Chapter 73
73
Drew
I expected this trip would end with Evie’s life in uproar. Not my own. I don’t even know what to do. Who to talk to. The police?
No. I can hardly walk up and offer the vague expertise of an amnesiac after she’s had a three-minute google and flicked through a linguistics article on Medium. She’d start raving about green coats and brown foxes and they’d have her admitted for psychiatric evaluation.
This is all just so incredibly, unimaginably hideous.
Why would my father kill my mother? What’s the motive? She and I were never any threat to him, or to Oliver. We never demanded anything. We weren’t going to make any trouble. Mum was the least likely person to make a fuss of any description.
“I can’t believe I’m even thinking about words like kill and motive in relation to my own parents. It’s absurd,” I say aloud.
Evie is sitting awkwardly on the couch, looking guilty. “I’m so sorry,” she says. “If I hadn’t got out the wedding DVD …”
“We wouldn’t know my father was a murderer?” I said it.
She flinches at my words. And looks lost. “I don’t know how much I knew about this, Drew. All I have are two words, crossed out on a page.”
“Should I make a cup of tea?” Bree asks.
“Yes, because tea is clearly the go-to beverage for the moment you discover you’re descended from a criminal,” I say.
Now they’re both floundering.
“Sorry,” I apologize. “It’s just … imagine the field day the press would have if this got out. ‘Prominent Sydney anesthesiologist charged with the murder of former lover, exposed by amnesiac daughter-in-law two weeks after she was widowed in a mysterious car crash …’”
Every aspect of this has tabloid fodder written all over it.
“Wait, is he an anesthesiologist?” Evie asks.
I nod to confirm it.
“How did your mum die?”
“According to her death certificate? Cancer. But she was on a concoction of pain relief toward the end, so …”
“Someone could tamper with that concoction pretty easily,” she suggests. “Especially if they were a specialist in drugs that put the body to sleep. And perhaps he’d know how to do it in such a way that the toxicology report wouldn’t raise any suspicion.”
“There was no report. They never looked into it any further,” I explain. “The doctor just took it as an open-and-shut case of natural death, with no suspicious circumstances.”
She looks at me. “But the note?”
“We found it after they left. Everything had been signed off. The note didn’t say she was going to do it. Just happened to have been sent that morning and was clearly a goodbye.”
She doesn’t seem convinced. Probably imagines herself as some sort of accessory after the fact. Something we all could be now—me, Evie, and Bree—if I don’t take this information about Anderson to the police.
“I’d already put her through a round of CPR that haunts me to this day. She was closing in on the end of her life. I imagined, if anything, she just helped herself over the line. So we did her one last favor and kept her secret. I recall thinking, What would it change?
I’m cycling through almost a decade of grief, remembering the way I processed it all. The anger I felt at one point that she had left me, knowing I’d already been rejected by my father. And the guilt of wishing she’d held on even longer.
“But, Drew, everything could have changed,” Evie says, quietly. “If this had been investigated at the time … if linguists were involved, and they’d found the note, they might have compared it with your mum’s other correspondence. They would have known she didn’t write it. And if there were other messages from Anderson, and he wrote this way in other places, he’d have been the suspect.”
All those messages I poured over in Mum’s inbox.
“If he’d been arrested …” she continues. “I mean, it’s the butterfly effect, isn’t it? Whatever else happened that week would have unfolded differently.”
I think of Anderson turning up at Mum’s funeral, warning me off Evie. And the text message she sent, ordering me to forget we’d ever met. If our father was in trouble, Oliver would have been reeling from the scandal and been preoccupied—rallying his legal mates.
Maybe she wouldn’t have gone back. Maybe she never would have married him.
I look up and meet that same solid compassion Evie had shown me stargazing. Even after everything we’ve been through and all the ways she let me down, and with the fragility of her own mental state, I know she is here for me now.
“I’ll need to report this,” I tell her.
“I’ll come with you.”
I get a flash of the empty seat beside me at Mum’s funeral.
“Okay, but this time, you need to see it through.”
I can tell by the way the words seem to smart her skin that it hurts. Amnesia or not, she needs to take some responsibility for what she did, because the abandonment theme has loomed large in my life, and I can’t take any more of it. And now here’s Evie, historically one of the worst offenders, and I’m just handing her everything.
Experience tells me this can only end badly.
It also tells me I will be reckless enough to take the risk.