He scanned the gathering. The church was filling up with familiar faces. Many of them from the same faux-family that had followed Eliza’s ghost through Sydney, those interns and film crews and journalists who had come to know Alexis. Cameramen normally seen exclusively in cargo shorts with Bose headphones cradled around their necks, who wouldn’t wear a tuxedo at their own wedding, were stuffed into black suits. He saw Lauren sidle in the back, clock him, and stand in the opposite corner. He silently thanked her for her discretion. Winter hadn’t taken a pew; he was standing by the door. Was he investigating the room or here to pay his respects? Ted was there too, hair still wet, in his favorite blue suit. He’d found a seat near the middle. This was almost more a networking event than a funeral.
And, on top of it all, there might be a killer here too. The pew creaked as Ian McCarthy shuffled in beside Jack.
“I didn’t know you were coming,” said Jack, even though he’d seen him outside. Ian’s jacket had patches of dust on the shoulders. He was another man Jack had never seen out of jeans that doubled as a dish towel. “It’s odd seeing you like this.”
“Whole bloody thing’s odd. Poor girl,” McCarthy whispered.
People were looking at them talk.
“You don’t have to sit next to me,” Jack said.
“She would’ve wanted you here.”
“She would have preferred none of us were here, I think.”
Ian fiddled with his tie. “Just wanted to let you know you’ve still got some friends. You got a program?”
Jack held his up. It was a folded booklet with an image of creeping vines on the front. In Loving Memory. A phone rang somewhere in the church. Someone mumbled, “Sorry, always forget that,” and turned it off.
“I’ve been thinking,” McCarthy said. “You still reckon Andrew Freeman might be a bad egg?”
Jack turned slightly, aware of the rustle of his jacket. It was a papery crinkle, too loud in the church. “It’s a line of inquiry,” he said.
“Three million worth of damage,” Ian said. “You think it’s enough to kill over?”
“Not sure.” Andrew’s words echoed: It’s not real money.
“Thing is…” Ian looked at his hands. “He didn’t claim it.”
“What?”
“The three mill is guesswork. Andrew wouldn’t have the insurers out. He didn’t lodge a claim. Never a dollar in. Apparently.”
“Why wouldn’t you lodge a three-million-dollar insurance claim?”
Ian shrugged. “I thought that too. I’m no finance cop. Maybe it means something, maybe it doesn’t. But I thought you’d like to know. Strange, hey?” Ian nodded, information passed on. He shuffled out.
Jack tried to process the information. Andrew didn’t want an insurer out to his property? That made sense if Andrew was up there strangling people. But Andrew had seemed so benign, and he hadn’t cared about the money, so there wasn’t any motive. But then why lie about a witness? Unless putting Curtis behind bars really was just small-town bigotry. Prejudicial police work rather than a deliberate effort to hide anything more sinister. Still, Andrew wasn’t in the church today, Jack noted.
Again, Jack thanked his luck that Ian McCarthy didn’t watch TV, that he thought Netflix was a brand of screen doors. You’ve cost a lot of people their jobs. Thankfully, Ian seemed to be doing okay despite how Jack had smeared him. Besides, Jack thought, it was a reputation not so unearned. Not ten minutes ago, Ian had left a yellow envelope exposed, behind an alluringly cracked window that an arm—not any arm, but a particularly skinny one, perhaps—could reach, depending on the owner’s willingness to risk a bruised shoulder.
Jack absentmindedly rubbed his shoulder again.
The service was starting. Jack picked up the program and opened it, could barely pay attention to the first hymn. He checked behind him. Winter wasn’t looking, and Lauren was leaning against the wall with her arms crossed. He was safe, tucked away in the corner. Jack opened his jacket pocket and withdrew the envelope. It had made the worryingly loud crinkle as he’d moved to welcome Ian. Jack unfolded it, peeked inside. Photos. Splayed hair on a steel table. A bloodied and bruised face. Severed fingers. Photocopies of reports too. He looked up at the altar. The priest was beginning to talk. Photos of Alexis flashed beside him on the wall. Jack looked down in his lap, and Alexis stared back up at him there too.
