The Silent Inheritance (44 page)

They passed him again at Canterbury Road where he was in a long queue, waiting to make a right-hand turn. Marni waved to him, and wondered if the kids in the back of his posh van were his hostages. He and his van looked evil.

They missed the green arrow at Hawthorn Road and Sarah spoke again. ‘After her husband die, she is going to sell her house when it is finished, but her daughter buy that dog, and say, “Get on with your dream”.’

‘I like her daughter,’ Marni said, and the lights changed.

They made their turn, and five minutes later were home, still alive, but exhausted by their day. They ate fried cheese sandwiches with a mug of tomato soup, and Marni said, ‘If Mrs Vaughn was still alive, we’d be cooking her dinner. If you had a husband, I suppose it would be the same, wouldn’t it, like every night, peeling potatoes, heating stew, then washing his clothes on Sunday.’

Their rooms were cold tonight. They had a gas heater in Mrs Vaughn’s house – in their house. The utilities had been transferred to Sarah’s name. They could have taken their soup and sandwich in there and been warm.

‘When are we moving, Mum?’

‘After carpet, curtains.’

They had little to move, only the microwave and television, their magic frying pan and clothing. Their laptop couldn’t move, or not until they had a new lead for their broadband connection.

‘Turn these rooms into our study. Get a desk and chair.’

‘Maybe get a man to pull it down then grow things.’

The news was on. Kevin Rudd was on it again. He’d been Australia’s Prime Minister until his parliament friends got rid of him – except they hadn’t. He was always on the news, and Julia, or Tony.

It was like the television ran the county, not the government, like each channel decided who they wanted to be Prime Minister and pushed their choice every chance they got, so the voters would think it was no use voting any other way.

None of the channels mentioned Danni, or the reward. That was old news. They’d be interested again when they found her.

A football player was having scans on his leg – was that headline news? Maybe to some people. Football was important in Melbourne.

Dave and Pop liked it. Marni would miss coming home to them when they were finished.

The floor-covering people would be here next week to rip up the last of Mrs Vaughn, to roll her up in her old carpet and vinyl and replace it with new. The drapes would be delivered and hung before the school holidays. Sarah was taking the last week of the holidays off to organise Marni’s birthday party.

They’d argued about the date. Sarah wanted to have it on Sunday the fourteenth, at lunchtime. Marni wanted it on Saturday night, on the thirteenth, which was a perfect date for a thirteenth birthday party.

‘How many you want to invite?’

‘Heaps.’

‘Not heaps, Marni.’

‘We’ll get a caterer.’

‘What?’

‘A caterer, to make and serve the food.’

‘No.’

‘If we can spend six hundred and eighty dollars on a painting, we can spend the same on a caterer.’

‘We got very good oven in there. We will make finger food, like Bob’s mother’s party,’ Sarah said.

‘I’m inviting our policeman.’

‘You embarrass him.’

‘He doesn’t have to come. I’m inviting Pop and Dave too, and Dave’s wife, and you’re inviting Bob and his mother and some of the people from your work.’

‘Maybe.’

‘If you don’t, I’ll ask Bob to invite all of them.’

‘T
he fish and chip shop must be close,’ she said when he tossed her the paper-wrapped parcel. It was conveniently close. He’d be forced further afield tomorrow. His computer needed charging. It took time, but the power adaptor worked. He’d need more duct tape soon, more firewood.

He’d forgotten the constant demand of a wood stove. Each day it forced him into action. Cut a barrow load in the morning and by nightfall that stove had turned it to ash. He had to keep it burning. Without its warmth, the house was uninhabitable.

Two weeks ago, he’d killed two birds with one stone, had hired a trailer, charged up his computer and bought two trailer loads of split firewood – and burnt most of it. Tonight he was considering using the house as firewood. He had twenty litres of petrol in the shed, purchased for the great escape he hadn’t made. He had half a dozen bottles of kerosene and the cans of aerosol paint he hadn’t used on the Kingswood. He’d got rid of the Hyundai.

Sat watching her pull that slab of battered fish apart with her hands before she bit into it. Watched her stuff chips, two at a time into her mouth. She’d made his eighty-three days and then some, which was all he’d asked of the first of them. He would have released the Chinaman’s daughter had she lived for eighty-three days. He couldn’t release this one.

