Pearl in a Cage

by Joy Dettman

  Not so to Jenny. She’d loved living with Maisy, had learnt so much about cooking and sewing and knitting, and now she couldn’t even have a bath in peace, couldn’t go to the lav without the twins throwing things at the door, the roof.

  ‘Just ignore them, love. Their sisters learned to ignore them,’ Maisy said.

  Hard to ignore those who don’t wish to be ignored. Hard to ignore that blackened gaping gash of ash and blackened timber, of twisted corrugated iron, propped up by Mr Miller’s blackened sewing machine. Hard to ignore the burnt boots.

  And the sheets of rain washing rivers of black ash across the footpath where the boot shop’s verandah had once stood, filling the overflowing gutters with ash, running down, and down, and down, to drain into the creek and leave its stain there.

  Mill men couldn’t work in the rain. Tree fellers couldn’t cut down trees in the rain.

  The forest rejoiced. Washed clean by the downpour, washed green, it drank its fill, and in the mud at its feet, a million seeds stirred.

  Then Vern Hooper took the phone call he’d been waiting for, and finally he left his verandah to give his roses some attention.

  ‘It’s going to take a while, but he’s awake and he spoke to the girls today,’ Vern said to one, to all. ‘He’s knocked out most of his front teeth, but the doc said they’d needed to come out anyway.’

  He worked on his roses until the sun went down, and for the first time in over a week was able to see the beauty of this land, most of it in the sky, red as fire tonight. He dead-headed roses until that red sky faded to salmon, faded to purple, then to grey. Lack of light sent him back to his verandah. He was sipping tea when he heard a lad calling at his fence, one of Clarry Dobson’s lads, his maid’s nephew.

  ‘Your aunt went home an hour ago, lad.’

  ‘It’s Barbie, Mr Hooper. She’s wandered off somewhere. Dad says can you get the constable? It’s getting dark.’

  Dobson owned a couple of acres down behind Macdonald’s mill, half of it cleared, half of it heavily timbered.

  ‘I’ve got no car, lad,’ Vern said, returning to the fence. ‘You’ll run faster than me.’

  ‘Sorry. I didn’t think. How’s Jim?’

  ‘He’s coming good. Now run, lad.’

  Too dark to see anything much. Vern went inside for his flashlight, and walked off towards the creek to lend what light he could to the search.

  Denham had a motorbike. He was down there with a handful of Dobson’s neighbours. Barbie Dobson was eight years old, a pretty little blue-eyed blonde, and not the type to go wandering around at night. She’d been playing hidey with her brothers in their creek paddock and had hidden too well. The boys gave up looking. They’d spent the last hour working on their billycart. Their mother had a new baby. Their father had come home late. No one noticed that Barbie wasn’t around until their father told them to get inside and clean themselves up for bed.

  ‘I’ve told her not to go near the creek unless her brothers are with her,’ Clarry said. ‘I’ve told all of those kids that those banks are treacherous since the rain.’

  Within fifteen minutes, fifty men, women and boys were down at the creek, calling to Barbie, scouring the forest alongside the creek, searching McPherson’s land, Macdonald’s mill, slipping, sliding in mud, walking the creek’s shallows, feeling for her around snags, while the dark soaked up the little light from lantern and flashlight.

  ‘Barbie! Barbie! You answer Daddy when you’re called. Barbie!’

  Only the frogs and night birds answered.

  ‘We’ll find nothing in the dark,’ Denham said. ‘If she’s lying hurt somewhere, we could be walking right by her.’

  ‘Barbie! You answer me. Barbie!’

  Clarry Dobson and a few more stayed on, but Vern’s flashlight batteries had given up. He gave up too and went home, but was back at daybreak, working his way downstream. A few kids had drowned in that creek. They hadn’t found one of them for five days. They’d never found Ray King’s body. It was a treacherous bastard, coming in too close to town before it started its curve to the west. Full of snags, silt feet thick in places, more water in it since the rain and moving faster, and the gutters from town pouring more in. A little dot like Barbie could have been carried for miles.

