The Dark Lake

by Sarah Bailey

  We begin the individual interviews. The others wait their turn in the boardroom, muffled crying occasionally breaking through the wall.

  ‘She was so young,’ sobs Millie Janz into her hands. ‘My daughter is only a few years younger than her.’

  ‘Were you at the play on Friday night?’

  Sam Blackstone wasn’t but he had really wanted to go. ‘My girlfriend was singing at a jazz club so I had to be there instead. We would have gone this weekend.’

  ‘I went,’ Trudy Fisher, the art teacher, tells us. ‘It was a modern masterpiece. Honestly. No private school could have done it better. Everything was perfect. She did an amazing job.’ She ducks her head forward conspiratorially. ‘I wasn’t sure she would, you know. She was sort of a quiet achiever, always keeping to herself.’

  ‘I was against it at first,’ says Troy Shooter. ‘I was a bit sick of all the arts stuff getting through when we couldn’t even get new nets for the soccer field.’ His muscles bulge under his shirt and he rubs at his eyes like a sleepy child. ‘But Rose was pretty convincing when she wanted to be. She definitely knew how to get her way! And my wife wanted to go, she loves Shakespeare, so we went along and I have to say it was topnotch. Really professional.’ Troy starts to cry. ‘She was a great girl,’ he tells us, tears spilling from his eyes.

  ‘It was beautiful,’ says Millie. ‘Just beautiful. I would have gone to see it another five times. I thought it was fabulous.’

  ‘I didn’t go.’ Paula Desmond looks like she has been crying for hours. ‘I wanted to stay out of the whole thing.’ She pauses and then whispers, ‘It sounds awful to say now, but I just didn’t really like the way she’d gone about it. I mean, we all want things, but she just wouldn’t take no for an answer. She really pushed it with John. You know, the principal. Have you spoken to him yet?’ Her eyes widen. ‘He’s absolutely devastated. She was his favourite.’

  Playground sounds sing through the windows and merge with the buzz of the ancient fridge. Nicholson has obviously decided that maintaining a normal routine is the best way to go. Substitute teachers have been called in to run the younger classes.

  I look around the small staffroom. The ceiling seems unusually low but it’s familiar in the way that generic office spaces are. I remember standing outside the front door off the quad, waiting for my teachers to come out. Peeking past the dividing wall, wondering what secrets lay beyond. Now it’s clear that we wouldn’t have discovered anything of note. Cheap-looking orange carpet fades in and out of the thoroughfares. A noticeboard heavy with news hangs crookedly on the main wall. A photocopier is beeping an error message softly from the corner of the room. Mismatched mugs hang on hooks above the sink. There’s a large bowl of shiny red apples on the bench. A Romeo and Juliet poster is tacked onto the fridge.

  ‘So would you say you were friends as well as colleagues?’ Felix asks.

  ‘Oh yes,’ says Millie.

  ‘We were very close,’ says Sam. ‘That’s why this is so hard.’

  ‘Like sisters we were,’ sobs Trudy.

  ‘Wouldn’t stay here if we weren’t,’ mumbles Troy. ‘Life’s too short.’

  ‘It’s such a great bunch of people,’ declares Paula. ‘I’ve always thought we are so lucky. I was only saying so to my husband the other month how lucky we are. And now this!’

  I get her a glass of water and she cries into it, sipping between sobs.

  ‘How do you find working for John Nicholson?’ Felix asks.

  Paula blinks. ‘He’s a good man. A great principal.’

  ‘He’s very involved,’ Trudy tells us. ‘Always in here for a chat.’

  ‘Was he close with Ms Ryan?’

  Sam’s eyes narrow. ‘Sure. We all were. It’s a real team culture.’

  Troy nods. ‘They both love art and stuff like that so they have a lot in common. Sometimes they would go to plays and things.’ He looks back and forth between us. ‘Like the theatre or other school plays, I guess. You know, to check out the competition.’

  Izzy Mealor shrugs and won’t meet our eyes. ‘He’s good as bosses go. Seems like a nice guy.’ She flicks her hair out of her eyes and chews at a fingernail. ‘They seemed friendly but not in an odd way.’

