Missing You, Love Sara

by Jackie French

  Bob Munn glanced down at the notebook in his hand. ‘According to Johnnie Blackstone, at his request your sister drove out to his parents’ place about eight o’clock the night before she disappeared.’

  ‘Reenie didn’t have a car,’ I interrupted.

  ‘It was your mother’s car,’ said Bob Munn gently and I felt stupid for not having guessed.

  ‘Johnnie told her he wanted to break off the relationship.’

  ‘Johnnie! But he was mad about her.’ I shook my head. It didn’t make sense. Nothing made sense.

  ‘He stated that your sister was very distressed about this and refused to accept it. But he finally convinced her to accept his decision and she drove home at about half past nine.’

  ‘But why? Did he say why he wanted to break it off?’

  Bob Munn chewed his lip, as though trying to work out how to express it. ‘Apparently he felt that with your sister leaving at the end of the year, there was no future in the relationship.’

  I said nothing. It might just be true. I knew Johnnie didn’t want her to go off to uni. He wanted her to stay and save up for a house of their own and all that stuff.

  ‘What do Johnnie’s parents say?’ asked Dad.

  ‘They were having dinner in town with friends. They didn’t arrive home till about an hour after Maureen left. Johnnie had gone to bed and the next day with Maureen missing, apparently he didn’t feel it was the right time to mention the quarrel.’

  Apparently. It seemed to be his favourite word. Apparently meant that’s what someone said, but who knows if it really happened that way.

  ‘But Reenie didn’t say anything about Johnnie breaking it off,’ I protested. ‘She’d have told Mum or Myra at least!’

  ‘Maybe she hoped he would change his mind,’ said Bob Munn even more gently. ‘Maybe she felt so upset she couldn’t talk about it.’

  ‘But Myra didn’t say she looked upset …’ I stopped. Myra wasn’t the brightest person in the world and, anyway, she’d had the flu. Perhaps she just hadn’t noticed.

  ‘Maureen didn’t call you on the Wednesday night? Or on Thursday?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘And you’ve had no word from her since?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘When was the last time you saw your sister?’ asked Bob Munn.

  I shut my eyes for a second to remember.

  CHAPTER 10

  The Last Time I saw Reenie

  I was up at Mum’s, having dinner.

  It was a Monday night. Mum usually has rehearsals Friday and Saturday night, and if I had dinner with her on a Sunday she would have to drive down to the farm to pick me up, or Dad drive me up to town then hang round in town for a couple of hours.

  So I go to her place Mondays after school. I do my homework there and we have dinner early, unless the play Mum is doing is near its opening night and she has extra rehearsals, or she has a staff meeting or something—which happens a lot, and that’s okay by me. I’d get out of it more often if I could. I mean, mothers should have dinner with their daughters because they want to, right? Not just because it’s Monday.

  Dad drives in and picks me up after dinner.

  We had just finished eating. It was borscht that night, which is disgusting—like lumpy blood someone’s put through the blender. Mum always feeds me something sophisticated. She seems to think Dad and I live on chops and frozen peas.

  I’m a really good cook when I want to be, but Mum has no idea that I can even heat up a bit of pizza in the microwave. And there was no dessert because she’s always on a diet and she thinks I should be too. It was nearly rescue-by-Dad time, when Reenie came in.

  I always knock on Mum’s door. I have a key but it doesn’t seem right to use it, unless I know Mum isn’t there. But Reenie always barges right in, calling down the corridor, ‘Mum?’.

  ‘In here,’ called Mum, rinsing the blood-spattered soup bowls in the sink before she put them in the dishwasher.

  Why bother putting them in the machine if they’re already clean, I’d like to know, but Mum likes even her dishwasher to be tidy. Reenie’s just the same.

  ‘Mum, did you hear …’ began Reenie, then stopped and said, ‘Hey, Sara, hi!’ in this surprised voice, which meant she didn’t expect me to be there, though given it was a Monday you’d think she might have realised.

  ‘Hi, Reenie,’ I said.

