Darkening Skies (2 page)

The gravel road wound through the last kilometre of the thick, dry, Dungirri scrub, and the old familiar tension coiled around her spine as she crossed the low wooden bridge over the creek and into the town.

A willy-willy stirred up dust and dead leaves and swirled across the road ahead of her. Dust and death. They still clung to Dungirri, the terminal illness of economic and social decay evident in boarded-up shop windows, long-empty houses and scarcely a soul in sight, the main street almost as dead as the cemetery she’d just passed.

Why the hell had she agreed to come back to this godforsaken hole?

Because of the desperation in her Uncle Jim’s voice in his phone message last night, the pleading of her cousin Paul’s email. Proud men, both of them, not the kind who could easily ask for help, but out of their depth with this sudden news and worried how Paula’s father Mick would respond.

But Jenn hadn’t come back just for their sakes.
She
needed to find out the truth behind Mark’s unexpected confession.
Unexpected and very public – at a brief lunch stop in a roadhouse somewhere along the way she’d seen the news of his press conference this morning blaring out from the TV – his shock resignation as an independent member of parliament, and the reopening of the police investigation at his request.

She gritted her teeth against a wave of nausea. Greasy takeaway food on top of jetlag, fatigue and stress hadn’t been one of her better decisions.

‘Get a grip,’ she muttered. ‘It’s only bloody Dungirri. You can sort out this mess and then leave again.’

Approach it like a story. Use her skills as a journalist. Be objective, rational. Behave as if Paula hadn’t been her cousin, sister, friend. As if Mark were just another politician with a convenient case of amnesia.

At the end of the block, a couple of cars were parked outside the Dungirri Hotel, a ‘For Sale’ sign attached to the upper veranda, and across the road, a sign advertising ice-cream stood on the path in front of the old general store.

Undecided about what to do or where to go first, she turned into the street beside the shop and parked in the shade of a tree. As she climbed out of the air-conditioned car, the dry December heat hit her, sucking moisture from her skin. Her legs and back stiff from hours of driving after a day in planes yesterday, she walked back to the corner to stretch her muscles.

Apart from slight movement in the leaves on the trees along the street, nothing stirred in the hot afternoon. A bulldozer parked across the road marked the recent demolition of Jeanie Menotti’s Truck Stop Café, burned in a fire. A gaping hole in a once-familiar streetscape.

Old habits resurfaced but
she refused to allow her gaze to linger on the dilapidated buildings of the Dungirri showground, or the grassed area of the overgrown show ring where she and her parents had once camped while visiting family. Where everything had changed in one terrifying, soul-ripping moment, condemning her to five years in her Uncle Mick’s uncaring guardianship in Dungirri.

A crow rose above the showground, black against the bright sky, its harsh caw so desolate in the stillness that Jenn had to close her eyes against the wave of old grief.

Dust, desolation, death – that about summed up her memories of Dungirri.

Steeling herself against the temptation to simply turn around, walk back to her car and drive away, she eyed the hotel from across the street. Time hadn’t been kind to it, and she would bet that the accommodation was basic. She could decide later if she would risk staying there, or head into the larger town of Birraga, sixty kilometres further west.

Right now she needed to bury her memories again, find her objectivity and focus on making some sense of this mess. Sitting in the car,
she jotted on a notepad the facts as she knew them from her Uncle Jim’s emails over the past few months and the news reports she’d seen. Fact one: Gil Gillespie’s return to Dungirri almost three months ago. Fact two: Gillespie’s revelations of connections between the Calabrian mafia Russo family from Sydney and the Flanagans, local shady business family and thugs led by wealthy businessman Dan and his sons. Drugs, blackmail, coercion – all the usual organised crime, and she’d seen more than enough of it, all the world over. Fact three: Her cousin Sean’s involvement with the Flanagans and the Russos, and his assault on Gillespie, believing him responsible for their cousin Paula’s long-ago death.

She paused with her pen on the page so long that the ink ran, forming a blot. There lay the crux of Jim’s and Paul’s concerns – how Mark’s confession would impact on Paul’s brother Sean, guilt-ridden and in prison, and on her Uncle Mick, Paula’s father.

She didn’t give a fraction of a damn about Mick, but the others – yes, maybe she did. Or maybe this was just personal, about her own needs, her own questions.

Fact four: Gillespie’s return to the district from witness protection a week ago, Mark’s meeting with him and subsequent public confession and resignation today, after informing the Barretts privately yesterday.

And in that line of her scrawled writing lay the focus of most of her questions and her journalist’s scepticism. What the hell had gone on during that conversation between the two men? Exactly what had prompted Mark to throw away his career so abruptly?

She tossed her pen and notebook on to the passenger’s seat and yanked the car door shut. The best place to find the truth was at the source. And the source, in this case, lived fifteen minutes beyond Dungirri.

She ignored the catch in her breathing and started the car. Ask questions, investigate, find the truth. She’d been preparing herself for this meeting all day, thrusting her fond, youthful memories of the boy she’d been half in love with firmly into the past; they were irrelevant now.

The three blocks of the town’s main street disappeared into her rear-view mirror
and the road ahead ran straight west into the flat, mostly cleared farmland towards Birraga. Only pockets of scrub and the eucalypts lining the road remained, the paddocks brown and withered in the summer sun.

All familiar, this road she’d travelled hundreds – probably thousands – of times. She battled the unsettling sense of being thrust back eighteen years in time by looking for the changes. The old O’ Connell wool shed, flattened in a storm when she was a kid, had been replaced by a new steel machinery shed. The Dawsons had installed solar panels on the homestead roof. The property next door to them had new fences.

Small, incremental changes. Nothing that disturbed the shape of the land; the paddocks stretching for kilometres, the cone of Ghost Hill towering over the plains, the green smudge of trees in the distance marking the Birraga River, snaking its way across the country.

