Strange Sally Diamond

She passed out again as I carried her to the car. I no longer cared what the consequences were. I didn’t even think of a name or a backstory or the jail sentence that awaited me. I laid her on the back seat on her left side. She began to shiver violently but appeared to be unconscious. At every corner, I reached for her. I was approaching the main road when she made this strange gurgling sound. Her whole body stiffened and then she went limp. I pulled over to the side of the road and climbed over the back seat. Her eyes were wide open in shock, but she wasn’t moving. I held my hand over her heart but could feel no heartbeat. I shook her and held her close to me. A spill of bile fell out of her mouth, but I kissed it anyway. ‘Please, no,’ I whispered. ‘Please, please, come back.’

I brought her home and washed her in the bath. Her skin took on a mottled colour. I washed and combed out her hair, careful not to let her head fall below the waterline. When she was clean and dry, I dressed her in her favourite clothes, a green cotton skirt, rubber-soled boots and a soft blue sweater. I wrapped her carefully into the sheepskin rug from the barn. Before I could put her in the car again, I had to clean it out with disinfectant.

It was about 2 a.m. when I drove to Lake Rotorua and parked in the deserted car park. It was a particularly chilly autumn evening. I carried her to the part of the lake that was closest to the forest trail where I’d first seen her, a brave little girl climbing a tree. I unfurled her stiffened body from the rug and gently folded her into the water. It must have been deep in that part, or maybe it was because it was dark, but she disappeared from view almost immediately.

49 Peter, 2019

When Lindy died in 2012, I was distraught. She was the person I was living for. I took extended leave from work. I had plenty of colleagues who had never turned into friends and, even if they had, how could I tell them that the love of my life, my only love, had died. I could not explain this to a bereavement counsellor; the intensity and length of our relationship, the co-dependency. Who would understand it, even if I told the truth? And I could not tell the truth.

I saw no reason to shower or change my clothes. Twice, I went to the lake with the intention of drowning myself, but when I hit the bottom of the lake, Rangi was there, pushing me back up. ‘It’s not your time, e hoa,’ he said, or I think he did. Three deaths on my conscience, Dad, Rangi and Lindy, kēhua, and all three of them came out to play, both in my nightmares and in my waking hours. All of them pleading with me to save them, and I could have saved them all.

I dismantled the barn bit by bit. I took the pieces of furniture and left them on the side of the road in remote areas all over the North Island. I was left with a pile of sheetrock and corrugated iron. I couldn’t be bothered to have it taken away. At least it no longer looked like her home. In the house, though, her presence remained.

The mystery of the unidentified woman found at Lake Rotorua three weeks after she died was a big story. The media reported that she had not drowned, that she had died of appendicitis, that she was fully clothed, that she had been in the water for less than a month. They made much of her missing front tooth. It would be a significant identifying factor, according to the police. Reports commented on the fact that the body of this woman was discovered at the same lake where a young girl had gone missing almost thirty years earlier.

I needed to get away from Rotorua. I had turned down job offers in Wellington and Auckland before but when I eventually went back to work after five months, I put myself forward for those jobs. There was nothing to tie me to Rotorua. Maybe a fresh start was what I needed. Another reinvention. I was appointed Head of Cyber Security at the Aotearoa National Bank in January 2013 in Wellington. The pay and conditions were excellent.

In preparation for the move, I removed what remained of the barn, and scrubbed the house clean with bleach from top to bottom. I kept very little of my father’s belongings, apart from his old fake identification documents. I had lived under a false name for so long, but I needed some back-up in case anybody ever questioned it.

I had promised Lindy that I would never read her notebooks. I tore them up and scattered them on long journeys in the middle of the night.

I sold up in Rotorua and rented a waterfront apartment in Wellington Harbour and tried to settle in, but I could hear people in other apartments, talking, laughing, watching TV together. I could smell their family meals. I bumped into so many people on a daily basis that I felt ill. After just a month, I moved out and bought a small detached house on South Karori Road. I had no neighbours that I could see. My commute to work was a thirty-minute drive.