by Kylie Kaden
‘Mummy!’ Eadie’s hand shook her arm.
Abbi turned to her daughter. ‘Sorry, hon. I was daydreaming.’
She huffed, then forgave easily, as she always did. ‘About unicorns? I dream about unicorns. Pink ones.’
A yearning look. A pang of remorse. If only. ‘Look at you, Miss Grotty,’ Abbi said, poking the swirls of dried cake mix on Eadie’s checked school uniform. Eadie giggled, and poked her back, before attempting to snatch another muffin from the polka dot plate.
‘So, can we? Boogie-board?’ Eadie’s face flipped to a hopeful smile.
‘Not today, sweet pea. The dunes have been eroded and the water is all yucky from the rain.’ Abbi’s heart sank. All she saw now was an ocean littered with body parts bobbing in the tide, like a legless army of mannequins invading by sea. ‘Plus, it’s getting cold.’ Another lie. Stingers kept you out of the sea in Lago Point, not the water temp. Temperatures in the tropics never got cold, only varying from hot to stinking hot; days that melted your make-up, boiled your radiators and dried your washing in two minutes flat. Abbi tapped her fingers. ‘How ’bout we flip a coin – heads for the trampoline, tails for playground.’
‘Boogie-boarding!’ Eadie stomped inside, rattling on about how it wasn’t too cold, how she was going to find her togs, get the board herself.
Lago Point had always been part of Abbi. The thick, salty air had seeped into her pores. It used to be synonymous with school breaks that stretched forever, days lost pestering soldier crabs running ink-blue stains across the beach, sand in your sheets and sunscreen in your nails.
Abbi was an only child but grew up with a transient group of foster brothers and sisters taking shifts as her stand-in siblings – so many she’d joked they needed a turnstile at the front door, and a night delivery bay. The bunks were stacked with kids like crates at a wholesaler. All types: skittish kids of addicts, wayward boys from juvie, and a few hyperactive serial absconders no one could keep in. There was often a cop on their doorstep at midnight, and a new kid in the spare room the next morning, ready to break in. She’d loved the mayhem, learned how to settle a crying baby by the age of eight, how to cater for a crowd. But she was never alone, and still feared it like fire.
The shriek was heart stopping. ‘Muu-mmy!’
Oh, God, what’s happened? Abbi’s mind raced. Catfish knew her secret and had broken in and had Eadie by the throat. The police had barged the doors with a warrant and her arrest was imminent.
Abbi knocked the table as she raced inside from the deck to find Eadie against the fridge, palms flat like a hostage. ‘Spider! Mummy, get it!’ A thin-legged huntsman scampered across the floorboards.
Abbi laughed out her relief. ‘It’s okay sweetie, he won’t hurt you.’ She grabbed a glass from the sink, scared the spider over to a pile of magazines and caught it. ‘Look, see, we can take Mr Spider outside, where he should be.’ Eadie gingerly held her mother’s hand as they took the stairs in sync, walked to the garden and watched her release the spider safely into the rugged bushland that divided their home from the steep sandy dune.
Under the shade of the flame tree, Abbi held her daughter’s hand as they watched the huntsman slip into hiding. ‘They look scary, but did you know their venom is non-toxic? You can’t tell if something’s dangerous just by looking at it. Like people; some pretend to be kind, but turn out to be bad just like some can seem strange, but turn out to be okay, don’t they?’
Sometimes murderers look just as ordinary as their victims.
Eadie looked up to the deck, the large weatherboard home a silhouette against the sun. ‘What if he comes back?’ she asked.
Abbi realised Eadie’s lisp was less prominent, today. Was it finally improving? Were things moving forward for her, instead of backwards? ‘He won’t scare you again.’
* * *
Will threw the day’s mail on the cluttered bench and looked over at his wife. ‘Late again, sorry. Three-month-old with whooping cough. Had to medivac her to the big smoke.’ He pecked her on the cheek, but she could see by his face that his mind was still at work.
‘That’s awful.’ Abbi could hardly complain about his lateness when that was what kept him. She removed his schnitzel and veg from under a warm plate. With the washed-up foot on the beach yesterday, Abbi had barely had time to worry about the state of her marriage. Things were still strained since that morning fight, but Will hadn’t mentioned it again, so neither would she.
