The Dry

by Harper,Jane

  Falk lay unmoving on the bed. Fifteen minutes had passed. He could be on the road by now. Instead, he was still there.

  He sighed and rolled over, his fingers hovering over his phone as he considered who he needed to inform. He pictured his St. Kilda flat, the lights off, front door locked up tight. Big enough for two, but for the past three years home only to him. No one was waiting there anymore. No one fresh from the shower, with music playing and a bottle of red breathing on the kitchen counter. No one eager to answer the phone and interested to hear why he was staying a few extra days.

  Most of the time, he was fine with that. But at that moment, lying in a pub room in Kiewarra, he wished he’d built a home a little more like Barb and Gerry Hadlers’ than one just like his father’s.

  He was due back at work on Monday, but they knew he’d been at a funeral. He’d avoided saying whose. He could stay, he knew. He could take a few days. For Barb. For Ellie. For Luke, even. He’d built up more overtime and goodwill on the Pemberley case than he could use. His latest investigation was a slow burn at best.

  Falk mulled it over, and another fifteen minutes passed. Finally, he picked up his phone and left a message for the financial division’s long-suffering secretary, informing her he’d be taking a week’s leave for personal reasons, effective immediately.

  It was hard to say which of them was more surprised.

  9

  Jamie Sullivan had been at work for more than four hours by the time Falk and Raco tramped across his fields. He was on one knee, his bare hands deep in the dry dirt, checking the soil with scientific scrutiny.

  “We’ll go into the house,” he said when Raco told him they had questions about Luke. “I need to check on my gran, anyways.”

  Falk studied Sullivan as they followed him toward the low brick building. Late twenties, he had a dusting of straw-blond hair that was prematurely thinning at the crown. His torso and legs were wiry, but his arms were built like pistons, giving him the shape of an inverted triangle.

  At the house, Sullivan led them into a cluttered hallway. Falk took off his hat and fought to keep the look of surprise off his face. Behind him, he heard Raco swear under his breath as his shin connected with a footstool lurking by the door. The hallway was chaotic. Every surface was crammed with ornaments and knickknacks gathering dust. Somewhere deep in the house, a television blared.

  “It’s all Gran’s.” Sullivan answered the question that neither of them had asked out loud. “She likes them. And they keep her”—he considered—“present.”

  He led them through to the kitchen where a birdlike woman was standing at the sink. Her blue-veined hands trembled under the weight of a filled kettle.

  “All right there, Gran? Fancy a cuppa? Let me.” Sullivan hastily took the kettle from her.

  The kitchen was clean but disorganized, and above the stove a large scorch mark stained the wall. The paint had blistered and was peeling away like an ugly gray wound. Mrs. Sullivan glanced at the three men and then back at the door.

  “When’s your dad getting home?”

  “He’s not, Gran,” Sullivan said. “He died, remember? Three years now.”

  “Yes. I know.” It was impossible to tell whether she was surprised by the news or not. Sullivan looked at Falk and nodded toward a doorway.

  “Could you take her through? I’ll be in in a minute.”

  Falk could feel the bones through the loose skin of the old woman’s arm as she leaned on him. The living room felt claustrophobic after the brightness of the kitchen, and everywhere half-empty cups jostled with blank-eyed china figurines for precious space. Falk led the woman to a threadbare armchair near the window.

  Mrs. Sullivan sat down shakily with an irritated sigh.

  “You officers are here about Luke Hadler, are you? Don’t touch those,” she snapped as Raco went to move a pile of dog-eared newspapers from a chair. Her vowels carried a trace of an Irish lilt. “No need to look at me like that. I’m not completely daft yet. That fella Luke was round here, then went off and did away with his family, didn’t he? Why else would you be here? Unless our Jamie’s been up to something he shouldn’t.”

  Her laugh sounded like a rusty gate.

  “Not that we know of,” Falk said, exchanging a glance with Raco. “Did you know Luke well?”

  “I didn’t know him at all. Other than he was friends with our Jamie. Came round from time to time. Gave him a hand on the farm.”

