Quiet in Her Bones

by Singh, Nalini

  Neither cop said anything and Justina Cheung, too, held her silence until we were outside the station. Walking with me to my car, she said, “From this point on, you stay silent. What they have, it’s circumstantial at best.” She stopped beside my sedan. “I need to know if the memory issue is real.”

  “Unfortunately.” I unlocked my car with an insouciance I didn’t feel, my injured leg suddenly heavier and harder to move. “I wish I was bullshitting, but my memory is ­currently … problematic.”

  “That might end up in your favor.” The lawyer glanced at her slim gold watch. “Call me the second they contact you again. I’ve seen that look ­before—­Regan’s a bulldog and he’s focused on you.”

  I waited until I was in my car and away from the station before flipping off my mask of careless indifference. “Fuck, fuck, fuck!”

  I hadn’t hurt her.

  I hadn’t.

  52

  Skin hot, a throb at the back of my head, I used the car’s ­hands-­free system to make a call to Shanti. “Is my father home?” He worked six days a week as a rule, then threw in the occasional Sunday as well.

  “No, he’s still at the plant.”

  “I’m going to see him,” I said, then hung up before Shanti could ask any questions.

  Ishaan Rai’s pride and joy was situated on a massive piece of land on the outskirts of a South Auckland suburb, a gleaming ­glass-­and-­steel structure that was a quiet sign of the ­high-­tech manufacturing that went on within. Rolling green lawns behind high fences separated the manufacturing center from the public without being an eyesore.

  The company pay structure started not at the minimum wage, but the living wage.

  My father, the great humanitarian ­business-­leader.

  The security guard at the small gate station waved at me with a smile when I stopped in front of the locked gates. But he still picked up the phone and verified I was cleared to enter before letting me through. When you worked for a company known for ­cutting-­edge advances in medical manufacture, you trusted no one.

  Paranoia was considered an asset.

  I parked in a visitor spot.

  “You could have all this,” my father had said to me when I was eighteen. “You could lead a ­multimillion-­dollar corporation. You could still scribble your stories in your spare time.”

  Sometimes I wondered how my father was oblivious to the fact I hadn’t done a single science paper in my senior years of high school. I was as well qualified to run this company as I was to operate on someone’s brain. Pari was the one who’d inherited my father’s scientific mind, though I didn’t know if he’d ever see that through his patriarchal blinkers.

  The security guard on duty at reception cleared me up to my father’s office on the third floor of the sprawling network of interconnected buildings. My father had a phone to his ear when I entered his office, but hung up with a quick “I’ll call you back” after he spotted me.

  A small golden statue of a Hindu god sat in an alcove to his right, several flowers at its base and an incense stand beside it. Shanti’s hand. Praying over her husband. To my father, it was nothing but theater. Quietly showcasing his piety and goodness.

  “Did you say anything to those cops?” he demanded as I sat down in his visitor chair with my leg stretched out. “You should’ve waited until you’d spoken to me.”

  Shanti must’ve called him after I got taken in. “Why? It’s not like I had anything to hide.” If there was one thing of which I was certain, it was that my father liked having power over others. Under no circumstances could he know about my memory issues.

  “Are you stupid, boy?” It came out a gritted insult. “Nothing to hide? You go out after your mother that night, smash up Shane’s bike in the process, and end up with a broken leg very close to where we now know she went off the road, and you think it’s not a problem?”

  His hands were fisted on the desk, the vein in his temple pulsing. “I don’t know why I wasted time going after you that night. I should’ve left you to die of the cold.”

  Bile burned my throat, the little I had in my stomach threatening to eject itself, but I forced a smile. “I’m not the one with a bloodstained rug I had to throw out.” It was a wild stab in the dark.

  “That bitch was the one who started throwing the glasses,” my father said with a sneer. “Just because I had better aim, she’s suddenly a saint?” A snort. “It wasn’t even a big cut. Rug would’ve been salvageable if you hadn’t vomited all over it after getting home from the hospital. Had to rip the doctors a new one to get you onto other painkillers.”

