The Van Apfel Girls Are Gone

by Felicity McLean

Later, when we tried to remember exactly what had happened that day, I said I reckoned Mr Van Apfel’s hand had been flat when it smacked Ruth’s cheek, but my sister insisted: no. She said I was wrong and that I hadn’t seen properly, and that in the final airless instant before his hand came down, Mr Van Apfel had flexed his palm wide and then drawn it into a fist so that when he hit Ruth, it was a punch.

  That’s what Laura said.

  Either way we never told Mum about it. The three of us walked home together in silence so that the only noise came from the bottleneck to our street where Mrs McCausley’s sprinkler pftzz-pftzz-pftzzed away like the twisting cap on a fizzy drink in the instant before it bursts.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  We saw more of those girls after they disappeared than we ever did before. Their noses no longer pressed against the flyscreen of our back door, their lips bleeding through the tiny wire squares as they called us over for a swim. They no longer took their heads out of the chest freezer at the milk bar when we met them in that concrete bunker to buy ice creams together.

  But we still saw them everywhere.

  In the distraught faces of our neighbours. On the TV news. Their satin school bows shiny, their smiles slick with spit. Those same smiles were stuffed into our letterbox on a flyer detailing the approximate time and date of their disappearance, and the number to call with information. They were wrapped around telegraph poles all along the main road like the foil around Easter eggs.

  In the week after the disappearance the police received the first in a series of fake ransom notes. All in blue biro, and all written on the back of shopping dockets from a store that hadn’t yet worked out how to put paid advertising on the back of its receipts. The receipts were for things like fly spray and canned corn (total: $4.80). Always insignificant amounts. While the notes themselves demanded $750,000 per girl.

  Then there were the sightings. We were plagued by reports of sightings in the beginning. Three girls aged between seven and fourteen, all with blonde hair, were seen getting onto a south coast train with a male (Caucasian, approximately twenty-four years of age). Three girls were spotted wading in the river at dusk (though nobody would be caught dead swimming at that time of day, not with the bull sharks around). Three girls were seen hitchhiking from the crime scene. They were seen rowing a boat. They were seen several hours south, although that turned out to be a false lead when police worked out they were German backpackers working as fruit pickers and that they were at least ten years older than Hannah, the eldest Van Apfel.

  Everyone, it seemed, had seen those girls.

  It was as if the three of them were far more visible to us now than they ever were before they vanished.

  * * *

  In the hours after the girls disappeared the police established a command post at the picnic sheds at Coronation Park. The sheds, with their carmine-red roofs like smears of mercurochrome, were at the southern end of the picnic grounds near the car park. Detective Senior Constable Justin Mundy from the neighbouring district was in charge of the police from the local area command, and he arrived in his football clothes because Friday night was training night and the Minnows had been in the middle of their shuttle runs when Detective Mundy got the call.

  Even without wasting time having a shower or getting changed, it took Detective Mundy the best part of twenty minutes to arrive. Still, it was reassuring for everyone under his command to see him dressed in his Minnows uniform. You could trust a bloke who fronted up for work wearing his football shorts.

  Later we’d get Detective Senior Sergeant Craig Malone, who’d come in a suit, not in shorts, but who’d bring with him a team from the homicide squad in the city. After Senior Sergeant Malone would come the detectives from the sex crimes unit, the crime scene officers, and special investigations. The water police cruised in too. In the end we’d have thirteen detectives, two special analysts from the city, forensics, plus all of the local area command and the SES volunteers. They’d talk in code, with maps and lists, and with a collection of highlighter pens in colours I didn’t even know existed, scouring the valley and finding no sign, even though we must have outnumbered those girls by more than a hundred to one.

  But until then? Until then we just had Detective Senior Constable Justin Mundy in his football shorts with a picture of a baitfish on them.

  My parents had to give witness statements on the night of the vanishing – everyone’s parents did. Though that seemed like a funny thing to have to do when no one had witnessed a thing.

  That was the problem, as far as I could see.

