Apples Never Fall Read online

  Pause.

  “Because Dad told her it’s not necessary to report her missing. You know Brooke. Daddy’s girl.”

  The Uber driver saw his passenger smile faintly. She had supermodel legs in shorts, ratty dyed hair, multiple ear piercings, and somehow simultaneously gave off a beachy vibe and an inner-city vibe. She was old, maybe even late thirties, but he’d go there.

  “Yes, I think we ignore Dad and still report her missing, just in case. It’s been over a week now, so it’s … probably time,” she said. “I’ve got a nice photo of Mum. I printed it out. It’s one from when she and Dad went to the beach that day, remember, when they were trying to be happy retirees frolicking in the sun? Anyway, listen, obviously we tell them about Savannah, right? I mean, maybe not every single detail.”

  Pause.

  “Ah, yes, I will be normal, because I am normal.”

  Pause.

  “Nope. Not offended, Logan, never offended. I’ll see you there.”

  She hung up and met his eyes in the rearview mirror as they stopped at a red light.

  “My mother is missing,” she said brightly.

  “That’s scary,” said the Uber driver.

  “Oh, I’m sure she’s fine,” said the passenger. She turned her face to the window and spoke quietly, almost to herself. “She’s perfectly fine.”

  Chapter 10

  “Joy Delaney. Sixty-nine years old. Last contact was nine days ago when she sent a garbled text saying she was going ‘off-grid.’ She didn’t take her phone with her.”

  Detective Senior Constable Christina Khoury read from her notes as Ethan drove them to interview the missing woman’s husband. Ethan’s full title was Plain Clothes Constable Ethan Lim but there was nothing plain about his clothes. Today’s shirt appeared to be mulberry silk. (Could it truly be silk?) His shoes had the luster of a grand piano. Christina tucked her own shoes back out of sight. They could do with a polish.

  She said, “The phone was found by the cleaning lady under the bed.”

  “I guess if you’re going off-grid you leave your phone behind?” She heard him try to suppress the question mark.

  She’d been Ethan’s designated detective for only a few weeks, and she was still trying to find the right rhythm for their working relationship. He seemed nervous around her, and she didn’t know whether to embrace that—keep the kid on his toes!—or try to help him relax.

  She wasn’t great at relaxing people. She’d been told all her life that she didn’t smile enough, and she hated small talk. Her fiancé, Nico, now handled all the small-talk requirements of their relationship, chatting to chatty cabdrivers and chatty aunts with ease. Christina sometimes fretted she wasn’t bringing enough to the table. “A relationship isn’t a bill you split down the middle,” Nico always told her. He was wrong. It was exactly like that. She’d keep an eye on it.

  When she’d been in Ethan’s position, her designated detective had taken a kind of avuncular approach that left no one in any doubt as to where they stood. “Remember your ABC?” he’d ask, so often it got irritating.

  “Accept nothing. Believe nothing. Check everything,” Christina would answer.

  But she couldn’t pull off avuncular. (Was there even a female version of the word?) “Just be yourself,” Nico told her. He said, “The guy wants to learn from you.” Nico never had any trouble being anyone else but Nico.

  “Two of Joy’s adult children reported her missing yesterday,” she continued. “A general duties police officer went to interview the missing woman’s husband and observed scratch marks on his face.”

  Ethan winced.

  “The husband is cooperating but not saying much. He did confirm to the officer that he and his wife had argued the last time they spoke. So.” She sighed. Her throat felt itchy. “Obviously a lot of red flags.”

  She could not get sick right now. In addition to this potentially suspicious missing person job, she was handling one street assault, two domestic assaults, a service station armed robbery, a wannabe schoolboy arsonist, a break and enter, and a bridesmaid dress fitting.

  The bridesmaid dress fitting was after work today, and the way her four cousins were arguing over waistlines and necklines, a third domestic assault was possible. Her wedding was still six months away, but apparently that was no time, according to her cousins, who specialized in weddings. Christina had thought she handled stress well until she had to organize a wedding. “Just keep it small and casual,” said her friends, who did not belong to big Lebanese Australian families and therefore did not understand the implausibility of this.

