The Dry

by Harper,Jane

  Falk turned to take his purchases to the counter and groaned silently when he realized he once again recognized the face behind the register. He hadn’t seen the shopkeeper since they were both stuck behind desks in the same sweltering classrooms.

  The guy had less hair now, but his heavy features were still familiar. He’d been one of those kids who was slow on the uptake and quick to anger, Falk remembered as he cast about desperately for his name. He suspected, with a flash of guilt, he’d been the punchline of Luke’s jokes from time to time, and Falk had never troubled himself to intervene. He forced a smile onto his face now as he walked up and put his goods on the counter.

  “How are you going these days, Ian?” he said, managing at the last moment to pluck the guy’s name from the ether as he pulled out his wallet. Ian something. Willis.

  Willis stared at the items as though he’d forgotten what to do.

  “Just these, thanks, mate,” Falk said.

  The other man said nothing but instead lifted his head and looked past Falk’s shoulder.

  “Next,” he called in a clear voice.

  Falk looked around. There was no one else in the shop. He turned back. Willis was still staring determinedly into the middle distance. Falk felt a hot flash of irritation. And something else. Shame, almost.

  “All right, mate. I’m not trying to cause you any grief. I’ll buy these, and I’ll be out of your hair,” Falk tried again, pushing his dinner closer over the counter. “And I won’t tell anyone you served me—Scout’s honor.”

  The man continued to stare past him. “Next.”

  “Really?” Falk could hear the anger in his voice. “This town’s dying on its feet, and you can afford to turn down a sale, can you?”

  The shopkeeper looked away and shifted his weight from one foot to the other. Falk was considering taking the items and leaving the money on the counter, when Willis opened his mouth.

  “I heard you were back. Mandy Vaser reckons you’ve been bothering kiddies in the park.” He tried to sound disgusted but couldn’t disguise the malicious glee in his voice.

  “You are joking,” Falk said.

  His old classmate shook his head, resuming his stare into the middle distance. “So I’m not interested in serving you. Not today, not ever.”

  Falk stared at him. The guy had probably been waiting twenty years to feel superior to someone and wasn’t about to waste his chance, Falk realized. He opened his mouth to argue, then stopped. It was the very definition of wasted energy.

  “Forget it.” Falk left the items on the counter. “Good luck to you, Ian. You’ll need it round here.” The door chime rang behind him as he pushed out into the heat.

  Raco had put his phone away and looked from Falk’s empty hands to the expression on his face.

  “What happened?”

  “Changed my mind.”

  Raco glanced at the shop and back to Falk, comprehension settling in.

  “You want me to have a word?”

  “No, leave it. Thanks, anyway. I’ll see you tomorrow. Work out the plan for Sullivan.”

  Falk turned, feeling more unnerved than he wanted to admit about the exchange in the shop. He was suddenly keen to get away from there, even though all that was waiting for him was a long evening in his tiny pub room. Raco eyeballed the shop once more, tempted, then looked back at Falk.

  “Look. Come for dinner. Round mine,” Raco said. “My wife’s been on at me for days to ask you.”

  “No, honestly, it’s OK—”

  “Mate, either I argue it out with you now, or I argue it out with her later. At least I’ve got a chance of winning against you.”

  25

  Forty minutes later Rita Raco placed a steaming bowl of pasta in front of Falk. She moved away with a feather-light touch on his shoulder and returned a moment later with a bottle of wine. They sat outdoors around a small pine table covered with a colorful cloth as the sky turned a deep indigo. The Racos lived in a converted former shop at the far end of the main street. Walking distance to the police station. The back garden housed a lavender bush and a lemon tree, and fairy lights strung along the fence gave the scene a festive glow.

  Light spilled from the kitchen windows, and Falk watched Rita as she disappeared inside to fetch this and that. He tried to help, but she waved him down with a smile. A tiny, compact woman with a halo of shiny brown hair falling over her shoulders, she ran her hand unconsciously over the swell of her pregnant belly. She seemed to harbor a huge concentration of energy and, despite the pregnancy, moved smoothly between any one of a dozen tasks with seamless efficiency.

