Moonlight Downs (13 page)

She rubbed my knee, put an arm around my shoulder. ‘If only you hadn’t stayed away so long, Em, maybe it wouldn’t have been so difficult. Why didn’t you come back earlier?’

‘Lots of reasons, Haze. I was afraid, for one. And I suppose I wanted to see the world, break out of the shithole in which I imagined I’d been raised. Same as most kids.’

Hazel snorted. ‘Most kids don’t have to kick the door down to get out of the house. Emily Tempest…who ever knew what to make of you?’ She grinned, shook her head. ‘Tempest? Christ, you was a little bloody cyclone, with your mouth full of questions and your fists full of answers, your spinifex kisses and your wild white ways.’

She rose to her feet, slapped me across the shoulder. ‘Come on, you crazy bugger, we’re not gonna sort anythin out sittin here. Let’s head back in; they’ll be wondering where we got to. Go now and we’ll be home for breakfast.’

Investigations

TWENTY MINUTES later we were cruising along the track, Ry Cooder ripping into ‘Get Rhythm’ on the tape deck, Hazel tapping time and grinning like a wet gecko.

‘Nice music,’ she said.

‘Great riff,’ I agreed. ‘I’ll try to get back out in a few days.’

‘You gotta go back in to Bluebush right away?’

‘I’m supposed to be at work this arvo. Better go, unless you got enough money to keep me in the style to which I’m accustomed.’

‘I got a couple o’ bucks.’

‘That’s about the style I’m accustomed to.’

‘But Jangala got a nine hundred dollar book-up at the store.’

‘Nine hundred bucks? Shit! We’re in the red. How’d they let him get that high?’

‘His friendly smile?’

‘His cunning-as-a-one-eyed-camel smile. Remember the time he managed to con those tourists into towing him all the way to Katherine?’

‘Plenty o’ people get towed round here.’

‘Yeah, but usually in a car that’s broken down. That one didn’t even have a motor.’

‘Oh, that time.’

We drove on for a while, then I said, ‘I’ll only stay in Bluebush long enough to get a bit of a stash together, then come and spend some time out here.’

She put a hand on mine. ‘Long as you don’t wreck the place.’

‘I’ll probably be more trouble than I’m worth, but I’d like to help get the community going again.’

‘Wouldn’t we all?’

When we reached the camp none of the others seemed particularly concerned about us: evidently they were used to Hazel and her wandering ways. She pottered around with her horse gear for a while, played a game of scratch-basketball with the kids, then began to gather together the wherewithal for a meal.

‘You got time for a feed?’ she asked.

‘Sure. Don’t have to be at work until five.’

I wasn’t planning to go in straightaway anyway. I wanted to make a closer inspection of the patch of mulga in which Lincoln had been murdered, and Hazel’s preoccupation with the meal gave me the chance.

I’d been reluctant to visit the site in her company. Death in any form brings up a vast array of taboos among the Warlpuju; the death of a loved one magnifies those taboos enormously.

So while Hazel pounded a damper and cooked up a stew I went over and stood on the edge of the scrub. The crime scene had been accorded the full extent of the detailed scrutiny warranted by yet another dead blackfeller: roughly zip. Whatever perfunctory investigations the cops had been carrying out had been disrupted by the appearance, and dramatic disappearance, of the prime suspect.

I got onto my hands and knees and wondered if I could do any better.

Nope, I decided a few minutes later. I can’t.

I don’t know what I’d expected to find. Fingerprints, maybe? There were fingerprints there, or what must have been fingerprints before the wind and the weather got to them. Fingerprints by the square metre. Entire hand prints in fact, not to mention foot prints, knee prints, nose prints, even a set of teeth, all of them mementos of the mayhem that had erupted on this site a few weeks earlier.

But what did they tell me? Bugger all. A lot of people had been doing bizarre things to each other, trying to assuage their grief. I already knew that.

Okay then, if my eyes weren’t going to be much use, how about my brain?

Hungry as a hawk. Who’d described me that way recently? Shit. Blakie. Maybe it was time I started satisfying that hunger with a few well-placed questions.

About motive, for one. Why would anyone want to kill Lincoln? Why would they have chosen that particular method? And this particular place?

The last question seemed a logical place to start, given that I was on location, as it were. Why here?

