Chapter thirteen

Rachel sat in a steaming hot bath, clinging to the sides while her head spun. It was a stupid idea to have a bath when she was tipsy from the Tupperware party. She’d probably slip when she got out and break her hip.

Perhaps that was a good strategy. Rob and Lauren would cancel New York and stay in Sydney to take care of her. Look at Lucy O’Leary. Her daughter had come from Melbourne to look after her the moment she’d heard about her breaking her ankle. She’d even pulled her son out of his school in Melbourne, which seemed a bit over the top now that she thought about it.

Recalling the O’Learys made Rachel think of Connor Whitby and the expression on his face when he saw Tess. Rachel wondered if she should warn Lucy. ‘Just a heads-up. Connor Whitby might be a murderer.’

Or he might not be. He might just be a perfectly nice PE teacher.

Some days, when Rachel saw him with the children on the oval, in the sunshine, his whistle around his neck, eating a red apple, she would think: There is no way on heaven and earth that nice man could have hurt Janie. And then on other bitter, grey days, when she caught sight of him walking alone, his face impassive, his shoulders broad enough to kill, she thought: You know what happened to my daughter.

She rested her head against the back of the bath, closed her eyes and remembered the first time she’d heard of his existence. Sergeant Bellach had told her that the last person to see Janie alive was a boy called Connor Whitby from the local public school, and Rachel had thought: But that can’t be, I’ve never heard of him. She knew all of Janie’s friends and their mothers.

Ed had told Janie she wasn’t allowed a serious boyfriend until after she’d finished her very last HSC exam. He’d made such a big deal of it. But Janie hadn’t argued, and Rachel had blithely assumed she wasn’t even that interested in boys yet.

She and Ed met Connor for the first time at Janie’s funeral. He shook Ed’s hand and pressed his cold cheek against Rachel’s. Connor was part of the nightmare, as unreal and wrong as the coffin. Months afterwards Rachel found that one photo of them together at someone’s party. He was laughing at something Janie had said.

And then all those years later, he got the job at St Angela’s. She hadn’t even recognised him until she saw his name on the employment application.

‘I don’t know if you remember me, Mrs Crowley,’ he said to her, a short time after he started, when they were alone together in the office.

‘I remember you,’ she said icily.

‘I still think about Janie,’ he said. ‘All the time.’

She didn’t know what to say. Why do you think of her? Because you killed her?

There was definitely something like guilt in his eyes. She was not imagining it. She’d been working as a school secretary for fifteen years. Connor had the look of a kid sent to the principal’s office. But was it guilt over murder? Or something else?

‘I hope it’s not uncomfortable for you, me working here,’ he’d said.

‘It’s perfectly fine,’ she’d said curtly, and that was the last time they’d ever spoken of it.

She had considered resigning. Working at Janie’s old primary school had always been bittersweet. Girls with skinny Bambi-like legs would streak past her in the playground and she’d catch a glimpse of Janie; on hot summer afternoons she’d watch the mothers picking up their children and remember long ago summers, taking Janie and Rob for ice cream after school; their little faces flushed. Janie had been at high school when she died so Rachel’s memories of St Angela’s weren’t tarnished by her murder. That was until Connor Whitby turned up; roaring his horrible motorbike through Rachel’s soft, sepia-coloured memories.

In the end, she’d stayed out of stubbornness. She enjoyed the work. Why should she be the one to leave? And more importantly, she felt in a strange way that she owed it to Janie to not run away, to face up to this man, every day, and whatever it was he’d done.

If he had killed Janie would he have taken a job at the same place as her mother? Would he have said, ‘I still think about her’?

Rachel opened her eyes and felt that hard ball of fury lodged permanently at the back of her throat, as if she’d not quite choked on something. It was the not knowing. The not fucking knowing.

She added cold water to the bath. It was much too hot.

‘It’s the not knowing,’ a tiny, refined-looking woman had said, at that homicide victims support group she and Ed had gone to a few times, sitting on fold-out chairs in that cold community hall somewhere in Chatswood, holding their styrofoam cups of instant coffee in shaky hands. The woman’s son had been murdered on his way home from cricket practice. Nobody had heard anything. Nobody had seen anything. ‘The not fucking knowing,’ she said.

