A Place for Sinners Read online

  Dedication

  This book is dedicated to two people and a place. The first person is my editor, Don D’Auria, the guy who took a chance on me, and whose support keeps me in business. The second person is Jian Vun, the guy who dragged me out of the house and onto an adventure that changed my life in every possible way.

  And lastly, this one is for Thailand.

  The island waits, as it always has and always will, twitching, shifting, ever hungry and impatient. Her sugar-white sands hold on to the day’s final burn, but loose their grip as the sun drops behind the mountains. She bruises in twilight. Soon her children won’t be able to tell sky from ocean, and that is okay. That is the way things are meant to be. It is easier to hear her speak in the dark.

  A sly shape between the branches, shadow against shadow.

  Then there comes the music, reedy chords of loneliness and melancholy chiming together. It is a song that most don’t live to dance to.

  Avenues of trees and trodden path; galleys of lightning-charred branch and vine. She is a restless, always-stinking mother, and is without architecture or rhythm. Her tallest fruit mocks icy, distant stars.

  Starved, half-blind animals prowl her orchardways. Spider eats mosquito; bird eats spider; monkey eats bird. There is the sound of tearing skin, a cough as bone catches in throat. It doesn’t move her; she has no concept of mercy. She was old when the first men to stumble her shores were young, and she was not to blame for what happened to them, either.

  Spider eats mosquito. Monkey eats bird.

  There is laughter in her canopies when the sun dares touch her again. Fish swim in her veins, celebrating the new day. Moss steams. Last night’s scat becomes the food of this morning’s scavengers.

  The island watches over it all. She is an impatient mother. Frustrated, she sometimes quakes and splits, but not often. There are long stretches of still silence. Silence interrupted by music. And like the twilight—like it all—it is okay. That is the way things are meant to be.

  And so the sun sets again. So she continues to wait.

  They will come.

  Yes, they always did. All creatures seek retreat in the end.

  Part One

  Chapter One

  Amity

  1

  A caul of mist painted the world a dull, headache gray. It was just after six in the morning on June 8, 2000, and those who still slept did so in fits and spurts. The small Australian town of Evans Head writhed with concern, illuminated by the defiant torches of men and women who refused to give up their search with the coming of the sun. A little girl was lost.

  “Amity!” called one voice.

  “Amity Collins,” called another.

  Over and over they yelled, throats red-raw and eyes bloodshot. The night had been grueling; fatigue ran deep. Whiskey no longer calmed or fueled, only thumped in their heads, as incessant and violent as the waves against the shoreline.

  Crabs ran sideways across the sand until snatched up by gulls, leaving behind disembodied claws and shells. A bloodied white feather. Sun fought unyielding fog.

  Seven-year-old Amity Collins had wandered from the tent near Chinaman’s Beach where she, her older brother and her father had been sleeping. They were a local family drawn from the comfort of their home on Yarran Street by mild adventure. Camping had been Amity’s idea.

  Janine Collins was at church, surrounded by friends, instead of searching for Amity with her husband. The room was cold. Knees ached against pews and the old wood groaned, the sound not too dissimilar from the group’s murmurs. Both were tortured, in their own way, yielding weights unaccounted for in their design. the groans falling from their lips were indecipherable from the wood

  Janine’s hair fell across her face, yesterday’s makeup still on. She worked at the Saint Vincent de Paul Opportunity Store on Woodburn Street and found comfort in the oddities and used clothes. On that morning, as they entered the ninth hour of Amity’s disappearance, she longed to go back there and make sense of those chaotic aisles of junk. It was soothing, in a way. And right now that was just what she needed.

  The stained glass murals—timeless faces trapped in glass—splayed the church in a kaleidoscope of color. Rosary beads whispered between fingers. Father Lewis, whose eyes danced in the shimmering light, was leading the group in a search of a different kind.

  “Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for our sins now…”

  The Collinses’ house was dark with all the doors and windows locked tight.

