Secrets of the Springs

by Kerry McGinnis

‘A wine connoisseur – like Palmer.’

  ‘Where on earth did you get a word like that?’

  ‘From Dad. I only remember it because I used to mispronounce it. We had to find six really hard words for school once and that was one of the ones he wrote down for me. “Desiccated” was another. I forget the rest. I remember those two because of what he said: “There’s a handy pair, colleen. They describe your uncle to a T.” I was thrilled and sure that mine would be the most unusual words, but when I stood up to read them out to the class I pronounced it oh-no-pill and Miss Weiss had no idea what I meant. I was teased about it for weeks.’

  She smiled faintly. ‘I can imagine. Well, we know why Palmer hated your father but have you any idea why it was mutual? Though maybe it was only dislike on his part.’

  I considered this. ‘There was certainly no love lost between them. We never visited him, and he seldom came to see us. Maybe Dad had a bad conscience over the station? Inheriting it, I mean, when Palmer was the one who stayed and slaved all through the Depression years and the war. Surely he ought to have got a share? Or perhaps he thought that Palmer knew about his first marriage?’

  ‘It’s not a crime to marry twice.’

  ‘As long as you divorce between,’ I said tartly. ‘I suppose with bigamy on your conscience it would be easy to imagine others were linking the dots . . . Think about it, years away from home, and you come back with a name change and a new wife. You’d only have to find it a bit fishy and from there it would be easy enough to discover the truth.’

  ‘If that was the case, why wouldn’t Palmer have just reported him to the police – if he really hated him?’

  ‘Because,’ I had wrestled with this myself, ‘of Mum. He didn’t want to shame her. She’d trusted my father, borne his bastard – and there’s no use blinking at facts, Marty, that’s what I am. How would she feel knowing that, having everyone in the district know that? Of course he couldn’t do that to her, not if he loved her.’

  ‘So killing them both was better?’

  ‘Don’t be daft! Mum was never meant to go on that trip. Her inclusion was a last-minute thing, I remember it clearly. She decided over breakfast that morning.’ I could see us all at this very table, me arguing and pouting my displeasure, ‘It’s not fair! I don’t want to sleep at Mrs Evans’ house! I don’t like her!’ and Dad’s voice, unusually stern: ‘That will do, Orla! The world wasn’t made for your convenience. Think of your mother for a change – she deserves a day out. Anyway we’ll be back before dark so you can sleep in your own bed.’

  A day out, I thought, that had killed her. Now I understood my uncle’s words when the young policewoman had brought me, struggling and shouting, to his door. He must have been waiting for the news and been as bewildered to find me standing there as I was myself.

  ‘An accident? What sort of . . .’ He had tailed off, waiting to be told.

  ‘I’m afraid so, sir.’ The policewoman had been kind but she had bony hands with a grip as unrelenting as steel cuffs. I had kicked her in my struggle not to be removed from the Park, despite Mrs Evans’ sugary endearments, as she had sought to persuade me to go to my uncle. ‘Killed instantly, so they wouldn’t have suffered. Yes, both of them. I understand you’re the closest relative so —’

  ‘Both?’ The look on his face had frozen me. He shouted, ‘What? Oh, the stupid, stupid bloody idiot!’ and had turned, blundering blindly into the doorframe as he did so. From shock, I now saw. It had been Marty who had taken custody of me and whose pinny had soaked up my tears when the torrent was finally released. I hadn’t seen my uncle again until the following day when his blank stare showed that he had forgotten I was there. Suddenly it all made sense and in that moment I was fiercely glad of my childish intransigence. Why should my mother’s killer have had an easy ride? I would as soon have cosied up to a brown snake.

  My thoughts must have been plain to read on my face for Marty reached to touch my hand. ‘Let it go, Orla. Remember what I used to tell you: sufficient unto the day . . .’

  ‘I know. But this is hardly the same as a bad mark, or a squabble in the schoolyard is it? Still, that verandah won’t paint itself. I might as well change and get stuck into the sandpapering.’

  That night the old dream returned for the first time in a long while. The hours I had spent with Sophia were probably the trigger, though the previous night had been dreamless. I was back in a dark, familiar place with the sound of the waves beating on a rocky shore and the high, wild scream of the gulls. My heart began to thud and my panting breath almost drowned the roar of the waves as I ran and ran through the woody shrubs that caught at my bare legs, and the knotted roots that tripped my feet. The terror that gripped me was mixed with the taste of foreboding and grief because I knew that it would happen, that I was already too late.

