After the Ferry

by C. A. Larmer

  SARISI

  “Oh darling girl! I did not hear you arrive. Did you come alone? Did you steal a boat?” Zoe was seated on a wicker chair at the back of her yurt, legs up, a book in her lap, the sun bearing down upon her face.

  “It’s low tide,” Millie said. “I walked across.”

  Ran, really, like she’d been running for the past decade, but this time she was running towards the truth, this time she was ready to face it, her legs almost buckling under her as she made her way to Mikro.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” Millie demanded, breathless but still calm at this point.

  Zoe looked at her sharply and dropped her legs to the floor. “I’ll get us some tea.”

  “I’m not here for your blasted tea, Zoe. I want the truth. I came here the other day for the truth.”

  “No, darling, you were not ready then.”

  “Well, I’m ready now!”

  “I can see that, yes. This week has been good for you. Nicholas, he has helped?”

  “What?” What was she going on about? “I didn’t come for a bloody holiday, Zoe.”

  “And yet that is exactly what you needed.”

  “You have no idea what I need. What do you even know about me?”

  “I know that you wear your fancy clothes and speak your haughty way, but I see you, Millie. I see you.”

  The hide of the woman, in her designer kaftans and plum accent. “You are such a hypocrite.”

  “No, I live by my truth. Do you?” Then she sighed wearily and struggled to her feet. “And now I will get us that tea.”

  As the elderly lady prepared the pot, boiling the water on the gas stove top, scooping in the loose leaves, Millie watched her, angry at first, then irritable and finally feeling foolish.

  What was she was even doing here? This had nothing to do with Zoe. Yet it felt like the right place, the only place where she might get some honest answers.

  Millie waited until the tea was done steeping and they both had mugs in hand, then followed Zoe back to the sunny spot where they sat down on wicker chairs. She had no idea what the woman put in her tea, but it calmed her almost instantly, and she felt stronger with every sip.

  “You knew, didn’t you?” Millie said eventually. “You knew it the second you saw me.”

  Zoe smiled. “As clear as your green eyes, my darling. I’m surprised Nicholas did not see it, but then he’s a man. They see what they want to see. They see what is convenient.”

  “So I’m like an inconvenient truth that’s just arrived on the scene?”

  “What did you expect? A ticker tape parade?”

  No, Zoe was right. She hadn’t thought this through. Had just reacted, not considered the consequences of her actions, something she never did, at least not since that fateful day on the ferry.

  “I always knew Effie’s story was not right,” Zoe was saying. “I knew she came out from Paros about the same time as you. I didn’t know the details, but I knew her baby was lost and then suddenly her baby was found.” She sipped from her cup, smiled. “Everything else you must hear from Effie.”

  “I tried. She lied to me.”

  “She’s a mother; you cannot blame her for that.”

  Millie shook her head. “Please…,” she said, needing to hear it confirmed, but Zoe was staring into the distance now.

  “It is not my place, my darling. And you know that. You have waited this long, you need to hear it properly. Go back to Effie. Find her. Ask her. Face the truth.”

  The beautiful, brutal truth.

  EVE

  Monty was still shaking when she got to the Malone residence. She was battered and bruised, looked like she’d gone a few rounds with Mike Tyson, but luckily nothing was broken and Beryl, bless her heart, managed to conceal her horror as she helped her gently inside and got her straight onto the couch.

  Ron had a glass of something stiff and strong in her hands before she could stop him, and she said, “I think it might be time for me to cut back on these.”

  He snorted. “You’re still in shock, Monty. You can start AA tomorrow.”

  She smiled and clung onto the glass.

  “I am so, so sorry,” Beryl was saying, a tumbler of whisky also in her hands. “If I had known this was going to happen, I would never—”

  “Please, Beryl. I’ll survive. I did survive, in fact, all thanks to Eve.” She shook her head and ignored Beryl’s confused look as she thought of that SOS story and how it may have saved her life.

  “What a nasty piece of work,” Beryl was saying. “I can’t believe he was a friend of yours.”

