The Dead Path (13 page)

Nicholas felt the pulse in his neck beat stronger. He flipped open the book.

The contents were broken into three chapters: the first twenty-five years, then 1914 to 1939 and 1940 to 1964. Within the chapters were sprinkled black-and-white photographs of principals, of buildings being erected, of a governor’s visit, and, of course, photos of classrooms full of students, seated in four rows of eight or so, their teachers smiling dutifully from their midst.

Was his father’s photo in here? Nicholas flipped through to the end of the book. As he did, a page slipped out and slid like a feather to the dark earth. He picked it up. No, not a page. It was a newspaper clipping, yellow and crisp: a truncated advertisement for Hotpoint clothes dryers. He turned the clipping over. As he read the headline of the small article, he felt his face go cold.

“Boy Missing—Police Seek Information.”

It stated that a twelve-year-old boy named Owen Liddy had left his Pelion Street home on a Saturday morning; he was to catch a train into Central Station and visit a model airplane exhibition at the city hall. His mother became worried when he hadn’t returned by four. People attending the exhibition were interviewed; none recalled seeing a boy fitting Liddy’s description. Police were inviting any information from the public.

Nicholas reread the article. Then he noticed the last page of the Tallong schoolbook was dog-eared. He picked it up and opened to the marked page.

It showed a photograph of the 1964 seventh-grade students. A grinning girl in pigtails held a pinboard with the class name: 7C. But it was the face of a short, freckled boy third along in the second to last row that Nicholas stared at. The face was circled in dark lead pencil. He slid his eyes down to read the caption below the photograph: “Left to right: Peter Krause, Rebecca Lowell, Owen Liddy …”

Nicholas stared at the clipping for a long moment. It was unlikely that his father knew the boy—Donald Close would have been in his late teens in 1964.

A boy went missing, and Donald Close thought it was odd enough a disappearance that he kept the article. Kept it for nearly ten years, until he himself had disappeared from his family’s life and broken himself in two when his sliding car was sliced open by a poorly marked concrete road divider.
But he left it,
thought Nicholas.
He left it with his books.

He left it for us.

He folded the clipping and slipped it into his pocket. Outside, the morning had turned gray and the air in the garage was cold.

He hurriedly put the suitcases back on the overhead planks, eager to be out of this room that was as uncomfortably quiet as a grave.

  N
icholas let himself back in the house. The hall was quiet, and the air was freezing.

“Suzette?”

He rapped on her bedroom door, opened it. Her bed was made, her suitcase open on a chair under the window. From underneath the house came a low thrumming. His mother’s pottery wheel: the electric hum of industry.

Halfway back down the hall, the walls took on a heavy tilt and Nicholas lurched. As he steadied himself, two large drops of sweat fell on the timber floor. He was feverish.

He fetched a change of clothes and went to the bathroom. In the bottom drawer of the vanity he found a half-empty box of aspirin and popped four in his mouth and felt them fizz on his tongue. Then he stripped off and turned on the shower.

As he showered, he chewed and took a half-mouthful of water, swallowing the bitter soup. His eyes slid down to his right foot and the scar: a faint line of pale skin where his sixth toe had been removed.

From his first job out of college—dish pig at the Kookaburra Grill—he’d saved every spare cent toward the elective surgery, and a lucky commission to design a logo for a new chain of wheel alignment garages brought his war chest to the required three thousand dollars. He booked himself in for outpatient surgery, had the offending appendage removed, spent a week recovering, then went out to the Lord Regent Hotel to find a girl to lose his virginity to, choosing the soon-to-be-unsatisfied Pauline McCleary. But every time he’d showered or bathed in the seventeen years since, his eyes had been drawn to his right foot, just to confirm that the deformity hadn’t grown back.

As he looked at the jagged white line, into his mind sprang the image of pale scars in dark wood: the marking scratched with a blade into the stock of Gavin’s rifle. Why had he hidden it from Suzette? And why hadn’t he told her that same mark on the health food store door had been the very one on the dumb, round woven head of the dead bird? Something had stopped him. Now, under the steaming water with the aspirin starting to work, he realized why.
She has children.
Telling Suzette might somehow bring the danger latent in the mark closer to Nelson and Quincy.

