The Parable of the Mustard Seed Read online

  “Let me go!” Caleb screamed again as John grabbed for him. And then, when John was lying on top of him, his fingers clamped around Caleb’s wrists. “Get off me!”

  John rolled onto his side, pulling Caleb with him to relieve him of his weight. He didn’t let go. He didn’t glance at Darren either. Couldn’t. This wasn’t the way Darren was supposed to find out. Not from this Caleb. The Caleb he should have been hearing it from was the one who’d been doing so much better lately. The one who talked and laughed and was pushed a little every day at the edges of his comfort zone until it expanded bit by bit. Not this Caleb. Not this broken, bloody thing on the floor. Because when John looked at this Caleb, all he saw was how he’d taken advantage of a fragile, fractured soul.

  “Darren,” John said, still too afraid to turn his head and meet his gaze.

  “Ambulance is here,” Darren said, his voice rasping, and for the first time John heard another sound encroaching on the ringing in his skull: a siren.

  They were still practiced at this.

  John held Caleb immobile while one of the paramedics checked his hand and wrapped it to stem the bleeding. Darren listed all Caleb’s medications to the other paramedic, also letting him know when Caleb had last eaten.

  “I don’t want to go,” Caleb said through his tears. “I don’t want to go to the psych ward.”

  The paramedics sedated him, and John felt him relax inch by inch in his arms.

  “John.” Caleb rolled his head back against John’s shoulder. His pupils were blown. “Why does it get so loud in my head?”

  “I don’t know, mate,” John answered. He ran a hand down Caleb’s arm. “I don’t know.”

  In a few minutes he was malleable, and the paramedics strapped him on his side onto a stretcher. John and Darren helped them down the front steps with it.

  The afternoon light was bright and dazzling. The neighbour next door was watering her garden. The yards were big enough here that she was still some distance away. She was an older woman, and John knew her face. She’d lived there forever. He wondered what she made of Darren and Caleb, and of the occasional dramatic visits by paramedics and police. The neighbour lowered her hose as they carried Caleb out of the house, and stood watching silently as they loaded him into the ambulance.

  “Where are you taking him?” Darren asked.

  “Gold Coast University Hospital,” the paramedic said. “You know it?”

  “Yeah. Been there plenty of times.” Darren’s expression cracked, and he swiped his eyes quickly. “I’ll follow you up there.”

  The ambulance drove off.

  Darren stared after it. He didn’t look at John. “Is it true?”

  “Yeah.” John nodded, his throat dry. He noted Darren’s clenched jaw. “Darren, I—”

  “Don’t.” Darren dragged a hand through his hair, and turned his head to stare at John. “I don’t want to hear it, John. I just want to get through the next few days with Caleb, okay?”

  “Yeah.” John swallowed. “Do you want me to drive you to—?”

  “I want you to go home, John,” Darren said. He snorted, and shook his head. “I want you to go home, and leave me to worry about Caleb. I think you’ve done enough, don’t you?”

  John stood on the footpath, his heart pounding and the blood roaring in his skull, as Darren headed back inside.

  John sat in his car, his eyes closed until the sharp rap of knuckles on his window jolted them open again. He sighed, and pressed the button to put the window down.

  “You’ve been sitting out here for ten minutes, baby,” Sepela said, her brow furrowed with concern. “What’s happened?”

  “Caleb’s in the hospital again,” John said. “And Darren found out we’re together.”

  Sepela raised her eyebrows. “You’d better come inside.”

  She didn’t give him the chance to refuse. She just walked back around his car and into her front yard. John briefly debated just driving off again, but he’d come here looking for his mother, hadn’t he? Like a kid with a skinned knee, fighting down the urge to cry the whole way.

  He put his window up again and climbed out of the car. Made sure it was locked—this was Woodridge—and followed Ma into the house.

  She already had the kettle on.

  “Where’s Jess?” he asked, out of habit more than anything else.

  “She’s at her friend’s house,” Ma said. “A nice girl, from youth group.”

