If God’s path hadn’t led Matthew here, then clothing design would have been the dream he followed. Luckily, the Lord had understood the temptations along that path would have led to Matthew’s downfall. Instead, he’d guided him in a new direction, one that pushed him into the position of leader and counselor, brother and friend.
“Do you have a clear picture in your mind?”
Andrew nodded, and Matthew tried not to feel the tingle from his nerve endings at the softness of Andrew’s hand beneath his, the warmth radiating out was for Justine’s benefit only. It would be sacrilege to take enjoyment in such a thing.
“Now, think of standing in front of the altar and vowing before God to take her as your wife. Remember the love that you held in your heart for her on that day.”
Andrew nodded his head, dislodging the strands of sweat-soaked hair so that they fell over his closed eyes. “I remember. Until our daughter was born, that was the greatest moment of my life.”
“The love you held for Justine on that day, the love you feel for your daughter, hasn’t gone anywhere,” Matthew said. “Those emotions are still sitting in your heart, waiting for the chance to be expressed. In the intervening years, you’ve coated them with dalliances that the Lord tested you with, and which you failed. Just because you’ve made mistakes, doesn’t mean you can’t wipe those sins away to reveal the love that’s been present all along.”
While Matthew waited for Andrew’s expression to change, watching for a signal to show that he’d heard and understood, he felt the curl of a finger against his palm. The stroke of Andrew’s finger. He saw that Andrew was looking at him from the corner of his eye, seeking a reaction.
Disgust flooded up through him. Matthew’s nostrils filled with the heavy metallic scent of blood while bile burned a trail up the back of his throat. His heart beat sped up, racing to pump oxygen out to muscles that had no use for it, frozen into immobility from dread and anger.
Why couldn’t they ever see that he wasn’t one of them?
If Matthew drew his hand back and curled his lip, like a fat spider had just tickled his palm, then all the work he’d put into Andrew this week would be destroyed in one fell swoop. He’d stay, they always stayed the course until the bitter end, but there would be no chance to reach him. If Matthew reacted the way his body wanted to, then Andrew would walk out of the conversion program as gay as he’d been the day he entered.
“Don’t do that,” Matthew said, instead of reacting. Kudos to himself, there wasn’t a trace of disgust in his voice. He gently pulled his hand back, not a recoil of horror but a slow withdrawal. “I understand that the urge is there, but the life tools that we’re giving you here each day will allow you to resist if you want to.”
He waited for a long minute, the silence hanging heavy in the air between them. “I know you want to resist, Andrew. Otherwise, you wouldn’t be here.”
“Justine made me come here.” The undercurrent of resentment made the words seem filled with hate. Matthew knew it wasn’t hate though, far from it. The childish retort spoke of an infant soul lost in a grown-up world. A toddler who wanted to do what felt good, rather than be instructed to do what was right.
As soon as Andrew started adulting, he’d begin to understand the program. This was the part of him that held him back, not the perverted urges of the flesh but the childish stubbornness of his mind.
“You were a good enough man to listen to your wife and seek help when you needed it,” Matthew said. His voice had dropped into a sing-song cadence, the one that his wife Emilia called hypnotism. It made him laugh even though hypnosis was on his list of evil tricks. “If you stay firm and work with the program, I have no doubt that you’ll come out the other side a changed man.”
Andrew’s lower lip still pouted out, but he nodded and stood to leave. “I suppose it’s too late to get my deposit back, anyway, so I’ll be here for the long haul.”
“You’ll be better for it.” Matthew nodded in encouragement and Andrew walked out the door.
As soon as he’d gone, Matthew put his head into his hands and blew air in a steady stream out through his lips. Each year, there seemed to be more men resistant to accepting the changes that were possible. Before the day was out, there’d be another man through his office with the same complaint, like clockwork.
Once upon a time, men came to this program full of shame, actively seeking change. Now they came because someone else wanted them to, and the difference landed straight in front of Matthew’s desk.
