The property was vast but barren, a bald patch in the otherwise lush farmland of Taree, near the Queensland border. A few years of camp fires just off the back porch, cattle wandering here and there across the dirt, and the regular crisscross of trucks and cars had deadened anything green that might have braved the immediate surrounds of the small house. Where there might have been flowers in ancient wood-lined beds along the side of the building, there were discarded beer bottles, an old tire, a milk crate full of rusting engine parts. I glanced over at the phone on the passenger seat of my car, checked the address I had been given was exactly right, before creeping steadily to a halt beside a corrugated iron carport.
The morning sun was making the iron tick. I got out, and immediately a cloud of wriggling, writhing chocolate-colored bodies swirled around my legs. Border collies, six of them, barking, snuffling my shoes. He’d been expecting me, had calmed the dogs as my car breached the distant front fence. Had held them back only long enough for me to get out, at which point the dogs came rushing, sniffing, barking. He was standing at the edge of the porch wearing flip-flops, black and white. His toes were dry and cracking, his face broad beneath a faded cap.
“Ted, eh?” He jutted his chin at me as he came down the steps. I smiled, offered my hand, braced for recognition of my face. There was none.
“That’s me,” I said. “Thanks for seeing me, Al.”
“No problem, mate.” He scratched his chest. He was ruddy faced and sunburned, what looked like a homemade haircut hidden beneath the cap. “Bit of a weird story, I gotta tell ya. I half decided you were havin’ me on.”
“Nope,” I said. “God’s honest truth.”
“Right.” Al slapped away the nose of a border collie who was snuffling at his crotch. “Well, she’s round ’ere, mate. Wouldn’t expect her to greet you at the car, that’s for sure. She’s a lazy bitch, I’ll give her that.”
He led, and I followed, up onto the porch, where the shade was a relief. There was a small plastic child-safety gate to keep the border collies off the stairs. A coffee table made from old pallets sat before mismatched cane lounges sunken with the shape of bodies now gone. At the very end of the porch, lying on its side on a hair-covered blanket, was a pure white dog.
She lifted her head, got to her feet as we approached. She was fat. Sadly fat, the sagging belly and thick neck of an unhappy creature who gorges on whatever passes beneath her nose. The dog had a cheerful face, though. Pointed at the nose, broad at the forehead, a mingling of perhaps dozens of breeds. I smiled at the triangular ears pricked, sharp, like two cupped hands.
“So this is her, huh?” I said. The white dog didn’t come to me, which I thought was odd, given the doggy smile about her lips. But as I crouched, hands out, in greeting, she took a couple of steps forward and I noticed the limp. The right front paw. The one that had been broken when she arrived at the RSPCA in Yagoona. I pretended the limp was a shock. “Oh dear. What’s that all about?”
“Yeah, she’s had it since we got her,” Al said. “These fucking rescue dogs, mate. You never know what you’re getting. It’s a lucky dip.”
“Is it permanent?”
“Aw, look, I wouldn’t spend the money finding out, you know what I mean?” He gestured to the dog. “When we got her, the RSPCA said she had recently recovered from a break. Needed rehab. Told us how, and all. I tried to tell her, Renni, my girlfriend at the time. Tried to talk her out of it. A rescue dog with a medical problem? You fuckin’ serious? But no, no, no. She wanted her own dog. Had to be a tragedy, something she could feel good about.”
“Right,” I said. I smoothed the white dog’s cheek and neck. She wagged her tail.
“I breed the collies, you see,” Al continued. “Those beautiful, intelligent things you saw back there at the car. The pups are two K each. When I was with Renni, we had seven bitches and seven sires and we were two weeks off having a new litter of six or more. Nope, wasn’t enough for her! Can you believe it?”
I didn’t answer. Didn’t need to.
“She wanted something special. Heaven help me. She goes and brings back this bag of problems.” Al gestured to the dog. “Jay-sus. Honestly. Women.”
“Yup.”
“So anyway, tell us more about the crime, mate.” Al slapped my chest. “You said on the phone it was an abduction? Down in Sydney, was it?”
“Look, it’s not something I can really go that deep into.”
“Right.”
“It’s a complex investigation.”
“Uh-huh.” Al nodded vigorously, looked back at the animal at our feet. She was sitting looking up at me, the cupped ears swiveling, listening, failing to understand. “Nah, I get it. I get it, mate. Look, I’m happy to help. Anything you want to know about her, I’ll tell you. There’s not much to say, really. She’s a piece of shit mongrel with a gimpy leg. When my girlfriend left, she didn’t even take it with her. Thing doesn’t even catch a ball. Were you gonna take pictures of her, or…? You never really said on the phone what you wanted.”
I hadn’t known exactly what I wanted when I’d called a day earlier from my hotel room in Sydney. It had been a struggle to get the information out of the RSPCA, without police credentials, on exactly where the dog had gone after she was dumped at the gates by Kevin on that day. I’d held the receiver, winced at the silence on the other end of the line, wondering if the administrator was about to tell me the dog had been humanely euthanized.
