Forbidden Fruit

by Ilsa Evans

  I pictured him, having a coffee at my kitchen bench, when I casually dropped the name of the blonde woman into the conversation. It would be like a grown-up version of bringing home your school artwork to show your parents. Look at me, look what I’ve done, aren’t I clever. After which I would wander around to the police station and offer to identify the body. Local woman with own road provides critical key. Father impressed.

  I put the car into drive and surged forward, then took a sharp left. The drive to Ballarat was not one that I took very often, Bendigo being closer if we wanted a broader shopping experience than what Majic offered. However, it was quite a pleasant drive with decent roads and little traffic. I spent the time adding to my hypothesis and by the time I reached the outskirts, I had the young blonde woman suffering from Stockholm syndrome, which seemed particularly apt if she was indeed Scandinavian, and this meant that Dallas Patrick had been able to walk her around the streets with no concerns regarding possible escape.

  My mobile had rung once on the trip, and a few messages had also pinged into being. I pulled up at a service station for petrol and, while there, checked the phone. Sure enough, the missed call was from Deb so I went straight to messages. The first was from Red: sorry cant make Scarlet meet & greet. Prior engagement. CU. The second from Lucy: These 2 r 2 cute 4 words. LMFAO! The third from Ashley: You didn’t tell me your father was involved. Take my advice (for once) and stay away. And the last was Deb’s: Patrick’s Pharmacy was the shop next to Forrest & Son Butchers – but I expect you knew that! Last day of trading 11 April 1970. Forwarding address: Cobham Pharmacy, 11a Cobham Road, Ballarat East. You owe me details – and lunch.

  I would have preferred a residential address as it was likely that Paul Patrick had now retired, but it was a start. I plugged in my GPS and keyed in Cobham Road, Ballarat East, feeling a rush of anticipation when it was accepted. Ten minutes later I was coasting into a parking spot outside a strip of shops where 11a was indeed a pharmacy, but the facia board proclaimed it as Lacey’s, not Cobham. I double-checked Deb’s message and then stared at the shop. It looked well-established, and the signage was not new, but forty-three years was a long time and it may well have changed hands in the meantime.

  The shop was not very busy, with just one young woman waiting for a prescription. She jiggled a pram with a fretful, red-cheeked baby. There were two chemists working behind the counter nearby, but neither was an elderly man. As I hesitated, a white-jacketed attendant approached me with a smile.

  ‘Can I help you with anything?’

  ‘Ah, I was actually trying to track down someone who might have worked here once. A man named Paul Patrick. He was a friend of my parents.’

  ‘Mr Patrick!’ She was nodding before I even finished speaking. ‘We know him well. You’ll be wanting to speak to Denise. I’ll see if she’s free.’

  She walked over to the prescription area with me following, and then slipped behind the counter to speak with one of the chemists, a pear-shaped woman in her early fifties. The chemist looked across and held up her hand, fingers splayed, to indicate that she’d be five minutes. She turned to beckon the young mother forward and passed her a tray holding an array of medication. The baby’s nose gleamed wetly. They moved away and the chemist came over. Her white lab coat sagged around her slim waist and then pulled tight across her hips.

  ‘Hi, I’m Denise Lacey.’ She shook my hand briskly. ‘Your parents were friends of Paul Patrick?’

  ‘Yes, back in the seventies. He had a pharmacy in Majic. And actually that’s what I’m here about. See, I’m doing research on that shop and the one beside it. Tracking down past owners and all that.’

  ‘Sounds interesting. Does it have anything to do with the body found there a few days ago?’

  I looked at her, impressed. ‘If you mean am I writing about that, then no. My parents really were friends. In fact they owned the shop next door and I’ve recently bought the pair of them. I was told Paul Patrick worked here after he left.’

  ‘Actually he owned this place, along with my father. I bought him out about eight years ago.’

  ‘So he’s retired now?’

  She nodded. ‘I can give him a ring. Ask if he wants to meet with you. What were the names of your parents?’

  ‘Harry and Lillian Forrest,’ I replied quickly, because I knew she was testing me. ‘My name’s Nell. Nell Forrest.’

