by Candice Fox
‘Everyone’s pissed at me,’ he replied, as though he hadn’t heard me. ‘None of the hotel staff are working. They’ll all miss their pay cheques this week.’
We stood watching Amanda as she mimed some kind of explosion. The officers all looked at each other incredulously.
‘Has Amanda –’
‘She has,’ Clark said, putting his hand up. ‘I’ve spoken to the officer involved and put a stop to it. There shouldn’t be any more trouble. I understand there’s a tradition of picking on Amanda Pharrell in this region that I’ll never stamp out, but my officers should know where the line is. And, frankly, their priorities should be elsewhere at the present time.’
‘Thanks,’ I said.
He made a couple of attempts to begin what he said next, struggling to find the words, deciding on them and then changing his mind.
‘She’s not so bad,’ he said finally. It seemed to be a huge leap for him, something he said and then puzzled over as it lingered in the air between us. He looked at me as though to gauge my reaction, perhaps to see whether or not I agreed. I smiled.
Amanda and I had been tasked with reinterviewing Jaxon Cho that morning, in light of new information his parents had told Chief Clark the boy wanted to share. The police were spread thin, and my partner and I were to determine if there was anything of merit in the new statement. I walked with Amanda through the hotel and into the offices beyond the foyer, finding the Cho family in the small room I’d been escorted to in cuffs the day Richie disappeared. Jaxon Cho was trying to climb the stack of folded chairs against the wall, and his mother, Clarina, was shouting him down. Michael Cho was slumped in his chair, flipping through his mobile phone, and I could see in the reflection of his glasses that he was playing some colourful puzzle game.
Jaxon Cho took in the sight of Amanda with a long, low gasp as my partner and I introduced ourselves to his parents.
‘Whoa!’ the boy scoffed, pointing at her tattoos. ‘You are … You are cool!’
‘This kid knows the score.’ Amanda nudged me.
‘How many tattoos do you have?’ Jaxon marvelled at Amanda. ‘I know! You have one thousand!’
‘I like to think of it as one big one,’ Amanda said.
‘Are they all over?’ the boy asked, his lips twitching with a hidden smile. ‘Are they on your … butt?’
‘Jaxon!’ Clarina snapped. ‘Good god. My apologies, Ms Pharrell. Little boys are frequently very disrespectful.’ She glared at the child.
‘Mate.’ I put my arms on the table, trying to draw Jaxon’s eyes from Amanda’s body. ‘Your mum and dad told the police that you had something you’d like to tell us. Amanda and I, we’re not the police. But we’re friends with the police. So you can tell us everything you know.’
‘Well –’ Jaxon’s eyes grew wide with excitement ‘– I know who stole Richie.’
‘Someone stole him?’ Amanda asked.
‘Yeah.’ Jaxon nodded vigorously. ‘I didn’t remember when I woke up and the police were coming and all the mums and dads were crying. And then I just forgot about it. But now I remembered and I said, “Oh, I remember now!” and I told my mum.’
‘Okay, great.’ I shifted uncomfortably, glancing sideways at Jaxon’s parents, who were watching their son with deep frowns. ‘Why don’t you tell us what happened?’
The night had been a fun one. The boys had walked all over the hotel, going up to the roof of the building via a set of dark stairs and watching the stars for a while, making wishes. They’d run laps of the rooftop, whooping and yelling, and had seen a silver object shaped like a dinner plate sailing through the clouds above the mountains. There had been flashing green lights rotating around the dinner-plate shaped object, which floated low over the top of the mountains before zooming away without warning. The boys had considered reporting the sighting to their parents, but had decided not to. They’d returned to the room to jump on the beds, and Jaxon had done a double somersault in the air off the end of one of the mattresses, landing perfectly on the floor by the wall with his arms up above his head like an Olympic gymnast. All the boys had cheered and agreed that Jaxon was the best guy in the whole world.
