white buildings and red roofs, with cars glinting in the sunlight. In the mid afternoon on a working day, as she crossed by the road bridge, racing a commuter train in the distance and beginning her ascent towards the Central Coast, the river was still a boundary line.
Travelling across it had always had a peculiar bitter-sweetness for her.
Today, she felt a shiver of anticipation, of energy, down her spine.
This energy lasted as long as it took her to reach Kariong, to be shown into the office and meet a man who wanted to spend as little time as possible speaking to her. Sooner than expected, she was back out in the car park ringing the boss.
‘Harrigan.’
‘It’s Grace here.’
‘Yeah?’
‘I’m afraid I’ve got some not very good information. I’m at Kariong but Greg Smith isn’t. He’s been bailed.’
‘You’re joking. Who bailed him? When?’
‘Preacher Graeme Fredericksen. He bailed Greg from the Children’s Court at Parramatta early this afternoon while I was still on my way up here.’
‘He’s finally surfaced, has he? So why didn’t anyone tell us? Why weren’t we involved in this?’
‘They don’t seem to want to include us in this at all. They didn’t get any warning themselves, or so they’re telling me. Two departmental officers arrived in a government car at lunch time and picked him up.
The paperwork came down from the department with some very senior signatures on it.’
‘Is he with the preacher now? Have they gone back to his refuge or whatever it is?’
‘That’s who Greg left the court with. But I can’t reach anyone at the refuge and I can’t raise the preacher. No matter what number you ring, you only get through to the voice mail. They’re shut down to the world. I can tell you they left the court in the refuge van at about 2:45, but that’s all the information I’ve got.’
‘Get back in here as soon as you can. I’ll take it from here.’
It had been a pointless journey. Driving back out onto the expressway Grace looked down the Gosford road, thinking of home, knowing it was just a short drive to her father’s house at Point Frederick on the Broadwater and wondering what he was doing now. He could be in his study, caught up in his work, writing research papers and speeches, or standing in his back garden on the edge of the water, wondering why things had worked out the way they had. She hadn’t the time to go and see him now, however much she might want to. She had work to do.
Grace sped up over Mooney-Mooney Bridge, heading back to the city. From about fourteen onwards, she could have found herself in a stolen car being driven too fast along this same freeway; the pleasure she had taken in the speed was with her as she drove now. Back then, the acceleration had been in her own head, she had wanted to get inside the sense of the speed itself, to let go completely, shouting at the driver (some other kid, completely spooked by her) go faster, let’s smash through something. They never had smashed anything — their car or another or the sandstone embankment — all they had done was to come very close. She had to admit it, she had wanted to save that lost boy’s life. Now all she could do was draw the line Harrigan had talked about.
When she reached the office, neither the preacher nor the boy had been found and every available person was out searching for them. She stopped in the doorway to Harrigan’s office, hesitating. He was on the phone and gestured to her to wait. As he hung up, he looked at her expectantly.
‘I’ve got the paperwork from Kariong for you if you want to see it,’
she said, feeling cold as she spoke. ‘It looks like they used the psychiatric assessment as a lever to get him out.’
‘Yeah.’ He was distant, unreadable. ‘Leave it with me, would you, Grace? I don’t have time to talk now. Okay?’
‘Sure,’ she said.
She went back to her desk, hiding behind her make-up and scrubbing out a sharply felt disappointment.
Not long after, Louise knocked discreetly on Harrigan’s door and put a message on his desk. It was the transcript of an email they had retrieved from the trash file on Toby’s computer.
Harrigan nodded as he read it.
‘Keep me posted,’ he said, and buried his head in his paperwork, working at a murderous pace, driving all other thoughts out of his head.
17
In the afternoon, Lucy woke from her electronic dreams to a curious sense of lassitude. It was the sixth day since the shooting. The thought ‘I am here’ was voiced in her mind as an acknowledgement that she was as good as imprisoned there. Events had slipped into suspension. Elsewhere in the house, her father slept his narcotic sleep.
After they had spoken to each other, he had withdrawn into his bedroom, shutting the door against her, holding her at bay. Out in the rest of the world, everything existed in an uneasy stability. She had the sense that neither she nor the preacher could move without initiating violence. She felt the threat of it in the same way that she might have listened to the sound of someone she feared approaching her from a distance.
She left her room to go and wash. At her door, she stopped and looked down the corridor at the closed door to her father’s bedroom.
She only had to walk in there and say, ‘I’m here, Dad. I just told you, you owe me. Can’t you give a bit, the smallest bit?’ Words that became a craving as she thought them. He had nothing to give her, that door was closed against her, she could not expect to find any mercy in there.
If she walked into his room with those words, he would turn his back to her and wrap himself in impenetrable silence and deafness. He sent whispered messages through Melanie, asking her not to leave, saying he still wanted to see her but only if she was kind to him, because he was a dying man. Come and be my friend before I die, he whispered to her through her sister, there’s no point in accusations. She could not use her gun against that whispered voice.
In the bathroom, she washed herself carefully. Her bleeding had stopped by now but she still washed herself several times a day, polishing her unfamiliar skin and body as a child might. She sat on the edge of the bathtub, carefully drying the soft skin of her vagina, then dressed herself, thinking that no one could touch her now. She traced the edge of her face as she looked at herself in the mirror, unnerved by the awareness that this mask and no other was her face. She felt she was inhabiting herself the way a ghost might take possession of someone else’s body.
As she came downstairs into the hallway, she heard the television in the lounge room. From the kitchen she heard softer voices, Melanie and Stephen speaking to each other, words that were partly indistinct but which seemed to be about everyday things. She stopped at the open door, to see Stephen smoking as he sat at the table reading the day’s paper, while Melanie stood at the bench slicing potatoes. He looked up and smiled at her.
‘Hi, Luce,’ he said.
‘Hi.’
This single syllable filled the air like a breath finally expelled and the past overlaid the present, going back years. It was late at night. She had left her room immediately after her father had and was going to the bathroom to wash herself. When she came out, she saw her father walking downstairs and then Stephen standing in the hallway watching them both. He was staring at her with his mouth open and his face white. He did not speak to her, he turned and went downstairs to the kitchen after their father. She stood at the top of the stairs, too frightened to move, listening. She heard the sound of Stephen’s quieter voice but she could not make out the words. In the cold and silent house, she heard her father shouting with that sudden anger he had, and then the sound of someone at first being hit and then crashing to the floor. She ran downstairs to find Stephen with his knee cracked on the laundry floor, rolling about in pain. She could say nothing; he gripped on to her while he refused to make a sound. Her father was eating a slice of bread, something. He finished, brushed himself down and then called an
