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She gave him an avuncular thumbs-up, opened the car door, got out, straightened her jacket, and tugged hard on her shirt.
Somewhere in the distance an ice-cream truck played its familiar tinkling chords.
* * *
Two hours later the house no longer looked quite so benign. Blue-and-white-checked police tape hung from the letterbox and ended at the side fence.
Christina had put in a request for a crime scene warrant and sealed the house immediately following her interview with Mr. Stanley Delaney.
The interview had told her both nothing new and everything she needed to know. This evening’s bridesmaid dress fitting was going to have to go ahead without the bride. Her phone was aquiver with outraged texts from outraged cousins.
Christina didn’t care. She was reserving her outrage for Mrs. Joy Delaney, because her husband was a liar.
Chapter 11
LAST SEPTEMBER
It was midmorning when Logan Delaney drove down his parents’ street a little over the speed limit, his head ducked low so as to avoid eye contact with friendly neighbors out washing their cars or walking their dogs.
If the Volvo was in the driveway he might circle the cul-de-sac and keep going, because he wasn’t in the mood for solo conversations with the parents. He preferred to have his siblings around to take some of the heat. Being an only child must be hell.
The Volvo wasn’t in the driveway so he pulled in. He got out and shielded his eyes as he looked up at the house gutters clogged with leaves from the liquidambars.
He checked the vintage-style letterbox—a present from Troy, naturally—in case there was any mail to bring in.
He wore paint-stained track pants, an old T-shirt, and sneakers. He hadn’t shaved, and he was a man who looked like a criminal when he didn’t shave. His hair stuck up in tufts. His mother would say he looked like a hobo. He was a big, solid guy, and he knew he should dress more respectably, because women sometimes crossed to the other side of the street if they saw him walking behind them at night. He always wanted to shout out his apologies. “Oh, that’s exactly what you should do, Logan, in fact you should run after them shouting, ‘I mean you no harm, fair lady!’” his sister Amy said once, and then she’d laughed so much at her own joke he’d been morally obliged to throw her in the pool. Troy’s rooftop pool: it had an infinity edge.
His mother had asked him to do the gutters in that way she had of asking without really asking.
“Oh, gosh, Logan, you should see the leaves in this wind! What’s going on? Climate change? They’re just rocketing down,” she’d said on the phone last week.
“You want me to do the gutters?” Logan had said. Climate change. His mother threw certain phrases around at random to make sure they knew she was up to date with current affairs and listened to podcasts.
“Your dad says he’s perfectly fine doing them.”
“I’ll swing by next week,” he’d said.
After Logan’s dad celebrated his seventieth birthday with a torn ligament and a complicated knee reconstruction, the family had begun playing with the idea that Stan was “elderly.” It was a nurse who first used the word. “Elderly people can suffer confusion and short-term memory loss after anesthetic,” she’d said as she checked their sleeping father’s blood pressure, and Logan saw all of his siblings jerk their heads in a mutual shocked shift of perspective.
“It’s like seeing Thor in a hospital gown,” Amy had whispered. Their dad had never been sick, apart from his bad knees, and seeing him diminished and acquiescent in that hospital bed had been distressing, even though their father suddenly opened his eyes and said very clearly to the poor nurse in his startlingly deep voice, “Nothing wrong with my memory, sweetheart.”
He had fully recovered and was once again winning tournaments with their mother, but the “elderly” idea had persisted. Dad shouldn’t climb ladders. Dad needs to know his limitations. Dad needs to watch what he eats. Logan wasn’t sure if they were all jumping the gun. Maybe they enjoyed it. Maybe it made them all feel like they were finally grown-ups, worrying about an elderly parent who didn’t really need their concern yet. Maybe there was even satisfaction in it: Thor toppled at last. Although Logan wouldn’t be surprised if his father could still beat him in an arm wrestle, and he had no doubt at all that he could still beat him on the court. His father knew his strengths, his weaknesses, his strategies. Logan was powerless against all that knowledge. Ten years old again: hands sweaty, heart thumping. Jesus, he’d wanted to beat his dad so badly.
It had been two years since they’d been on the court together. “Go have a hit with your father,” his mother would invariably suggest when he visited, and Logan would make up an excuse. The subversive idea had begun to creep up that he might just never play again. It felt like treason, and yet who would care, who would even notice?
Their mother would notice.
Since his father’s operation, Logan had begun doing odd jobs around the family home, whenever he thought he could get away with it without his father getting angry. He slid in and out like a ninja. Change a light bulb here and there. Get up with a chainsaw and cut back the overgrown branches around the tennis court.
He couldn’t work out how his father felt about it. “You don’t need to do that, mate,” he’d said last time he’d caught Logan changing one of the court lights. He clapped him on the shoulder. “I’m not dead yet.”
That day Logan had a hangover and his father actually did look to be in far better health than him, ruddy-cheeked and clear-eyed, yet another doubles trophy on the sideboard.
Later that same day his father had asked about how his “career plans were progressing,” and Logan, who had no particular career plan except to stay employed, had felt himself squirm like a kid. His father seemed to always be observing Logan’s life the way he used to observe his tennis. Logan could sense Stan’s desire to call him to the net, to point out his weaknesses, to explain exactly where he was going wrong and where he could improve, but he never did criticize Logan’s life choices, he just asked questions and looked disappointed with the answers.
The slam of his car door sounded loud on the quiet street. He could hear the twitter of magpies and the sarcastic caw of crows from the bushland reserve that backed onto his parents’ tennis court. It reminded him of the rhythms of his parents in conversation. His mother chattering, his father’s occasional deadpan response.