Already Dead (9 page)

When Jax finally closed her eyes in the quiet of her new bedroom, images ran behind her lids like a confusing, drug-induced seventies movie. Brendan Walsh with a gun aimed at her face. Aiden Hawke with a gun aimed at her face. The motorway, the crash. Yelling, screaming. Then it got mixed up with Nick's crime scene – the one she'd visited, with a bloodstain enclosed by blue-and-white police tape, and the one in photos, with his body under a sheet.

A little before 4 am, she woke crying. Tears streaming, breath catching, a name on her lips – she wasn't sure which one when consciousness finally took hold. Wiping her eyes, she reached a hand automatically over the side of the bed, felt around for a moment before realising the document box that was always there had been stacked with the packing cartons around the walls of her room. She flipped a lamp on and got up, found it among the larger containers, sat cross-legged on the mattress and lifted the lid. Just walking her fingers along the familiar edges of the hanging files was enough to settle the anxious restlessness of her nightmare. Like an addict preparing a fix.

It was two nights since she'd read from one – not that it mattered where she left off, she knew them all word-for-word. She started from the front again, pulling the first manila folder onto her lap and opening the cover. The words blurred and shimmered in the dim light. She pulled the lamp closer, rubbed at her eyes, at the centre of her forehead where her headache had settled, gave it a minute or two then went in search of painkillers.

None in the boxes in her room or the ones in the hallway so she tiptoed upstairs and tried Tilda's kitchen cupboard, the one above the stove – same place she'd always kept them. Jax downed two, was on her way back to the stairs when the lights of the city outside pulled her in a new direction. On the deck, a gentle, balmy breeze tugged at her hair as she rested her elbows on the railing. She breathed it in, told herself this was what she was here for. To relax, to let go, to find a way to heal the gaping, bleeding hole in her life.

For a year, she'd asked questions and searched for answers. The only thing she'd got was an obsession that turned her wound toxic. It took time away from Zoe, made friends keep their distance and filled Jax with endless circling thoughts. This morning's gasping wrench from sleep was the first time in twelve months she hadn't woken with the sweating, quaking horror that Nick's death might never be explained. Brendan Walsh had scared the hell out of her but maybe he'd shoved a wedge into the spinning, thundering wheels of her frustration.

She closed her eyes, told herself another man's death might break the cycle.

You don't want to know anything I know.
I
don't want to know what I know.

Had PTSD done that to Brendan? How awful did a memory have to be to make a person lose touch with reality? Maybe it took more than one terrible event to make the brain struggle under its burden: the first opening a crack and each one that followed pushing it wider. Or was the damage caused by making yourself front up for more? Soldiers going back into battle, police officers to their jobs, emergency workers to another accident scene.

Jax had suffered overwhelming grief and loss twice in her life and the psychological toll each time had felt like an injury. But she hadn't witnessed the fire that took her parents or the incident that killed her husband. Would she have been pushed over the edge if those images were caught in her brain?

Brendan had scrubbed at his scalp like he wanted to break it open and tear out his thoughts. How much of what had been stuck in his brain was memory – and how much was delusion?

Walking back through the darkened lounge room, Jax opened a laptop on a desk in the corner. She had studied for final school exams on the antique walnut unit and her aunt had run the specs of the slimline computer past Nick before buying it. Jax brushed those memories aside as she accessed her email account.

She'd checked it from her phone before leaving the house yesterday, sitting in the shade on the front step, needing a reason to linger. Christ, if she'd left five minutes earlier, Brendan would have got in someone else's car. She brushed that aside, too, and skimmed over the dozen or so new emails, not interested in replying to reporters yet, stopping at Russell's name.

His note was brief:
Good memory. You were close on headline and date. It was the first weekend in May. Call me if you need anything.

Pulse picking up, Jax clicked on the article and read the headline: ‘The long kiss goodbye: Tears and fears for families and soldiers'. Scrolling quickly through the first paragraphs, recognising her style more than the words of a story written five years ago, she paused at the first photo – a tear-jerker shot, a soldier snuggling into the chubby cheeks of a babe-in-arms. Not Brendan. Skimming and pausing through a few hundred words of copy, Jax stopped again at a group shot. It was a casual line-up of about fifteen soldiers in fatigues, back row standing, the rest sitting or kneeling on the floor. She zoomed in on the caption, searched the names and ranks.

Second-last mention:
Private Brendan Walsh
.

