The Wife and the Widow

by Christian White

  Bobbi was waiting at the security gate and greeted Lori with a tight hug.

  ‘Go on upstairs,’ she said. ‘Maggie’s setting up a space for you.’

  ‘Thanks, Bobbi,’ Lori said. She turned to Abby, offered a brief embrace, then headed through the gate and up the stairs to Bobbi’s apartment.

  Abby and Bobbi stood in silence for a moment.

  ‘Are you alright?’ Bobbi asked.

  ‘Bobbi, the way I acted, I lost my shit and I’m—’

  ‘We’re cool,’ she said. ‘We’re always cool.’

  ‘Promise?’

  ‘Promise,’ Bobbi said. ‘You want to come up?’

  ‘I should get back to Eddie,’ she said. ‘Thanks for looking after Lori. The second she starts to drive you crazy, just call me.’

  Abby hesitated. She looked across the street to where she’d parked the car and sighed. ‘What do I do now, Bobbi?’

  ‘Now, you keep moving,’ she said. ‘You eat, you take a bath, you shave your legs and you keep looking forward. Guilt, fear, grief, they’re all like moss, Ab. If you slow down long enough it’ll start to grow, and it won’t stop until you’re covered.’

  ‘Eat, take a bath, shave my legs,’ Abby echoed. ‘Survive.’

  * * *

  Night fell. Abby went upstairs to Eddie’s room to ask if he was hungry, but he refused to come to his door. She slumped back downstairs, dug out a frozen box dinner and heated it up. She poured some red into the biggest glass she could find. It was cold enough to hurt, so she started a fire and stared into it. The house was too quiet. In the silence, it was too easy to imagine a colossal wave rising from the ocean and crashing down over the island, carrying with it all the mistakes of her past. The events of the past few days flickered in her mind, like sunlight through leaves.

  Feeling lonely and overwhelmed, she tried desperately to keep from getting lost in a wild tangle of thoughts. The luminol on Ray’s clothing. The two men embracing on the front of Y-Mag. The ferry terminal. Ray’s confession. Ray’s confession. That was the loudest thought of all. It slunk and slithered around her, like the slowly circling tentacles of an inky creature from the bowels of the ocean and—

  Clunk!

  All the power in the house shut off. The room fell suddenly and unnaturally quiet. There was no buzzing lamp in the hallway, no humming refrigerator in the kitchen. There were only the sounds of crackling flames and distant insects. Abby sat in the firelight for a moment, catching up, then went over to the window. Blackouts were common in Belport at this time of year, when the weather was bad, but the night was clear, and the lights were on in Dorothy and Terry’s cottage at the bottom of the hill.

  ‘You alright up there, Eddie?’ she called.

  She heard his bedroom door open, then close, followed by footsteps along the upstairs landing, then Eddie, silhouetted against the dark hallway, appeared at the top of the stairs. ‘What happened?’

  ‘Power went out,’ she said. ‘I’ll check the fuse box. Wait in here.’

  She crept out into the hall and down the corridor, and quietly opened the front door to a chilly blast. She was used to Milt Street looking deserted, but tonight there seemed to be too many shadows and dark things to hide behind. She felt watched. The fuse box was mounted on the side of the house beneath a narrow awning. It was barely more than a dozen steps from the door, but tonight it felt very far away.

  Down the verandah steps, onto the damp lawn; she used a penlight they kept on a hook by the front window. Its beam was pencil-thin and pathetic. Rather than lighting her path, it seemed to make everything around it darker.

  A couple of metres before reaching the fuse box, she froze.

  The little white wooden door was wide open. Someone had flipped the latch and left it that way.

  Alarmed, she spotted the figure of a tall man on the periphery of her penlight. He was big, broad and stood perfectly still. Watching her.

  ‘Who’s there?’ she asked, trying her best to make her voice sound big and brave. ‘What do you want?’

  There was no answer. The figure in the dark remained still. For a moment, Abby feared it was David Stemple’s ghost, back to take his revenge, grinning maniacally in the dark. Whoever was standing in the narrow walkway beside the house was well over six feet tall, with bulky shoulders, a narrow head and heavy sleeves that flapped in the wind.

