Chapter 28
This is the part where I should cut to Dylan and me at the police station, handing over this crucial bit of evidence (the phone), telling them what we’ve learned from watching the video (who killed GG), and going back to Perth safe, sound, and with one hell of a What I Did on Vacation essay up our sleeves.
That would be the smart thing to do. But it doesn’t happen like that.
Instead let me cut to the next morning (don’t worry, you’ll get to see the video soon, and it’ll be better this way), to the living-room couch where Dylan and I fell asleep the night before, only after putting everything but GG’s phone back into the box and returning it to its hiding place so we could be the ones to reveal its existence to our parents, rather than Dad discovering all when he trips over it and breaks his neck en route to the bathroom.
We’re smooshed head to toe but with just the one blanket over us and Dylan is holding one of my socked feet like it’s a comfort toy.
All of which makes it kind of weird when Dad finds us half asleep.
“Good morning?” he says, making it a question.
I sit up and Dylan’s foot kicks my boob, while GG’s phone drops out of my hand to the floor.
I pick it up and the time on the phone tells me it’s late, nearly ten a.m., and I have no idea how we slept through the family having breakfast in the next room except that we were up until three a.m. watching that video of GG and talking about what it meant until our throats were sore and even the idea of disappearing to our respective beds felt like too much.
“Dad!”
“Correct. What’s going on here?”
“We couldn’t sleep.”
“You seemed to be doing a pretty good impression of it.”
“Insomnia,” I insist, still thick-headed. “We thought TV might help.”
Dad and I both look at the TV, which is off.
Resisting the temptation to prattle into the silence (always a classic giveaway of a lie in progress), I smile my blandest no-teeth smile.
The one thing Dylan and I agreed on last night was that we’d show the video to our parents together, but Dylan is either still asleep or pretending to be.
“Where is everyone?” I ask, kicking Dylan lightly. “There’s something Dylan and I want to talk to you about.”
“They’re all outside—Vinx and I are going to bring Nick back from the hospital and Bec and Shippy are going to go check the bus timetable back to Perth.”
“They can’t drive home with Aunty Vinka and Nick? Or us?”
“I’m not sure they feel good about being in a car with any of us for three hours. Shippy said he’d rather risk motion sickness.”
“Fair enough.”
Dad does that peering-into-my-soul thing he whips out sometimes, and, clearly, he doesn’t love what he finds there, because his expression gets very focused. “I was going to go with Vinka to help with Nick, but I can stay here if you’d rather.”
“We’ll be okay. How long will you be?”
“Not long. Are you sure it can wait until we get back?”
“Sure.”
Dad kisses the top of my head and goes out the front door.
I lie back down on the couch, wondering if I’ve made a mistake not showing him the video right away.
(On balance, probably yes: A lot of things might have gone differently if I’d just told Dad the truth.) But I’m tired and my thoughts are mushy.
Dylan sits up as soon as the cars drive away. Faking, then.
“Man, my head hurts,” he says. “I think I got about three hours’ sleep. You wriggle.”
“You could have gone to your own bed.”
“And leave you scared and alone?”
“Whatever. You snore.”
“I do not.”
“You do.” This is a lie, by the way, but how would he know? And how dare he say I’m a wriggler when what I was really doing was constantly readjusting my body in an attempt to not fall off the couch entirely or knee Dylan in the balls. Maybe I shouldn’t have tried so hard.
“You didn’t tell your dad.”
“I knew you were faking. Should I have?”
“I don’t know. I’m not sure I’m awake yet.”
“We should tell everyone together. Nick’s getting out of the hospital, so we’ll tell them when they get back.” (If you’re getting a bit tired of Nick’s whole deal, let me assure you he really is coming home, just in time to…well, you’ll see.)
“Sounds like a plan.” Dylan closes his eyes again.
“Then we take it to the cops.”
“Uh-huh,” he mumbles.
“Are you seriously going back to sleep?”
“Are you seriously not?”
I am not. I get up, put on the kettle, wash my face, brush my teeth, and put bread in the toaster. The moment he smells hot toast and cold butter, Dylan decides he’s hungry too, and we wind up having quite a pleasant little breakfast at the dining table, GG’s phone between us like a gun in a play.
