The Silent Inheritance (45 page)

She talked while she bubble-wrapped their bushfire, and before Sarah wrote her cheque, Sylvia bubble-wrapped the pink and violet dawn, which would match Marni’s bedroom drapes perfectly.

Herod remembered them. Marni couldn’t go for a walk with him, but gave him a pat and a scratch, and because they looked so lonely when Sarah started the car, Marni wound her window down and invited them to her party.

‘It’s a combined housewarming and birthday party on the thirteenth of July at seven o’clock. Herod’s invited too. We’ve got a safe backyard and a lock and a
Beware of the dog
sign on our gate.’

They backed out then, left them standing in the drive, the artist in her psychedelic poncho which must have been warm because she lived in it, and Herod, standing with his head hanging low.

‘We buy paintings from her, the same as buying from shops. You don’t invite people from shops to your party.’

‘I bet that man from Harvey Norman wished I had. He was giving you the eye the whole time we were buying the fridge and stuff there.’

‘People stare at deaf people – and he is thinking I am retard who can’t pay for anything.’

‘You talk rubbish. Anyway, it’s different. Shop people don’t make what they sell. If I went to the trouble of painting something, I’d want to see where it ended up.’

Sarah didn’t turn the car towards home. She drove again past Gramp’s land, convinced since their last visit that Sylvia’s neighbour was one of Gramp’s sons. Whoever he was, he was expecting visitors. He’d left his gate open.

‘His name is Jack James, Mum.’

‘Writer using different names so they can be … anon … anonymous,’ Sarah said, and she drove onto Gramp’s land and up a steep drive that wasn’t paved or dry.

*

For one winter, she’d known it well. ‘Keep your wheels moving,’ Gramp had warned the first day she’d driven it wet. She kept them moving today until the land levelled out in front of the tin shed, where she parked, pulled on her handbrake and wound her window down so she could smell the winter scent of this land.

‘Smell is beautiful,’ she said. Always the scent of wet eucalyptus, and wood smoke on Gramp’s land.

Up here she could see smoke was gusting up from the kitchen chimney. No sign of the writer, but fresh tyre marks led towards – or away from – the old shed. ‘Maybe he is go out.’

‘He’ll come back and block you in and get stuck into you. He told me to get off his land, Mum.’

‘He tell the dog, not you. I don’t like big dogs,’ Sarah said, her feet now on Gramp’s land. Marni didn’t move, so Sarah walked around and opened her door.

‘I’m staying here, Mum, and when he comes out yelling, don’t expect me to save you.’

‘Invite him to your party. Tell him, bring Sylvia and her dog. Come on. He won’t understand me.’

‘Write him a note—’ Marni started, then she pushed the door wider and undid her seatbelt.

‘Thank you.’

‘Shush,’ she said. ‘I can hear someone screaming.’

And she was out and running, down the path that led to the back door, the way Sarah had wanted her to go. She locked the car and took the same path, unconcerned as to why Marni had changed her mind, or unconcerned until she saw the screen door open and Marni hammering on Gramp’s old back door.

‘Stop that!’ Sarah pulled her back by her hoodie.

‘Someone is being murdered in there. She’s screaming!’

Sarah could hear something. A siren, maybe, or alarm. Something.

The kitchen window was narrow, and well off the ground. There’d always been a gap between the drawn kitchen blind and the window frame – a rarely drawn blind when Sarah had lived here, and never drawn during daylight hours. Gramp’s kitchen had needed all the light it could get. Sarah was cupping her hands to that gap, attempting to see in, when Marni swung her out of harm’s way, before tossing a lump of firewood at the glass. Two panes cracked.

‘You gone mad!’

‘We’re coming,’ Marni yelled. ‘Help me, Mum. She knows we’re out here. She’s yelling to us now.’ She bashed out cracked glass with the lump of wood, then reached a hand through to tug at the blind.

It didn’t roll up. It fell to the sink.

And Sarah saw what Marni could hear, saw two fighters in the corner where Gramp’s radio had lived. A tangled nest of blonde hair and grey, a hand tangled within that tangle of hair; a mouth screaming, ‘Help me!’

‘Danni?’ Marni said. ‘Oh my God, Mum! It’s Danni!’

Firewood from the barrow their battering rams, they smashed glass, splintering the narrow strips of timber securing those six small panes. Like wreckers, like vandals, they bashed out shards of glass, then, using Sarah’s knee as a step, Marni scrambled through, kicked the roller blind out of her way and slid from the sink to the floor. Sarah followed her, Gramp’s old wheelbarrow lending her height enough to climb through.

