by Candice Fox
It felt as though a family was meant to be here. But the house didn’t smell like a family. That’s what was missing, I realised. There was another picture on the wall, a photograph of a woman that had been printed on regular copying paper and framed – an imitation. But the smell. A family house smells of food and toys and damp bathrooms. It smells like washing powder and farts and sour fruit left too long at the bottom of school bags. It smells like plants on the kitchen windowsill and perfume and sweet toothpaste. Of chaos. Loving chaos. This house smelled like nothing. It was a theatre set. I knew, somehow, that no one had ever lived here – or if they had, that they were long gone. There was another blank canvas hanging by the entrance to the kitchen.
I started to feel the trembling I’d experienced back in the city beginning at my fingertips. But it wasn’t shock this time. I’d forgotten all about Tara Harper.
‘It took a long time to get it like this,’ Eden said. She looked at the table, at the empty glasses – two water, two wine. ‘I pieced it together mostly from crime-scene photographs. Some of the things I had to hunt down – the toys in the bedrooms were particularly difficult. Everything went into the trash when they died. There was no one to leave it to.’
‘What …’ I cleared my throat, ‘what is this place?’
Eden wasn’t listening. Her eyes were on the distant lake. The house was secluded. I couldn’t see another for miles – at least not one that was lit up. Out on the water, a single boat sat still as a stone on the surface. It had all the deadness of a painting. The background of the set. A single strip of grey between layers of black.
‘They came in through the French doors.’ Eden nodded to a doorway behind me, which led to the side of the house. ‘We were here, in the living room. Marcus was colouring. I was in my mother’s lap. When they heard the glass breaking, they didn’t move. You’d think they’d move. In the movies, they’d have got up and grabbed weapons or rushed us out the kitchen door. But my parents weren’t heroes. They just sat and waited and watched as six men came into the house.’
My teeth were chattering. I clenched my jaw. Somehow I’d lost the ability to stand straight, some powerful thing was twisting and twisting in my stomach until my back started to hunch and my arms started to fold around my middle. I wasn’t a hero either. I never had been. And as Eden spoke I found myself, just like the people she was describing, rooted to the spot in the middle of the house.
‘They were still in their seats when they were murdered,’ she said. She was looking at the couches as though she could see them there, the bodies of her parents. ‘They’d dragged Marcus and me out to the car by then, so we didn’t see it. But we heard it. It all went wrong so quickly. It was over in seconds.’
‘Marcus … Marcus Tanner,’ I remembered. ‘The Tanner family murders.’
‘The government repossessed the house when we were declared dead. The second inquest – they ruled that Eric and I had likely been killed. I bought the house a few years ago and I hunted down the crime-scene photographs, and piece by piece I started to put it all back together,’ Eden said. Her eyes flickered over the china cabinet against the wall, the crystal glasses inside. A wind chime hanging from the roof guttering just outside the window was still, sheltered from the wind that only seemed to touch the trees. ‘I got the pictures from murder sites online. The ones that gather clues. The cutlery in the kitchen is the same. The coverlets on the beds are the same. It’s all perfect. It had to be perfect, or as perfect as I could make it. The one thing I couldn’t replicate were her paintings. I didn’t try. She was better than I am. Far better.’
‘Eden,’ I said. ‘I –’
‘This is the moment they entered,’ she continued, gesturing to the room. ‘Everything was just like this. Sometimes I come here and I try to imagine that moment, try to be there, somehow, to stop it. It’s easy to be there, but it’s impossible to stop it. I sit on the floor and I see them coming in just the way they did, a group of monsters. I see myself screaming. When you’re a kid you always imagine monsters in the singular. You don’t expect an army.’
I’d glimpsed things about the Tanner family murders across my career, but never really sat down to look at it in detail. People talked about the case when there was nothing to talk about, in elevators, in coffee rooms, at Christmas parties. It had fallen from memory into the back corner of cop conversation and existed nowhere else. Except here. It was perfectly present here. I felt the tangible danger in the room. Knowing what had happened here, I was being infected, drugged, with the terror of the victims. I felt in real danger of being grabbed. I was a child before her.
