The Silent Inheritance (7 page)

She was hypo-allergic to mops, brooms and cooking. As far as Marni could tell, all she did all day was smoke and hammer on her window if anyone dared to use her driveway, even to turn their car around.

Marni and her mother cleaned her house on Sundays, did her washing and cooked her boring soups and stews, big ones they froze in empty margarine containers in her freezer. She had a big modern freezer. They didn’t. They had a microwave and she didn’t, so they had to thaw what they’d frozen, then serve it to her with their own vegetables.

She never thanked them – except with cheap rent and free electricity and water. Their phone bill wasn’t free. It came addressed to her, but they paid it, because of their broadband.

Marni lived three separate lives. In one, she was Mrs Vaughn’s servant and she never talked back. At school she was just another kid. At home she felt about eighteen. She was allowed to drink coffee and watch adult television, and if she had to go to the shops or milk bar she took her mother’s purse that had everything in it, and her mother trusted her to turn the power board off before she left for school, because the television, laptop and fan were all plugged into it.

There was a second power board on the bench, for their jug, toaster, microwave and fridge, which they couldn’t turn off because of the fridge. It had individual switches you could turn off. She turned off the toaster and the jug.

The fridge was antique. It had been in here when her mother moved in, as had the old stove. The fridge still worked. The stove’s oven hadn’t turned on for at least a year and a while ago another one of its hotplates died and Mrs Vaughn refused to pay anyone to fix them.

Marni took an apple from the fridge and the sandwich her mother always made for her when she made her own. She put them into her schoolbag, slung the bag over her shoulder, removed a packet of cigarettes from a carton that lived on top of the fridge and let herself out. The door locked itself if you slammed it.

Their granny flat had two windows. The one in their bedroom looked east at the clothes line, the kitchen’s faced north. It had a good view of the back fence. Their door spent its days staring at Mrs Vaughn’s laundry and toilet windows.

They’d worn a diagonal track across the back lawn, a track which branched into two near Mrs Vaughn’s back door. Every school morning, Marni hammered on that door until the old lady came, and how fast she came depended on how desperate she was for a cigarette. Not very desperate this morning, so Marni hammered again, then listened.

A year ago when that door hadn’t opened, she’d heard her yelling from inside. She phoned Raymond, and when he hadn’t picked up, she’d had to climb in through the bathroom window. Mrs Vaughn had been on her bedroom floor, all bloody from a hole in her head – and as mad as hell when Marni phoned for an ambulance.

Another thing their landlady didn’t like was hospitals. She’d signed herself out after two days, and came home in a taxi with about ten stitches in her head, which you could see because they’d cut her hair off around the gash and she hadn’t had much to start with.

That fall achieved something. That night, she’d shown them where she kept an emergency key to her front door, which Marni wasn’t going to need this morning. She could hear movement, old lady slow movement. She was about five years away from turning a hundred.

The door eventually opened wide enough for a scrawny old hand to reach through for its daily ration, which she pocketed, then from the same pocket took a handful of change which she took her time counting coin by coin into Marni’s hand, her mouth slapping, raising saliva enough for her morning accusation.

‘I could hear your television blaring again last night.’

‘Sorry,’ Marni said, knowing their landlady hadn’t heard their television because it had been turned off and they’d been in bed reading by ten o’clock. ‘Are you all right for milk?’

‘I’ll tell you when I’m not. Bolt that gate behind you.’

‘I always do,’ Marni said, and went on her way, counting the dollars and smaller coins, knowing she’d made almost sixty cents on the cigarette deal. Mrs Vaughn didn’t know they bought them by the carton at the supermarket, which made them heaps cheaper than the milk bar man’s. They didn’t overcharge her to cheat her, just to stop her calling the milk bar man a thief the next time she went there to buy an emergency packet. With crotchety old people, you always had to think two steps ahead. Like not giving her the whole carton of cigarettes because she’d just smoke twice as many.

She could afford to. She’d written a cheque for twenty-two thousand dollars to pay for her Hyundai, then the first time she’d tried to back it out, she’d run into the fence and knocked down two metres of it as well as raking paint off the driver-side doors of a brand new car, which she hadn’t even bothered to get fixed. The neighbours got the fence fixed and had to threaten her with a lawyer’s letter before she’d write a cheque for her half of what it had cost, and she’d been the one who’d broken it.

