nine

Fact: Kate didn’t know Amanda had been seeing Lyndon.

Or at least that was what she told Joe, and I only know this because I heard Joe and Dee talking the morning after the police interview.

Joe had called Kate that night. She’d been as surprised by the news as he was. And then she had backtracked, saying that it might have been possible, and that she’d begun to wonder whether she knew Amanda at all.

I guess they all felt like that.

Cassie had no trouble believing that the rumour about Amanda and Lyndon was plausible. Sonia and I weren’t so sure.

We sat on the street, once again talking about her and how she could have died. The jacarandas were still, but to the south the clouds were condensing as a storm built, moving slowly towards us. The first fat hot drops would soon sizzle on the bitumen, leaving slicks of rainbow oil smeared across the tar.

I had been showing Cassie and Sonia my skateboard moves, which consisted of little more than being able to roll precariously for a few metres, then leaping off before the steep incline that led to the waterfront. Despite practising, I hadn’t improved all that much, but I persisted, partly because I wanted to learn but also because when I got on the board, I felt like I was closer to Nicky, foolish as that may sound.

‘So that’s it?’ Sonia shrugged.

I handed the board to her. ‘You give it a go.’

The deck rolled too fast, and she wobbled, hastily jumping off, leaving it to race all the way to the bottom of the hill.

‘Go get it,’ I grinned, pointing to the end of the street, ‘Miss So-That’s-It.’

As she carried it back up towards us, Bradley Parsons came out of the gate with his mother. Each Saturday she took him off to a sheltered workshop, picking him up again in the late afternoon. Squeezing himself into the front seat, he rolled down the window, peering out at the darkening sky, while he waited for his mother to start the car.

‘Hi,’ he called out to Sonia, who did her best to ignore him.

With the window still down, he continued to call out as Mrs Parsons pulled the car out onto the road and began to drive up the steep incline towards us.

It was Cassie who responded – ‘Hi Bradley’ – and she waved.

‘I love you,’ he told her, leaning out the window as the car picked up speed, his voice loud and booming.

We giggled.

The branches of the trees overhead began to stir, and with the onset of the wind, the first rain fell, finally breaking what had felt like weeks of unbearable heat. Cassie screamed as a crack of thunder shattered the stillness and the birds, twittering wildly, flew off in a great arcing swoop.

‘Lets go to the caves.’ I made the suggestion out of habit, because this was where we hung, but it was only as we were running down the hill, leaping the stairs two at a time, that I wished we’d just gone to my place. The waterfront now held a menace it had never had before.

The river was choppy, tiny white waves crisscrossing its once smooth surface, the water a deep lead green. As we reached the shade of the first desert oaks, each needle glittering with rain, the storm picked up in intensity.

We made a run for it. Across the burnt grass, whipping our ankles like paper cuts, to the rocks, the sandstone a deep orange swirled with cream and ochre as it soaked up the wet. My thongs were slippery and I had to be careful now, not wanting to fall on the sharp oyster blades, while the other two, who were in their sandals, ran ahead of me.

It wasn’t until we were right near the entrance to the first cave that we saw Lyndon. He was sitting on his own, knees to his chest, a half-empty bottle of what looked like Brandivino next to him, a pack of cigarettes beside it. Seemingly oblivious to the downpour, he hadn’t moved back under the shelter of the rock lip, but had stayed where he was, his dark brown hair slicked across his forehead, his shirt soaked through, and his faded jeans a deeper blue from the rain.

The tide was high and unless he moved back, our knees would literally brush against his face as we tried to edge through to the next cave.

It was Sonia who summoned the courage, asking him if we could get past.

‘Nothing stopping you.’ He didn’t look at her and it was hard to make out his words against the pounding of the rain.

We had no choice but to squeeze past him, the legs of his jeans cold and wet as I pressed closer than I wanted, and then, just as I was almost out of his reach, he grasped my ankle, his hand clammy on my skin.

I tried to squirm out of his grasp, scared I would overbalance and fall into the river below.

‘Have a drink.’ He went to lift the bottle and knocked it over, the last of the alcohol running out across the rocks and into a pool before he could stop it. The bottle then rolled, bobbing up and down in the tide, as it floated away.

I stepped backwards, wanting only to keep walking with the others to the cave, but I didn’t. I kept staring at him.

‘What are you looking at?’ He was leering now, trying to stand, his balance wrong as he clutched onto a rock ledge and hauled himself up.

I took another step backwards, the roar of the rain on the river too loud for the others to hear me if I screamed and there was a moment when I felt I should call out because he was frightening me, but then I also realised he was too drunk to focus any sort of harm on me.

‘You should be careful,’ I told him, when I finally found the nerve to speak.

He just stared at me.

‘You’re drunk. You could fall and drown.’

He leant against the rock, his eyes half-closed. ‘Like Amanda?’ And I couldn’t tell whether it was tears on his cheeks or just the slashing of the rain.

