A Child's Book of True Crime (6 page)

Henry
[pretending to be God]: “G’day!”

Lucien:
But how would you know if that was the truth?

Billy:
Because everyone told the truth.

Lucien:
But how do you know if everyone was telling the truth?

Billy:
Because that was the truth.

Lucien:
But how would you know?

Lucien had made it clear he disagreed with most of what was being said. Finally I called on him to share his impressions. As usual there was a mind-spinning adultness to his speech, and then a strangeness as it slid back into nine-year-old
patois. I was ready to find his pretensions endearing, but the depth of his ideas left me and the others near speechless.

Lucien:
About seven thousand years ago everybody knew that the Earth was the center of the universe. Now it’s not true. It was true then, but it isn’t now. So my point is you can change the truth. But it usually happens after years . . . Truth is a flexible substance.

There was a knock on the classroom door. All the children looked up to see the principal standing outside. Lillian Hurnell, neat in her tweed suit, wore so much foundation she glowed orange. I rushed to let her in, asking, “Children, how do we greet a guest?”

“Good afternoon, Miss Hurnell.”

“Good afternoon, 4B.” She turned to me. “Miss Byrne, may I have a brief word?”

“Certainly.” I followed her to the door. Lillian was from the equivalent of Tasmanian royalty; her family settled very early and their dessert spoons and embroidered christening dresses had been donated to the town’s museum. Her family homestead had bluestone walls. And one wall was papered with pages from an old
Woman’s Weekly
. My mother had told me Lillian’s aunt became pregnant to a farmhand and the young woman shot herself. The Hurnells covered the stained bluestone with pretty pictures.

Lillian stepped outside. “I was just checking you were all right.”

“Yes, fine.”

“Elsbeth saw you limping back late from lunch.”

“Oh! I had a doctor’s appointment.”

“You do look flushed,” Lillian agreed.

“A little fever. Thank goodness I can spend the weekend sleeping. By Monday I’ll be fine.” I paused. “Luckily the children all seem to be in perfect health.” I turned and saw, through the window, each child’s face staring back at me. “They’re all doing really well.”

Lillian, having followed my gaze, became self-conscious. “Right, I’d better let you get back to it then.”

“Thanks for the concern, Lillian.” I nodded gravely. “It’s appreciated.”

“Kate?”

I turned, holding the door handle. “Yes?”

“There’s a snag in your panty hose.”

“Oh dear, Lillian.” I smiled. “I’m so glad you noticed.”

I closed the door, confident that Lillian was offended by no more than my lack of grooming and punctuality. I continued checking the children’s work: Eliza colored in an earnest tiger; Billy, a loglike wombat. I stood still, watching them draw. It was amazing how their skills advanced: at approximately thirteen months, infants grab pencils with their fists to spread scribble all over anything; around the age of three, children start drawing spirals or circles as if putting to paper their memory of floating; then the circle becomes a head, and arms and legs are fastened, like sunbeams radiating off the sun. These children, now, took up their colored pencils and they seemed so assured. Each line bore no trace of doubt or ambivalence. They believed their drawings to be straightforward, and they were: like the beautiful maps to some lost world.

The only child whose pictures made me worry was Lucien. He had drawn a family of blind koalas, all hanging limp from a tree. Koalas apparently suffered from skin cancer, morphological abnormalities due to inbreeding, and chlamydia, which led to blindness and infertility. Ninety percent of the population had died in the last ten years.
President Clinton has been written to about this,
Lucien claimed.
We need his help to write the National Koala Act.
He was diligently drawing himself with hulking shoulders, and a square, robotlike upper body. Hopefully, he thought chlamydia came from too much sun. Bolted across his arm he drew a large water pistol. “Lucien,” I asked, “you’re not going to hurt the koala, are you?”

“
Nooo
,” he said, “I’m protecting it.”

“Oh, so you’re, like, on the same team?”

He rolled his eyes. “Yep.”

“Very good, Lucien. Well done.”

Once I’d asked Thomas, “Do you worry about your son’s education now that we’re lovers?” “On the contrary,” he’d claimed. “You’re being far more attentive, far more tender to my son.” He’d taken a deep breath. “In fact, I’m only doing this for his education.” I had balked. “No really, he’s flesh of my flesh. You’ll see him. You’ll see him first thing in the morning. You’ll see him when he leaves. You’ll stroke his hair and think of me, and he’ll have no idea.”

I looked out the window. Slowly, the mothers were gathering in the playground. There was an old ship’s bell under the jacaranda. In five minutes, at half past three, it would ring and all the children would run outside. I loved the way they fell out the classroom door, as if being disgorged by a sea monster;
then, the theater of matching them to their mothers—the blond to the brunette, the charismatic to the deeply dopey. All these glaze-eyed, drowsy kids would suddenly be sharp as lawyers, doing deals on sleepovers. They would run to dump their schoolbags, before showing off on the monkey bars.

I moved around the room trying to seem natural and bright to those on the other side of the glass. Most of the mothers wore sneakers and track pants. They had sensible hair and sensible shoes. Except for Veronica. Pale Veronica with skin that held the light. Through the window, I’d long studied her looks; her trademark red lipstick confusing, or perhaps accentuating, all the orchid delicacy she had going for her. She reminded me of the prettiest girl at any party. She walked with a perfectly blank expression until she saw someone she liked—one of the vaguely comme il faut mothers—whom she might greet extravagantly. She’d guiltily smoke the other’s cigarettes, tilting her head, baring a long smooth neck as she exhaled. As soon as the bell rang, she’d stamp out her butt and offer around the mints from the glove box.