  My hand squeezed the end of the chair arm. “You cut her that night, you admit it.”

  “It was nothing, a flesh wound after a shard of glass ricocheted off the mantelpiece.” My father shrugged. “The way she screamed, you’d have thought I’d stabbed her, but the bitch was barely bleeding when she left.

  “She probably drove herself into the bush despite what the cops ­think—­she was ­off-­her-­face with vodka. And she had the gall to swipe my most expensive whiskey as she walked out the door, just to spite me.”

  A fragment of memory crashed through the blockade created by my broken brain.

  “You can’t drive! You’re trashed, you whore!”

  “Try to stop me, you ­limp-­dicked bastard!”

  “Put down the damn whiskey, Nina. You know how much that’s worth?”

  “Oh, bechara Ishi. You can lick it off the road after I pour it out!”

  Echoes of words spoken by ghosts, bouncing inside my skull. Real memories? Or ones my mind was manufacturing based on the fuel of my father’s words? “You’re saying you didn’t hurt Mum that night?”

  My father held my gaze. “I stayed home and fucked my secretary.” He smiled, hard and bright. “You didn’t know that, did you? Aurelie had the brass balls to come knock on my door after she saw Nina leave. And since she was offering, I accepted. Then I kicked her ass out when you messaged to say you’d gone off the road.”

  Aurelie had lied after all. My father looked too ­self-­satisfied to be telling anything but the truth. But why had she done it? Because it placed her in the house during the critical time period? What, after all, had I seen? Red taillights driving off into the distance. My mother could’ve already been dead, Aurelie in the driver’s seat, with my father following to make sure she didn’t lose her nerve.

  My father might be telling the ­truth … but lying about the timing.

  “Convenient,” I said. “Will she back you up if I ask?”

  “If she has a single brain cell, she’ll keep her mouth shut.” My father leaned back in his leather chair. “She was stalking Nina, you know that? Nina saw ­her—­and I emailed Aurelie about it. Still have her reply admitting to it.”

  His smile was ­razor-­edged. “She came back two weeks after Nina vanished, but I was bored of her by then and let her know ­it—­I was pretty sure you heard her bawling in my study, but you never said anything about it.”

  I kept my silence, because his words hit a total blank in my mind. My father was a master ­game-­player, and right now, I had no idea which game he was playing. “Except you just said she was with you when Mum drove away.”

  He shrugged. “She’s smarter than she ever let on. For all I know, she paid someone to off Nina.” The faintest stretching of his skin over his bones. “If she did and I’d known that at the time, I’d have put my hands around her neck and squeezed the life out of her. Nina was mine.”

  “Funny how you’ve never before mentioned Aurelie being there that night.”

  “I forgot about her. She was nothing, just a bit of fun.” He waved off his former secretary’s existence. “But she was so obliging that she sat for photos for me more than once. I have to say I still take them out from time to time. Shanti is a good wife, but Aurelie ­had … talents.”

  So he’d used the photos and the emails to blackmail Aurelie into silence. No wonder Aurelie had all but thrown
up when I tracked her down. My father had gotten to her first.

  The question was why. After all, she could verify his alibi.

  Maybe it was because he’d taken great pleasure in painting my mother as the one at fault for the failure of their relationship. His halo would fall with a spectacular crash should his sexpot secretary come out with the salacious details of their affair.

  Then again, he could be spinning lies out of murder.

  I rubbed at my forehead, things so foggy and confused in my head that I almost missed his next words.

  “Gossip around the police watercooler is that Nina’s ribs were marked as if she’d been stabbed multiple times.”

  “How do you know?”

  My father rubbed his thumb and forefinger together. “Find the right person, don’t push too much while keeping things sweet, and all kinds of information flows to you.” Reaching for the glass of water on his desk, he took a sip before putting it down with deliberate care. “You had cuts on your hands that night, son. Doctor noted it on your medical chart.”

