The Silent Inheritance (21 page)

FREEWAY KILLER STRIKES AGAIN

Thought perhaps tonight he’d stay away from the freeways. Since February he’d developed an aversion to them. Get onto one and you couldn’t get off, and they had speed cameras everywhere. He’d disappoint his fans but this delivery was about cleaning up the mess of another.

The slope of his driveway offered sufficient momentum to roll the vehicle out to the road, where, like a feral thing exiting its lair, like a minor moving shape seen darkly, the Kingswood freewheeled by the arty one’s retreat, with only the crunch of tyres on bitumen to mark its passing. Not until he made a right-hand turn at the T-junction did he start the motor and notice the fuel gauge.

How ridiculous if he ran out of fuel and along came a friendly hunter.

‘I didn’t do it, Officer,’ he said, and he chuckled as he drove on.

He got rid of his load in the driveway of a fine tall house in a dead-end court, and when it was done and the door closed, he was uncertain of how he’d got there.

FREEWAY KILLER DRIVES IN CIRCLES AFTER DROP-OFF

FREEWAY KILLER ABANDONS ELDERLY HOLDEN. PETROL TANK EMPTY.

He’d filled two cans weeks ago, aware that the Kingswood’s tank was low. Had forgotten to pour it in. Had meant to do it this morning but lost his morning. Nothing had gone to plan today, and nor did his right-hand turn. He’d lost all sense of direction, was swimming now in sweat, his hands squelching inside those latex gloves and his wound stinging. He was considering opening that door, shedding his protective clothing and continuing on foot when he found Church Street, and relief opened his throat in a wolf howl sufficient to wake the sleeping flock and to give their lambs nightmares.

He’d become one of God’s sheep for a time, had obeyed the warped rule of society where the wolf must learn to sit on command. Not any more. The wolf walked alone now, and alone he drove back to his lair.

His oven felt hot enough to heat his chicken and chips, but he added a lump of wood then removed the large hotplate so he might feed the flames. Gloves first, raincoat, her school uniform, paper towels, and like a cleansing deity that fire took each offering and processed it. He fed it the defiled straw and the plastic Target bag, fed it her socks, one at a time, then her shoes – and the stink of burning leather and rubber sole too strong, he replaced the hotplate and went to the bathroom where he bathed, shaved, then walked, towel-clad, to the kitchen to check his supper then replace his wet bandaid while listening at the pantry door.

Nothing.

He opening it, just a crack. Enough.

‘You’re not Mr Watts,’ she said. ‘He would have worked out the maths.’

‘Cryptic puzzles were never my thing,’ he said.

‘It’s too big,’ she said. ‘But thank you.’

Thank you? What had he caught himself? He closed the door fast, castigating himself for his stupidity in replying to her.

Mr Watts would have worked out the maths, he thought, then thought of another, also fond of cryptic puzzles.

‘What do you call a deer with no eyes? What do you call a deer with no eyes and no legs?’

She’d been addicted to hot chips, and greasy fish in batter.

He used his towel to protect his hand when he lifted the tray from the oven. The chicken was sizzling, the chips were brown and crisp.

A chicken has two legs. There were enough chips on that tray to feed an army. He served two meals. He shared his tub of coleslaw, kept cool all day in his esky, then, barefoot and clad again in his towel, he returned to that room with a piled-high party plate he had to bend to fit between the bars.

She took it from his hands. ‘Thank you,’ she said.

‘Curse me, don’t thank me, my pretty Yank,’ he said, and ran from her, locked the door, cursing himself for a fool but recalling a blue-tinged butterfly he’d chased one sunny Sunday, also a rare and beautiful thing.

He didn’t go to bed. He ate his meal, dressed, fetched his axe from the shed and returned to the beaver dam in the gutter to fetch a few loads of firewood – and to cover up all evidence of his night’s work – then later to stand and stare in awe at the pink and lilac dawn.

He was home by seven thirty and eating breakfast with the morning news.

T
hree bike-riding Templestowe kids found the garbage bag. Half a dozen adults stood guard beside it until the first police car arrived. The television news vans and their cameramen arrived before Ross, but not before the street was ribboned off, the site screened and both kids and adults hunted back to their fencelines. With little to aim at with their cameras, they aimed them at Ross, and caught him with a smoke in his mouth and a frown between his eyes.

