The Silent Inheritance

by Joy Dettman

  What would happen to Mrs Vaughn if they weren’t there to look after her? She couldn’t look after herself.

  She was Raymond’s responsibility, not Sarah’s, or Marni’s.

  Marni wanted to buy one of the new houses opposite her school. She didn’t want to change schools.

  An exhausting day, Monday, Sarah watching the hands of her watch for most of it and was pleased when it was over, pleased to ride the lift down with Bob, walk at his side to his car, buckle in and sit back, her eyes closed.

  He liked to talk. ‘We had a visit from the police while you were at the dentist,’ he said.

  ‘Dentist?’ For a second she’d forgotten her phantom dental appointment. ‘Oh, yes, Jackie said.’

  Jackie saw all. She’d told Sarah about the two officers who had been waiting when Crow came in this morning, how they’d holed up with Crow and Bob, in separate offices, for almost an hour.

  They wouldn’t have learnt much from Bob. He kept his working life and his other life well separated, except with Sarah. She’d become a part of both.

  He’d kissed her on Saturday night when he’d driven her and Marni home from his mother’s party. Her fault. She’d encouraged him by clinging to his side for the hours she was there, too many hours because Marni hadn’t wanted to leave.

  Near midnight Bob had walked them to their gate, and when Marni had gone ahead to unlock the door, in the dark cave behind that gate, he’d put both of his hands on Sarah’s shoulders and kissed her. She’d escaped him fast, his kiss disturbing her, but not in the way it was supposed to; she’d been embarrassed by it. She didn’t want to kiss him or have his hands on her.

  It would be easy to become lost in his family. His mother was nice, his sisters friendly, and there were enough of them to absorb her and Marni, and it would be good for Marni to have those people in her life – life-changing.

  Their lives would change anyway. The man from TattsLotto had said so.

  ‘A life-changing amount,’ he’d said.

  You can’t change lives. You can move away, change your name, hide in a granny flat with a landlady playing watchdog at her front window, but inside you’re still stuck with who you were born to be, because every memory of who you were is still jammed inside with every image of where you’ve been.

  She’d dreamt of Perth last night, a convoluted nightmare about the TattsLotto people delivering garbage bags full of money, that she’d had to get back to Victoria because the Freeway Killer had Marni and she had to give him that money as a ransom.

  Afraid to sleep again, she’d looked up Peter and Lynette Clark on the internet. They were still in Perth. She’d googled their house, seen their backyard, their swimming pool. She’d googled Uncle Bill’s street in Brisbane. He was probably still there. He’d had an electrical business in Mount Gravatt. She’d looked for Gramp’s farm. She used to know the roads out there. In the months before Marni had been born, she’d driven into Eltham, and further than that, Gramp at her side. He’d been near blind, but a careful teacher. He’d made her drive around and around his front paddock, made her reverse down his drive, parallel park between a big rock and a tree before he’d allowed her to drive him to a farmers’ market where he’d sold his honey. Near the end, unable to see much more than night from day, he’d walked with his hand on her shoulder. Loved him, truly loved him. He’d loved her too and he would have loved Marni but from December until June, she’d hidden the bulge of Marni beneath big sweaters, because along with driving him and cooking for him and keeping Gran clean, she’d read newspapers and letters to him.

  The last letter from Perth had made her know that it was time to go. It had started everything. Gran had ended up in a nursing home; John, Gramp’s son from Dubbo, wrote to say that he’d be arriving on the Saturday.

  She’d walked away with twenty dollars in her purse but over a thousand in her old bank account, Centrelink money. They’d paid her a carer’s pension, because of Gran.

  They’d given her more money once Marni came, and had continued paying that allowance until she was almost eight months old, when Sarah had withdrawn all but fifteen dollars from that account then told Centrelink that she had a job and didn’t need a pension.

  She’d opened her current account with ten dollars of that pension money – and today she was a millionaire.

  Ridiculous, she thought. Re-dick-you-luss.

  Could see that word written in blue biro on her mother’s notepad, could remember watching the biro writing, her mother’s mouth teaching her how to say it.

