Medea's Curse (20 page)

‘If they’d listened to me none of this would have happened.’

Jim looked like he had heard this spiel before. ‘Now, Sandra, we don’t know—’

‘Yes, we do. As much as the police and probably more.’ Sandra was unstoppable and
Jim gave up trying. ‘Travis is a piece of shit and his friends are no better. Do
you know he got thrown out of school?’

Natalie tried to look neutral. ‘So you think Travis was somehow responsible for Chloe’s
disappearance?’

‘Of course. Him or his dim-witted mates.’

‘This would be…the night before?’

‘Yes,’ said Sandra. ‘Last I saw her before all this, Tiphanie was exhausted. I’d
lay bets that Travis took Chloe with him to his mate’s place.’

Natalie frowned. ‘What makes you think that?’

‘Because he had before. Not that I thought it was a good idea, mind. He usually made
Tiphanie drop him and pick him up so he and his mates could drink. And when Travis
said jump she’d ask how high.’

‘This night Tiphanie was home in bed.’

Sandra made a dismissive gesture with her hand. ‘As I said, just before all this
she was behaving like one child was too hard to manage. As if.’

‘Now Sandy that isn’t—’ said Jim. Andie’s Mr Beige.

‘We need to be honest here,’ Sandra said. ‘Tiphanie has always avoided arguments
and doing the hard yards. The pills for instance.’

Natalie didn’t think taking medication for an illness was an easy way out but this
wasn’t the moment to defend Tiphanie nor to explain a possible depressive disorder.

‘So tell me about Tiphanie,’ said Natalie. ‘What was she like as a child?’

‘Tiphanie was the baby and always spoilt.’ If there was any motherly love underpinning
Sandra’s words, it wasn’t apparent. ‘She was a cute kid, don’t get me wrong, but
being cute she thought she could get things easily. Her teachers liked her, always
gave her good marks and she thought that made her special. They encouraged her to
do
Japanese
for God’s sake. By
correspondence.
’ She sniffed loudly. ‘What use was
that going to be to her?’ Glancing at her husband she added, ‘Had him around her
little finger.’

‘Jeez, Sandra,’ said Jim, ‘she liked helping out at the service station, that’s all.’

Probably to escape her mother.

‘What about her brothers and sisters?’

‘Kiara is twenty-seven. She was always looking out for Tiphanie, you know, at school
and the like.’ Kiara, according
to Andie, was Sandra’s daughter, not Jim’s.

‘She’s a nurse,’ Jim added, straightening up in the chair. ‘Works on the children’s
ward at the base hospital.’

‘Married?’

‘She lives at home with us,’ said Sandra.

‘And your son?’

‘William has cerebral palsy,’ said Sandra. ‘He needs around-the-clock care.’

‘Sandra’s wonderful with him, but it’s not always easy,’ Jim added. ‘The girls do
what they can.’

Sandra sniffed. ‘Kiara does. She was helping when I went into premature labour with
him and no one else was around.’ The look at Jim was unmistakable: Sandra blamed
him for whatever had gone wrong with their son.

Natalie drew her thoughts back to Kiara. Kiara with the bruises in the school change
room. ‘Did she rebel at all as a teenager, Kiara?’

‘Just the usual. We got that under control pretty quickly.’

‘Did you believe in smacking in your family?’

‘There were rules and consequences. The girls knew what happened if they played up.’

Rules and consequences were important, but for healthy development there had to be
an underpinning of unconditional love. Tiphanie had tried to find the love she craved
by escaping, but lurched, as so often happened, from one abusive relationship to
another—in this case from her mother to Travis. Maybe Travis’s weakness had reminded
her initially of her father’s passivity. Instead, Tiphanie’s low self-esteem had
been fuel for Travis’s abuse. If Tiphanie had been like her mother, perhaps Travis
would have become like her father.

‘What I’d like to do now,’ said Natalie, ‘is to ask Jim
to step outside. Then after
speaking to you, Sandra, have a word with him alone.’ Before Sandra could object,
Natalie continued, voice firm. ‘I can see how much you want to protect each other
and I want you both to be able to be blunt.’

Sandra’s jaw slackened. Jim patted her hand then made a dash.

