The Family Friend, C. MacDonald [ereader for android TXT] 📗

had the gallery’s telephone number, but then I don’t even have money for the payphone. Oh God! What should I do?! Something’s happened to him. That’s the only explanation. If he’s hurt, if he’s gone, I don’t know how I’ll carry on.

16 June 1999

I’ve been up to our neighbour Colin’s house and called the two big hospitals in Darwin and the one in Palmerston. He’s not there. I was going to call the gallery but then realised I didn’t know what it was called. I rang a couple out of the phone book but I couldn’t stay in Colin’s house for too long. Donny thought he was creepy and wouldn’t have liked it.

I’m sure he’ll be back soon. He has to come back soon. He never would have left me, so he has to come back. I can’t believe that something terrible has happened. I can’t.

18 June 1999

The police came today. I begged them not to call my mum but they have. They’ve been looking for me ever since I left home. I told them that it was me who wanted to go to Darwin, I told them that I suggested moving back out to the sticks, but they keep saying he kidnapped me. They keep saying that he’d abused his position at the school but they don’t know what they’re talking about, he wasn’t a proper teacher, just an assistant, and I didn’t even do art.

I keep trying to tell them what Craig was planning, I told them he was hunting me down all on his own, told them what he was planning to do to me, how weird he’d been with me whenever I was half dressed at home. I told them that Donny was just trying to protect me from Craig and that he should be the one they lock up, but they’re not listening.

They don’t have Donny. They keep asking me where he is and don’t seem to believe that I don’t know. They say that our old neighbour Jean was found at the bottom of the stairwell and they think Donny might have pushed her. I told them that it was impossible, that Jean wasn’t steady on her feet, that the stairs in our apartment block are too steep for an old woman, that they shouldn’t have let her live there. But she’s unconscious in hospital at the moment so she can’t tell them that she fell and they’re blaming it all on Donny.

I wish I did know where he is though, even if it meant us going to prison for fifty years. I feel certain something terrible’s happened to him. He would never have left me otherwise. I keep telling them to ask Craig. I’m sure it’s him. That he found Donny and, when he wouldn’t tell him where I was, he did something to him. It’s the only explanation. I’m scared. I’m wasting time being held in the police station when I should be out looking for him.

28 June 1999

He’s alive. He’s alive. He’s alive. He’s alive. He’s alive. Mum said he’d probably left the country. So I rang all of the airlines that operate out of Darwin International. Many of them wouldn’t speak to me, but when I started telling them that my husband had gone missing, I eventually found one that told me Rafael Donadoni was booked on a flight on 15 January. When I pressed her for his destination, she wouldn’t tell me.

I’ve found a women’s hostel to stay at in Cairns. Mum wouldn’t have me when she found out what I’d told the police about Craig. She says he’d never dream of doing what I’d said. But she would protect him. I’ve got an interview to assist a childminder in three days. So now I just have to wait until Donny gets in touch to tell me how to join him. I can be patient. I can wait. Because that’s what you do for love.

Erin puts the notebook down on the train table in front of her. The drama, the passion, the certainty of Amanda’s words, the handwriting, they’re all so young. She was a child and he did that to her. Convinced her she was his muse, pretend-married her in just the sort of ceremony that a spooky, gothy kid would lose their mind for. He separated her off from her family, her friends, then abducted her, telling her it was for her own safety. You can’t tell from the journal whether this Craig guy was a creep, maybe he wasn’t that nice a guy, but he never did anything to her. Raf did do something to her – or Donny as he clearly wanted to be called then, probably to hide his Italian provenance. He was a teacher at her school. He groomed her. Abducted her. Raped her. Moved her around to avoid detection and then, presumably, fled the country without a word when it looked like the net was closing in on him. Erin lifts the notebook up and brings it slapping down onto the table. It wasn’t Raf’s father’s indiscretions with younger students that got them in trouble, that forced him to leave Australia. He was the sick one; he was the depraved one who couldn’t help himself. The move from Melbourne – was that the same thing? Was there another underage girl he and his father had to run away from? Is it a pattern of behaviour? She glances at the time on her iPhone – she scoured their downstairs looking to see where Raf had put it, finding it in the side pocket of one of his bags. It seemed ridiculous to delay, but she somehow felt she might need something more powerful than the useless Nokia he’d given her.

Then it hits her. She gave her phone over to him willingly, but only because he made her believe that she was delusional, that she was suffering side effects from some form of addiction to her smartphone and that it was the only way