Glass everywhere. A jeans-clad man face down on the floor, a pink-clad rider on his shoulders, one foot at his ear, her two hands gripping a single rein. Not a rein, a dog chain, and her mouth behind that tangle of hair screaming, ‘Kill him!’

Marni, armed with Gramp’s poker swung it with bloody hands, like a woodsman swinging an axe at a block of wood, but the grey man’s head was that block, and it kept moving as he bucked like a crazy horse at a rodeo, attempting to rid himself of his rider.

Some are born pacifists. They lose. Others are born to wage war. They win. Marni waged war with Gramp’s poker, and she got his head.

He turned his face then to Sarah and she saw the teeth behind a well-remembered grimace, saw his eyes. And when Marni’s weapon connected again, Sarah felt his pain as a spasm in her bowel. It washed the colour from the old brown kitchen, washed it white, like the colours of a spinning top washed white.

Head spinning, making the room spin, she grasped the glass-littered sink to stop her sliding into the spin.

He’d stopped bucking. Marni was on her knees, yelling words as she untangled his hand from Danni’s hair. Danni’s mouth was making words.

‘Keys. Chain.’

‘Look for keys, Mum. She’s chained up and it’s around his throat. Find his keys. There’s a padlock on it?’

He kept his keys in his pocket. Always, but Sarah couldn’t find the words to say so. Couldn’t make herself move. Stood like a rabbit caught in the headlights, unable to look away from him.

‘They’re hanging up, Mum. Look. Near the window.’

Gramp’s keys had always hung on a hook between the window and the door, where she’d hung them the last day she’d driven Gramp to the market. Saw them. Not Gramp’s, too many to be Gramp’s.

He was dead. Two years after she’d walked away from this place he’d been dead. No one had told her. Hadn’t known where she was to tell her. Got rid of her name, her pension, her bank account, hadn’t gone to a doctor for five years because she’d been scared to show Jillian Jones’s Medicare card number, scared that one day he’d find her.

Re-hab-il-it-a-shon
. Always knew that jail couldn’t rehabilitate him. Always knew he’d come out angrier than he’d gone in.

Marni got the keys. She’d taken charge.

‘My mobile. In the car. Get it, Mum!’

‘You bleeding,’ Sarah said.

‘Get my mobile. Phone triple zero,’ Marni demanded and Sarah looked away from him to the old key still in the door latch. Gramp had only ever removed that key when they’d had to lock Gran inside when they went to the market, shops, bank. Couldn’t take her out. Like Marni, she’d been born to wage war.

Like him. But today he was the one who was bleeding.

That old door had never wanted to open, not in wintertime. Easier in summer. Sarah’s hand remembered that lift, that drag. Her hand got her outside, where there was air, where there was space, where the land smelled of winter’s clean.

They’d had a church service for Danni, in Sydney. It had been on the news. Barbara Lane there, clinging to David Crow. Danni was alive and fighting the devil to stay alive, and they’d found her, found her because Uncle Fred had told them about Gramp’s will. Marni called him Hubert, their angel. He was Danni’s angel too.

That day at Forest Hill when she’d walked into him, today had already been written by the gods. Driving out here, finding Sylvia and her paintings, had been written. Every move she’d made since had been leading Sarah back … to the devil.

The mobile was in her hand. She didn’t know how to make a voice call. She touched the symbol for phone. It offered choices. She raised a keyboard, touched the zero three times, touched
call
. Didn’t know if she’d done it right, if it was ringing, if it wasn’t, and today she wanted to hear it. Today she wanted to hear the difference between a siren and Danni’s scream. Wanted to hear her voice screaming, ‘Kill him.’

The phone vibrating in her hand she ran back to the house to ears that could hear and she had to stand close to him so she could hold the phone to Marni’s ear.

He didn’t move.

‘We need the police. We found Danni Lane,’ Marni told the phone.

She should have said the Freeway Killer. Everyone knew about the Freeway Killer. People had forgotten Danni Lane.

He’d gone grey, like Gramp. His hand, palm up on the floor, had never been like Gramp’s. Long blonde hairs from Danni’s head were entwined between his fingers. He’d liked long hair.

Marni pulled the padlock clasp out of the collar, and when Danni’s foot was free, she didn’t get off him but snatched the padlock and looped it through a link of the chain she’d twisted around his neck. Fell off him then and crawled away, shaking, shuddering, like she was having a fit.