  ‘Back in a second.’

  I browsed a display of multi-vitamins as I waited. With the addition of Chinese herbs, they promised vitality and peak energy levels along with mental stamina and endurance. I needed all that, plus I quite liked Chinese.

  Denise returned, smiling for the first time. ‘Paul was thrilled. He says he remembers you well. And he’s fine with me giving you his address – you can even drop by now, if you like.’ She paused, her smile dropping. ‘But if this has nothing to do with the body anyway, can I ask that you not mention it? They don’t go out and never watch the news so they’ve got no idea, and it’d only upset them. They were gone by then, I checked.’

  ‘Ah, okay. Sure. If you prefer.’

  ‘Paul has early stage motor neurone disease,’ she said flatly.

  ‘I’m so sorry!’ I had heard of this illness before, and it was a nasty one. ‘Absolutely, I’ll stick to the shops and that. Ah, his house? Is it far?’

  ‘Depends on your definition of far.’ Her grin returned. ‘If you walk down to the end of this strip and turn left, it’s the fourth house along. Number seven. Red letterbox.’

  I thanked her and then paid for my vitamin tablets and left, deciding to leave the car where it was.

  Paul Patrick’s street was a narrow one, lined with neat weatherboards. Rhododendrons were in plentiful supply, along with roses that bobbed over orange brick fences. Number seven had a wrought-iron gate, which gave a protracted creak as I opened it. There was an elderly, white-haired woman standing on the porch, wearing a wraparound sundress, slippers and chunky gold costume earrings that looked like they might have been thrown on for my benefit. She would have been better served changing the slippers.

  ‘There you are! I was worried you’d get lost. Look at you, all grown up! I met you, you know, when you were just a little tyke.’

  ‘Yes, I know.’ I smiled, warmed by a feeling of nostalgia. ‘You knew my parents.’

  ‘Oh, not so well. Not as well as Paulie, that’s for sure. Come in, come in.’

  She shut the door behind me and ushered me into a lounge room directly on the right. It was cluttered but cosy, with a musty closed-up smell. A huge flat-screen television anchored to the feature wall was showing Dr Phil as he departed his program, holding hands with his wife. There was a pair of Jason recliners in the centre of the room, one occupied by an elderly man with pouchy jowls and thin strands of grey hair combed neatly across his balding pate. A salmon-pink throw rug lay across his lap. He peered at me.

  ‘Well, well, well. If it isn’t little Nelly Forrest, all grown up. Take off your hat, girl, let me have a proper look at you.’

  I obeyed, feeling uncomfortable. ‘Hello, Mr Patrick, it’s very nice –’

  ‘You look just like your mum, except for the hair. Always had that mop, though, even when you were little.’

  ‘Yes, yes I did.’

  ‘You used to play with my two all the time. Do you remember them? Paul and Jenny.’

  I had vague recollections of a boy, a little older than me, who invented the most imaginative games, but insisted that I not speak to him at school. The girl had been small and whiny. Paul Patrick Senior was looking at me expectantly, so I nodded.

  ‘Denise tells me that you’ve bought the old shops! What a turn-up for the books. And what a story those walls could tell, huh?’ He winked, and I had a sudden glimpse of the man that Grace June Rae and Bernice described as having a ‘touch of the sleaze’.

  ‘Sit down, sit down,’ said his wife, herding me towards the spare recliner. ‘I’ll get tea.’

  ‘Use th
e pot!’ her husband called after her. He turned back to me with a grin. ‘None of them teabags for our important guests.’

  ‘Thank you.’ I returned his smile, a little touched, and then made an effort to get the ball rolling. ‘One thing that really did surprise me, Mr Patrick, was that your family all managed to live above the shop. It’s such a small space!’

  ‘Yeah, we did talk about getting a house but it seemed such a waste when that space was there anyways. The bitch wasn’t happy, though.’

  I blinked, unsure I had heard right.

  ‘Nice town, Majic. Probably would never have moved on if the council hadn’t straightened the road. So how’s your folks doing nowadays, huh? What about that pretty mother of yours?’

