by Megan Norris
‘Mike … Mike!’
He was sobbing, uncontrollably.
I had never seen him cry.
‘Oh, Mike,’ I said and wrapped my arms tightly around him, feeling his pain, empathising with his fatherhood’s loss.
‘She’s dead!’ he wailed.
‘She’s not!’ I cried out.
He flung my arms away and rocked recklessly on the bed, flinging his body around in anguish. ‘She’s dead.’ He sobbed and sobbed, and then suddenly his body fell back, and dropped like a rag doll, limp. Still. His eyes glazed.
I thought he was dead. ‘Mum!’ I shrieked.
Mum came in as Mike raised himself again. ‘I’m sorry,’ he sobbed, shaking. His whole body racked with torture. Trembling. Almost inaudibly he said, ‘I love my children, I love my children, I love my wife, I love my wife.’
I had never seen him look so terrifying. It was like he was possessed.
Ashleigh-Rose came in. Looked at her father, tried to hold him. He fell back again, limp as a doll, unable to move. She stroked his head.
I ran from the room. Mum ran after me. We left him with Ashleigh-Rose stroking his head, crying in her arms.
I rang our doctor in Mont Albert. Told them what had happened. But because we lived in Heathmont they were unable to make a house visit. They gave me the phone number of a locum service.
Ashleigh-Rose came out and sat on the couch. ‘He’s quiet now.’
The phone rang again and Mum returned to Mike with a glass of water and two paracetamol. It was my father Ivan and stepmother Susan ringing.
Before I could tell them what had happened they asked if Ashleigh-Rose would like to stay with them in Healesville until Rachel was found. Ashleigh-Rose replied with a firm ‘yes’ and started to cry. She had never seen her father cry either – now she had witnessed him sobbing. She was a very scared eleven-year-old.
The locum arrived within the hour and stayed talking, privately, with Mike for another hour. He prescribed medication and rest, but he knew the rest would be highly unlikely.
Mike did rest until noon. We knew the Richmond police were interviewing teachers and students at the dance school so we decided it was best not to interfere.
My father and Susan came to collect Ashleigh-Rose, who had hurriedly packed her bags. We rang one of my aunts to come and sit with my mother so she would not be by herself while she was busy answering phone calls.
Mike was now convinced that Rachel was dead. No amount of persuasion could alter his mind. Rachel was a girl who was afraid of the dark, and tentative in new surroundings. She was a girl who needed the security of family and friends. When we moved to Heathmont she hated having a downstairs rumpus room as a bedroom – she begged to come upstairs. ‘I want to be with you guys.’ So her father emptied his study and she moved upstairs.
I had described her to police as a creature of habit. ‘Rachel was fifteen going on eighteen going on twelve.’ My girlfriend Chris said, ‘She couldn’t help being naive, just look at her mother!’ She was not mature for her age. But we could not deny that from the time Rachel had left school she had blossomed. Young womanhood agreed with her. Mike and I were looking forward to her future.
Thursday and Friday now tend to blur together, but to the best of my memory we left home early Thursday afternoon.
On the way we called into our friend David’s employment where he was just completing the new poster. We had decided not to include Rachel’s name on it, I suppose, for her privacy on her return.
But by now it had been three days and we knew Rachel wasn’t coming home. We knew she loved her family and boyfriend too much to let them worry. There was always the chance she had been raped or kidnapped for a brothel. Some well-meaning friend had informed us about a date-rape drug. We were told she could have been given this in a drink, drugged, even shipped out of the country. I thought this was a fairytale, but by the end of our search we had heard more of a trade where occasionally girls were kidnapped and taken overseas. Mike said that if one of the alternatives was being kidnapped for child prostitution, with no chance of rescue, he would rather she was dead.
We decided to call briefly into the dance school before connecting with the police, who in the meantime, thank God, had been to take statements. Monday she was reported missing, Wednesday afternoon we get past the front counter, and finally, Thursday morning some action.