Her son had fights with her about moving into a nursing home, which she would have been expelled from on her first day. He’d booked her into one once and sent Marni and her mother an email telling them they had thirty days to find alternative accommodation. Told them before he’d told his mother. The entire street heard her the day he told her.

She looked like an Egyptian mummy, preserved in nicotine – and smelled like one because she’d only allow the district nurse to come once a week to shower her.

Marni sighed, dropped the coins into her schoolbag and walked on towards the pipeline, her short cut to school. Until she’d turned twelve, her mother who had made her go to the before-school care ladies, used to walk her there early before she caught her bus. Other kids with working mothers had grandparents or aunties or neighbours to look after them. Marni only had her mother.

Mrs Vaughn used to have two sisters. She had five grandchildren in Ireland who she’d never seen, and Raymond had sons she hadn’t seen in years. He had a wife too. She never visited. If she had, Mrs Vaughn might not have been so crotchety. If she’d been less crotchety her daughter-in-law might have visited her, which was a case of what came first, the chicken or the egg?

No one in Marni’s family had lived long enough to grow old. Her mum’s parents had died in a car accident and her mother had to live with a foster family in Perth. She’d got married there when she was eighteen, then he’d died, before Marni was born, so her mother had gone to live with her grandparents, Marni’s great-grandparents, then they’d died too.

They had a framed photograph of Gramp and her mother when she’d been about six. They had one of her mother’s mother as a bride. Marni would have preferred one of her father, but they didn’t have one single photograph of him, which was crazy.

She used to ask why. She used to ask heaps of stuff about him. He was a plumber, had driven a white kombi van and died of a brain tumour, and that’s all she knew. Maybe when you loved someone enough to marry them at eighteen, and then they died a horrible death when you were pregnant, it hurt too much to talk about them – anyway, having a father who’d died before you were born was probably better than having one who’d run off with a girlfriend when you were old enough to remember, like Samantha Smith’s father, who was alive somewhere but she hadn’t seen him since her seventh birthday party.

‘I was born posthumously,’ Marni said if anyone asked where her father was. That’s what newsreaders said when a baby was born to the wife of a soldier killed in Afghanistan.

Maria from school had brothers, sisters, cousins, a grandmother, and dozens of uncles and aunties. At weekends, her house was like a Greek party, everyone talking Greek. They had to because of Maria’s grandmother, who’d been in Australia for almost forty years but could barely speak English. Marni used to think it was because Nona wished she’d never left Greece, but Maria said it was because she’d been too old to learn when she’d immigrated, which sort of explained a bit why deaf people who had cochlear implants as adults never learned to understand spoken English, but implanted deaf babies learned to speak like everyone else. It had something to do with brains needing to learn how to process speech before they got filled up with all the junk of living, like the difference between having a new sheet of paper to write on and one already covered with print.

That pipeline had something to do with water or sewerage pipes. For kilometres it cut across the land on an angle, just this stretch of vacant land with houses on either side. Parts of it had been turned into kids’ parks, with slides and swings and stuff. The part Marni walked through had trees, not large enough trees for a man to hide behind, though some of the bushy clumps would hide one.

And she saw something, saw movement near the fence, and for an instant her legs wanted to run, or they did until she saw the edge of a school uniform and heard Samantha’s laugh. Some people had a signature laugh.

Marni left the track to see what she was doing, then wished she hadn’t. There were four of them, crouched low, their backs to the paling fence, sharing one cigarette, two boys Marni had known forever and a girl she didn’t know who had a bunch of blonde hair half a metre long and a fancy mobile.

Obsessed by them, and in particular by iPhones, which did everything a camera or a computer could do, she joined the group.

‘Can you take a photo of us?’ the new girl asked. She had an American accent.

‘Probably,’ Marni said, eyeing her as the girl offered her phone. Marni put her schoolbag down to hold it, to feel the weight of it, the shape of it, while listening to instructions on how to make it work.

