The Vale Girl

by Nelika McDonald

  It was only when I found out what my mother did when I was born that I understood why this was – they were scared of her. She made them doubt the things they thought they knew, the people they thought they could trust. She played with them like they were puppets, and then cut the strings that held them up and laughed as they fell to the ground. And as for me, well, I was their reminder. Like a post-it note on the fridge, I was there to say: remember. That everything you have can fall apart with just a sentence. A gust of wind to a house of cards.

  When she returned to Banville, Susannah kept to herself. She decided that even though she lived in that town, she didn’t have to be part of it. Being part of it would have meant launching herself back into that knotted, sticky web of relationships and obligation and propriety, the very same web that had been spun so tight around her mother that it choked her. She refused invitations from old school friends, her mother’s friends, everyone. The Banville Players, the local amateur theatre troupe, offered her a role at discounted membership rates, feeling that was generous indeed, but she just laughed at them, not even trying to hide her scorn. The CWA suggested she sell Avon, and Edna Stewart stuck leaflets on becoming a Tupperware party hostess into her letterbox. But they were wasting their time. Susannah had settled on a career path already. A keen ear on the conversation at the pub could have told them that.

  She had been back in Banville for less than a year when she went to the doctor to seek advice for a series of blinding migraines she had suffered in the last few weeks. When the migraines struck, Susannah could do nothing but lie flat on the floor in the small concrete pantry off the kitchen, her eyes shut and a wet tea towel draped over her face. She would have preferred to be in bed, but the light coming up through the gaps between the floorboards in her room made her temples pulse with pain. The pantry had no windows and, if she stuffed flour sacks into the crack beneath the door, was completely dark. When her attacks ended, Susannah was weak and tender all over; even her bed sheet felt as heavy as lead. The migraines were affecting her ability to work, and Graham was nagging her, worrying and wittering like an old woman. Something had to be done.

  The doctor she saw was not Dr Gresham, the GP in Main Street, but a Chinese doctor who worked from his home, a small and light-filled asbestos shack in Saville Street. Most of Banville only saw Dr Gresham, dismissing Chinese medicine as voodoo nonsense, but Susannah had visited Chinese herbalists in Sydney and knew their treatments worked. Besides, Dr Gresham was a curmudgeonly old crank who diagnosed just about any ailment women suffered as ‘female hysteria’.

  At the Chinese doctor’s house, the receptionist was the doctor’s wife, a strong-looking woman with the hands of a farmer and a shorn head like a little boy. She brought Susannah a glass of tea while she waited. Somewhere in the house a radio played, and Susannah could hear the clang of saucepans and spoons from the room behind the beaded curtain to her left. A dark wooden apothecary cabinet with dozens of tiny drawers stood against the far wall and the doctor’s wife clomped around in front of it in her heavy boots. She screwed lids on jars and tied up small bags of cheesecloth with string and deposited them in the drawers, chatting with an older woman who was slumped in a rocking chair by the window. A child sat at a small table outside, eating hot chips from a paper bucket and singing in a high-pitched voice. A tricycle stood next to her, with tattered red streamers hanging from the handlebars, and each time the child took a chip she offered one to the tricycle too. When their eyes met, the older woman smiled at Susannah, then leant forward and made a shape with her arms as though she was holding a bag of fruit. Susannah smiled back abstractedly, then the doctor’s wife motioned her into the surgery.

  The doctor was a slight man wearing neat slacks and a bright Hawaiian shirt. He insisted she call him Dr Bob. Susannah described her state of health, and the doctor examined her. When he had finished, he called his wife into the room and gave her a command in Chinese. She nodded and left the room, returning with one of the small cheesecloth bags Susannah had seen her preparing earlier.

  ‘Your migraines will stop if you use this as I tell you, but you must stop taking it after three weeks or it may harm your baby,’ the Chinese woman said.

