1
‘Maybe she just decided to leave you, mate.’
‘No! No way! We’re madly in love with each other. We’re the happiest family in the world. There’s no way she would have left me and taken our son.’
‘Look, that’s what they all say. Their wives are cleaning out their houses, movers are carrying out all the furniture and they still don’t realise that they are being dumped like a mangy old dog.’
His heart pounded like a base drum. His breathing was shallow and strained and there was a look of total panic in his eyes. He hadn’t shaved or even dressed properly. The young constable was trained to be completely unaffected by the surging emotions of the distraught man sitting opposite him. He was tempted to say something funny like, ‘take a ticket’, or, ‘get in line’, but he held back. He saw this sort of thing every single day. Some deserted husband ringing up in a panic, or busting in through the station doors, screaming something like, ‘she’s kidnapped my kids’, or, ‘she’s stolen everything’, or,
‘she’s run off with some bloke and emptied the house while I was at work’.
‘Look, why don’t you try and take it easy, mate. How about we make you a cup of coffee. You had breakfast? How about a doughnut.’
The policeman opened a drawer and brought out a printed form and a tape recorder and placed them on the desk between them.
‘I’ll treat this as a missing person’s report for now, mate. Why don’t you first tell me your name and address again and then start from the beginning.’
Adam took a few sips of the watered-down, instant coffee and a couple of bites out of a chocolate-flavoured, iced doughnut. He closed his eyes momentarily and sucked in a deep lungful of stale police-station air. His mind was in a complete spin. The policeman could see his hands shaking as he brought the coffee up to his mouth. Although he was young, with only a few years of on-the-job experience, the policeman had already learnt not to get sucked into any kind of ‘academy award performance’. He could remember his instructor telling him that crooks were the best actors in the world. ‘They are like wily old foxes and they’ll pull the wool over your eyes every chance they get. A good cop believes nothing.’
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After giving the policeman his personal details, Adam began a nervous and disjointed account of what happened.
‘Where will I start?’
‘Anywhere you like, Adam. How about the last time you saw your wife and son.’
‘OK, that was yesterday. I got home from work at the same time as usual, about five thirty. We had Ben’s tenth birthday party last weekend. Everything seemed normal. Libby was cooking dinner. She does these stuffed mushrooms. You’ve never tasted anything like them. She uses these strange herbs. Reckons they make you live longer. Ben was working in the workshop. He got a hacksaw to the brushcutter and was building his jetpack. It’s what he calls it. He’s had the idea ever since he got his roller blades.’
‘Excuse me, Adam, did you say that your son is ten years old?’
‘Yeah, he’s a genius, a bona fide prodigy. You know, he spoke his first words at four weeks of age.’
The young constable looked Adam squarely in the eyes trying to discern whether he was a nutter or a very cagey crook.
‘Please go on.’
‘Right back in the early days, Libby pulled him out of school because the teachers didn’t know how to deal with him. He always knew everything they ever wanted to teach him. It freaked them all out. Anyway, Lib got him out of there. That’s when he was six. She taught him herself through the correspondence scheme. He learnt a whole year’s worth of work in a couple of weeks, got a hundred percent in all his tests and then took the rest of the year off. He’s the most unbelievable child.’
‘You got that right. Please go on.’
‘Sorry, I’m going around in circles. I’m not making much sense.’
‘That’s OK, mate, you’re doing fine. You just take your time. We’ve got plenty of tape.
Please continue.’
‘Do you want to hear more about Ben?’
‘Whatever you think might help us understand your problem, as long as we get to your wife’s disappearance eventually. She did disappear? That’s still what you claim?’
‘They both disappeared … and took all their things. Nobody said anything. No note, no indication. It was just happy, happy … gone!’
‘Did she take the car?’
‘No, I’ve got the car.’
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‘How did she leave then?’
‘I … don’t … know … I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know …’
Adam broke down and started moaning, causing the constable to call in a female police officer. She came into the room, sat down next to him and put her arm around his shoulders.
‘He reckons his family has disappeared. His name is Adam.’
