‘Was there an inheritance?’
Money. Their money. It wasn’t something she’d thought about for a long time. The trust was what her grandfather had called it. When you’re twenty-five you can access it, he’d told her, and she’d wondered why on earth she would want to do that. It wasn’t until later that she realised he had heart disease. That he’d known for quite some time that he may not last for long and the money he was talking about was his. She had a recollection of receiving a letter once (where exactly had she been living, she couldn’t remember now) embossed with what looked like a solicitor’s name, and pondering briefly how it had found its way to her before tearing it into small pieces and shoving it in the rubbish bin. Unopened. Undigested.
‘We got a bit of money from our parents after they died,’ she said finally. ‘As for anything else, I really couldn’t say. Maybe my grandfather’s estate.’
She went to the drawers behind the dining table and pulled them out, one by one. Pencils, paper, notebooks. Daily detritus. But the bottom drawer contained something more substantial. A photo album. She recognised it straightaway. The worn blue vinyl cover. It had been a magnet for her when she was small. She’d often go to the cupboard where it was kept at home and pull it out onto the floor to look through it. Gaze at the images of her mother looking like a princess on her wedding day in her long white frock, a sheath of satin trimmed with lace at the sleeve and neckline. It surprised her that she could still remember most of the photos, their composition and their order on the pages. She hadn’t thought about the album for years, yet without opening it she knew the first image was of her mother pinning a white carnation onto her father’s lapel. Her parents were standing in the entrance hall at her grandparents’ house, the scene framed under its heavy Victorian arch, the dark wooden stairs behind them. Her mother’s face was fixed in concentration at the task. Her father gazed at her, an expression which, although it sounded cheesy, could only be described as one of adoration, an expression which Lori had seen in real-life moments between her parents, even in later years. They’d still had that connection. She remembered walking in on them a few days after Troy’s death, their arms wrapped around each other in a way that made them look so insular, complete. Her heart had ached suddenly with loss, at the idea she could never have what they had, never be like them. Never be loved.
She took a deep breath. Behind her, she sensed that Daniel Levandi had stopped sorting through papers.
‘You found something?’ he asked.
‘It’s my parents’ wedding album.’ She bent down to get it and another plastic sleeve full of loose photos, and pulled them all onto the table.
‘Do you mind?’ He tilted his head to indicate he’d like to look at them.
She shrugged indecisively and pushed the album and sleeve along the table towards him, then turned back to the sideboard, grateful in a way that she didn’t have to go through the photos just yet. It had taken her by surprise that Scott had the album. She hadn’t expected to see photos of her parents, but then she realised there was no one else to take the stuff that had been their life. She wondered what else he had but didn’t have the energy to even imagine what might be here, perhaps in some boxes in his spare room, or in a storage facility somewhere.
She hadn’t imagined the books on Scott’s shelves either. The way they duplicated what she’d read, or attempted to read, over the years. Herman Hesse, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Don DeLillo, David Foster Wallace. (A more blokey selection than hers, but a similar vein.) Lined up on the sideboard in front of her were works on Buddhism and comparative religion, sociology and anthropology. Had he gone to university? she wondered. Scanning their spines she noticed small clutches of envelopes pushed between titles. Then, further along the row, a lone letter: a thin envelope in a familiar hand, marked return to sender, which she pushed firmly back in place. She pulled the larger stashes off the shelves and inspected them. There were letters from charities, a superannuation fund; none appeared to have been opened. Clearly nothing that he’d deemed to be urgent. She turned and put them on the table.
Daniel Levandi, diverted from the photos, glanced at them and prodded the superannuation envelope. ‘We’ll be able to get his workplace through this.’ He pushed it to the centre of the table, then motioned his head back to the album, a photo of her parents. ‘Your mum and dad look nice.’
