Cedar Valley

by Holly Throsby

  ‘Jimmy’s in Clarke,’ Simmons said. ‘I’ve got a Clarke cop, a mate, meeting him at the train station, for continuity up there. Those boys know it better. I want to see what he gets. I’m thinking about that little pie cart next to Clarke train station.’

  ‘You hungry, boss?’

  ‘Always,’ said Simmons, and he told Franklin to get on with putting together a statement, something basic to release to the press—all the local channels. Someone had to be missing a man in a brown suit.

  Franklin stood up and scrunched his paper sandwich bag into a ball. ‘I’ll write it up, boss,’ he said, and he wandered back inside.

  Simmons stayed leaning against the wall for a time. It was going to get hotter, he could feel it, and he was going to need his towel. Across from the station, at the park, people were standing around the Driver Reviver van, drinking from polystyrene cups. There was an old woman who, from this distance, looked a bit like his mother.

  Simmons had such a funny feeling about this case. This unknown man. It was something he couldn’t quite put his finger on, but it was not unpleasant. His mind ticked over and he wiped a little sweat off the back of his neck.

  From the folder beside him, he pulled out a photo Hall had taken at the morgue. How grey the dead man’s face was. He flipped though several pictures, framed like grim portraits. The unknown man, captured from various positions as he leaned against the wall of Cora Franks’s shop, his eyes open, his expression neutral, dead as a doornail in his shiny shoes.

  Simmons smiled, he was quite amused, and he had the strangest sense that someone was playing a game.

  21

  It took a good while for Benny Miller to settle on an outfit for her first shift at the Royal Tavern. She rummaged through the drawers in her new bedroom, pulling out various T-shirts, some button-downs she’d bought at the markets, a pair of maroon corduroy trousers. She tried on a black skirt and found it too formal. She tried a flannelette shirt and found it too casual. In the end, she settled on blue jeans, a navy T-shirt and her boots. She braided her hair in the pink-tiled bathroom, sitting on the edge of the bath.

  Benny walked to town slowly via a different route. She turned right early and followed a long street where several houses had caravans parked in their driveways, and hydrangeas grew against weatherboard walls. Lost in thought about her morning discovery—why were Vivian’s books in the shed?—she temporarily lost her bearings when she got to Valley Road, at the south end, opposite a big petrol station and mechanical repair. Benny stood for a moment and oriented herself, then she headed north along the main street, stopping to look in the camping supply store and then going into Hargraves Books, where a man sat behind the counter reading Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.

  As always, there were people out front of Fran’s World Famous Pies and Benny stopped there too, to inspect it. A faded article taped in the front window spoke to the high quality of the traditional steak pie in particular, and commended the atmosphere of the store itself, which had ‘all the ambiance of a bygone era’. Benny peered in the big window and had to agree that it did. Dark wooden shelving went along one side, full of chutneys and sauces, and the counter area opposite—a long glass pie-warming cabinet illuminated with soft light—glowed with pies.

  Across the road at the bakery, Benny decided on buying something to take with her later to Odette’s house for dessert, but it was difficult to choose. The cakes looked ridiculous, decorated with whipped cream and glazed fruits, and like nothing Odette would ever eat. Next to the lamingtons and tarts were some chocolate biscuits, and they seemed to Benny to be the most unassuming, and therefore best, option. She and Odette could have them with cups of tea. So she bought four, and then continued on—past Curios where a closed sign hung in the window—to the Royal Tavern.

  When she entered, Tom Boyd was behind the bar, bent over a notebook, writing numbers in columns.

  ‘Good morning, Benny,’ he said, looking up, and she liked the way he emphasised her name in that sentence, as if he was particularly glad to see her. And it occurred to Benny properly then just how handsome this older man was.

  ‘Hello,’ she said, and then paused slightly, unsure of how to address him.

  ‘You can call me Tom,’ said Tom, who seemed to be a man blessed with natural intuition. ‘You could call me Thomas Henry Boyd, if you’d prefer, but it’d be lengthy.’

  ‘I’m sure I’ll be too busy pouring beers to use that many words,’ said Benny.

