So, you don’t know anything about this note?” Detective Mitchell slid a plastic-encased slip of exercise paper across the table. The note was written in the same scrawl as the one she’d found in the letterbox.
Give it to me.
“Gil wrote it.” Alison shivered.
“It was under your door. After you decided to take a little trip, I got a warrant to search the place. This is the only thing I found, so if you do have something of his, you’ve hidden it well.”
“I really don’t. And I really don’t know anything more than I’ve already told you.”
Detective Mitchell sighed, leaned back in her chair, and slumped her shoulders a little, and a strand of that tightly pulled-back hair fell into her face. She huffed out of the side of her mouth, blowing it up, and then tucked it behind her ear, quickly, like that piece of hair was a constant annoyance.
“Yeah, I’m beginning to believe you.”
“You searched my place?”
“Look at it from our point of view, Alison. Cause of death isn’t nailed down yet, you’ve got an ex in common—a violent one who you never reported—and then you go missing too?”
“Billy said it was the fire.” Was the detective lying now, or had she been lying to Billy? What trick was this? What lie was she hoping to catch Alison in? “And I didn’t go missing. I told Sal and Billy where I was going, and I told Billy where I was more than once.”
“You compromised my ability to trust Constable Meaker. Your relationship makes his information unreliable at best.”
“For both of us, apparently.” Alison tried not to think about that phrase, your relationship. “Where are you looking for Gil?”
“Everywhere. We’ve got alerts out on his car and his cards, and his likeness is in every motel in the area. When he pops up, we’ll find him.”
“He’s not an idiot, you know. Everyone knows cops can track your money, track your phone. He’s probably not going to turn up at the closest Best Western.”
“Well, where do you think he is?”
“I think he’s somewhere near me, wherever I am. I thought I was paranoid in the days after the fire, but I kept feeling like someone was watching me, and a couple of times I got up in the middle of the night to look out the window, ’cause it felt weird, and then after I’d go back to sleep I’d hear an engine turn over.”
“You think it was him.” It wasn’t a question.
“I really do now. That’s why I went to Billy’s last night. I didn’t want to turn up at Sal’s alone at two in the morning.” Honesty was the best idea in this particular moment.
“And you really didn’t learn that Simone’s violent boyfriend, Michael, was Gil until the day you left town?”
“I told you. That’s when Chris Waters told me about it and that’s why I left. I thought, I dunno, maybe I could do something.” Better to keep to this lie, Alison thought.
“What kind of something?”
“I don’t know.” Alison paused, tried to check her tone and lower her voice. “I guess maybe find out from his old mates in Cairns where he was or why he was looking for Simone.”
Detective Mitchell stared at Alison, no expression translatable on her face. “All right. And?”
“And nothing. I didn’t learn anything. Turns out this investigating thing is more difficult than TV’d have you think.” She couldn’t tell her about the pictures, about why she’d decided to destroy them, about how they had made her feel.
The detective rolled her eyes. “You don’t say.”
She got up from the table as if to leave the room, and Alison reached out and caught her by the arm. “I know you probably don’t believe me, but he killed her.”
Detective Mitchell looked at her, skeptical. “We want to talk to him, sure, but there’s no evidence she was killed by anything unnatural.” Should have kept the piece of paper. Should have kept the pictures.
“You mean you think it was the fire.” All this for natural fucking causes.
“It was the fire. Eventually the forensics will figure that out. I’m just trying to find out why she was where she was, why she went missing, what he’s doing menacing his exes.” She waved the note for effect. “He might not be a murderer, but he had something to do with her going missing.”
“He killed her. I’m sure he did.” She was. She didn’t really know why she was so sure, but she was.
“The evidence just doesn’t lean that way, Alison, as much as you want it to.” She gently wrenched her arm free and left, leaving the door open. Alison stopped holding her breath a few seconds later when she realized Detective Mitchell wasn’t coming back.
Billy stuck his head into the room. “Al, you can go.”
“Is that it?”
“For now. She’ll let you know if she needs anything else.”
“OK.” Alison got up from the table and picked up her bag. In the main station the air was stuffy and there was no one around. Billy opened the counter gate and let her through. “Quiet in here today.”
“I’m holding down the fort. Everyone else is out on insurance reports and whatnot. Had a bit of looting, looks like local kids taking advantage of the empty houses, but it’s keeping us busy enough.”
“Why aren’t you out there too?”
“Sarge is a little pissed with me, now all that stuff about you and Gil and Simone being linked has come out, says I made us look like the worst kind of country coppers.” Billy shrugged. “I get it. I know how he feels being made to look like a fool.” They stared at each other until Alison couldn’t look him in the eye any longer.
“Billy, I’m sorry.”
“Yeah, me too.”
“If you need me, I’ll be at Sal’s.”
“You think he’s staking Sal’s out and you’re just gonna go back there?”
“I let Gil destroy me once. I’m not going to let him do it again.”
Alison turned and left the station, stood on the steps for a minute, took three deep breaths. The sun hit the bitumen full on, tar tacky where it coagulated. Beyond the bend, up there on the ridge, exposed rock, like a deep wound, black and gray, stripped trunks, ash underfoot.
Everything felt strange in an indescribable way.