The Game You Played

by Anni Taylor

  “Please have a seat.” I couldn’t read Gilroy’s expression, nor the expressions of the other detectives.

  I needed them to lay it down on the table. Tell us. But I sensed a hesitancy.

  “Who is it? Who?” I held Phoebe’s hand in mine as we sat.

  It was Detective Ali Haleemi who spoke first. His thick eyebrows rose and made waves of creases all the way up to the shiny bald dome of his head. “Luke and Phoebe, so, it’s been three months or so since we last spoke in person. But I’m still one of the detectives working on this case. Trying to solve it as best I can. I know you both want answers, and this has been a nightmare for you both. I need to say up front that at this stage, we don’t have new information on where Tommy is. But we do have information on who was sending the letters.”

  Mentally, I recalibrated. They didn’t know anything about Tommy. Didn’t know whether he was dead or alive.

  Phoebe gasped quietly. “The man from last night?”

  “No,” Haleemi said shortly. “No, we don’t think he has any connection.”

  “Then. . . ?” She shook her head questioningly.

  He exhaled, his eyes directly on her. “As far as I understand, Detective Gilroy informed you that we were going to install surveillance cameras on your street and in the café. Do you remember that conversation?”

  She touched her head, her eyes growing large. “God, I’d forgotten. So you have this person on film? Actually on film?”

  He nodded. “I was in charge of that operation, and the cameras were installed yesterday morning. This morning, I went through the footage together with Detective Yarris.” He glanced at the female detective beside him. “And the footage clearly shows who placed the third letter in the mailbox.”

  I couldn’t control the frustration simmering in my stomach, turning the toast and eggs I’d had for lunch into some kind of toxic sludge. Why didn’t they just come out and tell us? “Who the fuck was it?”

  Gilroy walked around the desk to sit on the edge of it, in front of us.

  It was obvious that he was going to be the one to tell us.

  20.

  PHOEBE

  Saturday afternoon

  I HEARD A NAME.

  A name that didn’t fit Luke’s question about who this person was.

  A name that didn’t fit anywhere. A name that suddenly turned as sharp as a knife, slicing everything I knew into tiny julienne pieces.

  “I don’t—” I started, unable to finish my sentence.

  “Phoebe,” said Detective Gilroy, his voice breaking through this new alternate reality. “It’s you.”

  Luke’s hands slipped away from mine and hovered mid-air, like he didn’t know what to do with them anymore. “What the hell? Of course it’s not Phoebe.”

  “This is difficult for us,” Gilroy said in a careful but determined tone. “But the video leaves no doubt. Before we say anything more, we’d like you both to come with us now and see the footage for yourselves.”

  Luke and I followed the detectives like obedient children into what they called the interview room. The room was dead plain. White walls, a single table, chairs. We were instructed to sit.

  Detective Annabelle Yarris loaded a micro card into a computer tower. A screen on the wall blinked and then showed a still. A still of my house. I’d completely forgotten that Trent Gilroy had said he’d install a camera. The last two days had been a rush, a whirlwind.

  Annabelle turned and looked back over her shoulder at Luke and me. “I’ll be starting the film at the point where you left the house that night.” She pressed a brief smile against her teeth.

  Luke had his arm around me, his hand on my shoulder—the pressure of it seeming more apprehensive than it was comforting.

  As I watched, I saw myself. But not any self that I knew. This was a raw, stripped me, without societal pretensions. I walked the pathway from my front door, looking from side to side. But my expression was not one of a woman searching for her child. It was, without a doubt, the cool, intent expression of a hunter. The turmoil I remembered inside my mind didn’t show on my face. I stepped through the gate and headed away. The film now showed an empty scene. Just dry leaves being scattered by the wind near our mailbox.

  “I’m going to fast-forward it here,” said Detective Yarris. “Nothing happens for the next couple of minutes. But I’ll do it so that you can still see the frames and see for yourself that nothing else happened during this time.”