  Tom Boyd had a laugh at that—a laconic laugh—and Benny settled down on a stool while Tom explained to her the type of pub this was.

  The Royal Tavern was a community pub. It was the communication hub of the Valley, he said, where everyone found out everything important—or mostly unimportant, as it were—that was going on in the town. The pub had a steady flow of customers. Almost all the local groups used the bistro for their monthly meetings: the fishing club, the river swimming club, the Quilting Bees, the mixed singing group, the gardening club, two book clubs and Shop Night. Lots of tourists stopped in on their way north or south, and many stayed for a meal, but it was the locals who kept the pub alive, and the regulars, rusted-on and faithful, in particular.

  ‘So many clubs,’ said Benny.

  ‘Well there’s more, actually, but the golf club meets at the golf club and the tennis club meets at the tennis club and the CWA meets at the CWA. I think the bushwalking club just has a little sit down with their thermoses midway along the trail.’ Tom smiled.

  Benny looked around the bar—this community pub—and noticed things she’d missed the day before. A pair of Dunlop Volleys nailed to the wall, a floral tea set, a framed photo of Jeff Fenech, an Aboriginal flag that looked hand-sewn.

  ‘You’ll want to talk to people here. Listen to people. We care for them. Right now I have Gary and Ern doing three shifts a week each and I need another for over the holidays. I haven’t had a girl work at the bar before, so this is a bit of an experiment. Try to ignore Ed. But if something feels not right you tell me about it quick smart.’

  Benny nodded. ‘I’ll make conversation, and if I’m harassed I’ll express it,’ she said.

  ‘That’s the spirit,’ said Tom. ‘You look like you can handle yourself pretty well.’

  Tom was an unruffled kind of person. Benny could see that his arms were strong and that his hands were working hands: they had nicks on them like he’d been applying tools to wood. Benny thought that if some calamity were to occur—a flood, a cyclone, a bushfire—Tom Boyd would be the kind of dependable person you’d want to have around.

  Tom explained the general duties Benny was to perform. Pouring beers, cleaning the ashtrays, wiping down the spirits bottles when they got sticky, cutting the lemons for the mixed drinks, refilling the fridges and topping up the snacks selection—all things Benny knew how to do well already.

  ‘Come around,’ he said, and Benny got off her stool and went behind the bar. He lifted the trapdoor to the cellar, and she followed him down the steep steps.

  ‘Can you change a keg?’ he asked. ‘I can always do it if it you can’t.’

  ‘I can do it,’ said Benny.

  Tom nodded. ‘Good,’ he said. He showed her the coolroom and the area where the spent kegs went and the storeroom with extra chips and nut packets and the red wines. He handed her a string bag of lemons to take back upstairs and said, ‘You got all that?’

  ‘I got it,’ said Benny, who was doing her best to commit everything he said to memory, so she would be a good worker, someone who listened and cared for her customers, someone who would remain in this man’s employ.

  Then Tom went back up the steep steps and Benny followed, and he climbed up on a stool to switch on the fairy lights strung along the top of the bar.

  ‘Do I get a T-shirt?’ she asked him, holding the lemons.

  ‘Sure you do, Benny,’ he said, hopping down from the stool. ‘It’ll swim on you, but you can have one.’ And he left her there to cut lemon wedge
s on a small plastic board while he wandered around opening the side doors and the big windows that looked out onto Valley Road.

  22

  Cora Franks opened the shop that morning the way she always did. She unlocked the door and wedged it open with the cast-iron dachshund she used as a doorstop. She wandered past the multitude of items that were spread in a rather unwieldy fashion throughout the deep, wide room. Leather couches, provincial chairs, vases and candlestick holders, framed botanicals. On the tables and available dresser tops there were dinner sets, ornate ashtrays and metal toolboxes. A kangaroo skin was draped casually over a footstool, and a rusted rabbit trap hung above a chamber pot.

  After checking that things were in a good position and hadn’t been moved about by customers, Cora headed to her counter, which was situated on the right-hand side of the store, around about the middle. It was a long tasteful counter, half of it a glass-topped cabinet, full of brooches and jewellery and ornamental spoons, and the other half an old cedar benchtop that Cora polished regularly to make shine.

