The Dry (10 page)

“Who gets that?”

“Charlotte, via Luke's parents. It's pretty minimal, though. It'll probably pay off the mortgage and not much more. She'll get the farm, I guess, whether she likes it or not. So far no other real red flags—multiple accounts, large withdrawals, third-party debts, that sort of stuff. I'll keep at it.”

The main thing Falk had learned from the exercise was that Karen Hadler was a competent and thorough bookkeeper. He'd felt a pang of affinity with her as he'd followed her ordered numbers and careful pencil markings.

Raco slowed as he approached a deserted junction and checked his watch.

“Seven minutes gone.”

They were following Luke's route home from Sullivan's place. Raco turned left onto the road toward the Hadlers' farmhouse. It was paved, but not well. Deep cracks showed where the asphalt had swelled and shrunk with the seasonality of a crop.

It was technically a two-way road but was barely wide enough for two vehicles to pass side by side. A head-on meeting would force one to take a neighborly dip into the scrub, Falk imagined. He didn't get the opportunity to find out. They didn't meet a single vehicle the whole way.

“Nearly fourteen minutes, door to door,” Falk said as Raco pulled up at the Hadlers' driveway. “All right. Let's see where Luke's body was found.”

 

 

It was barely even a clearing.

Raco managed to shoot past it and swore quietly, screeching to a halt. He reversed a few meters and pulled over at the side of the road. They got out, not bothering to lock the doors. There was no one else around. Raco led the way to a gap in the tree line.

“It's in here.”

There was a pocket of eerie silence as invisible birds were momentarily stilled by the sound of his voice. The gap opened into a small space, big enough for a vehicle to drive in but not turn around. Falk stood in the center. It was fractionally cooler here, shaded on all sides by a sentry line of ghost gums. The road was completely hidden by the thick growth. Something in the bush rustled and scurried away. The yellow earth was baked solid. No tracks or wheel marks.

Directly beneath Falk's feet, in the center of the clearing, lay a dusting of loose sand. He realized what it had been put down to cover and hastily stepped off. The area had been trampled over by dozens of boots recently, but other than that it looked ill-used.

“Pretty miserable place to spend your last moments,” Falk said. “Was this spot supposed to mean anything to Luke?”

Raco shrugged. “Hoping you might have some idea about that.”

Falk searched his memory for old camping trips, boyhood adventures. Nothing came to mind.

“He definitely died here? In the back of the truck?” Falk said. “No chance he was shot somewhere else and moved?”

“None at all. Blood pattern was definitive.”

Falk tried to organize the timeline in his head. Luke had left Jamie Sullivan's around 4:30
P.M
. Luke's truck was on camera at the Hadlers' farm about thirty minutes later. Longer than it had taken Falk and Raco to drive the same distance. Two gunshots, four minutes, and the truck had driven away.

“It's fairly straightforward if Luke shot his family,” Falk said. “He drove himself to the house, taking the scenic route for whatever reason, killed them, then drove himself here.”

“Yeah. Gets a lot more complicated if it was someone else, though,” Raco said. “The killer had to be inside Luke's truck at some point soon after he left Sullivan's, because Luke had the murder weapon with him. So who drove it to the farmhouse?”

“And if it wasn't Luke behind the wheel, where the hell was he while his family was being murdered? Sitting in the passenger seat watching it happen?” Falk said.

Raco shrugged. “Maybe he was. I mean, it's a possible scenario. Depending on who the other person was, what kind of hold they might have had over him.” They looked at each other, and Falk knew Raco was also thinking about Sullivan.

“Or the killer could have physically overpowered him,” Raco said. “Might have taken a bit of effort, but some people could do it. You saw Sullivan's arms. Like walnuts packed into a sock.”

Falk nodded and thought back to the report on Luke's body. He was a decent-sized bloke. A healthy male, other than the gunshot wound. No defensive marks on his hands. No sign of ligature marks or other restraints. He pictured Luke's corpse lying flat on its back in the truck's cargo tray. The blood pooled around him and the four unexplained streaks on the side of the metal tray.