  It means silly, funny, baby.

  I’ve had a ridiculous life, she thought.

  An-on-a-muss: It means no one knows you, baby.

  Sarah Carter was anonymous.

  Her mother had taught her to read words before she could say them. Printed them on cardboard she’d cut from cereal packets. Chair. Table. Car. Shoe. Tree. Tent. Should have been a teacher of the deaf, not a house cleaner, not a child minder.

  A dreamer, her mother, an incurable optimist.

  One day the doctors will be able to fix your ears, baby.

  And a fool.

  He loves us, baby. We are all he’s got.

  Marni was an incurable optimist but no fool. She wanted Sarah to retire, get a cochlear implant and pay a personal speech therapist to live with them in their McMansion. She’d said last night that if they made Sarah wear a blindfold, she’d be forced to listen to speech, and that if she listened for long enough, her brain would become so frustrated it would start processing the sounds of spoken English.

  It wouldn’t. A study done recently claimed that babies implanted at twelve months had better results than those implanted at two years. At fifteen, it would have been too late for Sarah. She was thirty-two. The part of her brain meant to process spoken language would have atrophied.

  At-row-fied: Turned into rock, baby.

  Her cochlear had probably turned into rock and the doctors wouldn’t be able to push their electrodes in, and even if they got enough in, even if she got the optimum result, the noise of the world would probably drive her crazy. Barking dogs drove Mrs Vaughn and Marni crazy. Not Sarah.

  She could afford to retire. Even earning interest at three per cent, those millions would make three times more than she could in a year. She wouldn’t have to pay tax on what she’d won, but would on the interest that money earned.

  And thinking about it was giving her a headache.

  ‘Traffic very bad?’ she said.

  ‘This freeway wasn’t built to carry the amount of traffic it carries today.’

  ‘I will buy a car when I get my licence.’

  ‘You’re having driving lessons?’

  ‘Soon. I will get my learner first.’

  Get a chequebook too. She used to write cheques for Gramp, then place the pen where he had to sign. He’d paid everything with cheques. She’d write one for Jackie to pay off her house, and one for Rena so she could fly home to Greece.

  That money could change a lot of lives.

  THE COVER-UP

  Washing a car inside and out with a sixty-five-dollar shirt and three bottles of top-shelf whisky had been life-changing for Freddy. As had driving through a rainstorm with one headlight and no windscreen, crossing over intersections where every car was a police car, turning corners where at every turn he’d seen that runner in yellow.

  By the time he’d got to where he was going, he’d been as sober as a judge, sober enough to know what he’d done, but too far away from where he’d done it to turn that car around and undo it.

  The old place was deserted, as it had been the last time he’d had a poke about out here, but he’d got that car off the road and under cover, got out of it and collapsed in a heap on the dirt floor, got his back against the shed’s paling wall and slept like one of the dead until the birds had got going at daylight.

  He’d seen the dried blood between his fingers, around his nails, before he’d seen his shirt. Its cuff, its gut, its sleeve was sta
ined, as were his light grey trousers, where he’d wiped a bloody hand.

  Stripped that shirt from his back, looked down at his bloated toad-white belly and stood bawling like a baby.

  There were two ex-army jerry cans of petrol on the bench. If he’d had a match in his pocket, he might have ended it there, burnt the shed, car, girl and himself. No match. He’d tried washing the blood from his shirt with petrol. He’d tried whisky before giving up and using his shirt and whisky to wash Cheryl and Rolland’s fingerprints from the car’s interior.

  A methodical man, Freddy, he’d been washing the glove box door when he’d found the small bottle of water. He’d found nail scissors, a packet of Panadol, two of which might have saved his mind. They’d stopped his bawling, had got him thinking.

  He had that ice, most of it turned to water. He had chicken, chips, peanuts. What he had to do was stay where he was until nightfall – then do what he had to do, and what better place to do it?

  Old tools in the corner, woven together by dusty cobwebs: axe and crowbar, pick, shovel – and a wheelbarrow.

  The car’s interior was still wet from its soaking when he’d backed it out of the shed and taken to the back roads again. No rain had fallen on Saturday night.

