Perfect Victim by Megan Norris, Elizabeth Southall Page B

were running out of options. Maybe if the police could see we weren’t closing down on their options they would not close down on ours, and keep searching.
    But if Rachel had run away, where would she go?
    We decided to walk around Mont Albert, where we had lived for five years, renting my stepmother’s house. We walked through the grounds of the local primary school. I felt ridiculous searching under shrubs, walking behind shelter sheds, and sussing out the play equipment, calling Rachel, Rachel, RACHEL. I checked in the shadowy brick corners of the old school building. Would I find a sleeping child like the children we saw by St Paul’s? I knew she would not be there.
    We split up. David and Renée, Michele and I.
    ‘Tape the posters to all the light poles,’ I said. ‘We’ll put posters in the letter boxes of our old friends.’
    I hesitated outside a two-storey house, pausing at the letter box. ‘Gail Reid lives here,’ I said.
    Michele said, ‘Go and knock on the door.’
    I put one foot inside the front fence, stepped back and pushed the poster through the letter box.
    ‘Elizabeth?’ said Michele.
    ‘I can’t.’
    It was a large sombre-looking house in the night light.
    We walked hurriedly around the corner. ‘Do you think anyone saw us?’
    ‘No,’ she said, looking back.
    A few moments later she said, ‘Look at that gargoyle. Makes you want to shudder.’
    ‘Part of Gail’s house,’ I said. ‘It’s not a happy house.’
    I remember, one afternoon, a few years before, Gail sitting at our dining-room table. We were enjoying a cup of tea and a chat. She had been to see a clairvoyant whom she hadn’t seen in a long while. I recall Gail saying she was feeling a little cheated. The clairvoyant was talking more about her Barber friends. We were a family Gail should not lose touch with, she said. We would remain lifetime friends.
    A phone call came through from Mike. They had driven past the man’s house several times. His car was in the driveway. Everything seemed okay. They had sat for an hour at the entrance to the no-through road. They decided not to check his family’s holiday house, so they drove to Wattle Park.
    Mike considered it possible that Rachel might have arrived at the Wattle Park tram stop after he left on Monday night. Perhaps she had gone to buy those two tops she had been interested in, forgotten the time, and on arriving late and finding no Mike, waited at the tram shelter, only to have been coaxed or dragged across into the park.
    A week had gone by. Mike went into the park looking for a body.
    Mike and Shaun split up and covered the whole grounds, checking the old trams, checking beneath tree canopies and around the creek. They half expected to find some kids shooting up or evidence of recently used bongs, but he knew she wouldn’t be there. We knew she hated drugs, intensely. ‘Mum,’ she said to me, on at least one occasion while on the phone, ‘are we doing anything this Saturday? I’ve been invited to a party.’ All the while shaking her head. She later said she’d recently discovered the girl smoked dope and didn’t want to go to the party.
    Mike walked along the boundary of the golf course and around to the back, discovering walkways and footbridges he didn’t know existed. It was eerie in the dark.
    There was a party up at the café near the tennis courts. People were out and about, glasses in hand, laughing. What would these people think of the torchlights searching the grounds? Nobody noticed, or if they did – what was it to them?
    The creek was densely overgrown, dirty-looking. Mike searched the undergrowth and along the edges – looking for Rachel lying beneath a film of murk, green algae braiding her hair. What did this father imagine now? What of his living grief? It wasn’t an imagined fear: it was a real fear that he would come across the distorted body of his first-born.
    I can still see the pride in his face when he first saw her. He was