under my mattress and a Land Rover from the farm, let the air out of the tires on all the other cars to slow us down. By the time we got after her she’d made it to town, ditched the Land Rover at the service station and got a lift from some truckie headed east. The coppers said they’d do their best, but if she didn’t want to be found… It’s a big country.”
He’d heard nothing for four months, while he dreamed of her thrown away on some roadside, picked clean by dingoes under a huge red moon. Then, the day before his birthday, he’d got a card.
“Hang on,” he said. Rustling, a bump; a dog barking, somewhere far off. “Here we go. Says, ‘Dear Dad, happy birthday. I’m fine. I’ve got a job and I’ve got good mates. I’m not coming back but I wanted to say hi. Love, Grace. P.S. Don’t worry, I’m not a pro.’ ” He laughed, that gruff little breath again. “Isn’t that something? She was right, you know, I’d been worrying about that-pretty girl with no qualifications… But she wouldn’t have bothered saying that if it wasn’t true. Not Gracie.”
The postmark said Sydney. He had dropped everything, driven to the nearest airfield and caught the mail plane east to put crappy photocopied fliers on lampposts, HAVE YOU SEEN THIS GIRL? Nobody had called. Next year’s card had come from New Zealand: “Dear Dad, happy birthday. Please quit looking for me. I had to move because I saw a poster of me. I AM FINE so knock it off. Love, Grace. P.S. I don’t actually live in Wellington, I just came here to post this, so don’t bother.”
He didn’t have a passport, didn’t even know how to set about getting one. Grace was only a few weeks off eighteen, and the Wellington cops pointed out, reasonably enough, that there wasn’t much they could do if a healthy adult decided to move out of home. There had been two more cards from there-she’d got a dog, and a guitar-and then, in 1996, one from San Francisco. “So she made it to America in the end,” he said. “God only knows how she got herself over there. I guess Gracie never did let anything stand in her way.” She had liked it there-she took the tram car to work, and her flatmate was a sculptor who was teaching her how to throw pottery-but the next year she was in North Carolina, no explanation. Four cards from there, one from Liverpool with a picture of the Beatles on it, then the three from Dublin.
“She had your birthday marked in her date book,” I said. “I know she would have sent you one this year too.”
“Yeah,” he said. “Probably she would.” Somewhere in the background, something-a bird-gave a loud witless yelp. I thought of him sitting on a battered wooden veranda, thousands of miles of wild stretching all around him, with their own pure and merciless rules.
There was a long silence. I realized I had slid my free hand, elegantly, into the neck of my top, to touch Sam’s engagement ring. Until Operation Mirror was officially closed out and we could tell people without giving IA a collective aneurysm, I was wearing it on a fine gold chain that used to be my mother’s. It hung between my breasts, just about where the mike had been. Even on cold days, it felt warmer than my skin.
“How’d she turn out?” he asked, at last. “What was she like?”
His voice had gone lower, rough at the edges. He needed to know. I thought about May-Ruth bringing her fiance’s parents a house plant, Lexie throwing strawberries at Daniel and giggling, Lexie shoving that cigarette case deep into the long grass, and I had absolutely no clue what the answer was.
“She was still smart,” I said. “She was doing a postgrad in English. She still didn’t let anything get in her way. Her friends loved her, and she loved them. They were happy together.” In spite of everything the five of them had done to one another in the end, I believed that. I still do.
“That’s my girl,” he said, absently. “That’s my girl…”
He was thinking about things I had no way of knowing. After a while he took a fast breath, coming out of his reverie. “One of them killed her, though, didn’t he?”
It had taken him a long time to ask. “Yes,” I said, “he did. If it’s any comfort, he didn’t mean to do it. It wasn’t planned, nothing like that. They just had an argument. He happened to have a knife in his hand, because he was doing the washing up, and he lost his temper.”
“She suffer?”
“No,” I said. “No, Mr. Corrigan. The pathologist says all she would have felt before she lost consciousness is shortness of breath and a fast heartbeat, as if she’d been running too hard.” It was peaceful, I almost said; but those hands.
