* * *
‘Brochures,’ Mr Van Apfel told Detective Senior Constable Mundy when he was questioned. The neighbourhood was full of talk of Mr Van Apfel being interviewed at length, and on repeated occasions, over the coming weeks. ‘I went to get more brochures for Hope Revival Centre’s Salvation! service out of the boot of my car.
‘I’d run out,’ he added helplessly. ‘I’d been handing them out all evening, before the show and then again during interval. I only had one stack left and I went to get more to hand out after the show, because I knew the encore was coming up.’
‘I went to the toilet,’ explained Mr Avery. He rubbed his hands up and down those hair-covered arms. ‘I couldn’t wait any longer. I’d been standing at the side of the stage helping students up and down the stairs all night.’
‘You couldn’t wait until the end of the show?’ asked Detective Mundy sceptically. ‘There were only a few minutes left.’
‘I didn’t know that. I thought that second-last act, that skit, would go for longer. And I hadn’t had a break – there was no one there to relieve me.’
Mr Avery turned a painful, blotchy red. ‘To relieve my post. Side of stage,’ he clarified for Detective Mundy. ‘There was no one to relieve my post.’
And it was true Mr Van Apfel had been distributing Hope Revival Centre Salvation! brochures that night. Everyone could attest to that. But why he chose that moment to go and get more when he could have gone during the interval or waited until after the show, well, Mr Van Apfel couldn’t exactly say. Nor could he explain how he’d gone through so many brochures when, by his own estimate, he’d started out with more than five hundred.
‘A run on salvation that night was there, mate?’ Detective Mundy asked.
But Mr Van Apfel was hard-pressed to say. Just like he couldn’t explain what took him so long at his car, or how he missed the whole rest of the show when there were still two (albeit short) acts to go. Or why there was a stack of his Salvation! brochures in the bin by the toilets. Did everyone in the audience throw theirs away?
In the same way, it was entirely plausible Mr Avery had gone to the toilet. Reasonable, you’d have to say. He’d been helping kids all night – all Friday night, when he could have been anywhere else. Only, nobody could verify they’d seen him at the toilets. And nobody saw him come back. In fact, no one had seen him for a good twenty minutes until he reappeared backstage stacking chairs.
The two of them – Mr Van Apfel and Mr Avery – were in syzygy as they moved around Coronation Park that evening. Like the sun and moon. Separate, and yet strangely aligned. And the way they told it to the police, it was as if they’d had no choice. Like their fates were sealed before they left the amphitheatre.
But almost immediately after both men disappeared from the amphitheatre the Van Apfel girls vanished as well. That left Mrs Van Apfel alone, peering into the dark. Scanning the packed amphitheatre for her three daughters.
‘Don’t go where I can’t see you,’ she’d directed them.
But they’d tripped over each other in their rush to get down the concrete steps, a stack of brochures tucked under Cordie’s arm. They’d convinced Mrs Van Apfel to let them hand out the remaining Salvation! brochures to the captive audience.
‘Make sure you wait for Ruth!’
It was the last instruction she ever gave them. The last thing they heard her say. And that was how Ruth came to be with them. Hannah and Cordie would have gone without her, if it were up to them.
* * *
After that first cop car pulled up, more and more cars arrived. Until the car park was jammed with cop cars. Swarming and wailing. Their lights making shadows that were slanting and strange.
‘Blue light disco,’ someone joked but nobody laughed, though at any other time we would have. And I realised I’d been holding Laura’s hand so tight that I was nearly cutting off the circulation, and we had to swap sides so she could shake the blood back.
The police set up a command centre at the picnic sheds by the oval: they would organise the search from there. The sheds were in line with the amphitheatre and close to the river. The oval stretched out in between. Under the lights of the oval you could make out the picnic shed’s red corrugated roof and the police crowded underneath the rusty ripples, talking and pointing and giving out orders. They held small torches that bobbed in the dark, and when the beams splashed onto the red metal roof they made bright tiny fires in the night.
