The Game You Played

by Anni Taylor

  9.

  PHOEBE

  Wednesday morning

  YELLOW LIGHT PEERED IN THROUGH THE blinds, investigating me, querying why I still occupied my bed. The grey fog had been replaced by sunshine.

  Two hours had passed while I dozed. I’d barely had any sleep last night. That wasn’t unusual. On most days, I didn’t have more than five hours’ sleep, in scattered patches.

  My outfit from the restaurant dinner last night was lying in a tangle on the floor. I’d made an effort to get through the dinner for Luke, but it’d been a strain. Those people all existed in such a different world to me. I didn’t care about the things they and Luke cared about.

  Dragging myself from the bed, I dressed in my usual—jeans, T-shirt, and a hoodie. My daily clothing selection consisted of two pairs of jeans, five T-shirts, three jackets, and the hoodie. That was all I’d worn in months and months. I hadn’t bought a single piece of clothing since Tommy went missing. I’d dropped three dress sizes, and I’d had to dig into the boxes of clothing I’d worn before I’d been pregnant.

  Heading downstairs, I made myself a lemon juice. I never used to like lemons all that much. Now, I liked the sharpness of them.

  Taking the drink, I went out to the living room. Before I realised what I was doing, I was pacing. Up and down the hallway.

  Stopping before the hallstand, I gripped it, putting the drink down.

  Crazy people paced.

  I couldn’t say it was the first time, either. Some days, I paced endlessly, trying to shake the darkness inside my mind.

  Picking up one of the hair elastics I kept in the keys bowl, I tied my lank hair up into a ponytail. I stared at my face in the hallstand mirror, as I found myself doing every day. I’d come to hate the face I saw reflected there.

  The envelope I’d taken from the mailbox was still lying there where I’d left it. Normally Luke opened all the mail, but he’d missed seeing this. Which was a good thing, because if he had, he’d have wondered how it got there between last night and this morning.

  I picked up the envelope. The paper was of a thicker quality than that normally used for mass mail outs. Maybe it was a letter from a neighbour. An invitation to a housewarming party or something. Only, no one new had moved to the lower end of the street in a long time. The rich people buying up the new properties on the street were mostly investors.

  Hooking my finger inside the envelope, I tore it along the top. There was a piece of paper that looked a little yellowed but was a similar blue to the envelope.

  I unfolded the letter. There were just a few lines in the middle of the page:

  Little boy blue

  Alone and forlorn.

  From the meadow led

  From your mother torn.

  At first, my mind saw the Mother Goose rhyme. When I finally understood that the words had changed, my fingers started to tremble.

  Who’d sent this to me? Anyone who knew about Tommy would know how I’d react to those words. Tommy had been dubbed Little Boy Blue by the media. He’d been wearing all blue when he vanished.

  Someone sent this to us deliberately.

  Someone who wanted to hurt us.

  Then another, more desperate thought: Whoever sent this was the person who took Tommy.

  My lungs were airless rooms closing in on each other as I picked up the phone on the hallstand.

  Luke didn’t pick up. He’d probably gone straight into a meeting. Leaving him a message to call me, I hung up and called Detective Trent Gilroy. It’d been a month since I’d last spoken to him, and that had only been a brief conversation. He’d called just to check in with me. As if that had become his job now. He couldn’t find Tommy, so he’d keep checking in with me, to make sure that I still existed, that I hadn’t vanished, too.

  “Trent,” I breathed. “I got a letter. About Tommy.”

  Silence on the other end of the phone. Then, “What kind of letter?”

  “It’s a children’s rhyme, but they’ve changed the words. It was in our letterbox.”

  I read out the rhyme.

  His tone became dead serious. “Drop the letter. Now. Use tweezers to place it into a plastic bag and bring it down to the station. The envelope too, if there was one.”

  I opened my fist and let the letter flutter to the floor. “I shouldn’t have touched it, should I?”

  “You weren’t to know. Well, it’s likely to be someone playing a very stupid prank. Still, we’ll certainly investigate it. Can you come down now?”