  The gulls were diving, squabbling and shrieking among the rocks as I sobbed, ‘Jamie! No!’ I screamed, ‘No! Give him back to me, give him back!’ but the nurse was holding me firmly while the faceless doctors in their white coats talked and talked, and Jamie toddled towards me, little face split with his wondrous smile. Then he was a baby again, his star-shaped little hand pressing the moony swell of my swollen breast as he sucked, eyes dark and unknowing, even as the gulls screamed their portents of a future without him.

  I woke with a gasp to the dampness of tears, and lay still, letting the terror and desolation subside along with the renewed sense of loss the dream carried with it. My son was gone, dead at age two of a ruptured coronary aneurysm, a condition I had never even heard of. Why the gulls with their vicious eyes and stabbing beaks should figure in my dreams I couldn’t tell, but in the months following his death they were always present, lofting and tipping on the island’s wind-blown shore by day, and haunting my subconscious by night. The crows of the sea with their baleful merciless eyes. I hated them, but hate, I had learned, was as useless as love at turning aside the juggernaut of chance. Take Palmer, who had wanted his brother’s wife but killed her instead, and my own case where all my love and prayers had failed to save my son.

  It was no good. I was never going to sleep. The slow tick of my bedside clock split the night into infinitesimal segments of time. I peered at the hands in the shaft of light from the window: one o’clock. Throwing back the covers, I welcomed the chilly air as I dressed, pulling on my father’s coat, found at the back of his wardrobe, before letting myself out of the house. Moonlight stippled the garden and cast deep shadows under the swing tree. The gate hinges creaked as I went through it, then the hairs prickled on the back of my neck as the distant quaver of a dingo’s howl rose under the glittering stars. I pulled my collar closed and, thrusting my hands deep into the coat’s pockets, glanced around at the sleeping station. The sheds were dark caverns, the horse-yards sharp angles of black where posts and rails met. I had spent hours there as a child, and had known the name of every horse to come through them. Now they stood dark and empty as my heart. Brown Bess and Ambler would be long dead of course, together with most of the others. It was thirteen years since Dad’s voice had echoed amid the hoof-beats, and the grumbles and good-natured chaff of the ringers.

  The old shearers’ quarters that now served only Joe were dark. In my grandfather’s day shearing time would have seen them crowded, the swooping clotheslines filled with flapping shirts and dungarees, the chimney stack constantly smoking. It must all be crumbling to bits, I thought, unless Mark had kept on top of the repairs. The climate was ruinous on buildings – timbers shrank in the dry heat, nails pulled free of the wood’s embrace, and the wind and dust worked away at metal and screens alike. The shearing shed floor was probably safe, coated with the oil of a million fleeces, but the rest might need checking before we introduced tourists to it.

  At the bore the outline of the mill was clearly delineated against its starry backdrop. My boots found the path that human feet had worn over the years and in a few minutes I was standing in the shadow of the pepper trees, staring across at yellow
lamplight in the overseer’s cottage. I wasn’t the only one wakeful this night.

  There was something soothing about the proximity of water, possibly just the knowledge of its presence in a harsh environment where its absence meant death. A vagrant breeze stirred the mill blades, sending the tail-vane groaning as it swung into the wind. The rods must have been rising; water plinked, falling in droplets like musical notes, into the full tank. I sat on the old adzed log seat, turned silvery-grey by age, and slid my hands over its smooth patina. Something brushed my hair. I reached to pull aside the drooping leaves and the acrid aroma of pepper tree filled the night. I closed my eyes and sniffed, the smell unzipping a pack from which tumbled willy-nilly myriad memories of childhood – of grubby palms and scarlet berries bitter to the tongue, and crowns of shiny leaves. When I opened them again it was to see the red dot of a cigarette glowing in the shadow of a nearby tree. My heart jolted in sudden fright, and I stood up, dry mouthed, as Mark limped slowly towards me.

  ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘I could ask the same of you,’ he said evenly.

  A dozen retorts hovered on my tongue but what I actually said was, ‘You never used to smoke.’

