home. The doctor’s notes stated there was no evidence of child abuse and all indications were that I’d fallen from my bike as per my father’s report.
I stared at the word “bike.” It could mean motorcycle as well as bicycle.
However, I’d had a mountain bike and had often taken off into the bush around the Cul-de-Sac despite rules prohibiting mountain biking. Go off a trail at high speed and broken bones were a real possibility.
Images of the dark green trees turning into a blur because of my speed, of water sluicing down the visor of my helmet.
My bicycle helmet had never had a visor.
My stomach was churning by the time Regan and Neri walked back into the room.
“We’re going to suspend the interview at this stage,” Detective Regan said after restarting the recording. “But, we will be coming back to you, so please don’t leave the area.”
“No intention of going anywhere until you find out who did this to my mother.” Whatever had happened that night, I refused to believe I’d had anything to do with it. For all her faults, she’d been my mother and I’d loved her.
Neither cop said anything and Justina Cheung, too, held her silence until we were outside the station. Walking with me to my car, she said, “From this point on, you stay silent. What they have, it’s circumstantial at best.” She stopped beside my sedan. “I need to know if the memory issue is real.”
“Unfortunately.” I unlocked my car with an insouciance I didn’t feel, my injured leg suddenly heavier and harder to move. “I wish I was bullshitting, but my memory is currently . . . problematic.”
“That might end up in your favor.” The lawyer glanced at her slim gold watch. “Call me the second they contact you again. I’ve seen that look before—Regan’s a bulldog and he’s focused on you.”
I waited until I was in my car and away from the station before flipping off my mask of careless indifference. “Fuck, fuck, fuck!”
I hadn’t hurt her.
I hadn’t.
52
Skin hot, a throb at the back of my head, I used the car’s hands-free system to make a call to Shanti. “Is my father home?” He worked six days a week as a rule, then threw in the occasional Sunday as well.
“No, he’s still at the plant.”
“I’m going to see him,” I said, then hung up before Shanti could ask any questions.
Ishaan Rai’s pride and joy was situated on a massive piece of land on the outskirts of a South Auckland suburb, a gleaming glass-and-steel structure that was a quiet sign of the high-tech manufacturing that went on within. Rolling green lawns behind high fences separated the manufacturing center from the public without being an eyesore.
The company pay structure started not at the minimum wage, but the living wage.
My father, the great humanitarian business-leader.
The security guard at the small gate station waved at me with a smile when I stopped in front of the locked gates. But he still picked up the phone and verified I was cleared to enter before letting me through. When you worked for a company known for cutting-edge advances in medical manufacture, you trusted no one.
Paranoia was considered an asset.
I parked in a visitor spot.
“You could have all this,” my father had said to me when I was eighteen. “You could lead a multimillion-dollar corporation. You could still scribble your stories in your spare time.”
Sometimes I wondered how my father was oblivious to the fact I hadn’t done a single science paper in my senior years of high school. I was as well qualified to run this company as I was to operate on someone’s brain. Pari was the one who’d inherited my father’s scientific mind, though I didn’t know if he’d ever see that through his patriarchal blinkers.
The security guard on duty at reception cleared me up to my father’s office on the third floor of the sprawling network of interconnected buildings. My father had a phone to his ear when I entered his office, but hung up with a quick “I’ll call you back” after he spotted me.
A small golden statue of a Hindu god sat in an alcove to his right, several flowers at its base and an incense stand beside it. Shanti’s hand. Praying over her husband. To my father, it was nothing but theater. Quietly showcasing his piety and goodness.
“Did you say anything to those cops?” he demanded as I sat down in his visitor chair with my leg stretched out. “You should’ve waited