The Roadhouse

by Kerry McGinnis

  ‘Oh, yes, very. We make the good partners. I am very happy, Charlie, because now I will be wife, yes? And maybe make family of my own.’

  ‘What? Oh, wow, he proposed?’ At her nod, I continued. ‘Congratulations!’ I caught her wet hands in mine and we did a little jig. ‘So you’re going to stay – in Australia, I mean?’

  ‘Yes, but first I go home before I return. But is not for many weeks yet. We work it out, Eric and me. He will stay to drive the machine when I go, then we get married in this Alice. You will come, Charlie? You and Molly and Bob? Perhaps you carry my flowers, yes?’

  ‘Be your bridesmaid? I’d love to, Ute. And it’s the Alice, not “this”.’

  She flung her arms wide, shook her blonde hair back and beamed at me. ‘The, this – I do not care. I am to be wife with gorgeous man. And maybe soon too, you are wife also?’

  ‘Well, I don’t know about that.’ But the distant possibility was somewhere at the back of my mind and shortly afterwards I took myself off to think about it, ambling down the garden to the summerhouse for some time alone. The shade there, however, was chilly and I moved on, pausing to pull the odd weed and sometimes just standing idly to feel the sun’s warmth on my body, my thoughts divided between Mike and Ute’s nuptials. Maybe Bob could give her away? Would she want a church wedding or something simpler? We could even hold it at the Garnet with Padre Don officiating it if that suited them.

  And where, I wondered, would I choose to get married – supposing Mike asked me? I pushed the back gate open and wandered along the well-worn path to the bore where I could see, through the white trunks of the gums lining Garnet Creek, a cloud of silver and grey swooping and shrieking about the tank and trough.

  Galahs were such show-offs! They put me in mind of Annabelle and the thought momentarily dimmed my mood of happy expectancy. How could I daydream about marriage when her battered body still lay in the morgue waiting for the police to release it for burial? Sighing, I sank onto a fallen gum trunk on the creek bank wondering if I would ever be free of her influence. Annabelle was dead and yet she still affected my thoughts and actions. I had been happy a moment before, my world rosy-hued, and now here I was staring glumly at the grey sand of the creek bed thinking that the darkish blob marring the grains immediately below me looked like tar, which was impossible, or blood. As if something had died there, only there were no feathers or tiny bones to point to either owl or hawk having made their kill.

  There was too much of it anyway for the victim to have been much smaller than a dog … My thoughts froze at that point and an instant later I was on my knees in the sand, poking at the grains that had fused together in a brownish mass. It was definitely blood. When I leant above it to sniff, there was a faint but discernable trace of bitter iron in the air and though the sand by its nature could hold no clear tracks, the formless indents around the dark deposit could well have belonged to Jasper.

  So, if he’d bled out here – why? – what had happened to his body? My eyes flitting nervously about, I paced across the narrow bed to the far side. An old cattlepad wound down the bank and crossed the sand, and here and there I picked out the distinctive drag marks of euro or goanna tails, but whether the larger tracks belonged to man or beast I wasn’t qualified to tell. Bob could, and I almost went to find him before remembering the job he had on that required Mike’s muscle. Better not disturb them, then. I could look for Jasper’s body myself.

  And it wasn’t that difficult. Whoever had shot or bludgeoned him – the only ways I could conceive of stopping an attacking cattle dog – must have picked up his body from the creek bed, then dropped it on the bank and dragged it from there. He’d taken it quite a way. The galahs sped off shrieking into the blue as I passed the bore, following the pad beside which the drag marks still showed. I crossed the first stony ridge before the smell tainted the air, just a whiff, but easily recognisable to the bush bred to whom death was a fact of life.

  I found Jasper dumped at the end of the drag mark, swarming with flies, his already swelling, eyeless body torn by the birds, and what was left of his mouth still set in the snarl with which he had met his killer. The smell of death was stronger close up, for his body lay in the sun. With a hand over my mouth and hatred for whoever had done it in my heart, I moved upwind from his remains, staring blankly at a gully, choked with scrub and kangaroo grass that led deeper into the range. Who was responsible, and why? There had been no break-in at the roadhouse, so why the need to stop its sole defender? If it had been Annabelle’s killer who had found himself challenged by the dog, why hadn’t he gone ahead and broken into the place once Jasper was dead? And if it not him, then who? Surely not Bryan who, I belatedly remembered, had been at the dance last night anyway.

  I couldn’t be absolutely certain that all the road-camp men had attended the race ball – the lights in the camp had been left on, after all – but what reason could any of them have had for doing this? If they’d wanted access to the Garnet they had only to wait for breakfast. Besides, Jasper had been killed out the back in the creek bed, not at the front, the logical point of approach for anyone coming from the camp.

