The Wife and the Widow

by Christian White

  Eckman crossed the room and drew the curtain from left to right, revealing a large white room on the other side of the glass – something between an operating theatre and an industrial freezer. A strip of fluorescent lights buzzed above a bank of heavy steel mortuary drawers. In the middle of the room was a steel gurney. Beneath it, against the stark tiled floor, was a drainage hole. On top of the gurney lay a body, wrapped head to toe in a plastic sheet. The sheet was pink.

  Why pink? Kate wondered, as if it mattered.

  An unusually tall medical technician was standing next to the body. He wore powdery pink latex gloves and a matching paper cap. It was cold enough to see the man’s breath. He reached across the body and folded the sheet down twice, first to the neck, then the pelvis.

  Kate had half expected the body to look as though it was sleeping. It didn’t. It just looked dead. Upon seeing it, a wave of heat swept over her. The skin was ghostly, wrinkled and waterlogged. The eyes were closed, but the mouth was open. There was a long narrow slit across the neck – a second mouth, lips lightly parted.

  She wondered if fish might have eaten some of John while he was in the water, mostly because she couldn’t stop herself wondering. She had heard that could happen. It made her think about a trip the family took to Bali years ago. John had dangled his feet inside a tank of Garra rufa fish. They swarmed to him, and he giggled as they chewed on his dead skin, tickling his feet.

  ‘I want to go in there,’ she said.

  ‘I’m afraid that’s not possible,’ Eckman told her. ‘This’ll sound a bit morbid, but technically the body is still considered police evidence and we need to avoid any chance of contamination.’

  ‘It doesn’t sound morbid. It sounds ridiculous.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Who did this?’

  ‘We’re looking into it, Mrs Keddie. We have several leads at various stages of development.’

  ‘Who did this to him?’ She wasn’t asking Eckman now, but the universe, which suddenly seemed like some vicious schoolyard bully, throwing rocks at passing cars without thought of consequences.

  ‘Is it him?’ Eckman asked. ‘Is it your husband?’

  The word formed in her mouth, round and full and total, but she couldn’t manage to get it out.

  ‘Mrs Keddie?’

  ‘… Yes.’

  ‘I’m very sorry,’ Eckman said. ‘But for it to count as a formal identification you’ll need to state the deceased’s name.’

  ‘I can’t … I…’

  It hit her harder than she had anticipated. She had been holding out hope. Actual hope. This might have been a mistake, a misidentification, a misunderstanding, but it was none of those things. This was real. This was happening.

  ‘Do you need a moment?’ Eckman asked.

  Her knees stiffened under her and for a moment she saw herself pitching forward, cracking her skull on the glass. Then she felt a hand take hers. For a startled, intimate moment, she thought it was Eckman. But when she turned, she saw Fisher standing beside her, staring through the glass.

  ‘His name is John Morgan Keddie,’ Fisher said. ‘That’s him. That’s my son.’

  * * *

  They didn’t talk on the way to the motel. Their home for the night would be the Blue Whale Motor Inn. Eckman told them they wouldn’t be able to stay at their holiday house for a few days because it was being searched, scanned and dusted. When Fisher called the motel to check if they had any vacancies, the man on the other end of the line said, ‘Mate, this time of year all we’ve got is vacancies.’

  It wasn’t hard to see why. The motel was marked by a giant fibreglass whale on the front lawn. It wasn’t a blue, as you’d expect, but an orca, positioned in a permanent breach, speckled with a decade’s worth of bird shit. It must have been ugly when it was first erected, but now, after weathering years of wild storms, baking heat and salty air, it had become an eyesore. The black and white paint had chipped and flaked away, revealing a faded red underbelly that looked like old blood. One eye was rotting, the other completely gone.

  Kate felt a twang of guilt staying there without Mia. Her daughter was obsessed with the fibreglass whale and was convinced that staying in one of the rooms would be like sleeping under water. The walls would be made of glass, behind which fish and eels would swim. John had explained to her that it was just an ordinary motel, likely full of stale sheets, bad reception and mysterious stains on the mattresses. The most she could hope for would be an alarm clock shaped like a seashell or an aquatic-themed shower curtain. Mia held out hope.

