by Candice Fox
Amanda walked home, and then took her bike to the house of the young chef who’d cooked the last meals at the back of the Barking Frog that night, and his kitchen hand who had put away the plates and polished cutlery, minutes ticking down until Andrew and Keema died. She rode to Claudia Flannery’s house, a terra-cotta bungalow perched on the edge of Crimson Lake, not far from Ted’s. The old woman had been sitting at her kitchen table when Amanda arrived, forking halfheartedly through a plate of pasta. She was wearing those big, heavy earrings and necklaces still, folds of chiffon hanging on her spotted arms.
Amanda wasn’t so arrogant as to think she’d be able to divine the killer of Andrew and Keema simply by looking at their face through a window. But she’d longed to feel something as she rolled from house to house, a ghost in the cold looking in on living people, admiring their warmth. She’d wandered all night from home to home, no real pattern to her movements, finally stopping when all she found were black rooms and drawn curtains.
In the morning she’d taken her bike and turned it toward the Barking Frog. The place where it all began.
She stood now and wandered a few meters down the creek, crouched and plucked a few smooth stones from the bottom. Tiny yabby-like creatures fled from her grasp. The bottom was sandy. She dug down, twisted her hand back and forth. New perspective. New feeling. It was warm down there with watery life.
She wondered if she might have been able to tap into that weird spiritual thing Claudia Flannery liked to talk about, to listen to the bar and the creek and the forest and hear them whisper cosmically to her about what happened to the murdered bartenders. But the jackhammering from the Songly house began and made her wince with shock. Amanda opened her eyes and looked at the house across the creek. The fence with the new blond paling of untreated wood stuck in the row of old palings like a gold tooth.
She walked up the bank toward the house, peered irritably through the cracks in the fence. She could see old Mrs. Songly’s legs lying on the footrest by a couch, the slippered feet flopped apart. Amanda wandered around to the front of the house. Perhaps the old woman was worth talking to about her ghostly gaze, the eye she’d swept over the men and women connected to the Barking Frog. Maybe Mrs. Songly knew something about Claudia and her pleasure parties, even if she hadn’t heard or seen anything specifically on the night of the murders. Amanda knew it was useful sometimes just to be in the presence of old people when a puzzle presented itself, though she couldn’t account for exactly why. The old timers in prison, the lifers, had always brought her calm. And besides that, they invariably smelled good.
She stopped at the corner of the front of the property, where the side fence was partially hidden behind some bushes. A fence paling was missing. Interesting. The fence was newer here. Blond, untreated wood. Amanda reached up and touched the new, shiny nail, twisted and bent, the paling yanked off around it, it seemed.
Amanda rounded the end of the fence and walked through into the backyard, to the back fence, where the blond paling had been renailed into the gap in the side facing the Barking Frog Inn. Amanda pushed on the paling. It didn’t budge. She stood back and kicked the paling as hard as she could, dislodging it, sending it flopping to the grass on the creek bank.
A new perspective. She could see directly through the gap in the fence to the back door of the Barking Frog. And presumably, she thought, someone standing there could see directly through the gap to where she stood. She understood. Almost saw Andrew standing there that night at the back of the pub. The paling had not been in place. Andrew had stood across the creek and looked through the gap to where Amanda now stood in the mottled shade, the heavy sun beating down above the trees.
Whatever he’d seen had made him run.
But what had he seen?
Amanda turned around just in time for a closed fist to smash her in the side of the head.
Sean and Frankie were waiting for me in the reception area of the Parramatta police headquarters, standing an awkward distance apart, Sean pretending to look through his phone. I’d finally answered the phone to Sean early that morning, having spent the entire previous day languishing in bed like a slug, the laptop on my chest, the police files of strangers scrolling before my eyes. Working on the Barking Frog case was a welcome dark tunnel to fall into, little tendrils of the lives of the people surrounding the murders leading me this way and that through an underground maze, well away from my tumultuous world. I tracked down the social media accounts of the young men and women who currently or had recently worked at the bar, and worked backward. Their present talk led me to believe that none of them were anything but shocked and saddened about the killings, but there was the odd interesting tidbit of less-than-sympathetic talk on the social media messages. The girls didn’t like that Andrew had been cheating on Stephanie. And the guys wanted to believe it could never have happened to them.
TIKO: Its really really bad and all that but I cant stop thinking like if I was gonna rob the place id have picked Andys shift too man.
MATT: You reckon?
TIKO: Yeah man he was fuckin loose as shit. He didn’t give a rats about the place. Ive taken shifts with him and he has one or two customers at the bar and he fucks off into the kitchen to spin shit for like half an hour. Leaves the register wide open. He was never gonna put up a fight.
MATT: You think it was a customer? Someone thought Andy would be easy pickings?
TIKO: Well they didn’t come on my shift did they?
I’d taken the side entrance to headquarters, having spotted press on the front steps of the towering concrete building. I wondered if someone in Melanie’s camp had leaked that I would be giving a police statement, or if one of my old colleagues had got wind of it and told the media. The entryway I took was reserved for notorious killers and rapists coming to give evidence, undercover cops and informants. Now me, the most hated man in Australia.
