by Candice Fox
I walked back to where Amanda and Dylan were standing over a wide, rectangular section of concrete, upraised from the surface of the roof by a metre or more. There was a heavy iron door over the top of the elevator shaft, sectioned into lift-out panels. Alongside the iron door there was a strip of rusty steel mesh bolted to the top of the concrete. The mesh was rusted completely through in parts, holes big enough for a person to put their fist into. I squinted through the mesh but couldn’t see anything, my eyesight ruined by the blazing sunlight.
‘One of the boys recounted being on the rooftop to us this morning,’ I told Dylan, folding my arms. ‘Is there any way they could have had access to this place?’
‘No way,’ Dylan scoffed. ‘I told the police that on day one. No one is allowed up here. Certainly not guests. I mean, I’ve let some of the staff up here now and then. New Year’s Eve, some of us come up here to watch the fireworks. But no, those two doors were locked.’ He pointed back towards the stairs.
I looked at Amanda to see if she was convinced, but she was squinting in the light reflecting from the second elevator bank, the mesh shining, newly replaced.
‘Can you bring the other elevators up to the top floor?’ I asked Dylan. ‘I’d like to see the top of each carriage.’
Dylan nodded and walked away in the direction of the doors. Amanda and I stood watching the cloudless horizon.
‘I feel like we’re right on the edge of it,’ I said. ‘A part of me wants to just throw him into an interrogation room and sweat him for eight hours, see what he’s hiding.’
‘Could be he’s just nervous around cops,’ she said. ‘He’s a bit of a rough old tomcat. See the fight scars? The caravan key?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Let’s do a background check,’ she said.
‘You think he had something to do with this?’
She stood with her hands in the pockets of her shorts, searching her feelings. ‘He told me he needed this job,’ Amanda said eventually. ‘He didn’t just want it. He needed it.’
Dylan returned, opening the iron doors on the top of all three elevator shafts. Amanda and I leaned over and looked into the dusty blackness. There were no shoe prints or traces of a body on the top of any of the elevators. The grime and grit lay undisturbed but for the dripping of oil from the hydraulic shafts.
Leena Ainsbury was run off her feet, but that wasn’t an unusual occurrence. The Happy Scratch Cat Refuge in Yorkeys Knob tended to attract volunteers who were more interested in cuddling and playing with the centre’s kitten population than the kind willing to use a little elbow grease.
The bell above the door rang just as Ainsbury was finishing off the paperwork on that morning’s surrenders – a van-load of felines rescued from a suspected hoarding situation. She looked up over the rim of her glasses as a pair of heavy boots with clanking steel buckles traversed her spotless floor, leaving dirt prints on the tiles. The man who approached the counter was heavy-set, deeply sun-weathered, his bald head shining in the light of the overhead fluorescents. He didn’t smile, and neither did she. On his wrinkled neck she could make out the shape of an ancient tattoo, a red-back spider.
‘I’m here to adopt some cats,’ the man said.
Ainsbury took her glasses completely off, squinting at what she thought was gold teeth flashing beneath his untrimmed moustache.
‘You …’ She glanced at a stack of forms on the counter, suddenly forgetting completely what they were even for. ‘I’m sorry. You’re here to …?’
‘To get some cats,’ the man said. He took a crumpled slip of paper from the inside of his leather jacket, unfolded it and glanced at the writing there. ‘I want two.’
‘Well, two is the legal maximum, yes,’ Ainsbury stammered.
‘One of them,’ the man continued, ‘has got to be orange, with white feet and green eyes. I want the other one to be black, yellow eyes, with a small white patch on its chest.’
‘Well, sir.’ Ainsbury shook her head, bewildered. ‘I can’t guarantee that any of our animals will match your specific description.’
‘Oh, I think they will.’ The man gave a menacing smile, and Ainsbury confirmed her sighting of the gold teeth. She picked up an adoption form, feeling oddly faint.
The bell above the door jingled again as she set the paper before the man.
