The Silent Inheritance (25 page)

‘You hear what he saying?’ Sarah said.

‘I’m trying to, Mum!’

‘You listen then.’

Marni’s reply was to turn the volume higher as the screen filled with a photograph of the grey-headed old woman with a shopping bag and walking stick. It was followed by another, of the same elderly woman, but in this one she was pushing a loaded shopping trolley and had no walking stick.

‘She look very old …’ Sarah started, then fell silent as a slide show of photographs began, of five men – or one with five altered hairstyles – who no longer looked like Mrs Vaughn, but like—

‘He’s Harrison Ford,’ Marni said. ‘From that movie we saw about—’ But the detective was back and looking directly at her.

And the channel cut to commercials.

‘So, are we going to Perth?’ Marni asked.

‘No,’ Sarah said. She knew why Marni wanted to go there. Samantha Smith had put some rubbish on her Facebook page about Marni’s father, which Marni wouldn’t have known about if another friend hadn’t shown it to her.

They watched the weather girl promise two days of heat then more thunder storms, then Sarah changed the channel.

‘Put it on the ABC news, Mum. They might play more of what the police said.’

‘They say the same thing. I like
Raymond.
’ She’d found a replay of
Everybody Loves Raymond
.

Marni couldn’t stand Raymond Vaughn, so didn’t love
Raymond.
She woke the hibernating computer and asked Google for bus tours around Perth, Australia. She looked up airfares, looked up Perth hotels, and when
Raymond
ended, she offered Sarah four printouts. Their new printer lived in the corner, on the floor.

Sarah glanced at the pages. ‘Brisbane,’ she said.

‘Perth first, then Brisbane.’

‘Not Perth.’

‘I do everything for you. Why can’t you do one thing for me?’

‘Because … because people can find me there.’

‘What people?’

‘Crazy people. No Perth, Marni.’

‘If we went on that six-day tour it’s not even in Perth. It tours around it and even takes us on a ferry to Rottnest Island.’

‘No.’

‘We wouldn’t need to book motels and stuff. You pay for the tour and it pays for motels and meals and everything. Have you been to Rottnest Island?’

‘No,’ Sarah said, and she went outside to water her garden, the daphne looked happier for its holiday in the shade. She gave it a spray and thought about the perfume of the Clarks’ giant daphne. She’d borrowed it for six years, borrowed little sisters and a beautiful house. Then she’d caught a bus and left them.

Should have let Marni grow up knowing the truth. She’d never lied to her, or only about her father’s name. Carter had come fast to her tongue that day with Mrs Vaughn, and once she’d moved in, she’d been stuck with it.

Hadn’t expected to stay here. It had been a safe place to stay and work only until she’d saved enough pension money to buy a ticket on the ferry to Tasmania. Over there, she’d have water between her and Perth. Had become too comfortable here, where everything had been provided, where all she’d had to do was cook and clean and look after her baby. She’d got to love Mrs Vaughn’s heavy wooden gates, her
BEWARE OF THE DOG
sign.

She’d lied about having no photograph of Marni’s father. She had one, but justified that lie by telling herself he hadn’t been her father when the photograph was taken.

Should have told her the truth.

For an hour she stood outside, wasting Mrs Vaughn’s water, but the old lady wasn’t watching, and that dead lawn was growing green again, and Sarah wanted it to stay green.

Marni came to the door. ‘There’s a movie starting. We haven’t seen it.’

It wasn’t worth seeing. Marni went to bed. Sarah sat staring at the screen while her mind roamed to Maureen Crow, who was no Barbara Lane. Show her something once and she had it. She’d known that office well ten years ago. She was rusty but her rust brushed off easily.

David Crow hadn’t been back.

The show ended at ten forty when Sarah crept into the bedroom to stand beside Marni’s bed, looking down at the length of her. She’d grown fast this year. Thirteen was the year of change. She’d mature soon. Sarah could remember the day she’d bled, could remember Lynette Clark telling her that it was her new beginning, that she’d become a woman, and would one day be a mother.