  He laughed harshly. ‘I never used to be crippled or widowed either. So why are you here?’

  ‘Maybe I felt like it.’ Abruptly I changed tack. ‘How well did you know my uncle?’

  ‘Palmer? Well enough, I suppose. Why? He was a decent boss. Knew the Park inside out. If it wasn’t for him you likely wouldn’t still have it. He worked his guts out for this place.’

  ‘So Ben said. This is where he grew up, of course. He’d have spent more time here than Dad did – he was only here for,’ I did some rapid calculation, ‘call it thirty years, half of them as a kid. Born here, died here. Do you remember the accident that killed him and my mum?’

  ‘Naturally I do.’ His breath huffed out, faintly visible in the frigid moonlight. ‘What are you getting at, Orla?’

  ‘Just that I don’t think I ever heard how the tractor Dad crashed into came to be there. Do you know?’

  ‘It ran out of fuel. Turned out there was a leak in the fuel line. Somebody was borrowing it – it might’ve been Joel Patterson. From memory he couldn’t get hold of your dad so he asked Palmer, who rang the message through and Harry gave the okay before he left that morning. Something like that. One of the men drove it out but he’d only got to the bend in the road when he smelled the fuel. There was just a cupful left by then, so he parked it and walked back.’

  I nodded to myself. ‘So that’s how he did it. He made up the message – too much of a coincidence that Joel would have chosen that very morning . . . So Palmer came along later, saw where the tractor was and rigged the mirror so a swerve would take Dad into it. Who knows? Maybe Palmer even put the hole in the fuel line?’

  He said roughly. ‘What the hell are you talking about?’

  ‘Dear Uncle Palmer. He murdered my parents. And wrote it all down and left it in a box for me to find, but he didn’t explain about the tractor. The police have it now – his confession, I mean. He did it with a mirror and I found that too, stashed in the cellar at the old hut, along with his account of how he pulled it off. Did you know the hut had a cellar, Mark?’

  The moonlight leached colour from flesh but I could easily read the shock on his face. ‘What? You’re joking, Orla!’

  ‘I wish,’ I said. ‘Did you know the cellar was there?’

  ‘No. What cellar – where?’

  ‘Outside, dug against the back wall of the old boundary hut.’

  ‘Really?’ He dismissed it and sat suddenly on the end of the seat. ‘Jesus Christ! You mean it, don’t you? Palmer actually confessed to killing them . . . did he say why?’

  ‘Apparently he loved my mother, but his plan worked too well. She wasn’t supposed to go with Dad that day, only something changed and she had a day out instead.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said gently. ‘God! It’s beyond belief. Palmer!’ A tiny red streak arced through the night as he tossed the cigarette aside. ‘He must’ve been mad to do it. Why would he even think your mother could . . .?’ He shook his head. ‘She was a lovely woman and I’m not just talking about her looks, though God knows she was a stunner. You’re her image except for the hair,’ he added, more comment than compliment. ‘But you couldn’t get two more dissimilar men than Harry and Palmer. I cannot imagine her marrying him if she’d lived. So his plan makes no sense.’

  ‘No.’ I had no intention of revealing my father’s crime that, in a mad sort of way, I could see served my uncle as justification for his action. I lifted my head to stare at the face of the moon. ‘Not much of life does, I find.’

  I heard him sigh. ‘You’re right about that.’ I felt his eyes on me but I refused to look at him, continuing instead to study the shadowy craters imprinted on the pale disc overhead. ‘You’ve changed, Orla. Before – you were so eager, so alive.’

  Rage was sudden and hot as a scald inside me. I jerked my head down and stood up. ‘I’m five years older,’ I said coldly ‘I’ve learned that fairy-tales don’t last. So you’ll just have to excuse my lack of eagerness, Mark. Call it the price of living.’ I stalked off and left him there sitting alone under the cold light of the moon.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Sergeant Wallis turned up next morning while I was scraping down the verandah rails. I had started with sandpaper until Joe, having learned of my plans over breakfast, turned up with a metal tool.

  ‘What’s that for?’

  ‘Paint scraper. Reckoned there’d be one in the shed. Sandpaper’s for later: yer scrape her first, then finish off with the paper.’ He pursed his lips, eyeing the length of rails before me. ‘Way yer goin’ I reckon about three ton of paper and two years’ hard yakka to finish. Scraper’s quicker.’

