by G. S. Bailey
She stood and collected her bag. The lovely eyed smile was back. “You have the key now, dear. If you would ever like some help learning how to use it.” She handed Clair another little white business card. “That’s my number,” she said. “That’s not some switchboard where you have to explain what you want or choose from the options or anything like that. If you call that number…” she fished a mobile phone out of her purse, “that’s this little beauty right here… And,” she added, glancing back from the door, “I would really, really love to hear from you sometime, Clair.”
Chapter 25
David sat on the bonnet of his work utility looking north at the expanse of Pacific Ocean. He was parked on the site he would be building his house. The view was the one he would have from the front veranda, though he had not settled on any particular design.
With winter blossoming into spring, the grass and weeds were growing wild and keeping him busy. He had picked up another few contracts and was thinking about employing someone to help. He would need to invest in more equipment to do that. He was considering a new vehicle and a second trailer. He could set an offsider up with his old gear and use the new stuff himself.
The expansion of his gardening business was also prompting consideration of the design of the house he wanted to build. He had finished paying off the land and had enough savings set aside to make a loan easily serviceable. He was thinking of extending a bit with the house. He wanted something that would suit a large family, without having to build on later.
His current living arrangement was the other consideration. The house actually belonged to his parents, and they were looking to free up that capital for their retirement plans. Amanda loved the place, and Brent was staying over more often than not. Brent was otherwise living with his quite conservative grandparents.
David’s own romantic aspirations were on the back-burner, in that they were set aside but not forgotten. He didn’t get why he had been shut out of Clair’s life. He didn’t get that at all, but he respected it. The change had occurred so suddenly he could only imagine something huge had happened, something far bigger than their couple of weeks of friendship and intimacy.
David hadn’t spoken to Clair in the month since bumping into her coming out of the supermarket. He regretted that exchange but couldn’t see how adding to it would fix it. At the time, he had been confused and angry. He was still confused, but the anger was gone.
He had sent the text as his sister had suggested. It was a simple ‘call me if you would like to’. He had checked his phone for messages every time he turned the mower or brush-cutter off, since both machines were loud and vibrated enough to overpower the buzz and jingle of his mobile phone.
If she ever did call or leave a message, he was not going to miss it.
Chapter 26
It was a Saturday morning and Clair lay staring at her ceiling. She was tired of it. She had never been a person to feel sorry for herself, and she was fed-up with it. She kicked off the bed-clothes, had half a glass of milk and pulled on her track-pants and joggers.
She jogged for an hour, up and down the streets and along the foreshore. It was a brilliant, warm, sunny morning. She finished up hunched over, clinging to the stair rail on the side of her little shop, exhausted. She felt horrible, but that was oozing out with the sweat. She got in the shower and washed it away.
Clair needed to move on. She had kept the card from the funny little woman, but had not used it. She thought she might use it at some point, but for now she needed to confront the widow. She left her car and walked, gathering herself and trying to still her anxiety. She wanted to go back to that room and be able to walk away, not run. She felt if she could do that she will have picked up that key the little woman was talking about. As yet, Clair reasoned, it was a key lying on the floor.
She pressed the intercom buzzer and waited.
“Yes?”
“Mrs Mulvane, it’s Clair Wells. May I speak with you, please?”
“Yes,” the widow responded softly yet immediately.
The heavy gates clunked and swung slowly back, pulling Clair through and unleashing the tension that was twisting her stomach. She strode up the driveway and met the widow at her steps.
“Hello,” the older woman offered, attempting a smile.
“Hi.” Clair had stopped at the bottom of the steps, looking up at the house.
“I’m glad you came by,” the widow said.
Clair folded her arms then released them, wringing her hands instead.
“Would you like to come in?”
Clair nodded and followed the widow inside. She stopped in the foyer, gazing around the room at the closed doors then up at the chandelier and the landing of the upper level where there was a dark haired woman looking down at her.
The widow had stopped in the middle of the room peering from her daughter to Clair.
“Hello,” Clair said. The feeling rushing through her was one of delight as she recognised the face of her childhood friend.
“Hello,” Nell said back.
She started down the stairs. Clair waited where she was. The widow waited where she was. Nell approached Clair, walking right up to her. Clair experienced a weird rush of fear.
“We used to be friends,” Nell said. “I kind of remember…”
“I know… Me too,” Clair replied. The fear subsided.
“You were the best of friends,” the widow said. “You used to wait all year for Clair to come and stay, Nelly. You girls were inseparable for those few weeks each Christmas.”
Nell smiled openly at Clair. “Would you like to see my room?”
“Yes, I would.”
She took Clair’s hand. “Come on, then.”
Clair remembered the banister rungs. She had polished them as another of the chores in a household reined over by a tyrant. She remembered the tapestry on the wall at the top of the stairs, how it was forbidden to touch it. It was a huge fox-hunt scene with horses and dogs and unusually tall and narrow men figures with bushy beards and top-hats and coat-tails.
“This is my room,” Nell said, ushering her into a cluttered bedroom with a worn, red couch and older style box television.
