Redemption Point

by Candice Fox

  Not long after I’d moved to my home on the edge of the lake, I’d looked out across the water through the diamond wire and spotted a point on the west side of the lake, a long bar of rocks and gray sand jutting out toward the center. If I squinted, I could make out a twisted, bent-backed tree right on the end of the point. I don’t know why, but the tree spoke to me, the way it grew defiantly on the end of the sandbar, on the furthest rocks, far away from the edge of the forest. Some bird had probably dropped its seed out there, or the wet season had caused it to drift and wedge itself between the rocks. Rather than dying for being dragged away from where it belonged, it stayed put and grew. I didn’t know what kind of tree it was, but it was not one of the proud, straight-backed gums thrusting their way out of the rainforest canopy nearby. It was not one of the plump, pale mangrove trees reaching out uniformly toward the water. Its trunk was hunched like it carried a great weight, and its top was flat as though beaten down. I thought it might have been a poinsettia, but I’d never seen it flower.

  Maybe the tree was a symbol for me. Of defiance, resilience, regrowth. Of a twisted, flowerless, removed life—but a life nonetheless—possible with only the bare minimum needed to carry on.

  I decided one day that I would walk there.

  It wasn’t as easy as it seemed. Most of the edge of the lake is impenetrable rainforest cut through with the faintest of animal trails. I tried and failed to find the point a bunch of times, following the trails, sometimes setting out from the roadside and not even succeeding in finding the water. Losing myself. When I finally did find the point after a couple of months, I’d walked out over the rocks, wary of croc movement in the water, and put my hand triumphantly against the gnarled tree. Not only was the tree growing here, but the tenuous roots that clasped the rocks had played host to other seeds. A thin strangler vine was slowly working its way up the trunk, a plant I knew would thicken, if allowed, and kill the tree. I pulled it down and tossed it into the water, vowing to return, a kind of guardian for the brave tree.

  I discovered eventually that the little arm of land reaching out into the lake had a name. Redemption Point. I liked the sound of it.

  Walking, whether to Redemption Point or not, became a kind of therapy. An act of protest against all the steps I’d taken in prison that had been halted by bare walls, iron grilles, stern-faced guards. I loved walking. Sometimes when I left the house, saying goodbye to the geese before one of my journeys, I fantasized about taking a dog with me. Chatting to the creature the way I chatted with Woman at home.

  * * *

  I left Dale Bingley and started out for Redemption Point. My house on the edge of the wide, mangrove-tangled Crimson Lake was very isolated. I didn’t have any neighbors. My property cut into the impenetrable bush and ended on the wet gray sand before the murky water, a strange choice for the tropical north, where crocodiles as big as limousines lurked in the depths.

  When I’d moved to the north after being freed from prison, I’d found the heat oppressive, the humidity a choking fog that infected every minute of my day, relieved only in the early hours after I’d sweated through my sheets and lost any hope of sleep. Frequent storms came and broke the heat briefly, rain hammering the corrugated iron roof of the porch. The rain drew up from the hidden depths all manner of amphibians; geckos appearing on the roof beams and fat, glistening frogs lolling on the lawn. After a few months, I’d acclimatized. As I walked, head down and thoughts churning, the thick air brought a kind of safety bubble down around me, so that I calmed as I focused on the taste of it, the rainforest smell of earth and moss a natural remedy.

  My phone shattered my newfound content. I recognized the number, stopped walking and gripped at my sweating throat, trying to encourage words.

  “Hi,” I wheezed, finally.

  “Hi, Ted.” Detective Inspector Francine Robertson cleared her throat, she too struggling to send words across the painful emotional space between us. “It’s Frankie.”

  My arrest had been heartbreaking for my colleagues in the drug squad. We’d been a team. A family. Of course, they had to trust our counterparts in homicide and sex crimes when they made the decision to lock me up. They had to know what a difficult decision it had been, something not taken lightly or made in haste. I’d lost contact with Davo and Morris, my squad brothers. Last time I’d spoken to them, the vitriol on the other end of the phone had been poisonous.

