chemicals had flooded her brain, pounded into her face, made her want to draw up her lips and sob. A command was given, and Skylar stepped into the trough. Eadie looked up at the girl’s feet. Blood gushed up her cheek, into her hair, along her arm. She strained at the twine at her wrists.

“You don’t have to, Skye. You don’t. Have to.”

“You need to learn that your fantasies about the outside world are all bullshit, Skylar,” Pea said, tying the ribbon at the girl’s waist, pulling the apron tight against her body. “Your place is here. And the way you keep trying to follow these stray cats out the door is just getting them all killed. It’s time to grow up. You’d be dead out there without your man, without me, without a cent to your fucking name, no matter what you think you know about the world.”

Skye’s legs were trembling. Eadie could see them beyond her own white fingers.

“What did you think you were going to do? Huh?” Pea snorted. “Start again in the big bad city? Put on a suit and be an office girl? Drink martinis at lunch? You didn’t even make it through high school, baby. You’d have failed before you opened your fucking mouth. People would know what you are, Skye.”

Skylar was trembling harder. Eadie struggled to breathe.

“You’re not a friend to these girls, Skye. Look what you’ve done to them,” Pea murmured. “We’re not friendly people. We’re bad people. And we belong here, with our own kind.”

“Skylar, listen!” Eadie screamed.

“Cut her pants off.”

Skye took a pair of scissors from the front pocket of the apron. She slid the blade into the waist of Eadie’s jeans. The blade was warm. Eadie strained against the ties, shook her arm so that the blood ran down her wrist. Her skin was on fire.