Chapter 2 #2
The pair both had their eyes trained on the vines stretching out below.
At first the space appeared empty but, following their gaze, Falk could now see the shape of a man moving along the rows.
He was alone and walking at a slow pace.
He stopped at a fence post, something unseen catching his attention, then after a long moment continued on.
“How is your brother?” Falk said, and Raco and Rita exchanged a glance.
“Charlie?” Raco rubbed his chin. “Yeah. He’s not bad. Considering.”
Falk nodded. If there was one person likely to attract even more questions than the spouse of a missing person, it had to be the ex-partner. However amicable the parting of ways was said to have been.
Charlie Raco and Kim Gillespie had shared a seventeen-year-old daughter and an on-again, off-again relationship, which had sparked to life with a teenage infatuation, bumped along for two decades, and finally fizzled out for good five years ago.
A co-parenting arrangement and division of assets had been mutually agreed without the need for either party to engage a lawyer.
Falk knew this, because everyone knew it now.
The details of the relationship had been rehashed and picked over at length after last year.
Falk turned back to the vines, but the rows once again appeared empty. He couldn’t see where Charlie Raco had gone. He reached out instead and picked up the flyer from beside Rita’s glass.
“Zara got them made up,” Rita said.
Falk nodded. The seventeen-year-old. He cast his eye over the information. All the important stuff was there. She’d done a good job. “And what’s the plan tonight?”
“The festival’s agreed to do a minute’s silence for the anniversary,” Raco said. “Plus an appeal on the main stage.”
“Appealing for what exactly?” The question came out more bluntly than Falk had intended, and he rephrased. “I mean, are there doubts? I thought after they found her shoe it was pretty much—”
“Not doubts,” Rita said quickly. “But questions, I suppose. About Kim’s state of mind on the night.” She glanced toward the house, and Falk guessed that Kim’s older daughter was inside somewhere. “But we’re trying to manage Zara’s expectations.”
“She’s struggling?” Falk said.
Rita flashed a reassuring smile as her own daughter looked up, and waited until Eva wandered off in search of more gifts for Falk before she spoke again.
“To be fair, it’s not only Zara pushing for this; we’d all like to know. I mean, I still think about it a lot,” she said, and Raco nodded in agreement. “What Kim must have been thinking to leave her baby like that.”
Falk looked down at the caption below the woman’s photo.
Kim Gillespie, age thirty-nine. Last seen at the opening night of the Marralee Valley Annual Food and Wine Festival.
Brown hair, brown eyes, medium build, 168 cm.
Wearing a dark gray jacket, white or cream T-shirt, black jeans or leggings, white sneakers.
Falk had never met Kim and as far as he knew had seen her alive only twice—once on a phone screen and once from a distance.
“I reckon the locals have probably said all they can say by now, but the opening night’s always mostly tourists.
” Raco took a long pull on his beer. “They’ll probably get maybe a thousand of them tonight.
Lot of the same families come every year.
So it’ll jog a few memories, at least.” His frown returned. “Like it or not.”
Falk nodded. He’d been involved in all kinds of witness statements over the years, and among the least helpful—worse than those who refused to speak, worse than those who straight-up lied—were the well-meaning bystanders who reckoned they’d seen plenty.
It was rarely deliberate, most people simply wanted to help.
Falk didn’t blame them; there was something in human nature that compelled people to fill in the gaps.
But what they’d seen and what they thought they’d seen were not necessarily one and the same.
Falk looked out to the empty vines again and thought back to his own statement last year. The local cop had been young and his questions a little leading at times. He should have known better, and if they’d been in the same chain of command, Falk would have pulled him up on it.
How did Kim seem?
Falk couldn’t say. He couldn’t even begin to say.
He suspected he probably wouldn’t have remembered anything much about those minutes at all if Kim hadn’t gone missing, but that was life. Insignificant things became significant unexpectedly. He’d tried to pick out only what he could recall for certain.
