The Silent Inheritance (40 page)

He’d heard the helicopter this morning. It had been flying so low it made the house shake. She’d thought police helicopter and he had too, because he’d come running inside. The dog had barked at it.

In the cage, the only way she could tell night from day had been that grey smudge of comet. Out here there was no total dark. He lit his lantern at night and when he put it out and went to bed she could still see glimmers of light from the stove and sometimes a long wide slit of moonlight that came in through the side of the blind.

She did her exercises when he went to bed. She conjured up Michelle and did squats with her, and jumps on the mattress, push-ups, sit-ups, the splits and leg lifts like she’d had to do when her mother had made her go to ballet, and after that pile of fish and chips she’d have kilojoules to spare tonight.

She added more rules to her cartoon man locked in the castle video game.

Get strong –
bold print and underlined.

Keep him calm.

Never take your eyes off him.

Check everything he gives you to eat that doesn’t come out of a can.
Wished he’d go to bed. Her bones were aching from sitting.

March, the middle of March when the outside world had ended, and with no bars to count, she’d lost track of how many days. She counted bricks now. Knew that April must have been over.

N
o one came forward to claim the two hundred thousand dollar reward. On Monday, the plumber sent his quote, via email. It wasn’t cheap but they wanted to get something started so they sent a fast email back accepting his price and asking how soon he could do it. He replied and said he’d be unable to start until the trees leaning on the house were cut back.

Then on Tuesday, the painter with the paint-spattered wagon and boots drove in as Marni was leaving for school.

‘Mum about?’ he asked.

‘She goes to work at half past seven,’ Marni said. He gave her his handwritten quote. She didn’t look at it, just asked him how soon he could start.

‘I’d need to speak to your mum,’ he said. ‘Ask her to give me a tingle, will you?’

‘She’s deaf, but she said if I ever saw you again to tell you we want it done as soon as possible. Have you got an email address?’

‘That’s a good place to stay away from,’ he said. ‘Tell your mum I’d have to fit her in between a few smaller jobs, but if she’s happy with the quote, I can make a start on it this arvo.’

‘Hold on a tick,’ Marni said and she sent his words via text, hoping her mother would feel her mobile’s vibration. She did, and her reply came back fast.

Tell him to go ahead. Ask if he can buy the paint and how much deposit he wants.

Marni read the text to him, then offered her mobile so he could read it for himself.

He refused it. ‘The wife’s got one,’ he said. ‘Tell your mum, a couple of hundred will do for starters. I’ll need to do a lot of cleaning and repairing before she needs to worry about paint.’

He already knew where that key was hidden, and before she left for school, he told her to call him Dave and he gave her his landline number. She keyed it into her mobile as she ran.

His old wagon was parked in the driveway when she returned. Mrs Vaughn’s front door was wide open, so she crept in and caught him up a ladder, washing the kitchen ceiling.

‘G’day,’ he said. ‘There’s a couple of colour charts on the bench. You might get your mum to have a look over them.’

‘White will do.’

‘A bit of colour never goes astray—’

‘We just want it to look clean.’

‘I’ll go snow-blind,’ he said, and he climbed down from his ladder to talk. ‘Tell your mum she’s got big problems in her shower. There’s an ecosystem of mould growing in there. Painting it will be wasting my time and her money, love.’

‘Can we fix it?’

‘Anything’s fixable. It needs stripping back to basics though, and your pipes need looking at.’

‘You can’t do it?’ she asked, hopefully.

‘I took offence at tiling forty years ago and got out of the game. My old man owned his own tiling business for thirty years. Want me to ask him if he’d be interested in taking a look?’

‘Yes, please.’

‘He’s as deaf as a post and no Speedy Gonzales.’

Marni didn’t know Speedy Gonzales. ‘We don’t care. We live out the back,’ she said, and back he went up his ladder to wash the build-up of nicotine from the ceiling, and Marni went out the back door, also wide open. Maybe he needed the fresh air.

Sarah wrote him a cheque that night for five hundred dollars. He didn’t turn up before Marni left so she took it with her to school. His wagon wasn’t in the driveway when she returned, and maybe she knew why. Mrs Vaughn’s ghost was doing her block inside, smashing ghostly plates. Her front door was open.

