by Kim Lock
‘Those books are more than that,’ Evelyn says fervently. ‘They’re evidence.’
‘Of what?’
‘Ark’s been hiding income.’
‘Big deal. Don’t all businesses do that?’
Pattie and Evelyn exchange a glance.
‘There’s more, Fro. There’s something else Jenna wanted me to give you.’ Evelyn stands up and moves across the lounge room to the sideboard covered with photographs. Sliding open a drawer, she retrieves something and comes back to Fairlie.
‘Here,’ Evelyn says. Before she hands the item to Fairlie, she sits alongside her on the couch. ‘You’ve had a lot of shocks today,’ she says. ‘It’s a lot to take in. But Jenna was adamant: she said this was for you. Only,’ she pauses and her voice drops, ‘I thought she would collect it from me, one day, and then give it to you.’
She hands Fairlie a notebook, A5-sized with a purple-and-black striped cover – the kind sold for a dollar at the supermarket. The cover is lined with creases, lifting away from internal pages rumpled and swollen with ink. Inside, the pages are filled with Jenna’s handwriting.
‘What’s this?’ Fairlie asks softly. She glances at Pattie, who is frowning curiously.
Evelyn looks faintly terrified. The colour has disappeared from her cheeks. ‘It’s Jenna’s diary. I received it in the mail last week. She must have sent it to me before . . . There was a note with it – instructions to give this to you. I guess she knew you would arrive on my doorstep once you’d been to the storage unit.’
Fairlie looks down at the notebook in her lap, runs her hand over the ridges and valleys of the strokes of ink, made by the pressure of Jenna’s hand. The first page is dated at the top in Jenna’s looped scrawl: 12 May. Almost four years earlier. A sad smile wells in Fairlie as she begins to read Jenna’s diary.
The first entry outlines a conversation with Ark. With a kind of no-nonsense precision, Jenna describes her initial ambivalence about Ark’s suggestion they have a baby. A lump forms in Fairlie’s throat; she remembers that day, in the tea-room at the hospital, when Jenna had told her that she and Ark were considering having a baby.
Fairlie reads on. Days and then weeks of tumult as Jenna struggles internally about beginning a family, and as she and Ark grow increasingly discontented. Jenna’s narrative has a literal feel, unembellished by fanciful, emotional stretches or conjecture. This happened, and I felt like this. But as Jenna’s handwritten words paint a picture of day after day, Fairlie skims ahead, the smile slipping from her lips. Her throat dries, and cold fear strokes up her spine.
Pattie and Evelyn speak quietly to each other, fevered tones, hushed words rushing at one another.
But Fairlie can’t hear them. Their voices fade, then blur, then drain away completely, like water sifting through sand to leave a cracked and parched earth. The room is silent and stuffy as Fairlie turns the pages in the notebook.
‘Fro?’ Evelyn is saying. ‘Honey, please. Say something.’
Fairlie lowers the notebook. ‘He killed her.’
The room plunges into a silence so complete they can hear the crickets outside. Pattie and Evelyn stare at her. Finally, someone prompts her for more.
‘This is a diary.’ She waves the notebook at them.
‘I know –’
‘It’s Jenna’s diary from the past four years,’ Fairlie rushes over her. ‘I can’t believe I never saw any of this, she never told me this much. I knew she was unhappy but this is bad, it’s all so bad, oh my God the things that he did to her . . .’
She can’t breathe. There isn’t enough air in the room. Her lungs are squeezing tight and Jenna’s gone and she’s never coming back because Ark killed her.
Breathe. In, hold. Out, hold.
Someone gently touches the back of her head; she puts her head between her knees. They’re murmuring again, those two. Why does everyone seem to know everything and she knows nothing?
‘I knew it was bad, I knew she was unhappy, and I worried that he was being an arsehole but nothing like this, nothing like this.’
Breathe.
After a while, the murmuring stops. The rushing sound in her ears fades. When she looks up, they’re both watching her, waiting.
Her mothers.
Picking up the notepad from where she’d dropped it to the floor, Fairlie opens it at random and reads: ‘“Monday, October ten. Things not good. Ark angry, I left food scraps in the sink drainer but I can’t reach it over my belly. Called me lazy and dirty.”’ She flips the page.