It was just after 9 pm when Detective Senior Constable Justin Mundy arrived from the neighbouring district squad. He was wearing his football training gear because he played touch football in the off-season with the Minnows to try to keep himself fit. (The fish sticker on the back of his car was the giveaway. That thing had mean piranha-like fangs, unlike the Van Apfels’ toothless ichthys.) Later we’d get Detective Senior Sergeant Craig Malone from the homicide squad in the city, who’d come with his own team, plus a team from the sex crimes unit. But until then we had to make do with Detective Senior Constable Mundy and our normal local area command.
The police took statements from everyone in the audience, who should have been watching the stage but seemed to have been looking everywhere else if their statements to the police were anything to go by. Mr Gonski said he saw the Van Apfel girls stand up and leave the amphitheatre during Jacob Hunter’s trombone recital. Yes, he was sure, he said. He remembered exactly because he was tempted to leave at that point himself. Mrs McCausley had been sitting on the far left-hand side of the amphitheatre and the girls drifted close enough that she could hear their conversation. They were worried, she said, that they’d left it too late. Too late for what? Mrs McCausley hadn’t heard. Reverend Richmond admitted he’d fallen asleep and so couldn’t vouch for anything after the interval. But the family with the red dog had seen the girls leave. Their eldest boy even saw them again a second time, walking around the edge of the oval when he took the red dog – C’mere – to stretch his legs.
‘Where were they headed?’
But the boy didn’t know. He pointed vaguely to the river.
‘They were handing out Salvation! brochures,’ Mrs Van Apfel explained over and over to a stricken-looking young detective. He’d dressed in a hurry and the epaulette on one shoulder was undone and waved shyly every time the wind blew.
‘I let them go,’ Mrs Van Apfel said. ‘The three of them went together. How could I know? Stay inside the amphitheatre, I said.’
While the cops did their interviews, the SES volunteers arrived, then the dog squad with their salt-and-pepper dogs. Then Dad said he thought it was time Lor and I went home with Mum, while he stayed to help with the search. The three of us left, and as we drove up and out of the valley, the moon sailed alongside us. Tethered like a balloon on a string.
* * *
In the following days they buzzed in like flies: the ground crews, the specialists, the teams from the city. Police divers surfaced and sank all along the river. Dropping like bait on a line.
By the cops’ reckoning, more than four hundred people were within a one-kilometre radius of the amphitheatre on the night of the disappearance. They counted. Then they interviewed each one. Plotting movements, cross-checking stories. Asking the same questions over and over again.
What did we see? Could we remember any details? Were the girls happy? Were they in trouble at school? Could we think of a reason they might run away? Did we know of anywhere they might go? They wrote and recorded everything we said and then they filed it in their reports. They had more than twelve hundred information reports in the end, and more than two thousand documents all up. So many words, but none of them were enough. None of them brought those girls home.
Lor and I were interviewed three times during that period. Me once, Laura twice, each interview coming several days apart. I guess they wanted to speak with my sister more times because she was older.
Either that or I was the more convincing liar.
We didn’t say anything about Hannah a
nd Cordie’s running-away plan. About Mr Van Apfel. Or about Mr Avery. Not a word about Laura’s cash, or my skit, or the fact Ruth was uninvited. We had more secrets than we had things to tell.
And on TV Lindy Chamberlain and her strappy sundress were replaced by photos of Hannah, Cordie and Ruth. They filled our screens each evening dressed in their ironed uniforms. Once they even appeared dressed as angels in Mrs Blunt’s nativity play (though no mention of whether Cordie’s costume included knickers or not).
Seeing them there, dressed for the nativity play, made me anxious about that script I’d kept for Cordie. The one for my Showstopper skit, back when I thought she might be in it.
That script was still stashed under my bed, with Cordie’s name on the front, and all her unlearned lines highlighted pink. And the part I’d assigned her, before Melanie Firth got the job, was the character of Azaria. The one titled: ‘Missing Girl’.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
They had Buckley’s of knowing how long she’d been dead when they found her there by the river. Wedged into those boulders. Rammed right in like the valley wasn’t low enough, like she’d tried to go deeper, tried to crawl right inside and be eaten alive.
