I tried to explain. How I’d gone to see my regular dentist in Ryde about grinding my teeth at night, because the sound of it was keeping Georgia awake and I was worried about cracking a molar and having to spend our end-of-year holiday money getting it fixed. Instead of the regular woman who did my teeth, I’d ended up with some big handsome bear-sized guy with a silver-grey buzz cut and dark-rimmed glasses pushed up on top of his head. He’d had a look around in my mouth, listened to my complaints and then asked if he could try to loosen up some of the muscles in my jaw and temples to see what that did to the alignment of my molars. I’d resisted a bunch, of course. Tried to get up. He’d tugged me back down into the chair by my shoulder, and I let him talk me into it. Being the guy that I was pretending to be—the intimidating, ultra-masculine straight guy—the most physically intimate I’d ever been with another man until that point was to begrudgingly accept a hugfrom Evan once a year at Christmas. And now, here was a guy taking the weight of my head into his hands. Pushing on overworked muscles. Raking his fingers up through my hair. Extracting pleasure and pain in equal parts while I lay there with my eyes closed and let him do it.
Bridie was so rigid as she listened, she didn’t even seem to be breathing. Her silhouette was black against the car’s interior lights, so I couldn’t see her face at all.
‘So, a …’ she began. I was unsure at first, but I thought I heard humour in her voice. Desperately hoped that I did. ‘So ahead massagekind of … blew up your entire life?’
I nodded. ‘In a sense.’
Bridie was silent for a while. Then she said, ‘That’s some fucking head massage.’
I blew out a laugh. She laughed, too. Alone in the woods on the edge of nowhere, we laughed together for the first time in years.
A text message interrupted the chuckling. Bridie pulled her phone out and looked at it. She had approval to let the possum go.
I watched her carry the cage to the base of a nearby tree, remove the towel and unclip the top. She lifted the lid off the cage like she was taking the cloche off a fancy dish. The possum gazed around, hunched and slow and wild-eyed. Then it spotted the tree and shot up through the open door of the cage, scaling the trunk in a series of hitching leaps, its limbs hugging the girth, claws embedded, jumping upwards. In less than three seconds it was thirty feet up on a branch and staring down at us.
Bridie waved at it before she walked back to the car.
EVAN
Dodge was standing by the edge of the little marquee at the back of the beer garden, studying the pub in the distance, the sandstone chimneys and the four hotel windows, all dark. All the activity was at the front of the pub. It occurred to me as I approached with my backpack slung over my shoulder that for years to come people were going to crowd into this sprawling, tree-lined place and gaze up at those old windows and talk about the young woman who had been murdered there. As the centuries passed an urban legend would almost certainly develop, about Chloe appearing and waving to punters down below from the shadows, or about the temperature in the room plummeting suddenly, waking any guests who dared to stay in room four. Doors slamming and lace curtains twitching and all that bullshit. I stood beside Dodge for a while and let the fantasies wash over me as a way of staying out of the real world. The awful, awful present. Because I was filled with a numbness now. A careful detachment from what was happening around me. I knew that could break at any second, when it finally hit me; that I was nearly certain about two life-changing, soul-destroying things.
That my son had been there the night Chloe was murdered.
And his DNA had somehow ended up on her body.
‘Your brother’s right, you know,’ Dodge said.
‘About what?’
‘He really couldn’t have watched the windows from the beer garden.’ Dodge pointed to the space before us. A fifty-metre-square stretch of cleared grass and picnic tables. ‘Not without being seen.’
Dodge beckoned me. I went. We stood so that we were aligned with the stairwell to the hotel rooms, and we could see the windows of the rooms as well. ‘You could only really watch from here,’ Dodge said. ‘Look.’
He beckoned again. I followed, my mind tangled in other things, thinking about DNA and fathers and sons. ‘You come back here,’ Dodge says. ‘See what happens.’
We went into the dark at the roadside. In the shadow of bright and twinkling stars, we crossed the narrow dirt road to arrive beside a barbed-wire fence. There was a house on the hill, maybe a hundred metres up an incline. Almost immediately, two slick black mixed-breed dogs came sprinting down the hill, barking madly as they went, skidding to a halt on the damp grass a stone’s throw from the wire. The dogs planted their front paws and dropped their heads low and snarled and snapped at us.
‘No watching from here, that’s for sure,’ Dodge said. We started walking back to the tables and the marquee. ‘This is good. It limits our suspect pool considerably. It was either someoneinthe beer garden, or it was Rob.Orit was someone she knew, someone she invited to the room. Jesus, I wish we had those bloody phone and email accounts.’
‘Okay, but people saw Chloe going up, and the electrician coming down,’ I said. ‘Why didn’t they see the killer going up or coming down?’
‘Oh, now, that’s an interesting sort of thing, isn’t it?’ Dodge sighed. ‘Because it depends on the moment. People just don’t notice things sometimes. Trust me. It’s a thing. You can have fifty people at a picnic and somebody walks up and abducts a kid from the edge of the gathering and not one person sees it. That happened. Happened to us, over at Wisemans, couple of years ago. It was the kid’s dad in the end who took her, and we got her back safely. But nobody saw the grab. Fifty people there, they all missed it.’
‘How?’
‘He was super close but just out of sight, waiting for the right moment,’ Dodge said. ‘The peoplehere, they were cutting and handing out pieces of cake.’ He demonstrated with his hands, making a cluster in the air. ‘Overhere, you had two kids having an argument and some parents trying to break it up. Overherethere was a game of cricket going on. Just for a few seconds, everyone was occupied with something else. Broad daylight. He snapped her up like a snake and disappeared into the bush.’
Dodge snatched the air in front of my nose.
We fell into silence, watching the stairwell.
‘There’s also a thing called “selective attention”,’ Dodge said. He almost blurted the words, embarrassed, rubbing his eyes. ‘If you’re … uh. If you’re interested.’
I turned to him. ‘What?’
‘Well, my Patsy is a psychologist, you see.’ Dodge dropped the hand from his eyes, the gate open and the horses of enthusiasm bolting out. ‘And her PhD thesis was on attention. Different types of attention. There’s this phenomenon called “selective attention”, and …’
I stood there watching Dodge, listening to him talking about distractions, intuition, neurological pathways, human habits, the dynamics of attention, and an experiment involving a person dressed in a gorilla suit, for a good ten minutes without taking a pause, regretting my decision to give him free rein so thoroughly that I could barely follow what he was saying. ‘Basically,’ he said in summation, ‘a person walking up and down that stairwell isn’t an out-of-place enough stimulus to arouse that part of your brain.’
