The Wife and the Widow

by Christian White

  Abby remembered what Ray had told her at the kitchen table, when she’d asked him about the terminal being a gay beat. He’d gone on about the crocodile in Blue Lake, the lighthouse drug ring, the family of deformed dwarves that haunted the saltmarsh. Rumours are like holey buckets around here, he’d told her.

  ‘I can’t tell you exactly why I followed him into the ferry terminal,’ Ray said. ‘But I did. When I got inside, he was sort of lurking in the corner. He didn’t say anything to me, and I didn’t say anything to him. It was like some sort of base instinct took over. I went over to him. He…’

  ‘What, Ray?’

  ‘He put his hands on me. And for a couple of seconds, and that’s all it was, it felt right. But then all of a sudden, it didn’t. I saw that he was wearing a wedding ring, and I thought about what I was doing and about what I could lose if I did it. I thought about you, Ab.’

  ‘What happened next?’ she asked.

  ‘I can’t remember all the details. I know I pushed him away. At first, he didn’t want to take no for an answer, so I pushed him harder. He fought back. I lost control. I don’t know how else I can explain it. Something just flicked inside my head.’

  The Switch, Abby thought.

  ‘He must have got me on my back somehow, because that’s when I saw the brick,’ he said. ‘That’s when I—’

  ‘Stop,’ Abby said. ‘I don’t need to hear that part.’

  For a long moment, they said nothing. The silence between them grew like the distant scream of an air-raid siren. Abby read her husband’s face while processing everything he’d just told her. A single word emerged suddenly, breaking through the surface of her mind like a breaching whale.

  Bullshit.

  She didn’t believe his story. It wasn’t that she was in denial – at least that’s not how it felt. She knew it in her bones. Just as she had known he was lying to her at the foot of the fallen gum tree, she knew he was lying now.

  ‘Promise me something,’ Ray said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Survive. You, Lori, Eddie. Promise me.’

  ‘If there’s one thing this family knows,’ she said. ‘It’s how to survive.’

  * * *

  On her way out of the station, Abby noticed the woman she’d sold cigarettes to at the Buy & Bye. She was standing in a dimly lit alcove beside the front entrance, feeding change into a vending machine. A young boy was with her, clinging to the pocket of her jacket with one hand, with his other pressed against the glass, gazing in wonder at all the confectionary that hung beyond it. He couldn’t have been more than five or six, with jet-black hair and a ghostly face.

  ‘What can I get, Mum?’ he asked in a small voice.

  ‘Whatever you want, Marcus,’ the woman told him.

  As the boy scanned his options, his eyes widened. They were luminol blue.

  25

  THE WIDOW

  After dropping Fisher at the train station on the mainland, Kate carried on to the highway until she reached the exit for South Hallston. She had been behind the wheel for almost four hours. When the colossal concrete structure of South Hallston Correctional Centre appeared on the horizon, she felt a rush of nervous energy sweep through her until she could feel it in her fingertips.

  There was a line of vehicles banked up behind a bright-red boom gate built into the perimeter fence. A sign above the glass booth read: VISITOR SECURITY CHECKPOINT 1. Kate joined the queue. A motorbike with exaggerated handlebars pulled up behind her. The rider was a middle-aged woman in a tattered red leather jacket. She met Kate’s eyes through the rear-view mirror, then gave her engine a few obnoxious revs.

  The line moved slowly, as each driver’s ID was checked against the visitor list by a prison guard at the booth. Kate had called ahead to have her name added to the list, but there was still no guarantee Ray Gilpin would agree to meet with her. She might have driven all this way for nothing.

  ‘Good afternoon,’ Kate said when it was her turn at the booth. The prison guard was a chunky man in a black, short-sleeved work shirt and a white baseball cap with Corrections printed across the peak. A heater glowed behind him.

  Kate handed over her ID. He checked his computer screen, nodded, then gave it back. Chant-like, he said, ‘No hats no sunglasses no revealing clothing no gang colours no offensive language.’

  ‘No problem,’ she said.

  ‘Drive through please.’

