The Practice Baby

by LM Ardor

  The fright woke her completely. There were podcasts on her phone of a science show she enjoyed. They were from a couple of years ago but she’d never got around to listening. They might help her stay awake as she drove. She drank Joe’s coffee and used the empty cup to prop up her phone so she could hear the talks.

  As she was about to take off, lights flashed in the bush opposite; another vehicle was driving down the mountain. Better to let them pass than have them behind her. She waited. Thirty seconds later a campervan beetled down the hill. They slowed then stopped twenty metres in front of her. It had to be the grey nomads from the pub. Why stop? Both front doors opened.

  Dee decided not to find out. She started the car and drove off. As she got to the tortoise she slowed briefly to give him a thumbs up as she passed. They were probably just being kind but there was no way she wanted to find out for sure. As she got past them she felt her heart thumping. In the mirror she saw the van door slam shut and the lights come on. Lights flashed onto the bush on the cliff side of the road as she drove; occasionally, on a straighter stretch, she saw the van’s weak narrow beams behind her. They were driving safely, but didn’t fall far behind. Dee was fine with that. There was nothing they could do unless she stopped. The only reason she would stop would be if she hit something.

  The adrenaline kept her thoroughly awake but she drove cautiously. By the time the bitumen started she saw their lights only on long straight stretches of road.

  At the highway she paused until she saw the VW’s yellowish beams in the rear-vision mirror. A row of cars appeared going north. She was in luck. Dee turned left to follow them. Dense tall forest lined both sides of the road. She passed two small tracks, probably fire trails. Just around a curve, she slowed, turned off her lights, drove up a service road then quickly turned into a small cleared space between the trees. It was a gamble but she was more at risk if she was followed to the motel.

  It was only seconds until lights flashed past on the road—weak, yellow lights—it had to be them. She checked the time on her phone. Would it be best to wait to be sure they were gone? No, if they caught up with the other cars they would turn back straight away.

  Dee backed up and carefully, without headlights, turned south onto the highway. Moruya was only a few kilometres away. Once she saw houses she turned on her headlights and turned off the main road. She used her phone to navigate to the Dolphin Motel via back roads then parked out of sight of the road. Once she arrived, she waited in the car for fifteen minutes. No other cars were about. She wondered if she had over-dramatised the situation. The couple probably just stopped to check she was okay.

  All the lights were out. Everyone at the motel was asleep. She knocked on the door of their room, no answer. She rang Bea.

  Inside, three teenagers, tousle-haired and smelling of sleep, all talked at once, each demanding she pay attention to their story and their photos. It was still hundreds of miles from Sydney but she had made it. This, these three, were her home.

  39.

  Monday was busy. Dee barely had time to scratch her mosquito bites from the pub veranda. It was a merciful respite from the worry about Tom and Leah. Weekends and holidays provided extra time for people to examine the minutiae of their bodily sensations and discover brain tumours or other exotic illness. Dee gave everyone a through hearing and examination. Sometimes they were right. Even rampant hypochondriacs get real illnesses at the same rate as the rest of the population. Most she encouraged to wait before she ordered intrusive or expensive tests. The majority of odd, isolated symptoms disappeared by themselves within a week or two.

  She lugged the laptop around with her and locked it in the surgery safe while she was at work. It was heavy, a weight in her bag as she climbed the stairs to and from the car park.

  On Wednesday in the middle of home visits she noticed its absence. She was tempted to ring Janelle to check it was still okay but knew she had simply forgotten to take it with her. It was safer at the surgery than with her as she trailed about the housing commission flats in Glebe. A heavy bag carried by a doctor was an easy target for a snatch and run attack.

  She wanted to know what was on it—to hand it over to Raj. Leah had said she would give her the password. It was better to wait.

  *

  On Thursday around 11 am Janelle came into Dee’s surgery with the mail instead of leaving it in her pigeonhole. She looked excited.

  ‘There’s another one,’ she said, holding an unopened envelope postmarked Majors Creek.

