An Accusation: A Novel

by Wendy James

  “Well, yes. But Rebecca Nurse is a solid role, too. I think Lexie will find it—”

  “Lexie’s been waiting for this for years. It was always expected that she would be given the main part in her senior year. Miss Amber promised her.”

  I refrained from telling her what I really thought, which was that her daughter’s determination to always be the center of attention didn’t equate to her having talent, and instead said very mildly that I’d made the decision based on who was right for this particular role.

  “But I don’t understand why you would give it to Jess Mallory. Why would she be any good? Lexie’s been going to drama classes for years. I doubt Jess has even been inside a theater. I’m worried—well, quite a few of us are worried—that she’ll . . . spoil things. Are you sure she really is reliable? I don’t want to seem mean, but I’ve always thought Jess was a little bit slow. Are you sure she’ll be able to learn all those lines?”

  It was true that Jess Mallory’s talent was something of a surprise. She certainly wasn’t one of the usual suspects: she wasn’t part of the popular gang, she was something of an introvert, and she certainly hadn’t had years of out-of-school coaching in drama and singing. But she could act. What I’d wanted to tell this mother was that art didn’t necessarily come from smart, or pretty or respectable or outgoing. And not even from good or kind or hardworking. Her daughter, for instance, was all those things. But all the elements that had made Lexie a happy, well-rounded girl with abundant self-esteem didn’t necessarily make her a great actor. I wanted to explain that art could come from places no one really wanted their daughters to go. I would have liked to tell her that Jess Mallory was tapping into experiences that her daughter didn’t have access to, that there was something dark in her, something hard, something powerful. I didn’t know what her life out of school was like—and to be honest, I didn’t want to know. Most likely there was something that stopped her from feeling whole, feeling real, feeling herself in the way that Lexie so clearly did. And it was this lack that meant Jess was able to become others so easily, so authentically. Mostly I resisted the notion of the artists’ wound, the idea that there’s always something melancholic in their nature, stemming from some existential trauma, some sadness that can’t be assuaged. But I had to acknowledge that there was an element of truth in it, too. Where there was darkness, there was damage—and with damage, sometimes depth.

  But I’d said none of this. Instead I’d smiled, kept my voice breezy. “She’ll do brilliantly. They all will.”

  “You don’t think perhaps you’ve been out of it for a long time?”

  At our only other meeting, the woman had seemed intelligent, interested, but now she was a lioness mother, her teeth bared, baying for blood. She looked me up and down blatantly, her lip curling. I suspected that I didn’t even meet her expectations of what a schoolteacher should look like, let alone an actor.

  “Perhaps things have changed a little since you were, er, active in the scene.”

  At this, I’d lost my cool. “Oh, I don’t think so. It’s like any art form—there are essential elements that haven’t changed since, oh, ancient Greece, probably. I’d be happy to fill you in on the details if you’d like, but it’s quite complex. It might take a while.”

  Her face had darkened with anger. “I’ll be talking to someone about this,” she muttered before stalking away.

  I stood there for a moment, feeling vaguely unsettled, wondering who it was she planned to talk to and what they would have to say.

  I’d told the story to Bret Baker, a science teacher who’d worked at the school for almost ten years. He’d warned me that Mrs. Simmons could be dangerous to get offside.

  “She’s ambitious for her four girls. And vicious when she’s thwarted in any way. A music teacher resigned after a complaint she made a few years back.”

  But according to Bret, Mrs. Simmons was the least of my worries as far as proactive parents went.

  “It’s the violent ones you have to look out for.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “There are a few big families here with pretty solid criminal backgrounds—Cruikshanks, Howatts, Sharpes. They’re all related, and even the ones who seem completely respectable can be pretty shady. They’re fine if you stay on the right side of them, but if one of them gets pissed at you, the lot of them are likely to come after you.”

  “Do you mean physically?”

  “It’s possible. There was a young English teacher here a few years back whose car was stolen, set alight, and pushed into the Lock after she complained about one of the Cruikshank boys verbally assaulting her. There were abusive letters, death threats. No one could ever prove it, but everyone knew who it was. She didn’t stay long after that.”

  I taught at least eight kids with the offending surnames. “Shit.”

  “And you don’t have to upset them personally either,” Bret added. “They’ve been known to go after people who have beef with their friends, or people who they don’t ‘approve’ of, for whatever reason. There was this scientist who visited one year to give a talk about sustainable farming, and apparently he said something that must’ve challenged their worldview—Christ knows what—and two family heavies cornered him after the event and beat the crap out of him.”

  “But how do they manage to get away with it?”

  “The usual. They’ve been here forever. People are scared of them. And they have connections.”

  Bret had laughed at my obvious dismay. “I wouldn’t worry too much. I doubt any of that lot are likely to get too upset about anything that goes on in your drama class. And anyway, you’re some old TV star, aren’t you? They’re not going to bother you.”

  It was almost two hours before the police arrived, and by that time the intruders had long gone. I’d persuaded Mary to go back to bed, and she was finally asleep. I offered to accompany them out to the shed, but the two officers—both male, one young, the other middle-aged—asked me to stay put. I watched from the veranda as they sauntered across the paddock and shone their flashlights over the shed, walked right around it a few times, then wandered back, flashing their torches this way and that.

