Buzz. The intercom spat static, then a sweet, soothing voice said, ‘Yes?’
It was Bobbi’s girlfriend, Maggie.
‘It’s me.’
‘Could you be a little more specific?’ Maggie asked. ‘I wouldn’t ordinarily ask, but there may or may not be a murderer loose on the island.’
‘It’s Abby.’
‘Abby! Get your arse up here. The remote unlocking doesn’t work, but luckily for you, neither does the security gate.’
The front gate gave with just a gentle nudge. Abby navigated around a small garden of ferns, then skipped up two short flights of external stairs to Bobbi’s apartment. Maggie was waiting for her on the second-floor landing, resting one hand on her hip and the other on her heavily pregnant belly. She was dressed in maternity jeans and an XL white T-shirt. Pregnancy suited her.
‘Come here, Ab,’ she said. ‘It’s so good to see you. In fairness, I’ve been cooped up inside for weeks so it’s good to see anyone, but it’s especially good to see you.’
She showed Abby inside. The apartment was warm and bright. There were potted plants on every surface and more out on the balcony.
‘I’m halfway through second lunch,’ Maggie said. ‘Or maybe it’s first dinner. Either way, there’s plenty, if you’re hungry.’
‘No thanks,’ Abby said.
Maggie slid herself into the breakfast nook and chowed down on vegemite toast. Abby sat with her.
‘Is Bobbi around? I know she’s been working nights lately, so I thought I’d catch her before she goes on duty.’
‘She’s just getting out of the shower; she’ll be out in a minute. Isn’t all this murder stuff crazy? I hate the idea of Bobbi going out there. I didn’t mind the idea of sharing my life with a cop when the biggest thing to happen was Bert Sercombe getting busted shoplifting tampons from the pharmacy.’
‘Did that really happen?’
Nodding, Maggie laughed. ‘Clare had sent him out for them. He had the money. He was just too embarrassed to take them through the register. It’s the most pathetic thing a man has ever done. But you didn’t hear that from me.’
‘Mum’s the word,’ Abby said. ‘And try not to worry about Bobbi. She’s tough.’
If Maggie had seen Bobbi in the car with the tequila, she might not have agreed so easily. ‘I know,’ she said. ‘She’s basically Sarah Connor.’
Joe slunk coolly into the room, yawned and helped himself to Maggie’s lap. Joe was a beefy cat, an apartment stray that Bobbi had started feeding a couple of years back. He had officially moved in soon after. Maggie winced as he kneaded at her legs to get comfortable.
‘I thought you and Joe hated each other,’ Abby said.
‘When I got pregnant, I had to stop changing his litter tray because cat turds can carry this nasty parasite called toxoplasmosis, which can cause birth defects.’ She rubbed her palm over her belly. ‘There’s something about not picking up someone’s shit that puts you on the same level. Joe respects me now.’
‘Toxoplasmosis,’ a voice mocked from the hall. Bobbi padded in from the bathroom, dressed in her crisp powder-blue uniform, drying her hair off with a towel. Her eyebrows were still wet from the shower. They looked more commanding than usual. ‘Be honest, Abby, don’t you think that sounds made up?’
‘Bobbi thinks the whole cat-turd thing is a conspiracy to trick her into cleaning out Joe’s litter all the time,’ Maggie said. ‘Personally, I think it’s a pretty good trade-off when you consider what I’m going through over here. Morning sickness, bloating, frequent urination, haemorrhoids. I can go on.’
‘And on and on and on,’ Bobbi said, giving Maggie a peck on the cheek. ‘How do I look?’
‘Babelicious,’ Maggie told her. ‘So you’re stuck at the information caravan again tonight?’
Bobbi prepped some coffee in a thermos at the kitchen counter. ‘All night.’
‘I drove past there, and it looked pretty packed,’ Abby said. ‘How’s it going?’
‘As an exercise in gathering gossip, it’s working great. As far as generating any actual leads, I don’t know yet. Time will tell, I suppose. Is everything okay, Ab? You look … weird.’
