Digging Up Dirt

by Pamela Hart

  I’ve never seen a living body go so still. It was kind of scary, although I didn’t know if I were scared for myself, or for him.

  ‘This isn’t for the media, pastor,’ I said quickly. ‘I’m not going to out you on The Daily Report. This is off the record. But when I was reading your sermons and interviews, I couldn’t help but notice that you never condemn homosexuality.’

  He finally looked back at me. Buttoned down, in control. Mostly. There was just a tightness in his voice and his shoulders. ‘I don’t approve of homosexuality.’ A pause. ‘I do not practise homosexuality. I have never practised it. It is not Godly.’

  I looked at him. He looked at me. I was pierced with pity for this old man who had grown up in a time when he could literally have been thrown into prison for who he was. Which didn’t excuse his silence. Pity warred with anger that he had encouraged so much bigotry, of so many different kinds.

  ‘Not Godly? Nor is letting gay members of your congregation believe that they are damned,’ I said, softly. ‘Do you know the statistics on suicide in LGBTQ youth?’

  ‘That’s why I don’t condemn it,’ he snapped.

  Huh. Time for the big question. ‘Did Julieanne Weaver realise your secret?’

  ‘I have no secrets!’ He stood up, standing over me, fists clenched. ‘You go look, missy. Nothing in my life to find. Nothing. Julieanne Weaver realised nothing because there was nothing there. Never. Not once.’ His voice quietened. ‘Not once.’

  I stood up, making him step back a pace. It put him off balance, and I steadied him with a hand on his arm.

  ‘Not too late, pastor. You still have time to accept who you really are. Who God made you.’

  He gaped at me. Was that a flicker of longing in his eyes?

  No. It was hatred. He hated me for making him admit who he was.

  Too bad. It made me sick to think of all the crap he spewed out every Sunday, and probably on every other day too. Prosperity gospel. Anti-everything. Give me your money or you won’t go to Heaven. ‘Family values’ but God help you if you weren’t heterosexual and married, no matter how much you loved your partner and children. And all the time hugging this secret to himself. I didn’t care if he was gay and hiding it. It was no excuse.

  As I drove back to Newtown to meet Stuart, I couldn’t make up my mind. Should I tell Chloe? Amos had an alibi. There was no proof that Julieanne had ever twigged to his sexuality. No proof of what his sexuality was, really.

  But what a motive for someone from the church!

  Gossip wasn’t proof. I decided I would sit on it, for now. I felt better about that; outing someone has always seemed to me to be a violent act. There’d been enough violence done.

  Stuart’s solid good sense was a nice antidote to the afternoon. Until we went into the cinema.

  I liked arty French films, usually, but this one turned out to be about a beautiful blonde woman being murdered and her distraught boyfriend (tall, dark) descending into madness as it was gradually revealed that he had killed her in a fit of jealousy.

  It’s a sign, I told myself, sounding like my grandmother. I squeezed Stuart’s arm in the dark and he patted my hand like I was a dog asking for a biscuit. I almost expected him to say, ‘Good girl, shh, now.’

  Afterwards, we walked down to a Thai place for dinner. It was a fine night and even though it was a Monday, most of the restaurants were open and full.

  It was reassuring to be out among people who weren’t worried about murder. I enjoyed watching the pierced, tattooed and brilliantly haired locals peacock down King St, mixed in with the nurses from the nearby hospital picking up takeaway on their way home. Stuart was funny and insightful about the movie, we drank a good Margaret River verdelho with our chilli beef, and I laughed for what felt like the first time in ages.

  Stuart walked me back to my car.

  ‘We’ll be back in the house tomorrow,’ I said.

  He grinned. ‘Thank god! We can have some time to ourselves.’ His goodbye kiss was a lot warmer and his hands moved more freely. Normally I would have been just as enthusiastic, but I couldn’t help remembering my suspicions about Julieanne. As soon as filming was over tomorrow I was scrubbing that floor. Maybe buying a temporary rug for it.

  ‘Are you all right?’

  I sighed. ‘Just hoping the police will sort all this out quickly.’

