The Game You Played (5 page)

Wednesday morning

FROM MY OFFICE WINDOW, THE CITY was a swirl of wintry fog and tall towers of Lego bricks. It looked like it could all tumble down and disappear into the harbour. Sometimes, I wished it would.

The first time I walked into this office and saw that view, I thought I had the whole world in my fist.

I’d already secured
the girl
, and now my life was complete. Later, when Tommy came along, I even managed to replicate myself.

That life was gone.

Six months without Tommy. No real leads. Just dead ends.

And guilt.

When Tommy first went missing, I never thought a day could go past ever again where he didn’t consume every second of my thoughts. But I was wrong. Someone had to go back to work, and after months, slowly, a day did slip by where I was so flat-out busy that I didn’t think of him—until I came home and saw the reminders and photos of him everywhere.

Sometimes, there was a reminder that hit me in the face so hard that it took my breath away. Like one of his old baby rattles that I found lying in the bottom of an office drawer, long forgotten.

How did a couple move on after their child went missing? Short answer: they didn’t. You just kind of moved sideways, trying not to lose sight of that point where you last saw your kid.

But if I had to pinpoint the exact moment that things went wrong in my life, I couldn’t say it was the day Tommy went missing.

When it came to real estate graphs, I could chart the swings of the market—the busts and the booms. If I were to try and graph my own failures and successes, I wouldn’t know where to start. No, it wasn’t Tommy’s disappearance where the line began trending down. The trend started before that, but it was hazy.

I still couldn’t let go of what it was supposed to be: my perfect life with Phoebe.

When I was growing up, other girls were other girls. But Phoebe was always
the girl
. Even when I kissed other girls. Even the year I lived with Kate.

Phoebe was the least accessible person I knew. Every part of her mind was held in compartments. Some compartments were securely locked. Some compartments were open, but only sometimes. You could knock on a door and maybe, just maybe, Phoebe would let you in.

It was no different when she was eight years old. Phoebe, Saskia and I grew up rough and determined on the city streets. The three of us lived on the low end of a street of neglected townhouses that were desperately buying time: Southern Sails Street. All soon to be knocked down to make way for those who
deserved
to be there (those who could afford it). At the high end of Southern Sails, huge old mansions graced the street. No one was threatening to knock those down. The government had never owned them. Kate and Pria had lived up that end—still did—in their parents’ expensive houses. They’d attended private girls’ schools and used to walk primly down the footpath in their straw school hats.

When we were all around age nine, Saskia commandeered Kate and Pria into our unruly gang. The five of us made a force to be reckoned with, even if most of us were girls. Bernice Wick had come in last, but she was never one of the gang. Not because she was a couple of years older but because she just didn’t fit with us. She was too damned strange.

Phoebe didn’t try at all. She didn’t have to. She had an aura about her even back then. Her name had been Phoebe Vance. She was fiercer than anyone, but she’d drop everything and climb a tree or drainpipe in a flash if someone’s mangy kitten had got itself stuck. She entranced me with large brown eyes that seemed like they could shoot lasers if she chose them to.

All of us were in and out of each other’s houses on the weekends. Except for Phoebe’s house. Her father, Morris, dominated the Vance family home. His moods controlled the atmosphere. Stormy day, winter or roasting summer, it was all under Morris’s sky. Phoebe’s mother reminded me of a sapling, struggling to find its way above the forest canopy to find its own sunlight, but ending up aging and withering where it stood. It was obvious to me that Phoebe had learned to put up a protective barrier. If her father was raging, she pretended to understand and she sidestepped him. If he was drunk and bitter, she’d get him coffee and cake. If he was in one of his rare sunny moods, she’d laugh along with him.

But I watched her. I saw her fingers twisting around each other as she laughed. I saw her smile drop like a stone when she left a room in which her father was. I heard the false tone in her voice when she asked if he was okay and if she could get anything for him.

Phoebe was always acting. Pretending that her life was better than it was. You could hear her father roaring at her mother, and Phoebe would come out of the house with her head up and a smile. No wonder she became an actor as a career choice. She’d had plenty of practice.

I wanted to save her and give her a different life.

I worked hard, and it was all for her. I built up a real estate agency that was one of the best in the city—and the most profitable. I wanted her to be proud of the man I’d become. I’d be her port in the storm, always. I’d never
be
the storm.

