No Cherubs for Melanie (23 page)

“Indictable?”

“Serious. Like murder.”

“Murder.” She tried to get her mind around it. “Melanie… murdered?”

Bliss bit the bullet. “Yes. I believe your father murdered her.”

She was already shaking her head before the sentence was out of his mouth. “That's not possible. It was an accident. You said so yourself.”

He cast his mind back. “I never told you it was an accident.”

“Didn't you?”

“No. You said it was an accident. I never have.”

She dismissed his assertion as inconsequential, “I don't know who told me. I suppose I've always believed it was an accident. That was the verdict wasn't it?”

He admitted it was, then tried a different tack. “But your mother didn't believe it was an accident, did she?”

Bliss watched, almost in alarm, as his words struck home and Margaret's whole being went through a metamorphosis. Intense mental turmoil fiercely entwined her fingers in a twisting, strangling motion, turning them white under the strain. The whirling cogs of her mind contorted her face as she struggled with some inner demon. Her body squirmed and twitched as if fighting off possession by an evil spirit. The battle continued for
a minute or more, then Margaret slumped forward and released a flood of tears. The demon had won.

“Melanie wouldn't stop screaming,” she bawled. “He was touching her, poking her. I saw him. Kissing her. She screamed, she kept saying, ‘Daddy don't, Daddy don't.' He wouldn't stop.” Margaret's wide eyes were pleading for help, as though she expected Bliss to stop the horrific memories — maybe even expecting him to travel back in time and stop the assault on her sister. But it was too late to change history; all he could do was stare at her with knowing sadness. His silence urged her on. “They were in the bushes,” she continued through the tears. “He pulled down her panties. I saw him. I saw him. Kissing her, down there, between her legs, pushing his tongue in.” She stopped, snorted loudly, and smeared the tears across her face. “I saw them, I saw them, I saw them. Melanie kept shouting. ‘Don't Daddy. Don't Daddy.'”

Tears flooded her face; sobs shook her shoulders. She looked up at him, her eyes inviting pity, pleading for forgiveness, as if by her confession she had somehow betrayed her father.

“What happened then?” Bliss prodded gently.

Margaret blew her nose on her sleeve and continued quietly, “Melanie stopped shouting and I saw her go under the water. Then I ran to get away from him.”

A sense of relief swept through Bliss — he'd been right. All those years, he'd been right. Not that it would do any good now, he told himself. The law may not impose a statute of limitation on serious crimes, but mortality certainly did. But now he knew — it wasn't pain he'd seen in Gordonstone's eyes that day, it was fear. Fear that he would insist on interviewing Margaret and that she would spill the beans. He'd been royally conned — more than conned, he'd been suckered into becoming a co-conspirator. He was the one who'd
sworn to God in front of the coroner that he believed Melanie's death had been an accident. He'd been conned because he'd allowed himself to be conned, he realized. And Betty-Ann, fearful for herself and her other daughter, had silently conspired with him and had eventually paid for it with her life.

Margaret clamped her head in her hands and mumbled through her fingers as if trying to blot out the images, as if she'd already remembered too much, and Bliss was surprised when she looked up and answered his original question. “I think Mum knew. He never left her on her own after it happened. He had to give up his job at the stock exchange to stay home with her. That's why he bought the restaurant, so we could live upstairs and he could keep an eye on her. To make sure she didn't wander off and start blabbering things.”

“Did he lock her in?”

Margaret looked up, composed her face as best she could, and said confidently. “No. She locked herself in.”

“So how did you end up here?”

