Trilemma

by Jennifer Mortimer

  He shakes his head again. “Actually, now I come to think of it, they’re far more likely to believe my wife did it,” he says.

  Christopher’s mouth smiles, but there is nothing in his dead eyes. “It would be easy to believe Vivienne went berserk when I told her you made a pass at me. She’s always hated you, and that would be enough to tip the balance.”

  “You bastard! No one would believe that!” cries Ben.

  But I flinch and a whimper escapes from my throat.

  “With Vivienne’s mental history?” Christopher snorts. “If you don’t want her back in the psych ward, then you’d all better pretend that nothing happened.”

  Wal slowly lowers his rifle and turns his head to look at me.

  “What do you want to do, Lin?”

  My pulse is beating as I think about this man who hit me over the head and stuffed me down an offal pit. I think about the bones in the pit. He has a taste for it now. He tried to kill not only me, but Ben and Cheryl. Who else might he attack?

  But if we try to bring him to justice, he threatens to lay the blame for the attacks on my sister. What would such a betrayal do to her? I think about Viv’s adoring eyes following Christopher’s every move. I think about her mother, Rose, who killed herself when my father betrayed her. I think about my father’s mistakes.

  Both options are unacceptable.

  Christopher laughs as he stands there, on the edge of Ngatirua ridge, the magic place where my sisters live. He thinks we will let him get away with murder. He thinks he has won.

  There is a third option, although it too is unfavorable, but, like Sally says, sometimes you have to make sacrifices for the people you love.

  Fleetingly, I think about my brilliant career back in Wellington, but the lesson I draw upon is of the farm, not the city.

  The head of the golf club catches him full on the chest. With the weight of my rage behind it, the blow knocks him over the edge.

  We don’t hear a sound as he falls.

  Chapter 51

  Wal is a big man, a strong man, a warrior, the epitome of stalwart Maori manhood, but he stands with his rifle pointed to the ground, gaping at the empty space in front of him. My Ben, the rugged Southern man, stares at me in astonishment.

  “Shit!” says Wal.

  I am small and slight and no epitome of anybody. “Remember, Wal? You told me you have to destroy dangerous dogs,” I try to explain.

  The space in front of us where Christopher was standing moments before resonates with emptiness. My pulse slows.

  My God, what have I done? What have I become? My right arm suddenly weakens and I drop the golf iron.

  “Where did you get that?” Wal asks sharply.

  “The offal pit. That’s where he put me.”

  “Christ!” says Ben. The men are not very eloquent tonight.

  My head hurts and my shoulder hurts and there is blood dripping down my cheek. “Why did he do it, Wal?” I ask.

  “Let’s get you back to the house,” Wal says. “We’ll talk then. Alison has been frantic.”

  “Who do you know who plays golf?”

  “First things first, Lin.”

  So we walk back up the hill and down to the house where Alison waits anxiously. When she flings her arms around me, I relax into her embrace, feeling the softness of her chest and the beat of her heart beneath her sensible sweater, smelling the lavender she uses on her hair. She doesn’t seem to mind that I stink.

  In the distance, or so it seems, Wal is telling her what happened. Alison hugs me again before taking me to the bathroom. I stand under the warm shower and clean away the remnants of the dead while she runs me a bath.

  “Can we keep it from Vivienne?” I ask. “All of it?”

  Alison sighs. “I don’t know.”

  I lie in the water and doze. Alison returns and dresses my cuts and anoints my bruised shoulder and then folds me into her dressing robe.

  “We have to keep what he threatened from Vivienne,” I say when we rejoin the men in the living room.

  Ben helps me into a chair, his kind face gentle, but there is a crease between his eyes whenever he looks at me. He glances over at Wal who is standing by the fireplace, looking grim.

  “We went back to the offal pit he threw you in,” Wal says. “It was one of the old ones.” He hits the stone of the hearth with his fist. “That bastard! Fergus was in there.”

  “What?” I ask. “Who is Fergus?”