  She switched on the ceiling lights, lamps, the radio and the kettle, and did a quick wipe-down of the display cabinets, tidying up various sections that needed tidying—there was always so much to do—and finally she settled behind the counter on an elegant yet lumbar-supporting stool, with a cup of tea and an arrowroot biscuit, and turned her attention to the Gather Region Advocate.

  Today, footfalls sounded a little too soon into her morning ritual. Cora heard them and kept her eyes on the newsprint—an article about a car accident on the coast road. She stared at the photo of the poor crumpled sedan, and hoped that whoever was walking into the shop would be a stranger she wouldn’t need to talk to.

  What an unusual thing for Cora Franks to hope—but she was beginning to realise that, just recently, something had shifted inside her. In fact, as she sat there, it was occurring to her more strongly that, since the dead man had been found right outside that big front window, she had been overtaken by an odd feeling. It was a foreign feeling, and the feeling was this: she wanted to be alone.

  Everything about this was uncommon to Cora. She had never understood why Fred spent so much time off fishing at the lake. It was a solitary drive there and then nothing but watery monotony when he arrived. ‘I like to be alone with my thoughts,’ he would say when she asked him, and Cora used to scoff and think, how dismal. How boring.

  But now she didn’t feel that way at all.

  All of a sudden she imagined herself floating in Fred’s boat on the lake. What an absurd notion! Perhaps there’d be long-legged birds there and the reflection of clouds on the water. Cora almost laughed at herself, craving a thing that was so unlike her. But she felt now this unexpected desire to stop having so many conversations that just went on and on about next to nothing all day—as entertaining as she had always found them—and to just sit quietly and truly consider her life: the contents of it, the feeling of it, and which bits of it mattered. And it wasn’t only her life she wanted to consider. What about the life of the dead man, who she had found? A man whose existence had floated away right there on the footpath. Just as hers could at any moment, just as Fred’s could, or anyone’s.

  But lo and behold, she looked up from the paper and there was Therese, with her stiff hair—what mysterious thing was in hairspray that it could make hair act so unlike hair?

  ‘I asked him,’ said Therese. ‘You said to ask him, so I asked him.’ She leaned against the polished wood with a comb in her hand.

  ‘Why are you carrying that comb?’ asked Cora.

  Therese looked down at the comb as if she had never seen it before in her life.

  ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘I must’ve forgotten to put it down.’

  ‘Well, what did he say?’ asked Cora, who now knew full well that Ed Johnson was getting his leg over Linda from the chicken factory.

  ‘He says he’s not doing anything with anyone,’ said Therese coyly, as if it was just the most foolish suggestion on earth that Ed would run around on her with another woman. ‘He says I need to stop worrying so much. And he’s taking me to the Riverside for a steak next weekend.’ Therese smiled and did a very good performance of ‘silly-old-me’ as she said this.

  Cora took a sip of tea and felt like an awful person. And at the same time, she felt that Therese was an awful person, too. And this was to say nothing of Ed Johnson.

  ‘Well, there you go,’ said Cora with a strained smile.

  ‘I feel embarrassed now even to have thought it. He says there’s always some out-of-town woman wearing bad perfume at the bar, and I’m sure they all breathe all over him.’ Therese laughed. ‘And speaking of—did you know Tom has a new girl working at the bar? A young thing, apparently. I haven’t seen her yet …’ Therese trailed off. She wandered over to Cora’s little tea-making area and made herself a cup of tea, and then Terri came in the front door with her leather hairdresser’s belt on, silver scissor handles all in a row.

  ‘Mary Anne’s timer went off—do you want me to rinse out her colour?’ asked Terri in a loud voice, hovering nervously next to a daybed near the door.

  Therese rolled her eyes, just privately to Cora, and said, ‘Yes, Terri,’ as if Terri was the dimmest person she’d ever encountered, and Terri flushed with humiliation and went back to the Coiffure.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Therese, who was never truly sorry, ‘but that girl is as thick as a brick.’

