Devastation Road

by Joanna Baker

  We were walking past a dam that looked like polished stone. The roadside grass was long and whiskery and there were tall weeds topped by yellow flowers. It was soft and peaceful. The sort of place that helps you to think.

  After a minute I came up with something. ‘Anything’s possible, isn’t it. Probably it’s nothing at all.’

  ‘Then why was Tara so interested?’

  I’d been wondering that, too. Normally Tara would’ve sneered and laughed at anyone who took the note seriously. And before that, on the way up the driveway, she’d given me that sun-breaking-through friendly look. It was confusing and a bit scary.

  ‘Well, after Annie … we all felt a bit tense.’

  Chess looked at me blankly. That told me she was thinking hard, and not about what I’d said. She frowned at the note. ‘This Devastation Road everyone keeps mentioning —’

  I groaned. ‘Not now, OK?’

  ‘OK. I’ll ask Tara.’ Chess started to hurry forward, forcing me to grab her.

  ‘All right. All right. I’ll tell you. Just walk slowly. They don’t need to hear it.’

  ‘Are they involved in it somehow?’

  ‘I don’t know. They always act weird when it’s mentioned.’

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘I can’t believe you haven’t heard about it.’

  Everyone in town knew about Devastation Road. It seemed incredible that Chess wouldn’t have heard about it from someone. But Chess didn’t have many friends, especially the kind who talked about stuff like that. And she wouldn’t listen to them if they did. Chess liked talking about science and maths and — well — chess.

  ‘It was eight years ago. When Tara lived in Station Road, in your house. Around the time the garage burnt down. You know those foundations in your back yard? I hear your Dad’s rebuilt it.’

  ‘Did that shed burn down while Tara lived there?’

  ‘Yep. Around then there were a lot of fires out this way. Just a few weeks before, a man had electrocuted himself fixing the wiring of his house and the whole place had gone up. And in that year there were three bushfires and two other house fires, and the Rolands’ garage was burnt down. People said some of it was arson, but no one was ever caught.

  ‘Most of the fires were near the Wilsons’ place, or a bit further out. Everyone thought Craig was lighting them.’

  ‘He would have been nineteen,’ said Chess, as if this mattered. ‘And Debbie would have been fourteen.’

  I shrugged. ‘That’d be right. They never proved it was him. After a while people started saying the area was jinxed. I was only seven, but Mum’s told me a bit about it. Suddenly everyone was dragging up stories about other disasters, a tractor rolled onto a young farm hand, an old woman had a heart attack and drove into a tree, that sort of thing. Instead of Station Road, people started calling it Devastation Road.’

  ‘I suppose they thought that was clever.’

  ‘Then, after the name got out, this girl, Jeanette Carmody, was killed. And suddenly it wasn’t a joke any more. Mum says people felt sorry they’d ever started using the words.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘Run over. Driver didn’t stop. Right near your place — so back then it was near Tara’s place. It was the day after their garage went up. Jeanette was out walking along the road for some reason. She was sixteen.’

  ‘Did you know her?’

  ‘She used to babysit people. She minded me a few times.’

  ‘Golly, how awful.’

  ‘The Wilsons’ is the only other place out here for quite a long way. And Craig was really wild. People said he must’ve done it — run her over. Mum didn’t tell me that part, but that’s the word around. Someone said they’d seen his dark blue car. But no one could prove that either. The police interviewed the whole family a hundred times, especially Debbie, because she was a neighbour and Jeanette’s friend. They were dead set she knew something, but she kept saying she didn’t.’

  ‘And now she’s dead.’

  ‘Poor old Debs.’

  Chess held up the note for me to look at. She spoke slowly as if she was working something out. ‘Right, I see.’

  She wanted me to ask what she was talking about. She tried again, waving the note near my chest. ‘I’m starting to see how it all fits together. This is very important, Matt.’

  ‘What is it? Evidence?’ I felt very smart. ‘You should put it in a plastic bag. What about fingerprints?’

  ‘Not important,’ said Chess. ‘I know who wrote it.’

  I raised my voice. ‘OK, Columbo. Who?’

