We duck under the line of police tape. I open the front door. Petrol fumes from the highway fill my throat as I step inside.
The house begins in the kitchen. There is a small table with a vase of white daisies in the middle. They are still standing tall, despite the heat, so must only be a few days old. A coffee mug is in the dish rack along with a single plate, a few forks and some spoons. A faded tea towel hangs neatly to the side of the sink. The shelves in the small fridge are scattered with a couple of sauce bottles and a small carton of milk. White wine bottles fill the rack on the fridge door.
Felix picks up the half-empty one and looks at the label. ‘Nice. This bottle would have cost more than my weekly grocery bill.’
I know very little about wine but even I can tell the label is expensive. An almost empty rubbish bin is nestled under the sink. Half-a-dozen empty wine bottles are lined up next to it. Felix confirms that they are all at the upper end of the market. In the freezer is a stack of Tupperware containing some kind of sauce. A bottle of vodka lies next to them.
‘She was definitely a drinker who knew her way around wine, but I don’t get the feeling she had many guests, do you? They wouldn’t fit in here.’ He gestures to the tiny rooms.
‘You think she got blind on her own?’ I ask.
‘That would be my guess.’
I bend down to look through the drawers and cupboards. They are mainly empty, just a couple of worn-looking pots and pans. An old blender covered with a layer of dust. I stand up too quickly and blank for a moment, dizzy. A faint floral scent enters my nostrils.
‘It’s like she was an old lady or something,’ says Felix. ‘With a penchant for outrageously expensive booze.’
I nod, running my fingers along the rim of the daisy vase. There are no photos but movie posters are everywhere: in the bedroom, in the lounge and in the spare room. A large old-style cinema poster announcing the debut screening of The Godfather is Blu-Tacked to the back of the toilet door. Dramatic scenes seem to close in on us from every angle. Familiar Hollywood faces are everywhere I turn. Magnets dot the fridge, most featuring a quote or a poem.
‘She must have been a real movie buff,’ says Felix, turning in a slow circle to take in all of the posters. ‘And a bookworm,’ he adds, noticing the bookshelf in the lounge.
It’s the nicest piece of furniture in the house; dark mahogany shelves are built into the wall and run the entire length of the room. Rows and rows of books are crammed into every square inch. There are hundreds of them. I remember how Rosalind seemed to slip into a trance whenever she was reading aloud to the class or acting out a scene. She always seemed so far away. I often wondered what she was thinking.
‘Well, she was an English teacher. I guess reading is kind of essential.’
‘I thought she was a drama teacher?’ Felix says, confused.
‘I’d say she teaches both,’ I tell him. ‘I think they are often paired together. At least, when we went to school they were.’
I remember poor Mrs Frisk yelling at us to use our bodies as tools and then awkwardly watching on through the necessary love scenes in our school plays.
‘I bet you would have been good at drama yourself.’ Felix’s eyes dance as he looks at me. The small room suddenly seems smaller.
I wish, not for the first time, that we could go away together. Escape. Sit on a beach and drink cocktails, make huts from driftwood, make fire from sticks and never come back. I want to wrap my body around him forever. But then Ben’s little face looms before me and I shake the fantasy away. ‘Come on,’ I say, ‘let’s get this done so we can get back to Anna.’
I head towards the bathroom, trying to focus. There’s an entry from Rosalind’s bedroom but a shelving unit has been placed in front of it so I go through the main door off the hallway. I am greeted by a shower over a small bath. The tap drips. Faded grey towels hang from cheap gold hooks on the back of the door and a bathmat riddled with tiny holes is folded on the side of the vanity. I stand in front of the mirror and try to picture Rosalind here every morning, brushing her long blonde hair and putting foundation on her perfect skin, but it doesn’t seem to fit somehow.
I pull open the cabinet doors and my face disappears. Inside is like a portal to a different world. Shining bottles of shampoo and body lotion line the bottom shelf. Expensive teeth-whitening products are arranged on the next shelf up alongside what must be thousands of dollars’ worth of make-up. L’Oréal, Estée Lauder, Chanel. I don’t even know what half of the products are for. I pick up a full contraceptive pill packet and turn it over, wondering whether it means she was seeing somebody. I’d taken mine religiously, but about two months ago had forgotten a day when I worked an early shift and then had got into a routine that was a day out. Then I worked late one night and accidentally skipped another day. A few weeks later I knew immediately that I was pregnant. The aching of my breasts and the slow tumble in my stomach were such visceral reminders of how it had been with Ben.
A few bobby pins are scattered across the middle shelf and a few hair ties are loosely bound around the stem of a designer hairbrush. Despite the expensive products, it still seems impossible that someone as glamorous as Rosalind groomed herself in a bathroom like this.
White chemist packets pepper the top shelf. I reach up and pull them down. Two brands of antidepressants and two Valium prescriptions, dated from September to November.
‘What was going on with you?’ I whisper.
‘What, Gem?’
‘She was on meds,’ I call out.
Felix sticks his head into the bathroom. ‘Who isn’t? Hey, so I can’t find a diary or any sex tapes but I did find something weird. Look.’
I leave the pills and follow him into the bedroom.
It’s a stone. Flat and smoothed by time, it has softened into the shape of a crude love heart. A neat X has been drawn on the back of it with a black marker.
‘I found it in her bottom drawer.’
I breathe out, thinking. ‘Anything else interesting in her drawers?’
Felix drops the stone into an evidence bag. Something about that movement reminds me of cracking an egg into a bowl. ‘Not unless you consider a book of poems and some Bonds undies fascinating.’
I swat at him gently and look around the small bedroom, which is so different from what I had pictured for her. The rug on the floor is faded. I recognise the grey bedspread as one that Kmart sold a few years back; I have the same one in blue. My hands are on my hips as I take in the giant artwork hanging above the bed: a stark, haunting painting of a tree. I let my eyes get lost in it.
‘This house is so strange. The wine, the movie posters, the art.’ I gesture to the piece on the wall. ‘Her make-up is all top-shelf stuff too. But everything else is so basic.’