  As she’d said, the scene remained as it was during the time she fast-forwarded the footage. She glanced at her watch, seeming to be waiting for the right time to put it back into play.

  And there I was again, walking back to the gate.

  I had something in my hand. An envelope.

  Luke’s fingers pushed into the flesh on my shoulder.

  I watched myself insert the envelope into the mailbox and then head back down the street again.

  There was no mistake. I had done this.

  I was the one who delivered the letter.

  Me.

  But how was that possible?

  Sweat dampened my palms, making small dark patches on my white dress. What was happening? The police were supposed to tell us who’d written the letters. Instead, we’d been shown a video that made no sense. No sense.

  Annabelle stopped the video at that point and turned to Trent. Luke’s hand dropped away from me, and he studied my face in confusion.

  “Now that you’ve seen what we’ve seen,” Trent Gilroy told us, “I can tell you that based on this footage, we’ve been conducting some further enquiries.”

  His eyes were grave, the graph line wrinkle in his forehead forecasting that what he had was more bad news.

  He eyed me directly. “Because of the nature of the letters and the reports about the man that’s been loitering around, we’ve had to take this very seriously. We had to be absolutely sure of what’s really happening. We’ve spoken with neighbours on your street this morning. Phoebe, we have two witness accounts that state that you were seen out on the street early on the morning you found the first letter.”

  Luke was on his feet before the detective finished his last word. “Don’t you think we should have been informed all of this was going on?”

  “We thought it best we have a more thorough understanding before calling you in,” Detective Gilroy answered.

  “Look, she didn’t even have the letter when she left the house.” Luke crossed his arms. “What the fuck is going on here?”

  Trent’s expression was guarded. “There’s a bit more we need to tell you. Please, sit.”

  Luke stood there staring at him for a moment before looking defeated and slumping back into his seat. I wished he would have grabbed me and stormed out, saying that it was all nonsense, so that I could believe that this was all a mistake and that I hadn’t seen myself on that video.

  But that didn’t happen.

  I was still here, in a world more surreal than in any of my sleepwalking dreams. And I couldn’t escape it by waking.

  Why didn’t I remember the envelope or putting it in the mailbox?

  Detective Eli Haleemi took over then. “Between leaving through the front gate of the house and returning to the letterbox was a time period of just over two minutes. Long enough for Phoebe to reach her grandmother’s house, get the letter, and bring it back.”

  “That’s not enough time,” Luke snapped. “My wife was sleepwalking. Nan’s house is towards the harbour end of the street. It would have taken—”

  “Not if she ran.” Detective Yarris raised her thinly plucked eyebrows.

  “She was sleepwalking,” Luke repeated. “Not doing an Olympic sprint. And what makes you think she got the letter from her grandmother’s house anyway? What if someone in the street gave it to her?”

  They were talking about me in the third person. I was no longer part of this. It was all about logistics now.

  Detective Haleemi took the baton again, bowing his head and crin
kling his forehead as if he were thinking very hard—no, as if he were demonstrating the revolutions that should be turning in Luke’s mind. “Well, I can’t claim to know a lot about sleepwalking and what people are capable of in that state. But it is possible to get from your house and back in that time, if you run. And the grandmother’s house just seemed the most logical place for Phoebe to have gone, seeing as that’s where she ended up later. And because of one other thing. We believe that the letters were written at that house, at some point.”

  Ali Haleemi waited for a few seconds before continuing. “And so we went there earlier today, Detective Yarris and I, to Mrs Hoskins’s house. We asked if we could take a look around, and she showed us through the house.” Stopping again, his eyes rested on me. “And we discovered a typewriter in the storage area under the stairs.”

  I couldn’t help but flinch. They’d been in my grandmother’s house, going through all the things belonging to my family. I knew of the typewriter they were talking about. But I hadn’t seen it for a long time. I hadn’t known that Nan still had it.

  “Mrs Hoskins allowed us to take the typewriter.” Words continued to drip from Detective Haleemi’s mouth. Nonsensical words.