  ‘Thanks.’ Dee put it in her pocket.

  Janelle looked disappointed.

  ‘Thanks, that’s great,’ Dee said again, ‘I was waiting for that.’

  Dee waited till she was home and dumped her bag on the coffee table in the lounge. She ripped open the envelope. The only content was ‘TomJimmyJoe’ written in careful separate letters on a piece of scrap paper. She fired up the laptop and typed the words into the password field. The screen sprang to life with a picture of Tom’s face in extreme close-up.

  Raj arrived within ten minutes of her call to say she had the laptop. He was on the lounge at the Glasshouse, fingers flying over the keyboard. After half an hour, Dee was sick of the suspense.

  She stood at his side for a while to get his attention.

  When ‘How’s it going?’ got no response she said, ‘Ground control to Major Tom.’

  He looked up. She handed him a beer. He took it and put it down without taking a sip.

  ‘Raj.’ Dee waved her hand between his eyes and the screen. ‘Tell me what’s there.’

  ‘Oh, sorry, nothing—but there may be a partition and hidden files. Another twenty minutes and I might be able to get in. You really need to get better wi-fi.’

  ‘Why wi-fi? I told Leah we wouldn’t do anything to the computer.’

  ‘It’s okay. I’m running some online diagnostics; they won’t leave any trace.’

  Dee went to the kitchen and opened a second beer for herself. It was good of Raj to do all this but the female thing, the bored wait while the important competent male person got his thing done, was painful. After the divorce she thought all that was over.

  Do something useful, she told herself. All the useful tasks were female domestic chores: sort out the washing, organise a menu and shopping list for next week, make dinner. None would relieve the ‘waiting for some important male outcome’ distress.

  She rang for pizza and made a list of what they had so far about Tom.

  Written down it didn’t amount to much. Her knowledge that Tom would not let his asthma get out of hand wasn’t evidence to anyone other than her. They had to find out more.

  *

  The pizza arrived as Raj was ready to quit.

  ‘There’s nothing useful. It’s all been cleaned up recently. The hard drive has been reformatted and personal stuff of Leah’s reinstalled,’ Raj said.

  He looked disappointed.

  ‘You didn’t really expect Tom to leave anything easy to find, did you?’ Dee asked.

  ‘No, not really, but whatever Tom found in Orange was significant. That’s when he asked Leah to stay away.’

  ‘Raj, I don’t know. If it’s all about Adam, it could be a big distraction. It probably has no connection to how Tom died.’

  Raj interrupted. ‘I know you’ve got an emotional attachment to it not being your old buddy but that’s when Tom reformatted the laptop. There must be more. We need to know what he found in Orange.’

  Raj’s repeated insinuations about her and Adam were difficult to ignore.

  ‘How?’ she snapped.

  Raj couldn’t possibly know about her history with Adam. Why was he so sensitive to the issue? He was right though, they should pursue all the clues; not rely on gut instinct.

  ‘We need to go there.’

  Her anger was gone. ‘Okay, when?’

  40.

  Friday evening, as Dee cleared her desk, Raj rang for the third time. He had a list of restaurants in Orange for Saturday
night. Dee had no idea why he was so excited. She couldn’t see anything useful coming out of it.

  The days were up and Leah was out of danger. That didn’t put Glen out of the frame. He might have been unable to find Leah. Or she could be dead at the bottom of a waterfall in the Araluen Valley. Goose bumps raised the hairs on Dee’s arms. A killer was still out there.

  ‘Raj, why don’t we just go by car? It’s only four and a half hours. It’s nearly six on the train.’

  ‘It’s an adventure. I’ll bring tiffin and we’ll get rooms somewhere glamorous.’

  ‘Tiffin.’ Dee sighed and wondered, not for the first time, if it was all a game to him.

  Her plan to drive up and back in a day had turned into a circus. Now they were spending the whole weekend. And they’d be noticed.

