by Candice Fox
No light. The battery was dead. The smell was of mould and takeaway. I remembered Stella telling me that Jake had been an addictive man. The back seat was covered in discarded fast-food bags scrunched and tossed over the driver’s shoulder. Discarded receipts for bets on greyhounds. Guilty pleasures. Secrets he refused to bring home.
There were no keys in the ignition. Amanda appeared at the murky front passenger-side door and popped it open, digging around in the glove box, the very tips of her fingers pushing the papers aside to avoid leaving prints.
‘So this is the spot,’ Amanda said. ‘Ormund lured him out here. Maybe confronted him with his theory about the books, the end-of-the-world secret Jake had hidden inside them. Maybe Jake disagreed, told Ormund his theory was bullshit. That the books were just books. Ormund killed him, and dumped him in the creek. Some fat croc came along and disposed of the corpse.’
‘I don’t know,’ I sighed, rummaging through the lolly wrappers in the centre console. ‘Lured him out here how? There was no email. No text. No phone call.’
I left the car and did a walk-around, pulling down vines, looking for a bullet hole or streak of blood, something to indicate there’d been a struggle between the two men and Jake had come off second best. I crouched and looked for the glint of a shell casing using the flashlight on my phone. There was none. There were no torn branches besides those which covered the car. There were no bloody disturbed rocks. No flattened areas of reeds.
‘What are these?’ Amanda said.
She was leaning over the passenger seat, holding a wad of papers. The sheets were dry and cracked, crumpled from being folded and shoved down the side of the driver’s seat. She spread them out on the centre console.
‘Fan letters.’ I looked through the pages. ‘These are new. I haven’t seen these.’
‘They weren’t part of the collection at the house?’
‘No.’ I glanced quickly over the text. ‘No. These are different.’
I was starting to get a sinking feeling as I read over the words. The letters got longer and longer.
I am just so obsessed with you.
I can’t tell you how proud I am of you.
We’re the same. If only you knew it. You’d feel glad you finally found me.
‘Look.’ I showed Amanda. ‘These didn’t come by mail. They’re emails. Printed emails.’
The hair on the back of my neck was rising. I trembled as I read.
It must be wonderful to be a god.
You probably think I’m a freak.
What if I threatened the people you love, Jake?
What’s it gonna take to get your attention?
‘Why didn’t Cary alert us to these?’ Amanda was looking at one of the later pages. ‘These are twisted.’
‘That’s not Jake’s regular email address.’ I pointed to the top of the page. ‘This must be the old one. An old email address, from the old website, where you can access all Jake’s previous works. Makes sense. Ormund would have been a Jake Scully fan before he was famous. He’d have written to him on the old address. Cary mustn’t have known about it.’
‘Superfan,’ Amanda whispered, her eyes wild with excitement.
‘Let’s shut this up and call the police,’ I said, closing the driver’s door. ‘We don’t want to contaminate it any further. We’ll let them know what we found and tip them off about Smitt.’
‘We’re taking these.’ Amanda shoved the letters into my hand. ‘We’ve done too much hard work to let the boys in blue take all the credit.’
Dear Jake,
Have you ever thought about what it must be like to be your characters? To be picked up and shuffled about the game board so unwillingly. To be tortured, taken, cast away when their usefulness dries up. Do you ever feel sorry for them? Do you even know how brutally your fingers work them, how hard you pump their jaws to make them talk, your little puppets jabbering about? While you play with your crew, your main posse of favourites, characters like me wait in the shadows to be picked up, again and again. I’ve never felt your god’s grip around my waist. I think about it all the time.
Raising characters must be something of what it’s like to raise a child. All those years of careful moulding. Intentions. Dreams. What was it like when your son Harrison stopped being your puppet and started wandering about on his own, spouting out words you’d never given him to say? I watched you sitting with him in the courtyard yesterday, reaching out and trying to touch him, your aching face as he pulled away. You made him, and now he’s out of your control. His fate is not yours to write, even as your fingers tap frantically at the keys, trying to get him back in the cage again.
Maybe this is the beginning of the end. You lost control of one character. Maybe you’ll start to lose tendrils of plot. Did God mean for his son to die? Or was that the result of all the wayward characters he’d created running amok over the page? What might happen if some waiting shadow you’d grown so accustomed to ignoring suddenly struck out and changed the game? What if I was to steal one of your favourites away?
Everybody loves a good twist, right?
My street was full of people. A television broadcast van was parked at an angle in the cane field, camera guys filming a man in a suit across the road, my house in the background of the shot, gold lights shining through huge softboxes on stands. A small knot of people had simply come to watch, neutral, their arms folded and faces cast in shadows. The rest were dipping in and out of the shot, bent white cardboard signs hastily put together, wobbling as their holders chanted. I stopped my car in the dark at the end of the street and read the signs, listened to the voices on the wind.
Justice for Claire.
Keep our children safe.
Burn, Ted, burn.