Nicholas turned off the taps.

Now he had a piece of new information that he’d exhumed from his father’s musty suitcases in the garage. He’d come into the house ready to tell Suzette about the child who went missing in 1964, but now he was glad she was out.

Don’t tell her. Keep her safe and send her home.

As he dried himself, his head began to throb again. Missing children. Dead children. Confessing murderers. Dead murderers. A strange mark.

Tristram touched the bird, but it should have been you.

As he dressed, Nicholas made a decision.

He would go to Gavin Boye’s funeral.

  S
uzette waved down a young waiter with a very nice bum and ordered her third long black with hot skim milk on the side.

A notepad with a page full of newly written notes was open in front of her, alongside a small pile of stapled cost projection reports, their margins crammed with her comments, all of which were now lined through. With one hand she clicked on icons on the laptop screen, shrinking her address book, restoring her mailbox, opening an accounts summary spreadsheet, highlighting days in her diary. In her other hand was her mobile phone; on the other end was Ola, her PA, a blocky and unattractive girl with a voice that was as lovely as her face was not. It was Ola’s good phone manner and skill at mail merging that got her the job.

Suzette was pleased. In the last hour and a half she’d concluded most of a day’s business, and the strong coffees removed most traces of her mother’s awful porridge from her tongue. She asked Ola to send out a tender to a few architect firms, and confirmed she’d be back in Sydney in a day or two. Then she rang home. Bryan answered.

“Hello?”

“Hello yourself. What happened to ‘Hello beautiful wife, I miss you and can’t bear another hour without you’?”

“Oh, hey gorgeous! Uh, yeah … the caller ID is down.”

Suzette frowned. “Down?”

“Nelson found my screwdriver set and did a bit of exploratory surgery on the handset. This is an old phone I found downstairs. I think it may have been used to convey the terms for the Treaty of Versailles. It’s got a spinny thingy.”

“Rotary dial?”

“I think you’ll find in telecommunications circles it’s called a ‘spinny thingy.’ ”

“Okay, Captain Hilarious. Why isn’t Nelson at school?”

Her husband chuckled. He sounded much more than a thousand kilometers away. “You won’t like this.”

“Try me.”

“He didn’t want to go.”

Suzette took a breath and told herself not to get snarky.

“Didn’t want to go. Did he have a good reason?”

“He said he doesn’t like his teacher because she isn’t nice to her husband.”

“Not nice … to her … what? I don’t get it.”

“Nels said she was married to her husband but kisses another man.”

Suzette’s new coffee arrived, and she tried not to watch the taut young waiter saunter away. “I still don’t understand. Did he see her kissing another teacher?”

“No.”

“Then how—”

She suddenly understood. Nelson just
knew
.

“Aaah.”

“Yep,” agreed Bryan.

Inklings. Feelings. Nelson had them. Quincy didn’t. She shivered at the prospect that Nelson might turn out like Nicholas.

“He’s napping now,” explained Bryan. “I guess gutting a two-hundred-dollar phone takes it out of a bloke. Maybe call later, explain to him some stuff about women and kissing and misplaced love and all that stuff I don’t understand because I’m married to the woman of my dreams?”

“You’ll go far, charmer. I’ll ring and tell him he’s going to school or going to sea.”

Bryan laughed. “How’s Nicholas?”

“He’s … I honestly don’t know. Sick, Mum said.”

“Hm. And you?”

She could hear the caring gravity in his voice. She knew what he meant. The image of Gavin’s broken teeth in his shattered jaw leapt again into the front of her mind and her stomach tightened.

“I’m okay.”

“Okay. Call later. Come home soon.”

They said their goodbyes, and then Suzette was staring at the cooling coffee with the disconnected phone on her lap. The thought of Gavin Boye crumpled on the porch stole all the joy out of her conversation with Bryan. There were a thousand reasons a man might kill himself, from tax fraud to child porn and everything in between. But this man was no stranger in the papers; this was someone she’d once lived near to. Why had Gavin Boye shot himself in front of her brother?

