Crimson Lake

by Candice Fox

  ‘You’re not big on foreplay though, are you, Conkaffey?’

  ‘Hey, she asked,’ I said. ‘I told her. I didn’t want to make it any worse by going inside and dicking around and making tea. Drawing it out, opening the fucking envelope like we’re on an awards show. I’m not even wearing a hat.’

  ‘You’re an arsehole,’ Damford said.

  ‘She hired Amanda and me in the first place because you goons fuck around too much, you know. You’re doing it right now, trying to mess with me out here. Shouldn’t you be in there, shining your chief’s arse?’

  ‘Are you telling us how to do our jobs now?’

  ‘What is your problem with me?’ I said. ‘Is it really what I’ve been accused of? Because I haven’t seen a kid under the age of sixteen since I got here. You say you’re trying to protect this town’s kids. What kids?’

  ‘You don’t think sixteen-year-olds are kids?’

  ‘That’s not what I’m saying,’ I sighed. ‘I’m saying I’m not a threat. And you know that.’

  ‘No, we don’t,’ Hench scoffed. ‘All the evidence would point otherwise, in fact.’

  ‘If you’re that worried about me, why aren’t you surveilling me?’

  ‘Who says we’re not?’

  ‘I don’t think all this has anything to do with my crime,’ I said. ‘I think you’re pissed there’s another cop in town, swinging his dick around. I’m surprised you let Amanda work on your beat. Why did you let Amanda set up here?’

  No answer. That weird, icy double stare.

  ‘Fuck you both,’ I said, turning to go. Before I could take a step, Damford grabbed my arm.

  ‘Leave,’ he said softly.

  That’s all he said. But the word did something to me. Got into me, like a poison cloud, crawling into my mouth and down the back of my throat, making my insides burn. I saw this man’s face over mine. Felt grass under my back. Felt his fingers around my throat. I felt the threat like an all-encompassing hallucination, a phantom death. It was the impact a person feels as they freeze on the road with their eyes shut, cowering, a car sailing towards them too fast. The screech.

  Damford didn’t have to say ‘or I’ll kill you’. I knew, looking at him, that if I didn’t do what he asked, the last thing I’d ever smell would be his breath.

  I shrugged my arm free and backed off, my legs stiff and awkward, and retreated around the side of the house.

  If I had expected there to be some large and dramatic Hollywood-style outburst from Stella at what the officers inside were telling her, I’d have been disappointed. Through the doors to the little stone courtyard where I waited, I could see across the foyer to the sitting room, a slice of the side of her delicate face. She was sitting upright, hands in her lap, listening. Emotionless, calm, the demeanour of someone taking in a lecture.

  I heard a rustling behind me and turned in time to see Harrison emerging from the bushes at the edge of the rain forest, the shoulders of his black wool jumper covered in condensation. He was looking down at his phone as he walked. I cleared my throat so he didn’t run into me as he headed for the door.

  ‘Whoa,’ he stopped, boots crunching in the black river stones. ‘What are you doing here?’

  I drew a deep breath. Glanced towards his mother inside.

  ‘The local cops are meeting with your mum,’ I struggled. ‘Amanda and I … We … We came as well, but she’s inside, handling it. I got shut out.’

  ‘What are they meeting about?’ he asked. He was chewing on that lip ring again, searching my eyes. The cocky kid at the fireside bragging about his father’s grisly death was gone now. His whole exterior seemed to have softened. I didn’t want to be the one to tell this kid his father was gone. The little arsehole I’d encountered upstairs that first day I’d visited, sure. That kid could handle it. But this one – this one looked suddenly ready to crack.

  Turns out I didn’t have to tell him. Like his mother, he read it off me, stripped it from my hands. He gripped the phone. Looked down at it, squeezed it, a mechanical friend he carried everywhere who somehow had no comfort to offer right now.

  ‘I thought he’d just gone off with someone,’ he murmured. ‘She said he’d just run off.’

  Before I knew what was happening, the boy was in my arms, his face against my chest. I hadn’t meant to hug him, and he probably hadn’t meant to be hugged, but as the grief ripped through his body I squeezed him tight. There was nothing else I could have done.

