The Silent Inheritance (46 page)

The back door was open. Marni heard Herod’s bark before she heard Sylvia’s, ‘Oh my God! Oh dear God.’

Herod knew where they were. He was on a lead, but he led the way.

‘Oh my God,’ Sylvia moaned while Herod tasted the soapy, salty, Dettol-flavoured bathwater, sniffed at Danni’s shoulder, licked it a little cleaner, then sat down to laugh about it.

There was a towel hanging behind the door. Danni shrank from it. They dried her with paper towels. She wouldn’t look at a man’s sweater Sylvia found in a bedroom, but accepted Marni’s underpants and t-shirt – and Sylvia’s poncho. It came to a long point front and rear so covered the important bits. She accepted Sarah’s comb, but couldn’t drag it through her hair.

‘Cut it off,’ she said.

‘The police will be here soon, dear,’ Sylvia said.

‘Cut it,’ Danni said. ‘All of it.’

She was scary. Her eyes were. Now that it was over, to Marni, this whole place felt unreal, but Sarah, who’d had her scare early, was over it now. She cut Danni’s hair, and was combing it when they heard the helicopter, or Herod and Danni heard it. Marni didn’t until she went after Herod, who’d let himself out.

He barked at it, and barked more when they heard the distant sirens, when Marni picked up his lead and took him back to the kitchen.

‘They’re coming.’

‘Your mobile?’ Danni said, her hand out.

Ross had said to stay on the line, but he hadn’t, so she gave it to Danni, thinking that she wanted to phone her mother. She didn’t phone anyone. She found the camera and shaking hands attempted to focused it on him.

‘You don’t want him,’ Marni said.

‘Take it,’ Danni said.

Almost told her he’d give her nightmares, but he’d probably given her enough to last forever, and maybe having a photograph of him tied up like a Christmas present with a big pink bow at his wrists might wash a few nightmares away, so Marni lined up a good full-length shot. Couldn’t see his bloody head in it, so she moved around until his head was the main focus, and got a close-up of it and the pink bow – and she hadn’t killed him, or not yet. He was breathing.

They came then, like a rowdy television show, uniformed men with guns on their hips and nothing for them to do when they came through that door.

Then he came, their egg and bacon McMuffin policeman, today looking like a worried Robert De Niro playing the role of detective, until he put his arm around Sarah, and when she looked at his face, he said, ‘I knew you were my luck. That day on the plane, I knew it.’

T
he Freeway Killer didn’t look a lot like his enhanced photographs, or not in his current state. The tall, poncho-clad girl with her fringe and pale short bob didn’t look like the photographs of the schoolgirl Danni. No rebel left in her eyes, no laughter, plenty of fear and staring distrust.

‘She needed a bath. We kept her stuff for you,’ Marni said, pointing with a sneaker-clad foot to the pile of rags she’d moved to the hearth, to the nest of tangled hair there.

The paramedics came then, and the girl who was but wasn’t Danni, who looked like Barbara Lane, grabbed Marni’s duct tape bandaged wrist.

‘I want my father?’

Marni removed that gripping hand, and held it. ‘I need stitches in that,’ she said. ‘And you need antibiotics for your ankle. I’ll go wherever they take you and stay with you until they get your parents.’

‘Where’s my father?’

‘Nearby. We’ll get him to the hospital, Danni,’ Ross said. ‘I’ll bet he’s there before us.’

She’d have nothing to do with the stretcher. Marni found a pair of sneakers on the table. Sarah got them onto Danni’s feet while Marni held Danni up, then together they walked her out to the ambulance, walked her slow, Danni not looking ahead to where she was going but up and around at the place where she’d been and Ross looking where she looked, at an old house on a hill, a decent old house in its day.

They’d got him. Jack James, the neighbour had called him. They’d got him, or those two girls had got him.

You either know or you don’t know when you’ve met your match. He’d known that day on the plane and denied it. When he’d waved those girls away on their tour bus, he’d wanted to get on it and go with them. Every time he saw them they brightened his day, then he let them get away.

Not this time.

He watched Danni assisted into the ambulance. Marni assisted herself, and Sarah wanted to get in and go with them.

‘You have to take our car home, Mum, and our paintings,’ Marni said. ‘And be careful at those roundabouts.’

