The Silent Inheritance (35 page)

Woke to an avalanche of light. It wasn’t coming from his camping lantern. That was on the sink where it had been before, but wasn’t burning now. The light was coming from behind it, through a worn-out blind at a window. Sunlight. She hadn’t seen sunlight, not for weeks, and it was too bright.

Saw him then, sitting in an old wicker chair he’d pulled close to the stove, saw his shoes propped on a carton full of wood.

‘Are you there?’ he asked.

She was here. Couldn’t see anyone else. She got herself up, got her back against the wall and he was asleep, his chin on his chest. He was talking in his sleep.

She’d imagined a monster, scarred and ugly. He looked … ordinary, was dressed in an ordinary sweater and jeans and sneakers.

And he did it again. ‘I can’t see you.’

She moved the pillow so it was between her back and the wall and she looked her fill at a man no one could ever imagine would murder four girls.

‘Over here,’ he said.

Carefully she eased the quilt back until she could look at the chain. Her legs were bare and she was wearing a denim skirt. He’d changed her clothes again, and he’d taken her pants and stretchy shorts this time. She was wearing white cotton briefs, and knowing he’d looked at her naked made her gag.

Wasn’t going to. Wasn’t going to waste that banana. Closed her eyes, swallowed, closed her mouth and breathed, in and out through her nose, in and out, in and out, refusing to let herself think of what else he’d done.

Knew she’d peed her pants. Maybe she’d done worse than pee, and if he’d done worse than change her pants, she had to be grateful that he hadn’t drowned her when he’d had the chance. Didn’t know why he hadn’t, only that he had to be seriously mad.

The chain was rusty. It had a ring fixed to its end and he’d cut a piece of what looked like ancient dog collar he’d put through the ring, then put a padlock through holes he’d made in both ends of the dog collar, only a small padlock, half as long as her thumb. She’d been like a hamster in the cage. She was tied up like a dog out here.

He had a ton of stuff on the table. The chain wasn’t long enough to reach it. He had a long curly metal rod thing leaning against the brick chimney, near where his feet were propped. If she’d seen that the night she’d fought him, she would have got away.

Everything was out of reach of that chain he’d fixed to the bottom of the corner wall with two screws. They were hidden by her mattress now, but before the mattress she’d seen two screws he’d put through two separate links of the chain.

If there was a better and a worse, being chained up and warm and eating a banana was better than being in his cage eating beans, or it was now that the tape was off her mouth and her hands were free. She could see things, hear everything, mainly birds.

She wasn’t in the city. Knew that now. There were bird sounds at home, but their calls had always been muffled by the background noise of traffic.

She was so close to him she could see everything, like he needed a shave and a haircut. He had grey hair, mostly grey. He was older than her father, but not old. He wasn’t big, wasn’t fat, wasn’t skinny. He looked normal.

She shouldn’t have been able to look at him. Should have been too scared to. She didn’t feel scared. She’d thought she was dead when she’d been frozen solid in this corner, but she was alive and warm. Maybe the cold had killed off the part of her brain that produced fear hormones – or it had swapped jobs and started making survival hormones – or she had that syndrome people who were kidnapped developed, a sort of dependence on their kidnappers, an acceptance – Stockholm Syndrome, that’s what it was called. He’d given her milk, water, a banana, a warm sweater, a bed…

She’d kill him if she got half a chance.

She’d had one chance and blown it. Hadn’t expected his house to be empty. Hadn’t expected windows that wouldn’t open or to find nothing in the house to break them with. In here, there were plenty of weapons. She hadn’t seen in here, not when he’d carried her through to the bathroom.

And her head was hurting now. She worked out why. She was sitting on her hair. In the cage she used to be able to comb it with her fingers and plait it, tuck the plait down the neck of her tracksuit. Maybe later. She gathered it into a bunch, twisted it and pushed the twist down the neck of the sweater, then sat, looking at his twitching wrist hanging down at the side of the wicker chair.