‘It’ll be OK, Adam, it’ll be OK. We’ll find them. That’s what we do, we find people.
You’ll be right, don’t fret.’
She looked at the constable with a ‘what’s going on with this guy?’ sort of look. He looked at her then rolled his eyes up at the ceiling as if to say, ‘this guy is some kind of nut.’
Adam slowly composed himself and then continued his story.
‘We had dinner, we laughed and listened to music. Ben described a small technical problem he was having with his machine. He told me he got Zeke to pop down to help him with it. I think he was looking for something to go around the throttle-control cable and Zeke came up with the idea to use a length of bicycle inner tube.’
‘This Zeke guy, who is he?’
‘Oh, he’s a really good friend of the family. I’ve known him for more than fifteen years. You wouldn’t meet a nicer guy, although most people think he’s a bit crazy, but that’s because they don’t really know him. Zeke and Ben are the best of mates. He’s like Ben’s uncle.’
‘Does he live locally?’
‘Yes, he lives alone up on top of the escarpment in a small two-room shack.’
‘Is there any possibility, in your own mind, that this Zeke person could have had anything to do with your wife’s disappearance?’
‘No way! Zeke’s got a heart of gold, and anyway, he’s pretty much a cripple. He nearly killed himself in a hang-glider accident about thirteen years ago.’
‘So, you had dinner and your son, Ben, was talking about his project. What happened then?’
‘What happened then? Well, nothing. Lib and I sat around on the veranda having a sm … a beer. She loves to talk about the stars. I keep telling her she should try to write a book; she has such a fertile imagination. Some of the stories she comes up with, I don’t know where she gets it all from. I can just sit back and listen, and I swear, she sends me off into her stories like they were real. We don’t even have a TV. We don’t need it. I’ve
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never enjoyed conversation as much with anyone as with Libby. To listen to her tell stories is like listening to Mozart playing music. You guys couldn’t even imagine it in your wildest dreams.’
The two officers looked at each other. Adam continued to speak into the small microphone.
‘After dinner, Ben went back up to the workshop to cut a thread into the end of the propeller shaft of his machine. He was going to use the new thread cutter that he asked me to buy for him from the hardware store. I guess he was still there till about nine thirty, messing about with his jetpack. By ten, we had all gone to bed. There are four bedrooms in the upper portion of the house. Ours is next to the bathroom and Ben’s is next to ours.
We all said good night and went to sleep.’
‘Ah, sorry to ask you this. Ah, please don’t take it as anything. I’m just trying to get the whole picture. Er, did you and your wife make, er, love last night?’
‘Oh, I see where you’re coming from. Look officer, we really, truly love each other, and of course we made love last night. We make love every night, and most of the days as well. Making love to Libby is like breathing for me.’
‘Thanks for that, Adam. Er, sorry I had to ask that question. It’s actually as hard to ask some questions as it is for people to answer them, but you understand, I’ve got to establish the nature of the relationship between you and your wife.’
‘Sure, it’s OK.’
‘So, what happened then?’
Adam looked at them for a moment, attempting to compose himself. He tried to speak a number of times, but the words just couldn’t find their way out of his mouth.
Unable to speak, he broke down and started to moan again. The young police lady consoled him and suggested another cup of coffee. Adam began shaking like a leaf.
‘Can we get him another doughnut, Sam? I think he’s going a bit hypo.’
‘Sure, I’ll pop out and get it.’
The male officer left the room.
‘Don’t try to say anything, Adam, take a break. I’ll switch off the machine.’
Adam began to turn white and break into a cold sweat. Realising that he could slide into syncope at any moment, the police lady positioned herself ready to catch him if he fell. Adam, however, just sat there looking like a sweating ghost. He’d had some
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experience at keeping his balance in a state of near unconsciousness. Sam walked back into the stark, featureless room carrying a whole tray of doughnuts and more coffee.
‘I put heaps of sugar in the coffee. Have a few swigs of this, mate … there you go …
you OK?’
‘Yeah, just feel a bit far away at the moment. Be with you in a sec.’