You beautiful kid, Ross thought. You give a man hope for the next generation.

He’d given up hope of finding Danni alive. One out of five, he thought. It’s poor odds, but better than none out of five.

*

Sarah stood in the biting wind, watching the ambulance reverse down the drive, guided by uniformed men. They were everywhere, swarming like Gramp’s bees. She wanted to go from this place, to get into her car and follow that ambulance and Marni. Knew she couldn’t. Knew there could be no more running away, and no more need to. This time, they’d lock him up forever.

The police had unlocked the big door of Gramp’s eyesore tin shed, and when the ambulance was gone from her view, Sarah turned and walked to the open door.

And there it was, Gramp’s old Holden, newspaper stuck over its windscreen, its chrome grille and bumper bar. They’d shown a photograph of a white station wagon on the television, a Kingswood. Should have known it, but it had looked newer, bigger, cleaner than Gramp’s and he’d never said Kingswood. Always he’d said the old girl, or the van.

It was parked facing forward. She’d never driven it forward down that drive, always reversed down, her head out the open window, watching the rocks and bushes on the driver’s side and letting the other side look after itself.

Ross was beside her. She turned to face him. ‘I learn to drive in that. I should know before, from on the television.’

‘Do you feel like talking about what happened here today?’

She shook her head, and walked across to the shed, still expecting it to smell of Gramp’s honey. Maybe a whiff clung to a shelf or the rafters.

Remembered those shelves, and the day she’d found Daddy’s pots of gold, lined up on them. It would have been gold enough for her and for her mother. They could have stopped moving here, lived different lives here. He could have stayed, could have inherited this land.

She’d known him as soon as she’d seen his eyes, his teeth behind that grimace. She’d inherited his teeth. Not his eyes. She had her mother’s eyes.

Joseph and Stephanie, hard names to say. J’s were the hardest sounds to learn because they were made up of two sounds, a D and a G. He’d had three J’s.
Joseph Jacob Jones
. She’d had two. Remembered every year of Jillian Jones, every year of that old green tent, its smell of mould – and the boot’s dark spare tyre and grease smell.

Ross was beside her again, and this time she tried to speak of what had happened.

‘Danni was fighting him. Marni hit him, with the poker. Like she is chopping wood. Two hands. She hit him maybe three time before he stop fighting Danni.’

‘What brought you out here?’

‘This,’ she said, her hands reaching wide to gather in this land, its mud, its sky, its trees. ‘My grandfather own all of this hill. I live with him … before …’

‘You heard Danni – Marni heard her.’

‘Yes. I think she is gone mad when she smash the window…’

‘He’s not your grandfather?’

‘No!’ She shook her head. ‘No! No!’

Walked away from him to her car, thinking of Marni, of what she would say when she heard the words Sarah had to say. Maybe she’d understand why Sarah had lied to her, why she’d changed their names, why she hadn’t kept in touch with the Clarks. He’d known the Clarks, had known where they’d lived, so they couldn’t know where Sarah Carter had lived.

The car unlocked since she’d got the mobile, she locked it, and because Ross was looking up, she raised her eyes to the grey of the sky and to a helicopter hovering overhead. The police? A television newsman aiming his camera at her car? Would it be on the news tonight as the murder car? It was a Hyundai. It was the right colour.

Gramp’s land would be in the headlines, and Danni, and Joseph Jacob Jones.

FREEWAY KILLER’S DAUGHTER AND GRANDDAUGHTER TO RECEIVE TWO HUNDRED THOUSAND DOLLAR REWARD

Like a boomerang, that money. Throw it far away and it came back. They’d spent a fortune on repairs to the house. They’d paid three thousand dollars for their lounge suite, had written a cheque to Harvey Norman for almost ten thousand dollars, but what leaked out of that bucket of money, each month came flooding back. She’d write a bigger cheque soon to give to the taxation department, but that money would come back when her term deposits paid their interest. Maybe the bucket would find its level one day and become stagnant.

But they’d found Danni Lane. Sarah and Marni Carter had found Danni Lane alive when everyone had believed that she was dead. Men had been out searching the sides of freeways for her body in a bag. She wasn’t well. Perhaps her father and the doctors could make her well.

