Chapter 8
You’ll rarely find me complaining about a lack of Shippy in my life.
Under ordinary circumstances I regard Shippy the way I regard a mosquito bite: annoying without being dangerous.
Or maybe he’s more like my Spotify subscription: a small price to pay for something I like (in this case Aunty Bec and Dylan).
And yet. By mid-afternoon, when he still hasn’t come home, I am distinctly unsettled.
The whole household feels on edge, even Dylan, which I can tell because he’s curled up on a chair in the living room with the rest of us, instead of locked in his bedroom listening to Scandinavian rockers work out their trauma.
“At what point do you think we call the police?” Dad quietly asks Aunty Bec, who has started a thousand-piece puzzle on the coffee table. Clearly, she’s settling in for the long haul.
“What do you mean?”
“About Shippy.”
“I don’t think they take missing-persons reports seriously before forty-eight hours or something.”
“That’s a myth.”
“Still.”
“It doesn’t strike you as being a little…suspicious?”
The grown-ups are sprawled out over the living room.
Dad is surrounded by a stack of DVDs, VHS tapes, and old board games he found in the cupboard.
For the last ten minutes he’s been counting pieces inside the box for Risk, for reasons best known to himself.
I’m in the nearest armchair, ostensibly still reading my book, although obviously mostly eavesdropping.
“What do you mean?”
“Bec, you don’t find it strange that the morning after our…stepmother is murdered, Shippy does a runner?”
Aunty Bec pauses in her separation of the puzzle’s edge pieces to give Dad a really? look I feel from across the room. “He hasn’t done a runner, Andy, and please stop talking like you’re in a noir film. I’m sure there’s a perfectly rational explanation.”
“Like what?”
“He might have gone for a…look around the farm.”
“In my car?”
“So he’s gone into town.”
“All day?”
“Dunsborough is a vibrant regional community,” Aunty Bec tries, and Dad snorts. “Okay, but you know Shippy—he’s probably off at the pub with someone he just met.”
“Let’s examine the facts. Fact one: Shippy disappeared mysteriously in the night.”
“He didn’t disappear. He’s just…not here.”
“Fact two: He stole my car and didn’t leave a note.”
“Borrowed.”
“Fact three: Gertie was murdered—”
“Andy.”
“She was, though.” Everyone goes quiet for a minute, but Dad’s never been able to let a silence sit for long. “I hate to state the obvious, but what do you think the police are going to think if they hear your boyfriend has disappeared right after our stepmother was brutally murdered?”
“Vinx, can you step in?” Aunty Bec appeals to the figure swathed in a caftan on the nearest armchair, who’s been mind-melding with her crocheting through all of this.
“I hate to say it,” Aunty Vinka says gently, the same way she talked to Grandad when he was almost dead but not quite and the same way I once heard her talk to a dog in the street, “but it is pretty odd behavior.”
“There’s a big gap between odd behavior and murder suspect, but don’t mind me—I’m going to drive out to get some service and see if Shippy has called.
” Aunty Bec stands up and tosses her head so her bob swishes around her face.
I wonder if my hair would do that if I took a photo of Aunty Bec to the hairdresser.
She has to pause her attempt to storm out to borrow Aunty Vinka’s car keys, which is embarrassing for her.
Dad keeps going once she’s left, because of course he does.
“What do you think, Vinx: police or no police?” he asks while Aunty Bec is probably still clicking in her seat belt.
Aunty Vinka makes a yuck face. “Should we call the police on Shippy, you mean?”
“Not on him, exactly. Just…about him.”
“Oh, in that case I’m sure Bec won’t care. Just explain it that way.”
“Shut up.”
“Anyway, that’s not the real question.”
“It’s not?”
“The real question is why would Shippy kill Gertie? He might have some, uh, problematic views on immigration, and the less said about his aura the better, but he doesn’t strike me as a psychopath.”
“Money,” Dad says. “Bec will inherit one-third of the estate.”
