The Van Apfel Girls Are Gone

by Felicity McLean

  * * *

  After the funeral Jade Heddingly pumped us for information while we stood in the foyer outside. Jade hadn’t been allowed to attend the service on account of it being too distressing, her parents said. But that didn’t stop her arksing us for all the gory details. ‘Did you see her?’ she wanted to know.

  Mrs McCausley shook her head. ‘Closed coffin, thank heavens. No one needed to see the poor girl.’

  ‘What did they talk about?’ Jade asked us then.

  ‘The sermon was a strange thing on the Valley of Dry Bones,’ Mrs McCausley said. ‘All about putting tendons back on bones and bringing them back to life, as if that was helpful at this point.’

  ‘Ezekiel 37,’ I added for Jade’s benefit.

  And when Mrs McCausley saw that I recognised which chapter of the Bible it was from, well, she just about keeled over with surprise. I didn’t tell her I only knew it from family Bible study at the Van Apfels’ house. Because that was a lifetime ago. (Also, because it wasn’t every day that you got to tell Mrs McCausley something she didn’t already know.)

  ‘I didn’t recognise any of the music either,’ she admitted to Jade. ‘They weren’t proper hymns; it was all pop music as far as I could tell.’

  We stopped talking after that because the hearse was leaving and we all stood by the window to watch. I thought about Ruth, laid out in that casket. Sealed like a Tupperware box. And even after the sad sermon and the songs, all the photos of Ruth that had been shown in a PowerPoint presentation, the idea of her being kept safe inside that thing forever was the most heartbreaking part.

  * * *

  In the days and weeks after we buried Ruth, Mrs Van Apfel retreated inside their dark house at the top of the street. The house remained pristine; it was still scrupulously respectable. Only the pool turned a more insidious shade of green with neglect, while inside the spiral staircase continued to twist tight around the house’s heart.

  The Van Apfels didn’t sell up and leave Macedon Close like we all thought they might. Nor did Mrs Van Apfel rejoin the search for Hannah and Cordie. She left it up to the experts to find no trace of her daughters. In fact, we never saw Mrs Van Apfel in the valley again after the day they discovered poor Ruth in that rock. She mostly stayed inside her house, or else she visited the Lord’s. She clung to her Hope Revival commitments more than ever. Praise and Worship each Wednesday. Rise Up Sunday mornings. Embalming her soul in her schedule.

  It was as if the red lines that she printed so carefully on her calendar were the only things holding her up. Mr Van Apfel, meanwhile, relied on a plastic outdoor chair he placed by the footpath that ran the width of his front yard.

  He sat in that chair every morning and most afternoons. Like a dream. Throned on faded plastic. The chair was split up one leg but, somehow, still managed to hold his weight for all those hours every day. He sat there just watching, unless you got too close to him. Then he quoted Bible verses at you. It was like he was afraid he might vanish too if he wasn’t out there in full view.

  But we couldn’t hold on to Mr Van Apfel any more than we could reach his wife, and bits of him fell away every day. In the months and years that passed he still quoted scripture at us if we strayed near his yard, but the verses were jumbled and halfhearted by that stage. And the funny part was, we got so used to him being there that after a while we stopped noticing him altogether. He still sat, but we stopped seeing.

  And then it was complete: the Van Apfels had vanished in front of our eyes.

  * * *

  Though there was one night when Mr Van Apfel swam into clarity for us. When he emerged, clear and sharp-edged and engaged in a fury-filled tirade. He stood in the dark, at the bottleneck to our cul-de-sac, and rained down venom.

  It was bin night that night, and red council-issue garbage bins lined the curb, interspersed with green garden-waste ones. Like Christmas decorations strung along the gutter. Season’s greetings! And a happy New Year!

  But as Mr Van Apfel wrestled with his bin, as he struggled to pull it into line, a garbage bag oozed out and over the lip of his bin and got caught on a plastic splinter. It punctured. And greasy chicken bones and limp lettuce leaves, piles of wadded-up tissues escaped and tumbled onto the road and lay in a heap at his feet.

