On the Thursday after I saw Mrs McCausley at the SupaCentre I visited her for afternoon tea.
‘You came before four?’ She sounded suspicious when she answered the door, like she hadn’t expected me to turn up on time.
‘I give the kookaburras their dinner at four o’clock,’ she explained as I stepped past the screen door and stood beside her in the hallway. ‘But then I’ve already told you that, haven’t I?’
I didn’t know if it was a bad sign she’d repeated herself, or a good sign that at least she’d realised.
She led me down the darkened hallway before we emerged into her immaculate lounge room. The carpet was lush. Doilies fortified every surface. She indicated I should sit on the couch, but only where it was safeguarded by a crocheted blanket.
‘I’ll put the kettle on. Do you drink tea?’
‘Lovely,’ I assured her. And I sat on the couch and listened to Mrs McCausley move around in the kitchen while I took in the landscape paintings on the walls, the coffee table polished to shining, the porcelain dolls with lace bonnets shielding their dead glassy eyes and standing on a custom-made shelf beside the doorway. Her house was exactly as I remembered it. When Mrs McCausley returned she carried a tray filled with cups and saucers, a dainty dish of Scotch Finger biscuits. She placed it on the coffee table alongside a teapot that was wearing a knitted cosy.
‘It’s good of you to come and see me, Tikka,’ she said, pouring the tea.
‘Anything for a Scotch Finger, Mrs McCausley.’
Because there were worse reasons for visiting the house at the top of the street, even if Laura said she couldn’t think of any.
‘It’s been a long time since you’ve been to visit me here.’
‘A very long time,’ I agreed. ‘A while since I’ve been back to Macedon Close at all.’
‘Ten years?’ she asked.
‘Maybe eight,’ I admitted.
‘There was no need for you to run away,’ she said cryptically.
‘How’s your hip today?’ I asked, changing the subject and helping myself to a biscuit. But Mrs McCausley’s face fell at the mention of her hip.
‘More to the point, how’s yours?’ She said it sharply, as if she was offended I’d asked such a personal question.
‘My hip?’ I was confused. ‘But – but last time I saw you, you were telling me about your hip replacement.’
Mrs McCausley made a face that said she doubted that very much.
‘Sorry, Mrs McCausley,’ I said, ‘I was only asking . . .’
I trailed off because I was worried about upsetting her more. Could she really not remember that part of our conversation at the SupaCentre? Why would she think I’d make such a thing up?
After that the conversation drifted for a while. Her garden. My lab work. A new detective series on the ABC. I hadn’t seen it. It was worth staying in for, she advised. The violence didn’t worry her too much, she said, though the plot sometimes seemed overly complicated.
I was almost at the point where I thought it was time to leave.
‘Your kookaburras will be getting peckish,’ I said, and she smirked.
There was nothing wrong with Mrs McCausley’s brain when it came to the punchline.
‘It is almost their teatime,’ she said, glancing towards the sliding glass doors that led out onto the back deck, but there was no sign of her kookaburras yet. Though it was impossible to see all of the deck from where we sat in the lounge room, because the doors were framed with heavy brocade drapes that were embroidered with their own, more delicate birds.
‘But you can’t leave before I say what I wanted to tell you,’ she said. Her voice had found some of its colour again since I made the crack about kookaburras. ‘Not before I tell you what I saw.’
‘What you saw?’ I asked. I was surprised she’d remembered she was going to tell me anything, but I was careful not to show it.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘What I saw the night before the Van Apfel girls disappeared.’
My head snapped to attention. ‘What did you say?’
‘What I saw the night before the Van Apfel girls disappeared,’ she repeated. ‘I’ve never told anyone else.’
And so Mrs McCausley told me about a night almost exactly twenty years ago to the day. The night before the Showstopper. When the Van Apfel girls were still here, still living across the cul-de-sac.
Mrs McCausley had walked out into Macedon Close that night with a brochure about Tupperware’s new Airtight Alright range in her left hand and a sample salad spinner in her right.
‘What time was it?’ I interrupted.
‘Eight-thirty?’ she guessed. ‘After A Country Practice.’
Mrs McCausley never missed an episode of A Country Practice. Her timing could be trusted.
She had teetered across the bottleneck of the cul-de-sac in her high heels and clack-clacked up the Van Apfels’ drive. She was there to sell a salad spinner to Mrs Van Apfel (even if Mrs Van Apfel didn’t know it yet).
‘A salad spinner with a retractable lid for easy storage and stacking,’ she explained, slipping effortlessly into her sales patter and shedding twenty years in the process. Mrs McCausley had been keeping Mrs Van Apfel in Tupperware for years. And while she never stretched to offering her neighbour an actual discount, Mrs McCausley was quick to point out that all Tupperware products came with a thirty-day return policy if you were in any way disappointed. (Which was more generous than it sounded when you took into account that disappointment was a very real risk when you were selling to Mrs Van Apfel.)