I gripped the wheel and watched them. They couldn’t be there all night. No one was that committed. When the cameras had their shots, surely the crowd would disperse. I leaned back in the driver’s seat and started tapping at my phone. These people weren’t going to stop my work. They could stop me going home, but they would not take away my only distraction – the hunt for Ormund Smitt, the inescapable desire to wrap up what had happened to Jake in a neat package of truth. There were things I could hold on to. Jake was one of them. I could pretend that resolving his case would resolve mine. I’d engaged in some pretty solid delusions in my life. This was not going to be any different.
I called a yawning and begrudging Cary and had him give me access to Jake’s old email account, the one he’d started as a young writer with big dreams and little recognition. Cary seemed less than impressed that we’d found Jake’s car. I guessed he knew Jake was dead, like everyone else, and the circumstances weren’t going to make a difference to his relationship with the writer going forward. Jake was gone. How he went was for everyone else to figure out.
‘That account’s a decade old,’ he told me, pots and pans clattering in the background of the call. ‘The police have already looked through it. There’s nothing of interest in there.’
‘You’re wrong,’ I said. ‘I won’t say much, because the police might want to keep things about the discovery of Jake’s car a secret. But we’ve got reason to believe the old email account was still active.’
‘It was a fan, was it?’ Cary seemed to perk up. ‘My god. One of the readers?’
‘Thanks for the login details,’ I said. ‘I can’t say any more.’
I opened Jake’s account and looked through the emails. Ormund’s were the only recently received messages in the inbox. I scrolled through the last message, the one that talked about Harrison and Jake sitting in the courtyard of their house, the older man trying to reason with the wayward boy.
You made him, and now he’s out of your control.
Someone walked by my car door in the dark, startling me. I hunched down, pressed the phone against my chest. It was suddenly much darker than it had been when I’d arrived. When the stranger had gone, I tapped the screen awake again.
There was one em
ail in the ‘deleted’ folder. I opened it up and looked at the subject header.
Re: Your inquiry, Sugarbell Ranch.
Another passer-by in the dark. I wasn’t safe here. I ditched the car in the rainforest and walked through the bush to the mangroves, fumbling along in the dark, trying not to think about crocodiles. Spider webs caught in my outstretched hands and palms sliced at my forearms as I made my way to the gate. When I emerged into the backyard, a police officer stepped out from the dark at the side of the house. Sweeney, one of the two patrollies who had protected my house the night before. My shoes were full of muddy water and the bottoms of my jeans were wet.
‘Oh,’ she said. ‘It’s you.’
I went to the tap at the side of the porch and took off my shoes and socks, rinsed the stinking mud away, put my feet under the stream and rubbed dirt from between my toes.
‘Are you guys on all night again?’ I asked.
‘Someone will watch the house until this all blows over,’ she said, watching me wash the cuffs of my jeans. ‘The protective detail sheet says twelve days. If you’re still being hounded after that, the chief might extend.’
I could hear the chanting at the front of the house from where we stood. We stared awkwardly at each other, listening.
Keep our children safe!
Don’t wait till it’s too late!
‘Safe doesn’t rhyme with late,’ I said. Sweeney looked at me like I was mad. I felt lonely for Amanda suddenly. She would have appreciated my attention to rhymes, and my painful attempt to throw cheer into a situation most people recognised as unredeemable. Nothing was too strange or too awkward when said in the presence of Amanda. The cop walked away.
I went to the bedroom and sat on the floor by the crack in the window and listened to the news reports. A man in a suit stood on the grass off to the side of the crowd, a microphone in hand, going through pre-recorded crosses for A Current Affair. He recorded some interviews with locals for a longer piece, trying out a number of introductions the editors could choose from later when they put the exclusive together.
‘A town in terror,’ he said, nodding and raising his chin sharply to catch the light. ‘The quiet, tropical community of Crimson Lake, where the only threat to youngsters is usually the steamy summer heat. It’s a place where families feel safe, and the friendly local farmers are always there to lend each other a helping hand. Well, no more.’
The cameras dipped. A woman stepped out from the shadows.
‘Good one, Mike.’ She took a card from a guy standing behind the camera and replaced it with another, stepped away from the shot. ‘Go again in three, two …’
‘In the quiet town of Crimson Lake, a terror is lurking,’ the suited guy said, jutting his square jaw. ‘This small tropical community, where the only threat to youngsters is usually …’
I couldn’t listen anymore. I thought I’d have a couple of Wild Turkeys on the back porch, try to lull myself into a false sense of calm while I worked through the emails Amanda and I had found in Jake’s car. As I turned into the hall, however, I glanced back towards the front door and noticed a slice of light.
The door was ajar. My stomach plummeted. I went to the door and pulled it open, looked out at the two female cops standing on the edge of the porch. They heard it creak and turned around.
‘Did you two come in here?’ I asked.
‘What?’
‘This door was unlatched,’ I said. ‘Has anyone been in here today? Since I’ve been gone?’
‘No. Go back inside, Mr Conkaffey, before the crowd sees you.’
I shut the door with a growing sense of dread. I knew I’d locked the door when I left that morning to spy on Ormund Smitt. I went to the bedroom and counted off the meagre things there – the laptop, my boxes of papers. I went into the kitchen and picked my phone up off the bench. Everything seemed just how I’d left it, but the electric feeling creeping up my arms told me that something wasn’t right. The phone buzzed in my hand, startling me so that I dropped it on the tiles.