A newspaper was folded under his arm. She could see the familiar red banner of the Chronicle and wondered when he’d started reading her trashy paper again. Today of all days. ‘Don’t bring that in here – Eadie’ll see it and freak. The school was already buzzing with gossip at pick up.’
The body part had brought more than its shoe to Lago Point. The fact that a suspicious death had taken place nearby had flooded the town with a lot of ugly possibilities. All the bad blood from generations of squabbles re-emerged, not to mention local business owners worrying about their livelihoods in the holiday town.
As he flicked the folded paper around, the feature photo caught her breath – a bone protruding from a seaweed-tangled shoe, crime-scene tape holding back a scrum of onlookers. She wished she’d had a win against the editor regarding the gruesome lead story image. She’d wanted to bury it on page three for local tourism reasons alone, but her boss came alive with excitement at the possibility of a real crime in his two-cop town. Abbi grabbed the paper and felt dizzy as she threw it in the bin, shoving it under last night’s bottle of sav blanc.
But Will seemed curious about it. ‘Who do they reckon it is?’
‘Drowned tourist, suicide victim, who knows?’ Abbi felt a swell of tears, turned away and shrugged. She was great at deflection but pathetic under direct assault.
Will stilled. Observed. ‘Then what’s with the waterworks?’
She hated his directness for once. His insistence on resolving things left the shield she hid her emotions behind tattered with big gaping holes. ‘This town is my home. It’s just an awful thought.’ Abbi ran her finger along her lower eyelid, trying to mop up spent tears before the eyeliner she’d caked on to hide her tiredness ran down her face.
‘You sure that’s the reason? I mean, you’re a journo, you’ve seen worse.’
‘You’re happy about dead bodies turning up on our beach?’
He shrugged. ‘Depends whose body, I spose. Kind of intriguing, actually. Did you hear about the duodenum? Kids found one on the rocks at Red Beach.’
Abbi glared. ‘Seriously?’
‘A CIB guy brought it to me this morning in an evidence bag. It was full of grass. Bloody sheep intestine. Stupid kids – reckon it was McGrory. His dad works in the slaughter house, doesn’t he?’
Abbi exhaled. ‘What sort of sick kid does that? Aren’t people panicked enough?’
‘Small town. Not much to do.’
‘Don’t they have iPads?’
Will smiled. ‘That’s probably where they got the idea – YouTube has a lot to answer for.’ He grabbed a beer from the fridge and sat next to her. ‘What’s Blake’s take on who the footloose guy is? Happy to finally have a real case?’
Happy wasn’t exactly Blake’s reaction. Her eyes flittered away. ‘He thinks it’s probably just a suicide.’ Abbi was convincing herself further with each word. That someone far, far away had gone swimming, snagged their leg on a reed and got caught, their lungs filling with water until only tiny bubbles rising to the surface remained. ‘Could be from anywhere.’
Except she knew who owned that shoe. She’d seen his face in her nightmares. Her version of events whirled in her head, filtering fiction from truth; the parts Will knew, the parts he could never know. Abbi had learned that you only lie when you have to, and to stick as close to the truth as you can. ‘Strange, though. I mean, why would it just be a foot?’
‘The shoe protected it from marine life, kept it intact, buoyant.’
Abbi felt bile in her mouth. ‘People
were saying he must have been chopped up.’
Will ate his dinner on the couch, the chink of cutlery on china, his chewing in her ear. ‘They’ve been watching too much Dexter. The pathologist said it was a natural break.’
‘Were you talking to him?’
‘You mean her. She came to the clinic yesterday, found it wasn’t severed, that it separated during the natural articulation process.’
‘Do they know when the person died?’
‘Hard to tell. Weeks, at least. They know things break down quicker in salt water than on land. Would have only taken a few days for sea lice to devour it. That’s why it’s mostly bone.’
‘So, the person is definitely deceased, not just, I don’t know, had his leg mangled in a boating accident?’ She felt the need to make up as many red herrings as possible.
‘Nope. The forensic anthropologists can tell by looking at the end of the bones whether they disarticulated naturally or whether there’s any sign of mechanical force: tool marks, any tissue trauma. There was none. Interesting, huh?’
Abbi gagged in disgust. She had science against her. How could she win?
Will squared his jaw. ‘No sign of our favourite neighbour since he moved. Thought he’d at least be back to see his mother. Could be him.’
