by Tara Moss
Mak frowned. Karen had a way of cutting past her defences and saying the most alarmingly apt things. But what exactly am I on the edge of? Mak wondered to herself, too afraid to ask Karen’s opinion.
‘You do know that we can’t know if he actually did it, or it was a setup,’ Mak said.
There was a pause on the line. ‘I know.’
‘Thank you, Karen. I appreciate the call.’
Mak hung up, excited by this first glimpse of new information.
So the guy who had been hired to kill Meaghan Wallace, or had been framed for the killing, was now conveniently dead. The guy who confessed to setting it up was also conveniently dead. In fact, every one of the key people involved in the case had ended up dead one way or another.
Except Mak.
CHAPTER 25
Early evening on day two of Makedde’s investigation into Adam Hart’s disappearance, things were about to get interesting.
Mak was to meet Adam’s ex-girlfriend, Patrice, a woman his mother had failed at first to mention, and only grudgingly gave Mak the phone number for, once Mak mentioned her name. It appeared, if Tobias’s information was reliable, that she had been quite central in Adam’s recent life. Her name was Patrice, not Patricia—Tobias had that wrong—and she was four years older than Adam. She had sounded at least moderately helpful when Mak had called, and was a natural next stop. Hopefully meeting Patrice would give Mak more insight into Adam and his previous attempt to leave home.
Mak waited only a few seconds before the intercom was answered.
‘Come on up,’ the female voice said as the door buzzed, unlocking. Mak stepped into the building foyer.
Built in the nineties. Decent place. Not fancy.
She climbed two flights of stairs, found Apartment 308, and was about to knock when the door opened.
‘Hi.’
Patrice was an attractive young woman. She had a wholesome student look about her: large brown eyes, brown hair held back in a headband, good skin. Mak imagined her in a library somewhere, perhaps having finished a healthy game of tennis with some fetching young man who would let her win.
‘Thanks for agreeing to speak with me,’ Mak said.
‘Sure.’
Patrice sat down at her dining alcove and Mak took a seat opposite.
‘I have to leave in about ten minutes,’ Patrice began, sounding a bit short.
Okay, so that’s how it’s going to be.
Mak would have to cut straight to the point, which wasn’t always the best way to build rapport. ‘I appreciate your time, Patrice. I won’t keep you long.’
The young woman crossed her arms. ‘Look, I know this is about Adam but I don’t see what the point is because I don’t know anything.’
Mak nodded. Great, she has her arms crossed defensively already. ‘You two dated for a while?’
Patrice nodded a silent yes.
‘I mentioned on the phone that I’m looking for him on behalf of his mother, and, because you dated for a while and knew him quite well, I thought I would ask you—’
‘I broke it off, like, a year or so ago.’
This is interesting, Mak thought. According to Tobias’s story, admittedly vague, they had stopped dating no more than seven months earlier. Was Patrice being evasive for some reason?
‘I’m not a cop, Patrice, and you aren’t in any trouble. I just want to find out where Adam might have gone. I want to make sure he’s okay.’ There was a nod, something that seemed like a positive sign of co-operation. Patrice even unfolded her arms. ‘Where did you two meet?’
‘The cafeteria at uni,’ Patrice answered.
‘And you started dating?’
‘Yeah.’
One-word answers really suck, Patrice.
‘When was the last time you heard from Adam?’
‘Ages ago,’ she answered.
Ages ago. What is this ages ago? Does no one speak with reference to the normal passing of time?
‘Ages being one month, one week, one day?’ Mak pressed.
‘No.’ Patrice seemed cross. Those pretty eyes grew dark. ‘Not a day. Like, ages ago. Months.’
When a subject was being difficult in an interview, it was wise to wonder why. Did this young woman have anything to hide? Had she taken a dislike to Mak for some reason? Was she really so rushed? If so, why had she agreed to meet Mak?
‘So you haven’t heard anything from him in the past week. No notes? Emails? Phone messages?’
‘No. Why would I?’ Her response was immediate. ‘He didn’t write about me in that stupid diary of his, did he?’
