Cara is Missing

by Tim Buckley

  She made a face and sat back into her seat, frowning.

  “Yes,” she said, after a moment, “yes, I do! This time, you let me do the talking!”

  She unclipped her seat belt and jumped down from the jeep. I scrambled after her, not sure I was going to like what was coming. I caught up with her just as she turned into the driveway. I looked up at the house in case we’d been seen, then scuttled up to the SsangYong and bent down to look at the tyres. Vredesteins. My heart leapt into my throat. I turned to Emily and nodded, and she marched up the drive to the front door and rang the bell. There was the sound of steps beyond and a pretty, smiling woman in her early forties, maybe, opened the door.

  “Hi there,” she said, momentarily taken aback by the strangers at her door, but the smile quickly returned.

  “Hi!” Emily said, her own smile bright and disarming. “Listen, I am so sorry to bother you like this, it’s so rude, I know! But we were driving past and we saw your jeep! My husband and I…” she threw an arm round my shoulder “… have been having an argument about cars. We have a Volvo and I just hate the blasted thing! I want a SsangYong, but he reckons they’re no good. I saw yours when we were passing, I thought maybe you could tell him I’m right, please! Tell him they’re great!”

  She put a hand on the woman’s arm like they were co-conspirators and the woman smiled back.

  “Oh, listen, love,” she said, “I could tell him a few lies for you, but I know nothing about jeeps. I drive the BMW, the other thing is just too big for me. But I’ll tell you what, let me get my husband, they can talk about it man to man!”

  “You’re a star!” Emily almost squealed with delight.

  The woman went back into the house and there was the sound of conversation and a thickset man in a shirt and jeans came to the door.

  “G’day,” he said, “the wife tells me you’re thinking about buying a Ssangy?”

  “She is,” I said, with a grin, “I’m not! But now you’re going to tell me they’re great, aren’t you?!”

  He held up his hands.

  “Sorry, mate, she’s right! It’s a beauty. Decent mileage out of a tank, comfortable inside, quick off the mark. What have you got now?”

  “A Volvo,” Emily said, shaking her head. “It’s awful. I hate it!”

  He laughed a little too hard.

  “Want to see inside?” he said to Emily.

  “Oh yes, that’s so nice of you!”

  He opened up the jeep and Emily sat into the driver’s seat.

  “This is weird,” I said to him, “but I’m sure I’ve seen you driving this. You don’t get many of these on the road, do you? They kind of stand out.”

  “Could be, I suppose,” he said. “You live round here?”

  “No, we live down in Clovelly. Ever pass by that way?”

  He paused and the smile fell off his face.

  “No,” he said, carefully, “don’t think I’ve been down there in a long time.”

  “You sure?” I pressed him and my tone was a bit harder. “I’m sure I’ve seen you.”

  “Like I say, don’t think so, mate. Listen I’ve got to get back, so if you don’t mind…”

  Emily didn’t move in the driver’s seat. He might not have been the one that took Cara, but if he was there he obviously didn’t want to talk about it or didn’t want anybody to know.

  “Let me rephrase that,” I said. “I know you were out on the old quarry road, so why don’t you tell me what you were doing out there? Or maybe we should ask the wife? Maybe she knows. Or maybe she doesn’t?”

  “Who the fuck are you?” he growled, standing up tall and stretching his neck.

  “Were you on the old quarry road on the thirtieth of March?” I said, holding my ground although I thought he might throw a punch at me.

  “Who the fuck are you?” he said again, slowly this time and with more menace.

  “Were you there? Tell me, or I swear I’ll go into your house and ask your wife.”

  He glared at me, but behind the flaming eyes his brain was trying to figure out his next move. My mind was racing ahead and I realised that I was backing myself into a corner. So what if he was there, he wasn’t going to admit that he was there that night. And I couldn’t prove anything, I couldn’t tell if he was lying or telling the truth. What I did know was that he was there and he was hiding it, that much was clear. The best thing I could do was take that back to Carter and let him do the police work. I wanted to strangle the truth out of him, there and then, but he wasn’t going to admit anything, I could prove nothing and I’d probably get a kicking for my troubles.

