My Brother's Keeper

Chapter 6



WEDNESDAY 21 NOVEMBER 2012

A long white plane moving silently across an expansive blue sky; strutting mynahs and jacaranda blooms; the sweet cloying smell of jasmine, the rotting stink of mangrove swamps; Rangitoto. All triggers. All invitations to the ghosts of my past to haunt me. I lived in Auckland when I was kid. We did, I mean. Mum, Dad, Niki and me. I remembered Mum here, shrugging the sundress straps off her shoulders. Bronzed legs. Shading her eyes from the late afternoon sun. Smiling. I don’t know if they’re real memories but I’ll take them, they’re all I’ve got of her. Memories of Niki surfaced, too. Us playing in the back yard, an Auckland back yard — there’s still nothing to compare; Niki running ahead of me on the way to the corner dairy to buy ice creams, traversing tree roots that had erupted through the pavement; Niki looking back over her shoulder, laughing, squealing. Her smooth brown legs. She was a gorgeous two-year-old, all joy and madness. Fearless. Gone.

I realised with a jolt that my father’s ghost was silent.

The Ponsonby house owned by Karen’s mother was one of a big block of townhouses just behind Three Lamps, at the junction between Ponsonby and Herne Bay. The units were spread across three streets to form a triangle, with the interior of the triangle being the gated commons area and driveway access to the units’ garages. I found the key under the front door welcome mat, as Karen said I would. A burglar would get a real hoot out of that little irony.

Later I’d ring Justin, introduce myself and ask if we could meet, but first I planned to walk by the house, get a feel for the neighbourhood. I wanted to try to sense how the family lived. In preparation, I’d dressed in trackies and gym shoes. Herne Bay is teeming with young trophy mums, keeping themselves in shape. Close inspection would give me away but with my hair pulled back in a ponytail and a pedometer clipped onto my waistband I’d pass a cursory look. If there was a car parked in the driveway or a sign of someone at home, like the song says, I’d just walk on by. That was the brilliant plan and, like all brilliant plans, it went totally to shit.

The house was a lavish icing-white Victorian villa set back from the street, with a high, wide visage. Two attic rooms had been added into the spacious roof, each with its own toy balcony. I guessed these rooms would have panoramic views of Cox’s Bay on one side, the Disney-coloured Chelsea Sugar Refinery across the water, and maybe even a glimpse of the Auckland Harbour Bridge. The property was what my father used to describe, accompanied by a clownish droop of the bottom lip, as salubrious. In other words, this place was serious money.

I crossed the road to gawk at the turquoise lap pool. Before I could wipe the envious drool from my chin and move on, a silver BMW M3 convertible drove up onto the footpath and stopped directly in front of me, cutting off my way forward. I immediately recognised both the man driving and the young girl in the passenger seat from my Google search. It was impossible to move past the car without getting in their way. Keeping my head down I feigned stretching as Sunny climbed out of the vehicle first and then her father.

Justin beeped the car lock over his shoulder, strode past me and went through the gate without so much as a glance. Sunny, too, stepped past and for a giddy moment it seemed possible I might not have registered on either of their radars. But as I edged around the metallic butt of the Beemer, Sunny spoke.

‘Sorry about the parking,’ she said. ‘Dad always does that. He’s going back out again in a minute.’ She had paused to check the letter box but when I didn’t answer she shifted her focus to me. Our eyes met and she smiled. She’d seen me, registered me and would remember me. It was too late to walk on.

‘No problem. I’m a bit of a footpath parker myself,’ I said. She smiled and pushed the gate open. ‘Actually,’ I added, and waited for her to turn back towards me. ‘You’re Sunny Bachelor, aren’t you? Do you think I can have a word with your dad?’

Sunny stood very still, her long limbs twitching with a fight-or-flight response. I tried to look as unstalker-like as possible. I didn’t want to frighten her more than I already had.

‘Who are you?’ she asked. ‘How do you know my name?’

Either I was doing an even lousier job than usual or this fourteen-year-old was more suspicious than most. I guess you learn to be wary of the unexpected if your mother has tried to kill you. Suddenly Justin was there behind her, car keys at the ready. He picked up the tension instantly.

‘What?’ he said to Sunny, then without waiting for a response, turned his attention to me. ‘What do you want?’ He advanced with hunched shoulders and straining pecs and didn’t stop advancing until he was inches in front of me, fists clenched ready to plant me one. He had gone from easy, detached calm to fight-ready in point four of a second. The Beemer I was sweating against probably boasted a similar acceleration rate. I unstuck my body from his car and readied myself to fend a blow. Better a broken arm than a smashed face, I guess. Mind you, a comminuted diaphysial fracture of the radius and ulna is pretty painful. I should know.

