North of Nowhere, South of Loss Read online

  Laura called Qantas. The flight to New York via Los Angeles left at 4 p.m. Jilly would have lots of time then, after check-in, to make a call. Could Qantas confirm that a Ms Jilly White was a passenger? No, Qantas didn’t give out that kind of information over the phone.

  Midday, Laura couldn’t stand it. She felt ill. She’d have to swallow her pride and phone her former husband’s secretary. No, wait. If there’d been a problem, the secretary would have phoned. Laura would wait. If she hadn’t had a call by 4 p.m., then she’d phone.

  At 1.45 p.m. the phone rang and Laura leapt on it. “Jilly?”

  “Uh, Sergeant Layton, ma’am.”

  “Oh,” she said disoriented. “Oh yes, was it Goodna?”

  “What? Oh, you mean about Voss. Uh, well, I’ve got someone working on that for you, but, um, actually, I’m not calling about that, Mrs White. I’m calling about your daughter.”

  Laura went weak at the knees. “Yes?” she said faintly.

  “Can you tell me exactly where she is, exactly?”

  “She’s in Sydney, she’ll probably be on her way to the airport by now. I’m terribly worried, as a matter of fact, that she hasn’t phoned yet.”

  “Mind if I come round, Mrs White? I have to ask a few questions, that’s all.”

  “Sure,” Laura said faintly. She leaned against the wall and slid down it slowly and sat on the floor till the door bell rang.

  “The thing is,” Sergeant Layton said. “Your husband’s secretary –”

  “Former husband,” Laura said sharply.

  Tell me, tell me, her nerves screamed. What’s happened to Jilly?

  “Yes, excuse me. Your former husband’s secretary said your daughter never got off the bus –” Laura heard the rest as from a great distance – “so she called your former husband in New York. Seems like he has a few friends in powerful places. Suddenly I have half the big brass in New South Wales breathing down my neck.” He shook his head as though clearing it of Sydney frenzy. “Never known anything escalate so fast in my life. Probably all a mountain out of a molehill. Hope so, anyway.” In the long run, he implied, easy-going Brisbane common sense could be expected to prevail.

  “The thing is, your former husband does have legal access for holidays, and he’s, ah, laying charges, it appears. He’s accusing you of abduction. Hiding her, so she wouldn’t be able –”

  “But for God’s sake, where is she?” Laura cried, surfacing from shock. “If she wasn’t on the bus, where is she?”

  Sergeant Layton sighed deeply. There was nothing so ugly as custody battles, nothing so savage as marital revenge, nothing so skilful as the acting he’d seen on both sides. “Are you countercharging your former husband with kidnapping, Mrs White?”

  “What?” For a second, Laura’s eyes flashed with hope, but she shook her head dully. “No,” she said. “There’d be no point. She was on her way to him anyway. He knew he could easily keep her there, if that’s what he wanted.”

  “Let’s get back to the bus terminal,” Sergeant Layton said. “You put her on the bus, and you watched it leave. What time was that?”

  “I didn’t actually put her on the bus,” Laura said wretchedly. “She didn’t want me to come inside the terminal. I saw the bus leave at 3 p.m., but I didn’t actually put her on it.”

  “You cannot swear to the fact that she was on the bus?”

  “She was on it, well she must have been on it … No, I suppose I can’t actually swear …”

  Sergeant Layton said sternly: “You drop a thirteen-year-old kid off at a bus terminal full of riffraff and God-knows-who and let her fend for herself? That’s not gonna look too good in court, is it?”

  “No,” Laura said in a small voice. She could see that it would not. Neurotic and overpossessive, or negligent: those were the choices. It seemed to her that whatever mothers did was wrong. She found herself guilty on every count.

  Sergeant Layton turned gruff: “Listen,” he said. “Husbands and wives think they know each other, but they don’t. Parents think they know kids. Ten to one, she never got on the bus. Or she got off at Tweed Heads and bolted. No.” He held up a hand to ward off her shocked interruption. “I know you know she wouldn’t do that. But it happens all the time, just the same. Happens in nice middle-class suburbs like The Gap. Have you any idea how many runaways we track down every week? Sometimes they want to give their parents a scare. And sometimes they just want to go off for a while and think, get away from the push and pull. Nine times out of ten, they turn up with their tails between their legs when the money runs out.”