‘ “Saturday, January twelve. Things quite bad. Ark called me selfish and said I was a bad mother, took Henry out and I was scared he wouldn’t bring him back. Laughed when I suggested counselling.” ’ Her voice begins to shake as she flips through more pages.
‘ “Wednesday, February tenth. I’m scared and tired. I’m sick. I don’t know how much longer I can take this. He won’t let me leave.”
‘ “Friday, June third”.’ Fairlie swallows, puts a hand over her throat. ‘“Raped again. Always my fault, this time because I’ve been too tired lately.’ Her eyes skim over the words. Words like bad mother and my fault and rape.
Fairlie closes the book. ‘I had no idea,’ she whispers.
‘Fro . . .’
‘Mrs Soblieski knew something wasn’t right!’ she cries. ‘Did you both know? Evelyn?’ She shakes the notebook at her. ‘You just said “she escaped that arsehole”. Well? Did you know?’
Evelyn nods quickly, once. ‘Yes. But like I said, only very recently. She started sending me messages –’
‘And you did nothing?’
‘I begged her to get away!’ Evelyn says, suddenly furious. ‘I thought we were planning her escape! Once she was out safely we were going to make an anonymous tip to the ATO so he could be charged with tax fraud! Look,’ she yanks the box over and removes items, one by one, ‘she stole his books, look here. Eight years worth of hidden income. Prick was so arrogant he kept a record of exactly how much he was earning – how much he was getting away with. He’d been selling truckloads of wine on the side, illegally, to some very unsavoury people.’ Evelyn slams the pile of books held together by elastic bands onto the coffee table. ‘And in here –’ she yanks out the A4 envelope filled with paper ‘– these are printouts of emails, conversations between him and his dodgy buyers. She wrote a statement about a man who came to the house just recently, asking for Ark and making threats. She even collected a list of staff he paid in cash, tradespeople who’d purposely over-invoiced so his expenses would seem higher.’ Streaks of pink shoot up Evelyn’s neck as she slams more pages onto the coffee table. ‘Do you really think I’d do nothing if I had known she was so desperate that she might . . .’ Disgusted, Evelyn makes a snorting sound in her throat.
‘I swear to you, Fairlie,’ she finishes earnestly. ‘I didn’t know that she was planning to end her life. I thought she was planning a new start.’
A saddened, cold, quiet falls, a stew of shared complicity. When Pattie finally beaks the silence she voices what they’re all too scared to admit: ‘Jenna was ill. No one could have seen it.’
Fairlie says quietly, ‘She tried to tell me.’
‘Don’t do that –’ Someone reaches a hand for her and she bats it away, lurching to her feet as she pulls out her phone, hits Ark’s number. Pattie and Evelyn stare as she backs herself into the corner of the room, the bookshelf digging into her back, her free hand held palm-out towards them and her face wild.
Ark doesn’t answer. A recording of his jovial, forced-friendly voice instructing her to leave a message and have a great day enrages her even further.
She’ll never quite remember it, what she says then; she won’t recall what she shouts, drunken and banshee-like down the line. But her words blanch the colour from the other women’s faces and Evelyn sinks to the couch, a trembling thin-boned hand over
her eyes.
22
THEN
When Jenna suggested they lie down together for his nap, Henry didn’t ask why. Although it had been months since she’d slept with him, at only two years old the primitive instinct to nestle alongside his mother hadn’t been quashed from him yet.
‘Go lie on Mummy’s bed,’ she said, smiling at him. Henry giggled and clambered onto the sheets as she drew the curtains against the midday sun.
She lay alongside him. Her fingers stroked the length of his small back; she buried her face in his soft hair. He smelled of strawberries and green grass, and she swallowed it.
Time slowed, sluggish in the growing summer. Silence filled the house and Henry quieted in her arms, his breathing slow and even, moist on her throat. His little arm went slack around her neck. Quietly, she took up his hand and pressed his small palm to her lips. A tear slid down her cheek and she wiped it, tenderly, with his tiny fingers.