‘Would you mind if I asked you to …’ Ainsbury spied the second man. He was almost a carbon copy of the first, muddy-booted and windswept, though his boxy skull was covered in black hair that didn’t seem to thin before becoming his heavy brows and beard. As he reached the counter, he drew a piece of paper from his jacket, his words halting as he struggled to read the writing.
‘I am here to … adopt … two cats,’ the man read. ‘One of them is … grey with yellow eyes. One of them is …’ He paused, squinted at the paper. The bald man, filling out his form with his pen clutched in his fist like a knife, stopped his writing and leaned over.
‘Tortoiseshell,’ the bald man read.
‘Tortoiseshell,’ the hairy man said, smiling.
Ainsbury fanned her face with her hand. She looked at the big, clumsy lettering the first man was scrawling on the adoption form. In the first name section of the page, he had written ‘Kidnees’. He had left the surname box blank.
Ainsbury took up the receiver of the phone beside her, thinking it might be best to get both men filling out the forms and then call the refuge director for advice. Before she could make a decision, the bell above the door rang once more, and three more men walked in, their heavy boots clunking on the tiles.
Lillian took Kelly on a virtual tour of the house, holding my phone in both of her small, chubby hands, walking from room to room and babbling out descriptions as though she and her mother hadn’t been here together just days earlier. I lay on the back couch and listened to the sounds of the phone call rising and fading as Lillian did a circuit of the place. Celine was stretched on the boards beside the couch, groaning now and then as I scratched her rump with my foot. The mountains across the lake were being stroked with grey fingers of rain, bringing us an early twilight.
I might have spent the evening delving into the fantasies that plucked at my brain of Lillian living here permanently, some miracle allowing us to spend every evening like this, the child bashing at the screen door every time I returned home, the air filled constantly with her pattering footsteps on the floor. But I was hungry for news about Richie Farrow and disturbed by our meeting with the White Caps Hotel’s maintenance man. I had watched and re-watched the hotel’s CCTV footage of Dylan Hogan leaving work at 6 pm the evening before Richie’s disappearance and returning at four in the morning. I didn’t see how it was possible that he had orchestrated Richie’s vanishing, when no camera showed him entering the building between those times. Richie would have had to go missing on his own between eleven and midnight, with Dylan finding him and taking the boy from the building after he arrived back at the hotel after 4 am. By that time the hotel had been completely locked down, and every guest suitcase and vehicle had been checked before it was released.
Still, I couldn’t keep my mind away from the man. I searched the photographs Sara had sent me for any sign of Dylan Hogan and didn’t see him. I tortured myself by slowly going through the pictures of the four boys jumping and splashing in the aquatic park on the waterfront, their joy-filled faces and gangly, growing bodies caught in twisting, leaping poses. Richie was captured in all the awkward tourist shots – standing by the Welcome to Cairns sign on the Esplanade, buried in the sand up to his neck, licking melted ice cream off the end of a waffle cone.
I decided to request that Clark allow me and Amanda to tail Dylan Hogan, or, if not, that he put a couple of officers on the maintenance man to monitor his behaviour. Lillian came strolling towards me, bored with her video meeting with her mother, and handed me the phone, running away to chase the geese.
‘Look at you,’ Kelly said as I held the phone above my head. ‘Pegged out on the couch,
soaking up the afternoon. Some things never change. You got a good book?’
‘No, but our daughter makes for entertainment enough.’ I turned the camera on Lillian and her pursuit of the birds.
‘She was going on and on about things she did with “Nanna”,’ Kelly said.
‘Well, “morgue woman” is a bit of a mouthful for such a little girl.’
‘Lillian has a nanna already, Ted.’
‘Yes, she has one,’ I said. ‘And since my mother is no longer with us, that gives me one free “nanna” title to assign to someone.’
‘I guess.’
‘How’s yoga camp?’ I said. ‘You fix your chakra yet?’
As Kelly tried to explain the many misunderstandings I had about chakra, and how it might actually help my life, I opened a couple of messages that had been delivered while Lillian had possession of the phone. There were two of them, both from Laney Bass.
I’ve got a sick cow I need to visit on a farm near your address, and Peeper’s fine to come home. Shall I bring her over?