  I glanced through the windows and saw Damford and Hench watching me from just inside the front door, one elbowing the other, gesturing, snickers. I held the child as their predatory eyes wandered over me.

  You can’t be an atheist in prison. If you are, you’re asking for trouble. Even if you don’t outwardly prescribe to a certain faith, it’s advisable to at least refer to crime in the way that religions refer to it: in terms of good and evil, sin and punishment, salvation and guilt. In administrative segregation, where the crimes are violent and the victims are women, children and the elderly, exculpatory reasons for what you did sound callous. It’s safer to blame your broken soul, the devil’s voice in your head, than your faulty frontal lobe. And it’s safer to blame God’s hand, if you’re innocent, than to suggest the legal system might have got it wrong. The guards don’t like that kind of talk.

  My mother was a guilt-ridden Catholic, but I hadn’t given much thought to religion and my part in it since she died. It was when I was led into a cell for the first time, and the door closed on me, that I thought about calling out into the universe. First, to ask for help. Second, to ask why. I remember running my hand over the iron face of the inside of the cell door, thinking how many times I’d seen the front of the same door and how few times I’d seen the back of it, tossing drunks and hooligans and nightcrawlers into the station cells, dragging them out again without looking at its closed surface. I’d pushed a little at the door to see if it was really locked on me. All hope that this was a joke was now over. I heard Frankie out there in the station somewhere, crying.

  I lay on the mattress that night and looked out the slit in the wall at the orange sky, a single star. I’d wondered if some voice would come. That’s what happens in those stories you hear as a kid in church, when faceless apostles or whoever are thrown into dungeons, thrown in with lions, thrown into pits of fire. A voice explains to them what they’re facing. Why. What they have to do to get through it, the lesson they have to learn.

  Eight months in remand, and the voice never came. I heard plenty of voices, but none of them was much concerned with helping me through my ordeal. I had no idea how to make it all stop.

  Amanda rode halfway to the Trinity Baptist Church without touching the handlebars of her bike, keeping pace alongside me, her arms folded and the wind whipping her short black hair now and then across her eyes. We didn’t speak much. I might almost have been able to imagine she was in the car with me. She squinted at the sun, reached over and hung onto the passenger side window frame now and then. I couldn’t bring the speed above thirty-five or I’d lose her. When a car came up behind us she fell back and I moved over to let it pass.

  Jake Scully’s Chronicles books lay scattered over the passenger seat. I’d left Murder in the Top End wrapped in the brown paper Co-op bag, stuffed into the glove box.

  Jake’s church was a small weatherboard building only metres from the banks of the Trinity Inlet, no fence at the end of the long sloping lawn before it gave way to a wall of reeds lining the water. Across the grey-black river I could see the featureless green of Admiralty Island, another barrier of mangroves hiding any access to the land.

  A couple of Aboriginal kids sat on the porch of the old building, drawing lines in the mud with sticks. Amanda got off her bike and stretched her quads, pressed her toes up against the tyre of my car to stretch her calves.

  ‘So what do we know?’ I asked.

  ‘Well, this is Jake’s home church.’ Amanda swept her arm across the view of the church like she
was showing off a game show prize. ‘He gave talks here once a week. A guest spot, just a couple of minutes at the Sunday night sermon. He would tour around bookstores and churches whenever a new book was due to come out, but he wasn’t your publicity dream. He’d gotten a reputation for shyness, so mostly if you wanted to see him, you had to come here.’

  ‘Was Jake shy? Do we know that?’

  ‘I’d say it’s a ruse to pay lip-service to the Christian theme in his books. You ask me? If I was fooling around with a man behind my wife’s back, I wouldn’t feel comfortable making too regular an appearance to talk about sin and hellfire in front of impressionable youths. Feels like the definition of hypocritical.’

  ‘But you still have absolutely no proof Sam is a guy, do you?’ I said. ‘Or that he or she has any connection to our case whatsoever.’

  ‘I do not.’ Amanda winked. ‘But I will soon.’

