The Housemate

by Sarah Bailey

  ‘But it was Nicole’s house?’

  ‘We think so. A woman who looks like Nicole was definitely living there with a kid. It wasn’t Alex—she lives in the city.’

  ‘So she went to Crystalbrook to see Nicole?’

  ‘No idea, but I assume so. Bowman was pissed about your article, by the way. I think he called someone at your paper.’

  ‘Yeah, well, that was a bullshit move. It was a legitimate lead.’

  ‘I’m just the messenger, Ol.’

  ‘What about the fire?’

  ‘I haven’t heard anything more. The word yesterday was that the fire in the main room caught and hit the gas supply, but a team’s out there today so we should know more later.’

  In the background are voices that fade as Rusty starts walking away from whomever is talking.

  Oli asks, ‘Were Alex and Nicole in contact this whole time?’

  ‘I don’t know. I doubt we’re going to know much more until we find Nicole.’

  Oli suddenly feels an overwhelming wave of frustration. ‘What the fuck happened yesterday, Rusty? Why was everyone so sure that it was Nicole up there?’

  ‘It was a total fuck-up,’ he admits. ‘They didn’t get the body down for a few hours due to some error with the coroner call-out, and Nicole Horrowitz’s old ID was found at the scene, which was obviously what leaked. There was no reason to think she was someone else—they look similar, and no one had sighted her for years.’

  Oli glances at Cooper and says more quietly, ‘What about the other thing you mentioned? The letter.’

  ‘I shouldn’t have said anything to you about that, Ol. You can’t run with it, okay? I’ve heard nothing since.’

  ‘Was it for Alex or Nicole?’

  Cooper isn’t even pretending not to listen now.

  ‘Oli. Be fair.’ Rusty has clearly reached his limit.

  ‘Okay, okay,’ she says. ‘Jesus, Rusty, this is big.’

  ‘It’s pretty crazy,’ he agrees, calming again. ‘Talking of death threats, this O’Brien situation is really blowing up too. We’ll have to provide him with security. People are out for blood because of his wife.’

  ‘Sounds like a great use of resources,’ Oli says sarcastically.

  ‘I know. What an arsehole.’

  Rusty joined the force full of optimistic passion to right wrongs, and she knows he worries that he’s now further away from achieving this than he ever was as a civilian.

  ‘Thanks, Rusty,’ Oli says, meaning it. ‘Thanks for talking to me.’ ‘It’s nothing. All going to be in the presser today, anyway.’ His tone is deliberately casual, but it doesn’t mask his emotions, and Oli feels bad for calling him even though she’d be crazy not to milk him as a source.

  ‘Honestly,’ she adds, ‘I really appreciate it. We’re going pretty hard at this.’

  ‘I have no doubt.’ He hangs up.

  She shoves her phone in her pocket, newly energised.

  Cooper seems to have recovered from the shock of Alex’s death, his eyes shining with something akin to excitement. ‘I didn’t mention this before, but I have something that might help.’

  Oli hugs her laptop to her chest. ‘What?’

  ‘I spoke to Alex twice on the phone. Last week and the one before.’

  ‘Yes, you told me already.’ Oli starts walking to the office, gesturing for him to follow.

  He lopes awkwardly along beside her. ‘The first time we spoke was really brief. Just a quick chat.’

  ‘Right.’ Oli is only half-listening. She can’t stop thinking about Alex being the body they saw hanging from the tree yesterday.

  They sidestep a pair of sausage dogs wearing tweed coats.

  ‘But the second time we spoke was more like a practice interview. Alex wanted to know what I was going to ask her. And I was keen to get my bearings, seeing as I’d never done anything like this before.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And I might have recorded it.’

  Oli stops walking. Looks at him.

  He smiles tentatively.

  ‘I could kiss you,’ she says.

  Oli and Cooper enter the office via the fire escape and take the stairs two at a time. They’re going to Cooper’s studio, and it’s unspoken that they want to avoid their peers.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me yesterday?’ she asks him.

  ‘I didn’t know Alex was dead, and I didn’t exactly ask her permission to record the call.’

  ‘Didn’t exactly?’ Oli echoes.