‘Is it Danni?’ they asked. ‘Is it Danni?’

A murder of crows, cawing around roadkill, Ross thought – and considered passing on his thought. He turned his back and went under the ribbon as a female voice asked him if smoking in a street full of children was really setting them a good example.

Here? Now? Pretty little Danni Lane dead behind that screen? Ross turned to look for the owner of that question, and recognised her. He opened his mouth to suggest she get her priorities straight, then closed it, aware that the comment wouldn’t go across well on morning television, or with Wall Johnson. It didn’t pay to say what you were thinking, not these days.

Australia gave lip-service to freedom of speech, but call a man a bastard these days and he’d have you in court for insulting his mother, call him an ugly great ape, and if his skin wasn’t white, he’d sue you for racial abuse. Let a cop defend himself in a melee and the rabble screamed police brutality, and this morning, Ross wanted out, wanted a tent beside a creek where he could scream his abuse at cawing crows who didn’t own cameras.

He’d been promising himself that tent since his mother’s death. He hadn’t done it. He hadn’t murdered the Sloan swine who’d bought her house and cut down her avocado tree.

She’d planted that seed. He’d watched that tree send up its first baby leaves, then waited fifteen years to taste its first fruit, and that bastard had cut it down. He’d driven by the house a week ago and noticed it gone.

Its falling leaves had made a mess. The tree had never produced enough avocados to warrant the space it claimed, but had grown the best-tasting avocados in the world.

He wouldn’t be driving by his old address again.

He didn’t want to be here, either. Didn’t want to see behind that screen. Didn’t want to find pretty little Danni Lane come out of that garbage bag.

*

Her two phones at her side, Barbara Lane sat on her peach leather couch, watching the massed police on her television screen.

Martin was here, had been here since her father had opened the door to him on Friday. He was pacing, pacing close to her telephones. His own was two thousand kilometres away, as was his bed. Her father had offered him Danni’s bed.

‘This is bigger than your private war, my girl,’ he’d said when she’d protested. He was in control now. She sat.

They filled her house. They ruled it. Her kitchen stank of their frying meat. Her sitting room stank of men.

Lost. Lost everything.

She’d lost her remote control. Captain William Daws had commandeered it for the duration, along with her recliner chair, all the better to chase news reports on every channel. He sat there like a giant gecko flicking his two-metre-long tongue at flies – until he caught the tail end of an interview with Lisa Simms’s mother.

‘They know it’s not Danni,’ he said, rising from the chair. ‘They’re replaying that thing because they know it’s that other missing girl.’

‘They’d contact us if they knew,’ Martin said.

‘
Me and Steve always done our best for
—’ Mrs Simms said, and the gecko’s tongue flicked her away mid-sentence, flicked to a channel showing the massed police.

Barbara hadn’t done her best for Danni. She hadn’t wanted her. Had been given no choice in the matter. She couldn’t take the pill. Every time she’d gone on it she’d put on weight, and in her business, she couldn’t afford to put on an ounce. Had been modelling lingerie at the time.

Watched that cowboy pace. Wondered what she’d ever seen in him, if she’d ever seen anything in him, other than his parents’ unit – and their money.

Should have flown home and had an abortion the first time he’d got her pregnant, but she’d been so sick and he’d told their parents they were getting married. And her mother had flown over and taken her shopping to buy a fairytale gown.

Lost her reason for marrying him on the honeymoon – and celebrated.

He hadn’t.

Hated him for what he’d done to her life – and for what her father had done – or hadn’t done. She could have made it big in Australia when she’d won that beauty contest. If she’d had his support, she could have got into modelling back then. He’d made her finish school, had wanted her to teach. She couldn’t stand kids. Dropped out of college that first year when she’d got the chance to go to America. Too old by then. Gorgeous fourteen year olds had been strutting the catwalks.

