The Midnight Dress(72)

‘I just thought she got sick of waiting,’ he says.

‘Look, I got this for her . . .’ He takes a little box from his pocket and shows the police officer a sparkling ring. ‘It’s cubic zirconia,’ he says. ‘One day it’ll be diamond.’

She’s missing. Missing. Now there’s a good word. It’s a lamenting sort of word. She was meant to be somewhere, but instead she vanished off the face of the earth.

‘Why did she have your dress on, and why have you got hers?’ the same officer asks Rose. It’s the only time she’ll speak to them before she herself disappears. Before the search starts. Before the interviews. Before the bigwig detective comes down from Cairns. Before the mountain tracks grow crowded with feet.

‘It seems strange, that’s all,’ he says, ‘to go to all that trouble to buy a dress and then just give it to someone else.’

‘I didn’t buy mine, I made it,’ Rose says.

‘Where was she going?’

‘To meet Jonah Pedersen. I told you. She said she’d be back in half an hour.’

‘What do you think happened to her? Where do you think she went?’

‘I don’t know, maybe she ran away. Maybe she got sick of this town.’

It’s a stupid thing to say.

‘I’m sick of this town,’ she says. ‘A girl can’t even not turn up for a day and everyone’s asking questions. Maybe she just went for a walk.’

She’s on a roll now, she’s remembering Paul Rendell in the crowd.

‘Maybe you should ask Mr Rendell Junior, he has a thing for young girls.’

‘What makes you say that?’ says the officer, offended; he plays Union with Paul.

‘Trust me I know.’

‘What’s your address?’ says the officer. ‘We’ll need to speak to you again.’

She says Paradise and wonders if her father has already gone. Her stomach sinks; she thinks of his eyes, his howling against the caravan in the night.

‘Anything else you can think of, Rose Lovell?’

‘Nothing,’ she says. ‘She’ll be back soon.’

But afterward, when she’s out in the street, she looks up at the sky. It’s filled with cloud writing, delicate swept-up cursive: it’s all written there, everything that ever happened, everything that was ever going to be.

She’s crying. She’s crying as she starts to run. She knows that what she said isn’t true. Pearl has gone and she’s never coming back.





Upright Cross-stitch





I’ll show you how her body lies. The sun is just coming up, the bush blushing rose-gold. She’s on her side, curled; she might be sleeping except for her eyes. There are ants on her arm. A long thin procession. Dew drops are on her eyelashes. She has been rained on. The sun has dried her.

The place is beneath the Leap, on the seaboard side of the mountain, low down. The tracks there are well maintained. There is a curtain fig, quite renowned, with a raised boardwalk, and a circuit route to several lookouts that afford glimpses of the sea.

It’s exactly the kind of place that Edie Baker would have shunned, full of her daytrippers with their echoing cooees.

A star pin winks in her hair in the first light.

The dress. The dress is the colour of a dark sea. It hasn’t faded, even with the exposure, although the fabric has grown limp. There is the black mourning lace. The cairn of sticks has flattened out, the leaves he piled on top of her have blown away. There is sunshine. The earth, holding her tenderly, is waiting.





These are the things that Edie has taught her: how to fly, how to leap out across a swollen creek, all the praying in your feet, knowing that you can make it to the wet rock. How to listen for the falling of the sun. ‘It’s a sound, Rose, if you listen you’ll hear it.’ The leaves follow it all the way down, then relax, turn inward. The solitaire palm folds up its fronds. A different kind of scurrying begins: quicker, louder, more urgent.

Edie has taught her how to sit still. How to breathe.

How to sew a straight line. How to pin a pattern. How to double stitch a seam, how to make tulle petticoats, how to work lace at a cuff.

Edie is waiting for her at the top of the back steps. Exactly the way she always has. The house is shadowy cool.

‘Something happened,’ Rose cries. ‘Something terrible has happened.’

Edie waits.

‘Pearl put my dress on last night and then she disappeared.’

The old woman’s face changes, pales. ‘Come inside,’ she says.

She can’t stop crying, Rose Lovell; she feels she’ll never stop crying. They sit at the kitchen table, knee to knee. Rose sobs into her hands.

‘Was it a magical dress? Was it the dress?’

‘What do you think, Rose? You made the dress.’

She looks smaller, thinner, Edie. Her hands tremble to her throat.

‘Oh God,’ says Rose. She’s seeing her father’s face. His obsidian eyes. The way he was in the night. The way he looked at her in the sunlight.

She’s clutching Edie’s hands. She’s sliding off her seat onto the floor. She’s saying this cannot be happening. ‘This cannot be happening, Edie. What have we done? What have we done? What have we done?’