by Candice Fox
A mob of wallabies broke from the long grass beside the road and bounded across my path up ahead. Their flight felt like a warning. The rainforest was thinning, shrinking to sprawling mangroves.
‘When I came back up the last time I made a huge fuss,’ Sara said. ‘Really screamed at the boys. I told them Richie was with them, that he’d been there all night, that they’d lost him. They said no, but I insisted. Yes, he’d been there. Yes, yes, yes. I could see them accepting it. I was so mad, I must surely be right. Once one kid starts believing, the others fall right into line. They had been dead asleep when I walked in, and now I was in hysterics.’ She glanced at me in the rear-view mirror. ‘Just like you said. Hysterics.’
I focused on the road.
‘They were upset, confused. But I screamed at them for five minutes before anyone arrived. And then the other parents joined in, backing me up. Richie had been with them all night. Where was he now? They had to know.’
I remembered Jaxon Cho’s wandering eyes as he delved into his elaborate fantasies about the night the boys had spent together. Two of them arguing in the interview tapes about whether they’d built a fort on the first night or the second. The boys had confused the two evenings, been convinced by the parents that their friend had been with them when in fact he’d been absent. Their own parents and police officers in uniform with serious faces and guns and recording equipment had told the boys that Richie had been there. They were used to trusting the word of adults, and now frightened, frenzied adults were telling them something and they were all listening, believing, terrified.
Luca Errett had been the one to get the closest to the truth in the interviews. I had watched him and not understood the depth of his words.
All the mums were crying.
They kept asking us, ‘Where’s Richie? Where’s Richie?’ but I didn’t know. I couldn’t remember. I said he wasn’t there. Maybe he went somewhere else.
Like maybe he was still sleeping or something.
‘How long had you been planning this?’ I asked. The questions kept coming. I knew I was distracting myself from my present danger by delving into Sara’s plan, that I needed to focus, think of myself. Think of Lillian. But I had to know the truth.
‘I’ve been thinking about it since he was born,’ Sara said. ‘But it was never real, just a kind of game. A fantasy. Lots of mothers think like that, but they just don’t admit it.’
I was silent. She rolled her eyes.
‘Oh, come on,’ Sara said. ‘Don’t be so naive. It’s the middle of the night and you’re sore and heavy and he’s been screaming for fourteen hours straight and you think If I just gave his nose and mouth a little pinch. You’ve driven for three hours with him in the car kicking your seat and complaining and farting and picking his nose and you finally get to some lookout in the mountains and he’s standing by the edge, where you told him not to stand and you think – If I just gave him a little push. I know what it’s like already. The aftermath. All the sympathy you get. All the help that suddenly comes.’
Sara had lost herself. She realised what she was saying and her face hardened.
‘But I was never going to actually do it. It was just … thinking. There’s nothing wrong with thinking,’ she said. ‘But then it’s every day. You’re thinking about it every day. And the opportunities are suddenly everywhere. On this trip I was thinking about it a lot. Looking at the cameras. Talking to him at the park. Driving him into the mangroves. Maybe it was real and I just didn’t want to believe that I would go through with it. He was right in front of me and I had the rock in my hand and I asked myself if I had covered everything. And I had. So I did it. I finally crossed the line.’
‘I don’t understand why you hired me,’ I said. ‘Was I always part of the plan?’
‘Not until I saw an advertisement for Conkaffey and Pharrell investigations in the newspaper on the first morning,’ Sara said. ‘They delivered it to my room. It’s an odd name. I remembered your case. I thought you’d be a good safety buffer. You knew what it was like to be falsely accused. I thought you could probably give me the heads-up if anything real bad was coming my way from the police, and you’d be purely focused outwards on other leads. You might have found something. At least, that’s what I thought.’ She locked eyes with me in the mirror. ‘I didn’t expect you to turn on me. That wasn’t your job.’
The dirt road had thinned, had disappeared beneath grass and vines for a while and now was completely gone. I was rolling on a mix of clay and sand, knocking over fledgling plants and winding between trees. I slowed to walking pace. Sara looked out the windscreen for the first time in a long time.