I knew that Phoebe loved her mother, but she never respected her. Roberta Vance had poured all her energies into the house. It had to look exactly right at all times. Especially during Morris’s meanest bouts. Her dinners were legendary. She pored over recipe books and came up with meals that made me secretly wish she’d teach them to Phoebe. It seemed that the worse Morris got, the more effort Roberta put into dusting and arranging every item in the house. As though putting the house into order somehow neutralised Morris’s tantrums. She could clean and mop and sterilise Morris’s existence in the house. At times, I caught her counting and recounting things. And dusting imaginary dust.

When cancer got Phoebe’s mother, it seemed to me like the house itself had crawled inside her. All of the caustic cleaning chemicals and Morris’s rage mixed together into one toxic brew.

Phoebe was just sixteen then. She was left living with her father and Nan—her maternal grandmother. How Nan had produced a daughter like Phoebe’s mother, I’ll never figure. When I was growing up, I always saw Nan as a scowling, embittered but stoic presence. She was still there, the old battle-axe, firmly wedged into the wood of the house. Nothing—not the government or anyone else—was ever going to dislodge her.

Morris drank himself into an early death a decade after Phoebe’s mother died. In those years, he’d had a continuous startled look on his face, as though he couldn’t accept that she was really gone. As though at any moment, she was going to come back through the door, put his shoes away, and make him dinner.

Phoebe was living in London then. I’d been on an extended holiday, staying with her. And she was pregnant with Tommy. We returned to Sydney for her father’s funeral, and we never went back to London. I got stuck back into the real estate agency that I’d created with my old school friend and fellow shyster, Rob Lynch. It happened just at the right time. In the months before a real estate boom, Rob and I rode the crazy wave.

When Tommy was nineteen months old, I paid a bomb for one of the new townhouses that had been built near the upper end of Southern Sails Street.

I thought Phoebe would love that. So many people she knew were there. Her grandmother and my parents still lived there. Pria still lived in her childhood home with her nine-year-old daughter, Jessie. Kate lived with her husband and twin boy and girl (in the newly renovated upper level of her parents’ house). Saskia was on the next block, in a swish apartment that overlooked her old street. So we were all still there—the Southern Sails gang.

Stepping over to my desk, I tapped a few keys on my keyboard and had a florist send Phoebe some flowers. I needed to give her some kind of reward for coming out to dinner last night.

I knew Phoebe wouldn’t really appreciate the flowers, but I didn’t know what else to give her. Nothing impressed her. Before, I’d given her the world. But there was nothing I could give her to fix her life now. I couldn’t give her Tommy back, no matter how much I wished I could.

Wednesday morning

YELLOW LIGHT PEERED IN THROUGH THE blinds, investigating me, querying why I still occupied my bed. The grey fog had been replaced by sunshine.

Two hours had passed while I dozed. I’d barely had any sleep last night. That wasn’t unusual. On most days, I didn’t have more than five hours’ sleep, in scattered patches.

My outfit from the restaurant dinner last night was lying in a tangle on the floor. I’d made an effort to get through the dinner for Luke, but it’d been a strain. Those people all existed in such a different world to me. I didn’t care about the things they and Luke cared about.

Dragging myself from the bed, I dressed in my usual—jeans, T-shirt, and a hoodie. My daily clothing selection consisted of two pairs of jeans, five T-shirts, three jackets, and the hoodie. That was all I’d worn in months and months. I hadn’t bought a single piece of clothing since Tommy went missing. I’d dropped three dress sizes, and I’d had to dig into the boxes of clothing I’d worn before I’d been pregnant.

Heading downstairs, I made myself a lemon juice. I never used to like lemons all that much. Now, I liked the sharpness of them.

Taking the drink, I went out to the living room. Before I realised what I was doing, I was pacing. Up and down the hallway.

Stopping before the hallstand, I gripped it, putting the drink down.

Crazy people paced.

I couldn’t say it was the first time, either. Some days, I paced endlessly, trying to shake the darkness inside my mind.

Picking up one of the hair elastics I kept in the keys bowl, I tied my lank hair up into a ponytail. I stared at my face in the hallstand mirror, as I found myself doing every day. I’d come to hate the face I saw reflected there.

The envelope I’d taken from the mailbox was still lying there where I’d left it. Normally Luke opened all the mail, but he’d missed seeing this. Which was a good thing, because if he had, he’d have wondered how it got there between last night and this morning.

I picked up the envelope. The paper was of a thicker quality than that normally used for mass mail outs. Maybe it was a letter from a neighbour. An invitation to a housewarming party or something. Only, no one new had moved to the lower end of the street in a long time. The rich people buying up the new properties on the street were mostly investors.

