The Dead Path (9 page)

A week later, Katharine Close made Nicholas wear a tie for his court appearance. All through the hearing—including when the prosecutor asked Nicholas to point out the man who had chased him and Tristram on November 1—Nicholas watched Winston Teale. The man no longer looked terrifying. He seemed smaller. His eyes shifted like caught mice in a cage, as if he couldn’t quite believe that he was in the docks of the Magistrates’ Court. And when Teale looked at Nicholas, there wasn’t a gram of recognition. He seemed even more confused by his own words during questioning.

“You killed Tristram Boye?”

“Yes.” Teale’s voice was that of a smaller man.

“How?”

“I … I believe I cut his throat.” He explained that he had used a carpet knife from his warehouse.

“Why did you kill him?”

Teale blinked, frowning. The courtroom was so silent that Nicholas heard a train horn sound at the distant railway station.

“Mr. Teale?” urged the magistrate.

“I don’t remember.”

“And transported him to the lot on the corner of Myner Road and Currawong Street?”

“Yes.” Teale’s voice was unconvincing.

“How?”

Again, Teale shook his head. “My car. The trunk of my car, I think. Yes …” Teale shrugged and gave an apologetic smile.

Nicholas felt eyes on his neck, and looked behind.

His mother was watching him, a frown line dividing the brow between her eyes. Her lips smiled, but her eyes kept watching.

  W
inston Teale was convicted of murder and deprivation of liberty, but hanged himself with his shirt the night before he was due to be sentenced.

Nicholas had no more cause to jump the back fence and run past Mrs. Giles on his way to visit the Boyes.

Cyclone season came and its hail-teeth winds blew away newspapers carrying the photo of his murdered friend.

One school year finished. The river flowed brown. The city sighed a mournful puff of car fumes and stale perfume and electric train ozone, then shrugged her steel shoulders and braced for her footpaths to be stamped upon by New Year’s drunks and her spiry hair stained bright by fireworks.

Time ticked on.

Katharine Close forbade her two children to ever walk past the Carmichael Road woods.

Chapter
6
   
   2007

  N
icholas watched his younger sister alight from the taxi, her chatty, white smile winking at the cabbie unloading her bags. He let the blinds fall and sank on the bed. Suzette hadn’t brought her husband on this trip to see her sad widower brother, nor her children.
I’ll be nice,
he decided.
Answer her questions. Accept her sympathy. Send her home tomorrow.

“Your sister’s here!” called Katharine brightly.

“I know!” called Nicholas in matching tone.

Rattling of the latch, the birdsong of greetings and compliments, rustling of plastic bags, the friendly thump of footsteps. Then Suzette was in the doorway, arms folded.

“Get out of my room.”

The last time he’d seen her was at his wedding in Osterley Park. Her hair was longer, but she was still tall and pale and pretty, with a stance like a bouncer.

“No.”

“It’s my room.”

“Not any more.”

“I’ll tell Mum.”

“Then you’d be a dirty little snitch.”

“
Muuum!
” she yelled, as brutally as a cheated fishwife. “Tell Nicholas to get out of my room!”

“Nicholas, let your sister have her room back,” called Katharine. The smile in her voice suggested she enjoyed this old game.

Nicholas sighed and got to his feet. He walked up to his sister. She grinned. He kissed her cheek. She grabbed him and squeezed him. He found himself sinking into the hug. She rubbed his back.

“Dear, oh dear,” she said.

  S
uzette felt him gently release himself from her hug, watched him turn his face away and suggest that while she unpacked he might “make some fucking tea or some shit?,” then he was down the hall. The room felt hardly emptier without him. She hadn’t expected him to look so … gone.

She stood in her old bedroom a moment, trying to reconcile the thin, insubstantial man with the resilient voice she’d heard on the phone just weeks ago.
No, don’t come to the funeral. She’s gone. Thanks, Suze, but Nelson and Quincy need you there. Cate’s folks are looking after me. I’ll be fine.
Suzette chastised herself. She prided herself on being sensitive to people, to being good at reading faces, decrypting moods, and deciphering subtle expressions—yet this huge lapse had occurred and she’d missed her own brother slipping over that twilit border into a dark place.

She lifted her suitcases onto the single bed. The springs let out a familiar squawk. She unzipped the larger case and pulled out her toiletry bag and makeup purse.

She’d failed. She and her mother both. Even before Cate’s accident, he’d had enough death for one lifetime. Now he looked like death himself.

“Tea’s made!” called Katharine from the kitchen, amid the staccato ticking of cutlery on china.