  All of the cops (aside from Detective Mundy) wore navyblue boilersuits that looked an awful lot like the tracksuits we wore for school sport each Friday. Everyone had to wear the sports uniform on Friday, whether you’d been picked to play in a representative team or not (our uniform code didn’t discriminate between those kids who could catch a ball and the rest of us who couldn’t). The fact that some kids were still wearing their sports uniform at the park that Friday night only added to the confusion. They wandered around in their navy tracksuits and matching caps like creepy, shrunken versions of the cops.

  Detective Senior Constable Justin Mundy didn’t match anyone though. He stood out, and not just because of his shorts. Detective Mundy was the boss and you could tell. He stayed very quiet while he listened to the information he was given, and then he shouted instructions and stood back and watched, his fingers laced at the back of his neck, as teams of cops and SES volunteers and our own mums and dads nodded and frowned and jogged off in the direction he indicated, beating the ground with sticks and calling through cupped hands.

  There were the dogs too. Three bouncy black-and-white ones, and a mean-looking German shepherd.

  ‘English springer spaniels,’ one of the cops told me, pointing to the bouncy ones. ‘High levels of enthusiasm and endurance.’

  He could tell that I was interested in his dogs. I’d been watching them for a while.

  ‘They come from the dog squad?’ I asked.

  ‘Cadaver dogs,’ he said proudly. ‘Can sniff out a decomposing body under running water.’

  ‘They go underwater then?’

  ‘What? Dead bodies? We find them everywhere, kiddo.’ He shook his head gravely when he said it.

  ‘No, the dogs, I mean. Can they go underwater?’

  ‘Sure can,’ he said. ‘But actually they smell out the bodies from above the surface.’

  I wondered how that would work with our river, which already stank like the dead.

  ‘How do you train them then?’

  ‘Blood. Bone. Teeth,’ the cop said casually.

  And I nodded knowingly as if I knew what he meant.

  ‘What’s this dog’s name?’ I asked.

  One of the bouncy dogs was snuffling around near my right knee and I reached down to pat him but the cop shook his head.

  ‘Name’s Alligator,’ he said. ‘Watch out. He bites.’

  I snatched my hand back as if it was on fire.

  ‘Nah, just kidding. But you can’t pat him while he’s on his shift.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘He’s a member of the force, isn’t he. Like me. And you wouldn’t try and pat me while I’m on me shift, would you?’

  I wouldn’t try and pat you in a million years, I thought.

  ‘Why’s he called Alligator?’

  ‘You mean, why’s he called that if he doesn’t really bite?’

  ‘Nah. Why’s he called Alligator if he lives around here? We only have crocodiles in Australia. Saltwater ones and freshwater. But we don’t have any alligators. Mrs Laguna taught us that.’

  Mrs Laguna was my Year Five teacher.

  ‘You know a lot about a lot, dontcha, kiddo?’

  I knew that knowing things was showing off and it was safer not to say.

  ‘I better go find Mum,’ I mumbled. And I left the cop and his springy dogs and went to see if my parents had finished giving their witness statements.

  *
* *

  ‘They’re English springer spaniels,’ I told Mum when I found her. She was standing with Laura, to the left of the picnic sheds, where the two of them had been keeping an eye on me the whole time I talked to the cop.

  ‘The big one’s a German shepherd like Mr Daniels’s dog, Samson, but the bouncy ones are English springer spaniels,’ I explained. ‘They’ve come all the way from Cadaver.’

  ‘From where?’ Mum said absently. She was distracted and looking for Dad now that I was safely back within touching distance. She gazed past me and scanned the sheds for him.

  ‘Where’s your father now?’ she said.

  ‘Wasn’t he in the sheds with you?’ I asked.

  ‘We’ve got enough people missing without him adding to the list,’ she said, ignoring my question. ‘And who was that police officer you were talking to, Tikka? I want you and you sister right here where I can see you.’

  So I stood in the dirt with Mum and Laura, while we waited for Dad to appear.

  * * *

  On the Tuesday after the girls went missing, a psychic arrived and told us where we should search. The sky was the colour of cold tea that day, the river a mirror image.