The flesh below and above her ankle collar was raw. If he didn’t get that collar off soon, her foot would fall off, and he smiled, visualising her escape on the stump. She’d do it.

He’d bought a replacement padlock. In Bunnings it had looked big enough. It wouldn’t lock around both bars. He could have crawled beneath the house and located the old padlock. Built on a slope there was a good metre of space beneath the house at the front. Could have. Hadn’t. He’d grown accustomed to seeing her sitting there, accustomed to watching her.

Watched her search the paper for one last chip, and when she found no more, she started eating the segment of lemon supplied by the fish and chip shop – and ate the lot, flesh, pith and rind, and when it was gone, for his own amusement, he threw his own squeezed portion of lemon at her. It hit the wall behind her and landed on her bedding. She found it, wiped it on the fish and chip paper, then ate it while he marvelled again at the breed of this fragile being with its steel-reinforced spine.

‘What’s the date today?’ she asked.

He no longer knew Monday from Friday, had stopped counting the days after she’d made her eighty-three. Each day was the same, the stove, the axe, the computer, a meal, and his hard bed and soft bottle.

Watched her fold the fish and chip paper, place it under her mattress.

‘Did the police find your other house? Are they watching it?’

He had no other house.

‘You used to go home,’ she said.

If he ignored her, she shut up.

‘How far are we into June?’

June was winter. Winters on this land were cold. He liked the green of springs, the scent of spring. Had chased a blue butterfly one fine spring day, praying to God to make it get tired and settle low so he could get it, and God had answered his prayer. It had settled and he’d captured it in a homemade butterfly net.

The elation, the ecstasy of holding perfection cupped between his sweaty palms. He’d caught a rare and beautiful thing, and all the way home he’d felt the flutter of its wings in the cup of his hands.

Opened them in this kitchen to show off his prize. Found tattered wings, their blue and silver shed to his palms.

‘Perfection is only for those free to fly,’ he said. It was a mistake to speak to her, but he’d made a lot of mistakes with this one, so what was one more?

He’d made a mistake in taking the second of them. He hadn’t meant to. He’d got away with what he’d done to the Chinaman’s daughter. Should have quit while he was ahead, but he’d seen her walking in the sun and she’d been Angie, the hair, the legs, even the walk, and because she wasn’t Angie, he’d wanted to punish her for being alive to walk in the sun while Angie rotted in her grave.

Hadn’t spoken to that one. She hadn’t lived long enough.

The last of them had cursed him to the final day. She would have lived longer had he not seen this one, near the carousel. He’d known that day that he’d have her.

Wind howling out there tonight, rattling the sealed windows, lantern flame flickering, playing shadows on the walls. Little of its light reached the corner. If he looked at her through slitted eyes, if he saw only the pink and white of her, she was his Angie.

Her Yankee accent killed the image.

‘We had a basement in Kentucky we used to go down to during bad storms. We used to live with my grandparents on a horse ranch. They died when their plane crashed into a mountain.’

‘Once upon a time,’ he said. ‘Once upon a time in this windswept kingdom there lived a holy hog wed to a lapdog. Imagine the progeny of such a union.’

‘Pigs don’t breed with dogs,’ she said.

‘They bred mutations. Pigs who yapped like dogs, dogs who squealed like pigs, and one born with the heart of a wolf.’

‘What happened to him?’

He stood and opened the door. ‘He caught rabies and they shot him,’ he said, and stepped out to the howling wind to slip and slide on greasy clay to the shed.

He kept a torch on the bench, and by the light of its beam he found the row of red plastic containers, his great escape petrol, his final solution petrol. Tonight would be a fine night for a fire. It would add its roar to the winds. No need for a grave or the stale words of the resurrection.

WRONG WAY. GO BACK.

If they’d only locked that brainless bastard up.

WRONG WAY. GO BACK.

They’d suspended his licence and sent him home to the loving arms of his wife and daughter.

‘You bastard,’ he howled to the wind.

