Chapter 42 - And Along Came Susan
Anne felt she had travelled as far along the path as Marks words would take her in the search for Cathy. She was a highly significant person in Mark’s life, as evidenced by the pages he had written about her. But she appeared for but a short time, bright though her impression was, seen like a shooting star lighting the night sky. And, once gone, no shadow of her presence remained.
But Mark’s diary story still had fifty pages to run, concluding with Susan, who occupied most of the last thirty pages, only finishing on the last night. So Anne had two tasks yet to do to complete telling the story in this ‘Diary of the Lost Girls’ the title her mind had assigned Mark’s book.
The first was to come to know Susan through Mark’s eyes, in the hope that this understanding might give some further insights into what followed. Some of Susan’s reactions and actions were surely driven by the Mark she had discovered in the month period in which she had known him. Perhaps this book would even give clues to where Susan went in the end.
Anne did not believe this, but felt she still must search it, just in case. More, she felt she had to try to understand the contradictions at the heart of this story. Why, for all but one day, had he treated her as a most loved person, but for a final day he treated her as an animal, trussed as wild and dangerous. He made her believe he killed others and would do the same to her, that he would callously murder her and give her body to the crocodiles. He let her spend a day and night in abject terror believing this. Her fear was so real, that she had killed him, seeing this as her only escape. But, when this was done, she stayed fiercely loyal to him and his memory, seeking for his name to remain unsullied.
Anne thought it was in part to protect her unborn children, but she was sure it was more than that. What happened on that last day and night was an enigma within an enigma, the enigma of Mark, the why h did what he did, and within it the enigma of Susan, both before and after she killed him.
In Susan’s telling of the story, captured on the tape, this part was most scant. She told in detail of the phone texts, she told of Mark tying her up, carrying her locked in the cooler box, of becoming his lover again on the last night in which she was a willing participant. She told how he returned her to captivity with the apparent intent of her death, after he told her his life story. She told finding the knife, using her seductive powers to lower Mark’s defences, seizing the opportunity to end it by ending him, the knife and the branch her weapons. She told of dragging his body to the billabong, not sure if he was really dead, and of watching the feeding frenzy as three crocodiles tore his body, limb from limb, until only blood and tiny scraps of flesh remained in the water. Then she told how she systematically hid all evidence of them being in this place, so all that remained was the box of buried passports and a few metal objects consigned to various watery graves. Last she told of how she had driven to Darwin, cleaned and left the car, and flown home, maintaining a fiction that all this had never been.
The chronology of this story was complete and verified. But something was missing, that ongoing story of ‘Why?’
Why had he treated her one way and then another, why had she done the same, what drove these reversals. Was it just two crazy irrational people or was there a layer of this story still hidden, a Russian Doll within a Russian Doll. Anne did not know if this book would give her the clues she sought but her job was unfinished until she tried to discover them. So she read and reread these last fifty pages, over and over, seeking understanding that refused to come.
Still gradually two things became clear, that there was no evidence of any girls after Cathy before Susan, whereas, before, brief presences of many were dotted through the narrative, most came and went quickly for temporary visits, a night or two, at most a week. He described these freely and intimately but with little emotion, “she was a good lay” was the sort of way he spoke.
Cathy seemed a shadow of his love and friendship with Belle. This seemed to give him a measure of forgiveness for his past. And it seemed she left him with a promise, the new Queen would come.
After Cathy was gone a year passed until Susan came. In the next twenty pages of notes there was no female presence, the story seemed to be mostly records of work and trips abroad, odd mentions of Vic and Buck, but mostly he was in the Middle East. It seemed he was there doing something significant, perhaps a major work project there though it seemed more of the nature of a search for an unnamed thing or person. At its end this part suggested he had found what he sought.
Returning from a final trip, he wrote, “It is done. Search over. I am glad.”
The day after this was written Susan appeared, glimpsed through trees on a beach in Cairns. She appeared ‘Goddess like’, and almost immediately it was clear he had found his new queen, successor of Elin, to whom he once promised an inheritance of a desert kingdom. This time an inheritance was given, written in a will, though Susan never saw it and its fate was unknown.
Last time the Queen died, this time it was his turn instead.
She killed the king and yet remained loyal, strange indeed!
Anne saw the pattern like an ancient prophecy, predicted and fulfilled. But she did not understand why one or both must choose to die.
It seemed like the Abraham story, with a life sacrifice at its heart. But it was not set in Old Testament times when God and man walked side by side.
Part 8 - The Emptiness
Lost Girl Diary Page 46