  Somewhere between Seymour and Heathcote, he’d eased the Commodore down a goat track into heavily timbered country, where he’d emptied the glove box and his pockets into a supermarket bag. He removed his trousers last, tossed them onto the driver’s seat and poured the contents of a jerry can over them, the upholstery, over the motor, and in the boot. He’d used his sixty-five-dollar shirt as a wick in the petrol tank, lit it and run.

  Feet unaccustomed to being walked on, clad in shoes not made for walking, hadn’t done it well. He didn’t know how far they’d walked him during the hours before dawn, or how often he’d sat down to rest his feet and allow his hands to labour on.

  They and Cheryl’s nail scissors had shredded his bank cards, licence, wallet, then dug holes where he’d buried the shreds. His hands were buggered before the scissors fell apart and before they’d shredded his banknotes. He’d tossed them to the morning breeze, had used his poker machine dollars to mark each hundred of his final steps, his final coin pitched at a farm fence before he’d stumbled down to the house.

  Two tied dogs raised the alarm. A middle-aged farmer found him, boxer-short clad, eaten alive by mosquitoes, on his knees, praying to a garden tap.

  The farmer’s wife phoned the police while the farmer led Freddy into a bathroom where he offered him a towel, a blue polo shirt that stretched and a pair of navy blue tracksuit pants, his wife’s. She was a big woman.

  Freddy had no identification on him. The farmer and his wife didn’t recognise his name or his mozzie-bitten face, but they fed him fried eggs on toast and two mugs of tea and looked kind, so he tried out his story on them, and when the country constable came, he tried it out on him.

  Frederick Adam-Jones had spent most of his adult life washing the guilty innocent. He did a whitewash job on himself that Sunday morning. He’d come up with a carjacking, of the five Islander types, one big chap covered in tattoos. The gang had made their attack as he was driving out of his Camberwell property. They’d tossed him into the boot and hadn’t opened it until they’d stripped him a few hundred yards from that farm gate – and by the time he was back in the city and relating his tale to city police, he damn near believed it himself.

  Carjacking was becoming a common occurrence around Melbourne. Freddy was uninjured. He refused to go to a hospital, and any evidence he might have had on him had been washed off in the farmer’s bathroom. He had no family member to call, no money on him to pay for a taxi, so a young female constable drove him home to Camberwell and waited with him until he found Cheryl’s emergency key to the back door. She told him to take it easy, that they’d be in touch.

  He reported his stolen bank cards online, an inconvenience, certainly, but what man who’d been carjacked and robbed wouldn’t have cancelled his cards? He swallowed two more Panadols then hit his pillow and died until Monday morning.

  The first reverberation hit him when he picked up the Herald Sun, delivered to his letterbox seven days a week. They’d given him the front page, had dug up an old photograph of a frog-eyed fat old bastard.

  TOP BARRISTER CARJACKED

  On Saturday night at ten o’clock, well-known barrister Frederick Adam-Jones was backing out of his Camberwell property when a group of youths he described as being large men of Islander appearance forced their way into his vehicle. ‘One had a knife with a blade about a foot long,’ Mr Adam-Jones said. ‘I didn’t argue with it.’

  The carjackers threw him into the boot, where he remained until dawn when a battered and bruised Mr Adam-Jones was thrown naked onto the roadside fifteen kilometres west of Heathcote …

  There was more. They’d spoken to the farmer and his wife. They’d printed a description of the tattooed Islander and his big knife, had suggested that the carjacking may not have been a random attack. They’d rehashed Freddy’s recent loss of the Swan case, had mentioned Swan’s known addiction to ice – which could also have repercussions. Freddy was currently appealing Swan’s conviction.

  Wanted to hide from Monday morning. His burying of that girl’s body haunted him, as did the knowledge that bodies were usually found – most of them were – sooner or later.

  He knew the burnt-out shell of Cheryl’s Commodore would be found. He was an arsonist now as well as a murderer. He’d set fire to the forest out behind Heathcote. It hadn’t burnt much, may not have burnt enough – the front seats had been soaked – and whether it had or not, the engine block wouldn’t have burnt, and each one was numbered. Given time, that Commodore would be traced to Cheryl Anne Adam-Jones. However, given the minimum of luck, that car wouldn’t be connected to the body of the girl.

