Cedar Valley

by Holly Throsby

  On one occasion, Benny cried on account of having to vomit—she had food poisoning—and Frank couldn’t cope with that in the slightest. He looked at the bathroom floor and said, ‘Oh, Ben, oh, Ben,’ in a distant way, and chewed his fingernails while she suffered there.

  Frank chewed his fingernails whenever something difficult arose, so at any mention of Vivian he would nibble away. In the end, the only facts that Benny knew for certain were these: that Vivian Moon was born in Adelaide and had grown up in the suburb of Brighton. Her mother, Nola Moon, had been a secretary of some kind and her father, Clive, a chemist. Every Christmas, Nola and Clive sent Benny twenty dollars enclosed in a card. On her eighteenth birthday it was fifty dollars, but that was from Nola alone, Clive having died. They were sweet people, if the cards were anything to go by, but apparently not fond of visitors or travel. They had other grandchildren in Adelaide, Benny was told, and a lot on their plate, and she didn’t think much about them apart from how best to spend the twenty dollars.

  Vivian left South Australia in 1961. She would have been nineteen. She moved to Sydney and studied at Sydney University. Benny had no idea where she lived, or what she did, and then there was a yawning gap of unexplained time until 1969, when she met Frank Miller at the Newcastle on George Street and he must have done something to impress her. Who knows what she saw in him, a man who cared so much about old furniture. But Benny had the photos and she could see he’d once been handsome. Perhaps his reticence had seemed like a puzzle in need of solving, but it wasn’t long before Vivian took off for the first time—this before Benny was born.

  ‘Ah, you know. Europe,’ Frank said when Benny asked where Vivian had gone.

  But all of a sudden, she came back again, to Frank—as mysteriously as she had left—and she pushed Benny out into the world in November of 1972.

  What happened after that? If only Benny knew.

  ‘She could be very evasive,’ said old Irene Miller, Frank’s mother, of Vivian Moon one very hot day. ‘But smart. And didn’t she let you know it.’

  Benny, a teenager by then in denim short shorts, nudged for more, and Irene, fanning herself with a women’s magazine in the living room, never could hide her disapproval. ‘I’ll say this about Vivian: some of us choose to stay, you know. And we don’t complain.’

  Then Irene ordered Benny to fetch her some water—everything was so impossible because of her arthritis—and Benny went reluctantly to the sink and never did like her grandmother, Irene.

  Now here was Odette Fisher, sitting across from her, and already Benny liked her very much. She had been prepared to like her, poised to, but when she met her—just that morning—she was almost overwhelmed to find that she really, truly did.

  ‘I had no idea,’ Odette was saying in response to this revelation that Benny had not seen Vivian, had not known her. ‘I thought …’ She trailed off and stalled, perhaps considering how to continue. Benny could see that she was mystified, and yet concerned not to say the wrong thing to this poor girl who, as it happened, had not known her own dead mother.

  ‘I must have got the wrong impression,’ said Odette finally, and she forced a smile. And then, ‘You know, I should show you around. Why don’t we go outside?’

  So they went outside.

  Odette ushered Benny through the door and onto the front verandah. There was a rocking chair with a knitted blanket on it facing the paddock. They went down the steps and Odette led the way to a small enclosure up the hill. To the left, Benny saw two brown cows beyond the fence, and she noticed the sound of her own boots walking in the tough, thick grass.

  ‘Those are my house cows. Retired house cows. I’ll introduce you later. And this is Bessel.’ Odette gestured to the dog. ‘He can be a bit forward.’

  Excited by hearing his own name, Bessel turned and reared upwards, standing on his hind legs for a moment to let out a brief woof.

  Inside the enclosure—a wire structure with a wooden frame—were chickens. Benny watched their heads jerk back and forth awkwardly as they pecked at the dirt and straw, and saw they were mostly brown and speckled. Two of them rushed towards Odette and made excited sounds.

  ‘These are my girls,’ said Odette, smiling at Benny. ‘Have you known many hens before?’

  Benny said she hadn’t.

  ‘These two are very gregarious,’ said Odette, pulling leaves from a plant in the grass and feeding it to them though the wire.

