Cedar Valley

by Holly Throsby

  ‘I did,’ said Hall. ‘They’re at the start of the next roll. It’s in a different pack.’

  He got up and went into Simmons’s office and didn’t come back for a minute or so. ‘That first roll ran out, so I had to put another one in,’ he said loudly.

  He came out again, empty-handed, and went to the desk used mostly by Senior Constable Steve Howard, which looked as if a burglary had occurred on it. Hall sifted around in the mess. ‘Here,’ he said, producing a pack of photographs.

  It was a roll of thirty-six, just developed, and about twenty of those photos were of the inside of Nigel Haling’s shed.

  ‘We missed these ones, did we? Lemme see,’ said Franklin, and he held one up to his face to examine it.

  There were the people gathered around on Valley Road, all of them there to witness the spectacle of a dead body. There was Cora Franks and Lil Chapman and Therese Johnson; Keith Hand and a group of locals from the Royal; there was silly old Les; and many more tourists than Franklin had remembered being there at the time.

  Hall had captured a lovely little moment of flirtation between the ambos: the male officer whispering in the ear of his female colleague and her laughing and looking delighted by it. Franklin smiled at that. Then he ran his finger along, over the faces—people standing, people sitting on the bench up opposite the Coiffure. Franklin set down the first photo and picked up the second. There was Maureen Robinson from the chemist, talking with some tourists, one of them holding a pie bag. And look, there was Gussy himself—gosh, he could do with losing a few kilos—and then Gussy’s finger stopped at the person he was looking for.

  ‘There,’ he said, his mind still half wondering if he really looked that big in real life.

  He turned the photo around, pointing to the face of a sophisticated blonde woman in a cream blouse. She was standing alone, staring intently in the direction of the dead man, with one hand covering her mouth and large dark sunglasses covering her eyes.

  ‘There she is,’ he said. ‘Our mysterious blonde who looks like what’s-her-name from the soap opera. She stuck around.’

  Constable James Hall looked at the photograph and grinned widely.

  Franklin grinned back. He said, ‘I reckon if we can’t get any more on our guy, let’s get a bit more on our lady.’

  33

  Benny Miller spent the rest of the Saturday at the pale wooden house filled with an unshakable sorrow.

  In the afternoon, she sat on the couch in the living room, reading her book. She lay for a while on the floorboards of the kitchen, her legs up against a cupboard door, looking out the window over the sink. The trees rustling, sunlight flickering through, and the tin of Cora Frank’s banana bread on the floor next to her, half eaten. An ache of grief would arise in her, close to every hour, and Benny would press her eyes together and will it to pass.

  As the sun lowered, she walked down the path to the shed, allowing herself only a brief glance at the cardboard box up on the shelf, full of Vivian’s books. She had resolved not to look at them again—for a few days at least—and instead she left a peach, cut in quarters, next to the old washbasin where the possum slept. She took a handful of gardening magazines from the dusty pile and carried them back to the house.

  On the small radio in the kitchen, Benny experimented with frequencies. She came across a local station with a Christian theme that played old pop songs and, every now and again, the announcer read out a verse from the Bible. Benny found it quaint when a wobbly elderly voice said: ‘Then Peter came to Jesus and asked, “Lord, how many times shall I forgive my brother when he sins against me? Up to seven times?”’ and she left the station on while she sat at the kitchen table with the gardening magazines and drank half a longneck of beer.

  By twilight, she had somehow rationalised further intrusions, and she went through all the drawers in the kitchen, and the cabinet in the living room, and the hallway table, looking in vain for some old relic of her mother. She found coloured pencils, a jar of small change, batteries, a Dave Brubeck record—Jazz Impressions of Eurasia—and an ancient joint in a tin on top of the fridge.

  She stared a while at the photo Cora Franks had given her, and eventually she put it inside her cardboard box with the rest of her collection. She would ask Odette about it, she thought, and then she sat on the bed next to the box, flipping through letters that Jules had sent her from Canberra. She felt a rare yearning for him then, and wished he was there with her, even just for an evening.