He said nothing for so long that I wondered if the line had gone or if he had walked away, just put the phone down and left the room; if he was leaning on a railing somewhere, taking deep breaths of wild cool evening air. People were starting to come back from lunch: footsteps thumping up the stairs, someone in the corridor bitching about paperwork, Maher’s big belligerent laugh. Hurry, I wanted to say; we don’t have much time.
Finally he sighed, one long slow breath. “Do you know what I remember?” he said. “The night before she ran away, that last time. We were sitting out on the veranda after dinner, Gracie was having sips of my beer. She looked so beautiful. More like her mum than ever: calm, for once. Smiling at me. I thought it meant… well, I thought she’d settled, finally. Maybe taken a fancy to one of the jackaroos-she looked like that, like a girl does when she’s in love. I thought, That’s our baby, Rachel. Isn’t she gorgeous? She turned out all right, in the end.”
It sent strange things fluttering in my head, frail as moths circling. Frank hadn’t told him: not about the undercover angle, not about me. “She did, Mr. Corrigan,” I said. “In her own way, she did.”
“Maybe,” he said. “Sounds like. I just wish…” Somewhere that bird screamed again, a long desolate alarm call fading off into the distance. “What I’m saying is, I reckon you’re right: that fella didn’t mean to kill her. I reckon it was always going to happen, one way or another. She wasn’t made right for this world. She’d been running away from it since she was nine.”
Maher slammed into the squad room, bellowed something at me, whapped a big piece of sticky-looking cake onto his desk and started disemboweling it. I listened to the static echoing in my ear and thought of those herds of horses you get in the vast wild spaces of America and Australia, the ones running free, fighting off bobcats or dingoes and living lean on what they find, gold and tangled in the fierce sun. My friend Alan from when I was a kid, he worked on a ranch in Wyoming one summer, on a J1 visa. He watched guys breaking those horses. He told me that every now and then there was one that couldn’t be broken, one wild to the bone. Those horses fought the bridle and the fence till they were ripped up and streaming blood, till they smashed their legs or their necks to splinters, till they died of fighting to run.
Frank turned out to be right: we all came out of Operation Mirror just fine, or at least no one ended up fired or in jail, which I think probably meets Frank’s standard for “fine.” He got docked three days’ holiday and got a reprimand on his file, officially for letting his investigation get out of control-with a mess this size, IA needed someone’s head to go on the block, and I got the feeling they were delighted to let it be Frank’s. The media had a shot at whipping up some kind of frenzy about police brutality, but nobody would talk to them-the most they got was a shot of Rafe giving a photographer the finger, which showed up in a tabloid, complete with morally upright pixilation to protect the children. I did my compulsory time with the shrink, who was over the moon to see me again; I gave him a bunch of mild trauma symptoms, let them vanish miraculously over a few weeks under his expert guidance, got my clearance and dealt with Operation Mirror my own way, in private.
Once we knew where those cards had been posted, she was easy enough to track down. There was no need to bother-anything she had done before she hit our patch and got herself killed wasn’t our problem-but Frank did it anyway. He sent me over the file, stamped CLOSED, with no note.
They never found her in Sydney-the nearest they got was a surf stud who thought he had seen her selling ice cream at Manley Beach and had a feeling her name was Hazel, but he was too unsure and too thick to count as a reliable witness-but in New Zealand she had been Naomi Ballantine, the most efficient office receptionist on her temp agency’s books, until a satisfied customer started pushing her to go full-time. In San Francisco she was a hippie chick called Alanna Goldman, who worked in a beach-supplies shop and spent a lot of time smoking pot around campfires; friends’ photos showed waist-length curls whipping in ocean breeze, bare feet and seashell necklaces and brown legs in cutoff jeans. In Liverpool she was Mags Mackenzie, an aspiring hat designer who served drinks in a quirky cocktail bar all week and sold her hats from a market stall at weekends; the photo had her wearing a wide-brimmed red-velvet swirl with a puff of old silk and lace over one ear, and laughing. Her housemates-a bunch of high-octane late-night girls who did the same general kind of thing, fashion, backing