Tristram. Tristram was the link. She was sure of it.

She sipped her coffee and started to put away her paperwork. At the bottom of the pile was the small notepad she always carried with her. This was the last job she’d left for herself. Two nights ago, she’d been excited about this, but now, for some reason, it was a task she felt like avoiding. She flipped open the pad. Drawn there was the strange mark she’d copied from the doorway of Plow & Vine Health Foods.
Quill’s shop,
she thought.

She clicked open her Internet browser and started to hunt.

Chapter
9
   

  N
icholas couldn’t help but admire the clerk at the convenience store. The young Filipino man managed to scan, bag, and total Nicholas’s purchase of milk, bread, peanut butter, toiletries, and a newspaper without once looking up from the swimsuit pictorial in the men’s magazine he held between his face and Nicholas’s.

Nicholas carried the bags out into the angled afternoon light. The pearly clouds had cleared and faintly warm sunlight fell softly between the leaves of jacaranda and satinwood trees. In sober daylight, the Myrtle Street shops held no menace and the nostalgia he’d expected here with Suzette two evenings ago finally arrived—the excitement about what sweet treasures would be in forty cents’ worth of mixed lollies (Cobbers? Freckles? Milk bottles? Mint leaves?) or how many pecans Mrs. Ferguson the greengrocer would sell him for a dodecagon fifty-cent piece, or the tactile pleasure of stroking a burnished silver chrysalis found in the oleander bushes out front, now gone and replaced with topiary trees.

Nicholas strayed to the door of Plow & Vine Health Foods. The shop within was dark. A Closed sign hung inside the door, with the shop’s hours handwritten on it: 10 a.m.–5:30 p.m. He checked his watch. It was five to ten. His eyes slid up to the doorframe. In the flat, friendly light of day, the mark was invisible under layers of gloss white paint.

He walked over to the curved galvanized steel handrail that separated the tiles outside the shops from the footpath, and then—with an easy swoop that defied the quarter-century since he’d done it last—he grabbed the rail in an underhand grip and swung to sit underneath it, legs dangling over the concrete buttress. Quietly pleased, he opened the newspaper on his lap.

A low sports car buzzed lazily past, chased by its longboat bass drumming. High in shadowed branches, a family of noisy miners quarreled with a magpie, forcing it to fly beyond the distant rooftops.

Nicholas felt slightly cold and a little light-headed, but his flu symptoms seemed to have eased. He opened the paper and flicked through to the personal advertisements section and scanned for funeral notices. The page was full.
Dying
, he thought,
remained as popular a pastime as ever.
He followed his finger to the middle of the first column and found what he was looking for: “Gavin Boye. Suddenly passed. Son of Jeanette. Husband of Laine.”

Nicholas blinked.
Christ, Gavin had a wife.
He read on.

“Loved and missed. Relatives and friends are respectfully invited …” He skipped to the end. The service would be at the local Anglican church the following morning. Nicholas’s stomach tightened involuntarily. The same old stone church where Tris’s funeral had been held.

Laine Boye. Could she shed more light on why her gray-faced husband had risen early two mornings ago, grabbed his favorite sawn-off, and gone to the home of his long-dead brother’s best friend to deliver a message …

It should have been you.

Was that Gavin’s own wish, that Tristram had lived and Nicholas had been found with his throat opened up like a ziplock bag?

No. Those weren’t Gavin’s words. Gavin couldn’t have known about the bird. The day Nicholas told Tristram about the talismanic bird, Tristram never returned home. And after his death, Nicholas never found a way to tell the Boyes about the tiny, mutilated corpse that Tristram had touched just before Winston Teale stepped from his olive sedan and strode like a golem toward them. The only person who could have told Gavin about the bird was the one who’d set the dead thing as a trap.

Nicholas checked his watch. It was after ten. He turned and saw that the sign on the health food shop door had been flipped and now read Open. He went to the door and pushed it inward. As it angled away from the light, the mark fell into relief—a vertical slash with a half-diamond. He felt the soles of his feet tighten vertiginously. He bit down the feeling and stepped inside.