  Luke sucked in a shallow breath.

  Haleemi straightened, as though he was about to come to his end point and needed to look official. “We had one of our experts check it out. It’s the same typewriter used to write the letters.”

  My upper lip began quivering even before I’d fully processed what he’d said.

  Luke swore under his breath, exhaling noisily. “Doesn’t that mean Phoebe’s grandmother is the one who’s been writing those letters? Why the fuck would she do this to us?”

  Detective Gilroy knitted his eyebrows tightly. “We don’t have reason to believe that the grandmother wrote them. We only found one set of fingerprints on the third letter and envelope.” His gaze lingered on me. “Phoebe, those prints were yours. Your prints shouldn’t have been inside the sealed envelope at all. I think you can see where we’re at.”

  Thoughts ground through my head, each thought turning to ashen powder before it could form anything coherent.

  How? How? How? How? How? How?

  How was any of this possible?

  Someone needed to explain it to me. But the three detectives had grown quiet, and their attention was all focused on me, waiting for a response.

  I was making movements—I wasn’t sure which—shaking my head, shrinking into myself, opening my mouth to speak. Maybe all of those at once. I was too numb, too inside my mind to be aware of how I was presenting myself in that moment, let alone speak or defend myself against these terrible allegations.

  Even Luke, who always found the right words, was silent. When I turned to him, he had his head in his hands. I didn’t know how long he’d been like that. When he raised his head, his expression was different to how it had been before. “What happens now?”

  Detective Gilroy’s very official posture seemed to relax. “Look, all of this—these letters—have come after months of the worst kind of trauma. A week before the letters started, the six-month mark of Tommy’s disappearance came. That’s a terrible milestone. We understand that it must feel as though we’re not doing everything we possibly can to find Tommy. We understand that. And perhaps, Phoebe felt that she would like us to do more. Our position is that this has been a cry for help, to try to make us start moving on Tommy’s case again.” He rubbed his temples, attempting a grim smile. “The truth is, we’ve never stopped moving on his case. We’ve thrown everything we humanly can at it. Tommy remains a top priority.” Inhaling steadily, he fixed his eyes on me, softening his expression. “So, what we’re going to do is to dismiss this latest wrinkle in the case. If this is a case of sleepwalking, then you’re hardly to blame. We’d just like some assurance that you’re going to see someone about how you’ve been feeling lately. Do you see anyone at the moment? A counsellor?”

  “She sees Dr Leona Moran,” Luke cut in. “A psychiatrist.”

  Detective Gilroy nodded. “Okay, good.”

  “I’ll set up an appointment,” said Luke. He then faced me with eyes that no longer knew me. “I don’t understand. Did you think this would get us anywhere?”

  “I didn’t write those letters.” There. I’d gotten the words out, pushed them out from somewhere deep in my chest.

  “I watched you on the video, Feeb, putting the letter in the letterbox. Just . . . stop. Hell, imagine if we’d caught up with the guy from last night. That would have been damned difficult to explain.” Luke looked away from me. I could tell he was embarrassed by what he thought I’d done.

  There wasn’t anything I could say to my husband right now. They had him convinced. I looked at each of the detectives in turn. “I didn’t write them,” I repeated.

  My words sounded even hollower the second time.

  No one in this room believed me.

  I wanted to run home and take my pills and climb into bed and dream of Tommy. I didn’t want to be here with four sets of eyes judging me, pitying me.

  Detective Yarris gave me a smile that I was sure she meant to be warm, but she just wasn’t capable of doing warm. “I used to sleepwalk when I was a kid. Ended up peeing in a cupboard one night, thinking it was the bathroom.”

  “Go easy on Phoebe,” Trent told Luke. “She wasn’t in control of this. Like I said, I’m no expert on sleepwalking, but we’re guessing she just doesn’t have any clear memory of writing those letters.”

