Clean Hands

"There's a moment in every performance when you stop being yourself and become the person the audience needs to see. The trick is knowing exactly when to make the change."

I sat in the car on a street I didn't recognise, my forehead against the steering wheel, my bloodied hands in my lap, and I let the shape of the problem settle around me like water finding its level.

I couldn't find them alone. That was the first fact. Inescapable, mathematical. The search area was too large, the variables too many, the resources of one woman in a car laughably insufficient against the scale of what I was facing. Even if I searched for another day, another week—even if I drove every track and checked every ruin and shouted myself mute—the odds of finding two children in that landscape without help were negligible. Approaching zero. The kind of odds you didn't calculate because calculating them meant accepting them, and accepting them meant giving up.

I needed help. That was the second fact. Police. Search parties. The apparatus of official response that existed precisely for situations like this—missing children, desperate parents, the machinery of rescue cranking into gear. I needed people with maps and radios and the authority to mobilise resources I couldn't access. I needed the very thing I couldn't have.

Because asking for help meant explaining. That was the third fact, and it was the one that closed the trap.

Where did you last see the children, Mrs Smith?

At my mother's house.

And when was that?

Yesterday afternoon.

Can we speak with your mother?

The questions would come in that order, or close to it. Standard procedure. Reasonable enquiries. The kind of questions any officer would ask when a woman walked in and reported her children missing. And every answer I gave would lead, inevitably, inescapably, to a house on the other side of town where the drawn curtains hid what I'd left behind.

They'd go to Dawn's house. They'd find the door unlocked. They'd walk inside, the way I had, and smell what I'd smelled. And then I wouldn't be a desperate mother anymore. I'd be a suspect. A person of interest. A woman with blood on her hands—

My hands.

I looked down at them. Still unwashed. Still carrying the evidence of yesterday afternoon in the creases of my knuckles, under my nails, in the fine lines of my palms. My mother's blood, dried dark, mixed with dirt and ash and my own blood from the cuts I'd opened and reopened throughout the morning. The hands of a woman who had held her mother while she died. The hands of a woman who could not sit across from a police officer without those hands being seen, examined, questioned.

That's quite a bit of blood, Mrs Smith. Mind telling me how that happened?

I couldn't report the children missing. The logic was brutal but complete. Any report, any official enquiry, any request for help that began with my children are lost would end with my parents are dead and I was there. The two facts were connected by a chain of causation I couldn't break—the children were missing because Dawn had hidden them, and Dawn had hidden them because something had happened at that house, and I had been at that house, and my fingerprints were on the gun.

The bind was perfect. Airtight. I needed help to find my children, but asking for help would ensure I never saw them again—not as a free woman, not as their mother, not as anything but a defendant in an orange jumpsuit being led into a courtroom while cameras flashed and reporters shouted questions about the grandmother-killer, the mother who'd murdered her own parents and then—what? Lost her children in the outback? Let them die of exposure while she was being interrogated?

I pressed my palms against my eyes. Saw red—not darkness, red—the colour that had followed me for two days now, the colour I couldn't escape.

Unless.

The word surfaced like a bubble through murky water. Small at first. Tentative.

Unless I didn't ask for help with the children.

I lowered my hands. Opened my eyes. The street was still there—ordinary, suburban, a row of houses I'd never noticed before, people inside them living lives that had nothing to do with mine. The morning was passing. The day was passing. Every minute I sat here was a minute my children were alone.

Paul.

The name arrived fully formed, complete with its implications.

Paul, who had walked out five days ago. Paul, who hadn't answered his phone, hadn't responded to messages, hadn't contacted his own children. Paul, whose absence was the original crisis—the one that had started all of this, the domino that had fallen first and set everything else in motion. Paul, whose disappearance was already known to everyone who mattered: Gertrude, the hospital staff, Karen Walsh, Greta. Paul, whose vanishing act was documented, witnessed, uncontested.

A missing husband was a legitimate concern. A wife reporting her husband's disappearance was a sympathetic figure—worried, frightened, seeking help from the authorities. A woman doing what any reasonable woman would do when the father of her children failed to come home.

Not a suspect. A victim.

I sat very still, feeling the shape of the idea as it assembled itself. The pieces clicking together with the precision of a mechanism designed for exactly this purpose. A concerned wife. A missing husband. A visit to the police station to file a report, to ask questions, to establish herself as a woman with nothing to hide—a woman so worried about her family that she'd come in voluntarily, cooperatively, helpfully.

And while the police looked into Paul—while they made their enquiries and checked their databases and did whatever they did when a husband didn't come home—Claire Smith would be on record. On the right side of the desk. A citizen seeking assistance, not a suspect being investigated.

It wouldn't help me find the children. Not directly. But it would do something else—something that might matter more in the long run. It would establish a narrative. A version of events in which Claire Smith was a woman dealing with her husband's abandonment, not a woman fleeing the scene of a double homicide. It would create a paper trail that led away from Dawn's house rather than toward it. And it would buy time. Time for me to keep searching. Time for me to find another way.

Time before everything collapsed.

The coldness of the calculation frightened me. Not the calculation itself—the ease of it. The speed with which my brain had moved from desperation to strategy, from I need help to here's how I can manipulate the situation to my advantage. Some part of me had been building this all along, I realised. Running the numbers in the background. Preparing for the moment when the grieving daughter would need to step aside and let someone else take over.