“Money, though.” Aunty Vinka shakes her head. “It’s just money, isn’t it?”
“Vinx, that’s almost as dumb as the time you claimed not to know what Facebook was. This property has got to be worth a couple of million.”
Aunty Vinka just frowns at that and goes back to her crocheting. “Although,” she says, almost as an afterthought, “he only inherits if he stays with Bec, right? So why would he disappear?”
She’s got a point.
“Maybe Shippy has a secret.” I don’t realize I’ve said this out loud until the others go quiet.
“Ruthie?” Aunty Vinka’s head jerks like she’s forgotten I’m sitting right here, not hiding, exactly, just…turning the pages of my book very, very quietly. “Honey, this isn’t really a conversation for kids. Do you and Dylan want to go for a walk or something?”
“You let me watch Talk to Me when you were babysitting,” I remind her—a little disloyally, since that was supposed to be our secret. “Do you really think this conversation is more traumatic than that?”
“It’s so important to support Australian cinema,” she says, avoiding Dad’s eyes. “But, Andy, maybe we should stop talking about this in front of the kids.”
“Hold on, Vinka, I think I heard Ruthie say something about Shippy’s dark secret.” There’s a smile licking at Dad’s lips.
“I didn’t say dark secret.”
“What do you think Shippy’s not-so-dark secret is, then? Tell us about his beige mystery?”
Even Dylan is looking at me now, and I can feel all the blood in my body trying to force its way out through my cheeks.
“I don’t know what it is, but maybe GG was going to expose it.
” Dad and Aunty Vinka exchange a look, and for a moment I think they’re going to send me up to my room, but Dad grins at his sister, and while I can see her teetering, she just shakes her head and doesn’t tell me to go away.
Adults are more fickle than the face recognition on my phone.
I keep talking, fast as I can without being weird about it.
“Maybe it’s a secret he couldn’t risk being exposed. ”
“What kind of secret?”
“Something that would make Aunty Bec dump him so he’d miss out on the inheritance. He’s, uh, secretly married.”
“I don’t know if that’s a turnoff for her,” Aunty Vinka murmurs.
“He’s got three secret kids.”
“Getting warmer!” Aunty Vinka says, and has she been…drinking?
“What happens next?” Dad asks, encouraging me.
I sit up straighter in my chair and put my book down, enjoying the attention but also aware that the timer has started on how long I can get away with this.
“GG pulls some ‘you tell her or I will’ stuff—classic mistake. Shippy freaks out and hits her over the head with, uh, an old typewriter for some reason. Then he sets up the ladder and smashes the window to make it look like a break-in.”
Mentioning the actual murder sobers everyone up. I’m about to mention the hot neighbor, Sasha, while we’re on the subject, and see if anyone else thinks he might have had a motive to kill GG, but Aunty Vinka gets in a question first.
“Why the typewriter, though?”
I think about it, the way I’d think about a math problem or how to handle a situation where Ali and Libby want to wear the same dress to the same party and neither of them has a plan B (not a hypothetical situation, since that did actually happen last year when John from school had a party in a fairly transparent attempt to hook up with Kym, which, FYI, did not go well, although that was not the fault of my dress solution, which was perfect).
“He never meant to kill her,” I say. “It was a crime of passion, and the typewriter was right there, I guess.”
“It wasn’t really, though; it was up on Gertie’s wardrobe. Why not use that hideous cat statue next to her bed or a lamp or something?” Aunty Vinka points out.
“It shouldn’t have even been in her room,” Dad says out of nowhere.
“What?”
“The typewriter. You know she loved that thing.”
“She told me it was worth a lot of money,” Aunty Vinka says.
“I once tried to type on it, and she gave me a ten-minute lecture about the lack of typewriter ribbon still available in the world,” Dad says.
“What do you mean it shouldn’t have been in GG’s room?” I ask, not quite ready to be edged out of the conversation.