He turned his back on me and began to pick his way slowly, precariously, along the rock ledge towards the grassy reserve below the path back up to our street. I almost followed to make sure he was safe, but I was scared and I knew that he would only push me away. So, instead, I stayed where I was, watching him, ready to run if he slipped and fell (although whether I would have had the strength to drag him out of the water is doubtful), until he had made his way off the rocks and away from the rush of the river.

I was drenched. My jeans and T-shirt left a pool of water on the floor of the cave and I pressed back against the cool roughness of the sandstone wall as I tried to wring them out, my teeth chattering with the sudden cold.

Cassie and Sonia were only a little drier, and the three of us huddled close. There was the remains of a fire, burnt ashes and clumps of charcoal, black and ready to crumble in your hand. In the corner was enough dry wood to light a small flame. The problem was matches.

Cassie grinned. She had some in her pocket, along with a now sodden joint she had nicked from home. The paper disintegrated in her hand, the small amount of dope wet on her palm. I was glad it was going to be impossible to smoke. The last thing I felt like was another attempt at getting stoned. The matches, however, weren’t much better. The tip flaked away as she tried to strike it against the side of the box. I rubbed both dry and she tried again and again, until eventually there was a small sputter of flame, enough to catch the end of a twig.

‘There’s no way she would have even looked at him,’ Sonia said, returning to the topic of Lyndon and Amanda.

I coughed in the smoke and moved a little closer to the cave entrance. ‘You’re the one who always says he’s sexy.’

‘He has a certain something,’ she conceded. ‘But you see him that pissed...’

Outside the storm had stopped. The freshness of the southerly was pushing the clouds, clearing patches of blue in the sky, washed by a watery sunshine. The current was a petrol blue now, dark and oily, the tide slapping downriver with a newfound vigour after the lazy torpor of so many long, hot days.

Standing out on the rock ledge, I looked to see whether Lyndon had left the reserve. There was no sign of him, the pale grass flattened by the downpour.

‘I reckon it’s possible.’ Cassie wrung the ends of her hair. ‘There was something going on with her. Remember?’ She looked at me for confirmation. ‘That afternoon with Joe? She wanted to say but she couldn’t.’

I nodded.

‘Maybe she was pregnant to him.’ Cassie’s eyes widened as she imagined. ‘Maybe he didn’t want her to keep the baby and maybe she did. Remember?’ She turned to me again. ‘She said everything was shit.’

I did remember.

‘But perhaps she backed out. She wanted to keep the baby. And Lyndon freaked out when he heard, they had an argument, he pushed her, and left. She hit her head and she died.’

Cassie had her hands on her hips; the look of satisfaction on her face was hard to mistake.

‘Solved.’ She grinned. ‘Detective O’Donnell figures out another case.’

It was plausible, I had to admit. ‘But there’s no evidence.’

Sonia wasn’t budging. ‘I still reckon she would never have gone round with him. She was Amanda. He’s Lyndon. And besides, someone would have known they were together.’

‘Someone did.’ Cassie had her arms crossed now. ‘Or else why would the police have asked Joe whether it was true?’

Behind us the fire was going out. The thick smoke had forced us all out into the open now, and we stood on the ledge, only metres from where they had found her body. I looked down at the river, not wanting to imagine, but unable to stop myself from seeing her, her long brown hair floating out like silk.

‘So what are you going to do, Detective O’Donnell?’ Sonia smirked. ‘Take your theory to the police?’

‘I might.’ And then she looked at me again. ‘You should ask Joe.’

Joe wouldn’t know, I told her. ‘If he did, he would have said something to the cops.’

I remembered his voice. He had sounded genuinely surprised when the police had asked him about Amanda and Lyndon. He wasn’t acting, I was sure of it. And even if he was, it was unlikely he’d tell me anything.

‘Maybe it’s even simpler than that,’ Cassie continued, pleased with her success. ‘They could have just got it together a few times and then she wanted to end it and he was angry, pushed her – you know, same thing.’ She was pacing along the rock ledge now. ‘Or it could be even worse. He actually held her under until she drowned.’

‘You don’t know any of this.’ I wanted to stop Cassie. Lyndon had been here only moments before. He was someone I had known since I was young and even though I had never liked him, I didn’t want to think he was capable of taking a life.

She shrugged her shoulders. ‘No one knows anything. Except whoever did it, of course. It’s just ideas, and you have to have them. It’s how you then figure out what actually happened.’ She paused. ‘You know, I wouldn’t mind being a cop. I kind of like the uniform too.’

I rolled my eyes. ‘You’d have to give up your drug habit.’ I pointed to her pocket where she had stuffed the remains of the soggy joint.

Sitting out on the ledge, where Lyndon had sat in the pouring rain, I picked up a stone and skimmed it across the surface of the river, counting the leaps it made as it danced over the surface, lightly touching the water before skipping on. In the warmth of the watery sunshine my clothes were still damp, and I told the others I wanted to go home and get changed.

‘I’ll come with you,’ Sonia said.

Cassie, too, was ready to leave. Maybe it was just me, but I don’t think so: it had changed down there, and the weight of what had happened made me wonder whether any of us would ever want to hang in the place where we had once spent so much time.