I checked the time on the message. It must have come through just as I handed the phone to Lillian. The second message, coming twenty minutes after the first, made me shoot up on the couch.
I’ll chuck her in the van and see if you’re around.
‘Oh fuck!’
‘What?’ Kelly asked.
‘Nothing.’ I stood, and Celine stood with me, jumping up from the ground with alarm. ‘Someone’s coming over, that’s all.’
‘Someone who?’
‘No one.’
‘A woman.’ Kelly rolled her eyes. ‘“No one” means a woman. You know, you don’t have to keep this shit from me anymore. We’re not together. We’re allowed to talk about it. Who is she?’
‘It’s no one, really, Kelly. My vet, that’s all. I’ve got stuff I have to do. Kelly, I’ve got to go.
‘Jeez.’ She smirked. ‘She must be some important vet.’
I hung up on Kelly without taking the bait and shouted to Lillian. She came running up the yard as fast as she could, infected by excited panic without understanding at all what had spurred it.
‘Lill, you’ve got to help me!’
‘Oh, help!’ she cried.
‘Laney Bass is coming over!’
‘Mamey Bass!’
‘She’ll be here any minute!’
Lillian screamed, her hands up and fingers spread wide. I grabbed the child and ran to the bathroom, stripping her off and starting the shower. I grabbed my belt and then paused.
Before my arrest, when Lillian was just a tiny infant, I had showered with her plenty of times. Kelly and I, both sleep deprived and busy, had sometimes taken the baby under the warm water to save time in setting up the bath. I’d loved holding her against my chest under the stream, kissing her wet head. Showering with my child had seemed completely natural, but now as I looked down at my daughter waiting for the water to warm up, I held my belt buckle and wondered what might happen to my life if Lillian told Kelly or Jett or anyone at all that she had seen me naked. That we had been naked together. It hit me that we had been in my bed together, too. I hadn’t even thought about it. She was my little girl. It had seemed the right thing to do.
With a sense of guilt and dread where there had once been joy and comfort, I stripped off and hurriedly washed us both under the warm water, deciding I didn’t have the time or the patience for a moral debate with myself. Lillian was covered in a day’s childhood adventures: dirt under her nails as black as coal, and leaves and twigs in her hair; around her mouth, Vegemite, crumbs, more dirt, a smudge of green ink that had also somehow ended up in her ears and down her legs. I scrubbed us both, hustled her into her bedroom and left her to dress herself while I threw on a nice shirt and clean jeans. When I came back to her she was sitting naked on the rug, singing a song about owls and blowing kisses at herself in the mirror. The doorbell rang as I was dragging a shirt onto her damp arms. I gathered all the toys from the floor in one mad swoop and heaved them into the cupboard, taking mine and Lillian’s discarded clothes from the hallway floor and chucking them into my bedroom.
I was breathing hard when I tore open the door. Laney stumbled back.
‘Whoa!’ she laughed. ‘Slow down, cowboy.’
‘Sorry.’ I smiled, pushing my damp hair away from my forehead. ‘We were just playing chasings. Come in. Let me get that.’
I took the animal carrier from the porch beside her and followed her into my house, the big bird inside the container shifting as I lifted it. Laney tried to greet Lillian at the door of her bedroom, but the child dissolved into embarrassed giggles and hid.
‘What’s with the boarded-up windows at the front?’ she asked as we walked down the hall.
‘Oh, um. Termites. I’ve got termites in the frames. I’m having them replaced.’
I led Laney out the screen door to the porch, where Celine mobbed us, snuffling and licking the vet’s hands.
‘This is nice.’ She nodded appreciatively, looking out across the yard, at the glassy lake beyond the wire. ‘A quiet slice of paradise, all of your very own.’
‘It’s not a bad spot,’ I told her. ‘If you don’t mind the racket the crocs make at night.’
