by Candice Fox
“That’s an odd thing for you to say,” I said.
“Well, it’s clear this woman’s lying. I mean, was she even your girlfriend? Do you even know her?”
“I dated her in high school. A kid thing. It was a few weeks.”
“Why would she bring it up now? Why after all this time? And telling it to Stories and Lives, of all places? She wants a piece of the limelight. She’s probably hoping for hush money or something. Maybe a magazine deal.”
“Huh,” I said. There was a chilly silence while Kelly analyzed the sound, the tone of surprise.
“What?”
“Well, it’s just—I don’t know. Three weeks into my incarceration you turn away from me. Your partner of fourteen years. You believe a child when she says that I raped her. Now an adult is saying something along the same lines and you’re scoffing at it.”
“I never believed you were guilty, Ted,” Kelly said. It was the first time she’d said anything like that. I felt my jaw tighten, almost painfully, my back teeth locking together. For a long time, I didn’t know what to say. I drank the wine.
“It’s very hard for me to hear you say that, Kelly,” I said eventually. “What are you trying to tell me? That you didn’t believe the accusations, but you abandoned me anyway? Was the whole fiasco just an excuse for you to dip out of our marriage?”
“Oh, fuck you, Edward.”
I bit my tongue.
“I didn’t believe you did it,” Kelly said. “I just wasn’t sure why they’d say you did. I was confused. I’m still confused.”
“Good to know,” I said.
“Don’t be an arsehole.”
She was right. I was being an asshole. She was, too, but that wasn’t an excuse. The whole “abandonment” line had been a low blow. I’d been about to replace it with “left me to rot in jail” but had thought it was too dramatic. It was the bitterness of a man scorned, a jealous man fresh from looking his wife’s new boyfriend in the face. Still bruised from being tossed aside. I was above that most of the time.
One of the geese was treading water at my end of the tub, eyeballing me. I smoothed down her neck, gave her a scratch under the beak. The geese believed me. Innocent Ted members believed me. Gangsters and murderers and thugs and random flight attendants believed me. I pinched the bridge of my nose.
“Was there anything else, Kelly?”
“That present,” she said. “From Khalid Farah. It’s a diamond bracelet. Like, real diamonds. Big ones. Twenty of them. On a child-sized bracelet.”
“I thought it was probably something like that. He’s a flashy guy.”
“What am I supposed to do with it?”
“I don’t know.” I shrugged. “Give it to Lillian.”
“She’s two!”
“I mean when she’s older. She can sell it. Or you sell it. I don’t really care what you do with it, Kelly. The man gave it to me to give to you. I did my job. It’s between you and him now.”
“It’s between me and him?” she scoffed. “He’s a bad person, Edward. I’m not like that.”
Bad people. Black sails on the horizon. The taste of salt water in my lungs, panic gripping at my heavy legs, trying to pull me down beneath a death cold swell. Grab on or drown.
“No, you’re not,” I said. She must have interpreted something in the tone, a conclusion of her own with a thousand possibilities, evidence of my contempt to take back to her new boyfriend. She hung up on me.
My body shot up in the bed before my mind had awakened, warm air rushing into my lungs, driving out dreams of pressure there, dark depths and the sandy bottom of the ocean rushing up toward me. I heard my own yowl of surprise. My mind scattered. All I knew was that there was a man in the doorway of my darkened bedroom and I couldn’t move my hands fast enough toward the gun on the nightstand.
“Jesus!” I was yelling. “Jesus! Jesus! Jesus!”
“You really don’t have enough security here,” he said, leaning on the doorframe. “I mean, you don’t even— You don’t even…” Words failed him. He gestured down the hall.
I was pointing the gun at him in the dark while bewildering realizations pulsed through me. My brain was trying to bring me calm, but nothing about the seconds that followed was calming. As my eyes adjusted to the dark, I picked out the lean profile of Dale Bingley in the doorway, matched it to his slurred voice. He was drunk. Really drunk. As I recognized the slouch, I remembered the slur in his words, smelled bourbon in the air all at once.
