The Wife and the Widow

by Christian White

  She sighed. ‘Fine. Dad was up super early again this morning, and I get up super early to pee, and I guess I thought you guys must be fighting or something because when I went to the bathroom door, I heard him…’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I don’t want to say.’

  ‘Ew, Lori.’

  ‘God, yuck, no, nothing like that.’

  ‘Then what?’ Abby asked.

  ‘Maybe I was just hearing things, but I’m pretty sure he was … crying’.

  * * *

  Ray didn’t cry. Lori must have been hearing things, and if she wasn’t, then there were a million logical explanations. The trouble was, right now, as Abby drifted from room to room in her empty home, she couldn’t think of one.

  There was plenty to be done around the house: laundry to fold, firewood to chop, The Buck River Murders to read, a possum to skin and stuff, but the thought of spending the day inside filled Abby with a heavy, mysterious sadness, so instead she decided to head out for another run.

  A few minutes into her usual route, her lungs grew hot and raspy, her breathing shallow. If she didn’t take it down a notch she’d be hurting for a week, but she couldn’t bring herself to stop. When she eased her stride or slowed down to avoid a clump of driftwood, dark thoughts of Ray caught up with her, clapped down around her shoulders like a wet jacket.

  First, Ray had told her he was working on Eileen Betchkie’s house, which Eileen disputed. Then he was crying in the bathroom. Something was up. Something bad, and Abby hoped to God it had nothing to do with another woman.

  She arrived at the seawall, stood beneath the Fun Prohibited sign and wanted to retch. She doubled over, gasping for air. She looked out over the water. Fog formed a white wall just beyond the buoys. For a second it felt like the mainland didn’t exist. She watched a pelican emerge from it like magic, drift by overhead, dropping a shit as it passed her.

  As she stood, she heard voices. There was a set of old stone steps that led up and over the seawall. On the other side was Beech Tree Landing, a series of concrete boat-launching ramps. That’s where the voices were coming from. She climbed the steps, peeked over the wall, and froze.

  ‘Holy fucking shit,’ she whispered. Her words caught on an arctic breeze and got carried away.

  There were five police cruisers in the expansive bitumen car park. Beyond them, parked across two of the extra-long spaces usually used to fit boat trailers, was a large white van emblazoned with the words Crime Scene Services. Forensics people, dressed in white coveralls and blue paper caps, scurried around with plastic ziplock bags and evidence boxes. Abby scanned the faces of the police, looking out for Bobbi’s, but all she saw were stern, unrecognisable officers.

  A police boat cruised in a slow arc around the ramps, bobbing and listing on the water. Two constables stood outside the main entrance to the boat ramps, standing guard. Both wore enormous, formless jackets with reflective strips sewn onto the sleeves. Neither were looking in her direction, but she kept her head down anyway, kneeling on the top step of the wall. It felt as though someone had built a movie set on her island.

  She watched a woman step down from the Crime Scene Services trailer, carrying a camera with a long lens and heavy-duty flash attached. She met a cluster of officers at the pier entrance.

  At the end of the pier stood the old ferry terminal, a dilapidated weatherboard structure that had been abandoned and condemned a decade earlier when a state-of-the-art terminal was built around the corner in Elk Harbour. The waves and salty air had stained the walls of the building pale green, and its roof was Jackson Pollocked with bird shit.

  The woman, along with the other officers, walked out to the terminal and disappeared inside.

  This must have been why Bobbi was called here. Nothing good. Abby stared hard at the scene, actively storing each detail in her mind so she might compare notes with her later. There was a black museum in the dark stillness behind Abby’s eyes – and one behind most people’s eyes, she guessed – whose shelves were lined with Ann Rule and John Berendt, and whose walls were decorated with crime scene photos and portraits of serial killers.

  ‘—shouldn’t be here,’ a stern voice said, cutting through her thoughts. Abby had been so engrossed that she hadn’t noticed a police constable approach. He had one hand on his hip, the other on his holstered firearm. ‘Did you hear what I said?’

  ‘I…’

  ‘You need to leave,’ he said.