Nice. What a useless word that was. A word that said nothing, implied a glossing over. The enamel paint of language. How could nice go anywhere near to explaining who they were, what they were like, their foibles and quirks, their humour and passions? And yet after all this time she wasn’t really sure she knew that herself. What they were in her head were pure constructs, half memory, half fabrication. Who they really were was most probably lost forever. Would she like them if she met them now? Would they be friends? Of course, it was ridiculous to think like that. She’d seen from Jason, from other people she knew, that parents were parents. They didn’t have to uphold the same values, be anything like their children. They just had to be there for you, and she knew that without a doubt they would have been there for her if they’d had the chance.
‘They were,’ she replied after a beat. ‘They were good people.’
Levandi had pulled photos out of the plastic sleeve and spread them across the table. ‘You kids?’ he asked.
There was Simon in their backyard, sitting on a banana lounge under an umbrella, reading a book. Next to that, Scott and Troy, bare-chested, arms around each other’s shoulders, an unrecognisable car in the background. How heartbreakingly young they looked. Strangely different from the way she remembered them. More childlike, ingenuous, scarcely ready to begin their lives. Her eyes narrowed in on a shot of Scott standing at the table on the back deck cutting a cake, his expression half embarrassed, half attention-seeking. It was his eighteenth birthday party. She recalled how hot it had been that day; the beginning of autumn, but still no sense of respite from the summer heat. Her mum stood to Scott’s right, smiling, her face so open and beautiful, so oblivious, as they all were, of what was to come. On his other side, Troy was leaning forward, eyes dark and glowing with mischief, his mouth open, mid-sentence. Was that what he was really like, she thought. Was this that boy?
Daniel put his finger on the photo of Scott and Troy. ‘Who is that?’
‘Troy Druitt.’ She paused, unused to hearing the name, speaking the name. ‘He was Scott’s best friend.’
‘The one who …’
‘Yeah.’
Levandi looked at the photo for a few more seconds, then shuffled through more. Shots of the party, of her father playing golf. Of her parents at lunch with her grandfather. Faces she hadn’t seen for twenty years, spread out like a deck of cards across a gaming table.
‘You were close to your mum?’ Daniel Levandi rested his fingertips on a photo of the two of them. It was from Scott’s party and appeared to have been taken within a few seconds of the photo that she had kept. In this one she and her mother were standing together, but no longer touching. There was a momentum to them, as if they were about to part. They were looking at each other and laughing, something conspiratorial between them. The photographer was further from them now, the distance rendering them smaller in the frame, and she could see Troy in the background, perhaps alerted by the camera (who had been behind it? Simon?) pointed in their direction. She tried to remember. The photos, their provenance, their history. Had she seen this photo before? Had she discarded this one in favour of the one she had kept?
It took her a moment to notice that Daniel had glancingly touched her forearm. ‘I apologise,’ he said. ‘This is clearly very hard for you.’
‘Actually, I don’t understand why I had to come here.’ She was surprised at the sound of her own voice. Irritated, brittle, uncontrolled.
‘The thing is, you are his next of kin. You just never know what we might find. You’re the only person, it seems, who may be able to give us any clues.’
She tu
rned and faced him, irritated now. ‘You did your research. You know what happened to him. To us. You know that and you still want me to say something. I have nothing I can add. I don’t know this man. This Scott Green. I haven’t seen him for … for twenty years.’ She moved past the table over to the couch where she had left her bag, and bent forward to pick it up.
‘Please,’ he spoke calmly, slowly, the way she imagined he’d been taught to deal with an armed offender at police training school, ‘I’d really appreciate you waiting a few more minutes, just while I check the last of the drawers, and the spare room.’
She stopped, feeling the momentary heat leave her, and collapsed down on the couch, her back to the detective. She realised she was shaking. Shaking from the outburst, and because of it, because it had actually happened. She didn’t do emotions, didn’t lose her cool, especially not in front of strangers. A spark of rage, a flood of tears: these were things that made her feel out of control. But if she had been momentarily felled by her feelings, this fact seemed somehow to have gone unnoticed by Daniel Levandi. Behind her she could hear him opening drawers, shuffling through papers, then walking back through the kitchen, into the hallway and what she guessed was the spare room. She opened her bag and checked her phone. No missed calls. She clicked on her emails. Twelve of them. She could see at a glance at least two were to do with work. Work. She’d given it such little attention in the last few days. It had slipped well down the list of life’s priorities.