Enlarging the photo, she slid it across the screen, scanned the faces, her eyes stopping at the bottom right-hand corner, second one in. And her lungs caught on a gasp. He was different – younger, beefier, happier, saner – but there was no mistaking him. Brendan Walsh: dark hair little more than stubble, intense eyes gazing straight down the lens of the camera as though he was staring at her. A tingle rippled across her scalp.

‘You were there,' she said aloud. ‘That was real.'

What about the quote?
Got me some kudos for a bit
, he'd said. She typed in a search for his name, but the only reference that came up was the one she'd already found in the caption.

Focus drifting away from the monitor, she sifted through her memories of the hours she'd spent at the airbase. Not an in-and-out job, not just grabbing a couple of interviews
and leaving the photographer to finish up with the pics. She'd wanted to ignore the rhetoric about the war and clichés of soldiers flying to foreign lands, and try to understand what it was like to live that moment, both for the ones in uniform and those being left behind. It takes time to do that, to make people comfortable enough to talk, to trust the person with the pen and paper, to get them past the bluster of meeting a reporter. It was what she liked most about the job, what she did best.

She'd sipped takeaway coffee with wives, cooing over a newborn and swapping labour ward stories; she'd cursed fluently with the soldiers so that her nice skirt and heels didn't mark her as straight-laced; and she'd stood around with fit, muscular, well-trained people of rank feeling podgy and strangely civilian. Then she'd singled out a few for interviews – a private who'd seemed introspective and articulate, a woman whose accountant husband was barely holding back the emotion, a weathered forty-year-old leaving for his fourth tour, a wife with three children under five. Not Brendan.

She scrolled back to the group photo, recalling the joking and cajoling it'd taken to pull that shot together. As the photographer had snapped, she'd called out lighthearted questions to keep them entertained and in place: What food will you miss the most? What's the worst army meal? What won't you miss? What won't you leave home without?

Jax wound through the story again to the couple of paragraphs she'd written on their answers. No names, just a representation of their answers, things readers could relate to: liquorice all-sorts, vodka shots, cauliflower in cheese sauce, shitty nappies, wedding ring, suncream. She stopped at the last sentence, the one direct quote:
‘Pride,'
one soldier shouted. ‘I want my wife and son to be proud of me.'

She remembered now. The question: If you could leave only one word with your family, something they could stick on the fridge and see every day, what would it be? Plenty of words had been thrown back: laugh, love, drink, bills, text, Skype. Then a man had called out, ‘Pride,' and it had stilled the laughter. Another man had said, ‘Yeah, pride.' Others had murmured agreement and a hand from above had patted him on the head … It was someone over on the right, maybe sitting on the floor.

She squinted at the photo again. Brendan was on the floor, one knee raised, an elbow resting on it.

‘Did
you
say it?' she asked him now. ‘Or did you just want to?'

‘Jax?'

She jumped so hard her chair scraped on the tiles.

‘Are you all right?' Tilda said from the kitchen, the single light above the stove turning her chic white hair into a halo.

‘I think I just had a heart attack.'

‘Sorry. I thought I heard you moving around out here. Can't sleep?'

‘Weird dreams.'

Tilda's slippers
scuff-scuffed
on the floor as she shuffled across the darkened room. ‘What are you doing?'

‘Russell sent me that article.'

‘It's four-thirty in the morning.'

‘I came up for Panadol and …' Jax shrugged. ‘I just wanted to see it.'

‘Of course you did. You can't help yourself, can you?' Tilda patted Jax's shoulder as she looked at the screen.

‘Brendan was confused. He said a lot of things and I wanted to know if this,' Jax pointed at the article, ‘was real. And it was. He
was
there. That's him.' She touched his face.

Tilda leaned in, squinting without her reading glasses, face illuminated by the glow. She lifted a hand, ran it over Jax's hair. ‘It's sad.'

‘Yes. It is.'

‘Why don't you try to get some rest? Zoe will be up early.'

‘Mmm.'

‘You must be tired.'

‘Mmm.'

Her aunt slipped her fingers under Jax's arm and tugged gently. ‘Come on, honey. Don't exhaust yourself with this too.'

Standing, shutting down the article and her email account as she did, Jax let Tilda lead her to the top of the stairs.

‘Don't come down. I'm okay.' She kissed Tilda's cheek, feeling her concerned presence hanging at the top of the stairs until she reached the bottom floor and the light above flicked off.