Dad starts to pile the Risk pieces back into the box, not bothering to keep them separated by color, so you can tell that he’s Going Through Something.
“Gertie asked me to take it downstairs,” he says.
“What?”
“The typewriter. The night she…died, she asked if I could take it down for her. She didn’t say why.”
Aunty Vinka lowers her crocheting. “Oh, Andy.”
“She asked me at dinner, but I just…forgot about it. I got distracted and then I had to…make a work call”—he glances at me, his cheeks going pink for a moment—“and it slipped my mind.”
If you’re hazy on the timeline here, the important thing to note is that GG asked Dad to take down the typewriter after she asked me to fetch her that cardboard box.
If I hadn’t been such a baby with my sore shoulder, would she have asked me to get the typewriter as well?
It’s not a nice thought, so I chase it away and focus on the obvious thing here.
“Dad, are you saying she asked you to take the typewriter down and then that night someone killed her with it?”
Dad looks guilty. Not guilty guilty, like he’s the one who hit GG with the typewriter, but guilty like someone who might have forgotten his teenage daughter is in the room.
“I know what you’re thinking, Ruthie. But life isn’t a detective story: Coincidences do happen.”
“Okay.”
Silence settles, and we all get back to whatever we were pretending to do until at some point Aunty Vinka throws down her crocheting and goes upstairs. Only a couple of minutes later…
“Andy!”
Dad’s on his feet and out of the living room before I’ve registered that it’s Aunty Vinka’s voice coming from upstairs.
“Should we—” Dylan starts to ask, but I’m already tripping over my feet to follow Dad.
When Dylan and I make it to Aunty Vinka’s bedroom, she and Dad are looking out the window. I come up behind them but can’t tell what in the back garden has so captured their attention, unless you find a lemon tree particularly shocking.
“What is it?”
“Vinka thinks she saw something,” Dad says.
“I don’t think I saw something. I saw something.”
“Sorry. Vinka saw something. Which has since disappeared.”
Dylan and I scoot closer and I scan the view. There’s the lemon tree (still boring), the fence (ditto), and beyond that the paddocks.
“What did you see?” I ask Aunty Vinka, who sighs so hard her breath mists up a bit of the window.
“I saw someone out there, in the garden,” she says, pointing. “Near the tree.”
“There’s nobody there now?”
“I only looked away for a second and they disappeared.”
“Let’s look outside, then,” Dylan says. “Quick, before they get away.”
“Mate, I’m not sure—” Dad starts to say, but apparently nobody in this family walks anywhere anymore because Dylan’s out the door. He’s fast, but we catch him outside just as he gets around the side of the house.
“Dylan, slow down,” Dad puffs, sounding pissed off in a way that makes me think he might have noticed how entirely unpuffed his fifteen-year-old nephew is.
“If there’s someone out here, we need to catch them.”
“If there’s someone out here, it might be the person who killed Gertie. You kids should go inside.”
“It might have been a bird,” Aunty Vinka says, smoothing down the caftan that’s turned into an air balloon. Good of you to tell us now, I think but do not say.
There’s nobody in the garden. Or, if you want to get technical about it, there’s nobody but the four of us in the garden, and we’re not suspicious. (Are we?)
When we’ve all confirmed a lack of intruders (or birds), we head back inside together.
I’m part relieved not to have to confront a possible murderer, part disappointed not to have learned anything new, and just a tiny bit concerned Aunty Vinka might be losing it.
I’m so distracted I trip on a power cord trailing from the lamp at the bottom of the stairs and nearly face-plant into the railing.
“Steady on,” Dad says, catching my elbow. “One body is enough for the week.” Most of the time I wish Dad would stop treating me like a kid. This is not one of those times.
It’s unfortunate that, at no point during this ill-advised mission, did I stop to consider why someone might be prowling around the house and what they might be looking for.
Perhaps, if I’d had a proper look around, I could have saved us all a lot of time and energy.
Certainly, nobody else would have had to die.