  “Yes, I’ll be there.”

  I dropped the letter and envelope into a ziplock plastic bag using eyebrow tweezers. Then rushed upstairs to find my mobile phone. It was almost out of charge. I switched it off and pushed it into my pocket.

  Breaking into a run, I headed out the front door. I didn’t drive anymore—the sleeping medications I’d been on meant that I was too drowsy during the day to be on the road, especially in the hectic rush of inner-city traffic. I’d let my car’s registration lapse, much to Luke’s chagrin.

  I raced to the tall brick fence at the end of my garden path and through the gate. And smacked straight into someone.

  Pria’s daughter Jessie stood there in her calf-length private school uniform and straw hat. The ziplock bag flew up in the air, landing near the drain. Jessie rushed across the path, but before she could get to the bag, I snatched it up.

  “I could have lost it!” I cried.

  Her expression immediately crumbled. “I’m sorry, Phoebe.”

  I wanted to smack myself for snapping at the kid. “No, I’m sorry. It was my fault. I shouldn’t have barrelled out of my gate like that.”

  “What is it?” She screwed up her forehead in that gaping, wrinkled-nose way kids did when they were puzzling over something. She was so like Pria, with her almond eyes and high forehead, except that her hair (unlike Pria’s) was dark.

  “Just a letter. But an important one. Are you okay? Hope I didn’t hurt you.” I rubbed her arm.

  “Yeah. I’m okay.” She paused, glancing down at the pavement. “Phoebe, how come you don’t come around and see us anymore?”

  “I will. I’ve just been . . . caught up.”

  “Mum says she misses you. I miss you, too. And maybe when you come over, you can convince Mum to let me walk our puppy sometimes. She says he’s already too big and strong and might get away from me. She walks him when I’m at school.”

  It was so like Jessie to ask me over. She’d always been like a small adult, organising and worrying about everyone. The other side of that was a hint of anxiety. She often seemed to be analysing her own words. She’d tell you something that happened at school and then pick the whole thing apart, scene by scene.

  “I’ll do my best to convince your mum about the pup,” I assured her.

  Jessie cut a lonely figure as I said good-bye and headed away. But I couldn’t stop and chat. Not now.

  I rushed along the hard pavements to the end of my street, turning right at the Southern Sails Café and then jogging the two blocks to the police station.

  The station was big and busy and intimidating. It had become my second home in the months after Tommy vanished. The kind of home you wished you could run away from and never see again.

  I was shown into Detective Gilroy’s office. He looked up briefly from a phone conversation. “Please, take a seat. I’ll just be a moment.” His tone was neutral. I knew already that he didn’t hold out much hope for this letter to lead to anything.

  I sat and waited, impatience spinning through me. I wanted him to move on this. Get things happening.

  So many times in the past six months, I’d sat here like this, impatient like this. Those times had become less and less frequent. There’d been no leads to follow, nothing to discuss. Until this morning.

  The detective kept talking on the phone. From his end of the conversation, it sounded like it was about a domestic violence court order. A husband taking an order out on his wife, worried that she was going
to hurt the kids.

  I studied Trent Gilroy’s face. He was the man who I’d once seen as holding the fate of Tommy in his hands. That was in the early days, when he all but promised me he’d find Tommy (before hope of finding Tommy had faded to nothing). He was in his early forties I guessed, his hair a mix of black and silver. He wasn’t bad looking. He had a single deep line running across his forehead that looked like a statistical line graph, with a blip to the right of it.

  I handed him the plastic bag as soon as he ended his call, before he had a chance to ask for it.

  Frowning hard, he turned the blip on his forehead into a statistical anomaly, tugging the letter from the envelope with his own special detective set of tweezers.

  “Hmmm. . . .” He sounded noncommittal as he read it. He looked up at me with a faint look of surprise. “This has been written with a typewriter.”