  “Please find her,” Laura said.

  “We got a full scale search on, Mrs White. But we also got an ex-husband laying charges. And we got another funny little thing here that came up on the computer trace.”

  He fumbled in his pocket and handed her a police printout. She read it blankly.

  Re: Laurence J Voss. Credit card search indicates that subject is currently living at Settlement Road, The Gap, in Brisbane, under assumed name of Laura White.

  “Amazing, those electronic-search brains,” Sergeant Layton said, watching her closely. “Pretty hard to fool them. They’re like an octopus, they suck in dental visits, credit card purchases, phone calls, mail-order lists, you can’t rent a video without they keep tabs on you and then match things up.”

  She couldn’t tell if she was being asked to take the printout seriously or not. “So Mr Voss is a woman and I’m him,” she said drily.

  “They’re not laughing at CIB,” he said. “Sort of link-up that rings bells on a police computer.”

  “I can’t believe this.” She could feel something indecent, black laughter maybe, gathering like steam about to blow. “I ordered something from one of his mail-order catalogues. I left the order form in his name, and wrote in my credit card number.”

  “And why did you use his name?”

  “I don’t know. No particular reason. It was already set up that way, and the delivery address was the same. It was just less trouble, that’s all.”

  “Maybe,” he said. “Or maybe you wanted to confuse the issue. Maybe you wanted to draw attention away from yourself. Maybe you want us to think Mr Voss abducted your daughter. You seemed very keen for people to believe he was at your party. I’m just telling you how it looks.”

  How it looks, she thought blankly. How does it look? When he left, she went and sat by the pond but she couldn’t bear Caliban’s smile. Was it a smile? What was it? Was anything the way it looked?

  Laura had never known time to pass so slowly. She sat on the verandah and stared at the jasmine. Mrs Spicer came with little cakes and pikelets and sympathy. There must have been strong reasons of course, Mrs Spicer said, with a soft click click of her tongue. There must have been strong reasons why Jilly wanted to visit her father, and why her father was so hasty, click click, click click, and why Jilly told that story about the man in the red Toyota. Click click, she said. Click click.

  “Yes,” Laura said vaguely.

  Mrs Spicer told Milly Layton that you had to wonder about a woman who was so secretive, and who kept to herself so much. “She never pruned a thing in that garden,” Mrs Spicer said. “You have to wonder why.”

  “You have to wonder,” her former husband said icily, over the phone from New York. “You have to wonder what goes on in your mind, Laura. Quite frankly, Caroline and I think this is something you’ve cooked up between the two of you, though I hold Jilly blameless. Brainwashing’s a dirty piece of work. I think this Voss is a figment of your imagination, a red herring. I think you wanted to get at me.”

  Laura searched her memory to see if he could be right. Had they cooked something up? Hadn’t she, secretly, really wanted to keep Jilly from him? How did it look? She couldn’t feel confident about any of her motives. Her memory of the sequence of things had gone slack, like butter left out in the Brisbane heat. She felt her cheeks and chin and mouth with her fingertips, in trepidation, for fear Caliban’s obscene leer was
lurking beneath her skin. She was afraid she might have done fearful things she could not remember.

  “But if I’m wrong,” her ex-husband said, “If something’s really happened to her, I hold you fully responsible.”

  That seemed to Laura fair, and no more than the charge she laid against herself.

  Sergeant Layton came back. “Our investigative branch has come up with something on Voss,” he said, “that lends weight to your side of the story.”

  Yes, it was Goodna where Voss had been committed, but for quite a short time. In the wake of the murders of his wife and daughter, he’d been suffering from shock. “Post-traumatic stress disorder,” the psychiatrist called it. No history of instability before that. Used to be a horticulturalist of some standing, used to lecture at the Queensland University of Technology. Sedation and counselling till the worst of the shock wore off, that was the treatment. Fairly straightforward really, then he’d been discharged. There’d be long-term effects of grief and anger and disorientation, which would gradually lessen. And possibly there’d be times when a trigger incident would make him re-experience the trauma. This could be intense, as vivid as the actual event.

