by Martin Roth
Chapter Ten
I couldn’t decide whether Melissa’s absence from church was cause for concern. Perhaps another religious service, just two days after Grant’s funeral, was a prospect too depressing. I wouldn’t normally relish church twice in a week, but I was feeling strangely buoyant after my meeting the previous day with Rohan.
Pastor Thomas, clad in a loose polyester suit of the sort that sheep farmers wear at agricultural shows, pulled me aside at the end of the service. “Got a minute?”
I looked at my watch, and studied it hard, but he ignored my attempt at what I thought was Australian irony. “Why don’t you head over to my place?” he growled. “Esther’ll be back there by now. She’ll fix you some coffee while I say goodbye to a few people. I want to find out about that journalist.”
“Yep.”
I turned to walk out through the church foyer, when suddenly the pastor called me back. “Here’s a question for the private detective,” he said in a low voice. “What did Melissa have hanging on her living room walls before she and Grant started coming to church?”
On her walls? Lots of pictures, surely. I looked at the pastor and shrugged my shoulders, but already he was busy farewelling a group of parishioners.
I ambled past a Toyota Corona and a Ford Fairlane, both a couple of decades old, to the pastor’s decaying weatherboard house, on the other side of the church carpark.
Melissa’s living room walls? What sort of question was that? It sounded more like a Buddhist Zen Koan than a poser from a Christian minister. Was something affecting Melissa?
Brightly flowering pansies and petunias greeted me at the entrance to the house. I knocked on the door. Esther opened it.
“Hello Johnny. Ron said you’d be coming.” She looked out of place in her smart two-piece navy skirt and jacket, and a faux-pearl necklace, standing in the gloomy entrance of a tumbledown home that was just a couple of degrees removed from a slum.
I walked inside, taking care not to catch my shoe in one of the holes in the carpet. Six months before, a parishioner had delivered a gift of a new carpet. When he came back the following day to lay it, he found that Pastor Thomas had already given it away to a nearby hostel for battered wives.
Esther ushered me to the sofa in the living room. “This rain and cold weather we’ve been having can’t be helping that injured foot of yours.” Esther always remembered exactly three things about you.
“The weather doesn’t make any difference. It’s how much walking and running I…”
“I’ll put on some coffee,” she interrupted, and left the room. The second item was my love of coffee. The third was my father.
“Any progress looking for your father?” she called from the kitchen.
“It turns out that it’s almost certainly Mel Gibson,” I said in a voice just soft enough that she wouldn’t hear properly.
“That’s wonderful, Johnny.”
Esther brimmed over with spontaneous love and grace and generosity. Yet her mind was fixed on her husband’s well-being, and, apparently, little else. She was the sort the women’s liberationists always had trouble with. She could catch a fish, tame a horse and lay floorboards, but preferred nothing more than cooking for Ron. She was like Australia’s pioneer women, who had no doubt that a woman’s place was in the home, but only after helping build it.
The room was musty, and, as usual, smelled of cats. This always puzzled me, as I knew the Thomases had no pets. I stared at the living room walls – a travel poster portraying Uluru at sunset, a red and brown abstract Aboriginal painting, some smaller reproductions of images of fruit, a wooden crucifix bearing the words, “I am the vine, you are the branches” - and tried to think what had been on Melissa’s walls before she started coming to church, and stuck up all those images of Jesus on the cross.
There were the pictures of me, of course, that I’d given them after my arrival in Melbourne. And my old rebel flag. But what else? I vaguely remembered some portraits of film stars.
Esther arrived with a cup of coffee. “You’re not having one?” I asked.
“Ron will be here soon. We always have something together after church.”
“How’s Melissa?” I asked casually.
She paused, and seemed about to speak, when we heard the front door open. She turned and went out to welcome her husband. He shuffled into the living room.
Church services drained him. It always amazed me that he could be on fire when delivering the sermon, and then right afterwards sometimes needed to sit down while farewelling the congregation.
Now he sank into a chair next to me. Esther came in with a cup of tea, apparently all ready to be served.
“Good service today,” he said. “A few new faces.”
I’d spotted Ming there, from the after-school tutorial business below my own office. “There was at least one person from the funeral service,” I said.
