The Husband’s Secret

time she’d heard of his existence. Sergeant Bellach had told her that the last person to see Janie alive was a boy called Connor Whitby from the local public school, and Rachel had thought: But that can’t be, I’ve never heard of him . She knew all of Janie’s friends and their mothers.
    Ed had told Janie she wasn’t allowed a serious boyfriend until after she’d finished her very last HSC exam. He’d made such a big deal of it. But Janie hadn’t argued, and Rachel had blithely assumed she wasn’t even that interested in boys yet.
    She and Ed met Connor for the first time at Janie’s funeral. He shook Ed’s hand and pressed his cold cheek against Rachel’s. Connor was part of the nightmare, as unreal and wrong as the coffin. Months afterwards Rachel found that one photo of them together at someone’s party. He was laughing at something Janie had said.
    And then all those years later, he got the job at St Angela’s. She hadn’t even recognised him until she saw his name on the employment application.
    ‘I don’t know if you remember me, Mrs Crowley,’ he said to her, a short time after he started, when they were alone together in the office.
    ‘I remember you,’ she said icily.
    ‘I still think about Janie,’ he said. ‘All the time.’
    She didn’t know what to say. Why do you think of her? Because you killed her?
    There was definitely something like guilt in his eyes. She was not imagining it. She’d been working as a school secretary for fifteen years. Connor had the look of a kid sent to the principal’s office. But was it guilt over murder? Or something else?
    ‘I hope it’s not uncomfortable for you, me working here,’ he’d said.
    ‘It’s perfectly fine,’ she’d said curtly, and that was the last time they’d ever spoken of it.
    She had considered resigning. Working at Janie’s old primary school had always been bittersweet. Girls with skinny Bambi-like legs would streak past her in the playground and she’d catch a glimpse of Janie; on hot summer afternoons she’d watch the mothers picking up their children and remember long ago summers, taking Janie and Rob for ice cream after school; their little faces flushed. Janie had been at high school when she died so Rachel’s memories of St Angela’s weren’t tarnished by her murder. That was until Connor Whitby turned up; roaring his horrible motorbike through Rachel’s soft, sepia-coloured memories.
    In the end, she’d stayed out of stubbornness. She enjoyed the work. Why should she be the one to leave? And more importantly, she felt in a strange way that she owed it to Janie to not run away, to face up to this man, every day, and whatever it was he’d done.
    If he had killed Janie would he have taken a job at the same place as her mother? Would he have said, ‘I still think about her’?
    Rachel opened her eyes and felt that hard ball of fury lodged permanently at the back of her throat, as if she’d not quite choked on something. It was the not knowing. The not fucking knowing.
    She added cold water to the bath. It was much too hot.
    ‘It’s the not knowing,’ a tiny, refined-looking woman had said, at that homicide victims support group she and Ed had gone to a few times, sitting on fold-out chairs in that cold community hall somewhere in Chatswood, holding their styrofoam cups of instant coffee in shaky hands. The woman’s son had been murdered on his way home fromcricket practice. Nobody had heard anything. Nobody had seen anything. ‘The not fucking knowing,’ she said.
    There was a ripple of soft blinks around the circle. The woman had a sweet, cut-glass voice; it was like hearing the Queen swear.
    ‘Hate to tell you this, love, but knowing doesn’t help all that much,’ interrupted a stocky red-faced man whose daughter’s murderer had been sentenced to life in prison.
    Rachel and Ed had both taken a mutual, violent dislike to the red-faced man, and they’d stopped going to the support group because of him.
    People thought that tragedy made you wise, that it automatically elevated you to a higher, spiritual level, but it seemed to Rachel that just the opposite was true. Tragedy made you petty and spiteful. It didn’t give you any great knowledge or insight. She didn’t understand a damned thing about life except that it was arbitrary and cruel, and some people got away with murder, while others made one tiny careless mistake and paid a terrible price.
    She held a face washer under the cold tap,