As he looked around, his apprehension dissipated. The shelves were stocked with handmade soaps, cloth trivets stuffed with aromatic herbs, small wooden barrels of seeds with brass scoops stuck in their surfaces like the bows of sinking ships. The store smelled of mint and cloves and honey.

The pleasantly fragrant air was broken by a silvery crash of tin hitting tiles in the storeroom behind the counter, followed by the ticking skitter of tiny spheres skimming across the floor.

“Shit!” A woman’s voice, followed by a stream of breathy words that could only be swearing.

“Hello?” called Nicholas.

Silence. Then a head poked out through the storeroom door. Her hair was blond and her eyes were dark brown. Her eyes and mouth were rounded in three embarrassed
O
s.

“Oh, bum,” she whispered, and disappeared again from sight.

Nicholas set down his bags and picked up a few of the tiny objects that had rolled under the counter. They were wooden beads, not unlike those on the necklace Suzette had given him.

The woman stepped from behind the counter, tucking her hair behind one ear. “Such a klutz,” she said.

Nicholas tried to guess her age. Twenty-five? Thirty? Her skin was milk pale and clear, lips red and pursed as she stooped to collect the errant beads.

“I fall down stairs,” he said.

She scooted about energetically, in and out of Nicholas’s sight, picking up beads. “Ah, but then you’re only hurting yourself. These, now …” She stood and poured them from her hands into the tin. “These can trip people very well.”

“What are they?”

She affected a wise expression as she slyly turned the tin’s label toward herself to read furtively: “ ‘Willowwood beads—for Dreameing, Inspiration and Fertility.’ ‘Dreameing’ spelled with an extra
e
for Olde English Effecte.”

Nicholas nodded.

The young woman smiled. It was a pretty smile. She shrugged. “People buy them.”

“I have some myself.”

“Willow beads?”

“I think they’re elderwood.”

She cocked her head and narrowed her eyes, then shook her head and shrugged again. Nicholas found it an attractive gesture. He was sure men shopped here just to look at her.

“Anyway,” she said. “Since I can’t trip you, can I help you?”

He thought about it. “I don’t think so. No.”

“Okay,” she said, frowning. A small, sweet line appeared between her eyes.

“There’s a mark on your door,” he said.

“Oh?”

He nodded at it.

She stepped out from behind the counter. She was slim and nearly his height. Her dress was of an old cut, but snugly fitted. Simple, but flattering to her figure. She kept herself a few steps distant from him as she went to the door. He told her to open it, and pointed to the rune.

She frowned again as she peered at it. “You know, I’ve never noticed that. Did you put it there?” She leveled both eyes at him with startling frankness.

He blinked, off guard. “No. There used to be a seamstress here, when I was a kid. She was a bit creepy.”

“I’ve been here a year,” the young woman said. “Before me was a pool supply guy. The place reeked of chlorine.” She shrugged again, and cocked her head as if to ask where this was going.

Nicholas realized it was going nowhere. “I have a cold,” he said suddenly, and instantly wondered where the words had come from.

She looked at him for a moment. The blunt gaze was strangely erotic—as if she were imagining him undressing, and finding the thought pleasing. Then she nodded to herself and ducked from sight. He could hear the sounds of tins opening and the crunching of slender fingers in dried leaves. She returned with a paper bag, which she sealed with a sticker from beside the till. “Sage, ginger, echinacea, garlic. Make a tea with it.”

Nicholas took the bag doubtfully. “How will it taste?”

She smiled. “Dreadful. Eight dollars fifty.” As she handed him change for his ten, she asked, “Are you a local?”

Nicholas looked at her. This close, he could smell her hair. It smelled like vanilla, clean and good. He thought for a moment. “Yes. Home again.”

She nodded approvingly. “Next time, I’ll try something much more treacherous than beads.”

“I look forward to it,” he said. “Sorry about the mark thing. I just thought … You know.”

“Strange marks,” she said.

It was Nicholas’s turn to shrug.