“No cameras.” He found the words, gestured down the hall again.
He was holding something against his leg. A dark, rectangular shape. I clicked back the hammer on my gun.
“Drop it,” I said.
“Drop what?”
“Whatever you’re holding.”
“This?” He lifted something. I squeezed the trigger, not tight enough to fire, but deathly close. Felt the metal slide on well-oiled metal, the springs compress. He dropped the envelope on the floor at the end of my bed. I barely heard it fall over the thumping of my heartbeat in my ears.
“Whatever,” he said, and walked off down the hall.
I couldn’t catch my breath. I was already drenched in sweat, causing the sheets to latch on to me, grip at my waist and legs like vines. I made my way out into the hall in my boxers, still holding the gun, thought about more clothes. The envelope. I went back for it, then found my victim’s father sagging in my remaining unbroken kitchen chair, his fair hair slick with sweat.
“I nearly just shot you,” I said, turning on the light. I showed him the gun. “Do you understand that? You can’t walk into my house in the middle of the fucking night and stand at the end of my bed like a ghost. I … Oh god. Imagine if I’d shot you just now.”
“Imagine that.” He stifled a burp. “How many questions there’d be. The press would love it. Just the fact that I was…” He lost his words again, twirled his hand. “Why don’t you have any cameras or anything? Why don’t you lock your windows?”
Because I spent enough time behind locks and bars, I thought. And locked windows and locked doors wouldn’t be enough, not once I started going down that track. I’d have to put up CCTV. A taller fence at the front with a chained gate. Alarms I’d punch a code into when I arrived home and when I went to sleep. I knew if I started adding these things to my home, little by little I’d create my own prison. The lack of security was an act of defiance, a rejection of my past. I could hear the geese outside screaming up a storm. I hadn’t been able to hear them from the bedroom. I was too angry to speak. I went to the fridge and pulled out a beer, held it to my face. Condensation.
“I don’t know what you’re doing here,” I told Dale. “But if you come at me like you did the first time, I will put you on your arse.”
“Tough guy.” He snorted, laughed to himself. He was hanging an arm over the back of the chair like a bored card player in a saloon. Now that I had time to look at him, I could see he was in a very bad way. He smelled, not just of bourbon but of days without a shower. His knuckles were still grazed from the attack on me. They hadn’t been treated, and some were infected. I couldn’t fathom why he was here, but I didn’t care. My geese were upset. I went out, letting the screen door slap shut behind me, hoping that when I returned the ghost of Claire Bingley’s father would be gone.
I opened the door. Seven sets of wild eyes peered at me from the dark. They stood, crowded forwards. I pushed at the soft, puffy chest of one, my fingers disappearing into an armor of flustered feathers until I found warm bone.
“No, no, no, don’t come out. I’m fine. I’m…”
A goose slipped by me and waddled down the little ramp. Then they all spilled out, an angry parade, bristling and shivering, picking at the grass in the night.
Dale Bingley was at my side. I smelled him before I saw him, and stepped back out of his swing range. I drank the beer and watched the birds form a crooked row foraging in the gold light from the porch, now and then stopping to glare at my vis
itor or chase off a restful cane toad. As I turned I noticed Dale had snagged a beer from my fridge. I examined his high cheekbones and pointed nose in the glow from the house, my chest still tight with confusion.
“This might seem like an odd question,” I said slowly, watching him put the beer to his lips. “But if you aren’t here to bash me, what…”
“What the fuck am I doing here?”
“Mmm.”
He shrugged. We watched the birds.
“I looked at those papers you gave me,” he said. “The ones in the envelope. That’s why I’m here. I guess. I don’t know. To be honest, the year or so I’ve just been wandering from place to place, and it’s anyone’s fucking guess why I do anything. Maybe I was hoping you’d shoot me. Maybe that’s why I didn’t knock.”