  Reenie leant over to give me a kiss on the cheek. She had started doing that about a year before. It drove me mad. Real sisters don’t kiss each other’s cheeks, not if they live in the same house. I know she meant well, but still.

  Reenie wore her blue dress. It’s in a droopy sort of material that hangs from her shoulders and looks beautiful. Well, on Reenie it did. Everyone is always telling me how pretty my sister looks, as though they think I haven’t noticed.

  ‘How’s school going?’ asked Reenie. It’s the sort of dumb thing that Dad’s and Mum’s friends ask me, but this was my sister, for Pete’s sake. You’d have thought she could come up with something better than that.

  ‘Fine,’ I said.

  Reenie went over to the fridge, as if she lived there—which she had, of course, until just after Christmas—and took out a bottle of diet lemonade.

  ‘Anyone else want one?’

  I shook my head.

  Reenie talked as she poured. ‘I just heard. Carrie Milligan is getting married.’ She was talking to Mum now, rather than me.

  ‘Marcus?’ asked Mum.

  Reenie laughed. ‘No, that’s the whole point. It’s this guy she met up in Sydney last month and …’

  Mum was listening like she was a dog waiting for puppy treats and Reenie was sitting cross-legged on the sofa. I’d hardly even heard of Carrie Milligan and didn’t care one way or another.

  … And then Dad knocked on the door, so I grabbed my bag, avoided another sisterly kiss but got a maternal one from Mum; just a quick one as I passed so she didn’t have to go and see me out and have to talk to Dad and miss Reenie’s gossip.

  ‘Bye, Sara,’ said Reenie.

  And that was the last time I saw my sister.

  CHAPTER 11

  Suicide

  It was a clear blue day, the sort of day when cows sing in the grass, or they might sing if cows ever thought about that sort of thing. I know because I’d looked out the window. But it seemed as if what was happening in the world outside had nothing to do with us. As though it was on a TV and we couldn’t get through to the other side.

  ‘They’re saying she might have committed suicide,’ choked Mum on the other end of the phone. She’d been crying. There was a sort of snuffling silence, as she tried to speak, broken by the hollow sobs. It had taken me ages to get her to calm down enough so I could understand what she was saying.

  ‘Who?’ I asked.

  ‘The police. That Detective Sergeant who came here.’

  ‘Bob Munn?’ I asked.

  ‘That’s the one. He said maybe she was depressed because of the quarrel with Johnnie. I told them Reenie has never been depressed in her life. If she’d been worried about something she’d have told me.’

  ‘You had a rehearsal on Wednesday night,’ I pointed out.

  ‘The answering machine was on. She could have come round if she was upset. I can’t believe she was as upset as all that. Not about Johnnie. And anyway, she could have waited when she returned the car and told me when I came in.’

  Mum never liked Johnnie. Not for Reenie. She always thought Reenie would meet someone glamorous at uni. A prince or a heart surgeon or something.

  ‘She’d have told Myra at breakfast or something. Or she’d have rung me before I went to work. I just can’t believe it. I can’t believe any of it.’

  ‘But if she killed herself, where’s her body?’ I asked, then wished I hadn’t, because Mum started sobbing again.

  ‘That’s what I told them. If she killed herself, where is she? She didn’t have a car. There’s no bus through town on Thursdays. Reenie would never hit
chhike and even if she did, someone would have seen her. And you don’t hitchhike to kill yourself. Even the police admit that.’

  ‘Why do they think she did it then?’

  ‘Because she’s a teenager.’

  ‘Reenie’s not a teenager,’ I began, then stopped. I suppose eighteen was still a teenager. But Reenie had never been that sort of teenager, with moods and stuff. Reenie would never have messed up her life by doing something like killing herself.

  ‘It’s just not right. Not right,’ sobbed Mum. ‘The police should be looking for her. But they say if she hasn’t killed herself maybe she doesn’t want to be found. Maybe she was upset by the quarrel and just wanted to get away by herself, away from town and people asking questions. That maybe she’ll ring up in a few weeks when she’s settled somewhere. But that’s not like Reenie, Sara!’

  ‘I know Mum,’ I said, because she was waiting for me to agree with her.

