Well-behaved Women Read online

  She lingered in the doorway to the bedroom, grinning, with tears in her eyes. Aaron laughed. He put his hands on the sides of her face, and she could feel the calluses on his fingers. As he cradled her jaw, he kissed her as if they’d been doing it for years. His tongue crept into her mouth, and she relaxed into the strangeness of the gesture, giving herself over to a bubbling electric happiness that had been building all afternoon.

  Caitlin was not on the pill like all her friends. She’d been trying to work up the courage to ask her father to take her to a doctor about it, figuring she’d tell him it was to clear up her skin or to ease her period pain. Anything was less embarrassing than telling her dad she wanted to have sex. Back in Perth, there was no urgency anyway; no boyfriend, just a few boys she and her friends talked to at parties from time to time. No-one had ever asked, really. There was no-one in particular whom she wanted to ask her. She liked the idea of sex, the way most sixteen-year-old girls with access to Cosmopolitan do. But there was no hurry.

  In bed with Aaron, Caitlin was someone different. She was beautiful, confident. Her limbs were long and her muscles were toned. Weren’t first times supposed to be awkward? Painful? There was only a little discomfort. She didn’t climax until he turned his fingers to the task. Afterwards, she thought that she would feel anxious, but it was more like she could finally relax. All the extra layers had been stripped away, and Caitlin understood herself clearly for what felt like the first time. This was what bodies were supposed to do. This was what people were supposed to do.

  Six weeks later, Caitlin realised she had missed her period as she pulled on her bathers for swim squad. She pressed her fingers to the squishy pad of her belly. Was it just her imagination or was her belly bigger and tauter? Had her belly button always looked like that? She couldn’t bring herself to pull up her bathers. What would she do if they didn’t fit? She sat down on the changing room floor, atop her towel. When the coach came to tell her to get a wriggle on, she said she was sick. Later, back in her school uniform and heading for the bus, she overheard two other girls laughing and saying she was only pretending to be sick because it was that time of the month. Caitlin ran outside to the school courtyard and vomited into the bushes, tears stinging her eyes. She began to walk home. She couldn’t face any of her classmates crowded into that bus.

  She stopped by the chemist along the way, and an hour later, she was certain. There was only one person she wanted to talk to.

  Caitlin wasn’t sure what she expected, exactly—she just needed for him to know. Boys at her school talked about sex a lot, but they never talked about babies. Her throat felt like it was full of needles as she told him, her voice hushed so that her dad wouldn’t overhear from the other room.

  ‘Oh, Cait,’ Aaron said. ‘It will be all right. This is a good thing, this baby. This is the start of our family.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, feeling strangely divorced from the whole concept.

  It was only later that she realised he had not asked her if she wanted to keep it.

  Aaron phoned her every night and was planning a trip to Perth to see her in the school holidays. Her stomach had barely begun to bulge. Caitlin thought of it as weight gain. She was not growing a person inside her, she was simply getting fat. Each time she spoke to Aaron, his excitement settled her. The secret felt less shameful. She began to feel maternal towards the little whatever-it-was. When she was alone, she talked to it, telling it about its daddy, and about Margaret River, the town she would take it back to one day, to see where its parents met.

  But what were they to each other? Was Aaron her boyfriend? If she went through with it—had the child—would they get married? Would she move back, or would he move up to Perth? The further away from him she was, the less easy it was to explain. They were Caitlin and Aaron, their lives were connected, they belonged to each other. She hadn’t even liked him until that long weekend, and they’d never talked about it.

  One weekend, at a party, she kissed a boy named Jack Bramston to make him stop asking her why she didn’t want to drink. She felt so guilty about it that she turned off her phone. But maybe Aaron wouldn’t care. Maybe it wasn’t even relevant. He was probably seeing girls from his own school. After all, that day in his bed, he’d demonstrated that he’d been with girls a few times before. Maybe he was just her baby’s father.

  Twelve weeks. The end of the first trimester. Caitlin was on edge. Her school skirt was difficult to do up, and the skin on her abdomen had begun to stretch.

