Fall by Candice Fox Page A

tugging at Joanie’s elbow. ‘Joanie.’
    â€˜No, my one’s out there.’ Joanie shrugged Tara’s hand away, laughing uneasily, pointing towards the curve in the track and the bushland beyond. ‘My Tara’s out there somewhere.’
    â€˜Joan–’
    â€˜Go find your mother,’ Joanie said, pushing Tara’s face away. She turned her hip, blocking the child from the woman beside her. ‘Jeez. Weird kid. Anyway, so you were saying?’
    Tara waited, but her mother didn’t turn back around. In time she walked through the crowds towards the school.

 
    They try to tell you that if you’ve got a couple of observers at the autopsy, it’s because they need experience for their forensic medicine degrees, but … I don’t know. I’ve had so many young observers hanging over my shoulder through the years, I just can’t get next to the idea that studying to be a ghoul is so popular. When we arrived to view the autopsy on Ivana Lyon there were two young men already there, guiltily fumbling with their notebooks, surgical masks pulled tight like the shoelaces of kids on their first day of school. I gave them a fiery look as I waited for the tech to set up. I’m convinced a certain percentage of these kids are just too curious about murder corpses to stay away.
    Beyond the glass, someone from Ivana’s family was watching. An older brother or something it looked like. I’ve only seen parents attend once. I don’t know why family would come at all. It’s not how I’d like to remember someone I loved. I guess in murder cases they like to see that nothing goes awry. The liver isn’t dropped on the floor or accidentally swapped with the patient on the next table. It’s pretty grim.
    Eden was unusually fazed. It was by all accounts her bread and butter, but she was restless, sighing, looking at her watch. She’d ditched the crutch for the morning, but I expected her tobe back to it by midday. Leaning against the table, her ponytail pulling up the corners of her eyes and her blouse pressed to within an inch of its life, she might have been the old Eden, the one I knew before her brush with death. Except that she was chewing a thumbnail. Her eyes were hard. I nudged her in the side and she jumped.
    â€˜What’s wrong with you?’
    â€˜Too much coffee.’ She stretched her neck so that it cracked on either side. I knew that was a lie but I didn’t push it. Eden could have snorted coffee like cocaine and not got the jitters. She absorbed chemicals like a sponge. I’d never seen her so much as tipsy.
    â€˜You’ve got to come to dinner with Imogen.’
    â€˜No,’ she said.
    â€˜What makes you think you can put her off forever? She gets what she wants. She’ll start turning up at your house, I’m telling you.’
    â€˜I would strongly suggest she doesn’t do that.’ Eden looked into my eyes. I felt a cold splinter in my chest, sweat prickle at the back of my neck. I cleared my throat, tried to focus on the technician laying out the tools like some kind of slow, methodical sadist. The brother behind the glass was watching the ceiling, fighting tears.
    â€˜What’s your beef with Imogen?’
    â€˜I think you can do better.’
    I scoffed. She was serious. I hadn’t expected the comment. It was kind of sweet. Strangely, bizarrely sweet, coming from a complete sociopath and ruthless serial killer who I’m sure got up every morning and looked at herself in the mirror and wondered whether today was the day she should kill meand dump my corpse in a mangrove somewhere, watch crabs pluck out my eyeballs.
    â€˜Imogen is –’
    â€˜Imogen’s an owner, Frank,’ Eden said. ‘She’s going to own you and train you like a newborn pup until you either bend to her command or snap her hand off one day, and it’s probably going to be the latter before