  “You know what,” I said, “don’t tell me. You’ve told me enough already. I’ll call the cops and let them have a chat with you.”

  This time the anger gave way to genuine alarm.

  “The cops? What are you talking about?!”

  “I think maybe you know what I’m talking about. Our little girl was taken from our house. She was taken. You were on our road. Nobody drives up that road. The cops will want to talk to you. That’s what I’m talking about.”

  “Now wait a minute,” he said, and now he really was scared. “I had nothing to do with that. I was…”

  “You were what?”

  He looked up at the house, checking his wife couldn’t hear.

  “Look, I was there, OK?” he said in a rough whisper. “I went up there to meet… someone, all right? Nothing else.”

  “To meet someone on an empty plot of land up a dead-end road in the middle of nowhere? You expect me to believe that?”

  “We needed… a bit of privacy, OK? Somewhere we wouldn’t be seen. That’s why I took her… that’s why we went up there.”

  “Where were you on the thirtieth?” Emily’s voice was cold as death.

  “I don’t know, I don’t know where I was. But not Clovelly, I was there on the nineteenth, I know that for a fact. It was the nineteenth. I haven’t been up there since then, I swear.”

  “Where were you on the thirtieth?” she said again, in an icy monotone.

  Now he was rattled. He pulled his phone out of his pocket, tapped the screen and scrolled through it with flustered fingers. It took a few moments but then he found what he was looking for.

  “There!” he said it too loudly and glanced quickly back up at the house. “There, I was at the Oval in Fremantle for the Thunder’s game against the Bulldogs. Look!”

  He showed me the phone and there was a picture of him and a couple of other men in a football ground, holding beers and saluting the camera while, under the harsh glare of the floodlights, the teams took the field behind them. I didn’t know much about Rules, I didn’t know the teams or when they’d played or where. I could check all of that, or I could tell Carter, but in my gut, I felt like we’d lost. I felt like this wasn’t our guy after all.

  “Toby! Phone for you.” His wife came out the front door, wiping her hands on a tea towel.

  “Thanks, love,” he said, the smile returning nervously to his face. “These guys were just off! Good to meet you both, mind how you go!”

  I looked at him and nodded and he went inside to pick up the phone from a table by the front door, never taking his eyes off us as he went.

  “Yes, we’re just off,” Emily said to his wife. She put a hand on the woman’s arm and whispered into her ear. “By the way, maybe you should ask him what he was doing on the nineteenth of March.”

  33

  I had no desire to go back to Carter with the news of my visit to see Toby, not least because I’d have to admit that I’d stolen a look at the file and that I’d done exactly what he’d told me not to do. At the same time, I didn’t want them wasting any of the little time they were actually spending on the case chasing after more wild geese. I’d looked into Toby’s story and Mandurah Thunder were, indeed, playing in Fremantle on the t
hirtieth. From photographs of the game online, I could see that the teams’ colours and the stadium and the weather all stacked up against his version of events and I was pretty sure he’d been telling the truth. Still, I wasn’t a cop and I’d have to pass on the information. So I called Carter.

  “Carter,” he answered the phone with a sort of defiant challenge. He might just as well have suffixed the greeting with “… do you have a problem with that?”

  “Detective Carter, it’s Wilde,” I said.

  There was silence and then he seemed to strike a more conciliatory tone. Maybe he’d been on a conflict management course, who knows.

  “Wilde,” he said, “I must say, I wasn’t expecting to hear from you. What can I do for you?”

  “You’re not going to like this,” I said, “so I’m just going to go ahead and tell you.”

  I took a breath and jumped in.

  “I found out who owns the truck, the one that left the tyre tracks up at the empty lot. He lives in Mandurah and we went to see him yesterday.”

