Ghost Child by Caroline Overington Read Free Book Online Page A

Jacob came along next?’
    ‘That’s right,’ she said. ‘And his dad’s a dead leg, too. Not welcome in this house. Then there’s Harley, and you might as well know, Harley’s actually got the same dad as Lauren. He turned up for five minutes whenshe was four, long enough to knock me up again, and me believin’ all his bullshit, and then he’s shot through again.’
    I said, ‘And there’s another one? A fourth child?’
    And she said, ‘Yeah. Hayley’s me youngest.’
    ‘All right,’ I said. ‘And these blokes, they’re off the scene but I’ve got to ask you. Is there any idea in your mind that one of them might have had something to do with this?’
    Lisa said, ‘Are you bullshittin’ me? I ain’t seen jack of ’em in years. If you find ’em, can you let Family Services in on the secret, because I’m owed child support.’
    She lit another cigarette. Humphrey had disappeared from the screen and Hayley, the toddler, was getting restless and clingy. Lisa reached down and picked an old dummy up off the carpet. She sucked it for a minute, to clear it of lint, and put it in the child’s mouth. I remember thinking, ‘My wife would have a heart attack.’
    I tried to get back to the events surrounding Jacob. I said, ‘Okay. So you’ve given Jacob and Harley the money to go to the shop for cigarettes …’
    ‘ I gave ’em the dough,’ said Peter. Why he wanted to make a point of that, I cannot tell you.
    ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Peter, you gave them the money. They left here around 5 p.m. Did you give them any instructions? Do you know which way they went? Do they always go the same way?’
    ‘I told ’em, you go straight there and you come straight back,’ said Lisa.
    ‘Yeah, and they do whatever the hell they want,’ said Peter.
    Lisa turned sharply toward him. ‘Nobody’s askin’ you, mate. If you gave ’em any discipline, if you’d get off your arse, instead of sitting there smokin’ bongs …’
    Peter shrugged and said, ‘Not my kids.’
    ‘Not my kids,’ she mimicked him.
    ‘Not my problem,’ he replied, smiling in a slightly menacing way, his foot slapping against his thong.
    ‘Not my problem.’ Lisa mimicked him again. ‘You bloody live here. You’re the one hangin’ around here, demanding to get your tea cooked … you’re the one who decided to make ’em your problem.’
    I thought, ‘Now, that’s a strange thing to say.’ In what way had Peter made the children his problem? But Peter said, ‘ You’re the one that let ’em run wild.’
    I let them go at it. Probably, I was thinking, ‘How many times have I had to listen to a conversation like this? “They’re not my kids, they’re your kids.” “You don’t discipline ’em. You gotta smack ’em.” “You smack them and I’ll smack you and see how you like it … ” How many times have I been to a house on the Barrett Estate to find, for example, a man with a bloody nose, head-butted by the woman in some dispute over her kids gone wild?’ So I let them keep at it, and after a while, I said, ‘Where’s Jacob’s bedroom?’
    This seemed to startle them, at least into silence. I wondered why.
    ‘What’s that got to do with it?’ Lisa said. ‘Why do you gotta see Jake’s bedroom? Why aren’tcha out lookin’ for where Jake got bashed ?’
    ‘We’re doing that,’ I said. I would have kept my voice gentle. There was no need for Lisa to know, not yet, that uniformed police had walked the schoolyard where Lisa claimed to have found Jacob, and there was no flattened grass or scuffs in the dirt, no patch where a body might have fallen to earth. Also, why had the bloke in the shop said he’d have remembered two kids coming in to buy cigarettes, yet he couldn’t remember Jake, and he couldn’t remember Harley, not even when our uniformed guys had gone there and shown him a photograph of two of the most distinctive kids you’re likely to see?
    Besides, if Lisa’s story was true, well, it would have