“Do you know if any of Isaac’s wives hit him hard in the divorce?”
“Oh, yeah. Number two.” Another giggle. “He didn’t have much with wife number one, but he was rich by number two. He made me sign a prenup. Boo.” She sounded like she was pouting.
“Oh, so he would’ve been in a bad financial position after the divorce?”
“Which one?” Mellie began to hum dreamily.
“The second one.”
“No.” Another giggle. “He hides money.” It was a whisper. “Thinks I don’t know but I found statements and Margaret figured it out. She says he’s had pots and pots of it for ages. In places like the Cayman Islands.”
“How much do you mean?”
“Millions.” A small clattering sound. “Oopsie, dropped the lipstick.” More humming. “Poor wife two didn’t know. She thought she won the battle because he had to buy her out of this house and give her a few hundred grand.”
I crossed Isaac’s name off my mental list of suspects; yes, there was a tiny chance he’d been my mother’s lover, but I couldn’t really see it. Isaac went after voluptuous blondes—every single wife had fit the template. “Good luck with Isaac.”
“Uh-huh.”
After hanging up, I wondered why Mellie’s infidelity—if it was that, and not just some communal pot-smoking—didn’t bother me. Maybe because her relationship with Isaac had always felt superficial. All gloss with nothing underneath.
The question about Isaac answered, I turned my mind to a far harder task, and called the local funeral director. The voice that came on the line was warm and soothing, a woman with long-term experience dealing with grieving relatives. When I identified myself, the pause was minuscule but present.
Apparently even experienced funeral directors didn’t expect to plan the funeral of a woman whose name was currently all over the media.
“Of course, that’s not a problem at all,” she said, recovering quickly. “If you wish, we can arrange to pick up the remains directly from the police. When would you like to hold the service?”
After deciding on the date, the funeral director asked me when might be a good time to meet to go over the details of the service.
Details.
Like her favorite song, or photos of her for a montage. Normal things children did. I barely kept myself from laughing, suddenly conscious of attempting to at least act normal.
Since I hadn’t figured out where to go from here when it came to finding my mother’s murderer, I sat down after the call to gather the photos for the montage. After my mother’s disappearance, my father had told me he was throwing out all the physical albums and deleting all the digital images that featured her—if I wanted anything, I had the day to grab it.
I’d taken it all, then scanned the non-digital images into the cloud. Now her face filled the screen over and over again. My mother in a cocktail gown. In a day dress with Diana by her side. In that halter-neck one-piece yellow swimsuit. She was crouched beside me on the beach, our hair damp and our skin glowing.
Her head was lifted in a laugh, no bite or anger to her.
This was who she could’ve been if Ishaan Rai had been a different man.
“Don’t make up stories about me, Ari.” Wicked laughter in my ear. “You know I had a craving inside me that nothing could fulfil. Maybe it came from a bachpan of never having enough, but I wanted everything.”
She’d never said those words to me, but they rang as clearly in my head as if she were sitting right next to me.
My hand clenched on the external mouse paired to my laptop, highlighting the image of us on the beach and saving it in the file for the funeral director. This was the mother I’d loved, the mother I wanted to remember.
I scrolled on.
As I aged, she grew more glamourous and impossibly more beautiful. Her smiles stopped being as wide-open, and began to hold the edge of a secret. Her body turned sleeker, her cheekbones sharper.
I paused on an image of her in a blue gown, champagne in hand. She was looking straight at the camera … straight at me. I’d taken this photograph downstairs, when my parents had friends over for drinks and canapés. I hadn’t been allowed to stay long, had spent the short time taking snapshots.
“Do you want to try champagne, Ari?” A whisper, sparkling eyes, before she switched to Hindi and said, “I’ll sneak you a taste.”
“No.”
“No?” Laughter. “What a good beta I have.”
What she’d had was a son who’d seen her drunk more than once. Alcohol was a smell that had lodged in my lungs and on my tongue, until I thought I’d never get rid of it. Then I’d fallen into its arms, just another casualty of the need to go numb, forget.
I saved the photo.
40
I also saved photos of my mother with her parents.
Most were sepia snapshots she’d carried with her to her new home, but she’d also traveled back to India twice. I’d gone with her when I was about five; my strongest memory from that time was of sitting with my grandmother around an outside fire at dawn while a cow lowed nearby and the last of the stars faded from the sky. The fields had been full of corn, the air a rustle of green stalks.
“Why don’t you bring Nana and Nani to visit us?” I’d asked her once.
“Oh, mera pyara beta,” she’d said, her fingers sliding over my cheek.
That’s all the answer I’d ever gotten: Oh, my sweet boy.
But the older I grew, the less I’d needed her to put the truth into words. In their neat little home in rural India, complete with a shiny TV that my mother had sent them the money to buy, new tiled floors, and pretty curtains, my grandparents could imagine that their daughter was living a glorious life “abroad” with a wonderful, generous husband.
My father had been generous with his money in one sense—he’d set up accounts at designer boutiques all over the city. My mother could always send him invoices for clothing and jewelry. Things that made her look good on his arm. She’d also had a credit card for lunches out with the girls, that type of thing.
