by Joy Dettman
Re-hab-il-it-a-shon. Always knew that jail couldn’t rehabilitate him. Always knew he’d come out angrier than he’d gone in.
Marni got the keys. She’d taken charge.
‘My mobile. In the car. Get it, Mum!’
‘You bleeding,’ Sarah said.
‘Get my mobile. Phone triple zero,’ Marni demanded and Sarah looked away from him to the old key still in the door latch. Gramp had only ever removed that key when they’d had to lock Gran inside when they went to the market, shops, bank. Couldn’t take her out. Like Marni, she’d been born to wage war.
Like him. But today he was the one who was bleeding.
That old door had never wanted to open, not in wintertime. Easier in summer. Sarah’s hand remembered that lift, that drag. Her hand got her outside, where there was air, where there was space, where the land smelled of winter’s clean.
They’d had a church service for Danni, in Sydney. It had been on the news. Barbara Lane there, clinging to David Crow. Danni was alive and fighting the devil to stay alive, and they’d found her, found her because Uncle Fred had told them about Gramp’s will. Marni called him Hubert, their angel. He was Danni’s angel too.
That day at Forest Hill when she’d walked into him, today had already been written by the gods. Driving out here, finding Sylvia and her paintings, had been written. Every move she’d made since had been leading Sarah back … to the devil.
The mobile was in her hand. She didn’t know how to make a voice call. She touched the symbol for phone. It offered choices. She raised a keyboard, touched the zero three times, touched call. Didn’t know if she’d done it right, if it was ringing, if it wasn’t, and today she wanted to hear it. Today she wanted to hear the difference between a siren and Danni’s scream. Wanted to hear her voice screaming, ‘Kill him.’
The phone vibrating in her hand she ran back to the house to ears that could hear and she had to stand close to him so she could hold the phone to Marni’s ear.
He didn’t move.
‘We need the police. We found Danni Lane,’ Marni told the phone.
She should have said the Freeway Killer. Everyone knew about the Freeway Killer. People had forgotten Danni Lane.
He’d gone grey, like Gramp. His hand, palm up on the floor, had never been like Gramp’s. Long blonde hairs from Danni’s head were entwined between his fingers. He’d liked long hair.
Marni pulled the padlock clasp out of the collar, and when Danni’s foot was free, she didn’t get off him but snatched the padlock and looped it through a link of the chain she’d twisted around his neck. Fell off him then and crawled away, shaking, shuddering, like she was having a fit.
‘We need the police and an ambulance … I told you, I don’t know the address. It’s a farm at Kangaroo Ground. We’ve got Danni Lane and I’m bleeding everywhere,’ Marni yelled at the phone.
Sarah lifted Danni to her feet. She tried to make her sit on Gran’s wicker chair. She wouldn’t sit, and she said something.
‘She’s deaf. Talk to her face,’ Marni said.
‘Tie him up,’ Danni said.
‘He can’t … can’t hurt no one now.’
The last time Sarah had seen him when he couldn’t hurt anyone, she’d screamed ‘murderer’ in his face. Killed him that day, in her head. She’d made him be more dead then her mother, who had wasted her last breath of life defending him.
Not his fault, baby. He loves …
He loves … forever more unfinished, because it couldn’t be finished, because he’d loved no one. Sarah had worked that out when she was seven, when he’d picked her up and locked her into the boot of the red and white car because her mother wouldn’t get in when he’d said Get in the car. Remembered nine too, remembered him laughing at a backyard full of tears while little Uncle Bill lay on his back on the lawn, his nose bleeding.
Then eleven, when she’d grown into hating him, it had been a good fit.
‘I’m calling Ross,’ Marni said.
*
Danni had a roll of pink ribbon, a roll of duct tape, and Ross wasn’t picking up.
Then, ‘Who?’
‘It’s Marni. Danni’s alive, and we found her.’
‘Marni,’ he said.
It wasn’t what he said, but how he’d said it. ‘Say something, Mum. He doesn’t believe me.’
‘I am Sarah,’ she said. ‘We find Danni Lane … at Kangaroo Ground.’
