‘Oh, I couldn’t hear any actual words.’ Mrs McCausley looked askance at the question and for a moment I was worried I had broken the spell and that she would lose the thread of her story. But then she continued: ‘Not her words anyway. Mr Van Apfel’s were much easier to pick up. I could make out at least half of what he was saying.’
How long had Mrs McCausley stood there in the darkening day and listened to Mr Van Apfel shout at his daughters? Difficult to say, she told me.
(How long had she spent watching the drama unfold through the lounge-room window while elsewhere, in neighbouring houses, people sat and watched TV. And on those screens, at the end of television tubes, lay cul-de-sacs just like ours where people were fighting and kissing and eating. Putting china plates back into cupboards. Were being sinful in all the same unremarkable ways as his daughters, if only Mr Van Apfel had seen.)
‘I was there long enough to witness Mr Van Apfel really lose his temper,’ Mrs McCausley answered.
‘He lost his temper?’
‘Did he ever,’ she said with marked disapproval. ‘Ranting and slamming his fists down on the armrests of that lovely chair his wife had had reupholstered . . . You know the one, she’d had it done in William Morris Tudor Rose,’ she said emphatically.
‘Not really.’
‘You do. The green one.’
‘And?’ I urged. ‘What happened then?’
But Mrs McCausley wasn’t sure she should say.
‘It’s a bit late for that now,’ I pointed out to her, and she agreed and looked relieved to continue.
Mr Van Apfel had stood then, backhanding the coffee table as he rose out of his seat and spraying a sea of toothpicks across the floors, where they covered the carpet and fell under his chair. Got lost in the fringe of the rug.
He spoke, but the words that came out were not words Mrs McCausley knew. And as he talked, his eyelids fluttered and his eyes rolled to the back of his skull, as if he preferred that view to the one that was there in front of him.
‘Airdiddia diddia diddia,’ he hissed. ‘Hereisshisshia sshisshia sshisha. Airdiddia diddia.’
‘What did it mean?’ I asked.
‘Oh heavens, I don’t know! He was talking in tongues!’ Mrs McCausley said. ‘I’m only telling you what I heard. He stopped after a while and gave a stunned sort of blink, and in the kitchen the clattering stopped too.’
‘And then?’
And then Mr Van Apfel strode across the room to where Hannah and Cordie were standing so close to one another that the backs of their hands were touching, their pinkie fingers curled together tightly. Hannah said something that Mrs McCausley couldn’t hear, and her father dismissed it coolly.
‘Shut up,’ he said. ‘The Lord knows your soul.’
Then he lunged forward and grabbed a fistful of Cordie’s fine hair. He twisted it and her head twisted too. She gasped and closed her eyes in pain.
‘Don’t!’ mouthed Ruth, still standing the doorway.
Hannah appeared to swear softly, her eyes on the faded rug at their feet. But her father ignored her, yanking Cordie’s head, dragging her downwards by the hair. She grimaced and put out an arm to try to push him away, but her hand fell hopelessly short.
‘Kneel!’ he barked at her then and he pulled her onto the floor. She stumbled and got herself onto her bare knees, leaning towards him to try to ease the pressure on her scalp, but he saw what she was doing and twisted her hair tighter and she sobbed, her eyes still squeezed shut.
‘Lord-Jesus-Lamb-of-God-Prince-of-Peace,’ the words dripped off his tongue. ‘You are the way, the truth and the light, no one comes to the Father but through you. No one knows the way but through you. No one sees the truth but through you.’
Each time he said ‘you’ he wrenched Cordie’s head closer to the muscles of his leg.
‘No one sees the light but through you,’ he said. ‘Say it!’
And Cordie appeared to echo his words, her face twisted as she spoke.
‘Amen,’ came Mrs Van Apfel’s voice from the doorway. Her eyes were closed too and she swayed slightly as she listened to her husband’s words.
Mr Van Apfel still gripped Cordie’s hair, and she must have spoken then because he bent low so his face was near hers. He brushed his cheek against hers, and when Mrs McCausley told me I could feel, just as Cordie would have felt, the beginnings of tomorrow’s bristles brush against my cheek. Smelled that sour beef stink on his breath. His face creased and he eased his grip on her hair and let it fall from his hand so he could run the back of one finger lovingly down the bridge of her nose. His gift from God. Cordeli. Aaah.