  “You must be calling about the new accusation,” I said, trying to help out.

  “Yes.”

  “I didn’t do it.”

  “Sex crimes has asked Melanie Springfield to come in for an interview,” Francine said. “She hasn’t … ah. She hasn’t done that yet.”

  I looked at the green wall of forest before me. Dark depths. A bird cry somewhere in there, high and pained.

  “What does that mean?”

  “They gave her a call about the statements she made to Stories and Lives,” Francine said. “Asked her to come in so they can, you know, uh, see if criminal charges are warranted.”

  I crouched by the side of the road, put a hand on the ground to steady myself. I’d known this was coming. But my mind had pushed it back, forced it down into a dark corner of my psyche where it couldn’t be heard through the screaming of my other problems. My legs were tingling, numb.

  “She was supposed to come in this morning,” Francine said. “But she hasn’t shown up. Isn’t answering the phone.”

  “So what now?”

  “We don’t know.”

  “What about the girl?” I said. “Elise. The younger sister.”

  “They’re trying to get hold of her. The family seems to have closed ranks.”

  “Why did you call me?” I said. “You’re not on the case. You’re … Are you still in drug squad?”

  “Well, I knew you,” Francine said. “So I sort of … volunteered.”

  “You still know me,” I said.

  She sighed. I covered my eyes, tried to hide in the dark.

  “They wanted me to ask you to come in,” Francine said. “You’re not being charged at this stage. No one’s going to, um … It would just be appropriate, we think, if you made an official statement.”

  “I’ll have to speak to my lawyer,” I said. I hadn’t spoken to Sean since the ambush at the Stories and Lives studio. He’d left me a voicemail, but I hadn’t picked it up. Part of me was disappointed in him for not seeing their delicious accusation bombshell coming. I hadn’t seen it coming, either, but during my trial I’d got used to the idea that Sean was smarter than me—that as my savior and protector, things like that didn’t get past him. I was the drug squad thug and he was the satin-clad scholar. He didn’t make mistakes. Of course I knew, deep down, that he was capable of mistakes. Entitled to them, even. But I’d needed some time to be unreasonably angry.

  “It would be good to see you,” I told Francine. “When I come down.”

  She made a noise, a word badly chosen, failing as it met the air. It sounded like it was going to be a “Yeah.” But it couldn’t be. It couldn’t be good to see me.

  “That’s all I had to say, Ted,” she said.

  I thanked her, and she hung up. I started walking again, and got the air into me. After a couple of minutes, I called her back.

  “You called me because you wanted to help me,” I said.

  “I wouldn’t say that,” she answered carefully.

  “I would.” I turned around, started walking back toward my house. “You said yourself, you volunteered to make the call. You did that because you knew it would be easier on me. Less stressful than being called and asked to come in by a stranger in the sex crimes department. There’s a part of you that wants to help me, Francine, even if you’re not ready to fully believe in my innocence.”

  She didn’t answer.

  “There are more things you can do to help me,” I said. “If you want to.”

  Dear Diary,

  It was risky business, but the window of opportunity was smal
l. I told Chloe I was going to bed, left her watching one of her ridiculous shows and snuck out of the house. Penny’s mother had put the bins out, right on time, as always. I crouched by the family car and waited, looking out at the street, checking every house to make sure the coast was clear. I took the top bag and rushed off with it, back down the side of our house into the yard. Chloe was totally consumed with the show when I checked on her through the living room window. Mouth open, practically drooling. Some idiot was handing out red roses to glamour models wearing sparkling dresses on the screen. Girls wiping at mascara running down immaculately made-up cheeks.

  I opened the bag under the light in the backyard and rummaged through it. Lots of papers. Electricity bill. Used prescription. Receipts. Pages of a notebook. I seized on a scrap slightly damp from the juices of an empty can of asparagus spears. Penny’s picture. The girl and her mother and the happy, smiling dog.