  And that was it. That was when we saw Mr Van Apfel fold.

  He shouted at the bin – at his life – at the injustice of it all. Spilled rubbish was what it took in the end. He raged and he swore, without bothering to bend down and pick up the rubbish off the road.

  He went on for minutes. He went on like that for so long that all around the cul-de-sac curious neighbours who’d been drawn to their windows by his shouts had enough time to leave their posts and go and mute their TVs and then return to their windows. To pull up a chair.

  Meanwhile, in the street, black clouds gathered ominously, though in the night sky they were easy to miss. And anyway, who could take their eyes off Mr Van Apfel? His despair was mesmerising.

  For an instant he paused. Drew a breath. Re-inflated. Looked like he was ready to begin again. Instead, he kicked his rubbish bin savagely and it wobbled capriciously. The thing teetered, and then righted itself.

  The bin stayed standing but Mr Van Apfel crumpled. Collapsed in on himself like thin origami paper. He howled while he crouched there, alone in the dark. Then even the howling ended and there really was nothing.

  Nothing, that is, except the soft sound of rain. It came strange and tentative at first. Like the rain itself wasn’t sure it was falling. ‘Dad, it’s raining,’ I said in awe. How long had it been? The two of us stood at the window in the lounge room and together we watched the rain.

  It fell heavier, more certain, more convinced of itself. It flowed around the wheelie bins. It congealed with car oil on the road and ran down the slope in slick, warped rainbows.

  And the whole time Mr Van Apfel stayed crouched in the dark, as if he couldn’t feel the rain pelting him there. It made rivers down his cheeks and soaked his white collared shirt. Leaked through the patterned holes of his sanctimonious brogues. Until eventually the rain eased, and Mr Van Apfel stood up. He walked sulkily inside like a child.

  * * *

  A fortnight after Ruth turned up dead, the search for her sisters was scaled back. Not because we’d found them, but because we hadn’t. (And Ruth didn’t give much away.)

  In its place a taskforce was set up to take over the investigation. This meant that our parents, the SES crews, and all those blue-capped cops under Senior Detective Constable Mundy’s command were being replaced by a new set of experts.

  It was left to Wade Nevrakis to tell us they were winding things up, and we knew Wade was telling the truth because we saw them drive out. We watched them as they went. The red sheds sat abandoned now the police command post was gone. Their rusty roofs glowed in the heat of the late afternoon, like embers not properly put out.

  The case was being passed to a taskforce after just twenty-three days of intensive searching. Barely one week of searching per girl. (Slightly more for Ruth when you consider it took nine days to find her. But then, when they did, she was already dead.)

  Mr Avery was dead too, by the time they discovered him. Hanging there in the shower. It happened eight months after the disappearance of the Van Apfel girls, which was both enough time for it to be considered a separate investigation and for the two to be forever linked in neighbourhood gossip.

  It was his feet that gave him away. With their beautiful arches, their knobbly bones like contours on a map. He was hanging from the shower rail in his small rented bathroom, where he’d taken the time to slide the plastic curtain with its raindrop design carefully out of the way. August gusts through the window buffeted his body gently so it swung slightly. It shifted and stirred. While the curtain stayed slime-stuck against the wet tiles and it looked like the dead thing, not him.

  He was dressed in his usual short-sleeved shirt and his brown, ironed trousers. His hairy hands hung outside his po
ckets. His tongue hung out too, and was stiff and dried out. As if he died trying to pass on what he knew.

  Jim found him. Jim Jericho, who came in his Jim Jericho van. The one that said: fix it and right price and mates’ rates. Jim had come round on his day off to fix a blocked pipe. Said the door was open. Said he just went on in.

  Then Jim said: ‘Jeez, mate, you couldn’t believe it.’

  And also: ‘What a thing to find.’

  Said a bloke would never get over seeing something like that. Not on a bloke’s day off.