  ‘Didn’t at all.’ He pulls ahead, and Oli’s breathing intensifies as they hit the fourth floor. ‘Come on,’ he calls out to her unhelpfully.

  When they reach level five, he pushes through the heavy door and holds it open for Oli. The walls are completely barren, the threadbare carpet spotless.

  ‘What’s up here apart from the studio?’ she asks, puffing as she follows him along the corridor toward the rear of the building. Her phone is going bananas, vibrating continuously in her bag.

  ‘Nothing. We shouldn’t even be up here. There were plans to move everyone here, a while ago, but there was a dispute about the refurb fees so now the landlords are trying to find other companies to move in.’

  ‘Why would we move up here?’ Oli asks, confused.

  ‘It’s cheaper than downstairs, and the paper is losing money. We were going to sublet the lower floors to another business.’ He stops in front of a closed door, swings off his backpack and sticks a hand inside, feeling around for a few moments before pulling out a set of keys. ‘You know there’s going to be a sale?’

  ‘There’ve been rumours of a sale for as long as I’ve been here,’ Oli says dismissively as he unlocks the door. ‘They’ve always amounted to nothing.’

  The room is small, and every surface is covered in black carpet. An Apple Mac sits on the desk against the wall alongside several speakers and other sleek devices. A scratched round table with two chairs sits in the centre of the room, two microphones positioned in the middle. Cooper pulls out his laptop and plugs cords into its side.

  ‘Wow,’ she says, ‘this is quite the production.’

  ‘Yep.’ He straightens, hands on hips as he surveys the room. ‘It’s not bad considering we threw it together so quickly. The sound quality is surprisingly good.’ With the door shut, his black hair and clothing blend into the walls. His pale face floats in the darkness. ‘I’ll pull the files up. It will take a few minutes to download.’

  Oli sits at the table and opens her laptop. The clack of her typing is dulled by the padded room, and there’s something comforting about being sealed off from the mayhem of the newsdesk.

  ‘I come up here a lot to work,’ Cooper says, after a few minutes. ‘One of the IT guys helped me set up this spare computer, but I had to organise a different wi-fi network. It’s not exactly kosher, but it works. The password’s CoopsScoops100, capital letters at the start of each word, with a hashtag at the end.’

  ‘Of course it is,’ Oli says wryly, reading back over her draft. It’s good enough for holding copy, so she connects to the wi-fi and sends it to Dawn.

  ‘Okay, you ready?’ Cooper asks, straightening as he looks at Oli.

  She closes her laptop. ‘Sure.’

  He guides the mouse to a file on the giant screen, double-clicks then hits the space bar. The low hum of white noise fills the room. A series of muffled sounds is followed by Cooper’s voice, more serious and stilted than in real life: ‘Today is just a warm-up, so we both feel comfortable when we do the real interview. Okay?’

  Oli can only hear soft breathing.

  ‘Right.’ Nerves creep into Cooper’s recorded voice. ‘So I’ll just walk you through the kinds of questions I’ll ask when we do the real thing. Please let me know if there’s anything you don’t feel comfortable answering.’ The rasp of a page turning. ‘So, Alex, to start with, I’ll be asking you why you’ve decided to share your story now.’ There’s a sharp intake of breath, then Alex Riboni’s voice fills the room.
>
  Oli badly needs the bathroom, but she doesn’t move, transfixed by Alex’s tentative account of the night her life was ruined and she became a pariah. Her voice is calm, confident. She sounds completely different to the terrified young woman thrust into the spotlight and metaphorically strung up to be stoned almost ten years ago.

  ‘I’m tired of not having a voice.’ A short silence. ‘Things are different now.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘I’m older. And I’m not scared anymore, I have nothing to lose.’ Another pause. ‘I’ve started to remember things about the night my friend died.’

  ‘And you’re ready to tell people what you remember?’

  ‘Yes, I am.’

  Cooper’s interview style is surprisingly polished. He’s polite and respectful, gently coaxing. There’s nothing of the unbridled child in his careful questions. ‘Despite your acquittal, a lot of Australians still think you killed Evelyn Stanley. There are Facebook groups full of people convinced that you got away with murder. If you tell your story now, are you worried about reviving the speculation?’