Vicki the dance teacher said, ‘Elizabeth, can I speak privately with you?’ Her tone made me feel insecure, and I followed her into the office of Dulcie the artistic director.
‘It’s about Emmanuel. They interviewed him in considerable detail, and I was present because he was under-age.’
I sipped my tea and thought, what on earth is she going to say?
‘They asked him really private questions. I felt so sorry for him. Like, is she pregnant?’
So that was it. They thought she was running away because she was pregnant. I laughed, and said, ‘They’re not even sexually active.’
‘That’s what I thought,’ she replied, and said something like, ‘I thought they were as pure as snow.’
Well, maybe not that pure, I thought.
‘Elizabeth, apparently within the last month … something did happen, but he swears she’s not pregnant. It was protected.’
So, I thought, it had to happen sooner or later. How long had they been a couple? Ten months, and so deeply in love I had been quite concerned by their obvious devotion to each other. He truly was her Romeo.
Silly thoughts come to mind at times like these. Like, Rachel would die if she knew Manni had been through the third degree. Like, poor boy, fancy finally consummating your love only to have some idiot kidnap your girlfriend.
I remembered a time when Rachel was twelve and had gone on a Baptist church youth camp to a place called Gum Creek. She came home ‘in love’. She hurried me into her room and closed the door, and with a great grin on her face said, ‘I’ve had my first tongue kiss.’ Giggle, giggle.
I looked at her, flummoxed by this delighted child. This really did require some kind of answer. I leant back against the window-pane and said, ‘Did you get lots of shivers running up and down your spine?’
‘Yes,’ she answered, sounding absolutely amazed. ‘How did you guess?’
She called this young man Macca and fortunately he lived far far away, over the distant hills. Our phone bill went up dramatically, for at least a month.
Her very first love was her kindergarten friend Ryan, her childhood chum. Together they made mud pies and were fun beach pals at Cape Paterson. There was Anthony who, according to his mother, was besotted with her. Sadly for Anthony, Rachel was not besotted with him, but regarded him as a good friend. There was well-mannered Hugh, her St Hilary’s friend, until Ben crept onto the scene for a few weeks, or was it days? Young teenagers often fall in and out of ‘puppy’ love and these five boys were special memories in Rachel’s life.
‘Elizabeth,’ said Vicki, interrupting my thoughts. ‘Elizabeth, I thought I had better say something in case the police come out with it. They told him it was confidential but …’
The door opened. ‘There you are,’ said Mike. ‘I’ve been looking for you.’
I told Mike in the car about Manni’s interview. ‘How does that make you feel?’
‘How should it make me feel?’ Mike is clever at answering questions with more questions. I call it beating around the bush.
‘Your little girl …’ I said. ‘Our little girl.’ I wasn’t sure how I felt.
‘Well, to be quite honest, all things considered, it doesn’t bother me. If somebody has dragged her off and … raped her, then it’s a comfort to know she’s experienced some sexual tenderness with someone who obviously loves her deeply.’
Dear Mike. He immediately made me feel comfortable.
We arrived at the police station, to see yet another new face behind the counter. However, this police officer seemed to treat us with some empathy and knew who we were. He a
pologised; there would be a short delay. We sat and waited. The missing persons poster glared at us from the wall.
While we were waiting, another concerned officer came through. He meant well, but he told us a story of another young girl who had been reported missing for six months when she was recognised by a truck driver who picked her up in country Victoria.
‘Rachel’s not a runaway!’ I shouted, and stood up. Mike attempted to still me. ‘She’s got innocently involved in something that’s got out of hand! When they find her four days dead they’ll say, “Oh, the parents were right after all.” ’
I can’t remember the police officer’s reply but I can remember Mike speaking on my behalf.
I asked if I could go to the toilet. On the Wednesday the detective senior sergeant had allowed me to use the station toilet. This police officer told me to go around to the security door and he’d let me in.
