Chapter 25

chapter twenty-five

Now

It was now fifteen days since Joy Delaney had been seen by her family.

‘My mother got very sick on Father’s Day,’ said Brooke Delaney. ‘She collapsed. It turned out she had a kidney infection. We had to call an ambulance.’

‘That must have given you all a fright,’ said Christina.

Christina and Ethan were interviewing Joy Delaney’s youngest daughter at her physiotherapy practice, surrounded by exercise equipment. There were only two chairs. Ethan had accepted Brooke’s offer to sit on the balance ball, which he did with great aplomb, diligently taking notes. Christina would have fallen off.

They had met Brooke at the press conference, but it had taken a few days for this interview to be scheduled. Christina couldn’t be sure if Brooke had been deliberately delaying. Right now she seemed keen to be cooperative, or at least to give that impression.

‘Well, yes, it did give us a fright,’ said Brooke. ‘We didn’t know what was going on at first. Mum was behaving so oddly. We thought it was because she was upset, not sick.’

‘What was she upset about?’

‘I felt especially bad,’ reflected Brooke. ‘Because I’m the one with medical training. She had a fever. I should have realised.’

‘She was upset about something?’ pushed Christina.

‘Just family stuff,’ said Brooke. ‘My brother and I had both broken up with our partners. Oh, and Dad decided it would be a good day to do a comprehensive analysis of our failed tennis careers.’ She gave a faint smile.

‘So what was your impression of Savannah?’ asked Christina. She burned her tongue sipping the too-hot cup of tea that Brooke had made for her.

‘She was just a sweet, quiet girl. She’d cooked all this food for us but then she was kind of serving us, in our parents’ house. It was odd and uncomfortable. It was like she was Cinderella, barely eating anything herself, and both my parents had become strangely . . . enamoured of her. Dependent on her. It was like she’d turned up and solved a problem we didn’t realise needed solving.’

‘What problem was that?’

Brooke considered the question. ‘I guess, maybe, the problem of cooking? Or the problem of retirement? My parents aren’t the sort of people who dreamed of retirement. They loved to work.’

‘Has your mother shown signs of depression recently?’

‘Absolutely not,’ said Brooke. She blinked. ‘Things haven’t been great recently, but Mum is not the sort of person to get depressed.’

‘What about your father, then? Is he the sort of person to get depressed?’

‘He can get grumpy,’ said Brooke carefully. ‘But never violent. If that’s what you’re implying.’

‘I don’t want to imply anything,’ said Christina. ‘I’m just gathering information about your parents’ states of mind.’

‘I wish you could see my father coaching a child,’ said Brooke. ‘Even a child with no talent. Especially a child with no talent. He was so gentle and patient, so passionate about tennis, he just always wanted everyone to love tennis as much as he did.’

This told Christina nothing. Gentle people snapped. People who were patient and kind in some circumstances were cruel and vicious in others.

‘But he’s not coaching anymore, right? Your parents are retired and you said they loved to work. So I take it they haven’t been enjoying retirement?’

‘They’ve been floundering a bit,’ said Brooke. ‘They tried travelling, but they didn’t know how to holiday. We didn’t really do holidays in our family.’

‘You never went on a holiday?’

‘Well, we did. Every summer we went for a week to a caravan park on the Central Coast,’ admitted Brooke. ‘Which was kind of fun.’ She frowned. ‘Kind of not.’ She sighed. ‘But there was never time for many holidays because we all played competitive tennis. We were either travelling to a tournament or training for one, and my parents were trying to run a coaching school at the same time.’

‘Was it a happy childhood?’ asked Christina. She hadn’t got a handle yet on this family. On the surface they seemed loving and cheerful but she could sense dysfunction bubbling ominously beneath their sporty, matter-of-fact demeanours.

‘I don’t know,’ said Brooke. She picked up a ballpoint pen, chewed on it, and then seemed to catch herself, removed it from her mouth and put it back on the desk in front of her and pushed it away. ‘I mean, yes, it was happy. It was very busy. It was dominated by tennis. Tennis hijacks your childhood. There’s no time for anything else.’

‘Did you resent having your childhood hijacked?’

‘Not at all. I loved tennis. We all loved tennis.’

‘You still play?’ Christina looked at the framed print of a tennis player on the wall.

Brooke’s nostrils flared. ‘Not competitively. I play with my dad every now and then. For fun.’

‘So growing up, did your parents put a lot of pressure on you to win?’

‘We put pressure on ourselves,’ said Brooke. ‘We all wanted to win.’ She followed Christina’s eyes to the picture of the tennis player, who was stretching for a backhand as if a life depended on it. ‘It’s hard to want something so badly and give it your all and then not get it. There’s this idea that all you need to do is believe in yourself, but the truth is, we all can’t be Martina.’

‘Martina?’ Christina checked her notes. Was that the older sister?

‘Navratilova,’ said Ethan. He pointed at the poster.

‘Oh, of course,’ said Christina. The only tennis player she knew was the angry one from the eighties. McEnroe. She had an uncle who used to put on an American accent to imitate his tantrums: ‘You cannot be serious.’

Ethan said to Brooke, ‘When you said “things haven’t been great recently”, is that because there was some fallout following that Father’s Day lunch?’

Astute question. Christina watched Brooke’s body language as she answered. Her shoulders went up and she stretched her neck in a turtle-like manner to make them drop.

‘There was no fallout,’ she said definitively. ‘There were just a few things said out loud that day that had never been said out loud before, that’s all. Then Mum was sick in hospital, and we all focused on that.’

Was that the truth? Or was that when things began to fray?

‘Okay then, so why do you think things “haven’t been so great” lately?’ asked Christina.

Brooke went very still. ‘I don’t know,’ she said, and she didn’t blink.

There was the lie. Right there. Christina could point at it like a doctor points out a fracture on an X-ray.

She did so know.

Christina waited.

‘Are you sure?’ she said gently. ‘Are you sure you don’t know?’

Two spots of colour rose on Brooke’s cheeks. ‘Yes, I’m sure.’

‘So back to your parents’ house guest,’ said Christina. ‘She was alone with your father? While your mother was in hospital?’

‘Yes,’ said Brooke. ‘It was only two nights.’

‘Right,’ said Christina. That was long enough. She waited. Brooke didn’t flinch.

‘Then your mother came home from hospital and Savannah stayed on.’

‘Yes,’ said Brooke. ‘We were grateful because she was doing all the cooking.’

‘I believe it’s around this time that your brother Logan discovered something unwelcome about Savannah.’

This time Brooke definitely did flinch. Had she not expected this information to be passed on? If not, why not?

Brooke recovered fast, although she had to work too hard to maintain eye contact.

‘Did Logan tell you that?’

‘He did,’ said Christina. Logan had mentioned it in a sudden rush, just before he had to hurry off to teach a class. ‘Can you tell me more?’

‘Well,’ said Brooke, and she spoke gingerly, as if she were tiptoeing her way through broken glass. ‘Logan was just sitting at home one day when he discovered something about Savannah that made us all feel a bit . . .’ She broke eye contact to try to find the right word.

Ethan wobbled on his balance ball.

‘Nervous,’ finished Brooke.