  Stuart patted my shoulder. ‘I’m sure they will,’ he said, but he sounded annoyed, as though he wished I hadn’t spoiled the mood. Fair enough, but I didn’t have the energy to make the situation better.

  ‘Night,’ I said.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Tuesday

  I put the key into my front door lock with mixed feelings. I was desperately relieved to get the house back, but what would I find inside?

  At first glance, it all looked the same as we’d left it the day Julieanne had been killed. The bare-earth floor, criss-crossed by joists and bearers, the lines strung across the shallow pit, the edging of chipboard around the walls and running from the front door to the stairs. I felt vastly relieved. Then I noticed details. Not all the string lines were there—some had been pushed into the ground where Julieanne had fallen onto them. The ground was mushed up by many, many boot prints. There was black dust everywhere—fingerprint powder, I figured. And worst of all, one bearer at the end of the pit had a neat section taken out of it; the raw wood showed up bright against the aged outside. They hadn’t sawn all the way through, just taken a section of the top of the bearer. One part of my brain planned to ask Boris to assess it for load-bearing safety. Another noted the dark stains on the side of the bearer just under the raw wood. Julieanne’s blood.

  I took a step forward so I could see the earth beneath the bearer. There was no terrible pool of blood—not even dried blood. So she hadn’t bled to death. But that bearer had been the instrument of her demise.

  My heart started thudding. I couldn’t stand to look at those stains—and I couldn’t imagine Tol working in that pit, staring at them, all day long. I rushed to the laundry and got the bucket and gloves I kept there and I perched on the joists and scrubbed and scrubbed until there was nothing on the bearer but water stains. I didn’t look at the bucket. I knew the water would be a dark red-brown. I threw it out on the garden. The hydrangeas. Tried not to think about blood and bone being good fertiliser. Tried not to giggle with shock and horror.

  I threw the gloves out, brought the vacuum cleaner down from the main bedroom and frantically hoovered all the fingerprint powder away. It was all I could do, but I knew it wouldn’t be enough to erase Tol’s memories. Lugging the vacuum cleaner up the stairs, I felt exhausted, and work hadn’t even started.

  When the doorbell sounded, I let the film crew into the house and waited while they set up the lights, seeming as normal as I could. They moved around the pit with circumspection at first, trying to show respect for the dead, but that wore off pretty quickly. It was just the same location that we’d been filming at the week before. I didn’t know how I felt. The image of Julieanne’s feet in the pit was vivid in my mind, but this was still my house, and I still loved it.

  Terry got some shots of the pit and close ups of the bearer to give to Tyler for the evening news. Business as usual. But then, with a glance at me to make sure it was all right, he got down in the pit and stretched out the string lines, so it looked as pristine as it could. I smiled at him with gratitude. I’d wanted to do that but I just couldn’t make myself get into the pit again.

  Tol arrived at nine, complete with coffee from Graciella’s and a tall burly man with a beard.

  ‘Alain Parkes, Poppy McGowan,’ Tol introduced us.

  Alain looked far more like an archaeologist just off a dig than Tol. His boots had seen a lot of hard wear, he badly needed a haircut, his beard was bushy and his fingers were dry and callused as though he’d dug with his bare hands. He looked competent and experienced and very smart. But I noticed that his pale blue eyes blinked a little shyly behind his bi
g glasses, so I smiled gently at him and thanked him for coming to help. He smiled back and relaxed a little.

  ‘Fat-tailed sheep, eh?’ he said.

  ‘I hope not!’

  He chuckled and we went inside, where he was introduced to the film crew and lost no time getting into the pit. Tol, I noticed, hesitated a moment before he jumped down too. I saw him glance at the cut bearer and go slightly pale, but he kept working, so I didn’t say anything. Alain, though, spent a lot of time up that end of the pit, as though he were deliberately shielding Tol from the view. A nice man.

  I was glad we had more filming to do—it was acting like a kind of antiseptic, clearing the room of Julieanne’s memory, overlaying the image of her body in the pit with images of Tol and Alain earnestly squatting and discussing the ways in which you could tell a fat-tailed sheep from a Cotswold, North Devon or Teeswater, which had all apparently been bred in the early colony.