  And whether Mr Avery’s suicide was a sign of his guilt – of his complicity in the girls’ disappearance somehow – was impossible to say. Not that that stopped people trying. Mrs McCausley said that it was conclusive evidence, his dead body there in the shower. She said that suicide equalled guilt and she’d suspected him all along. Ever since that day she first met him at the milk bar. And I didn’t like to point out she hadn’t actually met him then and, in actual fact, she’d missed him by minutes. Because a little thing like the truth never stopped Mrs McCausley: judge, jury and executioner.

  Or maybe he was just sorry he hadn’t done enough to save those girls, to save Cordie. We all knew what that felt like.

  The police took Jim’s statement. (Though Jim didn’t know much more than us.) What Jim did know was how that thin curtain rail held up under the strain of the body, because Jim had fixed that rail himself. He’d made it secure back when Mr Avery first arrived and moved into that rental place.

  Not long before Cordelia Van Apfel fell out of a tree.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  On the Thursday after I saw Mrs McCausley at the SupaCentre I visited her for afternoon tea.

  ‘You came before four?’ She sounded suspicious when she answered the door, like she hadn’t expected me to turn up on time.

  ‘I give the kookaburras their dinner at four o’clock,’ she explained as I stepped past the screen door and stood beside her in the hallway. ‘But then I’ve already told you that, haven’t I?’

  I didn’t know if it was a bad sign she’d repeated herself, or a good sign that at least she’d realised.

  She led me down the darkened hallway before we emerged into her immaculate lounge room. The carpet was lush. Doilies fortified every surface. She indicated I should sit on the couch, but only where it was safeguarded by a crocheted blanket.

  ‘I’ll put the kettle on. Do you drink tea?’

  ‘Lovely,’ I assured her. And I sat on the couch and listened to Mrs McCausley move around in the kitchen while I took in the landscape paintings on the walls, the coffee table polished to shining, the porcelain dolls with lace bonnets shielding their dead glassy eyes and standing on a custom-made shelf beside the doorway. Her house was exactly as I remembered it. When Mrs McCausley returned she carried a tray filled with cups and saucers, a dainty dish of Scotch Finger biscuits. She placed it on the coffee table alongside a teapot that was wearing a knitted cosy.

  ‘It’s good of you to come and see me, Tikka,’ she said, pouring the tea.

  ‘Anything for a Scotch Finger, Mrs McCausley.’

  Because there were worse reasons for visiting the house at the top of the street, even if Laura said she couldn’t think of any.

  ‘It’s been a long time since you’ve been to visit me here.’

  ‘A very long time,’ I agreed. ‘A while since I’ve been back to Macedon Close at all.’

  ‘Ten years?’ she asked.

  ‘Maybe eight,’ I admitted.

  ‘There was no need for you to run away,’ she said cryptically.

  ‘How’s your hip today?’ I asked, changing the subject and helping myself to a biscuit. But Mrs McCausley’s face fell at the mention of her hip.

  ‘More to the point, how’s yours?’ She said it sharply, as if she was offended I’d asked such a personal question.

  ‘My hip?’ I was confused. ‘But – but last time I saw you, you were telling me about your hip replacement.’

  Mrs McCausley made a face that said she doubted that very much.

  ‘Sorry, Mrs McCausley,’ I said, ‘I was only asking . . .’

  I trailed off because I was worried about upsetting her more. Could she really not remember that part of our conversation at the SupaCentre? Why would she think I’d make such a thing up?

  After that the conversation drifted for a while. Her garden. My lab work. A new detective series on the ABC. I hadn’t seen it. It was worth staying in for, she advised. The violence didn’t worry her too much, she said, though the plot sometimes seemed overly complicated.

  I was almost at the point where I thought it was time to leave.

  ‘Your kookaburras will be getting peckish,’ I said, and she smirked.

  There was nothing wrong with Mrs McCausley’s brain when it came to the punchline.

  ‘It is almost their teatime,’ she said, glancing towards the sliding glass doors that led out onto the back deck, but there was no sign of her kookaburras yet. Though it was impossible to see all of the deck from where we sat in the lounge room, because the doors were framed with heavy brocade drapes that were embroidered with their own, more delicate birds.

