The Wife and the Widow

by Christian White

  She noticed her phone buzzing softly from inside the handbag she’d slung over the side of the chair. There were two missed calls from Fisher. He was probably wondering where she’d got to. ‘I have to go. Thank you for your time.’

  He looked at her longingly for a moment. Did he want her to stay, or did he want something from her?

  ‘What is it?’ she asked.

  ‘Dad’s obituary,’ he said, sheepishly shifting his weight from his left foot to his right. ‘Mind if I hang onto it?’

  There was a good chance David Stemple’s obituary was evidence, but then she thought of how Eckman had said John’s body belonged to the police – how it had made her feel. She took the folded paper from her pocket and placed it on the coffee table, between an empty cup of stale noodles and the glass bong.

  Marcus nodded his thanks from the kitchen doorway, and asked, ‘Why did you come here?’

  ‘To figure out John’s connection to your father,’ she said, honestly.

  ‘If you have a theory, I’d love to hear it.’

  As it happened, she did have a theory. From the outside looking in, she must have looked cool and composed, but inside, her mind was scrambling like a crab.

  ‘When John was younger, he started having these nightmares,’ she started. ‘Worse than nightmares, actually. Night terrors. It turned into a full-blown sleep disorder, and he started seeing things. Hallucinations. He saw a man with…’

  ‘What?’ Marcus asked.

  She remembered the sketches she found in John’s notepad, remembered the Visitor – a heavy black jacket, a pair of tennis sneakers, and—

  ‘Moths,’ she said. ‘He saw a man with moths spilling out of a split in his head.’

  Marcus said nothing. He didn’t move a muscle. He didn’t even blink. He just waited silently for Kate to go on.

  ‘I think John knew something, or saw something, or heard something, or discovered something. Whatever it was, he must have supressed it for a while, learned to live with it.’

  ‘For a while?’

  ‘Your mother’s death was the leaf that dammed the stream,’ Kate whispered dreamily, recalling Holly Cutter’s words. ‘When Annabel died, John turned dark. He didn’t tell me about it. He didn’t tell anyone about it. But he must have come back to Belport to work through that darkness. I think that’s why he came to see you, and I think that’s what got him killed. John had information about your father’s killer.’

  Marcus exhaled, long and slow, like a deflating air mattress. ‘If your husband had evidence that would help solve the murder, he was about two decades too late.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘My dad’s murder isn’t unsolved,’ he said. ‘They caught the guy who did it a few days after it happened. He’s serving twenty-five-to-life at South Hallston Correctional Facility.’

  Kate’s mind was floundering, but it caught onto a single word. ‘Did you say Hallston? H-A-L-L-S-T-O-N?’

  * * *

  Fisher was standing beneath the awnings outside his room at the Blue Whale Motor Inn, staring into the cold rain.

  ‘I’ve been trying to call you,’ he said when Kate parked the car and climbed out, hurrying under the awnings to join him. ‘Where were you?’

  ‘With Marcus Stemple,’ she said.

  ‘Stemple? As in…’

  ‘David Stemple’s son.’

  As the rain grew heavier, she explained what she had learned from her visit with Marcus. Fisher lit a fresh cigarette, smoked and listened.

  ‘My God,’ Fisher said when she was finished. He frowned, searching his memory. ‘I remember there was a man who was murdered here, but I never knew the victim’s name. Or, at least, I didn’t know it til now. When was the obituary from? 1995?’

  ‘August 1996.’

  He nodded. ‘1996. It was big news. He was a holiday resident, like us, killed by a local man – God knows what Stemple was doing here in August. Still, people saw it as an attack against tourists, and the day tourists stop coming to Belport is the day it may as well sink into the ocean.’

  For the most part, Belportians treated Kate kindly during her stays, but there was a palpable tension below the surface. Smiles and greetings often felt hollow, there were heavy sighs behind her in the long line at the Buy & Bye, and the occasional hand-painted sign hung outside a shop on Bay Street that read, LOCAL PARKING ONLY. The locals needed tourists, but that didn’t mean they had to like them.

