Apples Never Fall

by Liane Moriarty

  “Your rabbit dream?” said Roger. You sure had to be on your toes with Amy.

  “You know. My recurring rabbit dream?”

  “Oh, yes, I remember,” said Roger. “Where you forget to feed your rabbit.”

  “I forget that I have a rabbit, and in my dream, I suddenly remember—oh my God, I have a rabbit!—and I’m walking out to the rabbit hutch in the backyard and I know the rabbit is going to be dead.” She shuddered as if at a real memory of a terrible mistake.

  She lowered her voice and met his eyes. “Sometimes it’s not a rabbit, it’s a puppy, which is worse, although I don’t know why; that’s so unfair to rabbits.”

  She put a hand to her collarbone as her chest rose and fell rapidly.

  “Your parents don’t require you to feed them, Amy,” said Roger. “They’re not bunnies or puppies or children. They’re grown-ups. It was your mother’s prerogative to go off-grid.”

  Assuming she actually sent the text. Roger had read the news stories. He knew her mother’s phone had been found in the house, meaning someone else could have sent the text.

  He wondered if his limitations were about to be tested beyond their capabilities, because it seemed possible, if not probable, that Amy’s father had killed her mother. Even someone with the most robust mental health would find that traumatic.

  “By the way, you’ll be pleased to hear I broke up with my flatmate,” she said abruptly. “Not that we were ever really going out. It was just sex.” She shot him a look as if she were hoping to shock him.

  “Why would you think I’d be pleased about that?” asked Roger.

  “He’s far too nice for me,” said Amy. “He’s been so supportive about my missing mother. I felt like I was building up this debt I could never pay off. Like a mortgage. I could never have a mortgage.”

  “Well, you know,” said Roger, “a relationship is about—”

  Amy said, “I wasn’t worried at first. About Mum. When we didn’t hear from her. I was pleased! I thought, Good for you. Your turn now.”

  Roger took a moment. He didn’t get it.

  “What do you mean, ‘Your turn now’?”

  “It was like what my dad used to do. When I was a kid, I always used to think, Why doesn’t she just walk out?”

  Roger wrote down, Father: walking out?

  But he didn’t speak. He could sense the words banked up in her.

  “I was angry every time Dad left.” She massaged her jaw. “But I was even angrier with Mum for putting up with it.”

  Roger waited.

  “But I don’t know. What if Dad did do … what people are saying?” She looked at him imploringly. “What if it was an accident? Because my grandfather—what he did to my grandmother—it could be genetic! Because that was a terrible thing that Mum did. Harry was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for my dad. You only get one chance like that! I always knew how much Harry leaving hurt Dad, I knew he never really got over it, I could see it whenever Harry’s name came up, and then we find out that it was actually Mum! All along it was Mum!”

  Roger wrote down, Grandfather? Harry? One chance?

  He couldn’t grab on to a thread of the conversation so he could make sense of it.

  “But if Dad did—I mean, I couldn’t forgive him. What if he asks for my forgiveness? How could I forgive him? But he’s my dad! How can I abandon him? What if he asks me to be a character witness? In court?”

  She was rolling down a steep, slippery slope of potential catastrophes. “Whose witness would I be? How do I choose a side? Do I visit him in jail? How can you visit your mother’s murderer in jail? You can’t!”

  The words dried up. All he could hear was ragged, desperate panic. Her eyes met his in mute terror. Watching someone have a panic attack was like looking into the eyes of someone trapped behind glass, drowning right in front of you.

  “Breathe with me.” Roger put down his notepad and picked up the carved wooden figure of an elephant that sat next to the tissue box.

  “Focus on this. Feel the curve of its trunk. Focus on the smoothness, the roughness.” He watched her hands trace the elephant’s textured surface.