  ‘Thank you, Joe.’ The broad-bladed tool looked promising and I took it gratefully.

  ‘I got a job on today, but I could give yer a hand tomorrow,’ he offered.

  ‘That would be wonderful – oh, but it’s Sunday, Joe.’

  ‘So? Me own time, ain’t it? Maybe,’ he added, ‘I like paintin’ work.’ His lips retained their straightness but there was a twinkle deep in his pinched-down eyes.

  I smiled at him. ‘What a coincidence! Me too. Thanks. Where are you off to now?’

  ‘Headin’ across to Pembroke to collect some wethers. Damn animals I’m gonna shear for your visitors. Blame yer lawyer for that. An’ you might pass the word to him that I hate sheep.’

  He left, and I saw him drive away in the Toyota, which now bore a crate on its tray. Somehow the sight brought the plans we had talked about much closer. Nerve-janglingly so. If the sheep were arriving today our first guests might turn up as early as next week. The task before me seemed suddenly huge. God! I’d need a week just to get the timber clean let alone covered in primer, then it still had to be given two coats of paint. And there was the dinner set and crystal to be fetched from town, and Marty would need whatever fancy extras Emu Springs could supply for her menus – which brought another thought. Should we, I wondered, have menus made up? Would the guests expect a choice of dishes, or would a single offering suffice?

  I drew a breath, stilling the incipient panic. The first thing is not to panic. The words echoed in my head and for a moment Kevin Buchan stood before me, stocky and bluff and white-haired, teaching me about boats.

  ‘Is that right?’ I had spoken lightly, finding his earnest manner amusing.

  ‘Yes. Panic has sunk as many boats as storms.’

  ‘For goodness sake, Kevin, it’s a day trip! She’s not sailing round the world,’ Rose had said. I smiled at the memory, steadied by it, their care, their love for me. The moment I could I would visit and meanwhile Kevin’s advice was timely. I applied myself diligently to the scraper, gratified to see the snow of falling paint flakes that my efforts created. If I could get the job done I would. If I failed it wouldn’t be the end of the world, or eve
n of our tourist venture. Who knew what people wanted? Watch some shearing, go on a bore run, paint a rail – why not? All part off the outback experience.

  Sergeant Wallis turned up then, his uniform identifying him before he spoke.

  ‘Miss Macrae?’

  ‘That’s me.’ I brushed paint flakes from my cheek and took off my gloves to shake hands. ‘How can I help you, Sergeant?’ From the corner of my eye I could see Mark limping towards us.

  He put a foot on the bottom step, alert police eyes taking in everything. Habit, I supposed. ‘I’m just here to follow up on Palmer McRae’s confession. The man’s dead, the case is closed but I need to visit the relevant sites. This cellar he mentioned, the place where the accident occurred . . .’

  ‘And then what?’

  ‘Well,’ he pinched the bridge of his nose, ‘nothing. I mean the case is over. I’ll send a report to the coroner. There’s nothing more to do. G’day Mark.’

  ‘Morning, Reg,’ Mark replied. ‘Heard what you said. I can show you the spots. Back wall of the cottage is it, for the cellar, Orla?’

  I nodded. ‘You’ll see the trapdoor. It was covered with sand and roly-poly when we found it. You’ll need a ladder, though there’s nothing down there except the mirror.’

  ‘No point collecting evidence at this stage,’ the sergeant decided. ‘I’ll just take a look so it can go in the report.’ He eyed the snowstorm I had created. ‘Giving the place a face-lift?’

  ‘We’re going in for tourism – weekend escapes, bush holidays for small parties. I’d be glad if you’d help spread the word, Sergeant. You probably see travellers all the time.’

  ‘I’ll do that,’ he agreed, inclining his head. ‘Could be good for the town. The highway’s done us no favours at all. Too damn easy for travellers to just put their foot down and keep going. Well, I’ll leave you to it. You right to go now, Mark?’

  ‘Yeah. It’s not far. You gonna run me back or will I drive myself?’

  ‘Hop in,’ the sergeant said by way of answer. Their voices faded as they walked across to his vehicle and I returned to my task.