After the service, everyone was welcomed to visit the community hall next door for a cup of tea and cake. The priest seemed to hang on the word everyone. Jack might have been imagining it, but there seemed to be a shift in the air. The people in front of him looked like they were itching to turn around. They needn’t have worried; Jack was leaving right away. Unfortunately, they only opened the door beside the altar, which led straight into the wake. Jack waited until the end of the line had mostly faded down to the stragglers hanging back to talk to the priest. Someone shut the projector off with a clunk and the room dimmed, Alexis disappearing. The envelope rustled in his breast pocket as he stood. He smoothed it. It should be easy enough to walk straight through the hall and out the door.
It wasn’t. The community hall was packed. Long tables of cakes and square-cut sandwiches lined each wall. A card table with a hulking steel coffee urn was at the back. Grief requires energy. People turned as he entered, though Jack avoided eye contact. He was used to the dullness in the air when he walked into a room now. He just wanted out. The fastest way to the door was by going around the end of the trestle tables, walking through the gap between the food and the door. He couldn’t see Lauren. She’d already be outside. They’d agreed to meet at the car.
“Bringing a date to a funeral. That’s low. Even for you,” Ted Piper said when Jack was halfway to the door. Thankfully, there was a table separating them. Ted had half a sandwich in his mouth and a handful of cakes and other morsels on a paper plate. He was picking more off the platters and adding to the pile.
“Who do you—”
“I saw you at the café.”
“We’re not at war, are we?” Jack pointed to Ted’s stockpiled plate.
“Fuck off.” Ted licked his fingers. “Why is Lauren here?”
“Alexis was her family’s lawyer. I imagine they knew each other.”
“That’s not what I’m asking. Why did you bring her here?”
“I have to g—”
“I know you’re hanging around out there.” Ted lowered his voice. “You think that will make it better? Look around.”
“You think I don’t know that?” Jack hissed, trying to keep the hurt in his voice to a whisper. A few people turned, aware that a table might get flipped soon. “You think I don’t know that all these people are here because of me? That one person isn’t?”
Jack didn’t want to argue. He took a step for the door. On the other side of the room, Winter was shouldering his way through the crowd toward them. Jack was conscious of the envelope in his pocket. McCarthy, likewise, was looking curiously over now.
“I don’t know whose side you’re on.” Ted kept pace, walking a parallel track, as if both of them were stuck on rails. “I’ve been digging too. Yeah, that’s right, on my own. No chain of evidence, no discovery. Just what I can find and where I can stick it. I’m taking pages from your playbook now. And I’ll have enough soon. You’re not the only one who can build a story. Lauren wouldn’t testify at the trial. You should know that.”
“There are no sides anymore, Ted. I’m leaving. And I know she didn’t testify.” He knew all the witnesses inside out. Neither the prosecution nor the defense had needed Lauren. She hadn’t seen anything. He put his hands in the air and stepped backward in what he hoped was a sign of clear surrender. Everyone around them let out a breath. Mostly relief. Some disappointment.
“That’s what I’m telling you. Not didn’t,” Ted called after him, “wouldn’t.”
That gave Jack pause.
He was in the door now, sun warming his face. Lauren was standing in the courtyard, waiting, unaware of what was happening inside. Ted’s parting shot came from behind.
“She’s lying to you, Jack. Ask her about the night of the murder.”
Chapter 22
“Wait here. I have to get something.”
Jack stopped in his Kensington driveway and opened his door. Lauren opened her door too. Jack shot her a look. He wasn’t sure he wanted her in his house. She’s lying to you. Ted might be manipulating him, but still. Jack was waiting for the drive home to ask her about her testimony, where he’d have her cornered for two hours. In the meantime, he had a yellow envelope in his pocket that he didn’t want her to see, and he needed a few of his own files from Eliza’s case.
