Apples Never Fall

“Keep it,” said Troy viciously. “We just want you out of our lives.”

“That was my intention,” said Savannah. She stood and picked up her handbag, the new one Joy had bought for her with the crossover strap. “I mean, to get out of your lives. This was only ever temporary.”

She sounded like she was trying not to cry, and Joy knew perfectly well that it could be fake emotion, or someone else’s emotion she was channeling for her own purposes, but her heart still broke for her.

Only ever temporary. Was that the way this child lived her whole life? This child who had been starving in their midst and they’d shouted at her, ignored her, refused to help her. Joy remembered how she’d slammed the laundry door with her foot. She couldn’t see the child’s face in her memory, just the outline of a little girl, her features a blur, but she could certainly remember the savagery with which she’d slammed the door in a child’s face.

They hadn’t known she was hungry. How could they have known? But Joy prided herself on being observant. She wanted to go back in time and do all the things the sort of person she thought she was would have done: feed the kid, listen to her, rescue her from her awful childhood.

“Well,” said Joy. “You don’t need to go right away—”

“Mum,” said Brooke. “I think she probably does need to go right away.”

“Yep,” said Savannah. She looked at Joy’s children. “It’s been a blast, guys.”

“Where will you go?” asked Amy.

“She’s fine,” said Troy abruptly. “She’s got money.”

“I am fine,” said Savannah. “I’ll be back at some point to pick up my stuff.” She smiled radiantly at Joy, and now she was a dinner-party guest taking her leave. “Thank you so much for your hospitality.”

“It’s been my pleasure,” said Joy automatically, but truthfully, because up until tonight it had been her pleasure. Her absolute pleasure.

For an excruciating moment they all held their positions, as if they were actors in a terrible theater production and someone had forgotten their lines. Joy wouldn’t have been surprised to hear an audience member cough.

‘“I’m very sorry,” said Savannah suddenly, her eyes bright with unshed tears. Joy would never know if they were real or fake, if she truly was or wasn’t sorry, because Savannah suddenly patted the side of her handbag decisively, drew herself up, and left the room, left the house, exit stage left, just like Stan. She disappeared into the dark night from where she’d first come.

Chapter 47

NOW

“That was the last time I saw Savannah,” said Troy Delaney.

“Did she return the money?” asked Christina.

Detective Inspector Christina Khoury was in what her mother would describe as a “tetchy” mood.

She didn’t have a body like she’d thought she’d had the day before. The call had come through almost immediately: Not yours. Skeletal remains.

This woman had died at least thirty years previously, back when Christina was a child, trying to decide whether she wanted to be a police officer or a marine biologist when she grew up, and why had she not stuck with marine biology? She could have been floating about looking at starfish right now.

Furthermore, a member of Joy Delaney’s tennis club, a Fiona Reid, had just called in with the wonderful news that she’d seen Joy, yesterday afternoon, getting off the train at Central, looking as hale and healthy as could be, although sadly she hadn’t seemed to hear her name when Fiona called out to her.

Because it wasn’t her, you fool, thought Christina.

Meanwhile a psychic had just gone public with the news that her feeling was that Joy was alive, but being held captive, somewhere near water, or possibly in the desert.

Christina did still have her motive. Joy Delaney’s hairdresser, Narelle Longford, had contacted police the moment she heard about yesterday’s discovery of the body, and she had shared all the information that her client had ever shared with her, including the story of a decades-old secret, revealed last year by their young houseguest, who was not in fact a random stranger at all.

Stan’s children had shared precisely none of this with Christina. They knew it made their father look bad and had chosen to say nothing up until now.

Christina studied Joy Delaney’s second son, a good-looking man buffed by money and success, no doubt adored by his mother, but a man who had fallen with absurd ease for a young woman’s blackmail.

She and Ethan were talking to him in his luxury apartment. The blindingly beautiful views from the huge windows were an irritation, like distractingly loud music. She found herself wanting to say, “Can’t you turn that down a notch?”

“She actually did return the money,” said Troy. “She sent me a check in t

he post. I tore it up. Never banked it.” He shifted slightly in his chair, which looked spindly and cheap to Christina, like an office chair from the 1950s, but which was apparently something to be impressed by, according to Ethan, who had asked Troy if it was a genuine something-or-other and it was a genuine something-or-other. Why even bother asking? Troy was the sort of guy who took pride in overpaying for everything. Even blackmail. “I suspect it would have bounced, but I don’t know that for sure.”