Apples Never Fall Read online

  This was what happened whenever Troy saw his family. He regressed. His emotions started to gallop all over the place. He wanted to beat Logan when Logan wasn’t even playing. He got jealous of the attention his dad showed his baby sister for her little physiotherapy practice. For fuck’s sake, you would think he was Amy. It was humiliating.

  “You were in New York for work, right?” said Logan.

  “And pleasure,” said Troy.

  There was no point talking about the work part. Whenever Troy tried to explain what he did for a living, his family would get the same expressions of focused yet vacant concentration as they might if they were trying to tune in to an out-of-area radio program and were only hearing every twentieth word through the static. His mother, bless her heart, had even subscribed to a podcast, Chat with Traders, and took notes while she bravely listened to it, but to date she was still none the wiser.

  “So … been on the court lately?” Troy gave Logan a speculative look. It had been years since they’d played each other.

  Logan gave an irritated exhalation, as if Troy had asked this same question multiple times before, which he was pretty sure he had not. “Nope. Not for a while now.”

  “Why not?” asked Troy, genuinely interested. “Not even with Mum and Dad?”

  “No time.” Logan fiddled with his left wrist as if to indicate an invisible watch.

  “No time,” repeated Troy. “What a crock of shit. You’ve got time to burn.”

  Logan shrugged. Then he said suddenly, as though he couldn’t help himself, “I don’t get how you play socially.”

  He said socially like the word smelled.

  “I enjoy it,” said Troy truthfully. He had friends he played with on a semiregular basis both in Sydney and New York. They were all former competitive players like him. He won maybe seventy percent of the time. “Keeps me fit. It doesn’t matter anymore.”

  “You’re saying you don’t care if you win or lose?”

  “Obviously I play to win,” said Troy. “But it’s not life or death.”

  They contemplated each other. They were exactly the same height, although Troy preferred to think he had just a fraction on his older brother. It was probably just his hair. He used mousse.

  Logan said, “I don’t mind having a hit, but the moment we’re scoring, I start to care if I win or lose, and then I just…” He paused. “I can’t stand it.”

  He looked warily at Troy as if waiting for him to throw this revelation back in his face.

  After a moment Troy said, “But you still follow the tennis, right?”

  “Sure,” said Logan.

  “I don’t follow it. Don’t even watch the finals,” admitted Troy. “If it’s on TV, I switch it off. I can’t stand watching it.”

  There were still a couple of guys playing in satellite tournaments who he and Logan knew. Guys they’d beaten. Logan gave a half smile, half grimace to show he got it. Troy understood why Logan couldn’t play. Logan understood why Troy couldn’t watch.

  Tennis was complicated. For all of them.

  “What about the girls?” asked Troy, suddenly curious. He should know this, but Logan was more involved with family life than him.

  “Brooke plays with Dad fairly often,” said Logan. “I don’t know about Amy. The last I heard of her having a hit was that time she grifted that beach volleyball player.”

  They both grinned with identical derision. Beach volleyball. Every now and then Amy dated a loser who didn’t believe it was possible for a woman to beat a man in any sporting endeavor, even if tennis wasn’t his sport. She generally capitalized on their sexism with a cash wager.

  They stood for a moment in uncharacteristically companionable, brotherly silence, and Troy considered telling Logan what was really filling his mind right now. Something of zero consequence and yet mind-bending significance, depending on how he chose to shift the prism of his perspective.

  I saw Claire in New York, he could begin. Logan would raise an eyebrow. He’d liked Claire. Claire had liked him. He would listen, with interest and without judgment. Logan couldn’t be bothered to judge.

  But no. Troy wasn’t ready to talk about it yet, and anyway, at any moment Savannah would get out of the car and interrupt them.

  He shoved his hands in his pockets. Was the chick going to sit there forever?

  Logan began his toneless whistle and Troy felt his mind break free: Fuck this.

  He marched around to the side of the car where Savannah was sitting, opened the back door, and bent down to look at her. She still hadn’t even undone her seatbelt. She sat with her hands pushed hard into the center of her stomach, as if she’d just that moment stabbed herself.

