Daughters of Eve, page 26
When I’d checked every inch of the room and restored it I stood at the door and made sure I’d left no hint of my search.
Then I moved to Rose’s room. I followed the same procedure. Lifted each item carefully. Ran my fingers down the back of every piece of furniture. My actions accompanied by a hypnotic mantra. It’s nothing. I imagined it. My girls are innocent.
Those were the words running through my head when I found a tiny tear in the fabric of Rose’s mattress. I inserted my fingers, gentle and careful, and withdrew a USB and a folded post-it note. That’s all there was.
I felt physically ill as I pushed the USB into the port on my laptop.
Let it be porn. Please …
The screen flickered and went black. A white box appeared. I waited. Nothing else appeared.
I unfolded the post-it and found a string of numbers, letters and symbols scrawled on it. I clicked inside the white box and typed in the password.
The screen flickered and went black again. A cursor flashed in the top corner. And then a line of text wrote itself across the screen.
Thought you had classes today?
I pictured Rose sitting with her laptop. What would she say?
I’ll work straight from the readings.
The cursor flashed. Had I blown it? Was there some sort of code I’d missed?
Know what you mean. Sick of pretending uni means anything anymore. Can’t wait to see what rises from the chaos.
What would Rose say to that? I know what I’d want her to say, but as I closed my eyes I could picture her face, split with a grin.
Totally!
Waiting …
Did you see the latest? That nun claims the cops are harassing her! Like we’d let a nun join Jane DoE.
Jane DoE?
Yeah, right!
You might wanna quit that group, tho. Love your commitment but remember the three rules.
Shit. What rules? Were they waiting for me to reply? Then I saw that the cursor had frozen. A few seconds later words spilled onto the screen at double time.
Don’t get caught, don’t get caught and don’t get caught!
I held my hands over the keys, my brain racing. There wasn’t a smoking gun here, but probing questions would blow my cover.
Before I could type again, letters marched across the screen.
Gotta go. Next class in five. Check ya!
The screen went dark. I tried to scroll up, to capture what had been said, but there was nothing. The conversation had disappeared. I pressed random buttons, but the cursor was gone.
Jane Doe. Why Jane Doe? That was the name we assigned unknown female corpses.
Then I realised it wasn’t D-o-e on the screen; it was D-o-E … Daughters of Eve.
I pulled out the USB and my home screen returned. The girls giggling at the beach. So benign, as if my computer hadn’t just scooped out my heart with a spoon. I laid it and the USB beside me on my bed and waited. Waited for the ceiling to collapse. The sky to fall. Anything that would end the awful aching emptiness inside me.
I picked up my phone and opened the contacts list.
I had to talk to someone. I couldn’t know this on my own. Not about Rose. My Rosie Rose. Twelve years old with eyes so dark, you could drown in their sadness.
My cop voice was gone. There was just my mum voice screaming at me. You can’t. You can’t!
I scrolled down, looking for Roberts.
He’d taken my gun out of the system to keep my girls out of trouble. Maybe he’d …
I saw the entry for Matt and stopped.
Matt had met my girls. He knew what they meant to me. They were family.
But he wasn’t my partner. Not at work or in life.
Less than an hour later, I stood on the front porch. My grandfather’s hunting rifle, retrieved from the roof space, now rested against a post beside me as the icy chill of the day settled in my bones. Still, I didn’t go inside.
Eventually a car pulled up to the kerb. It nudged up behind where I’d reparked mine.
Rose got out and waved as her friend pulled away. She smiled when she saw me and pushed through the white picket gate.
Then she saw the gun. I was watching her the way I watch suspects and it felt dirty and wrong.
‘I have a surprise for you.’ I indicated two swags beside me. ‘Let’s go.’
Rose looked at the front door, then back to the car.
‘What about Grace?’
‘Zanthe got out of hospital today. Grace is staying with her.’
‘I’ve got an assignment that’s due tomorrow.’
I reached for the rifle and picked up a swag. ‘When was the last time we did anything together, just the two of us?’
She looked at the swag. ‘Camping?’
I nodded. ‘Just one night. Everything’s packed. You can do your assignment under the stars.’
Rose looked at her bag and back to the front door. ‘My laptop’s running low. I’ll just grab a charger.’
She was halfway to the door when my fingers closed on her arm.
‘There’s a charger in the car.’
She stopped but I could feel her body straining forward.
Finally, she picked up the remaining swag and I looped my arm through hers. I steered her through the gate and we packed the swags into the boot along with the rifle which I wrapped in Robbo’s blanket.
I headed west. Something about the way Rose sat back in her seat, clutching her backpack to her chest, told me that I hadn’t fooled her anywhere near as well as she’d fooled me.
I hadn’t set foot on my father’s land since he’d been jailed for my mother’s murder. That was more than thirty years and a funeral ago. Almost a hundred acres of mixed scrub and grazing land just over the Blue Mountains. Less than two hours and over half a lifetime away, it felt like the place to go to do what needed to be done.
