Free Hades by Candice Fox Page A

watched as he heaped the ball of cats’ tails out onto the floor, watching them uncurl like furry worms of every conceivable color—black and burned orange and chestnut and white. There were eighteen in all.
    Eden started to cry.

8
    A ccording to the missing persons report filed by her parents, eleven-year-old Courtney Turner had disappeared on the short walk home from a sleepover at her friend’s house. Courtney had left the Oberon Street house at seven o’clock in the morning, crossed the Randwick cemetery on Malabar Road and gone missing somewhere between Elphinstone Road and her house on Jacaranda Place. Nobody saw a thing. I knew that area. It was quiet and leafy and narrow back there behind the cemetery—rolling hills and shadowy lanes and plenty of housing commission flats. Endeavour House was near there, full of navy and army boys.
    At eight o’clock the morning she went missing, Courtney’s parents had phoned her friend’s house. At half past, they’d gone for a drive. At ten o’clock they’d arrived at the Maroubra police station and sat in the waiting room among the families of drug addicts and drunk teenagers for an hour. They were turned away. It was too early to file a report, they were told. At midnight they’d sat down with an apologetic Constable Alan Marickson to make a full report. Courtney was long gone by this time and everybody knew it. Gone, baby, gone.
    It had been two weeks since Courtney disappeared when Eden and I turned up on the doorstep of the Turner house. Until now, the case had been handled by the missing persons department. From my discussions with them that morning it seemed they’d tried to hand the case over to homicide after a week and had been knocked back due to lack of evidence. And the big bosses were reluctant to cause a stir in the press by hinting that a child killer might be lurking around its pretty beachside suburbs. Lately, it seemed like missing persons had been whining a lot about a steep caseload and no one had taken them seriously. The discovery of the Watsons Bay bodies seemed to justify their concern about an upsurge in their work.
    Courtney’s mother clearly recognized Eden from the news reports about the bodies in the boxes. Her knees went and I caught her before she hit the deck. I heard her husband calling from the kitchen.
    Soon the screaming stopped and the numbness set in. The four of us sat around the glass-top table in the Turners’ stylish dining room, burning in the silence. Courtney’s mother, puffy-eyed, sat beside Eden, staring at her reflection in the microwave. The father chewed his knuckles.
    I’d been in this situation a number of times and this was usually how it went. They howled and denied and threw things around. They sobbed and moaned and blamed each other. After a while the awkward presence of the cops was noted and everyone was invited to sit down. Then the parents closed up.
    Eden was making notes quietly in her notepad. It looked like she was plotting a novel. I glanced around the kitchen, counting the purple tiles on the splashback above the sink.
    Courtney’s mother was a small, thin blond woman. Her husband, by contrast, was huge and red-haired, like a caricature Viking. Agony was thick in the air. There were framed photographs of the girl everywhere. On the kitchen counter sat a stack of posters with her face. I couldn’t draw a correlation between the smiling preteen beauty in the “missing” posters and the sunken-eyed corpse I’d seen in the morgue only hours before.
    I lost track of the conversation thinking about Courtney. Eden was cracking her knuckles. She made a few pages of notes from the barely whispered words of the mother.
    “Who’s Monica?” Eden asked softly. Eliza Turner bit her lips. She took a breath and sighed. The gold bracelet found in the box with Courtney’s body was in the center of the table, still in its evidence bag.
    “We have another daughter, two years older than Court,” Eliza