She felt . . . odd. She’d almost called out, ‘Please don’t go!’ as Julieanne swung her car out of the driveway that afternoon.
It had been a good couple of days. Talking about the book really had helped her feel her way back into it, even if she still hadn’t begun to rewrite it. They’d talked of other things too, gone to dinner at Moura, even gone swimming while Blue looked after Mattie. Julieanne had babysat while she had gone to see Sam — only once a day now, as she had promised Fish, and yes, that had meant she had room to live again. It also, somehow, made the time she spent with Sam more meaningful.
Was she just lonely now she and Mattie were by themselves again? No, she thought. This was different.
She looked out the window again, at the tree shadows shivering in the breeze. Full moon had meant swims in the river with Sam. Now she just felt vulnerable, as if the sky held up a searchlight so that anyone could spy on her.
But there was no car down on the track. There hadn’t been one the night before either. If there had been, she and Julieanne could have walked down and challenged the occupant. Julieanne was right: she should not be alone. Not yet . . .
She moved to the phone before second thoughts could stop her. Because she still wasn’t easily able to ask for help, and this was a big ask too . . .
‘Hello?’
‘Scarlett, hi, it’s me. Hope you haven’t gone to bed yet.’
‘Nine o’clock? No, I live on grown-up time, not baby time. Jed, what’s wrong?’
‘I . . . I’m sorry to ask, but could you come home again for a few days? I know term is going to begin again soon and you need to get more reading done —’
‘I can take a few days off.’ Then more urgently, ‘Has there been a change with Sam?’
‘No, nothing like that.’ Jed felt even more stupid now, asking for help.
‘Has something else happened?’
‘Yes. No. I don’t know. There’s been a car on the track to the billabong the last two weeks. Not every night . . .’
‘Hmmm. Probably teenagers canoodling.’
‘Canoodling?’
‘A Nancy word.’
‘A couple would drive further down the track. Whoever is in that car is looking at me. I can feel it. Oh, I’m probably just being paranoid . . .’
‘Well, if you are paranoid, you shouldn’t be paranoid and alone.’
‘Thank you, Dr Kelly-O’Hara. That makes me feel much better. I . . . I wondered, do you know much about dental records? How sure can they be that Merv is really dead? Lots of people might have fillings in the same teeth.’
‘No, it’s not just that, especially if there are X-rays. There’s the width of the palate and the position of the wisdom teeth. It’s fairly exact.’
Which was exactly what Constable Ryan had told her. Why couldn’t she just accept Merv was dead? ‘That’s good. I think.’ What were the odds of two people wanting to kill her? Whoever killed Merv wouldn’t have any reason to come after her now. Unless they simply enjoyed killing, like Fish’s mass murderer. I’m letting my imagination gallop tonight, she thought.
‘Do you want me to come tonight?’ asked Scarlett’s voice on the phone.
‘No, tomorrow is fine. I don’t want you driving through the night.’ And her two am stalker would be gone before Scarlett got here anyway.
‘Jed, go and stay at Moura tonight. They’d love to have you.’
‘No room. Blue and Joseph have Kirsty and Fish with them, remember?’
‘Overflow then. Call Nancy. Better yet, ask Michael to come and get you.’
‘No, really. It’s probably just my imagination anyway. Only teenagers. Don’t worry.’
‘I am worried. I’m worried that you didn’t call the police the first time you saw a car there.’
‘I didn’t think . . . I mean I’m almost sure it’s my imagination . . .’
‘Call them if you see anyone tonight. Promise?’
‘I promise,’ said Jed.
Chapter 38
Wuffles is Home Again! See page 3 . . .
THE KILLER
The killer took the car keys silently from the top of the chest of drawers, then slipped out along the corridor. The back door creaked . . .
‘Love, is that you?’
‘Yes, just me. Go back to sleep.’
‘What are you doing?’
‘Letting the cat out.’ Lies had once been an almost unthinkable cliff to jump over. They came easily, so very easily, these days.
The killer shut the door again and walked back down the corridor. Not tonight then.
Tomorrow.
Chapter 39
Ladies’ Night at the Gibber’s Creek RSL
Every Friday is Ladies’ Night at the Gabber’s Creek RSL, with ladies’ drinks at half price. Take advantage of the all-you-can-eat $6 buffet and give Mum a treat!