The doors opened and as I was about to go through, unaccompanied, a policewoman asked me where I was going. I told her I wanted to go to the toilet. She replied I could not use the station toilet and if I went outside I would find a toilet around the back of the building. But when I stood outside the front door of the police station I was so angry I walked one and a half blocks to the McDonald’s toilet instead. On my return, Mike, who had heard the earlier comments of the policewoman said, ‘You went to the McDonald’s toilet, didn’t you?’
I nodded.
‘I would have done the same,’ he said.
We sat in front of the detective senior sergeant sitting at his desk, the woman detective standing beside his chair. Formidable.
We felt like criminals. Why? It felt as if it was our fault that they were being put to all this trouble. My impression of this man was that he would have been excellent at interrogating villains. But we were not villains. He should have been head of Fraud Squad, head of Drug Squad, head of Arson.
We handed the detective senior sergeant more photographs of Rachel and showed him the new poster. David had also given us a zip disk of the photographs for the police.
The detective thanked us for the photographs but mentioned that if we displayed the posters outside Richmond we would need to inform the police stations. Other stations would not know who the girl on the poster was otherwise. He also warned us to be careful where we displayed these posters as it was an offence to put them just anywhere. It was possible to incur a $70 fine for each poster. It was important to obtain permission from shops and offices if we wanted to place them on the inside of windows.
Lost dogs have more rights than lost children, I thought.
The detective senior sergeant then shared what he considered to be a positive sighting of Rachel. Another independent detective, not from Richmond, was on his way to a court hearing when he noticed an unusual occurrence in Bridge Road outside some shops. He’d seen a girl counting out coins with a blond-haired man, and was so concerned that he’d reported this to Richmond police. The detective senior sergeant had shown this detective photographs of Rachel and he was ninety to ninety-five per cent sure the girl was Rachel. So the detective senior sergeant told us that he believed Rachel was a runaway and repeated his advice: people who do not want to be found are very difficult to find. We obviously didn’t know our daughter as well as we thought we did – they had discovered something about our daughter that we didn’t know. He did not say what this was but I jumped to conclusions. ‘The loss of her virginity?’ I said. ‘What fifteen-year-old would tell her parents?’
‘You surely can’t be serious,’ said Mike. ‘That girl could not possibly have been Rachel!’
Can you be so sure? was the sentiment expressed by the detective senior sergeant.
I considered this for a moment, not believing a word of it. If Rachel was a runaway why would she be sitting in Bridge Road, Richmond, where she would no doubt be recognised? It seemed preposterous that the police could have even considered this.
I had the idea from the woman detective’s body language that she didn’t necessarily agree with the detective senior sergeant either.
We had been given the impression that a press release or announcement through ‘Crime Stoppers’ was likely today. But now we were told that it would not be possible. There was no evidence, other than our gut feeling, of foul play. And the detective senior sergeant added that he didn’t necessarily think it was a good idea to involve the press at present.
We had mixed feelings about a press release because we feared for Rachel’s safety. We still believed she was being held against her will. So we said we didn’t think it was a particularly good idea either.
But if we were so unsure about the idea of a press release why were we so clear about our need to distribute posters? There is a contradiction here, and I have thought about this in detail. I believe the posters were important as active participation for Rachel’s family and friends. The posters were necessary as mind therapy. The alternative would be to sit back, wait on the police, and go mad. By distributing posters people were kept moving, and spread the news by word of mouth. And just maybe we’d be rewarded with a living, breathing Rachel.
We continued to put up posters all Thursday afternoon, concentrating our efforts on the Punt Road end of Bridge Road. We asked staff at every shop on both sides of the road if they had seen a girl with a blond-haired man counting out money.
Nobody could remember seeing a girl counting out money with a man. We asked people in offices, in the corner milk bar, workmen renovating a shop, people in the Epworth hospital and its pharmacy.
