Devastation Road

by Joanna Baker

  ***

  Chess ended up in the Beechworth Hospital, which people seemed to think was lucky, because she might’ve been sent to Albury, and that was a lot further away. Mum was at the hospital most of the afternoon, while Chess’s burns were washed and dressed and a bed was found, and when she got home she gave Dad and me the full story. Chess’s condition was being taken pretty seriously. She wasn’t critical or anything, but she needed pain killers and antibiotics and a drip for fluid and special bandages. No one suggested she could come straight home.

  Home being our place. The fire had turned Chess’s house to black rubble. No one could find her father.

  So, with all that going on, I had to wait until the next day for my explanation and even then, because this was Yackandandah and not NCIS: Los Angeles, I had to go through a lot of the boring, family-type stuff first.

  They hadn’t let the police near Chess but, being classed as family, we were allowed to see her the next morning. We got there five minutes before visiting time.

  Even though Mum had said Chess wanted to see me, I was nervous about going there, thinking of those horrible raw arms and the way she’d sweated and shaken. I half expected her to be bandaged from head to foot, with tubes sticking out of her nose. Like everyone I get most of my ideas about hospital from TV.

  When we got there I found it wasn’t so bad. In some ways it was what I expected — a double room with the other bed empty, crisp white sheets, cool green walls, and some mysterious machines — but in other ways it was ordinary, and fairly depressing. Chess’s face was free of tubes and masks and Mum had brought her some of her own pyjamas that she kept at our place — flannelette with yellow smiling suns. She would’ve looked better in a hospital gown. Her hair hadn’t been washed. It was pulled back off her face, but on top of her head it looked greasy and dull with smoke. There was sticky stuff around her eyes. Her right hand was bandaged completely over, with the bandage disappearing up into her sleeve, and the left arm was the same, except the hand was out. In this hand there was a drip. The place where the needle went in was hidden by a Band-Aid patch, but at the edge of this there was dried blood showing, and the transparent tape over it puckered the skin of her hand into uncomfortable looking wrinkles.

  Mum, Dad and I stood along the bed in a little row, smiling in an embarrassed way, and I handed Chess the photograph she’d saved, already in a new frame. Then it became the typical Tingle thing. Mum fussed around, cleaning up her face and hand, while Chess went into this long speech about the different types of second degree burns and carbon monoxide poisoning and hydrogen cyanide, which I thought sounded pretty deadly. Then Mum started going on about food and the dressings and the smell of the place. Sometimes you just have to let these two talk. Dad hovered in the corner like a calm shadow, most of the time looking out the window at the rose garden, and I made a few faces behind their backs, which Chess managed to see without cracking a smile.

  I wondered what drugs they’d given Chess. She looked tired and sick and kept her head back on the pillows. But it was obvious she wanted to talk to me. Our eyes kept meeting in a meaningful way and once all the fuss had died down even Mum and Dad picked up on it. They behaved pretty well then. Some parents would’ve insisted on hearing what was going on. Instead, after about ten minutes, they said they’d go down the street for some fruit, and when I said I’d stay they didn’t argue.

  ***

  I didn’t have to ask anything. As soon as they’d gone Chess picked up a paper bag from her tray table and handed it to me. Somewhere she had got hold of a pen and, during the night, with her left hand and probably fighting sleeping pills, she’d written a list of words:

  paper bag

  lie

  footprints

  secret engagement

  driver

  necklace

  the only one

  what Wando told Matt

  fear

  soft grass

  the sound of the car

  party shoes

  Chess watched me read it through half-closed eyes. ‘They give you a jug of water,’ she said. ‘And a glass in its own little bag. It’s the only paper I had.’

  Smoothing out the crinkles, I started reading it again, mouthing the words to force myself to concentrate.

  ‘It helps me to write headings. The police are coming this afternoon and I’m going to tell them everything. I need to get it into a logical order, so they can understand my exact thought processes. I thought I’d practise on you.’

  I stopped staring at the words and started staring at Chess.

