The Roadhouse Page 16

  ‘Wouldn’t hurt.’ He scowled, pondering the likelihood. ‘Man can’t tell what the bastard might be planning. I s’pose he might’ve circled back thinkin’ if it ain’t in one place it’s gotta be the other. If we knew whatever the hell it was,’ he ended crossly.

  ‘I’ve had an idea about that,’ I said. ‘Could she have been blackmailing him? What if, for instance, he’d done other burglaries – ones she wasn’t involved in – and Annabelle had something that could incriminate him, and wanted a safer place than on her person to keep it?’

  ‘So she planned on coming all the way out here when she needed it? Bit inconvenient I’d have thought,’ Eric said dubiously.

  ‘But that’s the thing. Blackmailers don’t actually need their material. It’s the threat alone that matters. If you have to expose the victim’s guilt, then you’ve lost out. They won’t pay after that.’

  We chewed on my words for a while in silence, broken when Bob said abruptly, ‘Did yer tell Molly about this lot?’ A jerk of his head encompassed the house.

  I shook mine. ‘Not today. She’ll have to know, but I thought I’d leave it a bit – just to prepare her a bit for what’s missing. If she gets wind of it now she’ll either be in the next vehicle leaving town or fretting herself to bits. She’d had a good day, she said. Been for a drive and a short walk. She sounded quite relaxed, actually. I didn’t want to ruin it for her.’

  ‘Yer done right. How long yer reckon she’ll stay put?’

  I shrugged. ‘A week tops? Long enough to get that painting finished out front anyway.’

  ‘What time do you have to leave?’ I asked Mike as we were finishing breakfast the following morning.

  ‘After lunch’ll do. I’m your man till then. Why, what did you have in mind?’

  ‘A drive if that’s okay?’

  ‘Suits me. A picnic job or …?’

  ‘No, just out and back.’ I looked at Bob. ‘Should be back around smoko time. You can hold the fort till then?’

  ‘Yeah. What are you up to, Charlie?’

  ‘Probably nothing.’ With a clatter of cups and plates I cleared the table. ‘I’ll clean my teeth and grab a hat, Mike, and be right with you.’

  Ten minutes later he heaved the drink cooler into the passenger well of his vehicle, leaving the door open for me to get in. ‘So, where are we going?’

  ‘Mica Valley. I want to see the spot where Annabelle died. I’ve never checked to see if the place is marked on the map. If it isn’t, how did Paul come to find it? Unless Annabelle led him there … and why would she do that?’

  Mike grimaced. ‘I dunno. You sure you want to do this, Charlie? Maybe we should just drop in on the cop shop and ask Tom instead?’

  ‘And he’ll tell us everything the police are thinking? Yeah, fat chance. Look, it might be nothing – probably is – but to me it seems odd that a stranger, someone Bob described as a townie, would go so far off the highway to dump her body. Why wouldn’t he just pull off the road somewhere and chuck her under a bush? If it hadn’t been for old Len poking around in the valley, chances are she would never have been found. After all, nobody was looking for her out here, not when she was supposed to have drowned off the coast two states away.’

  He puzzled over this for a moment as we left the silent road camp behind us. ‘So, what are you thinking?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ I heard the exasperation in my tone. ‘That’s the problem and it’s driving me crazy so I thought if I at least had a look for myself …’ I sighed. ‘It probably won’t make any difference but I feel as though nothing’s happening. Perhaps I’m just trying to prod things along.’

  ‘It can’t do any harm. But I was wondering – you’ve implied Annabelle wasn’t the outdoors type, so would she have known how to get into Mica Valley?’

  ‘Ah.’ I considered that. ‘Maybe not. Which means what? It is on the map, or the track’s signposted?’

  There were more questions than we could think of answers for and a part of me was irritated that I was wasting time this way when I could just have been enjoying the last few hours of Mike’s company. All the stations would, I knew, be straight back into the mustering once the stock camps returned from town, and he would have few free days once that happened.

  I said belatedly, ‘I’m sorry. We could be painting the front of the Garnet or having flirtatious conversations instead of doing this.’