Still, the world had been heading this way for as long as Matthew could remember. Everyone he knew complained of working longer hours just to achieve the same results. Lower pay, harder work.
When he was a kid, he’d got a job at the supermarket at age fourteen that easily put food on the table. That was at children’s rates and only working a few hours. Now, he spent three full days working at adult wages just to clear the grocery bill.
His tastes hadn’t changed, everything just became more expensive over time. Milk, lamb, beef. They’d once been as cheap as chips because they were all locally sourced, locally grown. That was still the case, but now the local supermarkets were competing for the same produce with the exporters. Paying overseas prices for something that grew up down the road rankled Matthew. All people mattered but the ones next door should matter first, not be pushed aside while the farmers chased the almighty dollar.
God would provide. Matthew believed that sentiment with his whole heart, but he’d be ashamed to task the almighty father with paying his family’s bills. If a man couldn’t take care of that for himself, then what right did he have to call himself a man?
None.
Matthew pushed his chair back from the table and stood, walking across to the window to look down upon the fields. A meditation class sat out on the lawn, trying to find their contemplative center in the closest thing they had to nature.
The director of the program would have rolled in his grave to see the hippy-dippy nonsense that they had going on nowadays. Meditation and yoga where once they’d had weight lifting and gritted teeth.
Of course, once upon a time, Matthew had stood at this window, feeling the silken scratch of lace against his upper leg.
Times had changed.
Chapter Nine
The house at the address on file for Shannon Rickards squatted like an ugly toad on the overgrown section. The white-painted plasterboard walls had absorbed the rain to grow damp patches of black spotted mildew, so the whole home appeared to be dull gray.
The cheap construction and the plain box layout indicated the house had originally been built as state housing. Unlike the other comparable homes interspersed along the street, it looked like no one at this address had ever bothered to try to make it appear anything more.
Long tufts of grass on the front lawn looked like islands separated by hardened dirt, baked into concrete by the sun. Despite the absence of any regular watering, some plants flourished along the edges of the property. The purple heads of Valerian bloomed in the shade offered by the sagging, wooden fence.
Although opposite the property, a row of tilt slab buildings indicated an industrial bent to the area, further down the road the gray blocks morphed back into homes and then ended at the corner in a large school, pupils running and screaming with laughter in the front parking lot.
Ngaire wondered if the parole board realized that they’d placed a child murderer near a new crop of victims. Given how long it had been since Shannon Rickards committed her crime, perhaps nobody had bothered to keep tabs on the layout of the area or just hadn’t cared enough to force a woman from her permanent home.
“Jesus,” Deb said, hand frozen ready to knock. “Look at that.”
She pointed to an old, overgrown shed with fresh yellow paint dribbling down the sides. Kid killer. The lichen on the ancient wood was so thick, the whole display could probably be peeled off when it dried.
“Nice touch for the neighborhood. I wonder what sp
arked that decoration,” Ngaire said. She pulled out her camera and took a couple of quick photos. Not good enough for court evidence, but at least they were a record in case someone cleaned it up.
“It might just be a regular thing,” Deb remarked, pointing to a portion of the fence recently painted. “Since there’s a school down the road, it could be teenagers doing it on a dare.”
Another patch farther along had also been retouched, although long ago. The sunlight was altering the color of the topmost layer so that the old graffiti was starting to show through once more. Same message.
Deb knocked on the door, and they waited on the stoop while somebody shuffled about inside. Enough time passed that Deb was getting ready to try again when the door finally pulled open a crack. A chain shone with the fresh gleam of new silver across the gap beneath a suspicious eye.
“Mr. Rickards?” Deb pulled her ID out of her back pocket and flashed it at him as though the fact they were police was in any doubt. “Is your daughter Shannon available?”
“What’s it about?”
“She’s not in any trouble, Mr. Rickards,” Ngaire hastened to assure him. “We’re following up on an old missing persons’ report for her boyfriend at the time. It was lodged back in ‘81.”
