Pearl in a Cage (5 page)

‘You wouldn't have a youngish woman in your group, would you, thirty-odd, long black hair?' he asked, blowing smoke with
the crowd. A bunch of heads shook in unison. ‘Any passengers you might have seen on the train who'd fit that description . . . dark complexion, wearing a black overcoat?'

They were Duckworths, or wed to Duckworths; they'd seen nothing but other Duckworths. Ogden took two quick drags on his smoke, killed it, then pushed off towards the station to ask about unclaimed luggage, or any passenger last night who might have fitted the woman's description.

Norman had his mother's funeral on his mind. He was no help.

Nor was Melbourne when the post office chap got a phone call through to an uninterested sergeant, who showed less interest still when Ogden described the stranger now sleeping in a pine box in Moe's cellar. No wedding ring, had an Italian look about her, died maybe of blood loss after giving birth beside a railway line. It didn't sound like a priority to the city sergeant.

‘I'm thinking of getting her onto the train this afternoon,' Ogden said. ‘I need someone down there to know she'll be coming.'

The chap didn't want her coming, or not until he'd taken a look at who he might have had reported missing. He told Ogden to give him a call back around midday, then left him holding the telephone listening to a few hundred miles of dead wires swishing. The post office chap hung it up and Ernie Ogden went home for breakfast, where he related his night's work to more interested ears.

Duckworths talked. He'd say that for them. The bunch staying with Vern got together with the bunch from the hotel, and before he'd downed his second cup of tea, a flat-faced girl of twenty-odd and a chap of fifty-odd were at his door.

‘Mum spoke to that woman you're describing at one of the stations,' the young Duckworth said. ‘Mum said to me that she wasn't game to take her coat off for fear someone would steal her brooch. She had the most gorgeous brooch.'

‘A black coat?'

‘They all wear black — she was one of those dagoes, Mum said.'

He forgot about his tea growing cold. Two foreign-looking women wearing black overcoats in yesterday's heat wasn't likely. He hadn't found a brooch — though maybe the reason he hadn't found the brooch was the reason the woman had been found beside the railway line four miles from town.

‘Did you notice if she was travelling alone?' he asked.

‘I couldn't say. I went into the canteen to get Mum a cup of tea. Mum might know. I'm not sure where she's staying.'

‘She actually spoke to her, you say?'

‘Just passed the time of day. She was very taken by that brooch. It had a ruby in it as big as a hen's eye, she said.'

‘I appreciate you coming around,' he said.

They left, he followed them out, followed them back across the railway lines where he found Vern hiding from his batch of Duckworths in Miller's boot shop, trying on boots he didn't need.

‘Caught you,' Ogden said.

‘Your jail is looking better by the hour,' Vern said, putting his own boot back on.

Two minutes later they were heading out towards the Bryants', Ernie now on the scent of a brooch.

Vern knew that road well, had known it since infancy. His land was out on this road, his father's land, his grandfather's. He'd ridden a horse to and from school for a couple of years, knew every paddock, every tree. It was good land out this way, bone dry right now but the creek was close by. Vern's grandfather had come with the first wave of hardy souls who had settled this area. He'd claimed his fair share of that creek, as had old man Monk, who had also got a good chunk of forest, which he'd harvested. He'd set up the first sawmill, an old pit mill. The modern mills put him out of business.

Lonnie Bryant was out with his dogs, but they found Nancy in, and she more than eager to show them where she'd found the stranger. They spent half an hour searching the area, looking for the brooch. They found blood, found the second shoe, midway between the railway line and where the woman had ended up,
which could have suggested she'd been pushed from the train by whoever now had her brooch.

Near ten, they left Nancy with her Duckworth guests, and Vern, in no hurry to join his own, turned again down the bush road to Gertrude's property, where they found her attempting to interest the infant in sucking boiled water from a teat better suited to a motherless goat than a newborn infant.

‘You didn't find a brooch pinned to that coat last night?' Ogden said, placing the second shoe beside its mate, still on the hearth.