  ‘Ah, but you wouldn’t enjoy them – the conversations – if your mind wasn’t on them,’ he answered, one side of his mouth twitching up in a smile. ‘Of course, I don’t know how you feel about painting?’

  ‘I loathe it,’ I admitted. ‘A friend and I painted a flat once. Put me off it forever. Paint down my arms, in my hair, all over the floor … It almost looked worse when we were done than before we began. And that’s saying something.’

  ‘Isn’t that sort of upkeep the landlord’s job? You should’ve just moved.’

  ‘We couldn’t afford to. Anyway, the paint didn’t help. Debbie said it just showed up the roaches better. Life in the big city, eh?’ I took in the view beyond the window. ‘This is a thousand times better.’

  He smiled. ‘We’ve still got roaches. Turn over a rotten log even out here, and you’ll find ’em. Oh, look!’ He was pointing off into the bush beside the shallow creek. ‘Emu, with his family.’

  ‘I see them,’ I said in delight, counting the stripy chicks as they ran at their parent’s heel. There were eight of them, necks erect, absurd little legs following the monstrously larger pair. ‘They’re so cute!’ Something occurred to me. ‘The Advocate said it was thirty kay from the roadhouse to the valley. Were they just guessing? I mean, we blundered onto it last time from other tracks – we didn’t get to it from the highway.’

  Mike shrugged. ‘It’ll be what the cops told the reporter but who knows if it was as the crow flies? I put the trip meter on and we’ve come about eighteen kay, so keep an eye out from here on. The track might be overgrown, but it was well used once.’

  We had gone twenty-eight kilometres before the old track into the valley appeared on our right. It was unmistakable and answered the question as to how a stranger had found it, for the narrow, grass-grown turn-off was marked with a thirty-litre drum, rusted a deep brown. It had its top removed, was half filled with rocks for stability, and had the words Mica Valley roughly painted around its circumference.

  Mike grunted. ‘So, he’s driving along with murder on his mind, spots this and decides it’s an isolated enough place to dump a body. Works for me.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Only, wouldn’t she be suspicious? Surely she didn’t just sit there and let him drive her to her death. And they must have been arguing, so she’d have been alert.’

  ‘She mightn’t have had a choice.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Bob said he was a big bloke, didn’t he? And by your account she was tiny. So if they did row and he lost it and hit her she might’ve been unconscious.’ He slowed the vehicle to straddle a bush growing in the centre of the track and I heard it rasping against the crash plate below us. ‘Hell, she could even have been dead. Be easy then.’

  I shivered, picturing it. The red sand beneath our wheels was giving way to gravel as the range came closer. Soon the track was winding across gutters and over ridges where slabs of broken rock replaced the ever present buffel grass. Euros bounded away and a family of happy-jacks flew, scolding noisily, through the branches of a mulga. I recognised the point where we’d met up with Len and Cora, the wheel marks still plain in the crushed grass.

  ‘There must’ve been tracks. I wonder if the police photographed them?’ I asked.

  ‘It wouldn’t prove anything. Could be any four-wheel drive that made them. Besides, we know fossickers come out here too.’ Mike’s hat tilted as he scratched his ear. ‘Have you thought that we mightn’t find the exact spot? It’s pretty rough-looking country.’

  I’d visualised a crime-scene tape outlining the spot, as one saw o
n TV dramas, but faced with the reality of the range, the rock and stunted scrub and spinifex, I saw how ridiculous that was. Then Mike said, ‘I think this is the valley. There’s been camps enough here in the past.’ We had reached a broad hollow in the hills with a steep wall of the range facing a narrow creek across an open swale that rose more gradually on the far side. Old metal gear, buckets and stretchers, and sheets of iron, rusted to the same colour as the rocks, lay about the workings, now so weed-grown they looked almost natural. The broken remains of a tiny windmill, its vanes missing, stood amid the straggly creek gums, along with the front end of a badly rusted vehicle. And, everywhere, sunlight glinted on scattered shards of mica as if a million bottle tops had been spread across the scene.

  Mike, having killed the engine, was looking at the tracks. ‘Come on, then, the next bit’s a job for feet.’

  Now I was here I felt strangely reluctant. I pointed at the ground. ‘Len’s, do you think?’