  White roses wilted against the lip of a vase on the glass dining room table; photographs lined the walls. Amity’s older brother, Caleb, lay in his parents’ bed upstairs. The home phone rested on the pillow next to him, the cord coiled around his fingers.

  A family friend had escorted him home earlier but hadn’t stayed. Caleb was alone now, content with exhaustion, lingering in that nowhere place between nightmares lived and those that were only dreamed. He remained there until seven, when the alarm clock blared barbs of music.

  The tent was swallowed up by mist.

  Inside: empty sleeping bags and a Raggedy Ann doll, the button eyes staring off into nowhere. Wind blew hard off the ocean, vomiting sunshine into the clearing. Dead trees full of spiders, their webs outlined in dew, shook and quivered. The tent flap stirred and a sliver of light cut across the doll’s face, and then was gone, fleeting as hope.

  2

  Amity Collins didn’t go anywhere without her transistor radio; she kept the palm-size unit tied to her wrist with a blue shoelace. The antenna almost stretched the length of her arm, and there were My Little Pony stickers—that she’d fished from a box of cornflakes—covering the battery hinge.

  She loved the pop stations, with their carousel of bubblegum melodies and all of the funny talk between the hosts, even if she sometimes didn’t understand what they were blabbering on about. And then, just as thrilling, was the noise between these stations, sometimes little more than a captured squeal of frequency pinned by a fingertip against the dial. Ghost sounds. Once, she’d even heard the voices of highway truck drivers, their conversations full of naughty words. That had been cool, a random glimpse into a life outside of Evans Head, the (uncool) east coast town she’d lived in her entire life.

  Amity wanted to be Carmen Sandiego when she grew up, the red-coated wonder woman from her favorite cartoon who crossed the planet in the name of mystery solving. This titular character would pop up in random locations, in dangerous situations, and Amity would applaud, jumping up and down and clapping in front of the family television set. Watching that program had gifted this child with the sense that the world might just be bigger than she had imagined.

  Like those truck drivers whose ghost voices she heard if the dial of luck clicked in her favor: Where were they going? Where did they come from? Wondering at the wonder of it all—it was enough to make her head spin.

  She’d been humming the Carmen Sandiego theme song when she wandered from the tent. The tune didn’t last long. And the radio was now shattered into pieces.

  The dogs were huddled around the cave, three of them, shaking their matted fur and fighting with each other. Accordion ribbed and bound whole by countless scars-on-scars, Amity thought they must have been wandering the scrublands for a long time. Ropes of saliva swung from their jowls as fleas hopscotched back and forth among them. These were creatures from the dead trees, from the part of town where little girls were not allowed to go, and yet somehow, here she was—the kind of places where the wolves in her picture books were as real as the hands that turned the pages.

  Despite pain, Amity wondered, Are they older than me?

  The dogs bared their teeth and growled every time she scrambled close to the jaws of the cave.

  �
�Pa! Pa, please! Help me! Help me!”

  She felt like a bone the animals had found and claimed as their own. It terrified her to think it, but she believed that her blood—now candying their maws and tongues—was a taste they found favorable. Sweetness forbidden until today. They were desperate for more.

  Amity was trapped, her back flat against the cave wall. The dogs glared at her with candle-flame eyes that flickered with the potential to burn and cause pain, or perhaps just blow out and die.

  3

  The door to the Collinses’ house swung open and Caleb came running out—only to trip over one of his father’s boots. This was no surprise; his mother had predicted this would happen if the family continued to ignore the rack she’d brought home from work. And Caleb had to admit that he was just as bad as the rest of them; he owned more scuffed and battered running shoes than all of them put together.

  “It looks like there’s an army staying here,” his mother would say. “It’s a pig’s breakfast!”

  Yeah, if I got a dollar for every time I heard that one.

