An Isolated Incident

by Emily Maguire

  I swear, it was like in this movie I watched with Carrie’s kids one night where this evil future government uses mind control to turn all the incredibly hot teenagers into soldiers. I was like those young babes, except I dressed in a tracksuit instead of combat gear and grabbed my wallet instead of a weapon. And off I went, striding out into the morning, seeing my street, my neighbourhood in a light I’d only ever seen drunk out of my mind at the tail end of a big night.

  Telling you now, it’s like telling a dream. I wasn’t in my right mind. I noticed everything. The tips of the grass were wet. Birds cawed and sang. I counted three trucks going by on the highway, four cars moving in nearby streets. One street over from mine, a dog barked and barked, and as I got closer I heard the rooster it was barking at.

  I walked to the newsagency on John Street and bought a copy of the local rag. The face of the girl from the bakery on Elizabeth Street took up nearly the whole front page. Mrs Chin held my hand for a long while when she gave me my change and her eyes filled with tears. Normally that might’ve made me tear up too, but, like I said, I wasn’t myself.

  At home I spread the paper out and started to read but the words faded off the page faster than I could get to them so by the time I was at the third paragraph there was nothing but pale grey smudges in neat little lines.

  I see that look you’re giving me, but I’m just saying it like it happened.

  I closed my eyes and opened them again. Closed the paper and opened it again. I turned the page and read about Thursday’s council meeting and a break-in at the Catholic school just fine. I turned back to the front page and watched as the girl’s face lost its vibrant colour and then any colour and then its shape. I watched her fade until I felt so drowsy I couldn’t anymore. I stripped off and climbed into bed and slept soundly until Nate showed up around eleven.

  He told me off for buying the paper, said it could do nothing but upset me right now. I asked if he’d read it and he had.

  ‘Yeah, that poor girl. Bad shit, babe. Bad, bad shit. But you don’t need to read it, okay?’

  Nate had already chucked it in the outside bin but when he left to get some fish and chips for lunch I went and pulled it out. There was nothing to read until page three, I swear to you. Nothing but a masthead and a large, very pale grey smudge where her face used to be.

  You know that the woman who was murdered, Tegan, was even younger than Bella? Just twenty-two. I wonder when she knew, if she knew. It’d been fast, so maybe not.

  But Bella had to have known. The question is how much and how soon. When she closed the nursing home door behind her and strode out into the street with her keys in her hand (did she have a key protruding between each finger of her closed fist the way our mother taught us?), did she feel it, a shiver of fear, a tiny premonition that something bad was going to happen? Did she – for even an instant – think about going back inside and asking one of the orderlies to walk her to her car and then shush her own mind, still her own heart as she imagined saying the words, actually admitting that she was afraid to walk less than a hundred metres? How stupid she would feel asking for an escort for such a short distance, in such a clear space, in daylight, based on nothing but a tingle at the place her ponytail met her scalp. So she walked on alone and what? When did she know something, if not everything?

  When a man approached her and asked for directions, to use her phone, for a date, for the time? And she, being polite, being kind, being unwilling to assume the worst, turns, smiles, answers and even when she sees the knife or gun or feels his hand on her throat she doesn’t scream she just says something kind and quiet, trying to disarm, to calm, like she does when a dementia patient goes ballistic, like she did when her older sister and her boyfriend came home drunk and rowdy and started smashing glasses in the kitchen.

  Or was it when a car pulled up beside her and she heard a voice say – what – what might they have said? When she was sprawled or sat primly on the back seat of a strange car or coming to on the floor of that car, old dirt or reeking cigarette butts under her cheek? Or finding herself, waking maybe, beside the highway, a man looming over her, her skin screaming, and she remembers the shiver when leaving work, remembers and remembers and remembers and rehearses in her head how she would advise other women, advise her sister, to always pay attention to that shiver, because look because look because look.