She coughed in shock. ‘Nah.’ She fiddled with her hem to buy her time. ‘Trevor would be busy with his new job, and Catfish is taking care of Connie. Jay at the bakery was worried it might be Harry – you know, the drifter who sleeps rough down the park. She offers him her leftover bread and he hasn’t been ’round lately.’ Abbi used to buy him a coffee when she saw him busking, and he was always so appreciative, thanking her profusely as he basked in the sun, his battered copy of The Great Gatsby under his arm.
‘I guess gun control took away shootings for people who’ve had enough. Drowning might be a palatable option. No mess.’ Will was almost flippant in his theory, continuing his dinner unperturbed. Perhaps he had to be pragmatic to distance himself from the ugliness. ‘The sea. It’s like a graveyard for lost souls.’
Abbi’s breath caught at the idea and before long, negative thoughts took over. She knew that once she started, the thoughts became unstoppable, like yarn casting off a knitting needle, unravelling row after row. Memories merged with fears that seemed so real, so intense she was finding it harder to separate the two. She couldn’t pretend anymore, and escaped the room to sort washing, alone.
Snippets of that night stabbed at her; lanterns, searching, dirty river water lapping. She didn’t think of the ramifications on herself – the guilt, the risk. If she could rewind to those moments, would she do it again? She couldn’t say. Doing the wrong thing had felt entirely right at the time. But now? She wasn’t so sure.
The problem with this game she’d unwittingly started was that she thought, like a deluded bank robber, that there would be no aftermath. That the body, and the evidence of her being anywhere near it, would wipe clean like felt pen on a wall, never to be revisited. She wasn’t naive. She should have pre-empted the fallout. Never particularly resilient, Abbi was the type who would rehash conversations days later just to check if she’d said anything to offend. Did she really have the gumption to play in this league? She simply wasn’t built for lies and deception.
For making bodies disappear.
But she had no choice. And that bastard deserved what he got.
She wanted it. Willed it, watching her neighbour die over and over in her wicked mind, wishing, hoping. And now she couldn’t get the image out of her head: Trevor Adler lying lifeless on cold concrete, his face flushed, his eyes fixed like she’d sucked the life from his lungs through sheer determination.
And in every choice since, in every betrayal covering the one before, it lingered. She could never quite escape the stench. Her life had become an act, and that scene the morbid backdrop to it. Which parts were real, which imagined?
Abbi hated the sight of blood, yet she’d stood there, gazing down at him with welcomed detachment, his legs splayed ungraciously in the sawdust and spent timber. She’d expected a fish-eyed stare, a pale face, expressionless, like the movies would have you believe. But instead he’d looked pink and plump with life except for an eerie stillness.
As if he knew death was coming. As if he accepted it.
* * *
The following morning, Blake answered the door in boxers, a toothbrush propped between his frothy lips. Abbi scanned his kitchen before blurting out, ‘Will’s been asking questions. I reckon he’ll call you.’
‘Me?’ he mumbled through foamy toothpaste.
‘Wondering if it’s his foot.’
He removed his toothbrush. ‘Keep your voice down, Hannah’s in the shower.’ He came close and whispered, ‘Well, I’m pretty sure it’s not Will’s foot. He still has two, surely? Two lefts, if I remember your wedding.’
Abbi glared at him. ‘You’re such a nob. He’s sniffing around Trevor Adler, questioning his absence.’ She’d noticed Blake had developed a rather macabre sense of humour since starting as a detective, like he employed it as a coping mechanism. The dead became ‘stiffs’ and the criminals ‘grubs’, but she supposed that was how he reconciled the awfulness he dealt with.
Blake squinted, as if thinking required effort. ‘Didn’t we tell Will I found Trevor running a fishing charter?’
‘Caravan park.’ That was the problem with lies: you got so used to telling them you forgot the original version. ‘I don’t think he really bought that. Wasn’t convinced he’d leave his mother, she’s been so ill. We should’ve invented a better cover.’
Blake grimaced. ‘It’s the best I could do on the fly – I mean, other than the obvious, what do we really know about him that we can use? We need to be careful – a bad lie they can prove wrong is as good as an admission. That we had reason to make something up. We need some facts we can elaborate on.’
‘You’re actually good at this.’ Abbi sighed as she considered her neighbour. ‘I don’t know. We weren’t exactly close.’
‘You lived next to him for years.’