  “This place is a bloody brothel,” was another popular turn of phrase, although Caleb didn’t quite understand what that meant. Weren’t brothels places where men went to have sex with prostitutes, like Cherry’s Retreat, that grungy joint on the road to Lismore (not that he was positive it was a whorehouse, though the schoolyard speculation had been fueled by a reliable source: the year eleven student who worked as a pizza delivery boy in town)? Brothel… How could his untidy room, with the sports posters hanging off the walls from where the Blue Tac had peeled away and his bedsheets knotted on the carpet, resemble such a place?

  Whatever.

  “I’m so angry, I could just spiflicate you!”

  That one confused him too, but there was no mistaking the venom in his mother’s threat, or how Caleb or his sister should react: Dummy up and run as fast as you can. She’s on the warpath.

  “Do it, or I’ll wear your guts for garters!”

  He could see himself on the floor, legs splayed, ribbons of blood dripping down the walls. The image made him come over all shivery.

  Caleb wondered if that was where Jack the Ripper got his ideas from: Momma dearest.

  Nah—Janine Collins, for all her weirdness, wasn’t so bad. Sure, there were times when Caleb hated her as only a son could, or was scared by her restlessness and mood swings, but there was also a lot of tenderness in the woman.

  Her arms beneath the folds of her winter nightgown, which she wore every night, regardless of the season, wrapping around him. Mumbled comfort.

  “You’ll be right.”

  “Come on, chin up.”

  “Things get better. You’ll look back on this someday and laugh.”

  Caleb wasn’t so sure about that last one. Monday to Friday, between nine in the morning and three in the afternoon, his days were full of guys who wore their pimples with pride, trying to flog his ass at handball, and girls who lived to bitch. Caleb didn’t want to look back on them and laugh. In fact, he didn’t want to look back on them at all.

  No way, José!

  But the boys he could handle. They were puppies, just like him, longing for affection, which was kind of endearing in a way. Hell, even borderline cute. The pimples, however, those they could keep to themselves, thank you very much.

  It was the girls, with whom he associated more often, that dealt the fiercest blows. They were forever armed with endless tests and impossible-to-meet criteria.

  If you’re really my friend, you’ll do this. You’ll do that.

  Boys were a lot easier to handle, which was a shame, because he just didn’t find them as fun to hang out with. Caleb couldn’t stand it; the pressure was incredible. Were one person to fuck up, it threatened to drag down the reputation of the entire group. For some reason, that person always ended up being him. And Caleb was no idiot. He knew they never had his best interests at heart, but that wasn’t the point—it couldn’t be—the moment it did was the moment it all started to hurt, the slowly penetrating blade plunging deep. Yes, his friends were selfish, and yes, he still longed for their approval.

  Sometimes, Caleb envied his younger sister. To be seven was to see the world as nothing but marvelous. It was so unfair. Situations that would stop Caleb’s heart filled Amity’s with wonder. She was free.

  Caleb’s jump from the front door to the bottom step was misjudged. He landed on his knees, pain crawling as skin peeled back to welcome gravel. “Don’t cry! Don’t. Don’t.”

  Was I just spiflicated?

  The fog had thinned, but the end of Yarran Street was still obscured. He limped past the family Holden and caught a glimpse of his reflection in the driver’s window. The sight of his warped, manic expression shocked the breath out of him.

  4

  The dog’s teeth were bared. Black gums. It stank of the ocean, of fog.

  Watching it inch closer was like watching a storm roll in off the sea, and Amity didn’t like storms. She’d watched a movie on television about them, and had felt naughty the whole time because it was rated M and she knew she wasn’t allowed to watch anything over G. G was safe, it was Toy Story or Barney’s Great Adventure. M, on the other hand, meant “old”. In the film about the storm, a man had been sucked out of the cellar in his backyard by the strength of the wind alone. There had been flashes of lightning and hail pelting down. Screams—the shriek of a grown-up.

  Men weren’t supposed to scream or cry; those were the rules.

  Day comes after nighttime; men marry women; girls wear dresses and boys wear shorts. Guys don’t cry. Or scream.