She didn't go to bed though. Arms folded across her chest, she wandered through the gloom of the sitting room, around the boxes and furniture that sat where the removalists left them a day and a half ago. The self-contained apartment was smaller than Tilda's floor above, and without the impressive artworks that hung on her walls, but two bedrooms, one bathroom and a cosy kitchen/lounge was plenty big enough for a widow and her six-year-old daughter.
And that's all we are now
.

Down the hall, Jax stood in Zoe's doorway for a long time, watching her sleeping face in the dim light that came through the curtains, telling herself she'd done the right thing. Then she went to her own room, sat on the edge of the bed and cried. Not for the reasons she'd cried on other nights. For another man. For the soldier in the photo and the person she'd met in her car. All the versions of him – happy, proud, frightening, sobbing, desperate, crazed.

And questions started to gather inside her.

What kind of man got in a car and pointed a gun at a stranger? What happened to him to make him like that – was it something over there or something here? What was real and what wasn't?

More questions she had no answers for. A whole raft of them.

How hard would it be to get answers? He was having some sort of medical treatment, he had a wife, a military history. Maybe a lot easier than the answers she'd spent a year searching for.

Jax thought back to the words of the soldier in the photograph.
I want my wife and son to be proud of me.

What were Brendan's wife and son feeling for him now?

It was seven-thirty when something hit Jax in the shin. Her hands tightened into fists as her eyes flew open, expecting Brendan's gun in her face.

‘Morning, Mummy.' Zoe's smile showed off the gaps where baby teeth had fallen out – three and counting.

Jax licked her lips, cleared her throat, didn't quite manage to loosen the spasm of panic in her gut. ‘Morning, Zoe.'

‘I wasn't scared last night.'

Well, at least that was one of them. ‘Good, baby.'

‘I was scared a little bit that night you weren't here and Aunty Tilda slept in your bed, but not last night.'

‘Uh-huh.'

‘So you didn't have to come into my bed.'

‘Okay.' It had helped Jax, though. She rolled onto her back, balancing on the edge of the single mattress, telling herself that her own scary dreams weren't a good reason to start climbing into bed with Zoe. It'd taken months to get her daughter to stay in her own room again after Nick's death – and Zoe didn't need to have her mother waking in fright beside her.

‘Aunty Tilda says I'll get used to the sound of the beach,' Zoe said. ‘She says then I won't be able to sleep when I can't hear it. Is that what it was like when you lived here?'

Jax rubbed at a knot of tension in her neck, too exhausted by the present to make her memory sift that far back. ‘Maybe. I can't remember.'

‘Can we go to the beach today?'

‘We'll see.' She found a smile, hoped it didn't look like a grimace. Watching the TV version of the motorway drama had made it seem like a nightmare. Then she'd had nightmares and now she wasn't sure she wanted to leave the house. Or drive a car.

Weeks ago, when she'd decided to take up Tilda's offer to move in, Jax planned to start the first day in their new home the way she wanted to continue: her and Zoe downstairs, Tilda doing her own thing upstairs – sending a gentle message that they all needed to respect each other's boundaries if this arrangement was going to work. Thanks to Brendan Walsh, there was no food and no flat surface that wasn't covered in boxes.

Tilda had seen the state of their apartment and must have made her own decisions about the first day because as soon as Jax and Zoe were up and about, she called down the stairs, told them to ignore the mess and come up for breakfast on the deck.

‘Fruit and toast, nothing flash,' she said, as they sat down to bowls of fresh melon and berries and a selection of fancy jams. Wearing a long filmy beach dress over a black, one-piece swimming costume, Tilda looked like she'd ordered the food from the resort kitchen, not thrown it together herself.

‘Where's my cereal, Mummy?' Zoe asked, swinging her legs under the chair, already dressed hopefully in purple swimmers and yellow floaties.

‘I haven't found it yet, baby,' Jax told her. ‘Have some rockmelon, it's yummy.'

‘But I like my cereal.' She was a one-breakfast kid – flakes and milk and a glass of juice, 364 days a year. At least for the last two.

‘I know, baby. But you like fruit, too. Here, try a strawberry.' Jax forked three bite-sized berries onto her plate, hoping a useless fact from the collection depot in her brain might help. ‘In Germany, some farmers hang strawberries on their cows' horns to make the elves happy.'

Zoe held on to the edge of the table, swinging her legs, making no attempt to eat. Jax poured coffee and took a long gulp as the tension in her neck spread tendrils across her shoulders.

‘You ate strawberries for breakfast yesterday,' Tilda reminded her.

‘That's because Mummy said you don't have children and you don't know little kids like to have cereal.' She looked at Jax to confirm the quote. Oh, yes, word for word.