  Tell them everything? Every what thing? About Tara? Would Chess say Tara had burnt her house down? Could she prove it? The police would interview everyone who’d been at the fire. Would everyone tell them different things?

  And what about Debbie? And Jeanette? This whole thing had to be fitted together somehow. Well, if Chess could do that, I wanted to hear it. I didn’t mind being a practice person, so long as she told me everything this time.

  ‘OK,’ I said.

  ‘I want to show you how it all came to me. It’s the only way it makes sense.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘It’s pretty long.’

  Through the puffiness, Chess looked apologetic and a bit shy. And suddenly a lot of other ideas jammed into my brain. Chess would’ve been told I’d entered a burning building for her. She hadn’t said anything about that, but what was she thinking? And before that, the last thing that happened was our fight. I’d told myself I was going to go back and fix it … We had a lot to talk over … and at the same time there was nothing to say. But those two bits of heavy history weighed down on me. I didn’t know how to deal with it.

  Chess was dealing with it in the way she always did — by talking about something else. Fair enough. We did have to talk about the deaths of Debbie and Jeanette. Chess had asked for me. She wanted to do this. I gave her a weak smile. We’d talk later. One day. Maybe.

  ‘That’s … OK.’

  My smile felt weird and wrong. I looked at the window. Chess spent a second staring at the side of my face, wondering what my problem was, then she pointed with her mummified right arm at the first words on the list. Her head stayed pressed into the pillows. If she started to look sick, I thought, I’d stop her and call a nurse.

  ‘The paper bag. This was the first clue I had and it happened on the Sunday morning, before we’d even found Deb’s body. Do you remember, as we came out of your house your mother asked you to get the plate out of my bag? While you were digging for it I saw a ball of red and white striped paper. I’d never seen it before and I hadn’t been anywhere else. Tara was the only one who’d been near my pack. Later I could see from the shape it was a bag for a bottle of some kind.’

  I was over the embarrassment now and was looking at her. She paused, waiting for the significance of the clue to sink in. I opened my mouth and narrowed my eyes at her, hoping this looked as if I was following. ‘Right.’

  ‘Then there was the lie.’ This time Chess didn’t move her arms. She swivelled her eyes towards my list, indicating the next heading. ‘I needled Tara a bit and got her to say she’d been watching channel Ten in Wando’s room. Wando’s TV has never received Ten. I’d heard you say that and I confirmed it much later when we went to visit him that time. I also checked then that Wando’s window would be easy to climb out of. If she’d been thinking, Tara would have known about Ten. It had been a silly lie and a big mistake, but she was distracted that morning, for obvious reasons. She knew there was a body in the creek.’

  My mouth flew open again, dry this time. I swallowed. ‘So it was Tara, then? Is that what you’re saying? Tara pushed Debbie in. But …’

  Chess turned her head to me. Her eyes were dark, as if behind them there was a bad headache. ‘She was worried about footprints. Do you see that now? That’s why she took us down there, so that when the police found her footprints there’d be an innocent reason.

  ‘And maybe she wanted to find
the body. To see what was there. Maybe she half hoped it hadn’t really happened, do you think?’

  Did I think? I wasn’t thinking anything. I still couldn’t believe it. ‘But why, Chess?’

  Chess gave her head a little shake. ‘One thing at a time.’ She closed her eyes a minute, gathering her thoughts. ‘At the time, when we were walking around the bridges and sitting on the grass, I didn’t know anything about Debbie. All I thought was that Tara had sneaked out of Wando’s to meet a boy or something, and there had been wine which she wasn’t supposed to have. And she’d had to get rid of the paper bag somewhere.

  ‘I did notice the comment about the engagement ring, and I remember thinking it was a strange thing to say, but it didn’t mean anything at the time.’

  I made a little noise of surprise. How could Chess have noticed anything after pulling a body out of a pond?

  She was getting into her story now and she’d started to look a bit less sick. She wriggled her legs and winced. I remembered they had burns on them, too. ‘Later, when we talked to Andrew, that comment began to be very significant. The engagement was a secret. The bakery phone was off the hook. So Tara must have seen Debbie between the proposal and her death.’

