by Candice Fox
I’d stood and walked into the hall without realizing it. My heart was hammering.
“Elise.”
It was Elise Springfield. The little girl at the top of the stairs, pouty lip and heavy, clopping leather school shoes bought a size too big so she would grow into them. I’d thought I remembered little about her, but as I looked at her I realized there was plenty there—I remembered the way she’d wailed when her sister had pulled her hair, and I remembered that she’d had a real nail-chewing problem, apparently still did. I remembered her room now, as I stood looking at her, her white pet mouse and the plastic hanging beads strung over the windows. My first girlfriend’s sister. Someone who should have had the right to fade completely from my life, and me from hers, a fleeting, meaningless connection formed and broken decades ago, a brief passing without pain. All I could think as I looked at her was that this was unfair. Her being dragged here was unfair. She should have remained the funny, pouty little girl in my memory.
“Look at you,” I said, for some reason. An absurd tingle of joy or novelty or something had struck me. She was all grown up. But then the crashing reality of it all hit me. My mouth was suddenly dry. I was desperate. “Elise, you know I didn’t … I didn’t…”
“Ted, I’m so sorry,” she said. She was wringing her hands. “I’m so sorry about all this. We haven’t known what to do. We were going to ask for a press conference, but we wanted the police to be there, to…”
“Who?” I asked. “Who’s ‘we’?”
“The family,” she said. “Melanie. She made a terrible mistake, Ted.”
Sean was standing at my side. I felt the heat of his body suddenly, as though his fury was literally burning him from the inside.
“Mum and Dad and I,” Elise stammered on. “We … We didn’t know she was going to do it. Any of it. We thought that after Stories and Lives didn’t show the accusation a couple of days ago that maybe it would all blow over. But it hasn’t. It’s getting worse. Stories and Lives won’t answer the phone to us. We’ve spoken to Mel and she’s agreed to read a statement for the press retracting her interview.”
“So she…” I could hardly speak. I looked at Sean, who was blank. Stunned. “Melanie, she—”
“She lied,” Elise said. “She’s sorry.”
* * *
The story emerged in frantic stops and starts. Elise began crying in time, wiping her eyes on the backs of her hands. No one seemed game to go into the interview room and sit down, to move out of the hall, in case Elise and her words evaporated into thin air as quickly as they had appeared.
Melanie had suffered from an undiagnosed mental illness for years. Elise wondered if she was bipolar, but it was difficult for her and her parents to get her older sister to go to specialists or take any medication, so a treatment plan when doctors did make an attempt at diagnosis was unmanageable. Though the relationship between the two women was strained, Elise had called Melanie when she first saw me on the news after my arrest for Claire’s abduction, remembering me from when we were kids. She’d received some texts from Melanie in the months afterward, always about the case. Elise had worried that her older sister was following the case too closely, that it might become one of her “obsessions.” Melanie had, at times, become fixated on the activities of American presidents, climate change, and the occasional murder cold case. But my arrest had really captured her imagination. And then, one devastating day, Elise’s mother had called after visiting Melanie’s apartment. She told Elise she had found something worrying.
“Mum didn’t know what it was,” Elise said. “But when I looked at it, I knew. It was an appearance contract. It was signed by the producer, by the network heads, by Melanie. It stipulated money that Mel was going to receive for her interview with them, with Stories and Lives.”
“Why didn’t you stop her?” I asked.
“Mum found the contract last week.” Elise sobbed. Her mascara was smeared. “It was too late. She’d already given it.”
“The network didn’t call you at all to check Melanie’s story?” I asked. “They didn’t call your parents?”
“It was the money, Ted,” Elise pleaded, glancing at Sean. She must have known from Sean’s face that he was with me. My lawyer was slowly purpling from the neck up. “Melanie wanted the money. She told them she was the only one who could account for your … what you wanted to do to me. She said she never told our parents, and that she’d asked me and I didn’t remember. She wanted that money. And the show, they wanted the story.”
