Winter (4 page)

S
he was right about one thing: it was quite a hike. The road wound up through open eucalypt forest. I'd been here a couple of times already, earlier in the week, and had wandered off the track down into the fern-lined gullies. But the bush seemed to stretch forever, and before today I hadn't realised it led anywhere definite. I'd assumed it just eventually blended into the next property.

I came to the fork and went on. The road climbed steadily. I got hot and a bit puffed, and took my sweater off and tied it around my waist. This was exactly the sort of exercise Mrs Scanelli always said I needed, if I wanted to develop my voice. ‘Big lungs!' she kept telling me. ‘You need lungs like airbags!' Well, if I kept climbing at this rate I'd soon have them.

I heard a heavy pounding away to my right, in the bush. It'd be a wallaby or kangaroo, escaping from this human trespasser. I strained on tiptoes, trying to see through the thick trees, but there was no sign of it.

The road flattened then started climbing again, at the same time as it swung around further to my right. I could see clear daylight ahead, and a few minutes later found myself at the edge of a firebreak, which ran either side of a fence line. The break was quite wide, and well mown on the other side, a bit overgrown and wild on this side. I assumed this was the boundary of my property. The road ran parallel to the firebreak, forming one edge of it, and went on up a steep hill to the right.

For a few minutes I'd been subconsciously aware of a buzzing noise, but now that I was in the open it became loud and obvious. I looked across to see where it came from. It was further again to my right, and I was surprised when I turned around to see several hectares of cleared land, the stumps of trees sticking up fresh and raw among the wreckage of the foliage.

A big semi-trailer was parked in the middle of it, with half a load of logs on board. A couple of blokes were working away with chain saws. One of the men looked like Ralph.

I walked across, stepping carefully through the debris, past a forklift. It was real ankle-breaking ground. Quite a contrast to the quiet forest I'd just been enjoying.

Neither of the guys had seen or heard me. The closer one was Ralph, as I'd thought. I was only half a dozen steps away when he saw me.

He was lucky he didn't cut his leg off, he got such a shock. The chain saw jerked up then down, and he had to jump away from it to avoid the ugly blade.

‘Jesus Christ!' He put it down, turning it off, then removed his ear protectors. ‘Sorry,' he said. He looked white and shaken. ‘I didn't see you coming. You gave me a shock.'

‘What are you doing?' I asked.

‘Doing? Oh, nothing much. Just, you know, putting in a . . . making the firebreak bigger.'

The other bloke had seen me now, and he turned off his chain saw and came over. I'd never seen him before.

‘Who are you?' he asked me. He seemed pretty aggressive.

Ralph was anxious to be nice. ‘This is Winter,' he told the man. ‘Winter De Salis. She's the heir to this property; inherits the place when she turns eighteen. She's just staying here for a while to have a look around.'

‘Oh yeah, right,' the man said. Or grunted. He didn't look too impressed. He didn't look easy to impress. Ralph seemed anxious to impress him though.

‘I've just been telling her,' Ralph went on, ‘how we're extending the firebreak. Make the place safer. You know what bushfires are like. Wipe you out in half an hour.'

‘Yeah, that's the truth,' the other man said. ‘They're a real bugger, them bushfires.'

They both stood there. It seemed a really uncomfortable situation. They looked so uneasy.

‘Where are you off to then?' Ralph asked.

‘Nowhere. Just up to the lookout.'

‘Oh yeah, well, you're quite a bit off course. You should have gone left at the fork. You want me to show you?'

‘Oh, yes, thanks.'

‘Up the road there . . . it takes a right at the corner of the fence line. Go a k and a half, turn left, and you'll see the lookout on the right.'

‘OK. I'll see you later.'

‘Yeah, sure.'

Once again I had the sensation of being watched from behind, as I plodded through the fallen timber and up the road. I didn't hear the chain saws start again until I was well inside the cool forest.

I wasn't surprised that they were so nervous, so guarded. Why wouldn't they be? I hate being treated like an idiot. I know when people are lying to me—after all, I've had enough experience of it—and I knew Ralph and his mate were lying through their teeth.