  “Tiger,” whispered Amy, and for a moment he didn’t get it. He thought, It’s an elephant, not a tiger. Was it something to do with the bunny dream? But then he remembered how at their very first session, she’d teased him about how every therapist she’d ever seen wanted to talk about the tiger when they described the fight-or-flight response.

  The saber-toothed tiger. She was trying to tell him it was here. Leaping for her throat.

  Chapter 51

  “No criminal record,” said Christina. “No evidence of violence or threats of violence. No life insurance policy.”

  “There’s still a financial benefit,” Ethan pointed out. “They were cashed up from selling the tennis school. He’d be in a better position financially than if they divorced.”

  “I’m not talking about the Delaneys. I’m saying you could have said all of the above about this charmer.” She jabbed a finger at the newspaper on her desk.

  The body found in bushland had been identified as Polly Perkins. Polly was a woman who’d lived in a suburb close to Joy Delaney. Thirty years ago, Polly’s husband told everyone his wife had left him and gone back to New Zealand. She’d left a “cold, hurtful” note. The neighboring women had been sad for him. They’d brought around casseroles and carrot cake.

  The truth was that Professor Andrew Perkins had hit his first wife, Polly, over the head with a new Sunbeam steam iron, after he had expressly forbidden her from buying it because he was under “significant financial stress at the time.” His full, frank confession included the rueful admission that he “really hadn’t intended to hit her quite that hard.” He’d buried his wife’s body in bushland within a short drive of his home. If it wasn’t for the landslide caused by the storm, Polly would be there still. Polly had been estranged from a scattered, dysfunctional family, but there had been a missing persons report filed by her best friend in New Zealand. Over the years this friend had valiantly tried to get the Australian police interested in her missing friend, to little avail. Records showed just one visit by police officers to the Perkins house, three years after Polly “left.” The two officers had enjoyed some carrot cake baked by the kind neighbor who had become Andrew Perkins’s second wife.

  The second wife had used the murder weapon to iron her husband’s shirts for a good twenty years before being given permission to buy a new one.

  She had this week told police about an ongoing pattern of financial, verbal, and physical abuse that had left her a prisoner in her home.

  “This man enjoyed thirty years of freedom after he murdered his wife. He could easily have gone to his grave without justice.” Christina pressed her thumb on Polly’s husband’s murderous, well-fed face. “We may not have Joy Delaney’s body yet, but—”

  Her phone rang. It was probably just as well. There had been too much emotion in her voice. It was Constable Pete Novak, the ground search coordinator. “We’ve found an item of clothing in the bush reserve behind the Delaneys’ house that you’ll want to see. I’m sending you a picture now.”

  She opened her email and clicked on the photo attached. It was a T-shirt screen-printed with a distinctive design of three flowers: orange, red, and yellow. Gerberas.

  “Is that—?”

  “Yes,” said Pete. “It’s covered in blood.”

  Chapter 52

  “Thank you for coming in today, Mr. Delaney,” said Christina.

  Ethan noted that her manner was businesslike: not at all aggressive. She seemed to be speaking with the friendly detached authority of a medical specialist who has asked a patient to come back in for a serious follow-up appointment. “You know Constable Lim, of course.”

  She indicated Ethan. Stan looked over at Ethan and nodded, folding his arms across his barrel chest. “Yup.”

  Stan Delaney’s wife had been missing now for nineteen days. The scratches
on his face were completely healed. Ethan noted that he’d shaved for this interview and dressed in a business shirt. No tie. The shirt was ironed. He looked like a respectable member of the community. He had no legal representation. It was difficult to imagine this man having anything to do with that blood-soaked T-shirt.

  They were in the small windowless ERISP room at the station. ERISP stood for Electronic Record of Interview with a Suspected Person, and it meant that this entire interview was being recorded on both an audio and video disk. Ethan sat in one corner, observing and keeping an eye on the recording equipment.

  “You really want to be a cop?” his brother had said to him when he first mentioned going into the police force. “Directing traffic?”