  I stared at him.

  “All I’m saying”—­he leaned forward on his ­desk—­“is keep your mouth shut. You’re not Aurelie. Tu hai mera beta. Khoon ka rishta hai ye.”

  How I wished the latter weren’t true. That I wasn’t his son. That we weren’t bound by blood.

  “If you killed your mother,” he continued, “then we deal with it inside the home.” In his eyes glinted an avaricious joy; he thought he had me, could control me now.

  The urge to do violence was a roar in my blood.

  Restraining it with ­ice-­cold ­deliberation—­I needed answers more than I needed to smash in his ­face—­I said, “I didn’t touch her.” I had to believe that; my love for my mother was a fundamental foundation of my personality, the thing that kept me on the right side of the psychopath line. If that proved a ­lie …

  “Good.” My father smiled. “Keep repeating that until everyone believes it.”

  53

  That night, I dreamed of wheels on wet tarmac, of the world rushing by.

  54

  Taking a bite of the sandwich Shanti had made me for lunch the next day, I stared at my computer. After spending the morning writing in order to find some sense of calm, and forcing myself to eat real food instead of my usual diet of sugar and caffeine, I’d pulled up the social media accounts of people I’d known in high school. None of us were close now, but we stayed in contact online in that vague way of people who’d once been friends and weren’t now enemies.

  I began to scroll backward through their photo archives with clinical precision. A couple of ­them—­one girl, one ­boy—­had been notorious for photographing everything and putting it online. I hadn’t cared one way or another, and as a result, had never avoided the camera. But neither had I posed for shots, which meant I was mostly in the background.

  That was probably why no one had thought to use these photos to get a little payday after I morphed into a celebrity. I spotted the first relevant photo about an hour after I’d started the search. I’d drunk two Cokes by then, my body craving sugar too much for me to stick to my ­healthy-­diet resolution. At least I hadn’t hit the candy drawer yet.

  I was only partially visible in this photo, but there was no mistaking the cast on my leg.

  I kept on searching regardless. I was looking for photos of my hands, to see evidence of the cuts my father had referenced. He was wrong in saying they’d been noted in the medical report. I’d read that report from front to back, then taken pictures on my phone to keep for later, not caring if the cops saw me. They were my reports after ­all—­I could get copies easily enough, though it would take time.

  All it had said was “scrapes and abrasions consistent with a fall from a ­fast-­moving bike.” Nothing suspicious, just another kid going off the rails because his parents had a shitty relationship.

  I kept on scrolling.

  Nothing. Just that cast, the plaster of it unmistakable even in the most grainy shots. But I knew there had to be more photos out there. Who else did I know that was a compulsive clicker and poster?

  Alice.

  I wanted to kick myself. I’d commented on her obsession more than once since moving to my father’s house. And Alice being Alice, her entire online profile was ­wide-­open. She wanted the likes, wanted the vapid admiration that came with being one of the rich “housewives” of the city. It was such a niche area to ­inhabit—­I’d gone down the rabbit hole of it once while I was bored and alone after the accident.

  Alice, I’d discovered, was friends with a network of other “housewives”—­I always thought of the term in quotes, because like Alice, half these women had jobs, a number of them very ­high-­powered. The other half all had so much staff that the only housewifely thing they probably did was sign off on the odd dinner menu, or instruct the maid on how many people were coming over for ­late-­afternoon cocktails.

  Suddenly my breath sped up, my heart pumping. Shit. Shit. I’d forgotten to make notes about the earlier photos. What if I forgot? What if I’d already forgotten?

  Snatching up the notebook with trembling fingers, I flipped through to the last used page. I remembered writing those lines about my meeting with my father. There were no other cryptic notes. Forcing my breathing out of its panic cycle, I began to make short, sharp notes about my current research.

  My hand was cramped in the aftermath and my handwriting so shambolic that it probably looked like I was on speed, but I’d gotten it all down.

  All of what I remembered.

