Chapter 22 #2
‘You’re opening a door on something very dark.
’ My voice trembled. ‘Okay? This would be very, very dark for me. I don’t want to go on a nice long journey into my family’s history.
I don’t want you to do it either. I would consider it a real gift, a real favour, Chrissy, if you just put this away somewhere.
’ I shook the box. ‘Just for a few years, even.’
‘Why are you the one getting gifts on my birthday?’
I had to bite back the rage. Sat, trembling, trying to contain it. ‘Okay. Look, if I haven’t convinced you, then let’s open it.’
‘No way.’ Chris shook his head. ‘I want to do it at Naomi’s. She wants to watch, because she’s thinking of—’
‘I really want to open it now, Chris.’ I was right on the edge. My pulse thumping in my jugular. ‘I want to read the pamphlet and see what’s involved.’
‘So go to the website.’
‘Open the box.’
‘Come on, Dad.’
‘Open the fucking box, Chris.’
The boy gave me a look. Reached over, snatched the box out of my hand.
Picked weakly at the sticker with a painted fingernail, drawing out the process.
I snatched the box back and took my car keys out of my pocket, slashed the sticker, fumbled to open the box.
Right under the pamphlet that was resting on the box’s contents, I spotted them.
Two plastic vials, sitting in vacuum-sealed baggies.
I waved the pamphlet at the kid. ‘I’m just going to have a little read. ’
‘Knock yourself out.’ Chrissy hammered some words into the chat. Reduced the font size so it was unreadable from where I was sitting. ‘I hope it’s very informative.’
Heavy silence. Pre-explosion teen anger billowing out into the room, eating up the oxygen.
I used the pamphlet as cover to palm the two vials, slip them into my shirtsleeve, shifting on the bedcovers to mask the sound of the crinkling packages they were sealed in.
It was a minute or so before I could naturally get my hand to my hip, poke the two vials into my jeans pocket with all the joy and relief of a guy hitting the cash-out button on a jackpotting poker machine.
I didn’t know exactly why, then, it seemed so important to make the ancestry kit thing impossible for Chris.
But his being at Redbelly, me knowing he’d been there, had lit a fuse in my brain.
When the vials were in my pocket, I had the cold-sweat feeling of someone who’d tripped at the top of a long flight of stairs and caught themselves before the fall.
I cleared my throat. ‘So, I’m seeing here that there’s supposed to be two collection vials. ’
Chris didn’t answer. I put the pamphlet on the only spare spot on the desk. Made a show of rumpling through the rest of the box. ‘I’m not seeing those vials.’
Chris took the box from me. Looked at the pamphlet. Unfolded the instruction sheet so that it was as big as an old-style tourist map. Did the whole routine once more. ‘Where are the fucking vials?’
‘Maybe they—’
‘Stand up.’ Chris was out of his chair, waving at me to get off the bed. ‘Did you drop them?’
‘No.’
Looking under the bed. Going back to the box. Running a finger down the two grooves where the vials had lain. ‘So where are they?’
‘No idea.’
Chris did one more run-through of the search. Then he stopped, straightened, and looked at me. I met my son’s eyes, and I heard a voice deep in my head that was half my own, and half my father’s.
Try it, you little shit.
‘Did you take them?’ Chris asked.
‘No,’ I said. We held each other’s gaze.
Then Chris tried it. He lunged at my pocket.
I felt an exhilarated, joyful rush crash into the violence already simmering in my chest. The genetic badness.
It was all I could do to make the blow to the kid’s face a firm but harmless palming and not a slap, as Chrissy came at me and I buffeted him away.
His cheeks were immediately beetroot red with humiliation.
‘What the fuck, Dad!’
‘I don’t have your vials.’
‘Yes you do.’
‘I have played nicely with you for as long as I can on this, Chris. But—’
‘This is you playing nicely?’ His eyes were big and swimming in alcohol. ‘Fuck you! You’re constantly badmouthing your own father, trying to tell me you’re the nice guy in all this. Fuck you!’
‘Right back at ya, kid.’
‘Did you ever wonder whether Pop is the way he is because he’s had to deal with you his whole life?’
I tried to control the urge to strangle my child. Actually saw myself doing it, a flash behind my eyelids. When I could finally speak, the words came out in a voice that was thick with evil. ‘Chris.’
‘What?’
‘I’m gonna tell you who you’re trying to “make a connection” with,’ I said carefully. I wanted to scream. The ends of my words pulled upwards, trying to climb, trying to let the rage take over. ‘I’m gonna tell you the truth. You wanted it, here it is.’
Delle was in the room suddenly. She put a hand on my arm. I couldn’t even feel the weight of it.
‘When we were kids, Dad bought Russell and me a dog each,’ I said. ‘They were border collies. I had the girl. Russell had the boy. We couldn’t believe it. We were hysterical with joy. Our mother had just killed herself the year before—’
‘Evan, stop,’ Delle said.
‘Shut up!’ I roared at her. She snatched her hand away like my skin was burning hot.