  Ethan’s brother was an actuary. He was sitting in a city office right now solving mathematical equations while Ethan was helping solve a possible murder, and his brother thought he’d made the better choice of career.

  Christina did something quick and complicated with her hair to make it tighter at the back. She said, “Mr. Delaney, I’d like to go through the timeline one more time.”

  “Okay.” Stan nodded. He sat up, uncrossed his arms, and placed closed fists on his thighs. Bring it on, he seemed to be saying. “What do you want to know?”

  “Stan Delaney is formidable on the court,” one of his fellow club members had told Christina and Ethan, a man who was keen to let them know that he believed Stan had buried his wife’s body under their tennis court. “He’s ruthless. Calculating. Ferocious. He gets this look on his face that makes your blood run cold.”

  Christina looked down at her notes as if to check them, although Ethan knew for a fact that she knew the timeline by heart.

  “You woke up that morning—Valentine’s Day—and you didn’t see your wife?”

  Ethan had been intimidated by Detective Christina Khoury when he first started working with her. He thought she thought he was a moron. She had a way of looking at him as if she were sizing him up and finding him wanting. But he’d got used to that look now. She gave the same look to her morning coffee each day, and she loved her coffee.

  (Ethan’s aunt said that he and his brother were intimidated by women because they were subconsciously terrified of displeasing them due to the fact their mother had walked out when they were little kids. Ethan and his brother both agreed that was total crap. They didn’t say this to their aunt’s face, of course.)

  “We were sleeping in separate rooms.” Stan answered Christina’s question with steady eyes.

  “Was that a new development?” asked Christina.

  “Relatively new, yes.”

  She checked her notes. “And you went out to buy milk first thing in the morning?”

  “Yes,” said Stan. “We were out of milk. I also bought the paper.”

  “Right,” said Christina. “And you came home but you didn’t see Mrs. Delaney.”

  “Not right away. I was reading … something in my office.”

  That was new. Reading what?

  Ethan leaned forward. So did Christina. “What were you reading?”

  “Just some paperwork.”

  “What sort of paperwork?”

  Stan shrugged. “Nothing of importance.”

  Ethan saw the lie, and he knew Christina saw it too. He watched her wait. She was still. He wondered if her heart was racing like his. Stan said nothing. Perhaps his was the fastest-racing heart in this small room.

  “Right,” said Christina after a moment. “So you were reading this ‘paperwork’ and then you heard the front door.”

  “Yes,” said Stan. “I don’t know where she’d been. But I heard her come in. And then I went to talk to her, in the kitchen. She was drinking a glass of water. She seemed … worked up about something.”

  “And that’s when you argued.”

  “That’s right.”

  “About what?”

  He crossed his arms again. Defensive. “It was just an ordinary argument between a husband and wife.”

  “Considering the fact that your wife left your home and has now been missing for nearly three weeks, I’d say this was more than an ordinary argument between a husband and wife, Mr. Delaney.”

  For the first time Ethan heard aggression in her voice: a hint of something bigger and more menacing beneath it, like a quick glimpse of a shark’s fin.

  But Stan didn’t even blink.

  Christina said, “So, that morning, after this ‘ordinary’ argument, you left the house and you didn’t come back until what time?”

  “Around ten o’clock that night. Like I’ve told you. Many times now.”

  “And where did you go that day?”

  “I just drove. Like I’ve told you. Many times.”

  “You just drove.”

  “I was upset.”

  “What about?”

  Ethan could see Stan’s frustration rising like boiling water, which was exactly what Christina wanted. She was slowly turning up the temperature.

  “I was upset because I’d argued with my wife.”

  “But you don’t remember what you argued about.”

  He unfolded his arms once more and leaned toward her. He was a big man. “No, that’s not right. I never said that. I do remember what we argued about, but it’s personal. My marriage is private. It’s none of your business. It’s not relevant to your investigation.”

  It took a certain type of man to say to a police detective: “It’s none of your business.”