Abby’s instinct was to open her mouth and tell her everything was just fine, but if that was true, she wouldn’t be there. In the time it took her to think of an answer to that question, Bobbi exchanged a telepathic glance with Maggie, who quickly took the hint.
‘If you’ll excuse me now, I need to make my eighty-seventh daily trip to the loo.’
She hoisted herself out of the breakfast nook with a grunt and waddled into the bathroom, which was still steamy from Bobbi’s shower. Joe made himself comfortable in the warm space she’d left.
‘If this is about the call, it’s all been straightened out,’ Bobbi said. ‘I buzzed the office earlier. Ray went into the station on his lunchbreak and cleared it all up. I should have known the call was about a caretaking job. Sorry if I freaked you out the other night.’
‘That’s good,’ Abby said. ‘But it’s not why I’m here. Bobbi, I need to talk to you about something. But before we get into it, I need to know I’m talking to Bobbi the Friend, not Bobbi the Cop.’
‘I’m always your friend first.’
‘Promise?’
‘I promise,’ Bobbi said.
‘I need you to give me a day, twenty-four hours to get my ducks in a row. Then Bobbi the Cop can do what she needs to do.’
A grave look came to Bobbi’s face. She sat down in the nook opposite Abby, forehead knitted with concern. ‘What’s going on?’
‘The other night in the church car park, you told me something,’ Abby said. ‘You said that in a town as small as this one, someone knows something. Do you remember that?’
‘A lot of that night is foggy,’ she said. ‘But yeah, I remember that. Why?’
‘Well, as it turns out, you were right.’
* * *
Gloomy afternoon was shifting into drizzly evening when Abby got home. She pulled the Volvo into the driveway, stepped out and winced when she spotted Dorothy Fancher coming towards her.
Dorothy was a slight woman, her face strewn with worry lines. She and her husband Teddy lived on their street. Teddy hardly said a word, but Dorothy never stopped talking. You could get caught talking to her for hours about absolutely nothing. Ray called her the human vortex. He once joked that all the people who went missing in the Bermuda Triangle really just got stuck talking to Dorothy.
Abby gave her a quick wave and started towards the house.
‘Oh, Abby,’ Dorothy called. ‘Do you have a minute?’
‘One minute?’
Dorothy strode across the front lawn, hunched beneath an umbrella. She cast a glance at the drooping she-oak in the front yard that she’d gently reminded Abby – six times – needed to be cut back. If it wasn’t the she-oak, it was the lawn they let get too long, or the bins they sometimes forgot to bring in after garbage day.
‘Would you be a dear and ask your husband to stick to the speed limit when he’s driving past our house? You know me, normally I wouldn’t mind, but there’s a pothole that the council hasn’t got around to fixing yet, and when it rains it fills up with water, and when your husband drives past doing eighty in a sixty zone, he sprays mud all over the nature strip, and it drowns the grass seed, and—’
‘I’ll let him know,’ Abby said. ‘Anyway, I should get in out of this rain.’
‘Mmm, I noticed you forgot your umbrella. You really should keep one in the car in case of an emergency. You’re still a city girl at heart, I suppose. You’ll figure it out one of these days. Where was Ray off to in such a hurry, anyway?’
Abby felt herself being pulled into the human vortex, so she took a step towards the house and looked at her watch, as if she had somewhere to be. Then she hesitated. ‘Wait, when was this?’
‘Not twenty minutes ago,’ Dorothy said. ‘He was driving like Juan Manuel Fangio. Like I said, normally I wouldn’t mind but�
�’
‘I have to go,’ Abby snapped.
‘Oh, your generation move a mile a minute,’ she said. ‘What do you have on? A party? Not great weather for a barbecue if that’s what you had in—’
‘Uh huh, bye,’ Abby cut her off. She felt Dorothy’s eyes on her back as she hurried up the driveway.
Where was Ray off to in such a hurry? It was a good question. She entered the garage through the side door, turned on the light and looked over at her workbench.
She could remember returning Ray’s clothing and workboots to the box, but she couldn’t remember putting it away. She had left it on the bench, she was sure of it. But it wasn’t there now, and neither was Ray.