Martin had pursued her. She hadn’t pursued him – and knew he’d done it on purpose when he’d got her pregnant the second time. She’d had access to his money by then, and booked a ticket home to have an abortion. He’d found out about her flight and got himself a seat in first class, on the same flight. She hadn’t known he was on that plane until she’d gone through customs. He’d gone through faster. She’d seen him kissing her mother, shaking her father’s hand.

And telling them about the baby.

They’d given up hope of grandchildren. If she’d mentioned abortion to them, they would have had her certified.

Wouldn’t let him near her after that kid came. Told him he wasn’t touching her until she’d had her tubes tied. He’d wanted them to fly that kid home to meet his parents.

She’d told him to go, and to take his shitting kid with him. He had, that kid in his arms. A week later she’d had her tubes tied. Keyhole surgery barely left a scar. She’d had a good time for twelve months, had got a bit of catalogue work. Hadn’t missed him or his kid.

Her parents had. They would have paid for a solicitor to get her back. She’d been born in Sydney. She was an Australian citizen, and Martin had no legal right to keep her in America.

She followed them to the US, had every intention of bringing Danni home but the old Lanes had bred racehorses and they’d owned their own small plane. She’d got to fly to race meetings all over the country. Hadn’t returned home to Australia until after her father-in-law crashed that plane into a mountain on his way back from a horse sale and Martin and his brother inherited everything.

Danni was ten years old when Barbara brought her back to Sydney. She’d found a divorce solicitor. Her father wouldn’t pay for him. She’d been too old to return to her line of work so had taken the receptionist job at Crows.

For two years she’d paid that solicitor before he’d got her what she’d wanted, a pile of money and full custody of Danni.

Then her mother had to go and die.

‘Stop combing your hair, Barb,’ Martin said.

She looked at the comb, at the mat of white-blonde hair woven around and between its teeth, then threw it at his head, and when it missed, she threw the landline phone. He needed that phone. He caught it. He didn’t catch her coffee mug. He dodged it, let it spray its dregs all over her peach drapes.

His fault. Everything. And that old gecko’s. The whole mess of her life was their fault, and her ruined drapes. She stood and cursed them to hell for ruining her life, and when the cowboy tried to hold her, she raked his face with her fingernails, and when Captain William Daws came to control her, she spat in his face, and screamed.

*

The neighbours, involved in the drama by proximity, had been watching the morning news broadcasts. When they heard that scream, they knew who had been found in those garbage bags, believed they knew, and they came to their doors, a few stepped out of doors.

They saw the ambulance arrive, watched Barbara Lane carried out to it on a stretcher, watched her menfolk get into the big khaki-green four-wheel drive, parked there since Tuesday, its tow bar overhanging the paved communal driveway, a hazard for drivers reversing out of their own garages.

T
wo weeks ago, Bob Webb, the car driver, had asked what Sarah planned to do with her month of holidays, and had told her he’d bring in a temp to take over her workstation.

This morning, Bob Webb, Crow’s yes-man, stood at her workstation and told her that all holidays prior to the end of June would be delayed.

‘No,’ Sarah said.

‘No one could foresee this happening,’ he said.

This terrible thing that had every mother who had a daughter living in fear. Mrs Simms’s seventeen-year-old daughter was dead and had been dead since she’d gone missing, and the police were no closer to finding Danni Lane than they’d been to finding Monica Rowan. Barbara Lane was in hospital – but whether she was or not, it would make no difference in this place.

‘School holiday in April. I will be home with Marni.’ And have driving lessons and go for her licence test on Wednesday, 24 April, and Bob knew about her lessons and her test.

It wasn’t his fault. He did what Crow told him to do, as had the last manager, and the manager before. Sarah had been afraid of them. She wasn’t afraid of Bob, but at lunchtime, when she saw him walking towards the tearoom, she went down to the street to window-shop.

When she bought a house, they’d need everything new. She’d told Marni they’d look for a house in April.

Her entire life revolved around her month of holidays in April and she wasn’t giving them up. She’d given up Christmas for the promise of April, and if Crow tried to take her holidays away, she’d leave.

Marni wanted her to retire. She had very specific plans for Sarah’s future: retirement and a cochlear implant.

A part of Sarah still wanted the senior payroll/accounts officer title – but not enough to give up April.