Someone harder. Someone capable of walking into a police station with a performance ready to deploy.

But not like this. Not with these hands.

I started the car. Drove home through streets I navigated without seeing, my body operating the vehicle while my mind worked through the logistics. The narrative needed to be clean. Consistent. A worried wife, yes—but not a panicked one. Not a woman who looked like she'd spent the night lying awake and the morning crawling through abandoned mine buildings. A woman who was concerned enough to seek help but composed enough to be credible.

I needed to shower.

The thought that had been impossible yesterday—the thought my body had rejected, recoiled from, refused to execute—was now simply the next item on a list. Shower. Clean clothes. Hair brushed, face washed, the appearance of someone who had slept and eaten and functioned like a normal human being. The costume of ordinary distress rather than the reality of extraordinary catastrophe.

My hands. I would need to wash my hands.

The house appeared around me. My driveway. My front door. I didn't remember the turns, the traffic lights, the streets between the side road and here. I was simply home, as though the car had delivered me automatically, following a route so familiar it required no conscious input.

Inside. The hallway was dim and cool and smelled of nothing worse than the faint mustiness of a house that had been closed up overnight. Normal. Safe. The shell of the life I'd lived before yesterday, preserved like a museum exhibit, waiting for someone to come back and inhabit it.

I walked to the bathroom. Turned on the shower. Stood watching the water fall, the steam rise, the mirror fog over until my reflection disappeared.

My hands.

I looked at them one last time. The blood—darker now, almost black in places where it had accumulated in the creases. The dirt layered over it. The cuts, scabbed and re-opened and scabbed again. The particular topography of the last thirty-six hours mapped onto my skin.

My mother was on these hands. The last physical trace of her, pressed into me, carried with me through the night and into this morning and across the kilometres I'd driven and the buildings I'd searched. I'd refused to wash her away. Had held her against my chest in the shower's steam and felt the irrational, feral, unnameable thing that said not yet, not yet, she's still here, don't let her go.

Now I was going to scrub her off so I could lie to the police more effectively.

I stepped into the shower before I could think about it further. The water hit my shoulders, my back, ran down my body toward the drain. I put my hands under the stream and watched it turn brown, then red, then pink—the layers dissolving, separating, swirling away. The nail brush was on the shelf where I'd left it yesterday, when I'd picked it up and put it down and couldn't make myself use it. I picked it up now. Scrubbed. Under the nails, between the fingers, across the palms. The bristles catching on the cuts, reopening them, fresh blood mixing with old as I scraped and scraped at skin that was already raw.

The water ran clear eventually. My hands were red—scrubbed red, abraded red, the colour of flesh that had been scoured clean. I turned them over, examined them. No trace of brown remained. No dark crescents under the nails. Nothing that would make an officer look twice and ask uncomfortable questions.

My mother was gone. Down the drain, into the pipes, into the ground beneath the house. Mixed with soap and shampoo and the ordinary detritus of ordinary showers in ordinary houses where no one had died.

I turned off the water. Stood dripping in the steam. The mirror was completely fogged now, the glass blank and white, offering no reflection. I wiped a streak across it with my palm and a face appeared—mine, apparently, though I didn't recognise it. The eyes were red-rimmed but clear. The jaw was set. The expression was something I couldn't name.

Not grief. Not fear. Something harder. Something that had crystallised in the space between deciding to wash and actually doing it.

I dried off. Dressed in clean clothes—proper clothes this time, not track pants and a jumper. Jeans. A blouse. A cardigan that looked respectable without trying too hard. The uniform of a middle-class woman going about middle-class business on a Friday morning. Parent-teacher conferences. Coffee with friends. A visit to the police station to report her missing husband.

Hair brushed. Face washed. A touch of concealer under the eyes, hiding the worst of the sleeplessness. Lipstick—not much, just enough to suggest someone who hadn't entirely stopped caring about appearances. I looked at myself in the bathroom mirror and saw a stranger. A woman who could walk into a room and tell a story and have it believed because she looked like the kind of woman whose stories were believable.

The hands were the last thing. I moisturised them—a habit, an automatic gesture, but also practical. The lotion softened the rawness, hid the worst of the abrasion. My hands looked clean now. Cared for. The hands of a woman who hadn't spent the morning crawling through ruins and climbing into chimneys and bleeding onto the outback dirt.

I found my handbag. Keys. Phone. Wallet. The equipment of normal life, assembled with the care of a soldier checking her kit before deployment.

The car was warm from sitting in the sun. I started the engine and backed out of the driveway and drove toward the police station with my clean hands on the steering wheel and my clean face arranged into an expression of appropriate concern and my clean conscience nowhere to be found.

I knew there was a new officer. I'd heard talk—at the school gates, in the supermarket, the kind of casual gossip that circulated through a town this size. A young woman, recently transferred in. Felicity something. New to Broken Hill, new to the force, new to the particular dynamics of a place where everyone knew everyone and histories stretched back generations.

Someone who wouldn't know me. Wouldn't know Dawn and Greg, or Paul, or the Smith family's particular brand of dysfunction. Wouldn't look at Claire Smith and see the daughter who'd been in hospital this week, the wife whose husband had walked out, the woman the whole town had been whispering about.

Someone I could manage.