‘No worries. Have another doughnut.’
‘Thanks.’
Adam took a few deep breaths while Sam went out for a smoke. After about ten minutes, everyone was set. Adam began to speak into the tape recorder again.
‘I usually wake up when the light starts coming in through the window. Then I usually roll over towards Libby and put my arm around her and we just lie there like that.’
Adam took another big swig of coffee. ‘Jees this coffee reminds me of the coffee Libby made me when I first met her.’ He had a big sigh. ‘When I turned toward her this morning
… she … she wasn’t there!’
‘Was there any sign of struggle?’ Sam asked. ‘I know it’s unlikely seeing as you never woke up.’
‘No, the bed on her side was made like she never got in it.’
‘Amazing.’
‘And when I got up and checked Ben’s room, he was gone and his bed was made as well.’
‘What did you do then?’
‘I went downstairs and looked for them there. Then I called out their names. The silence hit me like a sledgehammer. I felt the first chills of panic shoot up my spine. I stepped outside, looked around and called out again. Nothing. I walked all around the house, in the garage, the workshop and the laundry. I ran back upstairs and checked the other two bedrooms. I was starting to spin out by now. I had another look into the bedrooms, just to make sure that I wasn’t hallucinating. For several seconds I actually made myself believe that it was just a bad dream and when I looked into the bedrooms again, they’d be there just like normal, but they weren’t. It was real. Then I thought maybe they went to the beach, maybe she went surfing, but she never went without telling me. I ran into the garage. Her board was still hanging on the wall. Then I thought they might have just felt like an early walk down in the park, so I got dressed and drove down there.
I looked everywhere. I kept thinking that I was just missing them and kept driving back
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up to the house, but they weren’t there. In the end, after driving all over Stanwell Park again, and even driving up the hill thinking that maybe they decided to climb up there, I went back home and had some coffee and just waited for them figuring that they should show up there sooner or later. I knew that the corner shop opened at eight, so I drove down there at eight and asked them if they had seen Libby and Ben, but no one had seen them since the day before. I waited till ten-thirty, then I came here … and here I am.’
There was a protracted silence as all three of them looked at each other. Then Sam suggested,
‘Why don’t you call home from here. They might have come back home since you left.’
There was no answer.
2
About an hour later, Adam drove up his driveway followed by a patrol car. Sam and the police lady, whose name was Margaret but everybody called her Meg, thought that they had better take a look at the ‘scene of the disappearance’. They all stood on the front veranda, the two constables completely overawed by the view.
‘Wow, Adam, this is so spectacular.’
‘Yes, we never get tired of it.’
‘Is that a vegetable garden?’ Sam pointed down towards the right front corner of the yard.
‘That’s Libby’s garden.’
‘Looks pretty freshly dug up.’
‘Yes, Lib just planted it out last week.’
‘She’s sure got it looking good.’
‘That’s because she’s a perfectionist.’
‘Could we see the bedrooms?’
‘Sure, up here.’
‘Have you altered anything?’
‘I haven’t touched a thing. I just put my pants on and looked in the wardrobes. Look, they’re all empty.’
‘It looks like no one else lives here, other than you. Can you show me something of theirs? Anything? Maybe a photo?’
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Adam scanned the room, desperately trying to spot anything that might have belonged to Ben or Libby, but he could see nothing.
‘They’re real. Go ask down at the corner shop.’
‘Can you excuse us for a sec please, Adam?’
The two officers stepped outside. They looked at each other as they exchanged a few quiet words. Finally, Sam suggested,
‘You want to take a run down to the shop and check that out? If the wife and son turn out to be real, then we’ve got ourselves a doozy of a case.’
Meg drove off and returned a few minutes later.
‘They’re real, Sam. The shop owner saw them yesterday.’
‘Are you thinking what I’m thinking?’ Sam asked.
They both uttered the same name, in unison.
‘Doyle!’
‘Definitely Doyle.’ Meg repeated. ‘This is too weird for anybody else.’
‘You want to call him?’
‘On it.’
After Meg made the call, they stepped back inside and calmly spoke to Adam.
