Redemption Point

by Candice Fox

  “I don’t feel good.”

  “I seen it on the news. You’re fucked.”

  “Mmm.” I rubbed my stomach, felt a burning in my throat. I’d forgotten how to put words together. They were like marbles in my mouth, clacking against my teeth. “It’s not okay. Things are not okay.”

  “Who’s this girl? Why’s she saying these things? Tell me what’s goin’ on.”

  His tone had changed. The “tell me what’s goin’ on” was a command. For the first time, I realized how dangerous this situation might be. I was in the house of one of the country’s most dangerous drug lords, a person who had stuck his neck out for me, believing in my innocence from the outset. His men had been protecting me when a second accusation came down. I knew exactly what he was thinking. It was what the entire world would be thinking as news of the interview spread. What were the odds of an innocent man being accused of the same thing twice? I looked away, again at the women all the way down the other end of the balcony. They were not family members. This group was like the group of men in the front room—Khalid’s soldiers, tolerated by his family members because his work and his involvement with these types had paid for the exorbitant roof over all their heads. These women were exotically, unnaturally beautiful, tanned and toned and glittering with expensive fabrics. Heels that looked dangerous to walk in. As I looked back at Khalid, I found him gazing at me skeptically. Was he trying to decide if I found them attractive?

  “The woman, she’s a girlfriend I had in high school,” I said. The words, once trapped, now came spilling out. “Melanie Springfield. She was fifteen when we met. I was eighteen. We went to the same school. It wasn’t even a real relationship—it was two kids saying they were together and kissing and going to the movies. It must have lasted … I don’t know, a couple of weeks? A month?”

  “You fucked her?”

  “No.”

  “Come on.” Khalid snorted, humorless. “You were eighteen!”

  “I was shy,” I admitted. “I was … I don’t know … A late bloomer, I guess. Is that even true? When do boys have sex? Urgh. Jesus. I wasn’t very popular. I hung out with the nerds.”

  “So she wasn’t your first?”

  “No, no. My first wasn’t until about a year later, a girl I met at university.”

  “Well, what’s all this bullshit about the little sister then? You didn’t even sleep with her? How could you have slept with the little sister?”

  “I don’t know!” I thrust my hands out. “You tell me! I don’t know why she would do this. I can’t explain it. I don’t even know her. We didn’t talk after high school. I didn’t really keep up with any of my high school friends. Once I joined the cops, you know, you get a whole bunch of new friends who do what you do, and you don’t have time.”

  Khalid said nothing. He leaned against the balcony rail, watching me, a bored cat. Dangerous, with the potential to spring and slash me to pieces. Waiting for me to explain why he shouldn’t.

  The memories were flooding back. Embarrassing, self-conscious teenagers, never looking at each other’s eyes. “I remember that the little sister, Elise, used to hang around Melanie and me a bit while we were at her house. Melanie hated it. She used to chase the girl away. Those are about the only interactions I had with her. She was the annoying little sister of a girl I barely dated.”

  It couldn’t possibly have been as cold on that balcony as it felt. I gritted my teeth to stop them chattering. I didn’t have anything else for Khalid. Any further assurances that I hadn’t pursued this child I hardly knew many years ago for underage sex. He glanced at the women at the end of the balcony. Then at me. There seemed to be a specific girl that interested him. A long-limbed brunette in a flowy gold dress.

  “You like her?” he asked, tipping his glass in her direction.

  “Oh come on, Khalid.”

  “You can have her, if you want. I think she likes you. I’ve seen her look over here at you a couple of times.”

  “And what exactly would that prove?”

  “I don’t know,” he said, knowingly.

  “I was with my wife for fourteen years,” I said. “Offering me one of your girls isn’t going to convince you I’m not what people are saying I am. You just have to believe me or not believe me.”

  He smiled. I was right. Now was the time to decide. And it seemed he did decide, his eyes wandering over my face, our every interaction perhaps playing through his mind. In time the man straightened, shifted his glass to his other hand and took a sip.

  “You want me to make it go away?”