  She spooned three sugars into her tea and helped herself to several biscuits, and Cora stared at her for a moment, marvelling to herself at how Therese and Ed Johnson used to be the most glamorous couple in town, the top of the pile, and what a ghastly mess it had all become. Cora turned back to the newspaper and said, ‘Nasty prang on the coast road,’ and Therese said, ‘Tourists.’ And then they chatted for a while, which really meant that Therese chatted—nicely now about Ed and meanly about Terri—and then Barbie Robinson came in, and after that Lil Chapman from next door.

  Cora stood behind the counter, like she always did in this scenario, which was altogether regular. This was Curios every day, with Cora hosting an ongoing merry-go-round of friends, acquaintances and customers who kept her stimulated and entertained and connected. Often someone would bring treats from the bakery. The kettle would boil again and again. Sometimes they’d all watch daytime soap operas on the small white television that Cora had behind the counter. This was the reason Cora loved her store and never wanted to close it: it was like a social club and she was president. So how strange it was now to have the pleasure of this dwindle inside her and to feel suffocated by the relentless activity.

  ‘The policeman came around—who’s the fat one? Bonnie Franklin’s son?’ Lil Chapman was speaking now.

  ‘That’s Gus Franklin, but I think he’s just got a big bone structure,’ said Mary Anne, who had arrived with a large blow wave.

  Therese was standing in front of her, fussing at it with her hands. ‘Bloody Terri. I’m sorry, Mary Anne, I should’ve come back in and done this myself.’

  ‘I like Terri,’ said Mary Anne.

  Mary Anne had a tendency to be generous, which was perhaps why Therese referred to Mary Anne, behind her back, as ‘a bore’.

  Lil Chapman went on about how she’d suddenly remembered—‘like a bolt from the blue’—the out-of-town lady who had crouched down and spoken to the man who’d died on the footpath.

  Cora looked up, unsettled by this new information. ‘What woman?’ she said sharply, and Lil described her as best she could.

  Cora’s mind ticked over, recollecting the out-of-town lady who’d been interested in the watch cabinet that day the man had died. A sophisticated blonde woman, hair so perfect she looked like an advertisement for shampoo. She’d asked to see several of the watches with thin gold bands, and then Cora was sure she had seen her in the crowd after, when the ambulance men were there and the police were asking questions. Were her hands a bit shaky when she inspected the watches? They were. Her hands shook—tremor
s like tiny earthquakes—and Cora remembered the surge of pity she’d felt, for such a refined woman to have the shakes like that. What an embarrassment it was when the decline was so visible. Yes, a clear picture of the woman was fixed now in Cora’s mind as Lil was talking.

  ‘I said to Bonnie Franklin’s son that if I had to say, I would say she looked just like Nikki from—’ and Cora Franks cut Lil off with a squeal.

  ‘From The Young and the Restless!’ said Cora, and she and Lil fell about laughing like a pair of schoolgirls.

  Oh, yes. That was funny. Cora laughed and laughed and thought: even though Lil Chapman couldn’t spell or use correct punctuation, she did have a good eye for detail—probably on account of her quilting—and even though she always stank of menthol cigarettes, she wasn’t an awful person. That was a relief. Cora was so grateful for Lil Chapman in that moment. And perhaps the closer everyone got to knowing who that dead man was, and how he died, and why it had to happen right there outside the window, then perhaps Cora Franks would begin to feel like her old self again.

  23

  It was late in the afternoon when Constable James Hall returned from Clarke with his pie crumbs of information about the brief amount of time the unknown man had spent there between getting off a train and getting on a bus.

  Simmons was in the kitchenette making a Nescafé and he stood there, solid and sweaty next to Jimmy’s rangy body, while Jimmy explained himself.

  Hall had met two constables from Clarke at the train station. One was outright condescending and the other was just mildly so. The two constables stayed for about three minutes before they said sarcastically, ‘Best of luck, mate,’ to Jimmy Hall, and left him to carry on with the investigation on his own.

  ‘Fuckers,’ said Simmons. ‘It was supposed to be O’Leary meeting you. Did they pass on my message about the pie cart?’

  They had, that was good, but that was about the only thing they had contributed, apart from a racial slur about the operator of the pie cart—they had called him a ‘wog’.