I led her down into the yard, pausing at the steps while she pulled off her sandals to avoid them getting muddy. I wanted desperately to look at the pale yellow dress she was wearing, her loosely braided hair falling out of its weave behind her out-turned ears, but I was afraid of being caught admiring her. Something at the back of my mind was insisting she wasn’t dressed to treat a sick cow, but it seemed dangerous to hope she had dressed up to come to see me. I told myself she probably had a dinner date or something after she dropped Peeper off with me, even as she stood beside me in the wet grass in my yard and breathed in the cool, earthy air coming off the water.
We talked about the geese and the little house I’d fixed up for them, Laney gathering the folds of her dress and tucking them between her thighs so she could crouch among the birds and feed them grain from her hand without getting the hem wet. I brought the carrier down to the group and let Peeper out, and Laney and I smiled while Peeper settled in with the others, the birds seeming to welcome her back by gathering into a kind of huddle, rubbing their chests against each other, battering excited wings.
‘You did this,’ I told Laney, gesturing to the geese. ‘I can’t tell you how grateful I am. I know they’re just birds, but –’
‘Don’t be silly,’ she said. ‘They’re not just anything. My whole life is all about animals. I understand how important they can be, especially when you’re on your own.’
I nodded along with her comment, even as I felt my stomach plunging at her observation that I was on my own. She’d probably noticed the distinct lack of flair to my decorating, the total absence of the warmth and character Kelly had somehow brought to our home back in Sydney. I’d tried, over the time I’d been in Crimson Lake, to make my house look lived in, but my tastes were simple and the ever-present threat of losing everything again probably stopped me bringing home treasures, books, pieces of art. While I’d tried to kit out Lillian’s room like any other girl’s, there was no denying it lacked the authenticity of a room a child usually lived in. There weren’t enough toys or books yet. There weren’t stains on the carpet and half-scrubbed-off doodles in pencil on the walls.
With my confidence shattered, I figured I had nothing to lose.
‘Can I get you a drink?’ I asked. ‘Being on my own, I don’t often have an excuse to open the good wine.’
‘Oh.’ Laney feigned surprise. ‘Sure. Why not? One won’t hurt.’
When I met Kelly, I was a newbie patrol officer responding to a house party that had got out of control. A handful of teenage girls had decided to have a boozy sleepover and pool party while the parents were away, and the next thing they knew, half the local high school soccer team had got wind of it and was outside, loitering suggestively while the girls peered out the windows. Word spre
ad, and when the police got there concerned neighbours were standing in their front gardens and the street was packed with teens revving their cars and hollering. Someone had chucked an Otto bin through the front window of the house in question, and the girl who lived there was hyperventilating and crying in the driveway. I’d spotted Kelly sitting on a fence across the street from the epicentre of the party, smoking a cigarette. She had a woven plastic choker necklace around her throat and black lipstick on. I told her to go home. She told me to fuck off. I knew then that I liked her, that some deep, primal thing in me had selected her and she was going to haunt me forever if I didn’t get her name.
I knew as soon as I sat down with Laney Bass on my porch that I liked her, that she’d stained me already with a desire I’d never remove. All at once I realised how lonely I had been without this burning, hungry longing for someone, the absence of an object for my affection. I wanted to touch her. I wanted to talk to her. It was impossible to try to maintain any semblance of coolness or mystique. Without really knowing how badly I’d wanted to talk, all those months alone in the house, I was now barely able to keep quiet, and I hung on her every word.
I brought out a chair from the dining room set and gave Laney the couch to herself, Lillian recovering from her embarrassment in time and climbing up there beside the vet.
Laney was from Harrogate, and though she tried to edge around her story, not wanting to be ‘one of those people’ who talks incessantly about their ex, she told me that the reason she’d moved to Crimson Lake six months earlier was because she had a broken heart. She and her ex-fiancé had gone to university together, then opened a practice together and treated the pampered poodles and Persians of her hometown. He’d asked her to marry him after four years, and she’d said yes, and they’d been in the throes of picking invitations and trying to decide on a colour scheme when she’d found a pair of women’s sunglasses in his car that weren’t her own. She’d shrugged off the find, until she found a single sock in the household laundry that wasn’t hers, either. She’d done some snooping around before she revealed to him what she knew.