  ‘What’s a psychic?’

  ‘She’s a bit like a fortune teller,’ Mum said.

  ‘She’s a quack,’ Dad informed me. ‘A crackpot.’

  But I didn’t know what a ‘quack’ was – or a ‘crackpot’ either – so I was left with Mum’s definition.

  The psychic had hair that fell in wispy pale waves and looked like it had never been cut. It was so long and so fine that you couldn’t quite see the ends; it petered out somewhere between the tops of her thighs and the backs of her knees, but it was impossible to put your finger on exactly where. Funny that it was her job to find missing things when she seemed to be dissolving herself.

  She told police to pump the septic tank behind the toilet block, near the oval, so a huge silver tanker, the same size and shape as a petrol truck, was shunted along the hairpin bends and into the belly of the gorge. It took three men in jumpsuits almost an hour to remove the manhole cover and lay it on the grass like an enormous concrete coin. A tithe for what might be inside.

  When they removed the cover the stink was like every single egg in the world had gone off, and even the men in jumpsuits, who must have done this a hundred times before, winced as they fed the hose down the hole. Then the pump started up and the roar ripped through the gully. Stuffed every crevice with its sad chugging sound.

  My sister yelled at me to stand back from the hole.

  ‘It’s not safe! Get back behind me!’

  We were waiting near the oval like everyone else, while our parents helped out with the search. And with Mum and Dad gone, Laura thought she was the boss. (Though technically, Mrs Lantana was in charge.)

  ‘Stand back, Tikka!’ she instructed.

  I took a step backwards, then inched forward again. What my sister didn’t understand was that I had to see it for myself. How else to say for certain that the girls weren’t down there? The pump men might miss them among the sludge and the mess. But as I watched the hose being fed down the septic hole that day, my stomach disappeared along with it. It was a sickening, slack-muscled drop.

  ‘Get back!’ Laura barked again, and I half-turned towards her and pointed to my ears.

  ‘What? I can’t hear you,’ I mouthed.

  And Laura rolled her eyes and mimed: ‘Wait till I tell Mum.’

  Anyone could have lip-read that.

  For a while nobody spoke because there wasn’t much point. But nobody held out much hope either. Not that it was useless. Just that we were unsure what it was we should hope for by now. So we stood and let ourselves be filled with the noise as though it might plug up some of our loss. Then: ‘Nothing!’ came the shout, and the pump was switched off and the silence that followed was shocking. After that, just a lonely mechanical beep as the septic truck reversed out.

  * * *

  For the rest of the morning my sister and I and the other searchers’ kids remained stubbornly stuck behind. We sat in the playground by the oval like we had yesterday, and the day before that, and every other day when our parents went out searching and wouldn’t leave us at home unsupervised like they would’ve done only last week. Back then they wouldn’t have thought twice about ducking up to the shops without us. Or leaving us to let ourselves into the house after school and eat cereal and watch cartoons and not do our homework for all those delicious hours until they got home from work.

  But that was then and this was now, and now there was a psycho on the loose.

  ‘Who says?’ I challenged Laura.

  ‘Jade Heddingly,’ she admitted. ‘And she was told it by Mrs McCausley.’

  We sat among the woodchips underneath the swings, flicking bits of bark onto the grass and occasionally at one another, but even that was pretty half-hearted. Mum had left Laura with strict instructions not to let me out of her sight, and so far she hadn’t, but we both knew that was only because her best friend was missing, and at least I was a better option than Jade.

  ‘Jade told me a psycho must have abducted the girls.’

  ‘How does she know?’

  ‘She doesn’t,’ Laura said, then she paused. ‘But it could be true. That’s what psychos do, it’s part of their psychosis.’

  ‘Is it?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said.

  Laura knew I had no idea what the word ‘psychosis’ meant and she took satisfaction from not explaining it now.

  ‘Do the police know that —’ I started to say.

  ‘Know what?’

  ‘That thing about psychosis. Maybe we should —’

  ‘Maybe we should nothing,’ Laura snapped. ‘Maybe we should sit here just like we’ve been told and not say anything at all.’