Hooking my finger inside the envelope, I tore it along the top. There was a piece of paper that looked a little yellowed but was a similar blue to the envelope.

I unfolded the letter. There were just a few lines in the middle of the page:

Little boy blue

Alone and forlorn.

From the meadow led

From your mother torn.

At first, my mind saw the Mother Goose rhyme. When I finally understood that the words had changed, my fingers started to tremble.

Who’d sent this to me? Anyone who knew about Tommy would know how I’d react to those words. Tommy had been dubbed
Little Boy Blue
by the media. He’d been wearing all blue when he vanished.

Someone sent this to us deliberately.

Someone who wanted to hurt us.

Then another, more desperate thought:
Whoever sent this was the person who took Tommy.

My lungs were airless rooms closing in on each other as I picked up the phone on the hallstand.

Luke didn’t pick up. He’d probably gone straight into a meeting. Leaving him a message to call me, I hung up and called Detective Trent Gilroy. It’d been a month since I’d last spoken to him, and that had only been a brief conversation. He’d called
just to
check in with me
. As if that had become his job now. He couldn’t find Tommy, so he’d keep checking in with me, to make sure that I still existed, that I hadn’t vanished, too.

“Trent,” I breathed. “I got a letter. About Tommy.”

Silence on the other end of the phone. Then, “What kind of letter?”

“It’s a children’s rhyme, but they’ve changed the words. It was in our letterbox.”

I read out the rhyme.

His tone became dead serious. “Drop the letter.
Now.
Use tweezers to place it into a plastic bag and bring it down to the station. The envelope too, if there was one.”

I opened my fist and let the letter flutter to the floor. “I shouldn’t have touched it, should I?”

“You weren’t to know. Well, it’s likely to be someone playing a very stupid prank. Still, we’ll certainly investigate it. Can you come down now?”

“Yes, I’ll be there.”

I dropped the letter and envelope into a ziplock plastic bag using eyebrow tweezers. Then rushed upstairs to find my mobile phone. It was almost out of charge. I switched it off and pushed it into my pocket.

Breaking into a run, I headed out the front door. I didn’t drive anymore—the sleeping medications I’d been on meant that I was too drowsy during the day to be on the road, especially in the hectic rush of inner-city traffic. I’d let my car’s registration lapse, much to Luke’s chagrin.

I raced to the tall brick fence at the end of my garden path and through the gate. And smacked straight into someone.

Pria’s daughter Jessie stood there in her calf-length private school uniform and straw hat. The ziplock bag flew up in the air, landing near the drain. Jessie rushed across the path, but before she could get to the bag, I snatched it up.

“I could have lost it!” I cried.

Her expression immediately crumbled. “I’m sorry, Phoebe.”

I wanted to smack myself for snapping at the kid. “No, I’m sorry. It was my fault. I shouldn’t have barrelled out of my gate like that.”

“What is it?” She screwed up her forehead in that gaping, wrinkled-nose way kids did when they were puzzling over something. She was so like Pria, with her almond eyes and high forehead, except that her hair (unlike Pria’s) was dark.

“Just a letter. But an important one. Are you okay? Hope I didn’t hurt you.” I rubbed her arm.

“Yeah. I’m okay.” She paused, glancing down at the pavement. “Phoebe, how come you don’t come around and see us anymore?”

“I will. I’ve just been . . . caught up.”

“Mum says she misses you. I miss you, too. And maybe when you come over, you can convince Mum to let me walk our puppy sometimes. She says he’s already too big and strong and might get away from me. She walks him when I’m at school.”

It was so like Jessie to ask me over. She’d always been like a small adult, organising and worrying about everyone. The other side of that was a hint of anxiety. She often seemed to be analysing her own words. She’d tell you something that happened at school and then pick the whole thing apart, scene by scene.

“I’ll do my best to convince your mum about the pup,” I assured her.

Jessie cut a lonely figure as I said good-bye and headed away. But I couldn’t stop and chat. Not now.

I rushed along the hard pavements to the end of my street, turning right at the Southern Sails Café and then jogging the two blocks to the police station.

The station was big and busy and intimidating. It had become my second home in the months after Tommy vanished. The kind of home you wished you could run away from and never see again.

I was shown into Detective Gilroy’s office. He looked up briefly from a phone conversation. “Please, take a seat. I’ll just be a moment.” His tone was neutral. I knew already that he didn’t hold out much hope for this letter to lead to anything.

I sat and waited, impatience spinning through me. I wanted him to move on this. Get things happening.