“‘Bloody women,'” Falk said out loud. “What do you think he meant by that?”

“I dunno,” Raco said, glancing at his watch. “But we're set to meet someone who might later this afternoon. I thought it could be worth seeing what Karen Hadler kept in her desk drawer.”

11

The wattle sapling looked a little less sickly once it was in the ground, but not much. Uniformed schoolchildren looked on in bewilderment as mulch was shoveled around its base. Teachers and parents stood in loose groups, some crying openly.

A handful of the wattle's fuzzy yellow buds gave up the fight immediately and fluttered to the ground. They settled near a plaque with the fresh engraving:

In memory of Billy Hadler and Karen Hadler.

Much loved and missed by our school family.

The sapling didn't stand a chance, Falk thought. He could feel the heat through the soles of his shoes.

Back on the grounds of his old primary school, Falk was again struck by the feeling that he could be thirty years in the past. The asphalt playground was a miniature version of the one he remembered, and the water fountains seemed absurdly low. But it was instantly familiar, sparking half-remembered flashes of faces and events he'd long forgotten.

Luke had been a good ally to have back then. He was one of those kids with an easy smile and a sharp wit who could navigate the jungle law of the playground effortlessly.
Charismatic
would have been the word, if they'd known it at that age. He was generous with his time, his jokes, his belongings. His parents. Everyone was welcome at the Hadler household. He was loyal almost to a fault. When Falk had once taken a stray football in the face, he'd had to drag Luke off the kid who'd kicked it. Falk, tall and awkward then, was always aware he was lucky to have Luke on his side.

Falk shifted uncomfortably as the ceremony came to a close.

“Scott Whitlam, principal,” Raco said, nodding as a fit-looking man in a tie politely extracted himself from a crowd of parents.

Whitlam came over, one hand extended. “Sorry to keep you waiting,” he said after Raco introduced Falk. “Everyone wants to talk at a time like this.”

Whitlam was in his early forties and moved with the easy energy of a retired athlete. He had a broad chest and a wide smile. Half an inch of clean brown hair was visible under the bottom of his hat.

“It was a nice service,” Falk said, and Whitlam glanced back at the sapling.

“It's what we needed.” He lowered his voice. “Tree hasn't got a hope in hell, though. God knows what we're supposed to tell the kids when it dies. Anyway.” He nodded toward the blond-brick building. “We've gathered together anything belonging to Karen and Billy, like you asked. There's not a lot, I'm afraid, but it's in the office.”

They followed him across the grounds. A bell rang somewhere in the distance. End of the school day. Up close, the buildings and play equipment made a depressing sight. Paint had chipped from every surface and the exposed metal was red with rust. There were cracks in the plastic slide, and only one end of the basketball court had a hoop. The signs of a community in poverty were everywhere.

“Funding,” Whitlam said when he saw them looking around. “There's never enough.”

Around the back of the school building a few sad sheep stood in brown paddocks. Beyond, the land rose sharply to a chain of hills covered with bushland.

The principal stopped to fish a handful of leaves out of the sheep's water trough.

“Do you still teach farm skills these days?” Falk remembered checking a similar water trough once upon a time.

“Some. We try to keep it light, though. Have some fun. The kids get enough of the gritty realities at home,” Whitlam said.

“You teach it?”

“God, no, I'm a humble city slicker. We moved up from Melbourne eighteen months ago, and I've just about learned to tell one end of a cow from the other. My wife fancied a change of scenery from the city.” He paused. “We got one, all right.”

He pushed open a heavy door to a hallway that smelled like sandwiches. Along the walls, kids' paintings and drawings were pinned up.

“Jesus, some of these are depressing,” Raco murmured.

Falk could see what he meant. There were stick-figure families in which every face had a crayon mouth turned downward. A painting of a cow with angel wings. “Toffee My Cow in Heaven,” the shaky caption read. In every attempt at landscape, the fields were colored brown.

“You should see the ones we didn't put up,” Whitlam said, stopping at the office door. “The drought. It's going to kill this town.”