Sean snorted. His jaw was so tight I could see muscles moving in his temples.
“I’m sorry.” Elise reached out. Seemed to want to take my hand, but stopped herself. I was untouchable. “Mel is sick. She’s sick, and she’s secretive, and we would have stopped her if we’d just—”
“Don’t get sucked in by this crap, Ted,” Sean said to me. “Mentally ill or not, she systematically, strategically, and with deliberate forethought set out to ruin any trace of a good reputation you had left in the world. If you ask me, she probably thought she had struck gold when she saw you’d been arrested for Claire’s abduction. There are people who are like that. They come wriggling out of the woodwork when they smell opportunity.”
Sean gave Elise a searing look. The young woman actually cowered, neared Frankie, the sleeves of her hoodie almost in her mouth.
“Your sister thought she could drop the accusations on national television and then run off with the money like she didn’t have a care in the world,” Sean said. “Who was going to question them, right? The whole world knows this man’s a fucking monster!” Sean slapped me in the chest. I winced. “And then suddenly the police are involved, she’s chickening out with a fucking mental illness sob story. What a heartbreaker. No worries, then! All’s forgiven!”
“No.” Elise stiffened with a moment of boldness. “She—”
“We’re suing,” Sean snapped. He went back into the interview room and slammed down his briefcase, started stuffing papers into it. He came back to the door. “We’re suing your sister, Ms. Springfield. We’re suing the producer. We’re suing the network. Stories and Lives hasn’t answered the phone to you because they’re holding damage-control meetings. I suggest you and your family do the same.”
Sean charged past Elise, his shark eyes locked on her downturned face until the last instant. The best lawyers can do that. Reduce you, so that you can’t even look them in the face, the strength drained right out of your legs and your stomach threatening to force itself up into your throat. I knew that from experience.
Frankie followed Sean down the hall, leaving Elise and me alone. I was too exhausted to even feel awkward. I leaned in the doorway, watching my lawyer go, his rants bouncing off the narrow walls as Frankie tried to calm him. Elise took her hair out of its ponytail and put it up again, an unconscious resetting, pulling the hair too tight, still sniffling. She nibbled her nails. When she dared to meet my eyes, she found me watching her and looked away, burning with shame.
“I can’t imagine what all this has been like,” she said.
I couldn’t think how to describe it, so I didn’t try.
“Did you read the transcript of the interview?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“Those accusations,” I said. “They were pretty specific. The treats. The games. You have to wonder if she adapted what she said from something real that happened to her. Or you.”
Elise wiped a tear and shook her head.
“We’ll get her back into treatment,” she said. “She’s sick. Very sick.”
Elise hitched her handbag on her shoulder, fiddled with the strap, little gestures to tell me she was about to go. That this was the time to say what a man in my position should say, perhaps what we both knew—that the press conference and the denials weren’t going to help. That the damage had been done. Ten years from now, people would still know me from Claire’s abduction. I was never going to shake that accusation. But if they ever had any doubt
about me, if they ever wondered if I was just an innocent man living through everyone’s worst nightmare, they would half remember some other accusation that might have been covered up or suppressed before it ever met the light of day in full.
Maybe I’d never been going to live a normal life again after Claire. But what Melanie had done had made absolutely sure of it.
“You must hate us,” Elise said eventually. I thought about it. I guess I deserved to. But Elise Springfield, the little girl all grown up, looked as tired as I felt just then, standing in the hallway of the police headquarters, her eyes puffy from tears. In the end, I told her that she was wrong. I didn’t hate her, or her family. Maybe it helped her, or me. Before she left, she gave my hand a brief squeeze.