  ‘I’ve known John for years,’ Millie tells us, leaning forward as she clutches at her handbag. ‘Years. He’s a wonderful man. It was very hard for him when Jessica died.’ Her eyes are huge behind her thick glasses. Tears teeter on their edges and threaten to spill over. ‘He cared about Rosalind a lot. I think he had a soft spot for her. Because she used to be a student here.’

  ‘So there was never any trouble that you can think of?’

  Trudy shakes her head. ‘Not really. Normal teaching stuff here and there; it can be a stressful job sometimes. And there was the Valentine’s Day thing.’

  Felix and I look at each other. ‘What was that about?’

  ‘Oh, it was silly, really. One of the boys sent her flowers on Valentine’s Day. A bit awkward, obviously, but no harm done.’

  ‘Do you know who sent them?’ asks Felix.

  ‘I’m not sure. I don’t think anyone wanted to make a big deal about it, but the kids would talk about it. One of the girls in my class said it was Kai Bracks, but I don’t know. Could have been any of them—they all adored her.’

  ‘I think she was a bit of a mystery.’ Izzy looks at us solemnly, her stare a haunting crystal grey. Her dyed red hair spikes sharply away from her forehead. ‘I mean, I’m newer than the others, this is only my first year, but I just couldn’t seem to get beneath the day-to-day stuff with her.’

  ‘So you wouldn’t say you were friends then?’

  Izzy shrugs and her complicated-looking silver necklace jangles.

  ‘I liked her, I guess. I mean we all liked her.’ She uncrosses and then recrosses her legs. ‘And this is just so awful. Obviously.’ She furrows her brow. ‘It’s just that I never felt like I knew her. I mean, she was very attractive,’ Izzy continues thoughtfully. ‘It was almost off-putting. And I feel like she played that up sometimes, especially with the men. Even with the students.’ Her eyes flit to her lap. ‘But once you got past that it just seemed like there wasn’t much there at all.’

  ‘Well,’ says Felix, after Izzy gathers her things and leaves. He leans back in his chair, which creaks loudly under his weight.

  ‘Careful,’ I say, ‘these chairs are worse than the ones in our office.’

  I feel exhausted. Dazed from all of this chat about Rosalind. We’ve been playing round robin in the staffroom for almost three hours but I can’t shake the feeling that we are getting no closer to finding out anything more about Rose.

  ‘We’re hardly getting a clear picture of her, are we?’ says Felix. ‘It seems like she was as much a puzzle when she was alive as she is dead.’

  ‘Yes. That’s pretty much what I remember from school too,’ I say, feeling the surge of anxiety from that era twist inside me. I had wanted her approval so much.

  ‘Mostly everyone seems to like her but it’s in a removed sort of way. It sounds like she was quite manipulative sometimes.’

  I feel mildly defensive about Rosalind even though he is right. ‘She was very attractive. I’m not sure that necessarily means she was manipulative.’

  Felix looks at me, obviously deep in thought about something.

  ‘Let’s head back,’ I say. ‘We need to review the interviews that the uniforms have done, touch base with the family and then do arvo check-in.’ I get up and stretch out my stiff back. ‘We also need to speak with Kai Bracks. See if he really did send her those flowers.’

  Felix doesn’t move. He is staring at the bowl of ruby-red apples.

  ‘You coming?’ I ask.

  ‘Yeah. I’m coming. I’m just trying to think. There’s something not right here, Gem, but I reckon we can’t see it.’

  ‘Yeah, I know.’ I sigh. ‘Maybe we’re looking for something that isn’t there. It could be a random attack.’

  ‘Maybe
,’ he acquiesces.

  I continue, ‘Though there are some things about her situation that seem jarring. Like, why did she come back to Smithson? She had a teaching job in the city. Why didn’t she just get another job in a nearby school? It’s not like there was a partner dragging her back here.’

  ‘I agree,’ says Felix. ‘And she’s not particularly close to her family. So why come back? I keep thinking about her being pregnant. Maybe she … oh fuck, I don’t know.’ Suddenly he grabs my hand and kisses it. We lock eyes and my heart jerks into a higher gear.

  ‘C’mon,’ he says, ‘let’s get out of here.’ He pulls me up and runs his hands down the length of my body as I scramble to get my bag and quell the fire that races through me.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Tuesday, 15 December, 6.56 pm

  I dial Anna on the way to Dad’s after work.