He took an enormous bunch of keys from his pocket and let them into his office. Pointing them to a couple of chairs that had seen better days, he disappeared into a store cupboard. He emerged a moment later carrying a sealed cardboard box.

“Everything's in here. Bits and pieces from Karen's desk, some of Billy's schoolwork. Mostly paintings and worksheets, I'm afraid.”

“Thanks.” Raco took it from him.

“They're missed.” Whitlam leaned against his desk. “Both of them. We're all still reeling.”

“How closely did you work with Karen?” Falk asked.

“Reasonably so. We've only got a small staff. She was excellent. She looked after the finances and accounts. Good at it too. Too smart for this job really, but I think it suited her with child care and things.”

The window was open a crack, and the sounds from the playground drifted through. “Look, can I ask why you're here?” Whitlam said. “I thought this was resolved.”

“It involved three members of the same family,” Raco said. “Unfortunately, something like that's never clear-cut.”

“Right. Of course.” Whitlam sounded unconvinced. “The thing is, I've got an obligation to make sure students and staff are safe, so if—”

“We're not suggesting there's anything to worry about, Scott,” Raco said. “If there's something you need to know, we'll make sure you know it.”

“All right, message received,” Whitlam said. “What can I do to help you?”

“Tell us about Karen.”

The knock was quiet but firm. Whitlam looked up from his desk as the door opened. A blond head poked around.

“Scott, have you got a minute?”

Karen Hadler stepped into his office. She wasn't smiling.

“She stopped by to speak to me, the day before she and Billy were killed,” Whitlam said. “She was worried, of course.”

“Why ‘of course'?” Raco asked.

“Sorry, I didn't mean that to sound facetious. But you saw those kids' pictures on the wall. I meant everyone's scared. The adults are no different.”

He thought for a moment.

“Karen was a really valued team member. But she'd become quite stressed in those last couple of weeks. She was snappy, which was unusual. Definitely distracted. And she'd been making one or two errors in the accounts. Nothing serious; we caught them. But again, it was unlike her. It bothered her. She was normally so precise. So she came to see me about it.”

Karen shut the door behind her. She chose the seat closest to Whitlam's desk. She sat straight-backed and crossed her legs neatly at the ankles. Her wraparound dress was flattering but modest, with a subtle print of white apples against a red background. Karen was the kind of woman whose youthful good looks had been softened by age and childbirth into something less defined but just as appealing in their own way. She could easily be cast as a how-does-she-do-it mum in a supermarket ad. Anyone could have confidence in a brand of detergent or cereal Karen Hadler recommended.

Now she was clutching a small stack of papers on her lap.

“Scott,” she began, then stopped. He waited. She took a deep breath. “Scott, to be honest, I wasn't sure about coming to you with this. My husband—” Karen held his gaze, but Whitlam felt she was forcing herself. “Luke, well. Look, he wouldn't be happy.”

Raco leaned forward. “Did she sound scared of her husband?”

“I didn't think so at the time.” Whitlam pinched the bridge of his nose. “But knowing what happened the next day makes me realize I probably wasn't listening closely enough. I worry that I missed the signs. I've asked myself that every day. But I want to be clear that if I'd suspected for a minute they were in danger, I'd obviously never have let her and Billy go home.” Whitlam's words unconsciously echoed Jamie Sullivan's.

Karen fiddled with her wedding ring.

“You and I have worked together for a while—worked together well, I would say—” She looked up, and Whitlam nodded. “I feel I have to say something.”

She paused again and took a deep breath.

“I know there have been some issues lately. With me and my work. A few mistakes here and there.”

“One or two perhaps, but there's no harm done, Karen. You're a good worker. Everyone can see that.”

She nodded once, dropping her eyes. When she looked up, her face was set.

“Thank you. But there is a problem. And I can't turn a blind eye to it.”

“She said the farm was going under,” Whitlam said. “Karen thought they had six months, maybe less. She said Luke didn't believe it. Apparently he was sure things would turn around, but she said she could see it coming. She was worried. She actually apologized to me.”