Page 48 of The Dysfunctional Family's Guide to Murder
“Did the police say we could go back to Perth?”
“Sure. They have all my details.”
“Not yet. What time are we going?” I both do and don’t want to get out of here. Sharing the house with Aunty Bec and Shippy is making my skin itchy.
“I don’t know,” he says, looking at the kitchen clock. “It took longer than I thought at the lawyer’s: You can really tell these guys are used to getting paid by the hour. Maybe we should wait until after dinner—more time for you to pack, and maybe Rob will have turned up by then so we can exchange our tearful farewells.”
Rob hasn’t turned up by dinner.
The meal is intensely awkward for reasons that have nothing to do with Rob. Maybe that’s not fair—it’s intensely awkward for me personally, but it’s entirely possible I’m projecting my discomfort onto the rest of the family and everyone else is having a ball. In my desperation not to sit too close to Aunty Bec or Shippy, I wedge myself between Aunty Vinka and Dad, which means I’m subjected to a lot of sibling banter, mostly around Aunty Vinka’s new business idea, which involves curating “artisanal soap” to be sent to subscribers once a week. Dad keeps trying to point out that nobody uses a bar of soap every week, but he’s lacking some of his usual appetite to go in for the kill.
Aunty Bec is trying to talk to Dylan about school, but he’s reverted to monosyllabic grunts, so she’s not making much progress.
While pretending to be fascinated by the contents of my stir-fry (it’s harder than you’d think to look really, really focusedon a piece of bell pepper), I spend most of the meal mentally compiling a list of reasons Aunty Bec and Shippy might have had to bump off GG.
Money. As in: Aunty Bec will inherit now, instead of waiting for GG to die of natural causes.
That’s it. That’s the only motive I’ve got.
There could be other stuff, of course. There always is in a proper mystery. Bec mentioned having visited GG by herself recently, so maybe GG saw her do something bad (an affair? A hit-and-run?) and was blackmailing her? Or maybe Shippy tried to steal something (jewelry? Whatever was in that box? An unexpectedly valuable stamp collection GG never mentioned for some reason?) and GG caught him and they got into a fight and he grabbed the typewriter and…? But nothing feels convincing.
The window for me to tell the family what I overheard up in GG’s room is shrinking. Dinner is over and the clearing-up has begun. In another ten minutes Dad will be loading our bags into the car—assuming I ever find my phone, which is still very much MIA—and I still won’t have told anyone what happened or didn’t happen. I just wish I knew for sure. Can I live with the uncertainty of spending holiday celebrations with two maybe murderers for another ten years? And follow-up question: Would that be better or worse than opening Christmas presents with two people I’d wrongly accused of murder?
Dad gets up to clear the plates, and I stand and push mychair back from the table. Nobody looks at me because they don’t realize that I’m about to make a speech. Or is it an announcement? A revelation? I have to say something. Don’t I?
“Everyone,” I say, but my voice is slow to catch up, so it’s less pronouncement than gasp. Worse, my single gasped word is entirely silenced by the slam of a car door. And then another.
“Rob,” Shippy says, like he never doubted it.
“Rob,” Dad says, almost disappointed.
“Rob,” I say, relieved.
There’s a knock at the door.
Dad answers, revealing not Rob but two uniformed police officers. One of them is Detective Peterson, who interviewed us before, and the other is a younger man, whose face tells a story. (That story is a short one called “I Think You Should Sit Down We Have Bad News.”)
“Can we come in, sir?”
17
Rob is not dead. Buthe might still die. Imagine if the cops had said it just like that. Instead it takes them forever to make the jump from “involved in a hit-and-run” to “critical condition” and “intensive care.” Mostly they’re intent on trying to figure out how well we know Rob (barely), where we’ve all been today (all over the place), and whether any of us might have had a reason to run him down in a car (don’t ask me, yet).
It’s a minor miracle (think Jesus’s face appearing on your toast, not a proper one) that I’m allowed to stay in the room with the cops at all. If Dad was thinking clearly, he would have sent me upstairs. Instead he’s too busy asking questions to notice as Dylan and I slip onto the corner couch, taking up as little room as possible by squashing our hips together.
Detective Peterson finally gets around to telling us that Rob’s been in a serious “accident” (her word, not mine) and is in the hospital, and Dylan squeezes my leg and mouthssecondbody.Rob’s not the second body, by the way. I wasn’t being cute, promising a body and delivering a coma patient—for now, at least, Rob is very much alive.
Shippy immediately embarrasses himself by saying, “No, he’s just surfing,” as if the cops are confused and the half-dead person in the hospital is merely in the process of catching a wave. Detective Peterson gives him ahoney, nokind of a look, and Aunty Bec pats Shippy’s leg, which is quite nice of her, because if my (nonexistent) boyfriend was that thick in public, I’d be forced to pretend we’d never met.
Rob is not surfing. Rob was hit by a car just outside Dunsborough earlier today by someone who failed to stop. The cops seem to think it happened in the afternoon, but he wasn’t found until the evening when a passing driver stopped to check the pouch of what they thought was a dead kangaroo.
I listen in silence and ask a question only when it seems like nobody else is going to ask the obvious thing.
“How did you know to come here?”