  ‘Good timing,’ she says, ‘I got the tox report about an hour ago. Alright, so …’ Anna breathes into the phone. ‘She was pissed, but that was it. Traces of marijuana too, but that would’ve been from weeks ago. Seems like your teacher friend dabbled sometimes.’

  ‘How drunk was she?’

  ‘On her way. Blood alcohol of .08. She would have been either overly excited or starting to get a little melancholy, depending on what kind of drunk she was and what her tolerance was like.’

  I picture Rose swaying as she stood in the middle of a trampoline at a house party in our final year, her eyes slanting slightly. I remember her jumping suddenly and then falling backwards with her hands across her chest. She lay there for a few minutes in the middle of the noisy party just staring at the sky. I watched her for ages.

  ‘I don’t think she was the overly excitable type. But I didn’t really know her that well.’

  ‘Anyway, that’s about it. I can confirm her pregnancy was about eleven weeks along. We can assume she would have known.’

  ‘We haven’t been able to find any medical records about her pregnancy,’ I tell Anna.

  ‘Well, maybe she was in denial,’ Anna replies. ‘It happens.’

  I swallow, glancing at Ben in the rear-view mirror. He’s playing with an action man, stretching his legs into side splits, oblivious to the content of my phone call.

  ‘Anything else?’ I ask.

  ‘I think she was in the water for a few hours,’ says Anna. ‘And I think she was killed around midnight. Maybe a little earlier.’

  ‘Straight after the play,’ I say.

  ‘Yep,’ says Anna cheerily.

  ‘What about the sexual assault? You mentioned some bruising and obviously there’s the missing underwear. Anything else?’

  ‘Yeah, that’s tricky. I’d guess she was assaulted because her underwear was missing, but who knows? Maybe she just wasn’t wearing any. Did you guys find any?’

  ‘Nope. Not that I’ve been told anyway.’

  ‘There’s no DNA because of the water. No clear evidence of violence either, just the bruising around her thighs, but I’m still not sure what that means. It could have been from roughish sex. There are some strange scratches that are hard to explain. But they could be from sticks in the lake.’

  I’m almost at Dad’s. Ben lifts his head, recognising familiar landmarks.

  ‘Was she seeing anyone or are we looking at an immaculate conception?’ asks Anna.

  I laugh. ‘We’re not sure yet. We’re still looking into whether she was officially seeing anyone. There’s nothing solid at the moment.’

  I think about the heart-shaped stone we found at her house. Was it from a lover?

  ‘Well, enjoy your night,’ says Anna. ‘No doubt I’ll see you soon. Hopefully at the bar rather than the autopsy table.’

  I say goodbye to Anna.

  Wild roses curl up the side of Dad’s brick fence next to where I park the car and I stare at them, turning them into tiny red dots, wondering, for what feels like the thousandth time, who the hell killed Rosalind Ryan.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Tuesday, 15 December, 7.22 pm

  ‘Are you looking after yourself?’

  ‘For the most part,’ I say, letting my feet dangle just above the shiny white tiles. Dad recently renovated his kitchen and there is now an island bench equipped with high stools. I kick my legs back and forth like a child as I watch him make dinner. He moved into this house on Winston Grove about three years ago. It’s a sweet little street: slightly elevated, so you can look out across the centre of Smithson from the hill in the backyard. Dad seems happy here; he’s even mentioned getting a dog. Scott and I have been renting my family home from him since he moved here. It made sense: I was pregnant and we barely had any savings. Dad was keen on the arrangement. The memories in the house were becoming too much for him but he couldn’t bear for it to belong to someone else. Three years later, and Scott and I have made no progress towards buying our own place. I feel paralysed at the thought and change the subject every time Scott or Dad mentions it. For now, Scott seems content enough to tinker in the yard and put new cupboards in the bedrooms.

  ‘Are you drinking too much?’

  ‘I’m drinking enough, Dad.’ My voice is firm and he nods, stirring cream into the pasta.

  I can hear Ben’s laughter from the lounge room. He is watching The Smurfs. Ben’s laugh always makes me nervous. I worry for the day when he won’t laugh easily: the day when he can’t sit back and enjoy Gargamel hunting down the tiny blue people.

  ‘How’s Scott?’