  Chess stopped talking at this point and tried to grab her glass of water. I had to get up and pass it to her.

  ‘Are you OK?’

  She made a gesture towards the biscuits Dad had made her. ‘I’m supposed to eat a lot.’

  She watched hungrily as I opened the tin. That was one thing about Chess. A little dose of pain and nausea weren’t going to mess up her appetite. If you wanted to stop her eating, you’d have to kill her. Even then it wasn’t guaranteed. She caught me smiling and suddenly everything felt normal. This was an old joke between us. The girl was a guts.

  Then she went straight back into her story. ‘So, Tara must have seen Debbie on the evening she died. It was still possible it was innocent. Maybe Tara had gone to the bakery and Debbie had drunk a lot of champagne. And maybe Debbie had given Tara the necklace and then Tara had left and Debbie had cleaned up and locked the bakery and then fallen in the creek by accident. I kept waiting for Tara to come out and say that this is what happened.

  ‘But the bakery had been cleaned too thoroughly. Someone had removed all fingerprints. And I didn’t think Debbie would have just fallen off the bridge. The other possibility was that Tara had pushed her, got the keys somehow, gone back and cleaned up, and then thrown the keys in the creek.’

  ‘Or it could have been Andrew.’

  ‘Yes, at this point I hadn’t been able to eliminate Andrew as a suspect.’ Chess nodded for a while. ‘More importantly, there was one thing seriously wrong with both these theories. There was no motive. Especially after we found the note. ‘I know you killed her.’ And the Eye of Ra thing, which connected Debbie to Jeanette. The more we learned the more it was confirmed — Debbie had been killed because she knew who killed Jeanette.

  ‘But there was no way that could have been Andrew. He was in Queensland at the time and didn’t even know the Wilsons or the Carmodys.

  ‘And it couldn’t have been Tara. Tara was eight years old when Jeanette died. She didn’t drive. And she hadn’t pushed Jeanette under the car because, according to the footprint evidence, she was definitely across the road. Wando told us. The police had checked. There was no one near Jeanette at the time of the accident. No one had pushed her.

  ‘So there I was. Nothing was making sense.’

  Nothing made sense. This was the way I’d often felt about Debbie’s death. But when Chess says something like that, you know she’s about to make it make sense. She knew it all. She had the solution, and when her eyes met mine I could see the triumph in them.

  And, suddenly, I saw the solution to my own little mystery — what it was that connected Chess and me. Why I’d gone into a fire for her. It was immediately right, and so simple I almost laughed.

  It wasn’t anything to do with us really. It wasn’t about the sort of people we were. It definitely wasn’t love, or attraction. Half the time we didn’t even like each other and sometimes she actually disgusted me. What was important lay in the space between us. We had spent so much time together that now, whether we liked it or not, we were linked by what we shared — everything we’d both seen and both heard and both felt, all the things we knew together.

  Some of it no one else knew about: her father drinking in the house while we played; the things kids used to do to her at school; the essay she finished for me; her secret chocolate supply for the bad days … But it wasn’t just secrets. There were other things that couldn’t be told. It was just sounds and colours and things without words: the low rumble of the bus from Beechworth, me down the back with Wando, her sitting by herself; the lonely aching quiet of the house when everyone was out and you turned the TV off; boring afternoons; the way a day could be good and bad at the same time; the way my parents were hopelessly ridiculous and also OK; the things you could and couldn’t say.

  And jokes. Five names for goldfish in a pond. Super, Duper, Pooper, Scooper, and John. Most of our jokes were so stupid we would never try to tell anyone else, but I knew when something amused Chess, even when she wasn’t showing it. For the first time I realised how powerful that was.

  And here we were now, sharing something bigger than all that, and the rest of the world had melted away. There was just Chess and me and between us, in the air, this puzzle, this terrible mystery and the solution she was building. For me. She hadn’t told anyone else yet. I was the one who’d been there through it all. I would understand, the way I understood a lot of things she did and felt, and she understood things about me, simply because she’d always been there.