  Opening the sweets drawer, I pulled out a wrapped piece of fudge and put it in my mouth. I relished the taste, but stopped my hand from reaching for a second piece. No doubt I’d need another sugar hit soon. Might as well try to pace myself since the no-­sugar thing was a total failure. After successfully fighting off the churning in my stomach, I began to go through the images on Alice’s profile.

  And hit the jackpot.

  We’d had Cul-­de-­Sac parties back then, spearheaded by Diana. She’d stopped at some point, maybe because she was tired of being the only one who tried to organize fun stuff, but more likely because she’d gotten busy with her kids’ activities. But the parties had been a fixture in my teenage years. The one from which I found photos had taken place a month or so after my mother’s ­disappearance—­and it had been organized by Alice.

  In very bad taste for it to go ahead if people had known she was dead, but just slightly awkward if they’d believed she’d abandoned her family and run off with a quarter of a million dollars. I remembered that party, mostly because of how pissed I’d been at my father for driving away my mother. I’d stopped thinking about the scream by then, telling myself that if she’d been able to handle the Jag, she must’ve been fine. I’d even gone to the party, just another surly teenager.

  A pulse of pain up my leg.

  Wincing, I rubbed at my thigh even though it hadn’t been injured in the crash. And I wondered how my mind had so carefully edited out all mention of my cast from my memories of that time. Dr. Jitrnicka would no doubt have something to say on the ­point—­there was probably a psychological explanation for why my memory issues seemed concentrated around this one seminal event in my life.

  There.

  A younger version of me seated in someone’s deck chair out on the main drive, with Beau beside me, and my cast a masterpiece of signatures and drawings. I didn’t look grim or angry despite the fact I’d been full of fury. I was ­half-­smiling as I held a bottle of Coke in hand, while Beau was turned toward me, his mouth caught open midspeech. Another chatty kid who’d turned into a secretive teen.

  My face looked thinner than usual, but bore no bruises or scrapes. Neither did my hands. But a month was a lot of time when it came to healing superficial injuries.

  I needed more photos.

  In my determination to unearth the truth, I scrolled back too ­far … and there she was: my mother, resplendent in a dress of vivid
aquamarine, sunglasses on top of her head and champagne flute lifted in a toast to the photographer. It had been taken in the sunshine, at a table set with gleaming cutlery and dressed with a single orchid bloom.

  The caption said: Birthday brunch with my glamourpuss of a friend, Nina. DD we missed you!

  DD? A touch more scrolling and I found a photo of Alice, Diana, and my mother. The caption read: Shopping with Nina and DD.

  I’d never heard Alice call Diana by that nickname, but their friendship hadn’t really survived my mother’s disappearance. My mother had been the glue.

  I kept on scrolling down, rubbing salt into the wound. Another solo image of my mother in a sparkling black dress, her head thrown back in laughter: Nina at my first cocktail party.

  Later on was a shot of my mother seated beside a laughing Calvin, playing cards in hand, while Diana looked on with an amused smile. Alice had captioned it: Extreme Go Fish!

  Cora’s hand appeared normal in an image from the same night. Also in one of the shots was Lily, caught in motion in the background in the black uniform of the serving staff. Another party at which she’d been the hired help. How many homes in the Cul-­de-­Sac had she entered, how many trays had she carried, how many spills had she cleaned up?

  There was Diana, in a little black dress that didn’t show too much cleavage and was accented with discreet jewelry. She was beaming up at Calvin as he talked to another man, whose face wasn’t visible. Next to them stood Paul and Margaret, the rockers chatting with my father. For once, my mother was beside him, her hand tucked into his elbow.

  Both of them playing their expected roles.

  I couldn’t stop looking at the images. Maybe there was a clue in the past, if I could only find it. It was too bad that Diana didn’t have a personal online profile as she’d no doubt have lots more interesting photos. But she just had a little business page on which she posted beautiful shots of her sweets, or reposted images sent in by her devoted customer base.