  ‘More likely the police. We’ll follow them till they stop. Sing out if you see a boot mark. Len would’ve described where the body was in relation to the mill, I’d reckon – it’s what I’d do with a bunch of town cops.’

  We walked through the remnants of old camps and some newer; here and there ash piles still showed where more recent visitors, from earlier in the year, had been. Rain fell infrequently out here and the country wore its history plainly for those with eyes to read it. The air was still and hot within the sheltered valley, but my skin felt cold and my heart thumped with dread. I wished suddenly that I hadn’t come, that the violence visited upon this quiet place of bird calls and insects could be left to reverberate away undisturbed until the passing years had buried the last echo, as it had with the noisy, busy miners of forty years before.

  Mike seemed to sense my mood. He moved closer and we proceeded in silence until he suddenly squatted to point. ‘Here. Two vehicles at least. One pulled off that way, and two lots of boot tracks’ – he pointed along the line of them – ‘heading that way. There’s even an old foot pad, see here? It must lead to another camp.’

  ‘What’s that?’ Some distance ahead, an anomoly, a straight line buried amid the natural curves of nature, had caught my eye. I stared, trying to make sense of it, and gradually realised that I was looking at a stone hut built against a ridge of tumbled rock. Its roof seemed to fuse into its surroundings and a sturdy wattle bush growing up beside it partly concealed the black hollow of the entrance.

  ‘Will you look at that!’ Mike exclaimed, as we moved closer along the pad worn into the soil. ‘Dry-stone work. That took a bit of skill.’ The tracks he was following made straight for the building, the ground immediately before the hut being scuffed and overlaid by many prints. He reached a hand to stop me.

  ‘This must be it, Charlie. Makes sense when you think about it – a body under cover can’t attract birds.’

  ‘Yes.’ My throat was dry. ‘Give me a moment. I’m going in – I have to see.’

  He looked troubled. ‘If you’re sure. There’ll be nothing there, you know. The cops’ll have made sure to remove every bit of evidence they could find.’

  ‘I know. But she meant nothing to them – just another case … Maybe we didn’t get on, but she was my blood, my family. Someone has to care. If we can just die and not matter to anyone …’ I swallowed, then finished shakily, ‘Even Annabelle deserves better.’

  With that I stepped from the bright warmth of the valley into the dimness of the tiny hut and glanced swiftly about me. It was just a small room, three walls and a roof backed onto the rock and earth of the hill. Uneven pavestones lined the floor. Bush rails, riddled with borers’ holes, had been laid across the walls to support the rusty iron the builder had overlaid with rock and soil for the roof: insulation for summer heat and the bitter winter nights. There was a hearth below a corresponding hole in the roof where, presumably, a stove pipe had once fitted, and a square aperture let into the opposite wall like a doorless cupboard.

  I let out the breath I’d been unaware I was holding and stared at the floor. There was a stain on the pavers and a smell like rotten meat, faint but all pervading, and nothing else. I squeezed my hands together, staring at the stain, remembering what Tom had said about her face having been bashed in. I hoped that Mike was right and she had been killed with a single blow, that the oppressive darkness the little hut radiated was only in my imagination and really held no echo of terror or pain.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I whispered. ‘Sorry I didn’t know you were my sister. Sorry I didn’t forgive you. I’m sorry you’re dead, Annabelle.’ The darkness and stink of corruption was suddenly overwhelming and I stumbled out, a hand over my mouth.

  Mike, squatting on his heels as he waited, shot to his feet. ‘You all right, Charlie?’

  I drew in a great lungful of air and swallowed a mouthful of saliva. Rather than lie I said instead, ‘I’m done here. We can go now.’

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Not surprisingly my sleep that night brought Annabelle’s awful ghost into my dreams. I was back in the foul-smelling hut in the dark when her white faceless form rose before me, but the doorway had turned solid and there was no escape. My own scream woke me, its dying sound no more than a moan in my throat. I bolted up in bed, gasping for air while the drumming of the nightmare’s hooves gradually diminished and my galloping heart slowed. At this rate, I thought faintly, Mum’s cardiologist would soon have himself a new patient.