Had become a mother by accident, and too soon.

Should have told Marni the first time she’d asked if she had a daddy, but she’d been so tiny, and there had been so much time, and she’d thought she’d forget about him and they could truly become Sarah and Marni Carter, just one more mother and daughter lost in a city of millions – as they had for such a long time.

She opened the built-in robe, or the left-side door of the robe, did it slowly, one eye on Marni, who didn’t move. Quickly then, from the top shelf, from amongst her old books, her old sweaters, she removed her mother’s cake tin.

It was a battered round tin that had never stored cake. It stored war medals, important papers, photographs of the many roads it had travelled and of the places it had called home for a little while.

For six years it had lived in a drawer at the Clarks’ house. For two days it had travelled east across the Nullarbor in a brand new case. It spent six months zipped into that case beneath Gramp’s spare bed, then seven lonely days in a cheap hotel before it went to live beneath a narrow bed in a women’s refuge. It had gone to hospital when Marni came, then returned to the refuge, until Sarah brought it out here.

She hadn’t opened it in five or six years. Remembered it well, remembered the battered, dented blonde on the lid she’d lifted too often before Marni.

It had been all she had, a cake tin, full up with helpless, hopeless memories.

Her birth certificate was in it, Marni’s too, and Sarah’s parents’ marriage certificate. Her mother had believed it important enough to keep, so Sarah had kept it. Kept the old war medals, the two bulky Kodak envelopes stuffed with photographs her mother had taken with an old camera she’d loaded with rolls of film, and when all of the film had been used, her mother would rewind it, remove it and take the roll to a Kmart to be turned into the miracle of trapped moments and people.

Remembered standing in one street looking at herself and Gramp her panda bear cardigan, remembered her mother buying a little frame for that one. Still had it.

Sarah carried the tin into the other room and sat at the table, sifting through old photographs, finding one of long wiry old Gramp in his working clothes, a laughing roly-poly Gran at his side. She found Uncle Bill, a chubby, soft little man. He’d had four children, her cousins. Somewhere out there, they’d grown, as she’d grown. Somewhere out there, they’d have children Marni’s age. She would enjoy visiting them in Brisbane.

Her mother had only kept the best of her photographs. She’d ripped up the rest and tossed them out of the car window. Used to say she was leaving a trail behind them, like Hansel and Gretel, so they could find their way back. He’d never gone back, just forward, always forward, getting to no place—

Until Perth. Until her mother had got that job with the Clarks—

I can’t just walk out. They depend on me, Joey.

Shook that memory away and opened the small brown cardboard box containing her maternal grandfather’s war medals. She hadn’t known her mother’s parents.

My daddy was a war hero, baby.

Learnt about wars and men with guns that day—

Put them away. Opened an envelope and removed Marni’s original birth certificate. She could give it to her in the morning then let her ask her questions.

A new-millennium baby. A life-changing baby. She’d made Sarah become what she’d become. Everything she’d done, she’d done for Marni. And telling her about Perth would only make her want to go there more, so she slid the truth back into the envelope, back into the cake tin, and she buried it beneath the war medals.

Television still playing. She felt its noise. Harvey Norman’s advertisement vibrated. If Marni had been out here, she would have hit the mute button. Muted or not, it made little difference to Sarah. Most of the ads had subtitles.

As did the newsflash. If not for the subtitles, Sarah wouldn’t have recognised Barbara Lane being shepherded towards the passenger-side door of a dark green four-wheel drive, then assisted up to the seat by a giant of a man who’d need that four-wheel drive to hold him.

That woman didn’t look like Barbara Lane. Her perfect hair hung limp, her face was clean of makeup. She looked broken – which was of no concern to the cameraman, who had to dodge the four-wheel drive when the giant man backed out.

Barbara Lane was released from hospital this afternoon. A spokesman for the family said today that they hold little hope that the police will find Danni alive
, a female reporter said.