‘Keep going.’
‘We’re going to get bogged.’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said.
We drove on sand, the finger-like roots of mangroves poking up from the ground. When there was nowhere further to go, I stopped. We sat in silence for a long time, the car ticking. Sweat was creeping out of the hair at the back of my neck, dampening my collar.
I looked out at the lonely place where Richie had died. I didn’t want to know how Sara Farrow had killed her son, but as I gazed upon the scene before me I saw that there were plenty of options at her disposal. Thick, twisted fallen branches and heavy clumps of moss-covered rock. The creeping tide rising, muddy, impenetrable water. And then, of course, we were now in the territory of the hellish, prehistoric creatures I had just seen captured and contained behind wire. As the thought came to me so did my awareness of the sounds outside the car, the swamps coming to life as they did every night. Birds giving their final song of the day, frogs and other amphibian things starting up their vigil chorus. And the crocodiles barking somewhere nearby on the banks.
‘Think about this for a second,’ I said. My voice in the car seemed impossibly large, clumsy. ‘No one is going to believe I came out here and killed myself with my child in the car.’
‘Why not?’ she asked. ‘Look at your life.’
We stared at each other in the mirror. She was composed, calculated, her features carefully arranged, the way I’d seen her sitting on the end of the hotel bed when I first met her. Unemotional. There was no need to pretend now.
‘Get out,’ she said.
‘I don’t believe you won’t hurt Lillian,’ I said. ‘I don’t believe you’ll kill me and leave her unharmed. You’ve killed a child before.’
‘You don’t have much choice, Ted,’ Sara said. ‘You can watch me do it now or you can tell yourself I won’t do it after you’re gone.’
She flicked something on the gun, maybe the safety, maybe the magazine release, fumbling to make a sound with the weapon to warn me. I didn’t move, took just a second to call her bluff. She raised the gun and fired right beside my ear, shattering the windscreen.
Ringing. The distinct pulsation of my eardrum, like I’d been slammed with an open palm against the side of the head. I turned and saw Lillian snap awake, already screaming, her mouth and eyes huge. Sara Farrow was shouting at me to get out of the car. I could see her mouth forming the words but I could not hear them.
Sounds rushed back, muffled, numbed, starting with the clunk as I opened the car door and got out. Sara followed me a few paces onto the sand, a narrow bar in the water where we could get our footing, but only barely.
I turned and stood before Sara in the wilderness, listening to my child sobbing madly, calling for me. I tried to plan, looking around me, wondering if I sank to my knees whether I could grab a rock or a handful of sand and hurl it at her face, distract her. But I’d never get away with Lillian in my arms unless I disarmed her. The thoughts were crashing into each other in my brain, no conclusions, only impulses. And yet I couldn’t move, couldn’t get air into my lungs.
Then I spotted movement behind the car. The sliding, slithering movement of something creeping cautiously.
I was afraid to let my eyes settle on Amanda for too long as she moved towards the back of the car.
Amanda slid along
the side of the vehicle and raised her gun, pointing it right at the back of Sara Farrow’s head from five metres away.
Amanda and I locked eyes. I shook my head, just one twitch, my eyes wild as I moved them to Lillian, who was visible through the shattered windscreen and just to Amanda’s right through the back passenger door. I had no words, but I hoped my message seared through my eyes. If Amanda missed and Sara Farrow panicked, turned and sprayed gunshots wildly, as she was likely to do as an unpractised gun user, she might hit Lillian. I felt tears on my face as I stared at my partner just beyond my abductor, willing her desperately to hear my silent thoughts.
Take her. Go.
‘I’m sorry,’ Sara said to me. I was hardly listening, trying not to watch over her shoulder as Amanda popped open the door of the car as quietly as she could. ‘You seem like a nice guy, Ted. I wasn’t lying when I said I had listened to your story and that I believed you.’
‘You can turn this around right now,’ I told Sara, watching but not watching Amanda unclipping Lillian from her seat. ‘You don’t have to do this. Let’s talk it through. Let me help you.’
Amanda took the blubbering child into her arms and glanced back at me. I nodded, and she turned and sprinted away into the night.
