Page 55 of The Dysfunctional Family's Guide to Murder
Dylan makes a face I don’t understand. I’ve never been sure if Dylan knew how badly Ali and I were crushing on him back in the day, although the summer Ali turned up in a white bikini on our family outing should have been a clue. (Not a super-practical choice if you want to get wet, the white bikini.)
“Half cousins, surely” is all he says.
Everyone (eventually) departs on the wholesome family walk. I still can’t find my phone, which is starting to feel like I’ve misplaced a limb, so I set a twenty-minute timer on the microwave instead.
The door to Aunty Bec and Shippy’s bedroom is shut, but there’s no lock to be locked. Inside it’s messy: two open suitcases on the floor, as well as clothes on the bed and the carpet. There’s a musty smell in the room, which might be unwashed sheets or unwashed Shippy or both. The room isn’t huge, butthe number of hiding places feels, in the moment, infinite: There’s the bed, the closet, the chest of drawers, and the suitcases. Twenty minutes feels optimistic.
I start with the closet, which is full of old linens, Grandad’s clothes, and an assortment of hats, shoes, and rain jackets. Nothing looks obviously disturbed, but I lift up sheets and towels anyway and dig my hand into each pair of shoes in turn. I check under the bed, under the blankets, in the pillowcases, under the mattress. I go through the chest of drawers, which is filled with towels. It’s a whole lot of nothing.
The bedside table is similarly easily dispatched, given it’s only big enough for a couple of old Inspector Morse novels and some out-of-date medication for athlete’s foot. Gross.
I’m halfway through Shippy’s bag, scared of what insights into his personal life I might find, when I hear a noise from the other room. I look at the clock on the bedside table. I’m pretty sure I’ve still got a good eight minutes to go, but that’s assuming Dylan (a) remembers the plan and (b) finds a way to stick to the plan, neither of which is guaranteed.
Cracking the bedroom door to hear better, I listen for the telltale sound of the front door, voices, or a pair of shoes being kicked off. But all I hear is the sound of…oh! No no no no no!
I run down the hallway, catching my hip on the bathroom door in my urgency. The floor is wet, water pouring over the lip of the bath too fast for the tiny drain on the floor to keep up. Dumb, dumb, dumb! I turn off the bath and pull out the plug, sloshing more water onto the floor in the process and completely wetting one arm of my terry robe. Brilliant. Thereare towels under the sink (so many towels in this house for the one person who lived here) and I throw them onto the floor to soak up the damage, which isn’t quite as bad as I feared. It’swet,but the water seems to be contained to the bathroom, not the corridor outside. If the towels and the drains do their work, it should be presentable by the time everyone gets back in…I race into the kitchen to check the timer…five minutes. Yikes!
Aunty Bec’s bag has a lot of clothes but nothing of note, unless you take an interest in her collection of cute dresses and sweaters, which under other circumstances I might.
Three minutes. I sit on the edge of the bed and scan the room, trying not to panic. The search has been, by any reasonable definition, a failure. If Aunty Bec or Shippy hasn’t yet destroyed whatever they took from GG’s room, they probably took it with them on the walk. Maybe they even suspected the real reason I wanted to stay behind and are getting rid of whatever it is, possibly while maniacally laughing just to really make the point, while I sit here like an idiot.
Two minutes. I make a half-hearted effort to put the suitcases back the way they were before, although I seriously doubt Shippy is going to remember which shirt was scrunched up in a ball in which corner of the case.
One minute. I’m halfway out the door when my foot catches on a pair of sneakers and I trip, grabbing the doorknob to right myself and cracking my head on the door as I do. Bloody hell, I’m having a night. My hand comes away clean when I hold it against my head, so at least I don’t have a gaping head woundI’ll need to explain. Head aching, I pick up the errant sneaker and return it to its mate. The movement dislodges something tucked into the toe of one of the sneakers and a folded piece of paper springs out. It has the look of something that’s been folded and unfolded more than once.
The moment I open it, I know that this is what I’ve been looking for, even if I don’t understand right away what it is. Okay, I’m not an idiot, because I know what it is: It’s a letter. I just don’t understand what it means. Not at first.
The letter is addressed to GG and dated last month. It’s from a company called Sure Solutions, which means nothing to me, although the return address shows that it’s based in Melbourne. The letter references test results on a sample, but what the sample is or what the test results are I can’t tell right away. I take a deep breath to slow my thumping heart and try to read through it more slowly. There’s a bunch of numbers, some talk of probabilities, and,oh crap,this can’t seriously mean that…
“What the hell?”
I look up from the spot where I’m kneeling on the floor, letter in my hand, looking as guilty as a puppy sitting next to a puddle. Shippy, wearing an LCD Soundsystem T-shirt and a face full of rage, is standing in the doorway.
19
“I thought you were downat the dam.”
This is, you don’t have to tell me, not a great line. It’s not a denial. It’s not an excuse. It’s straight-up self-incrimination, and I really thought I’d be better than this in a crisis. I’m disappointed in myself.
“I’m back.” His face, which normally tends toward blandly benign, is crinkled into an expression that might be anger. It might even be rage. “What are you doing in my room?”
I could point out that this really isn’thisroom and it’s really not evenAunty Bec’sroom and if it’s anyone’s room but GG’s it’s closer to being mydad’sroom than his, which makes it closer to beingmyroom than Shippy’s, but of course I don’t say any of that because there’s still a chance I can just walk away from this.
“Sorry, I was just looking for, uh, a tampon.”
This is more like it. Obviously, it makes no sense at all that I’d be looking for a tampon in Aunty Bec’s shoe, but I’moperating, for the second time tonight, on the instinct that anything to do with periods makes dudes like Shippy profoundly uncomfortable. I may have failed with Dad, but Shippy seems like a guy who could be brought undone by the phrase “heavyflow.”
Except Shippy is either more enlightened about menstruation than I thought (unlikely) or he doesn’t believe a word I’ve said (more likely) because he doesn’t seem remotely bothered. Instead he chooses this moment to notice the letter in my hands. His eyes go to Aunty Bec’s running shoes, and I know I am more screwed than Ali that time her mum discovered her secret TikTok account. (It was actually super wholesome, dedicated to where to find the best banh mi in Perth, but do you think her mum wanted to hear that?)
“Where did you get that?”
He knows the answer, so I don’t bother saying anything. I just stand up and shuffle backward as he comes further into the room, shrinking it instantly. The door is still open, but he’s between me and it, and there’s a vein in his neck that’s suddenly as thick and dangerous as a snake.
“Give it to me.” This is not apass the saltormake us a cup of teakind of a request. This is a demand.
Over Shippy’s shoulder I can see the empty hallway. Did Shippy come back alone? I desperately want my dad, but I’d settle for Aunty Bec, who, even if she did have something to do with GG’s death, surely wouldn’t let Shippy actually hurt me. Not like this, anyway. Probably not. Would she?
I try to do something brave, the kind of thing a real girldetective in a book might do, safe in the knowledge that she’s the hero of the story and will definitely survive until the end. (I donot,in case it’s unclear, possess the same certainty at this stage in the proceedings, but I have to do something.)