  Sullivan came through carrying a tea tray. Ignoring his gran’s protests, he cleared a space on the sideboard and waved at Falk and Raco to sit down on the battered couch.

  “Sorry about the mess,” Sullivan said, handing around cups. “It gets a bit tricky—” He glanced toward his gran and turned his focus instead to the teapot. He had shadows under his eyes that made him look older, Falk noticed. But he had a confidence about him, the way he took stock of the situation and managed the room. Falk could imagine him away from all of this, wearing a suit in a city office somewhere. Making six figures and blowing half of it on expensive wines.

  Sullivan finished passing out the drinks and pulled up a cheap wooden chair. “So what do you want to know?”

  “We’re tidying up one or two loose ends,” Raco said.

  “For the Hadlers,” Falk added.

  “Right. No worries. If it’s for Barb and Gerry,” Sullivan said. “But look, the first thing I want to say, and what I told the Clyde cops, is that if I’d known—if there’d been any suggestion that Luke was about to go off and do what he did—I’d never have let him leave. I want to say that straight off.”

  He looked down and fiddled with his mug.

  “Of course, mate. No one’s saying you could have stopped what happened,” Raco said. “But if you could run through it one more time, that would be helpful. So we can hear for ourselves. Just in case.”

  Rabbits, Sullivan told them. That was the problem. One of them, at least. Hard enough to get through the drought without them attacking everything worth eating. He’d been complaining in the Fleece the night before, and Luke had offered to give him a hand.

  “Anyone hear you making the arrangements?” Falk said.

  “Probably. I don’t remember specifically. But it was pretty busy. Anyone could’ve heard if they’d bothered listening.”

  Luke Hadler pulled up at the entrance to the field and climbed out of his truck. He was five minutes early, but Jamie Sullivan was already there. They each raised a hand in greeting. Luke reached into the cargo tray for his shotgun and took the ammunition Sullivan handed him.

  “Come on, let’s get these bastard bunnies of yours,” Luke said, flashing his teeth.

  “You supplied the ammo?” Raco asked. “What kind?”

  “Winchester. Why?”

  Raco caught Falk’s eye. Not the missing Remingtons, then.

  “Did Luke bring any of his own?”

  “I don’t think so. My bunnies, my bullets, was my way of thinking. Why?”

  “Just checking. How did Luke seem to you?”

  “I don’t know really. I’ve gone over that in my head a lot since then. But I suppose I’d have to say that he seemed fine. Normal.” Sullivan thought for a minute. “By the time he left, at least.”

  Luke’s first few shots were poor, and Sullivan glanced over. Luke was chewing on the skin around his thumb. Sullivan said nothing. Luke shot again. Missed.

  “All right, mate?” Sullivan said reluctantly. He and Luke tended to confide in each other as much as Sullivan did with any of his friends, which was to say hardly at all. On the other hand, he didn’t have all day to get these rabbits dealt with. The sun bored down on their backs.

  “Fine.” Luke shook his head, distracted. “You?”

  “Yeah, same.” Sullivan hesitated. He could easily leave it there. Luke shot and missed again. Sullivan decided to try to meet the man halfway.

  “My gran’s getting a bit on the frail side these days,” Sullivan said. “Can be a handful.”

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nbsp; “She OK?” Luke said without taking his eyes off the rabbit warren.

  “Yeah. It’s just a bit tricky looking after her sometimes.”

  Luke nodded vaguely, and Sullivan realized he was only half listening.

  “That’s bloody women for you,” Luke said. “At least yours can’t run around carrying on about God knows what anymore.”

  Sullivan, who had never once in his life considered his gran to be in the same category as “women,” struggled to think of a response.

  “No. I suppose not,” he said. He felt they had somehow strayed into uncharted waters. “Everything OK with Karen?”

  “Oh. Yeah. No worries.” Luke leveled his gun, pulled the trigger. Better this time. “You know. Karen’s Karen. Always something happening.” He took a breath as if to say something else, then stopped. Changed his mind.

  Sullivan fidgeted. Definitely uncharted waters. “Right.”

