The Right Side of the Desk

"In a small town, everyone thinks they know your story. The trick is finding someone who hasn't read ahead."

The police station smelled the same as it always did—that familiar musty stench that greeted me at every visit, a combination of old paperwork and floor polish and the particular staleness of a building where air conditioning was a suggestion rather than a reality. I'd been here too many times. For noise complaints, for the incident with Paul's car, for the argument the neighbours had called in. Each visit another entry in a file I could picture even without seeing it, another line in the story of Claire Smith's failing marriage.

Today I would add a new chapter. One I was writing myself.

"Can I help you, Ma'am?"

The voice came from behind the reception desk, and I felt the first flicker of something that might have been luck. The woman who stood there was unfamiliar—young, dark eyes behind wide-rimmed glasses, her uniform still crisp enough to suggest recent arrival. Not Sal. Not anyone who would look at me and see the accumulated history of every previous visit, every complaint, every notation in whatever file bore my name.

Sal must be at lunch, I thought, walking straight up to the desk.

"Paul is ignoring me, again," I said bluntly.

The woman's face crinkled with confusion, her inexperience leaking from every crease. "And who is Paul?" she asked.

"My husband," I replied.

"I'm sorry. I'm not sure how I can help you."

"Hmph." I scoffed loudly, letting the sound carry the weight of a woman at the end of her patience. Such incompetence. But useful incompetence. The kind that wouldn't dig too deep, wouldn't ask the questions a more experienced officer might ask, wouldn't look at Claire Smith and see anything beyond what Claire Smith chose to show her. "You must be the new one."

"The new one?" the officer repeated, her tone matching the ever increasing rise of her brow.

"My husband is always full of dramatics. Everybody here knows it," I told her, pressing my palms against the countertop as I leaned heavily forward. My eyes darted about the otherwise deserted reception. Empty. Good. No Sal returning early from lunch. No other officers who might have questions of their own, who might look at the file on the screen and remember details this new woman wouldn't know to look for.

"I'm not sure I quite understand," said the officer.

I paused my thumb through the assortment of brochures that sat atop the severely-cracked wooden reception desk—community notices, crime prevention tips, tourist information for visitors who'd somehow found themselves in Broken Hill and needed suggestions for passing the time. Looking up, I met her glare and stood my ground firmly. "Well of course you wouldn't. You're new," I said.

"Again," the officer began, "how can I help you?"

They're really scraping the bottom of the barrel with this one, I thought. But that was exactly what I needed. Someone who would take the report, enter it into the system, create the paper trail—without the institutional memory to contextualise it, to connect it to other reports, to see the shape of something larger forming in the gaps between what I was saying and what I wasn't.

I sighed loudly, performing the additional burden of having to assist a struggling cop. "I've been speaking with his mother who lives in Adelaide. She insists she hasn't heard from Paul either."

The officer's confused, yet otherwise blank stare continued unabated.

"She's a known deceiver. I wouldn't expect a newcomer like you to understand," I said.

"A known deceiver?" the cop repeated.

Oh, for fuck's sake. What the hell is wrong with this woman!? I leaned across the counter, a single strand of my braided hair brushing across the brochures, sending several of them fluttering toward the cop. "She lies. All the time," I said in a hushed voice, as though sharing a confidence, before standing back up straight. Several bones cracked as I gave my body a gentle stretch—the accumulated tension of two days without proper sleep, two days of searching, two days of carrying what I was carrying.

The officer glanced at the computer screen in front of her. "And your husband's name?" she asked, unable to mask her obvious disdain by her over-the-top polite intonation.

"Paul Smith," I answered.

"Paul Smith," the cop muttered, typing loudly on the keyboard. Then her eyes changed—a brief lighting up, quickly suppressed, returning to their furrowed position. "And you must be Claire Smith?" she asked.

I felt my stomach tighten. The file. She was reading the file now—the accumulated record of every call, every complaint, every incident that had brought Claire Smith to the attention of the Broken Hill police. The unsubstantiated complaints. Whatever Sal had written, whatever notes existed in that system, whatever story had been assembled from the fragments of a marriage falling apart in full view of a small town's curious eyes.

Carefully, I studied the cop's eyes, their movement indicating that she was engrossed in the notes. She doesn't need to read them all, I told myself impatiently.

"Ignore what they say about me," I interjected quickly. "Loud voices in a small town seldom mean anything useful... or truthful."

The cop ceased her pointless reading and returned to what appeared to be her standard response of glaring at me uncomfortably.

"Greta," I said, eager to hurry the cop along and have Paul's missing person's report entered into the system. That was what mattered. The official record. The documentation of a concerned wife doing what concerned wives did when their husbands disappeared. Not a suspect. A victim. A woman seeking help, not fleeing from it.

"Excuse me?" the cop replied.

I frowned, my focused eyes holding back an instinctive roll. "His mother's name is Greta."

The cop shrugged.

"Gimme some paper," I told her, grabbing the black biro that lay atop the desktop.