“So you either have a death wish or you want to discuss your daughter’s case with me?” I summarized. He sat on the grass by way of an answer, his legs flopped out in front of him.
“I don’t have anything to say about those papers,” I said firmly, edging closer. “I haven’t even looked very hard at them. I don’t want anything to do with the case. I’m trying to live a quiet life here, so that maybe, if I’m lucky, people will forget about me and leave me alone. I can’t help you, Dale. Maybe you could talk to Amanda about those leads. But I don’t think she’s gone much further with them, either. I think she—”
Dale flopped onto his back. The beer bottle toppled over. I watched him fighting sleep as one of the geese neared him, picking the grass warily beside his pockets, hoping to catch a glimpse of pellets in the fabric folds.
“Christ,” I sighed.
Dear Diary,
I was stalking her. There was no doubt about it. Not that I tried to fool myself very much. When you’re constantly squinting through the gaps in the back fence to see if she’s there, your ears pricked for the sound of her, a giggle or a squeal on the wind, you know you’ve turned. I followed her to school a couple of times, watched her mother walk her there. It was exciting, trying not to be seen, not to be noticed by other parents, lurking in the shadows in the car a hundred meters down from the gate. I considered buying a child-sized mannequin and propping it up in the passenger seat so that just the top of the head was visible through the window. But try hiding that from Chloe. Having a girlfriend is a real necessity when you’re like this, but it does have its downsides.
I guess the only thing I was kidding myself about Penny was how far it would go. I’d never offended. I thought I could control it. I thought all my wicked little games were just that; a bit of fun.
The easiest person to convince of anything is yourself. I stood in the TechWare store holding the teddy bear nanny cam and looking at its plump, cheerful face, and told myself what I was planning was a compromise. If I had to have these predilections at all, mental impulses that I didn’t ask for and that I never encouraged, I was at least allowed to compromise so that I didn’t end up doing the worst of bad things. Being too hard on yourself doesn’t work. I was born this way. I was working with what I had.
I’d tried a less invasive strategy, of course, if only out of sheer laziness. Someone online, one of the ghouls with magic fingers from deep in the dark web, had taught me how to hack into the family computer next door and switch on the camera on the desktop without turning on the little red light indicating it was operating. Absolutely thrilling, this kind of stuff. I’d seen images online captured secretly from a hacked family computer—someone undressing unknowingly before an open laptop, someone thinking they were using a private webcam line to sex-talk their long-distance boyfriend. But when I turned the camera on, all I got was Penny’s mother Andrea sitting there night after night, clicking away at shopping sights, her face flabby, an unhealthy blue in the reflections on the screen. Unlucky.
So I bought the teddy bear nanny cam at the tech shop and then I went down the street and bought some colorful wrapping paper.
Placing the bear was the hardest part. I’d listened to Penny talking about her upcoming birthday party through the fence and learned that her mother planned to place the present table up against the side fence, our fence. But when the day came and the yard next door was filled with squealing, running, shouting kids, I peeked over and saw that the present table was at the back of the yard. It was almost a full-on disaster, but as the evening descended I walked around the block and spent some time scouting the house behind Penny’s. The occupants weren’t home. No sign of security cameras. I went along the side of the house to the back fence, waited for an ideal moment, and dropped the present over the top, hearing it land with a soft, crumply sound on the pile.
I don’t think I’ve ever sweated so much in my life. By the time I got home I was drenched in it. I told Chloe I’d gone for a run, but I was still sweating as I sat in the yard with a beer listening to the party next door drawing to a close. Penny’s tinkling voice wishing everyone goodbye. Her excitement as she and her mother went into the yard and began carting all the presents back to the house, including one tightly wrapped, adorable teddy bear. No card. No sign where it had come from.
I wanted so badly to turn the camera on. To hear her confusion through the microphone, her delight when she prized the paper open. A mystery present. It was a high-end bear. Mohair fur—none of that acrylic shit. She’d love it, I was sure. Something traditional for a girl who appreciated the finer things. But every time I tried to open the app on my phone and activate the bear, Chloe came fluttering around me like a fat, needy moth.