The site’s proximity to Blakie’s camp had led the cops—and me—to assume that he was responsible, but did it have any other attributes? It was isolated, for one, close to the single men’s camp but far enough away to be beyond the noses and ears of the dogs. And, by local standards, the scrub was thick. The ideal spot for an ambush.

I took a few short steps into the mulga, then a few long ones, and ended up at the foot of a low rise. When I climbed it I found myself surprisingly close to the main road.

I stood for a minute or two, lost in the mottled landscape of my own thoughts.

Why here?

The answer emerged from the topography.

An outsider.

If you were an outsider wanting to kill someone in the camp, this would be the logical spot. You could sneak in, conceal yourself, wait for your target to wander by and be gone before anybody knew about it.

Violent death was as common as snotty noses in the blackfeller camps. Anyone investigating would automatically figure it as an inside job. The mutilation, with its intimations of sorcery, would have strengthened the supposition.

Somewhere up ahead, through the knotted branches, I spotted movement in the air. A black hawk hovered, radiating violence. What did it have its eye on? I took a step forward and saw a flock of zebra finches moving through the grass, eating seeds. The hawk glided down, landed less than a metre from them, waited as if it had all the time in the world—which it did. The finches froze; even I froze, although the blood was rushing in me. The hawk sprang with a casual, hopping movement, seized a finch, killed it with a blow to the brain. The survivors scattered like the blast from a shotgun.

Zebra finch: one of Lincoln’s dreamings.

It was the sight of that sudden attack that put into words the half-baked speculation that had been floating around all morning in the half-baked custard of my brain.

The words, of course, were ‘Earl Marsh’.

Did our sensitive new-age neighbour have the same approach to blackfellers who were a pain in the arse as he had to dogs which bit him on the arse? He’d fought the land claim tooth and nail: had he decided to fight the claimants similarly? He didn’t look like he had the brains to blow his nose, much less set up the murder as an inside job. But, until I knew him better, how could I tell what he was capable of?

He had a motive of sorts: his anger over the land claim, the return of a horde of unwanted neighbours, the trouble with the dogs. He had the means: I could well imagine those massive slab-hands wrapping themselves around Lincoln’s neck.

And, more than anything else, he had that dodgy lease, conveniently ‘signed’ the day before Lincoln died.

Convenient? Shit, it was more than that. Not exactly a smoking gun, but getting there. A spent shell, perhaps; something which could be tied to a gun. If I could find any evidence of the bastard’s being here I’d take my suspicions to McGillivray.

I made my way through the silver leafwork and the spindly branches, slowly and deliberately, my eyes scouring the earth.

From time to time I crouched down, studied the sand, searching for anything out of place. The main occupants of this little patch of scrub were ants: white-ants, honey-ants, mulga ants, meat-ants, slow-moving moneybox ants. They scurried across its surface in furious formations, snapped their mandibles, built their turrets and towers. If there was a success story in this country, they were it. They’d be here, moiling away, when the rest of us were grains of sand in the desert of time.

Around them the subtle panoply of desert life wended its way: centipedes and butcher-birds, barking spiders, sunrays, the prickly little fruits we call teddy-bear’s arseholes, dried-out paddy-melons.

But nothing extraneous did I find, nothing to suggest that a big ugly whitefeller had blundered this way before me.

I reached the road and gazed at it bleakly. Six inches of drifting bulldust, a mess of ridges and ruts and furrows crissing and crossing and cutting into one another as far in as the wind-rows. What would that maze tell me? Sweet F.A.

Or would it? As I turned to leave, I noticed a break in the windrow, a few feet from where I stood. A narrow indentation. I crouched low, studied it. A few feet further on was something similar. The sand around them went against the grain of the prevailing ripples. Tyre tracks, perhaps? Smoothed over? I paced them out. Couple of metres apart, a bit more. Wide enough for an F100? Possibly. Had somebody parked here? Could well be.

Were there any other signs of an intruder? I cut a wider arc out from the tyre tracks and found what I’d missed the first time: boot prints, taking a circuitous, northerly route to the hollow. The prints were faded, caved-in, weather-worn, but the further you got from the hollow the more visible they became, as though someone had made a hurried attempt to cover them up.

I stood up, stretched, tried to imagine the scenario. The darkness, the stealth, that ruddy face gleaming in the moonlight. I shuddered.

