My Brother’s Keeper (2 page)

‘I’m going away for a while, Sunny.’ She watches me but she doesn’t move. ‘It’s for the best.’ She just watches, as the big white clouds eat the sky behind her and again in the mirror where that other mum is watching me, too.

T
UESDAY
20 N
OVEMBER
2012

W
olf was performing his habitual morning tap-dance routine around the dog bowl when Sean gave a perfunctory knock and pushed the door open. From the way Wolf behaved you’d think my ex-husband was the love of his life, returning from the battlefield years after being declared missing in action. Maybe it was like that for Wolf. For all I knew he was still waiting for Sean to come home. I’m not projecting. Sean was wearing a charcoal suit which looked really good on him.

‘How’s the baby?’ I asked, reminding myself.

‘Good. Good,’ he repeated, squinting at me as if my question was other than innocent. As if. ‘Not so much a baby any more though.’ He reached for the little coffee pot that used to be his.

I took it off him. ‘You could knock, you know.’

‘I did,’ he said.

This little exchange pretty much sums up our relationship now: both right, both saying the complete opposite. I started the coffee-making routine while he hunkered down and ruffled Wolf’s neck fur. It wasn’t so much the suit that looked good, but him in it. He’d lost a bit of weight around the midriff and muscled up in the thighs and biceps. I thought men were supposed to go to seed when they had babies. Oh no, that’s right: it’s us, the dumb sex, who do that. I shifted my focus back to the coffee-making but not before noticing his shoulders had muscled up, too.

‘How’s Robbie?’ he asked, as if sensing my appraisal.

He was always good at reading me. I didn’t want to discuss my lover with my ex, even if they had buddied up. Especially now they’d buddied up. I put his coffee on the table and took up a defensive position against the sink bench.

‘To what do I owe the pleasure of this early morning visit?’

He brushed dog hairs off that good suit and watched Wolf shovel biscuits into his mouth. It was Sean’s way of avoiding eye contact. I can still read him pretty well too.

‘I want to talk to you about selling the house.’ He looked around the room as if seeing it for the first time. ‘With Patrick and all, it’s time Sylvie and I bought a bigger place. Together, that is. Her place is tiny and anyway, it’s time I put in my share.’

I bit the tongue that wanted to say he’d obviously put his share in already, which is why they’d gone from being a twosome to being a happy little family threesome. Instead I poured myself a coffee and kept silent. It wasn’t Sean’s fault he’d left me and taken up with a little pixie of a woman he worked with
at Police HQ. Well, it was his fault. But on my grown-up days I accepted some of the responsibility. When my little sister Niki was murdered I’d become obsessed with finding the person responsible. It didn’t help that Sean was a cop; in fact, it made things worse. I was on at him all day, every day about it. There was no room in my life for anything else. Sean was great at first but weeks turned into months and I kept hounding him all day and closing him out all night. Eventually he gave up on me. Some months before that I’d pretty much given up on myself. We separated. It was my idea. By the time I was ready to find my way back to him it was too late. He’d gone and found someone who was the complete opposite of me. I’m a rangy uncouth tomboy with a mean mouth and a habitual frown. Sylvie the pixie is friendly, feminine, finessed and fucking my husband. Okay, ex-husband, but still. Obviously this wasn’t one of my grown-up days.

‘Sell the house. Right,’ I said. ‘I’ll get on to it. Anything else?’

‘Diane …’

I waited for him to say more. He didn’t. He just looked at his cup and let my name hang in the air between us. Oversensitive as always, Wolf slunk under the table and dropped his head on Sean’s regulation polished shoes. I refused to take that as a declaration of whose side he was on.

‘It’ll be tough letting the place go. Tough for both of us. I know that. But can we please try and not make it harder than it needs to be?’

At least he hadn’t said selling our house would be good for me.

‘You’re right,’ I said. ‘We need to sell. It’ll free us both up.’
I hadn’t meant the words to sound so heavy with meaning. ‘Money-wise,’ I added. That still wasn’t right but I didn’t trust my voice to say more.

I told him I’d contact an agent and promised to keep him in touch with how it went. We made small talk and finished our coffee. Sean lovingly stroked Wolf’s ears and gave my shoulder an awkward pat as he left. Of all the things we imagined when we were together, I’m sure neither of us imagined this. I watched him walk down the path.

