Ripples on a Pond (39 page)

K
IDNAP

T
hey came in the night, five days before the Christmas of '77. They came silently. Robin had his own room now, a big boy's room. He didn't wake. Bowser didn't alert the house. Dear, laughing, friendly Bowser, never destined to become a watchdog, lay on the back porch in a pool of blood, his head near severed.

Robert found him. He covered him with one of his own blankets before rousing Cara. It was she who found Tracy's bed empty. It was she who found the screen removed from Tracy's bedroom window, that window open and a circle cut professionally in its glass.

They'd been so safe in Ferntree Gully. For most of this year, they'd felt safe. Tracy's adoption would be finalised in a month or two.

And Tracy was gone.

Cara's scream woke Robin. He saw the empty bed and ran for the back door. Robert caught him before he reached the bloody porch, so he ran for the front door, unlocked it. He climbed over the front gate and ran out to the street, calling his sister's name. Cara, pyjama clad, unlocked the gate and ran after him, calling his name. Robert dialled triple zero.

Neighbours who occupy safe suburban courts know their neighbours; and when a quiet household alters its early-morning habits, neighbours peer between venetian blinds, from behind closed bedroom curtains. When they see a pyjama-clad woman and her little boy barefoot in the street, the boy calling his sister's name, they know why.

The woman from Number Eight, her hair in plastic rollers, the man from Number Five in his dressing-gown, opened their front doors.

Robert walked out to the footpath. ‘The police are on their way,' he called. The woman with her hair in rollers hurriedly donned her dressing-gown, hid her curlers beneath a scarf, and crossed over the road, where the male and two half-grown boys from Number Three joined her.

Robert told them his granddaughter had been taken from her bed sometime between midnight and seven. He was grey-faced and trembling.

Cara had Robin's hand, was drawing him resisting back towards Number Seven, but he pulled away to search the next-door neighbour's yard, still calling ‘Tracy'.

‘The police are on their way. They'll find her,' Robert said. The woman with rollers went next door to fetch Robin. ‘Come home with me, love, and have breakfast with Jack,' she said.

But Robin wanted to find his sister, and refused to stop calling or searching until the police came.

‘Go with Mrs Macy,' Robert said.

Robin went, but unwillingly.

A male and a female constable now in charge, the neighbours returned to their fence lines. Minutes later, a second police car arrived carrying two more men in blue.

‘Raelene King and Dino Collins,' Cara howled to them. ‘They killed our dog. They'll kill Tracy. Raelene King and Dino Collins. They cut a hole above the lock in her bedroom window.'

The police wanted to go inside. Cara wanted them to get back into their cars and hunt that feral bitch and her mongrel mate down, wanted them to shoot them with the guns they carried on their hips. It was Robert who led them inside, explaining Raelene King's connection to Tracy.

Nothing more to be seen on the street, the neighbours sat down to their breakfasts.

‘She's the natural mother of the child?' the older of the men in blue asked.

‘Is it natural to break your baby's arm?' Cara howled.

There was nothing natural about murdering a beautiful friendly dog. The police lifted the bloody blanket, replaced it too slowly. Cara saw Bowser's dead eyes, his open mouth, the blood. In such circumstances, the death of a dog is neither here nor there to a policeman. They didn't know he'd been more than a dog, he'd been Bowser, Cara's dog, and she had to bury him. They wouldn't let her bury him.

‘We'll look after him for you, Mrs Grenville.'

Then the questions began, and Cara was crying, out of control. She'd been answering questions for three years; fighting a mindless system that allowed those who abused their babies between flogging their wares on street corners to dictate the lives of those babies.

She watched Robert search the high cabinet to the left of the stove, looking behind headache pills, throat lozenges, bandaids and sundry until he found his out-of-date bottle of Valium. Out of date or not, he had the cap off and a pill in his mouth before Cara slapped the bottle from his hand.

‘Don't you try to hide from this, Daddy!'

He washed it down, then picked up the bottle and spilt pills, found the lid hiding beneath the fridge door. Cara walked away from him to the police now studying the window and the hole cut in its glass.