  John might have felt happier about that if he hadn’t just had his heart ripped out of his chest. He sat heavily at the small kitchen table, the old vinyl seat squeaking under him.

  Sepela sat across from him. “Darren didn’t know you’re boyfriends?”

  John shook his head, searching her expression for censure and only finding sympathy. “He didn’t…he didn’t want to tell him yet. It was only new.”

  It sounded stupid now he said it like that.

  Ma raised her eyebrows again. “Hmm. And Darren doesn’t want you to be Caleb’s boyfriend?”

  “No, I…” John sighed. “I don’t know. We never even got that far before he told me to piss off. He’s angry.”

  “You’re a good boy, John,” Sepela said. “But you’re pig-headed. Are you going to give Caleb up because his father is angry?”

  “No, I don’t want to do that.”

  Sepela shrugged. “Then apologise.”

  John snorted.

  “What? You think it’s not that simple? It’s exactly that simple. What else is there to do?”

  John sighed, and buried his face in his hands. “It’s a fucking mess.”

  “Language,” Sepela chided. The kettle clicked off, and the legs of her chair scraped across the floor as she stood. “Tea or coffee?”

  “Coffee,” John murmured, straightening up. “You really think it’s that simple?”

  “Do you love Caleb?” Sepela asked.

  John nodded, his heart thumping.

  Sepela shrugged. “Then it’s the most simple thing in the world, baby.”

  John wished he could believe that.

  Chapter Fourteen

  John wasn’t comfortable with Naomi. She was a sharp-eyed little kid whose lifetime of mistreatment had made her already hard around the edges, and she was barely twelve. She was cunning, and she was a liar, too used to presenting herself in the most favourable light to the adults around her. The psychologist said she told people what they wanted to hear. There was something inside her that had been twisted and ruined by the Children of Galilee, and John didn’t know if she’d ever be able to just be a kid.

  “No,” she said now, hugging her unopened bag of chips to her chest. “I was never bad. I’m good.”

  “I know you are, Naomi,” Brian said, his eyes crinkling when he smiled at her. “But it’s not bad to tell on someone else, is it? Not if they’ve been bad?”

  John could see the cogs turning rapidly in her clever little mind.

  “Brother Leon said that if I saw anyone doing anything bad, I had to tell him,” Naomi said. “But he also said that Ethan could see us all the time.”

  There was uncertainty in her words: maybe the all-seeing Ethan wasn’t as all-seeing as he said he was.

  Brian nodded and hummed. “And what do you think about that?”

  “God tests us,” Naomi said after a moment. “He can see everything, but he wants to know if we’re lying.”

  “That might be it,” Brian agreed. “Did you ever tell Brother Leon any of the bad things you saw people doing?”

  “Yes,” she said, her eyes bright with sudden fervour. “I saw Simon holding Caleb’s hand down by the creek!”

  Brian glanced at John. “Is it bad to hold someone’s hand?”

  “No,” Naomi said. “It is if girls and boys hold hands, because that’s sinful. But I knew Simon and Caleb were being bad too because they were hiding it.” She tore her chip packet open. “They wouldn’t have hidden it if it wasn’t a sin.”

  John swallowed down a bit
ter laugh.

  Her twelve-year-old logic was impeccable.

  Two days later on Saturday morning the grass at the oval crunched dryly underfoot as John went to stand at the sidelines. He watched as David checked bootlaces and jerseys, unable to stop a smile when one little boy stripped his jersey off right there at the edge of the oval before putting it back on the right way around. The Magpies lined up to shake hands with the other team and then the referee blew his whistle. The kids spilled onto the field, knocking into one another like skittles and then pinballing off in all different directions.

  “Hey, bro.” David clapped him on the shoulder. “Glad you could make it. Tee’s coming by later with stuff for the sausage sizzle. Are you sticking around for that?”

  “Yeah,” John said. “I reckon I will.”

  David’s brow creased. “You okay, John?”