‘It’s an old farm,’ Marni said. ‘Out past Eltham, in the bush. It’s got an old house on it and a big tin in-your-face garage, you can’t miss—’
‘Say 271 … in the map book,’ Sarah said.
‘The farm’s on map 271 in our street directory, oh, and there’s an artist called Sylvia Moon who lives like half a kilometre away.’
‘Moon,’ he repeated.
‘Moon, as in sky. Tell her we’re at the writer’s place. She’ll know where.’
‘You need to get out of there, Marni.’
‘He’s not going anywhere. Mum’s tying him up – and he’s probably dead anyway. He hasn’t moved.’
‘Stay on the line,’ Ross said. Marni turned the phone on to speaker and picked up the discarded duct tape and scissors.
The table was a treasure trove. He had food, a laptop that looked brand new, paper towels, tissues.
The side of her wrist was gashed deep and still dripping blood. If it had been at the front, it might have cut a vein. It wasn’t hurting, or hadn’t been until she helped herself to a bunch of tissues to use as a pad on it then reached for his paper towels to rip off half a metre, she folded it lengthwise to use as a bandage. Couldn’t do the duct tape with one hand so waited and watched Danni tie a bow.
At school, she’d envied Danni’s hair, and her mobile. She wasn’t like the same girl and seeing her like she was made Marni scared. Wanted Ross to come. Wanted an army of policemen.
‘Mum.’
Sarah came to use the last of his duct tape, to bind the paper towel bandage tight, and before she was done, Danni was gone up a passage. They went after her.
And Ross was back. ‘Are you there, Marni?’
‘Yes.’
‘Don’t hang up on me. We’ve got Sylvia Moon’s number.’
‘You’re on speaker. Please come fast.’
‘We’re on our way,’ Ross said. ‘Stay on the line. What is Danni’s condition?’
‘She’s walking.’
She was running a bath too, in what might have been a bathroom a hundred years ago. It had old metal taps like Mrs Vaughn’s garden taps, and a green bathtub with legs – but a modern bathplug, and one of those taps gushed steaming water.
‘You should wait,’ Marni said. She’d seen enough television police shows to know that investigators didn’t want their evidence washed down the drain. Danni didn’t hear her, or ignored her. She was stripping, and Sarah helping her to do it. They didn’t need words.
Marni kicked what they stripped off out the door, a pink sweater, a denim skirt, a pair of wrecked underpants, and, naked, Marni could see how not-all-right Danni was. She’d been skinny at school. Apart from her face, she was skin and bone and had hip bones that looked sharp enough to cut with, and her ankle where the dog collar had been was red raw and oozing pus.
‘Soap,’ Sarah said.
There was soap beside a candle on the windowsill and salt on the table, and Dettol. Shampoo too. Sarah used it to wash Danni’s matt of hair. She washed her neck, her back with her hands, and maybe her hands or the hot water slowed Danni’s shaking. She sat there, being washed like a baby, like she was mesmerised by being cared for.
The back door was open. Marni heard Herod’s bark before she heard Sylvia’s, ‘Oh my God! Oh dear God.’
Herod knew where they were. He was on a lead, but he led the way.
‘Oh my God,’ Sylvia moaned while Herod tasted the soapy, salty, Dettol-flavoured bathwater, sniffed at Danni’s shoulder, licked it a little cleaner, then sat down to laugh about it.
; There was a towel hanging behind the door. Danni shrank from it. They dried her with paper towels. She wouldn’t look at a man’s sweater Sylvia found in a bedroom, but accepted Marni’s underpants and t-shirt – and Sylvia’s poncho. It came to a long point front and rear so covered the important bits. She accepted Sarah’s comb, but couldn’t drag it through her hair.
‘Cut it off,’ she said.
‘The police will be here soon, dear,’ Sylvia said.
‘Cut it,’ Danni said. ‘All of it.’
She was scary. Her eyes were. Now that it was over, to Marni, this whole place felt unreal, but Sarah, who’d had her scare early, was over it now. She cut Danni’s hair, and was combing it when they heard the helicopter, or Herod and Danni heard it. Marni didn’t until she went after Herod, who’d let himself out.