  ‘Don’t forget; it’s the country. They don’t do exotic. Your inner maharajah has to go incognito for people in Orange to talk to us,’ Dee warned.

  *

  On Saturday morning at Central Railway Station the teenage girls on the seat next to Dee pointed to a figure striding towards them and asked each other, ‘Who’s that? Isn’t he in a movie?’

  Dee looked along the platform to see six foot five Raj in a slim-cut suit with a shirt the same shade of not-quite-navy and a narrow charcoal tie. The contrast to the worn detritus of humanity’s rejects who were gathered for the early XPT train to Orange could not have been more obvious. He glowed with the aura of the famous or mega-rich or beautiful. She looked down; please don’t be wearing watermelon or lime shoes—mercifully they were plain black although polished to an eye-damaging shine.

  ‘Do you like it?’ He sat down. The girls giggled and stared.

  ‘Raj, you look like a movie star. James Bond.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘No, that wasn’t what I meant. The aim was to look ordinary, harmless—forgettable. No one’s going to think you’re harmless in that. We’ll get some jeans and a T-shirt when we get there.’

  Raj emitted a noise of protest but didn’t verbalise it. He would comply.

  On the train, first class was unoccupied except for them. Raj was miffed about Dee’s lack of appreciation of his dressed-down outfit. For the first ten minutes of the trip he looked at his phone and didn’t talk.

  But he was too excited about their adventure to be quiet for long. His idea to take the train was to be exploited to the full. He was equipped for a safari. His wicker picnic basket had china cups for the espresso he decanted from a thermos to accompany spiced peaches with buffalo yoghurt and chocolate croissants.

  His PA had also packed lunch. Chicken sandwiches on fresh sourdough and a crisp green salad. The poor assistant must have been up before 6 am to get the fresh bread and prepare everything—all on china plates with proper cutlery.

  Raj had gin, tonic and fresh limes. All on ice. It was tempting but Dee said no.

  They needed to be sharp.

  *

  The journey was slow. Dee wondered what the X in XPT meant. It couldn’t be for Express. Over the mountains they emerged onto the western plains, wheat farming country, wide, flat and fertile; vast fields of ripening crops, green wheat stalks rippling with promise.

  Bathurst was the last major town before Orange, their objective. Dee was surprised when the train stopped fifteen minutes out of Bathurst at a small town called Blayney.

  She pointed out the window for Raj to look. ‘This is Blayney, this is where Glen was charged with attempted murder.’

  ‘But didn’t you say he wasn’t convicted, he pleaded to a minor charge of assault? It doesn’t get us anywhere.’

  ‘Yes, but when I looked it up I had no idea where Blayney was. It’s here near Orange. Tom could have been researching Glen too.’

  ‘Did he have any reason to look?’

  ‘How do we know? The only way to find out is to check it out for ourselves.’

  41.

  Dee expected the offices of the Central Western Daily to be old and dusty with a big wooden counter manned by men in navy blue dust coats. Instead it was like any open-plan modern office. There was none of the smell of newsprint or clang of presses and no elderly editor ready to tell her the local gossip from thirty years ago over a pint at the pub.

  At the counter a twenty-something woman with cropped black hair couldn’t take her eyes off Raj in spite of the brown slacks and navy T-shirt they’d bought at Target. Dee might as well have been invisible.

  ‘What’s youse looking for? Got a story? I could get youse in the paper if there’s a story,’ said the girl to Raj, who stood silent, apparently stunned by the Aussie country slang. Dee tapped his ankle with her foot.

  ‘We’re doing some historical research and wanted a look at your archives,’ said Raj.

  The girl looked disappointed. ‘There’s no archives here since we got the new building.’

  Dee gave him another tap with her foot. It was no use her trying to speak.

  ‘Oh—a friend of ours got some photocopies of old news articles here a few weeks ago. That wasn’t here?’

  ‘Youse could try the lib’ry. All the old stuff’s over there now. Mr Fielding, he’s the editor, won’t be in till Monday. He’s been here forever; he might know.’

