Chapter 18
RUSSELL
We’d been walking for five solid minutes, through the trees at the back of the pub and down a dirt road along the riverbank, when Dodge finally got up the gumption to speak again.
He was slightly ahead of me, glancing back as I shot texts to people I knew in the grief team about Chloe’s parents.
I also googled Chloe Lutz and got a sense of her.
The girl I’d seen laid out, cold on a slab at the medical centre, had been big-mouthed and smiley in life, animated in a way the CCTV in the pub hadn’t shown her to be.
She was showing gums in all her photographs.
Always struck a playful pose. Her carefully curated internet life gave me the impression of a happy person who was quick to laugh, who felt at home in cafes with a laptop and a cappuccino.
She called herself a smattering of different things across her profiles: Student.
Journalist. Student journalist. Writer. Woman of letters.
Scribbler. She wrote reviews and profiles for online magazines, and on the weekends when uni was out, she flipped furniture she got cheap or free off Facebook Marketplace for cash.
I kept my eyes on my phone screen as Dodge spoke.
‘Would you mind clearing something up for me?’
‘What?’
‘Just because, you know, I’ll be needing to do the paperwork …’
‘What do you want, Dodge?’
‘It’s not “Gunther”?’ He gripped his hat down by his thigh, flicked the brim with his index finger so that it made a rhythmic snapping sound. ‘Because your brother is calling you Russell, and you’re calling yourself Russell, but my call sheet said—’
‘Russell is my middle name. I go by that,’ I said. ‘ “Gunther” can go on the paperwork as and where it needs to.’
We kept walking. Dodge managed to swallow his curiosity for all of about three seconds before it came bubbling up again.
‘So why not—’
‘Because I might be an incredible prick, Dodge, but I’m not the kind of prick who walks around calling himself “Gun Powder”.’
‘Ohhh.’ Dodge gave an awkward laugh. ‘Right! Gunther. Gun. Gun Powder. That’s … That was Dad’s idea, I suppose, was it?’
I didn’t answer.
‘I’m with you, I’m with you.’ He nodded. ‘I’m Louis, spelt the French way: L-O-U-I-S. But the amount of times I get “L-E-W-I-S” or “Lois” or “Louise”—mate, I have been sorely tempted to go by my middle name.’
I said nothing.
‘Problem is,’ he said, ‘it’s “Shirley”.’
I looked up. Dodge laughed hard, pointed at me, pleased with himself that he’d got a reaction. I blew out air and tried to resist the urge to turn off the road and walk straight into the river, hands by my sides and my eyes on the horizon, never to be seen again.
We were turning down an even smaller road between the trees, a foot trail at best, that opened onto a field.
The gums and wild bottlebrush parted into a decent strip of land beside the brown, snaking river.
Cicadas were zipping loudly in the undergrowth.
Dodge stopped beside a broken-down gate, scratched at his thinning blond hair.
I looked at what was before me in the field, slipping my phone into my back pocket.
‘What the hell is that?’
‘So, um.’ Dodge turned and stood beside me for once and looked at the giant houseboat. The vessel was sitting in the middle of the wide, unmown field, its port side to the road. ‘It’s … It’s just an idea.’
‘Why are you showing me a houseboat, and why is that houseboat in the middle of a fucking field, Dodge?’
‘It’s a long story.’
‘Make it short,’ I barked. ‘Three sentences. Go.’
Dodge thought hard, his brow creasing, still flicking the hat brim in a way that was making my shoulder muscles tighten. ‘I own this piece of land, and the houseboat located upon it.’
‘One,’ I said.
‘The boat floated here during some massive floods we had a while back.’ Dodge huffed a sigh.
‘Annnd it wasn’t sensible, financially, for the original owner to, uh, to recover it from my field and to tow it back to its mooring …
because it was in a state of disrepair, or, um, semi-disrepair, and so an agreement was made between myself and—’
‘Two!’
‘And if you were amenable’—Dodge’s speed picked up, his face reddening with the effort of not prattling on—‘I thought this might suit you and your daughter as temporary accommodation, because it’s so central to the town and to the crime scene, and … d-d-do you want to just go take a look?’
I glared at Dodge and made to turn back towards town, almost running smack-bang into Bridie. I hadn’t even heard the Mustang following us, or the sound of it pulling up.
‘What the hell is that?’ She pointed.
‘That’s what he just said.’ Dodge smiled.