  Bessel considered the chickens momentarily and then took his leave to pee against a fencepost. Odette and Benny stood side by side, looking at the hens in silence. Eventually Odette put her arm around Benny’s shoulder and squeezed it in a reassuring way before taking her arm away again.

  Benny thought that was one of the nicer feelings she had ever felt.

  ‘So,’ said Odette. ‘Why don’t you tell me more about this dead man.’

  11

  The bus from Clarke to Cedar Valley followed a direct route down the coastal highway and made very few stops in between. There were some dear little towns in the region, inland across the river or up around the mountain, but the bus ignored those. They were too out of the way. It had a limited job to do and the job was this: to begin at the train station in Clarke; to make five stops in Clarke; to pause one last time at the very edge of Clarke; and then to plough along the fifty-minute slog to Cedar Valley, stopping at Barrang and Galarra only, and hoping very much, as dusk came, that the kangaroos and wombats would stay clear of the road.

  There were two bus stops in Cedar Valley, one on each side of Valley Road. The bus set down its passengers, welcomed new ones, and continued on to Solent Inlet, where it terminated, turned around, and did the whole blessed trip in reverse.

  Simmons was not usually one to catch the bus, nor to consider the bus, but today the bus was of great interest. In the past ten minutes he had learned more than he’d ever need to know about the Gather Region Bus Service—a fleet of ten vehicles operated by the Neville family, who were based in Clarke. Simmons had been more than happy to take the call when Doreen Neville herself phoned the station with information about the driver who’d been rostered on the previous day. It was Mark. And when Simmons had explained that he needed more than just a first name, Doreen was delighted to give him a brief history of the Neville family’s deep connection with the transport needs of the region, and reveal the number of their coaches that boasted a four-star rating (it was six). And then she digressed.

  ‘You said Simmons? And you’re a policeman. Would you be Neville Simmons’s son?’

  Simmons felt a familiar tightness in his stomach. ‘Yes, ma’am, I am,’ he said.

  ‘Oh, well, goodness me,’ said Doreen. ‘I always remember meeting Neville for the first time because we shared a name, in a roundabout sort of way. He was the best mayor we’ve ever had, and I’m not just saying that.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Simmons forced himself to say. ‘And now, Mrs Neville, what’s Mark’s surname?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The driver. Mark.’

  ‘Oh, yes, love. Mark Foy. Like the department store. No relation.’

  She gave Simmons a telephone number and he wrote it down and thanked Doreen Neville. Then he left the station, passing the neat hedge that pleasantly reminded a person of the mother country, and walked across to the bus stop.

  Simmons ran his finger down a column of the timetable stuck to the wall of the shelter. He knew the dead man had been in the possession of a ticket for the 11.44 am bus from Clarke station and, on a weekday, according to the timetable, the 11.44 am bus from Clarke station arrived in Cedar Valley at 12.52 pm. Simmons looked down the street to the antique shop and checked his watch. Then he walked in what he considered to be a regular pace. It took forty-eight seconds to get to the front window of Cedar Valley Curios and Old Wares.

  Simmons stood outside the shop and looked around. There was no indication that anything unusual had happened here only yesterday. He could see Cora Franks inside, her back to the wind
ow, right down the rear of the shop near the bookshelves. The Quilting Bee sat to the right, and the real estate agent to the left.

  Simmons scanned the pavement, and he looked up to examine the underside of the awning. A wasps’ nest was perched up in the corner.

  Then Simmons sat down on the ground, in the spot that the man had been sitting, and he leaned his back against the glass and looked out at the street. There were some cars parked over to the right, outside the hairdresser. There was a line of them down to the left, too, near the video store. But the little street trees on this particular section of the footpath were planted in a bed that extended out into the wide roadway, making an area where cars could not park, and allowing a good view across the street even from a low, seated position.

  Simmons sat and he looked—just as the man had looked—in an attempt to ascertain what the unknown man had been looking at.

  The Cedar Valley Pharmacy was the main thing he could see.