At first, there was only light. Then colors came, red and green, smashing into each other in explosive starbursts against the backs of her eyelids. Pretty. She was being dragged by the wrists. Amanda had only been knocked out by a punch once before in her life. She’d copped a stray fist trying to break up a fight in the visitors’ center of Brisbane Women’s Correctional, mainly because the guy going to town on his ex-wife had totally disregarded that the woman was holding a baby against her chest. Amanda didn’t usually mind the odd prison fight. She found their spontaneous appearance in her otherwise ordinary day as refreshing as finding a surprise ten-dollar note on the pavement. But not that time. The big lughead in the visitors’ center had fractured her cheekbone.
Nothing felt fractured now, as far as she could tell, except her conception of time. Just when she thought she was coming to, it seemed she slept a little more, on her chest on the dust-coated floor, long enough for her hand, trapped under her hip, to become numb. In time, voices came to her. She lay still and listened.
“… any more of your pussy-arse shit. We need to get this done. Go into the other room, if you have to. I’ll just pop her.”
“It’s over. Come on, Jay. Come on. We need to cut our losses and go. We can’t make this any—”
“I’ll just pop her, mate. Bran, move. Move.”
There were shuffling footsteps. Cursing. Amanda tasted concrete dust and blood in her mouth.
“A cop is different.”
“She’s not a cop. Look at her.”
“She told me she was a cop or an investigator or something.”
There was a pause. The grind of boots on grit on tiles. Amanda felt her wallet wrenched from her back pocket. Her phone was already long gone. She struggled as one of them took her wrists, began winding tape around and around them. She fought, and they were surprised by her sudden wakefulness. She slid awkwardly onto her backside, looked up at them.
Two young men, the same ones she had encountered the first morning after the murders, at the front of the Songly house. Damo and Ed. Or Bran and Jay, as she now knew. Two dark-eyed, rough-bearded men, distinguished by the shapes of their faces. One wolfish and lean, the other box-headed and brutish. They stared down at her, measuring, as she was measuring them. Amanda felt blood running down the side of her neck from her ear.
“Which one of you arseholes punched me?” she snapped.
The men looked at each other. One had her wallet, the wolfish-featured man, his eyes dancing between the item and her.
“Amanda Pharrell,” he said, reading her credit card. “You a cop or not?”
“Last time I checked they frowned upon neck tattoos and violent homicide in the academy,” Amanda said.
“Homicide?” the wolf scoffed.
“Look me up.” Amanda spat blood on the floor. “I’ve killed. But I won’t kill you. I’ll just smash your face in. One for one, that’s how I like it.”
“Jay, this bitch is crazy,” the wolf said.
“My ear is throbbing,” Amanda wailed.
Jay bent and took a pistol from his back pocket. He pushed the slide back and pointed the barrel at Amanda’s face.
“Girl, your problems aren’t limited to a punch in the fucking head,” Jay said. He was the mean one, Amanda could tell. There was always a mean one. One ideas man and one easily led man. One brain, one brawn. This would be the man who hit her. She was sure of it. “You better forget about who punched you and think about whether you want to die fast or slow.”
“Don’t.” Bran nudged his partner with his boot. “We need to talk about this. We might need her as leverage. She’ll be missing from somewhere, mate. Someone will come looking for her.”
Jay and Amanda watched each other. Amanda knew the man before her was looking for her fear. But there wasn’t any. Wouldn’t be any. Fear was one of the things that Amanda felt most rarely. It was an impossible equation to solve in her brain, a puzzle that now and then partly assembled itself before the pieces inevitably fell away.
“I’m gonna break your nose,” Amanda said. Jay frowned and got to his feet, followed his partner into the other room.
Dear Diary,
I’m so excited, I need to get this down right now. I can’t do anything else. I haven’t even left yet. I’m sitting in my car. My god. My hands are shaking.
I met him.