  ‘We spent the next few summers up in Noosa after it happened,’ Fisher said. ‘But eventually we went back. It wasn’t quite the canary down the coalmine some people thought, but Belport was never really the same after that. John would have been a teenager when it happened. I’m surprised he even remembered it, so I can’t imagine why he’d be so … invested in the family.’

  Invested was a polite way to put it. Obsessed might have been more accurate.

  ‘Is it possible he witnessed something?’ Kate asked.

  ‘It was the off-season; we weren’t even here.’ He looked at her, held her gaze a second, then turned back to the rain. ‘It’s time for me to go home, Kate. That’s why I called you. There’s nothing left to do here, and Pam needs me. She’s … she’s not coping. Not that she’d ever admit that, but I can tell. You don’t have to come with me; I can catch the ferry back to the mainland and the bus home after that, but I think you should.’

  He didn’t add, Mia needs you, but Kate was pretty sure he was thinking it. Instead, he gazed into the rain and did something startling: he smiled. It had been a long time since she’d seen him smile, long even before John disappeared. ‘Before you got here, I was thinking about the time John fell asleep during mass. Did he ever tell you about that?’

  ‘No,’ Kate said, but now she was smiling. Whatever it was that Fisher had caught, it was contagious.

  ‘It was the night after his high-school graduation, and he was wildly hungover,’ he said. ‘He couldn’t keep his eyes open. Usually it wouldn’t be so bad, because Pam gets so wrapped up at mass that you could strip naked and run up and down the aisles and she wouldn’t notice. But John started snoring. Then, before Pam could say anything, Father Chang stopped halfway through his sermon, looked at John, and said, I’ve always encouraged young John to follow his dreams, but this isn’t what I had in mind.’

  Fisher laughed. It sounded so unfamiliar.

  ‘Do you remember his apartment in Elwood?’ Kate said. ‘The first time I ever went around there, the kitchen looked spotless. But when I opened a cupboard to look for a glass, I saw he’d just stashed all his dirty dishes under the sink.’

  Laughing, Fisher asked, ‘What did you say?’

  ‘Nothing. I just shut the cupboard door and acted like nothing had happened. But when we got a place together, I made sure it had a dishwasher.’

  ‘When John brought his first girlfriend home to meet us, he called ahead first. They’d been dating nearly four months, so it seemed like things were looking serious. But when he called ahead, he told us that she thought his name was James. She must have misheard it when they first met or something, and rather than correcting her, he just let her keep calling him James.’

  ‘No!’

  ‘Swear on my life,’ he said. ‘It gets worse: he was calling ahead to ask that when she was around we all call him James too!’

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘What could we do? We called him James the whole time. Thankfully it didn’t last too long!’

  He threw his head back, tears in his eyes, shaking his head. It felt good to watch him laugh, and even better to laugh herself. Slowly though, reality drifted in again, like tear gas.

  ‘I wish he’d let me in,’ she said, driving a dagger into the heart of Fisher’s good mood. ‘Whatever he was chasing out here, I just wish he’d asked for help.’

  Fisher’s smile vanished. ‘He did.’

  ‘He did what?’ she asked.

  ‘John called me, Kate. On the morning he left to come here. I didn’
t know it at the time, but I checked it against my phone log later. He told me he was on his way to the airport, that he was about to fly out to London for the palliative care research colloquium. The same lie he told you. But he was quiet, and strange.’

  ‘Strange how?’

  ‘You were married to my son long enough to know he rarely went directly at a thing. He danced around a subject until you talked it out of him. He was doing the same dance when he called. There was something on his mind. He … wanted to talk.’

  He dropped each word slowly, like stones from a bridge, watching them tumble through the air and disappear in a splash.

  ‘I was at Woolworths with a shopping list as long as my arm,’ he went on. ‘I was in the pasta section, trying to find something that was gluten-free because Pam’s been on a no-gluten diet and those labels are so small, and I’d been getting calls from the Porsche club all morning because the new president is a bloody fool and … I was busy, Kate. Too busy to talk to my son. If I had acted like his father … Instead, I acted like mine.’

  Be a man, Kate thought.