‘Adam, er, it’s our job to assess the specific nature of a case and then call in the people who specialise in such cases. You’ll get a visit from a Detective Doyle in about an hour. He has a much more trained eye for this sort of thing. You’ll have your best chance of finding your wife and your son with him on the case. We’ll be going back now. Please refrain from touching anything.’
‘Would you like a coffee before you go? I owe you one.’
The two constables looked at each other and then at Adam.
‘You’ve found our Achilles heel, Adam. I guess we can spare a few more minutes.’
As it turned out, the two officers ended up waiting for Doyle as well. Sam thought that it would make everything easier if he briefed Doyle himself instead of leaving it to Adam to have to agonise through the whole story all over again.
The three of them were sitting on the front veranda, sipping away at their second mug of Adam’s fine coffee, when they were all startled by the sound of screeching car tires. They all stood up in unison and looked down the driveway. They saw a huge cloud of blue smoke surrounding a grey car, of indeterminable make, stalled half way up the driveway. Adam suggested,
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‘Tell him to take a bit of a run-up.’
Sam walked down and had a word with Doyle. They then all watched the grey car roll back down the driveway and almost disappear in the lingering blue fog. They heard the engine rev up and the car take off. As the back wheels hit the driveway, they broke traction and began to spin, furiously belching out clouds of blue smoke. The second time around, Doyle managed to burn nearly two thirds of the way up the driveway before coming to a complete stop, stalling his engine in the process. It became almost impossible to see anything for all the smoke. Doyle tried to restart the car but it wouldn’t kick over.
Sam made an observation.
‘I think there’s smoke coming out from under your bonnet, Doyle.’
Doyle backed the car down in neutral and rolled it backwards into a parking spot on the other side of the lane. Sam walked down the driveway and sat in the passenger seat of Doyle’s car. They sat there for about ten minutes while Sam briefed Doyle.
‘I’m still not sure if this bloke’s a nut. If it wasn’t for the fact that people around here saw his wife and son yesterday, I’d have written him off ages ago. Apart from that, there doesn’t seem to be one shred of evidence that they ever lived here.’
Doyle was a thin, fifty-five-year-old man who looked old for his age. He was a chain smoker who always had a lit cigarette hanging out of his mouth. He was officially retired but he still occasionally helped out in a tricky case. Secretly, he lived for the phone calls.
He loved a good case and these days they only gave him the best ones, the ones they couldn’t figure out themselves. He could now do whatever he wanted, whenever he wanted. There was nobody to answer to anymore. He was his own boss because he now did it as a favour.
Adam and Meg watched Doyle struggle up the driveway with a much younger Sam casually shuffling up beside him. When they reached the veranda, Adam put out his hand to shake Doyle’s.
‘Mister Doyle.’
‘It’s Detective Doyle, but you can just call me Doyle.’
Doyle’s beady little eyes scanned his surroundings as he put his hand out to shake Adam’s.
‘You’re Adam I presume?’
‘Yes, sir.’
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‘I got a pretty good brief from Sammy here, Adam. What you describe is a tad strange, but then, that is why I’m here. You see, strange is my speciality.’
‘I just woke up and they were gone.’
‘Apparently. Can I see the bedrooms, please?’
They walked up the stairs into the bedrooms. Doyle took his time as he carefully studied the scene.
‘So, all their things are gone?’
‘Well, Doyle, I don’t know, but I can’t see any of their stuff anywhere.’
Doyle tried again.
‘Is there anything here, at all, that is your wife’s or your son’s? Have a good think.’
Adam thought and thought, then suddenly remembered,
‘The surfboard!’
‘I knew it!’ said Doyle.
‘Her board,’ repeated Adam, ‘her surfboard, it’s hanging in the garage. I saw it this morning.’
‘Let’s go see it,’ suggested Doyle. When they got to the garage, Doyle asked Adam,
‘Would you mind taking it down?’
Adam unstrapped the fluid foil and brought it out into the light. He was the first to notice,
‘Hey, there’s no wax on this board. It’s been polished clean.’