Tilda flicked a quick, amused glance at Jax. ‘Well, that's true. Maybe you can tell me about this cereal while you eat your breakfast.'

As Zoe ate and explained the joys of breakfast from a box, Jax clung to her coffee and read the local paper. The front page carried sequential photos from the pull-over zone stand-off: Miranda Jack and Detective Senior Sergeant Aiden Hawke with pistols drawn, Jack dropping gun, Jack being searched for weapons, Jack collapsing and being dragged to a police vehicle. And a final overhead photo
of the kilometres of traffic backed up on the motorway, as though she was responsible. Well, she was, sort of.

The details of the drama were spread across pages four and five, accompanied by more photos, a map of her route along the motorway and a timeline, including her pee stop at the cafe. The ‘gunman' was confirmed as Brendan James Walsh, a private security officer and former infantryman in the Australian Army, who'd completed two tours of Afghanistan.

Jax's gaze wandered to the view for a moment. Two tours of Afghanistan. He hadn't sat in a command centre – the infantry were the guys who saw the action. The way he'd handled a gun had already told her that much.

Plane or chopper
, she heard him say. They'd been playing Zoe's game.
Plane
, she'd said.
Less chance of being thrown from the wreckage and dying slowly.

I've seen that
, he'd said.
It's a bad way to go
. Had he seen it in Afghanistan?

She skimmed the double-page spread, hoping it might tell her. A comprehensive yet disconcerting job, she thought. Although it would've been better without the sidebar recap on her and Nick – investigative reporter killed in hit-and-run, wife's pleas for police to continue investigation, wife tells last month's inquest she hasn't been able to work since the accident, coroner hands down open finding.

Jax stood up, paced to the railing, the words making her edgy and anxious. She took a breath of cool morning air, attempted to appreciate the view but went back to the paper as though it was calling her.

The main story quoted a family friend, a.k.a. Russell:
Walsh was one of a group of soldiers Miranda had
interviewed five years ago
. Blah blah.
Miranda attempted to calm her abductor by talking to him
. Blah blah.
Miranda is fine and resting at the home of a family member, grateful to be alive but saddened by the tragic end to her ordeal. She thanked police for their efforts
.

Yes, and Jax would personally like to thank Detective Senior Sergeant Aiden Hawke for not shooting her. And her dead husband's friend for his support as her tragic life once again becomes worthy of front-page news.
Shit
.

While Tilda headed off for her ‘few easy laps' of the ocean pool at the bottom of the hill, Jax eyed off the laptop on the walnut desk as she cleared the breakfast dishes. There would be other media coverage online. It might have more information about Brendan; maybe it would confirm what was real or what wasn't. On her second trip from the deck, Jax switched the laptop on, watching it warm up while she stacked plates into the dishwasher.

‘Can we go to the beach now?' Zoe asked just as Jax put fingers to the keyboard.

She'd finally promised over breakfast – when fresh coffee had taken the edge off the taut, lingering sense of apprehension that had been with her since she left the motorway, and after Tilda reminded her she didn't need to get in a car – that she and Zoe could walk from the house. Jax glanced at the screen, tried to sound enthusiastic. ‘Give me ten minutes.'

The stand-off with Aiden Hawke and subsequent ten-kilometre traffic jam had made international headlines. No surprise there: the pictures were impressive and it'd taken hours for the vehicles to clear. Australian internet news was the most comprehensive but details about Brendan
were still sketchy and no-one had come forward with a tell-all about the dead carjacker.

As Jax hit Enter for another search, Zoe ran at her from the top of the stairs, pink plastic bucket and spade now accompanying the swimmers and floaties. ‘Ready!'

‘Yes, you are.' Jax laughed, told herself not to look back at the screen. She'd promised – and she'd promised herself to do better for Zoe here. Her daughter had missed out enough over the last year, with nothing to show for it. Jax closed the laptop, put hands on her hips. ‘So where's
my
bucket?'

Downstairs, though, as she rummaged through boxes for beach towels, the apprehension freshened and she gave up the search, running upstairs instead for Tilda's phone.

‘Aiden Hawke.'

‘It's Miranda Jack,' she told him. ‘From last night.' Then she remembered his calm, unruffled composure and figured it was possible he hadn't gone home and collapsed in a dazed heap like she had, that there might be another woman ringing with the same opening line. ‘The carjacking?'

A pause, the hint of a smile in his voice. ‘Yes, I remember. Actually, it's not one I'm likely to forget. How are you this morning?'