  ‘We have to leave tomorrow. Is there any way to contact him?’ Dee piped up. Raj was useless.

  ‘No,’ the girl reverted to the default position of the resentful receptionist: obstruction.

  Dee kicked Raj’s ankle harder this time. Raj finally got it and turned his best smile on the girl.

  ‘I’d be so grateful if you could get a message to him. My name’s Raj. This is my card.’ His hand brushed the girl’s as he handed it to her. ‘I don’t know what we’ll do if we can’t get information while we’re here. Perhaps I can check in with you later to see how it goes? How can I get in touch with you?’

  ‘I’m Lois.’

  The girl wrote her mobile number on a generic card and put it into Raj’s hand.

  ‘Thanks so much, we’re at the Duntryleague Hotel. Please ring anytime.’ Raj reached across the counter to shake her hand.

  *

  ‘Microfilm, it’s like when I was in high school,’ Dee said.

  Her eyes were dry, irritated by the blotchy black and white images flashing by. If she read the label for each it would take forever to find anything but if she didn’t there was no way of knowing what was significant. There were no indexes beyond the date of publication of the paper. The dates from Tom’s copies were all they had to orient them.

  ‘This isn’t civilised. A proper IT consultant would have this indexed in hours. Don’t they know there are programs that search text and organise it?’ Raj complained for the fourth or fifth time since they had been there.

  ‘We’ve come all this way. We can’t go home empty-handed,’ Dee said. What she thought was this would have been much easier without Raj along.

  ‘It’s hopeless. We could be here for days.’ Raj took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. ‘How about a break, a walk in the Botanic Gardens?’

  ‘How did Tom do it? He can’t have stumbled over the articles he found unless he was here for weeks.’ Dee ignored the call to have a break. Sometimes she wondered about Raj’s motivation. He didn’t have the fire inside that drove her on to find justice for Tom. Perhaps it was that he didn’t believe they would succeed. She worried about that herself.

  ‘A bit of shush please. This is a library!’ the woman with helmet hair at the front desk announced at top volume.

  Dee felt like a naughty schoolgirl. At that moment Raj’s phone vibrated. He held up the screen for Dee to see the message.

  ‘Hi Raj, Mr Fielding will be in at 7 am tomorrow if you want to talk to him. Let me know if you need any other help. Lois.’

  ‘Thank goodness. Good you switched it off too,’ Dee whispered. ‘Let’s get out of here.’

  42.

  The waiter unfurled the starched napkin onto Dee’s lap with a near miss between his hand and her breas
ts. The whole lap, breast, napkin thing was one part of why Dee felt uncomfortable with the ‘fine dining’ experience. Raj loved it. His research determined this to be the finest restaurant in the foodie destination of Orange and that meant the full silver service catastrophe. Dee wanted takeaway in their hotel rooms and an early night so they could get up early to meet the editor.

  Raj wanted a big night out. It felt right to let him have his way after all he’d done to help.

  The restaurant was in the nineteenth-century post office with sandstone walls and several small rooms. There were four tables in their room including a family with a teenage boy and young girl. All eyes were on Raj, who seemed oblivious.

  ‘Let’s not discuss the Tom thing here. It’s too quiet,’ Dee urged Raj.

  ‘And sad,’ said Raj.

  It was good to hear Raj say he was sad; to know their quest wasn’t only a puzzle or a game for him.

  ‘Yes, I know. Thanks, Raj. The other thing is—we need to be careful we’re not overheard. Adam is liable to react badly to people asking questions about his past.’

  Their order was placed and the amuse-bouche of parsnip soup with flakes of scallop tartare cleared away. Raj had impressed the waiter with his order of an expensive local sparkling wine to start. Dee looked across the silver and linen and polished glassware at Raj. The deep brown of his skin toned perfectly with the dark blue of his suit. His cufflinks were acorn-sized pieces of onyx set in silver that drew her eyes to his beautiful, long smooth hands. He had to be gay.