  And maybe this other girl, Tegan, maybe she had been following the news about Bella. She would’ve felt sad for her – because every human with a heart must – and she would’ve got stricter about personal safety – because every woman with a brain did. Wouldn’t have walked around or parked her car in deserted areas even in broad daylight. Would’ve walked with her keys between her knuckles, her phone in the other hand, looked twice at slow-cruising cars, trying to memorise the numberplate just in case. She wouldn’t have gone out after dark alone. Would’ve been glad to have her husband at her back.

  May spent the morning at the primary school’s Sunday produce market, interviewing anyone who’d agree to talk to her. In the four days she’d been in town, she’d filed six stories and taken enough notes for a month of weekend features, so collecting more anecdotes about Bella’s kindness to old people and dogs was not at all necessary but anything to keep busy. Such a cliché, she knew, but then it had been the most horrifying cliché of all – a romance with a married man – that had smashed her heart and life into a thousand tiny shards in the first place, so the thirty-year-old-woman-throwing-herself-into-work-so-as-not-to-face-up-to-the-holocaust-that-was-her-private-life cliché seemed appropriate.

  And it was her entire private life that he had shattered, because she was now a stranger to her family and friends, who had no idea about the whole revolting mess. Nobody had even known she was in love. She had planned to tell them after Craig left his wife and moved in with her, which he was going to do as soon as the car was paid off the promotion came through his mother-in-law recovered the youngest child started school the baby was born. The what now? Ha. Ha ha ha ha ha. Ha.

  That wasn’t the end, him telling her his wife was pregnant. If she had any self-respect it would’ve been, she knew, but if there was one thing Craig had taught her about herself it was that she didn’t. If there was a second thing he’d taught her it was that she could sleep fine knowing she was keeping a father from his children and a husband from his wife as long as said father/husband made her come so hard the cow next door banged on the wall screaming at her to shut up.

  The end came three weeks after May found out Craig’s wife was pregnant. It came via a phone call. From the wife. Carmel. She told May that she knew everything, that Craig was sitting beside her and that they were together on this. She said that Craig would not be going anywhere near May again and that May would not be going anywhere near Craig. Then she hung up.

  Craig called a few hours later. May’s phone was off. He left a message telling her he’d meant everything he ever said to her. But he needed to do the right thing and recommit to his family. He wished her well.

  That was the day before Bella Michaels’ body was found, so at least the timing was good. Finally a big, national story with which to prove herself. There was some kind of irony in the fact that she wouldn’t even have the crime reporting gig if it wasn’t for Craig. He’d got her talking about why she went into journalism and when she tried to sarcasm her way through the conversation, he pinned her to the wall with his eyes, demanded she take herself as seriously as he took her. ‘We’re still young,’ he said, and May heard a promise about their future together that made her determined to be worthy of a man like him.

  Crime reporting, she admitted, that was the dream ever since she was a ten-year-old reading pilfered copies of her mum’s true-crime books under her quilt by torchlight. Specifically, she said, when Craig pushed her, she wanted to write about murder. But there weren’t enough of them for that to be a full-time job anywhere in this country and so she�
��d take crime in all its forms to be in a position to report on the murders when they happened.

  ‘And once again you blow my mind,’ Craig had said. They were in her bed, as usual, post-, and May hoped also pre-, coital. ‘I never would’ve picked it. Thought you were going to say politics or social justice. Murder. Should I be scared?’

  ‘Well, yeah, I’m terrifying. Had you not noticed?’

  ‘Seriously, why murder?’

  ‘Seriously? It is a social justice thing, I think. I mean, writing about murder victims is a way to make sure their deaths aren’t forgotten and to help authorities identify the killers. And given how many of those victims were occupying the lowest rung on society’s ladder when they were killed, that makes it even more important.’

  ‘Okay, but wouldn’t writing about the social and political conditions that put those people on the bottom rung be a better use of your energy? Help them while they’re still around to benefit? Maybe even get them up a rung so they’re not so vulnerable?’

