The Darkening (40 page)

‘It’s fine. Fine.’

‘You’re bleeding.’

Laine blinked, and raised her fingers to her cheek. They came away lightly dotted with red. Rowena stood and hurried to reach under the counter.

‘I’m fine, it’s nothing.’

Was I going to
kiss
her? What was I thinking?

Rowena returned with a tissue. ‘Here . . .’

She gently reached for Laine’s cheek. Laine fought the urge to shrink back from her. Rowena pressed the tissue onto Laine’s skin. The scratch pulsed in new pain.

I’m sorry, she mouthed.

Laine forced a smile - forget it - and finally grabbed her phone and hit the green button. ‘Hello?’

‘Mrs Laine Boye?’

‘Ms Boye, yes.’

‘Ms Boye. Okay. This is Detective Sergeant Kaye Waller from Police Headquarters. I need to ask you a couple of questions. Is now a good time?’

Rowena frowned as she pulled away the tissue. A flecked line of blood on the white gauze.

‘One second.’ Laine covered the phone with her hand. ‘I’m sorry, I have to go outside and . . .’

Rowena nodded. ‘Sure. But come back in and I’ll put some pawpaw ointment on that. I’m so sorry . . .’

Laine stepped outside. The door shut behind her. Rain tattled on the awning overhead.

‘Sorry. Go ahead.’

‘Ms Boye, can I ask you about your movements last night?’

‘What’s going on?’

‘If you could please tell me what you did last night, and the times.’

Laine’s heart started thudding again. She turned around.

In the back of the store, Rowena was frowning, hands busily tidying.

‘Ms Boye?’

‘I went to the Anglican - what do you call it? Parsonage? - here in Tallong about eight or so and was there with Reverend Anand till, I guess, ten?’

The detective asked a few questions to confirm the times, to confirm she drove straight there and back, to confirm what make of car she owned.

‘And I have a Nicholas Close here,’ said Detective Waller. ‘He wants to talk to you.’

Laine looked into the shop. Rowena was out of sight.

‘Sure.’

She took the opportunity to slip away into the rain.

Nicholas leaned against the cold black granite of the Police Headquarters building, wanting desperately to sit.

Rain was hitting Roma Street so heavily that he wouldn’t have been surprised to see the tarmac. Only by pressing himself against the building could he get any cover from the high, clipped-wing awnings. The metal bench seats out front were all exposed to the rain and rang dully as the heavy drops struck them. Nicholas shut his eyes, figuring anyone passing would take him for a swaying vagrant too pitiful to charge.

For the last half-hour, he’d been trying not to watch a middle-aged man on the footpath in front of him reel under a barrage of invisible punches, fall to the ground, heave and jerk as he was struck by unseen kicks to his kidneys, his groin, his head. The man’s face was white and wide with terror and, under the steady bombardment of ethereal steel-tipped toes, caved in and bloodied. His eyes came out. His jaw snapped. His fingers bent and their bones broke through skin. Gradually, he stopped his voiceless wailing, spasmed briefly, and was still. Then there was a silent edit in the spool of his death and he was suddenly swaying whole and seemingly drunk beside the steel bench in front of Nicholas, his ghostly clothes dry despite the downpour . . . and the grisly replay of his murder began again.

Nicholas was too exhausted to lift his feet and find another spot to wait. It was now well after eleven. His hour and a half in the police building had been almost solid questioning, punctuated with short breaks when the detectives left him alone. He supposed the pauses were designed to allow him to panic and consider confessing. Instead, they gave him time to divine from the questions what might have happened to Hannah Gerlic’s sister, Miriam.

Detective Waller and a male detective had tag-teamed the interview. Each asked slow, deliberate sets of questions: some were repeated over and over; some were rephrased or amalgamated with others; some came out of the blue to catch him off guard. Nicholas’s favourite had been: ‘Why did she take your cigarettes?’ He’d chewed over the cleverness of that while he leaned against the ice-cold wall, recalling how carefully Waller had watched his response. ‘I never saw her,’ he’d replied truthfully. He supposed Waller had been hoping for ‘I don’t smoke’ or better yet, ‘I don’t know, but the little bitch has still got ’em’.

‘When you picked up Hannah Gerlic, was she alone?’ Waller had asked.

‘Yes.’

Nicholas guessed that this was unusual and Hannah habitually walked home with Miriam.

‘What were the two girls arguing about?’ asked Waller.

‘Hannah never spoke to me.’

The girls were having a fight. That explained their separation.

‘Was Miriam still in her school uniform when you dropped Hannah home?’

‘I never saw Miriam.’

Miriam had made it home after school, but she’d gone missing afterwards - sometime through the night.

‘You say you were at the presbytery with Reverend Anand and Laine Boye. Till when?’

‘I don’t know. Ten or so.’

‘Did you drive straight home?’

‘Yes.’

‘Did you stop at any shops? Petrol station? Parks?’

‘No.’

He was left alone in the room then for a quarter of an hour, before Waller came in again, as friendly as if they’d never laid eyes on one another.

‘You’re free to go, sir. There’s a taxi rank in the Transit Centre across the road.’

Without realising why, he’d asked her to phone Laine Boye.

And so now he was hugging the police building’s front wall, trying to stay dry. He lifted his fingers to his neck. The wooden beads felt warm. His back against the stone felt frozen.