  ‘I can see you,’ she cried. ‘Who are you?’

  No answer.

  She could run, but she was sure this man would chase her down. Instead, after summoning everything she had, she took one long stride forward and raised the penlight.

  ‘Fuck me,’ she said.

  The figure in her yard was a beach umbrella. She’d forgotten that was where they stored it during winter. She braced her hands on her knees and exhaled. A killer wasn’t here for her after all, but the fuse box was left open. She didn’t imagine that.

  Moving fast now, she shone her penlight inside the box. The main switch had been thrown. She switched it back and power returned to the house. Light poured out from inside, illuminating the side yard and a shaggy, unkempt section of garden. Abby scanned it, half expecting the man she imagined lurking there to leap out brandishing a dagger. Instead, standing among the foliage, she spotted a teenage boy.

  ‘Christ,’ she said, gasping.

  The boy stared quietly back at her. He was quite a good-looking kid, fifteen or sixteen, with delicate features and thick black hair, slicked back in a way she didn’t see very often nowadays. He wore blue jeans and a light-blue windbreaker. He was shivering.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I didn’t want to use the front door in case the cops were watching the house, but I needed to see you.’

  ‘Who are you?’

  He took a step forward, into the soft light falling out through the living-room window.

  ‘I’m John Keddie,’ he said. ‘Do you remember me?’

  27

  THE WIDOW

  Kate pulled the car into the vehicle loading area at the mainland ferry terminal, waiting for the second-last boat of the day to arrive and take her back to the island.

  She spent most of the trip outside, on the ironically named sun deck, her gloved fingers curled tightly around the railing, watching Belport Island loom closer and closer. The ferry lifted wildly and fell suddenly, but it didn’t falter.

  The fresh air helped clear her mind. She had spent too many hours in the car.

  She had thought a lot on the drive back from South Hallston Correctional Facility, mostly about home. Mia. She missed her little girl. It had been days, not weeks or months, since she last saw her, but her heart ached when she thought about it.

  Even now, out on the sun deck, she wondered if coming back to Belport was the right move. Deep down she knew she didn’t have much of a choice – she had to find out what happened to John. How could she go back to Mia and build any sort of normal life with these questions chasing her?

  Still, the urge to take the Melbourne exit off the freeway had been strong. She’d have been halfway home by now if she had.

  Her things were still in her room at the Blue Whale, but she could have checked out easily enough over the phone, popped her room key in the mail and had the motel staff post her things.

  Then all she’d have needed to do was look for a good real estate agent to sell the holiday house, and she might never have had to come back to the island again. Hell, the agent wouldn’t even need to be good. Anyone could sell real estate in Belport. All they’d need to do was clean the place up a bit, air it out, maybe hire someone local to throw a fresh coat of paint on the walls and—

  A bulb flashed in Kate’s mind. Ray said he worked in maintenance. She remembered going back to the holiday house, remembered the three-piece sofa, the furry blue rug that Mia sat on to watch TV, and the fresh white paint that had been slapped against the wall on the far right corner of the living room.

  She had run the palm of her hand across the sticky paint and wonde
red what on earth John had been thinking when he covered up the dozens of names and heights that were written underneath. The answer came suddenly now: John wasn’t thinking anything because he hadn’t been the one holding the brush, no more than he was the one who tripped the house alarm.

  Finally, she thought of the maintenance truck she’d spotted parked on the street, and pulled out her phone.

  * * *

  ‘Island Care?’ Detective Eckman asked. They were back in the small interview room at Belport Police Station with the cramped view of a concrete laneway. Kate sat opposite Eckman at her coffee-ringed desk. ‘What’s that got to do with any of this?’

  ‘I looked it up.’ From the company’s outdated website, she’d discovered that Island Care was an off-season caretaking service specialising in general maintenance, storm damage repair and winter surveillance. At the bottom of the page was the contact information for an Ed Gilpin. ‘There aren’t many maintenance companies in this town, and this one is run by somebody with the same surname as the man who murdered David Stemple. It has to be the van that I saw near the house.’