We’d made good time and it wasn’t much after four o’clock. The late-winter daylight had started to fade as I veered off the dirt road and we bumped and jolted down a trail that had been worn so deep it was still discernible after so many years of neglect. A patina of green grass softened the harsh ridges that lined the valley, dotted here and there with scribbly gums.
Rose switched off the radio, plunging the car into a charged silence. She wound down the window and inhaled, as if the crisp country air might sweep away the tension that buzzed between us.
‘Here looks good.’ I pulled the car off the track in the spot I’d been hoping to find. The place my parents had used as a campground when I was growing up.
Rose emptied the boot while I searched through the lush long grass that grew closer to the creek. I collected several rusted cans, already peppered with bullet holes, and set them up along the long, mossy rock, the way my father had done decades earlier.
‘Leave the swags for later.’ I hauled the gun out of the back and began loading it with the bullets I’d bought on my way home. ‘If you’re going to take my gun, I need to know you can shoot it safely.’
Rose came over from where she’d been setting up a camp stove and I held the rifle out to her. She met my gaze without reaching for the weapon.
‘I don’t feel much like shooting,’ she said finally.
But I needed to see her shoot before we could talk, and we had to talk tonight. The words I would have to say were pressing on my heart making it hard to breathe, to think, to feel anything but pain and hurt and confusion.
With a sigh, she took the gun, raised it to her shoulder, aimed and fired. Her body absorbed the recoil effortlessly. The first can flew off the rock and flipped again and again with each shot she took until she let it fall.
The way she stood. Feet planted. The butt of the gun solid against her shoulder.
‘Who’d you say it was that taught you to shoot?’
Rose took out the next three cans without a ripple in her breathing. ‘I didn’t.’
She slipped the safety on and handed the gun to me.
‘So, who was it?’
She didn’t answer, so I walked down to replace the cans, feeling her eyes boring into my back. That had always been my dad’s rule. The person holding the gun lines up the cans—that way no-one gets shot by accident.
With each can I checked, the shadow over my heart grew heavier. It was easy to tell the clean fresh shots from the older ones, their edges feathered with rust.
Clean centre shots, every one.
When I got back, she was cross-legged on the ground looking at her phone.
‘No signal out here,’ I said as I put the gun to my shoulder and squeezed the trigger.
One. Two. Three. Four.
My fourth missed the can completely and it stayed stubbornly standing on the rock.
‘Was it your dad?’
I handed her the gun and she slid her phone into a pocket before heading down to the cans.
My shots wouldn’t be as clean. She’d see it.
She returned, lifted the gun and laid her head over the barrel to line up the shot.
I cupped my hands over my ears and waited. Nothing happened.
Rose let the gun fall to her side, the safety still on. She stood for a moment, then turned. ‘Why did you really bring me out here?’
I looked out towards the cans and back at the campsite Rose had started setting up.
‘How about a cuppa?’ I went to the stove and kneeled to light it before pouring water into a kettle from the jerry can I’d brought from home.
Rose squatted next to me on the sandy patch of ground she’d selected for our campsite.
I settled and picked up a stick which I poked at the ground, making little clusters of dots while I waited for the kettle to boil.
‘Something happened today, Rose.’
A shadow crossed her face before she locked her feelings down.
‘Someone recognised you in a photo on my desk.’
Her face was neutral. She didn’t speak.
‘A woman who didn’t have any reason to know you.’
I’m not sure what I expected her to do, but at least she’d stopped bracing for battle.
‘Was it that nun?’ she asked.
I nodded and continued to prod at the dirt as my insides churned. I hadn’t told the girls about the support group or the nun.
‘I went to a support group for a while. It was a churchy thing. I didn’t tell anyone because …’
Her voice trailed off and the urge to jump in, to paper over any cracks in her story, was strong. Maybe she’d seen a story about the group in the paper and maybe Jane DoE was just a uni club, or a warped fan club tracking the Daughters phenomenon. But I waited.
‘Because I didn’t want to hurt you,’ she finished.
I didn’t look up; I didn’t want to see the lie reflected in her eyes.
‘Why do you think it would have hurt me?’
Rose picked up a pebble and placed it in the centre of one of my clusters of dots. ‘That I could talk to strangers, but I couldn’t talk to you.’
I’d run through this conversation a thousand different ways since I’d found the USB. As I’d hauled the swags out of the back shed and dusted them off. As I’d packed clothes and a few cans of food for camp cooking. As I’d stood on the front verandah and waited.
This was always the point of no return: where the truth of my betrayal and the possibility of hers could no longer be avoided.
I reached into my pocket, pulled out the USB and dropped it beside her pebble.
Rose had been gone for almost an hour. Her face, when she’d seen the USB, had told me everything I didn’t want to know.
I’d paced the campsite at first, trying to burn off the excess energy that fizzed through my body. Then I’d resorted to the campsite equivalent of housework. I found rocks and wood for a campfire, finished laying out the swags and set out plates for the tinned stew I was going to heat up when she returned.
If she returned.
We were too far from the road for her to walk out, but the longer she was gone the more I began to wonder if she’d found a farmhouse nearby and spun them some tale to get a lift into town.