Only thing, but: Ruth was dead.
They said when they saw her that her mouth was twisted into its usual curl. Said her head was tipped back, her jaw wide as a pair of cupped hands. Next they saw the flies, that brilliant roiling mess, shifting and dripping and liquid as the tide. They poured from her nose, clustered at her eyes. She could have been down there for days. She could have been dead the entire time we searched, at least that’s what Wade Nevrakis said. And he was told it by his parents, who were there delivering sandwiches from their deli for all the searchers.
Kelly Ashwood spread it that when they found Ruth the black cockatoos already knew. In their bird way they’d sensed it, they’d come back for her. That’s what Kelly Ashwood said. The cockatoos had already travelled up the valley that morning and then back down again, and now there they were, doing a third lap. Only this time they stopped when they got to the spot where Ruth lay dead and they wheeled and careened in a languid black loop, screeching their requiem from the sky.
It was the police from the local area command who found her stuffed in that rock. They saw her plait first. Poking out from between the rocks, looking like one of those woven markers wedged between the pages of her family’s Bible. It was a Sunday afternoon after all.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
At first it seemed like Ruth would never get an autopsy, just like she would never get an eighth birthday. Only, the autopsy was denied because her parents didn’t believe in them (and you couldn’t say the same about birthdays).
But what I wanted to know was: why couldn’t the hospital just show them? When I tracked Dad down to ask him, he was standing at the basin in the bathroom, shaving. He looked at me warily.
‘Show them what, Tik?’
He held his razor in midair, paused on its way to his neck.
‘An autopsy. If the Van Apfels don’t believe in autopsies, why doesn’t someone up at the hospital just show them one? You can’t say you don’t believe in autopsies if you’ve seen one for yourself.’
Dad smiled sadly and put his razor on the lip of the sink. He turned from the mirror to face me square before he answered me.
‘It’s not that the Van Apfels don’t believe autopsies exist. They know they do. It’s more that they don’t agree with them. On religious grounds, you know? They don’t believe that’s what should happen to Ruth.’
I wanted to know what grounds specifically said that Ruth couldn’t have one after everything else she’d been through. After everything she was going to miss out on now, why should she miss out on an autopsy too?
‘I don’t know specifically.’ He smiled ruefully. ‘But I’m sure the Van Apfels have got their reasons. Maybe they think it’s desecration of the body God made. Or maybe they’d like to try and protect Ruth in some way they weren’t able to do when she was still alive. But I really can’t tell you for sure, Tik. It’s not something I understand.
‘The coroner has to consider the public interest too, though,’ Dad went on. ‘The coroner will think it through and then might decide that, for whatever reason, an autopsy isn’t going to tell us anything helpful anyway. Often they can’t determine the cause of death, especially if someone has been lying exposed for up to nine days like Ruth had. And you don’t want to go through that for nothing.
‘The Van Apfels have suffered a lot,’ he added.
The mirror was fogging up and Dad’s face was vanishing. The tap spat a rush of tears into the sink.
‘Tikka,’ Dad said, ‘you know, this isn’t really something for someone your age to have to worry about. It’s not really something that you should —’
But I placed my hands over my ears. Hot tears brimmed in my eyes.
‘Tell that to Ruth!’ I shouted at him. ‘Tell Ruth! She’s not even my age and she’s the one who needs an autopsy! She’s dead and her parents won’t even tell her why!’
I spun on my heel and ran to my room, and I slammed the door behind me. Then I turned and shouted at the closed door: ‘And why am I the only one who can smell that river? Why can’t any of you smell the stink?’
In the end the coroner did step in and overrule the Van Apfels’ ‘no autopsy’ request. A coronial post-mortem was required but it didn’t tell us much. Didn’t tell us how Ruth turned up dead. The findings were inconclusive about exactly how she’d died and so we had no more answers than we’d had before.
But at least I felt slightly better for Ruth.
* * *
Ruth was put back in the ground on a Monday morning, eight days after her body was discovered, and seventeen since she first disappeared. Her funeral was held at the Hope Revival Centre, though there wasn’t much reviving going on.
