Dodge and I listened.
‘He took her,’ John said. ‘I wasn’t going to give him a single other thing.’
I took my phone out of my pocket and stood. ‘I just want to make a short phone call.’
Dodge and John continued talking. Their voices lowered to a soft rumble as I made my way back into the hall, up and through the kitchen, passing the spot where I assumed Linda Special’s body had been found, judging by descriptions in the newspaper articles I’d read. The floorboards creaked as I stepped through the spot, the very centre of the house, it seemed. The heart. I told myself not to step over the place where she had lain. But I did, anyway, taking a long stride, not sure exactly why the impulse presented itself. Respect, maybe. Superstition. Fear. I went out the back, where there was a little sitting area, the one John had said his wife used to sit in to watch the sunset. I dialled my brother.
EVAN
Iwent to the verandah, shouldered the screen door open, stood there listening. I was waiting for the approach of Martin Rodger, the neighbour to the east, upon hearing the gunshots. ‘Uncle’ Rodger, as Arthur had bitterly dubbed him, had been storming over from the direction of his similarly hoarded and unkempt property intermittently since Russell and I were kids, reacting to gunshots, the smell of smoke, loud music or the animalistic whooping of teen boys in the wild strip of forest that separated the two slabs of land. I counted off five minutes, hearing only the sound of distant ride-on mowers, bugs buzzing, dogs barking. Country sounds. Then I went back inside. One of my father’s feet was rhythmically twitching, like he was revving an engine in his sleep. Blood was pooling everywhere, black and inky, following the patterns in the linoleum.
I was emotionless. Hard, cold, moving from one action to the next. I went to the bedroom, tugged the comforter from the bed and brought it into the kitchen. The foot-twitching stopped. I rolled the old man onto the comforter, wasn’t shocked by the soft, breathy groan that came as air moved around in my dead father’s lungs. I tucked the top and bottom of the comforter into the bundle, rolled the man twice more, and then hefted him onto my shoulder.
I took him down through the long, wet grass to the third shed along a winding row of leaning aluminium structures filled with rusting trash. I heaved the bundle onto the ground, pulled up thedoor and went in, opening the front passenger side of Dad’s current main car, a Ford Falcon sedan. In the footwell, I spied what must have been Chloe Lutz’s laptop and phone, quiet, still, the batteries removed and lying on the mat beside them. I didn’t even move them. I ratcheted back the front passenger seat, loaded the bundled comforter with its swaddled body into position and shut the door.
My breath was coming in short, dry huffs, like I was jogging back to the house, not walking. Working my way through the miles and miles it took to murder a person, a marathon. I was staying focused, talking myself out of the impulse to stop, to give in to the exhaustion. A big, cheerful yellow sun was rising above the eucalypts. Lorikeets tinkling. I went to the house, walked around the blood pool that was left where Arthur had died and into the laundry off the kitchen. I started gathering supplies.
It took a good half an hour to clean up the blood on the linoleum. A garbage bag full of rags, towels, paper towel, sponges. There was blood spray on the kitchen window over the sink. On the cabinets. In their handles and hinges. When I was done cleaning, I went into Dad’s bedroom, changed into a set of his clothes, and took an old duffel bag from the shelf, dropping my sopping and bloodied and gunpowder-dusted clothes into it. I zipped up the bag, tucked it under my arm. Taking the garbage bag with the used cleaning supplies and my bloodied clothes in the bag, I went out and walked it back to the car where Dad lay waiting for me.
Driving beside my father, I gripped the wheel, stared ahead, told myself that the bundle slumped beside me contained bones and flesh and blood and nothing else. Arthur was gone. He wasgone. I tried to believe it. But the hope always came side by side with the terror of disappointment. They were siblings, those two.
My phone rang in my pocket. I slid it out and answered it, my eyes locked on the road ahead.
‘Where are you?’ Russell asked. No hello. Nothing.
‘Dad’s.’
‘Good,’ he said. ‘You’re already halfway to Sydney. I have two jobs for you, and one involves going back to Pemulwuy. To evidence holding, this time.’
As I drove my murdered father towards the nearby river, my brother explained what had been found in Chloe Lutz’s phone and email accounts. Linda Special, Marian Richley, and the unnamed teenager from Womerah. ‘She might have been on the edge of something enormous here,’ Russell said. I could hear the excitement in his voice. ‘She might have been about to solve a case that’s been around twice as long as she was even alive.’
‘Maybe,’ was all I could say. My jaw was chattering and my fingers were tingling on the steering wheel. Shock finally kicking in.
‘I want to keep my feet on the ground about this,’ Russell said. ‘Not get carried off with the fairies too quickly. Because it’s a very long shot. The guy would have to be in his seventies at least.’
I looked over at the bundle beside me.
‘So, I’m not dropping the angle with the lanky kid with the cap,’ Russell said. ‘I want you to get Fry to send you the image from the CCTV, and I want you to organise a region-wide SMS blast. Tell him to get it to the local press. The ones coming into town.’
I managed to breathe the word ‘Okay’.
‘At Pemulwuy,’ he went on, ‘get them to tell you what they have in evidence holding for Linda and Marian’s cases. Linda’s husband says there was never any DNA. But they can run everything again. The technology is better now. We might get something. And if we can link Linda and Marian’s guy to Chloe’s killer …’
Russell trailed off. I held a hand against my mouth so I wouldn’t gag.
‘Anyway, go do that,’ he said. ‘Now. Stop rubbing your father’s tootsies for him and get back to work, and while you’re leaving, tell him I said to do the world a favour and go fuck off and die.’
‘He might be about to do just that,’ I said.
‘What?’
‘He’s got cancer.’ I cleared my throat, adjusted my grip on the wheel. ‘Dad. He’s got lung cancer. He’s packing right now to go up north for a while. Hasn’t said exactly where.’
‘Oh, Evan,’ Russell said, ‘I wish you’d saved this news for me for later on today. It’s too early to get stuck into the champagne.’
I didn’t answer. Russell drew a breath and let it out, long and slow and loud, a huge sigh that crackled the line.
‘This’ll be great,’ Russell said. ‘It’ll be like The Time He Went, only better.’