  “Happens to war vets all the time,” Sergeant Layton said. “Shell shock, we used to call it. Now they got this fancy name for it. Basically, though, Voss would be all right. And he was getting regular counselling as an outpatient, no worries there. And here was the crucial thing: he was haunting the scene of the trauma like a ghost, his psychiatrist knew all about that, it was par for the course. He’s your man in the red Toyota all right. Takes some of the suspicion off you.”

  “Sergeant Layton, it’s Jilly I’m worried sick about. Would he do anything to Jilly? I mean, when you talk about trigger incidents, what …?”

  “Ah, on that score, not a thing to worry about. Stuffing’s taken right out of him, poor bugger. Worst he’d do would be cry in Jilly’s lap. Great relief, eh?”

  “Yes,” Laura said. She told herself she felt relieved.

  “Atta girl!” he laughed. “Ten to one she’ll turn up of her own accord.”

  A police van pulled up outside Laura’s house and two constables came to the door.

  “Laura White?” one of them asked.

  “Yes?”

  “We have to ask you to come with us, Mrs White. We have an order for your re-committal.”

  “My what?” Wheels spun in Laura’s head: it’s to do with Voss, he’s flipped again, he’s done something. “I think there’s been a mistake,” she said. “Don’t you want Mr Laurence Voss?”

  The officer looked uncertain. His partner said in a low quick voice: “When you’ve done this as many times as I have, you’ll know. They always claim it’s a mistake. Then they get violent.”

  “Look,” Laura said, getting angry. “This is a mistake. I’ve never been committed once, so how could I be re-committed? It’s the former owner, Mr Voss, you’re after. Call your own Sergeant Layton from my phone, and you’ll find out.”

  “Tell you what, ma’am.” The officers had her arms now, and were treating her with the kind of wary patronising gentleness reserved for the dangerously mad. “We’ll call Sergeant Layton after you come with us, how’s that?”

  Laura sat in the cage in the back of the van and told herself: I must not dissipate my strength in rage. I must stay calm. This will all be sorted out very quickly.

  It was sorted out, of course, though not quite as quickly as Laura had hoped. Sergeant Layton himself, wreathed in apologies and shame, came to pick her up at Goodna.

  “Thing is,” Sergeant Layton said, “the psychiatrist suddenly realised this was happening a week ago, it’s not that uncommon. Well, it is uncommon, but not after very severe trauma. The boyfriend that ran off with Voss’s wife, see, the boyfriend killer … well, the very thought was unbearable. Unbearable. So the mind switches places. Mind’s a funny clever bugger in its way. He’s, uh, we think he believes he’s the killer. He’s become the boyfriend, you see?”

  Laura saw. Abused kids become abusers, there were children in Auschwitz who had worshipped their guards. She’d read about this.

  “Psychiatrist signed the forms a week ago.” Sergeant Layton sighed. “Government bureaucracies, damn them. The right-hand memo never knows what the left is doing till it’s too bloody late. And then the flaming police computers step in.” He pulled up in front of her house and said gruffly: “The implications aren’t good, I’m afraid.”

  “No,” she said. “I see that.”

  The one thing she had to hold on to was that Jilly would never accept a ride from a stranger in a red Toyota. She was certain of that.

  She couldn’t sit by the pond. The place seemed to her humid with evil. And she understood, now, the meaning of Caliban’s leer. It was the laugh of someone who had looked at horror, because horror was a jokester, no questioning that. And this was the grimmest joke in horror’s bag: that the innocent and the damaged were capable of fearful crimes.

  The serpent swallows its tail, she thought. The victim eats the man with the knife.

  She couldn’t bear to stay in the house. She drove about aimlessly, restlessly, in her blue Mazda. She remembered the day she’d bought the house, the day Jilly had sat outside in the street in the same blue car, listening to the radio, while Mr Voss watched them both.

  She remembered the day she’d stood with him by the pond and watched his reflection watching hers, just the two of them. Four, counting statues. Eight, if you counted reflections.

  What is evil? she wondered. How does it look?