SCARLETT
Scarlett zipped up her bag, hoisted it onto her lap and wheeled out into the living room. Alex had his bare feet up on the sofa as he read the latest Family Doctor. Very nice feet . . .
‘Are you sure you don’t want me to come with you?’ he asked.
Scarlett shook her head. ‘I really think it’s just Jed’s imagination. She’s been through too much.’ Plus if Alex wasn’t sharing her bed, he’d have to sleep on the sofa, which would be embarrassing, especially with the possibility of a visit from Fish. She wouldn’t put it past that kid to ask Alex why he wasn’t sleeping with her. She smiled at him. ‘Besides, what would you do there?’
‘Be extremely bored,’ he said lightly. ‘And you’re right. Jed and I never seem to have much to say to each other.’
He was right, she realised suddenly. He and Jed . . . it wasn’t that they didn’t get on. But they just didn’t have anything in common. Alex didn’t read sci-fi or history, wasn’t interested in solar panels or fruit trees or vegetable gardens, much less in playing with Mattie or taking Maxi for a walk. Alex’s idea of a walk was down to the coffee shop . . .
‘What are you staring at?’
Why had she never realised before? ‘Alex, what would be your perfect home?’
‘Seriously? Okay, somewhere with you, of course.’ He paused, waiting for her response.
‘Of course,’ she said, smiling as required.
‘And a penthouse,’ he added dreamily. ‘One with a swimming pool and roof-top garden. Modern furniture, a few really good artworks, a sculpture maybe, a view of the sea . . .’
‘Right. Lovely,’ she said automatically.
‘What brought that on?’
‘Nothing.’ She thought of Dribble, the furniture antique because it had been owned for generations, slightly gnawed by kids and puppies; Overflow, with its carefully designed wheelchair-accessible chairs and tables, the avenue of shaggy-barked eucalypts, the verandas covered with choko and passionfruit vines and wisteria all trying to choke each other in a tangle of flowers and fruit.
He smiled at her. ‘Look, let’s get away together for a few days at the end of term. All this mess should have been sorted by then. Maybe the Gold Coast?’
It was hard to think of a less wheelchair-friendly holiday. Though maybe by the end of term she wouldn’t need it all the time. She might even walk down to the sea. No, that was stupid. The sand would be too difficult . . . but she could read while he went swimming. Her body began a small secret burn. Maybe, just maybe, Alex meant it would be a sort of honeymoon for them.
But ‘all this mess’? That ‘mess’ was her family, her home. Even when the inquest and police investigation were over, there’d be family problems and family rejoicing that she’d want to be part of. Nicholas and Felicity’s baby, the opening of the new wing at the hospital . . .
Alex swung off the sofa, crossed to the wheelchair, then bent and kissed her lips, gently but deliberately. He held her gaze. ‘The end of term. Promise? Just you and me?’
Hadn’t it been just the two of them for the past year? But she smiled obediently. ‘Yes. Just the two of us.
’
Scarlett, with her bag on her lap, wheeled herself down to her car.
Chapter 40
Entertaining with Celia Proudfoot: Fondu for Two
Looking to rekindle the spark? This tip may sound a bit to gouda to be true, but it’s fondue!
For those not in the know, fondue is all the rage now. It is a Swiss dish of gently melted cheese. You take long forks and dip in bread or fruit. A grate one-dish meal for entertaining.
FISH
Fish stared out of her bedroom window. On the plus side, she’d finished two murals on the woodshed and a painting of the jars of chutney glowing on the bench that the Greats had loved, and Great-Uncle Joseph had taken it to get framed, and she hadn’t been bitten by a snake yet.
On the minus, Gran had rung Mum. There’d been no news of Dad, nor had Mum asked when, or even if, Fish was coming home.
She was bored. There was nothing, absolutely nothing to do here. No TV, no friends — she’d hoped that maybe Woad-who-was-now-Wes might have phoned or called in, but he hadn’t. No shopping once you walked through Lee’s Emporium, the bookshop and a few other holes in the wall. Or rather there was lots to do, but it all involved potentially being bitten by a snake or falling off a horse.