  “No,” I said. “I certainly do not. I want it to go away, definitely. But I do not want you to do anything about it. You need to be one hundred percent clear on that, Khalid. I know you think you know what’s good for me, but that would be very, very bad for me right now.”

  He shrugged a shoulder, clicked his tongue, disappointed.

  “I’m serious,” I stressed.

  “I got you, bro.”

  “I’ve got to go home.” I glanced at the horizon. The city skyline, sharp and imposing. “I might have people targeting my house again after this.”

  “What are you goin’ to do ’bout it?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. Nothing? It might blow over. I’ll talk to my lawyer. Maybe … Maybe we’ll sue? Force her to admit she’s lying. Why would she do this? I don’t understand. What could she possibly gain from this?”

  “Lawsuits,” Khalid sighed. “Bro, you oughtta start thinkin’ ’bout which side you’re on.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “This chick has lied about you,” he said. “Whatever the reason. Whatever she gains from it, man. Doesn’t matter. She lied. It’s a lie that could bury you. Literally put you in the ground.”

  “I know.”

  “So you’re, what—” he scoffed, sneered. “You’re gonna get your fuckin’ lawyer onto it? You’re gonna see her in court? You fuckin’ serious?”

  “Maybe?”

  “You’re dealin’ with people on the bad side, Conkaffey.” He put a hand on my shoulder, squeezed. “This guy that raped that kid. This chick who’s telling lies. They’re from the bad world. You gotta treat bad world problems with bad world solutions.”

  The small, lethal man before me stood strong and proud as a lion. But his eyes were appealing to me. Pleading with me to let him out of his cage. There was, indeed, a bad world, and I’d let myself be led blindly right into its brilliantly lit, lavish town hall: Khalid Farah’s mansion. I glanced at the figures behind me in the house, moving shadows clinking glasses and shifting chairs on plush carpets. An endless party in a perfectly decorated hell. I went to the balcony rail and Khalid leaned against it, mirroring me, his arms folded on the cold stone, eyes searching the distant shore.

  “You fell off the good ship, bro,” the drug lord said. “You’re in the water now, and they ain’t turnin’ back to get you. There are black sails on the horizon. You gonna grab on, or you gonna drown?”

  Ships. Boats. Big white planes with huge sail-wings bearing me home to my geese, to the case I should have been working on, the things that were supposed to matter. I walked through the tunnel to the plane with my head down, certain the people walking behind me were talking about me. There were pictures of me on the television screens beside the lists of planes departing and arriving. The public didn’t know what Stories and Lives was going to reveal about me on the upcoming episode, but one thing was for sure—the entire country would be watching. The show had that kind of pull, and so did my downfall. I needed to get home.

  I made eye contact with no one as I headed to my seat, my boarding pass crumpled in my hand, an unconscious gesture. I stopped and unfolded it, glanced at the seat to my right, 10D.

  There were children on the seats beside mine. A young boy in the window seat, sixteen maybe. His sister, maybe thirteen, was texting in the middle seat, thumbs dancing over the keys. Two redheads, a pigeon pair. I grabbed at the pain in my throat and looked ar
ound desperately for help.

  “You right, mate?” said the man behind me, sighing.

  “I can’t sit here.”

  The girl in the seat was looking up at me. The unfair perfection of youth. Impossibly soft skin. Her T-shirt had some high-cheekboned rock star with bad hair on it, a celebrity not much older than her roaring into a microphone on her narrow, featureless chest.

  “What’s the holdup?” Someone further back in the queue.

  “I can’t sit here,” I said. Panic was creeping up my arms, hot liquid rolling into my chest. I looked beyond the line of people behind me, twisted too fast, bashed my bag against the nearest seat. There were red-blazered flight attendants at the end of the plane. I headed down the length of the aircraft to where they stood fiddling with things in the storage area.

  “I’m sorry. I can’t sit in my seat,” I blurted. There were two of them, a man and a woman. The woman turned to me, pursed her red-painted lips and adjusted her immaculate bun like my words might have knocked it askew.

  “I’m sorry, sir.” She composed a smile. “All passengers have to take their assigned seats, at least for takeoff.”

  “I can’t do that.”