The white dog had been on my mind for a while. In the week since it had all come to an end, as I sat alone in my room drinking Wild Turkey and watching the traffic on the street below, she had returned again and again to my mind. I’d been almost too afraid to make the call.
Leaving Sydney, driving northwest along the inland highway, I still hadn’t known what I wanted. But now I knew. Standing with Al the border collie breeder on his battered, sun-dried porch, looking down at the white dog, I knew.
I reached into my back pocket and drew out my wallet.
Rumbling along the highway, my window down, air shuddering in and out of the vehicle. The white dog sat upright on the passenger seat, mouth open and tongue foaming, panting as she watched the road ahead, that bad paw slightly raised, all her weight leaning on the good one. I let the phone in the center console play what it wanted through the radio, a wandering streaming channel, hits from the 1980s. The musty, acrid smell of unwashed dog was strangely nice. I crossed over to the coast road just to draw out the journey with her. I think she might have liked to stick her head out the open window beside her, but her balance wasn’t good.
I stopped somewhere near Byron Bay and bought a couple of sausage rolls at a little roadside service station, stood outside the car looking in at her looking out at me while the pastry cooled. When I offered her the roll she didn’t even sniff it. Just took it into her jaws in two gulps. Gone. Impressive.
Near Burleigh Heads I noticed a flea crawling in the hair on my arm, pinched it and put it out the window. The dog lifted a paw, acquiesced as I reached over and examined her belly. She was crawling with them. Flashes of black between the strands of white. I gave her a rub on the head, reached down and lifted the battered tag from the front of her throat.
“Pig,” I read aloud. The dog’s ears swiveled, mouth drawing closed, ready for my command. I gritted my teeth, tugged the tag. It came right off the tattered old collar.
“Sorry, honey,” I told the dog. “‘Pig’ isn’t gonna work for me.”
I chucked the tag out the window. We rode together in silence.
Near Mackay, a song came on the radio. Celine Dion’s “Think Twice.” I jolted at the sound of the dog’s howling, having forgotten she was there. The dog looked at me. Paused. Lifted her head and howled again, a low, sad, lilting sound perfectly in keeping with the song on the radio.
I drove and watched. The dog sang and sang. And when Dion’s song was over, the animal beside me fell quiet, that pink tongue appearing again, jiggling with the vibrations of the car.
“Is it just that song?” I asked the beast, taking the phone from the center console. I typed into the search bar as I drove. Something by Ronan Keating had begun to play. I cut of it off to play Celine Dion’s “The Power of Love.”
I watched the dog. Nothing. And then, just when I’d turned back to the road, she lifted her chin and began to howl. She sang and I grinned.
“‘Celine’ it is, then,” I said. I fell into long overdue laughter.
She came in the afternoon, not bothering to announce her intentions in any way, just walking around the side of the house and leaning her bike against the fence like she usually did. I was standing with my shirt off, the humidity such that even the menial task of painting was making me sweat. I’d decided green was best for the goose house. I didn’t want it to stand out too starkly from the rainforest surrounds of my property. The birds were sitting all around me on the grass, beaks tucked into backs or feathery breasts, round, featureless stones. I’d finished the sides and stood dabbing paint onto the front façade of the playhouse when I heard the unmistakable tread of squeaky sneakers on the lawn behind me.
Two weeks. But already some of the bruises and grazes Amanda had come away from her ordeal with were easing, sinking back into her colorful flesh, swallowed by the flowers and portraits and leaning, curving buildings on her skin. If there was one thing Amanda did well, it was heal. She still had two black eyes, but those eyes were smiling, as always. I glanced at her, raised my brush in greeting. She stood and watched my work for a while, squinting in the sun, before Celine raised her head from where she lay curled in a ball among the birds, a camouflaged creature revealing its true form.
“Oh lord!” Amanda grabbed at her chest. “That was a good trick.”
“I think she thinks she’s one of them,” I said. Celine had indeed integrated with the birds, but it hadn’t been smooth sailing. As I’d knelt by the bathtub, pouring warm water from a jug over the stiff-legged dog, I’d heard the indignant slapping of webbed feet on the floorboards behind me. The soapy water was swirling with dead fleas. I’d turned and spied two geese jabbering in their strange language, instinctual confusion at the sound of the water in the bath and the distinct lack of Neil Diamond in the air. The birds had eyed the intruder dog, clicking, tittering. Celine had barked and they’d fluttered away, a frenzy of panicked wings. Over a couple of days, the animals had come to some kind of silent agreement. It became obvious to the birds, I supposed, that Celine was too fat and too awkward to chase them. And to Celine, perhaps, that Bitey Bulger was going to bite no matter what she did, but it wasn’t all that hard.
