‘We’ll do a two-week trial,’ said Tom. ‘See if we like each other.’
‘Okay,’ said Benny, and she felt very pleased.
‘Okay then, Benny,’ said Tom, friendly and concise, and he told her to come back at ten the next morning so he could show her how things worked, and she could do a shift straight after, if she liked. Then he wrote down her roster on another coaster, including a day shift on Sundays because they’d started a new lunch special and it was proving popular.
‘Ed over there runs the bistro, when he feels like it,’ said Tom, and the man called Ed, a few stools along, turned his head around.
Tom raised his voice a little. ‘This here’s Benny,’ he said. ‘For the job.’
Ed tilted his schooner glass at her with an unnerving kind of confidence and looked Benny up and down.
‘You’re hired,’ said Ed, grinning before he turned around again, and Benny thought he had eyes like a snake might. They were little leaden eyes, both vacant and hungry at the same time.
‘See you at ten then,’ said Tom Boyd.
Benny stood up. She looked down at Tom’s black T-shirt and saw it had a drawing of the pub on it and Bistro, Gaming, Free beer tomorrow! under the logo. Benny wondered if she’d get to wear a T-shirt, too, and she hoped she would. In fact, what she really wanted was to sit down right then on a stool, order a middy of beer and drink it at the bar with these local people. But, no. Benny Miller, often at the expense of her own enjoyment, was ever vigilant not to appear too eager.
Instead she said, ‘Yes, ten o’clock,’ and she held her hand over the bar for Tom to shake it.
Tom Boyd, slightly amused by the formality of the gesture, took her hand and shook it firmly, and Benny found his rough skin to be as warm as sun.
Then she turned around and left, walking straight out of the big pink galah of a building and back down Valley Road towards the shops.
16
No matter how hard Simmons and Hall had looked for it, there was no wallet in the gutters of Valley Road. Torchlight revealed no wallet in any drain. An unsavoury search of two bins found no wallet, emptied and discarded, in either. And it wasn’t among the dry leaves under the hedge by the bus stop, nor—according to the lost property service at the Gather Region Bus Service—on the actual bus either.
Adding to their growing frustration, along with there being no wallet, there were no new other clues either. Nothing physical, at least. A lone identification card, a money clip, even an extra comb—all of this would have been something. A person at the bus stop who had managed a conversation with the man and was waiting there to share it—now that would have been fantastic. But Simmons and Hall, during their laborious search of the short distance between bus stop and window, found nothing.
They reconvened at the police station for a situation report shortly before beer time.
Constable Gus Franklin had spent a good while during the afternoon going shop to shop, asking questions. It wasn’t possible that anyone on Valley Road hadn’t heard about the dead man, he knew that for certain. But perhaps what the people of Cedar Valley didn’t understand was this: that at a time when the police had next to no information—when it was barely possible to know any less about the gentleman in question—then anything further, even if it seemed insignificant, could be inordinately helpful.
Franklin returned with a few nuggets.
First, Terri, the young assistant to Therese Johnson at the Old Paris Coiffure, had seen the man get off the bus. Terri didn’t like to take her break too close to the salon—Therese had a tendency to monitor her—so she was sitting on the bench up next to the hedge at the bus stop, having a cigarette and looking through a magazine. She saw the man and noticed his suit, and though Terri was a hesitant young woman, she was not without ideas. She told Franklin that the man had alighted, kept his eyes down, and walked directly towards Curios. She already knew he was going there, there was not a doubt in her mind she said, ‘because obviously he was an antique-y sort of guy’.
Second, Barbie Robinson, on her way to visit her sister Maureen, who worked at the chemist, had seen the man sit down. She was walking by, about to cross the street, and she saw him arrive at the front of Curios. She said he peered briefly in the window and she, too, had assumed he would go in. But instead he turned around to face the road—or the shops opposite?—and then, with what seemed to be a sense of purpose, he sat down gracefully on the footpath. She found it a strange place to sit, considering there was a bench a few doors up outside the Coiffure. But there was something about the way he did it—the intentionality of it—that somehow made it not strange at all. Barbie had thought, ‘Oh well, I guess he knows what he’s doing,’ and she’d gone across to see Maureen, sensing that the man was ‘kind of watching me, maybe’, as she went on her way.