That night, however, Mrs Van Apfel had to wait for the chance to be disappointed and Mrs McCausley had to wait for her sale. Because as she approached the Van Apfel house, her Airtight Alright salad spinner tucked under her arm, Mrs McCausley heard raised voices coming from inside the house.
‘“Sinful” this, and “penitence” that. To tell you the truth, I was embarrassed by what I heard,’ Mrs McCausley said.
But not so embarrassed that it stopped her from climbing the three steps up and onto the verandah, where she had a clear view into the downstairs lounge room, and then from standing, unseen, on the Van Apfels’ doorstep without ever ringing the bell.
From there Mrs McCausley could see straight inside to where Mr Van Apfel sat in his father’s armchair, his feet planted on the old man’s rug. In front of him Hannah and Cordie stood together in the middle of the room, copping the full force of his rage. In one hand he held a toothpick, which he pointed as he spoke, stabbing each word forcefully into the air. He had a small army of toothpicks in a container on the table beside him. ‘A Tupperware tubful,’ Mrs McCausley noted.
‘They’d had roast beef for dinner,’ Mrs McCausley remembered. ‘I could smell it through an upstairs window. My Ralph used to insist on roast beef once a week.
‘Half a teaspoon of baking soda to make the vegetables shine. That’s the secret,’ she confided.
‘Where was Ruth?’ I said. ‘Could you see her too?’
She told me Ruth had stood shame-faced in the doorway.
‘The doorway to the garage?’
No, Ruth was standing in the doorway that led off to the other parts of the house – to the downstairs bedrooms, the laundry, the study, to those spiral stairs. Mrs McCausley could also hear someone upstairs in the kitchen, clattering china plates into cupboards with enough force to make her disgust known, but not so hard she might chip a dish.
‘Cordelia was the only one of those girls doing any talking,’ Mrs McCausley reported. ‘Their father, of course, hardly came up for air. But Cordelia gave it back to him at every chance she got. She wasn’t going to take it lying down.’
‘Take what? What wasn’t she going to take?’ I asked, my heart thumping.
‘Oh, I couldn’t hear any actual words.’ Mrs McCausley looked askance at the question and for a moment I was worried I had broken the spell and that she would lose the thread of her story. But then she continued: ‘Not her words anyway. Mr Van Apfel’s were much easier to pick up. I could make out at least half of what he was saying.’
How long had Mrs McCausley stood there in the darkening day and listened to Mr Van Apfel shout at his daughters? Difficult to say, she told me.
(How long had she spent watching the drama unfold through the lounge-room window while elsewhere, in neighbouring houses, people sat and watched TV. And on those screens, at the end of television tubes, lay cul-de-sacs just like ours where people were fighting and kissing and eating. Putting china plates back into cupboards. Were being sinful in all the same unremarkable ways as his daughters, if only Mr Van Apfel had seen.)
‘I was there long enough to witness Mr Van Apfel really lose his temper,’ Mrs McCausley answered.
‘He lost his temper?’
‘Did he ever,’ she said with marked disapproval. ‘Ranting and slamming his fists down on the armrests of that lovely chair his wife had had reupholstered . . . You know the one, she’d had it done in William Morris Tudor Rose,’ she said emphatically.
‘Not really.’
‘You do. The green one.’
‘And?’ I urged. ‘What happened then?’
But Mrs McCausley wasn’t sure she should say.
‘It’s a bit late for that now,’ I pointed out to her, and she agreed and looked relieved to continue.
Mr Van Apfel had stood then, backhanding the coffee table as he rose out of his seat and spraying a sea of toothpicks across the floors, where they covered the carpet and fell under his chair. Got lost in the fringe of the rug.
He spoke, but the words that came out were not words Mrs McCausley knew. And as he talked, his eyelids fluttered and his eyes rolled to the back of his skull, as if he preferred that view to the one that was there in front of him.
‘Airdiddia diddia diddia,’ he hissed. ‘Hereisshisshia sshisshia sshisha. Airdiddia diddia.’
‘What did it mean?’ I asked.
‘Oh heavens, I don’t know! He was talking in tongues!’ Mrs McCausley said. ‘I’m only telling you what I heard. He stopped after a while and gave a stunned sort of blink, and in the kitchen the clattering stopped too.’
‘And then?’
And then Mr Van Apfel strode across the room to where Hannah and Cordie were standing so close to one another that the backs of their hands were touching, their pinkie fingers curled together tightly. Hannah said something that Mrs McCausley couldn’t hear, and her father dismissed it coolly.
‘Shut up,’ he said. ‘The Lord knows your soul.’
Then he lunged forward and grabbed a fistful of Cordie’s fine hair. He twisted it and her head twisted too. She gasped and closed her eyes in pain.
‘Don’t!’ mouthed Ruth, still standing the doorway.
Hannah appeared to swear softly, her eyes on the faded rug at their feet. But her father ignored her, yanking Cordie’s head, dragging her downwards by the hair. She grimaced and put out an arm to try to push him away, but her hand fell hopelessly short.
‘Kneel!’ he barked at her then and he pulled her onto the floor. She stumbled and got herself onto her bare knees, leaning towards him to try to ease the pressure on her scalp, but he saw what she was doing and twisted her hair tighter and she sobbed, her eyes still squeezed shut.
