Chapter 30 #2
“Given that we found this address on Robert, it seems likely that he came here to see his mother,” Detective Peterson says.
“Matthew mentioned that Robert befriended him on the beach one day.” She nods at Shippy, which is good because I forgot his real name again.
Matthew just doesn’t suit him; he’s got a Shippy face and there’s nothing to be done about it.
“It seems possible that meeting was engineered to gain him entry to the house.”
“Why was Martin calling himself Rob?”
“He’s not in a position to talk yet,” Detective Peterson says. “He might have been going by his middle name simply to distance himself from his past.”
“It’s so hard for the formerly incarcerated outside jail, isn’t it?” Aunty Vinka puts in, and Dad gives her a look that’s only slightly more polite than the one on Detective Peterson’s face.
“Maybe not now, Vinx.”
“I’m just saying. There’s a lot of prejudice against people who have been incarcerated. Not just Rob, I mean Martin, but Sasha, too.”
“Sasha did try to murder a guy.” Dad looks at Detective Peterson. “Right?”
“It’s really too early to say,” she says automatically.
Then: “If, as seems possible, Sasha arranged to meet Robert or agreed to meet him with the intention of hitting him with his car, we could go for a murder charge, although how much of this we’ll be able to prove, I don’t know.
” There’s a moment where maybe she remembers that Dad’s a journalist and that she’s being pretty loose-lipped in the moment.
“This is all off the record, by the way,” she says, looking right at him.
“Oh!” Dylan, who’s been letting me have the spotlight here, stands up, then sits right back down again.
Maybe his legs, like mine, are still feeling a bit wobbly, even with a hot chocolate and cookie in him.
“Rob’s phone!” he says, looking at me. “Sasha took it after you told him it had proof that Sasha and Rob had arranged to meet the night that he died.”
“After you told him what?” Dad almost shouts at me, and Dylan mouths sorry.
“I was bluffing,” I add, quickly and a little lamely. “But Sasha believed me and he really wanted that phone, so there’s probably something incriminating on it.”
“Sasha had this phone on him?” Detective Peterson asks.
“He should have.”
“Ruth, we’re going to need you to come into the station to make a full statement about this. You too, Dylan.”
“Oh!” I say. “Dylan’s phone.” Belatedly I realize that this is one more thing I really should have mentioned before now.
And if you’re rolling your eyes at me, why don’t you try confronting an attempted murderer, witnessing a car accident, and possibly locating a long-lost aunt in a half-hour time period and see how sharp you’re feeling at the end of it?
“We were filming the whole time with Sasha, when we asked him about GG and Rob/Martin and all of that.”
I look up at the kitchen counter but the phone is gone. How? This house straight-up is the Bermuda Triangle for phones.
“What?” That’s Dad.
“It was Ruth’s idea,” Dylan says, and I can’t tell if he’s trying to avoid getting into trouble or trying to help me out. He pulls the phone out of his pocket and hands it over to the detective. “I grabbed it when you ran outside,” he says to me.
“Sasha didn’t know about this one,” I add.
“Right.” Detective Peterson doesn’t look as pleased with this development as I feel she should be. Gushy invitations to join the police force to put my detective skills to use may prove thinner on the ground than I’d like.
“Just to clarify: Are there any more phones I should be aware of that contain crucial video evidence?” She has the kind of voice that could make me confess to crimes I didn’t commit.
“I don’t think so.”
“Michaels,” she says to the hot-chocolate-making policeman, who is brewing up a second batch and looks annoyed at being distracted just as he’s sprinkling in some cinnamon.
“Bag this phone as evidence and radio the hospital. See how many phones were found on Sasha when he was taken in. If there weren’t two on him—no, three; he’d have one of his own—grab some gloves and check the truck. ”
Michaels (presumably) nods and turns off the stove, but he doesn’t look pleased about it. (Neither am I: Cinnamon in hot chocolate, who’d have thought it?)
“Let me clarify what happened,” Detective Peterson says. “You filmed the suspect without him knowing it, even though you believed he had tried to kill a man, in order to confront him about that attack? That was seriously dangerous, kids. This isn’t an episode of Scooby Doo.”
“What’s Scooby Doo?” Dylan asks.
Detective Peterson meets Dad’s eyes. “Kids don’t get a real education these days,” Dad says.
She nods. “All my daughter wants to watch is kids unwrapping presents on YouTube.” Then she snaps back to being a cop and gives Dylan and me a look that would have told me she’s a mum, even if she hadn’t mentioned it. “You’re both very lucky things worked out the way they did.”