‘You’re Morgan Tanner,’ I said.
‘Yes.’ She smiled a little sadly.
‘Why now? Why are you telling me this?’
‘I brought you here because you wanted us to address this thing between us,’ Eden said. She went and perched on the back of the couch, her hands between her knees. ‘And you were right. We needed to address it. It’s been too long since you found out what I am. Part of what I am, I suppose. You’re almost certain I killed Benjamin Annous. Trying to discover that cost you the woman you loved.’
‘Don’t.’ My eyes began to sting.
‘You deserve to know,’ Eden said. Her own voice sounded strange. Deeper. Threatening to crack. ‘I killed Benjamin Annous because he was one of the men who murdered my parents. And yes, Eric and I, we killed the other men involved. But I’m responsible for so many more deaths. I’m a hunter. I hunt people like this.’
She gestured to the French doors as though the dead men she spoke of were standing there, frozen in her memory, hands out and reaching for her child-self and her brother. Innocent at the time, about to be ruined forever. Eden wiped at her eyes. I’d never seen her like this. She seemed broken somehow. A once-perfect machine now rattled, something loose inside, ticking and scraping against its housing as it turned, in need of tightening, replacement, repair. When she stood again the thing that was broken stopped ticking, and she was that immaculate monster again, her face hardened, eyes shadowed by the cap. Lost to me.
‘I like pedophiles,’ she said. ‘But I’m diverse. I like the challenge of finding and capturing other skilled hunters. I’ve killed drug dealers and rapists and violent husbands. I’ve killed mothers and wives and daughters. I look for their true nature, the predator inside, and I take them down.’
I was really shaking now.
‘Eden, please stop.’
‘You have to know why I do what I do. It’s important to me to keep the landscape thinned of monsters like the ones who took my parents. Then I feel as if I have some measure of control back from this moment, this moment here, when I lost everything.’
Absurdly, I took out my phone and dialled Imogen. I think my body knew what was happening even if my mind wasn’t ready to go there yet.
‘You have to understand, so one day you can accept what I’ve had to do.’
‘Just wait,’ I stammered. I fumbled with the phone to dial again when the call rang out. ‘Just wait a second.’
There were tears on my face. I had to swipe at them to recognise the figure that emerged from the kitchen, looking behind her briefly to watch the door click closed. Hooky took her place beside Eden, and I looked at the two women before me, helpless for words.
‘Imogen found out what I am,’ Eden said. Her words burned in my ears, words I knew were coming but I wasn’t ready for. ‘She’s been working on the Tanner case to try to get hold of the reward.’
‘Please, please, please, please.’ I ran my fingers through my sweaty hair, dialled and hung up and dialled. ‘Please, no.’
‘She didn’t kill her,’ Hooky said gently. I lifted my eyes to the child-woman standing before me. I didn’t even ask how Hooky had been brought into this. My little friend. My damaged little genius. ‘She wanted to, but I said no.’
‘My new apprentice here has erased all the evidence Imogen gathered,’ Eden said, looking at Hooky. ‘The DNA listings have been
altered. The registry files have been replaced. All the reports have been adjusted in the necessary way so that anything Imogen has is useless now.’
‘God,’ I was stammering. ‘Oh God.’
‘That should have been it. But you know me, Frank. I wanted her to die. The child convinced me that you wouldn’t be able to handle it if I took Imogen away from you. You wouldn’t be able to endure another Martina.’
‘Please, Eden.’
‘So I need assurance,’ Eden said, lifting her eyes to me. ‘I need to show Imogen that I’m serious.’
Eden reached into the back of her jeans, and from her waist belt drew a gun. It wasn’t her service weapon.
‘I told Imogen that I’d take everything she ever held dear if she whispered a word of my story to anyone,’ Eden said, actioning the gun and pointing it at me. ‘She needs to know I mean it.’