  “Why not?”

  I pulled at the skin at my throat, told myself to stop. Didn’t stop. “I just can’t. Trust me. You’re really going to want to move me.”

  The male flight attendant had turned around, two bags of small muffins in his hands. He actually stumbled backward a little at the sight of me.

  “But, sir—” the woman was saying.

  “It’s okay, Sheree.” He grabbed her shoulder. “It’s okay, sir, we’ll move you. I’ve got this.”

  He wriggled past me in the tight space between my bulk and the thin doors on either side of us leading to the toilet cubicles. I felt the heat draining from my face as he presented a seat in the back row. He took my bag from my fingers, physically and metaphorically lightening my load. I sank into the seat and let myself be dragged mentally into a magazine I found tucked into the back of the seat before me, my heartbeat slowly returning to normal.

  I didn’t question why the young male flight attendant had saved me. It was easy to assume that upon recognizing me, he’d been quick to act simply because he knew that if someone snapped a picture of me on the plane, regardless of who I sat beside, it would make waves on social media. People might boycott the airline because they’d accommodated me. They might question whether I was properly supervised while in the air, whether I’d lurked menacingly by the toilets, waiting for girls to pounce on. Certainly, seating me beside a teenage girl was business suicide. I was safest tucked away, out of sight, out of mind.

  But then, when we had reached cruising altitude, the male flight attendant tapped the top of my magazine and I brought it down from around my face to find him unclipping and pulling down my tray table. He glanced behind himself, secretive, as he put a small plastic bottle of red wine, a plastic cup, and a little packet of cheese and crackers down on the table before me.

  “Hang in there, Ted,” he murmured, before ducking away again.

  It was the best wine and cheese I’d ever had.

  * * *

  There was nothing for it. I needed a bathroom party.

  The bathroom parties had started when the geese were very small, so fragile that a stiff breeze could send them rolling helplessly across the lawn like fuzzy gray tumbleweeds. With humidity-cracking storms frequent in Cairns, sometimes it was just too harsh out for the baby birds, so I’d fill the bathtub with a few centimeters of water and drop the lot of them in under the watchful eye of their skeptical mother, still lame, hobbling in the hallway. In the beginning I’d simply sit on the toilet lid and watch the birds ducking and diving in the tepid water, paddling their little feet and exploring the emptiness of the white porcelain towering above them with their beaks. They always seemed like happy creatures to me, because I remembered them gathered at the bottom of the cardboard box when I’d rescued them, squealing in terror on the sandbank where I’d found them. My parental instinct was to try to make them happier, all the time, an inner drive to ensure every possible experience was as enjoyable as it could be. It wasn’t much of a leap to grab a couple of plastic bath toys from the supermarket the next time I was doing one of my undercover shopping missions and toss them in with the birds, something interesting to peck at and squabble with on the tiny waves. Then one day I’d brought a book in with me and sat reading as they paddled around. On another occasion I’d played music. Before I knew it, I was lounging in my bathroom while my feathered family played, a glass of wine on the vanity and Neil Diamond in the air. They seemed to like Neil.

  When I got home to Crimson Lake I dumped my bag in the doorway and headed straight out the back to where the geese had been locked away in their playhouse overnight. Dr. Valerie Gratteur, my close friend and occasional goose babysitter, had left a note on the fridge, which I barely glanced at in my haste to get to the birds. I recognized a painful yearning in my chest not dissimilar to the kind I had felt when I’d stood in the elevator waiting to see Lillian at the FACS offices. My loves waiting for me. Daddy’s home. Everything’s okay now.

  I don’t know much about the intuition of waterfowl, but as I unlatched the playhouse doors they spilled out, a parade of fat, waist-high waddling soldiers all shivering, the dainty feathers of their lean necks aquiver as though from cold. Geese shiver when they’re excited. They knew somehow that a bathroom party was imminent.