So many times in the past six months, I’d sat here like this, impatient like this. Those times had become less and less frequent. There’d been no leads to follow, nothing to discuss. Until this morning.

The detective kept talking on the phone. From his end of the conversation, it sounded like it was about a domestic violence court order. A husband taking an order out on his wife, worried that she was going to hurt the kids.

I studied Trent Gilroy’s face. He was the man who I’d once seen as holding the fate of Tommy in his hands. That was in the early days, when he all but promised me he’d find Tommy (before hope of finding Tommy had faded to nothing). He was in his early forties I guessed, his hair a mix of black and silver. He wasn’t bad looking. He had a single deep line running across his forehead that looked like a statistical line graph, with a blip to the right of it.

I handed him the plastic bag as soon as he ended his call, before he had a chance to ask for it.

Frowning hard, he turned the blip on his forehead into a statistical anomaly, tugging the letter from the envelope with his own special detective set of tweezers.

“Hmmm. . . .” He sounded noncommittal as he read it. He looked up at me with a faint look of surprise. “This has been written with a typewriter.”

“Are you sure?” I’d never seen something typewritten before. Typewriters were relics of an era before my time. I knew that you could get fonts on the internet that matched the old typewritten look.

“Yeah.” He held it up to the light, examining it closely. “I’m sure.”

“What do you think about the rhyme?”

“Well, it’s hard to determine what the person wanted to achieve in sending this. It doesn’t say very much. I mean, we don’t know for certain that it’s not well intended.”

“Well intended?” I raised my eyebrows incredulously.

He scratched his temple. “Maybe. But if it is, it’s very misguided. We’ll run tests on it anyway. Just leave it with us. We already have your fingerprints and Luke’s on file, so we’ll be able to distinguish different prints on the letter and envelope.”

The police had taken our fingerprints after Tommy had gone missing, so that if they found anything belonging to Tommy, they could quickly tell which prints were ours and which were those of a stranger. They had Tommy’s fingerprints, too, from the ornaments of Nan’s that he touched on the day he disappeared. They even had items of his clothing from my dirty laundry basket (for the sniffer dogs), including one of his T-shirts that had a tiny patch of blood from when he’d fallen and grazed his knee the day before.

“Could it,” I began, “I mean, is it possible that the person who took Tommy wrote this? Maybe they’re feeling bad about what they did.”

He exhaled a drawn-out sigh. “Unlikely. In the realm of possibilities, no.”

“Why not?” I asked bluntly.

He took a moment before answering. “Because people who take children don’t want anything to do with the police. They don’t make contact with the parents of the child, unless it’s a ransom demand. And ransom demands would normally come in close to the time of abduction.”

I’d sat here in this office with Luke six months ago, our hands grasping each other’s as Luke asked the detective for cold facts. Gilroy had admitted that children who were abducted by strangers had a high chance of being murdered. And of those children who were murdered, three-quarters of them were murdered within three hours.

Three hours.

If that statistic included Tommy, then he’d already been dead when Luke and I were still searching the playground and surrounds for him with the police and others who’d joined in.

Did Detective Gilroy believe that Tommy was dead, despite him claiming that he didn’t?

Dead, dead, dead.
Such a flat, final word. There was no light or hope in that word. There was no Tommy in that word. There was only the possibility of a body. After all these months, if Tommy was dead, there wasn’t even any possibility of a body: there was only the possibility of Tommy’s skeletal
remains
.

Suddenly, I couldn’t breathe. There wasn’t enough oxygen in this tiny office. I couldn’t stay here in Trent’s office any longer, with his abduction statistics and his neutral voice and the graph line on his forehead.

“Are you okay, Phoebe?” His eyes flicked over me in concern. I knew the laundry list of what I looked like: dark circles under my eyes, no makeup, untidy hair spilling out of a ponytail. I didn’t look
okay
.

Nodding, I got up too quickly. The room tilted and spun.

“Phoebe?”

“I’m just tired. Please let me know if you have any news.”

I hurried out, my head still swimming, trying to look normal. Out on the street, the wintry air stung my cheeks, but at least I could breathe again.

I’d know if Tommy were dead.
Wouldn’t I?

The answer came to me instantly. I wouldn’t know. A stranger had taken him from under my nose, and I hadn’t even known that was happening. In those moments that I thought he was playing near my feet, he was being led or carried away from me.

When I looked back, I imagined I had a sense of dread right at that time. But the dread had to be in retrospect. If I’d known what was about to happen to Tommy, I would have stopped it.