Marni stood listening for a moment, then crept in – and ran into a very old Dave, pushing a wheelbarrow full of broken tiles.

‘Hold that screen door for me, darlin’,’ he said. She held it. He came out, upended his barrow on the porch and went back for more. She followed him.

‘I’m Marni,’ she said.

‘Call me Pop,’ he said.

For the next two hours, she became Pop’s apprentice. While he did the wrecking, she did the loading and the barrow pushing.

He was almost as deaf as her mother and spoke as if it was the rest of the world that was deaf, but they’d wrecked the shower room and built a small mountain of tiles and rotting masonite on the front porch before Dave arrived at a quarter to six to pick up his father.

They found a gardener that night on the internet. He came when he said he would, but started backing off when Marni told him they wanted to get rid of most of the trees.

‘You need a tree lopper, not a gardener,’ he said and made his escape.

They found a tree lopper in the local paper, and when he asked what sort of tree, Marni came clean about their forest. ‘They’re not big trees. There’s just a lot of them.’

He must have driven by to have a look, because he phoned the next night to say he could do the job on Saturday morning, for cash in hand, then told them how much cash he expected to receive in his hand.

Marni hired him. On Friday night they tied rags onto the trees they wanted to keep – the two camellias, the fig and the magnolia – and notes that read,
TRIM ONLY PLEASE
, and lucky they had because the tree loppers arrived at seven, three big dark-skinned men who parked a truck with a tree-eating machine attached in the street, and within minutes, their chainsaws were cutting and their machine chewing up Mrs Vaughn’s forest. To escape the noise of it, Sarah and Marni went shopping, and when they returned, the spiky plum, the wattle tree and the letterbox had been eaten – and fifty per cent of the camellias, fig and magnolia – and the tree eater was still spitting chips.

Away they drove again, this time to Bunnings, where they bought a new letterbox, numbers to screw onto it and a bag of premixed concrete. An hour later, Sarah counted fifty-dollar notes into a huge brown hand then the men, their truck and machine drove away and Sarah put her aids back on.

They were out the front, digging a hole for their new letterbox, when a neighbour, who’d spent years demanding Mrs Vaughn get her trees cut back, came out and took the shovel from Sarah’s hands, then later offered props to hold the letterbox level while the cement set.

It looked good from the far side of the street, and props or not, a junk mail deliverer baptised it.

*

Freddy hadn’t been out of the house that day, and nor had Rolland. He ate dinner with them, then went to his room when Cheryl tuned into the football. By ten thirty, Cheryl’s team losing and the sitting room not a healthy place to be, Freddy checked on Rolland, and he wasn’t in his room. He wasn’t smoking weed in the backyard either, so Freddy walked around to the front of the house and out to the street.

He didn’t see what else was missing, or not until he was walking back. He ran the last metres to the sitting room to interrupt the final minutes of the football match.

‘I’ll kill him,’ he wailed.

Cheryl was more interested in killing a player. ‘He was twenty-five metres out from the goalposts. He could have levelled the score, and he kicked it out of bounds.’

‘He’s got my Ferrari!’ Freddy wailed.

She stopped screaming abuse at the player and turned to Freddy. ‘Where did you leave your keys?’

‘In the bowl. I’m calling the police.’

‘You’re not calling anyone.’

‘He’s got my Ferrari. He’s a drug-smoking, ice-sucking, thieving little bastard and someone has to stop him.’

She stopped watching her match to stop Freddy’s dialling.

‘There’s bad blood in him. He has to be stopped.’

‘Says the man who wants to put an ice-smoking baby murderer back on the street,’ she said, but the siren had gone, and she was gone, with the phone.

He followed her. ‘He’s killing me, love!’

‘The fat around your heart is killing you, and it’s a car, Freddy, and you know how he is with that car, and you leave your keys lying around where he can pick them up.’

They had a second phone in the bedroom. She read his mind and beat him to it, and stood across the marital bed, telling him that she’d had her fill of police, and he wasn’t calling them on his own son.

When her blood was up, Cheryl Adam-Jones was a fighting woman you didn’t want to tangle with, and he could relate to her having had enough of police harassment.

