‘Can I get you something? asked the woman. ‘A cup of tea or coffee or a cold drink?’
‘No, thank you, Mrs Drenkin,’ said Mum.
‘Call me Deirdre,’ said the clairvoyant. She took the chair opposite Mum. ‘We’ll get right into it, will we?’ she asked.
Mum nodded.
‘Did you bring something of your daughter’s?’
Mum nodded again. ‘It’s a photo of her and her boyfriend. She kept it on her dressing table.’ Mum’s voice was shaking.
The clairvoyant—Deirdre—took it, and held it for a moment, then she put it on the table.
There was a pack of cards on the table too, though I didn’t recognise the one on top. It didn’t look like the cards we have at home.
Deirdre picked up the pack and shuffled them for about five seconds, then handed them to Mum.
‘You shuffle them,’ she said. Mum obeyed.
Mum’s not a card player, so she didn’t shuffle them very well and, anyway, I could see her hands were shaking. Or rather, they were tense because she was trying to get them NOT to shake.
I wanted to take them and do it for her but I assumed the clairvoyant wanted Mum to do it. After all, it was Mum’s future she was supposed to be telling, or maybe her past.
Mum dropped one of the cards on the floor. I picked it up and handed it to her and Mum had another go at shuffling, then gave it up and handed back the pack.
The clairvoyant shook her neat, grey head. ‘On the table,’ she said.
Mum did what she was asked.
‘Now cut them.’
Mum looked uncomprehending.
‘Take some of the cards off the top and place them next to the others,’ said the clairvoyant. ‘Face down. Now again. And again. And again. Now turn the first card up. Now the next one. And the next. And the next.’
I’d like to tell you which cards Mum turned up but, to be honest, I can’t remember. I was watching the clairvoyant instead of the cards, and Mum of course.
The clairvoyant picked the cards up and said, ‘Mmmmmmm’, then nothing else for quite a while. Then she touched the photo with the tips of her fingers.
I could hear a clock ticking somewhere. I looked round and saw one on the cabinet right where I expected it to be; one of those wooden clocks that look like five hills humped together, with the clock in the middle. It wasn’t showing the right time. I know, because I checked my watch.
‘I’m getting something,’ said the clairvoyant at last.
Her face was relaxed but sort of concentrated. She really did look as though she was trying to see something or listen to something, not like she was conning us and working out what to say.
‘Reenie is at peace,’ she said at last. ‘She’s happy and she wants you to be happy too. There’s no anger where she is now. She’s left it all behind. She wants you to stop worrying and know that she’s at peace.’
‘What else?’ whispered Mum.
‘It’s confused,’ said the clairvoyant. ‘Do you know a … I think it’s David. The name is David. Do you know a David? Could he be concerned in any way?’
Mum shook her head.
‘There’s Uncle David,’ I said, because it was obvious Mum hadn’t remembered. ‘But he’s dead. He died when Dad was a kid.’
‘That’s it,’ said the clairvoyant. ‘That’s what they were trying to tell me. Uncle David is watching over her. He’ll look after her.’
‘But what happened?’ cried Mum. ‘Can she tell us that?’
The clairvoyant frowned. ‘It’s not clear,’ she said. ‘I can tell you this. You’ll find out the truth sometime. You won’t have to go forever without knowing. It’ll take time for all the evidence to come out, but you have to trust that it will.’
There was more in that line for a while, Mum asking questions and the clairvoyant giving answers—but even Mum’s questions weren’t real questions, if you know what I mean.
She never even asked straight out, ‘Is Reenie dead?’ It was like she didn’t really want to know.
Finally, the woman stood up. We’d been there about an hour and I suppose she had another customer due. She took Mum’s hand. ‘Don’t hesitate to ring me if you have any more questions,’ she said. ‘The answering machine is always on.’
Mum nodded and handed over a fifty dollar note and the woman shoved it into the pocket of her jeans. I suppose there were other fifty dollar notes there as well.
We walked down the path between the tightly-pruned roses and got into the car. There were tears running down Mum’s face, so her mascara was all smudged, but she wasn’t crying. Well, there was nothing else about her that seemed to be crying, except the tears.
She turned the key in the ignition, then turned it off, as though she didn’t trust herself to drive. ‘What did you think?’ she asked.
I shrugged.
I didn’t think the old duck was kidding us, if that’s what Mum meant. But I didn’t think spirits were telling her all about Reenie either, especially not Uncle David’s. I mean, if the spirits wanted to communicate with us they’d have told us what we really wanted to know. Where was Reenie? What had happened? WHY?
‘She seemed sincere,’ I said at last. It was as good a word as any.
‘She said we would find out some time,’ said Mum hopefully.
‘Mum? You told her all about Reenie on the phone, didn’t you?’
‘Of course,’ said Mum surprised. ‘I had to tell her why we wanted to see her.’
‘So what else was she supposed to say? That we’d never find out? Or that she knew exactly where Reenie was? And then we’d find out she was wrong straightaway.’
‘But …’ Mum hesitated. ‘Then you don’t think that she was telling the truth?’