  “Need a throat lozenge?” asked Ethan.

  “No,” said Christina. She cleared her throat. “No, thank you.”

  She pulled a tiny speck of lint off her suit jacket and discreetly checked that the buttons on her shirt weren’t gaping. Her cup size didn’t suit either her personality or profession, but she was descended from a long line of short, acerbic, busty women, and so this was her lot. If the police force hadn’t abolished height requirements in the late nineties, little Chrissie Khoury, the shortest kid in every single class photo throughout her school years, would never have got this job.

  No lint on Ethan’s suit, of course. It looked bespoke. He came from old money, apparently. Private-school boy. Christina tried not to hold it against him. She didn’t come from old money or new money but from never-quite-enough money.

  They pulled up at a traffic light behind an SUV with three children’s bikes tied to the back, the number plate responsibly visible. These shady, leafy streets with their manicured lawns had little in common with the neighborhood out west where she’d grown up, except for the dead bat hanging from the powerline above them. Still, she was happy not to be working in her old neighborhood like when she first started out and was forced to lock up people she knew. The very first person she ever arrested used to sit next to her in biology. “Little Chrissie Khoury is arresting me!” he’d cried with drunken delight as she cuffed him.

  “Did she take anything with her?” asked Ethan.

  “She took her wallet, house keys, and nothing else. No luggage. No clothes. No sign of activity on her bank accounts or social media.”

  Christina pulled out the color photo of Joy Delaney provided by the family. She looked like a sweet, tiny lady, younger than sixty-nine, smiling on a beach, one hand on her head to stop a straw hat from flying away in the wind. A photo of someone wearing a hat wasn’t great for identification purposes. She would ask the family to provide another one. At least two or three. In this one Joy wore a T-shirt over a swimsuit. The T-shirt was white with three flowers in a row across the chest: red, yellow, and orange. The flowers were gerberas. Christina had only recently become aware of the names of flowers. The bridal bouquet was next on her list. She’d honestly rather solve a murder than choose a bridal bouquet.

  “Looks like a nice lady,” she said to Ethan, flicking the photo against her knee.

  “Any history of domestic violence?” he asked.

  “Nope,” said Christina.

  They pulled into the driveway of a large, well-tended family home. Silver Volvo in the driveway. Pink, purple, and white flowers (which she could now identify as hydrangeas) spilled from garden beds. A tiny gray cat streaked across the front lawn and through a fence. The white edge of a letter poked out from a wrought-iron letterbox with the house number, the word POST, and an engraving of two birds, beak to beak, as if they were kissing. This was a neighborhood of family pets and garden sprinklers, paid-off mortgages and nicely modulated voices.

  She said, “But just because it wasn’t reported—”

  “Doesn’t mean it didn’t happen,” finished Ethan.

  He listened. Rare for a private-school boy.

  “Remember your ABC?” she said suddenly, on impulse, as Ethan turned off the car ignition.

  He didn’t hesitate. “Accept nothing. Believe nothing. Check everything.”

  Her mood elevated. Maybe they had their rhythm.
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  She gave him an avuncular thumbs-up, opened the car door, got out, straightened her jacket, and tugged hard on her shirt.

  Somewhere in the distance an ice-cream truck played its familiar tinkling chords.

  * * *

  Two hours later the house no longer looked quite so benign. Blue-and-white-checked police tape hung from the letterbox and ended at the side fence.

  Christina had put in a request for a crime scene warrant and sealed the house immediately following her interview with Mr. Stanley Delaney.

  The interview had told her both nothing new and everything she needed to know. This evening’s bridesmaid dress fitting was going to have to go ahead without the bride. Her phone was aquiver with outraged texts from outraged cousins.

  Christina didn’t care. She was reserving her outrage for Mrs. Joy Delaney, because her husband was a liar.

  Chapter 11

  LAST SEPTEMBER

  It was midmorning when Logan Delaney drove down his parents’ street a little over the speed limit, his head ducked low so as to avoid eye contact with friendly neighbors out washing their cars or walking their dogs.