I hadn’t seen Little Frankie since the morning I was arrested, the few agonizing hours she and my workmates had been given to shout at me in the interrogation room, express their horror and disgust. It hadn’t been an official questioning. They’d just needed their time to ask me directly if I’d done what I was accused of, to look me in the eye and see if I lied to them.
Short, stocky Frankie, with her heart-shaped face perpetually turned upward. She’d always had to stand on a milk crate when we took squad photos so that me and the guys didn’t tower comically over her. We’d graduated from the academy together. Sean strode forward when I appeared and shook my hand.
“Melanie Springfield is coming in to give her statement today,” Sean said. He clapped me on the shoulder. “But we’ll be in and out before she arrives.”
“So she is coming,” I said. “She is going through with it.”
Sean didn’t answer. Or maybe he did, and I didn’t hear it. I was reeling. Frankie took a stiff step forward and cleared her throat, professional distance, protecting her heart. She’d always been a crier, Frankie, but she wasn’t crying now. Her eyes were red and her lips were a thin, hard line, but she wasn’t giving in.
“I’ll take you up to the interview room,” she said.
“Level five?” I asked. My old level.
“No, seven,” she said unevenly. “We thought … It’s just that Davo and Morris are here, you know, so…”
My drug squad brothers. I understood. It would be more than reasonable to expect either of them to take a swing at me, given the chance. Our other colleagues probably expected it, in fact. I followed Frankie and Sean into the elevator and we emerged on a long hall of empty interview rooms. We took one and Sean and I sat quietly on one side of the table while Frankie set up the things we would need, official police statement sheets and paper. She went and retrieved coffee, which I thought was nice. She wasn’t obliged to do anything like that. She kept her eyes steadfastly away from mine, which was facilitated by her floppy black hair constantly falling across her brow. She’d never been very confident about her hair. She had been fr
equently cutting it all off when I knew her, regretting it then trying to grow it out. She poured the coffee and put a packet of sugar down next to my cup, slid the milk over to me. She remembered how I liked it. After everything that had happened, she still knew me. I wanted to tell her, like I had on the phone, that she still knew me. This was proof. But instead, other words rose.
“Do you still see Kelly?” I asked her suddenly. Frankie looked at Sean as if for help, didn’t dare look at me to see if it was a casual question or a challenge.
“I haven’t seen her in a long while,” Frankie said. “I text now and then.”
She’s asked me back, I wanted to say. If I say yes, we’re going to pretend nothing ever happened. Would Frankie be a part of that, too? Would assuming my old life mean I could have some of my friends back? That they’d have me back? The accusation had deleted me from the lives of my colleagues, too. From Kelly’s life. I’d not only lost her but she’d lost me, and now she was finally feeling that loss. If I decided to go back, I’d be leaving Amanda. Val. The house on the water. The geese. It was a silly thing to contemplate, but suddenly the tree on Redemption Point flashed into my mind. The vines would come up and strangle it to death in my absence.
The silence was ringing. Sean and Frankie took out identical stapled sheaves of paper, Sean sliding his across to me.
“I thought we’d respond directly to the issues raised,” Sean said.
“Oh, this is it?” I said. I took the pages with shaky hands. “This is the transcript of Melanie’s interview with Stories and Lives?”
“There it is, in full.” Sean sighed, revulsion clipping his words again. I read the pages while they watched me, my eyes dancing over the cold, printed lines as shockwaves of dread came again and again. I had to read some lines several times over. It was hard to focus.
LARA: When did you first think something was wrong?
MELANIE: Ted started asking whether Elise had a boyfriend. I said of course she doesn’t, she’s eight. Like, I felt weird myself, you know? Ted was my first boyfriend. But he was very advanced. It struck me at the time that he’d probably had other girlfriends before. He was always wanting to touch, to kiss. He wanted to play Truth or Dare, and that’s kind of how he led me into sexual things. And he wanted to involve Elise.
“This isn’t true.” I was trembling all over. I wiped my sweating brow. “None of this is true.”
“Let’s take it a step at a time,” Sean said. Frankie started the tape and did the introductions. Sean put a hand on my shoulder. It was all I could do not to shrug it off. “Tell us about your relationship with Melanie.”
“It was nothing like this.” I gestured to the papers. “Nothing at all like this. I was not advanced and there was no sexual kissing or touching. Melanie was my first girlfriend, and I was very nervous. I just about broke it off because I couldn’t bring myself to kiss her. I was embarrassed—we were close with another teen couple and they kissed all the time, in front of us, like they were showing off.”
“So you never kissed?”
“No.” I put my head in my hands. “I tried. I put an arm around her a few times, for photos and things. But I was a really awkward teenager. Tall and goofy, you know?”
A flicker of a smile from Frankie. Maybe she wanted to say she had known me to be like that. I’d been the biggest person on the drug squad and she the smallest. We made fun of each other for it. But Frankie’s smile was a flash if there at all. The words on the paper before us were stark, like a death warrant, almost painful under my fingertips.
“So it wasn’t until you were at university that you became sexually active?”
“Yes.”
“And who was that with?”
