Cliff’s office was as cold as his house. He closed his laptop as Jack entered. Cliff’s desk held a pen, a calculator, an exercise book, the kind children used at school, and the laptop. Every five seconds a CCTV screen on top of a filing cabinet flicked to a new image: the tall metal doors of the chicken sheds, the silos stark against the night sky, an empty paddock, Jack’s Jaguar on the driveway, a shot of the front door of the house, and one of the back. There was Kim, still standing in the back doorway, her hands bunched inside the arms of her woolen sleeves, lost in her thoughts.
Cliff took two beers from the bar fridge and handed Jack one. They clinked the beers.
“Celia’s put the fear of God in me,” Jack said. “She hasn’t spoken to me all day.”
Cliff made a sound that could pass for sympathy. “That woman, the butcher’s wife . . . she’s hiding something.”
“I doubt it.”
Cliff’s pinprick eyes glistened. He lowered his voice. “We need to know who we’re dealing with. I googled her. Joelle Smithton does not exist. There’s no Facebook for her, no Instagram, no email address.”
“Lots of people don’t have social media.”
“Yeah, sure. But she’s not on the Smithton’s Fine Meats web page. She volunteers at the nursing home and the Country Women’s Association and she’s not listed on either of their volunteer pages.”
“How do you know she volunteers there?” Jack said.
“She told us yesterday. Weren’t you listening to her rabbiting on?” Cliff flicked a pen off and on. He never sat still. It was exhausting to watch. “Smithton is her married name. What was Celia saying yesterday?”
“No idea,” Jack said firmly.
Cliff eyed him keenly. “She said Joelle was involved in something. I can’t remember what she said.”
Jack thought of Kim, alone in her house with her sons, while her husband was over here in his office doing Google searches on a woman who had the misfortune to walk into the wrong bathroom at the wrong time. It was not hard to follow Cliff’s train of thought, and sometimes it was sport to play along, but Cliff did not need to know about Pieman’s Junction. God only knew what he would do with that kind of information.
“Do you think she’s in witness protection?” Cliff asked. “Or maybe she’s a police informant.”
“If she’s ratted on you, you’ll be the first to see the police coming to arrest you.” Jack nodded toward the CCTV.
“Not funny. The fact that she walked in on us is stressing me out. She saw me holding the bag of gear.”
Jack tried to think of some advice to calm Cliff down. “Keep telling yourself you did nothing wrong. You did nothing illegal. You have to believe the lie.”
It was the wrong thing to say.
“We did nothing illegal.” Cliff stood up with one smooth athletic movement. Sweat shone on his upper lip. “I’m going to—”
“Don’t get emotional,” Jack interrupted, and then hesitated. “There’s no need to do anything. We just deny it. Our word against hers.”
Cliff sat down and began picking at the torn rubber on the bottom of his boots. The soles were almost worn through. Jack had made the mistake once of offering to give his friend a secondhand pair of shoes. It was better, he had learned, for Celia to give Kim a bag of stuff they no longer needed.
“I hope you’re right.”
“I usually am,” Jack joked. “Anyway. Brian Smithton will set his sights on me, if anyone. Look what happened with the Hollybank Creek sign. There was a moment there when I thought I wouldn’t be allowed to change the name of the creek—and on my own farm! Why would anyone want to live near something called Murdering Creek?”
Cliff stared at him. “You change the name, you’re acting like that shit didn’t happen to those people.”
“It was a long time ago. They’d barely cleared the land.”
“I think you’ll find this valley was fire farmed a long time before the government started carving it up as land grants,” Cliff said. “That’s why the settlers chose this area. It’s been a treeless valley for thousands of years. Treeless valleys don’t make themselves.”
Sometimes Cliff surprised him with his knowledge.
“Maybe,” Jack said.
He was thirsty and he drank most of his beer while Cliff talked about the anti-battery hen activists who were lobbying against him for keeping his birds in sheds. Cliff wanted to transform his poultry enterprise into a free-range chicken farm. This plan was threatened by neighbors who objected on the grounds of noise and smell.
“You’re damned either way,” Jack said.
“Did you know this island imports most of its free-range chicken from the mainland because of the protestors?” Cliff said.
Jack leaned back in the chair as Cliff wound himself up. He felt himself relaxing somewhat. Celia had once asked Jack why he enjoyed spending so much time with Cliff. His answer was simple—they got along. But he knew what his wife was really asking. Jack had other friends, men with whom he played golf, went sailing, or had long business lunches. Some were farmers he had known since he was a boy, others were friends from boarding school or work connections. They were friends who required something of him, a level of either intellectual or professional engagement. With Cliff he could relax. It wasn’t so much that he could be more himself. Rather, with Cliff, he could be nothing.
Jack took another beer out of the fridge and held it up. “Do you mind?”
“Fucking drink it.”
Cliff began listing the various neighbors who were trying to ruin his plans for the free-range chicken farm. He claimed to have dirt on them, and he boasted to Jack that he wasn’t afraid to use it. Jack nodded and listened to the rant without comment.
Before he left, Jack told Cliff he needed help chainsawing some trees that had fallen near the river.
“If you can use the firewood, you’d be doing me a favor,” he said.
“Always happy to help a friend.”
* * *
Calendar House
His daughters were asleep. Frannie, Josephine, Alice, and Harriet. From the doorway of each of their bedrooms, he watched them and wondered at their beauty. He would not kiss them tonight.
In the bedroom, Celia also slept. She was curled on her side, her hair spilled across the pillow, her shoulders bare. He thought of pulling the blankets up, but he didn’t want to wake her.
The shower was too hot, and he did not care. There was no soap he could see so he scrubbed his body with Celia’s expensive geranium extract shampoo. Guilt gripped him. He closed his eyes and cursed himself. Each visit he made to the farmhouse at Marsh End sickened him. The knowledge that he had been there repulsed him. He hated himself, for doing this to Celia, for lowering himself.
In a dark recess of his heart, he knew the truth.
He would go back.
* * *
Joelle
The Smithtons’ house
Sunday night was their special night. They made love to each other on other nights too; she liked Sundays best because they were planned. They only ever missed it for a good reason like when Brian had his wisdom teeth pulled out, and when the twins were newborn.
Once they had checked that the kids were asleep, they had a ritual. Brian put on music—Neil Diamond and Paul Kelly were his favorites—and Joelle lit three candles that flickered on the dresser. He never touched her until she touched him first. He never undid her nightgown—she always did that for him. Making love with her husband was something she looked forward to. When she pressed her body against him, it made his breath come from deep in his throat. He was well built, and strong, but here in their bed, he was as cuddly as a kitten. She knew what he liked, and he definitely liked it a lot.