O’Hare rolled those eyes that were far too pretty to belong to a man who talked about killing women the way most men talked about ordering a burger. “Julia Mahoney, I know you watch a lot of television; you don’t leave your house enough voluntarily to have a decent range of hobbies. So I know you are aware of the genre we are entangled in right now and therefore better-informed than to think you should run away from me in an unfamiliar area this far away from any potential sources of help.”
He didn’t even have the decency to display any reaction to my dismay that he seemed to know more about my activities than a few days’ stakeout should have offered. It really creeped me out to think that he might have been watching me for longer than he needed to just to kidnap me. Why had he bothered? There was absolutely no sexual spark from him when he looked at me: I knew what that felt like.
Well, if I wanted to know what this was, I needed to start being a little strategic. Not even strategic: compliant, at least for the moment. He seemed to want to tell me some things, after all.
I stood, and took hesitant steps past O’Hare, over to the doors. He got up and followed me over, opening the doors so the two of us were able to step out side by side into the night.
He slammed the doors, and took hold of my hand. I was staring down at my hand completely enclosed in his and stumbled when he started walking, pulling me along.
“Do you know Rocky Halloran?”
“He’s a local councillor in our area; I don’t know him directly, no.” Was I really walking barefoot and shivering a little in my pyjamas on the edge of some farming property at probably three in the morning, discussing local politics with my kidnapper?
“Do you remember what happened to him, necessitating an extended leave of absence from his council duties?”
It took a while to come to me. It had been all over the local news at the time, but it wasn’t exactly something that had mattered to me personally. “Injury, right? He—his kneecaps, he broke both his kneecaps…” I stopped walking alongside O’Hare, and pulled my hand out of his. It had just been a gory accid
ent at the time, something to avoid thinking about, but now the man who had snatched me out of my bed was asking me about it, I knew without being told there was something more sinister to it.
“More accurately, someone broke them for him.” There was the confirmation. “Who exactly that person was, doesn’t really matter. The main point here is that I’m the one who got that done… but if you’re looking for someone to blame, you don’t need to go further than your lovely mother.”
“My mother,” I repeated. It occurred to me that as seamless as this kidnapping was, it was entirely possible Devin O’Hare just had the wrong house, the wrong family. Maybe he wanted that couple at the end of our street who always wanted to talk about some obscure political happening when I ran into them on the street and had ridiculous numbers of different visitors every week. “My mother won’t even swat a fly, there’s no way she’d—”
“Do it herself?” O’Hare slung an arm across my shoulders, and I felt a shiver going through me he probably felt too. It was definitely wrong, but I couldn’t help it: this was an incredibly attractive man getting close to me, and it had been a while since that had happened. “Of course not, when she can pay someone else to take care of it for her. You may even remember the situation that caused the trouble: our unfortunate friend Rocky had the bright idea of developing the waterfront near your house as a tourism hub, and of course that would have meant your dear old mum would lose her favourite strolling spot, not to mention some of your ocean views.”
God, I remembered that dumb tourist spot proposal. It annoyed me both because it was stupid, anyone could see that, and because I was the one who had to suffer through endless lectures about how it was never going to work, when I already agreed. You didn’t turn next door to a new subdivision with high rents and utterly unhistoric houses into a tourist trap. I still cringed a little when I remembered how Mum had raged at the idea of some outsider coming in and deciding that one of her precious places was going to be changed forever in some misguided attempt to bring money to the area. “All I know is we all dodged a bullet when that plan fell through.”
“Except for Rocky Halloran, who didn’t manage to dodge the hammer that found its way to both his kneecaps at high speed in the space of thirty seconds.” I winced. “That little accident did cause him to see the error of his ways as far as his tourism project was concerned though, so there are some who might still think the whole thing was a bit of a blessing.”
“That’s quite disgusting, and somehow I’m not at all shocked you have something to do with this situation, but my mother doesn’t have any involvement in it. She wouldn’t know where to begin finding someone to get that kind of thuggery organised.”
“The wife of an international mobster, not know how to get some annoying local player back in his lane?” O’Hare tipped his face up to take a gigantic whiff of the night air. “What a time to be alive and to hear such bullshit.”
I was too stunned for a few seconds to speak, let alone respond with the laughter that suggestion deserved. “My mother, some—like do you mean in the Mafia?”
“That term tends to come with connotations that are useful to varying degrees, but yes, that is essentially what we are talking about here. A local mafia.”
My thoughts had been screaming to me all this time that there was something up with this man who was apparently not afraid to be caught in the act on his activities, but I couldn’t accept everything this possible answer came with just yet. “Come on, this is Tasmania, not exactly the sort of place that breeds criminal activity. I mean hardly anyone here has any money to speak of, we have two nice houses and we’re the pinnacle of society.”
“Yes, and that’s why they need to travel so much to get in on anything interesting.”
I tried not to sound so satisfied that I’d caught him mid-bullshit, but I couldn’t stifle the smirk that found its way into my voice as well. “They travel to attend conferences, and I’ve actually seen their published papers, so I’m not receptive to anything more you have to say about that. They actually get paid to go all over the world and speak.”
“You’ve seen their papers, you little idiot.” Said without either annoyance or amusement, which somehow made me pay attention more than either of those reactions would have. “They submit drivel to low-level workshops that will have them and there’s no chance they’re being paid a cent for their expenses. You’ve seen their published papers, you should be able to tell me how many times you’ve seen them being put up as keynote speakers or being the lead publication in a collection.”
I bit my lip. They were usually in the three hundreds if there was an index… or a lot of the time it was an online-only publication. It wasn’t like I had any experience in how being a university academic practically worked; maybe at some point they’d told me they got their attendance covered financially, and I’d believed them.
“Now I’ve read some of your parents’ work too, as it happens,” said O’Hare. “I particularly like your mother’s last publication, for which she… read a whole bunch of other papers and books, summarised them, and then put them into the stupidest categories I’ve ever seen. Now you tell me: did the world really need a meta-analysis of homeschooling techniques based on how interested the writer or researcher also is in healthy eating?”
That one had seemed a bit questionable to me too, but it was academia, so I hadn’t thought nearly as hard about it as I was now with O’Hare challenging me to do it.
“It’s a pretty high-effort ruse,” said O’Hare, “but it’s only successful because everyone around your parents is either completely ignorant of how academia works, or they’re part of it, so they are only interested in themselves. But with a lot of money to your name, that’s as good a ruse as you need, because nobody is going to be looking too closely.”
“I—but—oh.” I reeled a little, O’Hare’s hand catching mine again and pulling me up the only reason I didn’t fall to the ground.
The thing was, I couldn’t see any good reason for him to lie… and maybe on some level I’d always known there was something going on with my parents. It had just been easy to ignore when what I mostly cared about, when it came to my parents, was how uninterested they were in me.
And… okay, being cold to your kid was one thing. But being part of a mafia? Perhaps being involved with actually— Well, O’Hare was trying to tell me my mother was happy to break a guy’s knees if it got her the outcome she wanted. So if he was telling the truth this was very bad.