After a minute she went out into the hall. She could hear noises from the far bedroom, shuffling steps, the scraping of cardboard. She stepped back through the door and around the table to the sideboard, where she gingerly picked out the envelope from its temporary hiding place. There it was, her address on the front. ‘Return to sender’ across it in her handwriting. She went back to the couch and slid it into her bag before making her way to the spare room.
‘Detective Levandi,’ she said, angling around the door to see him kneeling over a box, flicking through its contents.
He looked up at her distractedly, his concentration broken. ‘Daniel.’
‘Daniel?’
He smiled. ‘Sorry, yes, please call me Daniel.’
‘Okay. So, have you found anything?’ She paused. ‘Daniel.’
‘Nothing obvious. There’s a bit of paperwork I could go through. Nothing to indicate where he works. So much of that stuff, payslips, contracts, et cetera, is online now. But as I said, I can at least follow that up now with the super info.’
‘Are you looking for something else, something more specific?’
He sat back on his haunches, steadied himself against a set of drawers. ‘Apart from his work, or people he knows. Yeah, I’m thinking letters. Threats. Anything suspicious that might tie in with this incident.’
She frowned. ‘I still don’t understand how I can help.’
‘It could be that you might recognise a name or something. Some artefact from the past.’
‘Artefact from the past? What do you mean? Do you think this was deliberate? That this is tied up with what happened back then? I don’t understand.’
‘It could well be. We don’t believe his injury was an accident.’ There was uncertainty in his voice, as though he wasn’t sure he should elaborate. ‘Listen, a witness has come forward, someone who claims to have seen Scott being followed by a vehicle that night. He might have received a threat. Nothing’s clear yet. Once the techs get to look at his computer I’m sure we’ll have a few more answers.’
‘But, really, this could be anything, couldn’t it? It could be a coincidence or he could be involved in something. Some criminal activity. He might know anyone. He could be implicated in god knows what.’ The words came out of her mouth in a rush, but as they did she doubted them, thought of the Buddhist images. (Was it stupid to think that Buddhism and criminality cancelled each other out?)
‘Sure and, naturally, we will keep an open mind, look into it all.’
‘I can’t see why anyone would wait for twenty years to punish him all over again?’
‘Could be opportunistic. Someone saw him somewhere out of the blue. Unexpected encounter.’ He put his hands out in a no-idea gesture. ‘You’d be surprised how things go.’
She raised her eyebrows. She felt fairly sure she knew how things went. To hell in a handcart on a routine basis, but this just seemed too left of field. ‘Are you thinking it’s the Druitts? I really don’t believe that. I think they, well …’ She shrugged. ‘The only other people in the car were Josh and Melissa. The accident made her a paraplegic. That might have been a motive. Maybe she came across him and mowed him down in her wheelchair.’
Daniel gave her a stony look, a reaction to her poor taste.
‘Really, I just don’t think this is an angle. Not now.’
‘What about Josh?’
‘They were friends. They stayed friends afterwards. Well, for the time I was there. Scott managed to keep most of his friends. People liked him. He was the kind of guy people liked. You know, warm, funny, outgoing.’
‘But you didn’t stay friends?’
‘No. Not us,’ she said quietly. ‘No, we went our separate ways.’
‘So maybe there were other people who didn’t stay friends either, after all that went down. Look, I ask these questions because we have to look at everything. It’s what we do. It’s our job. Sometimes that upsets people, sometimes it might seem stupid, redundant, but we can’t not do it. I’m not trying to narrow down the options. I want to be able to rule things out.’
She felt suddenly tired. ‘I know. I’m not trying … It’s just …’
In the silence a muffled buzzing came from the living room.
‘Your phone?’ Daniel asked.
‘You’ve got good hearing,’ she said, walking back to her bag.