  ‘I can’t help what people think, but I do know I didn’t want my friend to die.’

  Oli’s mind drifts to Alex at the trial. The image of the woman hanging from the tree yesterday slices unpleasantly into her thoughts.

  ‘Alex, what do you think happened to Nicole Horrowitz?’

  ‘I think she ran away.’

  ‘In the middle of night, leaving all of her things?’

  Alex seems to hesitate. ‘Yes.’

  ‘What do you think she ran away from?’

  ‘From everything.’

  Oli looks at Cooper. ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘Don’t know, she didn’t elaborate. It’s something I would have pushed in the real interview.’

  His recorded voice says, ‘The three of you were obviously very close, but a lot of people who knew you back then said things had started to go wrong before the party that night. Can you tell me about that?’

  Alex’s breathing becomes more audible, tiny wheezing noises that fill the room. ‘We just … Things were complicated. We were very young, and I was scared of losing them. And then,’ she swallows past a sob, ‘and then I lost them anyway.’

  ‘Have you seen Nicole since that night at the house? Do you know where she is?’

  There’s a pause, a silence so long that Oli thinks something is wrong with the tape.

  ‘No, I haven’t seen Nicole since that night.’

  Oli and Cooper lock eyes.

  ‘She didn’t really answer the second part of that question, did she?’ he says.

  ‘No, she didn’t.’

  Oli leaves Cooper in the studio transcribing the phone call with Alex. They’ve forged a hasty plan to divide and conquer. He gave her a set of keys to the studio, and she gave him the keys to the Audi so he can drive back to Crystalbrook and try to find out more about the woman calling herself Natalie Maslan. Oli is going to stay in the city and attempt to make contact with family and friends of Alex and Nicole before Bowman’s press conference.

  She scrawled Rusty’s number in the front page of Cooper’s notebook. ‘Call him if you get yourself into a pickle,’ she said.

  ‘What kind of pickle?’ he asked nervously.

  ‘A journalistic pickle.’

  Now Oli rushes down the corridor, the weight of the story sitting right on top of her chest. She presses her fingers in between her collarbones, trying to relieve the pressure. Thoughts roll around in her head. Why did Alex agree to speak to Cooper, and what exactly was she planning to reveal? His recording is by no means explosive, but there’s grit in Alex’s tone, a quiet power. Oli has done enough interviews to recognise someone on the brink of letting loose, sensing the freedom that will come with telling their truth. This momentum jars with Alex suiciding less than four days later. What happened to have her sink so quickly to such a desperate place?

  Oli careens around the corner and heads to the lift. She pauses as she hears its doors open. Dawn steps out, followed by TJ. Oli ducks into an alcove, but they don’t even glance in her direction. They head up the hallway toward the empty offices, heads bent close, indecipherable murmurs bouncing off the bare walls. Oli reaches the empty lift just as the doors are shutting; she steps inside and jabs the button to close the doors, her eyes on their retreating figures. TJ was talking to Joosten about Dawn, and now Dawn and TJ are having secret meetings?

  But Oli can’t think about that now—she needs to focus on the story. Her impatience flares. She wants all of the information immediately, for there to be a magic code allowing her total access, but the years have taught her that instead this will be a slog. Phone calls, emails. Chasing people down. Waiting. The heart and soul of journalism remain the same no matter how much technology you wrap around them.

  An electronic beep announces her arrival on level one, and she steps out of the lift hoping to find Pia and Brent. All the TVs are playing news footage of Bowman in Crystalbrook yesterday, and Oli glimpses Rusty’s red hair in one of the shots.

  Pia and Brent are in the meeting room next to the boardroom. ‘Anything more on Nicole Horrowitz?’ Oli says in greeting.

  Several sheets of paper are scattered on the table in front of them, devices lined up like weapons.

  ‘We’re not sure,’ Brent says. ‘There are a few social media accounts in her name and variations of it, but we’re pretty sure they’re not her.’

  ‘What about Natalie Maslan? Or Evie Maslan?’