There was a ripple of soft blinks around the circle. The woman had a sweet, cut-glass voice; it was like hearing the Queen swear.

‘Hate to tell you this, love, but knowing doesn’t help all that much,’ interrupted a stocky red-faced man whose daughter’s murderer had been sentenced to life in prison.

Rachel and Ed had both taken a mutual, violent dislike to the red-faced man, and they’d stopped going to the support group because of him.

People thought that tragedy made you wise, that it automatically elevated you to a higher, spiritual level, but it seemed to Rachel that just the opposite was true. Tragedy made you petty and spiteful. It didn’t give you any great knowledge or insight. She didn’t understand a damned thing about life except that it was arbitrary and cruel, and some people got away with murder, while others made one tiny careless mistake and paid a terrible price.

She held a face washer under the cold tap, folded it and placed it across her forehead as if she was a patient with a fever.

Seven minutes. Her mistake could be measured in minutes.

Marla was the only person who knew. Ed never knew.

Janie had been complaining that she was tired all the time. ‘Do more exercise,’ Rachel kept telling her. ‘Don’t go to bed so late. Eat more!’ She was so skinny and tall. And then she’d started complaining about some vague pain in her lower back. ‘Mum, I seriously think I’ve got glandular fever.’ Rachel had made the appointment with Dr Buckley just so she could tell Janie there was nothing wrong with her and she needed to do all the things that her mother told her.

Janie normally caught the bus and walked home from the Wycombe Road bus stop. The plan was that Rachel would pick her up from the corner down from the high school and take her straight to Dr Buckley’s surgery in Gordon. She’d reminded Janie of the plan that morning.

Except Rachel was seven minutes late, and when she got to the corner, Janie wasn’t waiting. She’d forgotten, Rachel thought, drumming her fingers on the steering wheel. Or she’d got sick of waiting. The child was so impatient, acting as if Rachel was a convenient form of public transport with an obligation to run to schedule. There were no mobile phones in those days. There wasn’t anything Rachel could do, except wait in the car for another ten minutes (she didn’t actually like waiting much herself) before finally going home and ringing Dr Buckley’s receptionist to cancel the appointment.

She wasn’t worried. She was aggravated. Rachel knew there was nothing particularly wrong with Janie. It was typical that Rachel would go to the trouble of making the doctor’s appointment and then Janie wouldn’t bother. It wasn’t until much later, when Rob said, his mouth full of sandwich, ‘Where’s Janie?’ that Rachel looked up at the kitchen clock and felt that first icy thread of fear.

Nobody saw Janie waiting on the corner, or if they did they never came forward. Rachel never knew what difference those seven minutes had made.

What she did eventually learn from the police investigation was that Janie turned up at Connor Whitby’s house at something like three-thirty, and they watched a video together (Nine to Five with Dolly Parton), before Janie said she had something to do in Chatswood and Connor walked her to the railway station. Nobody else ever saw her alive. Nobody remembered seeing her on the train, or anywhere in Chatswood.

Her body was found the next morning by two nine-year-old boys who were riding their BMX bikes through the Wattle Valley Park. They stopped at the playground and found her lying at the bottom of the slide. She had her school blazer placed over her like a blanket, as if to keep her warm, and a pair of rosary beads in her hands. She’d been strangled. ‘Traumatic asphyxiation’ was the cause of death. No signs of a struggle. Nothing to scrape from her fingernails. No usable fingerprints. No hairs. No DNA; Rachel asked the question when she read about cases being solved through DNA testing in the late nineties. No suspects.

‘But where was she going?’ Ed kept asking, as if Rachel would finally remember the answer if he asked the question often enough. ‘Why was she walking through that park?’

Sometimes, after he’d asked her over and over, he’d end up sobbing with rage and frustration. Rachel couldn’t bear it. She wanted nothing to do with his grief. She didn’t want to know about it, or feel it, or share it. Hers was bad enough. How could she cope with carrying his as well?

She wondered now why they couldn’t turn to each other to share their grief. She knew they’d loved each other, but when Janie died, neither of them had been able to bear the sight of each other’s tears. They’d held on to each other the way strangers do in a natural disaster, their bodies stiff, awkwardly patting shoulders. And poor little Rob was caught in the middle, a teenage boy clumsily trying to make everything right, all false smiles and cheery lies. No wonder he became a real estate agent.