I turned back to Chris. ‘We figured Arthur was trying to make us happy. Which was something he’d never done in our lives.
Not once. He was being weird and giving us these dogs and smiling and letting us sleep with them on the ends of our beds, and we just didn’t question it because we were too excited. ’
Chrissy was watching me, his mouth pulled downwards, the chat rolling up the laptop screen faster and faster behind him.
‘Three months, we had those dogs,’ I said.
Suddenly it was hard to breathe. ‘They went everywhere with us. They would wait at the gate for us to get home from school every day. Then one day Arthur came and told us we couldn’t afford to feed them both anymore.
We had to get rid of one. And he wasn’t just talking about rehoming the dog, Chris, like a normal person would do.
He was talking about taking that dog out the back of the property and shooting it. ’
Chris’s head snapped back hard, the way it had when I’d palmed him off. ‘What?’
‘He told us to fight. Me and Russell. The winner got to keep his dog.’
‘Why? Why would he do that?’
‘Because he was teaching us a lesson.’
‘What lesson?’
‘That we should never love anything,’ I said.
The night swelled around us. The house was silent but for a clock ticking somewhere.
I was trying to stop the words, feeling like my eyes were wild, like I needed to claw the story back out of my son’s precious, pure, innocent brain before it was too late.
Because it was happening. I was poisoning him.
I was letting Arthur’s venom get into my son.
‘What happened?’ Chris asked. His voice was tiny.
‘What do you think?’ I said. ‘Russell and I beat the shit out of each other. I broke his eye socket. He knocked me out cold. Dad took my dog away and shot it dead.’
‘Jesus fucking Christ,’ Chris said. His voice was a monotone. Delle’s mouth was hanging open.
‘Russell was so guilty about winning that he ran away with his dog the next morning,’ I said.
‘He told me years later that he took him all the way up to the Sunshine Coast. Hitchhiked. Wanted to get him into the hands of someone far, far away from Dad.’ The breath was finally coming back into me.
I was trembling with shame. Rambling. ‘I was terrified for those three days that Russell was gone that he’d never come back and I’d be stuck alone with the old man forever.
When he got home I was so happy I just …
you know … I couldn’t grieve for the dog anymore. I was just so happy.’
My wife and child were silent.
‘This person isn’t someone who deserves my sympathy, or yours,’ I told Chris. ‘And you’re forbidden from being alone with him. If you were with him last night, you need to tell me right now.’
Chris just shook his head. I waited, but that’s all he did: shook his head, sat on the bed shaking it and staring at nothing. I walked out. Went to the bathroom and started stripping, and Delle came right in behind me and closed the door after herself.
‘What the actual fuck, Evan.’
‘He asked. I answered. We’re done now. It’s over. He wasn’t there. There’s nothing to worry about.’ I pulled my shoes off. ‘Now I’m going to shower and change and head back out. I’ll be up all night working on this Redbelly thing.’
‘We agreed you’d never bring that shit into this house.’ Delle’s eyes were wild. Wet. ‘It stays in the therapy room. It never comes near Chris.’
‘There’s not enough therapy sessions in the world to contain all that stuff, Delle,’ I said.
‘And I’m tired of paying thousands of dollars just so I can comfort my therapist about the crazy shit that I tell her.
Also, trying to keep the stories out of the house is a little redundant, isn’t it?
The actual man himself walks right in here whenever he damn well pleases. ’
Delle was massaging her brow as I unbuttoned my shirt. ‘You never told me that story. About the dogs.’
‘Yeah, well, I’m sick of comforting you about it all, too.’
I showered, pulled on fresh clothes and left the house without saying goodbye to anyone. As I pulled away from the kerb, my phone rang, and I answered it on the hands-free.
‘I thought you said you were going to wait here for the results?’ The tech’s voice on the phone was unmistakable, thick and smug.
‘You got something?’
‘I’ve got a partial profile,’ he said. ‘Like I said, it’s only a piece. I’ll email it to you, you punch it into NCIDD and see if anything lines up.’
I pulled over right there, three streets away from my house, and dragged my laptop out of the backpack.
I logged in to the National Criminal Investigation DNA Database and gave the tech my credentials so he could securely send me the coded profile of the DNA taken from Chloe Lutz’s body.
I thanked him, asked him to deal with me and me alone going forward, and ended the call.
I transferred the code into a new search of a system that contained more than 1.
7 million DNA profiles from Australia’s criminals, suspects, cops, volunteers, missing persons and unidentified remains.
The system started scrolling. I sat the laptop on the passenger seat beside me, pulled back onto the road and continued driving towards Redbelly.
As I crossed the bridge into town, the wooden boards drumming under the car’s tyres, I noticed the system had stopped scrolling.
Thinking I’d lost internet, I pulled over again with a painful tightness in my chest. I was in sight of the pub where Chloe Lutz had been murdered.
Her killer’s DNA profile popped up on the screen.
Beneath it was a heading that read Familial link.
Beneath that heading were two coded profiles. I clicked on the first one.
It was me.