The Hope Revival Centre was where you could find Mr and Mrs Van Apfel most days by that stage, rather than at the police command post in the valley or at their house overlooking Macedon Close. They had attended the eight o’clock Rise Up service at the centre just the day before Ruth’s funeral. ‘Better to seek God’s grace in here than go looking for it out there,’ they reasoned for not joining the search for their remaining two daughters. And Mrs McCausley said: ‘For heaven’s sake, you won’t find those girls in a church.’
But Ruth was there on Monday morning all right.
At her funeral, a photo of Ruth lay on top on her casket. Her plaits straight as two arrows, pointing south to the exits at the far end of the hall. She was buried, not cremated. Put back into the same earth the police had taken so much trouble to yank her from.
During the service they re-used the candles left over from the vigil we’d held, just over a week before, in the park. Mrs Lantana had overdone it at the time by collecting five thousand candles, and she had stored the leftovers in her garage, wedged down between the rat traps and a gone-soft carton of VB, before dragging them out for the funeral and stacking them in her reliable white station wagon. Then she ferried them to the church across the valley.
When we arrived at the funeral we were sent in two directions at the large double doors of the worship hall. There didn’t seem to be any method to the division, only that the women ushering us in wanted the hall to be filled from the front on both sides. ‘Like separating the sheep from the goats,’ Mrs McCausley said when she was directed to sit next to me. My family and Mrs McCausley were on the opposite side of the aisle from Mr and Mrs Van Apfel, though it was impossible to say if that meant we were sheep or if it made us the goats.
There were no windows in the Hope Revival Centre worship hall. No natural light at all. Instead the ceiling was studded with rows of downlights that had been dimmed to the lowest possible setting, as if the congregation were sitting in a cinema waiting for the movie to begin. At the front of the hall was a colossal carpeted stage, complete with stage lights in unimaginable colours. Though they kept those rainbow lights swit
ched off out of respect for Ruth. Or maybe Mr and Mrs Van Apfel requested to be kept in the dark.
There was a drum kit on stage, and a row of black microphones lay abandoned on the carpet. As if the band had gone backstage for a break and their encore would come after the service. Ruth’s casket was centre stage. On top of the casket, next to a photo of Ruth, sat a yellow Care Bear, its daffodil down hacked into a spiked mohawk.
‘Cordie did that,’ I said in disgust, remembering the day she played hairdresser. Typical of her to try to steal centre stage when, for once, it was all about Ruth.
‘Plus it stinks in here,’ I muttered to Mrs McCausley.
‘Lily-of-the-valley,’ she explained, and she pointed to the flower displays up the front. Though mostly Ruth’s funeral smelled like hankies and despair, and I couldn’t wait to get outside.
Across the aisle from us Mr Van Apfel sat straight and stiff-backed throughout the funeral. Upright the entire time. While Mrs Van Apfel sat by his side and sobbed quietly, fatalistically because the worst had finally happened. Their chairs were separate from the rest of the congregation – they had their own self-made row – so that the two of them were closer to Ruth than anyone else in the hall, except for the pastor on stage.
And as the pastor started to speak – as he read a long and bewildering scripture that talked of angels and altars, of horseheads and bottomless pits (‘Let loose the angels bound in the river! One woe is past; and, behold there come two woes more hereafter . . .’), as Funshine Bear smiled down benignly on the congregation from on top of Ruth’s casket like some sort of Pop Art deity, as the lilies began to wilt and brown at the edges in the stale airconditioned air – it was then that Mr Van Apfel turned to face the family and friends, the neighbours and teachers who sat massed and red-eyed behind him. He looked approvingly at the size of the congregation. Nodded at a few people. But in the instant before he turned back to Ruth, Mr Van Apfel caught my eye. You know, I thought. You know your daughters planned to run away. And what’s more, you know I do too. Sweat prickled at the nape of my neck. But Mr Van Apfel smiled munificently at me for one moment. Then he turned back to his daughter’s casket.
The Van Apfel Girls Are Gone Page 19