Cedar Valley
Page 3
‘Did anyone here see this man earlier today?’ asked the big policeman. ‘Before he became, uh, deceased?’
Huddles formed, the big policeman began to take notes, and the other officer jogged back across to the station, returning shortly with a camera. He aimed it at the sheet and the surrounding area and clicked away. Then the ambulance officers helped to lift the sheet strategically so photos could be taken of the body, the face, the attire.
Once the photographs had been taken, the policemen stood around and took more notes, and the ambulance officers rolled the stretcher over to the dead man.
Benny Miller was fascinated by all of it.
Standing there among the crowd, she took in every detail, her shopping bag at her feet.
What a peculiar thing to see, she thought, as the wind blew along the pavement, rustling the branches of the little street trees. A particularly strong gust lifted the sheet covering the man in the suit and revealed a shiny black shoe. The sides and the sole were so clean and unscuffed, it was like he hadn’t walked a step in it. And it was when the lanky policeman came over and straightened the sheet so it covered the shoe again that Benny’s mind went suddenly, unexpectedly, to her mother.
Vivian Alice Moon.
Oh how the mind has a mind of its own. Benny tried to push the thoughts away, but of course she couldn’t. In an instant, the sense of Vivian Moon was so strong that Benny closed her eyes and a dreadful vision appeared, of Vivian under the sheet, slumped there against the window, her hair so lovely and gold.
Benny scolded herself silently; how ridiculous she could be. And yet the vision persisted: an awful sense that her mother had merged with the sad form under the white sheet. That her mother was the man, and the man was her mother.
Vivian’s death, so fresh and recent, had come as such a shock that Benny had not allowed herself to wonder much about it. Certain details were too difficult for her to contemplate. Like how still Vivian Moon would have been. How unblinking. Did her foot splay to one side? Did her head slump forward? Benny swayed a little there on the footpath, filled with unease, voices chatting away around her, and she wondered, did her mother suffer?
‘Well I don’t know about you, but I’ll be needing a brandy,’ said the very loud voice of a short woman in half-moon glasses, and Benny came back to her surroundings.
The ambos had lifted the man onto the stretcher, and the stretcher had gone into the back of the ambulance. The policemen were speaking to each other in quiet voices. Once the ambulance had departed, the townspeople went their separate ways and the loud woman ushered a handful of other women into the antique store. Benny watched through the big window as they pulled chairs into a small circle, deep inside the shop, and she saw the woman switch an extra lamp on and fetch glasses from a cabinet. She poured brandy from a crystal decanter in the soft light, waving her free arm about as if relating some kind of dramatic narrative.
Benny’s thoughts of Vivian passed. She picked up her shopping bag and watched for a moment longer through the window of the antique store, charmed by the community of it—all the ladies debriefing with their brandy—and then she turned and walked back towards the green cottage.
It was almost dark. Benny had lost her appetite for hot chips and was no longer thirsty and the sky was a vast thing above her, clear of clouds, and she could see the first of the low evening stars. There were lights on in weatherboard houses and the sound of televisions and the cidadas had stopped and now there were crickets. Benny walked quickly and began to pulse with excitement at what she had seen.
Back in the cottage, she changed directly into her bed shirt and got into her new and unfamiliar bed. Then she lay sleepless well into the night, looking out the window at the black trees moving about with the wind. She thought endlessly about the man in the suit, about her mother, and she listened to the ungodly sliding sound coming from the ceiling, like someone dragging a sack of potatoes, intermittently, across a rough surface.
If anyone had told Benny Miller that she would see her first dead body on the main road of a small country town, of all unlikely places, she would have scoffed in disbelief. And if anyone had told her that a single python in a roof space could have made such a heaving racket, she would not have believed that either.
6
The following morning Benny roused early with the yellow sun that came in the picture window. Loud birds squawked from the surrounding trees, and others squawked from off in the distance. Benny lay still in the bed and smiled listening to them, this rich chorus of birds, of which kookaburras were the only ones she could identify. Those morning birds were loud enough to wake the whole town.
Odette had told her to come over in the morning, so Benny got up presently, dressed, and ate Weet-Bix in the garden. Wary of appearing too eager, it was a great disappointment when, having done this, she checked the clock on the stove and found it was barely seven. She went back to the bedroom and read several chapters of a new novel she’d bought herself as a rare treat before she left, about a man who had an arduous life and moved to Newfoundland. Benny appreciated his predicament, but she found it unusually difficult to concentrate. She put the book down eventually and unpacked the remainder of her clothes into the wardrobe and the chest of drawers.
It was just before nine when she got into her car. She sat, warming the engine, studying the map Odette had left on the kitchen dresser. A red texta line drew the way and Benny followed it with her finger, familiarising herself with the turns. Then she reversed out, the map on the passenger seat beside her, drove to the corner, turned right and continued past the grocery store and along Valley Road.
As she passed the big antique store called Cedar Valley Curios & Old Wares, Benny slowed down. She wasn’t sure what she was expecting to see, but there was no sign of the events of the previous evening. No policemen were gathering evidence, no area had been cordoned off, and many of the shops on Valley Road were yet to open. She carried on through the town, over the bridge, and up the steep hill into the scrubby bush.