  “Are you sure?” I’d never seen something typewritten before. Typewriters were relics of an era before my time. I knew that you could get fonts on the internet that matched the old typewritten look.

  “Yeah.” He held it up to the light, examining it closely. “I’m sure.”

  “What do you think about the rhyme?”

  “Well, it’s hard to determine what the person wanted to achieve in sending this. It doesn’t say very much. I mean, we don’t know for certain that it’s not well intended.”

  “Well intended?” I raised my eyebrows incredulously.

  He scratched his temple. “Maybe. But if it is, it’s very misguided. We’ll run tests on it anyway. Just leave it with us. We already have your fingerprints and Luke’s on file, so we’ll be able to distinguish different prints on the letter and envelope.”

  The police had taken our fingerprints after Tommy had gone missing, so that if they found anything belonging to Tommy, they could quickly tell which prints were ours and which were those of a stranger. They had Tommy’s fingerprints, too, from the ornaments of Nan’s that he touched on the day he disappeared. They even had items of his clothing from my dirty laundry basket (for the sniffer dogs), including one of his T-shirts that had a tiny patch of blood from when he’d fallen and grazed his knee the day before.

  “Could it,” I began, “I mean, is it possible that the person who took Tommy wrote this? Maybe they’re feeling bad about what they did.”

  He exhaled a drawn-out sigh. “Unlikely. In the realm of possibilities, no.”

  “Why not?” I asked bluntly.

  He took a moment before answering. “Because people who take children don’t want anything to do with the police. They don’t make contact with the parents of the child, unless it’s a ransom demand. And ransom demands would normally come in close to the time of abduction.”

  I’d sat here in this office with Luke six months ago, our hands grasping each other’s as Luke asked the detective for cold facts. Gilroy had admitted that children who were abducted by strangers had a high chance of being murdered. And of those children who were murdered, three-quarters of them were murdered within three hours.

  Three hours.

  If that statistic included Tommy, then he’d already been dead when Luke and I were still searching the playground and surrounds for him with the police and others who’d joined in.

  Did Detective Gilroy believe that Tommy was dead, despite him claiming that he didn’t?

  Dead, dead, dead. Such a flat, final word. There was no light or hope in that word. There was no Tommy in that word. There was only the possibility of a body. After all these months, if Tommy was dead, there wasn’t even any possibility of a body: there was only the possibility of Tommy’s skeletal remains.

  Suddenly, I couldn’t breathe. There wasn’t enough oxygen in this tiny office. I couldn’t stay here in Trent’s office any longer, with his abduction statistics and his neutral voice and the graph line on his forehead.

  “Are you okay, Phoebe?” His eyes flicked over me in concern. I knew the laundry list of what I looked like: dark circles under my eyes, no makeup, untidy hair spilling out of a ponytail. I didn’t look okay.

  Nodding, I got up too quickly. The room tilted and spun.

  “Phoebe?”

  “I’m just tired. Please let me know if you have any news.”

  I hurried out, my head still swimming, trying to look normal. Out on the street, the wintry air stung my cheeks, but at least I could breathe again.

  I’d know if Tommy were dead. Wouldn’t I?

  The answer came to me instantly. I wouldn’t know. A stranger had taken him from under my nose, and I hadn’t even known that was happening. In those moments that I thought he was playing near my feet, he was being led or carried away from me.

  When I looked back, I imagined I had a sense of dread right at that time. But the dread had to be in retrospect. If I’d known what was about to happen to Tommy, I would have stopped it.

  10.

  LUKE

  Wednesday morning

  “MATE, WE CLOSED THE MONAHAN DEAL.” Rob grinned. At six and a half million dollars, we were going to get a tidy commission out of that. Sitting back in his chair, he crossed his feet on the desk.

  Every morning, Rob and I had a brief catch-up. We’d been caught a few times telling clients different things, and now we made sure we had our stories straight. Selling real estate was an art. You tried to funnel buyers towards the top of what they could afford, sometimes to the properties that weren’t selling, or to the deals if you thought they’d be a good repeat customer. You had to know when a buyer was worth going the extra mile for and when a buyer was a time-waster.

