Stephen Irwin - The Dead Path

“You killed Tristram Boye?”

“Yes.” Teale’s voice was that of a smaller man.

“How?”

“I… I believe I cut his throat.” He explained that he had used a carpet knife from his warehouse.

“Why did you kill him?”

Teale blinked, frowning. The courtroom was so silent that Nicholas heard a train horn sound at the distant railway station.

“Mr. Teale?” urged the magistrate.

“I don’t remember.”

“And transported him to the lot on the corner of Myner Road and Currawong Street?”

“Yes.” Teale’s voice was unconvincing.

“How?”

Again, Teale shook his head. “My car. The trunk of my car, I think. Yes…” Teale shrugged and gave an apologetic smile.

Nicholas felt eyes on his neck, and looked behind.

His mother was watching him, a frown line dividing the brow between her eyes. Her lips smiled, but her eyes kept watching.

W inston Teale was convicted of murder and deprivation of liberty, but hanged himself with his shirt the night before he was due to be sentenced.

Nicholas had no more cause to jump the back fence and run past Mrs. Giles on his way to visit the Boyes.

Cyclone season came and its hail-teeth winds blew away newspapers carrying the photo of his murdered friend.

One school year finished. The river flowed brown. The city sighed a mournful puff of car fumes and stale perfume and electric train ozone, then shrugged her steel shoulders and braced for her footpaths to be stamped upon by New Year’s drunks and her spiry hair stained bright by fireworks.

Time ticked on.

Katharine Close forbade her two children to ever walk past the Carmichael Road woods.

N icholas watched his younger sister alight from the taxi, her chatty, white smile winking at the cabbie unloading her bags. He let the blinds fall and sank on the bed. Suzette hadn’t brought her husband on this trip to see her sad widower brother, nor her children. I’ll be nice, he decided. Answer her questions. Accept her sympathy. Send her home tomorrow.

“Your sister’s here!” called Katharine brightly.

“I know!” called Nicholas in matching tone.

Rattling of the latch, the birdsong of greetings and compliments, rustling of plastic bags, the friendly thump of footsteps. Then Suzette was in the doorway, arms folded.

“Get out of my room.”

The last time he’d seen her was at his wedding in Osterley Park. Her hair was longer, but she was still tall and pale and pretty, with a stance like a bouncer.

“No.”

“It’s my room.”

“Not any more.”

“I’ll tell Mum.”

“Then you’d be a dirty little snitch.”

“ Muuum! ” she yelled, as brutally as a cheated fishwife. “Tell Nicholas to get out of my room!”

“Nicholas, let your sister have her room back,” called Katharine. The smile in her voice suggested she enjoyed this old game.

Nicholas sighed and got to his feet. He walked up to his sister. She grinned. He kissed her cheek. She grabbed him and squeezed him. He found himself sinking into the hug. She rubbed his back.

“Dear, oh dear,” she said.

S uzette felt him gently release himself from her hug, watched him turn his face away and suggest that while she unpacked he might “make some fucking tea or some shit?,” then he was down the hall. The room felt hardly emptier without him. She hadn’t expected him to look so… gone.

She stood in her old bedroom a moment, trying to reconcile the thin, insubstantial man with the resilient voice she’d heard on the phone just weeks ago. No, don’t come to the funeral. She’s gone. Thanks, Suze, but Nelson and Quincy need you there. Cate’s folks are looking after me. I’ll be fine. Suzette chastised herself. She prided herself on being sensitive to people, to being good at reading faces, decrypting moods, and deciphering subtle expressions-yet this huge lapse had occurred and she’d missed her own brother slipping over that twilit border into a dark place.

She lifted her suitcases onto the single bed. The springs let out a familiar squawk. She unzipped the larger case and pulled out her toiletry bag and makeup purse.

She’d failed. She and her mother both. Even before Cate’s accident, he’d had enough death for one lifetime. Now he looked like death himself.

“Tea’s made!” called Katharine from the kitchen, amid the staccato ticking of cutlery on china.

“Okay!”

All this brightness. Pleasant voices and biscuits and tea. No wonder Nicholas was a mess. This was how they’d been taught to deal with grief and heartache: a cup of tea, then back to the washing or into work or on to the bills. Keep busy, don’t worry others, the world’s got enough problems of its own without yours. That was the Lambeth Street motto. Totally fucked.

“Oy!” called Nicholas.

“Coming! Christ…”

Maybe it wasn’t too late. She was here, wasn’t she? She must have sensed something was wrong, because…

She pulled from her suitcase a small parcel wrapped in tissue paper. This might help. She slipped it into her pocket.

“I don’t have sugar any more!” she yelled sunnily, and hurried down the hall.

K atharine let her children wash up the dishes, casting her ear into their conversation like an angler who doesn’t really care if she catches a bite. Nicholas asked about his nephew and niece. Nelson was fine. His sixth birthday had a pirate theme and he got too many presents so Suze and Bryan returned half to the stores. Quincy was enjoying her preschool and had taken to looking through Bryan’s old telescope at the moon, which pleased Suzette for some reason.

Katharine went and folded laundry. Her family was together again; well, as much as it could be. So why did being a mother again feel so… empty?

It had been fifteen years and she was happily out of practice. She wasn’t in the mood to play the wise matriarch and offer explanations for how she’d coped when Donald left her in the lurch with two young kids. And she certainly did not want to confess how her heart had jumped to her throat when she saw two policemen at the door a few nights ago; how she’d had the helpless feeling of being wrenched back through time to a rainy night thirty-odd years ago when two constables stood at the same door telling her there’d been a car accident and Don had been at the wheel.

She folded the last towel, smoothing down a sharp crease. No. Her grief was her own, and Nicholas’s was his. He’d have to cope.

And now a child goes missing the very night Nicholas returns. Nicholas had lost a father, a friend, a wife… and now he was back, and more death. When Nicholas was born on a Sunday night in April, Don’s smiles had been peppered with frowns. “Funny day,” he’d kept saying, as if even then he recognized a mark of congenital bad luck on the boy.

“Hey.”

Katharine jumped at Suzette’s voice at her shoulder.

“Hay makes the bull fat,” she replied, trying to disguise her racing heart. Such nonsense. Old wives’ tales and rubbish. “What are you up to?”

“We’re going for a walk. Need anything?”

Katharine nearly blurted, I need you to stay here. She bit her tongue.

“Can you pick up some milk?”

A minute later, she was at the window in Suzette’s bedroom, watching her children close the front gate behind them. They walked down toward Myrtle Street, just as they used to twenty-five years ago-her daughter, still with the mop of brown hair she’d had as a child, and her son, tall and fair but with a crane frame so familiar that Katharine could swear it was Donald walking away. The hairs on the back of her neck rose. She had a sudden urge to fling open the window and shout to her little girl, “Get away from him! He’ll get himself killed and you with him!”