I turned back to the class, but it was difficult to muster composure. I had not expected to see her. I’d thought she’d be away for the weekend, but the vigilante on about the ethics of journalism had driven her back. I wiped clean the blackboard, while sizing up her physical strength. If it came down to some sort of tussle, I would obviously have the advantage of youth; she was pushing forty and I was at least fifteen years her junior. Plus she was so thin, very thin and graceful; if I wasn’t badly stunned I could easily outbulk her.

Veronica’s main advantage would be strategy. Ever since
she was young she’d read these parlor detective stories where crime is so pristine, always conforming to a trusted formula: after the stableboy-with-ringworm finds the deceased under a pile of hay, everything is conducted in a most urbane fashion; interrogations take place during high tea. When the murderer breaks down and politely confesses, they all have gin and tonics on the lawn.

One day Veronica had had
I-could-do-that
syndrome. Always canny, she discovered true crime sold better than fiction—and who could make this stuff up? A small-town American football star murders local girls using soda pop bottles. A wealthy British doctor kills his wife and her maid; then cuts off their identifying characteristics: fingertips, eyeballs (the maid had a bad squint), and teeth (his wife’s were bucked). By this stage Veronica was thirty-five. She was married to a lawyer, with one young child and, even though it was inappropriate for me to speculate, perhaps the marriage wasn’t going so well. Black Swan Point’s story was attractive because it was classic: nice upper-middle-class girl meets nice upper-middle-class boy. They marry young. They have trouble communicating. They have three babies in a row, and she gets fat. He starts fucking a pretty young employee. She gets more desperate. Most often this story ends with years and years of passive-aggression, or with the now middle-aged nice girl getting screwed over as her husband starts another family. This figure, Margot Harvey, had broken out of the mold, and went blazing into the night, howling,
“No! No! I will not be civilized about being replaced! I will not retire gracefully!”

“Okay, kids.” I clapped my hands. “It’s time to clean up.
Quietly!” There was the scrape of their chairs as they all jumped up; then the fiddly business of packing one’s pencil case. Watching them prepare to leave made me the tiniest bit sad. “This weekend, as homework, I want you to finish your drawings.” They stuffed their pictures into their schoolbags. Then the bell rang, and soon their mothers were all standing in the doorway, helping to retrieve lost lunchboxes.

Out the window Veronica stood alone.

When
Murder at Black Swan Point
first came out I had been stunned. She and I were initially quite cordial, but after reading her book, I walked around my house as if visible from every angle; suddenly the walls were made of eyes. Like some primitive version of hell, every vase knew I was bad. Abruptly Veronica stopped waving in the mornings. She stopped entering the classroom. Then, at night, late, the telephone started ringing. My evenings were so silent that the sound could startle me at the best of times. I would answer and often there was a low rumble in the background. If it were just children, why were they still awake? The call was coming from a public place. At first I would hang up, but later I became more brazen; I’d stay on the line, waiting. To prove I wasn’t scared I would stay there, hoping someone might speak.

I watched Lucien as he crept from the room, walking toward his mother—“When he says something smart you’ll be proud. When he mispronounces a word, you’ll be touched. When he’s crabby, when he yawns, when he laughs you’ll watch him, but you’ll see me.” Veronica quickly took her son’s bag and ushered him to the sleek silver car I’d traveled
in only hours before. They drove away and I turned from the window, suddenly alone. All the other children had stormed outside.

These Friday afternoons had the air of a one-sided game of hide-and-seek. The playground, the toilet cubicles, the locker rooms all appeared to be empty, but rather than searching out clever nooks and crannies, I’d count to twenty and walk—slightly too briskly—through the Cyclone wire gates. Quietly, I closed the classroom door. I bent to lock it, and a shudder ran through me. In the door’s olive paintwork, two words were now scratched in a maniac’s hand:
I KNOW.

• MURDER AT BLACK SWAN POINT •

Kitty spied the stainless steel instruments.

I
’m scared,” whispered Kitty Koala, peek-peeking through the window. Between her splayed paws, Kitty spied a naked fluorescent bulb illuminating stainless steel instruments, a shining metal trolley, and a refrigerator. The mortuary room of any country hospital, she realized, was bound to be minimal. Two policemen, a crime-scene photographer, a technical assistant, and the doctor performing the postmortem hovered about the drab room. Finally the doctor gave his assistant a nod. The metal trolley
was wheeled over to the fridge, Ellie’s naked, blood-smeared body transferred.

“Oh sweet Jesus!” the doctor appeared to groan, surveying the horrific wounds.

The men spoke sadly amongst themselves. Kitty strained to understand what they were saying. After all these years she still found broader Australian accents difficult to interpret. It has been suggested that Australians’ pronunciation is due to a prevalent nose inflammation, caused by pollen in the air. Others say that a dry climate causes thinner mucous tissues in the nasal cavities, producing a harsher quality of voice. Kitty believed it to be mere lip laziness; “The Australian often speaks without obviously opening his lips at all,” she complained, “through an immobile slit, and in extreme cases through closed teeth.”

“Oh well,” reckoned Kitty, “the crime’s brutality speaks for itself.”

The men considered the girl’s every pore from every angle. It was always sad when a young person passed away, especially in such brutal circumstances. Kitty felt herself start to blush. Perhaps these men couldn’t help thinking of the
petit
dalliances they’d kept from their own wives, the trysts at conferences, the one-night stand on a hot night, late, legs spread . . . Oh dear! The lowermost parts of Ellie’s body were now a purplish red from postmortem lividity. The killer must have found the girl asleep in her room, and started the attack while she was prone. It made the bear so glum: Ellie had been stabbed repeatedly in the chest and abdomen. At this point she had presumably woken and tried
to defend herself; her hands and calves bore knife marks, traces of attempts to both push and kick her attacker away.