‘You might like to dress, Mrs Grenville,' the female officer suggested.

Cara looked down at her pyjama top, one button missing, and nothing beneath that top. Turned on her heel and went to her bedroom to stare at her reflection in the mirror. Jenny's face looked back at her. Today, she hated that face; hated Jenny for doing the things she'd done, for living the life she'd lived, and for her happily-ever-after with the man she loved, and her name on two kids' books. Hated her more for Raelene. Blamed her for Raelene.

Blame helps when there is no help.

She clad herself in the jeans she'd worn yesterday, in the light summer shirt she'd worn yesterday, slid her feet into sandals, combed her hair, then went out to more questions.

Told them again of her baby's broken arm, of the magistrates, of mindless laws that had refused to allow her to take her two children to a place where they'd be safe. Told them plenty they didn't need to know, but nothing that might help them find Tracy. And she was already dead anyway. In her heart, in her bones, in her stomach, Cara knew they'd cut her tiny throat as they'd cut Bowser's.

Robert, calmed by his out-of-date pill, answered their questions. ‘We heard nothing. If the dog had barked, we would have heard him.'

And they were taking Bowser away.

‘This is his home!' Cara howled. ‘I'll bury him in his garden.'

‘He'll be returned, Mrs Grenville. Try to remain calm. Did the natural mother have a relationship with her daughter?'

‘If breaking her arm and giving her nightmares qualifies, then yes, she had a relationship,' Cara yelled.

‘She saw her mother on average twice a year, though not in the last twelve months,' Robert, retired school principal, said, in control now. ‘In July, her natural mother signed papers releasing Tracy for adoption.'

Cara left him to it. He knew the details. He'd stood at her side through the last years of it.

She went to the refrigerator and stood looking into it, unsure of why she'd opened it. Or maybe she knew. There was a bottle of vodka in the door shelf, beside the bottles of milk. Sun a long way yet from the yardarm, but she removed it, poured a dash into a glass and drank it. Her empty stomach didn't like it; perhaps her head would.

The glass in hand, she stood listening to the questions, to Robert's replies.

‘I went to bed sometime after ten. My daughter would have been in bed by twelve.'

His daughter had spent five hours last night attempting to find the life and times of a youthful Matilda Robertson, in love with her soldier boy. Robert had escaped from his mother at seventeen to join the army. He'd been helpful last night in filling in many details of that era, that war.

She opened a cupboard, searched its shelves for a can of tomato juice, glanced at the lime cordial, Tracy's favourite. She'd liked having a green tongue. Opened the fridge again, seeking orange juice. Found a small bottle of a liquid sedative, prescribed to settle Tracy when her arm was in plaster. Well out of date, but still half full of an orange-flavoured syrup. Poured a dash into a glass, topped it up with vodka, added a little water, then washed two aspros down with it. It wouldn't kill her pain but may wrap a cushion around it.

Robert was still discussing the natural mother, and that ‘natural' was one too many.

‘The natural mother spreads her legs to get money enough to shoot shit up her arms,' Cara said, ‘and the mindless, bloody bleeding-heart lawmakers still gave her visitation rights. Natural or unnatural, I'm Tracy's mother.'

‘We'll find her,' the female constable said.

‘Will they let me bury her when you do? Or will that feral slut be given the right to toss her into a garbage bin?'

‘Trust us, and try to stay calm.'

Trust? A long time ago she'd lost trust in a system hogtied by fools. Stay calm? Tracy was lying dead somewhere and they were doing nothing to find her.

No use blaming them. They were all she had. Blame herself. She should have heard him cutting that glass, should have heard Bowser dying, Tracy waking.

And would have, had Tracy woken. If either of those kids murmured in the night, she was on her feet. Knew why she hadn't heard Tracy. They'd killed her in her bed, and dumped her beautiful little body in one of the neighbours' rubbish bins. If Raelene couldn't have her to abuse, then no one would have her.

Two policemen in her little girl's pink bedroom. No blood in there. No blood on her bed. Bunny Long-ears, already well-loved by Robin, his ears now worn ragged by Tracy, lay discarded on the floor. Her pretty quilt gone.