The rheumy eye at the door blinked. The door closed and there was a long gap before they could hear the chain being pulled across and the door opened again.
An old man, his shoulders beaten down with age and poverty, stood in a skivvy and a pair of sweatpants. The clothes were freshly laundered but showing the popped seams and running threads of age.
“Come on in then,” he growled, standing in their path, so Deb had to gently push him aside to gain entry. “I’ll go get Shannon.”
He sighed and stood stock still in the hallway despite his words. When he pushed the long strands of a comb-over away from his forehead, the back of hand showed the advanced liver spots of old age and not enough attention paid to health.
“She’ll be upset, if it’s about that lad, Sam,” he said. “You be kind to her. My Shannon’s had enough shit to deal with in this life.”
The rumble of affection across his face flicked him back through time like he was once again a proud father being handed a newborn baby. His eyes brightened, and the corner of his lips curled into a tiny smile. Then he turned to fetch his daughter, and his face dropped back into shadows.
“You can take a seat in there.” He pointed into a room to the right-hand side with two sofas, two puffy chairs, and a TV blasting color from the corner without any accompanying sound.
The slow shuffle of his slippered feet up the hallway faded away into nothing and then expanded into two sets of footsteps. A pit of dread pulled at Ngaire’s stomach. The relentless poverty of the household set her teeth on edge.
Not that she hadn’t seen worse—families living without electricity, without a fridge to keep food from going off. When she was growing up, her own situation hadn’t been much different. One parent unemployed and the other believing that acting in a small theater house would somehow explode into a career.
Her mother’s pride had made her keep the house well-maintained and nag Ngaire’s dad into keeping the lawns mowed and gardens trimmed. When she left, the house showed her absence. Ngaire didn’t know how to keep it nice, and her father didn’t care. When he’d moved to the North Island, his standards slipped even further. The home he lived in now should have been condemned years ago, more a part of the foliage of the bush than a structure built to accommodate.
“Dad said you wanted to talk to me about Sam?”
The woman in front of them was tall, towering somewhere between five-eleven or a flat six feet tall. The hunched stoop of her father probably passed those genes on. Although he was shorter now, once upon a time, he would have had a few inches on his daughter.
Her graying hair was clipped short, a shaggy cut that could have been in fashion but more likely indicated it had been cut at home. Although her lined face showed the passage of years, her skin wasn’t discolored or blemished. In a different setting, she would have looked regal, a matriarch. Here, she just looked out of place.
“Shannon Rickards?” Ngaire asked, and Mr. Rickards snorted.
“Who the bloody hell else do you think it is?” he said. “After I said I’d fetch her and all.”
“Quiet, Dad,” Shannon chided him. “Watch your telly.”
He sat on the sofa nearest the set and glared at Ngaire until she stepped out of his line of sight. Although he stared at the TV most of his attention seemed to be focused on the three women. His eyes flicked to and fro, charting every movement as though they were just another soap opera.
“Would you like to take a seat?” Deb asked. “We might have some bad news.”
Again, a snort from the father, but Shannon meekly sat as she was told. Ngaire could see the years of imprisonment forming her compliance. After the amount of time she’d served, it either showed up as obedience or complete defiance. The obedient ones tended to be released earlier and did better on parole.
“We’ve located the remains of a body on the Port Hills,” Ngaire said. “Due to the age and artifacts found with the skeleton, we believe that it’s Sam Andie.”
Ngaire expected the quick intake of breath that usually accompanied bad news. No matter how much people thought they’d prepared for it, hearing the words aloud often caused a physical reaction that caught many off guard.
Shannon nodded, and her face pulled tighter where her jaw clenched hard together. Otherwise, she remained impassive, looking for Ngaire to continue when she’d stopped to give the woman a chance to process the information.
Deb stepped forward, a heightening instinct for trouble displayed in her rigid posture. “You don’t seem surprised.”
“I told her what youse was here about, that’s why,” Mr. Rickards said. “Don’t you go accusing my Shannon of being unfeeling.”