‘If it was on it, it's still on it.'

Her hands full, Gertrude pointed with her elbow to a cane laundry basket and her night's washing, already bone dry and removed from the line ten minutes ago. The sun was sucking moisture from wherever it could suck it today.

A domesticated man, Ernie folded the towels and blanket, turned the gold crepe frock right side out, shook it, then offered it to Vern.

‘Someone paid big money for that,' Vern said. He knew the cost of women's clothes. He had a wife who liked spending money, and two daughters from previous marriages, still schoolgirls but with very definite opinions on what they wore.

‘I almost cut it off her,' Gertrude admitted, offering the teat again to an uninterested mouth. ‘It's beautifully made. You could wear it inside out.'

‘Someone will be looking for her,' Ogden said, patting the coat down, feeling for the brooch he couldn't see. He shook it, willing that brooch to fly free. It didn't. It wasn't caught up in the lining either, nor in the pockets.

‘Nice-looking coat too,' Vern said. ‘Beautiful fabric. It wasn't made in Australia.'

‘It smelled like wool when it was wet.'

‘A wool mix,' Vern said. He knew his wools.

‘Everything that woman had on her back reeks of money,' Gertrude said. ‘And she's been up here before too, or someone she knew has been up here.' She slid the now dry luggage label across the table.

‘A few years back, though. It's one of the old labels,' Vern said, turning it over. He did a lot of train travelling with his wife.

‘Any chance she's connected to Norman's folk?' Gertrude said.

‘Not from what they say,' Ernie said.

‘One of the young Duckworth's lady loves?' Vern suggested. ‘Decided to follow him up and surprise him in front of his family?' Ogden nodded, considering the theory, while Vern looked at the handkerchief, the ten-shilling note. ‘The sum of a woman's life,' he said. ‘It's not much, is it?'

‘And this mite — who won't be long behind her mother if I can't get her sucking.'

‘It's too small to live,' Vern said.

‘Not all infants are ten-pound Hoopers,' Gertrude said.

‘What's it weigh in at?'

‘A smidgen under five pound. You might see if Jean and Charlie have got any decent feeding bottles up there. She's gagging every time I get this one in.'

‘I'd be gagging too,' Vern said. ‘I take it you won't be going in for the funeral?'

They were burying Cecelia Morrison at eleven thirty, then having a luncheon wake at the town hall, which would save the billeting families the hassle of feeding their guests lunch.

‘What I had to say to that woman I said to her in life,' Gertrude said.

The six men who hauled Cecelia Morrison's coffin up and out of Moe's cellar had a lot more to say about her, but the less said about what they said or how they got that coffin up those narrow steps the better. How they were going to lower it into a six-foot hole with dignity, Moe didn't know. The woman must have weighed twenty-three stone and her coffin didn't weigh a lot less.

He'd used his best timber and done a champion job on it — and a dozen at the church told him so. He'd get orders out of this funeral, for fancy tables and cabinets. A bit of advertising of his craftsmanship never went astray.

Cecelia had a good turnout. The Duckworths filled the front pews, but the locals were well represented — a few there to get a closer look at Norman's relatives, and a lot of elderly men who never missed a chance to see someone younger beat them in the race to the graveyard.

Norman had requested the choir, a blend of Woody Creek's old and young voices. Some days they got it just right.

Charles Duckworth was a parson. He and the local C of E minister combined their talents in a service lasting an hour, but noon on a midsummer day was no time for a funeral, be it short or long. The church was small, badly ventilated, and today full of perspiration and supposition.

Ernie Ogden had seven sons, ranging in age from three to fifteen, who'd heard more than they should have heard. Moe Kelly had three near grown sons and a girl of twelve, who'd
seen more than they should have seen. One kid guarding a secret is one too many. Half a dozen kids, not too concerned about getting their facts right when they pass on that secret, leads to a general buzz of misinformation.

‘They say that one of the stationmaster's relatives was murdered last night, one of the ones who stayed out with Nancy and Lonnie Bryant.'

‘No.'

