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  Claire-the-ghost had taken grandmother and granddaughter’s hands and joined them. Or did we try and fail to reach each other because she stood dead between us? We both wanted Claire, and all we had was each other.

  And Malcolm.

  She opened her eyes.

  His battered car squatted in the driveway. He’d lost a screw from the back license plate and it dangled askew. It probably wouldn’t fall off. In his world, things limped along.

  Her father’s letter waited in the kitchen. She might have a whole other family: step-siblings, grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins.

  For an instant she stopped breathing, then her lungs shuddered into action again.

  She would not go in terror of her family. Not again.

  Chapter Seven

  The television giggled its inanities. Malcolm slumped in Roxie’s recliner, watching. He didn’t make even a token effort to read the remainder of Roxie’s letters. He had helped to transport her belongings to the charity shop, but that was the extent of his involvement in the clearance of the house.

  Alice had ordered in pizza.

  The game show reached a crescendo of hilarity and faded to its closing credits. Malcolm muted the tinkly theme tune. “So, have you looked up your father online?”

  “No.” Her breath hitched and she hated the panicky response. She made her voice decisive, dismissive. “I’m sure there are any number of Stephen Jacobs in the world.”

  “I doubt there are that many. You should try the White Pages. Phone the S. Jacobs.”

  Typical Malcolm to disregard her line in the sand, her statement that the subject was closed.

  “And say what? ‘I think I might be your daughter, that is, if you’re a recovering drug addict who once had it off with a Claire Hendley.’”

  “Wouldn’t hurt.”

  “Of course it would bloody hurt.” She threw Roxie’s letters on the floor and immediately regretted her loss of control.

  He eyed her warily. “Might be better than sitting here wondering if he’s dead or alive.”

  “I intend to hire a private detective.” Her law firm had an agency they used for messy cases. She knelt and gathered up the letters.

  “A private detective?” Malcolm stared at her as if she’d lost her mind. “To check the phone book for you?” He waved away her incipient objection that it could be far more complicated than that. “I’ll phone the S. Jacobs for you here and now.”

  “Malcolm!”

  “Well, don’t you want to know?” He had his phone out.

  She shook her head, bit her lip at the self-betrayal, then nodded. “But don’t tell him I’m here—if he is in the local phone book and not…somewhere else.” She’d nearly said “dead”. Did she want him to be dead? “If he answers, I’m not ready to talk to him.”

  “You mean, you want to do some background research on him first. Be the one in control. That’s why you want to employ a private detective.”

  “He could be anyone,” she defended herself.

  “Yeah. He’s your dad.” Malcolm dialled the first number.

  She set the letters aside, sat on the sofa and leaned forward, gripping her hands together.

  “Hi, I’m looking for a Stephen Jacobs? Oh, you’re Simon. Sorry to bother you.” The second phone call followed the same pattern.

  She got up and walked around the lounge room, out into the kitchen and back.

  The third phone call got a Steve Jacobs.

  “I’m phoning on behalf of my sister, Claire Hendley. She’s looking for her dad. Oh, you’re twenty four. No. No, it can’t be you. Claire’s a bit older than that. Thanks, anyway.”

  “Doesn’t anyone have an answering machine anymore?” She dropped onto the sofa. “They’ve all answered your calls.”

  “Maybe it’s a good omen.”

  She caught herself chewing a fingernail and grimaced. She remembered Claire’s fingernails, gnawed till they bled, and laced her fingers together.

  “Only three more to go,” Malcolm encouraged her, dialling.

  “He won’t be in the phone book. He probably relapsed. Once a junkie…”

  “Hi, I’m looking for a Stephen Jacobs? You are? No, you don’t know me. I’m phoning on behalf of my sister, Alice Hendley. She’s looking for her dad.”

  “I’m her dad!”

  She heard the shout clear across the room.

  Malcolm winced and held the phone away from his ear.

  “Hang up,” she said urgently. “Hang up.” She launched herself off the sofa, prepared to physically wrestle the phone from him.

