Trails in the Dust

by Joy Dettman

  Could still see Amy sitting at it, her hands, twisted with arthritis, hitting her typewriter keys while Jenny read aloud from scribbled notes. How they’d laughed. They’d laughed until they’d cried some days.

  They’d taken the idea for Sent in Chains from Jim’s Molly tome. After he and John had put together that pictorial history for Woody Creek’s Centenary, they’d received commissions for other historical projects, one of which had got Jim researching the early history of Molliston, a town east of Willama. Over a period of years, he’d compiled many pages of facts, figures and John’s photographs – which may well have had historical significance but failed to catch the eye of a publisher.

  Poor Molly, transported to Australia for prostitution, had caught Jenny’s imagination, and the day Jim decided to burn his tome she’d smuggled most of its pages down to Amy.

  They’d stripped them to bedrock, then together began the game of reconnection, justifying what they’d been doing by convincing each other that Jim would appreciate their work when he had publishers knocking down the door to get at survivor Molly.

  The game should have ended when Amy and her laughter died. It would have – if not for a deathbed promise. ‘Finish Molly and dedicate it to me, Jennifer,’ Amy had said. ‘Promise me, Jennifer.’

  People will promise anything when a loved one is dying, but she’d tried. She’d had a rough beginning, a wobbly middle and an unsatisfactory end when fate stepped in.

  Georgie, attacked in her own backyard, had been stitched from throat to shoulder. One of her arms was out of action and she’d been pregnant with Katie. Jenny elected herself for the job of nurse/companion/carer and she’d taken her manuscript with her to Greensborough.

  You can read with one arm out of action. Georgie read Molly. ‘Shades of brilliance, mate,’ she’d said. ‘Get it onto a computer, delete the Jim bits, give Molly a background and you’ve got a novel.’

  It was Paul who’d scanned those dog-eared pages onto computer discs. He’d been the first to sit Jenny down at a computer. She’d stayed longer than necessary in Greensborough. Leaving Jim home alone with Lorna’s furniture hadn’t done a lot for his mood, nor had the clean computer printout of Molly Squire she’d dropped onto his lap, her name with his on the face page.

  He might have read six pages before blacking out Jim Hooper. ‘It’s all yours, Jen,’ he’d said.

  ‘What’s wrong with it?’

  ‘For one, the family will sue you,’ he said, and read no more.

  She’d given up, had left her manuscript to gather dust while becoming a grandmother to beautiful Katie.

  Georgie hadn’t given up on Molly. She’d been on maternity leave and looking for something to fill her days. She’d altered every name on the Molly file, altered every place, altered the title, then so as not to defile the Hooper name, she’d typed Juliana Conti on the face page – then posted a new printout to the publisher who’d printed the Hooper/McPherson children’s books, seven of them, big colourful magical books that were still selling today.

  The publisher’s acceptance of Sent in Chains caused Jim’s first major breakdown, or his first since their marriage. He’d laboured twelve hours a day, three hundred and sixty-five days of the year on his tome. Jenny had fed his work into a demon computer and turned historical fact into popular fiction. He’d seen her computer addiction as a modern form of demonic possession.

  She’d been possessed by something. Before Her Time came next, then The Stray, then The Winter Boomerang, then The Town. She’d ripped Woody Creek apart in that one. My Sister, her last novel, was her favourite, if not her best seller. She’d had the time of her life writing it, had named a dog in that book Sissy – for obvious reasons.

  We’ll Meet Again had been a lengthier project, in time, not bulk. She’d stolen time from her boys to write it, had stolen time in the dead of night. It was a dark love story. Her thoughts always became darker at night.

  Jim read every word of that one. ‘Publish it when I’m dead,’ he’d said.

  ‘What’s wrong with it?’ she’d asked.

  ‘Nothing. It’s good,’ he’d said, and he’d kissed her.

  ‘Stop!’ she said, and Lila looked at her, not understanding her command. ‘Not you,’ she said, and she reached again into Jim’s concertina file – her file now.

  Her will was in the Will pocket. She read it, then ripped it in half and the halves in half. She glanced at the manila envelope that had spent the last three years beside her will. It contained no list of investments, no instructions for her funeral. It contained a disc and its contents were black.