He barked at it, and barked more when they heard the distant sirens, when Marni picked up his lead and took him back to the kitchen.
‘They’re coming.’
‘Your mobile?’ Danni said, her hand out.
Ross had said to stay on the line, but he hadn’t, so she gave it to Danni, thinking that she wanted to phone her mother. She didn’t phone anyone. She found the camera and shaking hands attempted to focused it on him.
‘You don’t want him,’ Marni said.
‘Take it,’ Danni said.
Almost told her he’d give her nightmares, but he’d probably given her enough to last forever, and maybe having a photograph of him tied up like a Christmas present with a big pink bow at his wrists might wash a few nightmares away, so Marni lined up a good full-length shot. Couldn’t see his bloody head in it, so she moved around until his head was the main focus, and got a close-up of it and the pink bow – and she hadn’t killed him, or not yet. He was breathing.
They came then, like a rowdy television show, uniformed men with guns on their hips and nothing for them to do when they came through that door.
Then he came, their egg and bacon McMuffin policeman, today looking like a worried Robert De Niro playing the role of detective, until he put his arm around Sarah, and when she looked at his face, he said, ‘I knew you were my luck. That day on the plane, I knew it.’
A STURDY MODEL
The Freeway Killer didn’t look a lot like his enhanced photographs, or not in his current state. The tall, poncho-clad girl with her fringe and pale short bob didn’t look like the photographs of the schoolgirl Danni. No rebel left in her eyes, no laughter, plenty of fear and staring distrust.
‘She needed a bath. We kept her stuff for you,’ Marni said, pointing with a sneaker-clad foot to the pile of rags she’d moved to the hearth, to the nest of tangled hair there.
The paramedics came then, and the girl who was but wasn’t Danni, who looked like Barbara Lane, grabbed Marni’s duct tape bandaged wrist.
‘I want my father?’
Marni removed that gripping hand, and held it. ‘I need stitches in that,’ she said. ‘And you need antibiotics for your ankle. I’ll go wherever they take you and stay with you until they get your parents.’
‘Where’s my father?’
‘Nearby. We’ll get him to the hospital, Danni,’ Ross said. ‘I’ll bet he’s there before us.’
She’d have nothing to do with the stretcher. Marni found a pair of sneakers on the table. Sarah got them onto Danni’s feet while Marni held Danni up, then together they walked her out to the ambulance, walked her slow, Danni not looking ahead to where she was going but up and around at the place where she’d been and Ross looking where she looked, at an old house on a hill, a decent old house in its day.
They’d got him. Jack James, the neighbour had called him. They’d got him, or those two girls had got him.
You either know or you don’t know when you’ve met your match. He’d known that day on the plane and denied it. When he’d waved those girls away on their tour bus, he’d wanted to get on it and go with them. Every time he saw them they brightened his day, then he let them get away.
Not this time.
He watched Danni assisted into the ambulance. Marni assisted herself, and Sarah wanted to get in and go with them.
‘You have to take our car home, Mum, and our paintings,’ Marni said. ‘And be careful at those roundabouts.’
You beautiful kid, Ross thought. You give a man hope for the next generation.
He’d given up hope of finding Danni alive. One out of five, he thought. It’s poor odds, but better than none out of five.
*
Sarah stood in the biting wind, watching the ambulance reverse down the drive, guided by uniformed men. They were everywhere, swarming like Gramp’s bees. She wanted to go from this place, to get into her car and follow that ambulance and Marni. Knew she couldn’t. Knew there could be no more running away, and no more need to. This time, they’d lock him up forever.
The police had unlocked the big door of Gramp’s eyesore tin shed, and when the ambulance was gone from her view, Sarah turned and walked to the open door.
And there it was, Gramp’s old Holden, newspaper stuck over its windscreen, its chrome grille and bumper bar. They’d shown a photograph of a white station wagon on the television, a Kingswood. Should have known it, but it had looked newer, bigger, cleaner than Gramp’s and he’d never said Kingswood. Always he’d said the old girl, or the van.
