by Tiffany Sala
“What I need from you is the password to access the security system. So it’s good you’ve come.”
Her face turned sour at that, but she handed over her phone with the monitoring app open. “I need to know when Julia left, if anyone came to get her,” I explained. If Mother knew enough to be able to fill me in, she was clearly expecting me to drag the information out of her. “She was here yesterday, so we shouldn’t have too much footage to look back over.”
But when I tried to find footage from yesterday afternoon, the latest I knew Julia had still been in the apartment, there was nothing saved in the cloud storage. I met with the same result when I checked the directory for the current day’s recordings.
I stared at Mother, who widened her eyes back at me.
“Now is not the time to play cute. What have you done with her?”
“What are you talking about?” She leaned closer to the screen. “You haven’t even looked at anything yet.”
“There’s nothing here to look at. Why did you deactivate saving of recordings?” I checked a few other directories and found video files there that worked, long dull sequences of the corridor outside Julia’s door with the occasional stranger wandering by.
“I never did that. I get a great deal on insurance because I have constant surveillance. Is it just today that it’s been deactivated?” She snatched her phone back.
“It’s today and yesterday. Coincidentally covering all the time since I lost contact with Julia. Are you really telling me you know nothing about this?” Actually, I had a feeling her surprise was genuine… but she knew something for sure.
She folded her arms and stared out a window with the blind left up. “I don’t care for you to give me a hard time over this, Devin, but I made sure the girl’s parents knew where she was staying.”
It all rose again: the feelings I had whenever I was talking about them, or in their house—feelings that only Julia, of all the things connected to them, seemed beyond. Feelings I could never share with my mother, because she would exploit them in a way that was little better than the way the Mahoneys had.
“It was the right thing to do,” Mother added in the wake of my silence. “They have a right to be aware of their daughter’s movements, and this is my property we’re talking about.”
“Their daughter is in her twenties. They have no right to lay a claim over her she does not approve of.” The thought that I had failed so badly at getting my position across to her that she had been willing to let her parents take her away was humiliating.
“My son is in his twenties too,” said Mother, “though he’s at the other end of it. And—Devin, listen to me. I did this for you as well.”
“Okay,” I said, “well now you have however long it takes me to be ready to leave here to explain that to me.”
“Devin, I am not the only one to see this. It’s not healthy for you to be keeping yourself tangled up with that family, trying to marry the daughter for goodness sake. It’s so transparent that it’s not about her—and if you think she’ll be happy when she finds out the full truth, you’re a bigger fool than I ever raised you to be.”
She was right, of course: Julia wasn’t happy to think there was anything more to this than a simple case of a debt owed, and she had no idea what the full story was.
How did I make her see that she was no longer exclusively connected to whatever situation existed with her parents—that she hadn’t been since she flung that shoe at me and I wanted to hurt myself for the little flash of defiant fear in her eyes? I hadn’t managed to explain myself well to her yet at all; there was too much additional context she did not have. But if she had gone back to her parents of her own free will, she would probably have pushed for any answers they could provide, and I believed they would give them to her.
And if she had not, if this was a return kidnapping, then none of this was so important anyway. There was every chance the Mahoneys would hurt Julia for her part in this situation, to get back at me.
I would not go directly to the Mahoney residence, after all. They would recognise the cars I used, and I didn’t want to tip them off that I cared enough to rush to her side. I would call in on a favour with someone none of them knew I worked with.
“Devin?” Mother was peering into my face. “Are you listening to me? You need to let this girl go. If you are so desperate for a wife, there’s no trouble arranging that.”
“I’m not desperate for a wife.” I pulled out my own phone, checked a note saved. The contact I needed was saved only in my own head, and I had a complicated keying system to help me remember. “I intend to marry her.”
And Mother kept talking as if she thought this was still a discussion we were having. “It’s not that I gave her no chance to prove she could be a good match for you. I considered her on her own merits, and she proved to have few.”
“It’s an understandable conclusion to draw, Mother. She is inexperienced, unrefined in many ways. But we all must start somewhere. She has many admirable qualities, and will show even more if she is allowed.” I felt bad saying it. I had made the mistake of withholding that permission: I had expected her to grow, but had given her no guidance in figuring out the direction. I’d treated her potential to figure it out for herself as a test. It must have seemed like an unsolvable puzzle to her. And to think some of the men I spent time with complained women were complicated…
I was about to put my phone away, when I received a text whose sender raised my eyebrows immediately.
Hello, Devin. I’ve been thinking, and I’ve decided it just isn’t going to work out between us. Sorry I don’t have the courage to tell you in person. I did everything you asked though so I think it’s only fair you pay me what we agreed on. I’ll send you my bank details. Sorry, I just don’t want to face you again.
The message with the promised details arrived while I was reading, and once I’d checked that there was one final message.
Tell Caroline I’m sorry I disappeared on her while we were out yesterday. She was a good friend to me and only trying to help.
