Where the Dead Go Read online

  A loose knot of worry that has been forming in Dot’s gut pulls tight. She bends at the middle, pressing her hand to the grubby wall, and wheezes again before spluttering through a few asthmatic coughs.

  Her legs are shaky as she makes her way slowly down the stairs.

  Daniel is in the kitchen, dressed in a blue singlet and faded jeans. His bronzed face shines with sweat. Despite the extra weight, he looks remarkably similar to the teenager she once swooned over. If she’s completely honest, a certain look from him can still make her insides lurch with desire, her body somehow immune to the years of pain and suffering.

  Daniel’s eyes are fixed on the mug of tea in front of him. The tea bag hangs out the side, wetness edging along the string to the label. She gets a whiff of the fat from last night’s sausages. Flies buzz above the stack of dishes in the sink, and the sound fills Dot’s head.

  ‘She’s not here,’ Daniel says, the husky rumble of his voice joining the hum of the flies.

  ‘Oh,’ says Dot, trying her hardest to think around the noise, to think of something to say. She clasps then unclasps her hands, before gripping them together again. She swallows. Cold beads of perspiration erupt from her pores.

  ‘I’m going to bloody kill him!’ roars Daniel. Tea sloshes everywhere as he slams his fists on the table.

  SECOND DAY MISSING

  Monday, 11 April

  8.14 am

  Scott slipped away to wherever the dead go in the early hours of Wednesday morning. Three months to the day he was diagnosed with the illness that ravaged his body, trapped his mind and stole his future.

  The illness that drove a stake through our normal.

  The hospital called me just after 10 pm last Tuesday, minutes after Ben had finally fallen asleep and just as I was fixing myself an extra-large whisky. Doctor Dave’s soothing voice informed me Scott had slipped into a coma; after resisting death so stubbornly, he was now catapulting toward it. Jodie had asked Dave to call me, and he was of the view we should come now, if this was what we wanted.

  Dad and Rebecca decided not to go, so it was just Ben and I who stepped out into the night. The wind roused the gum trees above the carport and they spritzed eucalyptus into the air as I bundled Ben into Rebecca’s Volvo. Shutting his door gently, I looked to the ceiling of silver stars and breathed shakily through my fear.

  I steered us through Smithson’s dark streets, gripping my son’s hand across the console, unable to speak. This thing that was about to happen seemed so impossible, no words made sense.

  The hospital glowed eerily and was set to a soundtrack of electronic beeps, expensive machines grimly breathing life into fading humans. I can barely remember guiding Ben through the white corridors, only the harsh smell of disinfectant and the occasional sympathetic look from a nurse.

  Jodie was breastfeeding Annabel when we reached Scott’s room, her free hand gripping Scott’s left one, pain etched so deeply into her expression that I wanted to scream. I can’t remember ever feeling so helpless.

  But Ben, our little boy, was astoundingly fearless, laying his head on the pillow next to Scott’s face and stroking his cheek with his hand. ‘It’s me, Dad,’ he said softly. ‘I’m here.’

  I hung back, hand glued to the doorframe, my chest compressing violently. The ghost of the conversation Scott and I’d had only days earlier taunted me. This was it, I realised. Everything we’d talked about started now.

  After a few minutes, Jodie gave me a pointed look. She sniffed and stood, clutching Annabel to her chest as she moved to the corner of the room.

  My turn.

  I picked up Scott’s free hand, still warm from Jodie’s touch. A hand that until recently had been so capable. So strong. I squeezed gently, looking across his chest to our son. Ben’s eyes were like green marbles, his mouth moving in a silent one-way conversation with his dad.

  The bed shuddered with Scott’s scratchy breaths. My throat swelled as I closed my eyes and said a final goodbye, said sorry, and made silent promises I hoped like hell I could keep.

  My relationship with death is solid. We go way back. We were initially introduced through my mum, who died of an aneurism when I was fourteen, and again a few years later when my first serious boyfriend, Jacob Mason, committed suicide. As a detective I’ve touched death with my bare hands. I’ve circled it, smelled it and looked it straight in the eye. I know it’s never far away. I spend a lot of my life thinking about it, talking about it, even expecting it—and when you confront something over and over, your brain eventually relaxes around it.