“After Mum died he didn't want me around anymore. He said I reminded him too much of the past.” She lost her composure again and tears streamed down her face. Bliss found himself crying with her, for her, for what she'd lost, for what he'd lost. Wanting to comfort her, to take away her pain, he slid onto the couch beside her and bundled her into his arms. The sudden tension in her body was as sharp as an electric shock and he shrank back as if stuck by a cattle prod. She wasn't used to being touched, he realized. She'd probably never been touched by a man other than her father. She was terrified of being touched. He understood and took his hands away. The tension melted out of her body instantly and she slumped into a ball and rocked herself comfortingly. A thirty-two-year-old virgin, he guessed. Not
a virgin by choice. Virginity forced upon her by fear. He didn't speak. What was there to say? The tiny scar that Melanie's death had left in his mind was a gnat's bite in comparison to Margaret's hurt. Her sister's death had chopped off her mother's legs and ultimately lynched her. It had turned her father from a respected stockbroker to a bitter drunken buffoon and had ripped out Margaret's heart, robbed her of her inheritance, and blighted her life. But there was a single unanswered question. The one that had nagged him all those years. Was now the right time to ask? Was there ever going to be a right time? He prodded her softly, persuasively. “Did your father ever …?”

She followed his train of thought and arrived at the destination before him. “He never touched me,” she said, interrupting aggressively.

“Never?”

“Never … Not ever. He never touched me,” she screamed. Then she crashed, blubbering, against his chest.

He gently held her head in his hands, feeling her twitch as she sobbed, wondering why Gordonstone had abused Melanie? Only six years old. Why not Margaret, double her age. Then he figured it out. “Oh my God, ” he mused. “The harelip.” He studied her distraught face in the dim light and realized that she too must have known — one look in the mirror would have told her. What crushing hurt of rejection in a young girl's mind. No wonder she thought of her father as poisonous.

She wasn't ugly — older than her years certainly, but not ugly. Her taut little body and rough hands had a masculine feel that led him to surmise that sex with her might approximate a homosexual experience. But he had no intention of finding out.

She lay sobbing quietly in his protective embrace, drawing comfort from his presence. Or was he drawing
comfort from hers? With the jigsaw beginning to take shape, Bliss ran through it in mind. Gordonstone, a pedophile, found his eldest daughter's disfigurement repulsive and assaulted the younger girl, who screamed — from the assault or because she is seen by her elder sister? He tried to stem her screams but couldn't and, in a panic, he suffocated her. Realizing what he'd done, he dumped her body in the lake to make it look like a drowning. No wonder he didn't search for Melanie before I arrived, Bliss thought, he knew exactly where to find her. No wonder they kept me away from Margaret — Margaret knew. How did they keep her quiet? Where had she been? Locked in her bedroom? No, too obvious; I might have looked. He strained his memory to recall the time he'd spent in the house interviewing Gordonstone and his wife. He'd heard nothing — no cries, no thumps on the wall or floor. He punished himself again for not insisting on talking to Margaret, imagining her bound and gagged, tied to the bed, crammed into a cupboard, or stuffed in the car's trunk in the driveway.

Margaret's soft rhythmic breathing told him that she had fallen asleep in his lap. With her father's dark secret revealed, everything about her seemed to have relaxed. He still wasn't entirely sure how Melanie had ended up in the lake. Did she fall or was she pushed? Or did she jump, intending to wash away the filth? But it no longer mattered. What mattered was that her death was a direct result of her father's action. He was guilty. He killed her, one way or the other. And Betty-Ann knew. For ten years the pain had kept her a prisoner and fear had kept her silent, until one night when she could stand the pain no more… Edwards was right, she had committed suicide. What else was there for her to do? She too had been guilty, in a way. Maybe she deserved the punishment she meted out to herself. She could have
spoken out, but he knew why she hadn't. The same reason he hadn't: the malevolent dominance of her husband. Margaret was right — he had poisoned everyone and everything. No wonder she didn't go back for the funeral. He'd exiled her from his life because of her looks and even robbed her of her inheritance; she owed him nothing.

Drawing comfort from the satisfaction of knowing he'd been right — and hating himself for not having done something about it sooner — he bent and gave Margaret a fatherly kiss on the forehead. It was time to go home. Time to face the music. But he could do so with a certain satisfaction. The satisfaction that he had cleared up the only unsolved mystery of his career. But he stopped himself; he knew that wasn't true. There were many unsolved crimes with his name on the dockets, more than he even cared to admit; yet, in some strange way, only the death of Melanie Gordonstone ever stood out in his mind as a failure.

