Stop, she commanded herself, slamming a lid over the thought and pushing it away, the way she had slammed the lid of the first-aid kit shut. The truth was, she had no real way of knowing what Ray was doing with those magazines. He might have found them stashed in one of the houses he looked after – there were plenty of rich pervs on Neef Street. That didn’t explain why he hid them behind his workbench, but it was something to hold on to.
‘I have to talk to him about this, don’t I?’ Abby said.
‘I’m afraid so,’ Bobbi told her.
Abby finished her wine and shook her head. She went to the bar to fetch fresh drinks. When she came back to the booth and sat down, she said, ‘Your turn.’
‘Huh?’
‘You said you needed to talk to me about something,’ Abby said. ‘What is it?’
Bobbi shifted nervously in her seat and gulped her wine. Apparently, whatever she needed to say required a gutful of booze. That wasn’t a good sign.
‘Jesus, Bobbi, what is it? You’re freaking me out.’
‘I thought about coming by your house to tell you this,’ Bobbi started. ‘But then I thought it might be easier without the kids around, and Ray. But the real reason I wanted to do it here was that I kept thinking about my parents. Whenever Mum and Dad had a big decision to make, they’d take a long drive, no matter what the decision was – figuring out what sort of car to buy, deciding if it was time to put Nan in a home, anything. They’d drive and drive with no direction in mind, and they wouldn’t come back without a clear plan.’ Bobbi smiled. ‘Ironically, the final drive they took was to decide if their marriage was worth saving or not. It wasn’t, FYI.’
She drank. Abby waited for her to go on.
‘I asked my dad about the long drives one day,’ Bobbi said. ‘I thought there might be something about movement and momentum that, I don’t know, made it easier to think. He told me I was overthinking it. He said what it boiled down to was: you don’t shit where you sleep. There are some things better left outside the home.’
‘So you’re shitting where we drink instead?’ Abby asked.
Bobbi chuckled. ‘Yeah. I suppose I am.’ She leaned back in her chair and shoved her small hands into the pockets of her windbreaker. It was warm in the bar, but she hadn’t taken it off.
‘It’s about the murder, isn’t it?’ Abby said. ‘You know I’ll always be here for you, Bob, and I get why you can’t open up to Maggie, but surely the police force offers some sort of counselling service or—’
‘This isn’t about that,’ she said. ‘It’s about the murder, but it isn’t about that.’ Bobbi sipped, nodded and resigned herself. ‘We’ve been looking into the victim’s phone records,’ she started. ‘And by we, I mean the detective running the case. There was a printout on the front desk and I wasn’t supposed to see it, but I thought I’d sneak a look. I was curious, and I thought I might recognise some of the numbers. He didn’t make many calls. A total of six in the two weeks before he was killed. Of those six, I recognised two. The first was Speedy Pizza. He called them four days before it happened. The second…’
A Paul Simon song came on over the jukebox, and for a moment Bobbi seemed lost in it.
‘… Yeah?’ Abby prompted her.
‘The second call was made on the day he died, at eleven-sixteen am, and lasted four minutes and forty seconds,’ she said. ‘And, look, I didn’t come here to scare you, or to accuse anyone of anything. I just wanted to give you a heads-up. There are a dozen explanations and all they’ll need is one good one.’
‘What are you trying to say, Bobbi?’
‘On the day he died, the victim made one call,’ she said. ‘That call was to your house.’
* * *
‘Our house?’ Ray asked. ‘That can’t be right. It must be a mistake.’
She had found him stretched out on the sofa watching TV when she came home, but now he sat up to make room for her. He fished the remote from behind the sofa cushion and switched off the TV, his face knotted with confusion. Or was it concern?
Abby sat down beside him, tangled her fingers together, then untangled them and stood up again. ‘Bobbi says there’s no reason to panic. She was just giving us a heads-up. A detective will probably be coming to ask us about it and—’
‘Ab, slow down, a detective? This is crazy. For all they know it was a wrong number.’
‘The call lasted four minutes and forty seconds,’ she said. ‘That’s too long for a wrong number.’