  His impatience dissipated. “Savannah,” he said gently.

  She looked up at him with unshed tears in her eyes. She blinked blond eyelashes. The tears spilled.

  Troy couldn’t stand to see a woman cry.

  “You’re safe,” he said. He hunkered down next to the car so they were face-to-face. “You’ve got us.”

  “I know,” she said.

  She wiped her cheeks and fiddled with the tarnished silver antique skeleton key that hung on a cheap chain around her neck.

  “I like your necklace,” he said. He’d learned this from Amy’s meltdowns: redirect her focus.

  “Thanks.” She dropped the key.

  “Does the vine symbolize something?” He pointed at the tattoo on her forearm. Green tendrils curled around her purple-veined, stick-thin arm. He had no problem with tattoos—Amy had a few—but this one, though in itself innocuous, seemed a desecration of her childlike arm. “Or did you just like the look of it?”

  “It’s Jack’s beanstalk,” she said.

  “Huh,” he said. He tried to remember the fairy tale. Jack climbs the beanstalk and steals the giant’s gold? “So … it’s about achieving your dreams?” She didn’t look like the type for self-help books and vision boards.

  “It symbolizes escape,” she said.

  “Right,” he said. “So, speaking of which, let’s get in and out of this place as fast as we can.” He went to offer his hand, but then thought better of it. Too domineering. He dropped his hand by his side, took a step back, and waved his hand in a courtly, over-the-top, “this way, madam” gesture. Give her space. Don’t rush her. Try to understand.

  She undid her seatbelt, swiveled, and slid from the car, smiling tremulously up at him as she put her thumbs in the loops of her jeans and hitched them up around her waist.

  “Sorry,” she said. “I know you haven’t got all day.”

  “Yes I do,” said Troy. “It’s fine.” He hoped the boyfriend was here and gave him an excuse to grab him by his shirt and slam him up against a wall like a cop in a movie.

  “Before we go up, perhaps we should check for his car.” She delicately touched her nostrils and sniffed.

  “Good idea,” said Troy. Logan didn’t speak. Troy bounced lightly on the balls of his feet. He was suddenly, unexpectedly jubilant.

  They followed Savannah to the covered parking area. She stopped and her shoulders sagged.

  “It’s fine. He’s not here.” She pointed at an empty space in the far corner.

  “Okay, so that’s good,” said Logan. “Great.”

  Troy felt himself deflate. Now this was back to being a boring errand to endure. He looked at his watch. He actually did not have all day.

  “There’s something wrong with you,” his mother once said to him as she drove him home from school after another suspension. “There’s something very, very wrong with you.”

  I know, he’d thought at the time, pleased.

  The three of them went up in the lift to the third floor. Troy looked at the mirrored walls and saw a hundred reflections of himself and Logan, getting tinier and tinier, but always towering over Savannah.

  She led them down a carpeted hallway with the familiar lemon air-freshener smell of this kind of well-kept, midlevel apartment block, and unlocked a door.


  “Please come in,” she said shyly, as if this were a social visit.

  The first thing Troy saw was unframed art leaning against the walls: proper art. Abstracts with violent strokes of paint so thick and textured they still looked wet. He had not been expecting art.

  “He’s an artist.” Savannah followed Troy’s eye. “Amateur artist.”

  There wasn’t much furniture: a battered double-seater leather couch faced a television leaning against the wall. A tacky-looking glass coffee table contained half-empty takeaway containers, chopsticks shoved upright into the fried rice, an open newspaper stained with blotches of soy sauce, a half-drunk bottle of Corona with a piece of lime floating in the remaining beer. A stack of unopened mover’s boxes sat in the corner of the room. This was a man who unpacked his art before he put up his television. A man who carefully cut up a piece of lime to put in his Corona but left his half-eaten takeaway dinner on the coffee table. A man who hit his girlfriend.

  Savannah shook her head at the food on the coffee table and made a move toward it as if she were thinking about cleaning it up, then stopped.