‘Yes. No. I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I don’t think that she was lying. I don’t know. Maybe she was telling the truth.’
To be honest I just said that to comfort Mum.
The whole thing seemed to comfort her a little.
She started the car and we drove to the main street. We stopped for a cup of coffee for Mum and a milkshake for me, because Mum’s hands were still shaking and she wasn’t sure about driving back. And we had some banana cake too, because Miss Marlatti had told me sweet things were good for shock, and I thought that we needed sweet stuff, even if Mum was on a diet and I sort of was.
CHAPTER 40
More Bodies
Mum keeps the radio on when she’s away at work. So a burglar will hear it and think there’s someone home, though any burglar from round here would know when she’s at a school.
I usually leave it on when I have to wait for her—it’s sort of comforting to have a voice muttering up on the fridge—and that’s how I heard the news.
‘Police on the south coast today announced the disappearance of a second girl …’
I turned the radio up and sat down.
My legs felt jelly-like.
This girl was 24 and she’d been to a disco the night before. Her car was in the car park, but it was still there the next morning and her parents said she hadn’t been home.
They interviewed her parents.
I couldn’t help it. I cried when I heard their voices. They sounded just like Dad and Mum; bewildered, sort of drugged on too much feeling, not believing it could be real.
I found myself saying over and over and over, ‘Please let them find her body. Please let them find her body,’ because it was obvious she must be dead, the police MUST think that she was dead, but the worst thing of all was for them never to know.
I don’t know how long I cried.
Not long, I think.
Then I washed my face so I could look normal for Mum when she came home.
CHAPTER 41
Letter to Reenie
Dear Reenie,
What’s it like being dead? If you are dead and not waiting on tables in Western Australia. That’s what Johnnie’s mum is telling everyone that you’re doing, though I know she’s wrong.
Will you be waiting for me across the dark water when I die, Reenie? Will you take my hand as you did when I was a little girl? Or won’t you remember me? I don’t see any reason why the dead should remember those they left behind.
Sometimes I hear your voice though, and think, ‘Maybe she’s watching over me,’ just like Grandma said guardian angels did when I was small. Dad commented last week how neatly I was keeping my room and I thought, ‘Maybe that’s Reenie’s influence.’ You were always so neat and I’m not.
Love Sara
CHAPTER 42
The Clairvoyant Rings Back
It was nearly five o’clock but Mum still wasn’t back from a meeting at school. I’d put the casserole in the oven like she had told me to and was trying to finish my French assignment so I didn’t have to do any at the weekend, when the phone rang.
‘Hello?’ Sometimes I thought I should say, ‘Mrs Marr’s residence’, but after all I was her daughter even if I didn’t live there.
‘Is that Sara?’ asked the voice. I didn’t recognise it but it was sort of familiar.
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘It’s Deirdre here. You and your mother came to see me last week, if you remember?’
‘Yes, I remember,’ I said.
‘I just thought I should call,’ said the voice sort of breathlessly. ‘I had a dream last night, a special sort of dream. I’ve had them ever since I was a child. It was so plain. So very plain.’
‘Yes,’ I said again, wondering if Mum was expected to pay another fifty dollars for this.
‘I was watching a car drive down a road … a dirt road and there was someone in the back. She was tied up or maybe she was unconscious. And then someone jumped out of the front and the car rolled into the dam and then it sank into the water. It was muddy water, orange-coloured and the edges of the dam were orange too. No trees. No trees at all.’
I didn’t know what to say.
‘I just thought I should tell you,’ said Deirdre. ‘Just in case. It was such an … an instant dream. Will you tell your mother, dear?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I’ll tell her.’ I didn’t know if I was lying or not.
I put the phone down.
It never ends, I thought. You never know when the phone is going to ring and it’ll be something else—I was so upset that it was about ten minutes before I thought, What if it’s true? What if she is in a dam? Somewhere …
I couldn’t ring up the police. Not after the last time I rang them. Not just to say, this old woman charged my mum fifty dollars and says my sister’s in a dam. She doesn’t know which dam, just some dam, somewhere.
But then I thought, she’s already got the fifty dollars. She didn’t have to ring us up. She didn’t have to keep pretending and I knew that she really wasn’t pretending at all. Whether it was true or not, she had dreamt it, and so she’d rung us up to tell us so.
I didn’t tell Mum. What was the point? The police had dragged all the dams around here, the ones on our place and the ones on Johnnie’s place. And then I thought: If she is in a car, in a dam, then when it gets drier people will see the car and they’ll investigate and then they’ll find her.
Because you can’t search every dam in Australia, can you? Even if what she had seen was true, it didn’t help at all.
CHAPTER 43
Bob Munn
I rang Bob Munn, and told him what the clairvoyant had said anyway.
‘I don’t suppose it’s really of any use,’ I said.
‘Honey, at this stage we’ll take anything we can get,’ he said. He sounded really tired and sort of flat, as if he was too exhausted to remember what he’d been taught about the right way to talk to relatives of murder victims and was just being himself.
