‘He said it wasn’t that much,’ said Stan. ‘It couldn’t have been that much. It wasn’t like she was covering up a murder.’
‘Did he write her a cheque?’ asked Joy. ‘Can’t he cancel it?’
‘I don’t think he has a chequebook. No-one writes cheques anymore.’ Stan sat down next to her on the side of the bed. ‘I think he transferred it straight into some kind of account. The height of stupidity. You know what Troy said to me when I finally convinced him he’d been scammed? He said he didn’t care. He can afford it.’
‘He only wants to impress you,’ Joy sighed.
‘Yeah, well, that didn’t impress me. It was dumb. And disrespectful. To you and me. To our marriage. For him to think that I would . . . in our own home . . .’
His voice trembled and her heart softened again. It was always like this with Troy and Stan. She was caught in the middle, her sympathy flying back and forth like a ball.
She put her hand on his thigh and they sat in silence for a moment.
‘So . . . what happens now? Where is Savannah?’ asked Joy.
‘I don’t know where Savannah is,’ said Stan. ‘But I told Troy to call his brother and sisters, and get them over here now, so we can discuss next steps.’
Discuss next steps. He was puffed up with the self-righteousness of a wronged man. A rarely wronged man.
‘We need to be sure nobody else is handing over their hard-earned cash,’ Stan continued. ‘We obviously need to get the police involved.’
‘Oh, I don’t know if that’s necessary.’
‘You need to check our bank accounts. She’s probably had plenty of opportunities when you were out of the room to go through your purse and take all your credit card details.’
Joy decided not to mention that not only had Savannah had plenty of opportunities to do exactly that but she’d literally handed her credit card to Savannah on multiple occasions.
‘All her things are here.’ Joy looked around her at the neat room. ‘Surely she won’t just leave them.’ She picked up Savannah’s pillow and hugged it to her. ‘I think she might have some sort of eating disorder.’
‘Eating disorder?’ Stan said ‘eating disorder’ like it was some kind of new fangled fashion choice. ‘Who cares if she has an eating disorder? She just blackmailed our son!’
‘Oh, well,’ said Joy, trying to imagine what in the world they would say to her. She didn’t feel angry so much as blindsided. It felt like there had to be another explanation.
‘Oh, well? Joy, did you seriously just say, Oh, well?’
‘She’s obviously troubled,’ said Joy. ‘Have a heart.’ She could feel herself and Stan slipping into their old parenting roles in response to Savannah’s actions. The angrier Stan got with a child, the more likely Joy was to defend them, and the worse the transgression, the calmer Joy’s response. She was more inclined to shout about dirty laundry thrown on the floor instead of the basket, than a serious-sounding telephone call from the school principal. If she hadn’t witnessed the crime herself, she wanted proof, or at least to hear her child’s version of the story first. Stan was always too ready to deliver a damning verdict before they’d heard all the evidence. She needed to talk to Savannah. She needed to talk to Troy. She believed Stan’s side of the story but part of her still felt as if this must be some kind of dreadful mix-up only she could sort out.
‘Joy, for Christ’s sake, do you understand the implications of this? If she went public with this kind of accusation? In this day and age?’
‘Well, I’m sure she had no intention of going public,’ said Joy uneasily. ‘And of course this is all very upsetting but –’
‘But what?’
‘Don’t you dare call me borderline moronic.’ Joy threw the pillow away from her and stood. Her eyes fell upon Savannah’s glory chest. The boys had struggled to carry it inside that day they’d picked up her things.
She lifted the heavy hinged lid. There wasn’t much inside: a stack of hardbound journals like the one on Amy’s desk and a handful of old-style battered-looking photo albums. Nobody really did photo albums like that anymore. They got those professional-looking bound books printed.
Joy picked up the first spiral-bound album and flipped through it. It was clearly a child’s album. The photos had been stuck in crookedly and some of them were so out of focus only a child would consider them worth keeping. The edges of the photos were peeling away from the sticky backing. She looked at a page of photos of two children sitting under a Christmas tree. It could have been a scene from her own albums: the dated summer pyjamas, tousled hair, strewn wrapping paper.