A kilometre or so before Ghost Hill she slowed, shifting down a gear, indicating for the turn-off even though there were no other cars around to notice.

As she made the turn on to the dirt road, a wave of nostalgia caught her unawares. The kurrajong trees still shaded the short row of mail boxes and the tilting corrugated-iron shelter where she’d waited, day after day, with Mark and Paula for the school bus into Birraga High. Despite all the frustrations and unhappiness of her youth and her Uncle Mick’s resentful guardianship, she, Paula and Mark had shared good times and a
strong friendship.

‘A long time ago,’ she murmured, steering her thoughts away from the past, concentrating instead on avoiding dust-filled potholes and the deep tyre ruts gouged in the last rain. Five kilometres along the track the gates of Marrayin Downs stood open, and she turned into the tree-lined driveway.

A dusty white ute was parked in the shade of an old red gum in the wide drive-circle across from the century-old homestead, and she pulled up behind it. Mark? His property manager? It was unlikely to be her Uncle Jim over here – he managed another Strelitz property just south of Dungirri. And her Uncle Mick probably hadn’t stepped foot on the place since his dismissal had forced them to leave the manager’s cottage nineteen years ago.

She spared a single glance towards the old cottage, half-hidden in its grove of trees. No vehicles, no signs of life. Turning her back on the house she’d once lived in – never a home – she straightened her shoulders and walked across the drive to the main homestead.

The deep shade of the vine-covered veranda created a refuge from the heat and her steps sounded on the timber boards with a mellow, half-forgotten resonance.

Long gone were the days when
she would have simply called out and walked in through the front door. Instead, she pressed the doorbell, heard its chimes echo in the house. Heard, too, footsteps inside. The silhouetted figure she glimpsed through the leadlight window beside the door hurried – but not towards her, the back door slamming seconds later.

Strange. Definitely strange. The figure was stockier than Mark. Although she hadn’t seen him in person for eighteen years, she’d seen him often enough on the TV news, and he’d maintained his lean fitness. Perhaps it was the manager or a housekeeper. A ten-thousand-hectare grazing property needed staff to run it. Or perhaps a lover or friend – she had no idea of Mark’s current domestic arrangements. A few women had been linked to him over the years, by his side at formal functions. One of them might have caught his heart.

She pressed the doorbell again, heard it echo through the house. No response. Uncertainty tightened the tension in her spine and she glanced again at her watch – it was after six o’ clock. According to Mark’s office manager in Canberra, he’d left straight after this morning’s media conference. Unless he’d stopped on the way, he should be home by now.

Huffing in frustration, she followed the veranda around to the back of the house. The east wing was new since her day, as were the French doors opening off the eat-in kitchen on to a large, multi-level terrace tiered down the slight hill. She quickened her steps, the low sunlight glinting on the jagged glass in the doorframes. Smashed glass, open doors, a man who’d run away on her arrival … her senses snapped to alert.

Nothing moved among the outbuildings beside the house that she could see. In the few minutes she’d waited on the veranda, he’d disappeared.

She hesitated, considering her options. Find the manager? She assumed there was one, but he could be anywhere, mustering, fencing, checking dams. Phone the police? She was three steps towards the kitchen phone when she caught the first whiff of smoke, and she whirled around, scanning the view for grassfire in the paddocks, or bushfire in the distance. Either could be deadly in the dry summer heat.

The second whiff of smoke drifted
from behind her, from the house, and a fire alarm suddenly began to beep, high pitched and loud. Underneath that sound a car engine roared to life somewhere – possibly down by the old wool shed.

Her sandals crunched on the broken glass on the kitchen floor. She could see the smoke now, thickening in the passageway behind the main rooms of the homestead, the light starting to flicker with a garish glow when she turned into the passage that led to the office.

The door was open, the room a mess, burning papers were scattered on the desk and floor, fire already eating the desk chair, the armchairs, and climbing the curtains.

And on the floor behind the desk she could see two feet, clad in dusty leather boots, lying motionless, close to the flames.

Nearing the end of the long drive
from Canberra, Mark skirted around the edge of Dungirri, dodging the main street, turning back on to the Birraga road a kilometre from town. He didn’t intend to avoid Dungirri for long, but he planned to go home, shower and change, check his messages for anything he couldn’t ignore and then head back to face the Friday-night crowd at the pub. There were usually a fair few people there; tonight, with the announcement of his resignation, he expected the pub to be crowded with people talking about it. About him.

Better to face them today, rather than later. His electorate covered a huge area of outback New South Wales, including larger towns such as Birraga and Jerran Creek, but in Dungirri they’d known him all his life. And they’d known and mourned Paula. If there was anger and a sense of betrayal, it would be strongest here.

Beyond Dungirri, out of the scrub, the road stretched flat and mostly straight ahead, the late-afternoon sun strong between the flickering shadows of the eucalypts along the road. He passed the rough track that led to the old Gillespie place a few kilometres from town. Somewhere along this section of the Dungirri-to-Birraga road he’d picked up Gil Gillespie one evening eighteen years ago. There was nothing in his memory to tell him where and why. Nothing but the gaping hole caused by the head injury he received in the accident, permanently erasing several days from his short-term memory. Days he would never recover. And while he’d been unconscious in hospital, Gil had been threatened and subsequently confessed to being the driver of the car.

Ghost Hill rose out of the flat plains, still some distance ahead. No matter where he travelled, that first sight of the hill beckoned him home.

Yet today the view of the hill seemed hazy, despite the clear afternoon air. Perhaps his eyes were just tired … He blinked a few times to refocus them, and scanned the landscape as he drove. Yes, definitely a grey, smoky haze. Worrying, in this summer heat. But from where?