  At school, during biology class, her stomach suddenly filled with a dull ache. She felt as if her period was beginning, though she hadn’t had one in months. Her knickers felt damp. She raised her hand and tried to look sufficiently uncomfortable enough to be allowed to go to the toilet. The severe-looking teacher at the whiteboard stared at her down the rim of tortoiseshell glasses and sighed. For once, Caitlin was glad that their uniforms were a thick dark green wool. She wiped the tiny smear of blood off her plastic seat with her hand before anyone could see and hurried to the senior girls’ toilet on the second floor, where there was never anyone around because the bathrooms were so old and disgusting.

  She didn’t know what else to do. She sat on the toilet with her blood-stained knickers and stockings around her ankles. When she began to feel faint, she leaned her head against the cubicle wall.

  At the end of the period, the teacher from biology noticed that she hadn’t come back and sent another student to look for her. She found Caitlin, white with pain and fear, and called for the nurse.

  * * *

  So long ago. She tried to imagine herself with a nine-year-old, but couldn’t. She had always assumed she’d feel like an adult by now, but now she knew she’d never feel like one.

  By the time she’d left the hospital, her father had already spoken to Aaron. There was a letter from him waiting for her when she got home, and inside it explained that he thought it was best if they didn’t talk for a while. She picked up the phone to call him, but his mother told her Aaron was out.

  She had still sent Aaron a card for his birthday later that year, and every year after, but she couldn’t bring herself to talk about what had happened or how she felt about it. She didn’t know how she felt, except that it felt like a near miss. The miscarriage had ensured that she would continue to have the kind of life she’d always planned on, instead of something drastically different. Even if, maybe, drastically different wouldn’t have been so bad.

  Beside her on the front seat, her phone buzzed and a message popped up on the screen. One new message from Andrew.

  Don’t forget we have a meeting with the fertility specialist on Wednesday.

  Her new life collided uncomfortably with her old. Caitlin flicked the iPhone into her bag and turned her eyes back to the road.

  It was the hormones, she reasoned. They were making her sentimental.

  As her car glided past Aaron’s house, Caitlin spotted a car with a battered green surfboard on the roof, and she knew he had not forgotten to meet her.

  He had never intended to come in the first place.

  FROM UNDER THE GROUND

  They found the girl’s skeleton in the back corner of our garden, buried under the lemon tree.

  I was doing the washing-up when the forensics team arrived, kitted out in dark blue jumpsuits that covered them from neck to wrist and ankle, white paper respiratory masks pushed up on the tops of their heads. There was a detective with them, a woman named Jacinta Greenway, who shook my husband’s hand and led us back into our house to explain what was going on.

  Detective Greenway kept saying the victim had probably been there since the nineties. She wanted to reassure us. I pictured the girl out there, wrapped in black plastic with pieces of a broken Discman pressed to her chest. Perhaps she was wearing a Nirvana T-shirt. Or the Spice Girls. I realised with a swoop to the stomach that she’d lived there longer than we had.

  ‘I’m very sorry to have to do this to you, Mr and Mrs Turner,’ Detec
tive Greenway said, gesturing to the kitchen table and waiting for us to sit down.

  She was about my age, pretty in a focused way, with lines around her eyes from spending too much time in the sun. She sat opposite me and Steve, her back to the sliding glass doors that faced out into the yard. I kept looking over her shoulder to where the forensics team had set up a tent on our lawn. I’m not sure what compelled me; though I harboured no great desire to look at the bones, I felt as if the whole thing were not quite real and that I could not be sure that any of this was really happening until I had seen them. Eventually, the detective got up and pulled the curtains across, plunging us into a daylight brownness.

  ‘I understand that you probably have a lot of questions,’ said Detective Greenway.

  Steve put his arm around my shoulders. I chewed my lip, unable to think about anything other than what was going on outside.

  ‘Is this connected to those young girls who went missing all those years ago? I saw in the papers that you’d charged someone.’ Steve’s voice was faster and higher than usual.