“Should we watch it again?” he asks.
“I sort of don’t want to.”
“I know.”
“But maybe? I’m still not sure I have it straight.”
“It made sense last night.”
“I know.”
Dylan swears.
“Yeah.”
“No, I mean—” And he swears again but he also nods over my shoulder, and I turn to see a familiar-looking truck coming up the driveway.
This time I swear.
“Exactly.”
“Doesn’t anyone ever call first in this town?”
“No reception.”
“It was a joke. What do we do?”
“Hide?” Dylan says, looking around the room.
“Why?”
“He’ll think nobody’s home and go away?”
“He doesn’t know we know anything.”
“How do you know that?”
I take a massive slug of my tea. “Or maybe we do the opposite of hide.”
“What’s the opposite of hide? Expose ourselves?” Dylan makes a face.
“We invite him in.” I drain the rest of the cup.
The tea is too hot and burns my throat, but I don’t care.
I’m too busy pulling Dylan’s phone out of his pocket.
“What’s your code?” He tells me, not asking why, and I have to enter it twice because my fingers have gone shaky and useless.
“We put this up here.” I tap the screen a few times and lean it back against the kitchen backsplash so it’s facing Dylan but mostly concealed by a stack of cookbooks (all Christmas and birthday presents from Mum and Dad to GG, and all pristine). “We talk to him.”
“Ruth, no.”
“When are we going to get a chance like this?”
“A chance to be murdered? Hopefully never.” He stands up. “I’ll get rid of him.” We both hear the slam of the truck door.
“Don’t be dramatic. Has anyone even been murdered?”
“You don’t think—”
“That’s only a theory.”
“You seemed pretty confident last night,” he says. “Let’s just leave it up to the police.”
“The police don’t have any evidence.”
“Ruth, no.”
“Dylan, yes.”
There’s a knock at the door, and Dylan and I look at each other.
We can each see what the other is thinking.
Dylan doesn’t want to do this. I do want to do this.
I know that I shouldn’t do this and that wanting to solve a puzzle isn’t worth the risk.
But, also, how long can it take to discharge a man from the hospital? Dad and the others can’t be far away.
“Okay,” Dylan says, standing up. “But let’s at least try to leave Rob out of it.” I don’t agree to this, but maybe he takes my silence as assent because he says: “I’ll get the door; you put on a bra.”
I’m touched he noticed.
When I come down, Dylan and Sasha are drinking coffee at the kitchen table.
Dylan gives me a little nod, which I interpret as We’ve got this.
(Do we, though? Do we got this?) The plan that seemed reasonable five minutes ago now seems childish and ridiculously dangerous, like the time I was ten and tried to buy a wireless spy camera over the internet using Dad’s credit card.
Okay, I was twelve, but I got cold feet and told on myself.
Sasha’s smile is friendly enough. For now.
“Hi, Ruth.”
“Hi, Sasha.”
“Sorry to drop by. I was hoping to see your parents, but David tells me they’re out.”
“Dylan,” Dylan and I say at the same time.
“Right. Like I was saying to…Dylan, I think my credit card might have fallen out of my pocket last time I was here. Okay with you two if I have a quick look about?” His smile is impossible to disbelieve, unless you’ve recently seen that video on GG’s phone.
“Actually,” I say, before Dylan can change his mind and get rid of this guy, whose muscles are taking up too much room in his shirt, “we have something to show you first.” I try hard not to make my voice go up on the last word and turn it into a question.
I smile, all too aware that Dylan and I are exuding the vibe of a nervous young couple inviting the boss over for a dinner party.
Except Sasha should be the nervous one; he just doesn’t realize it yet.
(Have you figured out what he did? Better yet, have you figured out why he did it?)
“What is it?”
“A video.” Is that a flicker in one eye?
“Of who?” He’s given himself away, whether he realizes it or not. The obvious question to ask here would be of what?
“Why don’t we just play it?”
“What’s this about?” he asks, and there’s something in his voice that wasn’t there before.
He knows, or at least he suspects. I want to risk a glance toward the backsplash, but that would defeat the whole purpose of this (awful) plan.
How much of a comfort will it be, exactly, if I get murdered but it’s all captured on video?