  ‘Ah, they’re fine, thanks. Mum runs a bookshop in town.’

  ‘She was feisty, that one. Ah, fond memories …’ He chuckled and then lapsed into silence, just the corner of his grin remaining.

  I stared at him, my mind churning. If I was forced to, I could probably move my father into the swingers group, but not my mother. Not without serious psychological assistance. On the TV, an ad for funeral insurance showed an elderly couple walking along a beach. I was never going to be able to look at older people the same way.

  ‘Jim and Rita Hurley still thereabouts?’

  I nodded, pushing my discomfort to one side. ‘Were you particular friends with them?’

  ‘You could say that.’ He looked at me sideways, the smile still tugging at his mouth.

  His wife came back, holding a fully laden tray. She put it down on the coffee table, teacups rattling, and began to pour.

  ‘Milk, Nell? Or lemon? Sugar?’

  ‘Milk, thanks. One sugar. Ah, Mrs Patrick, I was talking with Grace June Rae earlier and she mentioned that you had a sister stay with you just before you left Majic, to help out?’

  ‘Grace June bloody Rae,’ said Paul. ‘Christ, this all takes me back.’

  His wife passed me a cup of tea. ‘I’m not sure who that is, but she’s wrong. I don’t have any sisters. Just a brother.’

  ‘Top bloke, Ray,’ said her husband, as he accepted his cup. ‘Thanks, Margie.’

  I stared. ‘Margie?’

  ‘Yes, love?’

  ‘But your name’s Dallas!’

  Paul Patrick instantly made a spitting motion to one side. His smile was gone. ‘Not that bitch.’

  ‘You’ve got me mixed up, that’s all,’ said the woman who wasn’t that bitch. ‘Dallas was Paul’s first wife, I’m his second. Margaret.’

  ‘But you said you knew me when I was little!’

  ‘I did, love. See, my brother is Ray Lacey, who went into partnership with Paul at the pharmacy up the road. Anyway, I was single in those days, footloose and fancy-free, so I went down to Majic for a week or so, helped Dall … his first wife pack. I met you a few times over at your father’s shop, along with your little sister.’

  My theory of the Scandinavian sex slave, complete with Stockholm syndrome, instantly exploded, the residue murky. ‘Then what happened to her? The first wife?’

  ‘Who the fuck cares?’ asked Paul, clearly not expecting an answer. I was shocked by the change in his demeanour, from lightly lascivious joviality to a targeted bitterness within the blink of an eye. Or the naming of a name.

  Margie was watching him with concern. She turned to me and inclined her head towards the kitchen. ‘Nell and I are just going to fetch some biscuits, love, to go with our tea. Back in a jiffy.’

  I followed her out into a small, old-fashioned kitchen, and she began talking immediately. ‘You’ll have to forgive him for that, love. It’s her name, see, it upsets him too much. Understandable, after what happened.’

  ‘What did happen?’

  ‘Well, she ran off and left him, of course. With the kiddies.’

  ‘I am so sorry.’ But even as my mouth moved, my brain was racing ahead. ‘I didn’t know any of this. Could you possibly explain it to me, so that I understand?’

  ‘Okay, but just between ourselves,’ she said, nodding, her earrings jiggling. ‘She really hurt him, see. Always acted like butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth and then did something like that. Part of the move up here to Ballarat was to make her happy, because she hated that poky little flat. She was here barely a month, Paul only a fortnight, working all hours with my brother setting up, and she shoots through.’

  I tried to do the maths, tripping over the calculations.

  ‘Abandoning young Paul and Jenny as well. I’d always thought she was fond of them. Not smothery like some, but genuinely fond. What sort of woman abandons her kids?’

  I shook my head, not wanting to interrupt the flow.

  ‘I did my best to make it up but it was the way she did it. So sudden. She left a note, you know. All this tripe about having to be true to herself and the one she loved.’ She turned her head and for a moment I thought she was going to make the same spitting gesture as her husband. Then I realised she was just checking the doorway. ‘Stupid woman.’