  Rules.

  Every time thunderheads crawled across the coastline, the image of that man being lifted up into the air came back to her with chilling clarity. Could such a thing happen to Pa? And if it could, did that mean that she was at risk too?

  Little girls don’t die. She knew this as much as she did anything. The world protects its children.

  “Doggy, don’t!” Amity screeched. Hands clenched tight. The shoelace that had tied her transistor radio to her wrist now hung around her bones, loosening, as was her defiance. She half smiled at the monster; maybe it was nice after all. Smiles always made people feel happy, didn’t they? So who knew, perhaps they made doggies feel better too—

  It snarled, leaped forward and snapped its jaws down inches from her fingers. Amity screamed and jumped backward, cutting up her shins on the rocks and oyster shells.

  Seagulls rode the wind outside, dropping scat and cawing.

  “Stop!” Amity screamed, pushing her palms against her ears. The radio lay in pieces before her, sprinkled with beads of water and blood.

  Waves crashed below, shaking the earth and dislodging rocks. The dank cave filled with the stench of natural gases, making her eyes water. Each breath filled her lungs with dust and mold spores. Each cough, a stab of pain. Cockroaches spilled from a crack in the ground on a thoughtless tide of legs and shiny backs. The dogs raised their heads and barked as the waves struck again, throwing fans of water up into the air. Only the water was full of eucalyptus oil from the weeping trees along the shore, turning the froth red.

  Caleb walked the cold church aisle, passing under the stares of religious statues, immobile enemies waiting to strike. Their vacant eyes didn’t move, though he was certain that they saw.

  His chest seized, squeezing out his breath. One of the marble figures held a dagger.

  He stumbled; the ceiling stretched high above him, vertigo sweeping in. Nausea hot on its heels. A similar sensation had overcome him the prior summer, when he and his clique of female friends had visited the Ballina Pool.

  He’d climbed to the top of the highest waterslide but had been too frightened to go down it. He watched the water rushing down the blue fiberglass alley as the sky drained of color overhead. The blowing wind tried to make wings of his scrawny arms.

  Jump. Slide. Fly. Fall.

  His friends, whom he was always desperate to impress, had laughed.


  Later, as the girls walked to the bus stop where they were to wait for their ride back to Evans Head, Caleb realized that he was walking on his own. Neither Mindy nor Sharon had told him to fall behind, yet somehow the order had been passed.

  Caleb looked up at the statue again. The cold saint wasn’t holding a dagger as he’d thought at first. No, the weapon in its hand was nothing more than a crucifix.

  Whoa. You gotta keep your head on straight.

  His mother sat among a small crowd in the front pew, watched over by Father Lewis, a man who scared him, despite being soft-spoken and mild. There was something in the way he held himself that Caleb found unnerving. He appeared so removed from everything. Owlish. It was as though he were waiting for something that anyone who didn’t fawn over him wasn’t enlightened enough to know about.

  Caleb cleared his throat, silenced their prayers. They turned to face him and the pews creaked protest. Father Lewis raised his eyes. They were the color of the ocean around those parts: steel blue, but threaded with imperfections, the wavering silhouettes of sharks.

  “Ma?”

  These people were strangers to Caleb, even though he knew them by name and went to school with their children. He knew they were the kind of folk who didn’t connect with those who contradicted their views.

  Doubting’s as good as sin, he’d been told by his mother, a woman who took her faith straight up, no chaser. And Caleb could tell that they smelled that doubt on him. Were the words I’M NOT REALLY SURE IF I GET THIS ENTIRE RELIGION THING tattooed across his forehead? Caleb figured that they might as well be, as there was no sympathy to be found in any of their expressions.

  “Ma?”

  Caleb knew that a lot could be said with very little, as the day at the Ballina Pool had proved. Like the girls he’d tried so hard to please, his mother didn’t have to say a thing. She’d already turned her attention back to the one thing that counted in her books: the Book on her lap.