Mak felt a touch of excitement.
Diary…There is a damn diary and I have to find it.
Patrice opened up a touch. ‘Look, I liked the guy, but you know…he’s so straight. He doesn’t drink. Nothing. He doesn’t have a car. After I moved out of home, I just didn’t think we had much in common any more.’
Four years was not that much of an age difference, except when you considered that Adam was still living at home and riding a bicycle. Patrice might have found her lifestyle being cramped by her younger boyfriend’s limitations.
‘Did he leave home? To be with you?’
Patrice bit her lower lip briefly.
‘Patrice, it’s okay. You can tell me; you won’t get in any trouble.’ Mak leaned forward sympathetically, and waited for more.
‘You said you’re not a cop, right?’
‘I promise you I am not a cop. I only care about finding Adam.’
‘Okay. Look. About a year or so ago, Adam decided to move in with me. Or maybe it was six months ago, I can’t remember. Anyway, he knew his mother wouldn’t approve, so I guess he just left and didn’t say goodbye, which I certainly didn’t make him do. That was his idea and I thought it was a bit…dramatic. It only lasted a week anyway. Not even. He is just so straight. It would never have worked.’
Mak considered that. ‘What do you mean by “so straight”?’
‘Like he would never drink or smoke or anything.’
‘Pot?’
‘Exactly. And I started bugging him about it. Eventually he agreed he would try it. So there is this party at my friend’s house and we’re all there. Adam doesn’t smoke fags, right? So we put some hash in a piece of bread, folded and toasted it. No big deal. Easy. And then an hour later he tells us he still can’t feel a thing. He is like, totally sober. So we did it again—another bud in some toast.’
Mak was no drug expert but she could see where this was going. If the drugs were ingested with food, they would take a long time to reach the stomach and take effect.
‘Finally it hit, like another hour later, and he completely freaked out. Adam was going on and on about how he couldn’t feel his tongue and he couldn’t talk. He said his hands were numb and he couldn’t breathe. He just freaked out. It was so uncool.’
‘You were embarrassed?’
Patrice nodded.
‘And then what happened?’ Mak prodded.
‘At the end of the night we all had to head home, but I’d been drinking, so he was the designated driver. Anyway, we got pulled over by the cops, and this cop, he actually shines his light across the floor of the car, and there it is, the rest of the hash. And Adam is driving and doesn’t even have a valid licence. Can you imagine? I thought we were really screwed. Then this cop just gives us a warning to drive carefully and waves us on. Adam went cold on the whole thing after that. He went home to his mother the next day. I broke it off with him after that. I mean, he was acting like a child.’
Mak nodded. ‘I haven’t found his diary yet. Do you know where he keeps it?’
‘I don’t know. Used to be under his bed.’
Mak had checked there already. She would check again.
‘I doubt his mother knows about it. There’s a lot she doesn’t know about him. She just tries to stifle his every creative impulse.’
‘What kind of other things wouldn’t she know about?’
At this, P
atrice recoiled.
‘You won’t tell her any of this, will you?’
‘I just want to find him safe. That’s my job.’ She avoided the issue of disclosure. ‘Would there be anywhere else he might hide things, like his diary?’
‘Unless he took off with it, I’m guessing it should be somewhere in his room.’
Hidden in plain sight? Mak wondered.
‘Thank you, Patrice. That was very helpful.’
Yes, very helpful, actually.
Mak sat on the lonely loveseat and sipped strong tea that she didn’t want, as Glenise Hart searched her face for answers about her son’s disappearance. Mak wanted answers, too
‘Thanks for letting me take another look in Adam’s room, Glenise. But first, I need to ask you a few questions about Patrice.’
‘Well,’ Glenise piped up. ‘I was surprised when you phoned to ask about her. They are no longer together, you know.’
‘Yes, she told me. But tell me, what did you think of her?’
‘Well, she was a nice girl. But…’ Glenise trailed off. Clearly she had not approved. ‘They went out for nearly a year. It was Adam’s first real relationship. He suffered over her. I think it was the first time he’d had his heart broken.’