  By late afternoon the next day, over a hundred men were searching both sides of that creek. A truckload had come up from Willama with a police sergeant and two constables. Out-of-town farmers had come in to lend a hand. Anyone with a boat had it on the creek, prodding now for that little body, dragging chains with cruel hooks attached, the town certain there had been another drowning.

  Joey Hall found her, just before sundown, when he took the horses down to the creek for a drink.

  He saw a small bare foot. A step closer and he recognised a leg. Blonde hair. And no face—like the last time. Same girl. Same place. Beneath the water-pumping log.

  Then the young horse smelled the blood and took off downstream, and Joey took off for home.

  Old Nugget limped closer to the dead child to stand guard until Gertrude came.

  FORGIVENESS

  Only a stranger can dissect a town, pare it down to the core and feel no pain. Only a stranger can ask the multiplicity of questions that turn every man’s eye on his own neighbour. For days the town was overrun by strangers, strange policemen driving strange cars, big black cars.

  The hotel was overrun by police; and Norman, queuing to use the limited facilities, was embarrassed by his situation, by the questions, by the cracked lens of his spectacles he was learning to look around. The older Dobson children had told the city men they’d seen him down at the creek one day, that he’d had a stick in his hand, that Barbie had spoken to him. He wasn’t the only one they’d seen. Folk cut across Dobson’s land on their way to the bridge, always had. Dobson’s timber paddock was treated like crown land, as was McPherson’s.

  Having those city police in town had got Denham’s loyalties a mote confused. He was a city man who might well have been one of those strangers had he not taken the move to the country when he had. He hadn’t planned to stay more than a year or two, but his wife had had two more kids, and Simon, his oldest, had a good job in the council office, and somehow, somewhere along the years, that house and his back garden had become home. He still considered himself a city man, still named a few of the locals yokels, but as the days passed he began to dissociate himself from the city men who knocked too hard on folks’ front doors at inconvenient hours, who saw evil in innocent endeavour.

  Like them or not, small towns have a way of getting under your skin, as do a few of the folk living in them. Denham found himself defending a few. John McPherson, for one.

  He’d gone with the city blokes to do a thorough search of McPherson’s land, but he stood with the lanky photographer while the others went over the property with a small-toothed comb, raked over his rubbish heap, kicked in one wall of the makeshift hut Harry Hall and a few wanderers had called home for a time. They found blood splatters on a log out front of it.

  ‘Rabbit blood more than likely. Old rabbit blood. There’s a lot of trapping done along the creek,’ Denham said.

  They found a sardine tin near the hut. It smelled fishy.

  ‘Have you seen anyone camping down here lately, John?’ Denham asked.

  ‘A few see it from the bridge and think it’s on crown land. If they’re looking for shade, it’s shady.’

  ‘Names?’ a city cop asked.

  McPherson and Denham eyed the man and wondered where he’d been.

  ‘I don’t trouble them, they don’t trouble me,’ McPherson said. ‘They’re usually gone the next day.’

  He’d photographed a few of the wanderers. Years ago he’d caught old Noah sitting on a log, the bridge behind him. It was one of his best. McPherson felt he had trapped the essence of the depression in that one: an old chap sitting reading a book, his flowing hair and beard gleaming white in the sun, the bridge to nowhere just a blur amid the trees. He�
�d captured Harry Hall’s cheeky grin that same year. A kid, clad in rags, squatting over a campfire, using a stick to stir some evil-smelling concoction.

  ‘Anyone down here when the girl was taken?’ a city bloke asked.

  ‘There was a chap on his way up to a fencing job who camped here for a couple of days. I think he pushed on west when the rain cleared.’

  ‘When did it clear?’

  ‘The day Barbie went missing,’ Denham said.

  ‘Where was his fencing job?’

  ‘West,’ he said.

  ‘Where west?’ Another city cop asked, and Denham and John McPherson pointed over the bridge.

  ‘What were you doing the day Barbie went missing, Mr McPherson?’

  McPherson, an unmarried man in his early thirties living with his mother on a few acres of river land, was a natural suspect. Their property was only a gutter and a partial fence away from where that little girl was last seen. The city men knew McPherson spent a lot of time hanging around the school, that he liked photographing kids.