  Ute and Eric, I remembered then, were in the next bedroom but they hadn’t stirred. Relieved and a little envious I slid back down onto my pillow, trying to slow my breathing and regretting that I had no one to hold me against night fears. Mike had returned to Abbey Downs after lunch. I missed him: his warmth, his presence, the way his eyes crinkled when he smiled. Lying there cocooned in the warmth of my bedding, I filled my head with the memories I had of him in the short time since we’d met. His sure strength as he’d wrested the vehicle from the road train’s path, the masterful way he’d dismissed Bryan at the barbecue, the laughter we’d shared on the fossick hunt when we’d found my garnet …

  Realisation flooded through me and next moment I was out of bed, bare toes curling away from the freezing slates, as I directed the torch’s beam at the lacquered box on the dressing table. All too vividly I remembered collecting its scattered bits from the floor after the intruder had been. I had recovered the hair combs (one of them broken), the lipstick, the nail file, the string of coral beads … All the little things I had tidied away within it. But I had completely forgotten it was where I had also put the garnet for safekeeping.

  It was gone. I wondered how brittle the gem was. It could have been trodden on, crushed underfoot in the clean-up, the dust of it swept away. Perhaps it had rolled into a corner and lain undiscovered? Instantly I was down on my knees, running frantic fingers over the slates, desperately hoping, but all that I found was the smooth edge of the skirting board. Perhaps I had vacuumed it up? I tried to remember when I had emptied the bag from the machine – had it been before or after I’d done the bedrooms? I thought – hoped – it was before. When I’d finished I’d put it away unemptied. First thing in the morning I would check; there was just a chance it would still be there. It had to be! Suddenly the little gem had assumed an importance far beyond its size. Shivering, I returned to bed filled with a wrenching sense of loss as if already aware that the tiny garnet was gone for good.

  The remainder of the night passed in wakeful starts that had me lying rigid with pent breath until I was satisfied that no stealthy tread disturbed the sleeping house. I rose tired and headachy, a condition not improved by a thorough search of the dusty hoover bag. Turning the contents onto a sheet of newspaper, I sifted carefully through it with no better results than to set up an itch in my nose that brought on a bout of sneezing. There was no sign of the garnet.

  On Monday morning the road camp was back, and as if it were a signal, the tourists began moving again. The next local event would be the
race meeting at Harts Range, which would also bring a temporary halt to station work and increased custom to the roadhouse. To me, however, it provided another opportunity to see Mike. Mum would be home by then, I thought. Then I found myself wondering whether or not she liked the tall young stockman. Mike said they had met but to a busy woman knee-deep in kitchen orders, one tanned face beneath an Akubra must look very like another.

  Because of the road crew, we ate earlier than usual that evening and I was able to catch the local television news on the roadhouse set. There were items about the rodeo with shots of the champion bronc and bull riders clutching their trophies, a few lines on the Mica Valley murder to the effect that the police had no fresh leads, and immediately after that, a computer-generated likeness of Paul as detailed by Bob: a tall, muscular figure with dark hair, and a threatening appearance. He should not be approached, the newsreader said. He was wanted in connection with a major crime and anyone sighting him should immediately phone Crime Stoppers or contact their local police station.

  It didn’t take long for talk of the weekend’s events at the Garnet to spread among the work crew and I was touched by Rob Wyper’s earnest offer to have a couple of ‘the boys’ spend their nights on the homestead and roadhouse verandahs. ‘If you’re worried he’ll be back, like?’

  I thanked him but declined. ‘Ute’s sharing the house with me and we’ve got Bob’s dog. I pity the man who tries to get past old Jasper!’

  ‘Dunno what the country’s coming to,’ he said. ‘Did you lose much?’

  I shook my head. ‘Nothing seems to have been taken. But he smashed the place up pretty well. Lucky Eric is so handy. The worst thing was losing the TV. We have to watch over here now. He killed the radio too.’ My initial fury had subsided to a tired anger but I could still have cheerfully brained the perpetrator.

  ‘Jesus!’ He scratched his greying head, face screwed up in perplexity. ‘What did the copper say?’