Three times she’d been called into the station to identify items recovered from the Commodore. She’d been unable to identify the remains of a platform-soled shoe. Freddy knew who the shoe had belonged to. The police had nothing on him, other than degraded DNA, and they weren’t going to get a non-degraded sample.

He went outside to watch for his pride and joy, his heart lifting each time he sighted a red car, then falling when it was the wrong-shaped red car.

His Ferrari still missing at midnight, Cheryl asleep, Freddy slid carefully in beside her to lay on his back, listening for the song of his motor while going over the last words he’d spoken to Ross Hunter, who’d all but accused him of concocting that carjacking story as a cover-up for his hoon son.

Hunter believed that Cheryl’s Commodore had killed that girl. He had no proof and she’d been in Bali. Freddy had no alibi other than the carjacking, and he had to stick to it. Hunter had spoken to Rolland, who couldn’t remember what he’d done yesterday, let alone on a Friday two months ago. He’d told Hunter that he wouldn’t have been seen dead behind the wheel of an old white Commodore.

Kids used to fear the law, fear their teachers, used to respect their fathers. Not now. The law couldn’t touch a minor – nor could a teacher or parent. These days, they feared the kids, or Freddy did.

One o’clock ticked over, and, not game to move from his back and have Cheryl taking her pillow to a spare room, Freddy lay still, thinking of a promise made by a twelve-year-old boy to himself.

He’d found a full-page photograph of a red sports car in one of his brothers’ magazines. Maybe he’d heard of
Ferrari
before, but until that day, he’d never seen one. He’d ripped the page out and when they’d driven him back to school, that
Ferrari
had gone with him, in his pocket.

A scholarship boy, little Freddy Jones, a chubby insult to the church-supplied uniform, a homesick, howling little sod until his Ferrari. He’d slept with it under his pillow thereafter, his hand on that folded page.

That was the year the principal had told him and an auditorium full of boys and their parents that no dream was impossible, the second-last year he’d invited his mother to the school. He’d learnt to fit into that uniform and to mimic the way John Swan had spoken. His mother having never learnt to mimic Lady Swan, he’d put an end to his annual torture.

During his final year, he’d got himself a job tutoring a few junior boys which had saved him the agony of weekends at home.

His mother had loved him. He’d loved her but hadn’t liked her much. He’d hated his brawling brothers – and John the Baptist, who had managed to separate himself from the family with a priestly dog collar.

The day Freddy had walked into the hallowed halls of Melbourne University, he’d pencilled in that hyphen between Adam and Jones, and it had looked so good, he’d gone over the pencil with a biro, knowing that to have any hope of unshackling himself from his family, he’d needed that hyphen.

Bill had separated himself with distance. Bert had gone further. He’d bought a one-way plane ticket to London twenty years ago. Of the others, Freddy preferred not to know. There was a rotten gene in the Jones family. It surfaced every generation or two. He’d had the snip after Rolland, had quit while he’d been ahead. Should have had it done twelve months sooner.

*

At one thirty-five, a red Ferrari was clocked doing in excess of a hundred and forty in a fifty kilometre zone, through Lilydale. It was now heading towards Healesville, a police car giving chase.

A vehicle guaranteed by its makers to be capable of reaching speeds in excess of three hundred kilometres an hour, in the control of a youth determined to push every boundary, a minor curve in the road—

Two constables saw that vehicle become airborne, watched it attempt to leap over a kombi van travelling in the opposite direction. It failed, but continued its maiden flight until a tree got in the way, a big tree.

The constables were running when the Ferrari exploded. Nothing they could do other than call it in then turn their attention to the kombi, which lay like a bug on its back, wheels still spinning, its lone driver buckled in, upside down, turning the night air blue.

He was taken by ambulance to the Lilydale hospital. The Ferrari driver was incinerated in the inferno.

S
ix o’clock when a phone rang beneath Cheryl’s pillow. She’d taken four phones to bed: two landlines, two mobiles. The landline was ringing. She found it, silenced it and eased herself from the bed, speaking in a whisper until the door between her and her sleeping husband was closed, when she told the female on the line that her husband changed his cars like most other people changed their socks, that she’d never had time to memorise the numbers on his registration plates.