He gently smoothed Margaret's hair as she lay in his lap and memories of Samantha flooded his mind. Memories of how she, as a child, had similarly fallen asleep on his lap. How could Gordonstone have done it, he wondered. What sickness would it take to permit a man to conceive of doing such a thing to his own child? What would drive a man to such behaviour? Bliss squeezed his eyes tight until kaleidoscopic colours swam through his vision, trying to imagine what it would have been like to touch Samantha, his own daughter. But the images wouldn't take shape. He could picture her, a joyous six-year-old, with frothy blonde hair, playing in the suds at bath-time or building sand castles on a secluded beach. But every time his mind reached beyond, to envisage touching, exploring, poking, it would swerve off, like a record needle slipping an LP's worn groove, skidding
across the surface to lodge on the next track. He kept bringing his mind back, but over and over again the thoughts got away from him. For him, even the thought was impossible. He tore his mind away, managing to change the focus if not the topic, and thought only of Melanie. Seeing her tiny corpse lying on the grassy bank. Her father's disgusting secret destined to be buried with her. He felt Margaret's head under his fingertips. If only he had questioned her twenty years earlier, how different life would have been for all of them — all but Melanie. Nothing would have brought her back.

In the morning light the house seemed brighter, the ceiling higher. More at ease than he'd previously seen her, Margaret's brittle edge had softened. The tenseness of her parched skin relaxed—the lines a little less deep; her eyes a little wider. If her self barricades had not caved in altogether, the defences were certainly beginning to weaken.

Bliss chanced his arm. “I'd really like to have a look around the island.

A cloud returned to her face instantly. “Like I told you, Dave, I worry about the animals. The whole point of a wildlife refuge is to keep them away from people. They're scared of people in the wild, that's what keeps them safe from hunters. If they get used to seeing people who don't shoot or trap them they become vulnerable.”

His crestfallen look clearly touched a nerve. “OK,” she capitulated, “but only the parts where there aren't many animals.”

He brightened.

“As long as you promise not to wander off.”

It was an easy promise.

“And I don't want this to become a habit.”

“I won't be here much longer anyway.”

“I thought you'd have to wait for Alice to return.”

“There's nothing keeping me here now. I'll work out some way of getting back.”

They chatted companionably as they strolled through the undergrowth. Margaret revealed that her father had picked up the island as an investment in a stock deal believing that it would one day be a real estate gold mine; giving it to her after her mother's death, making it clear that she was expected to live here.

Bliss, for his part, felt he owed her something, and told her about his ex-wife and her newfound love; making her laugh with “Gangly” George's nickname. He even mentioned that he had more or less decided to quit the police, but skipped the part about attacking Edwards.

“So what are you going to do now, Dave?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, if you had your choice.”

“I'd go back.”

“To where?”

“Not where. When.”

“When?”

“Before Sarah… ” He gazed skywards with a detached look. “Before she left.”

Margaret shook her head. “You can't. You've got to keep going, keep moving forward. You can't go backwards. Life doesn't work in reverse.”

“If I could get Sarah back, that would be going backwards.”

She chewed a thumbnail in deliberation. “No, it wouldn't. Sarah, your Sarah, isn't the same now as she was when she left you. She's moved on without you.”

“So?”

“So, going to her now would be moving on, for you anyway. You'd be going on to a different person. The
old Sarah has gone forever. You can't get her back. She doesn't exist anymore.”

Acceptance of her assertion was difficult for him and he contended that Sarah would be going back as well. “We'd be going back together,” he claimed.

Margaret shook her head. “No. She'd be moving forward as well, because you're different now. You've changed as well.”

“I have,” he admitted.

“So, she would be moving forward then.”

“Yes… ” he hesitated, then added, more to himself than Margaret, “But she might be worse off with me than she was before.”

She heard. “Nobody says the future has to be better than the past.”