  That and Fran’s World Famous Pies, which had a little crowd out front, and Fran, who was a roundish thing, generally with an apron on her. There she was, standing on the footpath, chatting with her customers.

  There was a phone box, and a bench, and then the shop on the other side of the chemist was empty, newspaper lining the windows. Identical street trees on the opposite footpath made it difficult to get a clear line of sight to the bookstore or the Cedar Valley Public Hall.

  Simmons could see Maureen Robinson at the counter of the chemist, serving, and he glanced up and saw some washing hanging over the railing of the upstairs verandah and wondered, briefly, who lived up there above the pharmacy.

  He nodded, making mental notes. Then he found that standing up again was painful and sadly ungraceful, and a noise of exertion came out as he straightened. Simmons put his hands on his hips, saw Cora making her way towards the front of the shop, and before she could reach him he turned and walked the forty-eight seconds back to the station, eyeing off the boys as he went through the common room. They had brought Les in to make a statement.

  ‘Gentlemen,’ said Simmons.

  Les, with his silly hoary grin, said, ‘Arrest me, copper!’—something he was so fond of saying.

  Simmons ignored Les entirely.

  ‘Jimmy, I got the number,’ Simmons told him. ‘I’m gonna call the driver.’

  ‘Sure, boss,’ said Jimmy Hall.

  So Simmons, with an ache in his lower back and a disgruntled feeling that never quite left him, went to his cheaply furnished office and dialled the home number of Mark Foy, driver of the four-star coaches of the Gather Region Bus Service.

  12

  Odette Fisher, at the wide stove in the farmhouse, cooked an omelette with eggs from her own chickens and Benny watched the whole process like a student might.

  Benny had never fetched fresh eggs from a henhouse before, and Odette had allowed her to do it, laughing at how Benny was so cautious, as if the eggs would combust or the chickens would protest. They hadn’t, and in fact Odette had scooped up a brown hen and held it against the curve of her chest, petting it firmly with her palm.

  Odette cooked with very little fuss about her—whisking the eggs and some chives with a fork until they had an even texture. She poured the mixture into a heavy pan that was hot and full of melted butter and she used the fork to whisk it more, in the pan, chatting away to Benny at the same time. Then she shook the whole thing vigorously so the sloppy contents all went to one side, making a half moon of eggs, and all of a sudden she was folding it over with the fork to form a neat parcel, and titling the pan so the omelette slid onto a waiting plate.

  Afterwards, they ate outside at a wooden table behind the house, near where the bush started. The view took in the whole paddock as it sloped gently down one edge of the mountain, citrus trees on this side of the fence, and a big open shed which had Odette’s car in it, and tools hanging along the walls.

  Benny found the omelette and accompanying salad to be particularly delicious. She thought about the way Frank Miller cooked eggs, and how the yolk would be too hard or the white too soft or, if scrambled, pieces of shell would surprise her. For a moment, she wished Frank Miller was someone altogether different. But she put the thought aside and she and Odette talked about the dead man, and it was a relief not to be focused on Vivian.

  Benny described the scene outside Curios again and Odette listened intently, interrupting several times to ask questions. What was so special about this suit? Had he keeled all the way over? Then, at the end of Benny’s recount, Odette leaned back in her chair and went, ‘Huh,’ as if the whole thing was curious in a particular way she hadn’t expected.

  ‘This is a delicious omelette,’ said Benny.

  ‘Oh, you’re easy to please,’ said Odette. ‘You’ll have to come over to eat more often,’ and she smiled serenely. Then she served herself some salad and talked about Cedar Valley, and she gave a little of her history with it, and of her friends who lived in town, and Benny began to assemble a vague outline of Odette’s life in her mind. She formed a few quick impressions, like the fact that Odette wasn’t fond of Clarke, the large regional town to the north where they had more amenities and bigger shops. Clarke had very little character. But Cedar Valley was a lovely place. Apart from the daily ebb of tourists, and a few volatile people who lived permanently in the caravan park, there was a great sense of community in the township.

  Sometimes Odette missed living in the cottage in town, where people would pop in all the time and there was a different kind of energy.

