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“What do you want from me?” Joanne balanced the pram handle against her stomach while she shoved her flyaway hair into an elastic tie.
Lexi paused beside her. “Facts. That’s all.” She spread her hands to dispel any anxiety. Joanne just shrugged.
“Okay. I have half an hour before our hospital appointment. Ask me questions and I’ll do my best.”
So, they walked and talked. The mood seemed to lighten with every step towards the river. Larissa burbled and chewed her fragile fingers. But Joanne spilled her guts. “We all loved Liza Barnard,” she said. “She worked as the Camp Mum on all the Catholic church events for kids. I got shoved into all the holiday clubs. I went three times a year to that same camp. My foster parents liked Rarotonga, but they couldn’t take me out of New Zealand. And because I got dumped at a Catholic church as a baby, some idiot put that on my records as my chosen religion.” Her lips tightened into thin lines. She shrugged off the blight of idiocy. “I enjoyed the camps, actually. It was often the same crowd. Trent showed up one year as the cook. He seemed a bit moody, but we’d kill for one of his cakes.” She winced and clamped her teeth over her lower lip at the blunder. “He met Liza at a summer camp. We all showed up during the next holiday to find they’d married. They seemed a nice couple. Very caring. They drove me to the urgent care clinic with stomach pains one night. I had appendicitis. Trent carried me in from the car with Liza clucking ahead like a mother hen.” Her gaze slid to the skeletal legs, kicking into the air with the motion of the buggy. “I’ve thought a lot about that over the last year. We weren’t theirs, but they just loved us, you know?”
Lexi nodded. She knew. Patrick Allen had done his best for her and Garima. Despite the lack of blood. “Do you remember hearing about Liza’s disappearance?”
Joanne shot her a sideways glance. “Yeah. We were there!” Her tone held a deep sense of failure, which she masked with scorn. “She went for a walk along the bush track on our last day. Said she needed some peace. We didn’t care. We went kayaking with the priest. He always made things fun. I remember feeling gutted when she didn’t come back to say goodbye. Liza always gave us a gift to take home. Something personal. Meaningful. I still have a pebble she gave me the previous summer. She’d painted my name in silver glitter and varnished it.” Joanne released a ragged, tortured breath. “We were just kids. What could we know?”
“Tell me what you remember of the day she disappeared?” Lexi kept her tone level.
Joanne wrinkled her nose. “Not the date. But we always left on Sunday evenings after dinner and prayers. Around seven o’clock.” She lifted her left hand and snapped her fingers. “Trent baked the most amazing cake for one of the other kids. For his birthday. It took him all afternoon to ice it. He made it in the shape of a football and painted on the black and white markings. The little tufts of grass and the daisies looked so real.” Her chin dropped. “For Gareth. He died a few years later in a car wreck.” She inhaled and shook off the sadness. “But he loved that football cake.”
Lexi stopped on the path. Her boot soles slid against the grit. “I’m assuming you know Trent pleaded guilty to his wife’s murder? How could he kill her if he spent the whole afternoon baking and icing a birthday cake?” Lexi closed her eyes and ran the calculations. “I guess he could nip up there in the hour while it cooked. But that’s a risk. Unless he primed someone else to ensure it didn’t burn.” She blinked in the sunlight and studied Joanne. “Or maybe while it cooled? How far did Liza usually walk?”
Joanne shook her head. Her doughy features became animated. “She loved hiking and kept super fit. Trent couldn’t match her pace. And anyway, he baked the cake the day before. I saw it in the chiller. He made me promise not to tell Gareth what he planned. I kept the other kids out kayaking for as long as possible and he’d just put it in the chiller when we got back.” Her shoulders slumped. “It took him all afternoon to ice it because the kitchen got too hot. He said he had to put it in the chiller for five minutes after adding every new icing colour. Nobody asked me about that afternoon. I wrote to the police station after the cops arrested Trent. They ignored me. What cop listens to an alibi given by someone who was fourteen at the time? They disregarded it.”
“I’m sorry.” Lexi reached out and touched Joanne’s freckled forearm. “That would have made you feel powerless.”
Joanne nodded. White-knuckled hands gripped the pram’s handle. “No one listened to kids then. And no one does now.” She pursed her lips. “That’s why Larry and I foster teenagers.” A smile graced her lips. “Larissa has a hospital appointment in half an hour. Otherwise, I’d be sitting next to my husband in the headmaster’s office with our latest bad boy right now.”