  In the nighttime, Benny turned on the lamps and had a long bath in the pink-tiled bathroom and smoked the joint she had found in the tin. She rested her head back and closed her eyes as her throat burnt happily. It was close to midnight when she ate the rest of Cora’s carrot cake, standing in the kitchen, her mouth as dry as dust, feeling unusually positive about a Phil Collins song that was playing softly on the radio.

  At first light she was woken by a deep sliding noise from the ceiling and she lay in bed for the next hour, half sleeping, half awake, listening to the slow, restless snake and thinking about her mother, and whether she had slept under this very quilt, on this very mattress. What were the contents of her dreams in this room? What kind of person was Vivian Moon, in the dark mossy parts of her that she kept so well hidden?

  The telephone rang just after seven.

  Benny sat up, startled and weary, unsure if she should answer it or not. She got out of bed and went up the hall.

  ‘Hello?’ she said, expecting Odette.

  ‘G’day, Ben,’ said a familiar voice.

  ‘Oh. Hi, Dad,’ said Benny, and sadness washed around inside her, like waves over rocks.

  Frank Miller paused on the other end of the line, then said, ‘How you going?’ His accent, as she heard it now, was a city accent. It wasn’t stretched and broad like the men she poured beers for at the Royal Tavern.

  ‘Good,’ said Benny. ‘I was just waking up.’

  And there they were together, on the phone: Frank and Benny Miller, father and daughter, who, having cohabited in their distant way for eighteen years, had never been good at communicating with each other, even when Frank had had a beer and was in a good mood. That morning, as Benny could easily tell, Frank was not in a particularly good mood.

  ‘So, how’s the house?’ he asked.

  ‘It’s good, Dad,’ said Benny, and it pained her how awkward this was, speaking to her father on the phone. It was always this way with Frank. As if any words he might have to offer were trapped inside him and couldn’t find a way out.

  Standing there in the hallway in the slanted light of morning, an old memory surfaced in Benny—of when she was little, running under the sprinkler in the back garden at Rozelle, while Irene Miller watched on from a chair.

  ‘When my mum comes home to live with us we’re going to get a swimming pool,’ Benny had said to her grandmother; where such a fantasy had come from, Benny did not know.

  Irene had made an odd sort of scoffing sound. ‘Benita, your mum’s not coming home. And there’s really no room here for a swimming pool.’

  Benny held the telephone receiver and looked down at her bare feet on the rug, a Persian runner that went the length of the hall.

  ‘The house is very nice,’ she said. ‘I like it here. Odette’s been good to me.’

  Frank went uh-huh, uh-huh and she could picture him, chewing his fingernails.

  ‘How are you, Dad?’

  ‘Oh, you know,’ he said, ‘pretty well. Just thought I’d ring you. See how you were going.’

  Benny wanted quite badly then to simply hang up and walk outdoors, just for the clear air. And at the same time, in light of what Odette had told her, she wanted to ask Frank a hundred questions.

  Did you know Mum lived here? In this house? Did you know she worked at the pharmacy in Cedar Valley? Why did you say she was in Europe then? What is it about me that made her leave?

  But instead they went back and forth with unbearable courtesies and the banality of it caused Benny
to shut her eyes tightly in discomfort, imagining her drab father who had once been handsome and perhaps even interesting, and who now was forlorn and couldn’t manage an even slightly animated conversation with his own daughter. When had he lost his charm? For Benny thought she remembered, from her childhood, some fire between him and her mother. Some flame of vitality in him. His sinewy arms would lift Benny above his head and onto his shoulders; and Frank Miller was so clever he could take a car engine apart and put it back together again. There was even a time when Frank had friends. Sometimes there’d be a group of them, men and women, they would come over and cook sausages on the barbecue and Frank would play Neil Young records and turn the speakers around to face the yard.

  ‘Better go then,’ he said, and he cleared his throat. Benny could hear the noises of the old Rozelle house in the background. The hum of traffic and the television, which Frank would leave on throughout the day as a kind of lifeless companion. She did not miss these noises, nor the house in Rozelle, and it saddened her that she did not in any way miss her father.

  Perhaps I will miss him later. This was what Benny said to herself, while knowing inwardly that she wouldn’t.

