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Joseph grabs a pale ale from the fridge and makes a mess of pouring it. Slurping foam, he goes to the dining table and sits. Already, the rich smells of plum sauce and fermented black beans are beginning to turn his stomach. Erin joins him at the table. Tilly traipses in, placing her phone beside her plate. Max sits opposite.
The meal is a feast of eyes: Max watches Joseph; Joseph watches Tilly; Tilly watches her phone screen; Erin watches everyone. The dearth of conversation accentuates the sounds of eating: the beetle-back crunch of crispy seaweed, the wet mastication of noodles and rice; the pulverizing of chicken and pork. They bite, they chew, they drink, they swallow. They suck meat from bones, smack their lips, probe their teeth with their tongues. For Joseph, it’s almost too much – a horrifying aural affirmation of their squishy organic states. He wants to cover his ears and drown it out. He grabs his beer glass, nearly swipes it off the table. Takes a long gulp.
Erin looks at him sidelong. She’s about to speak when Tilly’s phone rings. ‘Oi, Missy,’ she tells her daughter. ‘You know the rules when we’re eating.’
But the device is already at Tilly’s ear. ‘Oh, hi,’ she says. ‘I was going to text you, but then I realized I didn’t have your number.’ She listens for a while, her eyes meeting those around the table. ‘No … No, she isn’t … You haven’t? … Wait, since when?’
A longer pause, now. Joseph feels Max’s gaze and forces himself not to meet it. An awful pressure is building in his chest. There’s no doubt in his mind who’s calling. The fallout from Drew’s disappearance was always going to arrivesooner than Angus Roth’s. Surprising, really, that Enoch Cullen waited this long before reaching out.
Worst of all is the knowledge that he’s witnessing, in real time, the opening beats of another man’s tragedy. One that he could have prevented.
Joseph knows what it’s like to lose a wife. He can’t begin to imagine the horror of losing a child. At last, the true cost of protecting Max is becoming clear: not simply how much of his own humanity he’s prepared to sacrifice, but how much inhumanity he’s prepared to inflict on others. Because if he does with Drew’s remains what he did with Angus Roth’s, he’ll heap even greater torment on Enoch – the unendurable pain of not knowing, the imposition of a life spent searching for answers that will never come.
‘Uh-huh,’ Tilly says. ‘No … yeah … I don’t … Just some guy she was meeting. I don’t even know that … No, I’m sorry, it was all pretty secretive … Yeah, exactly. Not at all.’
Finally, Joseph looks across the table at his son. Max has put down his fork and is leaning forward in his chair, watching his stepsister closely. His breathing, although silent, is laboured.
Tilly catches her lower lip between her teeth, releases it. ‘Just … yeah, anything … Of course. I’ll do it now.’ She listens again, then frowns. ‘And what did they say? …Howlong? … OK … Yes … Guaranteed.’
She ends the call and opens an app, typing with palpable urgency.
‘That didn’t sound great,’ Erin says. ‘Everything OK?’
Tilly shakes her head. ‘That was Enoch. Iknewsomething was up. He says Drew never came home last night.’
‘Has he heard from her?’
‘No.’
‘Have you?’
‘I’ve been messaging her all day with no answer. She hasn’t even viewed what I sent.’
Erin looks at Joseph, then back at her daughter. ‘Has anyone else heard from her?’
‘That’s what Enoch wanted me to find out.’
‘Did you say something about a guy she was meeting?’
‘A new one, yeah,’ Tilly says. ‘Not that I could tell you much about him – because Drew’s been so weirdly tight-lipped about the whole thing.’ She flicks a look at Joseph, then returns her attention to her phone. ‘She said it was someone a lot older. Someone she thought would freak me out completely, hence all the secrecy. I told her it didn’t matter but she still wouldn’t open up.’
‘Who was the last person to see her?’
‘Right now, I guess that’s Enoch. Drew was here most of yesterday. Then she went home to get changed before meeting this new guy. Enoch says he saw her before she left.’
Joseph is still reeling from the look Tilly just threw him. Surely she doesn’t suspect a tryst between her stepfather and her best friend – that he’s somehow responsible for Drew’s disappearance?
He recalls his visit to the Grind House, Saturday morning, and how Drew had greeted him when he approached their table:Hey, Mr Carver, I amlovingthe newparfum.
At the time, catching Max’s expression, he’d had the craziest notion his son was jealous. But Tilly had looked at him strangely, too. Had that innocent coffee shop encounter planted a seed of suspicion in his stepdaughter’s head? How terminally ironic if a throwaway comment from Max’s victim ends up implicating Joseph.
He needs to head this off quickly, before Tilly’s seed can germinate. Trouble is, the Grind House conversation isn’t the only problematic one. Yesterday lunchtime, makingsmoothies in the kitchen, Drew had leaned into him and dropped another grenade:I know what you did for Max, and I think it’s really brave.
Tilly, arriving from the garden and catching the tail end of Drew’s disclosure, had asked herwhatwas really brave. If she hadn’t accepted the explanation, where might her mind have gone?
His problems don’t stop there. Earlier, attempting to justify his madcap dash to intercept the estate agent, he’d told Erin he’d visited the bungalow yesterday. And now Tilly, albeit unknowingly, has turned that excuse into a reason for further suspicion by claiming Drew’s secret liaison was with a far older man.
Abruptly, he realizes that he hasn’t spoken a word since Tilly’s phone rang a minute ago, and that his silence might incriminate him further. ‘Where’s Enoch now?’ he asks.