  Susannah thought several things in quick succession: her English is very good, there are many plants in here, I can smell baking. Perhaps some sort of bread. The doctor and his wife rushed to her side then, each taking an arm and levering her back into her chair. She had been sliding off it in a slow crumple to the floor. The wife stayed by her side and the doctor went to get more tea, which Susannah drank as slowly as she could. She knew that when she finished the tea she would have to go home, and eventually bathe, and she would not be able to avoid looking down at her belly in the water and picturing it round with child. She remembered the older woman in the waiting room. The mother of the doctor, or of his wife? Susannah copied the way the woman had held her arms, and looked down at the shape they made in her lap. A cradle. That woman knew before she did. From the next room came a burst of laughter, a loud braying in stereo, and then someone else called for hush with a barked sentence. Susannah vomited her tea into the wastepaper basket and the doctor’s wife patted her shoulder with her rough, calloused palm.

  That night, Susannah came up with a plan. Unfortunately, she was not accustomed to thinking of the baby she carried. The plan was an excellent one for her purposes, but not so excellent for the baby in her womb.

  chapter twenty-five

  At lunchtime, Sergeant Henson and Detective Crane found themselves back at the office, overheated and empty-handed. The divers had turned up nothing in the creek, so then they had gone to see Mrs Wolfe again, and had chased up all the other Wolfe boys. Conveniently, they had found them all together, passing around a joint in the car park behind the mechanic’s. They had all been arrested.

  ‘Bargaining power,’ said Sergeant Henson to Crane, when they were all handcuffed and locked in the car.

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘If they tell me where Cameron is I’ll drop the possession charges. The Wolfes are not the most loyal of creatures. It’s a pretty safe bet they’ll cough after I leave them in the car for an hour. Parked in the sun.’

  ‘But that’s not even enough grass to charge them.’

  ‘They don’t know that.’

  Crane looked at Henson with something like admiration. While they let the Wolfe boys boil, they had returned to the creek, gone over some possibilities of how events might have panned out. But they were just guessing, and they knew it. When they got back to the car, the Wolfe boys just smiled, cool as cucumbers and silent as the grave. They dropped them at the station to stew a bit longer. Frustrated, and desperate to be doing something, Henson had suggested they pay a visit to Graham Knight.

  He had answered the door before they even knocked.

  ‘Officers,’ he said, his hand fluttering over his scalp, trying to smooth down his hair. ‘I thought you might be coming.’

  ‘You did, did you?’ Crane pushed past Graham into the kitchen, seated himself at the table and lit a cigarette.

  ‘I mean, I thought I heard your car,’ amended Graham. He bent down and inspected the floor that Crane had crossed, then pulled a dustpan and brush off a nail on the wall and got down on his hands and knees to wipe at the barely visible red dust tracked across the lino. He picked up a newspaper from the basket by the door, and unfolded the real estate section in a path across the floor from where Henson stood in the doorway to a chair next to Crane’s. Crane burped and raked a hand over his crotch. Graham gestured for the sergeant to walk across the path of newspaper. Henson grumbled, but walked on the paper. Crane snickered and ashed into a teacup.

  ‘Graham,’ began Henson.

  Graham glanced at the doorway and jumped up, whisking the cup over to the sink. He rummaged in the cupboards until he found an ashtray, brown glass the colour of a beer bottle. He placed it in front of Crane, then turned to the sergeant and smiled apologetically.

  ‘All set?’
asked Henson. Graham nodded.

  ‘Graham, I suppose you’ve heard about Sarah Vale going missing?’ Henson said.

  ‘Susannah’s girl,’ said Graham.

  ‘You know Susannah?’

  Graham blushed. ‘We’re friends,’ he said. His voice was so soft that Henson had to scoot closer to hear him.

  ‘Friends,’ said Crane.

  Graham said nothing.

  ‘Has Susannah said anything to you about Sarah being missing?’

  ‘Missing . . . No.’

  ‘Okay. Well when did you last see Sarah?’

  ‘I haven’t seen her for a couple of weeks.’

  ‘Really? But you have seen her mother, haven’t you? When did you last see Susannah?’