“You’re coming in?” he asked.
“You want me to wait in the car?”
“I’ll be quick.”
“Fuck that.” Lauren missed his tone and followed him. At the door, she dragged a finger under one of his wilted pot plant’s ferns. She held the frond up, then slid her finger away and let it flop. She made a humming sound. Disapproval. The door swung open, and Jack led her into his home.
“It’s freezing in here,” she said.
“I’ll just be a minute,” Jack said, and headed up the stairs. He lived in a two-story town house, like Alexis’s but cheaper, though he’d paid it off now. (Who says crime doesn’t pay? his father had said when Jack told him.) He headed into the bedroom and opened his closet. Inside were half a dozen filing boxes bursting with notes, black permanent marker scribbled on each. Interviews. Court Documents. Jack had kept everything just in case. In these boxes was the truth of the case, before he cut it together. The box he was looking for was stacked under the Finance box. The Wade family assets tabulated, their wealth significant. The expenditure on the restaurant was no-holds-barred. And then the older accounts, the $35,000 handwritten invoice from Brett Dawson’s The Concrete Company to the former owner, Whittaker, flitted past him. Jack mused at Brett’s company name; country towns really suck at naming companies. He imagined the office, adorned like the bakery with blue ribbons from the local fair—Highly Commended, Concrete Pour, Footpath Division 2004. He sifted through more files, handwritten notes, and audiotapes: the rainbow glint of CDs, silver side up. So much written down and recorded, yet he’d turned it into so little truth. Farther back, behind his files, was the small shoebox. Jack reached in and opened it. The sneaker was surprisingly intact for four years in the bush. It must have been planted. But by who? The real killer.
“I figured out why it’s freezing.” Lauren’s voice from the doorway made him jump. He closed the shoebox and shoved it back, grabbed the box labeled Forensics, and pulled it out instead. Lauren rapped his doorframe with her knuckles and said, as if he might not have noticed, “You’ve got no fucking doors.”
“I’m redecorating.”
“What if I need to take a shit?”
“Sing,” Jack said.
“What?”
“If you’re singing, I’ll know you’re in there.”
Lauren assessed him. “You don’t have much company, do you?”
“I don’t often invite people around to take a shit, no.” Jack picked the box up and placed it on the bed.
“You okay?” Lauren took a step toward him.
“Can you just—” Jack sighed. “Can you go?”
She walked over, sat on the bed, put her hand on the forensics box. Jack held the lid down.
“What about sharing?” she said.
“Ted Piper told me something at the funeral.”
“Oh. Okay.” Her eyes flickered downward. She’s lying to you.
“So, you tell me. What about sharing?”
Lauren stood up; the bedsprings creaked. “What do you want to know?”
“Everything that happened the night Eliza died.”
Lauren ran a hand through her bangs and sat back down again. “You want to know about Eliza. Okay. I’m Andrew Freeman’s witness.”
She took a breath, calmed. “We were all waiting in the lounge room for the police. The sergeant was first; he took me aside and asked me a bunch of questions. I don’t remember them all, but I— He asked me if I’d seen or heard anything. I said I’d heard Curtis get up. I wasn’t sure what time, around midnight.”
Jack nodded, piecing it together. “But you took it back,” he guessed, “so your statement never made it to trial?”
She nodded. “Dad was so mad. He said our family was supposed to be a team. And when I really thought about it, I couldn’t actually be sure. It was, like, two in the morning when he was questioning us. I couldn’t tell if what I heard was the house settling or people moving or anything really, if maybe I’d dreamed it. And Andrew was asking me so many questions. I was tired and I was stressed and I screwed up, okay?”
Jack put an arm on her shoulder: fatherly, protective. He could imagine Andrew Freeman beating her with questions until he pulled the answers he wanted out of her.
