Apples Never Fall

by Liane Moriarty

  A ferry sounded its sonorous horn as it lumbered across the water toward them.

  “That’s where I kissed you for the first time,” said Troy, his eyes on the ferry stop.

  “Don’t,” said Claire sharply.

  “Sorry,” said Troy. “I just didn’t want you to think I’d forgotten.”

  They watched the ferry bump clumsily to a stop. The passengers emerged across the gangway. A savage-eyed seagull stalked toward them in the hope of something better than croissant crumbs.

  “This one worked,” said Claire quietly.

  He said nothing. She thought he didn’t get it.

  “I know it did,” said Troy finally, without looking at her. “Congratulations. I’m really happy for you.”

  “You know?” She swung sideways to look at him. “How do you know?”

  “I just knew. The moment I saw you. Something about your face. And you’re not drinking your coffee.”

  “That’s not why. It just tastes really strange today.”

  “It tastes strange today because you’re pregnant,” said Troy. “It’s great coffee.”

  She looked with astonishment at the takeaway coffee cup. “I can’t believe you worked that out before me.”

  “I know you,” said Troy quietly. He lifted a hand quickly, as if to accept a fair penalty by the ref. “Sorry. I mean, I knew you. I once knew you.”

  They sat in silence and watched the ferry heading back out toward the horizon, and the grief for what could have been and what could now never be bowed their heads.

  “I wish I could tell my mother about this,” said Troy.

  “I wish I could tell your mother about it too,” said Claire.

  She wished so many things were different about this moment, except for the baby, who would be cherished, who had been created out of modern medicine and love, reluctant, guilty, complicated love, but still love.

  Somehow it would all work out. She would make sure of it.

  Chapter 57

  “Troy thinks Dad is going to be arrested today,” said Logan.

  “What does Troy know?” said Indira Mallick, and she realized she’d automatically slipped into the role of supporting Logan in the ongoing competition between him and his younger brother, although only Troy openly wanted to win.

  Indira and Logan sat at the glass-topped table where they used to eat dinner each night.

  She’d told Logan that she was here in Sydney for a friend’s baby shower, and it was true, but she would never have flown all this way for an awful baby shower. She’d come for Logan. “You’re still in love with him,” accused a friend as they cooed, “So cute!” each time the guest of honor opened another gift and held it up above the proud pregnant curve of her stomach. Indira had informed her sternly that her ex-boyfriend’s mother was missing. She was here as a friend.

  “How is Amy coping?” she asked Logan.

  “She’s okay. I think she’s actually in a session right now with her therapist, or counselor, or whatever we’re meant to call him,” said Logan.

  “That’s good,” said Indira. “She should probably—”

  She stopped herself. She was no longer a part of the Delaney family and therefore no longer entitled to an opinion about how Amy should manage her mental health.

  Amy had once told Indira that she was pigeonholed because she was easily offended when she was a child and now everyone assumed she was still easily offended, which was offensive. Indira had sympathized because she too was pigeonholed by her family as the “clumsy one,” even though she was no longer especially clumsy.

  She picked up one of the “missing person” flyers on Logan’s table. It was too busy, with too many different typefaces. It broke her heart that she hadn’t been the one to design it. The photo showed Joy wearing a T-shirt that Indira had given her. It was screen-printed with three big gerberas. She and Joy had a shared fondness for the flower. They bought little gerbera-themed gifts for each other.

  “Do you want any help putting these flyers up?” she asked Logan.

  “It’s okay,” said Logan. “They’re everywhere. I feel like we’ve done everything possible to get the word out there. She’s just … vanished.”

  Indira looked at Joy’s smiling face. Logan’s mother would never deliberately stay out of contact for this long. She was the sort of person who kept effortlessly in touch with everyone. Even after Indira broke up with Logan, Joy had continued to send the occasional nonintrusive text or email, filled with exclamation marks and emojis.