‘Not sure that helps. I know he subscribed to Fishing Monthly because they always sent it to me by accident. He liked to blare jazz on Saturday nights, take outdoor showers after he swam and seemed to be allergic to everything – bees, pollen, peanuts. Too paranoid to eat anything at the street’s Christmas drinks. And what’s with all that jogging? Every day, even in the rain. I used to call him Forrest Gump when he grew that beard, running down the highway.’
‘Did Will recognise it? The Nike?’
‘Not specifically. But it obviously raises questions. Average-height male, suspected suicide.’ Abbi said. But the foot wouldn’t be a problem if there was a story to explain how and why it washed up on shore. Years of forensics shows was enough for even Abbi to know that murderers got it wrong when they focused on making the corpse disappear. The corpse itself wasn’t the problem.
Hide the crime, not the body.
‘Let’s face it,’ Abbi said. ‘The prick can’t have been the happiest person. It could have so easily become a suicide. Maybe we should have planned for that.’ She covered her mouth with her hand as if playing Chinese whispers, but without the sense of fun.
Blake stepped into the kitchen and violently spat toothpaste in the sink, threw his brush on the stainless steel with a ting. ‘You say that like there was a plan.’
Abbi drew back, folded her arms. ‘I’m sorry.’ She was mindful to not be critical. He’d risked everything. ‘I just – I want to make sure I don’t fuck it up. Say the wrong thing.’ Her composure slipped.
She thought Blake would go soft, respond to the tremor in her voice, but he remained indifferent. Before Hannah had returned, before all this, he would’ve hugged her. Made her feel safe. Now she was the fly in his salad, ruining his Sunday brunch.
Blake shook his head. ‘Well, if you’d married your average Joe with normal self-preservation instincts, instead of a fucking saint, none of this would
be happening.’
‘I can’t ask him to be less than he is.’
Blake pressed on his cheek. ‘Geez, my mouth is sore. Probably gum disease.’
‘Probably. Or signs of an impending stroke.’ Abbi rolled her eyes. How many times had he asked Will to check his blood pressure, his eyes for signs of jaundice, some deadly rash that turned out to be nothing?
He scowled. ‘One of these days I’ll be dead and you’ll be sorry for giving me shit, you know.’
Footsteps. Hannah in the hall. Blake panicked, said he’d suss it out and shut the door like she was hawking something no one needed.
Abbi stumbled the few blocks home, the neighbouring houses becoming scarce as she approached the point. She puffed hard as she pulled herself up the last steep incline, past the new unit block, her eyes focused on her front door as she rushed past the Adler house.
She grabbed a drink from the sink when she got home, her eye catching on a photo on the fridge of Will and Eadie. Their daughter lay on top of Will like an undersized blanket, her ever salt-matted hair leaving a tide mark of damp on his shirt. She marvelled at the swirls of Eadie’s biscuity-blonde locks that fell down his soft belly. She couldn’t believe she’d created something so beautiful. She admired the integrity in Will’s face, the kindness in his eyes.
Blake was right. If she’d married a lesser man, a man who could lie for her, things would be simpler.
The most attractive thing about Will was his commitment to the truth. Finding it, living it. It had seemed child-like at first, his freakish inability to tell even a white lie. ‘What is the point?’ he’d once said. ‘To spare people’s feelings?’ Abbi preferred being liked over being truthful. He’d shrugged, as if trust, and the truths that bred it, were the only things that mattered. And yet, now, through her smile, her carefree banter, Abbi lied to him on a daily basis.
Would he ever understand why?
Chapter 14
35 DAYS AFTER THE MOON FESTIVAL
He wasn’t hungry, but Blake flipped the scotch fillets on the George Foreman grill at exactly three minutes, just as Hannah snuck into the kitchen, skin pink and hair dripping from the hot shower. The sweet smell of coconut shampoo mixed with the aroma of burning marinade. Hannah looked ten years younger with her hair wet, and it reminded him of the summer they’d both worked at the waterpark – he oversaw the kids’ slides, while she served in the kiosk. He spent most of his shifts waiting to see Hannah, aged all of fifteen, putting out bins or taking drinks to the office staff in her cut-off jeans. He felt just as enamoured with her now, half a lifetime later. Even though she was a little broken, he understood she had reason to be. She pressed herself against his back as he worked over the grill, and the tension from the day melted away.