  Had to keep going, keep doing what he had to do. He had to keep playing the injured party. His appearance helped, his limp, swollen face, his aching muscles and protesting sinews.

  *

  He’d caught a taxi to the office. Smyth paid the fare then gave him a handful of notes from petty cash. Freddy’s refusal to discuss the trauma of his weekend earned him a smidgen of respect from the newshounds and maybe the judge, who asked him twice if he wished to continue, and Freddy nodded, aware he was getting the jury’s sympathy vote. Then the judge went and dismissed them early.

  Rolland had been in touch. He preferred the less personal text to voicemail, and neither text expressed remorse or concern for his father’s health. Rolland’s concern was for the health of his malfunctioning bank card.

  On his sixteenth birthday, Freddy had given him access to the family everyday account – limited access. He’d been allowed to withdraw up to four hundred dollars per month, Freddy’s means of teaching that boy the art of money management. Apparently, he’d used his allowance to set himself up in the marijuana business.

  Freddy replied to him via text.

  Will be home by five. Will speak then.

  Lack of funds or the need to charge his mobile drove Rolland home at seven thirty. No greeting, a grunted reply to Freddy, but he plugged his mobile into the charger, opened the freezer, ripped his way into a packet of frozen meat pies and placed two, unwrapped, into the microwave before setting it humming. A search of the refrigerator revealed no can of Coke, nor would it until his mother returned.

  ‘Where have you been?’

  ‘What’s it to you?’

  Not a lot, Freddy thought, then shuddered and thought of the parents of that girl who hadn’t come home on Friday night.

  ‘Where have you been sleeping?’

  ‘As if you care.’

  He hadn’t slept at home. Rolland left behind mute evidence of his every passing.

  Children are born into love, Freddy thought, but as with a fine pair of shoes, love pinches, then wears out. Freddy’s pinching shoes were in the green bin. He was barefoot tonight. Born with faulty feet, or feet made
faulty by hand-me-down shoes, for the greater part of his adult life he’d suffered the agony of ingrown toenails. Since his walk through the bush, both big toes were preparing to explode. He needed an appointment with his podiatrist and Cheryl wasn’t at home to make it.

  The microwave beeped – too soon to have heated those pies through. Freddy considered advising that boy, but a poorly heated meat pie wouldn’t be the worst he’d put into his gut.

  He had the sort of looks that might take him a long way, and was already three inches taller than his father. He might have had a brain had he sat still long enough to find it.

  Watched him search the pantry for the tomato sauce dispenser. Watched him find it, squeeze, and when nothing came out, pitch it towards the garbage bag in the corner, then return to the pantry for a two-litre bottle of sauce. Plenty in it. It came out fast to drown his pies. He picked up the plate, relieved it of one pie, bit, spilling pie and sauce as he left the kitchen.

  Like blood on the floor.

  And the phone rang. It jarred Freddy’s mind back to the moment. He was reaching for it when Rolland materialised behind him and snatched it.

  ‘A customer?’ Freddy asked.

  Not a customer. The snarling youth’s demeanour altered as he began his mother manipulation. Freddy had witnessed it before.

  ‘Mine isn’t either,’ Rolland, his son, said. ‘He won’t tell me.’ He listened a moment, then slid the phone along the granite bench. Freddy caught it before it fell overboard.

  ‘What’s happening with our cards, Freddy?’ Cheryl asked. Banks, known thieves, were apparently efficient thieves. The repercussions of the cancelled cards had reached Bali – or Thailand.

  ‘I had to cancel the lot,’ Freddy said.

  ‘Why would you do a thing like that with me stuck over here?’

  He had to lie to her. It didn’t come as easily as it had to the police and farmers. ‘I was carjacked,’ he said. ‘They took everything.’

  ‘I told you when you bought that car that flaunting your money around was asking for trouble,’ she said. ‘Are you all right?’