I heard my name floating on the wind. Hazel’s beautiful, high-pitched warble. I was glad to go: the little copse was giving me the creeps. I made my way back through the mulga, pausing only for a glance at the red-earth hollow in which we’d found the body.

I walked past it, then stopped.

Red earth?

Not entirely. A flash of iridescence gleamed through the dirt.

I swept it aside to uncover a spray of tiny blue pebbles.

Blue

NOT PEBBLES, I decided as I rolled them between finger and thumb. More like shards, little splinters of hewn rock, rounded and smooth on one side, rough-split on the other. What were they? Opal? No, they were too angular, almost metallic. One of the sulphides, perhaps? Chalcopyrite? Labradorite? Maybe.

Where could they have come from?

I sifted through the surrounding earth, and scouted a wider area, but could find nothing resembling them, no outcrop from which they might have been chipped.

What did they tell me, these little stones? Not much. They reinforced the possibility of an outsider, perhaps, but would do no more, not unless I could somehow link them to Marsh. The ground on which I’d found them had had fifty hysterical mourners stampeding over it.

And they weren’t just mourners: they were nomads, wanderers. Even these days, they tended to spend a lot of time on the move, both by foot and by car. Anybody from the camp could have picked up a few fragments of non-indigenous rock in their travels and unwittingly brought them here in a trouser cuff or a boot sole. The cops could have brought them. Or the paramedics. I could have brought them here myself.

With such thoughts rolling around my head and the stones rolling around my pocket, I made my way back to the shack.

Hazel was sitting by the fire, grinning and flipping a damper on her nimble fingers.

It was beautiful. We slopped on a layer of golden syrup, ripped it apart and ate it, sipped some tea, passed a pleasant hour in each other’s company. I checked my watch: time for me to go. Jimmy and Maggie had loaded my ute with supplies and gifts for the refugees in town: bush potatoes, conkerberries, a trussed-up goanna I hoped nobody was expecting me to put out of its misery.

Hazel stood in the doorway to say goodbye, a blanket about her shoulders, cheeks glowing.

‘I’ll try to get into town,’ she said. ‘Come and see you.’

‘You do that,’ I said. I reached out and feathered the back of her hand. ‘I’ll put a candle in the window.’

‘A candle? Hang on, I got somethin better’n that.’

She ducked inside and came out a moment later with a wind-chime, a replica of the one hanging from her veranda.

‘A present,’ she smiled, putting it in the back of my ute. ‘Hang it on your front porch.’

She planted a kiss on my cheek. ‘Thanks for comin, Em,’ she whispered. ‘We’ll work it out.’

As our heads parted I opened my eyes. Hazel’s own eyes were as lustrous as the mineral in the wind-chime dangling over her shoulder.

Eh?

I took another look, soft-focused. Pulled the stones out of my pocket, compared them with the flashes of blue in the upper section of the wind-chime.

They were the same.

‘Hazel, the stone in your wind-chime, where’d you get it?’

‘Oh, people…’ I felt a sudden tension, a tightening of her fingers in my hand. ‘People bring it in. From out bush.’

‘Which people? And from where out bush? It might be important. There wasn’t any sign of it last time I was here.’

She hesitated, let go of me, tugged at an ear-lobe, chewed her lower lip. And then it clicked. God knows, it had taken me long enough.

Blakie.

Minerals. Crystals. Rocks. Fossils. Stones of every lustre and colour and composition. They were a magnet for him, they were his trademark, his signature-tune, his call-sign. How often had I seen him and his bloody rocks: he’d talk to them, sing to them, polish them, he’d sit for hours gazing into their depths. He knew their lattices and refractions, their stories and symmetries, their hidden intelligence. Anything out of the ordinary and he’d be onto it. Like me, really. He and I had that much in common.

It all tallied: the reports of pilfering from mining camps, the crystals on her window ledge, the wind-chime. And yes, even the old mining maps she’d transformed into works of art.

‘He’s been here, hasn’t he Hazel? Blakie.’

She shuffled awkwardly.

‘Sweet Jesus. How could you? You’ve been sheltering him.’

She turned away, stared at the ground, ran a hand through her hair. Looked uncomfortable.

Bloody uncomfortable. Much more so than she’d look if shelter was all she had to hide. I felt an icy hand clutch my heart. The owl feather in her swag.