“This is about Gertie’s death. Dylan and I know what happened.”
Two pink splotches grow on Sasha’s cheeks. He doesn’t have to ask the question—he knows the answer, just as we do—but he’s still trying to work out how much we know, and so he asks it anyway. “Who killed her?”
“To answer that question, we really have to go back to when GG found out she was dying,” I say.
Dylan’s face asks if we’re really doing this, and, okay, maybe my delivery was a little Daniel Craig at the end of Glass Onion (minus the accent), but I’m trying my best.
“Right,” Sasha says, smiling like he’s not panicking.
“When GG got her diagnosis, she started to reevaluate her life choices. In particular, I think she regretted her estrangement from her son—his name’s Martin. She’d always told everyone he was dead, but the truth is that Martin’s been in prison for years.”
“I told you that,” Sasha points out.
“You did. You were the one who told us that GG’s son was still alive and that she knew about it.
I assume you did that because you wanted to throw him out there as a possible suspect, just in case?
” No response. “Or maybe you just wanted an excuse to come over that night, so you could find out if we knew anything and go hunting for, what was it, a missing credit card?” Again: nothing.
“But it’s not so easy to go hunting under the floorboards with a house full of people, is it?
I heard you bump into Shippy outside the kitchen, but Shippy was on his way to use the upstairs bathroom, so how would he run into you if you were coming back from the downstairs bathroom, which is in the opposite direction?
I didn’t pay attention to it and Shippy didn’t ask the question. Well, he’s not that bright.”
“Ruth,” Dylan says, trying to bring me back.
“Anyway, the point is that GG was feeling pretty bad about her son, but what she didn’t know was that Martin had recently been released.”
“I told your parents all this already: She knew he was getting out.”
“I know that’s what you said,” I say, enjoying this a bit too much (another check in the psychopath box?), “but I don’t think that’s what really happened, because it doesn’t make sense.
” I pull GG’s phone out of my pocket and turn it around to face Sasha.
His hand twitches like he wants to reach for it, but he doesn’t move.
“I think GG wanted to make amends with her son, and I think she wrote to him in prison, probably begging his forgiveness, at the very least saying she was sorry.”
“So?”
“I think that letter was seen by someone who should never have seen it: Martin’s friend, or maybe his cellmate—are cellmates a thing in Australian prisons or is that just an American TV thing?
—and that guy got the idea into his head that there was a rich old lady out there who was desperate to be forgiven and might make a good target. ”
Sasha’s mask of polite interest barely shows a ripple. But barely isn’t nothing.
“I think Martin’s cellmate—or maybe they were just acquaintances in the exercise yard or something; most of my knowledge of prison comes from Orange Is the New Black, so—”
“Ruth.” Dylan is barely audible.
“Right, right. So, Martin’s…whatever gets out of prison first. He comes to find Gertie, representing himself as a friend and a confidant of Martin’s.
This bit is mostly guesswork, but I, we”—I gesture to Dylan to make it clear in what direction that we extends—“think he convinced Gertie that he had Martin’s ear and that Martin was still angry at Gertie, but that perhaps he, as an intermediary, might be persuaded to smooth over any unpleasantness. ”
Still nothing. I flick a glance at Dylan, who gives me a tiny, encouraging smile. My body is surging with adrenaline now. I don’t think I could stop if I tried.
“Maybe Martin’s dodgy mate—no offense—also knew about the life insurance and had a plan to get his hands on it. I have no idea.”
“Is there a point to this?” Sasha says, and he’s (finally) stopped smiling, which is a relief, because the whole thing was getting a bit Jokeresque. “You said you wanted to show me something.”
I waggle GG’s phone in my hand.
“This video,” I say, “will show us—and the police—who killed GG.”
Sasha’s face suggests we’re discussing how many calves he expects to sell this year. He really could have been on Farmer Wants a Wife: He’s a good enough actor to feign interest in half a dozen women ostensibly looking for love.
“Who did kill your grandma?”
“Step-grandma,” I correct him. “And: nobody.” Then I hit play, and it’s such a shame there’s nobody here but me and Dylan and Sasha to see, because it’s about as cool a moment as I’m ever likely to have.