Ray frowned. ‘Could it be one of the kids?’
‘It was the middle of a school day. The kids weren’t home. I’ll ask them, to make sure.’
Ray fell quiet.
The nostalgic smell of burning wood filled the room. Wind swept down the chimney of the wood heater, aggravating the flames and creating an eerie, strangely ominous howl. Come to think of it, maybe it wasn’t ominous at all. Maybe ‘Jingle Bells’ would have sounded the same way to Abby right now. Bobbi had placed a knot in her thoughts, and so far, all Ray had done was make it tighter.
‘It was the day of the big storm, Ray,’ she said quietly.
He flinched at that. He must have known what she was about to say, but he let her say it anyway.
‘The kids were at school, I was at the Buy & Bye, and you…’
‘I took the morning off,’ he admitted. ‘It was too wet to work.’
‘So, you were home?’
For a moment, in the flickering orange glow of the wood heater, he looked sinister. She pictured the blond man on the cover of Mountain Stud. Then his face calmed. He clicked his tongue. ‘Come to think of it, I do remember getting a call that day.’
‘You do?’
‘Yeah. Some guy called about Island Care. A potential new client, that’s all. See, a lot of these summer residents think hiring a caretaker for the winter is a waste of money until they arrive at their house and find a wasp’s nest under their verandah or a family of fruit bats in their guestroom.’
‘So he was calling to … hire you?’
‘Yeah.’
‘What did he say?’
‘He wanted to know what I did and how much it would cost him.’ He tugged at his earlobe a second, then shook his head. ‘I laid it all out for him and he said he’d have a think about it and call me back. When he didn’t, I assumed it was because he’d changed his mind. Now I know the real reason. Pretty spooky, when you think about it. I’ll swing by the cop shop on my way to work in the morning and straighten it all out – won’t mention that Bobbi gave us that heads up, of course,’ Ray said. ‘Belport is a small place. I’m probably one of a dozen locals he came into contact with.’
Nodding, Abby said, ‘He ordered something from Speedy Pizza.’
‘There you go,’ he said, and tugged at his earlobe again.
If Ray had told her this before she opened the first-aid kit, Abby might have believed him. There would have been no reason not to. But if he could keep a secret like that, how was she supposed to separate the fiction from the nonfiction? Then again, she had to believe him, didn’t she? What was the alternative?
She wanted to ask him about the magazines then but wasn’t sure she wanted to know why he had them. All she could manage to say was, ‘Ray, do I have anything to be worried about?’
He looked at her a moment, then grinned, bound his wrists with invisible handcuffs and offered them to Abby.
‘You got me, copper,’ he said.
Abby didn’t think that was very funny.
15
THE WIDOW
Clank … Clank … CLANK!
The noise was coming from outside. It was the middle of the night, but the noise hadn’t woken Kate. As far as she could remember, she hadn’t slept at all since turning off the bedside lamp.
She listened.
Clank … CLANK!
She climbed quietly out of bed, thudding her knee against a chair in the dark. She reached the window and drew back the curtain, half expecting to see a deranged killer tryi
ng to break into the room. Instead, she saw Fisher. He was dressed in a tattered motel robe, empty steel bucket in hand, swaying drunkenly and harassing the ice machine.
He yanked at the machine’s lid. It caught. He set the steel bucket down on the ground, kneeled and tried again. He was apparently too shit-faced to notice the sign, taped not half a metre from his face, declaring in bright red letters: Out of order, sorry 4 inconveniens.
‘Goddamn fucking thing,’ he muttered, giving up. As he climbed to his feet, he knocked the steel bucket and sent it rolling. He watched it roll, then shrugged. Abandoning the bucket, he ambled back to his room, swaying left and right as he walked. Kate watched him struggle with the lock, then finally fall inside.
She thought about going back to bed but knew she wouldn’t sleep. Instead, she fetched the little rubber ice-cube tray from the minibar and walked outside into the cold night. It was freezing. She hurried to Fisher’s door and knocked. There was no answer, so she knocked again. Finally, his face appeared in the window beside the door. His bloodshot eyes wandered down to Kate’s feet and back to her face again. He looked drunk, and baleful.