  ‘I guess so.’ May pretended she was stretching so she could check the time. Clock-watching irritated Craig but she couldn’t help herself. She needed to know how many minutes she had left with him so she could ensure not one of them was wasted. One hundred and four minutes. So, a little more talk and then she’d stop his questions by climbing onto his face. ‘But it’s not either/or. Most murder victims are killed by someone they know. Gangsters killed by other gangsters. Kids killed by parents. Wives killed by husbands. Occasionally the reverse. And in every case there’s a history, a backstory that, once you know it, you think, Well, yeah, this was always going to end badly.’

  ‘Sounds dangerously close to saying the victims were asking for it.’

  ‘No, no, not at all. I’m saying that if we paid more attention, a lot of those bad endings could be prevented. Like, if everyone who knew him saw that this dude was eventually going to go too far with his beatings and kill his wife, then why did no one step in? If looking back we can see that every young man from a poverty-stricken migrant family who dies in a western suburbs knifing or shoot-out has followed a similar trajectory, then what are we going to do about intervening at that first point along the well-worn path?’

  ‘Mmm. Might it also be that creating narratives around murder allows a measure of comfort? Murder in the abstract is terrifying; in the details, you realise it has nothing to do with you.’

  ‘It might have something very much to do with you if you keep Socratising instead of fucking me.’

  And so that was that, but after he’d gone home to his family she ran the conversation through her head and realised what it was he was poking at and she was protecting. The squishy, reeking black truth of it was that reading about murder thrilled her in the exact same way, she supposed, that it thrilled the masses who snapped up true-crime books in the millions and watched cheesy crime re-enactment shows and moody, gritty cable dramas. It was just so intimate.

  Not only the act itself, though obviously that was, but the way that everything gets dug up and laid out in the aftermath. Homicide investigations – police ones and, sometimes even more so, media ones – open up private lives in an extreme way. Someone dies of natural causes, everyone’s all about respecting privacy. Someone gets murdered and it’s considered okay – helpful and responsible, even – to delve into every email and text message, to lay out her underwear and porn collection, to note body-hair removal habits, how often the sheets were changed, whether she preferred tampons to pads, condoms to an IUD. And not just of the victim, either. The victim’s current and ex-partners, siblings, parents, kids, workmates, friends. All their nasty habits and dirty secrets laid out in the name of truth and justice. It was as terrible as it was irresistible.

  Every so often, after having read a particularly juicy account of a murder investigation, May would be gripped with a horror of evidence and tear through her bags throwing away receipts, deleting messages and photos from her phone and the history log from her laptop. She worried, too, about the vibrator and dirty fiction in her bedside drawer and the various creams and pills in the medicine cabinet, but decided the embarrassment of living as a horny, rashy, hyperventilating mess was a worse prospect than a hypothetical homicide detective’s sniggers and raised eyebrows. Anyway, she probably had it coming. Live by the breathless murder site inventory, be humiliated after death by the . . .

  Bella Michaels, murder victim, had so far refused to supply the expected nasty, dirty thrills. No drugs or alcohol in her system and by all accounts that would’ve been true even if she’d been killed on New Year’s Eve. The woman didn’t even drink coffee, for God’s sake. There were rumours of a secret boyfriend, but nobody was able to offer a name. The sister had a rough reputation and there was the business of her violent ex, but Bella herself was pristine.

  And yet, well into her third hour of interrupting people buying their weekly fruit and veg to ask for their thoughts on the murder, May realised that there was a salaciousness to the way some people spoke about Bella – but only post-mortem. Sweetest girl you could meet. Always ready to lend a hand. Too good for this world. And then . . . What those mongrels did to her, followed by a visible shiver, like the speaker had taken too much icy gelato into their mouth at once. When I think about what happened to her – I mean, really think about it – rapid blinking, tongue darting out to wet lips – I mean, it’s hard not to imagine, once you know.