  Christina said, “If you’re worried about your wife, perhaps you could let us determine what’s relevant.”

  Stan shrugged in the manner of his oldest son. Said nothing.

  “So you came back and she was gone.”

  “Yes.”

  “But you didn’t call anyone. You didn’t call a single one of your children. You didn’t call a single friend. You didn’t call her.”

  He lifted his chin a fraction. “We’d argued. Like I told you. I knew she was angry with me. I assumed she’d gone to stay with someone—and that she’d be back the next day.”

  “But she wasn’t.”

  “No, she wasn’t,” said Stan.

  “Was there any infidelity in your marriage?” she asked.

  His nostrils flared. “No.”

  Christina flipped a page in her notebook. For show. “It’s my understanding your youngest daughter once caught your wife with another man at a party.”

  “That was a long time ago. Joy drank too much punch and kissed Dennis Christos. It was hardly a great love affair. Old mate is dead now anyway. According to my wife I killed him.” Stan frowned as he realized what he’d just said. “I didn’t literally kill him. He had a heart attack.” He sniffed. “He should never have kissed my wife either, by the by, but as I said, that was a lifetime ago.”

  Grudges can last a lifetime, thought Ethan.

  Stan jerked his chin at Christina’s notebook. “Did my daughter tell you that? About Joy kissing Dennis at the party?”

  “Your former son-in-law, Grant Willis.”

  His brow cleared. “Right. Well, that makes more sense.”

  “You mean because your daughter wants to protect you?”

  He said nothing.

  Christina said, “I’m guessing all your children want to protect you.”

  “I don’t need protection,” said Stan. “Because I’ve done nothing wrong.”

  “The young woman who stayed with you last year,” said Christina. “I believe she was a former student’s younger sister. Your most famous student’s sister.”

  His face hardened. “There was no affair, if that’s what you’re thinking. I know that’s what people have been saying. It’s laughable.”

  “So it’s recently come to our attention that while Savannah was staying with you, she revealed certain information. Information that I understand came as a shock to you.”

  He squeezed his lower lip between his thumb and his finger. “Who told you that?”

  Christina di
dn’t answer. Ethan watched him trying to work out which of his children had handed over a potential motive for murder.

  “Your wife betrayed you, didn’t she? She told Harry Haddad’s father that he’d be better off with another coach.”

  “I wouldn’t use the word betrayed,” he said.

  “Wouldn’t you? I understand that’s exactly the word you did use.” They held each other’s gaze. It felt perversely intimate, as if they were about to kiss.

  Stan Delaney’s eyes, brown and dark-lashed, were young and wary in an old man’s face. Was it a young man’s violent rage that had been responsible for this old man’s unthinkable actions?

  “What do you mean?” His voice quavered. He was cracking. At last.

  “You said to your wife that you’d never felt so betrayed.”

  “Who told you that?” Stan’s jaw shifted back and forth as though he was grinding his teeth. Ethan could no longer see the young man, only the old man. An old man wondering which of his children thought he was capable of murder.

  “I’m hearing that your wife may not have been faithful. I’m hearing that she betrayed you professionally.” Christina was going in for the kill now. “You lost your temper. Justifiably so. Harry Haddad could have and should have been your greatest professional success. Your wife stole that opportunity from you and kept it a secret.”

  She pushed the Polaroid of the bloodied T-shirt across the table. “Mr. Delaney, we found this T-shirt buried in bushland near the back of your house,” she said. “Have you seen it before?”

  The color drained from his face.

  “Buried,” repeated Stan Delaney. “You think I buried Joy’s T-shirt?”

  “Did you?”

  “No.”

  “Do you recognize the shirt?”

  “It’s my wife’s shirt. I’m sure you know that,” said Stan. He pushed the picture away from him, contemptuously, as if it meant nothing to him. “It’s covered in my wife’s blood. You probably know that too.”