I let the sarcasm sit there. She had every right to be smart-arsed. It had been unfair of me to catch her unprepared. Once I was out of here I would beat myself up for getting it so wrong, but right now my priority was to stop Justin doing that job for me. Hands on hips in a clichéd posture of an angry man, his eyes swung from Sunny to me and back again. He saw his daughter was close to tears and took control.
‘Look, I don’t want you here in our home,’ he said. Unfairly, I thought, given that it was he who had ushered me in there. Sunny gave him a look. It wasn’t one I could interpret, but Justin had. He scrabbled around in his wallet and threw a business card in my lap.
‘Come to my office tomorrow, ten o’clock. We’ll talk there.’ I pocketed the card. ‘Now you can fuck off,’ he said, opening the back door for emphasis.
I placed a card of my own on the table. Gym shoes squeaking, I made the long trek across the floor. I made it all the way across the eight metres of polished recycled rimu without Justin thumping me in the ear. I’d count that as my best achievement of the day.
‘I might be there or I might not,’ Sunny called, with all the pluck of a poleaxed fourteen-year-old.
‘We’ll decide on that tonight,’ Justin amended. ‘As a family.’
He was addressing Sunny, not me, but I caught the response from her. It was a definite sneer. Was it the word ‘family’ she was reacting to? Hard to tell with teenagers. They do make a point of sneering at everything.
The decor of the townhouse was low-key designed living space, three floors, plus a garage, laundry and storage area underneath. There was no one hiding in the wardrobe or the showers. I checked. But there were women’s clothes in the main bedroom’s wardrobe and a few men’s shirts and jackets in the smaller bedroom, facing the unit’s common area.
A big antique clock ticked the minutes away as I studied the cluster of photos on the wall in the spare bedroom. It was a poignant soundtrack by which to study these captured moments in time. They were arranged in a semblance of chronology, starting with studio family portraits of Karen as a toddler with her mother and father. They were quite formal for the 1980s. There was no sign of other siblings. Parenting can be a big learning curve for someone who’s grown up with no little brothers or sisters to look after. Still, ‘learning curve’ is a long way from murder. The most recent photos were of Karen’s mother, Norma, in the company of a benign-looking bearded man. He looked a good decade older than her, but from the camera’s point of view, they made a happy-looking couple.
In one of these photos a good-looking guy in his late twenties was squeezed proprietorially between the two of them. I pieced together the narrative of the family’s life: Karen was an only child and after her dad died Norma had remarried. The looker in the photo was her new husband’s son from a previous marriage.
One photo of Karen with Sunny and Falcon was set apart from the others, centred above a small oak side table on which a wooden cross and candle were placed. Judging from the age of the kids, the shot must have been taken shortly before Karen drove the car into the lake. Sunny leaned against the bonnet of an olive-green two-door Holden hatchback. Knock-kneed and ridiculously skinny, enormous sunglasses hid her expression. Falcon was unsmiling, his arm stretched towards the car as if reaching to anchor himself. Karen was in the driver’s seat. She was looking at the camera with what seemed to me like a look of defeat. I chided myself for reading way too much into the image. This was me trying to understand how anyone could have driven their two children into a lake. Then it occurred to me that this was probably the car. If I was right, then it was a morbid choice of images for Norma to hang on the bedroom wall, even with the reverential cross and candle keeping it company. I went in search of a glass to fill to the brim with the wine I’d brought.
Feet up and alcoholic sustenance in hand I could now comfortably kick myself for stuffing up the first meeting with Sunny.