All That Was Left Unsaid

by Jacquie Underdown

  “Why do I keep doing this to myself?” she groaned. In the last three years, she had come to that spot a dozen times and each time she regretted it. Seeing that tree was enough to drag all the pain to the surface and overwhelm her. But as she stared up at the branches through the shadows, she was not only grief-stricken but angry. A dark force was vibrating beneath her skin and filling her chest. Rage. Violence.

  The bottle of wine was still in her hand, opened, half-full. She tipped it to her lips, skolled the contents. It burned and made her gag, but she kept going. She didn’t want to be there. She didn’t want to feel anything let alone that excruciating agony.

  * * *

  “You bitch, you killed my daughter!” Maddison hurled the empty wine bottle at the side of Tina’s house. It smashed into a million tiny pieces all over the grass. “Why couldn’t you have stuck to your own husband. Why did you have to take mine! I hate you. I hate you.”

  A light turned on inside. She raced up the stairs to the front door and banged hard on it with her palms. “I know you’re in there. I know you can hear me. You should hate yourself for what you did. You killed my daughter. You and Ben killed her. I hope by knowing that, your soul is destroyed. I hope you kill yourself you horrible, whore slut! I hate you. Everyone hates you.” She scooted along the porch to the window and slapped it with her palms. “Did you hear me! You should kill yourself. That’s all you deserve.”

  * * *

  The sound of a child’s voice. A poke at Maddison’s ribs.

  “Mummy, there’s a lady here.”

  Maddison dragged her eyelids open, squinted against the blast of sunlight, and gazed into the face of a small girl about the age of six. Big brown eyes stared down at her. The girl smiled.

  “Come away, Natasha. Hurry! Come on now,” came a high-pitched older voice.

  “Hello. You have priddy lipstick,” the girl said.

  Maddison sat up, her head pounding as she did. She glanced around. Grass beneath her palms. A swing set in the distance. The local park.

  Chapter 28

  Eighteen years ago…

  Tina stood at the entry of the waiting room and called her next patient, “Chris Brooks”.

  Chris got to his feet, smiled at her and said in a deep, gruff voice, “G’day.”

  He was tall, broad, and as he followed her down the hallway, she was aware of every step he took. He had her heart racing double-time.

  When in her office, she closed the door quietly behind them.

  He reached for her hand and shook it. “Chris Brooks. Good to meet you.”

  A firm handshake. A hand so large it all but smothered hers. The rough friction of calluses met her palm, and she knew before he spoke that he worked a physical job. Not unusual in a blue-collar town like Gladstone, but something she hadn’t known she appreciated until now.

  Her first thought when Chris took a seat across from her and she gazed into his blue eyes was how rough-around-the-edges attractive he was. She checked his details; he was twenty-nine years old, five years older than her.

  Her second thought was a question: why did a strong, burly man like him would need to see a psychologist? But, of course, she was thinking about stereotypes. Stereotypes didn’t exist, at least not once she delved deeper than the social facade.

  For the next four months, Chris sat across from her once a week and spoke about his life. When four years old, his mother, Benita, died from pancreatic cancer. It devastated the family of five, but his father more so. Randall had sunk into a depressive funk and, when Chris was fifteen, had driven the family car into quiet bushland, put the barrel of a shotgun into his mouth and pulled the trigger.

  To avoid the foster system, Chris’s eldest sister, Jacinta, eighteen at the time, had taken him and his younger brother, Ben, into her legal care. For four years, the three of them lived together until Ben left for Rockhampton to study sports science at university. Soon after that, Chris was earning enough money while undertaking his apprenticeship as a mechanical fitter to move in with a couple of mates. A few years later, Jacinta landed a great job in Brisbane, so she moved there and settled.

  Physically, Chris was a big, strong man with a beard and a gruff voice, and yet he was so gentle and careful. He often cried during his sessions, unafraid of his emotions. As someone who had been unable to access emotion since she was a young girl, Tina found that fascinating. Exhilarating.

  As Chris continued to reveal the deepest parts of his soul, and she worked with him to shift him out of his grief and onto a path of healing, she developed a crush. That was the most surprising thing of all. Tina had never had a crush. She had never had a boyfriend.

  From the age of thirteen, she had slept with a lot of boys, some her classmates, others from the competing schools in the district. She hadn’t understood back then that it wasn’t socially acceptable behaviour but, instead, something she later came to know as hypersexuality.

  While studying her psychology degree, she spent many nights with many different men until one evening she found herself in a play park with four guys she had met at a club. As they all took turns with her body, at no stage did they acknowledge she was human.

  When done, they left her there alone and walked away laughing with each other as though Tina was nothing more than a big joke. She searched the ground for her jeans and underwear and slowly dressed, trembling from head to toe. She crumbled onto the grass, lowered her face into her hands and cried.

  For three weeks, the tears wouldn’t stop. She didn’t attend her lectures. She couldn’t get out of bed. The toxic residue from her past had rotted through her defences and contaminated her life. That was the first time she had discovered that her childhood couldn’t be ignored. Immense and festering, it loomed over everything.