By the look of that photo on the beach, Adam was quite capable of breaking hearts himself, Mak thought.
‘What happened?’
‘I don’t really know,’ Glenise said. ‘He doesn’t talk to me about things like that.’ She fidgeted a bit with the pleat in her pants. ‘They split up about six months ago. I haven’t heard from her since. He didn’t talk about it, but I knew he was upset. He lost weight for a while there. He became even more…introverted, I suppose.’
Mak was finding it hard to reconcile the image of that bronzed beach Aussie with the introvert his mother spoke of. She wondered if Adam was still not coping well with the split. Or with the death of his father.
‘For a while Adam wanted to get back together with Patrice. I try not to interfere in these things,’ Glenise said, clearly awkward with the subject.
‘And shortly before they broke up, that’s when he disappeared the first time?’ Mak asked, straight-faced. She sipped her tea.
This bombshell hung in the air for a while. ‘Uh. Yes. He left without telling me.’
So he had disappeared before and you didn’t tell me.
‘Do you think he might have done something similar this time?’ Mak asked, without directly challenging why Mrs Hart had withheld this vital information. She didn’t need to. The woman knew she should have told Mak.
‘Absolutely not,’ Glenise said. ‘That girl is out of his life.’
She blamed Patrice for the transgression. Of course.
‘You can’t think of anyone else important in Adam’s life? Or any other reason he might have left again?’
‘No.’ She was adamant.
‘Well, if you think of anything, please do let me know,’ Mak said. ‘Anything at all. Any little bit of information could help me find him for you. And on the off-chance, I recommend that you keep an eye on that credit card. Check the transactions daily, if you can.’ Glenise sat with her arms crossed, half defiant, half dejected. ‘I’ll get him home to you as soon as I can, Mrs Hart,’ Mak said soothingly. ‘Now, I’d like to have another look in his room to see if I missed anything.’
They stood.
Mak walked up the staircase to Adam’s bedroom, noticing that Glenise Hart did not follow her this time. Mak was glad for the space.
Makedde began her search of the room again, this time concentrating on hiding places she might have missed. Fake soft-drink cans with drugs stashed inside. Hollowed-out books. As clean as it was, there had to be some trace of Adam Hart in that room, some clue as to who he was and where he might be.
She felt a little guilty and destructive as she lifted the mattress off the bed, flipped it over and went through Adam’s drawers like a cop on a raid. Mak thought of the fake Bible from the magic store, and returned to the bed where she had seen a thick, innocuous-looking dictionary. She pulled it out, took a breath and opened it. Damn. No hollowed-out middle containing vitally important clues, or even an old flask of whisky. It was just a dictionary. So far her search had yielded nothing new. But then there was his bookshelf. It was so neat. So perfect. She cocked her head to one side, and began pulling each book out one by one, flipping through the pages to see if any notes might fall out. There was a slim volume at the end of one shelf, heavily worn and probably loved. THE ACTOR’S BOOK OF MONOLOGUES. Mak pulled it out, once more hoping for private notes or letters. Was Adam interested in acting as well as magic? Instead, she found a thin, stiff manual nestled inside. Magic City Library of Magic, Volume 6, it declared. Folding Coin. ‘A Beginning in Magic’. Mak opened the thin tome, and a DVD fell out. Wild Card, the sleeve declared, above an illustration of a magician in a turban and bejewelled costume gazing intensely into a crystal ball, surrounded by flying cards, nymphs, bats and dancing figures, all in the style of the early twentieth-century posters of the great magicians Houdini, Thurston and Kellar, and most specifically the turban-wearing illusionist Carter the Great.
THE WORLD’S WEIRDEST AND MOST WONDERFUL CARD TRICK, it declared in smaller type.
So Adam was, or once was, interested in magic and performance. Patrice said his mother tried to stifle his creative urges. Perhaps there were more hints about his interests here? Perhaps there was some link between these interests and his current whereabouts?