  She did as she was told. The narrow road opened into a wide car park. She sat in the car for a few minutes, engine idling, watching the front door and mentally preparing herself for the gauntlet of security checks she was about to run, and the man waiting for her on the other side. Collecting herself, she walked towards the reception hall. It was stuffy and overheated inside and smelled like mice and man-sweat. The first thing she saw was a noticeboard beside the front desk. Pinned behind plexiglass were brochures and flyers offering legal advice, support groups and helplines. Someone had made a hand-painted sign in big green block letters.

  The idea of being with him tomorrow is enough to get me through today

  – Old Prison widow saying.

  Kate showed her ID to a prison guard behind the front desk, an almost impossibly pale man. He waved her into the next room, where a metal detector waited. After that came a sniffer dog, a personal search by a prison employee – ‘hair back, mouth open’ – and finally she had earned the coveted South Hallston Visitor Pass, displayed in a lanyard around her neck.

  Through a heavy glass door, Kate entered the visiting hall, where everything was bolted to the floor – the tables, chairs, even the vending machines. The walls were painted in soft pinks and blues to fool the inmates into believing they were trapped inside a creche and not a prison. She found a free table against the far wall and sat down, listening to the chatter of inmates and their visitors. The nervous excitement reminded her of the day at the airport.

  Soon, a man entered the hall and looked around, searching for someone. Kate was the only person sitting alone, and he caught her eye across the room. There was a flicker of something in his face – it might have been recognition, but she couldn’t be sure. She raised her hand in a brief wave and he began to shuffle towards her table. It made her picture an old boat drifting at sea with nobody inside.

  He was somewhere in his sixties but looked older than he should have. It wasn’t just his hair that had turned grey, but his skin too. He was clad in heavy denim and wore boots without laces. Deep wrinkles crisscrossed his forehead, and he was either bald or had shaved his head with a razor, or both. He was desperately thin, with coathanger shoulders and saggy jowls that dangled loose beneath his chin. He would be a tall man if he walked upright, Kate thought, but instead he walked with his shoulders slumped forward.

  He reached Kate’s table and regarded her with caution.

  ‘Are you Ray Gilpin?’ she asked.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Thank you for agreeing to meet with me.’

  He shrugged. ‘It’s not like I had to move anything around to fit you in.’

  He sat down and glanced around the hall, watching his fellow inmates and their visitors. The rumbling sound of their chatter filled the room.

  ‘Your name was Kate?’ he asked.

  ‘Kate Keddie,’ she said. ‘I think my husband came to see you recently. I’m not sure when, but it would have been sometime over the past few weeks.’

  He shook his head. His sagging jowls wobbled like a turkey neck.

  ‘Are you sure?’ Kate asked.

  ‘Positive. So, is that it?’

  ‘Can I show you a picture of him? Maybe it’ll jog your memory.’

  ‘My memory doesn’t need jogging. I can count the number of visitors I get on one hand.’ He raised his right hand into a two-fingered Scout salute. ‘Come to think of it, I don’t even need the full hand.’

  Several times on the long drive to South Hallston, Kate had doubted herself – it was a long way to come for some words scribbled on a Post-i
t Note – and she doubted herself again now. But she had shed her cocoon. She was something new now. Something stronger. ‘I know he came here to see you,’ she said coldly. ‘I just don’t know why. You can either tell me, or I can leave. But if I leave, my next stop is the police. They won’t have any trouble accessing visitor records, and then you can talk to them.’

  ‘The police?’

  ‘My husband is dead,’ Kate told him. ‘John was murdered on Belport Island a few days ago.’

  Ray flinched. His muscles tightened. ‘I had no idea…’ he said, looking past her. ‘How?’

  ‘Someone lured him to Beech Tree Landing,’ she said. ‘Then they slit his throat, close to the exact same spot where David Stemple was killed.’

  He met her eyes. ‘Jesus. I’m sorry to hear that.’ It sounded like he meant it.

  ‘He did come to see you, didn’t he?’ Kate asked.

  There was a moment of confused silence. Watching him, Kate felt sure he was about to deny all knowledge again. Then, unexpectedly, his face softened. He nodded and looked away.