‘I didn’t mean for us to meet like this. I just happened to be walking past.’ Liar, liar, pants on fire. ‘I’m Diane Rowe. Can I make a time to talk with you?’

‘Talk about what?’ he said, folding his arms across his chest. It looked more impressive like that. That was the point. But already his anger was dissipating. I’m five foot ten, athletic and can hold my own in more situations than most people, but he had it all over me in size and strength and knew it. The knowledge of it calmed him, just like that. I wasn’t so sure he’d stay all that sanguine when I told him his ex-wife had employed me to check up on their daughter. Sunny stepped out from behind her father’s bulk. She eyed me closely.

‘You know Karen has been released from prison,’ I said, as an opening gambit. They both tensed and glanced at each other but neither responded. ‘I’ve been asked,’ I said, skirting the point, ‘to talk to Sunny. To see how she is. Check that she’s okay.’

Justin swelled up like a baboon’s arse as he closed the small gap between us.

‘Who told you to check on Sunny? Tell me who told you to do that!’

He was right in my face, spit hailing my cheek. What Justin lacked in height he made up for in bulk. I was scared but knew I had to stay exactly where I was. I needed to keep my voice calm and, ideally, I needed to not shit my pants.

‘Karen asked me to make contact,’ I said, trying not to flinch in anticipation of a punch. ‘I’m sorry it’s happened like this. That’s my fault, not hers. I should have phoned you first.’

‘Who the hell are you?’ He sounded more confused than angry.

‘I’m a missing persons expert. I try to find people who are missing.’

He breathed heavily on me for a full ten seconds — I counted. Then, finally, he took a step back. My butt hole and half of my flight muscles relaxed.

‘Well, you can f*ck off then. Sunny isn’t missing. She’s here with me. I’m her father.’ He wanted to say more but held it back because of Sunny. I saw him struggling and he knew it. ‘Go inside,’ he said, turning his back on me and attempting to usher Sunny inside the gate.



She shrugged his arm off her shoulder. ‘No. I want to hear her.’

‘I said go inside.’ He knew she wouldn’t.

‘If she was sent by … M … by Mum.’ She halted, embarrassed, I think, by her hesitation at the word, but then picked it up again. ‘I want to hear what she has to say.’

He glanced up and down the street and then pushed the gate open aggressively. ‘Let’s take this inside.’

Presuming the ‘this’ to be taken inside was me, I dutifully followed Sunny down the path to the house. Justin walked close behind me. I could feel the warmth of his breath on my neck. It was meant to be intimidating. It was.

So far my judgment had been way off course, but I was determined not to make things worse by gabbling on about the impressive Carrara marble benchtop, although the kitchen was, without doubt, an impressive designer number, all grey on grey and white on white. Justin pulled a chair out from the billiard-sized dining table and leaned in to indicate I was to sit on it. I perched awkwardly with my bum on the hard wooden edge. The room smelt of burnt milk. Justin filled the space with his bluster, and it was a large space to fill. Eight metres by eight metres, would be my guess. Sunny tilted her shoulder against the wall, levelled a cool gaze at her father and then transferred it to me. Physically, she resembled her mother. The same almond-shaped eyes and long neck. She was painfully skinny but there was a steadiness about Sunny that her mother didn’t have. This girl is brave, I thought.

‘So why did Karen send a private detective to check up on me?’ she asked. She’d been practising this question on the way into the house. Using ‘Karen’ instead of ‘Mum’ made it easier for her. We both knew it was bravado.

‘I’m not a private investigator … I, I’m …’

She interrupted me with a forced laugh. ‘Oh great, not even.’

I let the sarcasm sit there. She had every right to be smart-arsed. It had been unfair of me to catch her unprepared. Once I was out of here I would beat myself up for getting it so wrong, but right now my priority was to stop Justin doing that job for me. Hands on hips in a clichéd posture of an angry man, his eyes swung from Sunny to me and back again. He saw his daughter was close to tears and took control.

‘Look, I don’t want you here in our home,’ he said. Unfairly, I thought, given that it was he who had ushered me in there. Sunny gave him a look. It wasn’t one I could interpret, but Justin had. He scrabbled around in his wallet and threw a business card in my lap.

‘Come to my office tomorrow, ten o’clock. We’ll talk there.’ I pocketed the card. ‘Now you can f*ck off,’ he said, opening the back door for emphasis.

I placed a card of my own on the table. Gym shoes squeaking, I made the long trek across the floor. I made it all the way across the eight metres of polished recycled rimu without Justin thumping me in the ear. I’d count that as my best achievement of the day.

‘I might be there or I might not,’ Sunny called, with all the pluck of a poleaxed fourteen-year-old.

‘We’ll decide on that tonight,’ Justin amended. ‘As a family.’

He was addressing Sunny, not me, but I caught the response from her. It was a definite sneer. Was it the word ‘family’ she was reacting to? Hard to tell with teenagers. They do make a point of sneering at everything.

