The Parable of the Mustard Seed Read online

John laughed and kissed him, and then dragged him to the bathroom to clean him up.

  Darren arrived home from his Melbourne trip happy and relaxed, and John convinced himself that everything was for the best. Darren was happy and Caleb was happy and John was happy—apart from his guilt—so there was nothing underhanded in the way he and Caleb had embarked on their relationship at all, not if it was working out for the best. And yet, even when he packed up his gear and Caleb drew him out of Darren’s sight for a secret farewell kiss, John knew that the danger wasn’t in how they’d started this in secret, but how they were now continuing it in the same way.

  “We need to tell him, mate,” he said in a low voice.

  He could hear Darren downstairs, whistling as he threw his clothes in the washing machine.

  “We will.” Caleb bit his lip, and looked at John pleadingly. “Soon. Just…just a little bit longer, okay?”

  John didn’t fully understand Caleb’s need for continuing secrecy. He understood it logically—Caleb wanted something of his own for once—but he’d never understand it on the same emotional level as Caleb felt it, because John wasn’t in Caleb’s shoes. He recognised that, though he didn’t even need to, because one thing the past few weeks had taught him was that there was nothing Caleb could ask him that John could refuse.

  “Soon,” he agreed, forcing away the trickle of unease in his gut. “Very soon.”

  Caleb smiled, and rewarded him with another kiss.

  Jesus, what a mess. John couldn’t bring himself to regret a moment of the intimacy he’d shared with Caleb, but at the same time he could see they were both stepping closer and closer to trouble the longer they kept their relationship a secret from Darren.

  John headed to Holland Park, to an apartment full of stale air that felt less and less like home every time he walked inside. He did his washing, went out and grabbed some groceries, and ate his dinner alone at the kitchen bench.

  He wondered what it would feel like to have Caleb here with him, and the sudden rush of loneliness that welled up in him almost left him reeling. Three days of touching whenever they both wanted, and now John felt the acute pains of withdrawal.

  He didn’t sleep well that night. He found himself reaching too often for someone who wasn’t there.

  He was woken sometime after dawn by his phone, and grabbed for it twice with a clumsy hand before he managed to pick it up, He squinted at the screen: Liz.

  “Hey, what’s up?” he asked when he answered.

  “Get in here now,” Liz said. “We’ve got remains.”

  John’s sleep-addled brain took a second. “What?”

  “We’ve got remains,” Liz repeated. She sounded strangely excited, almost delighted, and John couldn’t make any sense of that until she added, her voice hitching, “John, we think it might be Simon.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  John watched as Caleb traced his fingers over the print-out of the COMFIT picture. A boy’s face stared back at him. It was a thin face, with a crooked jaw, a smattering of freckles over the bridge of the nose, and tousled red hair.

  Caleb saw him watching and pulled his fingers away with a jerk. Colour rose in his face. “It’s not right,” he murmured.

  “No,” John agreed. “They’re tricky to get right, most of the time. And sometimes when you look at six hundred pictures of noses or chins or eyes all in a row, they all start to look a bit the same.”

  He took the picture from Caleb, and walked over to the whiteboard. Taped it there, and then studied it for a moment.

  It was Simon, or as close to as they’d get. And it was better than searching for a fucking ghost. John wanted everyone on the team to look at this picture, and to remember that it was a real boy who’d been killed. A real boy with whatever hopes and dreams he’d been able to nurture in that nightmarish place.

  He headed back to his desk, and put a hand on Caleb’s shoulder. “Do you want me to print you a copy?”

  Caleb pushed the chair back, shaking his head. “No,” he mumbled, and then hid his face in his hands. “No, I can’t. It—it’s wrong.”

  John’s heart broke for the kid.

  It was a man walking a dog who found him.

  It was always a man walking a dog, wasn’t it, who stumbled across a shallow grave?

