There were predators beyond the wire. I knew they were there, although in the months since I’d been released from incarceration I hadn’t yet seen one. My evening ritual was to come down to the shore and look for the ominous rise of two dead eyes above the surface of the water, the flick of a spiky tail. Feeding time. Half a ton of prehistoric reptile lolling and sliding beneath the sunset-lit water, separated from me by nothing but an old, rusty fence. I looked for crocodiles every day, drawn to the bottom of my isolated property on Crimson Lake by the recollection of being one of them. Ted Conkaffey; the beast. The hunter. The hidden monster from whom the world needed to be protected.
I couldn’t stop myself coming down here, though holding the wire and watching for the crocs brought up the comparisons, the dark thoughts, all those scary old memories of my arrest, my trial, my victim.
She was never far from my mind. Claire would come to me at the strangest times, more vivid than she possibly could have been when she first etched herself into my memory, standing there at the bus stop by the side of the road. Every time I thought about her, I saw something new. Gentle wind from the approaching rain tossing her almost-white hair over her thin shoulder. The glaring outline of her small, frail body against the blue-black clouds gathering on the horizon.
Claire Bingley was thirteen years old when I stopped my car beside her on the ragged edge of the highway. She’d stayed at a friend’s house the night before. Her backpack was stuffed with pajamas, half-eaten bags of candies, a brightly colored magazine; little girl things that would in a few short hours be spread over an evidence table and dusted with fingerprint powder.
We had looked at each other. We’d hardly spoken. But on that fateful day, the backpack would stay by the side of the highway while the girl came with me. I snatched her right out of her beautiful little life and pulled her, kicking and screaming, into my depraved fantasy. In a single act, I ruined everything that she ever hoped she could be. If all my plans had come to fruition, thirteen would have been her last birthday. But she survived the fiend that I was. Somehow, she crawled back out of the woods where I left her, a fractured remnant of who she’d been when she stood before me at the bus stop.
At least, that’s what everyone says happened.
Only half of that story is true. I did stand before the child at the bus stop that day, impossibly taller and broader and stronger than her, opening the back door of my car, watching her nervous eyes. But in reality, I’d only pulled over to shift my fishing rod off the backseat where it sat leaning against a window, tapping irritatingly on the glass as I drove. I’d spoken to Claire Bingley briefly, but what I’d said wasn’t an invitation to come with me, a plea or a threat. I’d made some stupid comment about the weather. Cars full of witnesses had whizzed past us on the road, looking out, photographing us with their suspicious minds, knowing somehow that we weren’t father and daughter, that something was wrong here. Premonition. I’d got back in my car and driven away from Claire, forgetting her instantly, having no idea what was about to happen to her. Or me.
Someone did abduct that little girl, just seconds after I’d been there. Whoever he was, he did take her into the woods and violate her, and he did make that awful decision, the worst a person can make—he decided to kill her. But she survived, too traumatized to know who the hell had done this to her, too broken to put anything much about the crime into words. It didn’t matter what Claire said anyway, in the end. The public knew who’d done this. Twelve people had seen the child, seen me standing not far from her, talking to her, the back door of my car yawning open.
I’d heard the story of Claire’s attack described to me so many times across my trial and incarceration that it was easy to see myself doing it. There are only so many times you can hear a lie before you start living and breathing it, actually remembering it like it was real.
But it was not real.
I’m not a killer or a rapist. I’m just a man. There are things I am, and things I used to be. I used to be a cop, a new father, a devoted husband. I’d been someone who could never imagine myself wearing handcuffs, sitting in the back of a prison van, standing in the queue for chow in a correctional facility food hall, a wife-killer in front of me and a bank robber behind. There had been only one little girl in my life, my daughter Lillian, whose existence on the Earth I was still measuring in weeks when I was arrested.
I used to read voraciously. I drank red wine, and I danced in the kitchen with my wife. I regularly wore odd socks and I often left beard stubble in the bathroom sink. I was an ordinary guy.
Now I was a runaway living on the edge of nowhere, looking for crocs, watching the sun disappear beyond the mountains across the lake. Wandering back up the hill, my hands in my pockets and bad thoughts swirling. When an accusation like that comes into your life, it never leaves. The story of what I had done to Claire Bingley played on and on, in the minds of my ex-colleagues, my friends, my wife, Claire Bingley’s parents, and the barrister who prosecuted me before my trial collapsed; they saw it just as vividly as I saw it. An unreal reality. A false truth.
People passed the story on to each other in whispers as I walked into the court in cuffs. The media printed it. The television stations ran it. The story was so real that it came to me in flashes of light in the strangest moments—while I was showering, while I was sitting alone on the porch drinking Wild Turkey and watching the water. I dreamed about it often, woke sweating and twisted in my sheets.
I am not, and never have been, a pedophile. I don’t find children sexually attractive. I never laid a hand on Claire Bingley. But that doesn’t matter. To the world, I am a monster. Nothing was ever going to change that.