She’d won five games of Scrabble; sketched till her sketchbook was almost full; watched birds with binoculars till she realised that birds did nothing more interesting in February than flying or eating; and had a dip in the swimming hole twice with Gran and the great-aunts.
The third time she went with them she’d glimpsed a red-bellied black snake lying on the rocky bottom. Blue had just said casually that the snake was cooling off and thrown in a stone that scared it off. But what if it decided to wriggle back again? There was no way Fish was going swimming after that.
She was also homesick. She’d sent postcards showing the Gibber’s Creek Town Hall to everyone, telling them how she’d gone droving sheep and was related to Clancy of the Overflow. She’d even got a few letters back. But it wasn’t the same. She wanted to see her friends again, hear what dramas Di had been up to last weekend — Di had a drama every weekend, usually involving boys. She wanted to show off with a whole day of perfect scores in every test again.
She especially wanted a nice anonymous flat in Toowong where no one knew the neighbours, and people didn’t hold on to decades-long mysteries and horrors and think of death as something that just happened.
Except now she suspected that even there, people kept tragedies tucked away. How much death had Dad seen? Almost certainly a lot. Even Gran and Gramps had done things in World War II they’d never mentioned till Fish had found that old photo album at Christmas, and, even then, Gran had just laughed and said, ‘Oh, back in the war,’ as if that had been another universe, and taken the album from her and Fish had never been able to find it again.
She had thought she’d been able to see the world clearly, tell truth from lies. But what if you didn’t even know what to ask about, if people thought the extraordinary was so everyday that they felt no hesitancy or shame?
A small cloud of dust erupted from the track between the ridges. A blue Mini Minor appeared, then parked in front of the house. A middle-aged woman in a flowered muu-muu, ten years out of date, emerged from the driver’s seat and went around to the passenger side to help an elderly woman dressed in the Gibber’s Creek senior citizen’s uniform of knee-length dress, flesh-coloured stockings and grey hair permed in three waves either side.
Friends of the Greats, thought Fish. She wondered what Di and the others were doing today. She could ask the Greats if she could make an STD call to Brisbane, though that would cost a lot. But how could she explain why she was here? Gran’s taken me away till Mum calms down? My dad’s vanished? I’m hunting a mass murderer?
I have secrets too, she realised, curling up on the bed again and reaching for her sketching pad.
Someone knocked on the door. Great-Aunt Blue looked in. ‘Fish? Would you mind meeting a friend of mine?’
Fish uncurled, manoeuvred the wig back on and padded out to the living room.
‘This is my friend Edna Sampson and her mother, Mrs Taylor,’ said Great-Aunt Blue. ‘Mah and I will just go and put the kettle on. No, stay there,’ to Gran, ‘we won’t be long.’ She grinned at everyone. ‘I’m longing for a cuppa. I’d forgotten how much work a baby was.’
Fish sat in Great-Uncle Joseph’s chair. Mrs Sampson looked helplessly at Gran, then back at Fish, blinking a little at the abundance of blonde wig. ‘I hope you don’t mind. Mum insisted I bring her here. She heard Alannah tell me you wanted to know about missing people, that you were doing a project on them —’
‘People who have died,’ clarified Mrs Taylor, her voice surprisingly deep. ‘People no one knows about, no one cares about. But people should know.’
‘Shh, Mum, don’t get excited. You can tell her all about it.’ She looked apologetically at Gran. ‘She gets into such a state lately.’
‘I do not get into a state. I just remember things!’
Fish moved over to the sofa and sat next to her. She hesitated, then took the much be-ringed hand. ‘Tell me.’
Mrs Taylor blinked, as if not quite sure where to start. ‘Three of them. All dead. Buried without a funeral, without any record at all.’
‘Who were they?’ asked Gran quietly.
Mrs Taylor seemed to steady. ‘Friends. That’s all you had of your own back then. Friends.’
‘Mum grew up in the Marigold Orphanage out of Sydney,’ explained Mrs Sampson.