  Luke closed his eyes briefly. “Okay. It’s just . . . I came here thinking we were about to get answers, and instead I get hit with this.” He turned to me. “Sorry I was a jerk.”

  I didn’t answer. He still believed that I wrote the letters. Nothing had changed.

  Luke looked back at the detectives. “Is everyone going to find out what really happened now? I mean, is this going to be all over the news?”

  Trent Gilroy shook his head. “It won’t come from us. Things have a way of getting out, but if you keep it under your hat, you’ll give this the best chance of blowing over. That doesn’t include Phoebe’s psychiatrist, of course. She’s going to need to talk this whole thing through with her. From our side of it, our official statement is going to remain that some notes were sent to your house and the café, but our new statement will be that the police don’t believe they have any connection to Tommy’s disappearance.”

  Luke exhaled quietly. I knew the most important thing to him was that no one found out about his crazy wife.

  I wasn’t crazy.

  But people who weren’t insane didn’t need to tell themselves that, right?

  21.

  LUKE

  Saturday afternoon

  DRY, BROWN LEAVES DROPPED FROM AN archway of trees as I drove Phoebe to Leona Moran’s clinic. The knobbed branches seemed skeletal and diseased to me.

  An hour ago, there’d been some hope that a resolution to what happened to my son was in sight. That hope was dust.

  I’d called Dr Moran as soon as Phoebe and I had left the police station. Dr Moran said that considering the circumstances, she’d see Phoebe straight away. Phoebe didn’t want to see Dr Moran, pleading to just go home. But I wasn’t going to let that happen. Someone had to look out for her, and that person obviously couldn’t be herself.

  Dr Moran stepped from her office to greet us as soon as we walked into the clinic. With her librarian-style smooth hair, rimless glasses and quick smile, she was a walking advertisement for her profession. She could make you shiny new and get rid of all the bad stuff cluttering your head.

  I expected to wait outside, but Dr Moran surprised me by guiding me into the room along with Phoebe.

  “I’d like to have a little chat with both of you.” She gestured towards two comfortable-looking chairs. “Because this is happening to you both. First of all, can I get either of you a drink? A tea or coffee? Water?”

  Phoebe refused the drink flatly, and I followed suit. I was thirs
ty for something stronger than coffee anyway.

  “Okay,” she started with a concerned set of wrinkles indenting the centre of her forehead. “Luke, you gave me a brief background on what’s been happening over the past three days. I’d like to take it from here and see if we can’t get things to a better place.”

  Her milky green eyes rested on Phoebe. “How are you? You’ve missed your last two appointments. I’ve been thinking about you.”

  “I just want to go home.” Phoebe looked away from me and Dr Moran.

  Anger pitted itself inside me again. She caused all this, and now she wanted to walk away from it? I didn’t even know she’d been missing appointments. She’d lied to me.

  “We just need to make sure you’re okay,” Dr Moran told her in a tone that was far gentler than I would have liked. “And you haven’t been okay. I understand that both of you are hurting right now. Perhaps we can start by you telling me how you’ve been lately, Phoebe.”

  Phoebe wrapped her arms across her stomach, eyeing Dr Moran with a defensive expression. “How can I tell you when I don’t understand anything right now? I need time to figure this out.”

  “You’re feeling confused?” Dr Moran nodded.

  “Confused doesn’t begin to describe it. I didn’t write those letters. I couldn’t have. Why would. . . .” Phoebe’s voice trailed away.

  “Of course,” said the doctor. “You’re not going to untangle this straight away. Don’t expect to. You’ve been through severe and unrelenting trauma these past few months. Have you been sleeping? How has the new sleeping medication been working for you?”

  I wanted Dr Moran to drill her about the letters. Analyse why she’d done it. Instead, she was starting in a different place.

  Phoebe gave a nod. “The medication’s fine. I’m sleeping.”

  “Except for the sleepwalking episodes,” I broke in.

  “I had a couple of restless nights,” Phoebe’s voice snapped tight. “Ever since the letters started.”