T
he lookout was a surprise. Someone, a long time ago, had put a lot of work into building it. A whole section of cliff had been reinforced and built up by rocks in a way that looked natural but must have taken a few people a few months. From the top you could see glimpses of the plains stretching away into the distance beyond Christie, but they were only glimpses, because the trees had grown so high they blocked most of the view.

I did stand and look at the view for a couple of minutes. That might seem pretty strange, considering that for the first time in twelve years I was about to come close to my parents. But I was too nervous. I didn't know if I had as much courage as I thought. This hadn't been part of my plans when I came back to Warriewood. Face it, I hadn't even known that this place, the lookout, existed until an hour and a half before. I certainly hadn't known the graves were there.

Yet a strange thing happened. When I turned away from the view to look for the graves, I knew exactly where they were. I headed off to the right, at about a 45-degree angle from the lookout, and went up a small rise, through scrub and grass and matted undergrowth. In a little clearing at the highest point I found them.

My parents lay under a huge blackwood wattle, its dark trunk like a column of mourning. The graves themselves were covered with weeds and fallen bark and dead sticks. I wouldn't have minded if they were covered with native plants and little wildflowers. But they weren't. These weeds were prickly and ugly. At the end of each grave was a headstone. I cleared the grass away from the left-hand one and read the faded words. It said:
In loving memory of Phillip Edward De Salis, born 15 May 1945, died by drowning, 27 December 1988. The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away.

It was the first time I'd known the date of their deaths. That was one of the things I'd returned to Warriewood to find out.

I cleared the other headstone. It read:
Sacred to the memory of Phyllis Antonia Rosemary De Salis, born 12 November 1945, died 9 July 1989.

There was no Bible verse on this one. Maybe whoever buried my mother had lost faith in God, with the two of them dying so close together.

I sat back on my heels, feeling a shock travel up my spine and through my scalp. Close together, yes. But not on the same day. Not on the same day.

Not on the same day. My skin kept tingling, like I'd been wired up to something. This wasn't right. This wasn't the way I understood it. Somewhere along the line I'd got things terribly mixed up.

I moved over to the tree and sat against it, staring at the stone words. Not on the same day. My mother had been alive for more than six months after my father's death. Then she too had died. How had she died? By accident? There was no clue. Only one thing was certain. She hadn't drowned. Otherwise they would have put that on the headstone, to match the first one.

If she hadn't drowned, the story in my mind, the set of facts I'd lived with all these years, was wrong. The story of my life was false. I'd built my life on a story and it was a lie.

In my mind I went through that story again, trying to work out how it could have broken down, how I'd been led onto this dead-end path. My parents had died in a sailing race. They'd been caught in a wild storm, during the Sydney–Hobart yacht race. Swept overboard. The bodies found a day and a half later. That was the truth. That was the story. That's what the Robinsons had said, the few times they'd talked about it.

I knew though that something had always bothered me. Some nagging thought deep in my mind had never been satisfied. Why else would I have been so desperate to come back, so desperate to find out the truth about my parents? I'd felt like I was on a quest. Oh, sure, I hadn't told myself I was coming back to find out the truth.

But a force stronger than curiosity had brought me back to Warriewood. That thought in my brain had known something was wrong.

I sat there trembling. The worst thing was that my confusion over the dates, over the way they'd died, made it impossible for me to get close to them now. As I'd trudged up the hill towards this spot, I'd imagined some scene out of a Hollywood movie: I'd feel their presence, feel that they were alive again for me, and fall weeping onto their graves. Then I'd be different somehow. I'd be changed. I'd come down from the hill a new person.

But all I was now was confused. I would come here again. And I would bring stuff to clean the graves. I would care for them, look after them, show my parents that they were loved. But before I came back, I had to know. When I went down to the rest of the world, I'd find out the true story. My life would be on hold until I could solve this mystery.