“Okay!”

All this brightness. Pleasant voices and biscuits and tea. No wonder Nicholas was a mess. This was how they’d been taught to deal with grief and heartache: a cup of tea, then back to the washing or into work or on to the bills. Keep busy, don’t worry others, the world’s got enough problems of its own without yours. That was the Lambeth Street motto. Totally fucked.

“Oy!” called Nicholas.

“Coming! Christ …”

Maybe it wasn’t too late. She was here, wasn’t she? She must have sensed something was wrong, because …

She pulled from her suitcase a small parcel wrapped in tissue paper. This might help. She slipped it into her pocket.

“I don’t have sugar any more!” she yelled sunnily, and hurried down the hall.

  K
atharine let her children wash up the dishes, casting her ear into their conversation like an angler who doesn’t really care if she catches a bite. Nicholas asked about his nephew and niece. Nelson was fine. His sixth birthday had a pirate theme and he got too many presents so Suze and Bryan returned half to the stores. Quincy was enjoying her preschool and had taken to looking through Bryan’s old telescope at the moon, which pleased Suzette for some reason.

Katharine went and folded laundry. Her family was together again; well, as much as it could be. So why did being a mother again feel so … empty?

It had been fifteen years and she was happily out of practice. She wasn’t in the mood to play the wise matriarch and offer explanations for how she’d coped when Donald left her in the lurch with two young kids. And she certainly did not want to confess how her heart had jumped to her throat when she saw two policemen at the door a few nights ago; how she’d had the helpless feeling of being wrenched back through time to a rainy night thirty-odd years ago when two constables stood at the same door telling her there’d been a car accident and Don had been at the wheel.

She folded the last towel, smoothing down a sharp crease. No. Her grief was her own, and Nicholas’s was his. He’d have to cope.

And now a child goes missing the very night Nicholas returns. Nicholas had lost a father, a friend, a wife … and now he was back, and more death. When Nicholas was born on a Sunday night in April, Don’s smiles had been peppered with frowns. “Funny day,” he’d kept saying, as if even then he recognized a mark of congenital bad luck on the boy.

“Hey.”

Katharine jumped at Suzette’s voice at her shoulder.

“Hay makes the bull fat,” she replied, trying to disguise her racing heart. Such nonsense. Old wives’ tales and rubbish. “What are you up to?”

“We’re going for a walk. Need anything?”

Katharine nearly blurted,
I need you to stay here.
She bit her tongue.

“Can you pick up some milk?”

A minute later, she was at the window in Suzette’s bedroom, watching her children close the front gate behind them. They walked down toward Myrtle Street, just as they used to twenty-five years ago—her daughter, still with the mop of brown hair she’d had as a child, and her son, tall and fair but with a crane frame so familiar that Katharine could swear it was Donald walking away. The hairs on the back of her neck rose. She had a sudden urge to fling open the window and shout to her little girl, “Get away from him! He’ll get himself killed and you with him!”

She smoothed her dress to wipe the stupid thought away, then went to the living room and turned the TV on loud.

  N
asturtiums blazed cold orange fire on the sloping banks that led down to the train tracks. Two pairs of silver rails curved like giant calligraphy around a far bend. They’d come from the nearby 7-Eleven and let themselves under a rusted chain-link fence to sit on mossy rocks at the top of the bank. From here they could look along to Tallong railway station and its sixty-year-old wooden walkway that crossed above the tracks. Beyond, red and green tin roofs marched through the trees up the suburb’s hills. They reminded Nicholas of pieces in a Monopoly set, playthings in some larger game. He chewed fruit pastilles. Suzette ate caramel corn from a brightly colored bag. Overhead, clouds the color of pigeon wings tumbled in loose ranks. Evening was coming.

The small talk about Bryan, the kids, their school, Suzette’s work, dried up and slid into quiet. As he finished his last sweet, Nicholas braced himself for the turn of the tide. Suzette would start asking about him. She’d ask how he was holding up. She’d see if he’d visited a counselor. She’d tell him it was okay to cry.

But Suzette remained silent. She simply sat beside him, licking her fingers and retrieving the last sugary crumbs from the bottom of the popcorn bag. She seemed content to do so for another hour.

“I don’t like your hair that color,” he said to break the silence.

She licked her fingers. “Fuck you. Bryan does.”

She looked at him. Her eyes were a steely blue, her gaze as solid as granite. He could see why her financial planning business went so well—her clients would be too scared not to believe her if she said “buy now.”

“I heard a boy went missing,” she said.