  I pick at some skin that has split down the side of my nail. It pulls away and a tiny trail of blood breaks out. I hold my thumb onto it, pressing hard. ‘He’s fine. Busy.’

  ‘Mm.’

  Dad’s new kitchen is still small but a skylight has been cut into the ceiling and the last of the sun hits the wall above his head. Dad is tall and lean and shows no sign of stooping. His hair has been completely white for over a decade. He is the most capable person I know. Dad is a fixer. I suppose ‘handyman’ is the technical term. Mechanical, electrical, old, new: Dad can tackle pretty much anything. He’s ridden the digital revolution like a pro and has added computers and smart phones to the things he can bring back to life. His hands just seem to know what to do.

  After Mum died I remember lying on the lounge, staring at the wall and hearing him say to my aunt Megan that this was the first time he’d ever felt like there was something in front of him that he couldn’t fix. Megan, who is teary at the best of times, had simply howled into her hanky.

  ‘Shame he couldn’t come tonight,’ Dad says.

  I shrug. ‘It’s good for him to go out with his mates. My job makes that hard sometimes.’

  Scott and I met at Riders. Back then Riders was new and the only club in town that was considered appropriate if you were over twenty-one. At twenty-five, I had outstayed my welcome at all of the bars in Smithson and wasn’t quite ready to embrace the full cop stereotype of drinking at Bessie’s or The Green Frog, so Riders was my standard Saturday night. As was getting stupidly drunk and passing out, either at my place or at the home of whichever lucky stranger had taken my fancy a few hours earlier. It’s fair to say it wasn’t the best of times, but I did have some fun. The evening I met Scott, I had bumped into a guy I’d slept with a few weeks earlier who was mad keen for a repeat episode. I’d let him kiss me and then had spent over an hour trying to lose him by disappearing to the toilet every ten minutes and hoping he’d be gone by the time I came out. This strategy wasn’t working, so I had reluctantly started to let him buy me drinks. The last thing I remember is telling a nice-looking guy that I was a cop. I woke up the next morning with a hangover that seemed determined to kill me from the inside, so bad was the stabbing pain. The guy was there too, nervously offering me an energy drink and Panadol capsules. Scott had been amazed to discover that I really was a cop and then had insisted on staying into the evening to cook me dinner, lecturing me on the importance of decent food as I sat on the cold tiles, my head pressed against the toilet seat. To this day
I don’t know whether we had sex that night but I suspect not. The pattern of our relationship was established and set in that first encounter. Scott was suddenly just simply there, looking after me, and has been ever since.

  ‘You should go out with your friends too, Gemma. Not always people from work.’

  ‘I don’t really have any, Dad. You know cops, married to the job!’ I say it cheerily but it comes out flat, even though it is partly true.

  ‘What about Catherine?’

  ‘You mean Carol?’

  ‘Yes, yes. From your mothers’ group. Weren’t you friendly with her for a bit?’

  ‘Sure, I guess. I’m supposed to see her on the weekend. She’s pretty busy with her kids. She has a new baby.’ I have some of the soda water that Dad has placed in front of me. ‘Plus I think that she feels like my job is contagious. I don’t think she likes me being around her kids.’

  Dad is dishing up our dinner and he stops to raise an eyebrow at me. ‘Did she say that?’

  I jump off the stool and call Ben into the kitchen. ‘Not really. Just a vibe I get.’

  Dad makes a sceptical sound as we sit down at the table.

  Ben chatters his way through the meal, and Dad and I talk around him. Despite being almost sixty-five, Dad is busy. He works almost full-time and swims at least two kilometres a day. He’s telling me about some mirrored cabinets he’s building for a new development out past Gowran when my phone rings.

  ‘Hey,’ I say, flashing an apologetic look at Dad as I walk into the lounge room. The TV is playing the credits of some cartoon I don’t recognise. I flick to the news.

  ‘Hey,’ says Felix. ‘Where are you? Home?’

  ‘At my dad’s.’ I pick up some of Ben’s toys and place them in the wooden chest my dad made for him last Christmas.

  ‘Well, after arvo check-in I spent some time digging into the RYAN empire. Mainly just financials but I made a few calls as well.’ I can hear female voices teasing each other in the background and I know he must be at home with his daughters.