  If the Volvo was in the driveway he might circle the cul-de-sac and keep going, because he wasn’t in the mood for solo conversations with the parents. He preferred to have his siblings around to take some of the heat. Being an only child must be hell.

  The Volvo wasn’t in the driveway so he pulled in. He got out and shielded his eyes as he looked up at the house gutters clogged with leaves from the liquidambars.

  He checked the vintage-style letterbox—a present from Troy, naturally—in case there was any mail to bring in.

  He wore paint-stained track pants, an old T-shirt, and sneakers. He hadn’t shaved, and he was a man who looked like a criminal when he didn’t shave. His hair stuck up in tufts. His mother would say he looked like a hobo. He was a big, solid guy, and he knew he should dress more respectably, because women sometimes crossed to the other side of the street if they saw him walking behind them at night. He always wanted to shout out his apologies. “Oh, that’s exactly what you should do, Logan, in fact you should run after them shouting, ‘I mean you no harm, fair lady!’” his sister Amy said once, and then she’d laughed so much at her own joke he’d been morally obliged to throw her in the pool. Troy’s rooftop pool: it had an infinity edge.

  His mother had asked him to do the gutters in that way she had of asking without really asking.

  “Oh, gosh, Logan, you should see the leaves in this wind! What’s going on? Climate change? They’re just rocketing down,” she’d said on the phone last week.

  “You want me to do the gutters?” Logan had said. Climate change. His mother threw certain phrases around at random to make sure they knew she was up to date with current affairs and listened to podcasts.

  “Your dad says he’s perfectly fine doing them.”

  “I’ll swing by next week,” he’d said.

  After Logan’s dad celebrated his seventieth birthday with a torn ligament and a complicated knee reconstruction, the family had begun playing with the idea that Stan was “elderly.” It was a nurse who first used the word. “Elderly people can suffer confusion and short-term memory loss after anesthetic,” she’d said as she checked their sleeping father’s blood pressure, and Logan saw all of his siblings jerk their heads in a mutual shocked shift of perspective.

  “It’s like seeing Thor in a hospital gown,” Amy had whispered. Their dad had never been sick, apart from his bad knees, and seeing him diminished and acquiescent in that hospital bed had been distressing, even though their father suddenly opened his eyes and said very clearly to the poor nurse in his startlingly deep voice, “Nothing wrong with my memory, sweetheart.”

  He had fully recovered and was once again winning tournaments with their mother, but the “elderly” idea had persisted. Dad shouldn’t climb ladders. Dad needs to know his limitations. Dad needs to watch what he eats. Logan wasn’t sure if they were all jumping the gun. Maybe they enjoyed it. Maybe it made them all feel like they were finally grown-ups, worrying about an elderly parent who didn’t really need their concern yet. Maybe there was even satisfaction in it: Thor toppled at last. Although Logan wouldn’t be surprised if his father could still beat him in an arm wrestle, and he had no doubt at all that he could still beat him on the court. His father knew his strengths, his weaknesses, his strategies. Logan was powerless against all that knowledge. Ten years old again: hands sweaty, heart thumping. Jesus, he’d wanted to beat his dad so badly.

  It had been two years since they’d been on the court together. “Go have a hit with your father,” his mother would invariably suggest when he visited, and Logan would make up an excuse. The subversive idea had begun to creep up that he might just never play again. It felt like treason, and yet who would care, who would even notice?

  Their mother would notice.

  Since his father’s operation, Logan had begun doing odd jobs around the family home, whenever he thought he could get away with it without his father getting angry. He slid in and out like a ninja. Change a light bulb here and there. Get up with a chainsaw and cut back the overgrown branches around the tennis court.

  He couldn’t work out how his father felt about it. “You don’t need to do that, mate,” he’d said last time he’d caught Logan changing one of the court lights. He clapped him on the shoulder. “I’m not dead yet.”

  That day Logan had a hangover and his father actually did look to be in far better health than him, ruddy-cheeked and clear-eyed, yet another doubles trophy on the sideboard.