  Logan didn’t seem at all like his mother, but in this they were alike: he was good at keeping in touch with people too. He was the friend who went around to people’s houses and helped build their back deck or fix their drainage problem. He was the friend people called when they’d locked themselves out of their house, or when an appliance exploded. She should never have called him passive. Passive people didn’t spend entire weekends helping their friends build back decks.

  He was a good person.

  She experienced the truth of this like a physical injury. A literal twist of the heart.

  “Are you okay?” asked Logan.

  “Don’t worry about me,” said Indira. “I’m worried about you.”

  She put her hand on top of his. He looked terrible. He was always scruffy—scruffiness was part of his identity, it was how he differentiated himself from his brother (that was her theory, of which he did not approve), but this was a new level of scruffiness. His eyes were red, his skin blotchy, his jeans sagged around his waist like an old man’s trousers. He must have lost weight.

  Seven months ago, she’d broken up with Logan because she’d felt trapped, pleasantly trapped, but trapped nonetheless, in a perfectly nice life, living in this perfectly adequate town house, going to the same perfectly adequate Mexican restaurant every Friday night. It wasn’t that she loved change. The thing she most disliked in Logan was the thing she most disliked in herself. She too loved the seductiveness of a daily routine.

  Logan didn’t chase her to the airport like a scene in a movie. Naturally he didn’t.

  But then: nothing happened. Her life didn’t magically become different. She was still Indira. Just alone and lonely. She missed him. She missed sex. She had assumed sex was like chocolate—if it wasn’t in the house she wouldn’t think about it.

  It had begun to occur to her that she wasn’t trapped because of Logan; she’d been trapped in her own Indira self, like everyone was trapped in their own selves.

  “What about Troy and Brooke? How are they?” She could feel the question everyone was surely asking unpleasant and sour in her mouth: Do you think your dad did it?

  “Troy and Brooke aren’t speaking,” said Logan. “It’s like Troy thinks he’s proving his loyalty to Mum, and Brooke thinks she’s proving her loyalty to Dad.”

  “And you?” said Indira. “What about you? Are you okay?”

  “I’ll be fine.” He suddenly flipped his hand over and held on to hers. She watched his face. A muscle in his jaw shuddered. He squeezed her hand once, tightly, and then he returned it to her, carefully and gently across the table.

  She held the released, rejected hand with her other hand as if to comfort it.

  Logan tugged hard on his earlobe. “Are you happy?”

  “I’m fine,” she said. “You don’t need to talk about me right now, not when you’re going through this terrible thing.”

  “Are you painting?”

  “Am I painting?” She gave a half laugh. “I’m all talk and no action when it comes to painting, you know that.”

  “That’s because you need a studio,” said Logan urgently.

  “Sure, Logan,” said Indira. “That’s what I need.”

  “You need somewhere like this,” said Logan. “Just for example.”

  He opened his laptop and clicked on a real estate website.

  “What’s this?” Indira pulled the laptop toward her, and her elbow knocked against the cup of tea she’d been drinking. L
ogan caught it before it spilled, with practiced ease, as if he’d known that was going to happen.

  “It’s a three-bedroom house,” said Logan. “It has a granny flat out the back. The light is beautiful.”

  Indira stared without comprehension at the screen.

  “Sorry, Logan, I don’t quite get—”

  “I looked at it just before Mum went missing.” Logan tapped his finger on the screen. “It’s further out from the city but it would be worth it for more space.”

  Had his anxiety about his mother made him lose his mind?

  “I also bought you a ring,” he said. “It’s in my sock drawer.”

  She stared at him.

  “Obviously I’m not proposing. Not now. Not when my father is about to be arrested for murdering my mother. It’s just that you’re here, looking…”

  He gestured up and down at her body as if it were obvious what he wanted to say. She looked down at herself, mystified. She was wearing a comfortable shift dress that he must have seen a hundred times before. Her nose was red around the nostrils from a cold last week.