Finally, Lil Chapman, who ran the Quilting Bee, had decided to remember that she had in fact seen someone approach the man and perhaps engage in some form of conversation. Lil had forgotten this entirely in the fog of his death, but now she miraculously recalled it. A woman had come across from the other side of the street. She’d walked straight up to the man, and then crouched down in front of him. She spoke to him, Lil was sure of it now. But Lil was inside the window of the shop, changing the quilt display, so she couldn’t hear the words, nor see if the man had replied. The woman just crouched and spoke, and not too long after she had straightened, still looking at the seated gentleman, and then she went back across the street and away. Or perhaps she went down towards the video store, Lil couldn’t be certain about the direction.
‘What did the woman look like?’ asked Franklin.
‘Not local,’ said Lil.
‘Not local how?’
‘Like a city woman; she looked like she came from money,’ said Lil, who was a country woman who did not come from money.
When pressed, Lil’s more detailed description of the woman was this: early fifties, blonde bobbed hair, white or cream clothing, attractive, and perhaps she wore gold jewellery. And then, reflecting on it: ‘She looked like she’d just had her hair done. Actually, you know, if I had to say, I’d say she looked a bit like Nikki from The Young and the Restless.’ Franklin raised his eyebrows and somewhat reluctantly wrote this down.
Six other people gave new statements too, but no one had anything relevant to add. Impressions of the man seemed now to vary. He was either calm, drunk, odd, healthy, contented or possibly a dancer. But no one had thought it a good idea to talk to him—to ask him what he was doing or if he was okay. No one, apparently, except for a rich blonde woman who resembled an American soap star.
Detective Sergeant Simmons, standing behind his chair for a quick stretch of his always-aching back, sat down again with a thump. ‘Okay then,’ he said.
‘This one’s a real corker,’ said Hall.
‘So we now have him speaking to a city woman. Or a city woman speaking to him. Is Lil Chapman telling stories?’ asked Simmons.
‘Nah, I don’t think so,’ said Franklin. ‘I think she’s just …’
‘Imaginative?’ said Simmons.
‘Flustered,’ said Franklin.
‘Well, it seems like he didn’t talk to anyone else. Or go anywhere else, apart from straight to Curios. And then he seems pretty sure of himself to sit down there. Then maybe this woman talks to him, but not for long. And then she’s off.’ Simmons was looking at the ceiling now with his hands clasped behind his head. ‘And then, yeah. At some point—after he dances his arms around like a good little fairy—he carks it.’
Hall, who often tried too hard at male camaraderie, boomed out a laugh.
Simmons looked down at the pile of statements, which had now grown in size. He would just have one schooner and then go see Elsie Simmons, maybe take her something for tea. ‘No news from Clarke Base?’ he asked, almost as an afterthought.
Franklin shook his thick head. ‘They’re getting to him. They have a bit of a backlog, apparently, with that crash on the coast road
.’
‘So when will we have cause?’ asked Simmons.
‘In the morning,’ said Franklin. ‘First thing.’
Simmons smiled and whistled and said, ‘Well I don’t know about you boys, but I’m on the edge of my seat. What do you reckon, Gussy, shall we get a beverage?’
17
It was six-thirty when Benny Miller woke the next morning, nestled on the long couch in the living room of the pale green cottage.
The python had dragged itself around loudly in the night, and Benny had gone in and out of dreams with the noise of it. She had rolled around in irritation, reorganising her restless body and silently cursing the ceiling. At some point, she had issued a drowsy protest by getting up, taking the quilt and a pillow, and retreating to the lounge room. She slept heavily on the couch then—it was soft and comfortable—until the dawn birds began their chorus, and a rooster joined them from somewhere nearby, and then the cicadas too.