  ‘This isn’t on you, Fisher,’ Kate said. ‘It’s not on me, either. Like you said, he had friends, colleagues, Pam. He had a support network that he chose not to use. That can’t be on us.’

  Fisher dabbed his eye with the sleeve of his jacket. ‘He was lucky to have you, Kate.’

  ‘He was lucky to have both of us,’ she said.

  He put his hands into the pockets of his jacket and turned to head into his motel room. ‘Will you be ready to leave in the morning?’

  ‘I’ll ride over with you on the ferry and drop you at the train station in Geelong,’ she said. ‘But I’m going to stay for another day or two.’

  ‘Are you sure that’s the right decision?’

  ‘Marcus mentioned something I want to look into on the mainland. Do you remember the Post-it Note we found in the kitchen of the holiday house, S. Hallston, 2pm? Turns out, S. Hallston isn’t a person. It’s a place.’

  She wasn’t through chasing John’s ghost yet.

  24

  THE WIFE

  Abby was shown into a small, featureless room at Belport Police Station. The walls were stark and there were no windows. A single light globe buzzed overhead, locked inside a small metal cage. There was a steel table in the middle of the room, and two white plastic chairs on either side. She sat down and waited for her husband.

  Ray was led in close to twenty minutes later, looking ghoulish, smelling of wet dog and week-old jeans. He was dressed in a faded grey T-shirt and loose-fitting trackpants – the clothes he was wearing at the time of his arrest – but his shoes were gone. Instead, he wore socks and blue paper slippers, which made him look almost whimsical. His eyes were like a rain-drenched sheet of glass.

  He sat down across from her, frowned and said, ‘Hi, babe.’

  ‘Are you okay?’ she asked.

  He shrugged. ‘I just spoke to the lawyer, Bob. He thinks they’ll be moving me soon, ahead of the trial. He wants to sit down with you next week to go through everything, so I gave him your details.’

  She was trying to listen to every word but found them hard to grasp. This couldn’t be their life. It was as if he was describing something he heard from a friend of a friend about an unlucky family whose life had been derailed.

  She placed her hand on the steel table, open-palmed, waiting for Ray’s. He didn’t offer it.

  ‘How are the kids?’ he asked.

  ‘Confused, angry, but not necessarily in that order,’ she said.

  He seemed reluctant to ask the next question but asked it anyway. ‘How are you?’

  ‘Confused, angry, but not necessarily in that order,’ she repeated. ‘I came in here wondering if I should apologise – for hounding you, for digging your clothes out of the garbage, for suspecting you in the first place.’

  ‘I took my own bucket down the well, Ab.’

  ‘You’re fucking right you did. I am sorry about those things, Ray, but what you did is so far beyond any of that. What you did is beyond real life and…’

  ‘… What?’

  ‘It might be beyond forgiveness, Ray.’

  He bowed his head, stared hard at his fingernails. There was a pale white ring where his wedding band used to be. The police must have removed it. She imagined him getting handed a small yellow envelope sometime in the future, when they were on the other side of this thing. The ring would be inside. He’d take it, turn it over in the palm of his hand, then slip it on.

  Will it still fit? She wondered. And when will that be? Ten years, twenty, fifty?

  ‘You know what really pisses me off?’ Abby asked. ‘What really pisses me off is, I still love you. I still love the hell out of you, in fact.’

  ‘I love the hell out of you too,’ he said.

  They looked at each other across the steel table. Abby felt a deep and helpless longing, down in her bones. She’d never felt anything like it.

  ‘Are they listening to us?’ she asked, checking the corners for security cameras or listening devices.

  ‘It doesn’t matter if they are,’ Ray said. ‘I told them everything. I told them the truth.’

  ‘You told them you killed that man,’ she whispered.

  ‘… Yes.’

  Never had a single word hit her so hard. If she hadn’t been sitting down, she might have collapsed. She pictured an egg that could never be un-scrambled, a glass that could never be un-shattered.

  ‘You look like you were expecting another answer,’ Ray said. ‘But you knew, Ab. You knew the whole time. So why do you seem so surprised?’