  ‘Can you explain to the camera what you’re looking for?’ I asked Alain, but he couldn’t. He froze as soon as he realised that we were filming. I sighed and sat on the edge of the pit. I’d dealt with reluctant interviewees before. ‘Just talk to me,’ I said reassuringly. ‘Tell me all about it.’

  ‘If it’s a fat-tailed, it’ll be a Cape sheep,’ Alain explained, keeping his eyes on me. His shyness was evident at first but began to melt away almost immediately as he got into his subject. Experts are like that. ‘The Second Fleet brought some from Cape Town on their way out in 1790. But by the early eighteen hundreds other breeds were being imported, like the Teeswater, which is much bigger. They kept the tails on, sometimes, but we should be able to tell from the size of the femurs …’

  Tol, on cue, proferred a leg bone and Alain inspected it.

  ‘Too big,’ he said. ‘Probably Teeswater, though it could be a Lincoln, even, if it’s a bit later.’

  Tol handed over another bone.

  ‘Tail,’ Alain said succinctly. ‘Mmm. Odd. Neither fat-tailed nor Teeswater. This is a Bengal tail. Seen a lot of them. Stringy-looking things.’ He bent down and examined some of the other bones poking up through the dirt. ‘Looks like there’re several breeds here. Not as early as Julieanne thought, though. Eighteen hundreds, definitely, but probably later than 1820.’ He peered more closely at one particular bone, which looked like all the others to me. ‘And that’s a cow rib, too.’

  He and Tol exchanged glances and looked down at the pit as if seeing it in a new light.

  ‘Butchery,’ Tol said.

  It took me a minute to realise what he meant.

  ‘A—a slaughterhouse?’ I asked, incredulous. ‘My house was an abattoir?’

  ‘Well, not your actual house,’ Alain said reassuringly. ‘That’s much later. But the site … yes, I’d say that whatever farm was here did its butchering in this area.’

  He and Tol were watching me anxiously, clearly worried that I would find the idea disgusting. Little did they know.

  The laugh started in my belly and worked its way up, leaving me helplessly giggling on the floor. ‘Dad’s going to love this!’ I gasped.

  Maybe I seemed a bit hysterical. Terry actually stopped filming and came over to see if I was all right, so I pulled myself together a bit and managed to say, ‘My dad was a butcher. A meat inspector. Worked in abattoirs all his life! My grandfather too!’

  The men exchanged glances and then smiled, half-amused, half-relieved that they didn’t have to deal with a crazy woman.

  ‘So …’ Alain wasn’t quite sure what to do next.

  I took a deep breath and motioned to Terry to get back behind the camera. When he signalled that he was rolling, I turned back to Alain.

  ‘Dr Parkes, can you summarise your conclusions for us, please?’

  Which he did, as neatly as if he’d been speaking at a conference.

  ‘It’s interesting,’ he said at the end. ‘We have known that there were several breeds of sheep used for meat in early Australia, and this is good evidence that they were grazed together on the same properties, as at that time livestock were not usually taken far before being slaughtered. So we have a very interesting insight into the working methods of the early settlers.’

  We wouldn’t be able to use any of that—it was much too complicated for littlies.

  ‘Could you say that again so a six-year-old could understand it?’

  Alain blinked and smiled ruefully, as if only now remembering why we were there.

  ‘We’ve found bones from cows and sheep, so we know that right on this spot was a butcher’s, and people who lived around here came here to get their meat. And the animals would have lived around here, too, so we know that the area was a farming area.’

  ‘Perfect. Will you need to do more investigation?’ Please say no.

  Alain hesitated. ‘I’d like to see if we can find any post holes. For the block and tackle, you know.’

  I signalled ‘cut’ to Terry. I understood what Alain was talking about, and I was pretty sure that the Year 1 teachers did not want their six-year-old students to hear about animals being strung up by their heels while their throats were cut.

  ‘Will that take long?’ Even I could hear that my voice was plaintive.

  Alain patted my hand. ‘No, no, we just need to survey what we can get at here. It’s just for confirmation, really. We know how they used to butcher. A day or two at the most.’