  Light glinted on something from across the scrubby gully, there and gone in an instant. It could be anything, sunlight on a turning leaf, or the same thing refracted from a polished pebble. I waited, and when the breeze stirred the dull olive foliage it came again, a blinding wink, like a heliograph, or the reflected light from a tin or bottle. In a place where nobody ever camped? Curious, I set out to investigate.

  I stepped carefully down through the tumbled rocks and spinifex of the gully, looking for a way up the other side, crowded as it was with thick wattle growth. Force seemed the only way through, so I grabbed at the stems of saplings, shouldering spiky branches aside and getting scratched for my pains as I climbed up the other side. The glint of light had vanished. Nothing but rock and shiny scree and the tumbled untidiness of curled eucalypt bark and kangaroo grass met my gaze. Then I glimpsed it again, somewhat higher than the ground.

  I wondered if somebody could have wedged an empty tin into a mulga fork, or possibly stuck a bottle mouth over a broken branch. I had seen that before, usually near a pub; the decorated growth, festooned from stem to crown with glass, then wittily dubbed a bottle tree. Forging ahead I pushed through the last line of shrubby mulga growth and found myself staring at a vehicle, a Toyota troop carrier, more or less hidden under a camouflage of dead and dying boughs. One of these had slipped off the cab to reveal part of the windscreen, and it was the sun glinting off this that I had spied from across the gully.

  I froze where I stood, knowing then that I shouldn’t have succumbed to curiosity. The very condition of the vehicle shouted the fact. It had nothing to do with Abbey Downs, whose stationhands had no reason to hide their presence. Taking shallow breaths, I used my eyes and ears, straining to detect any sign of life but nothing save the twitter of birds broke the silence. The camp was deserted. It wasn’t exactly a glade – did such things even exist in desert country? I wondered wildly – more a small clearing in the patchy mulga that closed behind it to fence it in. I could see where the wheels had straddled the smaller growth, leaving it half bent still from the vehicle’s progress through it. There was more than one set of tracks so the troop carrier had clearly come and gone a few times. There was a sixty-litre fuel drum under the trees and another of equal size beside it, with a siphon hose doubled through the bunghole – the water supply? A rough swag wrapped in a bright blue poly-tarp lay beside it.

  Bob had long since taught me to automatically orient myself with my surroundings so that I knew, without having to think about it, that where I stood was perhaps half a kilometre or so south and a little west of the roadhouse. Which meant that the vehicle, a four-wheel drive, had bush-bashed its way from the main highway to reach this point, crossing the shallow Garnet Creek in the process. So Paul Belligrin was back – and not for the first time judging by the size of the ash pile where his campfire had burned. He had
probably been coming and going for weeks, unobserved and unsuspected. Given the dust-laden state of the sky, nobody would notice the smoke from a small fire during the day, while after dark scrub and distance would screen the glow. Nor was anyone likely to blunder onto his camp so far from the road. Only fools like me. I stared at the blackened billy as the wind stirred again, teasing the white ash into movement, and my heart thumped in sudden fear. Wherever the man was, he could return at any moment.

  Mouth suddenly dry, I whirled about, stifling the urge to run for my life. I must leave no trace of my presence to alarm him. He must remain unsuspecting until I could get word to Tom Cleary. I glanced at the ground, thankful for its rough nature. There had been the sand drifts below in the creek but the grass and bark might have absorbed my tracks there. I would have to check. Then my heart almost stopped and a shocked cry was torn from me as a man’s voice said roughly from somewhere behind my right shoulder, ‘Where do you think you’re going?’

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  I should have run then and risked it, for he wasn’t within grabbing distance, but I doubted a rabbit could have kept its feet along that gully side. Even as the thought flashed into my mind he moved, and my limbs froze at the glimpse of the stubby black pistol in his right hand.

  Absurdly my first reaction was to think how small it was. I had never seen a pistol before, but I had imagined something larger with a longer barrel. I stared dumbly, rooted to the ground by shock and fear. Belligrin – for it had to be him – was big, easily Mike’s height, with a bush of dark hair under a cloth hat, and a scrubby bristle of stubble that, along with the stony dark eyes, lent his hard face a dangerous aspect. His hands were large, engulfing the weapon, and his forearms brawny, covered with dark hairs.

  ‘So who are you – the cousin or the slavey?’ he asked.

  ‘What?’ I said stupidly.

  ‘Answer me!’ he barked. ‘Do you live at the roadhouse, or do you work there? Who the hell are you?’

  ‘Annabelle’s cousin. And the men know where I am. I told them before I left,’ I lied.