B
ack at the homestead I still couldn't find the courage to go visit Mrs Harrison. I was having enough trouble just finding the courage to think of her as Aunt Rita. I mean, what do you call a great-aunt anyway? All I knew about great-aunts came from a story I remembered Ailsa, my friend at school, telling me: how when she was a little tacker her family went to visit a great-aunt in Mount Isa, and Ailsa somehow got the idea that great-aunt meant great big aunt, so she thought her aunt was a giant. All the way to Mount Isa she was excited, expecting to meet an aunt five metres tall. She was tragically disappointed when they introduced her to a shrunken little old lady.

Maybe that silly story had lodged itself somewhere inside my head, because I think from the moment I heard about Mrs Harrison from Bruce McGill she started to grow bigger and bigger to me. The way Mr McGill talked about her, then the way Sylvia talked about her . . . it sounded like she had them both a bit nervous.

Ever since I'd started my campaign to return to Warriewood I'd felt I was running on my own fuel, with no-one around who I could trust to fill my tank. These last few days I was down to my reserves, with no sign of a new supply on the horizon.

So I chickened out from visiting Mrs Harrison. I told myself that I was exhausted from the walk to the lookout, too tired for the long hike to her place. Instead I decided to start playing detective in earnest.

First I rang Mr Carruthers' secretary and asked if he could come to Warriewood tomorrow. She said she'd check and call me back.

Then I set myself up for some serious research. I had my notebook computer, and for the first time since the telephone lines were reconnected, I hooked up to my e-mail provider. I nearly fell over when I found forty-eight messages waiting. Maybe I was more popular than I realised. Maybe they were all junk mail. Whatever, I downloaded them without opening them, then switched to the Internet and clicked onto the search engine.

Like with most Internet searches, I spent quite a while chasing shadows. I was scrolling through newspaper archives, concentrating on one date, 9 July 1989. It was a bit of a long shot. If she'd died in a car accident, for example, there might have been only one or two mentions of her name. Forget the one or two. There might have been no mention at all. Quite often newspapers just say things like ‘the name has not been released'.

On the other hand, according to Bruce McGill, she had been well known in the district. And I knew from the souvenirs I had of my parents that she'd been a star in two areas at least: shooting and horse riding. She'd held two Australian records for marksmanship, and won the Garryowen three times at the Royal Melbourne Show. The Garryowen is named after a woman who died trying to save her horse, Garryowen, from a stable fire, and it's the most prestigious riding event in Australia. So that should have been worth a paragraph when she died.

Eventually I connected with the
Age
for 1989. But it seemed like only the major stories for the year were available. I searched for her name, but with no success. Perhaps she hadn't died in the kind of spectacular accident that made the front pages of the papers, like a plane crash.

I realised that my best hope lay in the death notices, the little classified ads that people put in when someone dies. I'd been leaving them for last, because I knew they don't give many details. A lot of them give no details at all. But I opened them for 9 July.

Nothing. Nothing. It was as though she hadn't existed. I sat staring at the screen, dumbfounded. Why wouldn't there be a death notice?

Then, just as I was about to give up and disconnect, I realised how stupid I was. If she had died on 9 July there wouldn't have been a death notice on 9 July. At best it wouldn't go in till 10 July. Probably not till 11 July.

I tried 10 July and drew a blank. Then hit the jackpot.

The first thing I saw was my own name. I guess your own name always jumps out when you see it in print. But there it was all right, ‘loving mother of Winter'.

I read the notice with tears in my eyes. For a few moments I forgot the reason I was on the Internet. All I cared about was that again, for the second time this day, I was in touch with my mother, my parents. These little connections were all I could have, but they were better than the great silence, the vacuum, that I'd known for so many years.

There were dozens of other messages, a column and a half altogether. It made me sad to read them.

So much feeling in so few words, such a sense that people liked and cared about her.

But there was nothing concrete, no information. The vague feelings that had brought me home for this search, the sense that something was wrong, that something needed to be explored and understood, hadn't been helped any. All I'd done was run up another bill on the Internet, and leave myself with more unanswered questions.
Tragically
? What did that mean? Her death was tragic all right. I knew that. I didn't need a newspaper to tell me.