The boys had decided to try to find some paper to draw on, perhaps to fashion some kind of medal for Jaxon’s achievements. They had been searching the hotel suite’s small kitchenette when there had come a knock at the door. Richie had answered it, and a man had come into the room, quickly checking the hall to see if anyone had noticed him before shutting and locking the door behind him. Although the man had been wearing a black-and-white ghost mask with fangs, Jaxon recognised him as the pizza delivery man who had delivered the boys’ dinner earlier in the evening. He was still wearing his red-and-black uniform with matching cap, a clue to his identity only Jaxon himself seemed to notice. The man had grabbed Richie from among the terrified boys and picked him up off the floor by his shirtfront. Jaxon had taken a big knife from the kitchenette and tried to threaten the masked intruder, but the intruder, while still holding Richie against the wall, had grabbed the knife by the blade and flung it across the room. The intruder had informed the boys that he was taking Richie away forever, and instructed them all to pretend they were asleep and not tell any of the parents that they had seen him or that he had taken Richie. Carrying Richie under his arm like a surfboard, the intruder had fled from the suite’s bedroom window into the night.
Amanda held her emotions in check until the very last second of Jaxon’s tale. She glanced at me, her eyes glistening with tears, and then burst into hacking laughter, slapping the tabletop with both hands as she struggled to breathe. Jaxon didn’t know how to respond. He seemed delighted that he had amused Amanda, but was painfully aware that no one else was laughing.
‘That story is the greatest thing that I have ever heard,’ Amanda moaned, wiping her eyes. She held out her hand and Jaxon, grinning, gave her a high five.
‘Your kid is fucking awesome,’ Amanda told the Cho parents. ‘What a little champ.’ Jaxon’s parents looked tired.
‘Mr Cho,’ I said. ‘Your son’s version of events is –’
‘We know.’ Michael Cho held up a hand. ‘Believe me. This new version of the abduction is even more extravagant than the one we heard this morning. The UFO is a new addition. Next time he tells it, there’ll probably be a sasquatch.’
‘What’s a sasquatch?’ Jaxon asked. Amanda lifted her arm and showed him a tattoo of a sasquatch walking through a field of sunflowers just below her left armpit. The boy smiled.
‘There must be something at the core of the story that’s true,’ Clarina reasoned, her eyes now and then flicking to Amanda, who was trying unsuccessfully to suppress her snickers. ‘Our son witnessed some kind of violence. Threats. A man came into the room. Jaxon has mentioned this pizza delivery man a few times over the past couple of days.’
‘We’ll take the story into consideration,’ I said. ‘But the video evidence we have shows the pizza man delivering the food and then leaving, and we don’t have any vision of him returning. He’s alibied all night long by his delivery route.’
Jaxon and Amanda were both leaning over the table, almost nose to nose, conspiring. I caught some words about UFOs before we made our excuses and left.
‘That was brilliant.’ Amanda was still giggling to herself as we walked down the hall towards the foyer. ‘Kids are terrible, but that one at least has something going for him. I guess we can totally discount the kids as witnesses now.’
‘I wouldn’t be so sure,’ I said. ‘Maybe there is some truth in there. During my trial, my lawyer dug deep into the research around children’s memories to try to see if we could make an argument around Claire Bingley identifying me as her abductor.’
‘Oh yeah?’ Amanda took a seat on a plush leather sofa in the foyer. I sat beside her. ‘So what did you find out?’
‘It’s messy,’ I explained. ‘There’s a lot of debate. Basically, a kid’s powers of observation and memory are less reliable than an
adult’s. They can only fit a certain amount of information into their heads at any given time, so if the boys were fixated on the movie they might have totally missed someone coming into the room and quietly taking Richie away. Kids have been shown to magnify events or invent them completely, and the younger they are, the more likely they are to do that. They’re enormously egocentric, so they’re not walking around remembering conversations or events that happened that don’t relate to them.’
‘So Jaxon’s fight with the pizza man was probably just a magnified version of some interaction between them,’ Amanda mused. ‘The pizza guy said something mean and Jaxon’s blown it up in his memory into a whole physical confrontation.’