  I quizzed them about the damage.

  “They’ve certainly done a job on your shed.”

  “Could you read what they’d written?”

  “Oh, you know. It’s just the usual rubbish. I wouldn’t bother even looking at it if I were you. We can send someone out to clean it up in the morning.”

  “Really? That would be fantastic.”

  “They’ll scrub it off with some sort of solvent—shouldn’t cost too much. The car might be more difficult.”

  “The car?”

  “It looks—”

  “And smells!” the younger officer chipped in helpfully.

  “As if someone’s dumped a bucketload of, er, human excrement all over it.”

  “What?”

  “Yeah. Maybe you can get out there with a hose first thing. But the frost might be a problem, yeah? Might be best to get to it before it, um, sets. Hopefully none of it leaked inside.”

  “There’s not someone who can come and clean that up?”

  The older officer scratched his chin, looked over at his partner. “You know anyone?”

  “Yeah, no. Maybe just contact a cleaner? They have like those trauma cleaners in bigger places, but I dunno about here. You could try and get someone up from Sydney, I guess?”

  “And what about finding out who did it?”

  They seemed oddly uncomfortable. “I’m not sure it’s going to be possible to identify them. You didn’t try and get a look? See what sort of vehicles they were in? What they were wearing?”

  “No. It was dark. I could see figures. They seemed quite tall. Male, I think. Adults or older teenagers, I guess.”

  “Maybe if you’d turned on your outside lights, they’d have taken off right away.”

  “But . . . I didn’t want them to see me, to know I’d seen them.”
r />   “Why not?” The young officer looked genuinely perplexed.

  “We’re two women out here, alone—and they probably already know that, with the reports in the newspapers and everything. It seemed a bit of a risk, anyway.”

  “Yeah, no. These types really don’t tend to be violent. It’s just simple property damage. They usually just say what they want to say and then they go.”

  “But we couldn’t possibly have known that.”

  “I guess not.” He shrugged. “So, do you want to file a report?”

  I was taken aback. “I’d have thought that was mandatory. Don’t you have to?”

  “Not necessarily.” The older man shook his head.

  “What would you advise?”

  “Well, it’s not like we’ll ever find out who they are. And even if we do, there’ll be no evidence. It would’ve been too cold for them to have been working without gloves, even if they happened to be that stupid, which I doubt, so there’s no point trying to get fingerprints.”

  “Right.”

  “It’d really just mean a shitload of paperwork for everyone. You included.”

  “You don’t have a list of . . . potential suspects you can investigate?”

  “Not really. I mean, we do have some what you’d call regular offenders, but most of them are only kids. Bored on a Saturday night, looking for kicks. And there are a couple of idiots who see themselves as serious ‘artistes.’ But I’d say in this case, it’s probably a little bit different.”

  “What do you mean, different?”

  “Well, first, it doesn’t look like kids. Kids don’t usually stray too far from town; most of them don’t even have cars. And if they do go out of town, it’s for a good reason. You know, something highly visible, like silos, billboards. That sort of thing. They don’t tend to deface isolated farmhouses.”

  “Oh.”

  “This is obviously a bit more . . . personal. You’ve been targeted for a reason.”

  “But doesn’t that narrow things down?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, it could be anyone, couldn’t it?” Both men looked grave. “You’ve made a lot of enemies out here, Ms. Wells. Half the town thinks you should be locked up for good. There’d be a lot of people wishing they had the guts to do it themselves. A lot of people who’d say this is no more than what you deserve.”

  SUZANNAH: DECEMBER 2018

  I had spent the last few months in a strange state of suspended animation, with my life put on hold indefinitely. Time blurred; the days were hard to distinguish from one another. Chip left at the crack of dawn every morning to do what had to be done to maintain his livelihood. I envied him his escape into a world that seemed simple in comparison to mine—farming might be physically harsh, brutal even, but it could be understood and negotiated. I envied, too, the fact that he could direct his focus elsewhere, even if it was only for a few hours a day.

  I had decided early on that if I was to avoid going mad, I would have to pretend that I was simply enjoying a well-earned break, taking early maternity leave. Every morning I set myself some routine domestic task—catching up on bills, gardening, unpacking boxes, rearranging furniture. But by the afternoon, my (clearly inadequate) imaginative reserves were exhausted, and I would slump on the sofa beside Mary, half watching whatever program she was currently obsessed with and sharing her dry Froot Loops. Somehow I still managed to keep the anxiety at bay, pushed it to the furthest recesses of my pregnancy-fogged mind and focused on the one bright point, the only certainty of my current situation: the child who was growing within me. I was well into the second trimester, the baby was kicking, and the nausea had all but disappeared. I tired more easily but had yet to develop any of the expected aches and pains. We hadn’t asked to find out the sex, but all the tests indicated a healthy fetus.