I had to meet him. Since I was a kid I’ve known there was something different about me, something bad. I’ve lived my whole life feeling that awful absence of hope, that whenever the real me was exposed, my life would be over. There was no coming back from it, from public knowledge of my true nature. I’d confessed as a kid to my shrink, who’d helpfully passed it on to my mother. But Mum had of course shrugged that off as a teen being weird and never told another living soul. As I grew I knew a single drunken slipup, a half-sure sighting of me staring too hard at someone’s kid or talking inappropriately about pedophiles, sympathizing, reasoning: that would plant the seed. The seed that grows and grows, that no amount of pulling or poisoning can destroy. Every human interaction held the potential for it. Every word. Every movement. Every handshake. Every hug. I was a balloon wobbling and rolling around everywhere, knowing any second everything could spill. My sickness. My virus.
Deadly exposure.
Ted Conkaffey. He’d been through the fires and come out alive, a broad-shouldered hero emerging in slow-walking silhouette from the flames. Supervillain. My great white hope. Yes, he was scarred, war-torn. The Ted Conkaffey who I’d watched, transfixed, on Stories and Lives wasn’t the fresh-faced, grinning guy of the uni graduation photos the press so loved to bandy about. The man I’d seen so briefly on that fateful day exiting his car, approaching my girl. He was deflated. But he was alive. I wanted to be in his presence, even if it was just to look gratefully into the eyes of the man who had endured my death for me.
Of course, I was nervous. The more nervous I am, the earlier I arrive at a place. So I got to the Lord Chesterton Hotel just as lunch was finishing, when Ted’s appearance hadn’t been slated until three that afternoon. There had been the necessary provisions to make. The podcast, which of course I’ve listened to extensively, asked listeners to go into a lottery to be allowed to attend the meeting. I knew I couldn’t risk that. With hundreds of thousands of listeners Australia-wide, I’d never make it, and I didn’t want my name on some list of attendees in case it ever came around to bite me. A deep-web contact was able to get me the address and the meeting time. It’s very useful to have people on the internet who can break into places and get you what you need like that, the same kind of people who can source you special delightful things that might get you into trouble if you went through the more obvious channels.
The Lord Chesterton Hotel was a good choice, I thought. Cozy, chipped sandstone and old fireplaces, long tables downstairs evoking the heyday of establishments like these full of shipmen from the harbor down the hill yelling and slamming down beer glasses. Big portrait of a proud-chested blond man in a military uniform in the main room—hands on hips, surveying the battlefield. Narrow carpeted stairs led past framed relics from the pub’s history to the planned meeting place—a small private room off the side of the empty fine-dining restaurant. I crept, rigid with anticipation, up
the stairs and along the creaking floors, deciding I’d get a look at the room before everyone arrived, plant myself before those who would check names off a list closed the room to gawkers. I didn’t for a moment expect Ted to be there this early. But there he was. Sitting alone at the little bar. I knew the outline of the back of his head, the thick skull and big hand gripping a polished rocks glass of some honey-colored liquid.
I was so nervous I could hardly move. Here he was! The other me. The man I would never be, could never be. Both so much more than I was, in strength, in quiet resilience, and so much less than me. So far out of reach of the sacred darkness in which I kept my secret. Exposed man. Ted Conkaffey was everything I’d ever feared. When he turned toward me, and his eyes met mine, I felt a stab of exhilaration in my chest.
I haven’t had many opportunities to celebrate anything over the past year or so. But as I sat alone in the bar at the Lord Chesterton, I decided it was time. The lovely owner, an older ginger-haired woman with ancient hands that had probably poured millions of beers, had settled me in the quiet room. She was obviously a “sympathizer,” an Innocent Ted partisan. When she’d asked if I wanted anything to drink while I waited, my first instinct had been that I didn’t want to lose my edge for my first dreaded public audience. But then, since leaving the meeting with Frankie, Sean, and Elise, I’d enjoyed the delightful sensation of a huge weight sliding off my shoulders. I ordered a Wild Turkey and sat sipping it as she left me to my thoughts.
The online newspapers were already picking up on Melanie Springfield’s imminent press conference. I put my phone on the fuzzy bar runner and opened the top hit, the bourbon warm in the back of my throat.