  The geese had long ago become far too big to all fit into the tub together, so I led my posse of followers through the kitchen and into the bathroom and started filling the tub with cold water as they waited in the hall, talking in their strange language to each other, a low gaggle of pips and squeaks and stuttering. I turned on the shower and pointed the stream at the empty tiles. Sometimes they all rush at me, but there seemed to have been some consensus this time about order. Three gray geese went for the tub and three waddled into the shower, shaking and bristling as the water hit their glossy feathers. I lifted the birds one at a time into the tub, wincing as the third got impatient and flapped its huge wings at me.

  “All right, all right, all right!”

  Their mother, the only snow-white bird among my flock, never seemed very interested in the festivities. The slower-moving creature stood in the hallway looking in, the regal, beak-up glare of a woman superior to such frivolity. I passed her, got my wine and started the music, and by the time I’d returned she’d taken up her usual spot at the front door, investigating my travel bag for signs of goose pellets, watching out the screen door for trouble.

  I called Amanda, taking a long sip of wine.

  “Conkaffey and Pharrell Investigations, Yvonne speaking,” Amanda said.

  “It’s me,” I said.

  “Ah, you must be looking for Amanda. I’ll just put you through.”

  Amanda sometimes pretends to be her own secretary. I understand that—it probably makes the business sound bigger and more official than it is. Why she carries the ruse on with me, I have no idea. I sighed as a bunch of tones came through the receiver, Amanda uselessly punching numbers into the phone.

  “Good evening, Conkaffey and Pharrell Investigations, Amanda speaking. How can I help you?”

  I drank more wine.

  “I need the lowdown on the Barking Frog case, egghead,” I said.

  “Should I be sharing details of our company’s active investigations with someone of such grotesque repute?” she said stiffly.

  “Oh Jesus. You see it online?”

  “No, Sean told me the news. But now I’ve been watching it on Twitter. This is one of those occasions the young people call ‘breaking the internet’ I think.”

  “Mmm,” I said. “Well, I’m trying not to think about it.”

  “Denial. Good strategy. My favorite, in fact.”

  “Can we talk about the Barking Frog?”

  “I may have to put you on hold while I get my notes.”

&n
bsp; “Don’t put me on hold,” I said.

  “Oh, come on! I’ve got new hold music now. It’s better than the last lot.”

  “What is it?”

  “It’s a pan-flute rendition of ‘Advance Australia Fair.’”

  “Don’t put me on hold.”

  “All right. Ballistics have had a look at the shell casings and the stippling on the bodies and they think the gun used was a nine millimeter. Nothing fancy. Did the job. Unlikely the neighbor across the way would have heard it over her dog.” I heard her shuffling papers on the other end of the line. “And Andrew was indeed cheating on his girlfriend with the backpacker, Keema. Saliva tells no tales, Ted. It never lies.”

  I wasn’t near drunk enough to get into what that meant.

  “What’s Stephanie’s alibi?”

  “At home, asleep, with no one to confirm her whereabouts, of course.”

  “Let’s get into Stephanie’s accounts. Bank, phone, social media. See what the phone towers have to say about the whereabouts of her phone during kill time. Same with Keema and Andrew. Did she have plane tickets back to England or was she planning on staying longer? How serious was it? Has she had any other relationships since she’s been here?”

  “Aye aye,” Amanda said. “We got the readout from the till, also.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “Only a couple of beers on the EFTPOS. Twelve hundred and change in cash.”

  “I thought it was the week’s takings.”

  “It was,” Amanda said. “Two lives lost for twelve hundred schmackos. Six hundred bucks a pop. Hardly seems worth it. Hey, is that Neil Diamond?”

  A notification buzzed and I looked at the phone. Kelly. I reached into the tub unconsciously, stroked one of the geese paddling and swirling around there. Found comfort in the damp feathers, the bird nibbling at my fingers. I got off the phone with Amanda and dialed my ex-wife.

  “It’s not true,” I said by way of greeting.

  “Of course it’s not true,” she replied. Kelly told me she had learned of my new accusation from Sean, who’d probably called to warn her about the possibility of increased hostility toward her in the coming days. I was momentarily stunned by her words. I had expected a barrage of anger, maybe those old exhausted tears I’d got so used to hearing on the end of the line while I stood gripping the phone in jail, a lifeline slowly fading.