  This shallow grave was in bushland, twenty kilometres from the Children of Galilee’s former compound. In the past eight years that bushland had shrunk. Housing developments had encroached on it slowly, bulldozers knocking down the trees and carving out allotments, slowed a little by environmental impact studies and protesters waving SAVE THE KOALA HABITAT signs. Slowed, but ultimately relentless. Now, years after the last of the protesters had moved on and the homeowners had moved in, a man walking a dog by the side of a creek had found the bones of a boy.

  Well, no confirmation of that until the pathologist wrote up her report, but the forensic officers who bagged the bones were sure of it: an adolescent boy. And John knew that it was Simon. Who else could it be?

  He saw them dig the skull out of the ground. A boy’s skull, caked in dirt. Cracked. From the wound that had killed him, or from the relentless pressure of the earth on his bones for the past eight years, the forensic guys couldn’t say. Probably what killed him. But don’t quote them on that.

  John had never felt so physically sick at the sight of a body before. Not at an old one like this. Not one clean of flesh. There was no putrefaction here. No clouds of blowflies. No five-day-old body that had melted into the carpet. Now that had been one that had taken more than a few drinks to escape. More than a few to turn it into something he could laugh about now.

  But this was Simon. It had to be. This was the kid who hadn’t made it. This could have so easily been Caleb.

  And Caleb had been there. Seen this.

  Two scared boys, screaming for their lives, and only one had lived.

  Nobody had ever cried for Simon, nobody except Caleb.

  John strode back to the car and leaned on it. He faced the road rather than the scene, and cried. For Simon, for Caleb, and for every kid who never came home. For every kid who never had a chance.

  Liz came and stood beside him, and they stared at the traffic together. A media van was parked a few hundred metres down the road, held there by the marked police car pulled up in front of it.

  “Shit,” Liz said, looking down at them. “Fucking vultures.”

  “Public’s right to know,” John muttered, and rolled his eyes. Except it wasn’t just information the media fed to the public, was it? It was speculation and rumour and spin, and none of those things helped John do his fucking job.

  “Do you want to be on this?” Liz asked.

  John nodded. “Yes.”

  This had been his case from the beginning. From the moment he’d wrenched open the door to the tank, metal screaming, and found Caleb there covered in blood. John wanted to see this one to the end. He’d caught up with some of the others since, who’d retired or transferred, and sensed that strange loss they carried with them when they talked about the case. The knowledge that they hadn’t finished. That they wouldn’t, not until they’d found Simon. Not until they’d brought him home. Nobody else missed him, or mourned him, or thought of him at all, except for them. In some intangible way, he had become theirs just as much as Caleb had become John’s.

  John couldn’t quit now.

  “Okay,” Liz said. “This is good, John. This is good.”

  Didn’t feel good, but he understood. They had a body now. They had a body, and if it was the right body that meant they could finally charge those fuckers with murder.

  “And John?” Liz’s tone was tentative.

  He turned his head, throat raw as he swallowed. “Yeah?”

  Her expression was grave. “We’re going to have to talk to Caleb again.”

  Caleb.

  God.

  Everything had been going so well lately. Caleb had rolled with the punches in a way he’d never quite managed before,
and John had been so hopeful that the worst of his trauma was behind him. No, that was a bad way to think of it. Caleb would never be cured. He’d never be transformed into a person who reacted to situations the same way that someone without suffering trauma would, but John had thought he’d been coping better. That his medication and his therapy and the strategies he and Dr. Harper worked on were all at last coming together in a way that kept Caleb at more or less an even keel, however choppy the water got.

  But finding Simon wasn’t a small thing. Simon was at the heart of Caleb’s trauma. Caleb had been in the tank with him. Caleb had seen Simon beaten to death, and then he’d been left to die himself. Two terrified boys, and only one of them had survived.

  And one, the adults claimed, had run away.

  John knew that was bullshit, but Simon had been a ghost long before he’d died. John and Brian and the rest of the team had done nothing but hit brick walls when they’d tried to find out who he was, and where he came from, let alone where he was buried. It was Brian who came up with the most plausible theory in the end.