“They found him in the river …” He nodded to the northeast. “Couple of clicks.”

Suzette kept her eyes on him. “Mum said he was murdered, too.”

Murdered, too
. He knew what she was thinking.
Murdered, like Tristram.

He nodded again.

A stainless-steel train whummed past, sighing as it slowed to stop at the platform. Men in shirts and ties and women in sensible black skirts alighted and started up the wooden stairs of the crossover, heading home.

He saw Suzette was frowning. It was the same concentrated scowl she used to wear solving fractions at the dinner table and correlating statistical charts on her bedroom desk.

“What?” he asked.

She shook her head—nothing.

He looked back at the train station. There was just one person left on the crossover now: a girl in a yellow anorak. From this distance her face was a blur, her hair a dark pistil atop a fluffed golden bloom.

“I’m waiting for you to tell me that I couldn’t have done anything to stop Cate dying.”

Suzette crumpled the empty popcorn bag and shoved it in her pocket. “That it was an accident?” she asked.

“Or some similar platitudes, yes.”

Suzette nodded. “Well. I don’t really believe in accidents.”

Nicholas looked at her again.

“What are you saying?”

“I’m not saying it was your fault.” She met his gaze. “But … nothing happens without a reason.”

He felt a warm knot form in his gut.

“Don’t give me bullshit, Suze. I saw her—”

He bit his tongue. He’d been about to say how he’d seen Cate falling from that invisible ladder time and again, over and over, her dead eyes staring at nothing, then rolling to him, blank as slate, without a trace of the person he’d loved and married. That wasn’t heaven. That was hell.

On the pedestrian overpass, the girl in the yellow anorak pulled up her sleeve. To check her watch, Nicholas guessed. Someone was late meeting her. But then she climbed onto the crossover’s rails, balanced for just a second, then stepped into space.

“Jesus Christ!” Nicholas leapt to his feet and his breath jagged in his throat like a hook.

The girl lay motionless on the track a moment. Her arm lifted a little as she tried to sit … then her anorak seemed to fly apart. She became a small, violent storm of feathers and red as an invisible train tore over her body, dragging pink flesh and one leg and shards of yellow thirty meters up the track. Then she was gone.

“You okay?” asked Suzette. “Nicky?”

Nicholas saw his traitorous hand pointing at the track and willed it to fall by his side.

Suzette looked down at the train line, squinting. “What is it?”

Nicholas looked around. And there, a flash of daffodil two hundred meters away. The girl in yellow was slowly making her way down the steep slope of Battenberg Terrace, her body whole, her face a smudged thumbprint.

Nicholas’s heart was kicking in his chest. He put his hands in his pockets to hide his shaking fingers. Jesus. Would he ever get used to the sight of them?

“Nothing.”

Suzette frowned skeptically. “Uh-huh …”

The sun was now resting on roof ridges in the west, and here in the shadows the air had grown cold. The ground beneath the round lily leaves of the nasturtiums was black. He turned his back to the railway station. He didn’t want to see that again.

Suzette’s careful eyes slid between him and the tracks. Then she cocked her head and fixed Nicholas with a hard look.

“I saw him a couple of times,” she said, and took a breath. “Tris.”

“You saw him more than that. He was over every time his bloody parents wanted a nap.”

Suzette’s eyes were still fixed on him. “No. I saw him
after
he died.”

Nicholas suddenly felt the air grow tight around him. His heart thudded slow, long beats as if his blood had suddenly taken on the consistency of arctic seawater, just a degree away from becoming ice.

“Where?” he whispered.

Suzette looked him in the eye. “Running into the woods.”

She got to her feet, dusted off the back of her jeans.

“Let’s walk.”

  T
hey climbed back through the rusty fence and down onto the road. The sky in the west lost the last of its furnace glow and grew purple and dark. Birds hurried to find shelter before the last light was gone. A cold breeze stiffened.

A month or so after Tristram was found murdered, she’d defied their mother and walked down to Carmichael Road. There, on the gravel path through the grass verge, she’d seen Tristram kneeling, picking something up, then running away into the trees. The sight had scared her senseless.

“I reckon I felt how you just looked,” she said, smiling thinly. “Like you just saw a ghost.”

She watched her brother. His dark eyes were fixed on the cracked footpath. He was motionless. Finally, he spoke.

“Do you still see them?” he asked.

She shook her head. “I saw Tris twice more. I snuck down one afternoon when you were sick, and another time when Mum went to work or something. He did the same thing. Picked something off the path, backed away, ran into the woods.” She shrugged. “But after that, I never saw him again. Or any others.”