I felt the impact of the bullets before I heard the sound. Two sharp, hard punches in my midsection, the thumps of a metallic fist that doubled me slightly in the middle. I heard the sound next, two claps of thunder that made my eardrums pump. There was no pain in those first few seconds. I reached down and gripped at my torn T-shirt, not even wet yet. And then I realised I couldn’t draw a breath. I’d exhaled hard with the impact. I struggled to pull in air, dropped down to my knees and steadied myself with a hand against the floor. A sort of a pop, and the air came, and the pain was blinding, limb-crumpling, so that I folded and thumped my head on the floor.
I heard Eden say, ‘Go, go.’
And then both the women were grabbing me, turning me over, gripping me under the arms and knees. My head fell back against Eden’s chest. I was looking up at her jaw, her cold predator eyes as they carried me through the doorway.
The fire alarm sounded, and Jim began to howl. Hades remembered a time, long, long ago, when he’d heard the sound of a car slowly creeping up the gravel drive, as it did now, delivering a new life to him. He hadn’t known it at the time, of course. He’d thought his life was in the slow and gentle roll towards stillness. Quiet. He’d thought the twilight finally had him. And then there they were, two children for him to raise. Two beautiful little killers who needed him, needed his ancient evil wisdom to guide the chaos of their minds.
Eden and Eric had been a surprise for Hades. But this child was not. He’d been expecting her. In fact, she was early.
A storm was flashing on the red horizon, glowing in the diamonds of the screen door as he wandered down the hall. He opened the door, and Jim flew past him, stood on the crest of the hill before his shack and watched the battered little Kia gripping its way onto the flat, parking under the tree. The objects hanging in the tree swayed and jangled in the growing winds, cogs and wheels from engines polished and shining, bottles and chains, some tea cups and tin cans.
Hooky stepped from the car and slung a backpack shaped like a shark over one narrow shoulder. She looked tired. Gold sequined boots settled in the dust and the skirt of her black cotton dress was lit for a moment by the distant lightning seeping through the lace.
‘Old man,’ she said as she approached him. He looked at her fondly, remembered her swearing and snarling at Eden as the garbage dripped from her body. He remembered her spitting blood on the dirt.
Hades knew, the moment he had laid eyes upon the girl, that the same thing that had been twisted and broken away from the souls of Eden and Eric when they arrived on his doorstep was gone in her too. The light that twinkled in the eyes of most children, even older children like Hooky, had been extinguished. He didn’t know yet if he could turn her off the dark path she was following, if he could somehow stop her progress towards being helplessly evil, the way that Eric had been, the way Eden sometimes was. Maybe there was something of her that could be redeemed yet. She was smart. She was tough. She didn’t have to go bad. Maybe if he tried hard enough, he could save her.
And if he couldn’t save her, he’d do the best he could to patch her up. The way he did with everything that came to him in the tip. She’d be crooked. She’d be hollow. But she’d be alive again.
Hooky smiled at Hades as she walked towards the little house, and the old man remembered seeing the same sarcastic teenage smile on Eden many, many years ago. The smile that breaks through the loneliness, that gives every day new purpose.
The two walked inside. The dog followed.
Epilogue
It wasn’t so much consciousness but a series of half-formed thoughts that whistled through my drugged brain as I lay in the bed, sometimes seeing, sometimes just watching colours and shapes. The first realisation that formed with any real clarity was that I’d lost the sight in my left eye. I felt as though I’d heard this mentioned a couple of times by people in the room while I was asleep. I didn’t know for certain who was speaking, but I picked up and held little pieces of what they said, repeated them over and over in dreams.
We’re seeing some minor brain damage from lack of blood flow to the brain. Nothing that’ll hinder him too badly. He’s been talking in his sleep. Making sense. But that left optical nerve has died. That’s lifelong, that one.
There’s nothing we can do to save it?
Two close-range gut shots and twenty minutes or more to the hospital? This guy had a 30 per cent chance at survival. The eye is collateral damage.