She stood there awhile, deliberating. The box and all its contents were probably at the bottom of Elk Harbour right now. She felt her skin flush hot, then run so cold it made her shiver. Since the murder, she had been living in a state of heightened panic, and had at times wondered if it might all become too much – if her spirit might simply slip away from her body, from her reality, from a world that once felt safe and predictable but now made her feel like a stranger.
But under all of that, a new seed was budding. She felt a strange and very strong sense of something else: relief. The evidence – and that is what it was – was gone, and with it, all tangible connection to the crime. She thought about the blue glow of the luminol and wondered if she might one day find a way to live with it. She might even be able to trick herself into believing she imagined the whole thing. She might be able to repress the memory itself, to push it down somewhere so deep and dark that even she couldn’t—
The sound of a car pulling into the driveway cut through her thoughts. It sounded like Ray’s truck. If that was true, then a difficult conversation was about to happen. She slammed the palm of her hand against the roller door’s Open button and it clicked to life, rising an inch at a time, slowly revealing the landscape beyond.
There was one police cruiser in the driveway – that was the car she’d heard – and two more parked on the nature strip, wheels already sinking in the wet soil around the drooping she-oak. Doors were open. Officers were spilling out in windbreakers and heavy black boots. Cherry lights were flashing against the dull late-afternoon gloom. Dorothy Fancher was huddled beneath her umbrella, watching it all with a giddy look in her eyes.
The officers were wearing gloves and carrying empty bags and boxes marked with big red letters: Evidence. One of them, a hefty man with deep-set eyes and trousers that swished together as he walked, walked up to the front door, wiped his feet on the welcome mat, and let himself into the house. It felt like a stranger’s hands riffling through her underwear drawer.
‘Hey,’ she screamed. ‘Hey!’
Another, rosy-cheeked, constable glanced over, then walked quickly towards the house. Abby marched through the rain. ‘Stop! You can’t go in there. What the hell do you think you’re—’
‘Ab,’ came a voice.
She turned to see Bobbi coming sheepishly towards her. Abby counted off the reasons she shouldn’t attack this woman where she stood, but she couldn’t hold onto a single one of them. She was existing in a single moment of hot rage, where reason and logic and the law were abstract, faraway objects.
‘What the fuck, Bobbi,’ she spat. ‘What the actual fuck!? You couldn’t give me a day. One fucking day.’
‘Wait.’
‘I guess you made your choice between Bobbi the Friend and Bobbi the Cop, you fucking—’ She almost said dyke and hated herself for it. The word seeped out from somewhere deep and vicious. ‘How could you do this to me, Bobbi?’
‘Stop,’ she demanded, raising the palms of both hands. ‘Just stop. And listen. It’s very important you get your shit together right now. We can scream at each other later all we want, but not in front of my colleagues, and not in front of your kids.’
‘Jesus. The kids.’
‘You can take them to my place. I’ll call Maggie and let her know what’s going on. They can stay there until we’re finished.’
‘Finished with what?’
Bobbi took a deep breath and looked at Abby with deep sympathy. ‘Until we’re finished with a search of your home, property and vehicles thereon.’
Two skinny constables in long raincoats slipped into the garage. An absurd and absurdly funny question popped into Abby’s head: what would they think of all her taxidermy equipment? What would they think of Trevor the half-skinned ringtail, wrapped in a Buy & Bye shopping bag and stashed inside the bar fridge?
‘We’ll be as low-impact as possible, Ab,’ Bobbi said. ‘I promise.’
‘Your promises aren’t worth much anymore, Officer. You’re crazy if you think I’d let my kids anywhere near your apartment and crazier if you think I’ll ever trust you again.’
‘Don’t make me the enemy, Ab, and get it together.’
‘Don’t tell me what to do.’
‘Look, I know you’re scared, but you need to calm—’
‘I want to see a warrant.’
‘Abby.’
‘You have no right to be here. I want to see a search warrant and I want to see it—’
‘We don’t need a search warrant,’ Bobbi said in a short, sharp tone. Her patience was wearing thin. ‘Ray gave us permission to search the house.’