The voice at the other end of the line was immediately familiar. Rebecca, she said, from intensive care. ‘I wasn’t sure if you were coming in today.’
For a moment Lori could only hear a silent rebuke, the reminder that she hadn’t been there over the weekend. It took several seconds to realise there was a different intent to the call. ‘I was planning to come in soon. Is everything all right?’
‘Good, good. Things are fine,’ said Rebecca. ‘I was ringing just in case you weren’t coming in. I wanted to let you know that things have progressed. Your brother’s condition has improved substantially.’
July 1993
Northam
On Monday morning Pam, failing to sleep well, had risen early and formed a firm decision. By just after eight she was driving down Main Street, making her way across town. It was a cool winter’s day and a thin mist clung to the nearby hills. On any other occasion she might have noticed the beauty around her, the way the diffuse light rendered the town into a nineteenth century artwork, softened all colour to smudgy layers of monochrome. But today all she could see was the dark bitumen in front of her, preoccupied as she was with what was in her head. Rehearsing what she would say to Ray and Maxine.
She parked at the top of the street: a cul-de-sac with a dozen or so fairly new houses, five or six of them clustered around its generous turning circle and wide grass verge, giving it a faintly village-like atmosphere. ‘A nice place to live,’ Maxine had told her once. ‘Safe,’ she’d emphasised, as though she knew instinctively that something dangerous lurked on the other side of town. Pam hadn’t been here for a long time. Even when the boys first knew each other there was only occasional dropping off and picking up to be done. Mostly they rode their bikes, they could even walk if they were desperate—it wasn’t that far across town, just over a kilometre. But there had been a couple of times when she’d come to fetch Scott. She’d never been inside the house, just waited outside. It was usually dark and no one noticed. Not the Druitts. Not their neighbours. All of them safely walled up in their little compounds, involved in their evening routines.
But it wasn’t dark now, and she was aware of her car being one of o
nly a couple parked on the street. She wasn’t sure why she had driven over when she did. She’d thought she was avoiding traffic (the local joke was that rush hour was between eight-twenty-five and eight-thirty) but perhaps she’d been avoiding thinking about what she was actually doing, acting on an impulse that might not hold. Now it felt too early to be here, to knock on the Druitts’ door. She needed to wait until the morning was underway, breakfast over, she told herself; but the alternative meant that people coming and going might actually catch a glimpse of her, might have an idea who she was and know her purpose, or at least surmise it. She sat there aware of the last of the cars heading out. A throaty engine, a billowing exhaust, the clank of a garage door: all gave her enough warning to slump down in her seat, hope those cruising by wouldn’t slow to a stop for a quick inspection.
Mick had declined to come with her, to put it politely. He had strenuously advised that she didn’t do it, didn’t go within a country mile of the place. She’d tried to convince him of the decency of it, but he wasn’t persuaded that there was anything they could say that would do any good for anyone. ‘Don’t kick the hornet’s nest,’ he’d told her. ‘You think the power of your charm’s going to bring them around. You’ve got no idea. Just bloody well keep away.’ Pam knew he was being sensible, if not a tad overdramatic. But something other than sense was compelling her to the Druitts. No matter what they might want to throw at her, she owed it to them to go. It was nothing to do with being charming. There was nothing else in all conscience she could do.
It was getting close to nine. Two kids on bikes rolled down the gentle incline, figure-eighting around each other, shouting a fractured conversation as they went, oblivious to her in the car, oblivious too, she was sure, to the family emotionally haemorrhaging at the end of their street. When they left there was silence, and after a few minutes she decided that it was finally time to move. The Druitts would be up, breakfast over (if they had been able to eat), yet it was also slightly early for visitors. It was the right time for her to slip in and say what she needed to say, slip away again before anyone else might happen to arrive. She opened the car door, clutching a small bunch of her camellias (plump and cream, framed in their shiny green foliage, from the same tree as those she brought Scott) and got out. The air was fresh after the fug of the car interior and she felt it on her face like a small slap. The click of the car door closing sonar-echoed between the houses.
Life Before Page 16