Doyle wasn’t familiar with surfboards, so he asked,
‘How’s it supposed to be?’
‘It’s supposed to have heaps of wax on top, to give traction in the water.’
‘So, she cleaned the wax off, so what?’
‘She wouldn’t have, but she obviously did, but she wouldn’t have polished it up like this, though. I don’t know, Doyle, it just seems unusual. She was using it all the time.’
‘This is nothing personal, Adam, but technically speaking, that surfboard could be anybody’s. We’ll take a good look at it nonetheless. Let’s not touch it anymore. Meg, can you call in the lab boys. Adam, I’m getting a couple of lab boys up here. We’re still looking for evidence that your wife and your son actually lived here. They’ll want their prints and hopefully some hair follicles to get their DNA. Let’s sit tight, the boys will be up in about half an hour.’
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A few hours later, Sam and Meg had returned to the station and the lab boys were still busy searching and scouring the whole house with magnifying glasses, tweezers, microscopes and a variety of powders and chemicals. Adam noticed how they kept scratching their heads and placing their hands on their hips. Finally, Doyle pulled Adam aside and spoke to him in a low voice.
‘I find myself in a quandary, Adam. This place is too clean. Somebody’s cleaned this place up. There are no prints on anything, doorknobs, kitchen utensils, nothing. And your bed, we found a small hair in it, but the boys are sure that it’s yours. And the sheets and pillow cases, they’re not just washed, they appear to have been sterilised they’re so clean.’
‘Libby is very clean,’ said Adam.
Doyle continued,
‘There is no hair at all on Ben’s bed. There is no hair in the shower and just in case there might have been a trace of DNA embedded in the surfboard wax, that’s been polished off as well. Do you see my dilemma here, Adam? The boys only found a few of your prints. They reckon they’re the ones you made this morning, so the house was cleaned up sometime before that.’
Adam couldn’t believe what he was hearing. A shiver ripped through him as he thought to himself how like a huge Nitrous trip all this was. For a moment he actually wasn’t sure what was real. Fear began to take grip of his body.
‘Are you alright?’ Doyle asked.
‘Actually, I’m a bit shocked. I just woke up and all this was happening. Last night I went to bed with my wife. We were in love with each other. Ben went to bed in his room.
It was about 10.00pm. Off to bed, one happy little family. Sleep tight, see you in the morning light. Nite dad, nite Ben … that’s all I know!’
One of the lab boys called Doyle over and spoke to him in a low voice.
‘There’s no way he could have done this, Doyle. This house is devoid of even one human cell except for the two short hairs we found on his side of the bed, which are his.
It’s so clean that he couldn’t have possibly had any visitors. I’ve never seen anything like it. No DNA, no prints, this guy couldn’t have done this clean-up. Even a pro couldn’t do this. I mean, no hair, no skin, nothing in the rugs, give me a break! This is really, really weird.’
Doyle was almost watering at the mouth. This was going to be a feast for his soul.
He asked Adam,
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‘Sam mentioned a Zeke.’
‘He’s a good friend of the family. He lives up on top of the escarpment.’
‘Can we pay him a visit?’
‘Yeah, sure.’
They drove up to Zeke’s place in Doyle’s car and pulled up behind his hut. They knocked on the door and Zeke opened it. They could see the surprised look on his face when Adam introduced him to Detective Doyle. Doyle smelt the thick, pungent odour of smoked marijuana wafting out the door.
‘Don’t worry, mate, I don’t care what you smoke. I’m here about something completely different.’
Doyle gave Zeke a summary of the mysterious disappearance and then asked him to describe his visit the night before. Zeke’s description matched perfectly with the one Adam had been telling all along. Doyle enquired,
‘What’s the jetpack?’
‘Ben was building it and Zeke was helping him. It was their little project.’
‘So, what is it, Zeke?’
‘Oh, it’s just a thing for kids, to push them on their roller blades. It’s a small two-stroke engine with a model-aeroplane prop, on your back. It was Ben’s idea. He did all of it. I mostly kept him company. He was teachin me. He’s a genius, a total, mind-blowin genius!’