Amanda had left me alone for the time I’d been back. She’d found out somehow, in her almost supernatural way, that Kelly had asked me to come home. It didn’t take me or Kelly to tell her that. Amanda might have heard it, the anguish in my voice when I called to tell her what had happened to Kevin Driscoll. When I’d told her, Amanda had joined the small, select crew of vastly different characters who knew. To the rest of the world, what happened to Kevin was unclear.
There were clues, of course. Police had found Kevin in the warehouse, slumped on his side, minute by minute cooling as his body adapted to its filthy surroundings. Beside Kevin’s body they’d found a man, someone resembling, but wholly different to, the Dale Bingley who’d existed not long before. Dale had been sitting with his knees drawn up, his arms hanging loosely around them, calm. The gun was gone. In the dust nearby, there were shoeprints, some of them very large, some of them very expensive.
Outside the warehouse, police had found Kevin Driscoll’s car with the driver’s side door open, the cabin light on. No prints. On the passenger seat, a journal and a pen, long scribblings in a heavy hand. A diary.
I’d seen Dale Bingley on the news only the night before, standing with his wife on the steps of a police station. He’d shaved. The shirt he was wearing was immaculate. Rose Bingley was holding his hand. All around them stood important people, people I didn’t recognize. Lawyers. Detectives. Specialists, probably. I didn’t know. He’d made bail.
The man who’d stolen my life was dead. In time, the media would release details of the diary, and that would go some way to exonerating me, at least for people who wouldn’t go so far as to believe that Kevin and I had acted together and that he’d deliberately kept me out of his writings. The police had kept me in Sydney for a week, wanting to talk about Dale, Khalid Farah, Kevin. Why I’d been at a house the police knew Kevin had been at only hours before he had been murdered. Why I’d called his ex-girlfriend, and what we’d spoken about. Whether or not I believed Dale Bingley had set out to murder Kevin, and whether or not I’d been there when he did. I’d brought Sean to the interrogations and enacted my right to silence. There was no case against me. The police couldn’t put me at the scene of the crime. I’d reported my phone stolen and thrown out my shoes, and no witnesses had seen me or Dale driving there that night. The case against Dale also had major problems. There was no gun found at the scene or anywhere near it. Dale wasn’t talking. His lawyer was one of the country’s top QCs. If he got into trouble, there would always be a provocation defense. Temporary insanity. Self-defense. Whatever they liked. I didn’t think the case against Dale would hold up. Or that he would care if it did.
Amanda knew that my wife had offered to give me back something of what I had lost. In the week I’d been in Sydney, I’d seen Lillian again, this time alone with Kelly at a McDonald’s, Jett nowhere to be seen. She’d asked me again to come home. I’d given her my answer.
Knowing all these things, Amanda stood beside me saying nothing, chipping old paint off the cubby beside her with her thumbnail. Maybe she was afraid to ask if I was going back. I didn’t know what fear was like for her, my strange little partner.
“I’m sorry about Sweeney,” I said. Amanda turned toward me too fast, betraying the terror I knew was there. I dipped the brush in the paint. “I know you liked her.”
“I did like her.” Amanda nodded. I saw her glance at my bare ring finger, quick as a flash. She looked away again. Cool and distant, or trying to be.
“They’ll be angry at us,” I said. “The Crimson Lake cops.”
“Mmm,” Amanda agreed.
“On the next case, we’ll have to keep our heads down,” I said.
I felt Amanda watching me. Tried not to smile. In time, the stiff, upright strip of color that she was in the corner of my vision seemed to slouch. She was leaning against the cubby, smiling, looking at the animals on the grass, feathers and fur gleaming in the dying sun.
No, I wasn’t going back to Sydney. To my wife. I loved Kelly still, of course. She was the mother of my child. But the woman that she had been before the fateful day that changed our worlds was gone now, and a new woman had taken her place. She was battered, bruised, and strained by what had happened. Her heart was broken, and her trust was gone. It wasn’t her fault. It was Kevin’s.
What Kevin had done had changed me, too. I wasn’t the same man. And to think that Kelly and I could go back, two completely different people trying to love each other in the same way we always had was a decision that was destined to fail. I didn’t want to have to leave that house again, packing my bags, saying goodbye to my daughter, starting over with that awful loss and loneliness newly heavy in my chest.
I belonged here. A different man with a different life. Displaced, but defiant, resolved to grow. I would work it all out eventually; how I could still be in Lillian’s life the way I needed to be. How I could form a new relationship with Kelly, if not as her husband, as her friend. How I could accept never being free of my accusation. I’d just work on it, one bit at a time. I wasn’t alone. There were people in my new life who would help me.
“The dog,” Amanda said, drawing me away from my thoughts. “What’s her name?”
I put down my brush, slipped my phone from my back pocket. I was already laughing as I brought up the music player.
“Watch this,” I said. “You’re gonna love this.”