She next pulled out a thick hardcover copy of the book Shantaram, another tome that seemed to give an insight to Adam’s interests and desires, and noticed that the glossy dust jacket did not quite fit.
‘Yes!’ she muttered under her breath.
It was a journal.
Adam Hart did keep a diary, and finally Mak had it in her hands.
She shook her head, delighted, as she flipped through the pages and saw just how in-depth the entries were, though she noted the last one, on the final page, was dated some months earlier. Still, the smell of well-used paper filled her nostrils, and she smiled. Ink. Felt pen. Pencil. This boy was a writer. He had written down everything he thought. She would be amazed if the diary did not reveal some valuable clues as to his whereabouts. Marian—and Glenise—would love her for this.
Now she could see the original hardcover copy of Shantaram, sans jacket, waiting further along the shelf. She eagerly continued her search, checking for any other valuable finds, and could barely believe her luck when she found another diary hiding amongst Adam’s textbooks, this time concealed under a book jacket for a treatise by the German philosopher Hegel.
This made her laugh out loud.
Hegel. Of course.
The philosopher was famous for, among other things, having kept incredibly meticulous journals every day of his life—his ‘excerpt mill’ he called them.
A coincidence? No. This kid was naïve, perhaps, but no dummy.
Mak felt sure she would get a much better feel for what made Adam Hart tick after reading his intimate thoughts. She was not one to fall for card tricks or magic shows. She believed in science and reason. A disappearing act like Adam’s could not be without clues. Makedde was determined to find them in his own words.
Only the first hundred or so pages of this journal were filled, with numerous blank pages waiting to receive his new thoughts and ideas. The final page of entries was bookmarked with a colourful vaudeville flyer: ‘Le Théâtre des Horreurs’, it proclaimed in elaborate gothic-style script.
CHAPTER 26
‘Rehearse, rehearse, rehearse!’
It was an hour before their performance for the Brisbane audience, and Bijou clapped her slender white hands together to punctuate each word, as the five younger performers sat in a circle at her feet, their heads bowed. No one dared talk back as their star berated them.
‘What will you be like? Merveilleux? Non. You are sloppy.’ Bijou shook her head. ‘Lara, you missed your cue last night.’<
br />
Lara opened her mouth to speak, but said nothing. She had missed the cue, but only by half a beat.
‘If you were better performers, we would have a full house! You never listen to me! Rehearse, rehearse, rehearse. It takes practice to be magnifique. Practice!’
‘We had a great review in Melbourne,’ Michel ventured. ‘This tour’s been going really well.’
Bijou ignored his valid point as if he had not spoken. ‘I’ve looked after all of you for too long!’ she shouted dramatically. ‘So long! What must I do? When will you learn? I’m docking your pay this week. All of you. Sometimes I don’t know why I bother with you.’
She doesn’t mean that, Arslan the contortionist told himself. She can’t mean that.
She paced around them as they sat on the floor, silent. This was something of a routine for the troupe. Every month or so it came to this. It had been that way for years. Arslan could not remember things having been any other way. This was life. Bijou was the brains behind the troupe, and she pushed all of them to be their best. She pushed them hard so they would be great one day. Without her, what would they be doing? Where would they be? Where would he be without her?
But Bijou was not finished yet. ‘Yelena!’ she went on. Arslan’s sister looked up, eyes wide. ‘You’re getting plump,’ she was told. ‘Day by day you are becoming a fat little pig. How will your brother lift you? We can’t have you being lazy like this. I won’t stand it any more.’
Yelena, though twenty-four years old, still reacted to Bijou’s scathing comments as she had when she was little more than a child. She clung to her brother Arslan’s arm and wept quietly, hiding her face. Arslan felt her hot tears on his biceps, and feelings of frustration and sadness swelled inside him.
‘Honestly, you look like a fat little dumpling out there. It’s disgusting,’ Bijou snapped. ‘Gia, you were supposed to keep an eye on her. Why hasn’t she lost any weight?’
Gia sat on her thin hands and said nothing.