  ‘Louisa Jones,’ I said. The two of them looked at me, Steve with surprise in his eyes and the detective with interest in hers. ‘Is it Louisa? She went to my high school. She was a couple of years ahead of me.’ Steve patted my hand in an effort to calm me. ‘Have you caught the guy who did this? Is that how you knew she was there?’

  Detective Greenway glanced at her watch. ‘We have a suspect in custody, but as the investigation is ongoing, I’m not at liberty to discuss further details. Would you mind answering a few questions?’

  My husband’s arm was stiff against my back as if he were bracing for an impact. ‘We didn’t even know she was out there.’

  ‘I’m aware of that, Mr Turner. We just need to make sure we have all the facts. Could you tell me how long you’ve lived in this house?’

  I looked at Steve as I counted in my head. We moved in three months after we’d married, and I had just turned twenty-six. I’d felt too young to be a wife, but I’d been excited about moving into our first home together.

  ‘We rent,’ said Steve, patting the back of my hand again. ‘I think it’s been about eight years now.’

  ‘And your landlord is …’ Detective Greenway flicked to the first page in her notebook and squinted at something she’d written there, ‘… Esther Livingstone?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Do either of you ever have any contact with the Livingstones? Mrs Turner?’ she asked, directing her eyes to me.

  ‘No,’ I said, a horrible feeling growing in my lower abdomen. ‘Everything is done through the real estate agent. We’ve never even met her.’

  She wrote this down, then looked back up at me, taking a deep breath. ‘What about her son, Roland?’

  ‘No, of course not,’ said Steve, folding his arms. I could tell he was anxious from the way he adjusted his position in the wooden chair.

  I watched as Detective Greenway wrote more notes, turning over the memory like old soil in my mind. Back when Steve had first started working FIFO, a man had come to our house to clean the rain gutters—he’d said he was our landlady’s son. He was an unsettling sort of person, the kind of man who always stood a bit too close.

  I hesitated, unsure of what I should say.

  ‘He came around once when Steve was away to check on the rain gutters. Told me that his mother had sent him … He seemed very interested in the garden and asked a few questions about how the lemon tree was doing.’ I swallowed, my spit stickier than usual. ‘Did Roland Livingstone kill all those girls?’

  The more I spoke, the more I remembered. I had invited him in, and we’d sat at the same kitchen table we were sitting at with the detective. I’d made tea. He’d commented on my hairstyle. I had just dyed it red.

  ‘Could you describe him?’ she asked, ignoring my question.

  I shook my head, tears prickling at the corners of my eyes. ‘No, but I think I would recognise him if I saw him again.’

  Detective Greenway nodded and put the cap back on her pen. ‘Thank you. Again, I’m very sorry that we’ve had to do this to you. I know it’s all quite confronting. I’m going to give you my card. If you think of anything that might be important, or if you have any questions, please call me.’

  She stood and held out the card. When my fingers brushed her palm, it was cold from sitting under the air conditioning.

  I burst into tears. Steve gathered me into his arms, rubbing his hand in small circles on my back. My body began to shake, and I pictured myself in gardening gear, planting daffodil bulbs and accidentally digging up a hand that was thrusting its way up to the surface like a wayward root.

  The detective shook hands with Steve and turned to go, tucking her ponytail through the little slit in the back of her hat.

  ‘Wait,’ I said, the steadiness in my voice surprising me. ‘Was there anything we could have done? Could we have stopped this?’

  ‘She’s been there a long time. We might never have found her,’ Detective Greenway said.

  Steve walked her out and closed the flyscreen behind her. He watched as the coroner’s van backed out of the driveway with that poor girl’s skeleton inside, one of the police cars following along behind. The other police car remained parked along our verge. In the yard, the forensics officers were still combing through our garden, searching for the truth.

