by Jane Harper
Cameron had laughed. “Oh, yeah, I’ve seen her. She’s all right.”
“Yeah, listen, so you’ll ask them? See if they’ll let me back?” Nathan had held his breath until the answer came.
“Mate, I’m sorry. It’s too soon. There’s nothing I can do, they don’t want you there.”
Nathan had hung up. He hadn’t spoken to his brother again for three months.
* * *
Xander returned the papers to the glove box and fidgeted in his seat. Nathan could tell he’d had enough and was anxious to go. Nathan was pretty keen himself. He wondered if they should drive on ahead but felt strangely reluctant to leave Bub and Harry lingering beside the grave. Their heads were down as they spoke in voices Nathan couldn’t hear.
“We’ll head back in a minute,” he said, and Xander nodded.
Nathan had always been privately gratified that Xander had never really warmed to his grandfather. Jacqui had told Xander her version of the story as soon as he was old enough, so Nathan then hadn’t been able to refrain from telling his. Immediately, he’d wished he hadn’t bothered. His version hadn’t sounded much better. Either way, Keith was dead now. He’d succumbed to a second stroke four years after the first, which was hardly Nathan’s fault but did nothing to help lift the finger of blame. Keith’s widow had moved to Brisbane to be closer to Jacqui and Xander, and now lived in a nursing home. Nathan had hoped for a while that Keith’s death might bring an end to his banishment, but if anything, it had seemed to make it worse. As though having suffered the crime, Keith was the only one with the authority to lift the punishment. Now he never could.
It would all blow over, Nathan had told himself daily at the start. Nearly ten years later, he was still waiting. He no longer thought that daily, or at all, in fact. Most days now were spent dwelling on the what-ifs. For example, what if Keith had actually died out there on the road that day? If he’d had the bloody decency to fall down quietly with his arm clutched by his side and his mouth shut?
Through the windscreen, Nathan watched Harry kick the toe of his boot in the ground near the grave.
Without Keith around to point the finger, things would have worked out a lot differently for Nathan. Dead men didn’t talk, and no one would have known what he had done. Nathan would have been free and clear.
Finally, Harry said something to Bub, who nodded. Together, they turned their backs on the grave and headed to their car. The engine fired up, and Nathan started his own. He took a last look at the ground where Cameron had been found.
Dead men didn’t talk.
Nathan must have thought that a hundred times over the years, but as he drove past the grave, the idea slipped slightly, taking on a strange and unfamiliar form. It was uncomfortable as it lodged itself in the darkest corner of his mind.
The wheels juddered over a patch of rough ground as he pulled away. Nathan didn’t look back but instead kept his eyes forward. His gaze fell, almost involuntarily, on the car in front. Specifically on the shapes of the two men and on the rearview mirror, in which Nathan could just make out a pair of eyes. Up ahead, Harry was watching him.
12
Even at a distance, Nathan could see his mum react as he pulled up the driveway in Cameron’s car. Liz was sitting under the tree by her late husband’s grave and stiffened at the sound of the engine. She started to stand, then slumped back down as Nathan, not Cameron, emerged.
He’d parked next to Harry’s vehicle, although there was no sign of either him or Bub. Nathan had fallen so far behind on the drive back that they had eventually pulled almost out of sight.
“I’m going to have a word with your grandma,” Nathan said to Xander as they climbed out.
“No worries. I’ll be in my room.” Xander headed off, like he had something on his mind. Nathan watched him go, then walked over to see Liz. Duffy was sitting by her feet.
“What did Glenn say?” Liz looked up. She’d been crying again.
“He’s going to give you a call. Sends his condolences.”
“Did his condolences include any answers?”
“No.” He sat down on his mum’s right side; her hearing wasn’t so good on the left. Duffy moved to rest her head on his knee.