‘I know you don’t understand,’ she whispered to him. ‘All I can hope is that one day you will. I’m sorry I couldn’t be what you deserve, but you have lots of people who can.’ She smiled, her vision swimming as she touched the pale, exquisite skin of his neck. ‘Your dad,’ she told him, ‘your grandmas Evvie and Pat.’ She swallowed and finished, ‘And Aunty Fro. She’ll always be here for you.’
Jenna crept out from under his grip, smoothed her hand over his sleeping body. ‘I do love you,’ she said.
In the kitchen, she made a raspberry jam sandwich, sliced it into even triangles and removed the crusts. She filled a yellow plastic cup with water. Removing the iPad from the charger, she tucked it beneath the wing of her arm and carried the items down the hall, back to the darkened bedroom. Silently, she set the food and iPad along with a basket of blocks on a colourful mat on the floor, where Henry would find it on the unlikely chance he awoke before Ark returned.
She looked down upon Henry, the rise and fall of his chest, his blameless, sleeping face. The crescent of his eyelashes. She closed her eyes and the picture of him stayed, solid, and with it she felt relief and gratitude and the warm glow of love. He was still so young; he wouldn’t remember her. And it was better, this way. Without her.
He would be okay.
The hall clock ticked. For a while, she stood in front of it. Outside the magpies cried to one another and a mild summer breeze rattled in the gums. She pictured the grapes growing ripe and fat in the sun, rich with their bounty of juice. In her mind’s eye she saw Ark, schmoozing in the swanky restaurant in Warrnambool, across the border in Victoria, an hour’s drive away. Swilling wine in bulbous glasses, laughing his booming laugh, clapping shoulders and shaking hands.
Jenna picked up her phone. Her hands were calm as she sent him the text message.
It was the last time she thought of Ark Rudolph.
She went back to the bedroom doorway and peered into the darkened room. Henry was deeply asleep. She did love him, she knew that. That was enough.
Jenna went down the hall, into the bathroom, where the light was filmy and white-gold and the water from the taps ran hot.
She locked the door.
23
NOW
Nerves flutter through Fairlie’s body so insistently they almost obscure her hangover. The morning is crisp and clear, towelled dry with the scent of pine chips from the timber mill on the edge of town. The fresh air gently cleanses the whiskey from her blood but does little to ease the throbbing pain between her temples, nor the anxiety wringing out her insides.
Only a short walk to the Mount Gambier police station from Evelyn’s house; Fairlie counts the steps with a sense of irony.
Last night, for the first time in years, she’d spent the night at Evelyn’s. Eventually, semi-passed out, she had curled beneath a blanket on the couch in Evelyn’s lounge room and slept; Pattie and Evelyn keeping watch over her until dawn fingered pink smears into the sky.
As Fairlie walks, a clutter of imagery crowds in her mind, each picture jostling for attention. Evelyn Francis gave birth to her. She knows her biological father. Ark had been abusing – raping – Jenna. Henry is without a mother. Jenna is her sister – her skinny, white, twin sister. And adhering it all together in a miasma of awfulness is the relentless grief: Jenna is dead.
She misses Jenna more than she can physically bear. More than anything in the world, she wants to talk to Jenna about all this.
Her sister. Her sister.
The police station looms before her, a hulking box of grey stone attempting to look modern and edgy yet formidable, a place for criminals to cower. Fairlie’s mouth dries up and she clutches the box tighter to her chest as she pushes through the door.
Bright artificial lighting and the warble of telephones and voices. A girl who isn’t nearly physically imposing enough, and certainly cannot be old enough to be a police officer comes to the counter. Hands on jangly belted hips, hair gelled back into a tight bun, she gives Fairlie a bright, questioning look.
‘Is Detective Dallas Morgan around?’ Fairlie says.
The girl playing police dress-ups looks Fairlie cautiously up and down and picks up a phone. Holding it slightly from her ear, she asks, ‘You are?’
‘Fairlie. I . . . I’m a friend. I have something for him . . .’ She lifts the box like an offering.
