was worrying how happy it made me. I thought back over the last few days. It was now Monday night. Yesterday was Sunday: open home day. Shit! That reminded me — I hunted down my phone and found this morning’s text from Jason and forwarded it to Sean. Then I turned off my phone. I didn’t want to talk with him about the likelihood of our house being sold within days. I didn’t want to talk about it or even think about it. Real grown up.
In my little black notebook I drew a timeline. Working backwards I wrote Sunday and drew a line leading back to the day before, Saturday. The day Sunny and Karen were going to meet, the day I found Karen dead. I drew a line leading back to a box and labelled it Friday. I’d spent Friday investigating Justin and Salena’s finances. That night, I’d dipped into my own meagre funds to pay for dinner with Ned. Too many wines at Prego that night but not so many that I didn’t remember the phone call from Karen. She had been happy and excited about meeting her daughter for the first time since … well, since she’d tried to murder her. I had a flash of the two-door Holden drifting down through the murky water. Falcon’s pale little moon face pressed against the back window, Sunny screaming. I forced my thoughts back to the timeline. Sometime between Karen’s call to me on Friday night and her death the following day, she had got hold of a recent photo of Sunny. Karen had dropped her letter and cheque to me at my house somewhere on this timeline, too. My pen wavered between the boxes. Friday night? Saturday morning? Karen had made a reference in the letter to not knowing what Sunny looked like. She had to have written this before she got hold of the photo. I wrote ‘Dropped letter off at my place’ and then drew a big question mark beside it. When? When did she drop it off? Was it Friday night or early Saturday morning before she was due for her flight?
I left a note on the stairs warning Ned that I was asleep in the main bedroom and put my phone under my pillow for safekeeping. Until I’d deleted the photos of the crime scene, I’d keep it with me at all times. The likely interrogation I’d have to endure with Detective Inspector Aaron Fanshaw and Detective Sergeant Brett Coleman if my phone was turned in to police with a bunch of illegally obtained crime scene photos on it, didn’t bear thinking about.
I thought I’d have nightmares about death and dying, stiffened rigor-mortised zombies coming for me with outstretched arms. Marital homes collapsing around me, cops dragging me off to prison. I don’t know what I dreamed. All memory of it had gone when I surfaced the next morning.
Chapter 17
TUESDAY 27 NOVEMBER 2012
Neo was playing on the computer in the gym’s reception area. In the fishbowl workout room opposite, three gym bunnies feverishly cycled nowhere. There was no sign of Justin or Salena. No sign of Sunny either. Neo glanced up as I approached the desk but showed no further interest in me.
‘Hi, Neo. Is your sister here?’
He yelled, ‘Sunny!’, without looking away from the computer screen.
Photos of Salena adorned the walls. In most of them her body was wrapped around a pole — not in a ‘car accident’ way and not exactly in a ‘strip club’ way either, more in an ‘old-fashioned circus performer’ way; glittery body suit, arched spine and arm thrown in the air in a theatrical ‘ta-da!’ gesture. Sunny hadn’t been joking when she’d said Salena taught pole dancing. Neo continued tapping, his fingers tripping expertly over the keyboard. Still no sign of Sunny.
‘What are you playing?’
He hit me with a look. ‘I’m not playing anything,’ he said.
I stopped myself from responding ‘whatever’. He yelled again, this time he stopped tapping the keyboard long enough to turn his head in the direction of the closed door leading to the upstairs offices.
‘Sunny! That lady’s here!’ His job done, he went back to the tapping, his attention riveted. I wandered over to the glass divider and watched the gym bunnies huff and puff for a while. Their desperation was so dispiriting that I decided even a five-year-old uncommunicative brat was preferable.