  ‘Why did you—’

  ‘Look,’ he interrupted, ‘I’m sorry you’re going through this, but you’re not going to get any big revelations here. I hadn’t seen him in years.’

  ‘Years? You’d seen him before?’

  Ray made the face of someone who had just accidentally ruined a surprise party. He began speaking more cautiously. ‘He was one of the regular summer kids,’ he said carefully. ‘I did maintenance on a lot of the holiday places, so I knew most of them. By face, anyway.’

  Kate considered probing further, but she could see him closing up again. She had to get to the point before it was too late. ‘Why did John come to see you?’ she asked.

  He spread his fingers on the steel table and stared at them, as if feeling for vibrations from long ago. ‘To tell me David Stemple’s widow had died.’

  ‘Annabel,’ Kate offered.

  ‘She was younger than me, but she had issues with her lungs. Pulmonary something.’

  ‘Why would he do that?’

  ‘I wasn’t sure myself for a while,’ he admitted. ‘It wasn’t until after John left that I figured it out. I think he wanted me to know her suffering was over. Not just the pain of her illness, but the pain … the pain I caused her.’

  ‘John knew something about the murder, didn’t he?’

  Ray glanced over at the next table. Kate recognised the woman there; it was the motorbike rider who had followed her off the freeway on her growling, overstated machine. With her helmet gone, a head of stark white hair hung down over one shoulder. She sat across from a stocky inmate, who was leaning forward on his elbows, holding the woman’s hands tightly in his own. Both had stopped talking and were staring at her.

  She lowered her voice. ‘He had information about David Stemple. He witnessed something or knew something somehow.’

  ‘What makes you say that?’

  She thought about John’s night terrors, about the Visitor, and said, ‘It doesn’t matter. I’m right, aren’t I?’

  He closed his eyes and took his hands off the table, placing them under his legs. The white-haired biker at the next table was crying softly now, working up to a goodbye with the stocky inmate across from her. Ray watched them for a moment, frowning, then turned back to Kate.

  ‘I was never a big reader before,’ he told her. ‘But when I came here I started to read a lot. There’s not much else to do here, and not that many options in the library. I tried reading Tolstoy but couldn’t get into it. Vonnegut and Salinger were both pretty good. Didn’t mind Jane Austen either – bet you’re surprised to hear that one?

  Kate said nothing.

  ‘Right. Well, lately I’ve been having a read of some Greek mythology. Have you ever heard of Orpheus?’

  Kate shook her head.

  ‘In this story, Orpheus is married to a beautiful woman named Eurydice, but she’s bitten by a snake and dies, so Orpheus travels into the underworld to save her. Hades, the god of the underworld, agrees that Eurydice can follow Orpheus back to the realm of the living on one condition: as they walk through the caves, Orpheus can’t look back. Not once. So guess what old mate does?’

  ‘He looks back?’ Kate offered.

  ‘Orpheus looks back. Eurydice is pulled back into the darkness forever, while Orpheus is torn to shreds by vicious, hungry beasts. The story really got to me. I’m up for parole in fourteen weeks, three days, two hours and…’ He paused to look at the clock on the far wall. ‘Eighteen minutes. I’ve been in this place for more than two decades. Want to know how I survived?’

  ‘How?’

  ‘I stopped looking back. For the first few years it was hard to do anything else, but it got easier as time went on. Then, I hardly thought about the past at all. It might be denial, but it’s got me here in one piece, so who gives a shit what you call it.’

  ‘What’s this got to do with John?’ Kate asked.

  ‘When John came to tell me about Annabel Stemple’s death, I told him what I just told you: I’d stopped looking back a long time ago; he should stop looking back too.’

  Without another word, he stood up and walked away.

  26

  THE WIFE

  ‘I can’t be in this house right now,’ Lori said. Abby had returned home to find her waiting at the bottom of the stairs with her suitcase packed. She was draped in layers of black: torn black jeans, oversized black T-shirt, scuffed and worn Doc Martens. Her hair was high and tight, her face as soft and white as fresh snow. Abby’s face, in comparison, was like snow freshly trod on, pummelled down by dirty boots and rain, grey and puffy and aching.