The time. It had been 8:00 p.m., and he knew that because the children’s fireworks had started. Night had crept in, and he remembered the lights and music had suddenly felt brighter and louder, the way they always did in the dark.
It had been busy. There were lots of people around, but Falk had been alone.
He had been making his way back across the grounds from the east end of the site toward the main entrance on the western edge.
He’d been returning from the festival’s head office to the Penvale Vineyard stall, where Raco and Rita were waiting for him.
He had weaved through families who were parking or collecting strollers and bikes from the bay near the ferris wheel, and was just past the ride itself when he’d suddenly slowed on the path, and then stopped.
The young cop should have asked the reason why, but he hadn’t, and so Falk hadn’t offered. It had had nothing to do with anything that night, anyway.
And that’s when you saw Kim Gillespie?
No. Here’s what had happened: a burst of static screeching from the speakers by the ferris wheel had snatched Falk’s attention away from the path and, still distracted, he’d glanced toward the ride.
A man nearby had also flinched at the noise, and their eyes had briefly caught in mutual irritation.
Falk hadn’t really known the man at the time, but was later able to confirm that it was Rohan Gillespie.
Rohan had been chatting to a couple with a tired-looking toddler, who were eventually tracked down and positively identified as tourists from Queensland.
Above them all, the ferris wheel had been continuing its slow rotation.
The carriages on the wheel were the enclosed kind, like gondolas or cages, designed to seat family or friendship groups together.
Perhaps designed also to stop falls, Falk reflected later, of both the accidental and deliberate kind.
By this point—Falk had leaned in to make sure the young officer was clear on this—he had already been losing interest in anything happening in the area around the ride.
Falk’s focus had been slipping elsewhere, even as he and Rohan Gillespie broke eye contact.
Rohan had turned to say something to the tourists and then pointed upward to the dark-haired woman and baby at the very top of the wheel.
The movement had been enough to snag Falk’s gaze and, driven by some animal survival instinct rather than any real curiosity, he’d looked up himself.
He’d sensed rather than seen Rohan wave from the ground.
For a beat there had been no response and then a small movement from the gondola at the top of the ride.
Falk had already been turning away as she’d waved back.
Now, a year later, Falk sat on Raco’s brother’s veranda with the printed picture of Kim on the table.
Last seen.
There was contention over the exact timings of many events that night, but the children’s fireworks had at least pinned that one to a point on the clock.
Falk’s statement had become one of several used to map Rohan’s movements, which—other than those missing eight minutes or so—had eventually been independently confirmed from the time he’d waved goodbye to his wife and daughter on the ferris wheel until the moment two and a half hours later when his phone had buzzed in the Italian restaurant with the news that his child had been discovered alone in her stroller.
How long Kim had lingered after her husband had left the festival grounds was still a matter of debate. As was exactly what had happened over those two and a half hours.
Maybe she had wandered. Maybe she was the woman who had joined the increasingly boisterous festivities outside the ale tent with a group of people who had never come forward, spirits soaring to a point where the overworked barman had been forced to cut her off.
Or maybe she had gone to try her luck on the carnival games, winning a blue stuffed toy kangaroo similar to one later found dumped in a bin.
Or maybe she was across the field talking to a man in a beanie.
Or crying in the toilets. Or leaning into the open window of a white or gray car in the parking lot, speaking to the driver.
Or maybe she’d done none of those things.
Maybe she’d parked the stroller, turned away from her baby sleeping inside, and walked alone to the reservoir.
“Hopefully something useful will come out of tonight, anyway,” Rita said now, looking at Kim’s face on the appeal flyer.
Falk nodded. He would love to be able to tell Rita and Raco more about that moment at the ride.
It wouldn’t be an answer, but he knew the family would welcome any insight, however small.
He couldn’t, though. Most of what Falk could remember now had almost certainly been fabricated after the fact, he knew.
Memories were fragile and fluid and prone to error and embellishment.
No matter how many times he thought back to that night, how many details he tried to conjure up and how crystal clear they might seem, it didn’t change reality.
And in reality, Falk knew, he had barely glanced up.