A rare smile crinkled across the pastor’s face, like a crease in leather. “Nothing like a sudden death to chase people into church.”
Then he lapsed into silence. I wanted to ask about the riddle of Melissa’s wall decorations, but knew I had little choice except wait.
He tested his tea, found it too hot, and spoke. “Reporter going to write an article?”
“No. At least, not yet.”
“Not yet?”
“He’s investigating. But he reckons it’s much bigger than just Grant’s death.”
“A bullet through your window proves that. What’s he hoping to find out?”
I drank some coffee before I answered. “Grant’s death might be tied up with attacks on Australian targets by Indonesians.”
“Attacks on Australian targets? What the heck does that mean?”
“He’s not sure.” I didn’t mention terrorism or militia gangs. Or Rohan’s suspicion that Grant was a leader of it all. “But Grant attending church, that’s all going to be pretty irrelevant. It’s bigger than that.”
Now the pastor sipped some tea. “I’m concerned that that bullet came because I asked you to investigate. Bullets are police matters.”
“I’d rather…”
“I’ve been prepared to become an accomplice to the crime of illegal entry to Australia. But when one of my parishioners is murdered and bullets are flying through windows I have to make decisions.”
“Rohan – he’s The Age journalist – he’s in touch with the police. He’s full of contacts. He’s making sure they know anything important. But I can’t have them investigating me.”
He went silent again.
I drank more coffee and looked again at the wall.
“I’m worried about Melissa,” the pastor said at last.
“She wasn’t in church this morning.”
“How well do you know her?”
“I got to know her after Grant brought me to Australia. A year ago. I stayed in their house for a while. I know her well.”
“Do you think she sometimes wanted Grant dead?”
“Mel? No, of course not. He was like a rock to her.”
“I’ve known her for four or five months. Since I met Grant in Barwon Prison. At your introduction, I recall.”
“I thought you could help him. You did help him.”
“I had some pretty intense conversations with Grant. In prison and after he got out. Hours at a time. I learned a lot about him, and a lot about Melissa too. We need to watch her.”
“She wanted him dead?”
“I don’t think she really did. But Grant said that’s what she sometimes told him.”
“Seriously? She was serious?”
“Melissa’s a complex woman. She has a lot of fantasies. And a lot of longings. Deep, deep longings.”
“She can be a dreamer...”
“Then as soon as she actually gets what she wanted, she wishes she had something different.”
“She can also be a powerful flirt. And moody. Temperamental.”
“Grant told me she often complained a
bout him. But as soon as she feared he might walk away she was all over him. It’s a classic case. Highs and lows. And a fixation on tragedy and death. Look at her living room wall. All these pictures of Jesus dying bloodily on the cross. She once told Grant that she wanted to die on the cross, too. Naked. Crucified. Blood and red roses everywhere.”
Images flashed unbidden into my brain of Melissa on a cross, naked.
“Grant told me that before they started coming to church she had posters on the wall of Marilyn Monroe and James Dean and President Kennedy. All tragic deaths.”
“A death wish?”
“No, no. Just fantasies of tragedy. We see her kind in church. Not often, thankfully.”
He looked towards the kitchen. “Esther,” he called. She walked in. “Remember that young woman right after we got married? When I was pastoring the church near Warrnambool? The odd woman.”
“Carmel?”
“That’s it. Carmel.” He turned back to me. “I went into the church one evening for some notes I’d forgotten and there she was in a long red robe, standing in front of the crucifix, her arms outstretched, in some kind of trance. Normally these kinds of people go for the big cathedral-type churches. Out in Warrnambool there wasn’t a lot of choice.”
I pondered. “Mel sometimes seemed unhappy about Grant’s new enthusiasm for religion.”
“She wanted a big fantasy church with bells and incense and stained glass windows, not a converted clothing factory.”
“But still, I always thought Grant was just the right husband for her. A rock of stability.”
“He was. Absolutely. She needed a larrikin like Grant. Someone who doesn’t take life too seriously. To help keep her locked into reality. That’s why I’m worried.”
“The rock is gone.”
“The fantasies are returning. I have a feeling that we can’t believe all that she tells us. And I wonder if she’s telling us all she knows.”