“Wow!” Clair admired the wall of video cassettes.
“I know,” Nell agreed with a giggle. “We’re going to pack them away.”
“There used to be a huge doll house.” Clair glanced around the room, searching.
“Yes. It was there where my videos are. It’s up in the attic.”
They walked out onto a balcony looking down on the cove and out to sea. They each remembered the story of the two princesses but only vaguely, only the basic idea of the lighthouse and mansion being two opposing castles and there being evil kings.
“And the fishing boats were pirate warriors,” Nell said. “Remember?”
Clair did remember. “Weren’t they skeleton pirates or something?”
The widow brought tea and set up in a sunroom on the other side of the mansion. They sat and chatted about the television series Nell had lived through the past ten years. Clair had watched bits of them herself. She told all about her life growing up in Brisbane and the Gold Coast, and about her floristry course and plans for her shop and about stripping, and Nell pumped her for information about boyfriends.
“Are you okay to get started with your floristry shop?” the widow asked. “This has been a set-back…” She had indicated where they were with her gestures in asking that. Clair understood the set-back she was referring to.
“You don’t need to offer me money,” she said. “You don’t owe me anything, Mrs Mulvane.”
“It isn’t my—our money,” she replied, including her daughter and squeezing her hand. “Is it, sweetheart?”
“No,” Nell said. “And Mum’s not Mrs Mulvane. We changed our name to Mum’s name, Cornish.”
Clair acknowledged that quietly.
“We take enough to live on from that business down there,” Susan Cornish went on. “We t
ake the bare minimum that we’ve needed with Nell being sick and me being unable to leave her and go to work. That business belongs to people who no longer exist, and the proceeds from it go toward doing good for the kind of people the Mulvanes hurt… I actually think they do owe us that, in the very least,” the widow concluded proudly.
“Sounds fair,” Clair agreed. “It’s good of you to set up people like that lady, Karen. She’s really nice.”
“Yes, she’s helped Nell a lot, hasn’t she, sweetheart?”
Nell just smiled her response.
“We were actually trying to decide whether or not to go to a wedding today. My friend John invited us. We sort of want to go…”
“I want to,” Nell said emphatically.
“We were thinking about sneaking in the back of the church and just staying for the service,” Susan explained further.
Clair remembered the date and the wedding David was attending. She had also been invited, but a lot had happened since then.
“I think I was supposed to go too,” Clair said reflectively.
“Really?” Susan asked with interest.
“Yes, with David Barrett. But I sort of dumped him, accidentally.”
“So, come with us!” Nell said.
Clair shook her head.
“Go on… Why not?” Nell went on. “David has it bad for you!”
Clair frowned at that. “How do you know?”
“Duh… His sister works here.”
“Oh, that’s right. I haven’t spoken to Mandy in a while either.”
“Well?” Nell went on. “If I can do this, you can!”
“You could drive us?” Susan added hopefully, enticingly. “I told John we weren’t coming, and he’s probably busy being best man, so we don’t have a ride.”
Turning up with the widow and her daughter was an interesting idea, Clair considered.
“So, what time are we talking?” she asked, conceding her opposition.
Both other women beamed. Susan checked her watch. “About an hour to the service.”
“Well, I have to go and get ready.”
Nell clapped excitedly. Her mother told her to get ready also. She walked Clair downstairs.
Clair stopped and turned to the closed study door. Susan watched her without protest as she approached it and opened it to look in.
Clair walked into the room. It was clean, though musty smelling. There was a large teak desk and high-back leather chair. The desk was bare. There were shelves of books filling the wall behind the desk. There was a small safe built into that wall as well. Against the opposite wall was a small leather sofa, barely broad enough to seat two people. It was the one Clair remembered so vividly. There was a matching chair in the corner and a coat rack beside it. The tasselled rug on the floor was there in Clair’s mind as well. She remembered the feel of scrunching it with her toes.
“The one in the photo—he lived here?” she asked the widow standing in the doorway.
“No. He stayed often, though.”
Clair met the woman’s eyes—the sorrow in them as her chin quivered.
“They were both here alone with you girls a number of times,” she said, fighting the quaver in her voice. “I knew nothing. I suspected absolutely nothing until I walked in here one night and saw my husband—” She paused, grimacing at the words. “He was photographing Nelly, nude, and he was wearing this leather mask and, like these studded pants. And I didn’t recognise him but in the split second that I hit him—I hit him with my softball bat—and in the split second before I swung it, I saw his eyes. And I knew it was him. And I hit him again and again!”
Clair uttered in shock. “You killed him?”
“Yes, I killed him. And my father and I killed the other one.”
“His brother?” Clair asked, knowingly, revelling in the magnificence of this woman she was then beginning to see.
Susan Cornish looked at her. She had gathered herself fully. “I’ve never told anyone this before, not even my man, John. Not Nelly. She saw me murder her father. I’ve never told her about the other monster. The real monster.”