They'd taken the quilt!

To wrap her dead body in?

There would have been blood – on her pillow, on her sheet – if they'd killed her. There would have been blood, and they would have left her lying in it, as they'd left Bowser.

‘They've taken the quilt,' she said.

Hope growing, she described the quilt in detail. She described the pyjamas Tracy had been wearing while they wasted time fingerprinting the area near the bed.

‘Dino Collins cut that glass,' she said. ‘He's done it before. He's been threatening me for years.'

You'll keep, moll.

She had kept. He'd waited until she had something of value to lose, then he'd taken it.

‘Dino Collins and Raelene King took her. No one else had a reason to take her.'

Taken her where?

Now that she was no longer dead, she was somewhere.

She always
comes back.

‘Raelene King was raised in Woody Creek. Collins owns a cabin at a commune up there. My sister said they always go back there . . .'

My sister, Georgie. No thought now of denying that blood link. Pared down to the bone by catastrophe, she gave no thought to tomorrow, only to now, only to finding Tracy before they killed her.

The police needed a recent photograph. Robert found the Kodak packet, a dozen photographs in it, developed only days ago. Two happy kids and a dog; one perfect photograph of Robin pretending to drive his missing daddy's red car; Tracy in the passenger seat beside him, a beautiful little girl with a shy smile and pigtails tied high with big pink bows.

Cara howled again for those pigtails and the pink bows, and for the laughing dog too and his dead eyes. She returned to the refrigerator to pour more vodka, another dash of sedative, water.

‘Collins threatened me in court, in '65, when he was sentenced to five years for the rape of a minor. He was sentenced again in '71 for robbery and drug offences. I gave evidence at both trials. Tracy isn't his. She was born while he was in jail. Raelene King threatened me while she was in jail. She rang me at work and told me never to feel safe in my bed.'

Talked too much. Blamed the vodka, the orange-flavoured sedative. When she returned to the kitchen for more of the same, the policewoman suggested coffee. She made it while Cara talked.

‘We went to court when she broke Tracy's arm. We pleaded to be allowed to move her out of the state. I've spent the best part of three years in courts. We've spent a fortune on solicitors.'

‘These days they try to keep families together,' a male said. The female offered a mug containing an anaemic brew. Cara didn't taste it.

‘We're her family!'

‘You and your husband are separated?'

‘Divorced. He lives in England.'

‘Could he perhaps have–'

Cara tossed her hands in the air and walked out to the kitchen, where she tipped the too-weak coffee down the sink and made a strong brew. Stood at the sink, sipping coffee and watching a policeman wash Bowser's blood away, feeling her helpless, hopeless frustration washing the last of her strength from her bones while she waited for someone to get out there and do something. Her baby was somewhere with two vicious animals, and she was here, drinking coffee.

They were doing something.

Near midday, she learned that the police were in Woody Creek; that Dino Collins was known to have been in Woody Creek with Raelene King two months ago. They knew a lot about that pair.

Cara knew that one of the constables was a smoker. She could see a butt balanced on a pot plant. No butts in her backyard since she'd moved to Ferntree Gully. Wanted a cigarette now. None in the house. She'd given them up cold turkey; smoked her last one in the Doncaster backyard, then pitched the packet into the incinerator and driven away.

Phone ringing in the lounge room, ringing, ringing, until the policewoman silenced it.

‘A John Norris,' she said.

Robert took the call.

John and Beth were flying down today; the cousins would start arriving in the next few days for a family Christmas. If Mohammed couldn't go to the mountain, the mountain would come to Mohammed. They hadn't had a family Christmas since Myrtle's death. Cara had made bookings at motels, at caravan parks. She'd booked Christmas dinner for twenty-six at a mountain hotel.

Raelene had cancelled Christmas again and no one had let John and Beth know.

Christmas cards hung over a string across the mantelpiece, like a smiling mouth. Today, they were laughing at Cara. A real live Christmas tree stood in the corner, a very big Christmas tree. Tracy had helped decorate it, her special pink bauble at Tracy height. Robin's blue bauble was much higher. He'd grown tall this year.