  She put it away then turned to the twins’ stroller. She and Jim had chosen the best. They’d bought it the day they’d brought Trudy and the boys home from hospital. It was folded up beside those cartons of books, free copies, supplied by the publisher, no doubt supplied for her to give away to friends. She had two friends still living, Harry and Jessica. Jessica had cataracts and was waiting for surgery. Harry read newspapers.

  ‘Dump them,’ she suggested. ‘Seal them into your garbage bags and dump the lot.’

  Didn’t have enough garbage bags left, so went to her linen closet for sheets to shroud them. You can see through some sheets. She covered the sheets with an old bedspread, then taped it down securely with duct tape.

  LANGDON HALL

  Tracy didn’t look like a businesswoman, didn’t dress like a businesswoman, but somewhere beneath that cap of dark curls was a mind capable of running the country. She was well on her way to making Morrie’s estate pay for itself.

  Cara knew enough about computers to use the internet when necessary. To her daughter, the cyber world was a second home. Tracy had uploaded photographs of the Hall, its ballroom and two of its better bedrooms. She’d uploaded photographs of a stone cottage she advertised as The Gamekeeper’s Lodge, a private hideaway in the woods. It looked better than it was, with the old stone bridge in the background.

  Born and raised in a boarding house, having spent the first fourteen years of her life tripping over lodgers, Cara refused to become involved in Tracy and Morrie’s business – other than to keep an eye on the figures at the end of each month. The lodge was paying back what they’d spent on it.

  At a pinch it would accommodate three couples, and since promoting the Hall on the internet, they’d been swamped with bookings, from overseas tourists, honeymooners, jaded city dwellers, and others.

  Well away from the Hall, hidden behind five acres of old woodlands, they rarely saw or heard from those who weekended in the lodge. This weekend, Tracy had handed its keys to a mob of students, wild things, seeking a parental-free place to party, with a stream outside their front door where they could wash away the megrims of the night before. For two nights, those at the house had heard that pounding jungle-beat today’s youth named music, heard the roar of late-night motors, racing in, racing out.

  The dogs may have heard more. This morning, when set free to run, the young pair decided to take off towards the woods, so Cara and Morrie followed them.

  The cars had disappeared in the night. The cottage was silent.

  ‘They’ve done a runner,’ Morrie said, walking faster across the stretch of grass between woods and stream. Cara followed behind, expecting to find a dead body.

  The lodge was empty – not empty, but empty of bodies, alive or dead. A hotplate was glowing red. Morrie turned it off.

  ‘Animals,’ Cara said. There were bottles everywhere, cans, takeaway cartons, cigarette butts littering every surface. ‘What gives them the right to believe they can walk away from this?’

  ‘Daddy’s money.’ Morrie picked up a bottle. ‘He can afford to supply them with the best,’ he said, glancing at the label before tossing it into the bin provided.

  ‘Tracy’s prices were supposed to keep out the bad element.’

  ‘They were medical students, the doctors who’ll be operating on us, the dentists pulling our teeth a year or two from now,’ he said, and he showed h
er another label before sending that bottle crashing after its mate. That was as close as he came to showing his anger, tossing bottles – and cursing the mobile phone that the business, or Tracy, forced him to carry. It beeped this time. Less fond of its beeps than its rings, he passed it to Cara. She wore prescription lens sunglasses.

  How do you feel about a May wedding? Down there? She read the message aloud. No need to say who that text was from. They’d raised two very different daughters.

  ‘What’s wrong with October in Scotland?’ Morrie asked, so that’s what Cara texted in reply.

  Three guesses? Elise shot back.

  You’re pregnant!

  We are, and we’re delighted it happened so fast. It took Felicity and Steve two years to get pregnant after she went off the pill. Have you got a free Saturday in May?

  Cara relayed the news as she read it. Elise and Ian had been living together for eighteen months. They had a wide circle of assorted friends. He was older, an architect and the only offspring of Scottish parents who’d been planning a big Scottish wedding with kilts and bagpipes.

  ‘We’re booked solid through May and you’ve got that German thing in June,’ Morrie said.