The decor of the townhouse was low-key designed living space, three floors, plus a garage, laundry and storage area underneath. There was no one hiding in the wardrobe or the showers. I checked. But there were women’s clothes in the main bedroom’s wardrobe and a few men’s shirts and jackets in the smaller bedroom, facing the unit’s common area.

A big antique clock ticked the minutes away as I studied the cluster of photos on the wall in the spare bedroom. It was a poignant soundtrack by which to study these captured moments in time. They were arranged in a semblance of chronology, starting with studio family portraits of Karen as a toddler with her mother and father. They were quite formal for the 1980s. There was no sign of other siblings. Parenting can be a big learning curve for someone who’s grown up with no little brothers or sisters to look after. Still, ‘learning curve’ is a long way from murder. The most recent photos were of Karen’s mother, Norma, in the company of a benign-looking bearded man. He looked a good decade older than her, but from the camera’s point of view, they made a happy-looking couple.

In one of these photos a good-looking guy in his late twenties was squeezed proprietorially between the two of them. I pieced together the narrative of the family’s life: Karen was an only child and after her dad died Norma had remarried. The looker in the photo was her new husband’s son from a previous marriage.

One photo of Karen with Sunny and Falcon was set apart from the others, centred above a small oak side table on which a wooden cross and candle were placed. Judging from the age of the kids, the shot must have been taken shortly before Karen drove the car into the lake. Sunny leaned against the bonnet of an olive-green two-door Holden hatchback. Knock-kneed and ridiculously skinny, enormous sunglasses hid her expression. Falcon was unsmiling, his arm stretched towards the car as if reaching to anchor himself. Karen was in the driver’s seat. She was looking at the camera with what seemed to me like a look of defeat. I chided myself for reading way too much into the image. This was me trying to understand how anyone could have driven their two children into a lake. Then it occurred to me that this was probably the car. If I was right, then it was a morbid choice of images for Norma to hang on the bedroom wall, even with the reverential cross and candle keeping it company. I went in search of a glass to fill to the brim with the wine I’d brought.

Feet up and alcoholic sustenance in hand I could now comfortably kick myself for stuffing up the first meeting with Sunny. It had been stupid to try a walk-by and risk getting caught. Now I needed to decide if I should tell Karen I’d met her daughter; cowardice won. Anyway, I reasoned, the deal with Karen was that I wouldn’t tell her where Sunny was until her daughter had instructed me to. Sunny certainly hadn’t done that. Not yet anyway.

Karen answered on the second ring.

‘Have you seen her?’ she asked, before I’d said a word.

‘There’s a chance I might get to talk to her tomorrow,’ I said. Evasion isn’t exactly lying.

Her breathing was loud in my ear. ‘Good,’ she managed.



‘It’s not confirmed yet,’ I warned.

‘Okay.’

She was grateful for anything I could offer. We chatted for a bit about her mum’s townhouse; I thanked her for letting me stay there; she urged me to make myself at home and to use anything at all. Her phone manner hadn’t got any easier. There were still long hesitations and she held the phone close to her mouth. The sound of her uneven breathing was unnervingly intimate.

‘If I do see Sunny,’ I said, ‘and we can talk privately, is there anything specific you want me to check up on? Anything you’re especially worried about?’

She didn’t respond immediately. I waited. Her breathing had quickened. My normal response in the face of phone silence is to chatter, but I forced myself to wait. I took another sip of wine. Finally she answered. Her voice was so quiet I had to press the phone hard against my ear.

‘It was Justin who introduced me to stuff. To drugs. I’m not saying it was his fault. It was my decision. Well, at first it was my decision, but then I got hooked and then I guess it was …’

I thought for one crazy moment she was going to blame the devil but, whoever or whatever it was, she left it unblamed. I poured myself another wine, taking care not to clink the bottle against the glass.

‘And not the … the killing either. I take full responsibility.’

I wondered how long this had taken. Was it after Falcon’s funeral? Had she taken full responsibility before the first anniversary of his death? Before he would have turned six?

‘It’s important to take responsibility. That’s the only way you can ever forgive yourself.’ So she’d forgiven herself for killing her five-year-old and trying to kill her seven-year-old daughter. Well, good for her. ‘But unless you’ve faced things, admitted your sins to God, I don’t think people change,’ she continued. ‘Not really.’ I took another sip. ‘Do you?’ she asked, taking me by surprise. ‘Do you think people change?’

‘Well, you’ve changed, haven’t you?’ I said. ‘You found God.’ It was impossible for me to say this without sounding sarcastic. Admittedly, it might have helped if I’d uncrossed my eyes.

‘That’s different,’ she said.

‘Uh-huh.’