The water was too cold now.

Rachel began to shiver uncontrollably, as if she had hypothermia. She put her hands on the sides of the bath and went to stand up.

She couldn’t do it. She was stuck in here for the night. Her arms, her dead-white stick-like arms, had no strength in them. How was it possible that this useless, frail, blue-veined body was the same one that had once been so brown, firm and strong?

‘That’s a good tan for April,’ Toby Murphy had said to her that day. ‘Sunbake, do you, Rachel?’

That’s why she was seven minutes late. She was flirting with Toby Murphy. Toby was married to her friend Jackie. He was a plumber and needed an office assistant. Rachel had gone for an interview and she stayed in Toby’s office for over an hour, flirting. Toby was an incorrigible flirt, and she was wearing the new dress that Marla had convinced her to buy, and Toby kept looking at her bare legs. Rachel would never have been unfaithful to Ed, and Toby adored his wife, so everyone’s marriage vows were safe, but still, he was looking at her legs and she liked it.

Ed wouldn’t have been happy if she’d got the job with Toby. He didn’t know about the interview. Rachel sensed he felt competitive towards Toby, something to do with Toby being a tradie and Ed being a less masculine pharmaceutical salesman. Ed and Toby played tennis together and Ed generally lost. He pretended it didn’t matter but Rachel could tell that it always rankled.

So it was particularly mean of her to enjoy Toby looking at her legs.

Her sins that day had been so trite. Vanity. Self-indulgence. A tiny betrayal of Ed. A tiny betrayal of Jackie Murphy. But maybe those trite little sins were the worst. The person who killed Janie had probably been sick, crazy in the head, whereas Rachel was sane and self-aware, and she knew exactly what she was doing when she let her dress ride a bit further up her knees.

The body wash she’d poured into the bathwater floated on the surface like drops of oil, slimy and greasy. Rachel tried again to heave herself out of the bath and failed.

Maybe it would be easier if she let the water out first.

She let the plug out with her toe, and the roar of the water going down the drain sounded as it always did, like the roar of a dragon. Rob had been terrified of that drain. ‘Raaah!’ Janie used to yell, making her hands into claws. When the water was gone, Rachel turned herself over onto her front. She got onto her hands and knees. Her kneecaps felt like they were being crushed.

She pulled herself to a half-standing position, held on to the side and tentatively put one leg over, then the other. She was out. Her heart settled. Thank God. No broken bones.

Perhaps that was her last ever bath.

She towelled herself dry and pulled her dressing-gown from the hook behind the door. The dressing-gown was made out of beautiful soft fabric. Another thoughtful gift chosen by Lauren. Rachel’s home was filled with thoughtful gifts chosen by Lauren. For example, that chunky vanilla-scented candle in the glass jar, sitting on her bathroom cabinet.

‘Big smelly candle,’ Ed would have called it.

She missed Ed at funny times. Missed arguing with him. Missed sex. They kept having sex after Janie died. They were both surprised by this, and sickened that their bodies still responded the same way as before, but they kept doing it.

She missed them all: her mother, her father, her husband, her daughter. Each absence felt like its own vicious little wound. None of their deaths was fair. Natural causes be damned, Janie’s murderer was responsible for them all.

Don’t you dare, was the strange thought that came into Rachel’s head when she saw Ed crash to his knees in the hallway one hot February morning. She meant, Don’t you dare leave me here to deal with this pain on my own. She knew right away that he was dead. They said it was a massive stroke, but Ed and her parents had died of broken hearts. Only Rachel’s heart had stubbornly refused to do the right thing and kept on beating. It made her feel ashamed, the way her desire for sex had shamed her. She kept breathing, eating, fucking, living, while Janie rotted in the ground.

She ran the palm of her hand across the steamed-up mirror and considered her blurry reflection behind the drops of water. She thought of the way Jacob kissed her with both his fat little hands pressed to her cheeks, his big clear blue eyes staring straight into hers, and each time she’d feel amazed gratitude that her wrinkly face could inspire such adoration.

For something to do, she gently nudged at the chunky candle until it reached the edge of the cabinet, toppled and crashed to the floor in a shatter of vanilla-smelling glass.

Date: 2015-02-03; view: 575