Something in Lexi’s heart clicked. A painful, agonising release of pressure. She swallowed, struggling to compose herself. The confession gushed forth like escaping dam water. “My mother abandoned my brother and I with our stepfather two weeks after marrying him. I was three and Garima was a baby. Patrick didn’t have to accept us, but he just got on with it. Fed us, clothed us, and attended every school parents’ evening without question. He could have put us into social care, but he didn’t. The older I get, the more I see his graciousness.”
Joanne’s lips tightened. “Yeah. It’s not always about blood, is it?” Her shoulder bumped into Lexi’s with an unspoken camaraderie as she navigated a huge grey dog with her pram. It trotted past without acknowledging them. Lexi glanced up to find Tarant a few metres behind it. He wore a blank expression similar to the dog’s.
“You mentioned the priest,” Lexi said. She stepped behind Joanne to let Tarant pass. His fingers brushed hers as he acknowledged her courtesy. A shot of electricity passed through the touch. Lexi shivered and ignored him. She dug her hands into her jeans pockets and didn’t look back.
Joanne’s smile became wistful. “Yes, Father Donald. I fancied him something rotten. A few of the girls did.” A stone lodged in Lexi’s throat and she coughed, not wanting to ask her next question. Joanne frowned at her. “Nothing like that!” she rebuked. “The man was clean as the driven snow. Always very proper, even back then, before all the scandals.”
Lexi nodded, grateful to let Garima off the hook. “I found him in the photograph, she began.
But Joanne spoke over her. “I don’t know how. He took the pictures so you wouldn’t see him in any of them. He owned a flashy camera. Really expensive for the time.”
“The window reflected him. It’s very grainy but you can see his robes and I understand he favoured purple socks.”
Joanne laughed. “Yeah, the purple socks. I look back now and he was a tiny little guy with receding hair and a crooked smile. But I think his priestliness gave him an air of mystery and we bought into it wholesale.” Lexi saw her profile harden. “I read in the newspaper that he’d died. Very sad. I didn’t even realise he’d returned to the Waikato. He came to lots of our camps, but he flew up from the South Island. Dunedin, I think.” She tilted her head back and squinted at the azure sky and its eye-watering brightness. “Yes, Otago for sure. He gave out lollies during bible quizzes. They had tartan wrappers, and he got them from a Scottish shop there.” She shrugged. “I wish I’d known. I’d have made time to visit him here and explain how much he’d influenced my life. We were throwaway kids to everyone else. A problem to dispose of in the system. He never treated us like that.”
“The date of the photo is confusing,” Lexi pressed. “The priest is wearing robes for Pentecost, but 1995 threw up a freak year. It’s almost always in May, but that year it happened in June.”
“Did it?” Joanne blinked in surprise. She shrugged. “I didn’t add the date. Can’t even remember when I received the photo. Father Donald gave all his negatives to the camp’s management. They made copies and posted them to the social workers to pass on to us afterwards. Tried to make us feel at least a little special, I guess. They arrived in a booklet and only contained the pictures we appeared in. I tried to avoid Father Donald’s camera.” She waggled her eyebrows at Lexi. “I hated my body. He probably only ever snapped me in one unsuspecting photo per camp. Bit of a joke between us.”
“Right.” Lexi processed the information. “So, the person responsible for posting out the pictures wrote the date on the border of each one?”
Joanne nodded. “I guess.” She glanced at her watch and gave a squeak of dismay. “I need to leave or I won’t make it to the clinic in time.”
Lexi turned with her, dodging the buggy’s front wheels. Larissa slept, her fingers at last still and her face serene like a cherub. “Wait!” Lexi hissed as Joanne increased her pace to a listing jog. The sun beat down on them, cooking Lexi in her leather jacket. “You said Father Donald came to all your camps. Why yours in particular?”
“Well, not mine!” Joanne’s blue eyes bugged as though affronted. “Just the Catholic ones.”
“Right.” Lexi frowned. The answer made no sense. If she investigated, she would find a Christian camp for children existed in the South Island during the 1990s. Wouldn’t she? What had drawn Father Donald Douglas north year after year to soothe the troubled hearts of the Waikato’s teenagers? Lexi doubted she’d ever find out.
But Joanne stopped with such suddenness, Lexi ploughed straight into the back of her. She grunted in pain and her spine jarred. As she dropped forward and clutched her ribs, an oblivious Joanne said, “You realise that Liza was Father Donald’s sister, don’t you?”