Liz stretched out a hand, and Nathan took it. He could see an old scar on her arm, its angry mark now faded with age. He ignored it as usual, looking instead at a new one that bloomed below, red and recent. A skin cancer removal, he knew without asking. They all had it, to some degree. Every white adult in the area. Whenever the specialist flew into town, there was always a queue of people waiting their turn to get the treacherous parts of their flesh cut out or burned off. Then cross their fingers until next time. Nathan had plenty of scars of his own.
“This all clear?” he said, pointing at the red weal.
“I think so, for now.” Liz turned her arm over so he couldn’t see it anymore. “But who ever knows?”
Somewhere close by, Nathan heard a dingo howl, and they both turned toward the sound.
“They’ve been hanging around for a while, those ones,” Liz said. “They’re getting too brave.”
Nathan hesitated. “You want me to try and get them?”
“Bub’ll do it. He likes it. The money,” she added quickly. The council paid thirty dollars for every dingo scalp presented at the cop shop, where Glenn would count them and fill in the paperwork.
Liz sighed. “Is Bub all right, do you think?”
Nathan thought about his brother standing in the dark with his stream of urine hitting the ground.
“I don’t know. Bub’s Bub.”
“He doesn’t seem worse to you?”
“Honestly, he seems about the same.”
Liz looked at the ground next to Carl’s grave. “I never in my life thought it would be Cameron going here. I can’t stop running through things in my mind. What I should have done differently.”
“Don’t do that to yourself. There was probably nothing that would have changed anything.”
“That feels worse, somehow.” Liz shook her head. “I wish I hadn’t gone riding that last morning. But someone had to exercise Sophie’s horse. It threw her, did she tell you?”
“She mentioned she fell.”
“I wasn’t sure if it was her fault or the horse’s. She’s training for gymkhana again this year, but she’ll have trouble if she can’t control him. I thought I’d better check how he was traveling, but maybe if I hadn’t gone—” Liz stopped. There were tears in her eyes. “Maybe if I’d sat down with Cameron and talked to him properly. Do you remember what you two talked about last time you spoke?”
Nathan tried to think. “Mending fences, probably.”
“Really?”
Nathan saw her face and almost laughed when he realized her mistake. “Not like that. I mean practically. How we were going to split the maintenance costs.”
“Oh. Of course.” She looked down. “Steve called from the clinic. Unless the autopsy finds it was something other than dehydration, they’ll release his body in a couple of days. We can have the funeral on Wednesday if we want.”
“Christmas Eve? That soon?”
“It’s either then or we have to wait until the new year. Ilse said she didn’t know, so I told them we’d do it then. Better done, I thought.” She turned her swollen eyes toward the house and the girls’ bedroom windows. “Do you think that was the right decision?”
“I think so. There’s no good choice.”
“I suppose I’d better let the neighbors know, then.”
“Will they come? This close to Christmas?”
“Of course they will.” Liz’s voice had an edge.
Nathan knew that was probably true. People had liked Cameron, and even if they hadn’t, they tended to make the effort for the dead. Funerals were one of the few events that ever drew his mum away from the property. Most were local, within a day’s drive, but a few months ago, she’d flown all the way to Victoria to see her brother buried.
Nathan
had barely listened when Liz had called to tell him his uncle had died. Malcolm Deacon, dead of a coronary, aged seventy-one. Nathan couldn’t pretend to care. He hadn’t even known the bloke. He’d only met him once, more than twenty years earlier, at the funeral for the guy’s own daughter. All three brothers had gone to that one, because Liz had made them.
“She was your cousin,” she’d said, and apparently that settled it. Carl had point-blank refused to go, then seemed astounded when that hadn’t deterred his wife’s plans. Instead, Liz and the boys had flown and driven for hours, trailing all the way out to Kiewarra, some shitkicker town Nathan had never heard of in the arse-end of Victoria. They’d arrived, and Nathan thought he could see why his mum had left practically the day she turned eighteen. It was bigger than Balamara, but there was something that felt off about the place. The soft-cock locals did nothing but bitch about the weather, while the Bright brothers strolled around in long sleeves, enjoying the cool change.