  ‘It doesn’t make sense, Sara. None of it makes sense.’

  ‘No, Mum,’ I said, but it was another twenty minutes before I could put down the phone.

  Dad was in the kitchen. There was a cup of tea in front of him on the table, but the milk was clinging round the edges, so you could tell it was cold.

  ‘That was Mum,’ I said, sitting down opposite him, though he must have guessed. ‘She says … she says the police think Reenie might have killed herself. Or hitchhiked somewhere without telling anyone.’

  Dad nodded. I suppose the police had told him the same thing but, being Dad, he wouldn’t have been making a fuss about it. He’d just tell them Reenie wouldn’t do something like that.

  Being Dad, he hadn’t told me what the police thought. He’d try to protect me, so I wouldn’t keep having images of Reenie white and slumped and dead, with her wrists cut or something, like I was having now.

  I forced myself to think of something else.

  ‘She wouldn’t just go off either,’ I said. ‘No matter what had gone wrong. No matter how upset she was. She wouldn’t, would she? Not Reenie. She wouldn’t want to worry everyone.’

  Dad shook his head.

  ‘It just doesn’t fit,’ I said, more to myself than him. I wasn’t sure what I felt about my sister, but one thing I did know: Reenie was bone deep kind. Reenie was NICE. She wouldn’t even hurt a budgie. Much less Mum. Reenie always did the right thing if she could—it was one of the things about her that was so irritating.

  ‘Dad?’

  ‘Mmm?’ Dad looked like he hadn’t slept for months, but it had only been days since Reenie had gone.

  ‘What do you think happened?’

  ‘I don’t know, love,’ he said quietly. ‘I don’t want to think she killed herself. I don’t want to think she went off just like that without telling any of us. But the alternatives are worse.’

  ‘Maybe she got amnesia,’ I said hopefully.

  ‘You need to have something to make you lose your memory, Sara. Like a blow on the head, or a stroke, or drugs maybe.’

  ‘Maybe something fell on her in the supermarket. One of those big cans of pineapple juice—’

  ‘Someone would have seen it happen,’ said Dad gently.

  ‘Maybe she felt sick and started to walk up to the hospital and someone gave her a lift and …’ I didn’t go on. They would know at the hospital who she was. That’s how it is in a town like ours. Everyone knows everyone, more or less.

  ‘Put the kettle on, Pumpkin,’ said Dad. He hadn’t called me that in years. ‘I need something to wake me up if I’m to get anything done this afternoon.’

  I lit the gas, then held the kettle under the tap. It takes forever to fill up, as there’s not much water pressure from the tank. It used to drive Mum mad, but I sort of like it. It’s peaceful, mostly, waiting for it to fill.

  ‘Dad … you’ll take care on the tractor?’

  Suddenly I was terrified for him. You hear about tractor accidents all the time and he was so tired and if something could happen to Reenie, to Reenie of all people, then something could happen to Dad. Or anyone.

  ‘I’ll take care, Pumpkin,’ said Dad.

  CHAPTER 12

  Monday

  I didn’t go to school on Monday. I didn’t even have to convince Dad. He just assumed I wouldn’t go, or maybe he’d lost track of the days. Suddenly school seemed terribly far away.

  I asked Dad if he needed a hand but he said he didn’t. He was going to do some fencing down the Back Creek paddock. I’ve never really done any fencing, except hold the wire strainer for Dad a few times, and pretend I was helping when I was little. I help him move the cattle, of course, and stuff like that, but most of the time that’s more fun than work.

  I think Dad would rather have stayed by the phone hoping it would ring; but the trouble was it kept on ringing—not Reenie or anyone who knew anything useful, but just everyone who had heard what had happened.

  And I mean everyone. Everyone we knew, it seemed, was ringing up to say how terrible it was, but also to get more details. Okay, they were trying to be kind and helpful, most of them, but every one of them kept suggesting the same old things. Had we rung Elaine in Sydney? What about her grandmother at the Nursing Home, maybe she’d called in there? Had we rung the hospitals?

  So Dad went fencing and I went for a walk.