My head was turned, and my vision was restricted to half the window beside my bed, the people going past, disembodied chests and shoulders and heads. Nurses in green with gentle faces. Freckles. Big smiles. Imogens, all of them, in their prettiness and simultaneous hardness, women who could care for a dying man, bring him back out of the arms of death.
I’d been out a long time. A good-size beard prickled against the pillow, felt sore against my temples. Everything ached. Not a powerful or unbearable ache, but the frighteningly deep kind you know is being held in check by blessed drugs, the kind of pain that will be all-consuming if the drugs so much as waiver, a feeling that makes you sick inside. Helpless.
Some story had been orchestrated about the shooting. I knew this because I had a sense that Eden had been in the room, more than once, while I floated between layers of dream. I’d heard her voice, confident and soft, commanding the way that only pack leaders can command, with the certainty that they’ll be taken seriously. No apologies. No requests. I had the feeling she had sat for some time on the end of the bed and watched me sleep.
Thirty per cent chance. She had to have known those were the odds she was playing with when she shot me in the guts. It had to look like she’d meant to kill me. Imogen had to think my survival had been a mistake, an accident, and that if she didn’t run now, Eden would come for me again when she could.
I lay and looked out the windows to the corridor with my one working eye, realising things behind the oxygen mask but not yet ready for anyone to know I was awake. I was aware that Imogen had never been in the room. I couldn’t remember ever hearing anyone talk about her as I drifted in and out, fighting for my life. That didn’t mean I’d heard everything. Maybe she’d called. I doubted it. If I knew Imogen, I knew she was smart, and if she was smart she was a long way from me right now. If she loved me, she was gone. She’d have left a break-up note, packed her things and moved to Perth if she had any sense. Eden had tried to kill me. And if Eden was willing to kill me, her own partner, she was willing to go further – to kill everyone Imogen had ever loved and held dear, to make her watch, and then to come for the beautiful psychologist in the night, maybe tomorrow, maybe the next day, maybe a year from now. I was an example. A demonstration of Eden’s seriousness. If Imogen was smart she was already changing her name, and she would never speak of Eden Archer or Morgan Tanner ever again.
No matter how far she went, Eden would be watching. Imogen would know that.
Imogen was lost to me now, as wholly and completely as if she were dead, the way I was meant to be. She might follow my story in the paper but she would never contact me or anyone close to me ever again. I saw her poring over my story in the
papers in a sunny café in Fremantle, her hair dyed and her shoulders bronzed and those damned freckles standing out everywhere like mud spatter. I hoped that’s what she was doing. I hoped she was clever and she stayed alive. I hoped I never laid eyes on her.
I realised as I lay there that I would never bring anyone into my life like that again. Hooky had been right to turn Eden away from killing Imogen. She was right when she told the older woman that I wouldn’t be able take it. I owed Hooky so much for that. For protecting me.
I would give my life over to her now, to protect her while she lingered, however long, under the dark wing of that deathly bird she’d chosen to sidle up to. There was no way on earth Hooky knew what she had done. How completely she’d signed her soul away, the true nature of the being who now owned it. I would never leave her now. I was locked to the two of them.
This was what I had been destined for, from the moment I walked into the Parramatta headquarters and Captain James introduced me to my beautiful new partner. Eden had me now and I’d never be free.
As I lay looking, a man came to the desk beyond the window ledge and stood there marking down things, a white-coated man with a thick black beard. I knew I knew him, but at first I didn’t know from where. I realised who he was when I saw him lift his dark eyes to the clock on the wall behind the desk, almost instinctively, as though an alarm had gone off inside him, as it did every night. It was eight o’clock. Aamir looked at the clock for a long moment, and then went back to his paperwork, his jaw tightened and his brow heavy.
It’s Ehan’s bedtime, I saw him thinking. I have to go say goodnight.
What felt like years ago, I had told this man that there was nothing after the cold, consuming tragedy of murder. That when you lose someone so completely, as I had lost Martina, there was no great revelation, no meaning, no answer. I’d tried to give him realistic expectations of life after his son was lost to him.