  ‘Some of my friends think I must get so lonely, living out here like a shag on a rock,’ said Odette, and she laughed in a way that made Benny wonder if Odette was lonely or not.

  The two brown cows had moved up the paddock, nearer to the chicken coop, and Benny could see them from where she sat. One ate at the grass with no interruption, and the other spent a while stamping a hoof into the dirt, and three white birds with yellow beaks stood close to them, like friends. Odette explained that house cows were too much work. These two had only four functional teats between them anyhow and had been out to pasture for close to nine years. They liked a scratch behind the ear and to lick your boots, and the smaller one would be eighteen years old next February, even older than Bessel. Benny found the slow bulky presence of the cows to be an unexpected comfort.

  ‘They’re advertising a job at the pub in town,’ said Benny, when Odette had finished speaking about the cows.

  ‘Tom is? At the Royal?’

  ‘The big pink pub,’ said Benny. ‘I thought I’d apply.’

  Odette sat back, seeming slightly surprised. ‘Well, good for you,’ she said, and she told Benny that the man who ran the Royal was Tom Boyd, and that he was a good man. Tom’s wife was Odette’s friend, Annie, and Benny might see a bit of her. Tom and Annie had a big house on land just out of town and two girls.

  ‘I think that’s a wonderful idea, Benny, to get a job while you’re here. You seem very capable. And if there’s one thing you want it’s financial independence. It’s the key to your freedom. Now, when you go in and talk to Tom, tell him I sent you. Tell him you’re family,’ Odette said.

  Benny felt a soft heat rise in her cheeks. Family. The way Odette had said it, so offhandedly, like it was of such little consequence—and her insistence that Benny could use it too, this word ‘family’, in relation to Odette Fisher and herself.

  Odette ate some remaining bits of salad and then put her fork down, as if preoccupied with something.

  ‘You know, when you were telling me about the man who died—it’s so strange. It reminds me of a thing that happened a long time ago.’

  ‘What thing?’ said Benny, too quickly. ‘What is it?’

  Odette let out a little laugh, startled by Benny’s enthusiasm.

  ‘Oh, it’s silly. It’s a very old case, but quite famous, I think. A man was found dead in a similar kind of way, that’s what reminded me of it.’

  Benny waited for Odette to say more, b
ut perhaps Benny had appeared too curious, or perhaps Odette had spoken up and then wished she hadn’t, because she put one plate on top of the other and stood up.

  ‘It’s nothing,’ she said. ‘I can’t really remember the details. I feel silly even saying it, it was a hundred years ago.’

  13

  Cora Franks was exhausted. She hadn’t slept well. She was kept up by thoughts of the dead man in the suit and Fred had not been a receptive listener when she woke him in the night to discuss it. He rolled over and said, ‘Cor, this one can wait till morning.’

  ‘But what if he was murdered?’ whispered Cora in the darkness.

  Fred Franks groaned.

  ‘Do you think he was murdered, Freddy?’

  ‘How could anyone have possibly murdered him?’ whispered Fred, his voice muffled against his pillow. And then: ‘Why are we whispering?’

  ‘Yes, but Janet said he looked so healthy,’ whispered Cora.

  ‘I don’t think you can see a heart attack from the outside,’ said Fred.

  ‘Janet said it was more likely an aneurysm.’

  ‘So why are we talking about murder?’

  Cora rolled over, irritated, and stared at the sliver of moonlight on the carpet.

  ‘We can talk about murder in the morning,’ said Fred.

  But when morning came Fred had gone off fishing and Cora was positively bursting with an odd mix of excitement and distress. Why was it that some part of her was so pleased about the whole thing? Why was it that just an inch of her hoped he had been murdered? Was she a monster?

  The only thing that made her think otherwise was a persistent fantasy: that she had saved the man at the eleventh hour by administering mouth-to-mouth resuscitation and the whole town had cheered. She liked this fantasy, which she had cultivated when she couldn’t sleep at one in the morning, and again at around three. But the fantasy kept being interrupted with a certain gladness that a man had died against her shop window, a quiet revelling in the intrigue it had created around her and her establishment.