  “We thought he went back to Scotland,” Wal explains. “But he didn’t. His body is in the pit along with his pack and the rest of his golf clubs.”

  “Max’s father!”

  “Christopher told us Fergus left by taxi early in the morning. When we never heard another word, we just assumed he’d decided to give up and move on. But Christopher must have killed him and buried him in one of the old offal pits.”

  “Viv is so fragile,” says Alison. “I don’t know how she’s going to handle it.”

  “Max needs to know his father is dead and he needs to know his father didn’t desert him,” argues Wal.

  “Fergus wanted half of Vivienne’s property,” Alison explains. “They didn’t have a prenup and so by law he was entitled to it. Vivienne was frantic about losing her house, and so was Christopher.”

  “But why did he try to kill me?”

  Wal looks at Alison. She gives me a faint smile that vanishes almost before it appears.

  “We wanted to tell you, but Vivienne wouldn’t hear of it.”

  “Tell me what?”

  “We thought we had persuaded her, but when we saw you on television, she got hysterical—she said you must be getting paid a fortune and that it wasn’t necessary to tell you. She refused point blank, and Christopher got angrier and angrier—”

  “We should have ignored them and gone ahead,” Wal says. “All this might not have happened.”

  Alison’s face flinches in pain. “I know. But I thought if she got to know us first—”

  I sit in the armchair and wait for Alison to tell me now. She meets my eyes briefly before wiping the already clean table with her sleeve and straightening the cloth. She picks at a thread dangling from the corner and snaps it short.

  “When our father left Mum, they agreed he would take nothing with him,” she says, bringing her hands together in her lap and clasping them as in prayer. “The arrangement seemed fair since it was Mum’s family’s farm and Mum’s family who lent them the deposit for the house in Wellington, and it was Dad who was leaving.”

  “Yes, I knew that,” I reply.

  “Mum hoped he would come back to her, that he would tire of your mother and come back to Ngatirua and the home she had created for him.”

  Alison is wringing her hands, the left tugging on the right.

  “He never came back. She couldn’t bear that he had—” Alison looks away. “And one day she walked out of the house to the top of the ridge and threw herself over.”

  “Oh, my God,” I say. “The same as—”

  “It’s going to be hard to tell her. But it would have destroyed her to discover Christopher was prepared to save himself by casting the blame on her.”

  “Christopher tried to kill me because your mother killed herself because our father wouldn’t leave my mother and return to her?” I shake my head.

  “No it wasn’t that, Lin. You see, Rose never changed her will. So when she died, Dad inherited everything she owned.”

  “I thought your grandfather was alive? I thought you inherited directly from him?”

  “He died a year earlier. Gran was still alive, but he’d left the property awkwardly. She took this house and the new farm, and Rose got the rest.”

  “But Dad can’t have known that! Or he would have stayed.”

  “Gran destroyed the will. He never knew he owned the main estate and when he died, he left everything he had to you.”

  I stare at her in wonder. I own this magical place?

  “Wal and I are okay. We took
over Gran’s house, and Wal used his own money to buy out Viv’s share of the new farm. But Viv spends all her income and she spends all the money we’ve paid her, and she’s put it all back into the damned house.”

  A little gurgling gasp breaks from my throat. “He didn’t have to kill me!” I say.

  “He was a twisted man,” breaks in Wal. “Something broke in that crash and never got mended. Viv saved him from destitution by marrying him and bringing him here and giving him a comfortable life. But I knew he was rotten.”

  I gaze into the fireplace with its vase of dried flowers and seedpods. My head hurts. I’ve stopped thinking about the why and wherefore. My shoulder is on fire and my nose is running and my eyes seem to be trickling water.

  “What do we do now?” I ask.

  Ben stares at me. I don’t understand the expression on his face. He looks away.

  “Wal and I have been thinking it through,” he says. “This is what we’re going to say—”

  Chapter 52

  The men carry Christopher’s broken body home the next morning and an ambulance takes him to the local funeral parlor where they will mold him back together and patch up his face as good as new, they say.