  “Looking so bloody beautiful,” he said, and his voice broke on the word beautiful. Indira was stunned. She had never seen him cry. Not even close.

  When they first started dating, he used to call her beautiful all the time, and she’d snap at him because it embarrassed her, it made her feel as if she needed to urgently call out to a derisive audience, Don’t laugh, I know it’s not true! So eventually he stopped saying it, and now it broke her heart to realize that she’d successfully trained her beautiful boyfriend not to call her beautiful.

  Logan rested his head in his hands. His voice was muffled. “Sorry. I don’t know why I said that. It just came out. I’m so tired.”

  “It’s okay.” She put her hand on the back of his neck and leaned in close to his ear. “Everything is going to be okay.”

  She didn’t know that, of course. All she knew was that right now she was going to make him eat, and then sleep, and then she was going to stay by his side for whatever horrendous or wondrous things lay ahead.

  Chapter 58

  “Beautiful day,” commented Ethan to Christina as they drove toward Stan Delaney’s home to arrest him for his wife’s murder.

  “It is.” Christina looked out the car window at the cloudless blue sky.

  “How do you think he’ll react?” asked Ethan. Ethan’s shirt today was an exquisite teal blue. The color of a bridesmaid’s dress. Christina looked down and saw a small stain like old blood on her shirt. That’s what happened when you got dressed in the dark so as not to wake your partner. It was probably tomato sauce.

  “My bet is he’ll be calm,” said Christina. “He will have been given legal advice not to say a word.”

  Her phone began to ring with an unfamiliar number. “Detective Khoury,” she answered, preemptively brusque. Nico told her she sounded too angry on the phone. He said not everyone was a potential criminal. He was wrong. Everyone was so a potential criminal. Or a potential victim.

  “Hi there, Detective Khoury. How are you?” It was the posh velvety tone of a man who was confident that his social status was superior to that of the vast majority of the population.

  Christina was irritated. “Who is this?”

  “This is Dr. Henry Edgeworth. I understand you’ve been trying to reach me. I’ve just returned from overseas.” Most people sounded nervous when returning a phone call from the police, but not this wanker.

  “Yes, that’s right,” said Christina. Took your bloody time, mate. “It’s in relation to a missing woman. Joy Delaney.”

  “Delaney,” he repeated. His silk-smooth voice snagged.

  “There was a phone call from your apartment to her on the fourteenth of February this year.”

  Christina felt Ethan’s attention on her half of the conversation. He would have worked out that it was the plastic surgeon finally returning their call.

  “I’m afraid I can’t help you,” he said. “I don’t know anyone by that name.”

  “Can you explain why our phone records show a phone call from the landline at your apartment on that day that lasted forty minutes?”

  “Perhaps you’ve got the wrong Dr. Edgeworth.”

  “Right,” said Christina. “Or is it possible that someone else could have made a phone call from your apartment? A family member? Your wife?”

  He was guarded now. “My wife and children never stay at the apartment. We have a family home in the eastern suburbs. The apartment is just a small one-bedroom near the hospital for when I’m working late. It’s more convenient.”

  Yeah, I bet it’s more convenient, thought Christina.

  “We have no doubt that the call came from your apartment. We also believe it’s probable that Joy Delaney met with foul play,” said Christina. “So I really need you to think carefully about this.”

  Another pause. “Is this the old lady? I saw the husband on the news.”

  “That’s right,” said Christina.

  “Well.” He cleared his throat. “Well, all right, I can tell you that I did have someone staying at the apartment a few weeks back. A … family friend.”

  Girlfriend. Definitely a girlfriend.

  “So, now I think about it, I’m guessing she was the one who called this lady,” said Dr. Edgeworth. His voice grew in confidence. “In fact, I’d say she definitely did. I expect they’re related.”

  Christina said, “Why would you expect that?”