  There was something else I knew. You never talked to Chess about things like this. Never.

  Chess had had a little rest and now she started off again, pushing at my paper bag with her stumpy hand to snap me out of it.

  ‘So then I had to go back over the death of Jeanette. Nothing was going to be solved until we knew exactly what had happened there.’

  Chess was excited by her own ideas and deeply happy that she had worked it all out. But she was enjoying making me sit through the whole list. I gritted my teeth. Good old, familiar old Chess, who was so important to me. I wanted to push a hand over that skinny face and shove it back into the pillow.

  I looked down at the next heading. ‘The driver of the car. That’s who killed Jeanette. Debbie saw who it was. So if Tara killed Debbie, she must’ve been trying to protect that person.’

  Chess nodded thoughtfully. ‘The question of the driver. Yes.’ She held her hand up for another biscuit and took a big bite before she went on. ‘We really need to go over the circumstances of Jeanette’s death. Here is the way it looked.

  ‘Apart from Jeanette, there were four people present. Tara and Wando were watching from across the road. Debbie was somewhere in the bush, running around — remember the police kept questioning Debbie about Jeanette’s death because her legs were covered in scratches and bruises and everyone thought she had been around at the time.

  ‘And the fourth person present when Jeanette was killed was the driver of the car.

  ‘Let’s think about this fourth person. We don’t know what to make of him do we? On one hand he came around a blind corner and hit a girl. There was no warning. He couldn’t have stopped. It would have been a terrible experience for him. There would have been blood on his car. He was just very unlucky.

  ‘On the other hand, he didn’t stop to help. So he was evil as well.’ She was serious now. ‘And who was he? Andrew lived in Queensland at the time. Craig was investigated thoroughly. The police failed to pin it on him, or turn up anyone else. No one remembered the driver’s face. Now, that day we were there, in the same position, we saw Andrew’s face clearly. If Tara or Wando had known the driver, surely they would have recognised him. But they didn’t. Even right at the beginning, before Craig had a chance to threaten them, they couldn’t
say who the driver was. They didn’t know him. He was just a faceless stranger. A nobody. A phantom. The car didn’t even have a colour.’

  I felt a trickle of cold run down the back of my neck.

  ‘And yet Debbie had written to someone, ‘I know you killed her.’ So what had she seen?’

  Chess waved at the next heading. ‘Then there was the necklace. It seemed central to the deaths. Both girls had treasured it as a symbol of special knowledge. Both had been wearing it the day they died. It had disappeared from both bodies. How? The clasp was very strong. It wouldn’t have fallen off. Someone must have taken it each time.

  ‘Which brings us to the really important question. Why? We’ve seen it now. It’s just a necklace. You couldn’t find anything meaningful about it. You did put your finger on it, though. The whole idea is so melodramatic. As you said, ‘It’s kids’ stuff. A fairy story. It’s a little girls’ game.

  ‘Someone cared about that necklace. Someone thought enough of its power to kill over it and steal it from the body. Was it a little girl?

  ‘I started thinking about Tara again. Debbie had worn the necklace in front of her that day in the bakery. We had watched in the reflection on the fridge. Tara had stared at her for several seconds and then had turned away without saying anything. We didn’t think anything of it. Tara always behaved like that. A little later Debbie said, ‘Oh, I think it went home all right.

  ‘And what else had happened on that day? Debbie had been writing something and handed Tara a receipt. A receipt? I don’t think so. It was the note. It said, “I know you killed her”.’

  ‘What if it had been Tara who had somehow killed Jeanette? Maybe there was something I’d missed. I decided to work with the idea.

  ‘Three things supported the theory. Two of them came from Wando. Wando knew all along what had really happened on Devastation Road. He’s been hiding the secret for eight years. He wanted it to come out, but he didn’t want to be the one to do it. And he found the necklace somewhere. He would have known Tara’s hiding places.