  He tried to think of something else to add, but his mind was blank. He glanced over at Luke, who had lowered his gun and was watching him. Their eyes met for a moment. The atmosphere had become decidedly uncomfortable. Both men turned back to the warren.

  “‘Always something happening’?” Raco said. “What did he mean by that?”

  Sullivan looked at the table miserably. “I don’t know. I didn’t ask. I should’ve asked, shouldn’t I?”

  Yes, Falk thought. “No,” he said. “It probably wouldn’t have made a difference.” He didn’t know whether that was true. “Did Luke say anything else about it?”

  Sullivan shook his head. “No. We got back onto the weather. Like always.”

  An hour later, Luke stretched.

  “I think that’s made a dent in them.” He checked his watch. “Better make a move.” He handed the spare ammunition back to Sullivan. They walked together back to the truck, any earlier tension now dissolved.

  “Quick beer?” Sullivan took off his hat and wiped his face with his forearm.

  “No, I should get home. Things to do, you know.”

  “Right. Thanks for your help.”

  “No worries.” Luke shrugged. “Finally got my eye in, at least.”

  He put his unloaded gun in the footwell of the passenger seat and climbed in. Now that he’d made up his mind to go, he seemed in a hurry to leave. He rolled down the window and gave a short wave as he pulled away.

  Sullivan stood alone in the empty field and watched the silver truck disappear.

  They mulled the scenario over in silence. By the window, Mrs. Sullivan’s teacup rattled against the saucer as she placed it down on a pile of novels. She glared at it.

  “What happened then?” Raco said.

  “A while later the Clyde police rang, looking for Luke,” Sullivan said. “I told them he’d left a couple of hours earlier. The news was everywhere about five minutes after that, though.”

  “What time was that?”

  “Probably about six thirty, I reckon.”

  “You were here?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And before that, when Luke left, you did what?”

  “Nothing. Work. Here on the farm,” Sullivan said. “I finished up outside. Had dinner with Gran.”

  Falk blinked as his eye caught a tiny movement.

  “It was just the two of you here?” Falk kept his voice light. “You didn’t leave at all? No one else came by?”

  “No. Just us.”

  It would have been easy to miss, but when Falk thought about it afterward, he felt sure. In the corner of his vision, Mrs. Sullivan had jerked her pale gaze up in surprise. She’d stared at her grandson for barely half a moment before casting her eyes back down. Falk had watched closely, but she didn’t look up again once. For the short remainder of their visit, she appeared to be sound asleep.

  10

  “I tell you, I would be climbing the bloody walls.” Raco shuddered behind the steering wheel. Outside, a thin wire fence protecting yellow scrub flashed past. Beyond, the fields were beige and brown. “Cooped up in the middle of nowhere with no one but the old lady. That house was like a weird museum.”

  “Not a fan of china cherubs?” Falk said.

  “Mate, my gran is more Catholic than the pope. When it comes to quasi-religious ornaments, I can see you and raise you,” Raco said. “It just doesn’t seem like much of a life for a guy his age.”

  They passed a fire warning sign by the side of the road. The alert level had been lodged at severe since Falk had arrived. The arrow pointed insistently at the bright orange segment of the semicircle. Prepare. Act. Survive.

  “Was he being straight with us, you reckon?”

  Falk explained how Sullivan’s grandmother had reacted to his claim he’d been at home that evening.

  “That’s interesting. She’s quite batty, though, isn’t she? Bit of a mean streak as well. There was nothing in the reports suggesting Sullivan was out and about, but that doesn’t really mean anything. He probably wasn’t checked too thoroughly, if at all.”

  “The thing is”—Falk leaned forward to fiddle with the air conditioner—“if Sullivan wanted to kill Luke, it would have been easy. They were out in the middle of nowhere with shotguns for over an hour. It’s an open invitation to stage an accident. His gran could have pulled it off out there.”

  Falk gave up on the air conditioner and wound down his window a crack, letting in a stream of boiling air. He hastily rolled it back up.

  Raco laughed. “And I thought the heat was bad in Adelaide.”

  “That’s where you were? What brought you all the way out here?”

  “First chance for a sergeant’s posting. Seemed like a good opportunity to run my own station, and I was a country kid, anyway. You always worked in Melbourne?”