  I waited for the shouting to start but there was only silence so I carried on.

  “He told me he was there, but it was on the nineteenth, a couple of weeks before. I think he was up there with a woman and she’s not his wife. Anyway, he says he was at the Bulldogs-Thunder game in Fremantle on the thirtieth. He showed me photographs, him and a couple of other guys. I checked and the game was on that night, looks like he’s telling the truth. Anyway, I thought you’d want to know.”

  There was more silence and I actually thought maybe he’d been cut off.

  “Detective?” I said.

  “I’m here, Wilde,” he said, with a sigh. “I’m here. You’re quite the Sherlock Holmes, aren’t you? Looking for a job, or what?”

  There was a hint of humour in his voice and I laughed in spite of myself.

  “No, no I’m not.”

  “Do I want to know how you found out about this guy? How you found him?”

  “Would it help find Cara?”

  “No.”

  “Then no, you probably don’t.”

  He sighed.

  “Look, Wilde,” he said, “I know we haven’t been on the best of terms lately, so thanks for this. Anything that means we avoid wasting time is a help, a big help. But if you’re going to go playing cops and robbers, you’d better be straight with me, tell me everything, all right? I can’t stop you snooping – or I can but I’m not going to put you in a cell unless you really piss me off. So just don’t do anything stupid and keep me in the loop. And if you get yourself in any trouble, I’m not bailing you out. Understood?”

  “Understood. Thanks, Detective.”

  I hung up the phone and turned to Emily who’d been sitting across from me, listening to the whole thing.

  “Well,” she said, “that’s a surprise.”

  “Certainly is. A good one though.”

  I reached over and took her hand.

  “Are you OK?” Emily had been quiet, she’d hardly said a word since we left Mandurah. I knew she’d been pinning a lot of hope on the tyre tracks, that they were significant and that they might really lead somewhere, and I knew she was bitterly disappointed.

  “I’m fine,” she said, with a half-hearted smile. “It’s just… you know…”

  “I know. Come on, let’s go into town – my nerves are shot and I need a coffee.”

  ***

  It was a bright afternoon and we weren’t in much of a hurry, so we walked into town. There was an awkwardness between us that I didn’t feel when we were in the car, maybe because there’s no need for improvisation when you’re belted in, no uncertainty about roles or place. You are where you are and you don’t have to analyse any of it. But walking along side by side, I wasn’t sure where we were, what the rules were. We were together, we were sleeping in the same bed, but we both knew that all wasn’t right, it wasn’t normal. It couldn’t have been, I suppose. So we stayed at arm’s length and walked in a not-too-uncomfortable silence until, somewhere just past the Gregsons’ place, a cat jumped up onto the wall from inside a garden and caught Emily by surprise. She jumped too and stumbled and, although she wasn’t going to fall, I instinctively reached out and caught her hand. She looked at me and smiled, blushing slightly, and squeezed mine.

  “Thank you,” she said and didn’t let go.

  It was mid afternoon when we reached town and the main street was busy with shoppers doing their daily errands. We didn’t know a lot of people and so we never recognised many as we wandered through town, but I did see four or five regulars that I knew from the pub chatting on a corner waiting for the light to go green and I nodded to them as we got to the kerb. I wouldn’t have expected to have been drawn into the conversation, it’s not like we were close, but something about the reaction puzzled me. One of them, Tom I think his name is, followed us with his eyes to where we stopped and stared for just a second too long, before turning back to the group without acknowledging us. They huddled just a little closer and two of the others glanced up at us. It was clear they were talking about us. It registered in my head without me really thinking about it, but as we crossed the street and walked over to The Pantry, I realised that two women walking the other way were staring at us too. In a town where not much happens, maybe we had finally found our fifteen minutes of fame.