  Perhaps this is why I’m so surprised that Scott’s death has rattled me so badly. I’m a shuddery, miserable mess, even though I absolutely can’t be. Every sobering thought of my fatherless son, poor widowed Jodie and blissfully clueless baby Annabel is a stabbing reminder that I have no right to grieve. In life, I treated Scott like a toy I’d grown tired of. I expected so much of him while he expected so little of me. Now, years of regret have surfaced with astounding force. I keep replaying our final conversations in my mind, his words gnawing at my heart. I was terrified of him dying, but now he’s gone I’m really scared.

  Both Mum and Jacob were snatched away, leaving me devastated but stinging with the absolute certainty they had vanished from this world, despite how desperately I wanted them to come back. In contrast, I feel Scott everywhere. He’s watching me curl around Ben at night, our faces soaked with tears. He’s listening as I try to reason with Ben, who has declared he won’t go back to school or respond to his friends’ clumsy messages. Scott’s also listening as I stumble through conversations with his brother, and as I try and fail to say the right thing to Jodie.

  I’m stuck in a bizarre limbo between the life I had in Sydney and this life—back in my home town, but with everything broken and unfamiliar.

  With Scott’s widowed mother too unwell to travel and no other relatives coming from afar, the funeral is arranged at lightning speed. Jodie and Scott confirmed the details over the past few weeks, so it’s just a matter of going through the motions on the conveyor belt of grief. And there seems to be no shortage of people to tell us what needs to happen next.

  I’m grateful to be propelled forward, reluctant to do anything but practical, physical tasks, knowing the mental part of this will be the most difficult. Impossible. Establishing a new life, forming a new plan. In many ways I’m desperate to remain in this holding pattern where the expectations are low. On the other hand, the endless time to think, in the fishbowl that is Smithson, is making me go completely insane.

  On the morning of the funeral, Ben and I barely speak. I shower and pull on a black dress, one I packed with Scott’s funeral in mind. Then I comb out my thick hair and twist it into a low bun, before helping Ben into his new suit, purchased only two days ago.

  ‘Buy him a new suit for the funeral, Gemma,’ Scott said to me, around the time his skin lost the last of its tan. ‘I don’t want him in the same suit he wore to my wedding.’

  I snip off the tags and help Ben gel his hair. Cupping his face in my hands, I stare into his eyes, giving him a firm nod as my jaw wobbles dangerously. He swallows hard and nods back.

  We can do this, but only just.

  The sunlight is a cheerful yellow and I fish around in my handbag for my sunglasses but can’t find them. Ben and I clamber into the back seat of Dad’s Toyota Hilux, which makes me feel like a child. Dad’s profile is solemn as he turns the key. He has combed his grey hair flat, and the woody smell of his aftershave permeates the confined space, making my eyes water. Rebecca sits ramrod straight, her ash bob weighted down by hairspray. A string of fat pearls circles her neck. Every few minutes she dabs at her eyes with a floral-print hanky.

  Peak hour in Smithson has nothing on the madness of Sydney traffic. A modest line of vehicles falls into a convoy, starting and stopping to the beat of the traffic lights. We pass the supermarket, the library, the tattoo parlour. On both sides of the street, kids in school uniform brave the new week in
little clusters, giant backpacks bobbing above their small heads. Women push prams, their lycra-clad legs pumping energetically, sunglasses masking their lack of sleep. Older couples walk dogs.

  We see it all but absorb none of it. We are not part of that world today.

  My phone vibrates with a message from Mac.

  Thinking of you and Ben. I really wish you had let me come to support you. I love you, call me later.

  I picture him pacing the small home office in our apartment, a worried expression on his chiselled face; his kind eyes, his thick blond-grey hair that I love to grab onto when we’re kissing. Tears blur my vision as I tap out a reply and slide my phone into my purse. I miss him, but I was right in not letting him come. Mac doesn’t have a place in today’s narrative and I want to avoid the pointless mental loop of bemoaning how cruelly our life together has been disrupted. There’s plenty of time for that tomorrow, and all the days beyond.