  The police come and go and come back again and are now planted around the offal pit, carefully extracting the contents.

  I never expected to get away with murder. I made the choice and I expected to bear the consequences. All I wanted was to keep my family safe.

  But when Ben suggested an alternative version of the truth, I agreed.

  The police didn’t disbelieve me when I told them I slid into the pit looking for a shoe that had slipped between the sheets of iron. They didn’t disbelieve me when I told them I fled screaming after I picked up what seemed to be the bones of a human hand. They didn’t disbelieve me when I said I ran and fell and hit my head and knocked myself out.

  They didn’t disbelieve Ben when he told them how Christopher had reacted to my description of what I had found. After all neither Ben nor I could have had anything to do with the death of Fergus, ex-husband of my sister Vivienne.

  And yet the police inspector isn’t happy. A blind man committing murder? He can’t put his finger on what triggered that sixth sense of his, but he knows something is not quite right.

  Wal takes him aside and admits that Christopher was not just blind, but had spent time in a mental health institute.

  Now a madman committing murder, that was comprehensible. So the police accept our stories and if there is a lingering doubt in the inspector’s mind, he clears his conscience by reporting Wal and my sisters to the Accident Compensation Commission. Too many accidents, he says. First, your sleep-out has no fire extinguisher and then you have an offal pit without a secure cover!

  The irony didn’t escape me. Rose had killed herself and my father had been accused of her murder. I murdered Christopher, but we convinced the police it was suicide.

  I hadn’t expected to so closely mirror my father’s fate.

  Ben has brought my purse. It smells and I don’t want it any more, but I retrieve the contents of my wallet. Wal says he’ll burn the woolsack Christopher wrapped me in. We don’t know where my cell phone went. Perhaps Christopher was smart enough to smash it and throw it down the cliff where its signals couldn’t be traced.

  “And we found this too,” Ben says, handing me a plastic bag. Inside is a men’s t-shirt with Mickey Mouse morphing into a Tiki on the front.

  “It was by the wall of the studio. He would have known to search for your purse, but he didn’t know you were carrying anything else. When we found it, Wal and I knew you must be somewhere on the farm.”

  Then again, Christopher hadn’t been that smart or perhaps I was just lucky. We think he’d expected people to believe I must have fallen victim to some random assault on the main highway.

  No one had ever followed up Fergus’s disappearance. The friends he had in New Zealand thought he’d left for Scotland. Presumably, the friends he had in Scotland thought he had changed his mind and stayed in New Zealand.

  When I let myself in through the French windows, the rooms still glow with beauty. Christopher’s absence has not made the slightest difference to the house.

  Alison is in the kitchen preparing food. Vivienne is in her bedroom, but she’s awake, Alison tells me. She holds my gaze and then nods her head to the doorway.

  When I take in the tray, the face peering back at me from the bedclothes is pink and puffy. Unlike the house, her beauty has dimmed.

  “I am sorry, Viv,” I say, taking her hand in mine. “So very sorry about Christopher.”

  I am sorry about Christopher. Sorry he was such a monster, sorry that she loved him, and sorry she is hurting now.

  “He was such a handsome man,” she says.

  “Indeed, he was a very handsome man.”

  “I want to remember him as he looked yesterday, wearing the jeans I’d bought him for Christmas and that blue shirt. He never saw the color, but it was his favorite. He used to say it smelled like summer.”

  “Summer?”

  “I dried it on the line down in the garden. He always said he could smell the scent of honeysuckle on the laundry in summer.”

  “I guess blind people rely on their other senses a lot more.”

  “It was uncanny how he knew where I was in the house. He could sense where I had been by the perfume I wear. And his hearing was so sharp! He knew by the sound of people’s footsteps who it was even before they spoke.”

  “I didn’t know him well.”

  “He didn’t like strangers much. He preferred being here in the house with just me.” Vivienne’s face crumples and her eyes start leaking tears. “I can’t bear to think of him running away through the dark and then, oh, I can’t bear to think of him at that ridge!”