Tired, wired, worried. ‘I'm okay, thanks. I wanted to take my daughter to the beach and thought I should check first about …' She stopped, swallowed.

‘What time to come in?'

‘No, I was thinking about what Brendan said. About people following him. I don't want to take her out if there are … if you've found … any indication of …'
I'm not the only one with a weapon. They've got them. They're prepared.

‘Someone pursuing him?' he asked. ‘We've found nothing to suggest Brendan Walsh was being followed.'

She'd hoped for,
We've found them, they're in custody
– or even,
Brendan's doctor confirmed it was all in his head
. ‘Does that mean no-one was or you're still checking?'

‘I understand your fears but I don't think there are safety issues around taking your daughter out.'

He was a cop – why had she expected a straightforward answer? ‘Okay. I guess I'll have to work with that.'

‘It's also worth considering, Miranda, that if there was someone looking for Brendan Walsh, they have no reason to keep looking now.'

Because he was dead. Slipped from her hands and killed in front of her. She squeezed her eyes shut. ‘Yes, that's a point.'

‘I'll see you at three-thirty to go through your statement.' It sounded like a reminder.

She didn't need another one. ‘Yes.'

 

Jax kicked off thongs and sank her feet into the cool morning sand. It was still too early for the January throngs to be out in full and she'd found a spot for her and Zoe in a prime position – between the flags and close to the ragged edge left by the retreating tide. While Zoe got started with her bucket and spade, Jax sat on a towel and lifted her face to a huge dome of deep blue sky. A single wisp of cloud hung high above, as though a bridal veil had been swept up to heaven. A breeze moved gently around her, bringing wafts of salt and suncream and the hot chips someone was eating nearby.

Jax wanted to enjoy it, wanted to breathe out and let go – of yesterday, of the past year, of the questions. But the pain was physical today: shoulders, neck, back, thighs, her right big toe. There were bruises from being dragged around; she couldn't remember what had happened to her foot but the rest, she figured, was from two hours of holding herself rigid and waiting for death. Maybe she hadn't quite stopped doing that, because she also felt jittery and on edge, barely able to loosen the arms that were clutched around her knees.

Watching Zoe dig, she wondered how Brendan's wife and son were holding up this morning, remembering how it'd been after Nick died. At five, Zoe was too young to understand the permanence of his passing or the hole that had been torn in their lives, but she'd understood enough to be hushed and frightened by the sombre-faced people arriving at their house, the continual ringing of the phone and her mother's frequent flow of tears.

Those first hours and days had been filled with a foggy, groggy sense of unreality. At seven forty-five one morning, two and a half weeks after Christmas, Jax had watched Nick pull on shorts and a fluoro vest and kissed him goodbye. Four hours later, she was told he was dead. There before breakfast, gone by lunch.

His body was found by a motorist beside a road in a short stretch of bushland, forty minutes' drive from home. His car was 3.1 kilometres away, parked neatly at the kerb in a quiet suburban street, his wallet in the glove box, laptop on the front passenger seat, and a document box in the rear, the kind he'd used for collecting and collating research. Nick was in his running clothes, car key zipped into a pocket, mobile phone in his hand. He'd lived long
enough to try to make a call. Not Triple-0. There were four digits on the screen, the start of a mobile number. Not Jax's. Not Russell's. Someone's.

Yesterday, Brendan Walsh had told Jax his wife would be just like her.
I'll be dead and she'll be a widow and my kid will have no father
. Except Brendan's wife would
know
what had happened to her husband. It wasn't a heroic story, not something she could label with ‘pride' – but it would be an explanation.

‘Can we go for a swim now?'

Jax glanced up, saw Zoe covered head to toe in sand, the bucket and spade tossed aside, and blinked away tears as she smiled. ‘I think you need to.'

Zoe chased waves in and ran squealing back out as they followed her up the beach. She rolled about in the shallows, getting tussled and tumbled by the wash of a decent surf. Jax stood at the water's edge, remembering other days when she'd been the fun mum who'd dug holes and splashed about with her daughter. She'd hoped coming to Newcastle might help her find that person again. Maybe it would, in time, but not this morning. Last night Brendan Walsh had been a circuit-breaker; today he was a ghost at her shoulder, just behind and out of sight, as he'd been in her passenger seat, his fear and paranoia hovering like a stranger who stood too close.

‘Look, Mummy!' Zoe was lying in the shallows, water rushing around her as she pointed skywards.