There was a pocket of silence when all they could hear was the hum of insects. Rita was stroking her son’s hair with an expression Falk couldn’t read. Naomi stared down at her hands for a moment, gathering her thoughts, then looked up at Falk.
“You’d have heard about this bushland party that happens at the festival every year? All the local teenagers and any tourist kids they can drag in go up behind the reservoir on the first night and get absolutely shit-faced.” Naomi glanced at Henry in Rita’s arms. “Excuse my language.”
Rita smiled, pushing back her chair. “I don’t think he minds. I need to get him changed, anyway.”
“And look,” Naomi went on as Rita disappeared indoors. “Unpopular opinion here, because I’m aware I’m a hypocrite who used to do this myself, but that’s one tradition that needs shutting down. Before some kid has a bad reaction to something, or falls down the embankment and breaks their bloody neck, or slips and drowns in that water, because I know no one wants to hear it, but it will happen.”
“But teenagers’ll always—” Raco started, but she shook her head.
“No, Greg. Come on. You know where the border of my property is. I hear those kids coming and going, and I’m telling you it’s not like you remember. Back then it was all people we knew and a handful of out-of-town cousins or whatever. This has grown with the festival, and as I keep saying, as a doctor and concerned resident—local busybody, whatever, I don’t care—it’s getting out of hand. Anyway.” Naomi swatted a fly away irritably. “For all the good it does me to keep saying that.”
Her tone was level and brisk, but underneath she sounded a little uneasy, Falk thought.
“So something happened involving Kim?” he asked.
Naomi and Raco exchanged another look, and then she nodded.
“We’re talking years ago,” she said quickly. “But it was a big night, that one, because a lot of us had turned eighteen by then. Me, plus Charlie and Shane and Rohan, and another friend of ours, Dean.” His name sounded faintly different in her mouth than the others and she cleared her throat. “Anyway. It was obvious Shane was going to be drafted by one of the footy teams, and the rest of us were off to uni after the summer, so it was the last time we were all going to be around for this thing. I mean, people did come back, there were always a few older faces home for a visit or whatever, and there were younger kids as well. You would have been—what?” she asked Raco.
“Fifteen.”
“Yeah, I went for the first time when I was fourteen.” Naomi’s eyes turned back to Falk. “But the point is, there were a lot of people there that year. A lot of drinking, possibly more than usual. And for whatever reason, maybe because of that, I wasn’t really into it that night. The whole thing just felt off.” She glanced at Raco. “You thought so, too?”
“Yeah,” he said. “Everyone got really drunk really fast, and there was definitely a weird atmosphere. There were all these kids there we didn’t know—” Naomi was nodding in agreement as he spoke. “The dynamic was wrong. Little fights kept flaring up, over stupid stuff. And Charlie and Kim had fallen out before they even got there.”
Beyond the veranda, Falk could see Charlie out among the vines. Shane was there as well. Falk hadn’t seen him arrive, but the pair were talking, their stances almost identical from that distance. Shoulders hunched and arms folded across their chests.
“Do you know why Charlie and Kim weren’t getting on?” Falk asked, and both Raco and Naomi shook their heads.
“It would have been nothing,” Naomi said. “Charlie says he doesn’t remember, and I can believe it. They were always breaking up and making up, even then. So they’d had another argument, and of course Charlie did the mature thing and spent the whole night talking to girls and trying to make her jealous. And Kim, being sixteen, did what you’d expect—drank too much, pretended she didn’t care what her boyfriend was up to, and went off every five minutes to secretly cry behind a tree.”
“They got like that sometimes.” Raco sounded weary thinking about it. “But basically at some point, Kim had had enough and she left. I didn’t actually see her go, but when I realized, I wasn’t surprised.”
“No, me, neither,” Naomi said. “I know it must have been still pretty early—only about 10:00 p.m.—because that was when I decided to leave myself. I was trying to find someone to come with me so I wouldn’t have to walk back alone, but no one wanted to. So in the end I just went.”
Naomi paused and Falk sensed that uneasiness again. He just waited.
“I found Kim near this spot where the track hits the reservoir trail.” Naomi motioned a meeting point with her hands. “She wasn’t even on the path. Probably five meters deep into the bushland, kind of half propped up against a tree. I had a flashlight with me because it got really dark out there—still does—but I only saw Kim because she had some sequin detailing on her top and it caught the light.”
Naomi took her sunglasses off her head, opening and closing them in her hands.
“So I stopped, and I called out to her. And she didn’t answer. She had her eyes shut and there was no one else around”—open, close—“and it was dark, and for this horrible second, I thought she was dead.”
Naomi tossed her glasses on the table and reached for her water. The memory still troubled her, Falk could tell. But as she looked up again, he had a sudden faint but unshakable sense of something being a fraction out of place.
“I mean, she wasn’t dead, obviously.” Naomi’s voice was brisk. “Thankfully. But God, she was absolutely wasted. So drunk. More than I’d realized, for sure. I could see she’d thrown up; there was this puddle of vomit beside her. So I went over to check on her. She had vomit all up the back of her top and in her hair. She was still really out of it so I took her arms.” Naomi lifted a hand lightly as though reaching out. “And pulled her up.”
Something about the gesture—the specific, precise way Naomi moved—set the oddly false note ringing again in Falk’s head. The story felt edited, he realized suddenly. To what degree, he couldn’t tell. Possibly not by much at all. Or no more than was to be expected after twenty-five years, with all the gaps in memory that might entail. Falk looked across the table at Naomi, straight-backed and clear-eyed. Trusted by the Racos. He could believe she was recounting this as closely as recall allowed. But even so, no story had just one side.
“So Kim was at least on her feet.” Naomi took a sip of water, her fingers trailing through the condensation as she put the glass back on the table. “She was pretty unsteady, but back then my friends and I were helping each other get home drunk every weekend, so it wasn’t much more than I was used to. I could tell she’d been sick so I was hoping she’d start to sober up. I got her onto the path, but something—” Her face hardened. “God, I don’t know. The whole thing felt wrong. I checked her clothes. Because with the vomit on her back it looked like she’d been lying down in it and her skirt was”—Naomi’s hands fell to her own thighs—“kind of rucked up. But her undies were still on and I remember feeling…” She stopped again, breathed out a sigh. “Relieved, I suppose, because at least they seemed fine. As far as you can really tell something like that, anyway. So I straightened her clothes, but to be honest I was freaking out myself by then because we were alone and I had a really strong—”