  When she smiled, which was often, a deep dimple appeared in her left cheek, and by the time she put the food in front of Falk he could see why Raco was in love with her. As they began to eat—a rich concoction of tomatoes and eggplant and spicy sausage washed down with a decent shiraz—he felt he was a little bit in love with her himself.

  The night air was warm, but the dark seemed to soak up some of the heat. Rita sipped mineral water and looked with good-natured longing at the shiraz.

  “Oh, what I wouldn’t give. It’s been so long,” she said, and she laughed at her husband’s disapproving expression. She reached out and stroked the back of his neck until he smiled. “He’s so worried about the baby,” she told Falk. “So overprotective, and she’s not even here yet.”

  “When are you due?” Falk asked. To his untrained eye she looked right on the verge.

  “Four weeks.” She caught her husband’s eye and smiled. “Four long, enormous weeks still to go.”

  Over good food, the talk came easily. They spoke about politics, religion, football. Anything but what was happening in Kiewarra. Anything but the Hadlers. Only when Raco cleared the table and disappeared inside the house with the plates did Rita finally ask.

  “Tell me,” she said to Falk. “Honestly, please. Is everything going to be all right?”

  She looked toward the kitchen door, and Falk knew she wasn’t talking just about the Hadler case.

  “Look, it’s never an easy job, policing a small community,” he said. “You’re on a hiding to nowhere in lots of ways. There are politics involved, too many people who know too much about each other. But your husband’s doing an excellent job. Really. He’s smart. Genuinely dedicated. The top brass recognize things like that. He’ll go far.”

  “Oh.” Rita made a gently dismissive noise and flapped a hand. “He’s not worried about that so much. His dad was a community officer his whole life. Out on a tiny dot on the map, somewhere near the South Australian border. You won’t know it. No one does.” Her gaze drifted toward the empty doorway again. “He was highly respected, though, I understand. He ran the town like a firm but fair patriarch, and they loved him for it. Up until the day he retired and beyond.”

  She paused. Reached over and shared the dregs of the wine between Falk’s glass and her own.

  “Shh,” she said, and she put a finger to her lips as she raised the glass. Falk smiled.

  “Is that where you met? In South Australia?”

  “Yes, but not in his town. No one would ever go there,” she said matter-of-factly. “It was in my parents’ restaurant in Adelaide. He was working nearby. It was his first job with the force, and he was so proper. So keen to make his dad proud.” She smiled at the memory and drained her small glass. “But he was lonely and used to come into our restaurant all the time, until I took pity on him and let him ask me out for a drink.” She rubbed a hand over her stomach. “He waited while I finished my master’s, and then we got married straight away. That was two years ago.”

  “Master’s in what?”

  “Pharmacology.”

  Falk hesitated. He couldn’t think how to phrase the question. Rita saved him.

  “I know,” she said with a smile. “So what am I doing barefoot and pregnant in the middle of nowhere, when I could be putting my qualifications to use somewhere else?” She shrugged. “It’s for my husband, and it’s not forever. H
is ambitions, you know, they’re not the same as some others’. He worships his father, and he’s the youngest of three boys, so I think he feels—wrongly, in my opinion—that he always has to fight for his dad’s attention. So we moved to this small rural town, and he had such high hopes that it would be like it was for his father, but almost immediately everything went so—” She hesitated. “Wrong. He has a weight on him constantly. He was the one who found that little boy’s body, did he tell you?”

  Falk nodded.

  Rita shivered, despite the heat. “I tell him, all the time. I tell him: What’s happening in this place, it’s not your fault. This place is different. It’s not like your dad’s community.”

  Rita raised her eyebrows at Falk, and he nodded. She shook her head and flashed half a dimple.

  “Still. What can I do? It’s too complex for logic, isn’t it? A man’s relationship with his father?”

