A Child's Book of True Crime by Chloe Hooper Page A

head. “You can’t pick them apart.” For a moment she looked wistful, then she turned to me, holding out a sandwich. “Lucien won’t eat this. Would you like it?”
    “Oh, thank you.”
    At that moment, I wanted more than anything for Veronica to like me. I had no problem suspending belief that I was her husband’s lover. In fact, perhaps I never had been: I was her friend. Being able to say, “Yes, Veronica is a great woman” seemed very mature. It struck me there was something so pure about her. I guessed that was the irony. You probably needed that purity to embark on such a brave, gory project—if you were already exhausted and cynical, it would all be too much. I took another bite, savoring the salmon. Since Veronica hadbrought it to my attention, I now thought perhaps Malcolm was catching my eye and giving me meaningful glances. While we ate lunch he stood staring out at the bay. He’d skip a pebble, then look back to make sure we were watching. It was impressive that he felt so passionately about all this history. Only just obscured, over the water, were the Suicide Cliffs which marked the eastern side of Point Puer. I saw Malcolm skip another pebble. “Oh, this sandwich is good!”
    “Lucien even runs like his father.”
    I held the bread, staring at the water.
    “He runs and his arms barely move.”
    “Really?”
    She gestured over the bay, shaking her head. “My husband finds my connection to the Black Swan Point crime slightly . . . repellent,” Veronica confided. “He’s very old-fashioned. But while writing the book I walked with him around the cliffs and I had to acknowledge there’s a struggle within all of us . . . An eye for an eye.”
    I didn’t speak.
    “You know, Kate, you get to an age and your whole body starts to fall apart,” Veronica said. “A lot of the women I know are having their eyes done. My best friend just fixed her breasts.” She saw my expression and added, “I understand it—she’s thinking of getting a divorce—and I’ve felt them.” Veronica laughed briefly. “Lou told me about it while we were shopping. Very funny, us in a changing room; she lifting up her shirt for me to have a squeeze.” She paused. “They weren’t rocklike. Listen, all I’m saying is I understand it, but I’m not doing it. If I did it I’d still look like a forty-year-old woman. Why try to look like a neat forty-year-old woman?”
    I wasn’t sure what to say. “Well . . . the thing is, for every wrinkle there’s more wisdom.”
    “No, there’s just another wrinkle.” Her voice grew businesslike; she was finally waking. “My friend found out the hard way that men reach a certain age, and they want to fuck around, because they only can for about five more minutes, and they want young flesh. ‘So, fine,’ I say to her. ‘Let them fuck.’ You know? You don’t have to take a knife to yourself.”
    “You can take a knife,” I began, before I could stop myself, “to the young flesh.”
    She laughed. “That’s good, that’s quite good.”
     • • • 
    After lunch, Malcolm stared out to where the convict ships would have dropped anchor. The children followed his gaze, disappointment clouding their faces. There was now a luxury cruise ship parked in Opossum Bay, but what had they expected? A chain of skulls strung together? Pickpockets’ loot hidden under loose rock? I could hear my heart beating.
    Malcolm pointed toward a small island, covered with eucalyptus, in the middle of the bay: “In between Port Arthur and Point Puer is L’Isle des Morts,” he announced dramatically, before admitting the convicts referred to their burial site as Dead Island. “The officers had headstones facing toward England; the convicts’ mass graves faced in the opposite direction. The gravedigger was a giant man who walked with a cane in each hand,” he continued. “The authorities were relieved when he volunteered to live by himself on the island, because he had a