12

TEDDY

Under the sunset that was making the clouds dark scratches in a red sky, Teddy was getting hungry. St Kilda was warming to life behind her, lighting up, getting loud, and Teddy was still sitting on the sand, watching the water’s slow retreat and checking on Alice’s dot, unmoving on her tracker.

She was thinking about the first time she met Alice, sitting in Choker’s office waiting to be assigned their jobs for the day. Alice had been sitting patiently and quietly – discovered by Choker after successfully defending the attempted theft of a beer delivery she was making to his favourite bottle shop – and Teddy had decided to break the ice by leaning in to tell the newcomer her favourite story: that Choker didn’t get the nickname because he choked people, but because he wore one in a punk band in the eighties. Alice had leaned in towards her as well, and asked, ‘Does he play at the work Christmas party?’ and the two of them had smiled at each other. That was six years ago; they were Teddy’s best years.

Teddy pulled her jacket around her shoulders against the cold and wondered if she should take herself out to eat somewhere here, or if she should just go home and cook up whatever was in her fridge. She tried to remember: there was hard cheese, some broccoli, a lot of different hot sauces, probably some apple cider. Really, now, in the cold, she felt like eating a giant, stodgy piece of lasagne, something warm with silky sheets of pasta and enough leftovers for the next day. Surely somewhere here would offer that, otherwise she could stop by a grocery store on her way home, pick up one from the freezer and have it all done within an hour. Or there was a more appealing alternative.

On the walk back to her car, she got out her phone and calculated the travel time to Seville from St Kilda: ninety minutes, give or take. She’d already done a lot of driving, and an hour and a half more was nothing. She called Rusty.

He picked up almost straight away, and she said, ‘Do you have all the ingredients to make me a lasagne?’

‘Why would I do that?’

‘I’m in St Kilda and I feel like one.’

He blew out a long breath of air. ‘That’s a long way for dinner. You’re telling me nowhere in St Kilda will make you a slice of lasagne?’

‘Not like yours. And you give me leftovers. I’m an hour and a half away,’ she said. ‘It could be done by the time I get there.’

‘Maybe I’m busy,’ he said, but she could hear the background noise: cupboards opening, the shake of a box of pasta sheets.

‘You’re right,’ she said. ‘I can come over some other time.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ he scolded. ‘I’ll see you soon.’

~

It was usually a nice drive out to Seville – a town at the bottom of the mountains that felt like the last gasp of outer suburbia before everything went to country – but at night, there were none of the horses and scenery; just darkness. Teddy stopped at the supermarket on the main street there for ice cream and beer, and drove another five minutes until she got to her house. Just Rusty’s house now, of course, at least out loud, but it would always be hers too.

Rusty had been living with them since he was thirteen years old, four years before he ran away. Teddy’s mother had abandoned the idea of parenting right after Teddy’s birth, but Rusty’s mother, Rebecca, had left his life slowly. Lucky and his sister had reconnected after the birth of their children, but Rebecca had seen him as more of a babysitter than a brother, and dissolved into the background like sugar in the rain until her son spent more time at Lucky’s house than her own. She died in a stranger’s backyard of alcohol poisoning when Rusty was twenty.

Rusty had stayed in Seville with Lucky after Teddy had moved in with Alice during their share-house years, and he stayed in Seville alone after Lucky moved to the apartment to be closer to Teddy. When Lucky died, Teddy got his apartment and the mortgage, while Rusty, who had tended the family home with love the whole time, stayed in Seville.

The two of them were always linked and, like with Alice, it had always worked. Teddy prided herself on getting along very well with her family, and with Alice and Choker and Art – and then with almost nobody else in the world.

She let herself into the house without knocking. Rusty kept the house scrupulously clean, far cleaner than it had ever been when all three of them lived there. Teddy thought, but did not say, that it was because he still feared she would kick him out of there. She never would, even without the lasagne, even if he didn’t vacuum her old bedroom floor every week and dust her shelves and the bullshit tchotchkes all over them.