  ‘I know who wrote it, but I don’t know who put it there.’

  I swore at her and started walking faster. Chess scuttled along beside me.

  ‘And there’s another glaring inconsistency.’

  ‘I’m not listening.’

  ‘Exactly.’ She actually poked me. In the arm. I gritted my teeth. ‘That’s your problem. You should pay more attention to what people say. Because you’ve missed something very very serious. Sometimes little comments are important.’

  A game. Despite myself, as my anger faded, I started wondering what I’d missed. But all I said was, ‘Yeah, right.’

  Chess gave up. We caught up with the others and walked in silence around the last bend before her place.

  Mr Roland was waiting at the car in the road, about a hundred metres away.

  ‘He said he was going up to the house,’ said Tara. ‘Your father must be out.’

  ‘Oh, he’ll be there somewhere,’ said Chess grumpily.

  ‘Is he …?’ Tara didn’t know how to finish her question. The words she was looking for were ‘still pissed’.

  Chess started to blush. Quickly she hid it by looking at her watch. ‘He’ll want his lunch at about twelve-thirty today. There’s a frozen pie. I should get it in the oven.’

  She turned to me. ‘Would you like to come up while I do it?’

  The other two hurried forward to avoid being included in the invitation. I could see Chess’s house from the road — wooden, badly painted, with a verandah on the front and side that looked as if it was about to fall off. You couldn’t imagine Tara ever living there. The roof iron was rusting and one piece was missing. The garden had a goat and geese running all over it. At Chess’s place you were always treading in slimy poo.

  ‘You could ride the old bike home,’ said Chess. ‘It’s only four k’s. We could have homemade lemonade.’

  She had spoken casually, more casually than she ever spoke, trying to show that it didn’t matter to her one way or another and looking away at the hills as she said it. But as I hesitated she glanced towards me, and then there was another expression that she quickly tried to hide, kind of worried and sick. She was expecting me to make an excuse. I never went anywhere with Chess if I could help it. I always had something better to do. And then something began to sink in. I thought about what Chess was going home to. I tried to imagine what it would be like to live alone with just a father, and to have to feed him when he’d been drinking. I’d seen Alec Febey on the grog before. He stumbled around and yelled a lot, about nothing. He wasn’t dangerous. People said he never hurt her, but somehow I couldn’t abandon her to deal with it alone. I sighed.

  ‘I’ll tell you who wrote the note,’ said Chess. ‘You could have some pie but it’ll take about an hour in the oven. There could be some Monte Carlos left, if he hasn’t eaten them all.’

  ‘OK, Chess,’ I said. ‘Sounds good.’

  ***

  Chess’s kitchen was a surprise to me. I realised I hadn’t been in it for over a year. Then it’d been a cruddy place. Not the sort of mess I lived in, which was a jumble of pots and fruit and books and things. Chess’s kitchen had been real grunge — dirty plates, open packets of stale food, crumbs, and piles of things that don’t belong in a kitchen, like clothes and buckets and bits of machinery.

  Now it had changed. The tiny wooden cupboards were still there, and the floor was the same green and white lino,
but everything was clean. The kitchen was on the south side of the house, with only one small window, and in the past it had seemed dingy and stuffy. Now it felt cool. The window had a curtain and a pot plant.

  There was no sign of Alec, but Chess didn’t comment, or waste any time looking for him. She went to the sink, put the envelope on the bench, rinsed a glass, opened a cupboard and put a few bottles into a bin, all in one smooth movement. Then she found a cloth and wiped down the small laminex table. She did it efficiently, without thinking. I started to realise what the difference was in the place. Chess had taken over.

  She stopped and turned to me with a little smile and an arm-lifting movement, presenting the kitchen for me to comment on. She looked nervous and at the same time hopeful, as if she cared what I thought.

  ‘This place looks different,’ I said.

  It was what she wanted to hear. She flapped her arms again. ‘Oh … Dad … you know. I’ve got him a bit more under control these days.’ She gave a dumb laugh. ‘Make him take his dirty socks off the table, that sort of thing.’