“It barely mattered,” Lauren said, “that I didn’t have to testify at the initial trial. It was finished before it started. The prosecution didn’t even have to try. Until your documentary began and the conspiracy theories came into play. Then suddenly the frame-up was the center of the defense’s strategy, and I guess I became important again. I begged Alexis not to make me take the stand, and, to her credit, she didn’t. Andrew wasn’t allowed to use what I’d said as evidence. I think the prosecution knew I’d just get up there and say I wasn’t sure. Besides, I was a minor, and I didn’t have an adult present at the time of the interview. But I feel like the moment I said that I’d heard him get up”—she sighed—“I made him guilty.”
“Jesus.”
“A family is about teamwork, my father always said. He used to punish us together. Curtis got drunk once when he was seventeen and spewed—we both had to clean the bathroom. Curtis stayed out at a friend’s one night—both of us got curfews for the next month. Dad let Curtis get away with anything. Anything.” She looked at the ground. “When Curtis was first arrested, it was like I’d really betrayed him. My father wouldn’t talk to me. It got better, over time. But it still always felt like it was my fault. And then he got out, and the same thing starts happening again. I felt like a victim for a long time. I am not a victim anymore.” She paused, considered her next thought. “We’re both guilty, you know, you and I. We carry that guilt in different ways. You’re doing this because you think you got him out; I’m here because I think I put him there.”
“This looks bad for Curtis.”
“I know.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Because you already think he killed her. I thought you wouldn’t understand. You’d take it out of context and run with it. As soon as you put something on TV, it’s automatically believed.” The truth of this stung, but Jack didn’t interrupt her. “It wasn’t admissible evidence, and it didn’t prove anything.”
“Everything’s important.”
“Have you told me everything then?” Lauren looked at him over his box full of files. He was still leaning on it, keeping the lid closed. He held her gaze, conscious of not letting his eyes flicker to the closet.
“I know you won’t want me to ask you this,” said Jack, “but did you hear him get up?”
“I don’t know.” Lauren sighed. Tears had started to form. “Maybe footsteps. Maybe. I told you, I was never sure. I shouldn’t have told anyone.”
“I do understand, you know,” Jack said. His protectiveness had really kicked in now, and he just wanted Lauren to feel better. She struck him more than ever as two different people: a woman who’d lived and a girl who never had.
“You don’t.” She sniffed.
“I told you I had a brother. His name is Liam. We lived in the Blue Mountains when we were teenagers. We used to love
mucking around on the fire trails. We’d take our backpacks and BMXs and spend the day out in the bush. At one lookout, there’s this large rock formation we used to call the Fist. It was cool; we used to love it there. But my dad, he was very clear: we weren’t allowed to climb the Fist.” He paused, deciding how much to tell her, but he’d already come this far. “One day my brother decided to climb it. I told him not to. I, um, I wouldn’t go up with him.” Now he’d got past it, the rest came quickly. “My brother went up, while I stayed at the bottom. He came down. Quickly.”
Whump.
Jack could see it still—the plume of dirt as if coughed. Orange dust caked on Liam’s cheek, congealed in blood and snot and fuck knows, cracked like a dried creek bed. Blood from his nose, his ears. And his chest, jumbled and broken, like a dropped bag of ice under Jack’s hands. The fucking helicopter too, a hovering silhouette in front of the reddening sun, just a breath above the canopy, jumpsuit-clad men rappelling down the lines, boots thumping into the dust, the steady crump of the rotor blades above it all. All Jack could think was, fuck, how cool Liam would have found the whole damn thing. A real action hero. He’d been flown away on that stretcher, rigid in his brace, hanging above the tops of the trees. And Jack couldn’t wait to tell him how badass it all was once he was recovering in the hospital.
Lauren had a hand over her mouth.
“Fuck. He died?”
“He’s in a permanent vegetative state. Dad looks after him because there’s still something left of him in there. We couldn’t let him go. You talk about failing to protect your brother, and I understand.”
Trust Me When I Lie Page 18