  Cheerful rays of morning sun stream through the car windows as the familiar strains of the ABC Radio news sting roll through the car. The bulletin is spearheaded by a breaking homicide in Fairhaven, a beach town north of Byron Bay. A seventeen-year-old male has been beaten to death in his home, and police are appealing for anyone with information to come forward. They are also seeking information about a missing teenage girl, known to the slain boy, who was last seen at a house party on Saturday night.

  The words ‘missing teenage girl’ turn my blood to ice. Around six months ago I worked an investigation that all but broke me, arguably the lowest point of my career. A game of cat and mouse that played with my emotions, made me question my instincts and tossed me between hope and dread, until I was forced to let go of the last shred of faith I had in humanity.

  Nicki Mara had brought Mac and I together, and in the end she almost tore us apart.

  I grip Ben’s hand as we near the church. In spite of the circumstances, my mind begins to riff off the sketchy details in the news report. Were the dead boy and the missing girl a couple? Friends? Are the two incidents linked? Is the girl still alive? Could she have murdered him?

  My train of thought is interrupted by Dad clearing his throat and flicking off the radio, no doubt deciding we already have enough death and tragedy to deal with today.

  The funeral is unbearable. Ben is like a statue beside me. Jodie weeps loudly a little further along the pew, while baby Annabel’s happy gurgles break every heart in the church. It’s hot and stuffy and I worry first that I will be sick, and then that I will faint. An oversized version of Scott watches me serenely from the easel beside his coffin, almost as if he is waiting for me to fuck up.

  The burial is brief. Scott is lowered into the gaping hole in Smithson’s church graveyard to a soundtrack of muffled crying and shaky breaths. The minister says something about the earth and Scott’s soul, and then it’s over. He’s gone, just like that.

  At the wake, I endure excruciating small talk for what feels like hours but is in fact only twenty minutes. Finally escaping to the kitchen at the back of the church hall, I fill a glass with water and knock it back in two large gulps before refilling it to take to Ben. As I walk away from the sink, exhaustion hits me like a gunshot, sharp through my brain, energy flowing out of me so quickly I worry I’ll collapse. I want to be anywhere but here.

  Josie Pritchard bustles in, an empty plastic tray in her hands, and gives me an efficient once-over that somehow feels both maternal and cool. ‘How are you holding up, dear?’ When she opens the oven, I can feel the heat from where I’m standing. She pulls out the tray and plonks it on top of the cold hotplates, then starts picking up the steaming pastries with her bare hands.

  ‘I’m okay,’ I say, which is a lie but one I know everyone around here is keen for me to keep telling, especially today.

  ‘Terribly sad for your little mite, all this,’ she says absently, arranging the flaking squares in neat rows on two long plates. ‘Especially seeing as he was so happy about finally having a sibling! And poor Jodie, god bless her.’

  I don’t reply, muttering a sound that hopefully passes as polite agreement before I head back into the main room and walk briskly to the outside area. No one knows what to do with me. I’m not Scott’s girlfriend, not his widow, not even his ex-wife. But I’m hardly just an acquaintance. My presence feels like a glitch, a contagious awkwardness.

  I spot my best friend, Candy Fyfe, across the faded green lawn. She’s a beacon of colour in the sea of black mourners, her lilac dress stretching over her huge pregnant belly. I pause abruptly when I realise she is talking to Jodie.

  I’m fighting a strong impulse to throw a tantrum. A giant messy number. I want to beat at the ground with my fists. Roar into the dirt. I want someone to tell me what to do. What the fuck do I do now?

  My old boss Ken Jones, ‘Jonesy’, is on the phone in the shade of the church hall, his spare hand holding a paper plate stacked high with club sandwiches and cake. The creases in his forehead deepen. It must be a work call.

  I join Dad and Rebecca, who are talking to Jack Grace, one of Scott’s long-time work friends.

  ‘God, this is awful, huh?’ he says to me.

  I nod, another wave of hopelessness threatening to drown me.

  ‘When are you heading back to Sydney?’ he asks.