  Karl was behind the counter in The Pantry and I took a seat in the corner while Emily went to get our coffees. Karl was just glad to have Emily back and once she’d reassured him, firstly, that he’d done a good job in her absence and, secondly, that she wasn’t mad with him for flushing her out, he’d settled back into life as usual. In fact, I was surprised to see him in The Pantry – he’d been spending so much time out at the vineyard I didn’t think he’d have time for a shift behind the coffee machine too. He wasn’t far away from his final exams either so I’d have expected him to be spending time at his books but, from what Bobby had told me, he hadn’t much interest in university or in anything that meant he had to spend three or four more years studying. Still, he’d need decent grades if only to get himself a job.

  “Karl is such a good guy, isn’t he?” Emily said, when she came back with our coffees and a couple of apple muffins. “I would trust him with my life, you know?”

  I nodded. We probably didn’t realise how much we relied on him for things that we simply had nobody else to look after. She took everything off the tray and sat down beside me.

  “By the way, the people from the wine board called. They’ve asked me to come in to talk about my grant application. I have a meeting next week.”

  Emily had had some ideas about promoting biodynamic wines and about setting herself up as a local pioneer in the industry and she had submitted a proposal to get some funding. I’d been afraid that they would dismiss the idea out of hand, but she’d put a lot of work into it and it appeared that she’d at least piqued their interest. She was quiet for a moment while she unwrapped her muffin, then she turned to me with a frown.

  “Do you see those people over there,” she said, “the old couple with the trolley bag?”

  I looked over and as I did, the old woman quickly averted her gaze.

  “Do you know them?” I said.

  “No, but they have been staring at us since I sat down. You don’t know them?”

  They were strangers to me but something was clearly going on. Just then, Bobby came in with a couple of boxes and brought them into the little storeroom behind the counter. When she came back out she saw us and waved over.

  “Are you guys OK?” she said, pulling up a chair to join us. “I’m surprised you came into town, braver than I’d be.”

  We looked at each other and then at her and that’s when she realised.

  “Oh shit, you haven’t seen it, have you?” she said, aghast.

  “Seen what?” I asked, and I wasn’t su
re I wanted to know.

  “The article in the Observer? Shit, guys, it’s not good. I’m on your side and even I know it’s not good. He’s stitched you up. I don’t know what you told him but I know he didn’t get that stuff from you.”

  “What article?” Emily was lost and I realised I hadn’t told her about Napier’s visit.

  I sighed and shook my head.

  “David Napier, the journalist, came round while you were away,” I said, so quietly that she had to lean in closer to hear what I was saying. “He said he’d write an article about Cara, said it would be good to get her back in the news, get her picture out there again. So we talked for a bit, and I told him what happened that night and what we’d been doing since she disappeared. I don’t understand how it could be bad, Bobby?”

  “I don’t know what you told him, mate, but either he’s made stuff up or he’s talked to someone with a different version of events. Give me your phone,” she reached over and took it off the table. “Here, it’ll be up on their website…”

  Bobby wasn’t making it up – it was bad. Someone had told Napier that I’d left my truck in town because I’d been in the pub and I was too drunk to be allowed to drive home. Carly, he’d written, had to force me into her car to stop me getting behind the wheel. He questioned how somebody could have broken into our house and abducted our child without waking Emily. According to him, I’d bitterly criticised our neighbours for not caring and said that they were happy to go on as though nothing had happened. He said that Emily didn’t seem to be around much and speculated that she too was just getting on with her life and leaving Cara behind. Someone had told him about our Lottery win and he characterised us as entitled and arrogant, that Emily was happy to buy her way into the wine business and that I was playing at being a writer. He even had anonymous quotes from other producers in the area saying that we had never really got involved with the co-operative and that Emily’s refusal to use pesticides posed a threat to other vineyards.

  But there was worse. Another unnamed source, “a youngster from the town”, alleged that I didn’t like the local kids and that I’d assaulted him when he accidentally bumped into my table in a café and spilled some of my coffee. He’d apologised and offered to buy me a fresh cup, he said, but I was furious and ran him out of the place. Gretz. That little bastard.