‘Or Jaxon’s just had the idea that someone abducted Richie suggested to him enough times, and now he’s recounting it,’ I said. ‘Think about it – all the kids have been hearing for days is Someone took Richie. Someone took Richie. Someone took Richie. They’re also being told they must have seen something. They’re being led to believe that they have the answers, and they want to please the adults around them.’
When my alleged victim, Claire Bingley, was questioned over her abduction and rape, she had been shown a set of photographs that included my picture. Simply by presenting the photo set, the police had suggested to Claire that one of the men they were showing her was the perpetrator. She had seen me that afternoon. She wanted to help the police. In her young, frightened mind, she was led to believe that I had been the one to hurt her.
‘Claire Bingley was thirteen and she misremembered events because of her suggestibility,’ I said. ‘These boys are seven and eight.’
‘It might be just as important to know what happened on the first night the boys were running around the hotel as the second night,’ Amanda said. ‘They might have seen or heard something relevant. Someone hanging around. Someone approaching them. Or perhaps they’ve seen something like that on the second night and they believe it was on the first. How are they supposed to tell the difference between two identical nights if their memories are so whacked out that they’re adding details of things that never happened?’
‘I’ll watch more of the interview tapes tonight, go back and see what they said in their initial interviews,’ I said. ‘With every hour that passes we get further and further from what happened. If they know the truth, it’s being twisted by everyone’s desperate desire to know it and the boys’ desire to help.’
We had been assigned a booth at the back of the Clattering Clam as a workspace. We set up our laptops there, spreading papers over the polished wood tabletops and pushing aside the sticky, laminated menus advertising chip-basket sizes and kid-friendly meals. Amanda walked behind the empty bar after a while and made herself a cappuccino without seeking anyone’s permission or asking me if I wanted one. She sat slurping it across from me, running one finger down a printed list of sex offenders in the Cairns region and their various known depravities. I watched the video of the Clattering Clam dinner with the seven parents on the night of Richie’s disappearance, rolling my cursor backwards and forwards through time, making the people at the table writhe and wriggle on the screen.
My eyes were drawn to Sara, who sat at the corner of the table beside the rough-edged John Errett and his wife. I played a few clips of her, following her eyes across the table to Michael Cho and Ivan Sampson. She watched them as they talked, her chin resting on her fist, her face seeming placid in the grainy footage. I tried to zoom in on her, to get some sense of her emotions as she sat there at the table, but the screen just filled with white and grey pixels.
‘Have you heard anything about Sara Farrow having an affair?’ I asked Amanda.
‘No, but she seems like the type,’ she said.
‘What makes you say that?’
‘She’s a good liar,’ Amanda said. ‘A practised liar by omission. They’re one of the more dangerous types of liar.’
I trust Amanda’s intuitions. They’re not always terribly consistent, sure. At times she seems to know exactly what a person is thinking, literally the words that are about to come out of their mouth, and yet at other times she can be completely unaware of her effect on people. I have seen her slowly rile a man into a steaming frenzy, only to be shocked when he finally explodes, and then turn around and sense my deeply hidden feelings as though she’s reading my mind.
For all her genius, Amanda has these theories. They come from nowhere, and once they’re established they’re as rigid as morals. I knew her theory about liars would have been something she made up, a sudden law of the universe she had decided upon based only on her unreliable observations. I decided to hear it anyway.
‘There are different types of liar?’ I asked.
‘You betcha.’ She scraped the foam from the top of her cappuccino and spooned it into her mouth. ‘Some people give you bullshit – planned liars. And some people give you nothing – unplanned liars. The former kind just replaces one truth with another. Like cutting a chapter out of a book and putting a different one in its place. You’ve got to craft the new chapter ahead of time and splice it in, hope that the book doesn’t read weird.’
‘Okay,’ I said.
‘But people who tend to lie by omission are deliberately riskier. They leave gaps in the narrative and don’t plan how they’re going to fill them, because they might not have to. They leave the chapters missing and just hope to Christ the reader doesn’t pick up the book and feel it’s a bit thin. When the missing chapters are discovered, they not only have to fill them in on the fly, but they have to account convincingly for why they left them out in the first place. One lie suddenly becomes two.’