  “Not really,” John admitted. He’d stayed up late last night trying to drown his sorrows with a six-pack of beer. He’d got through four of the six, and this morning he was just as miserable, except now he had a hangover as well. So much for that plan.

  Darren had sent him a text to tell him that Caleb was being held for a few days in the mental health unit, and since then there’d been nothing but radio silence from his end.

  “Stick around,” David said. “I mean it.” He glanced at the field when the ref blew his whistle. One of his players was on the ground, hugging his scraped knee and sniffling. “Stick around, we’ll talk!”

  John watched as David jogged onto the field to escort his wounded player off. It was nothing a Band-Aid wouldn’t fix, probably, but the poor little bugger saw the blood and started wailing and yelling for his mum. David hoisted him up and carried him off the field, delivering him into the arms of his parents.

  A few minutes later the kid was sitting cross-legged on the sidelines, a melting ice-block in his hand, and a Batman Band-Aid on his knee. He was grinning and cheering for his teammates as his ice-block melted in bright green streams down his arm.

  John wished that all hurts were so easy to heal.

  His phone buzzed in his pocket, and he pulled it out and answered. “Liz, what’s up?”

  “How much would I have to bribe you to get you to come into work today?”

  John raised his eyebrows. “I’m on a day off.”

  “Hence the bribe.” Her tone was light, but it couldn’t disguise the seriousness of the request.

  “What’s going on?” John asked. It wasn’t like he was doing anything with his day off, was it? Not since Darren had made it clear he didn’t want John near Caleb right now. At least John hoped that it was right now, and that Darren would eventually unbend. He hoped that Caleb would still want to see him, and that Darren would respect that. And he hoped that Caleb wasn’t sitting in some dreary room in the mental health unit at the hospital, wondering why John hadn’t visited. He hoped, selfishly, that Caleb knew to blame Darren for that, instead of him.

  “The media’s sitting on the story for now,” Liz said. “And they’re not fucking happy about it, according to the boss. We need to get all our ducks in a row and start pulling in the former members to interview them all again before this breaks in the news.”

  John’s stomach clenched. “Yeah. I can come in. Still no ID on the remains?”

  “Not yet,” Liz said. “It’ll take another few days at least to run all the possible matches.”

  “Shit. They can’t move it to the top of the list?”

  “Another few days is the top of the list,” Liz said. “And that’s assuming that Simon was related to someone already in the compound. If he was a runaway who was never reported, we’ll be shit out of luck.”

  John sighed. Forensic work was never as quick as it was shown on television, and the government forensic lab had been drowning under a backlog of cases for years. They did their best, but there were only so many hours in a day. They needed at least twice the staff they had now, but then wasn’t that the case in every government department? Except in middle management positions, probably. There never seemed to be a shortage of middle managers.

  “He had to be one of theirs,” John said. “He was there from when he was a little kid too. He wasn’t some disenfranchised teenage runaway.”

  “I’m hoping so,” Liz said. “Otherwise we’re leaving an awful lot of reasonable doubt for a jury, you know?”

  Yeah, John knew.

  “Maybe we’ll get DNA evidence to tie him to the killer, at least.”

  “Yeah, I’m hoping for that too.” Liz exhaled heavily. “There’s an awful lot I’m hoping for with this one. I’m also hoping that because you already dealt with these arseholes that you can spot their bullshit at a thousand paces.”

  John snorted. “Oh, everything they ever said was bullshit, trust me.” He looked at his watch. “I’ll be there in about half an hour.”

  “Make it forty minutes,” Liz said. “You can grab some coffee on the way.”

  Thirty-eight minutes later, John was walking into the office. He hadn’t really been dressed for more than a morning at the football, but he kept a spare set of clothes in his locker downstairs and he’d changed into them. Black trousers and a long-sleeved button-down shirt. He didn’t bother with accoutrements as he wasn’t leaving the office.

  He’d sent a text to David from the queue at the coffee place, apologising for missing the barbecue.

  Liz was at her desk, and John walked over and set her coffee down.