  I can’t believe I once slept with him. Monty remembered that first night near the Spanish Steps. How Angus had chosen Millie or, as she’d just learned, how Millie had chosen Angus, leaving one man smug and another resentful. She couldn’t believe she hadn’t sensed it, had continued sleeping with Thomas for that week in Rome then discarded him so breezily for Angus after Millie jumped ship.

  She shuddered thinking how lucky she was that Thomas hadn’t held that against her, wasn’t as fixated with her as he had been with Millie. She might also have found herself brutalised on a beach somewhere. Because didn’t that book now prove everything? Tom had Amelia’s copy of The Celestine Prophecy, the one that had been stolen from her the night she was attacked. If it was in Thomas’s possession, then he had to be her attacker, there could be no other conclusion.

  “Oh you’re still shivering, dear. Ron, get the poor girl a blanket!”

  “I’m okay,” she said, but Beryl wouldn’t hear of it and fussed around her for many minutes, tucking a cashmere throw carefully around her aching limbs and fetching the soup she’d been warming up.

  “This’ll comfort you,” she said as she handed the bowl over.

  But how could Monty ever feel comfortable again? How could she possibly rest until she knew that Amelia was okay? That she’d made it out of the country and was safely in Greece?

  Earlier she had told the policewoman the whole story and been urged to make a statement at her local station the next day.

  “We can get in touch with Interpol,” the officer told her. “We can try to track your friend down. That is, if she’s even over there.”

  She told Ron and Beryl all of this as she slurped the chicken soup, but Ron was having none of it. He had dallied long enough. He strode out of the room, and when he returned a few minutes later he had his wife’s mobile phone in his hands.

  “I just did my first text message,” he told the two women, Beryl gulping as Monty smiled. “I told Amelia that if she didn’t reply to me in the next hour, I’d be getting on the first flight to Greece.”

  “But what time is it over there, Ron? She might be asleep for all you know!”

  “It’d be daytime now,” Monty said, giving Ron the thumbs-up.

  He nodded, his face grim. “If that doesn’t get her calling, then we can be worried.”

  TOM

  Tom knew there was no hope the second he spotted the flashing blue and red lights, was glad he’d downed a few beers at the pub with Glenn earlier, it would help buffer him from the brutality of what was to come.

  There were several squad cars blocking the road and two vans parked up his driveway, a woman in a plastic bodysuit pulling something from a trunk. But worst of all was the sight of the small digger perched in his backyard.

  Constable Dobson pulled Tom’s car up well before the driveway and demanded he get out. Then frogmarched him the final fifty metres towards his house.

  He spotted Scarlett standing in her yard again, no kids at her feet this time, scowl on her face, and he went to wave but thought better of it and looked away. That’s when he saw Harry, standing to the right of Geoff Pinter, under the shade of Amy’s monster tree.

  Harry wouldn’t meet his eyes.

  “We found her,” Geoff said as soon as Tom reached him. Then he nodded his head towards the sandpit, which had been partially dug out, and to what looked like a baggy grey suitcase on the
other side.

  It was Amy, of course, now lying in a body bag, and Tom felt his throat constrict and his eyes well with tears.

  “How could you?” This was Harry, now glowering at him, but Geoff had a hand up.

  “Mate, I told you, if you’re gonna get emotional you need to move back.”

  “You’d still be looking for her if it wasn’t for me!” he retorted.

  “You?” Tom gasped at his brother and Harry glared at him again.

  “Jimbo told me about the stolen sand. How it went missing on Sunday night. Same time as your poor wife!”

  Tom looked away, hung his head. He thought he had been so clever, the sandpit such a perfect burial place, her body rotting beneath her special spot, the very place she once pottered with their son, the child she then plotted to rip away. He had driven to work very late that night, pinched a few bags of sand to cover her over, didn’t think anyone would notice.

  He watched as a forensics examiner squatted at the edge of the sandpit, shifting through it as if looking for gold nuggets.