Taking note of the odometer, Benny counted three kilometres before an unsealed road manifested on the left, indicated by an honesty box with a handwritten sign that said LIMES ETC. Benny drove along it until she arrived at the fencepost with horseshoes on it, and she rattled over the cattle grid and up to the house.
Odette Fisher, having heard the car, was standing on the steps of the verandah in an oversized shirt, cotton shorts and ugg boots, smiling a broad smile and waving with one arm high above her head—a big wide wave, like signalling to someone at sea.
In her collection of photographs Benny had two favourite pictures of Odette Fisher and her great friend Vivian Moon. In one, which looked to have been taken in a wide-open field, Vivian was sitting up on a wooden fence and Odette was standing next to her, both women smiling. Benny loved Odette’s smile almost as much as she loved her mother’s—the way it took over her whole face and made her shut her eyes a little so they squinted. The photo was black-and-white and on the back someone had written 1971 in pen. Odette and Vivian were both wearing bell-bottom jeans and tight knitted jumpers.
In the other photo, there they were in a bar, elbows on the table, leaning in and posing. Odette’s smile was less broad and more conspiratorial, and Vivian was alluring, in a low-cut top and with a cigarette in one hand. A little wisp of smoke curled out the side of her mouth. Both women were halfway through their drinks and the table was crowded with empty glasses.
Benny liked the first photo better, but the second was somehow transfixing. She could not count the number of times she’d looked at it, stared at it, got lost in it. She didn’t know who took the photo, or where it was taken. But those women—those two glamorous women, looking out. Benny wanted so much to know what they were talking about, and to be a part of the conversation.
And now here was Odette, as a much older woman, walking down the drive as Benny got out of the car.
‘Benny,’ said Odette with feeling. ‘You’re here.’
And then time started up again.
Odette, gripping her firmly by the shoulders, pushed Benny out into the day, so she could get a good look at her.
Benny blinked. She had next to no expression, save for bewilderment at the embrace and how nice it had felt. Odette was a little heavier than in the photos, with creases next to her eyes and mouth, but her wide, intelligent face was still so familiar. Her hair was grey now, in a loose bun, and something in her posture suggested a long life of physical activity.
Odette surveyed Benny then; she looked all over Benny’s face, down to her feet and back up again. Her intensity was exhilarating and Benny had the sense of something very unfamiliar. Someone is seeing me, she thought. Someone is looking at me and seeing me: this powerful woman in the ugg boots.
A cow mooed nearby and Benny smiled nervously, looking beyond Odette to the barbed-wire fencing along a paddock, a hammock strung up between two trees, big wooden garden boxes covered in netting. She noticed a dog next to Odette too, a thin kelpie. The dog stared up at the older woman, as if awaiting instruction, and Odette stared at Benny.
‘Oh, Benny’, said Odette, with sad kindness. ‘You look just like her.’
Benny, overwhelmed, felt such a rush of gratitude. ‘It’s very nice to meet you,’ she said.
7
The Cedar Valley police station was a single-storey sandstone building opposite the park. It was a ‘historic’ building, as were so many in the town, with a hipped roof and windows topped with arches. A neatly clipped hedge went around the front and sides of the premises and made the whole thing look like a scene from an English village.
There were only a handful of officers working in Cedar Valley and its surrounding towns on any given day. On a normal morning, a lone police car would be parked out the front of the station, waiting for something illegal to happen. That year, the most common complaint was theft, which was how it generally was. It seemed that people loved to steal things from the paddocks and sheds of Cedar Valley. Farm machinery, spare parts, fuel, sheep. Every so often a house would be burgled or something would catch fire. On a particularly fast day, a small cannabis plantation was found by a bushwalker on a property near the riverbank and three arrests were made.
But December 2nd 1993—the day after an unknown man had died of unknown circumstances on Valley Road—bristled with minor intrigue from the outset and only got more interesting as it went along.
Detective Sergeant Anthony Simmons—an impressively tall and solid man—sat in his small office with its cheap furnishings and a mediocre view of the war memorial. A photograph of his wife and two daughters, mannered in their posing, sat in a brass frame on his desk. Noise from the common area (the ring of a telephone, a boiling kettle) spilled into the room, and a fan revolved on the ceiling, providing little relief for a man so prone to easy sweating.
‘I just got in now, Mrs Franks, and I’m telling you I don’t know anything about him. I was up in Clarke all day yesterday, I didn’t get home till late. You should be talking to Constable Franklin or Constable Hall.’ This was what Simmons was saying, perhaps a little curtly, to Cora Franks.
‘But since you’re here and they’re not,’ said Cora.
Simmons smiled thinly. It was true—Franklin and Hall were over at the courthouse talking to the clerk, informing him that an unidentified male had died on Valley Road yesterday in a somewhat mysterious manner, an odd-sounding case that Simmons had been made aware of only half an hour previous.
