Darkening Skies

by Parry, Bronwyn

  He now remembered skimming the obituary. He’d known Marta only a little better than he’d known the more private Wolfgang. There’d been an exhibition of her work at the Birraga Art Society five or so years ago – the first local recognition of the talent in their midst. From their brief meetings he recalled a shy, self-effacing woman, who’d studied under a master potter in Germany before emigrating decades ago. And in the rubble or whatever remained of his Birraga office he had a set of her coffee mugs, the rich brown decorated with the salt-glaze technique in which she’d specialised.

  ‘So, if Marta’s death prompted him to scan the old photos, why?’ Jenn thought aloud.

  She sat there in the hospital bed, still with irritation reddening her eyes, dust and ash marking her T-shirt, and asked him why a man had delayed taking action on incriminating photographs until the woman he’d loved was gone.

  ‘Perhaps he was protecting her. If these images represent illegal activity, then their existence is a threat to whoever’s behind it. Gil was intimidated into pleading guilty because someone threatened to hurt Jeannie. If Marta was threatened, or Wolfgang was afraid they’d get to him through her, that might have kept him quiet.’

  ‘Until it didn’t matter anymore.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘We need to talk to him.’

  ‘Yes. Or Steve does.’ If Steve didn’t, Mark would. He made that a silent vow. He had to find out from Wolfgang where the danger came from, so that he could protect Jenn, protect them all from it.

  ‘But we still don’t know what the connection is between the images in the Bohème folder and the accident.’ Jenn’s gaze drifted back to the screen, and the list of files. ‘Okay, there’re two – three – here from the year of the accident.’ Her fingertips brushed over the track pad as she selected the files, and they opened in quick succession, one after another, tiling on the screen.

  A woman, kneeling naked on a patterned carpet with her hands tied behind her, her head forward in submission, dark hair falling loose around her shoulders. Two more of the same woman, from different angles, curtains on a floor-length window visible in one, only a little of her face visible in the last, her face turned and shoulder raised as if flinching from something.

  Mark’s breath froze in his chest. ‘Zoom it. There.’

  As that portion of the image grew, so did the eyes of the woman, and the scar on her shoulder became clear. The scar she’d carried since she’d been thrown from a bolting horse at a barbed-wire fence when Mark was just a kid.

  ‘Oh Jesus … oh fuck,’ breathed Jenn. ‘Is that—’

  The ice in his chest spread, and the room around him narrowed to just those few square inches of screen, to the image that he could find no way to comprehend.

  ‘Yes,’ he said somehow, his voice strangled inside his head. ‘That’s my mother.’

  TEN

  Mark stayed silent a long time, his gaze fixed on the screen, on the image that felt to Jenn like a punch slamming into her gut every time her eyes were drawn back to it. Caroline Strelitz. Beautiful, self-assured, capable; as at home on a horse mustering cattle on the plains as presiding over an elegant dinner table or a meeting of the Dungirri Country Women’s Association. And kind and encouraging to two girls lacking a strong female role model. She’d never been motherly or physically affectionate – neither of Mark’s parents had been demonstrative, even towards him – but Caroline’s practical advice on a few occasions, her down-to-earth expectation that a girl could – should – be whatever she chose to be, had stuck in Jenn’s mind all these years, a reinforcing echo when she’d needed it of her own mother’s principles.

  To see Caroline in such a position of capitulation, of degradation, made absolutely no sense, and felt like a violation. She passed the laptop to Mark.

  ‘I’ll have to phone them,’ he said at last, closing down the screen, as if he too had seen more than enough. ‘I’ll have to ask her what this is about.’

  She didn’t envy him that conversation. ‘Where are they?’

  ‘South America. This year they’re building a school in Bolivia. Last year it was a clinic in Chile. They spend most of their time on charity projects in out-of-the-way places.’ He exhaled a tight breath. ‘I doubt I’ll get on to them straightaway. I haven’t even been able to tell them about the fire at Marrayin. I’ll have to leave another message, but at least they might have time to get over the shock of it all, to prepare themselves before they call me back.’