  “You must eat something. Alison has made your favorite soup.”

  “Why didn’t he wait and talk to me? I would have stood by him, I would have made sure people understood it wasn’t his fault! How I wish you’d never fallen in that hole!”

  “At least now you and Max know why Fergus never replied to any of Max’s e-mails.”

  “I would rather Christopher was alive!”

  “I guess he couldn’t face being blamed for Fergus’s death.”

  “But it was an accident! It must have been!”

  Her eyes lock on mine, but I glance away, casting around Vivienne’s bedroom, desperately seeking to distract her. Unlike the rest of the house, here there is but one picture, of a Maori warrior with feathers in his hair and a moko, tattoo, covering his face.

  “What a beautiful painting! The detail is so intricate.”

  Vivienne’s sobs stop and her swollen eyes stare fixedly at me. “It’s a Goldie.”

  “Ah? I don’t know anything about New Zealand artists.”

  “That’s my favorite of all my pictures,” she says.

  “I’m not surprised. Oh, I have seen it before! Didn’t it used to hang in the studio? I think it’s in the photograph I have of Dad.”

  “Bitch!” she suddenly shrieks and the next instant the bowl of soup bounces off my cheek, its contents sliding down my face like duckweed.

  “I hate you! It’s all your fault, you and that Chinese whore who stole my father!”

  Her face is contorted and her mouth sprays saliva. “I hate your stupid face and I hate your horrible eyes!” She screams hysterically and flings the cutlery at me.

  I retreat and slam the door shut. Alison comes running down the hallway as I lean against the door, shaking.

  “Lin! Are you all right?”

  “All I did was admire that painting she’s got by her bed. Then she starts screaming and calls me a bitch.”

  “Oh. You saw the Goldie.”

  “So what?”

  “That will stain,” she says. “I’ll put it through the wash for you.”

  “No more fricking secrets, Ali!”

  Alison’s kind face is resigned, but she is silent
. I awkwardly pull the damp shirt back on around my injured shoulder and wait for her to speak. She hands me a clean towel to wipe my face and lets out a sigh.

  “Mum gave the Goldie to Dad for their first anniversary. She loved that picture and Viv loves it too. Now it’s worth a small fortune. And there is no doubt the Goldie belongs to you.”

  We can hear the sound of Vivienne keening, louder and louder. Alison’s eyes flick toward the room and back to me. Vivienne is her twin; they have been inseparable since they were born. I am merely the bastard latecomer.

  “You’d better go to her,” I say. “But first, let me tell you what I’m going to do.”

  Afterward, I trace my way back through the beautiful house, leaving wet footprints on the polished floor. The works of art shine forth their messages of beauty and wonder, the living room glistens in its pristine shades of cream and brown, the garden sprawls alongside the walls in a splendor of colors and shapes.

  There is a sharp pain in my chest. I cannot imagine facing Vivienne again, Vivienne who hates my stupid face and my horrible eyes. How much more would she hate me if she knew what I’d done?

  I’d done it for her. But we couldn’t tell her that.

  I pause on the path and look back at the beautiful home she and Rose created. Ngatirua. A sacred place.

  A brilliant career, a close family, a great love—it is a woman’s trilemma. You might get one, and if you’re lucky, two; but few of us can have it all. I should have known I wouldn’t get to keep my sisters.

  I turn back onto the path and walk away.

  Chapter 53

  Red velvet curtains frame the stage, chandeliers drip from the ceiling, and cables festoon the corners of the room in which Hera is holding its press conference.

  Stewart Hobb stands at the podium gripping the microphone, behind him the portly figure of Mark Stanton and the plump shape of Pita Lane.

  The journos balance laptops on the papers they’ve been given, faces turned to the stage, waiting to hear what they’ve been enticed here for. The photographers focus on capturing images of the important people and ignore what is merely spoken. There are a few coughs, assorted buzzes from cell phones, and scraping of chairs as bottoms shift to seek comfort.