  Before I had time to answer, she’d gone across the room to a chest freezer, carefully lifted down an ancient radio-CD-player and opened the lid. Feeling I should be helping, I went to join her.

  The freezer was well-stacked and neat. On the right were two piles of pies from the Yackandandah bakery, wrapped in clear plastic with their white paper bags showing through, each with the printed logo of the bakery and a label in red pen stating the type of pie. The one Chess wanted must have been right at the bottom. She swung around with a pile of five pies and dumped them into my arms.

  ‘Debbie always wrote the names on these for me so I know what they are. I’d better sort them out. Just put these on the table, will you?’

  I did it and returned to the freezer. She was back leaning over the edge, rummaging away.

  ‘Oh, look, I’ll tell you what,’ she said, from somewhere down among the frost. Without straightening, she reached into her top pocket for the note and held it up over her shoulder for me to take. ‘You make a start. Sit at the table and have a look at it. Tell me what you come up with.’

  I looked at her skinny little wriggling bottom and the furious digging activity of her top half and decided there’d be no point arguing. Pulling out a chair I sat down and put the note on the table near the pies.

  ‘I know you killed her.’ Plain lined paper. There was a tear in the top left hand corner and a bit of dirt on the back from the Wilsons’ driveway. No great revelations there. Why was I supposed to look at it?

  By the time Chess had found her pie and got it into the oven, and produced two glasses and an old cordial bottle holding the promised lemonade, I was sick of trying.

  Putting Deb’s envelope on her knees, she sat across from me and poured us a drink. The happy half-smile had returned. I was making her feel clever.

  ‘Let’s set something out,’ she said. ‘Try looking at it this way. Here is the Eye of Ra.’ She picked up an apricot pie and put it in front of her so that to me it was at the top of the table.

  ‘That’s Deb’s necklace. The all-seeing eye or something.’

  Chess ignored me. ‘And here are Debbie and the fire at the Rolands’ café.’ These were a blackberry-and-apple and a beef curry, which she placed on my left. ‘And over here on your right — Devastation Road, eight years ago. A fire at Roland’s garage …’ (beef and potato) ‘… and Jeanette Carmody,’ (lemon tutti frutti). In the centre she spread out the little white note. ‘Now, what do you see?’

  I felt a familiar, sinking feeling, Chess loved to play games like this. Puzzles. And I was hopeless at them. Usually I told her to nick off, but today we were in her house, and I wasn’t sure I could.

  I frowned at the pattern. The Eye of Ra, two pies on each side. ‘We-l-l,’ I said slowly, ‘It’s like a graph.’ Chess shook her head. I tried again. ‘A family tree?’ Another shake. ‘A triangle.’ Shake. ‘It’s symmetrical.’ A shake and a snort, which was unfair because it was symmetrical.

  Chess loved this stuff. It was something to do with the fact that no one really liked her. Somewhere along the line she’d decided that if she couldn’t be popular she’d be smarter than everybody else, even if — especially if — it annoyed them. It gave her a feeling of power, I suppose, which is better than just being a poor victim that everyone feels sorry for. She didn’t get much chance to do the clever act, because most kids wouldn’t talk to her for more than ten seconds, but now and then she cornered me and sometimes I let her have her bit of fun. In a way I’d got used to it. Besides, I wanted to find out what she knew, and the only way to do that was to play along.

  Chess reached behind her for the yellow envelope. ‘Would it help if I showed you this?’

  She took a page out of Deb’s envelope and put it on the table among the pies. It was a picture cut out of a children’s book. An Egyptian god — one of those things with the body front on and the head sideways. The head was some kind of bird, and on top of it was a big circle, filled in red. Underneath someone had written ‘RA’.

  ‘Read what Debbie’s written underneath.’

  ‘Ra travelled in the Manjet-boat, the Barque of a Million Years, through the twelve hours of daylight. At night he entered the underworld and rode through the twelve hours of darkness.’

  ‘Psychedelic,’ I said.

  She didn’t answer.

  I was sick of it now. She’d had her win and enough was enough. ‘Chess, we’ve got pies, we’ve got hawk heads — ’

  ‘It’s a falcon.’

  I banged the table.