Benny got up and made coffee in the stovetop pot she found in a low cupboard. She sat and drank it sleepily at the outdoor setting, where occasional mosquitoes hovered. The bush rang with noise while she thought about Odette Fisher.
Odette had invited Benny over for dinner that night, and Benny couldn’t wait to go. And this morning she was to be at the Royal Tavern at 10 am and she would see Tom Boyd again, and now Benny found herself thinking of him. She had seen how his big hand had gripped a small pen with gentle intensity and she smiled at the memory of it. He had reminded her of Jules Cowrie, his dusky skin and the way his veins made long ridges along the tops of his hands. But Jules was just a young man, the same age as Benny, and Benny was not sure how she would describe what Jules was to her now. He had been her boyfriend for two years before he decided to switch universities and move to Canberra. And he’d said so earnestly, so many times, ‘Come with me, Ben. Come along with me.’
But she hadn’t.
And over the past six months she had answered fewer and fewer of his letters.
Benny went inside to the kitchen and made toast and put butter and sliced banana on it. She found a jar of cinnamon among a shelf of dried herbs and spices in the dresser and she sprinkled some on top. Then she went back outside and ate her breakfast and it tasted good. She pushed Jules Cowrie from her mind and returned to thinking about Odette.
Odette Fisher had said so many things the day before that had caused Benny to contemplate, and of course she had longed for Odette to say more. Every mention of the name Vivian Moon had made Benny ripple with anticipation. She wished to know so much, but a cold, empty feeling always accompanied the knowing and, as always, Benny was divided between two conflicting impulses: wanting to look and needing to look away.
What had Odette been referring to when she said the dead man in the suit had reminded her of something that happened a long time ago? The older woman had a way of making it clear when she wanted to stop a line of conversation on its heels. But the discussion swirled around in Benny now, along with another thought—one that filled her with great discomfort: was Odette Fisher only spending this time with Benny, being so kind to her, out of some misplaced obligation to a dead friend? Benny closed her eyes firmly at the thought of that—as if to hide from the humiliation of it—and hoped that it wasn’t so.
The sound of someone watering came over the paling fence next door.
Benny opened her eyes again and looked around at the wild garden, where mint was wilting in the dry earth, and without thinking she got up and untangled a crumpled hose and began to water her garden, too. Vines and weeds and shrubs grew deep by the fence, and Benny watered and felt good while she was doing that, she enjoyed the task of it. She had always found some kind of solace in responsibility.
The old shed sat aslant at the end of the yard, with the bush tall behind it, and Benny rolled the hose back onto its wire mount and wandered down the mossy brick path. Perhaps there would be tools in there that she could use to tend to the garden—she thought this as she pushed the old door. It creaked open on its one hinge and a smell like damp concrete and soil came out.
On the left as Benny entered were tools, just as she’d expected: a rake, a shovel, some trowels and a rusty push mower. They were all propped against the wall next to a ladder, and on the floor was a bag of straw mulch and a stack of empty pots. Paint tins and snail pellets sat on a shelf, and an old washbasin had a towel folded inside it. Benny remembered Odette’s note and guessed that this was where the possum slept.
At the back of the shed, along the length of the wall, were three metal shelves full of dusty relics. She broke a spider web as she went across, her bare feet on the rough floor, and she looked around with some curiosity at a crate of ceramic tiles, old wind chimes, a floor fan, a pile of gardening magazines.
Above all that, on the top shelf, were three cardboard cartons. Benny looked up at them. They were too high for her to see inside, so she reached up and gripped one and slid it off the edge of the shelf towards her, hoping it wouldn’t be too heavy for her to catch. It wasn’t. She set it down and found it full of old utensils, jars and tins, a few tea towels wrapped around some glassware.
She put that box back and, with little thought as to the impropriety of her prying, pulled down another.
It was full of papers—receipts, bills, recipes written on index cards, a wall calendar from 1980. Benny took a cursory look through the top few layers and saw they were Odette’s. She recognised the writing on the index cards, and she saw the name on the bills: Odette Fisher, 5 Wiyanga Crescent. She closed the box again, then lifted it back up onto the high shelf.
