My Brother's Keeper - By Donna Malane Page 0,15

It had been stupid to try a walk-by and risk getting caught. Now I needed to decide if I should tell Karen I’d met her daughter; cowardice won. Anyway, I reasoned, the deal with Karen was that I wouldn’t tell her where Sunny was until her daughter had instructed me to. Sunny certainly hadn’t done that. Not yet anyway.

Karen answered on the second ring.

‘Have you seen her?’ she asked, before I’d said a word.

‘There’s a chance I might get to talk to her tomorrow,’ I said. Evasion isn’t exactly lying.

Her breathing was loud in my ear. ‘Good,’ she managed.

‘It’s not confirmed yet,’ I warned.

‘Okay.’

She was grateful for anything I could offer. We chatted for a bit about her mum’s townhouse; I thanked her for letting me stay there; she urged me to make myself at home and to use anything at all. Her phone manner hadn’t got any easier. There were still long hesitations and she held the phone close to her mouth. The sound of her uneven breathing was unnervingly intimate.

‘If I do see Sunny,’ I said, ‘and we can talk privately, is there anything specific you want me to check up on? Anything you’re especially worried about?’

She didn’t respond immediately. I waited. Her breathing had quickened. My normal response in the face of phone silence is to chatter, but I forced myself to wait. I took another sip of wine. Finally she answered. Her voice was so quiet I had to press the phone hard against my ear.

‘It was Justin who introduced me to stuff. To drugs. I’m not saying it was his fault. It was my decision. Well, at first it was my decision, but then I got hooked and then I guess it was …’

I thought for one crazy moment she was going to blame the devil but, whoever or whatever it was, she left it unblamed. I poured myself another wine, taking care not to clink the bottle against the glass.

‘And not the … the killing either. I take full responsibility.’

I wondered how long this had taken. Was it after Falcon’s funeral? Had she taken full responsibility before the first anniversary of his death? Before he would have turned six?

‘It’s important to take responsibility. That’s the only way you can ever forgive yourself.’ So she’d forgiven herself for killing her five-year-old and trying to kill her seven-year-old daughter. Well, good for her. ‘But unless you’ve faced things, admitted your sins to God, I don’t think people change,’ she continued. ‘Not really.’ I took another sip. ‘Do you?’ she asked, taking me by surprise. ‘Do you think people change?’

‘Well, you’ve changed, haven’t you?’ I said. ‘You found God.’ It was impossible for me to say this without sounding sarcastic. Admittedly, it might have helped if I’d uncrossed my eyes.

‘That’s different,’ she said.

‘Uh-huh.’

It’s always a mistake to start a conversation about God, particularly with Christians. Ever since Niki was murdered I’d had trouble taking God seriously. When I was a kid I believed in Him, It, Them — whatever. Niki and I even got our school backpacks blessed by the local priest.

‘Anyway,’ I said, bringing my thoughts back to Karen, ‘is there anything particular you want me to ask Sunny?’

I waited, going over in my mind all the things she might want me to ask her daughter. There was the obvious ‘Can you forgive me?’ question. I could imagine Sunny’s response. The silence went on for so long I tried something else. ‘Or any message from you that you’d like me to give her?’ There were even scarier options here, like: ‘Sorry I tried to kill you’, or ‘Sorry I murdered your little brother’ or even ‘Sorry about stuffing up your life forever’. Maybe she would even go for broke with the old ‘I love you’ chestnut. I hoped not.

‘No,’ she said and let out a long breath, like a sigh. ‘There’s nothing I can say to her, is there? Just check she’s okay. Please.’

The phone went dead. She’d hung up.

I poured myself another glass. My second, I told myself, making that my number two lie for the day. No doubt about it, lying gets easier the more you practise it. There was a new sign going up on the building across the road, ‘Shamrock. Love Business’. Was it an advertisement for a business recruitment firm or a brothel? Hard to tell.

The conversation with Karen supported my suspicion that she didn’t want me to check Sunny was safe but to have me make the first approach on