‘Don’t tell me that’s where we’re staying. Is it, Dad?’ She grinned at me. ‘Look at it! How did it get here? Oh my god. Oh my god!’
Bridie walked towards the boat, Dodge at her heels.
I followed, low scrub brushing statically against the legs of my jeans.
The two-storey, wood-shingled vessel was fifty yards from the edge of river, a thing that was weather-beaten on the outside but showing cutesy signs of life from three large windows on the first level on the port side.
Coffee mugs hanging over a stainless-steel sink.
A kitchen nook in bright florals. Bridie entered up a gangway at the stern and crossed a barbecue area complete with fairy lights and wind chimes and potted plants, while Dodge blathered on with as many sentences as he damned well pleased.
‘My main house is down the road a bit, you see,’ he was saying.
‘And after her hip replacement, my mother-in-law has been staying there with my wife and me. Patsy is her name. Not my mother-in-law. My wife. Renee is the mother-in-law. Anyway, she’d been living in Weatherill Park, but with her getting older and needing her hip done, we thought she should be closer to us.
Turns out inside the house with us is real close, if you know what I mean?
Not to say we don’t love having her there, but we did have this land and this boat, and … ’
I rubbed my temples, following Bridie and Dodge into the vessel, silently reciting a prayer for Dodge to stop talking.
‘It’s just that the bed situation itself might be an issue,’ Dodge droned.
‘In the back there you’ll find a dining room set.
Two bench seats and a big table. The seats fold down and become two single beds, or you can put a cushion over the tabletop and fold it down and the whole thing becomes a king-sized bed.
But you’ll be wanting to have singles, right?
Which is fine, except for the fact that I only have linens for a king. ’
‘I think everything will work out,’ Bridie said with inexplicable optimism. ‘We’re so grateful that you would put us up, aren’t we, Dad?’
‘I would rather be literally anywhere but here,’ I said.
‘If a helicopter came down into that field right now, and a couple of guys got out and said, “Detective Inspector Powder, we need you to leave this houseboat, and this town, and the company of Senior Sergeant Louis Dodge, because we’ve found a mass grave under a serial killer’s house, and we need you to spend an indefinite period knee-and-elbow-deep in the brown decomposing sludge that these bodies have become, picking out teeth and bones and searching for forms of identification, I’d say, “What are we waiting for, chaps?”’
‘He’s very creative,’ Dodge said to Bridie, nodding, appreciating me. ‘I could see all that stuff he described just then, in my mind. The brown sludge. The teeth.’
Bridie was looking at me the same way her mother used to when she complained about a headache and I’d tell her to drink more water. ‘He’s just messing with you, Mr Dodge. We’d be so pleased to stay here, and the boat’s really cool.’
Bridie rubbed Dodge’s arm as she went to the kitchenette. Actually rubbed his arm, like I’d thrown scalding water on it. ‘I’m making coffee. Then I’m going to get the place settled. You guys probably both have work to do.’
It was Dodge’s turn to make himself scarce, telling me he’d go get a status report from his staff.
Bridie dug around in the tiny cupboards and found me a plastic go cup, made me a coffee and one for herself with some long-life milk that was there while I simmered in the awkwardness of her having rescued Louis Dodge from my jaws.
One minute your kid is crying because the nose fell out of her Bubble-O-Bill, and the next thing you know she’s drinking coffee and calling you on your bullshit in front of strangers.
‘You could take it easy on that guy,’ she said.
‘I could, but I could also take up cave diving, and neither of those things sounds safe or enjoyable to me.’
‘Dad.’
‘It’s too risky, Bridie.’
She shifted one of her bags from the little kitchen nook and sat down. ‘It’s risky to be nice to people?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘For me it is.’
‘Why?’
‘Because it opens the door on it, Bridie.’
‘On what?’
‘All of it.’ I sipped the coffee. ‘Dodge is a friendly guy. He’s talkative.
He offers stuff. About the mother-in-law, for example.
About the wife. You let him do that for long enough and suddenly he starts feeling free to pick at my life, trying to even things up.
And what do I say? Huh? “Oh, yeah, I had a wife too, once. Then I destroyed her life and my daughter’s life because I found out at nearly fifty years old that I’m a flaming queer.
”’ Something came over her face at the words.
I was too afraid to look closely at it, to see whether it was surprise or anger or sadness.
‘How do you think that’s going to play out in a town like this, Bridie? ’ I went on.
‘I don’t know, Dad. And you don’t, either. It might be fine.’