I wondered if he was trying to find out about the dead girls down the coast, or if other police were working on that. I wondered how he coped, working with tragedy day after day.
It’s funny, he hadn’t found out one single thing about Reenie’s disappearance yet—nothing we hadn’t known already. But I never felt angry at him. I always knew he was doing everything he could.
CHAPTER 44
TV News
The police found the second body in some scrub in a nature reserve near the beach.
It was just a bit on the news, the body bit I mean, but lots of footage of the parents crying and her mother starting to sob so hard she ran out of the room.
The TV station must have really liked that bit because they played it on all the news previews and on all the news updates.
I didn’t want to watch but I had to, of course, in case there was something I needed to know, something that might just give us a hint about Reenie.
I felt like chainsawing off the arms of whoever took that film and I’ve never felt like that before.
CHAPTER 45
More and More …
‘Another girl is missing down the coast,’ said Dad expressionlessly. ‘A third one.’ He put a slice of toast on my plate as I sat down for breakfast, and I realised there was no way he hadn’t heard about the other two. Or Mum either.
‘She was at the same disco as the second one,’ said Dad, burning another piece of toast under the griller. Dad refuses to get a toaster. He says he prefers the griller. ‘About the same age. Young. Blonde.’ He looked at the toast as though he didn’t believe it was burnt, then threw it in the bin and got out four more slices of bread.
‘Like Reenie.’
Dad shook his head. ‘Older. A bit older anyway. Different area.’
Not that different, I thought. Not if you were a killer. A maniac with a car.
‘Dad … do you think the same person might have taken Reenie too?’
‘I don’t know, Pumpkin. I suppose it’s possible.’
Something we’d read at school came back to me suddenly. when you’ve eliminated the impossible, only the improbable is left.
What if Reenie had changed her mind suddenly about Johnnie? Something about his phone call that morning made her want to see him urgently. Maybe HE’D threatened to kill himself. Or she realised how much she’d hurt him.
Maybe she had hitched a ride, on impulse, to get out to his farm.
‘Reenie would never get into a car with a stranger,’ said Dad, as though he was reading my mind. He put his new bits of toast on his plate and carried them over to the table.
‘What if the killer dragged her into his car?’
Dad grinned. It looked weird, struggling through the pain in his face. ‘It was the middle of the day in the middle of town. You can’t get away with that sort of thing around here, Sara.’
I took another mouthful of porridge, but the thoughts kept coming.
‘Dad?’
‘Mmmm …?’ Dad was spreading raspberry jam on his first and second bits of toast.
‘Dad … suppose it was someone she knew. I mean, suppose the serial killer lives round here. Suppose he just went down to the coast where no one knows him to kill those other girls.’
Dad stopped spreading Vegemite on his third and fourth pieces of toast.
‘Pumpkin, no one around here is a serial killer,’ he said soothingly.
‘But how do you KNOW? I mean, isn’t that what people always say when the police catch someone like that? People have lived next door to them or known them for years, but they never guessed.’
I suppose my voice was rising, because Dad put his knife down and took my hand.
‘That all happens in the city, Sara. Not round here. No one could get away with anything like that round here. There are too many busybodies.’
He was trying to grin again, trying to make me grin.
‘But something did happen without anyone seeing it! Reenie disappeared.’
Dad had no answer for that one. He just sat back in his chair and I felt like I’d punched him.
CHAPTER 46
Whispers
It felt like everyone was whispering about it everywhere I went. ‘Did the serial killer take Reenie Marr?’ As if it made our town more important if a serial killer had struck here too.
I just kept looking at faces: Mr Litchik in the newsagents, Phil at the Royal, and wondering, Could you kill someone? Did you do it?
Because, of course, it could be anyone. How do you know what happens in anyone’s house when the door’s shut and the curtains are pulled?
You just don’t know.
CHAPTER 47
Counselling
Dad had another chat to Miss Marlatti about me a few days after that. I had started crying in class and couldn’t stop and Miss Marlatti took me to sick bay.
‘Don’t tell Mum,’ I asked Miss Marlatti as she was going out the door after getting me settled with a cup of sweet tea and a blanket and all that. I didn’t want Mum stressing and racing up to the sick bay. It’s hard enough having a mum who is a teacher at your school without her coming to check on you all the time.
And I was okay by the time the buses left so there was no reason for Miss Marlatti to ring Dad and upset him. But she did and he went uptown to talk to her.
The result was that I was sent to see the school counsellor every Tuesday morning at eleven o’clock, which was okay because I got out of French which was never my favourite subject, though it meant I got even further behind, but that didn’t matter because I was going to drop it as soon as I could. They say everyone in France speaks English anyway.
The counsellor was okay. I suppose it was good to talk to someone about Reenie—someone who wasn’t hurt by it, or who wanted to know all the details as if it was a TV show or something.
Sometimes even Di was a bit like that. The last time she’d come up with a new idea about what had happened I sort of snapped at her. She shut up about it after that. Di’s a good friend and she knows when to shut up.
Missing You, Love Sara Page 10