  “Well, as it happens, this girl’s name was Savannah Delaney.”

  “Savannah Delaney,” repeated Christina, looking at Ethan. His eyebrows had popped.

  Right from the beginning she’d known that Savannah was at the very center of this investigation, and yet they still hadn’t managed to locate the damned woman.

  “Maybe she’s her niece or something? She said her mother was dead.”

  “When did you last have contact with her?”

  “Not for a while now,” said Dr. Edgeworth. “Actually, the last time we spoke was probably … let me think … Valentine’s Day.”

  Chapter 59

  Simon Barrington’s breath quickened as he stared at the words on his laptop screen. Was it a coincidence? Was he misremembering the words in Amy’s mother’s text? Did this mean nothing or everything? Had he just accidentally cracked the case of the disappearance of Joy Delaney?

  He was sitting at the dining room table. He knew Amy was at home. She’d just walked in the door and given him a silent, stiff wave before running up the stairs to her room.

  She was so fragile right now, like a delicate glass version of herself.

  “You knew this wasn’t ever going to be a thing, right?” she’d told him when they “broke up” a few days ago, although Simon wasn’t sure if there was anything to break. She made it sound as if there were blindingly obvious ethical considerations that prevented them from being together, as if they were married politicians from opposing parties, not flatmates with a larger-than-conventional age gap. They could have given it a shot.

  But he said, “Sure, I knew that,” because he didn’t want anything to be difficult for her right now, and she was looking at him with such desperate entreaty.

  “I’m hard work,” she told him. “I’m hard work even when my mother isn’t missing.”

  He could have quoted his dad’s favorite Kris Kristofferson song and told her that loving her was easier than anything he’d ever do again. He could have said, “Let me help get you through this.” He could have said a lot of things, but he just said, mildly, “I like hard work. I’m a hard worker.” Then he felt bad because she’d looked like she was about to cry, so he’d said, “It’s fine, Amy. Don’t worry about me. Focus on your mother.”

  There were footsteps on the stairs again. Was she going straight back out?

  “Amy?” he called.

  She came into the dining room.

  “Hi,” she said. She looked pale and tired, but composed. “I’m on my wa
y out. My brother is picking me up. He thinks my dad might get arrested today.” She smiled without it reaching her eyes. “Lucky I got in a quick session with my shrink. I’m good to go.”

  “That text message your mother sent,” said Simon. “Did it mention the number twenty-one?”

  Amy looked startled. “I think it did. But they were just random nonsense words. She did that when she texted without glasses.”

  She tapped at her phone and showed him the text message. The wording was exactly as he remembered.

  “Well, this might not be anything,” said Simon. “But I was just thinking about Savannah, and how it turned out she was Harry Haddad’s sister, so then I was googling Harry, and I was looking at his charity work and I noticed this.”

  He moved the laptop around so she could see the words.

  She looked at the screen, then at her mother’s text message, and back at the screen again.

  He saw her catch her breath.

  Chapter 60

  “Does this change anything?” Ethan frowned. “That Joy talked to Savannah on the day she disappeared? And that was also the last day Dr. Edgeworth had contact with Savannah?”

  They’d stopped at an intersection, and he looked over at Christina, his hands on the wheel, trust and respect in his eyes, as if this was a question with a right or wrong answer, and that Christina, with her years of experience, would know the answer, and all he had to do was ask for it. He thought she had some special knowledge and that one day he would attain that knowledge, and for a vertiginous moment she felt like a kid, pretending she was an experienced detective. I’m just little Chrissie Khoury, Ethan, what the hell would I know?

  “What do you think?” she said. Good mentoring.

  “Well,” said Ethan. “Is it possible that Joy and Savannah are somewhere together?”

  “It’s possible,” said Christina. “Anything is possible without a body.”

  “Call us when you’ve got a body,” the guys in Homicide said.

  Accept nothing. Believe nothing. Check everything. Should they turn around?