  ‘How do you know all that?’ May asked an artisanal goats’ cheese seller who’d been describing – in hot, sour-smelling whispers – the condition of Bella’s body when it was found.

  The cheesemonger stood back, gave a crooked smile. ‘Come on, like you haven’t looked at the photos.’

  May felt the flush spreading up her neck. Only rookie reporters feel embarrassed at not knowing more than their sources, she reminded herself. ‘Are you saying you’ve seen photos of Bella Michaels’ body?’

  The man blinked. ‘Yeah, I assumed . . .’ He leant in close again. ‘I thought it was common knowledge that they’d been leaked. I guess not, though, if the journos aren’t onto it yet. Look, I don’t want to get anyone into trouble. Is it too late to say off the record? Ha, ha, ha.’ He stepped back, looked around hopefully for customers, then began rubbing a yellow cloth over his glass cheese case.

  ‘Can you tell me where you saw them? Off the record.’

  He leant close to her again, whispered a five-word phrase, pulled away abruptly and continued wiping the spotless glass. ‘Anyway, better get back to work,’ he said.

  May wove through the crowd, bumping against straw baskets and hessian bags, elbows and sweaty forearms until she reached the exit. She stood against the school fence waiting for her pulse to slow. The accessibility of the photos was irrelevant. She couldn’t describe them in her reporting. Even mentioning they’d been leaked would be legally questionable and ethically foul.

  There was no reason for her to look. So she wouldn’t.

  Back at the hotel she took a cold shower, flinched at the sting of water against her freshly sunburnt neck. Still too hot for comfort, she sat naked on the bed and began going through the morning’s notes, entering any potentially publishable snatches into her computer for later use and noting anything that called for further investigation. There was very little of either.

  She opened the web browser, started to type the cheese man’s phrase, closed the window and then the laptop.

  If she were killed tonight, here in Strathdee, the police would go through her browser history, her computer files, her notebook. The hypothesis that she’d been murdered because she got too close to the truth about Bella Michaels would be laughed out of consideration.

  They’d listen to her voicemail, hear Craig’s saved messages – one telling her never again, the other taking it back – and he would then be the chief suspect. That thought made her feel as she did after a binge and purge, sick and satisfied at the sam
e time.

  But he’d have an alibi, the shithead. His smug bitch of a wife would say he was with her all night and, even worse, it would be true. The police would have to dig deeper, find any other men May was involved with. The way people in this town talked it wouldn’t take them long at all to turn to that fella from her first day in town. Chas. He’d turned out to be such a good interview, full of local lore and tips. They’d talked the afternoon away and then he’d walked her back to the hotel. It might have looked, to anyone passing by, that he’d been angling for an invitation and that she had hesitated a bit too long so that the eventual firm goodnight seemed harsher and more of a figurative as well as literal door-closing than it might’ve if she’d cheerily waved goodbye from the pub.

  May slid the laptop under the bedside table then flipped through her notes to find Chas’s number. She’d done loads of interviewing and research since she’d spoken to him last. There were plenty of new questions she was sure he could help her with.

  Nate was still out at the fish-and-chip shop and I was sitting around thinking about Bella and Tegan when there was a knock on the door. I had the curtains closed because I was still in my nightie and so I hadn’t seen anyone coming up the drive. I pulled on this big old rain jacket of Nate’s that was hanging near the front door and stood for a minute and tried to feel a bit of Nate in me – oh, not like that, you dirty bugger. His way of talking to people, I mean. Polite but absolutely bloody unmoving.

  I opened the door to a man of about my age with the saddest eyes I’d ever seen on a human. Dog eyes, you know? Broken, beaten, minutes-from-euthanasia shelter-dog eyes. He was wearing beige cargo pants and a stripy polo shirt and wasn’t holding a notebook or camera or recorder that I could see.

  ‘Chris. Hello. My name is Glen Goodes. You don’t know me, but I knew your sister very well and I hoped I could –’