  ‘What happened here?’ she asked.

  The constable’s shaggy black eyebrows lifted into arches.

  ‘Nothing good,’ he said.

  He stood his ground and glared at her. Abby nodded, climbed back down the stone steps and onto the beach, leaving the crime scene behind her. She turned and jogged inland. She forgot all about what Lori had told her, and left feeling quietly thrilled.

  When she made it back to the top of Harvill Hill Road, she turned and looked over the water. The island ferry was coming in.

  9

  THE WIDOW

  The Island Ferry docked at Elk Harbour in Belport at twenty-five minutes after midday. The doors opened, lowering into a ramp, and spat the Lexus out like a dislodged chunk of meat. Kate and Fisher followed the road up and over the promenade, towards the town proper.

  ‘It’s been a long time since I’ve been back here,’ Fisher said, watching swatches of coastal woodland pass by the window. ‘I don’t know why anyone would live out here all year round. The isolation would drive me crazy.’

  ‘I’ve thought about it before,’ Kate admitted. ‘Every summer, the last weekend of our holiday, it’s all I can think about, actually. More for Mia than anything else. Kids grow up too fast nowadays. I always thought a childhood on the island would be simple, and humble, and…’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I was going to say, safe.’

  ‘Mm,’ he said. ‘I used to think that too.’

  They reached Bay Street, which was usually packed with tourists. Today, like the rest of Belport, it was grey.

  Most of the shops and restaurants they passed were shut until December: Island Gifts, where last year Mia bought a stuffed seal and about three dozen postcards she never sent; Pond & Beyond Seafood, who cooked a mean grilled blue grenadier and always threw in extra onion rings; and Belport Bike and Kayak Hire.

  The hardware store, laundromat and Buy & Bye were still open, but there was little movement inside. Kate’s car felt like the only thing in motion.

  ‘Do you need to stop for anything first?’ Kate asked.

  ‘No,’ Fisher said. ‘Let’s just get there.’

  ‘Are you alright?’

  He seemed surprised by the question. It probably wasn’t something he was asked often. ‘I think so. You?’

  ‘I think so. For now. I keep wondering how to explain all this to Mia. Best case scenario, we get to the house and find John camped out there, working through some stuff. What do I tell her? Daddy needed a holiday? How much am I supposed to protect her from?’

  ‘John was about her age when my mother passed away. He asked all sorts of strange questions. Would grandma get hungry underground? Would they poke holes in the top of the coffin so she could breathe? Stuff like that. It’s quite far from the same thing, but I think the most important thing is just to listen.’

  At the top of Bay Street, she took a left onto Ewing Street, then a right onto Double Bluff Road, which took her higher on the island. She came to a T-junction, then turned left onto Neef Street. She’d driven down this road countless times but couldn’t remember ever doing it without John or Mia. Driving along this street and looking at the neighbouring houses used to feel like coming home. Now it felt eerie and wrong. The slate-grey, cube-shaped mansion that she used to think was elegantly modern today looked like an invading alien spaceship. The sixteen-bedroom residence that once reminded her of Downton Abbey now looked haunted.

  Finally, they arrived at the holiday house. It was a California-style beach house, set back
from the road behind a tall wooden fence. It didn’t seem real; it looked like a replica of what had been there the previous summer. It might have been that she wasn’t used to seeing it in the off-season – the lawn was a little overgrown and the landscape gloomy – or it might now be coloured by all the dark things that had happened over the past few days.

  Has the house changed, she wondered, or have I?

  She pulled through the front gates and parked at the top of the driveway, behind a stand of white birch trees that looked much healthier than they had during their last hot summer. The driveway was empty, and she couldn’t see any lights on in the house. When she killed the engine, a hush fell over the world: no sound of distant traffic, no construction.

  There was a chill in the air. Kate had packed two winter parkas but she didn’t have time to fetch her suitcase. She wanted to get inside. She broke away from Fisher and hurried through the cold, then paused at the front door. She had brought the house key, but as far as she remembered it was the only one they kept in Caulfield. On a hunch, she reached beneath the front steps and found the plastic hide-a-key rock they kept for emergencies and visiting relatives. The rusty gold key was inside.