She got their cigarette in one of the boy’s hands in the first shot, so had to take a second photograph because the new girl wanted to send it to her father.

‘Her parents are divorced,’ Samantha said. ‘He’s an American.’

Marni was more interested in the iPhone, now back in its owner’s hands. She stood close, watching how she sent that photograph flying over the ocean to America.

‘How long have you been in Australia?’ she asked.

‘I was born in Sydney but we lived in Kentucky until I was ten, when my folks split and Mom brought me back to Sydney – then down here.’

‘She’s not allowed to contact her father,’ Samantha said.

‘Why not?’

‘I’m a hostage in Mom’s war game,’ the girl said. ‘What’s your name?’

‘Marni Carter. Who are you?’

‘Danni Lane.’

Marni turned away and picked up her bag, knowing who’d bought that iPhone. Lane wasn’t a common name, not like Smith. She knew that Barbara Lane had divorced her American husband, that she’d transferred down from Sydney to steal Marni’s mother’s promotion.

Walked on then, thinking,
I’m a hostage in Mom’s war game
, thinking how much better it was to have been born posthumously, better too to have your father run off with a girlfriend than having parents fight over who got custody of you.

T
he finding of Monica Rowan’s body had pushed the Swan trial from the headlines and Ross Hunter’s mind, but not from the courts. He’d been sworn in at one thirty, had cleared the courtroom by one thirty-five and had since been sitting, cooling his heels while fat Freddy played his games behind closed doors.

After Ross’s last run-in with Freddy, he’d watched a wife murderer walk, and if that clever little bastard got Cory’s grandparents’ home videos chucked out, Michael Swan would walk.

His girlfriend, pregnant with a possible baby Swan, had retracted her statement, and without it, all they had were those home videos. The grandparents had captured little Cory Martin’s brief life story and Ross had seen them play it out on a modern television in their lounge room.

They’d raised him for the first eight months of his life, videoed a newborn not doing much, trapped a gurgling three month old wearing a Hawthorn football sweater, beanie and socks that Grandma had knitted. They’d caught a chubby two-toothed eight month old, crowing about how well he could crawl. Then the mother had taken Cory from his grandparents’ care, and there’d been no further record of that brief life until his first birthday.

They’d videoed a rocking horse, a chocolate cake with one candle, and a wide-eyed matchstick boy who hadn’t smiled for Grandpa’s camera. They’d caught a bruised leg and backside before the screaming started. Not Cory’s. Grandma’s and the boyfriend’s. There was a bare two seconds of it before someone turned off the camera.

‘Did you report this?’ Ross had asked the couple.

‘We rang up a woman and I told her we had to get Cory away from those two or they’d kill him,’ Grandma said.

‘She did nothing,’ Grandpa said.

‘So we went around to where they were living to get him ourselves, and Mick went stark raving crazy. He attacked us.’

‘We reported what he’d done to the police,’ Grandma said. ‘But they don’t do anything when it’s a family matter.’

Ross had done something that night. He’d arrested Swan and charged him with murder, on the strength of those home videos. They’d found a spot of Cory’s blood on one of that bastard’s shoes, but later. They’d found a dent in the hovel wall in the shape of an infant head – or a rounded bowl – or a bowling ball.

Without the home videos Freddy would make mincemeat of Grandma and Grandpa, and pretty boy Swan would walk, and if that bastard walked, Ross was running, taking off around Australia in his Commodore and leaving this shit behind him.

He checked his watch. Ten after two. Time moved more slowly within the great halls of justice. Closed his eyes and considered a tent, or a little fold-down van. A van maybe. He could damn near see himself heading out on the Hume Freeway—

Which switched his mind back to Monica.

They’d found his note. He always sent them a note. They knew the brand of shampoo he’d used on Monica’s hair, where he’d bought the outfit she’d been found in. Hadn’t found much else.

A careful, evil bastard, he drugged those girls, drowned then bathed them, shampooed their hair, brushed and tied it in pigtails with big pink bows and dressed them in brand new near-identical outfits, white socks, white briefs, pink t-shirts and short denim skirts. All the same. Then he tied them into identical garbage bags and tossed them from a moving vehicle to the side of a freeway.