  ‘I don’t follow.’

  Kate told Eckman about finding the obituary locked in the attic of the holiday house, about John’s connection to Annabel Stemple, and about her visits to Marcus Stemple and South Hallston. Eckman listened carefully, leaning on one elbow, chewing a little harder on the end of her pencil each time Kate dropped a new detail. She looked surprised.

  You underestimated John Keddie’s widow, Kate thought. Just like everyone always has.

  ‘Ray Gilpin’s nephew or whatever broke into the holiday house to paint over a wall in the living room,’ Kate said, when she had reached that part of her story. ‘His name must have been one of a dozen or so kids who had their heights marked on the wall. I knew the paint was important. He and John knew each other as kids, I’m sure of it. They would have been around the same age.’

  Eckman took the pencil from her mouth and looked at her teeth marks sceptically. ‘First off, he’s Ray’s son.’

  ‘You know them?’

  ‘Second, why would he paint over his name?’

  ‘To erase his connection to John.’

  ‘You think he had something to do with John’s murder?’ Eckman asked, setting the pencil down.

  ‘All I know is that he has something to do with all this. He’s connected, the way everyone on this damn island is connected. He was parked outside the house. He helped me open the lock-box I found in the attic. He saw what was inside.’

  ‘To be clear, this is the lock-box you took from an active crime scene, right? That’s called evidence, Mrs Keddie. Evidence than you didn’t just contaminate, but evidence you withheld from the police.’

  ‘Evidence you missed,’ Kate said. ‘Evidence that I found in my own house.’

  ‘Your house is a crime scene.’

  ‘I’m well aware of that, Detective. My house is a crime scene and my husband’s corpse is police property.’

  Eckman sank in her chair. Her jaw flexed, then relaxed. ‘Where’s the obituary now?’

  ‘I don’t have it,’ Kate admitted.

  ‘Where is it?’

  ‘Marcus asked if he could have it, so I gave it to him.’

  Eckman sipped stale coffee from a ceramic mug and shook her head. ‘I don’t want to argue with you, Mrs Keddie. I’ll talk to Ed and Marcus Stemple, and I’ll follow up on everything we’ve talked about, but you need to take a step back now. I can’t have you running around the island like this is some sort of suburban procedural TV show. I just can’t. You understand that, right?’

  ‘I need to be doing something,’ Kate said.

  Eckman’s expression softened. ‘I know this isn’t what you want to hear, Mrs Keddie, but the best thing for you to do is go back to Melbourne. Spend time with your daughter. Wait. Survive. Then repeat.’

  Kate smiled sadly. ‘Please stop calling me Mrs Keddie. It’s Kate.’

  ‘Barbara,’ Eckman said. ‘But everyone calls me Bobbi.’ Eckman was right. It was time for Kate to go home. Mia needed her mother, and just as much, Kate needed her daughter. If she packed and checked out of the Blue Whale quickly enough she’d make the last ferry back to the mainland. But there was one thing she needed to do first.

  She followed Bay Street back down to the boardwalk carnival and turned left, following the promenade. She turned down Old Harbour Road and drove along until the houses gave way to ragged thatches of coastal woodland.

  Soon enough, she arrived at Beech Tree Landing, where someone had lured her husband, slit his throat and let him roll into the sea behind the wheel of his car. He’d hated this place, this island. It seemed painfully unfair that he had to die there.

  The landing had thirty or so extra-long parking spaces to accommodate people’s boat trailers, and every one of them was empty. She drove diagonally across them and parked at the top of the furthest boat ramp.

  In the water beyond stood a dozen or so wooden pilings rising from the sea like blunt teeth – the remains of what must have been the old ferry terminal, where David Stemple met his end.

  She looked across the face of the water and thought: this is where it happened, this is where I was made a widow. The last word hit her hard. She was a widow. Worse, she was a widow who never really knew her husband.

  She threw open the door of the car and stepped out into the wind. She marched to the bottom of the boat ramp, far enough so her sneakers touched the water, and screamed.