  Behind Rob lay the same view I had from my office window. But for some reason I couldn’t determine, the scene looked different from Rob’s window. Maybe it was because I felt myself moving inside Rob’s frame here in his office. He lived for the thrill of the big sales and saw everything as an opportunity.

  “Gonna call Ellie.” With his feet still on the desk, he grabbed the phone.

  Ellie was one of our best salespeople—the best actually. I’d been wanting to put her onto handling the auctions. Almost all of our sales were via auctions. And Ellie had a sense of drama and theatrics that Rob and I lacked. But Rob kept holding out. I couldn’t be sure, but I thought maybe that he just couldn’t cope with the idea of his wife being on the same level as him. Maybe I understood that, in a way. The auctions were a male bastion. I only knew of a handful of female auctioneers in the whole city. If Ellie proved to be better than Rob, that could be a bitter pill for Rob to swallow.

  The Monahan sales commission would help Rob and Ellie hang onto their ritzy house and Italian cars a bit longer. I’d known for a while that Rob and Ellie spent more than they earned, but that was something Rob would never admit.

  There was a time when I would have called Phoebe and whooped like a little kid and told her we were dining out at the most expensive restaurant. And she’d have gotten excited with me. But those days were gone. Now, I would barely get a glimmer of acknowledgment.

  “I’ll go give Feeb a call.” Pulling myself to my feet, I exited Rob’s office. I was lying. I wasn’t going to call her.

  I had a stack of paperwork sitting on my desk. A stack of bills to pay. The mortgage on my house and the lease on my office were crippling. I needed to put my head down and keep working.

  I dug out the folder of photos taken of the properties belonging to my newest client. He had an apartment with a million-dollar view of the harbour, and he wanted me to sell it. I needed to give him my attention right now. The Monahan deal was good news, but we had to keep the mill churning.

  First I’d check my phone messages. During our morning meet ups, Rob and I had a no-phone-calls policy. Otherwise all we’d do was answer calls.

  I frowned. There was a message from Phoebe to call her and a message from Detective Trent Gilroy.

  My stomach clenched. Phoebe never called me. And when Gilroy called me, it was always about a lead in Tommy’s case that I was going to hear about in the news, and
he wanted Phoebe and me to know first. (Not one of those leads had turned up anything.) Gilroy usually called Phoebe to reassure her that they were still working hard on the case, and he called me to tell me about the news items. Almost like he were running a PR company rather than a police division.

  Still, there was always the sword of Damocles hanging over my head, waiting to drop the news that the police had actually found Tommy. To tell me that Tommy was dead.

  I had to suck down a deep breath before I returned the calls. I didn’t know which to return first. I decided to return Gilroy’s.

  “Detective Gilroy,” he answered.

  “Hello, this is Luke Basko. Returning your call?”

  “Luke, yes. Have you spoken to your wife?”

  “Not since I left for work. What’s happening? Is she okay?”

  “She’s fine. She brought in a letter earlier—”

  “What letter?”

  “She found an unaddressed envelope in the mailbox. The letter inside has no name on it. It’s just a children’s rhyme.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “Well, neither do we. It’s just a piece of paper with a rhyme printed on it. It’s the Mother Goose rhyme, Little Boy Blue. Only, the words are changed. Now, we’re not certain, but it does sound like it’s about Tommy. Phoebe’s convinced that it is.”

  “What does it say?”

  He read the rhyme out to me.

  Dumbstruck, I stared at a space on the wall that seemed to dissolve into a memory, reaching all the way back to the nursery rhyme book I used to read to Tommy at night. I knew the rhyme and what the person had changed. How could he say it might be about Tommy? Of course it was.

  I expelled a hard stream of air. “Phoebe doesn’t need this. She isn’t coping as it is.”

  “I thought so. She was very distressed. I’d like to ask if there’s anyone at all you can think of who might do something like this. Someone with a grudge?”