The family had listened to a sermon for a girl they had never met, surrounded by people they didn’t know. Nathan knew his cousin had been seventeen, only a few years behind him, but he was surprised by how young that suddenly seemed when he saw the coffin. There were two boys and a girl about her age sitting near the front, visibly shaken, with their eyes wide in disbelief. Bub, who had only been eight at the time, had sobbed into his hands, as if he’d known her.
After the service, Nathan, Cameron, and Bub had held back and watched Liz’s frosty reunion with her brother. A cousin on the other side of the family had loitered the whole time, staring at them with the half-glazed eyes of a daytime drinker. He looked like the worst kind of dickhead, and Nathan had been glad he kept his distance. Later, the bloke had said something to upset Bub, so Nathan and Cam had cornered him in the toilets and roughed him up a little. Not too much—it was still a funeral and they weren’t animals—but enough that he’d remember it next time. As they’d left the wake, his mum had shaken her head and muttered something under her breath.
“What was that?” Nathan said.
“Nothing. Just, we should have done better for that poor girl.”
They’d headed out of town the minute it was all done and dusted, Liz apparently not interested in staying even a single night in the farming community she’d grown up in. That year felt like it was marked by death. Within a few months, they’d prized Nathan’s dad from a tangled metal wreckage and buried him in the far corner of the yard.
After that, Liz hadn’t set foot on a plane again until three months ago, when she’d announced she was attending her brother’s funeral. Nathan had been completely taken aback. He’d felt nothing but vague relief at his uncle’s death and had assumed his mum had felt the same.
“Why on earth are you going?” he had asked.
“He was my brother.”
“Yeah, but—” he had started, then couldn’t think how to continue. She had all the same information that he did. To be honest, Nathan thought it was bloody lucky the heart attack had done the man in before the legal system caught up with him.
Not that the technicalities had mattered to Jacqui. She’d had an absolute field day when she’d heard what his uncle had been accused of and had jumped at the excuse not to send Xander for his visits, citing ongoing legal proceedings and appropriate role model behavior and all that bullshit. Nathan had been forced to pay a three-figure sum for his lawyer to send a six-sentence letter reminding Jacqui of her court-ordered obligations. So if the bloke was dead in the ground, Nathan—for one—was happy enough about it.
But Liz had seemed determined to go, and Nathan had worried about her doing that absolute slog of a journey on her own. He’d thought about it for longer than he should have, then reluctantly said he’d go with her, only to be told that Cameron had already offered, and she’d told him not to bother either.
“For God’s sake,” she’d said. “Mal wasn’t worth one airfare, let alone two. Not before and especially not now.”
There had been a long argument and, in the end, Uncle Harry had gone with her.
“How was it?” Nathan had asked him later.
“Quiet,” Harry said.
“Many there?”
“Pretty much just us. A couple of cops turned up.”
“Officially?”
“I don’t think so. One was the local bloke from Kiewarra. Friendly enough, but on leave. He was a bit—” Harry had waved at his face “—damaged. There was another one, tall guy who said he used to live around there but was based in Melbourne now. Didn’t say much else, seemed pretty pissed off about the whole thing. I think they were there mainly to check the old bastard was really dead.”
Nathan suspected his mum had gone for much the same reason.
At the thought of Harry, Nathan suddenly remembered the drive earlier. The man finding the hidden track in the rock face on the first attempt.
“Cam never mentioned anything specific that was bothering him?” he said. “Small stuff, even? Problems with Harry? Or Bub?”
“I don’t think so. Like you said, Bub’s Bub.”
“And Harry?”
Liz frowned. “Fine, as far as I know. Why?”
“I don’t know. Nothing. Just with Harry saying Cam might have been under pressure. I wondered—”
“Wondered what?”
“I don’t know. If they’d had a falling out or something.”
“Not that I know of.” Liz’s frown deepened. “Harry’s a good man. He’s been good to this family.”