  ‘Okay,’ she said into the phone. ‘Thanks for calling.’

  She meant that in a way. She was pleased that he’d thought of her, but he was probably just worried, and she didn’t want his worry. In fact, she worried for him, was the truth of it. It had always been that way, from when she was ten or eleven and began to take on the cooking of their dinner. She would iron her school uniform and then the shirts he wore to the auction house. She had worried about him and she had pitied him for being so hopeless, and it seemed ridiculous to her now that she hadn’t understood earlier why Frank was so sad.

  Frank Miller was still in love with Vivian Moon.

  Benny saw this now. That he was mourning her—her death—in a vivid way, but that he’d been mourning her for Benny’s whole life.

  They said their goodbyes and Benny hung up the phone. And she walked out into the wild garden, where it was so cicada-loud, and the sad waves moved around inside her for this father of hers, who was so lost and lonely and sad.

  34

  Constable James Hall and Constable Gus Franklin walked into the chemist on Monday morning shortly after 9 am and found Maureen Robinson behind the counter, affixing price tags to bottles of vitamins.

  ‘Oh, good, it’s you two,’ she said, looking at them over her reading glasses. Her shirt was pale blue and offered the name of the chemist on the breast pocket—Cedar Valley Pharmacy—and a logo of a mortar and pestle with a heart on it. She also wore a name tag and a wry kind of smile.

  Hall and Franklin had already stopped in at the newsagent, the bakery, the craft and crystal store and the cafe that morning, appealing for any information about the blonde woman who had spoken to the dead man. No one in any of these establishments recalled a blonde woman, but at least Franklin had an excuse to buy a neenish tart.

  Cora Franks had been helpful—she’d come into the station first thing, and was more than happy to do so. Lil Chapman told Cora she should go up and talk to them. And, well, Cora Franks could talk the leg off a chair, and she didn’t need much encouragement to get more involved. She went straight up there after breakfast and her only disappointment was that Tony Simmons wasn’t in yet and she had to speak to Franklin and Hall.

  Cora told them what she recollected: the woman was very interested in the watches, the ones with thin gold bands in particular. She tried on three and bought none. She was elegant, clearly not local, and did indeed bear a resemblance to Nikki from The Young and the Restless. Finally—and Cora didn’t know the medical reason for this kind of thing—the woman had a bad case of the shakes.

  ‘Like this,’ said Cora, who demonstrated by holding out her hand and shaking it.

  Franklin nodded.

  ‘And now, I need to talk to Tony. When will he be in?’

  ‘Detective Sergeant Simmons is due in this morning,’ said Franklin. ‘Anything we can help with?’

  Cora considered this carefully, tilting her head at Gussy Franklin. ‘No, I think I’d better talk to Tony,’ she said. ‘Tell him it’s about a chat I had with Elsie. His mother. Elsie Simmons.’

  Franklin nodded again and Cora left, and then the men began their canvass, and Gussy Franklin finished his tart on the bench outside the chemist before they went in.

  ‘Is Dieter around?’ asked Hall, referring to the pharmacist, Dieter Bernbaum, who was known to wear white clogs and be weird.

  ‘He’s stepped out,’ said Maureen, fondling a bottle of B12. ‘I’m glad you’re here. I was going to come up to the station on my break.’

  ‘Good-o,’ said Franklin. ‘Did you hear we’re asking after a woman who may have had a chat with the man who died?’

  ‘Oh, are you?’ said Maureen, barely listening. ‘How’s your mum, Gussy? Before I forget, will you tell her we’ve got her orthotics in—or should I ring her?’

  ‘You go ahead and ring her, Maureen,’ said Franklin. ‘Did a woman come in here last Wednesday, to your recollection, a blonde woman? Cora and the ladies from Curios reckon she looked like a soap star. Ring any bells?’

  Maureen tapped the vitamin bottle against the counter, thinking about it. She leaned forward and looked up to the ceiling.

  ‘Oh, yes, her,’ she said. ‘I remember.’

  Franklin and Hall exchanged a look.

  ‘Just a minute,’ she said, and the two men stepped back to allow an elderly woman with a metal walking stick to approach the counter and purchase a box of cotton buds and some Mercurochrome.