Eventually, to his surprise, Laine arrived.

The car’s tyres hissed on the road. Nicholas slumped in the passenger seat. They drove in silence for a long while. He looked at Laine. Her eyes were as grey as the sky.

‘How do you feel?’ he asked.

Laine glanced at him. A flash of . . . what? Self-consciousness?

‘What do you mean?’ she replied.

‘I mean, how do you feel?’

The rainy-day traffic was stop-start and the cars inched ahead like cattle towards a crush. She didn’t answer, so he spoke again.

‘There are nights I still dream that Cate is lying beside me. And then I wake up. And at that moment when I . . . remember . . . I feel like I feel now. Heavy.’ He watched the rainy world sliding idly by. ‘Like if you laid me on the ground I’d just sink into the earth.’

Laine drove, grim-faced.

‘I used to feel like that,’ she said. ‘Then Gavin killed himself.’

He looked back at her. Her profile was strong and fine. Hers was a face out of antiquity, anachronistic. She should have been born in a city of Renaissance sculptors, or the daughter of some Pharaoh, not today when culture was a thousand hits on YouTube. No wonder she was always angry.

As if feeling his gaze, she turned suddenly to face him. ‘Did you love her?’ she asked. ‘Cate?’

Nicholas nodded. ‘Very much.’

Laine lifted her chin. ‘You said last night that you can see . . .’ She hesitated. ‘That you see ghosts. Did you ever see her? Cate? After she died?’

Nicholas was quiet. For some reason, this seemed deeply personal, like a new lover’s questions about past partners. He didn’t want to answer. But his tongue betrayed him. ‘Yes.’

Laine drew a long breath through her nostrils. ‘You must be so sad.’

He thought about that. ‘I’m not sad. I’m angry.’

Laine smiled. ‘I was angry. Now I’m sad.’ She flicked on the indicator. ‘Aren’t we a pair?’

The car turned onto Coronation Drive, and their speed picked up.

‘Where am I taking you?’ she asked.

Before he could think why, he answered, ‘The church.’

She nodded, checked her mirrors and changed lanes. As she turned, Nicholas saw a small cut on her cheek.

‘What happened to your face?’ he asked, and guessed: ‘Mrs Boye?’

‘Yes.’

Her tone said the talking, for now, was over.

Outside the church, a group of middle-aged and elderly men and women huddled under umbrellas, hardly moving, heads turning this way and that. To Nicholas they looked like a team of mallard ducks - dignified and vulnerable. Their heads all followed Laine’s car as it slowed and stopped. He would have been unsurprised if they’d sprouted wings and fled, honking forlornly. He wound down his window. ‘Hi. The rectory’s around the side.’

An old man with a long face and wide, hairy nostrils looked down at him. ‘We do know.’

Nicholas shook his head - then why . . . ?

‘The reverend is dead, and his replacement is in hospital.’

‘Who?’ asked Nicholas. ‘Pritam? Reverend Anand’s in hospital?’

An old woman with sagging wattles looked at him as if he were a fool. ‘Do you know any other replacement? We’re discussing what to do.’

Nicholas looked at Laine.

At that moment, Laine’s grey eyes rolled back in her head and she sank into her seat.

25

H
annah Gerlic sat in her beanbag stroking Swizzle. The cat’s girth was growing in direct proportion to his unwillingness to go outside. Hannah liked his warmth on her lap. If she thought about nothing but the immediate task of scratching behind Swizzle’s ears and keeping the rumbly motor inside him purring, things were okay.

Her bottom hurt where her father had hit her for lying. Just thinking of how his face had been a twisted fist at once so angry and terrified made her want to start crying all over again.

She had been dragged up from the depths of ugly sleep by motion, sliding. She’d opened her eyes and looked right up into the pale, angry, scared face of her father - a man whose soft features were usually buried in a book or newspaper or smiling over his wife’s shoulder while they danced in their pyjamas - a sight that made their daughters roll their eyes. This morning her father took a moment to process the empty bed, the picture frame on the floor, his youngest daughter blinking sleepily on it, before whispering, ‘Where’s your sister?’ The memory of the spiders tumbled back as heavily and hard as stones off a tip truck, and Hannah started to bawl. Her father asked her again and again until Hannah finally stuttered through sobs, ‘The spiders took her.’

Before she could explain that she’d had no choice, that if she’d let them in she’d be dead too, or if she’d screamed he and Mum would be, her father smacked her. Hard. And stalked out of the room.

Hannah hung around in a distant orbit as her parents set fire to the morning with raging phone calls, storming to the car and screeching away, storming back, standing at the door and yelling for Miriam. The fire died and became something quiet and tight-lipped. When Hannah heard her name mentioned, it was quickly snapped up by her father hissing something about ‘ridiculous dreams’.

It
was
ridiculous that a black, silent army of spiders would come in the dead of night to steal one girl and, bested, would take her older sister. But it was true. So Hannah sat in the beanbag, nursing Swizzle and her still-stinging bum, trying not to think about what had happened to Miriam after the spiders got her. She was still in her beanbag when the police came. When the lady police officer came over and asked Hannah if she’d heard any funny noises in the night, Hannah knew she would be a fool to say anything but ‘No’.