  Graham pulled at a stray thread in the tablecloth, winding it around the pad of his finger. He pulled it tight so the flesh bulged out around the string. Henson thought of ligature; a glistening joint of meat tied up with string. Sausages bursting out of their casings. Lambs strung up in the window of the butcher, carcasses swaying. They all watched as the top of Graham’s finger grew steadily redder, and then the string burst. The finger returned to normal pinkness. Graham folded his hands on the table.

  ‘Yesterday.’

  ‘Yesterday?’ Henson leant back, surprised. He had not expected Graham to admit this.

  ‘Yes – I thought she might be lonely,’ Graham said, defiant now, mouth set in a line.

  Crane muttered something unintelligible.

  ‘So you just went over? Knocked on the door?’

  ‘Avon calling!’ Crane sang out in a high voice.

  Graham ignored him. ‘I have a key.’

  ‘Why do you have a key?’

  ‘I told you: we’re friends.’

  Crane slammed a fist down hard on the table and Graham almost fell off his chair. The ashtray rattled from the reverberation and ash sprayed across the table.

  ‘I have friends,’ Crane said. He stood up, moved his chair closer to Graham, and breathed stale nicotine into his face. Graham squinted at him. ‘But I don’t give them all keys to my house.’

  ‘Then how can people check on you?’ Graham asked. His tone was reasonable, but there was a tremor in his voice.

  Henson held up a hand to Crane. ‘You were checking on her?’

  ‘Well, who else is going to?’

  ‘Why does she need to be checked on?’

  Graham looked from the sergeant to the detective, shaking his head. He spread out his hands and spoke to them as though trying to explain something to a child – something that should be obvious.

  ‘She is a prostitute with an alcohol problem. She is alone with a teenage daughter. Anything could happen.’

  ‘Something has happened,’ Crane said.

  ‘Yes.’ Graham nodded. He raised his chin and stared at Sergeant Henson, and then Detective Crane. ‘But I had nothing to do with that.’

  The men all leant back in their chairs, looking at each other. Graham was the first to look down. He seemed to be trying to act casual, but perspiration sprung out of the pores at his hairline and Henson thought he could almost see the savage thud of his heart. His hands shook on the tabletop. Graham looked down at the hallway beyond the kitchen with a disorientated expression, as though the floorboards, crosshatched in their tongue and groove, were a maze, stretching on and on infinitely.

  Graham was lying. Henson knew what a man looked like when he lied. It was as though he was suddenly being operated by someone else; he became stiff and watchful, and the thousands of muscles in his body moved like an orchestra conducted by his conscience – when the voice was saying no, the body screamed yes. Yes, it was me. The casting of the eyes, down and away, the protective arm crossed over the stomach, the angling away of the body, the micro expressions that flickered over the face. It was even easier to detect deception when the man was Graham Knight, who was not accustomed to lying even for the sake of politeness. If you asked Graham how he was, he would reel off a detailed inventory of his health from the bunions on his feet and the eczema spritzed around his ankles to the mysterious bruise on his hip and the irregularity of his sleep patterns. He would find it tiresome that you asked, but it would not occur to him to answer in any way other than honestly and completely. Seeing the lie was not the problem. The lie was as plain as the nose on Graham Knight’s face. The problem was seeing the truth.

  chapter twenty-six

  It was ten o’clock on Thursday night. Sarah Vale had now been officially missing for five days. Sergeant Henson stood on his back verandah in his pyjama pants and singlet, smoking a cigarette. His first in eight years. Possums scrabbled at the trees in the yard, hissing and screeching at each other. The tin roof of the house groaned as the last of the day’s heat left it. He would have preferred to be in his armchair inside, watching the Agatha Christie mystery on the telly, but Gertie wouldn’t let him smoke indoors. Anyway, he needed a cigarette more than he needed to watch some smug old bag revealing how she had solved another crime while knitting a complicated Fair Isle jumper, with only a splinter of wood and drop of indigo ink as clues. Henson could have done with a clue or two himself. The Wolfe brothers had remained tight-lipped about the whereabouts of Cameron, just shrugging their broad, sloping shoulders and watching the sergeant with their dark oil-spill eyes. Henson made noises about charging them with possession but they just laughed at him and wandered out of the station. Crane had looked at him like he was an imbecile. Henson stubbed his cigarette out in the ashtray, grinding it into the glass, gritting his teeth at the memory. When had those little bastards learnt to count?