I would bide my time. I was good at that.
Detective Inspector Sweeney sat stiffly in one of the chairs before the desk in Amanda’s “office,” looking about her at the place. It was hardly the dry, professional environment she’d expected from the private detective novels she had enjoyed in her youth. She’d anticipated a bare space, a filing cabinet with the proverbial whiskey bottle stashed in the bottom drawer, a map filled with colored pins, and stacks of files. But the office was more like the slightly messy living room of an elderly eccentric. Plush red lounges to the left of the door, bathed in sunlight, a shag carpet beneath them hosting three cats curled like scattered circular cushions. There were framed certificates, as one might expect, but they were not of an academic nature. One qualified Amanda in horse husbandry, another in the use of a soldering iron. They were issued by Brisbane Women’s Correctional Centre during her incarceration. A bookcase crammed with books, many of them technical manuals, the upper shelf home to another of the cats, its striped tail hanging over the ledge, curling back and forth. To the right of the L-shaped desk, a small kitchen, the sink manned by used novelty coffee mugs, one sporting what looked like a human ear in place of a handle, another clearly swiped from Brisbane Women’s Correctional, possibly during Amanda’s incarceration.
The investigator herself had left Sweeney waiting for a long while, appearing at the door at nine in a Batman-themed satin bed robe, half-comatose from sleep. Sweeney had sat and listened to her padding around the upper floor, yawning loudly, groaning, swearing, showering. She’d glanced at her watch after a while and told herself not to bother seeking Amanda again before the clock struck ten.
Ted Conkaffey seemed to know the drill. She watched through the window beside the front door of Amanda’s office as Ted parked and locked his car, glancing up and down the street like a man on the run. He had a nervous, low-headed kind of walk, a tall and broad-shouldered man who would be taller and broader if he weren’t so weighed down by his circumstances. The beard was gone, and he wore a stark white shirt with jeans. Clean, as though he’d tried to scrub off some of the trauma of the past year and now his skin squeaked. Before he could reach for the handle Amanda appeared, inexplicably, and thumped into him from the side, a shoulder barge that almost sent him tumbling onto the grass. Amanda must have seen him pull up and snuck down the stairs and around the back of the building.
Pip watched them talking, the tall, world-weary gentleman and the petite, buzzing garden sprite who had
confronted him. Amanda made a grand gesture about something with her arms and Ted rolled his eyes. Sweeney couldn’t fathom how their relationship worked. Why it worked. Surely there was something about Amanda’s murderous past that struck a raw chord with Ted, even if the killing had been in self-defense. Or had Ted’s accusation opened his mind to people like Amanda, the ones society rejected? Sweeney wondered what Ted might think if he found out she had let her own father die on the kitchen floor like an animal, help the mere push of a button away. A valve in her father’s heart had ruptured that night. It was probably one of the most painful things a human being could experience. Pip had watched and done nothing. She didn’t have the luxury of Amanda’s self-defense claim—Amanda had seen and known what the men in the rainforest had wanted to do to her. She’d been in the midst of the danger. Pip had only seen the flickers of danger in her father’s eyes. She’d guessed, assumed, what he might have become. But she knew, deep down in her heart, that there was a chance he’d have stopped hurting her, stopped the drinking, cleaned himself up and become the father she’d wanted and needed him to be.
She’d denied him that chance.
She’d looked into his eyes as he died and judged him.
As Ted opened the door, a fat orange cat leaped from the floor at him like a round, furry cannonball, colliding with his chest. He winced at the impact, barely caught the animal.
“Can I come around here just once without being assaulted?” he moaned, trying to pull the cat down from his neck. “I’m getting it from all angles here.”
The cat was meowing loudly and repetitively, a desperate and insistent noise. It seemed to want to scramble back up his chest, against his face. Ted flipped the animal and held it like a babe in his arms. Pip found herself trying to suppress laughter.