The kitchen was dim, and warm from the oven. Rusty was leaning against a bench, pink from the heat, his short hair stuck down to his scalp. ‘Ten more minutes,’ he told her.

She kissed him on his stubbly cheek.

He said, ‘So what’s up?’

‘I’m hungry is what’s up.’

‘No shit.’ He took the ice cream and said, ‘You didn’t have to bring mint.’

‘But it’s your favourite.’

‘It’s not yours.’

‘No,’ she said, ‘but you are.’

They popped some beers and sat at the kitchen bench. He had lit candles all along it in a row, and there was a bowl out with banana chips. Neither Rusty nor Teddy liked them, but Lucky always had, so they ate them diligently, as a sign of respect, and so there could always be a fresh bowl waiting for him. She took one now, and it immediately stuck in her teeth.

‘So how’s your holiday going?’ Rusty asked.

‘Well,’ she said.

‘I should probably say I looked through your Docs before you got here, so I know you’re doing the case with Art. And Alice, who is supposedly on holiday on the Great Ocean Road, is actually in Gippsland driving a dead body with last-minute address changes.’

‘You know her,’ Teddy said. ‘Always up to shenanigans.’

‘Who’s the stiff?’

‘I’m not allowed to say,’ Teddy said primly.

Rusty folded his arms.

‘You won’t figure it out,’ she said. ‘There’s nothing about it online. You can find out about it in a week like everyone else.’

‘I don’t need to find it out online. You’ll tell me before you leave.’

‘I will not,’ she said. ‘I am Fort Knox. A steel trap of secrets.’

‘With everyone else, sure,’ he said. ‘With me and Alice? Not at all. Is Alice supposed to keep it a secret too?’

‘Isn’t there some lasagne you could be checking on?’

‘It’s fine,’ he said. ‘Okay, so you won’t tell me about your dead body. What about your potentially alive one?’

She told him all that she and Art had found out; it didn’t feel like much.

Rusty listened and drank beer and at the end he said, ‘Is there anything else you want me to look up?’

‘You already found everything online about him, which is just basically his Instagram – with only five pictures of him looking moody in nature – though you didn’t see fit to include that local newspaper article from the time ten years ago when a wallaby turned up at his school, accompanied by a picture of him and a couple of classmates standing behind said wallaby while it had a snooze.’ She paused. ‘Cole looked moody in that one too.’

‘Well, you didn’t ask, but I did a little more digging. He got busted for possession a couple of weeks ago, but they let him off. It was speed, but not enough to be selling, so he cruised through. First offence.’

‘I’m already across him selling a little weed, and it doesn’t seem like it’s at any level that would lead to him going missing, but there was mention of a dealer. Some actor, maybe?’

‘Nobody else was pulled in with him. He didn’t drop any names.’

‘You know any actors that are weed dealers?’

‘Not personally.’

Teddy sighed. ‘Anything else?’

‘He applied for a uni course and didn’t get in.’

‘Really.’ She picked up another banana chip. ‘Nobody mentioned that. What did he want to study?’

‘Architecture. His marks weren’t high enough to get in. And he only applied for the Melbourne University course and nothing else; not even something that could lead into it. I guess nobody was helping him figure out his way.’

‘When I find him,’ Teddy said, ‘I will help him get his dream university degree.’

‘I bet you will,’ Rusty said.

‘Did you track down anything else?’

He shrugged. ‘Kid’s a pretty blank slate. So where’s he gone?’

‘Art thinks he ran away.’

‘Maybe,’ Rusty said. ‘But you don’t.’

‘I’m here for the worst-case scenario.’ Teddy drank some beer to wash the banana down. ‘I can’t quite figure out what would’ve happened to him, though. Maybe his girlfriend knocked him off so she could move on; maybe one of her boyfriends did. Maybe his terrible parents did away with him, but even that – I don’t know, Rusty. Nobody so far has enough passion to kill somebody. I can’t see it happening.’

‘What’s your plan from here?’

‘I don’t know. Maybe once I sleep on it, I’ll figure it out.’

‘I’m sure you will,’ Rusty said. ‘Dinner’s nearly ready. Go wash your face.’