Blood Ties (61 page)

I was instantly defensive, shrinking back. “I didn’t know that. You’ve kind of left me feeling that you don’t like me much and –”

“I’m sorry if I gave you that impression, because I do like you,” he said, butting in quietly. “I’m looking forward to working with you. I think we’ll make a great team.” He smiled. “When we sort out a few teething problems, like your allergy to paperwork. And your inability to not have something calamitous happening to you every five minutes.”

I smiled faintly in response. It
had
been a hell of a first week for us. But his comment that we’d be a good team was the right thing to say, and gave me more confidence to continue. I inhaled another huge breath of fresh air. “In that carpark today, I regretted that I hadn’t got to know you better and that I’d been so reluctant to share information about myself with you,” I told him, so honest that it was verging on the point of physical pain for me. “So, in the interests of advancing our partnership, I’m going to share something with you that’s very personal and very private. I haven’t shown many people before. Just Dad, Nana Fuller, Fiona and her husband, my best friend Marianne, Abe and . . . and someone else.”

“Not Jake?”

I paused for a moment, before deciding to be completely honest. “No, not Jake. He’s not good with negative things. This would really freak him out. And he’s a Bycraft, so I never would show him anyway.” I pushed it closer to him. “I’m hoping that perhaps it might help you understand me and Little Town better. At the least you’ll appreciate why I always carry my knife with me.”

He didn’t take it, so I picked up the book and handed it to him, a desperately vulnerable sensation in my stomach as I did. I wanted to throw up, my usual response to every stressful situation in my life. Although he had no way of knowing, once before I’d let a man get close enough to me to view this book. He had ultimately proven himself unworthy of my trust and I was so afraid of repeating that experience that I almost snatched the book away from the Sarge before he even had the chance to touch it.

“Tess? What is it?” he asked, taking it from me carefully, eyes glued to mine.

“It’s my scrapbook. It’s a whole history of the Fuller-Bycraft situation right back to beginnings of Little Town. It’s mostly newspaper clippings, but there are crime scene photos, police and autopsy reports and court transcripts in there as well. Any information I could gather, really. There’s a lot of material about my mother.” And my mind flashed to that awful photo of her huddled against the back door in a pool of her own blood, a broken knife sticking out of her back, the image that haunted me in my sleep. “And Nana Fuller. And Abe’s wife, Marcelle. But lots of other stuff as well. Some of it’s about me.”

He placed it gently on the coffee table and opened it up. I jabbed my finger on the first clipping, a printout of a scanned version of the
Wattling Bay Messenger
from 1888.

“I think this is where it all started – with the murder of my ancestor Elizabeth Fuller by Ned Bycraft. If you read it, Ned’s brother is threatening a ‘reckoning’ on the Fuller family. Now, I’ve thought about this a lot and I think that the Bycrafts are still carrying out that reckoning, all these years later. Except they don’t know anymore why they hate the Fullers. It’s just something that’s ingrained in them from generation to generation. I tested Jakey one day and he knew nothing about any of his ancestors except for Mountain Ted, the bushranger, and he wasn’t interested in knowing about them either. The Bycrafts are simply not the type of people to be interested in the past, but it has a strong hold on them anyway.”

He kept his eyes on me the whole time I spoke, but I thought I could see a hint of uneasiness in them.

I shut up and let him casually flip through my scrapbook for five minutes, as the voice of another female singer who I didn’t recognise, filled the room with beautiful melodies and her rich sultry voice. He read a few items as he turned the pages, glancing at some of the stomach-churning photos, his face growing increasingly grim.

“Tess,” he said finally, stunned and appalled, closing the book with a decisive snap. He glanced up at me with an expression that was indescribable – a mix of pity, revulsion, distress and . . . even more pity? “Are you sure that this is a . . . er . . . um . . .
healthy
thing for you to do?”