At that point it registered dimly with Benny that what she was doing was not respectful. She didn’t know what had come over her. She would never have dreamed of looking in Frank Miller’s drawers or hunting through his cupboards. But she had no interest in Frank Miller, she realised—no interest in him at all. That was the thing of it. And she certainly had none in Irene Miller. You couldn’t have paid Benny to open a drawer at her grandmother’s grim house in Lane Cove, where even the hallway smelled sickly and sour.
But Odette Fisher—she was different, compelling. Benny wanted to know so much about her. And, while she knew it wasn’t right to poke around in Odette’s boxes, she couldn’t seem to help it.
So Benny pulled the third box down, finding it much heavier; her arms strained as she held it and lowered it to the floor. The top, covered with silt, was closed, and when she opened it dust floated about in the air. Benny looked down and saw books. The box was full of books and she sunk with disappointment.
What was she expecting to find in there? What possible interesting thing would Odette hide in an old shed in a house she didn’t live in anymore? Benny felt foolish, embarrassed by her intrusion, and it was with only vague interest that she picked up the first few books and looked at the ones below. Lolita, Catch 22, novels by John Updike, Edna O’Brien, J.P. Donleavy. Benny had read some of these books, others she had planned to read, and she reached in and pulled out more. Volumes of poetry, collections of essays, travel guides and phrasebooks, a Roget’s Thesaurus. She thought about the long bookshelves lining the walls of Odette’s farmhouse and guessed they were full, leaving no room for these, and she silently admired Odette’s obvious thirst for literature.
Holding a copy of The Magus, Benny flipped through the thin, yellowed pages, arriving at the first page by accident. A name was written in pen at the top right-hand corner, and she quickly saw that this was different handwriting and not Odette’s name at all.
Benny stared at the name a long time.
Then she took several more books from the box and checked the first pages of each of them. They didn’t all have a name written inside, but most of them did, and the name—written in many different pens—was always the same. It was Vivian Moon.
18
Detective Sergeant Simmons was up early, too. His eyes opened and no sooner had he become aware of being awake than his legs swung out from under the quilt and he was sitting
upright and alert on the edge of the bed. Jenny Simmons was snoozing beside him, facing the wall, the sheet over the hills of her body. Simmons put a hand on her hip, patted her gently as a good morning, and a drowsy moan came out of Jenny that gave him a rare feeling of contentment.
This was when his house was most lovely and Tony Simmons felt a fondness for it: when everyone else was asleep.
Simmons had got home the night before when the girls were too tired to be tolerable, and Jenny was in one of her moods because of his lateness. Simmons had been in one of his moods, too, after seeing Elsie Simmons. How frail she was. So much so that she didn’t get up to see him out; she only sat there in her armchair and had unusual difficulty reading the newspaper.
‘It’s these floaters in my eyes,’ she said. ‘I’m going to have to cancel the paper.’
Tony squirmed inside. Where had she gone, his mother? Where had his vital, robust mother gone?
He had microwaved her a Lean Cuisine and set it on the side table, and she’d been so grateful. But these days—when she was tired like that, unable to sit down with a book like she used to—she seemed so thwarted and bereft.
Simmons sat on the edge of the bed now, in his own home, and his back hurt in the place it always hurt, and he thought about Elsie Simmons and felt something close to misery. Then he got up and showered and dressed and ate the same breakfast he had eaten since he was a child: Weet-Bix and milk. He made his instant coffee and drank it standing up in the kitchen while the girls watched cartoons and Jenny stomped around making lunches with an absent kind of irritation.
Simmons didn’t ask her what was wrong. He didn’t offer to help her. He didn’t interact with his daughters or wash up his Weet-Bix bowl or his coffee mug. He left his pyjama pants and T-shirt on the floor of the bathroom, his used dental floss dangling over the side of the sink, and left for work.
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