Fresh rain fell. Abby stood on the grass and let it fall. ‘… What did you say?’
‘I didn’t tell anyone about what we talked about,’ Bobbi said, lowering her voice and leaning in closer. Her hair was soaked, clinging to her cheeks. ‘Abby, as soon as you left, I got called in. I was despatched here straight away to perform an evidence search. Ray’s at the police station. He turned up with a box full of what he claims is evidence.’
‘No, that doesn’t make sense … You’re lying.’
‘I’m not.’
‘You’re lying!’ Abby reached out with trembling hands and shoved Bobbi, hard.
Bobbi stood her ground but she didn’t fight back. Abby shoved her again, but this time, in almost the same movement, she collapsed into her arms and began to cry.
Bobbi held her and kissed her softly on the forehead.
‘I wish I were, hun, but Ray confessed,’ she whispered.
‘… No.’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘He confessed to the murder of David Stemple.’
23
THE WIDOW
‘Dad was murdered in the winter of 1996,’ Marcus Stemple said, massaging the arm of the dusty armchair with his fingers. ‘Blunt force trauma. Someone hit him across the head with a brick, then dumped his body in the water.’
‘God,’ Kate said. She was leaning forward in the wooden chair that John had sat in just two weeks earlier. ‘I’m sorry.’
Marcus, who had nearly reached the bottom of his longneck and was glancing over at the fridge in anticipation of his next, looked back at her and shrugged. ‘What are you gonna do, right?’
Kate was struck with an unnerving idea: she might have been looking at a future version of her own daughter. Mia was older than Marcus was when his father died, but it was too easy to imagine her following the same path of substance abuse and self-destruction.
I should be with Mia, she thought, with a sudden twang of guilt. I should be home with my daughter and instead I’m out here in the middle of the ocean, chasing John’s ghost.
‘What happened?’ Kate asked.
Marcus drained his beer, found a half-smoked cigarette in the ash tray and lit it. ‘I don’t remember many details. That whole time in my life just feels like some movie I watched when I was a kid. I was ten or eleven before they told me he was killed.’
‘Your mum kept it from you?’
‘She refused to talk about it.’
‘Maybe she was trying to protect you,’ Kate said, and thought about monsters under the bed.
‘Maybe, but it’s never a good idea to keep something like that from a kid. All it does is send them off to find out themselves, which is what I did.
Some of what I’ve learned came from family or looking at old newspaper articles, but mostly it was from talking to old-timers down at the Belly. Everyone remembers when it happened, and everyone remembers why he was killed.’
‘Why?’
He sucked on the cigarette hard and fast, as if he was hoping to develop lung cancer before dinnertime. ‘Dad got killed because he was a fag.’
Kate flinched. ‘Excuse me?’
‘His body was found floating in the water off Beech Tree Landing. He was killed in the old ferry terminal that used to be out there, then dumped off the jetty into the sea.’
‘Beech Tree Landing? Are you sure? That’s where John’s body was found. There must be a connection.’
Marcus raised his eyebrows. ‘If there is, you might not like it.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘The terminal was a gay beat,’ he said. ‘Men used it for sex. That’s what my dad was doing out there that day. Cruising for it.’
He sucked the last of his cigarette, stubbed it out forcefully in the ash tray and fetched himself another longneck. He popped the lid and sculled a third of the bottle before closing the fridge, then hovered in the next room.
‘Are … are you sure?’ Kate asked.
‘Only one way to be sure, I suppose. Like I said, I have that ouija board somewhere if you want to ask him. I’m serious, you know. I saved up my pocket money as a kid and bought the official Psychic Circle Spirit Board. I’d have to wait until after Mum went to bed because she hated all that stuff. I’d sit there in my bedroom with the board and a notepad, all set to take down the messages from the other side.’
He pulled the longneck to his mouth, glanced down at it as if the taste had soured, then set the bottle down on the kitchen counter with a loud thud.
‘I guess Dad was the silent type,’ he said. ‘Because his ghost never told me shit.’
Marcus’s mood had darkened – something she wouldn’t have thought possible – and Kate sensed it was time to leave.
The Wife and the Widow Page 16