  And then there was Graham Knight. Sergeant Henson rubbed his eyes.

  ‘Bob?’ Gertie called from inside.

  ‘Coming, love.’

  Graham fucking Knight. Whoever the fuck he was. The man was keeping him up at night. Crane thought there was something off about him too, but really he was more interested in Cameron.

  ‘Boy goes missing at the same time as the girl. It’s simple arithmetic, mate. Either he’s with her, or he’s done away with her,’ he said. Sergeant Henson had nodded at the time – it was easier to let Crane think he was deferring to his rank, but Henson didn’t give a shit about rank. He’d seen this before. Crane just wanted the simplest answer. Pin it on the Wolfe boy, and then he could pack up and go home. But Henson didn’t buy it. It was too easy. According to Tommy, Sarah Vale would sooner have tap-danced naked at school assembly than go anywhere with Cameron Wolfe. It was possible that Tommy didn’t know everything, that maybe the Wolfe boy and Sarah had been having a secret little romance, but Henson didn’t think so. He just didn’t feel it. And what was the point of having a gut as sizeable as his if you didn’t bloody listen to it? Real coppers trusted their instincts. And his instincts were screaming that Graham Knight knew a lot more than he was saying.

  ‘Bob!’ Gertie called again.

  ‘Yep, coming, love,’ Henson called back, and lit another cigarette.

  Gertie appeared at the doorway. ‘Bob,’ she said, exasperated, ‘I’ve been calling you. Put that out and come inside. There’s someone here to see you.’

  At ten o’clock at night? Henson threw his dressing gown on as he came down the hallway. Mr and Mrs Montepulciano were sitting on the dark green corduroy lounge. Maria Montepulciano and Gertie were friends, but the old man had never stepped over his threshold before. They both stood up immediately when he came in.

  ‘Sorry to bother you, Sergeant Henson,’ Mr Montepulciano said. ‘I know of the lateness of the hour. But my wife here, she insisted we come to see you now.’

  Henson nodded and turned his gaze on Mrs Montepulciano. She looked at him, twisting her hands in the belt of her cardigan. Henson was surprised to see a tear fall from her eye and slip down her nut-brown cheek. Gertie held a mug of hot tea out to her, and Mrs Montepulciano took it and nodded at him. Gertie sat down beside her and placed a reassuring hand on her back.

  ‘What is it, Maria?’ she asked.
/>   Mrs Montepulciano put a hand over her heart and then took a deep breath.

  ‘I couldn’t sleep,’ she began.

  ‘So I tell her, have a hot milk, eh?’ Mr Montepulciano interrupted. ‘Women.’ He rolled his eyes.

  Gertie glared at him and he shrunk back into the couch cushions.

  ‘I couldn’t sleep, because I was thinking about the girl,’ Mrs Montepulciano said.

  Henson frowned. ‘The girl?’

  Mrs Montepulciano reached into her handbag and pulled out a folded piece of paper. She handed it to Gertie, and Gertie smoothed it out and placed it on the coffee table. MISSING, said the poster in red across the top.

  Henson leant forward. ‘Mrs Montepulciano, why were you thinking about Sarah Vale?’

  ‘Well, it’s like the poster says. If you know anything, you to tell the Sergeant Henson.’ She pointed at him. She had not been home when he canvassed the streets, Henson remembered now. He should have gone back; God, he should have gone back. He waited, trying to smile, to encourage her. There was a rodeo in his ribcage. Gertie nodded at Mrs Montepulciano, and squeezed her shoulder.

  ‘I see her. I see her on Friday,’ she said.

  Henson drew his breath in sharply.

  ‘You said she was with some boys, eh?’ prompted her husband. ‘Salvatore – Signora Concetta’s grandson, may she rest in peace.’