The bills had gone to my father, so he could question her on any unusual purchases.
So the money she’d sent to her parents and the money she’d put in my account? She’d gathered that by buying designer items from the boutiques, then waiting a bit before reselling them online.
My father had kept my mother on a financial leash. I’d always thought her plan was to save enough to be able to take him on in court, but then she’d vanished and all he’d lost was half the value of the house.
I sent an email to the funeral director with a zipped file of photos.
Job done. Normalcy achieved.
Almost able to feel my mother’s breath on my nape, I got out of the chair and made my way downstairs, the crutches thudding on every step. I made it to my car without running into anyone else—Mia had long since returned to her home, and Pari was probably doing homework in her room.
The notebook in my back pocket was digging into my butt, so I took it out and threw it in the glove box. I was driving past the café when I spotted Lily closing up. The sight threw some switch in the back of my mind, disgorging the fact that tonight was one of the few nights when she wasn’t open. She must’ve stayed late to do paperwork or a stocktake.
Stopping the car, I rolled down the window. “Want to come for a ride?”
She gave me a narrow-eyed look, glanced down at the brown paper bag in her hand, then shrugged. “Yes, okay.”
She brought with her the smell of sugar and coffee. “Leftover pastries,” she said, stretching around to put the bag in the backseat before shrugging out of her black fleece. “Where are we going?”
I hadn’t thought about it. “The Huia Lookout?” It’d be empty at this time, especially with the winds having begun to swirl.
“Sure.” She settled back, trim and neat in her black uniform.
We didn’t speak the entire drive
to the lookout, and darkness had begun to fall by the time we arrived, but it wasn’t pitch-dark yet, the world caught between night and day. There were no other cars in the small parking area surrounded by green, the picnic table empty.
Walking together through the wind, we found our way to the lookout itself. The land fell away in a dizzying drop around us, the mountains in the distance huge goliaths and the water out front as dark as the horizon.
Below, the tops of the barely visible tree ferns looked deceptively welcoming and soft.
Fall from this height and nothing would stop your descent as you tumbled screaming through the ferns and the trees. Perhaps the splintered branches would eventually hook into your clothes or limbs, your body a broken doll hanging in the air, but you wouldn’t be alive to appreciate the bloody artistry of it.
“I could kill someone here.”
Lily jerked and took a step back.
“In fiction.” I grinned. “Sorry, hazard of a writer’s brain.”
Dark eyes scanned my face, before Lily’s lips twitched. “You always were a bit weird. I was cleaning your room once and I found this exercise book full of notes about forensics and how to hide bodies.”
“Research is important.”
Lily rubbed her hands up and down her arms, her gaze out toward the darkening waves of the Tasman Sea. “God, it’s breathtaking, isn’t it? Out here, you can forget that a whole city lives and breathes less than an hour away.”
Turning away from her view and to the right, I could see the lights of a few houses, but they were scattered stars against the darkness. You could imagine this as some ancient cove, peopled only by isolated fisherman. “Do you ever wonder how many people lie dead in the bush? People no one’s ever found?”
I’d watched a few episodes of a psychic-detective reality TV show once, and the psychics kept leading the crews into the bush, certain the victim lay buried in the voracious green. They’d never actually located a body, but in one case, the psychic had dug and dug, certain of their instinct. I’d found that the most realistic aspect of the show—if I had to bury a body, I’d do it in the bush, where my victim’s bones would lie undisturbed for a lifetime and more.
Lily put a hand on my upper arm. “I’m so sorry, Aarav.” Gentle words. “Whatever else she was, Nina was a good mum. I remember all those times she’d come home from her ladies’ lunches with a carryout bag of your favorite snack, and how she’d always pick you up from school. She didn’t deserve this.”
For the first time since my mother’s remains had been discovered, my eyes threatened to turn hot. Staring out into the wind, I swallowed hard. My instinct was to strike out, hurt Lily for daring to see under my skin, but the words wouldn’t come. Turning, I walked back toward the car. The wind was gathering now, and I had to pay attention not to get blown over on the damn crutches.
Once inside the car, I grabbed the bag of pastries and took a cream doughnut. Lily removed an éclair, and we sat there eating fat and sugar as total darkness cloaked the world outside. In the bush below the lookout would exist an even darker night, pitch-black and impenetrable. My mother had breathed her last breaths in lonely darkness so complete there could be no hope.
“Where did you get the money for the café?” I shifted to look at her. “Just tell me. It’s fucking with my head and I’d like to have at least one person I know I can trust.”
She stared at me, a hardness in her eyes that was nothing like what I’d previously glimpsed. “You’re so privileged, Aarav. Do you have any awareness of that?” She slashed out her hand. “Yes, your mother was murdered, but I haven’t seen my mother since I was twelve and my father decided to kidnap me and bring me to this country. She died while they were still fighting for custody—and it was a horribly unfair battle because she didn’t have even a tenth his resources.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t know that.”
“Why would you?” Her lips twisted. “I was just the maid.”
“Don’t put that on me.” Yeah, I’d been a shit at times, but never with Lily. “You had the power in that relationship, not me.”