Working on my goose house seemed to drive out the darkness, so I went to the newly erected structure and stood before it, making plans. Around me on the sprawling, empty lawn seven geese wandered, plucking at the grass, muttering and clucking contentedly to one another. When one settled by my feet, her hunger apparently sated, I reached down and stroked the back of her soft gray neck, the feathers collapsing, weightless, until I felt the soft, warm flesh of her neck underneath. My geese don’t think I’m a monster, and that’s something, at least.
I never planned on being a goose daddy. I spent eight months in prison with no idea if I was ever going to see the outside world again, let alone what I might do if I was ever released. I didn’t have a home to go to. Three weeks after my arrest, my wife Kelly had started to turn her back on me, the weight of the evidence against me and the pressure of the public opinion simply too much for her to withstand. I didn’t make any plans for life after the accusation. I was taken to prison and I tried to survive each day there without going completely insane or getting myself killed. Then, without warning, three months into the trial proceedings, with my lawyer looking more strained and exhausted with every passing day, the Office of Public Prosecutions dropped the charges against me. The legal procedure, a motion of “no billing,” meant that I was not technically acquitted. I was not guilty—but I was not innocent either. There simply wasn’t enough evidence to ensure I would be convicted, so they decided to let me go until new evidence could be acquired, if any ever surfaced. With the knowledge that I could be re-charged at any time, I was sent out into a hateful city. I went home, packed my things and fled north on nothing more than the instinct to hide and terror of the public’s revenge. Kelly wasn’t at home when I left. She refused to see me. I had to borrow a car from my lawyer.
Not long after I’d arrived in Crimson Lake and rented this small, beat-up house, a mother goose with a broken wing had showed up and interrupted my sunset drinking, squawking and flapping on the other side of the wire—the croc side. It was the first time in more than a year that I’d laid eyes on a creature more helpless than myself. The three-foot-tall, snow-white Anser domesticus, which I named Woman, had six fluffy chicks trailing behind her, just begging something slippery and primordial to emerge from the dark waters of the lake and snap her up. Since then, Woman the goose and her babies and me had lived together on the edge of the water and tried to heal.
Her babies had grown up quickly, and these were the creatures that surrounded me now as I assembled their new living quarters, approaching at times, examining my bare feet in the lush grass or pecking at my pockets where I sometimes kept grain pellets. Watching, their beady eyes following my hands as I pushed the screws into the corrugated iron roof of the playhouse.
Yes, instead of a proper goose coop, I’d acquired a children’s playhouse. Not the most sensible idea for a notorious accused child rapist living in hiding with no children at home. I’d found the playhouse online, free to whomever was willing to come and pick it up from the nearby town of Holloways Beach. I’d scrolled past it at first. It was a dangerous idea. Vigilantes and gawkers had learned of my presence not long after I arrived in town, and they still drove by my house every now and then, curious about the man who’d somehow escaped justice. And one in three times when I opened the front door to a knock, it was a journalist who greeted me, notebook and pen thrust out like guns. All it would take was for one of these people to spy the playhouse in the backyard to bring the press and the public mob to my front door, pitchforks in hand, once more.
But money hadn’t exactly been in abundance, and the playhouse was free. A genuine goose coop cost anything from $1,200 upward, and all I really needed to do to the playhouse was remove the floor and replace it with wire, and build a ramp to the entrance for Woman and her young. Since I’d found them, the family of geese had settled on the porch of my small, barren house, and I liked to sleep out there on the couch sometimes when the night was hot and loud with the barking of crocodiles and the cry of night birds. More than once I’d been awakened at dawn by the sensation of a goose beak foraging for bugs in my hair. Sometimes the first thing I saw when I opened my eyes in the morning was a curious bird-face inches from mine, waiting for me to hand out the breakfast pellets. Something had to give.
I squatted in the grass and swept away some of the cobwebs from under the playhouse, tested the base with my fingers. I would cut it out with a jigsaw, staple a sheet of wire across the bottom, then fit a steel tray I could unhinge and spray out to keep the house clean. The construction of the cubby was solid and would protect the birds from the foxes and snakes that sometimes made guest appearances around the property, preying on waterhens down by the shore. I went to the front of the playhouse and opened the shuttered windows, tore down the moldy curtains that some kid had probably spent many years enjoying drawing against the outside world, closing their little house off in privacy for their games. Playing house. My daughter might have enjoyed a playhouse like this. She was going to be two years old in a week. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen her in person, held her, warm and wriggling, against my chest.
“I’ll tie these up for now,” I said, pushing the shutters closed on the windows, showing the geese as the chipped wooden frames clicked into place. “But eventually I’ll probably put locks on. You can have them open during the day. You lot are sleeping in here tonight.” I pointed, stern. “You’re not sleeping with me. It’s getting weird.”
Copyright © 2018 by Candice Fox
