Chapter 20
Now
quinn
Quinn double-checks her phone’s satnav. Fuck. This is the right place.
She peers up through the windscreen at the driveway rising like a solid gravel wall in front of her. Jesus. How the hell is she supposed to get a car up this?
She could park here at the bottom and walk up, she supposes. Given the rental car’s low clearance, that might be the smart thing to do.
Fuck that. She put the deposit on Phil’s credit card.
She drops down a gear to get more power, puts the pedal to the metal, and launches the Subaru up the near-vertical dirt road.
Her phone shoots off the dashboard onto the floor, and her half-drunk coffee sloshes wildly in its cup before the whole thing flies out and into the back seat.
The engine strains with effort, the wheels spin, and for a moment she thinks the car’s going to tumble backwards like an overambitious beetle; but then, with a final screech of protest, it lurches over the crest of the driveway, its underbelly bottoming out with an ominous crunch against the gravel.
Thankfully, the drive levels off as it curls towards a neat clapboard house. Quinn parks in front of a wrap-around porch decorated with pumpkins and seasonal gourds and gets out.
The house looks deserted. She hasn’t called ahead: no one wants to talk to a journalist, and Quinn’s learned from experience it’s better to ask for forgiveness than permission. Most people are far too polite to slam a door in your face, especially once they’ve clocked your eyepatch and scars.
She steps up onto the wooden porch, opens the mesh screen, and knocks on the front door.
Up close, she can see some of the porch railings are rotting and need replacing, and the clapboard could use a fresh coat of paint.
But the window frames are fairly new, and there’s a young apple orchard to the side of the property that’s been thoughtfully laid out with a winding path through the trees, even if the grass is almost knee-high.
It looks like a house that has been loved and looked after until recently.
Until the person who loved and looked after it suddenly disappeared.
Quinn walks around the porch and peers through the kitchen window. There are no lights on inside the house, nothing to indicate that anyone is home, but her gut tells her otherwise.
She raps on the kitchen window, and is rewarded with a fleeting movement inside the house.
Quinn returns to the front door. ‘Mrs Connelly?’ she calls. ‘Mrs Connelly, please. My name is Quinn Wilde, and I’m an investigative reporter with INN. I’d like to talk to you about your husband.’
Footsteps approach the other side of the door, and then stop.
‘Mrs Connelly, I don’t believe your husband ran out on you,’ Quinn says. ‘I think something happened to him. Please, I only want five minutes of your time. Just hear me out; that’s all I ask.’
She holds her breath.
Finally, the door opens a few inches. A small, dark-haired woman peers out. Quinn recognises the mix of wary hope and hard-won cynicism in her eyes: she’s seen it in the faces of grieving family members of the missing too many times before.
‘You know what happened to Luke?’ the woman asks.
‘No. But I want to help you find out,’ Quinn says.
The woman hesitates, and then nods briefly and steps back.
Inside, the house is neat and well kept.
A box of children’s toys is stacked to one side of the sitting room, and an old-fashioned wooden high chair is pushed against a scrubbed pine table in the kitchen.
The fridge is covered with colourful paintings and cartoon fridge magnets.
Quinn’s eye is drawn to the red foam heart in the middle, on which is glued a happy family snap of a smiling blond man, a new baby cradled in one arm, his other reaching down to a little girl’s hand.
Luke Connelly and his young daughters, Quinn presumes.
Luke’s wife pulls out a chair at the kitchen table and sits down, picking fretfully at her blunt nails.
Quinn is aware Tara Connelly is only in her early thirties, but she looks closer to forty.
It’s the not knowing that eats away at the families.
As devastating as it is when a body is discovered, at least then they can grieve and eventually start to heal.
For Luke Connelly’s family, the loss is an open wound.
‘I spoke to Luke’s dad yesterday,’ Quinn says. ‘He told me his son – your husband – would never have just upped and left you all without a word.’
She pauses and waits.
‘Of course he wouldn’t!’ Tara says, as Quinn had known she would. ‘He’d never do that to the girls. He loves them. He loves us.’
‘I know this is painful, Mrs Connelly, but can you tell me what happened the last day you saw Luke?’ Quinn asks. ‘How was he? What was his mood?’
‘He was just the same as usual,’ Tara says.
‘He got up early to give the baby her breakfast – he always liked to do that, said it was his chance to have some daddy-daughter time. He said he had a couple of work meetings, but he’d be home in time to help bath the kids and put them to bed.
’ She shrugs helplessly. ‘It was just a normal day.’
‘He wasn’t worried about anything?’
‘Like I said, he had a lot on with work – he’s a PhD student at UVM, and he works part-time at a bar to help with the bills, so he’s a bit stressed sometimes, but he was always there for the girls. Always!’
Quinn doesn’t miss the way Tara confuses her tenses when she refers to her husband. The poor woman is in limbo, caught between two worlds, unable to move on.
‘Is there anything you remember about the week before Luke disappeared that strikes you as out of the ordinary, looking back?’ she asks. ‘Any odd phone calls, changes in his routine?’
The woman frowns. ‘I thought you said you could help me find my husband,’ she says uneasily.
‘Look, I don’t think I should be talking to you.
I don’t want to stir everything up again.
It was awful after Luke disappeared, the things people said.
That he’d run off with another woman, that I’d driven him to suicide.
’ She shivers and wraps her skinny arms around her torso.
‘There was nothing out of the ordinary that week, I told you.’
‘It might be something really small,’ Quinn says. ‘Something that didn’t seem strange at the time—’
Tara stands up. ‘I’m sorry, I’ve got to get on. The baby will be waking up from her nap soon. I think you should go.’
‘Perhaps something to do with his research into the lake?’ Quinn asks. ‘He found out something he shouldn’t have, maybe?’
It’s just a hunch. She has no evidence connecting Luke Connelly’s disappearance to the accident that would claim the lives of twenty-one teenagers just a week later, other than that they both involve the lake.
But Tara Connelly sits back down.