  ‘Well, unless you have enough pocket money saved to afford a suite at the Blue Whale, you don’t have much of a choice. Go back upstairs and unpack.’

  ‘I called Bobbi,’ Lori said. ‘She and Maggie said it’s okay if I stay there for a while. A few days, maybe a week.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Mum.’

  ‘This isn’t a discussion.’

  ‘I can’t stay in this house because it terrifies me,’ Lori snapped. A single black line of mascara streaked down her left cheek. ‘I’m scared. I’m scared of what everyone must be saying about us. I’m scared of the police. I’m scared of … Dad. I’m trying to tell you I’m not okay, Mum.’

  Abby tried to hug her daughter, but Lori recoiled.

  ‘I don’t want a hug,’ she said.

  ‘Then what do you want?’

  ‘I don’t fucking know,’ she shouted. ‘I want this not to have fucking happened. I want a dad who didn’t … I want … I just want a ride to fucking Bobbi’s house.’

  Abby stared at her daughter and saw a woman with child’s eyes. ‘Go put your suitcase in the car.’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Yeah,’ Abby said.

  Surprised to have won the battle, Lori brushed a loose strand of hair from her face and gathered herself.

  ‘Where’s your brother?’ Abby asked.

  ‘He’s in the backyard, regressing.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Go see for yourself.’

  Abby went to the window and looked out. In the rear left corner of their property line, wedged between the fence and a drooping she-oak, was Eddie’s cubby house. In truth, it was less of a cubby and more of a lean-to: a sheet of corrugated iron for a roof, a strip of carpet for a floor and a few scattered milk crates as furniture.

  Eddie hadn’t used the cubby since he was twelve, and Ray had talked about dismantling it. He called it an eyesore and he was right, but Abby couldn’t bring herself to allow it to come down. It was one of the final relics of Eddie’s childhood, and she hadn’t been ready to see it go. Now, she saw Eddie might not have been ready to see it go, either. He was sitting on one of the milk crates, socked feet on damp earth, reading an X-Men comic book.

  Abby went out into the yard and joined him.

  ‘Mind if I pull up a crate?’ she asked.

&nbs
p; Eddie looked up, shrugged, then looked back down at his comic book. Abby joined him, doing her best to ignore the stale smell of mould in the air.

  ‘Did you see Dad?’ Eddie asked.

  ‘Yeah. He’s okay. He misses you and Lori.’

  ‘Will he be coming home soon?’

  ‘I don’t know, Eddie. I don’t think so.’

  ‘He didn’t hurt that man, Mum. Everyone’s saying he hurt that man, but he didn’t do it. He wouldn’t.’

  ‘Your father confessed, Eddie.’

  ‘He’s lying.’

  ‘I know this is hard, but we need to—’

  ‘Why couldn’t you just leave it alone?’

  ‘Eddie.’

  He glared at her. ‘This is your fault.’

  From somewhere just beyond the garden, she heard the pounding sound of surf against sand. Order and certainty and control were shifting like the tides. She felt sick and tired. ‘… That’s not fair.’

  But it wasn’t a lie, either.

  Eddie stood. Then, in a sudden rage that seemed to sweep up from nowhere, he flung his comic book hard into the trunk of the she-oak. The comic slapped facedown against the wet grass, pages splayed like the wings of a dead bird. It made Abby flinch, and for a moment she saw Ray’s face on Eddie’s.

  What have you left us with, Ray? she thought.

  * * *

  Lori and Abby didn’t talk on the ride over to Bobbi’s place. Lori pulled her feet up onto the seat, hugged her knees, and stared out the window. The island looked different – more sinister. The shadows between the trees lining the street looked darker; the empty houses beyond more full of secrets. Even the Deepwater Living apartment block, which Abby had visited a hundred times, today looked haunted. The four-storey mess of balconies and rain gutters looked mad, like staircases to nowhere. It reminded Abby of the Winchester Mystery House, a mansion she’d read about in California, whose owner claimed ghosts designed the home by whispering to her in the middle of the night.