  I was so excited I hardly slept. In the morning I was up and out of there in the ute, stopping at the RSPCA in Yagoona first to see if I could find the dog. I knew of course that the dog in the drawing was only white because Penny had been so desperate for her mother to confirm or deny she was getting a dog that she hadn’t bothered coloring it in—but still, I wanted to stay true to the picture. That’s what you do when you love someone. You pay attention to the details. You go the extra mile. You be poetic. I examined the picture closely, walking along the concrete aisles, bowing and squinting at the hounds barking at me from behind the wire in individual enclosures. Penny’s dog had a classic long snout and tall, pointed ears. I found a white Chihuahua. A host of Maltese terriers. But they weren’t right. I had to get the perfect dog, the one the girl had envisioned. I wanted her to see it in my arms as a thing plucked straight from her dreams. Her dream guy holding her dream dog.

  The RSPCA was a blowout. I googled and found a dog and cat shelter near Liverpool, drove there almost panting with anticipation. The only white dog there was a scruffy little teacup poodle with smeary, dirty marks beneath its eyes. My frustration was building. I sat in the ute and googled another shelter. Mount Druitt. Half an hour one way. The morning was wasting away. Chloe called and I pretended I was at work. The man looking at me in the rearview mirror was not a happy guy. Dead eyes as he blew kisses through the phone.

  My internet browser had picked up on the fact that I wanted a dog. When I opened my Facebook page, there was an advertisement squeezed into the feed that seized my breath in my throat. There she was! Sitting proudly before the camera, tongue lolling out of a pink-lipped mouth. I laughed aloud, thumped the steering wheel. I was almost shaking as I tapped through to the advertisement on the Trading Post website.

  I started the car and drove like a madman, no idea where I was even heading, just wanting to be in motion when I got the address. The British couple met me outside their house with the dog sitting beside them, wagging its thick, furry tail.

  Princess. What a perfect name. A princess for my little queen. I gave them the song and dance about my daughter and what a responsible pet owner she’d be, showed them a picture of Penny I’d covertly snapped during our over-the-fence conversations, pretending to browse while we talked. How could they resist her? That face. They looked at each other, seemed to come to a smiling consensus. I started fumbling for my wallet, but the couple told me she was free to a good home. I could have cried. They were crying, hugging the animal around the neck, saying their goodbyes.

  I opened the door to the ute and Princess jumped right in. Everything was so perfect.

  Why couldn’t it all have just stayed that way?

  Pip had reinterviewed Stephanie Neash at the Crimson Lake police station, her chief superintendent sitting in this time to ensure absolutely all the right questions were asked. There wasn’t anything new that could be derived from the girl’s story. The last time she had seen her boyfriend, he’d been leaving her house to go to work at the bar that night. She’d stayed in, cooked herself dinner, texting him now and then, receiving the usual kinds of loving responses. She knew he’d finish late, probably around 3 a.m., and go home to where he lived with his father. She signed off at 10 p.m. with smiling emojis and hearts, not realizing, she claimed, that she was saying goodbye forever. Pip had watched across the barren plastic tabletop as the girl struggled through her story again, pushing exhaustedly at frizzy strands of her unwashed hair that wouldn’t stay in place behind her ears.

  Stephanie’s story lined up with her phone records. Her phone had stayed at her house near Crimson Lake all through the night, pinging off a tower nearby on a mountaintop in Cattana. Michael Bell’s records indicated he had been home all night as well. Pip was skeptical that either was involved. Whoever Andrew had seen coming toward him as he stood outside the bar, they had caused him to run and fall. Neither his girlfriend nor his father, Pip assumed, would make him do that. Unless of course, she reasoned, they had said something threatening. Or they were holding a gun.

  On a corkboard above her desk, Pip had pinned photographs of the two secret lovers. Andrew, steadily growing barrel-chested like his dad, grinning and holding a foaming schooner on some sunny balcony somewhere. Interviews with his colleagues had revealed a cheeky party animal who could be relied upon to pull stunts to amuse a loving crowd. Many recalled him climbing an enormous palm tree in a friend’s backyard, slurring drunkenly, to rescue a cat that the noise of the party had scared up into its highest branches. The cat had leaped onto the roof of the house and Andrew had fallen into the backyard pool, inspiring his friends to jump in with him fully clothed. He was a big-hearted guy. He would have been Keema’s larrikin Australian dream—sun-bronzed and grinning, gentlemanly and antiauthoritarian at once.