Fumbling with a post-it note, the cop tore off a yellow sticky and handed it over.

I scribbled Greta's phone number quickly—the number the dumb cop should have looked up herself, or at the very least had the nous to ask for. "Call Greta," I said, handing the note back. "Tell me she's not covering for her childish son."

"That seems a little harsh," the words fell effortlessly from the cop's lips.

Harsh. She had no idea what harsh looked like. Harsh was a lounge room floor with blood spreading across the carpet. Harsh was a gun on the ground and a mother bleeding out and children lost somewhere in the outback while their grandmother died whispering directions that led nowhere. But none of that could show on my face. None of that could enter my voice. I was a woman worried about her husband, nothing more.

"I'm worried that this time Paul may actually take the kids away from me," I said, my face drawn and serious.

The cop glanced back down at the screen. "Did you and Paul have an argument a few nights ago?" she asked.

"That has nothing to do with it!" I snapped, more than I intended, folding my arms across my chest.

The file. The bloody file. Whatever was written there—whatever Sal had noted, whatever the neighbours had reported—was pulling her attention in the wrong direction, toward the wrong story, the one that ended with domestic disturbance and a marriage in crisis rather than the one that ended with—

Stop. Focus. Don't let her see.

I watched the cop continue to stare at the screen, my foot beginning an anxious tap against the floor. How much was in there? How detailed were the notes? And when the bodies were found—when Dawn's house became a crime scene—would someone pull this file and read it with new eyes, looking for connections, looking for the shape of something they'd missed?

Impatient and not at all keen for the cop to finish her read of the report, I interrupted. "I'm leaving for Brisbane tomorrow to visit my sister, and taking the kids with me. For their protection."

The lie came out smooth and steady, a statement of fact delivered with the calm certainty of a woman who had every right to make such a statement. Taking the kids to Brisbane. For their protection. As though the kids were at home right now, or at Dawn's house, or anywhere I could actually access them. As though I hadn't spent the entire morning searching abandoned mine buildings for two children I couldn't find.

The cop's head tilted, her glasses slipping to the edge of her pointed nose. "I don't see any actual wrong-doing here. You're perfectly within your legal rights to take your children to visit your sister," she said.

"I know," I replied, no longer surprised by the cop's apparent lack of policing skills.

A Silverton Artwork brochure caught my attention among the scattered papers on the desk. Paul likes that place, I thought—the gallery out in the desert, the sculptures, the way he used to drag us all out there on weekends and stand in front of the metal figures talking about form and space and the relationship between art and landscape while Mack fidgeted and Rose asked when they could go home. I slipped the brochure into my handbag. A habit. A reflex. The gesture of a wife who still thought about her husband's preferences, who still collected things he might like, who was definitely not a woman whose parents were lying dead across town.

"Find my husband," I said, feeling the beginnings of an unwanted tear building in the corner of my eye. Real, that tear. Genuinely felt—though for what, exactly, I couldn't have said. For Paul? For the children? For the mother whose blood I'd scrubbed down the drain an hour ago so I could stand here and lie?

"I'll look into it," the cop said.

Finally satisfied that the inadequate cop might have felt just enough emotion to follow through with searching for Paul, I turned and made a hasty exit from the building.

It's best you're not here when Sal gets back from lunch, I told myself, pushing through the door into the bright midday street. The sunlight was sharp after the dimness of the station, and I blinked against it as I walked quickly toward where my car was parked across the busy main road.

Best not to let any of the other cops see you, really, I thought, darting between cars, the rear lights of my own vehicle flashing as I pressed the key fob. Wouldn't want them helping that new incompetent, but somewhat useful cop from changing her mind.

With a conscientious glance about—checking the street, the footpath, the windows of the shops that lined the main road—I got into the car.

The door closed. The sounds of the street dropped away. And I sat in the driver's seat with my hands on the wheel and my heart hammering against my ribs and the taste of every lie I'd just told sitting in my mouth like something bitter, something I needed to swallow or spit out but couldn't do either.

I'd done it. Created the paper trail. Established myself as a concerned wife, a woman with a missing husband, a mother planning to take her children to Brisbane for their protection. When the bodies were found—and they would be found, today or tomorrow or the day after—that record would exist. Claire Smith, visiting the police station at noon on Friday to report her husband's disappearance. Claire Smith, cooperative and concerned. Claire Smith, with a documented reason for leaving town that had nothing to do with fleeing a crime scene.

It wasn't enough. I knew it wasn't enough. The moment they found Dawn and Greg, the questions would start. The timeline would be examined. Someone would notice that Claire Smith had visited the police station hours before the discovery, that she'd mentioned taking the children to Brisbane, that she'd been anxious about her husband but hadn't mentioned her parents at all.

But it was something. A thread of narrative I could hold onto. A version of events that didn't begin with I walked into my mother's house and found my father dead and my mother dying and my children gone.

The lies would hold or they wouldn't. The bodies would be found today or they wouldn't. But the children—my children—were somewhere in that landscape, and I was the only one looking.