Have you got a daughter, Sarah asked that woman silently. If you had a daughter you couldn’t speak like that.

Again they showed the policeman, or the part of the interview where he’d mentioned Hannibal Lecter, then the news cut to something about tattoo parlours and Sarah turned back to her photographs, sorting through them as she might through a pack of cards, selecting a few she placed on the table.

She was in most of them, from babyhood to twelve years old, twelve and a half. She found the last photograph her mother had taken: Sarah, standing with the Clark children, in her bathers, beside their swimming pool.

Her mother had been dead for two months before that film was rewound and taken to the Kmart. Sarah hadn’t ripped up any of those last precious twelve. She’d needed to hold on to what little she’d had after the funeral.

Glanced up at that woman who had no daughter, back on the screen now and speaking about Michael Swan.

… convicted of the manslaughter of toddler Cory Martin, was today granted an appeal.

And Marni came out and caught her. ‘They’re going to try him again! What for?’

‘Appeal,’ Sarah said. ‘Not trial. You can hear that when you sleeping?’

‘It’s loud enough for Mrs Vaughn to hear, Mum, and if you’d get an implant, you’d hear it,’ Marni said. She turned the volume down as Sarah slid photographs back into their packet. Not fast enough. Marni swooped on the one of Sarah and the Clark children. ‘I didn’t know you had these.’

‘You see them many time before.’

‘Not since I can remember, I haven’t. Who are they?’

‘Clarks.’

‘You’re thinking about Perth!’

‘You make me think about Perth – only think, Marni.’

‘Show me the rest.’

Sarah passed her a packet and watched them spread, on the table, on the computer, on a Brisbane brochure and the printouts of Perth.

‘Who’s he?’

‘My father,’ Sarah said.

‘And you, as a baby?’

‘Yes.’

‘Was he driving the car when it crashed?’

‘My mother can’t drive.’

‘How come you don’t want to visit their graves?’

‘Grave don’t have people. Grave is only stones with names. People who die stay in here,’ she said, tapping her head.

‘It must be awful to lose your parents when you’re a kid. Is that why you won’t go to Perth, because everyone you loved is in a cemetery?’

‘Gramp and Gran get put on their farm.’

‘You can’t bury people on farms, can you?’

‘They getting cremate. Gramp wrote … in his will.’

‘
Cre-may-ted
,’ Marni corrected.

‘Cremated,’ Sarah said. ‘They will have both ashes put around a beautiful tree, pink bark. He show me his tree. Gum, with red flower that smell like honey. It is very beautiful.’

‘What’s this?’ Marni asked.

It was an old bank card Sarah hadn’t seen in twelve years and couldn’t remember putting in with the photographs. She took it from Marni’s hand, glanced at it, then tucked it into the cup of her bra.

‘It’s not even your name on it.’

‘From before. Long time before. Go to bed.’

‘You know we won’t get tickets to fly anywhere soon.’

‘Places all the same. Town, city, tree, road.’

‘Yeah, but you’ve seen them and I haven’t,’ Marni said and she returned to bed.

H
e’d underestimated his hunters’ imagination. Their mock-up portraits hadn’t overly concerned him. The shot of Nelly and her loaded trolley exiting the public toilets concerned him.

He was making mistakes, and get two of them side by side and like mice they bred. He’d bred up a plague with this one, and he’d known it. He’d intended buying Nelly a new outfit, just hadn’t got around to it.

He had to finish this. He had to get rid of her and the Kingswood, then get out of this place and keep his head down.

He checked his watch as he unlocked the gate. Plenty of time. He drove through, got out, closed and locked it, and cursed the neighbour who’d caused him to lock it. That padlock was a mistake. It advertised ownership. The newness of it advertised recent occupation. He cursed the hunters for forcing his hand with this one. He’d made his own rules with the others, had decided when the time was right. The time wasn’t right. It was necessary.