Sara didn’t seem to notice the sound of the child’s cries receding. She raised the gun and pointed it at my chest.
Amanda couldn’t get any breath into her lungs. She hadn’t been able to in what seemed like hours, since she had begun to realise what was happening to Ted. She’d panted, gasped for air as she took her motorcycle to its mechanical limits down the highway, the rainforest becoming a green blur, the air in her helmet red-hot and burning in her mouth. She had breathed in short, heavy huffs as she sprinted through the forest and into the mangroves, stopping at what she hoped was a safe distance from where her quarry would be so that her motor wouldn’t be heard. She couldn’t breathe now as she kept running, the child slipping in her sweat-drenched arms as she fumbled her out of the mangroves, splashing and stumbling through water that looked like puddles but was knee deep. Gripping, sucking mud and bottomless sand. She’d lost the path the car had taken in her haste. Around her in the growing dark, things were barking and howling and croaking, the sounds only audible between the screams of the child.
Amanda stopped and held the girl out from her chest. She was wet all over, tears and snot and sweat. Amanda coughed, mosquitos landing on them both, buzzing at her mouth and ears.
‘Listen, sprog!’ Amanda drew deep gasps, letting the words tumble out. ‘We’re in croc country here. You! Need! To shut up! Shut! Up! Listen! You’ll get us fucking eaten! With that noise!’
She gave the child a good shaking, but that only made things worse. Amanda wondered what Ted would do. With every cell in her body rebelling, her instincts screaming against her actions, she pulled the child to her again and squeezed it tight with her arms.
‘I love you,’ Amanda said as she rocked the child, put her cheek against its hot head, bent and kissed it on the temple. ‘It’s okay. It’s okay. I’m here. I love you. I love you. I love you.’
She patted the damp curls and kissed the child a dozen times. In a few moments it was quiet.
‘Good work,’ Amanda said, hefting the child onto her chest and starting to jog on through the dark. ‘Good work, sprog.’
She didn’t stop, even as she heard the gunshots behind her.
I took a couple of steps towards Sara. The woman was on the edge, but she had fired the weapon already. She knew how to do it. She could do it again. Just like the killing of her own son, taking a life, my life, here in this place would be easier a second time. I could see her detaching from me, justifying it to herself, practising what she would tell herself about the act later, far from here, when what she had done was only a memory. I was close to the gun, one hand out and reaching, and as she came back to the situation she raised it higher, aiming at my face, her teeth bared.
‘Sara, listen,’ I began.
‘I can’t,’ she said, the gun shaking. ‘I can’t. I’m sorry. I have to.’
I had remembered the keys in my hand as Amanda opened the back door of the car to retrieve my child, some strange habitual instinct making me take the keys from the ignition as I exited. I’d wondered why I hadn’t locked the car, why the door mechanism didn’t seem to click when she lifted the handle. Absurd, logical, everyday thoughts, the kind that push through trauma’s peaks of intensity, the brain trying to calm itself. I gripped the keys in my pocket and pushed the lock button on the car’s remote control now twice in quick succession, and the car gave a short beep of protest right behind Sara.
It was enough to distract her just for an instant, her head twitching, wanting to look but too focused on me to fully let herself go. The gun swung slightly to the left and I slapped it away in the same direction, grabbing Sara’s wrist as she dropped the weapon. But she was too wild, too full of the same adrenaline she’d needed to take my life, to be subdued easily. She collapsed, and I went with her, and as we hit the ground her hand was raking across my face and her knees were in my belly. I tried to force her into the sand, tried to turn her and wrap my arm across her face, my fingers fumbling at her hair. She bit down hard on my forearm and a howl rippled out of me.
Sara saw the animal before I did. It was only a movement in the corner of my vision, the hide and snout slicked with the same mud and sand that was everywhere, so that for a second as it rushed out of the water it seemed like the swamp itself had come to life. The croc ran at us, and we parted, screaming. Another strange, disconnected, rational thought pulsed through me, that the beast was my size, that its scaly shoulders were as broad as mine and its eyes were knowing and alert and thinking, calculating.