  She unlocked the front door, disarmed the alarm, and slipped inside. She hovered on the threshold a moment and performed a quick scan of the entrance. It took a few seconds for her eyes to adjust to the low light. All the blinds in the house were drawn, just as they’d left it on their last day of summer. She looked down. A business card had been flicked beneath the door – Sanctuary Security: we’ll keep you safe!

  ‘John,’ she called.

  There was no answer, so she went inside. Fisher followed her into the hall, then went upstairs to check the bedrooms.

  ‘John,’ he called. ‘Mate, are you here?’

  Kate went into the kitchen and, almost on instinct, checked the fridge. It was a hulking old thing, busy with magnets, and John had promised to replace it as soon as it gave up and died, but so far it had kept on trucking. Inside were some bottles of water, a few tubs of hummus and a litre of milk. She checked the use-by date: three days left. Beside the fridge, inside the microwave, was a tub of untouched mac’n’cheese.

  There was a brown shopping bag on the counter. Printed across one side were two interlocking Bs. Inside, she found Valerian capsules, chamomile tea, three different types of antihistamines, a litre bottle of Wild Turkey, water crackers, a five-pack of Mi Goreng instant noodles and a box of Frosties cereal.

  There was a yellow Post-it Note stuck to the counter by the phone. On it was written, S. Hallston 2pm. She had no idea who S Hallston was and no idea what to make of the note, but the handwriting was undoubtedly John’s. There it was, irrefutable proof that John had been here. This confirmation made her want to throw up and put her fist through a wall, but not necessarily in that order.

  She tiptoed through the downstairs hallway next, glancing through each door she passed, checking the rooms for any sign of a disturbance. Laundry, bathroom, toilet, guestroom. Each door had been slung wide open.

  She scanned the living room but there was no sign of him. She turned to leave, then hesitated, looking back into the room. Something was different, but she couldn’t pick it right away. A plasma screen and the spines of dozens of old DVDs and Blu-rays looked back at her from the large entertainment unit against one wall, opposite the fireplace. The three-piece sofa set was just as she remembered, as was the furry blue rug that Mia liked to stretch out on to watch TV. But something was different. She was sure of it.

  Then, it struck her. The far right corner of the living room had always been marked with dozens of people’s names and heights. They had inherited the wall with the house, and all the names along with it. It wasn’t just John, but John’s cousins and friends. As soon as Mia was old enough, John had marked her height each summer, and each summer Mia had marvelled at how much she’d grown. Two years ago, Mia had insisted Kate finally join the wall, and she had done so, proudly. But now, all the names and heights were gone. The wall was eggshell white, just like the rest of the room. It was as if she’d wandered into a parallel universe where everything was identical except for this one small, seemingly trivial detail.

  Kate dabbed her finger on the new paintjob: it was still slightly damp.

  ‘What have you been doing out here, John?’ she whispered.

  She left the room quickly, feeling spooked, and climbed the stairs to check the master bedroom. They had stripped the bed at the end of their last holiday, but it had since been roughly made. There was an unnatural yellow tint to the room; dull afternoon sunlight fell in through the curtains. It made the scene feel like a memory she wanted to walk into. If this were a movie, a flashback might have shown her and John lying in bed, spooning, making love or reading the Sunday papers.

  On the other side of the bed, below the window, she found John’s suitcase. She knelt, unzipped it. All the clothing she had thought he packed for London was there, washed and neatly folded. Trousers, shirts, socks, underwear and toiletries case. There was a black leather notebook wedged in a transparent compartment in the lid of the case. She took it out and leafed through the pages.

  It was full of drawings. Kate immediately recognised John’s untrained, slightly childish drawing style: lots of uneven narrow lines, hatched shading and muddled perspectives. But up until that point she’d only ever seen his doodles in the margins of the Sunday newspaper, little houses and transparent cubes. She had never seen him draw anything like this.