It’s always a mistake to start a conversation about God, particularly with Christians. Ever since Niki was murdered I’d had trouble taking God seriously. When I was a kid I believed in Him, It, Them — whatever. Niki and I even got our school backpacks blessed by the local priest.

‘Anyway,’ I said, bringing my thoughts back to Karen, ‘is there anything particular you want me to ask Sunny?’

I waited, going over in my mind all the things she might want me to ask her daughter. There was the obvious ‘Can you forgive me?’ question. I could imagine Sunny’s response. The silence went on for so long I tried something else. ‘Or any message from you that you’d like me to give her?’ There were even scarier options here, like: ‘Sorry I tried to kill you’, or ‘Sorry I murdered your little brother’ or even ‘Sorry about stuffing up your life forever’. Maybe she would even go for broke with the old ‘I love you’ chestnut. I hoped not.

‘No,’ she said and let out a long breath, like a sigh. ‘There’s nothing I can say to her, is there? Just check she’s okay. Please.’

The phone went dead. She’d hung up.



I poured myself another glass. My second, I told myself, making that my number two lie for the day. No doubt about it, lying gets easier the more you practise it. There was a new sign going up on the building across the road, ‘Shamrock. Love Business’. Was it an advertisement for a business recruitment firm or a brothel? Hard to tell.

The conversation with Karen supported my suspicion that she didn’t want me to check Sunny was safe but to have me make the first approach on her behalf. Maybe she wanted to let Sunny know she cared enough to send someone to ask if she was okay. This didn’t seem such a bad thing to me but I had seen how Justin reacted to the idea of Karen having anything to do with their daughter. It was predictable. Understandable even. I wondered how much of the drowning Sunny remembered.

A text alert interrupted my thoughts: Caravan confirmed for 1 pm tomorrow. Cheers Jason. I stared at the message for a full minute, trying to figure out what it meant. Then I got it. It was a message from the real-estate agent Jason Baker, confirming that a bunch of agents would be traipsing through my house — our house — tomorrow.

Just like that, a tsunami of sadness swamped me. Sean and I had been so happy when we bought it. We had walked through the empty house talking quietly, self-conscious of the echo. It felt to both of us as if we were trespassing. We couldn’t believe we’d done something as grown up as buy a house together. We loved everything about it; even the flaking paint on the old window sashes. Later, when we had to scrape it back for repainting, we complained that it was a pain in the arse, but on this first day, possession day, we called it romantic. When the movers rang to say the furniture truck would be late arriving we grabbed the opportunity. For some now-forgotten reason we ended up in the hallway, maybe because there were no windows or because the wall was warmed from the early morning sunshine, I don’t remember, but I do remember we were interrupted by the neighbour arriving, armed with a plate of muffins, to welcome us to the neighbourhood. She cheerfully instructed us to carry on with it and not stop for her. She even insisted we’d enjoy the muffins more once we’d finished the job in hand.

Later we learned that eighty-six-year-old Madeleine’s eyesight had failed some years earlier and she’d thought we were putting up a shelf. From then on Sean and I used the phrase ‘putting up a shelf’ as our private code. Over the years we put up a fair number of shelves. We even put up a real shelf against that sunny hall wall and let our books slowly fade there. Now I’d have to sort those faded books into his and hers.

It was never a good idea to ring Sean when I was feeling nostalgic but I needed to let him know I was on to selling the house. I didn’t want him making any more buddy calls to Robbie with messages to pass on to me. Sean’s mobile rang for a lifetime. I wondered which ring tone he had for me. Probably a song, ‘We are Family’? No, probably not. He finally answered and without any preamble I told him I’d contracted an agent and there was going to be a caravan at the house tomorrow.

‘So it’s all go,’ I said, repeating an upbeat phrase Jason had used on me. ‘I don’t need to ring Abi for advice.’ I resisted the urge to point out I was unlikely to ask Abi’s advice on anything. She’d had the hots for Sean for years. It had sparked at my party four years earlier when he’d done a joke striptease as a surprise birthday present for me.

‘Thanks for arranging that,’ Sean was saying, all business.

I could hear the cry of a baby and pots and pans banging in the background. My heart gave a lurch. Either the baby was taking out his frustration on the cooking utensils or Sean’s partner was. Suddenly my anger and sadness lifted off somewhere.

‘You’re welcome,’ I said cheerfully. I almost meant it.

‘Well, if there’s anything you need from me, just let me know,’ he said.

I refused to let the formal phrase and its deeper meaning affect me. I felt no need to lecture him about talking to me through Robbie. Felt no necessity to remind him what our house had meant to us. And when I hung up I was smiling. It’s impossible to explain why — probably those two glasses of wine.

I thought about ringing Robbie. I even hovered my thumb over his name in my contact list. Instead, I plugged the phone into the charger and fell asleep almost immediately.