He disappeared from the window and, after fifteen seconds of shuffling and rustling around in his room, answered the door. ‘Kate, what is it? Has something happened? Is everything alright?’
‘I have ice,’ she said.
‘Excuse me?’
‘I saw you struggling with the machine and thought you might need some.’
She handed him the rubber ice tray.
‘Oh, uh, thanks,’ he said. ‘I’m just having a little nightcap. Helps me sleep.’
‘Mind if I join you?’ she asked.
‘Oh,’ He furrowed his brow and glanced back into his room. ‘Sure. Come in.’
Fisher’s room was a mirrored version of her own. There was an empty bottle of Chivas Regal on the desk and a freshly opened one beside it. He fixed them both a glass, adding a few blocks of Kate’s ice to each.
‘I hope straight is okay,’ he said, handing her a glass. ‘I don’t have any mixers.’
‘That’s fine.’
She sat down on the bed and sipped the Scotch. It stung on the way down but instantly warmed her belly. She usually couldn’t handle spirits, but sipping her Chivas was like slipping into a warm bath – a little too hot at first, but soon it felt just right. For a long time, they didn’t talk. Kate worried that Fisher might prefer to be alone, but when they finished their drinks, he quickly made two more.
‘It didn’t look like him,’ Fisher said softly, letting the ice clink in his glass. ‘I mean, it looked like him, but not quite right’.
‘Like seeing him through a camera lens,’ she offered.
He nodded. He took a cigarette from the pack, placed it between his lips and asked, ‘Do you mind?’
‘I think the rooms have smoke detectors.’
‘I found a workaround.’ He stood, swayed forward, caught his balance, then went and opened the window. If Fisher was cold, he didn’t show it. He dragged a chair to the window, sat down and smoked.
‘You never met my father, did you?’ he asked.
‘No.’
John’s grandfather was five years dead when they met. Emphysema, if memory served.
‘He was a tough old bastard,’ Fisher said. ‘An arsehole, really. You’re not meant to speak ill of the dead. You’re supposed to say he called it as he saw it, he was a straight shooter, he wouldn’t tolerate fools. But what all that boils down to is being an arsehole.’
He dragged on his cigarette and looked down at his drink, slumping forward slightly in his chair. ‘He couldn’t stand to watch another man cry. Far as I can remember, I only ever cried in front of him once. I was ten. I’d had a run-in with some older kids. I’d been riding home from school and had taken a shortcut through the Dustbowl – that’s what we called this big, pie-wedge-shaped patch of dead land near where I grew up. I was waved down by three boys. They were tooling around at the big storm drain. One of them was Jim Haskin. A few sandwiches short of a picnic and mad as a cut snake, we used to call him. Not to his face, of course. I can’t remember the names of the other two, but I can still picture their dirty faces.’
Kate said nothing.
‘It was those other two kids who dragged me off the bike,’ Fisher said. ‘But it was Haskin who wheeled it into the mouth of the storm drain, gave it a steady push right down into the dark and told me to fetch. They gathered around and watched me go in after it. Two steps in, my heart was pounding. Three steps, I was just about ready to scream.’
He smiled, but it was a tragic, distant smile, and made her feel cold.
‘The darkness in that storm drain was total and complete, like death,’ he said. He hiccuped and nearly lost his cigarette. Kate was all the way across the room, but she could see the tears in his eyes. ‘My bike had been gobbled up by that darkness and it wanted to gobble me up too. So, I ran. Christ, I loved that fucking bike. For all I know it’s still there, rusted out and waiting for me in the dark.’
‘Fisher, you were ten. Anyone would have cried in that situation. I’d cry if it happened to me now.’
‘Dad saw things differently,’ he said, long-buried scorn in his voice. ‘I came in the front door, crying like a puppy; he looked down at me like I was nothing. Like I was less than nothing. It wasn’t just that he saw crying as a weakness. It disgusted him. I disgusted him. Made him sick to his stomach. You know what he told me, Kate?’
