The Silent Inheritance (36 page)

He read the note, then spoke as he might to a child attempting to buy a block of chocolate when she had money enough for a musk stick. She’d dressed for her driving lesson, not for a bank, and she needed a haircut. Should have had her hair cut first, should have worn her office clothes, and lipstick. Business people had more respect for well-dressed clients.

She pushed the card across the desk to him, hoping it may buy his respect. He swiped it, and, hot and sweaty from her hand, it worked well enough to raise his eyebrows, for him to stand and excuse himself – then leave her sitting alone for five more minutes.

He wrote his own note when he returned.
I suggest you make an appointment to speak to our financial adviser.

No thank you. I want to invest five hundred thousand for one year. Also I want two bank cheques for five hundred thousand.

It took many notes, his and hers, but half an hour later she walked away with her investment receipt, two bank cheques, and the promise of a chequebook and second bank card within five business days. Bank cheques cost ten dollars each. In future, she’d write her own.

Still disbelieving that a bank was allowed to charge ten dollars to give her her own money, she walked down to the Bank of Melbourne, where she planned to invest one of the bank cheques in Marni’s name, and to open an account with the other one in Jillian Jones’s name. It was her maiden name. She had that old card and her birth certificate as identification, and Marni’s birth certificate with Jillian’s name on it – and her parents’ marriage certificate.

The woman wanted her card.

‘I want to get one, please,’ Sarah said.

‘Pardon?’

Again she showed her hearing aids. Again she removed her notebook.
I don’t have an account here. I want to open an account here and invest five hundred thousand dollars for twelve months.

‘Do you have a passport?’

Didn’t tell her that she wasn’t booking an overseas flight. Wanted to, but shook her head.

‘A driver’s licence?’

Soon she’d have a licence, but not yet, and she sighed, reclaimed her notepad and gave up. She was on her way out when a second woman tapped her on the shoulder.

‘Come through,’ she said.

Another office, another chair, a better speaker. ‘You require identification to open a new account,’ she said. ‘Do you have a passport?’

‘No.’

‘A driver’s licence?’

‘Soon,’ she said and giving up on Jillian Jones, she offered Sarah Carter’s Commonwealth Bank card, her learner’s permit, Medicare card, phone bill, library card, video shop card, then to the pile she added her bank cheques.

Money talks, Gramp used to say, and Sarah Carter had too much of it, which, unless she admitted to having, she couldn’t give away. Desperate now to use a toilet, she gave up on the idea of locking money away for Marni. Sarah Carter locked one bank cheque away for twelve months at 4.45 per cent interest, and the other for three years at 4.75 per cent, with accumulative interest – which in three years’ time would have made about seventy thousand dollars, and the thought of it made her more desperate to use a toilet.

*

Frederick Adam-Jones had made it to the toilets in the nick of time. He had bowel cancer, self-diagnosed, and his mother’s Alzheimer’s, self-diagnosed, his heart was on its last legs, and he couldn’t go to his GP to get his ills diagnosed because he’d want his blood, and Freddy suffered from DNA paranoia. He didn’t count sheep when he couldn’t sleep, he listed the places where he’d shed DNA.

He was shedding his wife too – or she was shedding him. She’d taken her pillow and gone to the spare room last night, and when he’d followed her there, afraid of having a heart attack and dying alone, she’d got out of that bed and gone into a second spare room – with twin beds.

‘I can’t sleep with you tossing around like a fish on a hook, Freddy. I have to get up at five o’clock in the morning,’ she’d said.

He’d thought she’d cancel her trip to Greece when they’d found out where their shit of a son had got the merchandise he’d been kicked out of school for selling, when they’d had two uniformed police with guns on their hips knocking on their door at midnight, demanding to speak to Rolland Adam-Jones. Cheryl couldn’t stand to sit still, or hadn’t since they’d moved to Camberwell. She’d been away more often than she’d been at home.

Thank Christ that boy had been at home, in bed, and the only reason he’d been at home in bed was because his mother had locked every door and window before taking the keys with her to bed.

Two of Rolland’s rat pack hadn’t been at home. The police caught Steve and Mick red-handed in the backyard of the Vermont house where they’d gone to tend their crop in Cheryl’s fernery. That house, vacant since Freddy had moved his family to Camberwell, was no longer vacant. The new owners recognising the greenery as something other than ferns had phoned the police.