I grabbed her by the sleeve, glared at her in a rush of rage and jealousy. I’d often suspected that she had a soft spot for Blakie, but it had never occurred to me it could be
that
soft spot. ‘How could you?’

She pulled away. ‘Emily, you don’t understand…’

‘Oh, I understand all right. You’ve been screwing him!’

‘No, you don’t understand. He’s like a child, that
warriya
, but…’

‘He’s a bloody psychopath, that
warriya
!’ I roared. ‘He’d kill you as casually as he’d pick his nose. Probably eat you as casually, too.’

‘I mean that sometimes he does things an he doesn’t know what he’s doin. Says he can hear spirits…’

‘He hears voices! It’s called crazy, Hazel. Schizophrenia, paranoia, I don’t bloody know, I’m not a shrink, but what I do know is that he’s as twisted as a bloody dishrag!’

‘…but I’m sure he wouldn’t have killed my old man.’

‘How could you know that? And even if he didn’t kill him it doesn’t mean you gotta fuck him!’

‘The old people are talking.’ She nodded out at the northern plains. ‘There’s troublin signs: sickness, bad dreams. Couple of weeks ago, they reckon there was an earthquake up in the hills.’

‘They’ve been giving us that bullshit all our lives.’

‘That’s why everyone was so quick to head back to town. They’re afraid.’

‘They just wanted to go back to the pub!’

‘They’re sayin there’s a
mamu
out there…’

‘There’s a fuckin
mamu
all right, and he’s in your bed!’

‘And why are you so worried about who’s in my bed?’

‘I thought we…’

‘
We?
What do you mean “we”!’ Suddenly she’d had enough of my badgering, and somewhere, deep down, I couldn’t blame her. She took a step backwards, stomped her foot, fixed me with a furious glare. ‘All
you
ever did was stir up a lot o’ trouble and leave me to wear it. Tried to tell you last night—thought we mighta been getting somewhere. But no, nothing’s changed, old Emily’s gotta keep goin like a bull at a gate. You roll up after all these years and everything goes wrong: my father killed, the community torn apart.’

I took a moment to unravel the implications of what she was saying. ‘Jesus! You’re not suggesting
I
had anything to do with him finishin up, are you?’

‘Don’t imagine you strangled him, no. You’d have trouble reaching his neck, for starters. But who knows what you stirred up? You might not even know yourself.’ She swept a hand out in the general direction of the desert, fixed her gaze on me. ‘There’s things out there give you a nightmare to even think about.’

‘But sleeping with Blakie…’

‘So he shares my swag from time to time! So what?’ she glared. ‘Who I sleep with is none of your business. He’s still one of our mob.’

Right. And I wasn’t. The anger shot up in me like the sparks from a farrier’s hammer. ‘One of your mob?’ I spat back at her. ‘Last person I heard describe Blakie that way was your old man.’ I pulled the stones out of my pocket, shoved them into her face. ‘You don’t reckon he killed him? Well, next time he pops in for a cuppa and a fuck you might ask him what these were doing on the ground next to your father’s throttled body!’

That stopped her dead. Stopped me dead too, the guilt bobbing up through a whirlwind of anger and jealousy.

She stared at the stones, shifted her gaze to the mulga, then back to the wind-chime. ‘You found these…?’

‘Yes,’ I snarled, then wheeled around, stormed back to the ute, jumped into the seat and threw her into gear.

Christ, I thought, I’d never understand Hazel or her mob. Whenever I thought I was getting anywhere the ground would shift beneath me. Had the city changed me, or had I always been a crazy outsider and just too stupid to notice?

I hit the road, flat chat, furious. My last glimpse of Hazel was a red blur in the rear-view mirror.

Only when I missed the turn-off and skidded into a fish-tail did I slow down.

As the fury subsided it made room for questions.

Blakie had been sleeping with Hazel. What did that mean? Did it make it more likely that he’d murdered her father, or less likely? Could he have killed him to get him out of the way? Lincoln was a bit more relaxed about Blakie than everybody else, but I doubt whether he’d have wanted him for a son-in-law. Their argument about the diamond dove. Was it about the place, the dreaming—or the person?

But then my thoughts returned to Marsh, he of the dodgy deals and the pit-bull personality.

The madman or the cattleman? I didn’t know what to think, but if Hazel thought I was responsible, I’d bloody well prove her wrong. And the only way I could do that was to find out who was.