  On the seventh day, a baggage loader for the Blue Coach company admitted something under police interrogation. He confessed that on the day Jilly disappeared, a man waiting in a car out the back in the loading bay had given him ten dollars. He was to go inside and tell the young woman with the grey and yellow duffel bag that her mother was waiting in the car with something she’d forgotten.

  The baggage loader had been suspicious. “Her mother?” he’d said pointedly.

  The man had lifted up a parcel. “Yes, her mother. She forgot this. Her mother sent me racing into town with it. Tell her to come out to the loading bay.”

  When the girl came out, the baggage loader pointed to the car. No, it wasn’t a red Toyota; it was a blue Mazda. He noted that the man was no longer in it, but the parcel was on the seat. “That’s it,” he told her. “That’s what you forgot.”

  He saw the girl open the door on the passenger side and reach for the parcel, but after that he hadn’t paid attention. He’d gone back to loading baggage on the bus.

  * *

  Laura felt as though she were on a very long journey into nowhere. She had a sense of desert waste and blowing sand and bleached bone. When, as though in a nightmare, Sergeant Layton appeared again at her door, she thought he might have been a mirage.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. Pieces of words blew about, scuds of sand, blue Mazda, Jilly’s body, in the boot, but she couldn’t put them together. Sergeant Layton went on talking like a face in a silent film, “Same model as yours, different plates. Not much comfort, but he blew his own brains out afterwards …” Laura couldn’t hear a thing. There was such a roaring in her head, such searing pain, it felt as though her skull was blowing out.

  UNPERFORMED EXPERIMENTS

  HAVE NO RESULTS

  You could say it began with the man in the canoe rather than with the dream, though I can no longer be certain of the sequence of events. It is possible, after all, that the letter arrived before either the dream or that frail and curious vessel, though I do not think so. I used to be without doubts on this matter. Chronology used not to be even a question. But since the disappearance, trying to catch hold of any kind of certainty has been like catching hold of water.

  Sometimes, when a tradesman or a parcel delivery man comes to the door, I have to restrain myself, by a fierce act of the will, from grabbing him by the lapels or by the denim coverall straps and demanding: “What do accidents mean, do you
think? Do you have an opinion? Are you a gambling man? Have you ever been spooked by coincidence?” The truth is, I have become obsessed with the patterns of chance – the neatness of them, the provocation such neatness gives – but chance is a subject that very much resists scrutiny, and the more I ponder random conjunctions of events, the more intensely I try to focus my memory, the hazier things become. You cannot, as the physicists keep telling us, engage in the act of close observation without changing the thing observed. Of course I resort to such analogies because it is Brian who is dying.

  Nevertheless, though it may or may not be the first cause, I will start with that afternoon on my dock and with the man in the canoe. It was a late summer afternoon and very humid, and the forecast – for thunder storms – was sufficient to keep most boats in marinas. There were white-caps on the lake and the river. When I looked east, I could see the pines on the tip of Howe Island bending like crippled old men in the wind. Westward, past the Spectacles, past Milton Island, I thought I could just see one of the ferries, veiled in great fans of spray, crossing the neck of the lake. Wolfe Island, directly opposite, was invisible, or almost so, behind a billowing indigo cloud that threw the whole head of the river into twilight, although it was only about four o’clock in the afternoon.

  I was right at the end of my dock, and I had a book propped on my knees, but the wind kept buffeting my light aluminium deck chair to such an extent that I began to wonder if it was aerodynamically possible to be lifted up on a gust and dumped into the water. I kept looking up over the page, partly to assess my chances of staying dry, but mostly to enjoy the extravagant theatre of wind and water. And then, startled, I thought I saw a canoe emerging from the bateau channel between Howe Island and the shore.

  I’m imagining things, I decided, rubbing my eyes. Who would be so foolhardy on such a day? Or so strong, for that matter. Here, the currents are swift and ruthless. Every summer, bits and pieces of our ageing dock disappear, and end up, no doubt, somewhere around Montreal; every winter the pack ice brings us splintered paddles and fragments of boats bearing registration marks from Toronto, Niagara, and even, once, from Thunder Bay. I shaded my eyes and squinted. Nothing there. Wait … Yes, there it was again, a canoe, definitely, with a solitary paddler, heading upriver against all this mad seaward-running energy.