Next to me Rodney’s head jerks. Jacob’s square jawline plays through my mind. ‘Mum,’ he says.
I look over to see Donna Mason walking briskly towards us. Time has not been kind to her. Her eyes sink into her face and her wiry greying hair is pulled tight onto the top of her head. Her denim jacket is like a square across her small frame. I remember her cool stare as Jacob and I curled together on the couch at his house, watching a movie. She was always lurking in doorways, watching us. It was hard to relax when she was around. I can still picture her empty gaze at Jacob’s memorial service.
‘Gemma.’ She nods at me.
‘Mrs Mason.’ I nod back, feeling like a teenager.
‘Detective Sergeant McKinnon,’ says Felix, sticking his hand out towards her.
She takes his hand and shakes it firmly. ‘Donna Mason,’ she says. She crosses her arms. ‘Yes, well. Awful business all this. Just awful.’ Her large eyes blink at each of us in turn.
Nicholson kicks his shoes at the ground awkwardly. ‘Donna, hello.’
She looks at him and executes another little nod. Turning to Rodney, her face softens. ‘You can have an hour, sweetheart. I need to get to the shops but I’ll pick you up on the way back.’
‘It’s fine, Mum, I can grab a lift with Kai or Em.’
‘No.’ She shakes her head nervously, like a bird. ‘I’ll be back here in an hour. I’ll drive you.’ Her eyes flit to the quadrangle and then back to the group of distraught teenagers. ‘Meet me out front at eleven.’
Rodney’s body seems stiff but he shrugs before shuffling back to his friends. He quickly disappears into the writhing mass of grieving students. The boy with the ginger hair catches me looking and averts his eyes sharply. He’s still stroking the back of a crying girl.
‘Well, bye,’ says Donna, the edges of her mouth pulling up briefly into a polite smile.
‘Right, well.’ Nicholson turns in a flustered semi-circle and then drifts back towards his office.
Felix and I are left standing alone in the bright square of sunlight next to the sobbing group.
Our eyes meet.
‘Jesus,’ says Felix under his breath.
Chapter Thirteen
Monday, 14 December, 9.27 pm
‘Something feels seriously off. She was so polarising. I can’t get a grip on her.’ Felix is lying flat on his back, talking to the ceiling. I sip at my wine, the golden liquid sliding down my throat. ‘I mean, I don’t even know what to call her! Rose? Rosalind?’ He laughs. ‘Anyway,’ he says, ‘we need to get on to her old school. Something clearly happened there.’ He rolls over to face me. ‘What do you think?’
I shrug, still a little disoriented by his closeness. I love how desperate he always is to strip my clothes off and hold me. To push his way inside of me. My body is still smarting, raw from him holding me down. At some point my head connected with the wooden bed head and that, paired with the exquisiteness of what he has just done to me, has left me in a state that is both exhausted and energised. I don’t really want to talk about Rosalind right now, but we always talk about cases we’re working, and as her dead face looms in my mind again, I realise that avoiding speculation about what happened to her right now is unlikely.
Felix gets up to pour more wine and I stare at the side profile of his naked body and wonder for the millionth time how the hell this is my life.
We always meet here, at the tiny farmhouse that belongs to Scott’s brother. It’s about fifteen minutes outside of Smithson and I know that Scott would never come here with Ben at night. There is no reason for him to. Quaint and isolated, it’s empty about ten months of the year, and Scott and I have a set of keys and do basic maintenance in exchange for the steady supply of fruit and vegies that grow in the garden. I have wondered what Felix and I would do if we didn’t have a place like this to come to. I assume we’d end up pawing at each other in our cars, fogging up the windows along a quiet, out-of-the-way road somewhere.
I was worried I wouldn’t be able to have sex with Felix tonight but the bleeding slowed yesterday and today it’s as if nothing ever happened. Only the vague thrum of an ache reminds me that my life was temporarily heading in a very different direction.
‘And what’s with the principal? Was he into her or what?’
I prickle slightly. ‘C’mon, he’s allowed to be upset. They worked together. She went to school there. They were close.’
I push the faded image of Nicholson watching Rosalind on stage from my mind.
‘We work together.’ He wriggles his eyebrows at me suggestively and I throw a pillow at him.
‘I think Nicholson is a good guy. He really cares about the school. Cares about the kids. I just can’t see it.’
‘People change, Gem. Maybe the unrequited love finally got to him, or maybe his wife found out, or maybe they were together and then Rose realised it was creepy because he’s really old.’
I throw another pillow at him. ‘Careful. He’s only got about fifteen years on you.’
He rolls his eyes.
‘Plus, his wife is dead,’ I say primly. ‘Or at least I’m pretty sure she is.’
He throws the pillows back onto the bed and reaches out to me. I go to him and lie down in the crook of his arm.
‘At least we know that Marcus was one of Rose’s visitors,’ he says.
‘Yes.’ We spoke to Rosalind’s brothers again today. Marcus confirmed he had called on his sister about a month ago, though he drove a hire car, a modest Toyota. Timothy and Bryce claim they haven’t visited her place in years.
Felix and I still think that Timothy is suspicious; the preliminary search of his finances shows he did purchase tickets to the school play two weeks ago. When we asked him why he’d bought two tickets but gone to the play alone, he said that he hadn’t got around to inviting someone else along.
‘Seeing those kids today was full on,’ says Felix, into my ear.
‘Yeah.’ I shuffle through their faces. Caught between child and adult, they were so beautiful and so dangerous, tripping over themselves to grow up.
‘So that boy today, the one you spoke to?’ His fingers tickle the back of my neck. ‘He’s the lead in the play. The Romeo, right? What’s the story there? You knew him?’
Outside a possum runs along the powerlines and cuts across the wire that leads to the house. It pauses, its tail dangling crookedly in the moonlight. I roll over and pull the sheets around me like a strapless dress. I have more wine as I weigh up what to tell Felix.
‘Yeah, I knew him.’
‘How?’
I look at him, slightly exasperated. ‘Like how I know everyone. I grew up around here.’
He nods slowly. I can tell he is deciding whether or not to let it go. He curls his fingers around mine, gently removing the wineglass from my grip. ‘Sure, but he’s way younger. Plus, you looked like you’d had a stroke when we saw him. How exactly did you know him?’
‘I knew his brother. Jacob.’
‘From school?’
‘Yeah.’ I let the second hand on the wall clock do a full half-circle before I add, ‘He was my boyfriend.’