I stared at my shoes in misery, trying to swallow the knot that had formed in my throat, not able to meet his eyes. I’d made a huge mistake giving it to him. Now he thought I was some kind of whacko. Well, even more of a whacko than he’d originally thought I was. And he was probably right. “I don’t know. Maybe not. I haven’t ever really thought about it, but it’s never felt . . . crazy . . . to me to be doing it.”

I gave a humourless laugh, giving him the full blast of my eyes. “I feel compelled to compile this morbid family history, I guess. I’ve discovered that all I want in life is the truth. I don’t want lies or platitudes, just the cold unvarnished truth, no matter how unpalatable, and that’s what this is. It’s very confronting and overwhelming to see it all assembled, isn’t it? Maybe it will be useful to someone one day. Maybe someone will write a book about it, or do a research study on the Bycrafts. Especially if something happens to me, because I’m the last of the Fullers. And I want someone to study them, because they’re nowhere near to being a normal family. I need someone to figure them out.”

I stalked around his lounge room, agitated, biting the nail on my right thumb. I’d already chewed all my other nails down to nothing waiting at the courthouse this afternoon. “I want other people to know that they’re not normal. It’s not
me
, it’s
them
! I don’t deserve what happens to me. None of the Fuller women have ever deserved what’s happened to us.”

“Tess, stop!” he demanded in a parade-ground voice. “You’re sounding completely . . .” He petered off tactfully, but I knew what his next word was going to be.
Crazy
. I hated that word because it cut too close to the truth.

But I halted instinctively at the sound of his voice and threw my eyes to him, remorseful again. I’d probably just scared him away from Little Town. The second I left his house tonight he’d be packing his belongings and fleeing in his cute little car all the way back to the city without even a restroom stopover, begging to be relieved of his nightmare country position and his creepy, ill-fated partner. I couldn’t blame him. What normal, sane person wouldn’t do the same?

“I’ll leave,” I decided, upset and angry with myself, on the verge of tears. I’d ruined the evening. As usual. I was hopeless at this sort of social stuff. I leaned down to pick up my scrapbook.

“No!” he insisted with heart-warming quickness, logging my suspiciously shiny eyes. He slammed his left hand down on the cover of the scrapbook to stop me taking it. “Come and sit down again.” He patted the lounge near him. I sat down. He stood up, took my scrapbook away to his office, quietly shut the door, poured me another glass of wine and turned up the soothing music. He sat next to me on the beautiful leather lounge and with one knee crossed over the other and his arm stretched out towards me on the backrest, head to one side, said, “So, we were talking movie characters. Who do you prefer – James Bond or Jason Bourne? And you know, I never realised before that they had the same initials. Do you think that’s deliberate?”

I stared at him in gratitude. I could have hugged him at that moment, but of course I refrained. It didn’t mean that he wouldn’t decamp during the night, but right now he was treating me like an ordinary person and not many people ever did that. I would never forget that little act of kindness from him no matter what happened between us.

In the middle of my long-winded explanation of why I far preferred Jason Bourne, my phone rang. I answered, listened and spoke briefly before hanging up.

“Sorry to break the mood, Sarge.”

“Tess, I told you not to call me Sarge when we’re not working,” he reminded me with more than a hint of irritation in his voice.

“Sorry Sarge, but we are now working again. I’ve just been informed of a head-on crash on the highway to the south of town. It’s a nasty one – a semi-trailer and two cars with probable fatalities. We better get going. They’ll need all the help they can get. It will take ages for the paramedics and Fire and Rescue from Big Town to get here.”

He stood up and sighed, pocketing his mobile and starting to close the windows. “We better rock and roll then, partner.”

“Sure thing, partner,” I smiled up at him as we headed to the patrol car together. As I buckled up and glanced over at his strong, reassuring profile, I sighed quietly to myself with relief. He wouldn’t be leaving Little Town tonight at least.