He leaned in closer and whispered something into Cordie’s ear, but she shook her head and seemed to refuse to say it. In the doorway Mrs Van Apfel repeated ‘Amen’ while her husband ranted about shame.
‘And “deep pits”? Something about “deep pits” I couldn’t catch,’ Mrs McCausley admitted. ‘And: “The wicked flee when no one is chasing them.” I remember that line because he said it so loud and so many times. I’m surprised you didn’t hear it from your place.’
‘Flee?’ I said urgently. ‘What, like run away?’
So this was Mr Van Apfel’s retribution then. How he’d made them pay over their running-away plan. No wonder Cordie was so desperate to try to get away. To try to travel in our car the next day to the Showstopper.
‘Are you sure that’s what he said? Flee?’ I asked. ‘That’s important!’
‘Of course I’m sure,’ Mrs McCausley said. ‘My hearing is perfect, you know.’ As if the whole street didn’t know she always watched her TV with the volume dialled right up to twelve.
Still, if Mrs McCausley was to be believed, in the next instant, when Cordie looked at her dad contemptuously, refusing to say what he was asking of her, Mr Van Apfel reached out again and this time gripped a handful of her hair in his fist. He twisted it and Cordie’s eyes widened in pain but her lips pressed tighter together.
‘No, Daddy!’ Hannah urged.
But Mr Van Apfel ignored her and ripped the entire fistful from Cordie’s head and stood holding it like a tail.
‘Her hair?’ I was aghast.
‘Right off her head,’ Mrs McCausley confirmed. Then she leaned in and lowered her voice as if this were the scandalous part: ‘I screamed, it was so horrific.’
‘You screamed?’ I asked.
‘Yes,’ she admitted.
‘Loud?’
‘Loud enough,’ she said.
Which was how, while Cordie knelt in stunned silence, staring at her hair in her dad’s hand; while Ruth stood in the doorway next to her mum and sobbed self-pityingly, Hannah raised her arm and pointed towards the lounge-room window.
‘Mrs McCausley,’ she simply said.
And they all turned to face Mrs McCausley standing there on the verandah, her face frozen in horror. Her high-heeled feet were rooted to the coir-wire doormat, her hand clamped over her mouth. For a moment she had the decency to look flustered at being caught out. Then she lowered her hand and raised an eyebrow archly. She pursed her disapproving lips and lifted her sample to the glass. ‘Salad spinner?’
‘What did they say?’ I asked.
‘Oh, Mr Van Apfel was his usual charming self. Invited me in. Acted like it never happened. In fact, he was so relaxed I started to wonder whether I’d dreamed the whole thing. Except for the hair that was still in his fist.’
‘It was still in his fist?’
‘The whole time we spoke.’
‘Oh my God, that’s shameless!’
‘You think I was going to lecture Mr Van Apfel about shame?’
‘But what about the girls? Where were they?’ I said. ‘What about Mrs Van Apfel?’
‘The girls disappeared upstairs as far as I could tell. Though Mrs Van Apfel stuck around. She bought a salad spinner but she didn’t like the colour. She was never very easily pleased.’
‘You still sold them Tupperware?’
‘What was I sup
posed to do?’
Mrs McCausley was starting to clear away our afternoon tea now that her story was done. She looked her age again without the wind of scandal in her sails.
‘But – but why didn’t you say anything?’ I said as she placed fine bone china, pretty floral cups and saucers and leftover Scotch Finger biscuits carefully back onto the tray. ‘Why didn’t you tell the police? Why didn’t you report it during the investigation? Or even report it now?’
‘Why don’t you?’ she replied evenly. ‘Now that I’ve told you about it.’
(Though I was hardly going to start talking now.)
She paused as if considering whether to say the next bit, then she smiled conspiratorially at me.
‘Anyway,’ she said, ‘no one would believe me any more. They all think I’ve lost my marbles.’