  ‘My mother and I were listening to the wireless when we heard Clarry calling to her. I went down to help with the search,’ John said.

  Back in the car, Denham put them right on a few points. ‘He hangs around the schoolmistress more than the school,’ he said. ‘He and Amy Rose have had some sort of an understanding for years. He’s a decent chap.’

  Water off a duck’s back to the city men. He didn’t attempt to turn their suspicions away from the Macdonald twins.

  ‘Born bastards, those two. Any trouble in town has their names written all over it, though they were only kids when the Abbot girl was killed.’

  ‘What aged kids?’

  ‘Eleven, twelve, I’d guess offhand.’

  ‘Means nothing,’ one cop said.

  ‘One egging on the other,’ another said.

  ‘They were away at school for a time. Curry, the headmaster, will know when.’

  ‘What do you know about Henry Duffy?’

  ‘If he found his way down to the creek, we’d be dragging it for him,’ Denham said. ‘He’s harmless.’

  ‘The stationmaster?’

  ‘No violence in him.’

  ‘His wife?’

  ‘She cleared out with another chap a few years back—before my time. Morrison took her back for his kids’ sake, so the story goes. They’ve grown up. Maybe he’s had enough.’

  ‘Where’s this farm that chap was supposed to be fencing at?’

  ‘Between here and the next place. There are farms all along that creek. The road out there will be a quagmire. Hooper’s land is out that way. He might know who’s likely to be putting up new fences.’

  ‘Same Hooper as that big old bloke on the corner?’

  ‘Same Hooper.’

  It took half a day and a lot of mud-running to track the fencing bloke down, and before they’d tracked him down, rain was falling again. They found him sheltering in a shearers’ hut and knew they had their man. He was a ferret-faced little bastard with close-set shifty eyes, who tried to make a run for it across a paddock the rain had turned into a lake. They got him. They dragged him back to shelter.

  ‘I’ve done nothing,’ the fencer said.

  ‘What made you take off then?’

  ‘Your ugly bloody faces.’

  They asked him when he’d taken off from Woody Creek and he asked them why they wanted to know.

  ‘Because an eight-year-old girl was murdered, mutilated and shoved under a log to rot, that’s why.’

  ‘You’re stark raving mad if you think I’d do something like that. I’ve got five kids of my own—’

  ‘I don’t see them around.’

  ‘I don’t drag them around. When are you talking about?’

  They told him when, and he stood counting on his fingers. ‘I wasn’t bloody there. I packed up near dawn that day and was four or five mile from the place by breakfast time. A farm dame cooked me some breakfast.’

  ‘Out of the kindness of her heart.’

  ‘For half a bloody ton of cut and stacked wood. Eggs. Three eggs she cooked me.’

  ‘Is that right.’

  ‘Ask her if you don’t believe me.’

  ‘We will.’

  ‘Your wife and kids eating three eggs for breakfast?’ they asked then.

  ‘They’re doing all right.’

  ‘Why take off in the middle of the night?’

  ‘I felt like it,’ the fencer said, eyeing the farmer who stood smoking and enjoying the entertainment. Not a lot happened fifteen mile from town, or not in the wet.

  ‘Same reasons you took off from your wife and kids?’

  The rain wasn’t letting up. The three cops lit smokes. The fencer held out his hand for one. It remained empty.

  ‘Same as you felt like taking off on your kids and missus, I said.’

  ‘I lost me job and had to move in with the wife’s mother. She hates me guts and I hate hers. Anything else you want to know?’

  ‘Yeah. Why you took off in the rain from Woody Creek.’

  ‘Me hotel had a leak in its roof.’

  ‘You’re in big trouble, feller,’ Denham said. ‘As far as we can see, you were in the wrong place at the right time. You’d be well advised to cut the smart-arsing around and answer the man’s questions.’

  ‘The hut was leaking. I’d packed up and went down under the bridge. Some dame was down there waiting for her boyfriend. She thought I was him. I couldn’t convince her otherwise, so I told her to go to buggery and I took off in the rain.’