  Not a conversation any man should have with his mother, prepared or not. Also, she wondered whether giving them time to prepare a response in these possibly sordid circumstances might take them further away from the truth, rather than closer to it.

  Damn it, when had she become such a cynic? Caroline and Len Strelitz had always been active, respected members of the community, both taking on leadership roles in numerous spheres. Caroline in the CWA, on the Dungirri Shire Council before it amalgamated with Birraga, and on the Birraga Hospital Board; Len in the Rural Fire Service, in the local branch of the Farmers’ Federation, and in livestock research programs in conjunction with Harry Fletcher, the local veterinarian and Beth’s father.

  The Fletchers. Aside from her brief encounter with Beth, Jenn hadn’t thought of them in years. They’d been close friends of Caroline and Len. Probably their closest; they’d certainly visited Marrayin more than anyone else in the time Jenn lived on the property. Barbecues, dinners, informal visits – hardly a week went by without them getting together. And Beth had stayed at Marrayin when her parents went to conferences overseas, a significant indication of trust by her protective parents. If Caroline had confided in a friend, it would most likely have been Beth’s mother, Sylvia.

  ‘If you can’t get on to your folks, would it be worthwhile asking Sylvia Fletcher?’ she suggested.

  ‘Maybe. But it’s not the kind of topic I want to broach with anyone other than my mother initially.’

  ‘The police will ask questions. Steve will … if you tell him you recognised her.’ Would she tell Steve, if Mark didn’t? No, not yet. Not tonight, anyway.

  Mark dropped his head on to his hands and rubbed his uninjured temple. ‘I’ll tell him.’

  One more horrendous task on top of everything he’d already faced. The deep lines of fatigue on his face and the dust streaking pale lines in his brown hair gave her a glimpse of how he would age in ten, fifteen years. Had he slept at all last night? She doubted it.

  ‘Why don’t you leave it until morning?’ she said gently. ‘You look exhausted.’

  ‘No, this could be something key. Steve needs to know. But first I’ll phone and leave a message for them.’ He reached to the pocket of his shirt. ‘I’ll go outside where it’s quiet.’

  ‘I’ll go through the images again while you’re doing that,’ she said. ‘I’ll see if I can piece together any pattern, make any sense of the file names.’ Like the two-letter code after the numerical section of the file name. Her fingers itched to open the laptop again, but she’d wait until Mark left. In her distraction earlier she hadn’t properly registered the file names on his mother’s photos, but now she recalled seeing the suffix ‘CN’. Caroline Napier? All the locals knew her maiden name – half of them had called her by it – as generations of her family had held another prominent grazing property west of Birraga, at least until drought and illness took their toll.

  ‘Will you be okay here for a few minutes?’ Mark asked.

  ‘Of course,’ she said, but he hesitated for a moment until Rhonda returned, carrying a box of dressings.

  ‘Doctor Cameron said the radiology reports shouldn’t be long,’ she told them as she crossed to a storeroom.

  The pain in Jenn’s ankle had eased considerably and once the X-rays confirmed that it wasn’t fractured she would leave, as long as Mark’s scans didn’t reveal any problems. Getting back to Dungirri might be difficult tonight – she assumed her car would be a smoking wreck – but even a night in a Birraga motel was preferable
to a night in the hospital. She’d coped, so far, because of the distraction of Wolfgang’s images, but the prospect of staying all night here, in the dark and quiet with nothing to occupy her thoughts except the memories of both her mother and Jim dying in this room … she couldn’t bear to contemplate it.

  She pulled Steve’s computer back on to her lap and skimmed the list of files again. No other files with the suffix ‘CN’, but one with a longer alpha/numeric code, ending with six letters – CNLSGM. From the year of Mark’s birth, if she interpreted the date code correctly, and among the earliest images. More initials? It could be. CN for Caroline, LS fitted Len Strelitz, but she couldn’t think of anyone with the initials GM.

  She opened the file. Another black-and-white image. A party scene. If her mouth hadn’t been dry she’d have whistled. Some party. In the corner of the image, a man sat naked, playing a grand piano. Not surprisingly, Jenn didn’t recognise the slim torso and buttocks, or the semi-dressed couple draped over the piano groping each other.