“I know.”
“He’s been here longer than you have. And he’s always done right by us, wouldn’t you say?”
“Yeah. I would.”
“So what are you saying now?”
“Nothing. Forget it.”
A pause. “All right,” Liz said, but Nathan saw her eyes flick toward Harry’s four-wheel drive.
“Listen, what happens to Cam’s share of the property?” Nathan said, changing the subject. It came out more bluntly than he’d intended, but Liz didn’t seem to notice.
“It goes to Ilse.” There was a faint stiffness in her voice. “With the day-to-day stuff, I don’t know. We’ll have to work out who’s going to run the place long term.”
She waited a beat as though half-expecting Nathan to propose something.
“Hire a manager, I suppose,” she said, when he didn’t.
“Not Bub, then?”
“No.” Liz’s answer was quick. “See what Harry reckons, but I don’t think so, personally. Make sure you and Ilse include Bub in any conversations, though, would you?”
“Yeah, of course.” Across the yard, Nathan could see a kid’s bicycle leaning against the house. “How are the girls today? This morning they seemed a bit—” He tried to find a better word and failed. “Strange.”
“God knows. It’s hard to tell with Sophie, but Lo’s taking it very hard. She was worked up already, even before all this. She’s got the idea into her head that the place is haunted.”
“By what?”
“I don’t know. The stockman, probably. He’s the usual suspect. You all went through that phase as kids yourselves.”
The wind blew across the plain and, in the distance, Nathan could see a spiral of dust rise like an apparition.
“It’s not hard to see why she thinks so.” Liz followed his gaze. “When I first came to live here, we used to have a stockman—a living one—who reckoned this whole area was haunted by the settlers’ dead children. The ones who died badly. Childbirth or accidents or illness, I suppose.”
There were plenty to choose from, Nathan thought. The child mortality rate had been sky-high. Not a single white baby born in the town had survived until the 1920s.
Liz’s eyes shone with tears. “He used to say the ones who wandered off called the loudest. For the rest of their lives, their mums would hear them crying out in the wind. Do you think that’s true?”
“That this place has ghosts?”
“That the mothers would h
ear their lost children in the wind.”
“Oh.” He reached out and took his mum’s hand again. “No.” He really didn’t. If that were true, the outback air would howl so loud the dust would never settle.
13
The backpackers were setting the table for dinner when Nathan put his head around the kitchen door. He’d left Liz sitting under the gum tree with her own thoughts and come inside. Simon and Katy both looked up, the clatter of cutlery falling silent as they saw him in the doorway. Nathan had the distinct impression they’d stopped speaking abruptly.
“Sorry,” he said, then wondered why he was apologizing. “Have you seen Bub?”
Simon shook his head. “I thought he was out with you and Harry.”
“Never mind. Thanks.”
Nathan didn’t hear the low murmur of their voices start up until he was completely out of the kitchen.
He found Bub in the living room, sitting on the couch with his feet resting on Nathan’s sleeping bag. He was playing a video game, something involving shooting and a masked man. Cameron’s painting looked down on them from the wall; a scene of serenity, in contrast.
“Hey.” Bub barely glanced up as Nathan came in.
“What are you doing?”
“Nothing. This.” He nodded at the screen. “You want to do two-player?”
“No, it’s all right.”
Nathan pulled his sleeping bag out from under Bub’s feet. “That’s my bed, you know.”
“It’s mainly the couch, mate.”
Katy walked past the open door and returned a second later carrying a clean tea towel. Bub’s eyes followed her with raw longing.
“I bloody love her.” He heaved a dramatic sigh.
“Oh, yeah? What’s her last name?”
Bub grinned. “I dunno, but I can tell you what it’s going to be.”
Nathan had to smile. “I think you’re a bit late, mate. Looks like she’s spoken for.”
Bub’s face darkened a little. “It’s a bloody crime, great girl like her with a Pommy prick like him. He’s not even keeping her happy.”