Susan’s chin lifted. “My husband was the lap-dog. He was a weakling, influenced by his elder brother. Hogue Mulvane was pure evil. He had thousands of photographs in the basement of his home in Melbourne. My father saw them. He said there were so many children down there, and no doubt you were one of them, Clair. I don’t know. I never saw a photograph of you. I hoped they hadn’t touched you. I sent an investigator to find you, and she reported you seemed fine and were doing well at school. I hoped for that—for you to have escaped this sickness that went on here.”
“And you and your father killed this Hogue character?” Clair was stuck on that.
“Yes, sweetheart, we did. Or at least my father did, and I helped by doing nothing to stop him. It’s the reason why I live like this.” She tossed her hands helplessly. “I think the police would have forgiven what I did that first night. Reacting that way. I believe a court would have taken pity and shown mercy, even though I continued to hit him. But what my father did to that other monster was premeditated and very cruel, and I helped him, and because of that I have had to live like this. I can’t be honest with anyone. I can’t even tell the man I love what I did because if I did, he would protect me, and that would make him guilty of a crime as well.”
The woman shook her head. “I shouldn’t even be telling you this,” she said to Clair. “You don’t need to know all this, sweetheart.”
“Yes I do.”
Clair walked over to the small couch and sat in it. Her skin crawled, but it was just a piece of furniture.
“You had an investigator find me?”
“Yes. I needed to know you were okay. We were setting up the foundation, and you were the only child we knew of who might have been…” She broke off there, seemingly unable to stomach the final few words of that again. “Karen suggested sending an investigator to see how you were. The report said they approached your parents, but you seemed fine, so you were not approached. You were about twelve at the time. I have the report if you’d like to see it.”
Clair would have a look at that sometime later. “And there were a lot of other children abused by those two men?”
“Yes. We never knew, my father and I, whether Charles was involved in all of it. His brother may have been abusing children for many years. Dad said there were anything up to twenty different children, boys and girls.”
“And the police reports about the house being burned down for insurance and the brother getting away with lots of money?”
“No, sweetheart, none of that’s true.”
“So, when did you and your dad kill him—the brother? How?”
“Oh, sweetheart, you don’t need that. He’s gone! I assure you, if there’s a hell he’s there screaming in agony. It was about three months after what happened in this room. Dad and I worked out that Hogue was involved, and Dad went to try and find out for sure. And he did find out. And I assure you, that monster is not living it up somewhere overseas like the police think he might be. He is not living at all.”
Clair took that in. It was enough. She had pictures in mind of various agonising deaths. It was enough to leave them without making the wonderful woman recount any gory details. She had murdered the two monsters. She was magnificent.
“You’ve got to not let this ruin your life,” she said to Clair. “You’ve got to not live in secret.”
“What do you mean? I’m not going to tell anyone!”
Susan smiled. “Well, I hope you don’t. I never really thought through telling you all of this.”
“Well, there’s no way in the world I’m telling anyone, Mrs—Susan,”
Clair had approached, and she was led to the front door.
“I mean, one day you have to tell someone,” Susan said. “When you have a man in your life you can trust, you should tell him everything and hide nothing!”
Clair laughed. “But what if I do, and h
e turns out to be an arsehole later on?”
Susan laughed too. “Well, okay… If you find a man you can trust and you’re married to him for a long time, then you should tell him your secrets. By then I’ll be old and grey, and I’ll deny it all, anyway.”
“Okay. I’ll pick you ladies up in twenty minutes?”
“Okay, sweetheart. The code for the gate is 9698—for when you get back, or anytime you want to visit.”
***
Clair was buzzing. There was so much to take in, and she had ten minutes to get changed for a wedding where she was likely to bump into a man she had been thinking more and more about the past few weeks.
The snippet of information via Nell and Amanda was thrilling and frightening. What had Nell said? ‘He’s got it bad for you’ is what she said. Well, vice versa—vice frigging versa.
Clair swung this way and that checking a simple grey frock in the mirror. She brushed her hair out, having no time to do anything with it. She dabbed on some makeup and pinned on a bit of jewellery to go with her bag and shoes. She walked through a wisp of perfume and hurried back to the big iron gates. She entered 9 6 9 8, and they clunked and swung back. Susan and Nell were waiting on the steps.
“Are you okay?” Susan checked with her daughter. She had been to Woolworths shopping twice, though. She was fidgety but fine.
It was a small church. The wedding was about to begin. Everyone was already inside, so they slipped in and sat on the pew just inside the door. The groom and party were at the altar. The music started, and everyone turned to see the bride appear from behind where Clair was sitting.
Clair only glanced at the bride then turned back to meet David’s eyes. He was sitting with Amanda and Brent. There was no one else sitting on that pew. He had no date, Clair decided.
Nell squeezed her hand. “Go to him,” she whispered.
“I can’t! You’re not allowed to move around once it starts.”
Clair sat through the service. David looked back a few times. She kept smiling at him. She got him to smile and frown in question. She wondered if he would have his phone switched on. She was being really bad, totally disrespectful to the people getting married. Surely he wouldn’t have it switched on, though.