  It hurt to think about Mia. She couldn’t even think about having that conversation with her daughter, about the avalanche it would cause. Pam probably would have told her. Fisher had called his wife from the hospital car park, Kate watching him from inside the Lexus as light rain covered up the windows. He had climbed back into the car and said, ‘It’s done.’

  She could almost hear Pam saying: Your daddy is up in heaven now, with Jesus and Mary and Charlie (Charlie was Mia’s pet rabbit, who met a sudden end when he hopped through their front gate and into heavy morning traffic). Maybe it was better for Mia to hear it that way. Pam would certainly be gentler with her. Still, as Kate thought about it, John’s words crept in.

  ‘If we don’t talk about the monsters in this world…’ she said aloud.

  ‘What’s that, love?’ Fisher asked.

  ‘Nothing.’

  When they reached the motel, Kate parked in the shadow of the orca. They collected their keys from reception and, without a word, separated. There were no fish swimming inside the walls of her room, Kate could now confirm. The walls were made of cheap plasterboard, the bed was too soft, and the air smelled damp. Still, it was a warm place away from the thumping wind coming off the ocean.

  She put the DO NOT DISTURB sign on the door, sat down on the end of the bed and tried to cry. She had been carrying around a live emotional hand grenade all day, and if she didn’t pull the pin out and toss it soon, it might just go off in her hands. Nothing came out. She might have been in shock, or she might have been broken.

  Her phone rang a couple of minutes later. Mia was calling. Feeling like the world’s worst mother, Kate didn’t pick up.

  12

  THE WIFE

  ‘Just because the victim was from out of town, doesn’t mean that the killer is,’ Lori declared loudly. She was uncharacteristically chipper, waving her fork at Abby as if it was a magic wand.

  For better or worse – usually worse – the Gilpins were a sit-down-for-dinner type of family. Abby would have been happy eating all her meals in front of the TV. That’s how she spent her childhood and she turned out okay. But family time was important to Ray. He envisioned a half-hour each night where those closest to him passed the salt around the table like a conch shell, talking about their hopes and dreams and fears. It rarely worked out that way. When the kids were small, dinner had often stretched to an hour as Ray got caught up telling a story while Abby fetched everyone an extra scoop of neapolitan. But when Eddie and Lori hit puberty, family time became dinner with strangers.

  Nowadays, the way it usually worked was that Abby and Ray would make stilted conversation, painfully drawing information out of their children. It was like taking water from a well with a bendy-straw. Eddie moved food around on his plate. Lori cast brooding gazes across the table and Abby speed-ate her way to the finish.

  Tonight was different. The body had Lori talking. She was perched forward on her chair, commanding the attention of the room.

  ‘The killer could be someone we know,’ she said. ‘This might not even be their first victim. They might do this all the time. They might have lured hundreds of people to the island then fed their bodies to the sharks in Elk Harbour, but this time the cops beat the sharks to the body, and—’

  ‘Take a breath, honey,’ Abby said.

  ‘All I’m saying is, that makes a lot of sense in my mind,’ Lori said. ‘What do you think, Dad?’

 
Ray sat across from her, furiously covering his meal with salt. It was Abby’s turn to cook and a chef she was not. She’d put some packet fettuccine in carbonara sauce on the stove and scooped whatever hadn’t stuck to the pot into four bowls. Each was a messy and unappetising tangle of limp, creamy noodles.

  ‘I think there has to be something lighter to discuss at the dinner table,’ he said, and shifted gears. ‘How was school today, Eddie?’

  Eddie was deep in thought, staring vaguely into the mouth of a Coca-Cola can, hood pulled up so high and tight that his peripheral vision must have been cut off. He didn’t reply to his father.

  ‘Earth to Eddie,’ Ray said, clicking his fingers.

  Eddie flinched, looked up blinking and muttered, ‘Huh?’

  Lori made a show of rolling her eyes. ‘One of Mum’s true crime books is happening right here on the island and my brother is sleeping through it.’ She plugged her mouth with a forkful of pasta, swallowed hard to get it down, then said, ‘You know who the killer could be? Denny Chow. You know him, Eddie, he’s in your year at school.’