“Why do you think it’s Sam?” Shannon asked as though her father hadn’t spoken.
Mr. Rickards muttered to himself for a moment, then stood up and announced he was going to make some tea.
When he’d passed out of the room, Deb continued, “The body had a badge nearby from the Springbok tour. That seemed to be around the date that Sam went missing.”
Shannon nodded. “Sam and I protested at the first test match, in Christchurch. Afterward, we got separated. I was locked up for breach of peace and Sam was ejected from the grounds. We’d managed to get onto the pitch—thought we were going to be able to stop the game altogether for a while, just like Hamilton—then the police rounded us up and tossed us out.”
“Why were you arrested if Sam was let go?”
Shannon ducked her head and smiled. “Because Sam had the good sense not to spit at the cops, and I didn’t. He’d got a strike on the head with a baton by that stage and wasn’t in the mood for any more.”
“Sam was hurt?” Ngaire didn’t know why she was so surprised by the information, but it pulled her off-center. “Did he get medical attention?”
The clenched muscles in Shannon’s jaw softened into confusion at the question. “I don’t know.” She shrugged. “I was carted away too quickly to see what happened after and they wouldn’t let me call anyone for ages. The last I saw of Sam, he was standing on the street outside the stadium, blood trickling down his face.”
Shannon ducked her head again, this time not to hide a smile but tears. She pulled a handkerchief from her sleeve and blew her nose loudly, then cleared her throat as if to speak, but said nothing.
“Here we go. A lovely cuppa will cheer you up,” Mr. Rickards said. He plonked a tea tray down in front of Shannon and Ngaire noticed with amusement that for the large pot of tea he’d made, there was only the one cup. “Don’t let them upset you, love,” he whispered, leaning forward to press a kiss on his daughter’s cheek.
“Thanks, Dad. I won’t.”
“Did anyone ever talk to you about Sam in the days afterward?” Ngai
re asked. When Shannon shook her head, she clarified, “So, you had no involvement in the case at all?”
“I don’t think there was a case,” Shannon said, leaning forward to pour a cup of tea. She held it in her hands, blowing on the surface to cool it, though she didn’t take a sip.
“What do you mean?” Deb was growing restless, shifting from one foot to the other.
“Nobody spoke to me at all,” Shannon said. “There was no follow up, even though I reported Sam missing as well as his parents. The police took a statement, but didn’t seem the slightest bit interested. I kept in touch with Sam’s folks for a while, until…”
Shannon broke off her sentence to take a sip from her tea and winced, either at the heat or the taste. She popped the cup back down into its saucer and clasped her hands, resting them on her knees.
“When I was arrested for…” she trailed off again, then cleared her throat. “When I was arrested for the murders, I still thought that the police might ask me more questions about Sam while I was in jail. I waited for them to, I wanted them to, but it was like the reports vanished into thin air.”
She reached forward for the cup again and this time drained its contents then held the empty cup between her hands. Shannon stared into it as she spoke, reading non-existent tea leaves.
“When Mr. Andie visited me in jail, before the sentencing, I asked him about Sam and the case, to see what was happening. He told me that they’d said they weren’t actively pursuing the case. They thought he’d just got sick of living with his parents and run away.” Shannon stared into space for a moment. “Sam would never have done that. It was completely against his nature.”
“Didn’t his parents chase up?” Ngaire leaned forward, trying to catch Shannon’s eye to no avail. “When Sam stayed missing, didn’t they ever contact the police and insist they treat it seriously?”
“I’m guessing since you asked me that, the files say they didn’t.” Shannon looked up then, tipping a wry grin at Ngaire before staring back down into the empty teacup. “I don’t know what happened first hand since Mr. Andie’s first visit was the last one. I presumed that they didn’t really care enough to pursue it.” She shrugged. “Maybe they would have made a big deal if a body had been found back then, but they weren’t going to search for him by themselves. They actively wanted Sam out of their lives so him disappearing was probably a relief.”
The Only Secret Left to Keep Page 6