The last tendrils of daylight had dissolved, shrouding the camp under a blanket of dark and bringing a bone-aching chill to the air. I lit the fire so she’d have something to follow when she returned. If she returned.
It was killing me that I hadn’t tried to stop her when she left. The mother in me had told me she needed space, needed time. Wounded children can be fragile, driving them to seek their own counsel in the face of fear. And that was my Rose. For all her strength, she was still a wounded child at her core.
Maybe it was the wounded child in me that loved Rose and Grace so fiercely. That felt so conflicted between the duty I’d sworn and a duty born in biology.
The snap of breaking twigs drew my attention just as Rose stepped into the circle of the fire’s light.
‘I was starting to worry.’
She held up her phone. ‘Ran out of battery, so no torch.’
‘There’s tinned stew in the pot.’ I pointed to the billy full of brown mush sitting by the fire and laughed when she made a gagging motion. ‘I thought you loved stew. You always asked for seconds when we went camping.’
‘I’d been eating out of bins and dumpsters. I know better now.’
She edged towards the blanket I’d laid over a log, wrapped it around her shoulders and sat.
‘Can we talk?’ I asked.
Firelight danced in her eyes and over her face. ‘What’s there to say?’
‘You could tell me why you did it.’
She met my eyes, finally. ‘You know why. Their names are written on our fridge door. The statistics that spark outrage for the time it takes to read them on the news, then they get swept away like litter after a football match.’
I felt the weight of her words, heavy in my own heart. ‘But why this? Why the Daughters of Eve?’
I wanted her to deny it, to make it untrue. A misunderstanding, easily explained away.
A friend asked me to keep that USB safe.
I found it on campus.
It’s just a game we play, pretending it’s us.
‘The only thing an alpha male understands is violence.’
‘That’s not true.’
Her eyes went wide, her nostrils flared. I knew every curve and plane of Rose’s face but her anger transformed it so I barely recognised her.
‘How would you know? Any time you deal with predators, you’re carrying a gun.’
Like a slap to the face, I felt my own anger bubble up. ‘I’d lived a lot of years before I met you, Rose. Don’t think you know all the roads I’ve walked.’
That stopped her, for a moment.
‘I doubt you’ve walked down all the roads I have,’ she said.
There was nothing to be gained from comparing scars. She’d win hands down. I’d seen the marks on her skin, knew she favoured her right leg when she walked.
‘So, tell me, Rose: which road taught you it was okay to kill? Because it was you, wasn’t it?’
She nodded and the world went into freefall around me.
‘And if I take my gun to Forensics, it’ll be a match?’
She nodded again, her eyes back on the flickering flames.
‘You’ve made me an accessory to murder.’
Her forehead creased but she didn’t speak. I would have thought she’d covered that concept by now in criminology.
‘I supplied the weapon …’
She cut me off, her voice small and tight. ‘But I stole it.’
‘There’s no evidence of that. No broken lock. No damage to the gun safe.’
‘We can fix that.’ She looked up.
‘Rose, the gun isn’t registered and that’s on me. It belonged to my grandfather and—we didn’t get along.’
‘That’s even better.’ Rose’s face was alive, her eyes suddenly bright. ‘We could bury it out here and no-one would find it.’
The idea had been simmering in the back of my mind too, but I wasn’t prepared to let Rose off the hook so easily. I needed to understand how her anger had turned from righteous outrage to homicidal fury. I’d seen that transformation in my father. Before I could consider helping her cover up her crime, I had to be sure she wouldn’t reoffend.
Was I really thinking of doing this? Of walking away from everything I believed about the law, about the sanctity of life?
‘Right now, I’m an accessory to murder, Rose. If I help you to cover up your crimes, I am perverting the course of justice. And that’s if they don’t decide to try and pin the murders on me.’
Her eyes fell to the fire again and her fingers curled around the edge of the blanket.
‘So, that’s it. You’re going to arrest me?’
The knot in my stomach tightened and I looked at my hands. Tiny hands, that’s what my mother had called them. They’d grown big enough to hold a Glock. To carry a badge but tonight they felt small.
‘Do you know what it is to swear an oath, Rose?’
I don’t know why I said it. They were bitter, sour words that stuck in my throat and threatened to choke me but before I could take them back, Rose’s hands disappeared into the folds of the blanket and she pulled it tighter around her.
‘I just wanted them to know what it felt like,’ she said. ‘To be afraid all the time, for no reason other than your gender. Every year, so many women killed by men, so few men killed by women. I just wanted them to know.’
I struggled for something to say. I’d felt it too, the desire to iron out that inequity, but I’d wanted fewer women to die, not more men.
‘They’ll put me in jail, Em. I’ll never get out.’ She shrank into the blanket. Pulled her knees up under it, so only the tips of her boots stuck out. Part of me wanted to hold her, wipe the hair out of her eyes and tell her I’d make it alright but I still hadn’t heard what I needed to hear.
Justifications, fear of the consequences, I’d heard these from too many criminals to count, but where was my Rose. Where was her humanity, her empathy, the sense of right and wrong I’d seen in countless essays.