  “The kid’s not in the system,” he said one night, peering at the whiteboard and all the names on it.

  “What?”

  “It’s the only explanation. I’ll bet he was born there, with those nutters. I’ll bet his parents never registered his birth. You know what that means? If we don’t get a body, get his DNA, it’ll be like the poor kid never existed.”

  None of the kids knew who Simon’s parents were. None of them knew who their own parents were. Even Caleb hadn’t remembered that Analise Fletcher, going by the name of Sarah by the time John met her, was his mother. And all of the kids said that Ethan Gray was their father. Their father, their God, and their whole universe.

  It still made John’s skin crawl.

  John stared out of the passenger window that afternoon as the ghost gums flickered past, golden light flashing like strobes between them.

  “Do you want me to tell him?” Liz asked as she drove.

  John shook his head. “Maybe we can leave it off for a few days? Until we get confirmation it’s Simon?”

  “That’s gonna take more than a few days,” Liz said. “We don’t know who his parents were, so the lab will have to compare his DNA with every adult who was a member of that fucked up bullshit cult.”

  “Shit.” John rubbed his forehead. “Yeah.”

  “Any contenders that you liked the look of?” Liz asked.

  “This is pure speculation,” John said, rolling his shoulders to try to ease some of the tension in his neck, “but I always thought it might have been Leon Harrison. Caleb said that Simon had red hair. And Leon Harrison had dark hair, you know? But I interviewed him once and he hadn’t shaved, and his beard was coming through with a reddish tinge. It’s a long way from evidence, but I always thought it was a possibility.”

  “Shit.” Liz shook her head. “You think he beat his own son to death.”

  “I don’t think those people thought of the kids as their children,” John said. “Family bonds were the first things they broke. Like, everyone belongs equally to God, or whatever, which meant that in that place Ethan Gray owned everybody.”

  John’s thoughts flew to Caleb, and he realised with a sinking, sickening sensation that a part of him would always be owned by Ethan Gray and there was nothing John could do to make it better.

  John’s stomach churned as Darren opened the door to him.

  “Hey,” Darren said with his easy smile. “You here for dinner?”

  John shook his head. “We need to talk. Is Caleb here?”

  Darren’s expression fell. “What’s going on?”

  “There was a—” John caught sight of Caleb wandering out toward the enclosed veranda, a piece of toast in his hand. “Let’s not do this on the front doorstep.”

  Darren let him pass, closing the door behind him.

  Caleb’s smile was bright and happy, and John was about to shatter it. The knowledge sat in his gut like a stone, and his stomach clenched around it and roiled. He walked into the living room, his gaze taking in the bright, airy space. How many tears and breakdowns and violent rages had these walls been witness to over the years? Too many, and here was John, about to hold a lit match to the short fuse of Caleb’s emotional equilibrium and all he could do was hope for the best.

  “Sit down, hey,” he said gently.

  Caleb froze.

  “Caleb,” John said. “Please, sit down.”

  “What’s going on?” Darren asked, reaching out and putting a hand on Caleb’s shoulder. “Just tell us, John.”

  And there was no way to brace Caleb for this. No way to circumvent whatever reaction he was going to have. And maybe—John’s heart swelled with hope—maybe Caleb wouldn’t break with the storm this time. His moods had been stable lately, and he’d smiled and laughed more than John could remember happening before. Except how was John supposed to know if the storm was over, or if this was just the calm of the eye as it passed over him? Hadn’t he told himself a hundred times that he knew Caleb’s conditions could only be managed and not cured? And yet he still hoped for it, like a fool, and just because for these past few weeks he’d made Caleb smile.

  “A body was found this morning in Jimboomba,” he said, his heart pounding. “We think, given the location and the approximate age, that it’s Simon.”

  Caleb blinked. His piece of toast dropped to the floor.

  “Caleb,” Darren said. “Caleb?”

  And then Caleb nodded slowly. He stepped free of Darren’s hand, and turned and headed for the bathroom. Closed the door behind him, which slowed John and Darren down.