‘Hello?’
‘Ted? It’s Francine.’
I felt light-headed. Everything was wrong. I hadn’t talked to Little Frankie since my pre-arrest questioning, since she’d left my interrogation and I’d heard her crying in the office, begging our colleagues to tell her that it wasn’t true.
‘Hi,’ I said, trying to think of something to fill the awful silence. ‘Hi.’
‘I, uh …’ Frankie sighed exasperatedly.
‘Did Kelly ask you to call?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘Why would she ask me to call?’
‘Oh, 60 Minutes is after her again. That’s all.’
‘No I’m, um, I’m actually calling because I’m wondering if you can tell me if you know a couple of guys.’ She shuffled a paper. ‘An L. Damford and a S. Hench?’
I gripped a chair by the kitchen table, crawled into its seat.
‘Why are you asking me that?’
‘They’re from your area. They’ve put in a couple of requests for warrants to search your place. A friend from the Queensland force told me. Gossip, you know. The requests have been knocked back, but they keep coming. I’m wondering if, uh …’ She fell quiet. I hung onto the phone. ‘If they’re after you. With all the news, and everything. You know?’
‘They are,’ I said. ‘Those guys are after me. It’s not just about my case. It’s deeper. They … I’ve got a partner. They don’t want me working with her.’
Across the miles between us, we listened to each other’s breathing, saying nothing. Outside, the chanting changed. I couldn’t make out the words.
‘It was hard to know if I should warn you,’ she said.
‘I’m grateful that you did,’ I told her. I thought about all the conversations I’d had with her in my mind since my arrest. The nights I’d lain awake in prison trying to explain to her that I was innocent. That I was sorry. That I missed her. I missed them all – those hard-nosed cops I used to call my brothers and sisters, the tired faces I passed when I came on shift, the drunken louts I celebrated with at the station Christmas party.
Before I could say any of that now, Frankie hung up on me.
Panic. As raw and as real as a heat burning through me, crawling up my throat, pulsing in my ears. I put the phone down on the kitchen table and went to the front room. I dumped the box of possessions there onto the floor. Picked up paperbacks and flipped through them. Shoved clothes out of the way. When I found nothing, I went to the bedroom, tore the sheets off the bed, crouched low and lifted the mattress, leaned it against the wall, ran my hand over the back of it, looking for slits or holes. I’d forgotten all about my injuries now. The pain didn’t matter. Panic had eclipsed it.
Damford and Hench wanted an official reason to come into my house. They wanted approval. A piece of paper to hold in the air. They’d never bothered with it before. They’d been in and out of my house on no more approval than their own.
There was only one reason I could think of for getting the search approved. They knew they’d find something this time.
When I noticed Fabiana Grisham standing in the doorway of the bedroom, I hardly acknowledged her. She wasn’t the immediate threat.
‘The front door was unlocked. What the hell are you doing?’
‘There’s going to be a search,’ I said. I tore out the drawer of the dresser and dumped its contents on the bed. ‘They’ve planted something.’
She fell silent, watching me. I was aware of the fact that she was very dressed-down, that she’d slapped on a soft white cotton dress to deal with the heat and her long hair was up in a high ponytail, off her sweaty neck. I was also aware that she looked amazing, but I couldn’t seem to fix my eyes on her. They wandered frantically over the room, then the ensuite. I ran in there and opened the cupboards, ran my hands up under the sink in case something was taped there.
‘Ted,’ she said. She was suddenly close, her hands on my arms. ‘Ted, you’re panicking. You’re going crazy.’
I pushed her away and bent over the toilet, running my hands over the dusty back of the cistern. Look everywhere, I thought. Look up. I went back to the bedroom, pulled the mattress back onto the bed and stood on it, ran my hands over the tops of the ceiling fan blades. I knew from my time in drug squad how creative people could be when they wanted to hide something very important. Drug dealers pulled away pieces of the skirting board, taped things beneath chairs, sewed things into the sides of mattresses. The possibilities were endless. I reminded myself to check all the pockets of my clothes. My shoes. To look in the pipes behind the washing machine.
Fabiana stood watching me from the door of the ensuite.
I hadn’t forgiven her. But enemy assistance in the middle of a crisis is better than none at all.
‘You can stare at me or you can help,’ I said.
She thought about it for a little while, then she went to the kitchen. I could hear her shoving things around under the sink. I joined her in time, lifting and shifting all the pantry contents from one side of the wide shelves to the other. I stood on a chair and checked the ceiling fans there, then went out onto the porch and pulled apart the cane lounge.
I came across my gun sitting in the top draw of my dresser. Held it for a few seconds and felt the old pull backwards, the lure of silence. Escape button. It would be so simple to get out of this trap.
At about midnight, I’d finished searching under the porch with a flashlight. I stood tapping it against my palm in the dark backyard, trying to think. She walked down the stairs with a couple of glasses of wine, her lean body silhouetted through the cotton dress in the lights from the kitchen. I was filthy and drenched in sweat. Cane toads scurried from her across the wet lawn as she came towards me. We stood barefoot, looking at the moonlit water between the trees.