  It was also the first time she had discovered she hated sex. Loathed it. She had never experienced pleasure from it. When she was in the arms of a man, her body was there, but she wasn’t connected to it—fortifications she had built up to avoid pain, but it also meant she couldn’t feel the opposite either.

  In time, she clawed her way out of that black hole and for the next five years, she didn’t touch another man. She had no desire for intimacy at all. Deep down, men frightened her, and she had always attracted those who could sniff out that vulnerability.

  But there was Chris. And she was feeling something. Physical at first—a burst of chemicals in her brain and body each time she sat mere metres across the room from him.

  Those lust chemicals were so new, interesting and unbelievably exhilarating. Mostly, she felt validated. All her hard work, years and years of picking apart her history and trauma and putting it back together with her new knowledge and adult perspective, had actually been helping.

  She wasn’t perfect. A child as broken as she was probably never could be. But she had chipped away at the compartments she had erected in her mind. The mechanisms that allowed her to float above her body, exist in her own safe, warm reality while grown men hurt, used and then discarded her.

  That was why she chose to study psychology in the first place. She had wanted to fix herself. And as she trawled through the texts and information, she found herself in those case studies. She read about people who had also suffered sexual trauma as a child. Many, many people. When she watched their transformations, heard their stories of recovery, she held hope in her hands for the first time. Hope that she was capable of healing too. Hope for becoming a whole person again.

  Tina was satisfied with the progress Chris was making, so she ended their sessions. She thought about him often but never saw him again after that until her friend Mandy’s twenty-fifth birthday. Chris worked with Mandy’s boyfriend, Trevor, and was invited to the same party. When he strode through the back doors, stepped onto the patio, where all the guests were gathered, and their eyes met, Tina had smiled so wide her cheeks hurt.

  They sat in a quiet corner together and chatted for hours and hours. Those same desires were vibrant and strong. At the en
d of the night, she gave him her phone number. The next day, he called her.

  Over the following months, they went to the movies together, for walks in the park, to the beach, out to dinner, for coffee, for drinks. She was falling in love with him. And he was falling in love with her; she could see it when his face lit up as he looked at her and in his bright smile.

  Chris made her feel safe—a completely new experience. But to take the next big step was proving incredibly hard. He was patient, though, and after six months, she was finally ready to bear herself to him. Be intimate.

  When Chris had held her in his arms, she was right there with him, and he didn’t let her down. Not for a moment. His touch was full of veneration. He was understanding. Careful. Tender. And when he hovered above her body, elbows holding most of his weight, and finally entered her, it was slow, like he intuited he must ensure in every moment she was safe, comfortable.

  She didn’t disappear that night. No, she stayed right there, and she felt pleasure for the first time. As she laid in his arms afterwards, she knew with all her heart and soul that she loved him.

  He had kissed her forehead, whispered into her ear, “I love you, Tina.”

  And without any fear, she said it right back. “I love you too.”

  Chapter 29

  McKenzie ordered two takeaway extra-hot flat whites from his favourite coffee shop. The coffee was still scalding by the time he made it to the police station and met Jenkins to discuss the results from the house search conducted on Tina’s home yesterday.

  “How are you feeling?” Jenkins asked, noting the puffiness under his bloodshot eyes.

  He swallowed a big mouthful of coffee, held his cup up. “Better after this.”

  “Not sleeping?”

  He shrugged. “The usual.”

  She left the conversation there and opened the case folder. “First and foremost, Tina’s DNA matched the samples gathered from the crime scenes, directly linking her to both. But…” She leafed through the paperwork until she landed on the right page. “The house search produced interesting evidence. This may be the key you were looking for.”

  His interest piqued, but his coffee cup was already to his lips, so he urged her to continue with a wave of his hand as he gulped a mouthful.

  “Traces of drugs were found in Tina’s espresso maker and the canister she stores her ground coffee. Both a match to the drug in her bloodstream.” She handed over the toxicology report and photos.

  McKenzie rested his coffee cup on the table and shuffled through the photos. The large espresso maker sat in the corner of the clean kitchen. A flap on the top could be opened, allowing ground coffee beans to be spooned inside each time an espresso was poured.

  The accompanying report noted that a sample taken of the residual grounds tested positive for Scopolamine in powder form. The specific brand of the drug only came in tablet form.

  He focused on his partner. “Someone would have had to grind the tablets into a fine powder before spiking the coffee. That indicates to me that this was an intentional drugging.”

  “I agree. Traces of this drug were also found in the splash of coffee left in a travel cup in Tina’s car.” She handed over another picture and report. “Latent fingerprints were collected from her house, most interestingly from the espresso maker and the coffee canister.” She pointed to one of the pictures in McKenzie’s hand, which showed a handprint. “See this here. This was found on the hallway wall.”

  Depending on Tina’s cleaning habits, it wasn’t necessarily incriminating to find fingerprints inside her home, because they could stay in place for years and she would have had many people come and go over that time.

  “Tina was fastidiously clean,” Jenkins said. “Shirts were ironed and hung in cupboards in colour-coded order. Shoes were perfectly aligned. Glasses were sparkling and in straight rows. The Tupperware cupboard was orderly. Forensics only found two sets of prints inside that house. One set was Tina’s.”