  ‘That’s the first weekend. You said you’d keep the following weekend free – and leave that for the cleaners, Morrie. You pay them enough,’ Cara said. He was picking up shards of a broken glass.

  ‘They’ll demand danger money. That weekend’s free, but we’re going to hire a car and drive around Germany while we’re over there.’

  ‘We can do that any time,’ Cara said, and her fingers got busy.

  ‘I need a holiday,’ he moaned.

  ‘She needs to get married.’

  We’ve got nothing booked for the second weekend in June. How far along are you?

  Only just. I stopped taking the pill two months ago. June is good. I’ll let his mother know.

  Does she know that you’re pregnant?

  Ian told her last night. It was a bittersweet pill but she got it down. She wants grandkids.

  They were still texting when Cara followed Morrie up steep stairs to the bedrooms. No bodies up there. The rooms looked well used but not abused. The abuse was downstairs, and they returned to it.

  No Smoking signs hung behind every door. They’d been ignored. There were butts in bottles, butts in cans, on the flagstone floor, in the sink.

  ‘Vermin,’ Cara said.

  Until the mid-nineties this cottage and its neighbours had sheltered only vermin. They’d been planning to demolish them, to sell the land they were on, until the powers that be had stepped in. The three cottages had historical significance. They weren’t allowed to remove one hallowed stone.

  At the time, Morrie was running the front half of the Hall as a B&B. Paying two local women to cook, serve breakfasts and do the rooms ate most of his profit; insurance swallowed the rest. Cara had urged him to sell the estate for what he could get. His ties to Langdon Hall weren’t blood ties, though maybe stronger than blood. He’d been seventeen when his parents brought him here. Old Leticia, widow of the last Henry Langdon, Morrie’s paternal aunt by adoption, had owned the Hall, plus eighty acres of land. He spoke often of his first meeting with old Leticia, of his first introduction to the Hall.

  The original section, built in the sixteenth century, had been uninhabitable; the front section, erected two hundred years later, was neglected but intact. Leticia had lived in the intact section, on credit, surrounded by her goldmine of land that developers had been drooling to get at.

  A complex tale, the Langdons and the Hoopers, interconnected for the last hundred years. During the Hall’s reclamation, Morrie had unearthed ancient documents, account books from the sixteen hundreds, a mouldy bible where every birth, death and marriage in the past two hundred years had been recorded.

  Vern Hooper’s marriage to Lorna Langdon had been recorded; Lorna, older sister of the last Henry Langdon. She’d died in childbirth, in Australia. Her daughter Lorna’s birth was recorded on the same date as Lorna, the mother’s, death. Leticia and Henry’s eight infants’ births and deaths were recorded. One little Henry had clung to life for a week, another for two days. The male infants had all been named Henry.

  Bernard Grenville’s birth hadn’t been recorded in that bible. Left motherless as a five-year-old, Leticia, his eldest sister, raised him. Had he possessed a modicum of intelligence, Henry may have adopted him, but Bernard had been an artist, or he’d spent his life splashing paint onto canvas. He might have been twelve years old when Henry chose his bride, Lorna, his Australian-born niece, and his last chance to gain an heir of the Langdon line. Bernard was in his forties and still solely dependent on Henry before he agreed to the match and was promptly shipped to Australia.

  Vern Hooper had produced two daughters, neither one a prize. Lorna would have put the fear of God into a heavyweight boxer. Bernard, only a little fellow, had preferred plump Margaret, who wouldn’t scare a mouse. At the time, he’d been unaware that she carried not a drop of Langdon blood, that her mother had been Lorna’s flighty little nurse maid.

  Henry had known. He’d cut Bernard off without a penny. Leticia, a widow for six years when he’d brought his family home, had welcomed her brother. The night they’d arrived, she’d told Morrie that he’d looked like a worthy heir for her Henry. She’d willed the estate to him.

  She wouldn’t have approved of what he’d done with his inheritance. He’d sold all bar thirty acres of her land. Vern Hooper wouldn’t have approved either. Morrie had sold his land and properties, but he’d paid Leticia’s debts. The remainder of that money had been spent on bringing Langdon Hall back from the dead, both the front and older rear section. It had taken years – and money.