‘It wasn't a Duckworth. It was some foreign woman who came up with one of the men.' Whispering then.

‘A baby?'

‘Shush! And that's what I heard. I don't know how much truth there is in it.'

A handful of the hardiest women and fifteen-odd men followed Moe Kelly's funeral van the block and a half to the cemetery. They heard the grunts, heard that coffin drop down; they scattered hot dirt, then hurried back to the town hall, a red-brick utilitarian barn of a building with multiple doors. It offered space for folk to spread, offered lavatories — little better than tin sheds, but readily accessed through a side door.

The lavatories were abuzz today, and not all of it due to blowflies.

‘They reckon she was with one of the chaps staying at the Macdonalds'.'

‘Is it a fact that she had a baby?'

‘It's fact, all right. It's down at Nurse Foote's place. I was in Charlie White's when Vern Hooper came in wanting to buy a titty bottle with the smallest teat they had.'

Suicide was suggested. An unmarried woman left in the lurch might have thrown herself off that train.

‘Someone told me she was one of Jenner's dagoes.'

‘Some of those dagoes import wives from Italy, you know. Imagine what one of them might do if his bride turned up in the family way.'

‘Slit her throat as quick as look at you.'

‘I heard she died of snake bite.'

‘Did you see that snake those kids got down behind Macdonald's mill. I never saw anything like it in all my life.'

‘The devil's work. I couldn't look at it.'

Hot sandwiches went down well with hot gossip, and there was nothing wrong with warm sausage rolls. The tea was too strong or too weak. The cream melted in the cakes. The jelly on the trifle reverted to its liquid state, but it all went down. A few remembered why they were there, though most conversations commenced and ended with the unknown dead woman. Very few strangers found their way to Woody Creek, and when they did, the locals always managed to connect them up to someone before they left. That dead woman was the first to arrive and die before any proven connection could be made.

Ogden lunched at the wake and he listened. He spoke to the woman who had admired the brooch. She wanted to be helpful but there was little she could tell him.

‘She could hardly string two words together,' Aunt Olive said. ‘Very hard to understand. I said what a terrible day it was for travelling and she said something that sounded like, always summer. I admired her brooch and I think she said it was her mother's. And that's about all that was said.'

He spoke to another dozen but learned nothing more, so he went home for a second lunch.

At two, he placed his second call to the city and got a pommy on a bad line. All Ogden got out of him was how folk moved around during the festive season, and how long it could take before that woman was reported missing — if a report ever came in. Women died in childbirth every day. It was one of the hazards of married life. Unwed woman died every day in attempting to abort the results of their low life. Ogden was pleased he hadn't been born a woman.

He wasn't too pleased about putting that coffin on the train on a day when the thermometer on his shaded verandah showed a hundred and nine, so he walked around to talk to Moe Kelly.

‘I don't feel right about loading her into the goods van, Moe, subjecting her to six hours of roasting in a pine box and maybe no one to pick her up when she gets there. We'll bury her in the
morning. I'll get young McPherson in to photograph her, and when she's claimed — if she's claimed — her folk can move her where they want her. The community box will pay.'

 

John McPherson, a shy, lean and lanky lad who looked younger than his seventeen years, had an interest in photography, which his parents encouraged. He'd photographed a few babies, a few brides, his parents and neighbours, but never the dead. Until that day, he had never looked upon the face of the dead.

His mother helped carry his equipment down the steep steps to Moe's cellar, where he set up his tripod and weighty camera while Moe and Ogden moved the open coffin over to where they might take full advantage of the light coming in through a high window and they propped the top end of that cruel pine box on a block of melting ice. Much had melted during the last days and the cellar's clay floor hadn't absorbed it well. It was greasy underfoot. John McPherson watched his step as he stretched out the leather concertina section of his camera, lined up on the coffin, then disappeared beneath a black sheet. There was a blinding flash and it was done.

His mother wanted to get away, but John took a step nearer to the coffin. It was too sad. A pretty woman's final photograph shouldn't be in a cheap dress in a cheap box in a greasy cellar.