The Husband's Secret(59)
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 afterward Rachel found that one photo of them together at someone’s party. He was laughing at something Janie said.
And then all those years later, he got the job at St. Angela’s. She hadn’t even recognized 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 hadn’t known 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, my working here,” he’d said.
“It’s perfectly fine,” she’d said curtly, and that was the last time they ever spoke of it.
She had considered resigning. Working at Janie’s old primary school had always been bittersweet. Little girls with skinny Bambi 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, picking up Janie and Rob and taking them for ice cream; their flushed little faces. Janie had been at high school when she died, so Rachel’s memories of St. Angela’s weren’t tarnished by her murder. That is, until Connor Whitby turned up, roaring his horrible motorbike through Rachel’s soft, sepia-colored memories.
In the end, she’d stayed out of stubbornness. She enjoyed the work. Why should she be the one to leave? And, more important, 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 more cold water to the bath.
“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 folding 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 heard anything. Nobody saw anything. “The not fucking knowing.”
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 both took a mutual, violent dislike to the red-faced man, and they stopped going to the support group because of him.
People thought that tragedy made you wise, that it automatically elevated you to a higher, more 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.