‘Let’s go see the jetpack.’ Doyle suggested.
They drove back down the hill to Adam’s place. They walked around the side of the new, two-car garage and up a small flight of stairs into the sizeable workshop above the garage. The new garage was Adam’s first major project after he settled down with Libby.
The first person to speak was Zeke.
‘It’s finished? No way! This is impossible.’
Adam immediately noticed a piece of paper lying on the workbench.
‘What’s this paper?’
‘Don’t touch it!’ snapped Doyle. ‘There’s a number written on it.’
Written on the paper, in inch-high numerals, was the number 2023. Adam commented,
‘That’s Ben’s handwriting. The two and the three, only Ben does them like that.’
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‘Don’t touch anything on this bench,’ said Doyle, ‘especially the paper. I’d like to see them clean that up. The boys will be back tomorrow …’
Zeke butted in on Doyle,
‘This jetpack was only half-finished last night. There is absolutely no way that Ben could have finished the machine between nine-thirty last night an now.’ Zeke pointed at the beautifully-welded, stainless-steel, propeller guard and exclaimed, ‘He hadn’t even drawn up the plans for this, an he’s got no welder. He’s never welded before, an check out these welds, they’re bloody perfect. You ever tried to weld stainless, Doyle?’
‘A bit out of my line, Zeke, but I take your point. What else do you see?’
‘I don’t know, everythin looks so clean an polished, but Ben always kept his tools lookin brand new.’
‘Never mind. Look, Adam, I can’t let you sleep in your house tonight. I want it locked up until the boys come back out tomorrow. They’ve got a room with a bed in it down at the station, or if you prefer, I’ve got a spare bed for the night. Well, that just about does it for my official duties so I guess this is where I bundy out. … Ah … listen Zeke … ah … I’ve had a tough day on the case and I … ah … feel pretty stuffed and you, ah, seem like a fairly reasonable sort of bloke to me and, ah, I was just wondering what you reckoned about a bit of a smoke for a tired old detective, eh?’
Zeke laughed,
‘Sure, Doyle, and a hot coffee if you like.’
‘Sounds good. Where do you want to stay tonight, Adam?’
‘Oh, I think I’ll stick with you, Doyle.’
‘You might as well take what you need and lock up the house.’
Zeke drove back up the hill followed a few minutes later by Adam and Doyle. When they got out of the car at the back of Zeke’s hut, Doyle took a short walk around Zeke’s yard. He noticed Zeke’s large, vegetable garden, which was looking slightly neglected. He kicked a few sods of dirt with his shoe then turned and walked back to the hut. They all sat around in Zeke’s guestroom and shared a few puffs of Zeke’s pipe. In a very relaxed voice, like light banter so as not to generate any tension, Doyle announced,
‘Just because I bundy out doesn’t mean I don’t talk about the case. You see, this isn’t just a job for me, it’s a passion, it’s my nectar of life.’ He casually turned towards Adam and calmly asked him, ‘Tell me a bit about Liberty, from before you met her.’
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Doyle’s skilful use of verbal technique ensured that Adam remained completely calm as he began to reminisce about the early days. Eventually he meandered into some relevant detail.
‘She was from California, from Manhattan Beach in the South Bay area. She had no living relatives. Her mum and dad died. She had plenty of money because of her uncle’s trust fund … and she was gorgeous … I can’t describe … you just fell in love with her. She was out here on a surf trip travelling in a van up and down the coast. God, it sounds incredible when I say it now. She was nineteen when I met her.’
‘Did she get pregnant before you got married? Sorry to ask, it’s just the case, no big deal.’
‘Yes, she was very fertile.’
‘And your son, Ben, do I remember Sam briefing me correctly? Did he begin to speak at four weeks of age?’
‘Yes, isn’t it amazing? We’d be driving down the road with Ben strapped in the back seat in his safety chair and he’d be reading out every billboard that we went past, and he was only six months old. It was like having a human audio billboard in the car. We loved listening to him. We laughed so much and we helped him and corrected his mistakes.’
