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If Joseph’s fists clench any harder, he’ll see the white bone of his knuckles burst through the stretched skin. ‘Try me.’
The bungalow reveals itself. Joseph sees no police cars. No forensics tent. Erin pulls on to the empty driveway and kills the engine.
Across the street, an old man in a Hard Rock Cafe baseball cap is shaving a box hedge with electric clippers. Joseph recognizes him – Dell Stephano. His mother used to take coffee with Dell every Wednesday and complain bitterly about his nosiness for the rest of the week. She’d stuck to that routine for as long as she lived in Saddle Bank, so Joseph supposes she must have found something about Dell that she liked.
He watches the man through the wing mirror, imagining how glorious it must feel to have no task more pressingthan the trimming of a hedge. Then he looks at his mother’s garage and thinks about what lies inside.
Two houses to his left, a sprinkler is flinging jewels of rainbow water into the air. Overhead, an aeroplane is scribing twin white lines across blue sky. The day is idyllic, dreamlike.
Erin slips her sunglasses back on. From her bag she finds a silk headscarf, folds it into a triangle and ties it under her chin. She looks like she’s channelling Audrey Hepburn, or perhaps Susan Sarandon fromThelma and Louise.
‘Well?’ Joseph asks. ‘Are you going to tell me?’
‘Yes, but not out here. Let’s go inside.’
Climbing out of the car, she strides across the driveway to the bungalow’s front entrance.
THIRTY-SIX
In the half-second before Joseph throws open his door and follows, a hundred thoughts rush through his head; a thousand.
Last night, lying awake, he’d been ready to tell Erin everything. Not just what Max had done, first to the dead man and then to Drew, but how Joseph had concealed the truth. He’d intended to tell her because he hadn’t thought it conscionable to let her find out any other way. Now, just like previous decisions since this nightmare began four days ago, the calculus has fundamentally changed. Because as much as he might still love his wife, as much as he might understand the reasons for her infidelity, he’s just glimpsed a side to her he hadn’t known existed.
Outside the police station, Erin had begun their conversation by spinning him back to his first meeting with Tilly, a memory she’d known would invoke all the emotions that had filled him that day, all his protective instincts. She’d gone on to share intimate details of her life with Robson, and then Mark, that he’d never heard before. Only once she’d pacified him with the opiate memory of first encounters and neutered him with the horrors of past relationships had she admitted the truth about Angus Roth.
He can’t fault her. She has, at least, been honest. But Erin’s manipulation of him, however trivial, does highlight something important – his ability to predict her behaviour isn’t as accurate as he’d once thought. Right now, right here, that could be his undoing.
Joseph gets out of the car, ignoring his body’s various shrieks of protest, unable to ignore the chill of fear his mother’s bungalow instils in him. The building seems different, in ways he can’t explain. It exudes a tangible menace. Breathing hard, he hobbles after his wife, his fingers hooked like talons, like claws.
Erin slides her key into the lock and opens the door. She sniffs the air, steps through. Joseph pauses on the step, casting a look back at Dell Stephano and the sprinkler flinging its jewels into the morning sky. He wonders if the stench of death rolling out of the bungalow is real or entirely illusory.
Sweat bursts from his pores. It rolls wet from his armpits. Flexing his fingers, he limps across the threshold behind Erin. He elbows the door shut, hears the snick of its latch. Immediately, he finds himself in an entirely different world to the one populated by Dell. It’s silent in here, but there’s anawarenessto the silence. The bungalow feels sentient; as if it’s poised, alert.
The stench Joseph thought he’d breathed into his lungs is already fading. His imagination must have been playing tricks. The air feels ancient, even so, hot and dead: like the inside of a crypt unsealed after a couple of millennia lying beneath desert sands. Again, he’s struck by how alien everything looks. He feels less like he’s standing in his late mother’s hallway and more like he’s entered a—
—lair, some part of his mind volunteers.
Erin glances over her shoulder at him, her eyes hidden by her sunglasses. Then she turns away and lifts her chin. ‘Hello?’
Joseph baulks at that, stares at his wife in confusion. She knows the place is unoccupied. Who does she think might answer?
‘Drew?’ she calls. ‘Are you here?’
Joseph watches Erin move along the hall, his stomach twisting like an Archimedes screw. She stops at the door leading to his mother’s bedroom, ducks in her head.
‘What’re you doing?’ he hisses. ‘You really think she might be here?’
Erin ignores his question, disappearing inside. Joseph, his heart kicking like a newborn foal, is forced to follow. What he sensed as he crossed the drive he senses even more strongly inside the bungalow. Something is badly amiss with the heavy, bookish quiet. Even the peculiar fall of the light through the slatted blinds feels wrong.
His mother’s room is a desolate space, familiar yet fundamentally changed. The fitted wardrobes – white with decorative gold inlays – look just as they did when she was alive. Her bed, now stripped to the mattress, is crowned by the same rose-velvet headboard.
But just like the rest of the bungalow, the vital touches that made this her sanctuary have disappeared. Her empty dressing table is layered with dust. Joseph remembers it cluttered with make-up and perfume bottles, along with keepsakes and gifts made by Max: the boy’s first finger painting; his first handwritten letter; Christmas cards he’d drawn; crude clay figures he’d pushed together; a bookmark cut from felt and badly sewn; a trinket box covered with carefully stuck-on shells; photos of him feeding ducks, or wearing a doctor’s dressing-up kit, or standing on a box and turning sausages on a barbecue.
Where did it all go? Joseph remembers clearing the bungalow with Erin, a few months after his mother’s death. But now, standing here, he doesn’t recall what happened to hermost sentimental belongings. He knows he didn’t throw them away.
Erin glances at the bed, leans over it. Whatever she’s looking for, she doesn’t find it. Going to the fitted wardrobes, she opens the doors two at a time, revealing the empty spaces beneath the rails.
Erin closes the last set. Then she returns to the hall. Joseph follows, watching as she performs the same routine in the guest bedroom.