  Brent stifles a burp and takes a swig from his water bottle. Nods. ‘We think this might be them.’ He holds out a piece of paper. It’s a copy of a newspaper article, a story in a local rag about an environmental program the local council set up. CRYSTALBROOK PLEDGES TO HELP THE CLIMATE, reads the headline. In one photo, several parents are tying newly planted native trees to wooden stakes. No names are listed, but Oli thinks one of the women might be Nicole Horrowitz: a sunhat casts a shadow across her heart-shaped face, but the eyes—the eyes are hers. Oli is sure of it. There’s a photo of some students too. Evie, Rosie and Max all love working in the garden. Oli looks at the grainy photo of the smiling little girl.

  ‘Guys, this is great.’ She checks the publication date. ‘Hang on. This ran three weeks ago?’

  Brent and Pia nod.

  The timing must mean something. She remembers Cooper saying that Alex worked for an environmental company, something to do with sustainability programs. Maybe she stumbled upon this photo. She could even have been involved in setting up the initiative.

  ‘We’re also seeing if Duffy can run some facial recognition on Facebook and Google Images,’ Brent says. ‘But I’m not sure it’s that reliable, and all the photos of Nicole are obviously ten years out of date.’

  ‘Find out where Alex worked,’ Oli says. ‘She might have been in Crystalbrook for a job. Keep me posted. I’m going to hit the road and try for some interviews.’

  Pia calls after her, ‘Will you go to the presser, or do you want me to?’

  ‘I’ll go.’ Oli grabs a half-finished packet of M&M’s from her top drawer and pulls the beige notebook out of her bag. She thumbs through it, scanning her decade-old handwriting until she finds the list of mobile numbers and addresses. She eats another chocolate and runs her finger down the familiar names. She tries the number she had for Miles Wu but is greeted with an automated message informing her that it’s disconnected. There’s no point contacting Nicole’s parents—from what Rusty said, they’ll still be with the police.

  Oli calls the landline number next to Geraldine Stanley’s name, but it rings out, no answering machine. It’s already past eleven; she’s running out of time. She scans the last few names.

  Cara Horrowitz, Nicole’s sister. Oli types the number into her phone and calls.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  THE TWENTY-MINUTE TRIP TO BRUNSWICK STREET FEELS LIKE IT takes a lot longer. The cab reeks of smoke, and the reggae music blasting through the speakers does
little to hide the sharp ticking the taxi makes when it idles.

  Cara answered Oli’s call, guarded but willing to talk. Oli offered to come to her house, but Cara declined, suggesting a cafe. Oli ticks off what she knows about Cara, which isn’t much. Adopted three years before Nicole was born. The girls were close as children and teenagers, but drifted apart after Nicole moved out. Cara never went to uni and was working in retail when her sister went missing. Unlike Nicole, she stayed in the family home well into her twenties.

  ‘There!’ Oli points to the cafe as they sail past. The cab driver launches into a rant about city traffic conditions, but Oli doesn’t engage, just pays and waits for the receipt.

  After she enters the cafe, it takes a moment for her eyes to adjust. Potted succulents take up precious real estate on the tiny tables. A few solo customers sip lattes, laptops open in front of them. In the middle of the room a young woman tries to control three toddlers, her voice rising as strands of hair fall from her messy bun; a babycino tumbles across the table, milk froth spraying in an impressive arc.

  A dark-skinned woman sits in the back corner watching Oli. Cara.

  Oli lifts her head in acknowledgement and approaches. Cara’s head is wrapped in a colourful silk scarf. There’s a faint hole in her left nostril, and gold hoops hang from her ears. She has the most perfectly sculpted eyebrows Oli has ever seen.

  ‘I hate reporters,’ Cara announces, after they shake hands.

  Oli removes her satchel and drops into the chair opposite Cara. ‘I’m liking them less and less myself,’ she says diplomatically.

  Cara watches blank-faced as one of the toddlers descends into a tantrum. ‘I need a coffee before we talk.’ She yawns, squaring her broad shoulders. ‘Sorry, I’m knackered. My kid is only six months old, and he still hasn’t mastered the art of sleep. I can barely function unless I have caffeine these days.’