“Oh, just a girl.” I shifted uncomfortably in my seat. “I don’t want to bring her into this unless it’s absolutely necessary. It was just a girl from one of my classes. I took criminology and criminal justice, thinking I’d be a cop or a lawyer. I didn’t make the grades for lawyer. Too much drinking, partying. It was really the drinking at uni that broke me out of childhood. It gave me the confidence to talk to girls for the first time.”
“Did you date anyone between Mel and the girl at uni?”
“No. It wasn’t even as though Mel and I were dating,” I said. “We just said we were going steady, and we held hands when we were at school. I sent her love letters and she wrote me poems. That was it.”
“You and Melanie—were you sexual at all? Even if not, all the way into intercourse?”
“No,” I said. “Not at all. And if I couldn’t get up the guts to even kiss her, I don’t know how she thinks I was going after her little sister.”
“So you’re saying she’s completely making it up? Fabricating the entire claim?” Frankie said.
“Yes. And she’s doing a bloody good job of it,” I said. I read over the words before me. There was sweat beading at my temples. “I mean it’s … It’s very convincing.”
“For a pack of lies,” Sean murmured.
“It’s like she’s taken the story from somewhere. Like she’s mistaking me for someone else.”
“How so?” Frankie asked.
“When she talks here about this Truth or Dare business. Yes, kids my age played Truth or Dare and Spin the Bottle, but we never played it. Melanie and I.”
“It’s a very specific detail,” Frankie mused. “She’s actually naming a game that would initiate sexual experimentation, even bargaining that might lead easily to sexual abuse.”
I nodded.
“She’s not just saying you led her into sex,” she added. “She’s telling us how you did it.”
“Well, I didn’t do it,” I said. “I don’t know who did, but it wasn’t me.”
Frankie seemed to catch herself musing, wandering out of her role as interrogator and over to the territory of being my colleague again. She straightened.
“She says here that you would lead Elise into touching games by bringing her treats.” Frankie pointed at the page before me. “Clinkers chocolates, which you knew were her favorite.”
“How would I know that?” I asked.
“Try not to ask questions,” Sean warned me. “Just answer the accusation, firm and straight. Just like in your trial. No unnecessary speculation.”
“I did not lead Elise or Melanie into any ‘touching games,’” I said. “I did not bring Elise any treats. I did not act sexually toward her in any way, or encourage her to act sexually toward me.”
“Did you ever touch Elise affectionately?” Frankie asked. “Like, with Melanie, you said you went so far as to put an arm around her shoulders. Did you ever hug her sister? Wrestle with her or grab—”
Frankie’s phone blipped on the table beside us. She looked at the lit screen, frozen, her hand in the air above it. I watched her pick up the phone, open the message and read it. She gave the proper statement officially pausing the interview, reading the exact time off her watch and repeating the date. She clicked off the tape. I glanced at Sean, disbelieving.
Frankie made her apologies and left, closing the door quickly behind her. I put my head in my hands.
“What now?” I groaned.
“I don’t know, mate.” Sean thumped my shoulder. “But whatever it is, I’m right here, and we’ll handle it together.”
We sat in silence. Fifteen minutes passed. I read Melanie Springfield’s statement over and over, trying to understand how she could possibly have said the things about me that were printed there. I had very few memories of Melanie’s house. It had been bigger than mine, I knew that. Melanie’s parents had been what my dad called “posh.” They’d had a pool table and an old pinball machine in the basement that Mel and I liked to play with. A saltwater pool that was so deep at the end it made my ears hurt to plunge all the way to the bottom. Elise had hung around us as much as she could until her sister got annoyed and banished her. I remembered the little girl at the top of the stairs to the basement pool room, sulking, trying to eavesdrop. The girls in Melan
ie’s year had carried around big binders with all their exercise books in them, covered in special glittery stickers. I remembered telling her, very maturely I thought, how lame sticker collecting was. Melanie being hurt by the comment. Me going out the next day to get her some from the newsagent.
I knew how sexual abuse interrogations went. I’d suffered through them after Claire’s assault, but I’d also been trained in them in the academy. I’d sat and watched a couple of them during my early years. Frankie would come back into the room and continue on at a helicopter level, circling around and around my and Melanie’s and Elise’s relationship from above, coming down slowly, level by level. Soon, I knew, she’d begin discussing what my particular sexual interests were. What turned me on now. What had turned me on as a teenager about Melanie. What I’d liked about Elise. Her personality. Whether I’d ever thought anything sexual about Elise, even if I’d never acted on it, even if only in my mind.
Slowly, slowly winding down, heading for a gentle, feather-light landing, Frankie would try to see if she could get me to say it. That I’d been that boy. That predatory boy.
And, of course, telling her that would be telling her that I was that predatory man, the one everyone said I was. Maybe it would be a relief to her. I didn’t know.
When Frankie returned, there was a woman with her who I didn’t recognize. The woman was dressed all in black, a thin hoodie and jeans with tattered hems. The two women stood outside the door talking animatedly. Frankie gestured toward me. The young woman looked. Nothing had twinged in me the first time I saw her, but as she turned toward me, her mouth open, almost frantic, I recognized her as the little girl Melanie and I had spent our brief relationship trying to avoid.