Mrs Taylor nodded. ‘Way out in the bush it was then. A hundred or so of us in two dormitories — just mattresses on the floor, two to a mattress. Neely shared mine, and Poppy and Merle were on the other side. There was a cement-floored shed out the back to wash in, one cold shower for the girls and one for the boys. Food was so bad that on schooldays we’d take our bags into the dining room so we could sneak it out instead of eating it, even as hungry as we were. If you made friends at school, they’d bring in extra sandwiches for us . . .’
Dread shivered its way along Fish’s arms. She knew what was coming now. Not a mass murderer.
‘Neely died first,’ said Mrs Taylor quietly. ‘She had an earache. You don’t die of an earache, do you? But it got worse and worse. She screamed and screamed. She wouldn’t stop, so Miss Tanty made the boys carry her out to the bathroom and they locked her in. And no one ever saw her again.’
‘Dear God,’ said Gran. Fish put her other hand too on Mrs Taylor’s shaking one.
‘And then the whooping cough. I didn’t get it too bad, but bad enough. I didn’t know what was happening for a while and, when I did, Poppy and Merle were gone. Empty spaces all down the room.
‘I . . . I asked Miss Tanty. She said they’d gone off to work, then gave me six on the hand for asking questions. But they hadn’t. We didn’t go out to work till we were ten . . .’
‘Ten!’ said Fish.
‘I was nine then. I looked for them. There was a gate out the back to a paddock that was ploughed up for cabbages and potatoes. That’s mostly what we ate, boiled up with milk, though mostly it was scorched. We used to hide it in our schoolbags sometimes . . .’ She blinked. ‘What was I saying?’ she asked her daughter.
‘Back at the orphanage,’ said Mrs Sampson gently. She didn’t look surprised or even distressed. She’s heard this many times, Fish realised. It’s not a secret. It’s just . . . unacknowledged.
‘They buried them in the potato bed,’ said Mrs Taylor. ‘There weren’t any graves to see, of course: just fresh digging between the rows. But I knew. I couldn’t eat potatoes after that. I was thin then, but I got thinner and thinner. Legs like sticks. Could hardly walk when they sent me out to work.’
‘Where did they send you?’ asked Fish, not wanting to hear the answer. But this woman deserved to have her story heard and more.
‘Drinkwater.’ To Fish’s surprise the old woman smiled. ‘To help in the kitchen. Wasn’t much help for weeks. M
rs Nelson and Miss Matilda — she wasn’t married then — sat me down at the kitchen table that first morning and just made me eat. Chops with gravy, and grilled tomato, and bubble and squeak, and great big slabs of toast and marmalade, and cups of tea. I’d never had anything like it. And milk with every meal. I worked there for seven years.’ Mrs Taylor smiled now. ‘And then one year when we were shearing, there was a new wool classer, and it was Izzy. We were married a year later. I wore a dress that showed my knees — did I ever show you the photo?’ She turned to her daughter.
‘Yes, Mum. You and Dad looked so happy.’
‘Oh, we were. We went to the Blue Mountains for our honeymoon. The hotel was just like a palace, all these mirrors and . . .’
She has forgotten the orphanage, thought Fish. But the memory must keep coming back. And so it should.
How did that Barcroft Boake poem go? That’s where the dead men lie. And the dead women, and dead children too. So many dead, their graves not marked. So many lost and never found.
The Greats came in then, carrying a tray apiece, gingernuts made that morning and a Black Forest cake that was supposed to go to the Hospital Auxiliary stall. Mrs Taylor and the Greats talked about the fundraising parade in World War II and about an elephant . . . Fish didn’t ask what an elephant had been doing in Gibber’s Creek . . .
‘Have you heard all that before?’ she asked the Greats as they waved goodbye from the veranda.
‘A few times,’ admitted Blue.
‘Has anyone ever dug up the potato bed?’
‘The orphanage was pulled down after World War II. There’re houses there now. I don’t suppose anyone is even sure where the potato bed was.’ She shrugged. ‘Maybe the bodies were found when the houses were built, and moved then, or maybe moved before. There probably was some kind of record, no matter what Mrs Taylor says. She was very young.’
‘But that Miss Tanty should have gone to jail!’
‘For neglect? That’s hard to prove. There weren’t any antibiotics back then, remember. All you could give was good nursing.’
The Last Dingo Summer Page 19