‘What if it’s not?’
She didn’t answer.
‘If it’s not okay with Dodge, I have to then spend the rest of the case riding around in a car with a guy who hates who I am,’ I said.
‘And he won’t keep it a secret. The whole town will know by sunset.
We’re fifty years behind out here, Birds.
The further you get from Sydney, the further back in time you go.
There are places in the outback where I’d be dragged into the street and kicked to death. ’
‘You don’t want people to hate you because you’re gay,’ she said. ‘So you make them hate you for being a prick?’
‘I can control being a prick.’
Bridie thought about that. She took out her phone and fiddled with it. Put it on the table in front of her, rotated it slowly, so that the screen faced down. ‘And, like, is that how you see it?’
‘See what?’
‘What happened. That it was you “destroying our lives”?’ Her voice was very small. ‘You said you just “found out” one day. That you were gay. Did you?’
‘I can’t talk about this right now, Bridie.’ I turned around, rubbed my sternum hard with my knuckles, relishing the pain, how it drew me out of the moment. It was a habit I hadn’t indulged in since I was a kid. ‘I will. I will talk about it. It’s just … At this very second I’m too revved up.’
‘It’s okay.’
The silence was suffocating. I shifted some things around in the kitchen just to make some noise. ‘Listen, I was thinking,’ I said eventually. ‘You, uh … I’ve got a stack of things to do. I’ve got to make some calls. I’ve got to hold a briefing. You’ll have nothing to do.’
‘I was going to borrow the ’Stang again and go do a pouch check about ten minutes from here. It just came up on the app.’
‘Oh.’ I looked at her. One minute they’re dancing around the lounge room because they picked the right shaped window on Play School, the next they’re borrowing your Mustang to fish around in the pouches of marsupial roadkill.
‘Well, if there are any more good rescues, can you, uh, save them to do with me?’
‘You can’t really “save” them,’ she said. ‘Not if it’s an emergency.’
‘True.’ I sighed. ‘I’m just missing out on spending time with you.’
‘There are always rescues, though. Always. Especially out here.’
‘Okay.’
‘We’ll catch up properly later,’ she said, with a disbelieving edge to her voice. ‘You’ve got to have dinner some time, right? We’ll just, like, make the most of it then.’
‘Yeah.’ I nodded, enthusiastically. ‘And Bridie, you can … um …’
She waited. I struggled.
‘You can ask me anything you want.’
‘About what?’
‘About anything,’ I pressed. Just when I thought it was getting easier with Bridie, it was hard again.
‘About the break-up. About … what happened that day when Dad and Evan came around the house. And what had been happening, in the years before. You know? Anything. I’m going to answer those questions you just had … about when I knew and … whatever.’
‘You don’t have to.’
‘I know, but I’m going to.’
‘Okay.’
‘Just say, “I have a question for you,” and I’ll answer. Whatever it is.’
She’d turned and was facing me now. I felt like I was up against a wall. Rifles trained on my chest. She opened her mouth and I winced, ready for a bullet. But instead, she said, ‘You can ask me anything you want about who I am, too.’
A shiver ran through me. Right through my guts.
Happiness and hope that were so unfamiliar to me they felt like terror.
Neither of us spoke for a while, just standing there in the cold sunshine coming through the kitchen window of the marooned houseboat.
Father and daughter moving mountains and making eye contact.
‘Is there something you wanted me to be doing?’ she asked eventually. ‘While you’re getting around?’
‘Oh. Uh. Well. I mean, you don’t have to help me. But it’s just that you’re young, Birds. You’re good with computers. You could find me everything you can on Chloe Lutz and what she was working on.’
‘I’m not a cop, though. I don’t want to get in trouble.’
‘The only person you could get in trouble from is me. I’m lead on this.’
‘But won’t there already be other cops digging around in that stuff? Dodge’s people?’
‘None of Dodge’s people look like they’re under thirty. You’ll know things about the internet that we don’t know.’
‘Okay then.’ Bridie nodded, energised. ‘You got it.’
She got up and refilled her coffee, wiped down the sink, put the teaspoon in the dish rack, her long delicate hands lit by that new, hopeful light.
‘I’m really sorry, Bridie,’ I said. ‘We should be at the Dendy Premium Lounge right now, eating a baked wheel of brie with fig jam and water crackers and watching something foreign.’
She smirked. ‘You’re the only one around here who’s actually sad about that,’ she said.