  I found myself examining Amanda again. I wanted to read Murder in the Top End so badly. What had caused her to go off the rails so dramatically? Was she still off? Sometimes, when she thought I wasn’t looking, she certainly seemed like someone with problems. The gentle head-twitching that I’d almost become accustomed to, almost didn’t see anymore. The just-slightly-too-big whites of her eyes. Everything about her was like that: edging on excessive, so close to crazy that her crazy became sane, consistent enough to ignore. She was functioning. I think that’s what the shrinks called it. Functional dysfunction. As long as she could still dress herself, brush her teeth, maintain a job and do the grocery shopping, what right did anyone have to question Amanda’s mental health? Her potential threat? She’d done her time.

  It was not as though she’d just walked out of prison, either. If she’d followed the same path I knew most convicted killers did, she’d completed pre-release programs while she was still inside. She’d been approved by the parole board and moved to a halfway house with a bunch of other female inmates on their second chance. She’d followed her curfews and listened in on the guest talks from ex-inmates on how to adjust to the outside world again, ticked off all the conditions on her re-entry report. She was certified safe for society.

  Following Amanda into the church, I found myself almost envious of her, as I mentally rattled off all the help she’d received to become a part of the real world again. When your case is set aside, they take the cuffs off you and walk away. Motion dismissively towards the door, like a weary teacher sending the kids from detention out to lunch.

  Get out of here. And don’t. Do it. Again.

  My charge had been rendered ‘no billing’, meaning that the state could take it up again at any time, but that right now, they couldn’t pin me. They didn’t want to keep pursuing the case in court and maybe find themselves with an acquitted rapist and attempted murderer on their hands. No. They wanted me to slowly boil in purgatory, just above the fires of hell, hopelessly far from the clear, clean air of the earth.

  The inside of the weatherboard church had recently been lovingly lacquered, making the walls gleam pink and turquoise on one side where the light streamed in through the eastern windows. A small foyer was filled with photographs in cheap frames, a table sporting copies of a single-sheet newsletter and pamphlets on counselling services. Amanda took a quick tour of the photographs, standing on her toes to see the higher ones. I went to the corkboard, read the death and prayer notices. Teresa Miller, dearly missed mother and wife. In the chapel, a man with a high forehead and the rocking movements of a praying mantis had the altar. We slid into a pew at the back of the room.

  ‘Here’s the problem,’ the priest was saying. ‘Matthew said to them, “The harvest is plentiful. But the labourers are few! Therefore pray earnestly. Pray earnestly to the Lord of the harvest. Pray to the Lord of the harvest and send out labourers into His harvest.”’

  ‘Hallelujah!’ I gave Amanda a sarcastic grin.

  ‘No, no, we want to save our hallelujahs.’ She looked around warily at the crowd, leaned in to whisper, ‘Save them for the right moment.’

  ‘I was only making fun.’

  She shushed me.

  ‘What does that mean?’ the priest asked. ‘I’ll tell you what it means. It means those willing, and happy, and prideful in the love of the Lord are lacking, my friends. There are too few people willing to share in the harvest – in the good love – of the Lord. It takes work, it takes labour, ladies and gentlemen, to receive God’s love. You know what? It’s easier to be a sinner. Isn’t it easy? It’s so easy to be a sinner.’

  I cast my eye around the crowd. Heads nodding in front of me, the bald and speckled heads of old men, and the shaven, styled hair of young men. Aboriginal men with arms slung around their girlfriends or wives over the back of polished pews. At the front of the congregation a collection of children knelt or lay on the floor colouring in, too young to comprehend the sermon. They sat at the feet of the preacher, who stood before a great coloured glass rendering of the crucifixion, the Lord’s face upraised and mouth downturned in agony. My discomfort grew steadily, an itch in my shoulders and neck. Time passed. I sat and listened.

  ‘But why don’t people come to the harvest?’ the preacher asked. ‘Why don’t they work for God’s love? Because people love to make excuses. Some people say they sin because of their families. “I was raised that way! I know no better! I have to steal, and cheat, and submit myself to Satan’s whims because my mother told me so.” Some people blame society. “Oh,” they say, “I have to turn away from the Lord because to be a good Christian isn’t fashionable. Isn’t cool. My friends won’t like me.” The homosexuals, they blame their blood. “I was born this way,” they say. “Something in my blood, in my genes, in my neurons, tells me that I have to defy the will of God and lay man with man and woman with woman. That I have to stay away from the harvest.”’