At six this morning, when Freddy left to drive Cheryl to the airport, Rolland was sleeping soundly. At seven fifty, when he returned, that shit of a kid’s bed was empty – as had been the notes section of Freddy’s wallet, which he hadn’t discovered until he’d opened it to pay for sixty dollars’ worth of petrol. Had to put it on his card, on credit, so he could sign for it, because he had too much on his mind to remember his new PIN.

Should have been at the office by ten. He’d called in sick, and he was. He’d poked his card into an ATM, hoping his fingers would remember his PIN, and when they hadn’t, and he’d had to drive to the bank, to queue, and show his licence before they’d give him two lousy thousand, and his bowel was in spasm before the money was in his hand.

His heart missing beats since he’d found his wallet bare, he stood looking at himself in the washroom mirror, looking at a dead man standing – looking at a fat, bullfrog-eyed old bastard, waiting for his heart to give up and stop – until he saw tomorrow’s headlines.

BARRISTER DROPS DEAD ON PUBLIC TOILET FLOOR

With what might have been his final breath, he swung that door wide and burst out to the corridor—

And damn near killed another one.

She wasn’t wearing yellow and was half his weight. He grasped her upper arm to save her and held on tight because she was alive and he was dead, and he didn’t want to be alone.

‘Sorry,’ she said. Then grasped the hand that held her. ‘Uncle Bill?’ she said.

He wasn’t anyone’s uncle. He had two thousand dollars in his wallet and he made a grab for it.

‘I am Jillian,’ the woman said. ‘We live with you. In Brisbane, in your caravan. Long, long time before.’

He didn’t know her. He didn’t own a caravan, hadn’t been to Brisbane in fifteen years, but with his wallet safe in his pocket, he pushed his Alzheimer’s aside long enough to remember that Bill lived in Brisbane, that he and his wife had been pulling a caravan down the coast of Western Australia when he’d got the news that their mother was dying. Good old reliable Bill, who’d flown home from Broome to hold his mother’s hand – and she wouldn’t have known who was holding her hand or if anyone had been holding her hand.

That’s what Freddy had told himself. Frog-eyed Freddy who hadn’t gone near her, who was a self-serving bastard who deserved to drop dead but wasn’t doing it, and his heartbeat had settled back into its rhythm.

‘Frederick’s the name,’ he said. ‘You’d be Joe and Stephanie’s girl?’ Her speech marked her as deaf. He remembered the day Joe and Stephanie’s baby had been diagnosed as deaf.

‘Sorry,’ she said, backing towards the door of the women’s toilets. ‘You look the same. Like Uncle Bill. I am very sorry.’

Disappeared then, and Freddy walked on, a finger on the pulse in his throat.

Then it hit him. The property. The missing girl. The bastard with a penchant for garbage bags.

That woman could have the information he needed, and he turned on his heel and walked back to watch that door until she came out – and her expression told him she wished he hadn’t waited.

*

On a good day, Frederick Adam-Jones could talk a man without legs into buying a pair of shoes, Cheryl had said that a while back. He could sell snow to an Eskimo, pork to a Muslim. She’d said that too.

It took him five or ten minutes to talk a deaf woman into drinking a coffee with him, and she only agreed because he’d told her he’d been at her parents’ wedding, that he’d known her as a toddling infant.

‘Joe and Steph lived with the family until—’ Until Joe had learnt that his perfect female version of baby Jesus was imperfect.

She’ll never be any good.

‘I have … appointment soon.’

They were seated with their cappuccinos in the food court when he asked if she was living at the farm.

She frowned. ‘We live here – not far. I am Sarah Carter now.’

‘You have children?’

‘My daughter. Marni,’ she said, and he told her he had a son, Rolland, and a wife, currently on a plane to Greece, then asked if her daughter was deaf, and when she shook her head, he asked about her husband.

‘He die, a long time before.’

‘Are you employed – working?’

‘I am senior payroll/account officer,’ she said, and said it well, and proudly. ‘I work for Maureen Crow, in the city.’

Freddy knew all about the Crow mess. Smyth was still totalling up hours in splitting that company down the middle.

‘You’ve done well,’ he said. ‘Your father became the family gypsy, after he left the farm.’

‘Gypsy,’ she said. ‘Yes.’