‘Uh-huh.’ I appreciated her theory. ‘You’re referring to Sara Farrow not telling police about her baby’s death.’
‘Specifically, I was referring to her hitting Richie.’ She sprawled her elbows on the table and slid her phone beneath her face, tapping distractedly at the screen. ‘I’ve listened to the phone call you sent me. It’s very good.’
She played the clip.
We were having those monthly visits from child services, the ones they put in place after our first child died. Henry and I were fighting. We weren’t getting any sleep. We had to keep the house immaculate because they showed up unannounced. Every time I turned around, Richie was bumping into things, leaving bruises on himself, or totally trashing things. He got into the kitchen and spread flour everywhere while I took a phone call one day. I had my back turned for two minutes. Imagine if they’d turned up then?
‘She tries hard to account for what she did,’ Amanda said. ‘Not telling you about the incident. She talks about the monthly visits from child services. Fights with Henry. Lack of sleep. The stresses of keeping the house clean and the kid getting into everything like an uncontrollable little monster.’
‘Mmm,’ I said.
‘She’s setting you up to feel bad for her,’ Amanda said. ‘She doesn’t fail to mention the death of her first kid, just in case you’d forgotten. And then she tries to relate to you.’
I just snapped. You’re a parent. You must get it.
‘I did relate to her,’ I said. ‘I understood completely.’
‘Because kids are disgusting and horrible?’ Amanda smirked.
‘You didn’t seem to mind Jaxon Cho.’
‘That kid is a hilarious adult man trapped in a kid’s body.’
‘I related to Sara Farrow because it’s not easy being a parent.’
‘Whatever,’ Amanda said. ‘Point is, she foresaw that you were going to discover the gap she’d left in her narrative, so she went back and arranged a very attractive, very relatable new chapter to fill its place.’
‘I don’t know.’ I played with the video before me. ‘Henry Farrow failed to mention his million-dollar life insurance policy on the kid.’
‘And what was his excuse for that?’
‘He didn’t offer one,’ I said.
‘Mmm-hmm.’ Amanda went back to her papers. ‘He has no new chapter
s. He left a hole, and he admits it. You can’t conflate the two. Sara is far more deceptive than Henry. But you want to defend her because you feel sorry for her. You know what it’s like to be suspect number one.’
I looked at Sara Farrow on the screen before me. Amanda was right, of course. Since I’d set eyes on the slightly plump, exhausted-looking mother sitting helplessly in the hotel suite she had been given, I’d been recalling my time under suspicion. I had intimate knowledge of everything Sara was experiencing right now. The sideways glances, the whispers, the awkward silences. Sara must have known it was only a matter of time before the papers dredged up the child services records on Anya Farrow’s death. Before they sat her ex-husband, her neighbours, Richie’s teacher down and asked them what kind of mother she had been. Her nights, like mine, would be filled with nightmares, hellish reimaginings of This Is Your Life.
My phone rang. It was Chief Clark.
‘They think they’ve found a burial site at the DeCasper place,’ he said.
I wandered with the phone to my ear, watching the journalists camped across from the hotel through the restaurant’s front windows, wincing as a few turned and took photographs of me. It was bad news. Clark explained that after the paramedics and crime scene techs had finished their work on the DeCasper house, the property had been sealed off and guarded overnight. Early that morning, a member of the dog squad had taken a trained search-and-rescue animal from the Zeerich region out to the DeCasper house, where it had shown interest in an area of disturbed earth near the back fence, within view of the house. The disturbed earth might have been related to the unfinished planter boxes, officers thought, maybe blood and bone fertiliser mixed in with the soil that confused the dog. They sealed off the section of yard and set up a crime scene tent around the area. The crew of three dogs that had searched the hotel for any signs of Richie on the morning he disappeared were loaded up into vans and driven south. This move was an important one, as journalists lurking in the cafes, restaurants and bars around the White Caps Hotel had been keeping an eye on the movement of the dog squad vans. Where the hounds went, there was sure to be a body, so the vans were trailed by cars full of reporters down the highway towards Zeerich.
