chapter thirty-one
Now
‘I actually met that girl the police want to talk to,’ said Debbie Christos to her friend Sulin Ho. ‘I bumped into Joy at the David Jones cafeteria last year. They’d been out shopping. I remember thinking they looked like mother and daughter.’
‘I heard about her, of course,’ said Sulin. ‘But I never met her.’
Sulin was driving Debbie to Monday night tennis, as she had done for the last month.
Losing one’s husband, like so many of life’s milestones, had turned out to be an interesting test of friendship. Debbie had lost friends, like the one who imperiously told her not to ‘wallow in her grief’ when she didn’t want to go to the theatre, and she’d deepened her friendship with others, like Sulin, who was not a widow yet seemed to intuitively understand the way Debbie felt six months after losing Dennis: so raw and sensitive the very air was harsh against her skin.
Sulin hadn’t said, ‘Let me know if there’s anything I can do for you, Debbie.’
She’d said, ‘I’ll pick you up at seven.’
When Debbie’s son delivered the eulogy at Dennis’s funeral, he said, ‘Dad died doing what he loved, just after he’d won the match at Monday night tennis.’
Debbie wished he’d let her fact-check his speech. Dennis had won the point, not the game, and certainly not the match. They were playing against Joy and Stan and no-one beat the Delaneys. About twenty people listening to that eulogy would have thought, In your dreams, Dennis.
‘What was she like?’ asked Sulin. ‘The girl?’
‘I don’t know,’ admitted Debbie. ‘I didn’t take much notice of her. I wish I had. I’ve been looking back, trying to remember things that Joy said or did, if she seemed unhappy or depressed, but she seemed fine! She was fine with me, anyway.’
‘Oh, where is Joy?’ said Sulin suddenly as they stopped at a traffic light. She turned to look at Debbie. ‘It’s just not like her, is it?’
‘No,’ said Debbie. ‘It is not like her. Not at all. That’s what worries me.’
It was seventeen days now.
Both Debbie and Sulin had been part of an organised search yesterday through bushland near the bike path that circled the St Helens Reserve. The bike path was the closest biking area to the Delaneys, and Joy had received a new bike from her son Troy at Christmas, which she supposedly loved, although not a single person had ever seen her riding it.
The four adult Delaney children had taken part in the search. Stan Delaney had not. Debbie didn’t know what to make of that, although a lot of other people knew exactly what to make of it.
‘There’s something I’ve been thinking about,’ said Sulin now, her eyes fixed on the road ahead. ‘It was last October.’
She looked worried, as if she were confessing something.
‘I was driving home from book club, about nine o’clock at night, when I saw a man sitting in the gutter on Beaumont Road. I thought it was some drunk teenager, but then the headlights caught his face, and I thought, That’s Stan Delaney.’
‘Sitting in the gutter?!’ Debbie was scandalised. Stan Delaney was not the sort of man to sit in a gutter. He was far too tall.
‘I know! So I pulled over, and he told me he’d been out walking and tripped and hurt his knee again. It just seemed odd because he was wearing jeans. He certainly wasn’t dressed for exercise. It was more like he’d wandered out of the house.’
‘Gosh,’ said Debbie.
‘Yes, and something else,’ said Sulin carefully. ‘I think . . . I might be wrong, but I’m pretty sure he’d been crying.’
‘Crying?’ said Debbie. She tried to work it out. ‘Because of his knee?’ Men did get tearier as they got older.
‘There was something going on,’ said Sulin. ‘I know there was, because I helped him into the car and drove him back home and all four children were there at the house. I didn’t get the feeling it was a celebration of any sort, that’s for sure. It was more like they’d just got terrible news. Something had happened . . . the atmosphere! You know how you just know? You could cut the air with a knife.’
‘Was the girl still staying with them then? Savannah?’ asked Debbie.
‘I didn’t see her,’ said Sulin. ‘I think she must have been gone by then. By the way, I haven’t told anyone else that.’ She took her eyes off the road and shot Debbie a brief anxious look. ‘I don’t know if I should.’