  When she was done screaming, she folded to her knees on the damp concrete. Grief poured out of her, hot and wet and salty. She wished that she could leave the grief here in Belport, but knew she’d be carrying it home.

  * * *

  If Kate had driven away from Beech Tree Landing thirty seconds earlier or later than she did, everything would have been different. She wouldn’t have arrived at the intersection of Old Harbour Road and Elm just as Ed Gilpin’s work truck – MAINTENANCE stencilled along the side panel – rolled past. She would have turned right, driven back to the motel, and caught the last ferry back to the mainland.

  Instead, she turned left, and followed Ed deeper into the island.

  28

  THE WIFE

  Abby put the kettle on and sat John down at the kitchen table. God knew how long the kid had been out there in the dark, creeping around the house. The knees of his jeans were muddy, and there were pine needles caught in the collar of his windbreaker, which he’d left in a pile on the floor beside his shoes.

  John had been to the house before, once or twice, she now realised. He was one of Eddie’s summer friends. There was a big group of teenagers around the same age that knocked around together during the on-season. It was hard to keep track of who was who, and John didn’t stand out any more than the rest of them.

  ‘I think I might have trampled a garden bed when I came over the fence,’ he said. ‘They were agapanthus, I think. Sorry. I’ll pay for the damages.’

  I’ll pay for the damages. Abby wondered if she’d ever heard those words from a mouth so young. Come to think of it, she could say the same thing about agapanthus.

  ‘You came over the fence?’ she asked.

  She put a glass of water on the table for him and he gulped it. When he’d drained the whole glass, he stifled a burp, and nodded. ‘From Elk Harbour, rather than coming up Bay Street, I walked up Hat Island Road and through the bushland there. I forgot to bring a torch, but I know those trails pretty well and there was enough moonlight to see for most of it. I followed the sound of the surf until I hit the sand dunes, then came in through the back.’

  ‘Over my agapanthus.’

  ‘Again, I’m really sorry about that. But I was sure the police would be watching the house.’

  ‘You mentioned that,’ she said. ‘Why would it matter if the police saw you? You’re not here to see Eddie, are you?’

  He wet his lips and looked down into his lap. ‘No. I … I saw on the news that Mr Gilpin had been
arrested. That’s … They got that wrong. That’s not how it happened.’

  ‘How what happened?’

  ‘It’s not how that man was killed.’

  ‘… And how do you know that?’

  He looked up and to his right. Eddie was standing in the kitchen doorway, crying. The kettle began to whistle loudly. Abby stood frozen in place for a moment, then turned off the stovetop. She watched the boys as the screeching kettle faded into silence.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ Eddie asked John. When John didn’t answer, Eddie turned to his mother with the same question. ‘What’s he doing here?’

  ‘We have to tell, Eddie,’ John said. John looked back down into his lap. His posture reminded Abby of melting snow. ‘We have to.’

  ‘Tell me what?’ Abby asked.

  ‘… Mum,’ Eddie said.

  Abby steadied her hands. She swallowed the ball of panic that had climbed up her throat and opened the pantry. She took the tin of Milo down from the pantry and prepped two mugs.

  ‘Sit down, Eddie,’ she said. ‘It sounds like we need to have a talk.’

  Reluctantly, he took a seat across from John. Abby felt hot and bitter, sad and fearful. Part of her – and it was a big part – didn’t want to hear what they had to say. Even before they started talking, she knew it would change everything. But slowly, tensely, painfully, like pulling a leech from the skin, she drew their story out of them.

  The boys talked. It sounded a lot like the truth. She filled some of the gaps by asking questions, others by using her imagination. Images came to her. Skin. Water. Blood. As Eddie and John explained, she saw the events of that day unfold in her mind’s eye, as vivid as if she’d been right there with them, watching from the corner of

  the ferry terminal shook in the harbour breeze. The walls shifted and the wood moaned around them like a tired old beast. Dusty beams of light fell in through the dirty window, casting them in light the colour of whipped butter. It was late morning, a school day.