Dylan and I look at each other, ostensibly contrite, but I suspect he’s thinking the same thing behind that facade of apology: that, whatever the grown-ups feel about it, we did something pretty awesome. While I’m watching, the corner of Dylan’s mouth twitches up, and I know I’m right.
“We didn’t know he had a gun,” Dylan says.
The police radio on the kitchen table buzzes, and Detective Peterson snatches it up, stepping away from the table to talk into it.
“You got pretty deep into this detective stuff,” Dad says, tipping his untouched hot chocolate into my empty mug. It’s lukewarm but still pretty good, so I’ll forgive him for (deliberately or not) stopping me from eavesdropping on the police-radio call.
“Sorry.”
“I wish I’d realized how serious you were. Maybe I could have helped.”
Well, this is some dictator-style rewriting of history right here. “You would have just told me to stop.”
“Maybe.”
“Definitely. But I suppose you could have told me where you were that night.”
“When?”
“The night GG died and you were out of your bed. You said you were checking on GG, but you weren’t because I heard her talking to Bec. You weren’t in the bathroom because I was there, and you weren’t out in the garden because Shippy was smoking. So where were you?”
Dad looks like I’ve spat in his face. “You didn’t think that I—”
I shake my head. “I never thought that.”
“I went out to the paddocks late that night to make a phone call.”
“Okay.”
“To a friend. A woman.”
I think I’m starting to get it. “Oh.”
“Ruth, I was going to tell you about her, but—”
I put one hand over my face so I don’t have to look at him.
Murder I can handle, but an insight into Dad’s love life is too gruesome for me.
“Dad, it’s fine, I get it. You don’t have to tell me.
” It would be childish, under the circumstances, to be annoyed that my detective skills so utterly failed to detect the presence of a girlfriend in my dad’s life.
“I hope you don’t think it’s too soon.”
“Dad, Mum is already married again—how can it be too soon?”
“Maybe when we get back to Perth you can meet Jane. That’s her name, Jane.” Detective Peterson is back at the table and looking at the floor like there’s a blood-spatter mystery to solve there.
Another puzzle piece drops into my hand. “How late were you out there?” I ask.
Dad looks confused. “A while, I guess. I was on the phone for a bit—we had some things to talk about.”
“What about the storm?”
“I had my jacket, but there was hardly any rain and the lightning didn’t get that close.”
I want to ask Dad if he’d be this Zen about me being out in a paddock with lightning flying around, but I’ve got other things on my mind. “Was anyone up when you got home?”
“No, I don’t think so.”
“And you came in the front door?”
“Yeah. I dropped my keys right on the doorstep and had to hunt for them in the dark.” He frowns, like maybe he’s trying to remember. “I thought I heard something, like somebody might have still been up, but there was nobody there when I finally found my keys and came inside.”
I think about what it was that made Sasha stash the box under the floorboards—a dumb move, however you want to spin it—and whether it could have been as simple as the sound of Dad coming home.
Of course, if I’m right, that means Sasha had hidden the box and was lurking in the house when Dad came in.
He wouldn’t have wanted to risk retrieving the box with someone awake in the house and a dead body upstairs; he’d have slipped out as quickly and quietly as possible.
It’s a theory and one Dad’s not going to want to hear (I barely want to hear it), but, much as I’d love to impress Detective Peterson with my deductive skills, for now I want to take advantage of Dad’s chatty mood.
I also really don’t want to think about what might have happened if Dad had run into Sasha that night.
“What about the money problems?” I ask.
“What?”
“You canceled the streaming services and sold your guitar. Dylan says you want to sell the house. Is there something going on?”
Dad gets a bit more uncomfortable. “I’ve been thinking about buying a new place, that’s all. And you know I haven’t touched that guitar in years.”
“Oh?”
“A bigger place.” He doesn’t add for Jane, but that’s got to be the subtext, if I’m going by the fact that his cheeks are on fire.
“What about the streaming services?”
“We have too many streaming services. Human brains weren’t made to have this much choice.” He does a very un-Dad-like thing and puts his hands over his face. “This is not how I wanted to have this conversation.”
“Forget I said anything,” I say, wishing this could literally happen.
Nobody speaks, and then Detective Peterson inserts herself back into the conversation. “Are there any more romantic revelations to disclose, or do you think we can get back to the criminal investigation?” she says brightly.