  His brow arched.

  “We ran the other set through the database. No match. But…” Jenkins turned her laptop, so the screen was facing McKenzie, then opened a video file. “Hours and hours of time-stamped video footage recorded at Tina’s residence was reviewed. You may find this interesting.” She opened the file and clicked ‘play’.

  Footage showing Tina’s front door. Night-time. A gaunt-looking woman wearing pyjamas runs up the stairs and pounds on the door. She yells something, hits the door again, and then rushes out of sight of the camera.

  Jenkins opened a second video file and hit ‘play’.

  The footage is showing inside the house, looking down the long hall. Off the hall are several bedrooms and the main bathroom. The same woman walks along the hall. Wobbly legs. She sways into the wall with her hip, lifts her right hand to balance herself.

  “That’s the handprint?” McKenzie asked.

  “Yep.”

  “All the prints belong to one person?”

  “Yep.”

  “Who is she?”

  “Maddison Brooks. Tina’s ex-sister-in-law.”

  “Kadie Brooks’ mother?”

  “The one and only.”

  “Organise a warrant to search Maddison Brooks’ home. If we find anything at all linking her to the drug, we make an arrest.” He got to his feet, straightened his tie. “Meanwhile, I’m going to have another chat with Tina.”

  Chapter 30

  Tina sat in the small interview room and waited. Her back ached. Her eyes burned. The emotional stamina required to endure that horrifying situation was rapidly emptying her.

  The police staff had provided her with plastic cushions to rest on in her cell, but, by the morning, she had had no more than a few hours of patchy sleep and her ribs and hip bones were bruised.

  Not that she would have slept anyway. Not without the help of sleeping pills or a lot of strong, hard liquor. She had never drunk alcohol in her life, nor taken sleeping pills, but she would make an exception if given the option.

  The most difficult aspect for Tina was knowing all the details of the crime she had committed, yet her brain was telling her a skewed version of events. Trying to reconcile the two was impossible.

  Not that it mattered. She deserved to suffer. Regardless of how much she wanted to change that day, sanitise it, turn it into something more palatable, she couldn’t. The facts were: she had swung a wrecking bar repeatedly and with such force that she had crushed Juliette’s eye socket, cheekbone and skull, exposing the brain and turning it to dogfood.

  She wouldn’t dull it down. She wouldn’t word it politely or obscurely to make herself feel better. That’s what had happened.

  Not a second went by that those images were not appearing in her mind’s eye like a nightmare on repeat. From the moment she was placed in her cell, she had sat on the stiff, cement bench and sobbed. Sobbed so hard she could barely breathe. She would never forgive herself.

  By the time morning had arrived, and she was taken to the interview room to await Detective Inspector McKenzie, she had no more tears to give. Empty.

  McKenzie opened the door and Tina flinched, her eyelids flickering. She had been expecting him, but her nervous system was set to panic, so the smallest noise or movement sent her fight-or-flight instincts into overdrive.

  “Morning, Tina,” he said. “I need a little more of your time to go over some details.”

  He still held the same casual I’m-your-friend tone that he had maintained all through their last interview. It unsettled Tina because she couldn’t understand why anyone would be nice to her after what she had done.

  He had maintained that tone right up until he had said he was arresting her. Then, his true feelings had shown on his face, in his timbre, and even though it was difficult being on the receiving end of such distaste, at least he was being honest. At least his emotions were matching the circumstances.

  She opened her mouth, but the only sound she managed to make after a night of tears was so soft it was inaudi
ble. She cleared her throat, swallowed, tried again. “Fine.” The single syllable was hoarse, practically a whisper.

  McKenzie sat down, eased back in the chair, his ankle resting on the opposite knee. His elbows were wide, fingers linked behind his head.

  No one could relax in a situation like that. Except for someone who was pretending to. Knowing that, Tina wasn’t quite so offended by McKenzie’s façade of nonchalance.

  She sank a little more into her seat, crossed her arms around her middle and sagged.

  McKenzie’s throat tightened when he noticed Tina’s oily hair, clumping the strands together near her scalp. He looked away, gathered himself. When he met her eyes, his mask was on. “As was established by a forensic toxicology report, you had substantial quantities of anticholinergics—namely Scopolamine—in your system when you were found in your car on the morning of the incident.”

  She nodded.

  “It’s a drug that’s not readily available other than by prescription. Have you recalled anything that might explain how you ingested it?” Medical records from Tina’s GP, obtained under a warrant, showed that she hadn’t been prescribed much of anything. The closest he found that even came close to a drug was a prescription for antibiotics six months ago to treat a urinary tract infection.

  “I have no idea how I could have taken it,” she said. “Zero.”

  “Tell me about this affair you had with Ben Brooks?”

  She looked away.

  “How long did your affair last?”

  “It wasn’t an affair,” she said.

  “You had sex with him while you were married to Chris, is that right?”

  “Just once.”

  “Just once because Kadie Brooks, the girl you were claiming to be your daughter a few days ago, broke her neck after falling from a tree?”