Didn’t know why she’d grabbed his wrist that night. If she hadn’t, she wouldn’t have seen where that grey comet of light came from, and if she hadn’t seen that it was a hole, she wouldn’t have dropped the padlock into it and she’d still be in the cage. Didn’t know how she’d found that lump of something that shouldn’t have been in baked beans. Maybe Nan Lane was up there, keeping an eye on things and sending her subliminal messages.

She’d started eating those beans. She must have scooped up two or three mouthfuls before she’d felt a powdery lump in her mouth, and known what he’d been planning. She’d scraped the rest of the beans into her toilet bucket, which he might have found if he’d ever emptied it.

Should have attacked him with that padlock when he’d been lifting her out of the cage. Hadn’t found out where he’d put it until he’d tried to push her back in. He’d never get her back in to it. He’d have to take the chain off first, and if he did, she’d get his scissors, or his boiling kettle, or that curly rod thing, or his lantern, anything, everything. Had to get herself strong enough first. Had to crawl to him until she was strong enough.

He had keys on a hook between the window and the door, a whole bunch of them. One would be for the dog chain padlock. If he came close enough when he had those keys in his hand, or in his pocket, if he put his head down low enough, once her bones weren’t so stiff and aching, she could use her chained foot to loop the chain around and around his throat. It wasn’t long enough to do it with her hands, but if she caught him off guard, her foot might do it.

She was measuring how much chain she had when he moved. Slid down then, pulled the quilt high and watched him through near-closed eyes.

He opened the firebox and packed it in with that curly rod thing. It was long, and looked heavy. Watched him push wood into it then walk to the door and open it.

She saw earth, a tree trunk and green, and glaring sunlight before he dragged the door shut behind him and the outside world was gone.

Heard him out there and not caring whether he could hear her or not, she tugged on the chain, dragged it to the right, jerked it up. The screws didn’t move.

Every sound seemed amplified now. She could hear water splashing, hear the creaking of the old joints of his house.

In Sydney, when Grandpa’s house had creaked, he used to say, ‘The old girl’s arthritis is playing up today.’ His house had been full of furniture. This one was almost empty. It had the same brown roller blinds as Grandpa’s, but his had spent their days rolled up behind curtains. No curtains here, and the blind over the sink was down.

And he was coming.

His door scraped when it opened. He was carrying a bucket she didn’t recognise as her cage bucket, but it must have been the same one. It had a lid. He put it beside the table leg, where her chain would probably allow her to reach it at a stretch, then he turned around and went outside again.

That bucket was white and it had three yellow ducks on it. In the dark she hadn’t seen its colour or the yellow ducks.

And he was back, and this time he propped the screen door open with a wheelbarrow. She didn’t look at him or at what was in his barrow. She looked over him, at the world she couldn’t get to.

He carried in a laptop computer and made space for it on the table, carried in two loaded supermarket bags, wood, ice too, then he went outside and came back with an office chair, then a big suitcase that looked heavy.

T
hey’d crept down the driveway not long before midnight and had been in bed five minutes later, and when Marni’s head hit her own pillow, it knew it. That was all she knew about coming home.

Her mother was washing out the inside of the fridge when Marni wandered out at ten, too late to go to school, and because their fridge was empty, they caught a tram to the Kmart Plaza, then paid a taxi to carry their shopping home.

They were unloading supermarket bags onto the nature strip when Marni saw the
For Sale
sign to the left of Mrs Vaughn’s letterbox.

It hadn’t been there last night, or this morning when they’d walked away, or if it had been, they hadn’t seen it. There were photographs of two rooms, and below them it said:
Renovators opportunity, four bedrooms, large lounge/dining room …

‘He putting her in a home.’

They hadn’t seen her. They’d knocked on her door before they’d gone out. She hadn’t opened her door, so they’d decided not to disturb her.

Self-contained bungalow
, Marni read. There was no photograph of their granny flat, which wasn’t worth photographing, but nor were most of Mrs Vaughn’s rooms – though the two they had photographed looked better than they did in reality. Maybe they’d airbrushed them.

Sarah emptied the overflowing letterbox. She found two snail-nibbled bills in with the junk mail, both addressed to Mrs Vaughn. She dropped the phone bill into her handbag, black, small, bought new for their holiday, then picked up four of the heaviest supermarket bags and left the rest for Marni.