  ‘Because I once saw you weep without shame during an airline ad. I’ve seen you add lavender oil to your bathwater. I’ve heard you laugh like a crazy person when you watch Funniest Home Videos. Because it’s you. Because even after everything, all I wanted was for you to tell me I was wrong. This whole time, that’s all I wanted.’

  She closed her eyes. Hot, salty tears had come to them, pulled from some deep, black well. They fell down her cheeks in fat, unapologetic drops. ‘Why did you do it?’

  Ray folded his hands on the table, looked Abby in the eyes and began to talk.

  ‘Let me start with those magazines you found,’ he said. He paused, as if he was expecting the right words to arrive when he needed them. Then, perhaps realising what Abby already knew – that there were no right words – he shook his head and pressed on. ‘I’ve always been attracted to women, so it’s not like I’m, you know…’

  ‘Gay.’

  He nodded. ‘Those magazines were just something I was curious about. I suppose part of me has always … worried I was that way inclined. I mean … I’m sorry, this is so fucking hard.’

  Abby thought about Bobbi’s rainbow flag analogy.

  ‘You were curious about your sexuality,’ she offered. ‘That’s fine, Ray. That’s normal. I don’t think anyone’s really all the way straight or gay. But have you ever acted on your curiosity? I’m not talking about looking at a bunch of skin-mags. That, I’d call research. But have you ever taken that research into the field, so to speak?’

  Ray’s face reddened. He shook his head. ‘Not until David Stemple.’

  Abby leaned back in her chair, almost instinctively, as if bracing herself for what was about to come.

  ‘Most days I eat my lunch down at Beech Tree Landing,’ Ray said. ‘I park at the top of the furthest boat ramp, eat my ham-and-cheese, drink my coffee. Sometimes I listen to talkback, but mostly I just watch the water. It’s peaceful down there. At least, it used to be.’

  ‘I didn’t know you did that,’ Abby said. ‘Why don’t you come home for lunch?’

  He shrugged. ‘I haven’t been happy for a while, Abby. It’s got nothing to do with you or the kids. You, Eddie and Lori are my everything, you know that. But when I’m in that house, all I think about are the mortgage repayments, and the bills, and all the broken things that need fixing, and all the renovations we said we’d do.’


  He closed his eyes and took a long moment before continuing.

  ‘Home makes me think about work, which is all I ever seem to do. Every day, every season, every year, and our savings account sits at below zero, and our debt just seems to get bigger. And I know that’s just, life or whatever, but sometimes it feels like trying to knock over a brick wall by tossing eggs at it. I’ve watched rich fucking tourists descend on this island every year since I was a kid. They spend their money and we circle like the seagulls and then they get to do what I never have. They get to leave, Abby.’

  He smiled sadly. ‘Sometimes I’d imagine the ferry coming in to dock at the old terminal – the little rickety old thing they used when I was a kid. It could barely fit half-a-dozen cars, and there was no lounge or cafe. There were just a couple of plastic chairs, a vending machine and the water. Me and Mum would go to the mainland once a month or so, and I’d sit with my feet dangling over the railing, watching for dolphins. Nine times out of ten I’d see them too. Most days, when I’m eating my lunch, I imagine that old ferry coming in to dock, and I imagine myself getting on it, chugging off the island, on and on into the sunset.’

  ‘Why haven’t you ever talked to me about this?’ Abby asked.

  ‘Come on, Abby, I’m not one of your girlfriends. I’m not Bobbi. Men aren’t like that.’

  The light globe above their head flickered.

  Ray cleared his throat and continued. ‘The day it happened, I was having my lunch at the landing as usual. That’s when he turned up. David Stemple. I didn’t know that was his name then, and I didn’t know it was the same guy who’d called looking for a caretaker. All I knew was he was driving a fifty-thousand-dollar car and looked like he’d never worked a day in his life. He parked his car right next to my truck. There must be fifty slots down there, all of them empty, but he parked right beside me. Thinking back, I guess that’s code or something.’

  ‘Code?’

  ‘When he got out, he looked over at me, right in the eyes, and nodded. It wasn’t until he got halfway out to the ferry terminal and looked back that I realised what he wanted from me, until I remembered what people use that place for.’