  ‘Hello, love,’ said the old woman in a phlegmy kind of voice.

  ‘It’s healing okay?’ Maureen yelled at the woman.

  ‘She’ll be right,’ rasped the woman, and Maureen took her money and gave her change and came out from behind the counter to escort the woman to the footpath. They hugged, and the woman raised her stick in the air as a goodbye before struggling off.

  Maureen returned to the counter. ‘The rich woman, yes. She looked rich. Nice clothes, nice jewellery, very sophisticated. She looked like she’d just stepped out of the salon. And it was that day, wasn’t it? I think I saw her over the road after they’d found him.’

  ‘You did,’ said Hall. ‘Here.’ And he held up the photograph of the crowd, pointing to the woman in the cream blouse and the large sunglasses.

  ‘That’s her. She came in asking for sleeping pills, but she didn’t have a prescription so I could only give her the over-the-counter kind. I think she asked for a sedative, actually, which is a bit sad, isn’t it? To use the word “sedative”.’

  ‘Hmm,’ said Gussy Franklin, wondering what was so sad about the word ‘sedative’.

  ‘Anything else you can remember about her?’ asked Hall.

  ‘Well, she was one of those well-to-do women that kind of look down their nose at you,’ said Maureen. ‘You know, a bit superior. She was looking around the shop like it was a pile of crap. But at the same time, she was just a bit too desperate for the pills. You see that sometimes in my line of work. Like someone has demons. And, you know, it’s the demons they want to put to sleep.’

  Maureen laughed darkly and Hall looked back at her, nervously blinking.

  ‘Oh, and she had a tremor,’ added Maureen, and she held out one hand and trembled it. ‘Like this,’ she said.

  Franklin wrote that down. And Maureen Robinson began to talk about the dead man and how strange it was to see a dead body like that, just sitting on the footpath.

  ‘It’s really shaken up some of the customers,’ she said. ‘Especially the older ones. Everyone’s been talking about him. I think because death is usually kind of hidden, you know? Happening someplace else. But when it’s just sitting there on the footpath in a nice suit—it makes people take stock of their lives. Betsy Dell was in this morning and she thinks we should have some sort of commemoration for him, which is a funny kind of idea, but I think it woul
d be good to give everyone a chance to come together and talk about it. It’s just not an everyday thing for people to see.’

  Maureen put her elbows on the counter and leaned in a little, so Franklin and Hall leaned in also.

  She lowered her voice. ‘And that’s what I was going to come up to see you about. You know Elsie Simmons? Tony’s mum? Well I was over there last night for tea and we were talking about it, and Elsie said it was just like a thing that happened in Adelaide after the war. You should have heard this story! It was so similar, I couldn’t believe it. And of course she hasn’t told Tony any of this. I told her to call him last night but she didn’t want to bother him at home, for some reason. So I told her I’d go up to the station today and have a word in his ear.’

  ‘Oh yeah,’ said Franklin. ‘Elsie’s solved the case, has she?’

  Hall repressed a smile.

  ‘Have some respect, Gussy,’ said Maureen sternly. ‘I’ve known Elsie Simmons for twenty-five years and let me tell you, she may forget a few things here and there, but she knows her stuff. The Somerton Man—that’s what they call him in South Australia. I think you should look it up. Elsie says it’s still a mystery, never solved. A man died just like our man did, in a nice brown suit on the first of December. I thought about it all evening. And I don’t think Elsie Simmons is one to make up stories, do you?’

  35

  Tony Simmons sat in his hot office with the fan going around and Senior Constable Bob Kurnell, a good bloke, standing in the doorway banging on about a couple of stolen rifles and how he’d had a run-in with the boys from Clarke over some yobbos in a ute who may or may not have stolen them.

  ‘That mate of yours, O’Leary, he’s come down here about it just now, because the bottle-o under the Clarke Plaza got held up by these two guys with rifles—which are probably Nigel Haling’s rifles. And I just said to him, “Mate, if you’re gonna give us help on our end, fine. But if you’re not, then youse can just get in your car and piss off back to Clarke.” And they pissed off back to Clarke!’