‘Tiphanie needs to start taking some responsibility for herself.’ Sandra had recovered.
‘She left once before, you know; at fifteen I caught her reading filthy magazines.
Well, not in my house. I had enough of that from the deadbeats my mother used to
bring home.’

‘What did you do?’

‘More like what did Tiphanie do. She went to stay with Jim’s mother. Took her
Cleo
s
with her.’

Cleo
? Jesus, the male centrefold wore a fig leaf. Natalie found it hard not to stare
in disbelief. Sandra should have seen what Natalie had been reading—and doing—at
fifteen. Her own mother had hung in there despite her disapproval of Eoin, nights
out drinking and a request from one headmistress to remove her because ‘she didn’t
fit in with the values of the school community’. It sounded like Sandra, reacting
against the negatives of her own troubled childhood, had taken it way too far in
the other direction.

‘She had to eat humble pie the next year though,’ Sandra said. ‘Her grandmother died.’

‘Did she keep going to school?’

‘Yes, finished that year, her final year, and then moved out with
him.
No gratitude.’

Beverley ushered in Jim and offered to get Sandra a coffee. Sandra was too flabbergasted
by the leopard print to do more than nod.

Jim didn’t have much to add about Tiphanie’s childhood. She was a ‘good kid’. He
was sweating and his shirt was now completely untucked.

‘How does she get on with Kiara and William?’

‘Kiara? I guess not that close, age difference and all. Kiara’s a little bossy but
her heart is in the right place. Tiph is good with Will; it can be hard at home.’

‘You have another son too, don’t you?’ Natalie asked, remembering Andie’s run down
on the configuration of children from three different relationships.

‘He lived with his mother,’ said Jim. ‘Tiph saw him a bit when she was younger, but
he’s grown up now.’

‘How’s Tiphanie faring?’

‘Pretty well,’ said Jim. ‘She’s a tough kid.’

‘She might need to be.’

Jim nodded. ‘You know, once when she was eight she broke her arm at school. Never
told anyone. Came home, didn’t tell us either. Kiara noticed the next day her arm
was black and blue.’

‘When do you think she realised Travis was a loser?’

Jim scratched his chin. ‘I don’t really know. Perhaps we can ask Sandra?’

‘No,’ said Natalie. ‘I’m interested in
your
opinion.’

They sat in awkward silence for a few moments until Jim caved. ‘Pretty early on,
when Tiphanie was pregnant, she was really excited. We…well to be honest we weren’t
all that happy about the father being Travis, him being married and all the rest.’

‘All the rest’ seemed to include the fact that Travis’s first wife was in gaol for
killing their baby.

‘Was she happy when he cut ties with Amber and they moved in together?’

‘No, not really,’ said Jim. ‘Tiphanie…I think she was more…keen on having a baby
than being a wife, to be honest. She knew she was always going to be a great mother.
Used to talk to me about it, all her plans. The things she did and didn’t want to
do.’

‘Did she ever talk to you about leaving Travis?’

‘No. She said she wanted her baby to have a father. That was after we knew the first
wife was going to stay in gaol.’ Jim cleared his throat. ‘I gather Travis didn’t
like the “image”, you know, being married to a murderer. Tiph was a bit sorry for
him—and scared about being alone.’

‘How about after Chloe was born, did she ever talk about leaving him then?’

‘She said Travis would never let her and Chloe go. Not because he loved them, but
because of image. Image, she said, was all he cared about. Sounded to me like she
wanted to leave but she was stuck.’

‘Did you suggest she could come back home?’

Jim moved in the chair. At least he had the fortitude to look up and face Natalie
directly. ‘I think we were both afraid Sandra might not think that was such a good
idea.’

‘How were Tiphanie and Travis getting on, before Chloe disappeared?’

Jim yanked at the collar of his shirt. ‘She and Sandra had a big barney about six
weeks before so we hadn’t seen them.’

‘You kept in touch though, right?’

Jim looked to the door. ‘I rang her a couple of times a week.’

‘And?’

‘She was doing fine, wouldn’t have ever let anything happen to Chloe. That kid was
her life.’

Until something happened.