  ‘But you can’t leave before I say what I wanted to tell you,’ she said. Her voice had found some of its colour again since I made the crack about kookaburras. ‘Not before I tell you what I saw.’

  ‘What you saw?’ I asked. I was surprised she’d remembered she was going to tell me anything, but I was careful not to show it.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘What I saw the night before the Van Apfel girls disappeared.’

  My head snapped to attention. ‘What did you say?’

  ‘What I saw the night before the Van Apfel girls disappeared,’ she repeated. ‘I’ve never told anyone else.’

  And so Mrs McCausley told me about a night almost exactly twenty years ago to the day. The night before the Showstopper. When the Van Apfel girls were still here, still living across the cul-de-sac.

  Mrs McCausley had walked out into Macedon Close that night with a brochure about Tupperware’s new Airtight Alright range in her left hand and a sample salad spinner in her right.

  ‘What time was it?’ I interrupted.

  ‘Eight-thirty?’ she guessed. ‘After A Country Practice.’

  Mrs McCausley never missed an episode of A Country Practice. Her timing could be trusted.

  She had teetered across the bottleneck of the cul-de-sac in her high heels and clack-clacked up the Van Apfels’ drive. She was there to sell a salad spinner to Mrs Van Apfel (even if Mrs Van Apfel didn’t know it yet).

  ‘A salad spinner with a retractable lid for easy storage and stacking,’ she explained, slipping effortlessly into her sales patter and shedding twenty years in the process. Mrs McCausley had been keeping Mrs Van Apfel in Tupperware for years. And while she never stretched to offering her neighbour an actual discount, Mrs McCausley was quick to point out that all Tupperware products came with a thirty-day return policy if you were in any way disappointed. (Which was more generous than it sounded when you took into account that disappointment was a very real risk when you were selling to Mrs Van Apfel.)

  That night, however, Mrs Van Apfel had to wait for the chance to be disappointed and Mrs McCausley had to wait for her sale. Because as she approached the Van Apfel house, her Airtight Alright salad spinner tucked under her arm, Mrs McCausley heard raised voices coming from inside the house.

  ‘“Sinful” this, and “penitence” that. To tell you the truth, I was embarrassed by what I heard,’ Mrs McCausley said.

  But not so embarrassed that it stopped her from climbing the three steps up and onto the verandah, where she had a clear view into the downstairs lounge room, and then from standing, unseen, on the Van Apfels’ doorstep without ever ringing the bell.

  From there Mrs McCausley could see straight inside to where Mr Van Apfel sat in his father’s armchair, his feet planted on the old man’s rug. In front of him Hannah and Cordie stood together in the
middle of the room, copping the full force of his rage. In one hand he held a toothpick, which he pointed as he spoke, stabbing each word forcefully into the air. He had a small army of toothpicks in a container on the table beside him. ‘A Tupperware tubful,’ Mrs McCausley noted.

  ‘They’d had roast beef for dinner,’ Mrs McCausley remembered. ‘I could smell it through an upstairs window. My Ralph used to insist on roast beef once a week.

  ‘Half a teaspoon of baking soda to make the vegetables shine. That’s the secret,’ she confided.

  ‘Where was Ruth?’ I said. ‘Could you see her too?’

  She told me Ruth had stood shame-faced in the doorway.

  ‘The doorway to the garage?’

  No, Ruth was standing in the doorway that led off to the other parts of the house – to the downstairs bedrooms, the laundry, the study, to those spiral stairs. Mrs McCausley could also hear someone upstairs in the kitchen, clattering china plates into cupboards with enough force to make her disgust known, but not so hard she might chip a dish.

  ‘Cordelia was the only one of those girls doing any talking,’ Mrs McCausley reported. ‘Their father, of course, hardly came up for air. But Cordelia gave it back to him at every chance she got. She wasn’t going to take it lying down.’

  ‘Take what? What wasn’t she going to take?’ I asked, my heart thumping.