‘What?’
‘Be a man.’ He finished his cigarette, stubbed it out on the windowsill and flicked it into the night. ‘Be a man. It seemed like such a strange thing to say to a child. I swore then that if I ever had a son, things would be different. But what does the Bible say about the sins of the father? That they shall be visited upon the sons to the third and fourth generation? Pam would know.’
‘You’re a good father, Fisher,’ Kate said. ‘Take it from someone who had a rubbish one. Whatever sins your dad committed ended with him.’
‘If that were true, I would have stopped John from coming out here. There must have been signs something was wrong.’
‘If there were, I missed them too.’ She drank. ‘Why do you think he came to Belport, Fisher? If he was lured here by the same person that lured him to Beech Tree Landing, why did he lie about where he was going?’
There was a stained-glass lamp in the corner of the room casting long, jagged shadows up the wall and over the ceiling. Fisher gazed at them and sipped his Scotch. ‘Did John ever talk to you about his night terrors?’
‘No.’
‘When he was a teenager, fifteen or sixteen, he started having nightmares. Terrible nightmares. He’d wake up in the middle of the night, screaming and crying and shouting. It developed into a full-blown sleeping disorder. He became an insomniac, his grades suffered, he started falling asleep in strange places. He started to see things.’
‘See things?’
‘Sleep is a funny thing. When you don’t get enough, it can do crazy things to the mind. After a month or two of barely any sleep, John started having hallucinations.’
‘What kind of hallucinations?’
‘He’d hear whispers that weren’t really there, see dark shapes and shadows out of the corners of his eyes. Then he started to see the Visitor. That’s what John called it.’ Fisher swallowed an invisible obstruction in his throat before he continued. ‘The Visitor would come mostly at night. He would stand in the corner of John’s bedroom, watching him. I asked John to draw him for me once. He drew a man in a long black coat. There was a big crack in his face, and falling out of the crack were dozens of—’
‘Moths,’ Kate offered.
‘What?’ Fisher said.
‘I found a notebook in the house. I’m sorry, I should have shown you, I just … Anyway, it’s in my room. All these drawings of a man with moths coming out of his head. It’s the same.’
‘No,’ Fisher said. ‘Back then, they were caterpillars.’
&
nbsp; A sudden chill crept up her spine.
‘It was a long time ago. He took a whole lot of drugs – clomi— clomipra-something, then a year on Ambien. Eventually the nightmares stopped.’ He stood and topped up their drinks. ‘We never found out what caused them. It felt a little like putting a bandaid over a scab you just knew was set to fester. Pam was worried he’d been abused or molested or suffered some sort of trauma.’
‘Is that possible?’
Fisher shrugged. ‘If it happened, John either didn’t remember it or didn’t talk about it.
‘Do you think that has something to do with why he came to the island?’ she asked.
‘John had valerian capsules, chamomile tea and three different types of antihistamines from the grocery store. Those are all sleeping aids. Come to think of it, the litre bottle of Wild Turkey could probably be considered a sleeping aid too.’
‘John didn’t need sleeping aids. I would have noticed. I slept next to the man.’
‘Would you, though? Would he know if it was the other way around?’
How well can you really ever know anyone? Kate thought.
‘So, what are you saying?’ Kate asked. ‘You think he was having nightmares again?’
He nodded, drank, and said, ‘I think that’s why he bought those aids, and I think that’s why he bought the bug zappers.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘I think that, for whatever reason, the Visitor came back.’
Kate shivered. She was suddenly cold. It might have been that the open window had let all the warm air out, or it might have been that Fisher’s words had sobered her up. ‘Even if that were true, what’s that got to do with Belport?’
He stood up, using the wall for balance, and shut the window. He necked the last of his Scotch and placed the empty glass on the bedside table.
‘It’s late,’ he said. ‘Mind if we call it a night?’
‘Fisher…’
‘I’m tired, Kate. Just tired, that’s all.’
The Wife and the Widow Page 11