  Everyone’s eyes are on me as goose pimples pepper my arms. ‘I don’t know yet. We need to work out whether Ben will live in Sydney with me, or whether I’ll, um, move back here for a while.’

  Dad’s eyes remain fixed to the ground during this exchange, and Jack looks between us in surprise. ‘Oh, so you’re going to have custody of Ben? I figured he’d keep living with Jodie.’ Jack shakes his head. ‘Wow, that’s massive.’

  ‘Excuse me,’ I say, tripping slightly as I make a beeline for the trestle tables.

  Jonesy strides toward me, his large frame stretching the seams of his dark suit. ‘Woodstock, how are you holding up?’

  I snap back into focus and serve him my standard line. ‘I’m fine.’

  ‘No, you’re not,’ he barks, placing a hand on my shoulder.

  I shrug through fresh tears and throw a hand across my eyes to block out the glare. Where are my bloody sunglasses? I grind my jaw and shift my weight from leg to leg, the rarely worn high heels pinching at my ankles. I’m doing everything I can to avoid going to pieces, but I’m not sure it’s going to be enough. I miss Mac. I miss Sydney. I miss how everything was before Scott’s goddamn phone call.

  Jonesy hustles me sideways, out of the sun. I spot Ben standing with Jodie. His hair gel has fallen out and dark locks drift into his eyes. He doesn’t look eight; he looks like a toddler.

  ‘Is something going on?’ I ask Jonesy. ‘I saw you on the phone before.’

  ‘What? Oh yes.’ He stuffs a triangle of chicken sandwich in his mouth and skilfully manages to talk around it. ‘There’s been a homicide in a coastal town near Byron Bay and they’re looking for a stand-in—the local inspector had a car accident yesterday, if you can believe it. I know him, actually, we did some training together years ago. Anyway, the regional chief called—Tran, I think her name is. She asked me to go but I told her I’ve got an internal investigation starting tomorrow, and there’s no way I can leave the squad unsupervised anyway. Bloody useless, half of them.’

  On the other side of the lawn, Jodie has her hands on Ben’s shoulders, and someone leans forward to hug her. My little boy disappears into a swirl of black fabric. I look down at the grass, where cake crumbs are crowd-surfing along a mob of ants.

  I look up at Jonesy as my heartbeat accelerates to a gallop. ‘I’ll do it. I’ll go.’

  Monday, 11 April

  11.52 am

  I don’t realise I’ve spoken out loud until I see Jonesy’s confused expression. ‘You?’

  ‘Yes. I could go. I could do it. I want to do it.’

  Jonesy’s hairline gleams with sweat, and he almost drops his paper plate as he mops at it with a serviette. ‘What about Ben?’

>   ‘I’ll take him. He hates being here at the moment anyway. Maybe a change of scenery will do us both good. Do you think they have holiday programs up there? That’s what he normally does when school’s not on. Or I’ll get a nanny—if he comes to Sydney with me, I’ll need to do that anyway.’

  Jonesy looks at me doubtfully. ‘Are you serious, Gemma? I know the last few weeks have been really tough on you, and today’s obviously very difficult, but I really think—’

  ‘I’m totally serious. Let me speak to Ben, and then you can call the chief back and tell her I’ll come. I can’t stay here anyway, it’s killing me.’

  Someone has moved the photo of Scott to the rear of the hall, and people have formed a line to say goodbye to Jodie and offer their final condolences. Soon, I assume they will slink away to drink heavily and reflect on the tragedy of a young life cut short.

  After tugging Ben away from where he’s standing with Rebecca, I quickly explain the situation in Fairhaven.

  He doesn’t hesitate. ‘I want to come with you.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ I say, holding his chin and looking into his eyes.

  He nods vigorously. ‘I don’t want to stay here.’

  I walk back over to Rebecca.

  ‘Gemma, you can’t just leave,’ she says, her grey eyes alarmed. ‘You need to talk to your dad.’

  But the desire to escape is coursing through me. ‘No, we have to get going,’ I say.

  She desperately scans the crowd. ‘Please let me find Ned first.’