  ‘So … she had a lover?’

  ‘Looks that way. I always thought it might have been a man from Majic. Who knows? Anyway, that was the last anyone heard. We tried to find her the following year, when we wanted to get married, but she must’ve changed her name. So we had to file for this special thing that declares all avenues have been tried to contact the other person. Cost more too.’ Margie frowned, as if this last part had been especially galling. ‘And that was that. I thought she might get in touch when Paul and Jen were older but she never did. She just vanished off the face of the earth.’

  ‘Where’s my biscuits?’ called Paul Patrick from the lounge room. He sounded petulant. ‘Starving out here!’

  ‘Coming, love! Just a tick!’

  My mouth felt dry. ‘Ah, I don’t suppose you remember the date that she actually left?’

  ‘Of course I do.’ Margie opened a Rosella biscuit canister and began placing shortbreads on a plate. She talked quickly. ‘We took the kiddies to see the parade. A big group of us. Dallas stayed back, said she had a headache. When we came home for lunch she was gone, along with a suitcase of stuff and the VW. Never got that back either. Anzac Day 1970, it was. I always thought it was ironic, what with the Anzac Day motto being “lest we forget”, because in this case we all just wanted to forget, especially Paul. Who wants to remember something like that, really? Best to bury it. Out of sight, out of mind.’

  And just like that, I’d found her.

  Chapter Nine

  Just letting you know I love your column. Don’t use the blog so much because all this online stuff gives me a headache and I’m trying to cut down on my codeine addiction. Doctor’s orders.

  It was a lot to take in, but fortunately I had the long drive home in which to do so. The sister had turned out to be the second wife, and the husband, I was fairly sure, had turned out to be innocent. Nobody could fake that sour resentment. I also suspected that he had been hurt, deeply, by the departure of his first wife. I put Margie to one side, however, because there was a possible scenario that had her getting rid of her competition. It didn’t follow that she would then be so free with the information just offered, but the possibility couldn’t really be dismissed either.

  The most likely course of events had Dallas in the middle of an affair so torrid that she had thrown away her marriage and children, returning to Majic on 25 April with the intention of starting a new life with this man. I wanted to believe that she had planned on seeing her children again once she was settled, but that circumstances prevented her. Those circumstances being, of course, that by the end of the day she had been buried in my father’s backyard.

  But who was this lover? I would have liked to read the note she left, but couldn’t think of a way to justify such a request. Anyway I doubted that the note included a name, otherwise the odds were that the garrulous Margie would have shared this information also. Which left me back with the group of swingers. The chances were strong that the lover
was also a member, because an alternative had Dallas swinging left, right and centre – and also carrying on a separate affair at the same time. Even with admirable organisational skills, that seemed a little too busy for a woman who was also taking care of two young children. Definitely would have called for vitamins.

  We had not had an Anzac Day march in Majic for many years, the commemoration now being limited to a dawn service at the cenotaph, followed by a wreath-laying ceremony and then breakfast at the community centre. But I was fairly sure that the march down Main Street had still been a regular feature in the seventies, which meant they would have passed right by the two shops that had not yet been sidelined. Even afterwards there would have been people milling around, greeting those they only caught up with once a year, perhaps sitting in the beer garden on the corner. Surely someone had seen Dallas Patrick or her car.

  It was nearly four o’clock by the time I arrived back in Majic. I drove straight past my road and down the main street, turning up the laneway that led to Kata House. I parked at the rear and used the heavy door on that side of the building, which allowed me to turn straight up the stairs and avoid the community centre itself, situated towards the front. The historical society was on the top floor, with a beautiful view of the surrounding valley. There were two people in residence that afternoon: Loretta Emerson, the president, and Sally Roddom. They were sitting at a table that was spread with photos and newspaper clippings.

  ‘Hello, Nell,’ said Loretta, looking up. ‘What brings you to our neck of the woods?’

  ‘Information, as always.’ I pulled over a computer chair and sat down. ‘First, did we have an Anzac Day march in 1970? Second, what was the route, and third, what time?’