He’d driven out here the day he’d buried Angie. Her mother had collapsed and been carted away in an ambulance before the hearse had carried Angie to her grave. He’d followed the hearse, not the ambulance, and after the earth had taken her, he’d driven out here and climbed that hill to howl out his pain where no one would hear him.

Satan had. He’d sent him down that hill with vengeance in his heart, and he’d found relief in vengeance.

It had taken time to find the Chinaman and his daughter, but he’d got her, and for a week, he’d read every newspaper. Then she’d sickened and he’d become afraid of what he’d done. He’d dosed her from a bottle with Angie’s name on it, then came out here the next night to dose her again and hadn’t been able to rouse her.

Tried to clean her up to take her home and she’d slid down in the bathwater and drowned while he’d been searching for soap.

It had come to him while he’d been dressing her in one of Angie’s outfits, how Angie had never got to ride in the Kingswood. The Chinaman’s daughter had. He’d tossed her out on the freeway where that brainless bastard had caused the pile-up.

She’d been found at daylight, and all day he’d waited, expecting the police to put two and two together and come knocking on his door. He’d wanted them to come, had wanted his day in court.

They hadn’t put two and two together. Given time the media had forgotten little Nancy Yang and the wolf had gone to ground, but as with the swallowing of a handful of pills, once the effect wears off, the pain returns, and is stronger.

T
heir painting was titled
Solitude.
Sylvia Moon had written it on her receipt, with the six hundred and eighty dollars. They hadn’t seen its title until Sarah found the receipt in her handbag and put it into the cake tin with the others. There was plenty of space in there for receipts. They’d bought an album for the photographs.

They hung
Solitude
over Mrs Vaughn’s mantelpiece, and to Marni, it looked better than a few of the paintings she’d seen hanging at the National Gallery. Maybe it would hang there one day when Sylvia Moon was dead. Most artists hadn’t been heard of until they’d been dead for a few hundred years and now their paintings were worth millions.

Solitude
looked even better once the new carpet was down and their black lounge was delivered. Then they found their dining room suite on eBay. It had a gorgeous timber table they could extend for the party and six tapestry-upholstered chairs. When it was delivered, it didn’t fade
Solitude
but did steal the eye’s attention away from it.

The curtain man faded it, or the colour they’d chosen for the lounge/dining room drapes did. They were a deep burnt orange, and they’d ordered a fancy pelmet. Mrs Vaughn’s corner window looked like a picture from a
Home Beautiful
magazine, and the drapes drew a tiny bit of burnt orange from the chairs’ upholstery. They were perfect together. The lounge suite was perfect, but together, they killed
Solitude.

‘We buying her bushfire,’ Sarah said.

‘We have to,’ Marni agreed, and they opened their cake tin and found the receipt and Marni phoned the number on it.

The artist didn’t know who Marni Carter was, or not until she mentioned
Solitude.
‘Mum is wondering if you’ve sold your big bushfire painting yet?’

She hadn’t, and would be pleased to hold it for them, however she would be away for most of the weekend.

‘I’ll be home by two on Sunday,’ she said.

They bought sheets, quilts and quilt covers, two big blue/green self-watering pots for their jade trees, and potting mix, and when those trees were in their new pots and on Mrs Vaughn’s front porch, they made it look proud enough to be called their patio. Pop called it their patio. He’d spent two days on his knees tiling it after Dave painted their wrought-iron railing.

Those men had done such a brilliant job and were so nice and their bills so cheap that when they were finished, Sarah put an extra five hundred dollars into two envelopes to give them, as a bonus, and when they wouldn’t take the money, Marni told them that her mother had won Powerball and that she liked giving money away.

‘But don’t tell anyone that we won because it’s our secret.’

The neighbours probably heard Pop. ‘Powerball? Fair dinkum, darlin’?’ he’d said. Dave pocketed his envelope then zipped his lips with finger and thumb, while Pop told a long loud story about a cousin who’d won a million a year or two back and went spending mad because she didn’t want to lose her pension.

Sunday was cold and windy but not wet, which was lucky, because Sarah had to test the car’s brakes at the first big roundabout near Eltham, when a van in front tested its own. They missed it by about two centimetres, but they missed it. They didn’t stop for a coffee, and were at the artist’s property before two. Her gate was open and her car was there, so they drove in and parked beside it.