  Raco reappeared in the doorway as she spoke. He was holding three mugs of coffee.

  “I’ve put the pots in to soak. What are you talking about?”

  “I was saying you put yourself under too much pressure to live up to your father’s standards,” Rita said, and she reached out to smooth his curly hair. The dimple flashed again. “Your partner here agrees with me.”

  Falk, who hadn’t offered an opinion either way, decided Rita was probably right. Raco colored a little but moved his head to meet her hand.

  “It’s not quite like that.”

  “It’s OK, my love. He understands.” Rita took a sip of her coffee and looked over the rim of the mug at Falk. “Don’t you? I mean, that’s partly why you’re here yourself, isn’t it? For your father.”

  There was a mystified silence.

  “My father’s dead.”

  “Oh, I’m very sorry to hear that.” Rita looked at him, her eyes sympathetic. “But surely that doesn’t make it any less true. Death rarely changes how we feel about someone. Heightens it, more often than not.”

  “My love, what on earth are you on about?” Raco said, giving her a friendly nudge as he picked up the empty wine bottle. “I knew you shouldn’t have any of this.”

  Rita frowned a little, hesitating. She looked from Falk to her husband and back again.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “Perhaps I’ve got the wrong end of the stick. It’s just that I heard the rumors, of course, about your young friend who died. They said your father suffered, was accused himself even, had to take you away, leave his home. That must have caused some … friction. And even now, those awful leaflets being scattered around town with his photograph.” She stopped. “I apologize. Please ignore me. I’m always reading far too much into a situation.”

  For a long moment no one spoke.

  “No, Rita,” Falk said. “Actually, I think you’ve read it just about right.”

  Mal Deacon’s truck filled the rearview mirror for more than a hundred kilometers along the road out of Kiewarra. Aaron’s father, Erik, drove with one eye on the reflection and two hands clenched on the wheel.

  Aaron sat mutely in the passenger seat, still reeling from his hasty good-bye to Luke and Gretchen. The Falks’ household goods clunked and shifted in the back. Whatever they’d managed to fit in. Far behind them, their farmhouse had been locked up and secured as tightly as they could manage. The sheep flock had been divided between any neighbors willing to take them on. Aaron was afraid to ask out loud if the arrangement was for now or forever.

  Just once, near the start of the journey, Erik had slowed right down to encourage Deacon to pass. As if this were a normal drive on a normal day. Instead, the dirty white truck had advanced steadily until it shunted the back bumper with a jolt that sent Aaron’s head snapping backward. Erik didn’t slow down again.

  Nearly an hour had passed when Deacon suddenly blasted his horn in one continuous bellow. He edged closer, his vehicle huge in Aaron’s side mirror, the noise blaring and bouncing along the empty road. The sound crowded Aaron’s head, and he pressed his palms against the glove box, bracing himself for the inevitable jolt from behind. By his side, his father’s jaw was set. The seconds stretched long, and when Aaron thought he couldn’t stand it anymore, the noise stopped. The abrupt silence rang in his ears.

  In the reflection, he saw Deacon wind down his window and slowly extend an arm and then a single middle finger. He held it there for an age, braced against the wind. And then he finally, mercifully, grew smaller and smaller in the mirror until he disappeared from sight.

  “Dad hated Melbourne,” Falk said. “He never really settled there. He found an office job managing the supply chain for an agribusiness, but it absolutely sucked the life out of him.”

  Falk himself had been pointed in the direction of the nearest high school to finish his final year. Distracted and dismayed, he barely remembered picking up a pen, let alone raising his hand. He sat his final exams and emerged on the other side with grades that were strong, rather than outstanding.

  “I managed to adjust a bit better than Dad. He was really lonely there,” he said. “We never talked about it, though. We both kind of closed in on ourselves and got on with it. That didn’t help.”

  Rita and Raco looked across the table at him. Rita stretched out her hand and placed it over Falk’s.