‘Lord-Jesus-Lamb-of-God-Prince-of-Peace,’ the words dripped off his tongue. ‘You are the way, the truth and the light, no one comes to the Father but through you. No one knows the way but through you. No one sees the truth but through you.’
Each time he said ‘you’ he wrenched Cordie’s head closer to the muscles of his leg.
‘No one sees the light but through you,’ he said. ‘Say it!’
And Cordie appeared to echo his words, her face twisted as she spoke.
‘Amen,’ came Mrs Van Apfel’s voice from the doorway. Her eyes were closed too and she swayed slightly as she listened to her husband’s words.
Mr Van Apfel still gripped Cordie’s hair, and she must have spoken then because he bent low so his face was near hers. He brushed his cheek against hers, and when Mrs McCausley told me I could feel, just as Cordie would have felt, the beginnings of tomorrow’s bristles brush against my cheek. Smelled that sour beef stink on his breath. His face creased and he eased his grip on her hair and let it fall from his hand so he could run the back of one finger lovingly down the bridge of her nose. His gift from God. Cordeli. Aaah.
He leaned in closer and whispered something into Cordie’s ear, but she shook her head and seemed to refuse to say it. In the doorway Mrs Van Apfel repeated ‘Amen’ while her husband ranted about shame.
‘And “deep pits”? Something about “deep pits” I couldn’t catch,’ Mrs McCausley admitted. ‘And: “The wicked flee when no one is chasing them.” I remember that line because he said it so loud and so many times. I’m surprised you didn’t hear it from your place.’
‘Flee?’ I said urgently. ‘What, like run away?’
So this was Mr Van Apfel’s retribution then. How he’d made them pay over their running-away plan. No wonder Cordie was so desperate to try to get away. To try to travel in our car the next day to the Showstopper.
‘Are you sure that’s what he said? Flee?’ I asked. ‘That’s important!’
‘Of course I’m sure,’ Mrs McCausley said. ‘My hearing is perfect, you know.’ As if the whole street didn’t know she always watched her TV with the volume dialled right up to twelve.
Still, if Mrs McCausley was to be believed, in the next instant, when Cordie looked at her dad contemptuously, refusing to say what he was asking of her, Mr Van Apfel reached out again and this time gripped a handful of her hair in his fist. He twisted it and Cordie’s eyes widened in pain but her lips pressed tighter together.
‘No, Daddy!’ Hannah urged.
But Mr Van Apfel ignored her and ripped the entire fistful from Cordie’s head and stood holding it like a tail.
‘Her hair?’ I was aghast.
‘Right off her head,’ Mrs McCausley confirmed. Then she leaned in and lowered her voice as if this were the scandalous part: ‘I screamed, it was so horrific.’
‘You screamed?’ I asked.
‘Yes,’ she admitted.
‘Loud?’
‘Loud enough,’ she said.
Which was how, while Cordie knelt in stunned silence, staring at her hair in her dad’s hand; while Ruth stood in the doorway next to her mum and sobbed self-pityingly, Hannah raised her arm and pointed towards the lounge-room window.
‘Mrs McCausley,’ she simply said.
And they all turned to face Mrs McCausley standing there on the verandah, her face frozen in horror. Her high-heeled feet were rooted to the coir-wire doormat, her hand clamped over her mouth. For a moment she had the decency to look flustered at being caught out. Then she lowered her hand and raised an eyebrow archly. She pursed her disapproving lips and lifted her sample to the glass. ‘Salad spinner?’
‘What did they say?’ I asked.
‘Oh, Mr Van Apfel was his usual charming self. Invited me in. Acted like it never happened. In fact, he was so relaxed I started to wonder whether I’d dreamed the whole thing. Except for the hair that was still in his fist.’
‘It was still in his fist?’
‘The whole time we spoke.’
‘Oh my God, that’s shameless!’
‘You think I was going to lecture Mr Van Apfel about shame?’
‘But what about the girls? Where were they?’ I said. ‘What about Mrs Van Apfel?’
‘The girls disappeared upstairs as far as I could tell. Though Mrs Van Apfel stuck around. She bought a salad spinner but she didn’t like the colour. She was never very easily pleased.’
‘You still sold them Tupperware?’
‘What was I supposed to do?’
Mrs McCausley was starting to clear away our afternoon tea now that her story was done. She looked her age again without the wind of scandal in her sails.
‘But – but why didn’t you say anything?’ I said as she placed fine bone china, pretty floral cups and saucers and leftover Scotch Finger biscuits carefully back onto the tray. ‘Why didn’t you tell the police? Why didn’t you report it during the investigation? Or even report it now?’
‘Why don’t you?’ she replied evenly. ‘Now that I’ve told you about it.’
(Though I was hardly going to start talking now.)
She paused as if considering whether to say the next bit, then she smiled conspiratorially at me.
‘Anyway,’ she said, ‘no one would believe me any more. They all think I’ve lost my marbles.’