The croc paused for only a moment, its jaws open and hissing before it turned and rushed again at Sara. I grabbed at the gun, getting a handful of metal and sand as Sara scrambled away into the water, slamming into a mangrove tree as she tried to flee, falling. The croc entered the water after her, disappeared as though it had turned back into the water itself, scales dissolving. The only indication of it was a V-shaped ripple on the surface as it advanced towards her.
‘Shoot it!’ she screamed. ‘Shoot it! Shoot it!’
I shot at the water before her twice. She stumbled again, hit a deep patch or was dragged down. I couldn’t tell. She made no sound as her head disappeared beneath the surface.
The car was bogged. I ran through the falling dark, sinking sometimes to my waist in the water, dragging myself out by the roots of trees. The thought kept coming that I would never make it out, that something would take my calf in its jaws and drag me back and I would remain here with Sara and her son forever. The thought was followed closely by those same impossibly vivid pictures of Amanda and Lillian running, being cornered by groups of the creatures against merciless walls of trees. I almost didn’t see the red and blue flashing lights until they were all around me. The ground was suddenly firm under my feet. Amanda was standing in the dark inside a circle of police cars with Lillian in her arms, both of them drenched and caked in mud, Superfish patting Lillian’s back as she sobbed.
‘Just give her to me,’ he said to Amanda.
‘No way,’ Amanda was saying. ‘I’m covered in its germified ooze now anyway. I’m holding on to it until he comes –’
I marched up and snatched my child from Amanda’s arms. I couldn’t help myself. She watched me in open-mouthed horror as I dissolved into tears.
‘I’m sorry,’ I told my child. ‘Lillian, I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry.’
Amanda was watching me cry the way a person watches a stranger throw themselves from a bridge. I reached out with one arm and encircled Amanda’s head and dragged her to me, held her with my baby against my chest.
‘Oh no! No!’ Amanda yelled, her face muffled in Lillian’s body and mine. ‘Urgh! Urgh! Stop! No touching! Oh god! Stop!’
There were police officers around us, uniforms from C
airns and some others I didn’t recognise, northerners responding to Amanda’s call.
‘Thank you, Amanda,’ I said. ‘Thank you.’
I let my partner go and she gasped for air, wiped and flapped at her face and neck and chest with her hands like she was covered in swarming ants.
‘Don’t thank me,’ she said, her words so fast they almost ran into each other. ‘It was great. We had a great time. The sprog and me. Yep. Running through the swamp. Lots of adventure. Loved it. Please don’t thank me again. No hugging. Nope. None of that.’
She turned to look at Superfish for help.
‘Don’t you start crying!’ she wailed at him. ‘Everybody stop crying!’
‘I’m not crying.’ Superfish turned away.
The adrenaline comedown made things hard to follow. I held on to Lillian as Amanda and Superfish briefed the officers who came into our little huddle, each taking different pieces of information away. Clark arrived and I told him about Sara’s murder of her child in the swamps and how I had seen her disappear into the water.
He said nothing to Amanda or Superfish, hardly looked at them. A helicopter rushed overhead and I walked away with Amanda to the edge of the gathering, sitting on a police car bonnet and hiding my face in my child’s neck and hair.
Amanda was still wiping at her arms and hands, her hair sticking out at odd angles from behind her ears like she’d received an electric shock. She mumbled complaints I could hardly hear, pacing back and forth.
‘Don’t know why you didn’t hug Superfish.’ She gave an angry wave in his direction. ‘He’s the only reason I got to you.’
‘What are you talking about?’ I asked.
‘I never received your text,’ Amanda said. ‘Your SOS text. That bitch Joanna Fischer lost my phone for me.’
She explained the confrontation on the rooftop at the White Caps Hotel, her nemesis walking in on her and Superfish trying to discover whether Richie Farrow’s body was at the bottom of a hidden secondary elevator shaft. Joanna had pulled a gun on Amanda just as my text had come through to her phone, causing Amanda to drop the device into the shaft. A group of officers on their way to the roof, having heard a rumour that Amanda Pharrell had been spotted in the building, had inadvertently stopped Amanda from being shot.