Cora Franks, festooned with cameo brooches, indicated her impatience, and Simmons pushed his chair out rather abruptly, strode out of the office to Hall’s desk in the common area, and returned moments later with a slim folder of papers. He sifted through them while Cora sat watching.
‘You made a statement last night,’ he said, looking at one of the papers.
‘Yes, and you see I told James that the man sat down outside the shop at twelve-thirty, but now I think perhaps it was later. I went over it with the girls last night and we decided it was later.’
‘Did you now?’ said Simmons.
‘Yes we did, Tony,’ said Cora.
Simmons stared back at Cora. He patted his chest. Cora gazed across at him blankly. Simmons raised an arm and waved it around to indicate the scant officialdom of the room.
‘I mean Sergeant,’ said Cora.
‘Detective Sergeant,’ said Detective Sergeant Anthony Simmons.
‘Isn’t that fancy,’ said Cora.
Simmons sighed. He was relatively new to Cedar Valley in the sense of living there, but he was not new to Cora Franks. Cora was in a book club with his mother, Elsie Simmons, and their book club had been meeting for twenty-seven years. Book club took priority over everything else: weddings, funerals, anniversaries, the birthdays of their children. In Elsie Simmons’s life, and in Cora’s, few things were as important as book club, despite the fact that some of the members found it difficult to finish the books, and so for every fourth meeting they travelled to Clarke and saw a movie instead.
Simmons was from Clarke. He had been born in Clarke and gone to school in Clarke and then later he worked in Clarke, making his way through the ranks from probationary constable upwards. He liked Clarke very much. It was a big town to the north—‘the commercial centre of the Gather Region’—and it had everything a person could need: four pubs, a shopping plaza, government services, several schools, many churches and the best pineapple pork in the world. Simmons had been very content there, king of the castle, and the thought of moving would never have occurred to him if it wasn’t for his mother, Elsie Simmons, who was ageing rather dramatically in Cedar Valley and requiring of assistance.
Elsie Simmons, his mother, said, ‘You mustn’t move down here for me. I’m fine.’
Jenny Simmons, his wife, said, ‘She’s dying, Tony. Apply for the transfer. We’ll rent for a few years before the girls start school.’
He applied for the transfer, and they were renting, and unfortunately the girls were still too young to start school. Detective Sergeant Tony Simmons, who had only recently acquired the distinction of ‘detective’, was now a somewhat reluctant resident of the town of Cedar Valley and held a mild contempt for what he considered the insignificance of the township.
‘I’ve been wondering if he was coming in to buy something,’ said Cora Franks. ‘Given his obvious taste for antique clothing.’
‘He probably was,’ said Simmons uncaringly, and he recalled what Gussy Franklin had mentioned earlier, on his way out the door to the courthouse: that the dead man was dressed up in a full vintage suit, on the first day of summer. He’d probably expired from heat exhaustion. And Gussy Franklin had said that when they searched him for ID, he had nothing. No wallet. No bank cards or licence. No cash. Simmons had only been half listening when the boys were telling him about it from the doorway, and Jimmy Hall’s eyes always popped out like that, so Simmons couldn’t tell if he’d been normal or excited.
‘So you told Constable Hall the man sat down at twelve-thirty. What time do you think he sat down now?’ asked Simmons.
‘Closer to one,’ said Cora. ‘Because Therese was on her lunch break, you see. She was very upset—about a private matter—and so we weren’t paying attention to the time. But let’s say one. You can tell James that.’
‘I will alert Constable Hall,’ said Simmons.
Cora paused, as if considering her next statement. ‘And I also think, now that the shock’s worn off, that there were some very unfamiliar faces around yesterday. If you know what I mean.’
‘I don’t,’ said Simmons.
‘Well
,’ said Cora, ‘I was talking with Lil and, as we understand it, it’s not unusual for a person who has done something illegal to kind of hang around. You know: at the scene of the crime. So they can see their handiwork.’
Simmons grinned, his teeth showing. ‘No one said this was a crime scene,’ he said. ‘Did you ladies read something scary at book club?’
‘Tony, don’t be condescending,’ said Cora. ‘There was a dead man on the street! If it wasn’t a crime scene then what was it?’
‘Just a scene,’ said Simmons, and he rose to signal an end to the conversation.
Cora stood up and went over to the doorway, clutching her handbag. ‘So you’ll keep me up to date then? Seeing as I’m the one who’s found him.’
‘Mrs Franks, as I understand it he was sitting on the main road in plain sight.’
‘Yes, but I’m the one who found he was dead,’ said Cora Franks.
Simmons stared at the woman.
‘I’ll be hearing from you then,’ said Cora. ‘And I’m not your maths teacher, Tony. Call me Cora.’
8
Odette Fisher swept back her arm, indicating the door of her dark-wooded farmhouse, and said, ‘Come on in,’ so Benny, Odette and the thin dog went in.
The house was bright inside and jazz music was playing from a record player. Odette moved around the space with ease. ‘I’ll put the kettle on,’ she said as she walked across a Persian rug and into the open kitchen area, where cast-iron pots hung against a wall.