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
In the dinge and dark inside the garage it was hard to make out Dad’s features. He was bent low, feeling around for the handle on the boot of his car, and I could hear his breathing. It was even and impossibly patient. After a long pause the lock clicked open and the rear door raised up, its interior light shining down on him like a dim, slim rectangular halo.
‘This is it,’ he said. ‘A job lot.’
Inside the back of his four-wheel drive there were boxes stacked to the roof. Brown, no-nonsense cardboard cubes with Foodbank stamped on the side. We were here to transfer the boxes onto the floor of our garage so that someone else – some fellow volunteer at the local Foodbank – could come and move the boxes into the back of their four-wheel drive and then ferry them back to the warehouse in a long and convoluted chain of events I couldn’t even begin to follow.
‘You reckon you’re up to it?’ Dad asked.
‘You reckon we might turn on a brighter light before we start?’ I replied.
I walked over to the far wall and flicked the switch, and the overhead fluorescent tube blinked once, twice before springing into life. Dad looked thinner from here. He was well into his sixties now, and even though he still had plenty of hair, it stood up in soft, feathery tufts that were completely white. He ran his hands through it now.
‘Is there an order to the boxes?’ I asked as I walked back over to the car.
There wasn’t. Each one was filled with the same tins of food. The same baked beans and kidney beans and pale peas and sliced beetroot. I spied a tin of condensed milk through a gap in the cardboard.
‘You used to let us drink condensed milk. Do you remember that?’
‘Did I?’ Dad said with feigned ignorance. ‘That can’t be right.’
We began unloading, and the tins rattled satisfyingly inside their cardboard homes as we stacked them along the garage wall. It was hot work and after a while sweat trickled down the length of my neck.
‘Visited your mate Mrs McCausley yesterday, did you, Tik?’ Dad asked as we stacked. Mum must have mentioned I’d been there.
I nodded. ‘Mrs McCausley says everyone thinks she’s going senile, but she seemed okay to me.
‘She can remember things with the most amazing detail,’ I went on. ‘Like . . .’ I hesitated. ‘Like, she remembers being at the Van Apfel house on the night before the girls disappeared.’
I let that hang for a moment, but Dad continued shifting boxes with a deliberate air of equanimity. He wasn’t going to be drawn into this conversation if he could help it.
‘She said it was pretty heated over there that night. You know, Mr Van Apfel was being violent and stuff . . .’
I watched as Dad dragged the next box across the carpet in the back of the car and then pivoted it onto the edge of the boot, ready to lift. He turned to face me and indicated I should grab the other end of the box. Together we lowered it to the floor.
‘Violent,’ he said after a long silence. ‘Is that right? Mrs McCausley told you that?’
‘Yeah, she did.’
‘And what else did Mrs McCausley have to say?’ There was no hiding the irritation in his voice.
‘She’s wasn’t gossiping,’ I assured him, because I knew what Dad thought of Mrs McCausley. ‘What she was telling me could be important, Dad. She said Mr Van Apfel was shouting at Cordie, and then she saw him rip out a handful of her hair.’
Dad said nothing, only shook his head. But whether he was disapproving of Mr Van Apfel or Mrs McCausley – or of me, for dredging things up again – was impossible to tell.
‘Can you get on the other end of this?’ he said eventually, and we lifted and then lowered another Foodbank box.
I’d started talking now and I had that old feeling, the one I got a lot when I was a kid. The sense that something had been unplugged somewhere deep in my chest. I felt it dislodge so the words could come tumbling out.
‘They were planning to run away, you know,’ I told Dad. ‘Hannah and Cordie and Ruth. They were planning to run away from home on the night they disappeared, and Mr Van Apfel knew about it.’
I paused.
‘Hannah and I knew about it too,’ I said.
‘I know,’ Dad replied.
‘You know?’
‘I do.’
Dad had been levering a box against the lip of the car but now he tipped it back into the boot to wait to be unloaded. He could see there was no avoiding this conversation now.
‘Laura already told your mother. She spoke to her not long after she was diagnosed. Amazing what comes out of the woodwork when you’re faced with a cancer diagnosis,’ he said.
‘What did Laura say?’ I was floored.