  “So these two boxes are obviously yours?” said Logan. He nodded his head at two of the mover’s boxes, one of which was labeled SAVANNAH—CLOTHES and the other SAVANNAH—RECIPE BOOKS.

  “Yes,” said Savannah. “Yes, thank you. Much appreciated.”

  Much appreciated. The cadences and colloquialisms of her speech slipped back and forth: one moment twenty years old, the next eighty.

  “Let’s get everything out of here and in the hallway,” said Logan.

  He and Troy carried out the boxes. Troy got the box of books, which made him stagger.

  “You right, mate?” asked Logan, straight-faced.

  They came back in to find Savannah squatting on the floor in the tiny kitchen, all the cupboard doors open, as she filled a box with saucepans, frying pans, and a blender.

  “I like to cook,” she said to Troy, as if explaining herself.

  “So I’ve heard,” said Troy. “Mum and Dad might keep you permanently.”

  “What else?” asked Logan.

  “In the bedroom,” said Savannah. She looked up at them. “The glory box at the end of the bed. It was my grandmother’s.” She winced. “It’s rather heavy.”

  They went into the musty-smelling bedroom, the bed a tangle of sheets and blankets and pillows, clothes strewn over the floor.

  “This must be it,” said Logan. He experimentally lifted one corner of the mahogany chest at the end of the bed.

  “What the hell?” A bare-chested man sat upright from the tangle of sheets.

  Troy’s heart leaped. He grabbed the nearest thing he could find from a bookshelf and held it up like a weapon. “Don’t fucking move!”

  Logan dropped the chest with a bang. “Stop right there, mate,” he said, his demeanor as calm and controlled as a country cop, his voice as deep and slow as their father’s. People often said Troy and Logan sounded like their father, but this was the first time Troy had realized just how much Logan sounded and even looked like their dad.

  The man scuttled backward up the bed until he was sitting with his back against the wall, his hands clutching the bedsheets. He was scrawny, pasty-white with lots of black chest hair, and he wore a pair of faded checked boxers with ripped elastic. Troy felt a revulsion so visceral it made him shudder.

  “I’ve about a hundred in cash,” the man said. He reached over for a wallet on his bedside table and held it up. “T’at’s all.” He had an Irish accent. Troy’s first girlfriend once said there was nothing sexier than a man with an Irish accent, and Troy had been personally offended by the existence of Ireland ever since.

  “We don’t want your money,” said Troy, disgusted.

  “What the…?” Savannah appeared in the doorway.

  “Savannah?” The man picked up a pair of glasses on his bedside table and put them on. Now he looked like Harry bloody Potter. How dare he look like Harry bloody Potter? Harry Potter would never hit a woman.

  “Where have you been?” he said to Savannah, as if Logan and Troy weren’t in the room. “I’ve been out of my mind.”

  “Why aren’t you at work?” said Savannah. Her eyes darted about the room. She looked terrified, and her terror ignited a flame of red-hot fury in Troy’s chest.

  “I’m as sick as a dog,” said Harry Potter. He put his hand to his stomach, and a queasy expression crossed his face. “Dodgy sweet and sour.”

  “Your car isn’t there,” said Savannah.

  “It broke down on the motorway. In the rain. Everything has gone to shit.” His face twisted with remorse. “I’m so sorry, Savannah, my love. For that night. That was unforgivable, I know, but I wasn’t myself, I was upset about … But that’s no excuse, I know it’s no excuse…” He suddenly seemed to remember the presence of Logan and Troy. “Who are these guys?”

  “They’re friends,” said Savannah coldly. “They’re helping me pick up my stuff.”

  “Is there much else?” Logan asked her.

  “Friends from where?” asked Harry Potter.

  “It doesn’t matter where we’re from,” said Troy. “We’re just getting her stuff and getting out of here.”

  Savannah grabbed a suitcase from the corner of the room, wheeled it over to the open built-in wardrobe, and began to fill it with clothes, chucking them in still on their coat hangers.

  “But where are you going?” asked Harry Potter. “Where are you staying?” He made a move as if to get out of bed.

  “Stay right where you are,” said Logan.