  Later that same day his father had asked about how his “career plans were progressing,” and Logan, who had no particular career plan except to stay employed, had felt himself squirm like a kid. His father seemed to always be observing Logan’s life the way he used to observe his tennis. Logan could sense Stan’s desire to call him to the net, to point out his weaknesses, to explain exactly where he was going wrong and where he could improve, but he never did criticize Logan’s life choices, he just asked questions and looked disappointed with the answers.

  The slam of his car door sounded loud on the quiet street. He could hear the twitter of magpies and the sarcastic caw of crows from the bushland reserve that backed onto his parents’ tennis court. It reminded him of the rhythms of his parents in conversation. His mother chattering, his father’s occasional deadpan response.

  Logan didn’t go inside. He walked straight down the side of the house to collect the ladder from the shed, past the drainpipe where they all had to stand to practice their ball tosses. A hundred times in a row, day after day, until they all had ball tosses as straight and reliable as a ruler’s edge.

  He wondered where his parents were, how long he had before they returned, and if his father would be angry or relieved to see this particular job done.

  Troy wanted to pay people to help out their parents. A gardener. A cleaner. A housekeeper.

  “What … like a team of servants?” said Amy. “Will Mum and Dad ring a bell like the lord and lady of the manor?”

  “I can cover it,” said Troy, with that very particular look he got on his face when he talked about money: secretive, ashamed, and proud. None of them really understood what Troy did, but it was clear he’d landed on a level of impossible wealth that you were only meant to land on by working really hard at your tennis. Somehow Troy had gone ahead and found another way to drive the fancy car and live the fancy life, and now he played tennis socially, with bankers and barristers, and without, it seemed, any hang-ups, as if he were one of the private-school kids who got private lessons at Delaneys not because they had talent or a love of the sport but because it was a “good life skill.”

  Their father never once asked Troy about his career plans.

  Logan opened the shed and found the bucket, gloves, scraper, and ladder. Everything was in its place. His friend Hien said the first heartbreaking sign of his own father’s Alzheimer’s was when he stopped putting his
tools back in the right place, but Logan’s dad’s shed looked as pristine as an operating theater.

  Even the glass of the shed’s small window sparkled, revealing the Japanese maple at the side of the tennis court that was just beginning to leaf up for spring. In autumn the leaves turned red-gold. Logan saw himself as a kid searching through a soft crunchy carpet of leaves for a rogue tennis ball, because tennis balls cost money. He saw himself storming past that tree the day he first lost against Troy, the same day his father told him to watch Harry Haddad demonstrate the kick serve that Logan hadn’t yet mastered, and maybe part of him already knew he never would master: he simply didn’t have that instinctive understanding of where the ball needed to be. He was so worked up that day he threw his racquet as he walked toward the house, almost hitting some poor kid waiting for her lesson who had to jump aside with a little squeak of fear.

  That was the day Logan understood that his younger brother might be better than him and also, more importantly, that Harry Haddad was a prodigy, and had something essential and wonderful that all the Delaney children lacked.

  He turned resolutely away from his memories and back to his father’s immaculate workbench.

  Troy was a fool to think they could pay someone to come and do jobs around the house that their father had always done himself. Stan would find that demeaning, extravagant, unmanly. Logan had been in the car with his father once when they’d driven past a man in a suit standing on the side of the road casually scrolling through his phone while a roadside assistance guy was on his knees changing the tire on the man’s Mercedes. Stan had been so offended by the sight he opened the window and roared, “Change your own tire, ya big fuckin’ pussy!” Then he’d closed the window, grinned sheepishly, and said, “Don’t tell your mother.”

  Logan wouldn’t let another man change a tire for him, but Troy sure as hell would, and he’d enjoy it too. He’d amiably chat to the guy while he did it. The last time they all got together, for Amy’s birthday, someone asked Troy what he’d done that day, and he said, without shame or embarrassment, “I had a pedicure.” It turned out, to everyone’s amazement, that the bloke got regular pedicures. “Oh, darling, I could have done your nails for free, saved you the money!” their mother had said, as if Troy needed to save money, and then everyone briefly and unfairly lost their minds at the thought of their mother on her knees trimming Troy’s toenails, as if Troy had actually asked her to do it.