She sucked in a breath, exhaled in a jagged burst. “You know, I never felt guilty about what I did until afterward, until I’d already had sex with you—I was so angry the whole time.” A quick glance. “Why didn’t you tell your parents I stole your money?”
“I didn’t want you fired, and I figured you must’ve really needed it.” Two hundred dollars my father had given me in lieu of affection or attention. Lily had mattered more.
“Sometimes, you’re almost human.” Picking out a plum Danish from the bag, she began to carefully chip off and eat the sugar glaze. “I walked out of my father’s house the day I turned eighteen. He stole my mother from me—stole all those years I could’ve had.”
Pick. Chip. Eat. “That’s why I’d never have hurt Nina, no matter if she was a bitch. You loved your mother, and I liked you.” Tiny fragments of glaze fell to her lap. “At least I got luckier in the old-man department—mine apparently felt so guilty that he left all his property to me in his will.
“I came into three-quarters of a million dollars while I was still working for your parents.” A sardonic smile. “Wanted to throw that in your mother’s face so many times. But all that poisonous anger inside me … I just sat on the money for months, not knowing how I felt about it. But I sure as hell didn’t need to steal a quarter mil.”
“The café wouldn’t have cost anywhere near the value of your inheritance.” It was too small, with too little foot traffic, and not enough land to make it worthwhile for development.
“No, I still have a chunk of the money. Invested it into a retirement account.” She took a bite of the Danish, chewed with deliberation, swallowed. “I figured his money was the least of what he owed me. Paltry compensation for murdering my mother—she died of a broken heart and no one will ever convince me otherwise.”
I stared out at darkness so thick I could no longer even see the lookout, much less what lay beyond. I considered bringing up her other business … but there’d be no point to that beyond cruelty. She wouldn’t have needed a lot of money to start that up—and for all I knew, the house itself was a rental. Easy enough to verify that with a few internet searches.
“Did my mother know your circumstances?”
Laughter from the passenger seat that actually sounded real. When I looked at her, her face was aglow, her eyes sparkling. She was beautiful. “Aarav, your mother thought I was little more than dirt on her shoe. She didn’t give a shit about my life.”
There was nothing I could say to that—I’d witnessed my mother’s treatment of Lily firsthand. “I never understood why.” It felt disloyal to say even that. “Was it just because you were young and beautiful? She never treated any of the other staff badly.”
Lily’s shoulders moved under the black of her long-sleeved tee. “Maybe I reminded her of who she’d once been and she couldn’t bear it.”
I wish I could go back in time. I wish I could do life right.
Bitter laughter. Alcohol-laced words.
I looked away from the sharp arrow of truth. “Any pastries left?”
“Blueberry muffin.”
I took it, ate, and somehow, we ended up just sitting there in the darkness while the stars dug themselves out of the clouds. When Lily said, “Do you want to come home with me?” I thought about the oblivion to be found in the arms of a welcoming woman.
“No,” I said at last. “We’re both screwed up enough already.”
Another laugh, this one softer. “There you go, being human again. I almost can’t tell you’re one of the Rai family.”
Transcript
Session #11
“Sorry I missed the last session. You got my cancellation?”
“Yes, and of course I understand. How did it go?”
“As well as can be expected. But that’s not what we’re here to talk about.”
> “Where would you like to begin?”
“Her. Always her.”
41
As it was, I ended up inside Lily’s flat anyway—she didn’t live in the Titirangi property where I’d seen her and Ginger and the other woman. Her home was a two-bedroom suburban flat that backed onto the regional park, and it had a little garden that had gone dormant for the winter.
When I dropped her back by her car in the Cul-de-Sac and she invited me to follow her home for coffee, I went because I was more comfortable with Lily than I was with anyone else. She saw the fractures that made me less than normal and she didn’t care. Maybe because Lily had the same papered-over cracks.
We drank coffee, watched trashy reality television, and she told me about how maids witnessed all kinds of things because they were “all but invisible to most rich people.” “Do you want to know stuff even if it goes against your image of your mother?”
“I’m not wearing rose-colored glasses. She had faults, plenty of them.”
“She had an affair with Hemi. A serious affair. Two of them were like puppies, as if discovering love for the first time.”
“You sure?”
“I saw letters he’d written her—full of mushy romantic stuff. ‘Love of my life.’ ‘Reason I wake up.’ That kind of thing.”
“Did she reciprocate?”
“I don’t know—but if she didn’t, or if she decided to break it off, well, a man who feels that strongly about a woman might resort to violence.”
“Hemi was at the Mahi Awards the night she disappeared. I found photographic proof online this afternoon.”
Lily scrunched up her face. “At SkyCity, right? I was part of the waitstaff there.”
“Big coincidence.”
“No coincidence.” She took a sip of the green tea she’d switched to after the coffee. “Tia knew I worked with an agency, and one day while I was outside your parents’ house a month or so before Nina fired me, Tia asked me if the agency did bigger events.”
A sudden pause. “She was so frail then, and I was pretty sure she was wearing a wig. But she had such a presence.”
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