“Do you think it could be Chinese?” she asked. “They used to have market gardens somewhere around here, I heard. It could be for luck.”

“Could be. I’m Nicholas.” He extended his hand.

She looked at it, and took it, and shook it firmly.

“Rowena.” She smiled. “We’re well met.”

“We are,” he agreed.

He found himself thinking about Rowena’s smile on his way home, and so guiltily buried the memory of it.

  H
e was emptying the letterbox when a man stepped through him. Nicholas jumped, his heart suddenly kicked into a sprint.

Gavin Boye kept walking up to the front porch of the house, silently carrying his gun in a black, glossy garbage bag. He stopped, then knocked silently on the door. No one answered.

Nicholas felt a greasy knot in the pit of his stomach. This was too much like the dead boy with his screwdriver outside his flat in Ealing. And that memory led back to Cate’s death.

I can’t face this every day.

He dropped the mail back in the letterbox and stepped out onto the footpath, closing the gate behind him.

  I
t was just after lunch when the balding, constantly smiling real estate agent handed Nicholas keys to a furnished flat on Bymar Street. Nicholas had signed the lease, paid two months’ rent in advance, and been allowed to use the agency’s telephone to connect power and gas. He considered continuing up the road to the shopping mall and replacing his cell phone, but the prospect of queues and forms and sales patter about plans and discounts was too exhausting. Another day.

He carried the keys and his bag of herbal tea up the concrete stairs to the first-floor flat, unlocked the door, and stepped inside. The furniture was cheap and badly worn. The fridge had an asthmatic rattle. The carpet smelled faintly of cannabis and wet dog. The white curtains of the front room hung as listless as dressed game fowl. He pulled one aside, repulsed by the greasy feel of the fabric, and looked down the street.

At the end of Bymar Street was Carmichael Road, and beyond it, the heavy darkness of the woods.

In the sagging kitchen, Nicholas found a ceramic kettle with a wire element, and boiled water. He wondered how the woods could still be there, how they survived the housing boom of the fifties, the licentious building rackets of the seventies, the fiscal orgy of the ’03 spike.

It wasn’t a loved park. No one went in there. In fact, people hurried past them. People
knew
, without even entering, that they weren’t friendly woods.

Leave here,
he thought.
Buy a ticket south. Get a job in a design firm in a nice new building and live in a new apartment where there are no ghosts. You can live with that. This place hasn’t changed.

He went to the window and stared down the road, but the woods were a sea of shadow. Down there, in the green, secret velvet, the Thomas boy was being dragged between dark trees, his face a mask of terror, his last hours or minutes playing over and over, again and again. And down there—somewhere—was Tris, caught in his own endlessly repeating cycle, tormented and helpless, forever just minutes away from his own awful, lonely death.

You can bring no solace to the dead,
he told himself.
Why not let the departed stay departed?

Because they didn’t stay departed. They just stayed. Cate in London, falling and dying and falling and dying. The Thomas boy here. And Gavin. And Tris. The dead were everywhere. And if he didn’t try to find out why, didn’t do something, he’d go mad. He’d put a gun to his head like Gav, or smash his car like his father, or Christ knew what else. Only then, he feared, he’d become one of them. Caught in his own death loop, forever lifting steel to his mouth or watching a power pole race toward his windscreen.

He was going insane.

And he was sure of one other thing: he couldn’t leave town. Tristram’s body had been found kilometers away, but Suzette had seen his ghost on the gravel path on Carmichael Road. The Thomas child’s body had been found three suburbs away, but Nicholas had seen his ghost dragged by invisible hands into the woods. The boys’ bodies may have been found elsewhere, and their supposed killers had confessed to murdering them a long way from Tallong, but their ghosts didn’t lie. The boys were murdered in the woods.

And he and Suzette were the only ones who knew that.

As much as he wanted to, he couldn’t leave.

Trapped.

His cheeks were wet. He wiped them distractedly. The kettle was boiling noisily. He made the herbal tea. It was surprisingly pleasant. He drank it all, folded himself onto the thin fabric of the sofa, and fell into a dark and hollow sleep.