‘Exactly what you just told me. She said that the girls were going to try and run away that night, and that you two knew about it. Though to be honest, your mum and I suspected something was going on at the time. You five girls were thick as thieves, and we figured if there was any funny business going on, then you and your sister probably knew about it.’
‘So why didn’t you make us tell you? Or tell the police?’
‘Ah well, we trusted you.’ He laughed gently and brushed grit from his hands. ‘You were good kids, Tik. You and your sister. We knew the pair of you had enough sense to speak up if it was something worth speaking up about.’
‘But we didn’t!’ I protested. ‘We didn’t tell anyone and we should have! The police should have known, and if they had – if Laura and I had told them – then maybe they might have . . . I don’t know, maybe they would have done things differently.’
‘I’m sure they would have,’ Dad said.
‘But then, that’s enough reason to . . . That makes it our fault that they didn’t . . .’ I could feel tears prickling in my eyes and I blinked them back.
Dad had stopped dusting his hands by now and he simply held up one hand in the same way he used to silence his students in class.
‘Tikka, enough.’
It was ridiculous, but just seeing that familiar gesture, that palm, more creased than ever these days, was enough to make me stop.
‘I don’t know that speaking up would have made much difference, champ. Sounds to me like those girls were pretty determined to get away.’
Somewhere down the street someone started revving a car engine in sharp, angry bursts.
‘There were a lot of people who should have been in the queue to talk to the police ahead of you, Tik,’ Dad said. ‘Mrs McCausley, for a start, if she knew so much. Why didn’t she say anything to the cops? Or why didn’t Mr and Mrs Van Apfel? I’m guessing Mrs Van Apfel got wind of the girls’ plan to run away if her husband knew about it. Someone might argue that they should have been telling the police.’
He grimaced, and for a moment I wondered if all this lifting and carrying boxes was too much for his back these days.
‘There were a lot of adults who didn’t do the right thing by those girls. Your mother and I, we could have stepped in. Done more. Said something.’ He gave a helpless sort of shrug. ‘We could have questioned you and Laura harder. Sometimes I wonder. But you were only kids, and it was hard enough watching you lose your fri
ends. You and Lor were a mess.’
I looked past Dad as he spoke, and I tried not to think about what it felt like back then, when our grief was so horribly raw. Instead I focused on the wall of cardboard boxes that were slowly piling up against of the brickwork of the garage. They made a second wall there, a cardboard-carton wall like the inner bailey of a fort. A fort of brown Foodbank boxes.
Dad turned his attention back to the remaining boxes in the car. Outside the engine noise died down and in the silence I could hear Dad’s breathing again, though it was more laboured now. He slid another box towards us and tilted it, ready to lift. I took the weight on the other side.
‘Anyway, Mrs McCausley didn’t know about the girls’ plan to run away,’ I said as we lifted the box into the air. ‘Only Mr Van Apfel and Mr Avery knew.’
Between us we’d lowered the box we were holding almost to the floor, but now Dad let it drop onto the concrete with a bang. Inside tins rattled like teeth.
‘Mr Avery? The schoolteacher? He knew?’
‘Uh, apparently.’ I was surprised by the force of Dad’s words.
‘Cordie told him,’ I said. ‘At least, she said she did.’
I thought back to the fight Cordie and Hannah had had on the way home from school the day Cordie had bragged to Mr Avery about their secret plan. ‘So what?’ she said scornfully. ‘He was interested. He’s always interested in what I’ve got to say.’ She’d stopped in the street to snap her sock elastic tight, and then she’d rolled the sock suggestively down her calf until it formed a thick sausage around her ankle.
‘So Mr Avery knew Cordelia was planning to run away?’ Dad said.
‘Cordie said he did.’
‘Did he know when?’
‘When they planned to leave? I think so. Yeah, he did. Because he told Cordie it was a shame he was working backstage at the Showstopper that night so he wouldn’t get to say a proper goodbye. Whatever that meant.’
Dad said nothing.
‘What? Dad, what? What do you think it means? Do you think that would have been enough for the police to get him on? Because if you think it means he was guilty of something then we could —’
I stopped when I saw Dad’s stony expression. He nudged a box tetchily with his toe.
The Van Apfel Girls Are Gone Page 21