‘We need the police and an ambulance … I told you, I don’t know the address. It’s a farm at Kangaroo Ground. We’ve got Danni Lane and I’m bleeding everywhere,’ Marni yelled at the phone.

Sarah lifted Danni to her feet. She tried to make her sit on Gran’s wicker chair. She wouldn’t sit, and she said something.

‘She’s deaf. Talk to her face,’ Marni said.

‘Tie him up,’ Danni said.

‘He can’t … can’t hurt no one now.’

The last time Sarah had seen him when he couldn’t hurt anyone, she’d screamed ‘murderer’ in his face. Killed him that day, in her head. She’d made him be more dead then her mother, who had wasted her last breath of life defending him.

Not his fault, baby. He loves …

He loves … forever more unfinished, because it couldn’t be finished, because he’d loved no one. Sarah had worked that out when she was seven, when he’d picked her up and locked her into the boot of the red and white car because her mother wouldn’t get in when he’d said
Get in the car
. Remembered nine too, remembered him laughing at a backyard full of tears while little Uncle Bill lay on his back on the lawn, his nose bleeding.

Then eleven, when she’d grown into hating him, it had been a good fit.

‘I’m calling Ross,’ Marni said.

*

Danni had a roll of pink ribbon, a roll of duct tape, and Ross wasn’t picking up.

Then, ‘Who?’

‘It’s Marni. Danni’s alive, and we found her.’

‘Marni,’ he said.

It wasn’t what he said, but how he’d said it. ‘Say something, Mum. He doesn’t believe me.’

‘I am Sarah,’ she said. ‘We find Danni Lane … at Kangaroo Ground.’

‘It’s an old farm,’ Marni said. ‘Out past Eltham, in the bush. It’s got an old house on it and a big tin in-your-face garage, you can’t miss—’

‘Say 271 … in the map book,’ Sarah said.

‘The farm’s on map 271 in our street directory, oh, and there’s an artist called Sylvia Moon who lives like half a kilometre away.’

‘Moon,’ he repeated.

‘Moon, as in sky. Tell her we’re at the writer’s place. She’ll know where.’

‘You need to get out of there, Marni.’

‘He’s not going anywhere. Mum’s tying him up – and he’s probably dead anyway. He hasn’t moved.’

‘Stay on the line,’ Ross said. Marni turned the phone on to speaker and picked up the discarded duct tape and scissors.

The table was a treasure trove. He had food, a laptop that looked brand new, paper towels, tissues.

The side of her wrist was gashed deep and still dripping blood. If it had been at the front, it might have cut a vein. It wasn’t hurting, or hadn’t been until she helped herself to a bunch of tissues to use as a pad on it then reached for his paper towels to rip off half a metre, she folded it lengthwise to use as a bandage. Couldn’t do the duct tape with one hand so waited and watched Danni tie a bow.

At school, she’d envied Danni’s hair, and her mobile. She wasn’t like the same girl and seeing her like she was made Marni scared. Wanted Ross to come. Wanted an army of policemen.

‘Mum.’

Sarah came to use the last of his duct tape, to bind the paper towel bandage tight, and before she was done, Danni was gone up a passage. They went after her.

And Ross was back. ‘Are you there, Marni?’

‘Yes.’

‘Don’t hang up on me. We’ve got Sylvia Moon’s number.’

‘You’re on speaker. Please come fast.’

‘We’re on our way,’ Ross said. ‘Stay on the line. What is Danni’s condition?’

‘She’s walking.’

She was running a bath too, in what might have been a bathroom a hundred years ago. It had old metal taps like Mrs Vaughn’s garden taps, and a green bathtub with legs – but a modern bathplug, and one of those taps gushed steaming water.

‘You should wait,’ Marni said. She’d seen enough television police shows to know that investigators didn’t want their evidence washed down the drain. Danni didn’t hear her, or ignored her. She was stripping, and Sarah helping her to do it. They didn’t need words.

Marni kicked what they stripped off out the door, a pink sweater, a denim skirt, a pair of wrecked underpants, and, naked, Marni could see how not-all-right Danni was. She’d been skinny at school. Apart from her face, she was skin and bone and had hip bones that looked sharp enough to cut with, and her ankle where the dog collar had been was red raw and oozing pus.

‘Soap,’ Sarah said.

There was soap beside a candle on the windowsill and salt on the table, and Dettol. Shampoo too. Sarah used it to wash Danni’s matt of hair. She washed her neck, her back with her hands, and maybe her hands or the hot water slowed Danni’s shaking. She sat there, being washed like a baby, like she was mesmerised by being cared for.