  “Are you there?” her father demanded. “Is Claire there?”

  Malcolm disconnected. “He’s alive and he lives in…” He checked the address in the phone book. “Seems like he wants to meet you.”

  “Maybe.” She couldn’t take it in. “But he knows my name. He could have contacted me any time.”

  “Unless Roxie told him you didn’t want to see him, ever.”

  She stared at Malcolm, stunned despite what she knew of Roxie.

  He shrugged one shoulder. “I loved Roxie and I understood her, but I know she wasn’t a saint. She must have answered his letter, if only to tell him to stay away.”

  “She kept him out of my life?”

  “Is there any of Roxie’s sherry left? You look like you need a drink.”

  “Not sherry. I’m going for a walk on the beach.” She didn’t want him watching her, judging her emotions or cataloguing her vulnerabilities.

  It was difficult to walk. Her limbs felt unconnected to her body, as if her mind had to pull puppet strings to lift, turn. She zombie-lumbered out of the house.

  The neighbouring units all had lit windows and the indefinable aura of busy lives, composed of music and voices, the scent of food and slam of car doors. The beach was kinder, empty and undemanding. She plodded along it, smelling the salt air and rotting seaweed. Moonlight turned the world to silver and shadow. She swerved away from the waves and huddled herself into the shadow of a dune. Knees drawn up, she rested her chin on them and struggled to find a way to deal with the situation.

  Legal training had only enhanced her natural aptitude for detached analysis. She was accustomed to despising the messy emotionalism of her clients. To find herself drowning in the same swamp was unacceptable.

  Unacceptable.

  It shouldn’t have been Malcolm who insisted she phone her dad. She was the one who took charge. Her own timidity scared her.

  Irrationally, the fact Roxie had likely lied to Stephen Jacobs felt like a greater betrayal than keeping his letter from her. Roxie must have told him his daughter didn’t want to meet him.

  “She stole my voice.”

  Lies. She hated them with a passion. Squirming, petty, fearful, destructive lies. Her clients lied to her all the time and she hated the disrespect of it. Hated, hated…

  Roxie had lied in her name.

  Alice tipped her head back, swallowing jagged rage. The rawness of her emotions tore at the serene stars overhead.

  “Lying bastards,” she whispered. You couldn’t wish on a star, not when you knew they were suns from distant galaxies. They could have died millions of years ago, but their light would stream on, relentless in an expanding universe. Like lies, once started, they never ended.

  Lies were like spider webs. They clung and terrorised and held you there, locked in place, while the monsters crawled out to devour you. Some people lived so long in a web of lies that they became the sucked-dry corpses, the fly bodies spiders left to rattle in the wind.

  Roxie had lied to Alice’s dad and, by omission, to Alice. She had stolen from them the right to decide their futures.

  All these years, Alice had thought she was unwanted. She’d earned her place in Roxie’s life with a grim acceptance of duty. Claire had died, and then, no one had wanted her. She’d filled the space, the echoing, terrifying void, by being needed. Even her career affirmed her identity by requiring her to untangle other people’s c
onfusion, their mistakes, their crises.

  But this was her crisis.

  And it found her unprepared. There was nothing in a whirling, shattered universe to hold onto.

  Malcolm had spoken to her dad.

  Stephen Jacobs was real, alive and the phone call meant the genie was out of the bottle. Whether she was ready or not, her father was part of her future now. The man who’d shouted down the phone wouldn’t go quietly, this time.

  What had Roxie said to him?

  It had to have been something hateful, something that stabbed him through the heart and kept him away for decades. Roxie had been good at scenting weakness, at nurturing uncertainty; offering her approval only when you backed away from a fight.

  Alice dug her fingers into the beach sand. The coarse grains forced themselves under her nails and clung to palms sweaty with emotion. Her breathing was too fast and her heart beat high in her chest. It had done the biologically impossible and lodged in her throat, choking her even as it pumped life around her shocked body.

  She was trembling, a fine quiver passing over her skin. If she looked at the ocean, memories rolled across it like a pantheon of regret.