“Caroline?” Mother was reading over my shoulder. “Why did she never say anything? Did she think she would be in trouble for losing the girl?”
“Oh I don’t think it’s nearly so wholesome as that.” Now I was certain I could see what was going on here. They thought they had sent me something that would complete the narrative they wanted to push, but they weren’t smart enough about it. “This was definitely not sent by Julia. She couldn’t type in a fully-realised sentence to save her life.” It had irked me, all the lowercase and her writing u and i everywhere, but now I was glad she wrote in a way so distinctive I had noticed. “And as for your question… I think Caroline knows a lot more about Julia’s disappearance than she wants either of us to realise.”
Mother wasn’t stupid. I didn’t need to join the dots any further for her. “Caroline always acted like she was excited to have Julia join the family, more than I was certainly. I don’t understand why she would turn on her like this.”
I slipped my phone out of sight. “You know her better than I do. Maybe she’s been promised a cut of the profits from this scam.”
I didn’t know whether it was stupidity or something more honourable, but Julia had never seemed to care that much about the money after we’d made the arrangement. She hadn’t seen me as any of the opportunities I could provide her, actually. And that just made me feel worse about letting her down to this point. There was no doubt in my mind now, she had not left by choice, and I had neglected my responsibility to protect her for my own selfish reasons, trusting family members who had their own games to run.
I should have known better. I acted like Julia was the one who needed to prove her sense and stability before I gave her more information… but here I was showing how easily I could make the most rookie of errors.
“At this point, if you’re interested in helping it might be reasonable for you to get in touch and ask her some questions,” I sa
id. “But not too probing, we don’t want her to blurt out the truth unless she’s having a change of heart. I can’t have anyone getting wise to my plans.”
Mother shifted on her feet. “What are your plans, Devin?”
“If I told you,” I said, not caring what I implied at this point, “it would defeat the purpose, wouldn’t it?”
Chapter Eighteen
I was ashamed of myself, but I spent about an hour in tears after they finally left me alone, shut into my room. The message they had sent to Devin made me sick. It was the way they’d looked as they took turns typing out the sentences, sniggering like teenagers delivering a sick burn over IM. Either he would send the money as requested to be done with the situation, and probably never think of me again except with contempt… or he might try to find me to thrash it out in person, in which case my parents were probably going to do something terrible to him.
The only solution was to get away, but when they were still in the house with me and I couldn’t climb out the window without alerting them, there didn’t seem to be a lot of options available. I was done with them, but not to the point where I would break their kneecaps or anything.
A knock at the door, dimly echoing through the rest of the house, had me on edge. As bad as it would be for me, I’d hoped he would just send the money and cut his losses.
But it couldn’t be Devin. As far as he should have known once he realised I’d ‘left’, I was most likely to have gone back to our usual house. The only other thing like a home I’d ever had. Then again, Devin probably knew exactly what other property my parents owned, and he just had to be smart enough to guess I hadn’t gone with them of my own free will to know he had to be careful.
I heard my father, dealing with some bewildered-sounding man who explained he’d just moved into the area. That happened fairly frequently when we were out here: regular idiots who’d just saved up enough money to get a shack in the area would think they were making a ‘tree change’ to some place where everyone was a stereotypical character on an Aussie TV show and actually wanted to be in all their distant neighbours’ business.
Then a tap on my window had me diving behind the foot of my bed. I peeked through the bars of the bedframe when no follow-up sound came… and popped right up in shock when I saw Devin standing out there.
He made an impatient gesture at the window, and I hurried to open it even though I had no idea how he was going to handle the alarm going off. I just had to trust that he would be able to manage whatever happened.
But when I unlatched the window and swung the two halves out, immediately taking five steps backwards into the room, the only sound that came in was a clearer version of our new neighbour’s spiel about his plans to install a security gate. Devin stared at me in silence for a moment, an uninterrupted vista of splendid suited man, and then climbed in through the window into the space I had vacated.
He closed and latched the window, pulled the little lace curtain that balanced the provision of light and privacy, and turned back to me.
“We will have to be quiet, Julia. I don’t intend for your parents to be aware I am here until I am ready.”
The clingy visitor who wasn’t put off by my anticharismatic dad. The silent alarm. I wondered just how deep Devin’s plans for dealing with this situation went.
Then all my courage abandoned me, and I flung myself at Devin, wrapping my arms around wherever I could and nuzzling into the nook provided by the closing V of his suit jacket. The thing was, I sensed immediately that I was getting far closer than I had before. It was like my angles suddenly matched all of his much more perfectly, instead of him turning every possible way to dislodge me. I could feel his heartbeat, strong and regular against my ear, and the warmth from his body warmed me as he folded his arms over my back.
“I never wanted to just leave like that,” I murmured. “And I would never have demanded money from you if I did.”
