When She Was Bad(29)

As he shrugged on his jacket and got ready to tear himself away, she put a restraining hand on his arm. He was surprised to feel her fingernails digging into his flesh.

‘Tread very carefully, Ewan.’ Though her voice was as high-pitched and girlish as ever, her eyes when they met his were suddenly hard and he felt a prickle of cold on the back of his neck.

‘You could go far in the company. Don’t blow it.’

Did she know that Chloe was waiting outside? Was that what the warning was about?

His thoughts, after he’d said his goodbyes and threaded his way through the post-work drinkers, were a heavy mix of apprehension, confusion and disappointment.

‘Where have you been? I thought you were never coming.’ Chloe peeled herself off the wall she’d been leaning against and looked up at him, pouting.

He felt a rush of irritation.

‘Come on then, if you’re coming.’

And when she took hold of his hand a few metres up the road, he imagined she was someone else.





16

Anne



From the outside, the house where Laurie grew up wasn’t a million miles away from the house in which she now lived with Jana and her family. A different suburb, but the same wide tree-lined streets, the same sense of everything being exactly as it should be. The house itself was situated on the corner plot of a block, set back from the road with only the overgrown lawn and scraps of police crime tape, still fluttering uselessly from garage handles and porch posts, to show that anything untoward had ever happened here.

‘The American dream, right?’ said the heavyset man behind the wheel as the Pontiac in which we were travelling pulled up to the kerb.

Sergeant Dean Cavanagh had been sitting in the driver’s seat when he picked us up from the medical school, and it wasn’t until he was out of the car that his true size was revealed. The man was enormous. Next to him, Ed Kowalsky seemed insubstantial, as if the policeman could snap him in two like a twig if he so decided.

‘You kinda expect a big spooky old place with turrets, doncha? Maybe a coupla bats flying around the top.’

Sergeant Cavanagh hoisted up his pants so the waistband nestled just under the hang of his belly. I stared at the gun that revealed itself as his suit jacket swung open. Nowadays I wouldn’t turn a hair. I’ve seen guns a lot closer up than that. But standing outside that house where so many unspeakable things had happened, I shivered at the sight of that moulded metal glinting in the sun and glanced quickly away towards the neighbouring house.

‘You gotta ask yourself what exactly they were doin’ in there, right?’ said Sergeant Cavanagh, misinterpreting my look. ‘I mean, you’re telling me all those years they never heard nothing? No shouting? No screaming? No little kids crying?’

‘As I understand it, the neighbours never knew there was a second child in there.’

Ed seemed to be trying to make himself look taller, raising himself high and straight out of his brown suede desert boots. I wondered if it was a response to the gun, whether he felt threatened by it. Whatever the case, the policeman wasn’t impressed.

‘Ya see what ya wanna see, hear what ya wanna hear. Sometimes it’s easier just not to know. Get my drift?’

There was still a car in the driveway, a Buick with a child’s booster seat in the back. As we walked past, I saw Ed Kowalsky hesitate and knew he was thinking about the seats in his own car, and his own children, and for the first time I wondered what toll this case might be taking on him. I’d never thought before about his wife or the three small faces smiling gappily out from the framed photo on the desk back in his university office two doors down from the one I occupy today. For the first time I allowed for the possibility that he might exist outside of his relations with me, that he might have layers concealed underneath the surfaces he showed me. Already, even at that stage, I’d begun what has turned into a lifelong habit of trying to corral and order events into a set pattern in my head, rather than reacting to them as and when they arise, and this evidence that Professor Kowalsky might have a rich, hidden life did not sit well with the narrative I’d created. My husband Johnny always used to tell me to stop writing the end of the story before it had a chance to evolve naturally. When we divorced after just three years of marriage, he considered himself vindicated.

The porch area of the house was accessed via two steps from the front path. I was wearing shoes with a small heel that gave me an uneven, hesitant walk, and as I placed my right foot tentatively on the first step, that’s when I first felt it – that sense of treading where her small foot had gone, looking at the same things she’d have seen . . . the white paint peeling on the post underneath my fingers, the small tear in the screen door up by the top left-hand corner. There was a neglected jasmine plant growing up the far side of the porch and I imagined how it would have smelled to her on summer days, the heady scent rising to meet her as she came home from kindergarten in the afternoons. How did she feel as she climbed these two steps towards her front door? I asked myself. Was she apprehensive? Did she wonder what kind of atmosphere would greet her today? Did she glance down towards the line of vented bricks at the base of the porch and feel a tug of . . . what? A sense that things were not right, that she was part of something that other people would find unacceptable. Did her heart start hammering in her narrow little chest? Did she clutch on to her school bag as if the connection to school and everything that was good and proper and normal might offer some protection against whatever was inside the house?