  ‘Young? Old? Middle-aged?’

  ‘Christ almighty. It’s raining cats and dogs, dark as pitch—’

  ‘You must have got an idea.’

  ‘I’m telling you, I don’t know! All I know is she was waiting for someone and she sounded drunk or crazy—which was why I took off. I’m a returned soldier, for Christ’s sake. I don’t kill babies and I’ve never been in trouble with the cops and you drive me back along that road and I’ll find that farmer dame with the eggs. And I can show you where I camped that night too. It’s a big old empty place six or so mile west of where I ate breakfast. And a bloke seen my smoke there too. He come over to see what I was doing there. A bunch of monks used to own the place, he said.’

  Denham knew Monk’s old place. He took out his smokes and offered them to the fencer. ‘The crazy dame went after you, eh?’

  ‘You could say that.’

  ‘You would have got an idea of her size then, I reckon. Tall, short, fat, skinny?’

  ‘Christ knows.’ He drew on his smoke, leaned against a wide bench. ‘Skinny.’

  ‘Black? White?’

  ‘One of the two.’

  They ran him to the car when the rain eased and they took off through the mud, one behind the wheel, two pushing, keeping those wheels spinning until they hit more solid ground. They were approaching Vern’s property when the fencer pointed.

  ‘That’s it,’ he said. ‘I camped on its verandah.’

  Maybe he had. Maybe he’d noticed it as he walked by too. Monk’s old house wasn’t easy to miss. He pointed to Lonnie Bryant’s property a few miles on, so they drove down to the house and spoke to Nancy. She told them he was the chap who had cut and stacked a pile of wood for her, and yes, she’d fried him three eggs for his breakfast. She said he’d seemed a respectful sort of young chap, but then most of the men who came by looking for work were respectful. They checked the days with her. She wasn’t young, they were hoping she’d got her days confused, but Nancy’s mind was as sharp as a tack, and her daughter, still living with her, backed her up. The fencer was clean—though he no longer had a job to go to.

  Clarry Dobson was waiting for them to bring him in. Most in town knew they’d gone after him. Clarry wanted to get his hands on the murdering mongrel and there was no gain in telling him they’d made a mistake. Denham locked the fencer in a cell. Clarry wasn’t the only drunk in town, and there’d be more tomorrow. Little Barbie was being b
uried in the morning.

  The train came through at seven. The community box paid for a one-way ticket to Melbourne. Denham saw the fencer on board.

  ‘Kiss your mother-in-law’s backside if you have to, and thank your lucky stars every morning that you’re free to kiss it. If you’d been holed up at McPherson’s the night that girl was taken, you’d be a dead man now,’ he said. He saw the train on its way.

  It’s a terrible day when a child is buried. The new Dobson infant screamed for the sister she’d never known; her mother, out of bed too soon after the birth, fainted; the Dobson boys, big and small, howled; and their father was drunk. He’d been drunk since they’d found Barbie’s body.

  Gertrude was there with Joey. Vern had gone down to Melbourne. Jenny stood with them, only there because Mrs Dobson had wanted her to sing at the service. Barbie had been so excited to know someone who’d sung on the wireless.

  The Melbourne police were there, unmoved by the burial, but watching, listening, moving through the crowd and keeping their eye on the stationmaster. They’d bumped into him at the hotel on their way to and from the bathroom. They’d seen him in the dining room. They watched him join Gertrude. The city men knew her; they’d spoken to her twice.

  They recognised the stationmaster’s wife. She’d told them she had been unwell for some time, had lost touch with what went on in town. They asked what the situation was between her and her husband. She told them he’d grown impatient with her illness.

  ‘Is he a violent man, Mrs Morrison?’

  The question had appeared to confuse her. She’d considered it, and for a brief moment they’d been sure she’d give them their murderer. Then she’d smiled. ‘He’d call his mother in to kill a cockroach. Couldn’t stand the crunch,’ she’d said, and she’d asked if they had time for a cup of tea. A cup of tea when you’re away from home always goes down well. She’d served it in gold-rimmed cups, in the parlour.