  “You’re a lifesaver,” she said, and took a sip. “God. That hits the spot.”

  John looked around the office. Being a Saturday, it was largely empty. Aaron was working away in the corner, and Casey was on the phone to someone. “Is it just us?”

  “Just you and me, partner,” Liz confirmed. “And our first interview is waiting downstairs.”

  “Okay,” John said. “Who is it?”

  Liz held his gaze. “Analise Fletcher.”

  John gave himself a moment to ride the wave of revulsion that rose in him. It receded at last, leaving behind a bitter aftertaste in his throat.

  “Okay,” he said. “Let’s do it.”

  “You set up,” Liz said, handing a bundle of files to him. “I’ll go and get her.”

  John headed for the interview rooms, and picked the first one. He fiddled with the recording equipment to make sure it was all working, and then took a seat where the back of his head wouldn’t obscure the camera. He wondered if Analise Fletcher would remember him. He sure as shit remembered her.

  He looked up a few moments later as Liz appeared in the doorway. She ushered Analise inside, and then pulled the door shut behind them.

  Analise took her seat quietly.

  At first glance it was hard to see any resemblance between Analise and Caleb, because Caleb was almost a carbon copy of Darren. But there was a certain softness to Analise’s features that Caleb had inherited. She was a pretty woman, despite the lines on her face that spoke of hard living. She had blue eyes and Caleb’s pale skin. She was light where he was dark. Her hair, once wheat blonde, was now shot through with grey. John remembered her as birdlike and frail. She’d put on a little weight since John had seen her last, and she wore it well.

  She smiled at John when she saw him; the sort of apologetic smile John imagined she’d give a stranger on public transport if they bumped into one another awkwardly.

  He wondered if that smile would vanish if she knew where her son was right now. Then again, her demeanour hadn’t shaken eight years ago when she’d known how close he’d come to death then. John was seized with a burning need to know if prison had changed her. If she really had accepted any responsibility for what had happened to Caleb, and if she felt even a shred of fucking remorse for it.

  “This is Senior Constable Faimu,” Liz said. “You might remember him.”

  Analise’s gaze slipped over him. She was still smiling faintly.

  “I remember you, Ms. Fletcher,” John said.

  “I go by Jon
es now,” she said, her voice soft.

  Her maiden name, John remembered.

  “Thank you for coming in,” Liz said. She took her seat. “Can I ask you to state your full name for the tape, and confirm that you have waived the right to have a solicitor present.”

  Analise cleared her throat, her hands fussing for a moment on the edge of the table before she slipped them into her lap. “Analise Laurel Jones. And I don’t want a solicitor.” She blinked. “I’m not under arrest, am I?”

  “No,” Liz said. “You’re not under arrest. If that changes, you’ll be afforded another opportunity to get a solicitor. And you can ask for one at any time during this interview. You can also end this interview at any time.”

  “I haven’t done anything wrong,” Analise said. “I haven’t broken my parole conditions. I don’t even know why I’m here.”

  “As I explained to you when I called you, this is a follow up enquiry,” Liz said. “We regularly revisit our old cases just to make sure there’s nothing we missed the first time. It’s all routine.”

  Well, not exactly, but Analise didn’t need to know that.

  Liz’s smile was perfectly cordial. “I’m hoping you can tell us a little more about Simon.”

  Analise’s eyes widened for a moment.

  “Eight years ago, you told us that Simon ran away,” Liz said “Do you stand by that statement?”

  “Yes.” A small furrow appeared on her brow. “That’s what I was told by Ethan.”

  John exchanged a look with Liz, and let Analise read into it whatever the hell she wanted. That was often the trick with interviews: introducing enough doubt that people stumbled and overcorrected, tripping themselves up.

  A flicker passed over Analise’s expression, but John couldn’t interpret it.

  “I was told that Simon ran away,” Analise said again, shaking her head slightly.

  “And you believed that, even after what they did to your son?” John asked.

  Analise tilted her head as she regarded him curiously. “I think I do remember you.”