EVAN
Iwent into Dad’s bedroom first. There was a tobacco stain on the ceiling, billowing out in a big brown-and-yellow cloud from the top of the bed like a portal to somewhere outside this world. The curtains above the reeking, thin pillows hadn’t been shifted in years, it seemed. I opened the bedside drawers, had to heave them back sharply to get them to shift. Water swelling in the chipboard. There were cigarettes, paperwork, socks, junk. An old picture of Mum with a big crack in the glass, buried under packets of various medicines for sinuses and funguses and headaches. I opened the chest of drawers, pushed clothes around, my heart heavy and my body jumpy. Because I didn’t want this to be it: this spiral-bound notebook flopped in the corner of the shoe cupboard. Or this: this shoebox crumpled under a laundry basket in the hallway outside the bedroom. I didn’t want to find Dad’s trophies. I didn’t want there tobeany trophies. I wanted my father to be what he’d said he was: a good man who made a couple of terrible, terrible mistakes. One of them an accident, even. All of them things he deeply regretted.
But I knew, deep down in my soul, that wasn’t the case.
So I kept looking.
I went through Russell’s childhood bedroom, which was full now of steel shelves and machinery parts and tools and screws and boxes. Moved on to the junk room where I’d found the photographs, the room I’d grown up in, the room with the mouldychairs. In the laundry, under the rusty sink, stood a row of cleaning chemicals, which were leaking and sticky from disuse. Some had probably been originally purchased by my dead mother, they looked so old, their labels faded completely. I almost disregarded the pink plastic box shoved behind the bottles, exhaustion making me careless. When I drew it out, I knew what I’d found. My body sensed it. I sat in the grease and muck and hair on the laundry floor and pried open the box.
A jade bracelet was the first thing I picked up. It came untangled from the pile neatly, round beads like strung garden peas, glossy and fat. In the tangled lump of jewellery, I saw necklaces. A locket, which I picked open with shaking hands: a tiny oval-shaped window that revealed to me a girl with a slick black bob and chubby cheeks. A ring slid away from the pile of jewellery and clattered into the corner of the box. The letter ‘J’ was engraved in a little gold heart with a blue stone. I pulled a ribbon out of the pile. Then a hairclip. Then a set of plastic dental retainers.
I put the box down and cried. My phone rang. It was Delle. I had to wait until she’d called and I’d not answered twice, sixteen full rings, before I had the composure to call her back.
‘Yeah.’
‘Evan, Chrissy is freaking out,’ Delle said. ‘Have you seen the SMS?’
‘Which one?’
‘The police have sent one. It’s gone out to every phone in the area. Chris and I both got it. It’s on the local news, as well. They’re looking for a guy who was at the pub on—’
‘Okay. Yep. I knew that was coming. And I know that it was Chris,’ I said, rubbing my nose. ‘Tell him not to worry. I’m going to fix it.’
‘He says he was there with your father.’
‘I know.’
‘Should he go into Redbelly? Can you—I don’t know—smooth it over with your people? He’s telling me he didn’t see anything that night. But he’s worried they’re going to hang him out to dry because he didn’t come clean about being there in the first place.’
‘Delle,’ I told her, ‘everything’s going to be okay. I’m fixing it.’
‘If you come home, maybe just go easy on him.’ Her voice softened. ‘He’s really worried. We can take him to task for being alone with your lunatic of a father some other time. Right now he’s asking me what he’s going to do if he’s arrested, Evan.’
‘Just tell him that he’s not going to get arrested,’ I said. ‘And tell him that I love him, Delle.’
I rang off and sat looking at the jewellery in the box on the floor between my legs, trying to guess how many lives the pieces here represented. How many families. How many people. How many years of sleepless nights and horrific wonderings by parents, siblings, friends. I picked up a small gold pin and turned it in the light from the grimy window. It was a cassowary under a banner that readWelcome to Cairns Airport.
A box of ended lives. A wedding ring on a leather string made me look to my own gold band, dull and scratched, sitting against my knuckle. I thought about taking the ring off and adding it to the box. Because my life was over now, too. I couldn’t hide this. I couldn’t bury this box of lives. The right and good thing to do was to come clean, to end the suffering of these people and their families. And in doing so, I would turn the world’s attention to my father. And his whereabouts. They’d find him. And then they’d turn on me.
He had killed me.
My fists balled and I dropped the box.
‘Youfucking killed me, too!’
I could almost hear him laughing from the water not far away. Sitting there, rotting and laughing and being eaten by fish. The rage was suffocating. I threw the box of jewellery against the wall and stood and kicked a hole in the laundry door, kept kicking it until it burst open.
Then the thing stirred in me again. The sharp, black, slithering thing, the thing whose approach was heralded by thunderous noise that blanked out all reason, all goodness and rightness. The thing that had made me murder him. These lives were gone. Mine was in the balance. I’d been willing to bury three girls to save myself andmy family. What did ten more matter? What did fifty? Locking me up was not going to give them what they wanted. They wanted Arthur. And he was gone. I had no justice to offer anyone. No closure. It was a waste to give them myself. It was just a waste of a life.
In a state of cold, liquid defiance, I started gathering all the jewellery up. Piece by piece. Putting it back in the box. Signing my soul away.
RUSSELL
Dodge was quiet for a long while, leaning in the doorway, watching me work, because there really wasn’t room for the two of us down on the floor. I pried up a second long hardwood plank using the claw hammer John had brought us. The wood was dry, creaky, wanting to crack as it popped sideways out of the tongue-and-groove system keeping it locked in. The nails were almost musical, squeaking and groaning as they surrendered and came out of the joists, bent like talons. I glimpsed bare dirt under the house. Ants. John Special was in the kitchen, sitting with the dog at his feet, watching me sweat and eating Tim Tams.
‘Is this a good time to admit I don’t know what we’re doing?’ Dodge asked.
‘That makes two of us,’ John added.