  ‘Oh yeah that guy’s weird,’ Eddie said. ‘He’s schizoid or something. He came to class last week with a big stain on his butt. It looked like he’d shat himself and was just walking around with it in his pants.’

  ‘Well that rules Denny Chow out, then,’ Abby said. ‘Whenever they interview the neighbour of a serial killer they always say, He seemed like such a normal guy. It’s never: Yeah, I knew he was a deranged killer because he had shit in his pants.’

  Lori laughed. It sounded unfamiliar, like an exotic bird call. Abby hadn’t heard it in far too long.

  ‘I’m serious,’ Abby said. ‘Whoever did this will seem normal.’

  ‘I guess that rules you out,’ Lori said.

  ‘Ditto.’

  ‘Maybe it has something to do with the Melbourne mafia,’ Lori said. ‘The victim might have owed them a gambling debt and when he wouldn’t pay it off, they, you know, made him sleep with the fishes.’

  Abby rose to fetch herself a beer. Her legs spasmed with pain as she pulled herself upright. She’d overdone it on her run. On her way to the fridge, she turned to Ray. ‘Biller told me something sort of weird about the ferry terminal out near where the body was found. He said it was a gay beat. Have you heard about that?’

  ‘That was the rumour when I a kid’ he said with a shrug. ‘But people also said there’s a crocodile in Blue Lake, a drug ring operating out of the lighthouse, and a family of dwarves with giant heads that live in tunnels under the saltmarsh and come out at night to eat children.’

  ‘The Melonheads,’ Lori said, nodding. ‘I’ve heard that one too.’

  ‘My point is, around here, rumours are like holey buckets. They don’t hold water.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Abby said. ‘I’ve been thinking about all this gay beat stuff. If you have something to hide you have something to protect, and if you have something to protect, you have something to kill for.’

  ‘A person died,’ Ray snapped.

  There was a subtle shift in energy in the room; suddenly there seemed to be a little less air. Abby, Eddie and Lori all turned to Ray in unison, like schoolchildren who’d just been caught smoking. He looked at each one of them in turn but held Abby’s gaze the longest.

  ‘A person died on our island,’ he said, slowly. ‘That isn’t fun or exciting or silly. It’s tragic and sad and scary. We should be showing some respect. Feel free to step in at any time, Ab.’

  Abby felt a twang of resentment, shook it off, then did her best impression of a functional adult parent. ‘Your dad’s right.’

  ‘Are you serious?’ Lori said. ‘You get off on all this stuff, Mum. Have you looked at our bookshelf lately? It’s full of serial killers and mass murders and child kidnappings and—’

  ‘That’s different,’ Abby said.

  ‘How?’

  She glanced across the table at Ray. ‘Because those things didn’t happen in Belport.’

  ‘Yeah but they happened somewhere. Your argument makes no sense.’

  ‘That’s because I’m an adult. We don’t have to make sense. So change the subject and eat your pasta.’

  Lori looked at her bowl. ‘Oh, so that’s what this is.’

  * * *

  After dinner, the family dispersed. Eddie took care of the dishes, Lori disappeared into her bedroom to pretend to finish her homework, and Ray went upstairs to take a shower. Abby switched from beer to red wine and took a glass with her out into the garage.

  She turned on the light and switched on the old three-bar heater she kept beneath her workbench. It glowed to life, filling the room with the smell of burning dust.

  Abby pulled a knitted throw rug over her shoulders, set her wineglass down on the bench and swung open the bar fridge. Inside, wrapped in a plastic shopping bag with the Buy & Bye’s double-B logo printed on the front, was the possum Susi Lenten had found dead beneath the powerlines outside her house.

  Abby looked at the shape beneath the shopping bag for a moment. She had never worked on anything so large before. Critters like birds, mice and rats were harder to taxidermy than larger mammals because everything was smaller – at least that’s what it said in The Big Book of Taxidermy she’d checked out from the Belport Library. But the bigger they got, the more real they seemed.

  The wool throw rug she’d pulled over herself caught on an exposed nail and slipped from her shoulders. It was deathly cold without it. Despite the three-bar heater running at full steam, the badly insulated garage was impossible to heat. She might have performed her taxidermy at the kitchen table, where it was warm, but she was pretty sure Ray would divorce her if she suggested it.