  ‘What about the toilet?’

  ‘What toilet?’

  ‘Can I at least go to the toilet?’

  Ordinarily I would never defer to Laura like this – I was old enough to make my own decisions – but the rules had changed and Lor and I were in it together. Besides, I couldn’t see Mrs Lantana to ask.

  Laura granted permission with a resigned nod.

  Then she called after me as I started to walk away: ‘Don’t disappear though, or else Mum will spew.’

  But she didn’t sound as tough as she was trying to be.

  By then it was late morning and the sun sat high and mean. I stared at it for a moment, which you’re not supposed to do (Brett Underwood told me my retinas would burn to a crisp). But that day the sun was so white that it actually looked cool and I had the urge to touch it. Sweat prickled uncomfortably at the backs of my knees and slunk down my calves when I walked.

  I headed towards the oval and the toilet block beyond, grass crunching under my thongs. At the oval I tightrope-tiptoed along the line markings spray-painted onto the grass, treading slowly, watchfully along each line, and if I lost my balance I went back to the beginning and started that line again. You couldn’t fall off: a crocodile could get you. Or maybe a snake.

  Snakey, snakey on your back. Which finger did that?

  At the third corner I hesitated. I was at the closest point to the toilet block now but I still had one side of the rectangle to go. It was only a short side but I was at the toilets. I would have to forget the last side.

  I had just squared up my new course – valley wall on my right, river on my left, toilet block dead ahead – when something moved among the mangroves and the mudflats. I stopped and took a sharp breath.

  ‘Hannah? Cordie!’

  A koel cried out from somewhere in the mangroves. Koo-ooo koo-ooo. It was a mournful cry and one that could go on, unanswered, for hours.

  ‘Cordie?’ I called.

  The thing moved again. But it was too dark, the mangroves were too twisted together for me to see what was hiding in there. I shielded my eyes with my hand to try to see better while I shifted uncertainly on the spot. I could nick
to the toilet and then go down onto the sand to see what was there. I should look. Should I look? I wondered. What I should probably do was get a grown-up. After I’d done a wee though.

  I took three quick steps towards the toilet block but the thing in the mangroves didn’t like that. It moved faster this time. Crack. A low grunt. I stumbled back onto my white spray-paint line. I didn’t want to upset the thing.

  ‘Ruth? Is that you? I can see you,’ I lied.

  The thing in the mangroves laughed.

  It was a hard laugh that wasn’t Hannah’s or Cordie’s, and not Ruth’s laugh either. It came from the maws of something much bigger. The koel reared up in the air in alarm and hovered for a moment, wings thrumming above the mangroves. Then it cried out once more – koo-ooo koo-ooo – before it rose higher and pulled away.

  ‘Mr Avery?’ I said, and I squinted into the spindly-armed darkness.

  It was him all right. It was just Mr Avery. Relief and mangrove stink flooded my mouth.

  ‘Are you yabbying down there or something?’ I called.

  ‘I believe we’re looking for something a bit bigger than yabbies, Tikka.’

  Mr Avery wasn’t the only teacher who called me ‘Tikka’ instead of using my real name. They all did, except for Mrs Tonkin. She’d called me ‘Tick-Tock’ ever since I was in her class in Year Two, when we’d first learned how to read a clock. She’d looked like a colossus, her bottom spilling over the sides of a child-sized chair while she sat out the front and swirled time tantalisingly forwards and backwards with just the tip of her pointer finger.

  But when Mr Avery called me Tikka my stomach bunched up in a way that I didn’t like at all.

  ‘Something bigger than yabbies? You mean the Van Apfel girls?’ I said.

  ‘Correct.’

  ‘Well, sure,’ I said. ‘Thing is, you’re not going to find them in the mangroves, though. Is that what you’re doing down there? I can’t really see you in the dark. The Cadaver dogs have been through the mangroves about a hundred times already. Did you know they brought special dogs out here? I thought they came all the way from Cadaver, but Mum said no, that wasn’t quite right.