  They’d been in debt, had been sweating over account books the day Tracy walked into the family room unannounced.

  ‘Aren’t you supposed to be in Italy?’ Cara asked.

  ‘I’ve left him,’ she’d said. ‘If he dares to phone, tell him I’m dead.’ She was a dancer, had married a dancer. They’d been performing Romeo and Juliet in Rome.

  Her death lasted for two days. On the third day she rose and walked with them down to those three crumbling cottages.

  ‘So turn them into self-contained accommodation,’ she’d said.

  ‘Money,’ Morrie said.

  ‘The bank’s got plenty. Start with the best of them and work your way down to the worst.’

  Still on the subject of overdue bills, she’d unlocked the old ballroom a week later and, pregnant or not, climbed onto an elderly cabinet to wipe cobwebs and dust from the signature on an ancient portrait.

  ‘You’re sitting down there like a pair of miserable old Scrooge McDucks when you have this! Borrow on this, on these,’ she’d said, wiping more cobwebs.

  They had two walls of these, all ancient Langdons and their wives or daughters they’d kept locked out of sight because most of their visages were only fit to be locked out of sight. According to Tracy, a few of the artists’ signatures had been worthy of display. She’d listed those she could decipher, then she and Morrie spent the evening looking for the artists’ names in an old set of encyclopaedias. One signature could have been worth big money.

  She’d called Morrie a dinosaur when he showed her the advertisement for his B&B business. She’d sacked one of the local women she’d caught texting in a bathroom instead of cleaning it.

  There wasn’t a lot of Tracy. She’d been built to dance. She had the elfin face of a dancer. Her formal education had ended abruptly when she’d received an offer from a ballet company at sixteen. Where her dancing had come from, Cara didn’t know but her biological mother must have got into a car with a businessman nine months before her birth. As if born to the job, she’d taken charge of the advertising and Morrie’s B&B business.

  Tony, her husband, took time off for Tristan’s birth, and when he flew away two months later, Tracy was pregnant again and threatening to leave him again. There was a bare twelve months b
etween Tristan and Leona, who’d put in her appearance the day work began on the Gamekeeper’s Lodge. There’d be no more little accidents. Tracy had her tubes tied.

  ‘Tell her no more student groups, Morrie.’

  ‘The booking was for three couples,’ he said. ‘They’ve paid.’ He’d been gathering takeaway cartons and flattening them beneath his shoe. He hadn’t crushed a fried chicken container; it was half full of banknotes and coins. ‘They’ve emptied their wallets into it,’ he said, offering a receipt from a bottle shop.

  Cara took it from his hand, glanced at it then at the banknotes. ‘Georgie’s mouse money,’ she said, then wished she hadn’t. They’d buried the past, almost. She’d forgotten Georgie. Most of the time she’d forgotten her.

  Morrie remembered her hair. He’d seen her on a television screen back in the late seventies, then in ’99, he’d seen her in the flesh, in Australia. On the long flight back to the UK, safe in no-man’s-land above the chaos of the world, he’d spoken of his sister, but once his feet were back on English soil, he’d put her and Australia away. That was who he was, and Cara loved who he was.

  They should have cancelled that tour when their plane had to turn back. Instead they’d waited eight hours at the airport to get onto another flight. For the next two weeks they’d played catch-up.

  An early flight from Sydney should have got them to Melbourne in plenty of time for the interview. It hadn’t. They were being ushered into the television studio when the past had called Cara’s name. She’d turned, and there she was, unchanged in the twenty years since they’d last met. She’d shaken Georgie’s hand, introduced Morrie as her husband, then left him to deal with, or not deal with, the fallout.

  Georgie hadn’t recognised him. She’d told him she was there as Juliana Conti’s minder.

  ‘What’s mouse money?’ he asked.

  ‘Just a memory,’ Cara replied, and wished again that she’d kept her mouth shut. But how can you forever keep biting back words? How can you keep killing memories? ‘Georgie worked for an old grocer who waged a private war on the taxation department. I came out from school one afternoon and she was waiting at the gate with her overnight bag. She had a shoe box in it, stuffed full of Charlie White’s ill-gotten gains.’