  He probably would have got away with it if Harry hadn’t said something. People always suspect freshly turned soil, but sandpits were frequently turned over, the sand frequently freshened up. Who would think to look below the surface, to defile a child’s playground? Only Harry would have known that Tom hated that sandpit almost as much as he hated the blasted fig and hadn’t replaced the sand since Phil was four. He’d loathed the way the two of them would spend hours out there, digging and laughing and avoiding him.

  Then he snickered at the memory of Harry’s snotty-nosed kids recently playing just above Amy’s rotting flesh.

  “Why, Tom?” Geoff said then. “Because she was leaving you?”

  “Not just leaving me, Geoff. Taking my kid! Hiding him away in some Sydney school so she could head to Greece and hook up with some wog she met for five seconds on some ferry a million years ago. Who did she think she was?”

  “But how did you know she was heading for Greece?”

  Scarlett told Geoff that Amy was good at keeping secrets, that there was no way she would have told him, but Tom was shaking his head incredulously now.

  “I didn’t, not until I saw Monty’s magazine article. Amy must have seen that article too. It must have put the idea in her head.”

  “It also put ideas into your head, didn’t it?” Geoff said. “You saw it as your get-out-of-gaol-free card. So you went zooming down to Monty’s Sydney office, made a big song and dance. Made sure everyone saw you there, accusing her of sending your wife to Greece, wanted us all to be distracted by that, not realising that in fact your poor wife never went anywhere. That she was lying in your sandpit.”

  “But… but if you didn’t know… then why?” This was Harry, barely able to contain his rage.

  “Because she was leaving me!” Like that was reason enough. “Told me calm as day, like it was all very normal behaviour thanks very much.”

  Geoff sighed, his heart twisting for Amy. Wishing she wasn’t quite so loyal, quite so honest. That was one secret she should have kept to herself.

  “She’d just put Phil to bed,” Tom said, his voice barely a whisper. “She came to my shed, looking so damn pleased with herself. Said very calmly, ‘I have to leave you Tom. I need to go away.’ I thought she meant to her mum’s for a bit, but then she showed me her new passport. Like she was so proud of it! Said she needed to go overseas, to find herself again.” He sniggered, the sound making his brother flinch. “I thought she meant Paris or something. I didn’t even twig she meant Sarisi! She said she needed a few weeks, then she’d come back for Phil. Like, yeah no worries, babe, you go spend all my hard-earned money on some fabulous holiday, then return and take my son away. Good fuckin’ plan that one!”

  “You tried to stop her?”

  “I didn’t have to stop her. I was never going to allow it.”

  “So you killed her.”

  Tom glanced at the policeman sharply. “It didn’t happen like that. It was an accident. I… I was so angry and she was so surprised, like, ‘Oh, I thought you’d be cool with this.’ My God what rock was she living under? Course I wasn’t cool with it.”

  “She wanted to be honest with you, Tom. Should she have lied? Should she have run off without telling you?”

  He thought about that and shrugged. “I would’ve tracked her down anyway. She was never going anywhere.”

  And that’s when it hit Geoff, the inevitability of it all. Poor Amy never stood a chance. Scarlett was wrong, she would have died either way. Perhaps she wanted to face life—death as it happens—with honesty, not sneak off like a rat in the dead of night. He had a hunch the forensics team would find her shiny new passport on or near her body. Her mobile phone smashed beside it.

  As if reading his mind, Tom said, “If she’d just stayed where she bloody belonged. If she’d just been the good wife and mother, well, none of this had to happen, see? She asked for this. It was her own damn fault. I gave her a good life. I made her happy.”

  But Geoff disagreed. Amy was already dead inside, living in a loveless marriage. It would all end eventually anyway. Tom’s aggression, his innate evil streak might have killed her one day. His aggression had been escalating as their marriage deteriorated. Geoff had seen it in so many marriages so many times before. It started with love, then with control, then escalated into violence. Maybe it hadn’t yet, but it was coming.

  Amy’s only mistake was not to try to cut and run. Now they would never know if she ever stood a chance. Maybe, just maybe, she might have got away. Maybe she might have made it back to Sarisi, maybe she might have met the man on the ferry and rekindled her only real chance at love. Or maybe she was fleeing to find herself.