  ‘Start with the letter L,’ said Chess.

  More gibberish. Refusing to look down at the table I stared into Chess’s eyes. They were tight and sharp and full of excitement. If she hadn’t had her back to the window they’d be twinkling.

  ‘It doesn’t make an L,’ I snarled. ‘It makes a tree graph.’

  ‘The L in “blackberry”. The L in “underworld”. The Ls in “killed her”.’

  I held her eyes for a few seconds longer and then I couldn’t bear it. I looked down.

  ‘The writing,’ I said feeling faint. ‘It’s the same writing.’

  Deb had written the labels on the pies. She always put a curl on her Ls and gave them a big round loop. The Ls on the page about Ra were the same as the pies. And so were the Ls on the note. Now that I looked, I could see that the Es were the same, too, and the Ys with their long tails.

  ‘It’s easy to see who wrote the note,’ said Chess. ‘No mystery at all. You just have to keep your wits about you.’

  She let me finish. ‘It was Debbie.’

  ***

  The rest was easy. I did it myself and Chess sat still and listened.

  ‘The note fell out of the rubbish. Annie said it had come from Debbie’s room. So — Debbie wrote the note, “I know you killed her”, and she probably didn’t return from heaven or the underworld or wherever to do it, so she must’ve done it before she died. And that means it’s not about her.’

  Slow progress, I know, but I have to take these things step by step. I pointed to the apple-blackberry pie which represented Debs.

  ‘So when she says “I know you killed her”, the “her” isn’t Debbie at all.’

  ‘Exactly,’ said Chess. ‘The note is Debbie saying someone else has been murdered, and she knows who did it. We don’t know who she’s accusing of murder, but we can guess the victim. There’s only one other person that’s likely to be.’

  I didn’t need Chess to tell me. I had this all by myself. I put my finger right on the lemon tutti frutti.

  ‘Jeanette Carmody.’

  Chapter 9

  At some point, while we had been thrashing all this out, movement had started at the back of the house. I hadn’t really heard it while we were talking, but after I’d said ‘Jeanette Carmody’, there was a stunned silence between the two of us and then I was aware of noises and I had a feeling they’d been going on for some time.
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br />   Now there was a voice. ‘Jess.’

  Chess ignored it.

  ‘Je-e-s-sy.’

  With a sigh she stood up, dropped her papers on the table and went to the sink. She filled a large glass with water, holding it out just as the door opened and her father appeared.

  Alec Febey was a tall man. Today he wore a sloppy nylon tracksuit and his thick black and grey hair needed washing. He had double bags under each eye and hadn’t shaved for a few days, which might be a cool look on deodorant ads, but here it was bad news. Against his pale skin, the whiskers stood out like black spots.

  I rose to my feet, being careful not to make any noise.

  Alec said, ‘I need to eat.’

  Chess wouldn’t look at him. ‘There’s a pie in the oven. Half an hour.’

  ‘You’re a saint.’

  ‘Have a shower. Put your clothes in the basket.’

  Chess turned her back on him and began to fill another glass. Her father finished his water and started to move towards the table, looking as if he was about to join our conversation. He smelt of beer and BO. Chess stepped into his way. I thought it best at this point to leave them alone. I picked up Deb’s papers and made for the door. As I edged away, Chess took her father’s empty glass and gave him a full one.

  ‘Dad. Have a shower.’

  Before I shut the door I took one look back. The tightness in Chess’s voice was reflected in her wiry body. She faced her father, feet apart, chin out. I wouldn’t have been game to cross her.

  I had to wait for Chess to find me the old bike. I couldn’t just pinch it and leave. I closed the door on them and shrank into a chair on the verandah. Through the thin wall I could still hear what they were saying. There was a pause while Alec drank his second glass of water. Then Chess started on at him again.

  ‘You’re supposed to be helping the Walkers with the St John’s Wort tomorrow. You have to be up early.’

  ‘Oh-h-h.’ It was a long word. The voice was weak and kept breaking up. I felt embarrassed for Alec, even with a wall between us. ‘I dunno, Jessy.’

  ‘Remember last year? How much you made? We need it for the washing machine.’