  But in the centre of the image, Caroline stood, young and pretty in a clinging seventies-style halter dress, a champagne glass in her left hand. The man holding her from behind had his face buried in her neck, one hand possessively low on her abdomen, the other cupping her breast. Unsmiling, her face was turned away from him, towards another man. Len Strelitz. Len, leaning against a wall in a half-unbuttoned shirt, drinking from a wine glass, his face tight with anger.

  CNLSGM – she’d been right. Caroline Napier, Len Strelitz, and GM … who the hell was the man embracing her in that predatory, controlling grasp? She could see no sign of a ring on Caroline’s hand, but Len’s reaction and her pleading look at him signalled their interest in each other.

  No-one else in the image seemed worried by, or even aware of, the undercurrents between the three in the striking tableau. Around them, the piano player, the groping couple, and a quartet of people sitting on the floor with a guitar and a bong partied on, oblivious.

  ‘Definitely not a CWA meeting,’ Jenn muttered to herself. ‘Just what kind of craziness did you get caught up in, Caroline?’

  Sex and power, mixed with alcohol and drugs. A combination that could rapidly become dangerous, particularly in the absence of trust and respect.

  The bell in the reception area pierced the quiet, jerking her back to awareness of her clinical surroundings. On the reception side of the nurses’ station, Rhonda spoke with someone before buzzing them in to the emergency area through the connecting door.

  Steve, not Mark. The small flutter of expectation died before Jenn even recognised it.

  The detective strode across the room, took his seat beside the bed and resumed the interrupted discussion without wasting a syllable. ‘Mark said you’d found a photo of his mother.’

  With the permission implicit in Mark’s sharing of the information, she opened the later image and turned the screen to Steve. He whistled under his breath. ‘That’s her? Mrs Strelitz?’

  ‘Yes. You’ve not met her?’

  ‘No. I don’t think they visit here often. Not when I’ve been here, anyway.’

  A purely pragmatic curiosity got the better of her. The more she knew about the detective, the more effectively she’d be able to work with him. ‘Have you been based here long?’

  ‘Me? No. I usually work out of Dubbo. I was called in to work on the Sutherland kiddie abduction a couple of years ago. And again last year when Ryan and Beth’s little girl was taken. Thankfully that worked out better than the first one.’ The guarded solemnity in his face dissolved into a sardonic twist of his mouth. ‘Hell knows why they asked me back but I’ve been temporarily filling a two-month vacancy for six months now.’

  In a hotel in – where had it been? London? Moscow maybe? – she’d skimmed the few terse lines in her uncle’s email telling her the news of the death of Mitch and Sara Sutherland’s daughter, experiencing a detached twinge of sorrow for them before the next email and pressures of work distracted her again. A year later, after a week working in Southern Sudan she’d caught up with her emails, and Beth’s daughter was already found, safe and well. Jenn had dozens of dead Sudanese children to write about so Dungirri news again slipped to the back of her mind, nothing to concern her.

  But this man, with his cynicism and no connections to Dungirri, had walked through hell with her former schoolmates and neighbours.

  She put the discomfort in her chest down to after-effects of smoke inhalation and ignored it. ‘So, why take a posting here in the backblocks? Surely there must be plenty of other detective postings.’

  He leaned back casually in the chair, hands in his pockets, legs outstretched, and his crooked grin was half-sardonic, half-boyish. ‘Oh, a stint in purgatory is supposed to be good for a sinning soul. And it’s a long way from my father.’

  She recognised it as a measured, strategic admission, not so much relaxing of any personal guard but designed to gain her trust. Steve Fraser was playing a role and wasn’t about to reveal anything truly personal. Nevertheless she asked, ‘You have daddy issues?’

  ‘Assistant Police Commissioner Fraser issues.’

  She recognised the name. ‘He’s your father? The tall, dour guy?’

  ‘Yep, that’s him. He sure isn’t renowned for his sense of humour.’

  Daddy issues, indeed. The disconnect between her knowledge of Steve and the stiff, formal and yes, decidedly humourless senior officer who appeared in media briefings … not hard to imagine a chasm of issues, there.