His new butt looked good in that suit too.

While my resolve was still clear and before I could mull too much I phoned a real-estate agency. There’s good mulling and bad mulling and I was pretty sure selling our marital home so Sean could buy a place for his new family would fit in the bad mulling basket. The receptionist was enthusiastic; an agent was free to come to appraise the property later in the afternoon.

‘Good for her,’ I said, and then into the uneasy silence added, ‘thanks. That’ll work for me too.’ No need to take my churlishness out on her. That done, I put it out of my mind, wrung a third cup of coffee out of Sean’s pot and took it through to the office. Wolf followed, climbed onto his sofa and prepared himself for a hard morning’s work of lucid dreaming, punctuated by orchestral farting.

I started with the bulging plastic bag Karen had given me. She’d arranged the file roughly in chronological order, which gave me an easy overview of how events had unfolded. Opening a new file on my computer I dutifully copied down the dates of marriage, divorce and the births of their two children. Karen
and Justin married shortly before Sunny was born, followed two years later by the arrival of their second child, Falcon. I flicked through the jumble of baby and little kid stuff: vaccination cards, first crayon scribblings and illustrated lists of milestones that all bore Sunny’s name.

There wasn’t much evidence of Falcon’s arrival. Not a single photo of either parent holding the new baby boy. Occasionally he appeared propped up on a sofa in the back of a shot and in one photo Sunny was lying with him asleep on a play mat, but there were no proudly dated drawings or finger paintings as Falcon stumbled into toddlerhood.

The few family photos from that time showed a rake-thin Karen with dark rings under her eyes. It was pretty obvious this was when she had started using. Justin was thin, too, with no sign of the narcissistic body building he would take up after the death of his son. In photos close to the time of the killing, Sunny was often on the edge of frame as if she was trying to get as far away from her parents as possible. I warned myself against reading too much into this. At six or seven she was at an age when trying to escape parents’ clutches is the norm.

Further down the pile I found a kindergarten photo of four-year-old Falcon, squinting suspiciously at the camera. He was small for his age. A tight, pinched little face and sandy-haired like his father, he wore a grubby woollen jersey that was unravelling at the neck. I copied the scribbled date on the back and then flicked forward through the documents to find the date he had died. Karen had killed him less than a month after the photo was taken.

I carefully returned the photo to the pile and then put the
whole lot back in the bag. I couldn’t rid myself of the memory of that photo of Falcon, the last image of him alive. Did Karen carry it with her? Was it pinned up on the wall of her cell for those seven years? The son she had murdered. The little five-year-old boy who thought his mother was taking him to The Warehouse to buy a PlayStation.

Tracking Justin on the net turned out to be simple enough. After half an hour googling I knew Justin Alexander Bachelor was now married to a woman called Salena Kosovov. Salena owned and managed an ‘exclusive’ gym, Apricot, in Herne Bay, Auckland. From googled photos of the couple at charity and media events it was obvious both made use of the gym. Justin was pumped and polished and Salena had augmented the toned, bronzed body with expensive teeth, Botox and a boob job, which had miraculously failed to completely destroy her natural beauty.

I tracked back to find earlier photos of Justin. In the twelve months following Karen’s sentencing, Justin pumped himself up to body builder size, met and married Salena and sired another son they called Neo. In the past couple of years Justin had deflated back down again to a more normal size, so maybe men do lose their bodies when they have kids after all. He was still a big guy, but nothing like what he was six years earlier. On his Facebook page he listed fourteen-year-old Sunny and five-year-old Neo as family members. Salena made no such ‘family’ claim to Sunny, not even the unfriendly sounding ‘stepdaughter’.

Neo had the high cheekboned beauty of his mother, but not the same discipline with calories. A computer boy rather than a gym boy was my guess. A couple more minutes’ searching
and I found a photo of the whole family outside Salena’s gym the first morning it opened. Sunny was in school uniform, which made it a simple enough match to search. Within five minutes I had the address of the private school she attended in St Mary’s Bay and a quick click to the white pages gave the family’s listed home address. The internet makes tracking people frighteningly easy.