  Terry was puzzled about why we’d stopped filming, so I went over and explained. He and Dave laughed and started making bad jokes about slaughterhouses and blood and horror movies. Hah! Let them. Abattoirs held no fears for me. That particular smell of fresh blood in a cold room just makes me nostalgic, full of memories of going to work with Dad during the school holidays. I said so, and had the satisfaction of shutting them up.

  In the quiet, we all looked at the bearer where Julieanne’s head had hit, and jokes about slaughterhouses weren’t funny any more. Mirha looked green, and the men solemn.

  ‘We’re done here,’ I said. ‘You can head back.’

  ‘She’s tougher than she looks,’ I heard Terry mutter to Dave as they started to pack up.

  Tol looked as though he was thinking the same thing.

  I smiled tentatively at him. ‘Coffee?’ I asked. ‘Before you get on with the survey?’

  ‘Great idea!’ Any reservations he had about my bloodthirsty streak disappeared, and he helped Alain out of the pit with enthusiasm.

  We waited until the crew had left and then walked down to Graciella’s and had coffee and her fabulous pistachio macaroons. Alain told me the story of his life. He was married to a journalist and was devoted to Middle Eastern archaeology, which meant that he disappeared to Jordan for at least six weeks every year to dig. He taught at university the rest of the year and occasionally took guided tours over the sights of Egypt. He told me about his family, his career, his hopes, the book he hadn’t finished writing, the books he wanted to write, and the difficulty of a career in archaeology where ‘not only do you study dead men’s shoes, you have to wait to fill them if you want to advance’.

  Tol teased him a little at various points, but mostly just sat and let him talk. On the way back to the house, he let Alain walk ahead and said quietly to me, ‘I’ve never heard him talk that way to anyone apart from his wife.’

  I shrugged. ‘Happens to me all the time,’ I said. ‘People talk to me. I’ve just got that kind of face, I guess.’

  He studied my face intently, and I wondered what he was seeing. Whatever it was, his eyes softened and he smiled. My breath came a little faster.

  ‘Lucky Stuart,’ he said, then quickened his pace to catch up with Alain. For some reason, that made me sad.

  When we went back to the house they started on the dirt outside the central pit, seeing what they could find. I went upstairs, prompted by a need to make sure Julieanne hadn’t left any other signs of her presence behind. Surely Detective Chloe would have taken anything away? The chipboard floors had always had stains—were there
any new ones? I couldn’t see any. But in the built-in wardrobe (the only modern thing in the house) I found a couple of bottles of wine in the bottom. Red. Jacob’s Creek—a nice drop, but not too expensive. And not mine. I had reached out to pick one up then thought better of it. If they were Julieanne’s …

  I rang Stuart.

  ‘You didn’t leave any wine at the house, did you?’

  ‘At your house?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘As a surprise, maybe?’

  ‘Was I supposed to?’

  I sighed. ‘No. But I found two bottles in the wardrobe.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Julieanne, Stuart,’ I said. ‘Maybe they were Julieanne’s.’

  ‘Maybe they belong to the film crew.’

  But I didn’t think so. Red wine gave Terry migraines and Dave drank beer. And Mirha never drank alcohol.

  ‘Um, I have to go,’ Stuart said. He sounded distracted. I should have remembered he didn’t like being called at work.

  ‘Bye,’ I said absently, thinking hard.

  I decided to call my friend the police officer.

  ‘They weren’t yours?’ Detective Chloe said suspiciously. ‘They were with other things of yours that had your fingerprints on them.’ Ah, yes. The yoga mat, the condoms—the accessories of sex that I couldn’t keep at my parents’.

  ‘What about the bottles? Whose fingerprints did they have?’

  There was a pause. ‘We didn’t print everything. Once we found your prints and your boyfriend’s prints on the other things, we assumed …’

  I restrained myself from pointing out her mistake.

  After a second, she said, ‘Have you touched them?’

  ‘I’m not that stupid!’

  ‘Stay there. I’ll send Martin over for them.’

  ‘She was meeting someone here,’ I said, a touch of complaint in my voice. ‘Who, do you think? My money’s on Carter.’

  ‘Martin will be there within an hour,’ Detective Chloe said. She hung up.