  I always go the same way when I go for a walk—over the creek at the ford by the house, then across the paddock and up the hill and down to Back Creek where the pools are bigger and there are more trees, and you even see a wallaby sometimes.

  But for some reason this time I walked along the creek near the house.

  It’s not much of a creek. The banks are bare, with the grass nibbled close even when there is no stock in the paddock, and two great big wombat holes that keep collapsing. The wombats must keep digging them out, because there’s always fresh dirt and long, fat droppings.

  There are no rock pools, like in Back Creek, but in a few places the rock comes to the surface and makes a sort of dam across the creek, so there’s a little pond. Reenie used to take me paddling in them when I was little. I had one of those blow-up crocodile things and she’d push it around the pool with me on its back, then she’d pretend to make it snap at me and I’d scream and laugh.

  Funny … it had been years since I’d remembered that.

  I’d gone for a walk because I wanted to stop thinking, but of course you think best when you’re walking. I do anyway. If I want to work out what I want to say in an essay, I go for a walk. Getting my legs moving seems to get my brain moving. So, of course, walking got me thinking now.

  Would Reenie really have told Mum if Johnnie had said he was breaking up with her?

  I’d always thought that Reenie told Mum everything, but would she have told her that?

  Things had to be perfect for Reenie. Her room had to be perfect. Her clothes had to be perfect. Maybe she was ashamed or humiliated. Maybe she felt there was something wrong with her because Johnnie didn’t want her. Maybe he’d said horrible things to her—though it was hard to think what horrible things you could say about Reenie. Even if someone said she was ugly, she would know she wasn’t.

  Maybe she was pregnant? That’s something Mum would never have thought of. Not about perfect Reenie.

  Maybe she just couldn’t cope with not being perfect for once in her life … police know about these things, don’t they? They deal with them all the time. If the police thought Reenie might have run away, or even killed herself maybe there was a chance she had. It was no use refusing to think about it.

  It was hot down by the creek. The hills seem to block the breezes, so all the air collects there. Today there were the smells of cattle droppings and hot grass and the dry clay edges of the creek, and another smell, too, a sweeter smell, a rotting, eerie smell.

  The crow cawed up above me, and then another replied.

  Crows are scavengers. They circle high above a body and call others of their kind to pull off strips, to feast on the rotting meat. I could se
e the others now, standing on the ground, busily burying their fat beaks in something too far away to make out.

  Something was dead, around the bend, amongst the little clump of trees.

  You get used to dead things on a farm. There’s a dead cow or two every year or a calf born wrong, and Dad shoots foxes and rabbits and is always on at me to get my junior shooter’s license and I always say I will.

  For some reason this smell was different. It made me feel sick and giddy, so I sat on a bony ridge of clay and tried to get my breath, and not look at whatever was dead in the distance.

  It wouldn’t be Reenie, of course. It was silly to even think it might be. It couldn’t be Reenie. Even if Reenie had decided to kill herself, she wouldn’t have come here. She would have gone to Mum’s for comfort. She would have taken pills at the flat … but she wouldn’t have killed herself, no matter what I’d been thinking a few minutes before. The police were wrong! She wouldn’t! She wouldn’t!

  I made myself walk forward. One step. Another step. The stench grew stronger.

  The crows caught sight of me. One flew off, screaming. The others gazed, uncertain, then when they saw I was still approaching they flew off too.

  One more step. Another.

  I could see the body now, sort of rolled up as though it had been thrown away. Brown, brown and just a flash of red. What colour had Reenie been wearing? Suddenly I couldn’t remember what Dad had told me.

  Closer. Closer.

  It was a wombat. It had that polished leather look of a dead animal.

  Its stomach had ballooned up like a tractor tyre. The crows hadn’t punctured it yet. It had died of mange, I suppose, or just old age.

  I turned round and left the body for the crows.

  CHAPTER 13

  Officially Missing

  The Windamoolla Dispatch comes out on Tuesdays.

  It’s only eight pages, wrapped around an insert that goes to the whole region—stuff about cattle sales and new fencing materials and sheep drenches and some supermarket’s plans to expand.