I threw a Frisbee down the back yard for Wolf and thought about all this. Even allowing for the fact that Karen had only just got out of prison, where she’d been for the last seven years, she could probably have found this information herself. It occurred to me that Karen might not have hired me to find her daughter or even to check she was okay, but to make the first contact for her. It would be pretty hard to turn up unannounced on your teenage daughter’s doorstep seven years after you tried to kill her; seven years after you’d successfully murdered her little brother.

As much as I wanted to convince myself it was okay to contact Sunny directly, I knew it wasn’t. Plus I was pretty sure the police, who I liked to keep vaguely on the right side of, wouldn’t think so either. I’d have to approach Justin first and hope he’d let me talk to his daughter. Nothing in the papers Karen gave me or anything I’d found on the net suggested Justin had been blamed for Karen’s actions. No one had questioned his right or suitability to take over Sunny’s custody either — not publicly, anyway. Given how closely the authorities must have investigated him, if Justin was using he must have been very good at hiding it. Or he had successfully stopped at the time of his son’s death. It was possible, of course, that he’d never used — possible, but unlikely. I wondered if giving up drugs
was what kicked the body building into action. Maybe they’d dealt with their guilt in parallel ways: Karen found sanctuary in the church and Justin had taken on the whole ‘my body is a temple’ number.

Wolf gave me what I swear was an ironic look as he dropped the Frisbee at my feet. He was bored with this game and knew my attention was elsewhere. With commitment this time, I hurled the Frisbee down the path again. Two things happened at once: a voice yelled in high-pitched outrage, and Wolf, barking and slavering with the kind of enthusiasm only a bored, one-eyed, overprotective ex-police dog can muster, launched himself at a besuited man, clutching his head with one hand and my Frisbee with the other.

Two cups of tea and a dripping packet of frozen peas later, Jason Baker had finally stopped shaking. But his mouth was still going strong. According to him, my reckless behaviour with the Frisbee had given him concussion and my dangerous dog should preferably be destroyed or, at the very least, be chained up at all times. Oh, please. I thought real-estate agents were made of tougher stuff. When he finally finished with the complaining I threw the peas back into the freezer, took Wolf into the office with me, closed the door and left Jason to click his well-polished heels through the house in what he called his ‘appraisal process’. I’d offered to walk him through but he clearly thought Wolf and I were both dangerous. He was probably right — about me anyway. I’d pointed out that Wolf, as a well-trained ex-police dog, had merely pushed him to the ground and had not ripped his heart out as he was perfectly capable of doing. Jason remained unimpressed by my dog’s
restraint. Personally, the more Jason grizzled at me the more I admired Wolf’s control. My dog’s behaviour had been non-discriminatory; he’d have knocked over anyone who came onto the property uninvited, whereas I’d taken an instant personal dislike to the man. And that was after hitting him on the head with a Frisbee. He was just lucky I hadn’t taken up the attitude before I let the Frisbee go.

Wolf sat bolt upright on his sofa, ears up in full alert. If I had ears like his I’d have done the same. I didn’t like the sound of Jason clonking through my house with such proprietorial heels either. Our house, I mean. Sean’s and my marital home. Wolf let out a low rumble of disapproval, which I suspect was just for my benefit. He’s nice like that.

I picked up the phone. ‘Karen? It’s Diane Rowe.’ I could hear her shallow breathing as she waited for me to continue. ‘Justin and Sunny are living in Auckland.’

‘That’s wonderful,’ she said. Nothing against Auckland, but I assumed she meant it was wonderful I’d found them.

‘I’m not sure how I’ll make the first contact, but I’d like to spend a couple of days up there sorting out how to go about things.’

‘Yes, good. When?’

Jason was talking loudly on his mobile in the other room. I caught the phrase ‘warm and welcoming’. I was pretty sure it wasn’t me he was talking about.

‘I can fly up first thing tomorrow,’ I said. ‘And all going well be back by Friday with a full report.’

‘You can stay at my mother’s place if you like,’ she said. ‘In Ponsonby. It’s empty.’ She was breathing fast. ‘She’s not there,’
she added. ‘I mean, Mum died a few months ago and I haven’t got around to putting it on the market yet. I’m going to sell up and go live in a Christian commune in LA but I won’t go until I know Sunny is alright. It’s fully furnished and everything’s still switched on.’

She fell silent as if embarrassed by her sudden chattiness. It was the most Karen had said in one burst. I realised she had no idea how close her mother’s house was to where her daughter now lived.