  “Mostly. Always been based there.”

  “You like doing the financial stuff?”

  Falk smiled to himself at Raco’s tone. Polite yet complete disbelief that anyone had chosen that route. It was a familiar reaction. People were always surprised to discover how often the banknotes he handled were sticky with blood.

  “It suits me,” he said. “Speaking of, I started going through the Hadlers’ financial records last night.”

  “Anything interesting?”

  “Not yet.” Falk stifled a yawn. He’d stayed up late peering at the numbers under the weak wattage of his room’s main light. “Which is telling in itself. The farm was struggling, that’s obvious, but I’m not sure it was doing much worse than any of the others round here. At least they’d planned for it a bit. Put some money away during the good times. Their life insurance policy was nothing special. Just the basic attached to their pension.”

  “Who gets that?”

  “Charlotte, via Luke’s parents. It’s pretty minimal, though. It’ll probably pay off the mortgage and not much more. She’ll get the farm, I guess, whether she likes it or not. So far no other real red flags—multiple accounts, large withdrawals, third-party debts, that sort of stuff. I’ll keep at it.”

  The main thing Falk had learned from the exercise was that Karen Hadler was a competent and thorough bookkeeper. He’d felt a pang of affinity with her as he’d followed her ordered numbers and careful pencil markings.

  Raco slowed as he approached a deserted junction and checked his watch.

  “Seven minutes gone.”

  They were following Luke’s route home from Sullivan’s place. Raco turned left onto the road toward the Hadlers’ farmhouse. It was paved, but not well. Deep cracks showed where the asphalt had swelled and shrunk with the seasonality of a crop.

  It was technically a two-way road but was barely wide enough for two vehicles to pass side by side. A head-on meeting would force one to take a neighborly dip into the scrub, Falk imagined. He didn’t get the opportunity to find out. They didn’t meet a single vehicle the whole way.

  “Nearly fourteen minutes, door to door,” Falk said as Raco pulled up at the Hadlers’ driveway. “All right. Let’s see where Luke’s body was found.”
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br />   It was barely even a clearing.

  Raco managed to shoot past it and swore quietly, screeching to a halt. He reversed a few meters and pulled over at the side of the road. They got out, not bothering to lock the doors. There was no one else around. Raco led the way to a gap in the tree line.

  “It’s in here.”

  There was a pocket of eerie silence as invisible birds were momentarily stilled by the sound of his voice. The gap opened into a small space, big enough for a vehicle to drive in but not turn around. Falk stood in the center. It was fractionally cooler here, shaded on all sides by a sentry line of ghost gums. The road was completely hidden by the thick growth. Something in the bush rustled and scurried away. The yellow earth was baked solid. No tracks or wheel marks.

  Directly beneath Falk’s feet, in the center of the clearing, lay a dusting of loose sand. He realized what it had been put down to cover and hastily stepped off. The area had been trampled over by dozens of boots recently, but other than that it looked ill-used.

  “Pretty miserable place to spend your last moments,” Falk said. “Was this spot supposed to mean anything to Luke?”

  Raco shrugged. “Hoping you might have some idea about that.”

  Falk searched his memory for old camping trips, boyhood adventures. Nothing came to mind.

  “He definitely died here? In the back of the truck?” Falk said. “No chance he was shot somewhere else and moved?”

  “None at all. Blood pattern was definitive.”

  Falk tried to organize the timeline in his head. Luke had left Jamie Sullivan’s around 4:30 P.M. Luke’s truck was on camera at the Hadlers’ farm about thirty minutes later. Longer than it had taken Falk and Raco to drive the same distance. Two gunshots, four minutes, and the truck had driven away.

  “It’s fairly straightforward if Luke shot his family,” Falk said. “He drove himself to the house, taking the scenic route for whatever reason, killed them, then drove himself here.”

  “Yeah. Gets a lot more complicated if it was someone else, though,” Raco said. “The killer had to be inside Luke’s truck at some point soon after he left Sullivan’s, because Luke had the murder weapon with him. So who drove it to the farmhouse?”