  ‘Hallelujah!’ Amanda shot up from her seat and thrust her fist in the air. I felt my cheeks flush with embarrassment. People turned to stare.

  ‘Praise the Lord!’

  ‘Amanda,’ I whispered, grabbing at her, ‘sit down!’

  I didn’t understand the desired effect of Amanda’s outburst until I saw the priest, who hardly paused in his ramblings, his mouth spreading into a grin even as he spoke. He glanced at my partner, pointed at her, his long sleeve flapping with his gesture.

  ‘Yes, sister, that’s right. The homosexuals, who are perhaps our greatest excuse-makers. They tell us that their wicked desires can exist even in the smallest newborn child of God, lying in his mother’s arms …’

  ‘Now we wait.’ Amanda smiled. The priest had been spurred on. He was on a tangent now, wandering away from the original sermon down a dark path about the homosexual as a particularly dangerous type of harvest-avoider. The people around us had also been inspired by Amanda’s movement. It was almost like the spontaneous shouting of the flock was a pastime they’d only just remembered was such fun.

  ‘He lies with man as he lies with woman.’ The priest paused for effect, his face twisted in disgust. ‘Is there any greater insult to God’s plan?’

  A movement caught my eye. A young man sliding along the back row, knocking prayer books over in his haste. He drew a packet of cigarettes from his pocket as he made for the front doors.

  Gotcha, I thought.

  The little girls on the front step had acquired their own colouring books now, the sticks and mud forgotten. I let the door fall closed behind me. The man from the back row was no older than twenty, seemed at least partly Indigenous Australian. Sweat stained the underarms of his red T-shirt. I gazed at the mountains, made like I was just getting air.

  He looked at me. The hangdog expression of a teen caught watching porn on the school computers. I lifted the corner of my mouth in a noncommittal hello, looked at the pictures the girls had drawn in the dirt. When I glanced up, the young man was shaking the cigarette packet at me.

  ‘Thanks.’ I took one, moved closer, let him light it for me.

  ‘No problem.’

&
nbsp; ‘Jesus. When they start on about the harvest.’ I smirked. ‘Yeah.’ He gave a sheepish grin. ‘Matthew drives me fucking nuts. So repetitive. Matthew and the letters to the Corinthians. Sometimes I wish somebody would put me out of my misery.’

  I laughed. Eight months in remand and I hadn’t lost my cop eye. As soon as I’d laid eyes on the guy, I knew his heart wasn’t in the sermon. I knew I was looking at a liar. I used to be able to spot a liar before they even entered the interrogation room, back in the old days. Before my arrest, I’d settled for knowing something was ‘off’ about a witness, or a suspect. I knew something was off with this kid, the way he shuffled out of the building, his head down.

  ‘I haven’t seen you here,’ he said.

  ‘No. I’m visiting. Ted.’ I held out my hand.

  ‘Ray.’

  We appreciated the river curling away from us between the cane fields. The preacher’s voice came through the doors in a low mumble.

  ‘It’s a nice church.’ I turned and nodded at the roof, the little spire leaning against the clouds. I wasn’t lying. It was cute.

  ‘Yeah, they have cake later, after the sermon.’ Ray met my eyes, possibly for the first time. ‘It’s good cake.’

  ‘I’ve heard about the cake here,’ I said.

  ‘Really?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Oh.’ Ray laughed, raising deep dimples at the edges of his wide mouth.

  I smiled. ‘I came because I heard that writer talks here. The Chronicles guy. I was hoping to catch him on my way through. I like his books.’

  ‘Right.’ Ray’s smile disappeared. He swiped at a stray black curl. ‘Nah, Jake’s gone missing. You mustn’t have seen it. It was in the papers. He’s been missing for ages. Just up and disappeared one night.’

  ‘Disappeared? What, like, ran away, or …?’

  ‘They don’t know.’

  ‘Wow,’ I said.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Shit. Shit, really? So what happened?’

  ‘Mate, they don’t have a clue.’ Ray leaned in close. ‘The papers have just been saying he went out one night and never came back. That was a few weeks ago, though. I mean, it’s gone from the news. The police just hit a wall, I guess. I’ve been looking for stories about it but there are none.’