  In early December, with only six weeks to go before the hearing, Hal came over to go through the prosecution evidence with us. Most committals were simple paper committals, with evidence supplied to the magistrate in the form of written statements, but Hal had asked for a physical hearing to garner more time, and in the hope that he might discover evidence to dispute the prosecution’s evidence—or even better, find a witness whose story would make Canning’s fall apart. If at committal the magistrate wasn’t convinced that the prosecution’s case could satisfy a jury beyond reasonable doubt, the charges would be dropped, the case dismissed.

  Media interest in the case had moved on—mercifully, Ellie Canning seemed to have become the focus of the story, rather than me, or even the crime itself—but a small contingent of reporters (a motley bunch representing mostly oddball online sites) still gathered at the end of our drive, so it was easier to meet Hal here than in his office in town. Chip had made the trip into town to pick up our week’s groceries and arrived home just before Hal. He, too, had increasingly kept clear of Enfield Wash over the past months, not so much because of the media, who didn’t seem to worry him, but because of local attitudes toward us, particularly after the night of the graffiti. He hadn’t said much—not wanting to worry me more, I guess—but he had made vague noises about certain people having too much time on their hands.

  The three of us sat down at the dining room table, where we had a good view of Mary, who was out on the veranda with the dogs. I tried not to laugh as Hal did a double take. This morning, Mary was dressed in what she’d taken to calling her hairy-wear—an old pair of orange fluoro work overalls supplied by a thoughtful Chip when I complained about the endless washing that Mary’s canine obsession was creating. She was sharing Rip’s doggy bed, lying curled up against him, one arm caught underneath, the other stroking his nose. She muttered constantly and sometimes quite heatedly, but the dog seemed happy enough, eyes closed, tail thumping sporadically. Ned was nowhere to be seen; he either had his nose badly out of joint or had gone into hiding.

  There were far too many documents for us to get through in a day—interviews, witness statements, scientific reports, photographs—but Hal had provided a précis of the critical elements. It was mostly what I’d expected. All of it nonsense, all of it fabricated.

  And all of it completely irrefutable.

  I read the girl’s statement again, went through it slowly, made notes, trying to find anything—some little error that might be expanded into a gaping hole—that would cast doubt on her testimony.

  We went through the list of physical evidence that provided proof of Ellie’s incarceration. The paintings, the underwear, the cup with her DNA and drug residue, the hairbrush. Read through the witness statements that the prosecution had provided. Everything added up—but not to the truth.

  Most of what was here wasn’t a surprise, but the accusations, documented so officially and authoritatively, made the craziness real.

  There were so many lies, coming from so many directions, it was impossible to know how I could even begin to refute them. The accusations were so lunatic, so preposterous. They made the small implausibilities (drugging a potential surrogate, for example) seem irrelevant.

  Suddenly the reality of what it all meant, and what it might come to mean, crashed down on me like an all-encompassing black cloud. Years in prison, the removal of my child, the end of this burgeoning relationship with Chip. And Mary, what was to become of Mary? I wanted to curl up and howl.

  “I don’t get it. It feels like someone’s just walked in and turned my life into something insane. Something hellish.” Chip, who looked as desolate as I felt, squeezed my hand mutely.

  “There must be something we can do, some way to show it’s all lies.”

  Hal looked thoughtful. “The problem is that it’s just so much easier to prove that something happened than to prove its opposite, its negative—to prove that something didn’t happen. What we need is something that casts doubt on her, on Canning herself. Any doubt at all.”

  “But the girl is squeaky clean—no one’s got a bad word to say about her. She’s prac
tically a saint.”

  “But if she wasn’t here, where was she? Someone must have seen something, know something.”

  “But who? And how would we find them? You’re talking about needles in haystacks.”

  Chip stated the obvious. “What about her phone records? I know she said it was out of power and that she hasn’t seen it since she got in the car . . .” He looked at his brother hopefully.

  “Yeah. That’s all been checked. Her records are completely consistent with her statement. The last call she made was from somewhere near Broadway, just after her interview at St. Anne’s.”

  “Do you have a copy?”

  Hal dug it out of the teetering pile of documents and handed it to his brother. Chip looked at it briefly, then passed it over to me. No calls had been made from her phone after the date of the alleged abduction. And no calls had been made to her phone, either, just half a dozen texts—one from her mother, a couple of group texts between classmates, her foster mother hoping she was having fun in Sydney—but not many. I felt a moment’s pity for Ellie. She’d gone missing from her life for almost a month, and there was no one to notice, no one who cared. There must be some sad story, some hidden pain behind all this.

  “Pity we can’t check her actual phone and look at her photos. I’d like to see if she’s really the virtuous little thing she says she is.” Chip looked at his brother hopefully. “Surely you know some dodgy techie who can find out that stuff for us? I thought no information was private these days?”

  “I’m just a country barrister, not James Bond. Anyway, even if a techie found something on her phone, it’d be inadmissible—and completely illegal. But, barring a witness, that’s exactly the kind of thing we need. A photo. A phone call. CCTV footage. Something dated, verifiable.” Hal sighed. “But you’re right—we’re talking needles in very deep haystacks. At this point only Canning herself knows wh—”

  He paused. “Actually, maybe that’s it. Maybe we need to look at it another way. Maybe there’s no point searching for the gaps in her story—maybe we need to consider what she knows.”