Zeke contributed with a comment.
‘He is an amazin little engineer. He knows all the maths an his geometry messes with me mind. He understands stresses an materials an everythin, an he’s only ten.’
Doyle spoke to Adam,
‘So, there’s nowhere she could go, nobody she could have gone and stayed with?’
‘No.’
‘We don’t even have a shred of hard evidence that they were even here. Let’s get that first. I don’t know about you, boys, but I’m pretty stuffed. What’s say we take off, Adam, there’s still a bit of a drive.’
‘Where do you live?’
‘Brighton-le-Sands.’
3
It was dusk by the time they arrived at Doyle’s house. He lived in a quaint little red-brick house built during the post-war building boom of the fifties. He was situated a few blocks back from the beach and just a short stroll from all the nightlife and bright lights.
He lived alone. His home was neat and not too cluttered. Things seemed to be logically
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organised. His living room and his study were lined with bookshelves full of books. On closer inspection, Adam noticed that the majority of them were about UFOs. It was also obvious that Doyle was heavily into his computer. Adam asked him,
‘You’re into UFOs?’
‘It’s just me, kid. I can’t resist a mystery. The bigger the better and there’s nothing bigger than UFOs. The books are full of strange, illogical accounts. You won’t find anything like them in any other books. In fact, they’re a bit like the account I’d have to write if I wrote one about your case. But don’t worry, I don’t write accounts. I keep everything in my head.’
‘What are you suggesting, Doyle?’
‘Isn’t it obvious?’
‘Are you seriously suggesting that my wife’s disappearance had something to do with UFOs?’
Adam’s eyes were almost popping out of their sockets as he asked that question.
Doyle smiled at him and quipped back,
‘I only deal with facts.’
‘Yeah, but has that thought ever crossed your mind?’
‘What is this, the inquisition? OK, it’s possible that that thought might have crossed my mind. So?’
‘This is weirder than weird, and it’s getting weirder all the time. UFOs? Aliens? Little skinny runts with bug eyes? They pinched my family?’
‘The possibility is infinitely small, but the clean-up and disappearance without a trace, doodoo, doodoo. I’ve got to get that jetpack thing analysed tomorrow. Aren’t you getting tired?’
‘No! You’ve got me wide awake with your bizarre abduction idea.’
‘You know what I fear the most, Adam?’
‘No, what?’
‘What I fear the most is that we’ll never find out. If they did the whole job like they did the clean-up, we’ll never find out.’
‘What? You mean it will always stay a mystery, like it is now, not knowing what happened to them? That’s like a living hell!’
‘Oh, you’d have to get over it eventually, so you might as well get over it quick. That’s the way I see things. I wish that I could say that I was just your hallucination, Adam, but I
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can’t. What transpired today really happened, and believe me, it’s as weird for me as it is for you. But it was real, it was fact and therefore it has my undivided attention.’
4
Next morning, everyone was up at the house early. A couple of guys started digging up the veggie patch. Later, they went up the hill and dug up Zeke’s veggie patch as well.
He reckoned that they tilled it for him pretty good. They took away the jetpack and the piece of paper, with 2023 written on it, for analysis in the lab. They did a much more sensitive search for DNA in the whole house and the workshop. Better technicians came.
One of them showed Doyle an old screwdriver handle.
‘Look, Doyle, look how this handle’s been cleaned. It’s like it’s been sandblasted with fine sand. Look, all the fine crevices are completely clean. We can usually get plenty of skin cells out of something like that, but this is unbelievable.’
Doyle was getting less surprised by the minute. He walked around the house silently singing ‘doodoo, doodoo’ to himself.
They did everything they wanted to do and took everything they wanted to take. At the end of the day, Doyle spoke with Adam.
‘Well, I’ll be going now. You can stay in your house again. We’ve got everything we want so you can touch everything and go back to normal living. We’ll do some tests. I’ll be in touch. I’ve got your number, you’ve got my number, call me if something happens. I might drop in on Zeke on the way home. Do you want to come up for a while?’