“We did agree that money was yours,” said Devin. “I would not have judged you harshly for insisting on it, but I realise you did not, would not, and that is a piece of the puzzle you are to me.”
“I’ve always tried to be straightforward,” I protested, stepping back.
Devin nodded. I couldn’t tell if he was agreeing with what I had said or simply taking it in. “I have probably not understood you as well as I could have. Certainly I did not appreciate how significant it was for you to have maintained such humanity in the family you have grown up in.”
I stifled the laugh his words surprised out of me. “If you see humanity in me then I think you still don’t understand what I am.”
“No, I understand very well. You are trapped in the middle of two worlds, and you will never be able to reach either from where you have started. That is what I saw in you from our first meeting—and I think you have come to understand that the same is true of me. If we are together, and not at odds, we can construct a world for ourselves that will protect us from those other worlds neither of us completely fits into.”
He put his hands on my shoulders and walked me back, leading me over to my bed. Even his posture when he sat alongside me was different to how he had sat next to me before.
I found now that I was the wary one. Why were we not getting as much distance as we could from my parents while they were unaware of what was going on? There could be no good outcome from confronting them at this point.
“So,” I spoke up, pushing through my suddenly dry, croaky throat, “when does your second kidnapping of me start?”
“I am going to walk out of your bedroom with you for the second time,” Devin said. “I will show them as many times as it takes that I can make our situation personal if they insist on making it personal.”
“So it is personal,” I observed.
Devin cocked his head, listening. Now distant again, the voice of the ‘neighbour’ droned on. “We only have a short time to cover this,” he said.
“I don’t understand why they are letting him go on like that.” I couldn’t help putting the question out there. “They usually won’t allow anyone to waste their time.”
“I’ve instructed him to drop a lot of hints about how much money he’s packing. A friendly idiot with a lot of millions to throw around… of course they’ll listen for almost as long as he wants to talk.”
“You have a plan in every situation,” I marvelled. “Okay, Devin… tell me this truth you were too afraid to reveal before.”
He gave me a sharp look. “I did not think it was the right time to share everything. You were struggling to cope with the world outside the home you’d always known, and…” He began to fidget with the collar of his jacket. “I did not consider myself ready to reveal everything.”
I stiffened as his hands moved lower, and began to work on his belt buckle. Suddenly, I was having a terrible flashback to the encounter with the man who had tried to assault me, the way he had looked as he revealed what Devin had done to him. A strikingly brutal punishment from a man who seemed to believe in second chances.
When his hands swivelled to pull down his suit pants on his left side, I let out a breath I had been all too aware I was holding.
The mark, when revealed, was a little below his hipbone, and though it was slightly misshapen and blurred, like it had been stamped down twice, I recognised it. The same mark was carved into a plaque that sat on our mantel at home, on my parents’ letterhead. I had a necklace with the symbol turned into a charm that hung off it, but I didn’t like gold so it had slowly sifted its way to the bottom of my box of trinkets.
I understood now what had been on the edge of my understanding some days earlier: it was a mark for my family like the marks Devin had for each side of his family, though somehow I’d never put the pieces together to see it that way. I always assumed it was some symbol my parents had found and tried to adopt into their lives, the way they tried to take on other things they thought made them appear trendy. It was stupid and ugly anyway: a hypnotic swirl in a circle,
divided by arcs sweeping from near the centre to the edge. Like a symbolic depiction of a fan. If we’d had some sort of ‘Mahoney symbol’, designed only for us, I would have expected my parents to induct me into it so I knew what I was looking at.
These thoughts went through my head as I stared at the scar Devin had been so careful to not let me see or touch. But I couldn’t wrap my head around what all of this signified.
“My adolescence was in some ways a polar opposite to yours,” Devin said. “I had many cousins, and once I got to an age where I could be trusted to follow instructions, they were always trying to get me in on their schemes. I wasn’t old enough to question some of the things they had me do, of course, so I was very useful to them. And one day they had me along on this scheme they were running where they… I honestly can’t remember the details, but there’d been some conflict between the Mahoneys and some other family, not a tremendous surprise given who they are, and my cousins were keen to sow some chaos by getting the lot of them even more riled up at one another.”
I wondered if this was the first thing Devin had ever forgotten.
“I was ten,” Devin said. “Mahoney figured out some of what was up—it might have been the only time he ever had a really good clue—and when my cousins sent me to scout things out, he was waiting for me. Grabbed me and dragged me into the house. I don’t think it was the same house that you live in now, it was in a more rural area like this. You were there, a baby practically.”
This was an unexpected turn to the story. I stared very hard at Devin, trying to bring back any part of that long-ago first meeting. But if he had been ten then I would have been no more than four years old, and the more I focused on the idea the less confident I was that I knew anything.
The house he mentioned, on the other hand… “We lived up north for a while, when I was younger. Quite a long way from here. I barely remember that house though, I don’t think it’s still in the family.”