  Steve grinned and shrugged his shoulders. ‘Maybe I should have bucked the family tradition and joined the army instead of the cops.’

  ‘My father was in the army.’ She didn’t mean to speak, but the words were gone, unable to be recalled. Just words. Nothing to do with the memories of an exploding car and her mother’s death in this room. She would not, could not, allow those memories to overwhelm her.

  ‘Barrett. Isn’t there a Barrett on the Memorial Hall roll?’ Steve asked.

  ‘That’s my grandfather, Paul Aloysius Barrett. He earned a Distinguished Conduct Medal and lost a leg in Vietnam. He died just before Paul and Paula were born. Hence their names.’

  ‘Ah. Honouring a hero in the family. But you escaped that.’

  She shrugged. ‘Not entirely. Jennifer Pauline. I came a year later, though, and it was already confusing enough with Paul and Paula.’

  ‘Your dad was the only one of his sons who followed him into the army?’

  ‘Yes. If he stayed here it would have been either the timber mill or agricultural work. The army paid more and provided better training.’

  ‘Was your mother a local?’

  Don’t ask about my mother. Not here. Not now. ‘No.’ She kept her voice just steady enough to offer the bare minimum. ‘An army nurse he met at Puckapunyal. But my family history isn’t relevant,’ she pointed at the laptop, ‘to this.’

  ‘Old crime in a small town,’ he said mildly, ‘in my experience, that makes everything, current and past, potentially relevant.’

  In her experience, too. Damn him for being right. But once again she deflected the focus away from herself. ‘Wolfgang must believe the roots of this crime go back years, because he also included this image. That’s Caroline, and Len over on the right.’

  Steve raised his eyebrows, spent long moments studying the photo of the party, then reached over to the track pad to flick between the two images. When she told him about the file-name code – dates and initials – he asked to take a look himself and she reluctantly passed his laptop back to him.

  Without the distraction of the computer, she shifted restlessly.

  She could hear Rhonda’s voice in the triage room, talking to another woman, soothing a sobbing child. Just as a nurse had soothed her when she’d been twelve, desperate to reach her dying mother, incoherent with shock and terror.

  Oh, crap, she couldn’t do this. She pushed the cotton blanket back and swung her legs over the edge of the bed, reaching for the crutches
Rhonda had brought a while ago.

  ‘Hey, you okay?’ Steve asked, dumping the laptop on the bed, moving to her side.

  ‘Yes. Just a sane, rational adult woman on the verge of a panic attack.’ Her strangled attempt at a laugh didn’t sound exactly sane. ‘I just need some fresh air and space. Now.’

  Without comment he handed her the crutches, helped her steady herself, then, tucking his laptop under his arm, he walked with her out to the ER reception area and through the glass doors to the almost-deserted foyer beyond.

  Mark. She almost burst into irrational tears the second she saw him. He and Morag Cameron broke their conversation and crossed swiftly to her.

  ‘I’m fine,’ she said to forestall their questions. ‘I will be fine. Just … Doc, I hope you’ve got good news on those X-rays, because I’m checking out.’

  ‘No fractures,’ Morag said. ‘But I’d like you to stay overnight, under observation.’

  ‘No. No offence, but I can’t do it.’ She felt ridiculous. Maybe if she explained, they wouldn’t all think she was losing it. She leaned on the crutches, her injured foot resting lightly on the floor for balance. Words, just words, and rational ones at that, if only she could get them into a clear, concise order. She sucked in a breath. ‘There’s a few too many bad memories. Not just Jim. I saw my mother die in there when I was twelve. My father was killed … they both died … the car-bomb explosion … I’m not usually emotional, but …’

  If she opened her mouth for one more word she would howl. She dropped her head, feeling the pain in her lip as she bit it, desperate to keep the sobs building in her throat from escaping. Control. Control. She had to pull herself together and stop this stupid overreaction.

  A hand clasped her shoulder, then became an arm around her, and she knew it was Mark because of the scent of smoke on his clothes. And because the ghost of the teenager she’d been knew she could rest her head against his shoulder. Just for a moment.