We told our story to a muscular and tanned man washing his car and boat, outside his house at the back of Bridge Road. He told us there were a number of legal brothels in the Richmond area and gave us the address of one – we tried to find it later that night but were unsuccessful. Feeling washed-out, we returned to the dance school.
We had arranged to meet Ted and Betty at 7.30 p.m. at the corner of Church and Gipps Street where Manni and Domenic, one of Manni’s brothers, and Rachel’s new dance classmates Tamara and Kylee, had said they’d last seen Rachel smiling and waving goodbye.
In fact, seven of us, all of us except Tamara, stood on the corner.
‘Now, is this where you said goodbye to Rachel?’ I asked.
‘No,’ said Dom. ‘Further up.’
We walked along Church Street tentatively, as if we were looking for buried treasure. Rachel was our treasure. We needed a treasure map. X marks the spot.
Rachel’s friends grouped together and said ‘Here,’ almost simultaneously, indicating a spot opposite the lane where they had parked their car on Monday.
I stood on the driveway, breathing in the space of her last known contact. ‘Oh God,’ I said. ‘Where is she?’
‘It was like she vanished,’ said Dom.
‘She was here, and then she wasn’t,’ said Manni.
‘She just disappeared,’ said Kylee.
‘And we were only gone a matter of minutes,’ added Dom.
Manni said, ‘She didn’t have time to walk out of view, in either direction.’
‘So she was taken quickly,’ said Mike.
I said. ‘No. Remember there’s been no evidence of foul play.’
Ted was at a loss, too. I wondered if ‘psychics’ could sometimes be too close to the situation themselves. Ted wanted Rachel to be living as well.
‘I wonder if the police have done a doorknock.’
‘Doubt it,’ said Mike. ‘But neither have we put posters in household letter boxes.’
An hour later we met again, having delivered posters to every letter box, to every flat in the street. Rosa, and Manni’s brother Frank, met up with us.
For some reason Ted directed us to a flower shop in Carlton that had recently been robbed. He couldn’t explain why he felt this shop had special significance. He said he kept seeing flowers, lots of them. He felt we should put a poster in this flower shop and others in Lygon Street.
This was a most peculiar evening, which I discov
ered Manni later reported to the police. Ted came up with the name of a street, Berkeley Street, and insisted Rachel was there. ‘But which suburb is this street in?’ someone was demanding. I went back to the car and felt we were on a wild goose chase, but because we didn’t have any other leads I was happy to go along. Stranger things have happened.
Ted, under obvious emotional strain, came up with map co-ordinates and a page number, straight out of his head. Berkeley Street, G4, map 43. We looked the co-ordinates up in the street directory and found Berkeley Street. The atmosphere was intense. I leapt from the car and started to cry. ‘You mean we’ll find her? Tonight! Mike!’
I remember this night with excitement. Of course I don’t intend to sound insensitive but this night was like an emotional roller-coaster. If we had not been searching for our daughter I could have described the night as a car rally or, indeed, like a treasure hunt.
But we didn’t find her. The street consisted of warehouses. The street was empty except for nine people walking up and down calling Rachel … Rachel … RACHEL.
I know that Ted has been greatly affected by this night. No one wants to be faced with the prospect of a loved one dying. The following week he said he was told to stay out of it. What had happened could not be changed.
It was very late at night when we received a mobile call from David who had finished printing two thousand posters. We arranged to meet him in Richmond, where we were to drop Ted and Betty back at their car.
Thursday night was the opening of my stepmother Susan’s exhibition at the Centre for Contemporary Photography. The Centre had offered to postpone the exhibition, but Susan had declined in the belief that its continuation may help towards Rachel’s discovery. The Centre placed a sign: ‘If you have seen the girl in these pictures recently, inform gallery staff immediately.’
Richmond police had visited the Centre during the day. I remember thinking that maybe the police thought Rachel’s disappearance was a publicity stunt for the exhibition. If they did they never mentioned it.