No rap on the corner window as the junk mail was redelivered to the green bin. The Hyundai was parked in its usual space.

They packed their poor little fridge, stuffed their cupboards, filled the box where they stored potatoes and onions, fixed the phone bill to the fridge door with two magnets, and with everything in its own space except the cigarettes and Mrs Vaughn’s bill, Marni knocked at the old lady’s back door, though no longer expecting it to open. It didn’t.

Every item of clothing they’d taken with them needed washing. Their
self-contained bungalow
had never stretched to supplying laundry facilities, and the house for sale or not, their rent was paid and they needed the washing machine. Since the week Marni had to climb in through the bathroom window, she’d known where to find an emergency key to the front door, so she ran around and got it and unlocked that door, and if Raymond didn’t like it, she didn’t care because she didn’t like him.

The house looked weird without Mrs Vaughn in it. The chair near that corner window looked lost. And the bedroom was different. Someone had swapped Mrs Vaughn’s old blankets and bedcover for a quilt and new pillows.

The laundry was as they’d left it. Marni opened the back door, and Sarah brought in their load of washing.

It was agitating, before Marni placed their landline phone on the charger and noticed a message flashing, only one.

‘It’s Raymond, Mum. He says the house is being auctioned and we’ve got thirty days to vacate the premises.’

‘What?’

‘Wait.’ Marni replayed the message, this time listening to every word. He didn’t mention his mother. ‘It’s Raymond Vaughn,’ she said. ‘He says that we’ve got thirty days to find another place to live – and he left that message five days ago, so now we’ve got only twenty-five days.’

‘Check email,’ Sarah said.

Their new computer, a fast and furious beast, spat out seven messages, two from Raymond Vaughn.

He hadn’t put his mother into a nursing home. She’d died in her bed. His second email was a repeat of his phone message. Mrs Carter was required to vacate the premises in thirty days – now twenty-five.

‘He probably poisoned her. She was like she always was when we left – and when I phoned her, she was worse than she always was.’

‘She taking heart pills a long time,’ Sarah said.

‘Can we buy a house in twenty-five days?’

Sarah shook her head.

Mrs Vaughn’s death cancelled the last of their holiday, and it was impossible to imagine that old lady being gone. They could smell her in the house, and when they emptied their first load of laundry into her tumble dryer, they almost expected her to walk through that door yelling about them wasting electricity. The dryer drank electricity like a camel drank water.

‘It smells like she’s still here,’ Marni said. The walls had absorbed too much nicotine in their fifty years of life. They were stained by it, her ceilings too.

Her ashtray had gone from the coffee table beside her chair. It used to overflow, spill butts and ash. Every door was a dirty brownish beige, as was the carpet.

A renovator’s opportunity
? There wasn’t much else a real estate agent could say about that house.

They locked the front door and hid that key beneath a terracotta pot that in Marni’s lifetime had never held a living plant, but like the two rusting iron chairs no one sat on, it had retained its space on the old lady’s front porch.

*

Marni went back to school. Sarah went back to her driving lessons. She’d paid in advance for ten, and had to get them done before 24 April.

She drove freeways, drove the route she might be asked to drive when she went for her test, then on Friday, she ended her lesson in the Forest Hill car park, aware that she needed to do something about moving some of that money, which couldn’t be as embarrassing as attempting to claim Jillian Jones’s fifteen dollars.

A woman greeted her at the Commonwealth Bank. Sarah showed her hearing aids and told her that she wanted to get two bank cheques and invest some money. The woman offered her a printout of interest rates, explained that the amount of interest was dependent on the amount invested. She didn’t want Sarah’s card but told her to take a seat.

Six chairs in a row, three of them in use. Sarah made it four, and there she sat for twenty minutes before an Asian male invited her into a small office. She showed him her hearing aids, then began back at the beginning.

And he couldn’t understand a word she said and she couldn’t understand him.

She took her notepad and biro from her bag.
I want to invest five hundred thousand for one year. You advertise 4.5 per cent interest.