  He’d used coloured pencils – no doubt taken from Mia’s room – and all of them dark shades: blacks, heavy browns and deep reds. There were fifteen sketches in total, each showing the same scene: a dark, featureless room and a man with his face to the corner. Page by page, as in a flip-art book, the figure grew in detail, from a shadow to a man with short hair, tennis sneakers and an oversized black jacket. On the final four pages, a long, jagged crack formed on the man’s face. Small brown shapes were spilling out from inside.

  ‘Moths,’ she whispered, even though she wanted to scream. Then, from someplace deep in her mind, Holly Cutter said, Spiritual distress.

  As Kate closed the notebook and slipped it into her pocket, she felt the touch of a finger rest lightly on top of her head. Startled, she gasped and spun around. When she saw that nobody was there, she ran her hands through her hair. A chunk of dust came loose. It must have fallen from above.

  It drew her attention to the ceiling. There was a flat, rectangular manhole cover there that gave into a cavernous storage cavity in the roof. Mia called it the door to the roof, and when she was younger, believed the cavity was home to a hideous, child-eating gremlin. If the door was open, then the gremlin would slink down into the house at night and scramble down the hallway and into Mia’s bed.

  In the years of checking the ceiling door, it had only ever been open once – John had left it ajar after going up there to look for his old Sonic Youth CDs – until today. There was a pencil-thin space between the cover and the lip of the opening. There was no reason for John to go up there, but then again, there was also no reason for him to be in Belport.

  Kate remembered an article she’d read a few weeks earlier on Facebook. It was a news report about a man who lived alone in an apartment in Kyoto, Japan. When the man noticed food disappearing from the kitchen, he installed security cameras in every room of the apartment. When he sat down to watch the footage, it showed a woman creeping out of his hallway closet in the dead of night, eating food from the kitchen and using the bathroom. After he called the police, the woman was arrested. She claimed to have been living there for months.

  ‘Kate? Kate!’ Fisher called from across the hall. ‘Come here!’

  She followed his voice into Mia’s room, which was painted a bright blue. Fisher was standing in the corner, looking at something that was obscured from Kate’s view by a towering wardrobe. On top of the wardrobe was a large plastic tub full of Mia’s summer toys, and plastered on its big double doors
were posters of yoga cats.

  ‘What is it?’ she asked.

  ‘Does this look familiar?’ Fisher asked.

  She crossed the room, then stood, shocked. A single bed had been dragged towards the wall and dressed with crisp new white sheets. One area of the wall had been covered with soft green wallpaper. There was a bar fridge – God knew where from – and on it stood a menu for room service. On the menu was printed, High Holborn, London. She was looking at a set.

  ‘My God,’ she said. ‘It looks like a hotel room.’

  ‘I think that’s the point. Is this where he Skyped you and Mia from?’

  She tried to answer but the words caught in her throat. She had started to come to terms with the fact John lied to her about his trip to London, but seeing their daughter’s room set up like a TV set made the lie something more sinister. This was premeditated. Deliberate. Antagonistic. Like an animal sensing a predator, she had the sudden urge to run. In that moment, she wanted to sell the house and never go back. The buyer could keep the furniture, kitchenware, linen, swimsuits, toys and the fucking High Holborn hotel room – or they could burn it all.

  ‘I’m not sure what scares me most,’ she said. ‘The fact John snuck off to this place, or the fact he’s left in such a hurry. There are unpacked groceries in the kitchen and food in the microwave. Something bad has happened, Fisher.’

  Fisher’s phone rang. He whipped it out gunslinger-fast and slapped it against his ear.

  ‘Yes, hello, this is Fisher Keddie … Hello?’

  ‘Who is it?’ Kate asked.

  He strained to listen, then shook his head. ‘I don’t know. The reception’s terrible in here.’

  ‘It’s better on the back deck.’

  He nodded, then hurried out of the room. Kate moved to follow him, but paused at the small window that looked out over the front yard. There was a tall old beech tree just outside the glass that Mia had inexplicably named Simon. Usually all you could see was its canopy, but its leaves had dropped for winter, and now Kate could see through its skeletal branches all the way down the street.