  “I thought I was strong.” Perhaps she had been. She hadn’t stayed here with Roxie. Hadn’t made her life in the shape and form the old woman wanted it to follow.

  But her choices had been almost as damaging.

  “I didn’t see.” The soundless cry halted the memories, let them sink into the waves. She stared at the empty ocean. “I survived.”

  At the cost of becoming impervious to Roxie’s every sly strike.

  She wore a carapace of success. No one ever saw her second guess herself. There was no softness, no weakness, no potential to undo her with sympathy. She had constructed an adult self to protect the child within her—and that adult coped with anything.

  Except finding that she had a dad who wanted her.

  No. She would cope.

  In the morning, she’d phone the detective agency. By evening she’d know if Stephen Jacobs had a criminal history, other children and if he was employed. By this time tomorrow she’d have a strategy for how to approach him.

  The wind blew off the ocean, setting the dune grass shivering.

  What did she know of fathers? There was Ethan with his two daughters, Emma and Olivia. He’d cut out his heart to save them. But she wasn’t a fool. Stephen Jacobs was a different sort of man, one of the many men who’d drifted through Claire’s life.

  Dark memories stirred.

  “You’re my beautiful baby girl and I will protect you,” Claire had said. There’d been blood on the knife. Malcolm had stood in the doorway, wide-eyed and fearful. The bad man had gone, cursing and bleeding. Claire had moved them all that night.

  If Stephen Jacobs was a man like that…but no, Claire had said he was a “nothing”. And a man like that wouldn’t have sounded so desperate on the phone. He wouldn’t have sounded agonised with hope.

  Alice rubbed her arms, goose-pimpled from the cold. Your life was in a bad place when you took comfort in “nothingness”.

  She stood up. She hadn’t huddled on the beach as a child. She wouldn’t be reduced to it now.

  If she wasn’t going to sleep, she might as well continue emptying Roxie’s house. It would be a pleasure.

  There wasn’t much left, if she disregarded Malcolm’s room. A couple more hours now, and then in the morning, and she’d be free to leave by lunchtime. To leave, and not look back.

  Malcolm wouldn’t get himself organised so quickly. He never did. But for once the knowledge didn’t irritate her. She found a petty satisfaction in planning to exploit his laziness. She’d have him let in the charity workers to collect Roxie’s furniture in the afternoon.

  Let him deal with something for once. She was all finished living her life by Roxie’s rules.

  Chapter Eight

  “No,” Malcolm said when she told him of her plans.

  “What do you mean, no?” She was back in command of herself and her world. The carapace of competence fit her like armour. “Do you have somewhere else you have to be?”

  “Do you?” He switched off the television.

  The blankness was disconcerting.

  “I left a lot of work piled up on my desk.” Nothing critical, though. She was too conscientious for that.

  “And the busy lawyer can’t afford another day away, while the poor salesman can?” He didn’t give her a chance to respond to the accusation, but launched an attack in a new direction. “Do you have anybody waiting for you? Who was that bloke hovering near you at Roxie’s funeral? Edward? Evan?”

  “Ethan. He’s a partner in the law firm.”

  “More than that. Why isn’t he here with you, helping you deal with your grief?” His face twisted on the last word.

  “Because even before all this I wasn’t hypocrite enough to pretend grief for Roxie. I’ve said my long, slow good-bye. I was in that damn hospice every day.”

  “And was this Ethan with you?”

  “What? No.” She recoiled at the idea.

  “Why the hell not?” Malcolm seemed angry out of all proportion. “He is your lover, isn’t he? I saw the way he touched you, wanting but fearing to claim too much.”

  “That’s enough.”

  “Did you ask him for anything? I bet he offered care, concern. You said ‘no’. You always do.”

  “Ethan offered his sympathies. He has two little girls. He couldn’t leave them to come down here with me.”

  “Of course not. Bring two little girls to a house at the beach where they can paddle and build sandcastles, have a barbeque and count the stars, and then their dad can hold you through the lonely night. What a stupid idea!”