Freddy searched his mind for something more to say that might keep her seated. ‘Another coffee?’

She shook her head. He spoke of his office, and her eyes spoke of disinterest. She had talking eyes. She sat with him until he emptied his coffee cup, then lifted the strap of her bag over her shoulder and stood.

‘Thank you for coffee. I have driving test soon.’

‘Can I drive you …?’

‘My instructor … Thank you.’

‘What time is your test?’

‘My test will be on twenty-fourth. It is coming very fast.’

He handed her his card as she was leaving. She dropped it into her handbag without a glance.

Gone then. He followed her, at a distance. She went up the escalator. He went up. Followed her until she walked across to the bus stop. He walked then to where he’d parked his Ferrari, and when he drove by the bus stop, she was still waiting for her instructor, or the bus. He double-parked where he could keep an eye on her, and he thought of his mother, who’d spent her life worrying about that girl who wasn’t being educated. She’d learnt something, somewhere. Crows? The company was worth millions.

There was a man who’d had it all, a decent wife and four kids and he’d gone and buggered up everything with his womanising. Freddy was and would ever be a one-woman man, but he’d buggered up his life anyway.

The bus arrived. He didn’t see her board it, but when it moved away, she was no longer waiting, so he tailed it, followed its stops and starts to a roundabout, where she left it to walk.

He drove by her and parked opposite a school entrance. Watched her approach in his rear-view mirror. She glanced at his Ferrari as she passed. Most did. Its windows were darkened. He dropped his chin, turned his face until she walked by.

She turned into a residential street, and he started the motor and followed again, slowly, which was the only way to traverse a narrow street with cars parked on either side. A van approaching from the other direction was prepared to play ‘chicken’. Freddy, ever a ‘chicken’, slid into a driveway and allowed the van through.

She stopped to empty a letterbox. He stopped well back, saw her disappear in behind a neglected garden. There was no mistaking that garden, but he got the number from the letterbox, keyed it into his organiser beside
24 April
, then drove on, and for the first time in weeks he wasn’t thinking about faulty heart valves, bowel cancer, DNA or Alzheimer’s.

*

The bank receipts safe in the cake tin, Sarah glanced at
Frederick Adam-Jones, Barrister
’s card. She knew that name, hadn’t known he was one of her unknown uncles. He was the image of Uncle Bill – or the image of the only photograph she had of Uncle Bill – taken over twenty years ago.

‘Stupid,’ she said, and thought of Marni, who would have adopted him, would have taken his photograph to add to her gallery of family now decorating the refrigerator door.

She’d wanted to put the print of Oliver and the Clark girls on the fridge door, but had settled for a photograph of the photograph – then taken another of eight-month-old Jillian and her father. Peter Clark and the group photograph were now beneath magnets, decorating that fridge door, which may have been why its freezer had stopped freezing ice-cream.

The business card returned to her handbag, she forced her eyes to her baby self. She’d looked like every other smiling baby. He’d looked happy too. Her mother had told her once that they hadn’t found out about her hearing loss until she was fifteen months old. Maybe that’s when he’d bought that tent and hit the roads.

The family gypsy …
Frederick Adam-Jones had said.

They’d been gypsies, always moving on – and of all the people at Forest Hill she could have bumped into, she’d had to bump into someone who’d known her, known him.

That 666 no longer showed up on her bank receipts, but that bulk of money was still there, still pushing her into situations she wasn’t ready to handle, like Mrs Vaughn’s death was pushing her to buy a house. She wasn’t ready for that either.

Bob had suggested they move in with him and his mother. Marni thought it was a good idea.

A life-changing amount
, the TattsLotto man had said.

World changing. They’d gone to Perth because they could afford to. If they’d stayed home, Mrs Vaughn might still have been alive. That money had made her go to Forest Hill and bump into an uncle.

She’d seen him on television during the Swan trial. Hadn’t looked at him, or not at his face, hadn’t wanted to. Never in a million years would she have believed that he was connected to her family.

She knew of a John the Baptist, a minister. She knew his address. She’d known and loved Uncle Bill the electrician, had seen Clarry the truck driver once, or she’d seen his truck driving into the farm. Gone for a long walk that day and hadn’t come back until that truck was gone. She didn’t know the other brothers’ names. Someone must have mentioned them. She knew there were seven of them.