‘So what did they fight about?’

Jim frowned. ‘Tiph and Sandra, you mean? No idea.’ He paused. ‘Tiph winding Sandra
up. First time for a while. Guess she must’ve been having a bad day.’

Chapter 18

Natalie had resisted revisiting the media coverage around Georgia because she hadn’t
wanted it to affect her judgment. But the journalists might have spoken to people
Natalie hadn’t. Right now she was keen to know what the people around Georgia thought
of her. Who were the girlfriends she shopped with? Were there friends who really
knew her, who didn’t believe her guilty?

Natalie knew from her work in the mother-baby unit that women did have fleeting thoughts
of not wanting their child, or of harming it. It wasn’t unusual. She also knew these
thoughts caused enormous guilt. Women felt that, to be good mothers, they must always
love their baby and if they didn’t, they were either mad or bad. Did Georgia’s friends
prefer to think she had been, temporarily, mad?

A search turned up several articles, including a feature piece. The police had first
been alerted by the coroner after the death of the third baby, Jonah. They had interviewed
her and Paul, checked the autopsy findings on Olivia, and noted the unclear source
of the bruise on her nose.

‘She was always bumping into things,’ Georgia was quoted as saying to them. The inquest
concluded that Jonah
had died as a result of SIDS and that no ongoing police investigation
was warranted.

They were involved again during Georgia’s pregnancy with Miranda. A Facebook ‘friend’
of Georgia’s alerted them to some concerning entries. The journalist interviewed
the maternal child health centre sister from five years earlier. There was a picture
of her accompanying the article. She looked about sixty. The sort who’d tell you
that all babies cried and postnatal depression was a load of Gen-X nonsense.

‘There’s something not right about someone with a family history of SIDS not wanting
to breastfeed,’ she had said.

The journalist quoted an unnamed friend—it wasn’t clear if this was the dobber from
Facebook—who’d thought Georgia was behaving oddly. What had she meant by oddly? Behaviour
that showed Georgia was terrified of losing another child, or D.I.D. odd? If Wadhwa’s
diagnosis was correct, there should have been periods of time when she either went
missing, or was behaving in a manner very different from normal.

The papers had interviewed Paul several times. Seen in a fuzzy photo with Georgia,
arm around her, head turned away from the cameras, he had been supportive—at least
initially. This had changed; perhaps when he found the bloodied knitting needles
behind the toilet. The O.P.P. decided this apparent attempt to induce an abortion
shifted the balance of probability. They went ahead with charges.

Georgia’s first psychiatric assessment deemed her fit to stand trial and she was
denied bail because of the unacceptable risk to the unborn child. Her baby, born
at the Women’s Hospital while she was under guard, was immediately removed and Georgia
had not seen her since.
Miranda, now eight months old, was in Paul’s care.

When Georgia was eight months old her parents were still together, but a year later
her mother was imprisoned for murdering her father and Georgia had gone to live with
her mother’s half-sister.

In all the press photos Georgia was smiling, patently at ease with the camera. In
one she was holding Olivia. The friends initially expressed disbelief that she could
be guilty; less so in the later articles. Her aunt, Virginia, was quoted as saying
she had done well at school and never caused any problems. In the most recent article,
Paul said he loved his daughter and they just wanted to get on with their lives.
They had moved interstate.

Natalie googled his firm. It was still based in Melbourne but had a Sydney office.
Paul was listed as the CEO. The internet search didn’t give her anything she didn’t
already have except that he’d gone to Scotch College. She knew he was early forties,
a little older than Liam. She googled Liam, something she probably should have done
earlier. Plenty about cases he had been involved in, including a mention of the paedophile
ring with his comments, and a few social page snaps with Lauren. He was a Xavier
boy. No surprises there.

Natalie wasn’t entirely sure what she was looking for in Paul’s history, but if the
marital relationship was part of Georgia’s pathology, surely he would have shown
earlier form? Georgia’s teenage pregnancy loss certainly told her something about
Georgia; maybe a previous girlfriend would fill in some blanks on Paul.

Having exhausted all avenues she could think of, she double-checked the windows and
doors and took her meds. The original, lower dose. She needed to be more alert.