  “I told him I’d be okay.”

  “I knew you would.” He shoved a hand through his hair, anger collapsing into weariness. “You’ll drive him away. Normal people like to be needed.”

  “Co-dependency is no basis for a mature relationship.”

  “Stuff the psychobabble. It’s human to need one another. But you won’t let yourself be human.”

  “Malcolm, I’m in no mood for an analysis of my character.” There had been too much of that, a monologue of painful realisation, on the beach.

  “Why do you think I came down here, today?”

  She was angry enough to tell the truth. “For whatever you could get.”

  “Thanks, sis. But for once I beat you to the draw. I came down here a month ago. A Sunday drive, thinking about Roxie, about lives ending. You know, she never changed the locks—or should I say, you never?”

  “I realised you’d gone through the house. Things were missing.”

  “Things were found, too. I read Roxie’s letters a month ago.”

  She froze as the implications of his words penetrated.

  “That’s why I’m here, today. To make sure that you found your dad’s letter and—oh hell—to be here for you.”

  “Here for me?!! You’d read Roxie’s letters. You knew about my dad. You knew! What was this performance about phoning all the false S. Jacobs? You were manipulating me. Did it give you some perverse satisfaction to see me falling apart?”

  “I told you. I tried to do the best thing for you. I thought—forget it.” He lurched out of the recliner. The television remote control fell off the chair arm.

  She stood in the doorway, stopping his retreat. “You’ve known of Stephen Jacobs for a month. I don’t believe you could have resisted looking up information about him.”

  “He’s a baker. I found an article online in a local newspaper. He volunteers at a drug rehabilitation centre. He’s one of its success stories. There can’t be two Stephen Jacobs the right age and background.”

  “A baker.”

  “I didn’t look any further. I don’t know if he has a family or…I wanted to know if he’d hurt you.”

  It was such an older brother attitude—one rare in Malcolm. His half defiant, half ashamed attitude disconcerted her
. She laughed out of pure anger. “You were trying to protect me.”

  “And doing a shit job of it.” He took a deep breath. “I’m sorry.”

  She shook her head, not in rejection but in exhaustion. “I can’t deal with any more.”

  He opened his mouth, closed it.

  “Goodnight, Malcolm.” She was grateful he didn’t continue their earlier argument. Who was he to claim she wasn’t alone, that he was here for her?

  The truth was she’d been alone since Claire died.

  She grabbed pyjamas and closed the bathroom door, stripping off her dirty clothes and stepping into the stream of hot water. It took some of the chill out of her bones.

  Emotional shock.

  She hit the tiled wall with her fist. Damn Roxie. For hiding her letter, hiding her dad. For taking Claire from her—yes, she faced it. In this house, memories of Claire ended with her schooldays. She’d been Roxie’s daughter, not Alice and Malcolm’s mum.

  What else did I lose?

  She scrubbed at her skin with the new soap she’d brought from home—sandalwood and rose, not Roxie’s lavender. The fragrance enclosed her in the steam.

  Malcolm was half right. She didn’t ask anyone for help. But he hadn’t understood why—and he should have.

  I can’t trust anyone.

  Roxie’s performance with her dad’s letter only underlined the early lesson of an addict’s child: trust no one. They won’t be there for you. They will betray you.

  Even Malcolm, with his clumsy attempt to be a brother, had only hurt her.

  One month ago she could have asked Roxie about Stephen Jacobs.

  She could have asked Roxie.

  “The lying bastard.” In the stream of hot water, you couldn’t tell she was crying.

  Malcolm had been protecting Roxie—not her.

  She shut off the shower and sniffed. Of course he had. He and Roxie had always shared secrets. He confided the failures of his life to her, and she gave him sympathy and money. Alice threw the towel across the bathroom.

  It was an echo of her childhood to step across the small passageway, into her bedroom and close the door to her haven, thin-walled and tiny, but offering the nearest thing to privacy she’d been able to attain.