  Three fat brown moths scuttled out from below the bar fridge and flapped briefly against Abby’s chin. Abby swiped at them but missed. They rose in a loose formation to the fluorescent tube overhead and whacked against it, over and over.

  Abby watched them, thinking of the crate of ruined baby clothes. If she had a can of flyspray handy, she might have cut them down with it then and there. Of course, that would have violated Ray’s strict catch-and-release policy. Whenever a spider or insect came into the house, Ray insisted on capturing it – usually in the plastic Batman Forever tumbler they kept under the sink – and letting it free in the coastal woodland that lined the rear of their yard. It didn’t matter how hairy or creepy the creature was; 106 Milt Street was a no-kill zone.

  After an animal was dead, however, it was free rein. Abby thought about this as she plucked the bag from the fridge and set it down gently on the workbench. She took a long sip of wine, hooked herself into a dark-green apron and snapped on a pair of surgical gloves.

  She unwrapped the corpse. It was an adult ringtail with grey and white fur. Judging by its expression, it had no idea what hit it. One second it was crossing between wires, the next, bam, Kentucky Fried Possum.

  ‘Hello there,’ she said. ‘What’s your name?’

  The possum stared back, mouth open, eyes bulging and glassy.

  ‘You look like a Trevor,’ Abby decided. ‘I’m Abby and I’ll be your stylist today.’

  She pulled up her stool, switched on the radio – a TLC song was playing – and took up her shiny silver X-Acto knife. She fixed it with a No. 11 classic fine-point scalpel blade and got to work. Upon the first insertion of the knife, all her apprehension about tackling a larger animal slipped away.

  Step one in taxidermy was to remove and preserve the skin. Starting at the belly, Abby cut a slow and steady seam, taking extra care not to puncture the bowels. She’d made that mistake a few specimens ago: she’d nicked the bowel of a bush rat, and the smell that seeped out had almost been strong enough to send her running from the room – almost strong enough, in fact, to make her hang up her apron, put away the borax and say never again.

  She worked the knife along the inside of the skin, making small, measured swipes. With her left hand, she peeled the skin back. The manual described this part
of the process as like removing the animal’s jacket and trousers, but she thought it was more like peeling an orange.

  TLC faded into Mariah Carey’s ‘Dreamlover’, and Abby wondered who the hell had set the radio to this station. She would have got up to change it if she hadn’t had her hands full. Still, she soon caught herself humming along as she entered a state of something like hypnosis. For the first time in twenty-four hours, she wasn’t thinking about the body – not the human one, anyway. There was just the thump of the moths against the light, Trevor the ringtail, and Mariah—

  ‘Fuck!’

  In one small, fast motion, she’d just dragged the X-Acto knife over the thumbnail on her left hand. A rush of heat flushed the wound, and hot blood seeped quickly from beneath a fresh slice in the surgical glove.

  She dropped the blade, wrapped her right fist around her left thumb and squeezed. She didn’t want to look at it, didn’t want to know how deep she’d cut. It didn’t feel like it would need stitches, but she knew from experience that the real pain wouldn’t come until later.

  She slid back from the stool and went over to Ray’s tool bench, to where she was sure he kept a first-aid kit for work. A drumbeat of pain began in her thumb. Keeping pressure on it, she navigated around the plastic tubs and empty pots, past the cobwebby weightlifting station and rusted-out old ride-on.

  She reached the bench that ran along the far wall. This was Ray’s domain. Aside from his work truck, it was the closest thing Ray had to an office. It was cluttered with various power tools. A mud-stained Stihl chainsaw sat on a plastic tub full of receipts with TAX STUFF printed down one side in thick black texta. A grass-covered Buffalo Turbine leaf blower leaned against a stack of For Dummies books.

  It took her nearly a full minute of panicked searching before she finally found the first-aid kit. She was seconds from running into the house, blood spurting from the jagged hole she’d cut into the surgical glove, when she spotted it, stood on its side, wedged between the bench and the back wall. It must have fallen back there. She slipped to her knees, reached in with her good hand, then paused. The lid of the kit was ajar and inside she saw what looked like—