Epilogue

Miss G was reunited with her suitcase of money. She told me candidly that her mother had not only been a hoarder but a stingy miser as well, desperate to keep money away from her philandering husband. So hearing about the stash of money wasn’t the great surprise we’d expected it to be for her. She promptly and generously halved the fortune with Valmae and Gerry Kilroy, appreciating their honesty in handing it over and claiming with wry humour that she didn’t need that much money at her time of life. Later, as I examined my bank balance with glum despair, I’d fleetingly wished she’d sent some of it my way too.

Stanley Murchison was currently wrangling with the government on her behalf for some compensation for her losses, arguing that the government bought her fraudulently sold land without undertaking proper due diligence. It promised to be a long, drawn-out legal battle though. And who knew if either of them would even live long enough to see it through to the end?

Unsurprisingly, the sale of the land on Mountain Road to the Defence Department fell through. But the government instead expressed immediate interest in buying the land next to the Kilroys (the land where the suitcase of money was found) for some kind of highly classified laboratory. I sincerely hope that it’s not going to be for genetic experiments though. I don’t want Little Town to turn into a place overrun by super-mutant Bycrafts, like the X-Men.

I couldn’t understand why the Sarge laughed for ages when I shared that thought with him. I was serious.

~~~~~~

Graham Mundy was found guilty of three counts of stealing with intent, one count of breaking and entering and one count of serious assault of a police officer (Pinky didn’t bother pursuing the coffee scalding incident). He was sentenced to sixteen years imprisonment all up.

During the trial Graham wept copiously, looking about as dangerous as a soft fluffy toy in the defendant’s seat, or so said Fiona. That made me almost feel sorry for him, but I quickly changed my mind when she went on to tell me how he had stubbornly refused to confess how much of the ill-gotten cash from the sales remained and where he’d stashed it, accusing the judge loudly of violating his human rights. I think that tirade earned him an extra year in prison from the livid, stone-faced judge, who was well known for her high profile and very vocal support of Amnesty International. When the trial was finished, Mr Murchison took Miss G, the Sarge and me out to lunch at one of Big Town’s nicest restaurants where the four of us complained through four courses of gourmet bliss about the lightness of Graham’s sentence. Well, they did. I was too busy stuffing my face with the expensive, delicious food to speak much at all. Heaven!

~~~~~~

Dorrie Lebutt was given a one year sentence for reckless driving occasioning bodily harm. It was wholly converted into a two year good behaviour bond because of her small children and the fact that she was pregnant again with Rick Bycraft’s baby (or maybe it was Mark’s?). Her attitude towards me hasn’t changed one little bit when we cross paths in town. I hadn’t expected it to.

~~~~~~

Karl, Al and Grae Bycraft were each found guilty of serious assault of a police officer and escape from lawful custody and sentenced to two seven-year terms of imprisonment, to be served concurrently. I was glad to see the back of them even if it was just for seven years. Three Bycrafts, including Lola, were arrested for public disorder at their sentencing hearing. On my day off, I drove all the way to Big Town to the watch house where Lola was sitting in a holding cell going crazy without cigarettes. Just to annoy her, I walked back and forth in front of her cell, asking her if she wanted a smoko. She called me names that I’d never even heard before and then tried repeatedly to spit on me. That behaviour drew the full, frightening wrath of Daisy down on her. It was a great afternoon. I wished I’d brought a camera.

~~~~~~

My whole team managed to complete the fun run, although disappointingly but understandably, I did a time that was far from my personal best. It was wonderful to have Jake cheering me on as I staggered, stiff-legged still, the last few hundred metres over the finishing line, straight into his arms. He picked me up and swung me around and around in celebration, making me squeal with laughter even though I was limp with exhaustion and dripping with sweat. I was the envy of every woman in a fifty metre radius.

We all had a great weekend in the city. That Saturday lunchtime, after the fun run, when I’d showered and changed, Jake and I had lunch with my best friend, Marianne, and her lovely husband and three cute kids. That always had the potential to be a little awkward because as a teenager, Marianne had slept with Jake a number of times. But if I had refused to remain friends with any of my schoolmates who had slept with Jake, I would have been very lonely indeed.