‘No thanks, Doyle. I think that I’ve had just about enough socialising to last me a lifetime. I’m ready to crash.’
‘OK then, I’ll call you soon.’
5
A week passed with no word from Doyle. Adam was roller-coastering, struggling to stay on a mental even keel. He found that going to work helped because it gave him something else to think about. The hardest thing was coming home to an empty house each night. He usually drove straight to Zeke’s place and didn’t come home till late.
Entering his house, he didn’t even bother to turn on the lights. He went straight to bed in the dark and buried his head in his pillow and rode out the heavy stone from the many pipes he had with Zeke. Most nights he ended up crying himself to sleep.
Ten days after Libby and Ben disappeared, Adam’s phone rang late on Friday night.
Adam answered it.
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‘Hello?’
‘It’s Doyle. I’ve got your jetpack. I’ve also got some news I thought you might be interested in. I might drop down tomorrow morning if you’re free.’
‘I’ll be free, Doyle. I’ve been waiting for your call.’
‘See you tomorrow then.’
Doyle hung up before Adam could say anything else. Next morning, he huffed and puffed his way up Adam’s driveway carrying the jetpack in one hand and the prop guard in the other. He sat down at the veranda table to catch his breath and immediately lit a cigarette. Adam made him a coffee and sat down with him. He made a comment about Doyle’s smoking.
‘Those things will kill you; you know.’
‘Is that a promise?’ Doyle picked up the guard. ‘We tested the welds on this prop guard and guess what …’
‘What?’
‘They’re not welds. The whole guard is made out of one piece of stainless steel.’
‘That’s impossible,’ said Adam, surprised, ‘nothing could make this guard out of one piece of metal.’
‘Not on this planet,’ replied Doyle.
‘But look, Doyle, you can see the welds … see?’
‘They’re fake welds to make it look like they’re real, but it’s really one piece. I can’t believe that we’ve actually caught them out. Look, you can see it with the naked eye, here where we cut it. See how the metal is homogeneous right through the join. Except it’s no join, it’s one piece. We are holding a miracle, an impossible construction.’
‘Hang on, it could have been cast.’
‘It wasn’t cast. That’s the first thing we checked.’
‘You’re freaking me out again, Doyle. Tell me, what would a copper who hasn’t got a house full of UFO books say?’
‘He wouldn’t have tested the metal. He wouldn’t have known.’
‘So, you are suggesting that this stainless guard, that I am holding in my hand is …’
‘Extraterrestrial.’
‘God, Doyle, what are you doing to me?’ Adam paused, stared at the guard in his hand and took a few deep breaths to calm down. After a moment he asked Doyle, ‘What are you going to do now?’
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‘Not much. We’re going to file a missing person’s report. Pity there isn’t even one photo to put in it.’
‘Oh, that reminds me, Doyle. When my parents found out about Libby and Ben’s disappearance, my mum went looking for their photo album and guess what …’
‘She couldn’t find it?’ Doyle replied feigning surprise.
‘How did you guess? Mum thought she misplaced it and is probably still searching for it. Nobody broke into their house or anything.’
‘Of course not.’
‘The missing person’s report you’re filing, what are you going to say about all the weird stuff?’
‘There’s no point in reporting too much of that. They wouldn’t know what to do with it anyway. I’ll treat it as my personal case. I am here to help you, Adam, and to satisfy my own curiosity. I want to find your family … but …’
‘But? I know what but is, Doyle. But is that I’ll never see my family again. This case will never be solved, like you said in the first place, cause it’s as perfect as the clean-up.’
‘Nobody knows the future and only fools speculate with it. We’ll just see what happens. You keep the jetpack. I’ll be going now. Let’s stay in touch. See you when I see you.’
‘See you, Doyle.’
And just like that Doyle walked out of Adam’s life. He would not hear from him for over twelve months.
It was right about then that the full impact of what had happened hit Adam like a Mack truck. The full realisation that he was alone descended upon him like a thick fog.
The house, which seemingly only yesterday sang with the sounds of a happy family, today was silent and devoid of life, like a total vacuum.
…….
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