  John was only a heartbeat behind him, but it was long enough. He pushed the bathroom door open just in time to see Caleb put his fist through the bathroom mirror, and then wheel away screaming. It was the scream of a broken thing. It wasn’t just physical pain; it was a raw cry of soul-deep anguish, and John wanted to scream too.

  The glass cracked, small pieces flying free and glittering on the counter. Blood ran down Caleb’s hand and dripped from his fingers.

  Darren grabbed a towel off the rack and stepped forward.

  “No!” Caleb flung up his hand and blood splattered the floor and the closest wall, shockingly bright and stark against the white tiles. “No!”

  “You’re bleeding, Caleb,” Darren said.

  “I don’t care!” Caleb yelled, backing up toward the shower. “I don’t care! I want to bleed! I want to! Why can’t you just leave me alone? I want to die!”

  The shower screen shuddered as he backed into it.

  “Why didn’t I die? Why didn’t I?” Caleb kicked back at the shower screen, and John winced as he heard it crack. “Simon died, but I didn’t!”

  The rage was like a storm, and Caleb was seized by it, buffeted by another fast-moving front that rolled over them all. It picked him up and twisted him around, and flung him toward the shower screen.

  John grabbed him and hauled him back. Circled his arms around him and held him tightly while he screamed and thrashed. Caleb got in a glancing kick on the shower screen, and the crack deepened, and then John hauled him back a few steps.

  “Let me go!” Caleb screamed. His face was red, tears streaming, sweat-slicked hair stuck to his temples as he tossed his head back and forth. “Let me go, you fucker!”

  “Call the ambulance,” John said to Darren.

  “No!” Caleb bucked uselessly against John. “No!”

  It had been a long time since John had seen him this bad, and he knew there was no talking him down from here. He needed to be in the hospital, sedated, for his own safety. It broke John’s heart to see Caleb try to tear himself apart like this. Broke it every fucking time, but if Caleb was caught in the storm then all John could do was try to weather it with him, and to try to keep standing when Caleb smashed over him like waves on a rock. And not even for now—Caleb wasn’t in control, wasn’t registering anything except his panic and his fear and his all-consumi
ng rage—but for tomorrow too, and for the next day and every day that came after it, when he would remember what happened here, and at least know that John didn’t hate him, wasn’t angry with him, and would never push him away for the things he couldn’t help.

  Darren stepped outside to make the call.

  Caleb screamed and thrashed again, and John held him. Managed to keep Caleb’s arms at his sides, so at least he wouldn’t cop an elbow to the face.

  “No!” Caleb screamed again. “No! No! No!”

  He grew tired at last, like he always did, but John knew that a second wave of adrenaline-fuelled rage could come at any moment. When he felt Caleb’s legs give out John went with him onto the floor and they both knelt there on the tiles, John still holding Caleb from behind as Caleb panted and wept.

  At some point Darren came back into the bathroom and was standing by the door watching. Ready to act if Caleb took John by surprise, or if John’s grip loosened.

  It wouldn’t though. John wouldn’t let him go while he was a danger to himself.

  There was blood on the floor, and smears of it when their feet and knees had slid through it.

  “Let me go, John,” Caleb said, and his voice was cold.

  “Not yet, mate,” John told him, and he felt Caleb tense in his arms.

  “Let me go!” Caleb bucked back against him, his second wind coming, but John was resolute. “Please, John!”

  “I can’t do that, mate.” John’s throat ached.

  Caleb sagged forward again, and for a moment John thought he’d gotten through to him. And then, a whispered, “Please.”

  “Caleb, I can’t let you—”

  Caleb wrenched forward suddenly, causing John’s knees to slip on the bloody tiles. “So you trust me to make my own decisions when it comes to us fucking, but now you don’t?”

  John was so stunned, shame and guilt flooding through him, that he took a second too long to react. In that moment Caleb reared back, his skull connecting with John’s jaw and leaving them both sprawling.