  The guy looked panicked. “Savannah?”

  “Don’t talk to her. Don’t say another fucking word.” Troy walked to the bed and loomed over the little fucker with the full might and power of his fit and healthy six-foot-four body. His nostrils twitched at the faint smells of vomit and sweat. “She doesn’t owe you an explanation.”

  Troy was showered and clean and wearing a nine-hundred-dollar shirt and a Louis Moinet watch, and he might have made some bad choices in his life, and he might right now be facing an ethical dilemma of monumental proportions because of those unfortunate choices, but he had never hit a woman and he never would, he had inherited not a single one of his villainous grandfather’s villainous genes, and he liked the fear and confusion on Harry Potter’s face. Harry Potter deserved to feel fear and confusion, because he was legally, morally, and spiritually in the wrong.

  It happened so rarely that you knew that you were right and the other guy was wrong; Troy was Spider-Man, the Hulk, Captain America. He was goddamned Batman.

  He had never felt better.

  Chapter 17

  NOW

  “So she sends her sons over to pick up this girl’s stuff. Doesn’t know her from a bar of soap, but she lets her move in!”

  It was late afternoon and the packed salon hummed with the roar of multiple hairdryers. Senior stylist Narelle Longford only half listened to her three p.m. half-head highlights as she prattled on about Joy Delaney. Nearly every one of her clients had been prattling on about Joy Delaney over the last week. Joy was well known in the local community.

  “It has to be connected, don’t you think? This strange girl and Joy’s disappearance?”

  “I don’t know.” Narelle removed the towel turban from the woman’s head. Isabel Norris was known to be difficult about her color.

  “Wait. Don’t you normally do Joy’s hair?” Isabel spun her head to look at her. “You probably know more than me! Have the police talked to you?”

  “No.” Narelle plugged in the hairdryer. “Smooth with a bit of volume?”

  “Did she tell you she was planning on going away?”

  “She didn’t,” said Narelle.

  “I heard that Joy and Stan were having issues. They were barely speaking.”

  “I don’t know anything about that,” said Narelle, who knew all about that.

  “Did she ever mention that girl to you?”

  “Savannah?” sa
id Narelle.

  “Wait, did you meet her?”

  She met Isabel’s eyes in the mirror. “I did. I cut her hair.”

  “Did you?” Isabel looked animated. “I heard she was a little, you know…” She mouthed the word, “Slutty.”

  “She seemed nice,” said Narelle.

  “It’s all tied up somehow,” said Isabel. “Too much of a coincidence. Strange young girl moves in and then the wife vanishes. Don’t be surprised if the next thing we hear is that Stan just happens to be in a relationship with this girl now he’s got Joy out of the way—ow, that’s a bit hot on my ear.”

  “Sorry,” said Narelle unapologetically.

  She was Joy’s confidante and confessor, as bound by secrecy as a priest or lawyer, but if Joy missed her next appointment, Narelle would go to the police and hand over thirty years of secrets. She’d tell them about the betrayals. The ones referred to obliquely and the ones discussed in frank detail. She’d give the police everything they needed to convict her husband. She would say, Here is one possible motive and here is another, because any marriage of that many years has multiple motives for murder. Every police officer and hairdresser knows that.

  Chapter 18

  LAST SEPTEMBER

  It was close to midnight, and Amy Delaney, oldest daughter of Stan and Joy Delaney, part-time taste tester, part-time normal person, part-time not-so-normal person, sat cross-legged on her unmade bed, naked, her hair in a perky cheerleader’s high ponytail, looking at the poem she’d just written in her journal. Her bedroom was at the very top of the inner-city terrace she shared with three flatmates. Red and blue neon light from the sign above the miniature golf course next door flickered across the page as she read:

  A Strange Girl

  There is

  A Strange Girl

  In the house where I grew up

  Sleeping in my discarded

  Bed

  Wearing my discarded

  Clothes

  Making lasagna for my

  Discarded

  Mother

  And my mother had to go

  In the middle of my call

  (I still had things to say)

  Because the Strange Girl