  Being the “other woman” was not like Keema. She’d been the good girl at home in Surrey. Her photograph, taken from her Instagram page, was a typical traveler shot—lean arms thrust out before a huge waterfall, embracing the world. Her travels were well deserved. She’d finished school in the top three of her form, spent a year volunteering with humanitarian efforts in Uganda, and was taking this year before starting university to let her hair down. She’d had a boyfriend in high school whom she’d professed to everyone she wanted to marry one day, only to find the Ugandan trip strained the relationship too far. If she’d been hurt by the breakup, she didn’t let the world know it. Her Instagram was full of wide-smiling selfies before towering landmarks and packed nightclub dance floors. She was the independent girl now traveling on her own, spreading maps across café tables and marking out her path.

  Pip sat and looked at the pictures in her spare moments and found herself forgetting that the two young people were dead. Her mind naturally wandered forward in their lives, sought out careers and partners for the two of them. Keema would return to England and become a nurse. She had the kindly face for it, the resilience. Strong hands and big, welcoming eyes. Andrew would be sad when she left, wary of giving away his heart again. He’d move south, go to school, do something outdoorsy—engineering maybe. Pip could see the sun glinting off his hard hat, his hand at its rim, trying in vain to ward off the Outback sun.

  But no. Neither of them would continue on. Someone had cut their paths short. And “cutting” seemed the right word for it; slashing through taut, colorful ribbons, a severing. Pip stared at the photographs and tried not to be dragged down into exhausted sadness at how wasteful it all was.

  It wasn’t a robbery. They knew that from the bag of money hurled up onto the roof of the bar, probably from behind the establishment. A proper search of the contents of the bag had revealed $1,247 and a stack of signed receipts, the count form Andrew had filled out as he shut down the till not long before he died. Pip sat at her desk and puzzled over the bag, sealed inside a plastic evidence pouch on the desk before her. The suspect had taken the cash out of the bar to make it look like he had gone into the bar with the intention of stealing it, while, in fact, he’d been there to kill Andrew and Keema. Pip understood that. What she didn’t understand was
why the suspect didn’t just take the cash. The bills were unmarked. The killer might have simply transferred the money into his wallet and thrown the bag away. Why throw the bag on the roof of the bar? Why not dump it elsewhere?

  Had they intended to come back for the cash later? Pip made a note to herself to order a second interview of Claudia Flannery and the rest of the staff who worked at the bar. Her mind swirled with possibilities. Pip’s chief had said it was incredibly lucky the bag had been found at all. Pip knew it wasn’t luck. It was Amanda Pharrell’s upside-down view of the world. Her new perspective. Pip wanted to know more about Amanda’s ways of thinking. If she could just get a handle on the strange woman’s psyche, maybe she could take something, some slice of her apparent genius, and use it for her own purposes. It seemed a betrayal to be trying to learn something from Amanda, a person so loathed by Pip’s colleagues. She was sleeping with the enemy.

  Pip told herself it was these insistent questions, this new hunger for Amanda’s secret view of the world that drew her back to the private investigator’s office-residence that evening. It was only as she stood in the abandoned main street of Crimson Lake that she questioned her intentions at all. What would Amanda think of her turning up at night? And what if her colleagues saw her? The sun had recently set, the distant green mountains silhouetted black against an angry red sky. Soon, storm clouds would creep from behind them, spread their ghostly arms over the cane fields. Pip had changed her mind, was turning for home when the front door opened and Amanda stepped out.

  “Whoa!” Pip actually reeled at the sight of the tattooed detective. Amanda’s lean, angular frame was strapped into a spectacular silver dress Pip could never imagine herself pulling off, the entire garment hung with an expensive array of sequins and beads. Amanda turned on her enormous sparkly heels and took in the sight of Pip standing there in the jeans and shirt she had changed into at the station. Amanda’s makeup was impeccable. Pip wondered if she was hallucinating.