Exiles (Aaron Falk #3)(6)

“She’s struggling?” Falk said.

Rita flashed a reassuring smile as her own daughter looked up, and waited until Eva wandered off in search of more gifts for Falk before she spoke again.

“To be fair, it’s not only Zara pushing for this; we’d all like to know. I mean, I still think about it a lot,” she said, and Raco nodded in agreement. “What Kim must have been thinking to leave her baby like that.”

Falk looked down at the caption below the woman’s photo. Kim Gillespie, age thirty-nine. Last seen at the opening night of the Marralee Valley Annual Food and Wine Festival. Brown hair, brown eyes, medium build, 168 cm. Wearing a dark gray jacket, white or cream T-shirt, black jeans or leggings, white sneakers. Falk had never met Kim and as far as he knew had seen her alive only twice—once on a phone screen and once from a distance.

“I reckon the locals have probably said all they can say by now, but the opening night’s always mostly tourists.” Raco took a long pull on his beer. “They’ll probably get maybe a thousand of them tonight. Lot of the same families come every year. So it’ll jog a few memories, at least.” His frown returned. “Like it or not.”

Falk nodded. He’d been involved in all kinds of witness statements over the years, and among the least helpful—worse than those who refused to speak, worse than those who straight-up lied—were the well-meaning bystanders who reckoned they’d seen plenty. It was rarely deliberate, most people simply wanted to help. Falk didn’t blame them; there was something in human nature that compelled people to fill in the gaps. But what they’d seen and what they thought they’d seen were not necessarily one and the same.

Falk looked out to the empty vines again and thought back to his own statement last year. The local cop had been young and his questions a little leading at times. He should have known better, and if they’d been in the same chain of command, Falk would have pulled him up on it.

How did Kim seem?

Falk couldn’t say. He couldn’t even begin to say.

He suspected he probably wouldn’t have remembered anything much about those minutes at all if Kim hadn’t gone missing, but that was life. Insignificant things became significant unexpectedly. He’d tried to pick out only what he could recall for certain.

The time. It had been 8:00 p.m., and he knew that because the children’s fireworks had started. Night had crept in, and he remembered the lights and music had suddenly felt brighter and louder, the way they always did in the dark.

It had been busy. There were lots of people around, but Falk had been alone. He had been making his way back across the grounds from the east end of the site toward the main entrance on the western edge. He’d been returning from the festival’s head office to the Penvale Vineyard stall, where Raco and Rita were waiting for him. He had weaved through families who were parking or collecting strollers and bikes from the bay near the ferris wheel, and was just past the ride itself when he’d suddenly slowed on the path, and then stopped.

The young cop should have asked the reason why, but he hadn’t, and so Falk hadn’t offered. It had had nothing to do with anything that night, anyway.

And that’s when you saw Kim Gillespie?

No. Here’s what had happened: a burst of static screeching from the speakers by the ferris wheel had snatched Falk’s attention away from the path and, still distracted, he’d glanced toward the ride. A man nearby had also flinched at the noise, and their eyes had briefly caught in mutual irritation. Falk hadn’t really known the man at the time, but was later able to confirm that it was Rohan Gillespie. Rohan had been chatting to a couple with a tired-looking toddler, who were eventually tracked down and positively identified as tourists from Queensland.

Above them all, the ferris wheel had been continuing its slow rotation. The carriages on the wheel were the enclosed kind, like gondolas or cages, designed to seat family or friendship groups together. Perhaps designed also to stop falls, Falk reflected later, of both the accidental and deliberate kind.

By this point—Falk had leaned in to make sure the young officer was clear on this—he had already been losing interest in anything happening in the area around the ride. Falk’s focus had been slipping elsewhere, even as he and Rohan Gillespie broke eye contact. Rohan had turned to say something to the tourists and then pointed upward to the dark-haired woman and baby at the very top of the wheel. The movement had been enough to snag Falk’s gaze and, driven by some animal survival instinct rather than any real curiosity, he’d looked up himself. He’d sensed rather than seen Rohan wave from the ground. For a beat there had been no response and then a small movement from the gondola at the top of the ride. Falk had already been turning away as she’d waved back.

Now, a year later, Falk sat on Raco’s brother’s veranda with the printed picture of Kim on the table.

Last seen.

There was contention over the exact timings of many events that night, but the children’s fireworks had at least pinned that one to a point on the clock. Falk’s statement had become one of several used to map Rohan’s movements, which—other than those missing eight minutes or so—had eventually been independently confirmed from the time he’d waved goodbye to his wife and daughter on the ferris wheel until the moment two and a half hours later when his phone had buzzed in the Italian restaurant with the news that his child had been discovered alone in her stroller.