  Maybe she was fleeing to stay alive.

  In any case they would never know. Now Phil would be left without a mother because she had proven too honest, too loyal, too dutiful to a monster.

  “So how did it happen?” Geoff asked, trying to keep his tone casual.

  He knew he should be doing all this properly, at the station, but he needed to hear the truth and suspected a good lawyer would shut Tom up. That it might never come out otherwise.

  “It was an accident,” Tom said again. “She came into the shed to tell me about her plans. I’d just pulled the jewellery tree apart, fucking thing wasn’t working, so I turned and…” He broke down then, falling to his knees and sobbing, and it was a relief to see, at least for Harry who had listened to this exchange with shock and horror, no longer recognising his own flesh and blood.

  They would later learn from the autopsy that Tom had smashed his wife across the back of the skull with the heavy wooden trunk of the miniature tree. She must have been walking towards the shed door at that point, perhaps her last thoughts were of freedom. In any case, he then washed the blood off and reconstructed the tree. Had let his own son look at it, touch it, inspect the very thing that had snuffed his mother’s life out.

  They didn’t know any of this yet. For now, Tom was just sobbing, choking back tears and snot and his anger, but Geoff was not quite finished.

  “So you drove straight to your workplace late that Sunday night, yeah? You pinched a few bags of fresh sand and you used it to hide your wife’s body under the sandpit.”

  He shrugged, dropping down onto his bottom. “She always did like the beach.” Then he wiped his face and shook his tears away. Half sniggered. “I wanted to do Belinda on the sandpit, but bloody Scarlett and Polly and all those bitches were always watching! Had to make do with Belinda’s sandpit instead.”

  “You disgusting, disloyal bastard!” This was Harry now, and he was about to launch himself at his brother, so Geoff grabbed one of his arms to hold him in place.

  Tom seemed more outraged by Harry’s comment than anything else and turned to him with fury. “Don’t you get it, man? I was the loyal one! Not Amy! We were meant to be together. It was our fucking destiny. How could she leave me? If she left me it didn’t just make a moc
kery of my marriage, it made a mockery of our mother.”

  “What?” Harry’s face was contorted with confusion and disgust. “What are you saying about Mum?”

  “That’s why she left, don’t you see? Mum left so I could be free to leave, too, to travel and find Amy. By leaving, Mum enabled me to meet Amy and—”

  “She left because she met another bloke, you moron.”

  “What? No! Dad wasn’t good enough for her. She sacrificed herself for me.”

  “It had nothing to do with you!” Harry was barely containing his rage, his body shaking under Geoff’s tight grip. “God, now I see why Scarlett calls you a narcissist, why Dad left you nothing! Because after everything, all Mum’s affairs, you still took her side, you refused to see. Her pissing off had nothing to do with you, and it certainly had nothing to do with a woman you met ten years later. Mum left because she loved some other bloke more than all of us combined, and that’s the end of that sad, pathetic tale.”

  “No!” Tom scrambled to his feet and reached for Harry, his fists clenched, but Dobson had a hold of him and Geoff had one palm out.

  “Enough!” he said. “That’s enough for today.”

  Then he gave Dobson the nod and the officer yanked Tom away, another officer helping to secure his hands behind his back. They were all eager to lock the bastard up. They’d seen the poor woman’s body, wrapped in a paint-splattered drop-sheet beneath the sand and plastic toys, and it had ripped their hearts out, the creepiness and obscenity of her burial place. Most of them had kids of their own, some would be sitting in their own sandpits now, shovelling dirty sand into their Tonka trucks.

  As Dobson dragged Tom to a paddy wagon, Geoff released his grip on Harry and gave him a short, sharp nod. It was a thank-you of sorts, but he wasn’t sure the guy would want to hear it out loud.

  Despite it all, Tom was still his brother.

  SARISI

  Effie was not at the Casa Delfino when Millie finally trudged back, but she already knew where to find her and headed straight up.