  “I’m sure whatever sacrifices he made for you, he felt they were worth it.”

  Falk inclined his head a fraction.

  “Thank you for saying it, but I’m not sure he would agree.”

  Aaron continued to watch in the mirror as they drove on in silence. Deacon didn’t reappear. After an hour of nothing, his father abruptly braked, slamming Aaron against his seat belt as he pulled the truck over at the side of the empty road with a squeal of tires.

  Aaron jumped as Erik Falk slammed a hand against the steering wheel. His dad looked paler than usual, and his forehead glistened with a sheen of sweat. Erik swiveled in his seat and in one swift movement had reached out and grabbed his son’s shirt. Aaron gasped as hands that had never once been raised at him in anger now twisted the fabric and dragged him closer.

  “I’m going to ask you this one time, so tell me the truth.”

  Aaron had never heard that tone in his father’s voice before. He sounded sickened.

  “Did you do it?”

  The shock of the question rippled like a physical force through Aaron’s chest, and he felt like he was suffocating. He forced himself to gasp a breath, but his lungs were tight. For a moment he couldn’t speak.

  “What? Dad—”

  “Tell me.”

  “No!”

  “You have anything to do with that girl’s death?”

  “No. Dad, no. Of course I bloody didn’t.”

  Aaron felt his own heart thudding against his father’s grip. He thought of their best possessions knocking and grinding in a pile in the back of the truck, of his rushed good-bye to Luke and Gretchen. Of Ellie, who he’d never see again, and Deacon, who he even now checked for through the rear window. He felt a thrill of anger and tried to wrench his dad’s hand away.

  “I didn’t. Jesus, how can you even ask me that?”

  Aaron’s father kept his grip. “Do you know how many people have asked me about the note that dead girl wrote? Friends of mine. People I’ve known for years. Years. Crossing the street when they saw me. All because of that note.” He tightened his grip. “So you owe it to me to tell me. Why was your name on it?”

  Aaron Falk leaned in. Father and son, face-to-face. He opened his mouth.

  “Why was yours?”

  “We were never the same after that,” Falk said. “I tried a few times over the years. He probably did too, in his own way. But we couldn’t really fix things. We stopped talking about it, never really mentioned Kiewarra again. Pretended it didn’t exist, none of it had happened. He put up with Melbourne, put up with me, and then he died. And that was it.”

  “How dare you!” Aaron’s father’s eyes flared, and there was an unnameable edge to his expression. �
�Your mother is buried in that town. That farm was built up by your grandparents, for God’s sake. My friends and my life are back there. Don’t you dare throw this on me.”

  Aaron felt the blood pumping in his head. His friends. His mother. He had left almost as much behind.

  “Then why are we running?” He grabbed his father’s wrist and wrenched it off his shirt. It came free this time. “Why are you making us run with our tails between our legs? It only makes us look guilty.”

  “No, that note makes us look guilty.” Erik stared hard at Aaron. “Tell me the truth. Were you really with Luke?”

  Aaron made himself meet his father’s eyes. “Yes.”

  Erik Falk opened his mouth. Then he shut it. He looked at his son like he’d never seen him before. The atmosphere in the car had morphed into something tangible and putrid. He shook his head once, turned back to the wheel, and started the engine.

  They drove the rest of the way without exchanging a single word. Aaron, burning with anger and shame and a thousand other things, stared into the side mirror for the entire journey.

  Part of him was disappointed that Mal Deacon never reappeared.

  26

  By the time Falk had walked back from the Racos’ place he’d felt an urgent need to cleanse himself. The past coated him like a layer of grime. It had been a long day, and the evening felt later than it was. The bar had still been in full swing as he slunk past and up the stairs.

  In the shower, his body bore the marks of exposure to the Kiewarra sun. The skin of his forearms, his neck, the V of his collar. What had been pale was now an angry red.

  The first thumps on the door were almost inaudible over the running water. Falk shut off the taps and stood naked, listening. Another flurry of knocking sounded, louder this time.