It was parked facing forward. She’d never driven it forward down that drive, always reversed down, her head out the open window, watching the rocks and bushes on the driver’s side and letting the other side look after itself.
Ross was beside her. She turned to face him. ‘I learn to drive in that. I should know before, from on the television.’
‘Do you feel like talking about what happened here today?’
She shook her head, and walked across to the shed, still expecting it to smell of Gramp’s honey. Maybe a whiff clung to a shelf or the rafters.
Remembered those shelves, and the day she’d found Daddy’s pots of gold, lined up on them. It would have been gold enough for her and for her mother. They could have stopped moving here, lived different lives here. He could have stayed, could have inherited this land.
She’d known him as soon as she’d seen his eyes, his teeth behind that grimace. She’d inherited his teeth. Not his eyes. She had her mother’s eyes.
Joseph and Stephanie, hard names to say. J’s were the hardest sounds to learn because they were made up of two sounds, a D and a G. He’d had three J’s. Joseph Jacob Jones. She’d had two. Remembered every year of Jillian Jones, every year of that old green tent, its smell of mould – and the boot’s dark spare tyre and grease smell.
Ross was beside her again, and this time she tried to speak of what had happened.
‘Danni was fighting him. Marni hit him, with the poker. Like she is chopping wood. Two hands. She hit him maybe three time before he stop fighting Danni.’
‘What brought you out here?’
‘This,’ she said, her hands reaching wide to gather in this land, its mud, its sky, its trees. ‘My grandfather own all of this hill. I live with him … before …’
‘You heard Danni – Marni heard her.’
‘Yes. I think she is gone mad when she smash the window…’
‘He’s not your grandfather?’
‘No!’ She shook her head. ‘No! No!’
Walked away from him to her car, thinking of Marni, of what she would say when she heard the words Sarah had to say. Maybe she’d understand why Sarah had lied to her, why she’d changed their names, why she hadn’t kept in touch with the Clarks. He’d known the Clarks, had known where they’d lived, so they couldn’t know where Sarah Carter had lived.
The car unlocked since she’d got the mobile, she locked it, and because Ross was looking up, she raised her eyes to the grey of the sky and to a helicopter hovering overhead. The police? A television newsman aiming his camera at her car? Would it be on the news tonight as the murder car? It was a Hyundai. It was the right colour.
Gram
p’s land would be in the headlines, and Danni, and Joseph Jacob Jones.
FREEWAY KILLER’S DAUGHTER AND GRANDDAUGHTER TO RECEIVE TWO HUNDRED THOUSAND DOLLAR REWARD
Like a boomerang, that money. Throw it far away and it came back. They’d spent a fortune on repairs to the house. They’d paid three thousand dollars for their lounge suite, had written a cheque to Harvey Norman for almost ten thousand dollars, but what leaked out of that bucket of money, each month came flooding back. She’d write a bigger cheque soon to give to the taxation department, but that money would come back when her term deposits paid their interest. Maybe the bucket would find its level one day and become stagnant.
But they’d found Danni Lane. Sarah and Marni Carter had found Danni Lane alive when everyone had believed that she was dead. Men had been out searching the sides of freeways for her body in a bag. She wasn’t well. Perhaps her father and the doctors could make her well.
That image of that corner, that tangle of pink and grey, the arms, the screaming mouth of a rider on the shoulders of a buck-jumping devil, would stay with Sarah for her lifetime. And Marni’s face in profile, Oliver written all over it, his determination to fight to the end.
He lived on in Marni, and she’d fought the devil and won.
Sarah had fought him the day of her mother’s funeral. He’d been balancing on crutches, trying to throw a handful of rose petals into the grave. She’d stopped him, or made his petals fall on the ground.
She’d fought him when he’d wanted her to write her name on a withdrawal form so he could get money from Stephanie and Jillian’s bank account.
Sign it for him, baby. We’re all he’s got. He loves us.
Her mother had taught her many things. She’d taught her to read, to write, to speak – and never to be any man’s fool.
He was different when I met him, baby.
Perhaps he was or perhaps all men had two faces, the one that said, ‘I love you’, and the other face.