The girl looks unconvinced. She speaks briefly into the phone, listens, and hangs up. ‘Sorry,’ she says. ‘He’s out. Can I take a message? Or . . .’ Gesturing to the box, she holds out her hands.
Jenna’s diary, the newborn ankle bands and the birth certificates are all tucked safely into Fairlie’s handbag. Secrets kept within the folds of family. Fairlie slides the box of evidence – eight years of tax avoidance, records of Ark’s illegal dealings – across the counter into the police officer’s waiting hands.
ii
Roasted coffee scents the warm fug inside the café. From behind the counter comes the whirring grind of beans, spoons clink against china cups and chair legs grate upon floorboards. Voices and laughter.
Beneath the table, Fairlie’s knee jiggles. Swiping her thumb across her phone screen, she glances yet again at the time. Still, it’s not quite ten.
The bell above the door jangles and a roar of street noise rushes in.
Fairlie stands. Unsure what to do with her hands she clasps them in front of herself, then lets them fall to her sides. Clasps them again.
‘Hello, Fairlie, it’s good to see you again,’ he says. His smile is as warm as the room. ‘I hear Evelyn told you everything.’
Fairlie shakes her head. ‘It was Jenna. Jenna told me everything.’
Detective Dallas Morgan offers his hand and she takes it tentatively. Where do we start? Twenty-six years ago? Or now, today?
The detective seems to be reading her mind. ‘I know we have some catching up to do, but would you like to hear what’s happening with Mr Rudolph’s case?’
Fairlie exhales, relieved. Ark’s tax evasion seems like safe territory. ‘Yes, please.’
Dallas waits for a man pushing a toddler in a stroller to pass their table. ‘Investigators for the ATO are handling it from here,’ he begins. ‘Ark will have a visit from the Feds any day now. The investigation could take some time, many months. But –’
A waiter approaches, a teenage boy with an eyebrow ring. ‘Here for lunch?’ he asks cheerfully. ‘The soup of the day is divine. Pea and ham –’
‘Yes, please,’ Fairlie and Dallas answer simultaneously.
The waiter looks back and forth between them as they stare at each other. Fairlie adds coffee, Dallas a cup of tea. The waiter retreats quickly when the two of them stop responding.
‘I wanted to get rid of him,’ Fairlie says first, when the waiter has left.
‘Me, too,’ Dallas says. ‘But also, I love pea and ham soup.’
Fairlie bites her lip and looks down at her pla
ce setting. She fiddles with a napkin, picks up her glass of water for something to do with her hands. Can he curl his tongue, like she can? That’s a genetic trait. Are her grandparents still alive? Who are her ancestors? Where does her mob come from? A sense of inadequacy sweeps through her. What if he’s disappointed in how she turned out? Fat, slothful, living alone with only a cat for company? Yet at the same time, she feels a conflicting anger bubbling through her limbs. Because hasn’t he known about her all this time? And had he never felt the need to give her a call and say, Hey, just thought you might like to know where you came from?
‘It’s likely Ark will go to jail.’
Water sputters up her nose. ‘Jail? Seriously? I thought he’d just hidden a bit of income.’
‘A lot of income – one and a half million dollars in eight years.’
Fairlie’s jaw drops. One and a half million dollars?
‘How, where . . .’ she stutters. ‘Where has he been hiding it – in a mattress?’
Dallas’s face creases with something like amusement. ‘In plain sight. He’s just been spending it – living it up. Probably on expensive household items, gifts, renovations.’
‘Jenna always said he was strict with money,’ Fairlie says with a frown. ‘They always seemed to be watching every penny.’
‘It’s a cover. If he’s telling the tax office he’s not earning much, he has to tell that to everyone else, too. And,’ his expression softens, ‘it was one of his control tactics over Jenna.’ Dallas takes a deep breath. ‘Unfortunately for Mr Rudolph, it’s not just the hidden income. He’s also been illegally selling his stock to a few individuals we’ve been trying to find for a while. Jenna led us to quite a crime ring breakthrough.’
Fairlie grips the tabletop to steady herself. Tax crimes, black market alcohol sales. Bloody hell. ‘What about Henry?’
Dallas looks rueful. ‘Mr Rudolph has already mentioned that.’