That image of that corner, that tangle of pink and grey, the arms, the screaming mouth of a rider on the shoulders of a buck-jumping devil, would stay with Sarah for her lifetime. And Marni’s face in profile, Oliver written all over it, his determination to fight to the end.

He lived on in Marni, and she’d fought the devil and won.

Sarah had fought him the day of her mother’s funeral. He’d been balancing on crutches, trying to throw a handful of rose petals into the grave. She’d stopped him, or made his petals fall on the ground.

She’d fought him when he’d wanted her to write her name on a withdrawal form so he could get money from Stephanie and Jillian’s bank account.

Sign it for him, baby. We’re all he’s got. He loves us.

Her mother had taught her many things. She’d taught her to read, to write, to speak – and never to be any man’s fool.

He was different when I met him, baby.

Perhaps he was or perhaps all men had two faces, the one that said, ‘I love you’, and the other face.

Bob would book his trip to Peru when he found out who she was. Jackie and Shane wouldn’t care. They’d want to know all of the gory details. Maureen Crow would look at her with sympathy and understanding. She knew all about being a man’s fool.

Sarah turned to Ross and Sylvia and the dog. They were standing where the garage sheltered them from the wind, Sylvia telling Ross about Jack James. She didn’t know much, but was easy to lip-read.

‘He kept to himself. I only spoke to him twice, but not for an instant did I suspect …’

They caught Sarah eavesdropping, so she walked up behind the old shed and through the scrub to Gramp’s flowering gum tree. It had grown. She put her arms around it, placed her cheek to its pink bark and prayed that there was no heaven, so Gran and Gramp would never know what had happened on the land they’d loved.

And felt Gramp’s hand on her shoulder.

Not Gramp. Ross was behind her.

‘What hospital where the ambulance is going to?’ she asked.

‘I’ll get Marni home to you,’ he said.

‘Is he gone now?’

‘Not yet,’ Ross said.

‘He is my father,’ she said, and his grip on her shoulder tightened.

Maybe that’s what it felt like when people were being arrested – the heavy hand of the law on their shoulder. His hand felt like Gramp’s, strong and good and she put her own hand on his so he wouldn’t take it away.

‘Marni … she knowing nothing … about him. I will tell her before …’ She pointed to the sky, to the helicopter, still up there, zooming in on Detective Senior Sergeant Ross Hunter and the Freeway Killer’s daughter.

Big headlines for the newspapers tomorrow.

H
e’d thought he was dead when that last blow had rattled his brain. He’d seen heavenly stars – and when he’d seen her standing against the light from the window, he’d thought that dear old God had sent down a welcoming committee.

He wasn’t dead and nor was the deaf one. By now, she would have been declared dead, if not for a Chinaman who couldn’t read English. Still blamed him for Angie’s death. Always had. Always would. The game may have been over but the blame was still alive and well.

He had no one to blame for this. He’d made one mistake after another with the little Yank. That first night when he’d found out who she’d belonged to he should have released her, but the mistakes had started breeding long before that.

He’d made his first in not buying old Nelly a new outfit, a summer frock, a straw hat. It was her unveiling that had led to his downfall. He could have, should have. Should have done a lot of things different.

The day they’d splashed his photograph all over the front page of three newspapers, he should have come out here, painted the Kingswood, dropped off the little Yank and kept on going. It had been easier to forget to buy newspapers, to control what Joan had watched on television.

She couldn’t walk, had minimal use of her right arm and hand, but insufficient to handle the remote control. She’d had minimal speech and what she’d had had been garbled. There’d been nothing wrong with her sight or her mind. He’d been making her a cup of tea when she’d seen the photographs of the Freeway Killer’s cars, his two cars. She’d known that old Kingswood well, had complained about the time he’d spent on attempting to get it going, and she and Angie had chosen the Hyundai together.

A smart woman, Professor Joan Murray, a middle-aged university lecturer, widowed, childless, with more money dripping out of her toffy nose than she’d known what to do with and too much time on her hands.

She’d volunteered at the prison for six months, teaching those who’d wanted to learn. The day he’d walked into her classroom and told her his name was Jones, she’d called him Indiana, and Indiana had played up to her too and she’d liked it. He hadn’t been there to learn. He’d been coming up for parole and would have used her, Jesus Christ or the devil to get out of that place.