  I tried not to think about it. Tried not to think about the fact that she’d been dead longer than I’d been married, tried not to wonder if her ghost had been watching me this whole time. Maybe she had. Maybe she’d been sharing my life, seeing as she’d had her own taken away. Watching me drink wine with my friends, watching Steve and me in bed, watching me fall to pieces when he was away and every little noise in the dark was an intruder coming to kill me.

  I had wondered about this case for years, wondering what really happened to Louisa. The truth had been buried barely twelve feet away from my bedroom all this time.

  Eventually, Steve closed the big wooden front door and headed back into the kitchen to put the kettle on. He exhaled loudly and leaned on the benchtop.

  ‘Jesus, fuck,’ he said.

  I sat back down, heavy in the chair. My hands were white and leached of blood. ‘Do you think it’s her?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said.

  Neither of us said anything else for a long time.

  * * *

  Louisa Jones had been three years ahead of me at school. She was the kind of girl everyone knew and liked, but whom no-one knew that much about. She was in the music program and had long fair hair. She came to our school on a scholarship but actually lived on the other side of the city, which meant she and I took the same bus most days. I don’t think we ever had a conversation, but sometimes she would smile at me if we were both waiting at the bus stop.

  The day she disappeared, I had a music lesson, so I didn’t get the bus until later.

  A few other girls had gone missing, but most of them were older. Louisa was the first one to be taken from outside of a school. She was seventeen years old. I was fourteen, but after her abduction, I was no longer a child. I read any article I could get my hands on, poring over every detail in an attempt to understand. Why Louisa? What was it about her? If I had been at that bus stop, would the monster that took her have taken me too? I kept clippings in a shoebox under my bed, made notes in the margins, hoping something would become clear to me—that I might remember someone who’d hung around that bus stop one too many times—and that it would lead to Louisa coming back. Except she never did.

  Everyone remembered her name, long after they stopped mentioning her in the paper. Her face had been tattooed on the psyche of our city; the poster child for missing girls. She was the reason young women were too afraid to walk home after nightfall and the reason we locked our car doors when we drove through the dodgier suburbs. Not since Eric Edgar Cooke had the women of Perth felt so unsafe.

  When the paranoia was at its peak, the media suddenly stopp
ed mentioning Louisa Jones. There was no new evidence, nothing new to rake over, no fresh angles. The story had been heading for a crescendo, but there was nothing else to say. This story didn’t have an ending, and so they tried to make us all forget.

  But I could not forget. I don’t think I ever will.

  * * *

  Two weeks after the exhumation, Steve and I had heard nothing more about the girl from our backyard. She was all I thought about. I scoured the internet for clues or rumours but came up empty-handed. I slept poorly, dreaming of young women with golden hair that turned green like moss, hovering over me in my bed and begging me to help them. When Steve went back on site, I took to drinking coffee and staying up late watching Netflix, putting off the moment when I’d need to close my eyes.

  It felt as though I lived a decade in that fortnight. My heart raced all the time, and I thought I would drop dead at each sudden noise. I avoided our backyard. I ignored the six-foot-long hole under the lemon tree, the one with the blue tarpaulin stretched over it to keep it safe from our sprinklers.

  Detective Greenway’s card sat on my bedside table. I took it out a few times that fortnight, turning it over and over in my hands and thinking about calling her, asking her if there was any news that she could give me.

  * * *

  When I picked Steve up from the domestic airport, I was struck at first by how brown his skin was, how much his skin had darkened. In comparison, I was sickly pale, my skin having taken on a sallow look from being inside all the time.

  He put his bag in the boot of the car and swung into the passenger’s seat with a practised oof, expelling a sigh he must have been holding on to for two weeks. He kissed my cheek, and his skin was dry and scratchy and unshaven.

  ‘You all right, Mags?’ he asked, his voice soft.

  I felt tears behind my eyes but plastered on a smile and turned on the radio. I had makeup on for the first time in days.

  We stopped at the IGA down the road from our house, and Steve ran in to get a couple of sausage rolls. When he came out, he was grinning and holding a copy of that day’s West Australian. The car door slammed behind him, sealing us inside, and he held the front page out to me.