  ‘Yeah? That was clever of you, Charlie. You are Charlie, aren’t you? Quit lying, you bitch! I watched you come and you were just following your nose. Well, that’s bad luck for you, ’cause we’ll be long gone by the time they figure out you’re even missing.’

  Pistol notwithstanding I turned then to run, but had scarcely launched myself down the slope before a steely arm encircled my neck halting me in mid-flight. The jolt almost took my head off. I stamped backwards with my heel and must have connected with some part of him for I heard him swear. I followed through with an elbow to his body, knowing as I did so that my efforts were laughably weak, then my breath was choked off and there was just time enough for my mind to scream Mike! before the asphyxiating blackness swamped me.

  The world was moving under me, the sun had vanished and everything hurt. Those were my first hazy impressions when my senses returned. Even as I registered them, there was a crash, and my helpless body rose and fell against metal, jerking my arms and banging my hip solidly against some obstruction. I blinked, heart racing again, and tried to orient myself. I was in the troop carrier and it was moving, which accounted for my being flung around. He must still be off the road, then.

  Okay, I thought, desperate to impose some sense on my current circumstances in order to retain a semblance of control and not start gibbering with terror, now I knew where I was: I was in the vehicle, the light dim because some sort of shade cloth hung over the side windows, while the rear ones, I found by forcing my head up off the floor for a moment, were smothered in the good red dust of the Centre. So, I was being driven God knew where by a man who had already killed two people. Could matters get any worse?

  The act of lifting my head proved that the most injured part of me was my neck. I tried to bring my hand to it and discovered that my arms had been wrenched above my head and secured to one of the seat legs bolted to the floor. At the back end of the vehicle, a similar accommodation secured my ankles. Belligrin obviously wasn’t risking me regaining consciousness and launching an attack on him as he drove, supposing I could’ve got my hand on a weapon. However, such scrutiny as I could manage by skimming my eyes sideways without actually moving my head revealed nothing as useful as a tyre lever or jack handle. The polytarped bedroll was wedged beneath the far row of seats, together with a backpack and a heavy wooden chest (his tuckerbox?) and the ones I lay against had a series of metal lock boxes built beneath them. Down by my feet, the billy I had glimpsed by his campfire rolled insouciantly back and forth across the floor.

  I fixated on these details only because I didn’t dare dwell on my situation or think about my probable immediate future or I would have dissolved into a terror-ridden lump incapable of helping myself. Not that there seemed much chance of that, bound as I was and with my neck in the state it was in. Every jolt felt as if my head was being taken off. I was almost grateful for the pain; it kept me from worrying about what would happen when we stopped, because I knew he was going to kill me and there was no one to prevent him doing so, for nobody had the slightest inkling of my whereabouts. If, when they grew concerned, Bob or Mike did manage to follow my tracks to Belligrin’s camp beside the gully and work out what had happened, I would be miles and hours away by then and probably dead. My breath caught in a little hiccup of terror as I fought down the rising panic.

  Where was he taking me? Why hadn’t he simply shot me back there and tumbled my corpse under a concealing bush? I should have clamped my eyes shut the moment he spoke and refused to look at him. Or better yet, never have followed the drag marks made by Jasper’s body in the first place. Instead, I had seen Belligrin’s face, and his own words had linked him to Annabelle. Put simply, it was too dangerous now for him to think of releasing me.

  We seemed to travel for hours. At some stage the slow jolting changed to a speedier, smoother ride, as if we were back on the road, then abruptly the pace slowed again and the pitching progress returned. From my supine position I couldn’t even guess at our direction, but it seemed logical to assume that the original bush-bashing had taken us around the Garnet to the highway and, having left it, we were now heading back into the ranges. Despair filled me. We would become the stuff of legend, Annabelle and I, two young women from the one family murdered by the same man.

  Abruptly, the vehicle stopped and a moment later the cab door creaked open, and I heard footsteps, though the motor continued to run. My breath came so quickly I was hyperventilating. Was this it? When the back doors opened, would he have the pistol in his hand? My mouth was too parched even to squeak let alone scream, though I knew there would be none but the birds and lizards to hear me. Bug-eyed with terror, I watched the dust slide down the glass as he rattled the door open, then his hands were loosening the strap that tied my bound ankles to the seat.

  ‘Wh–what are you going to do?’ I despised the tremor in my voice and swallowed to moisten my mouth.

  ‘Anything you can think of, Charlie, then double it,’ he said with a smirk. Both his hands were busy with the buckle, so he wasn’t holding the gun. Of course he wouldn’t kill me in the vehicle, I realised belatedly as he jumped lithely into it. One of his hands landed on my hip and he slid it slowly up my body, making me cry out as my instinctive attempt to jerk away jolted my neck. ‘Maybe later,’ he said, leering. ‘Bit of a plain Jane, aren’t you? Your cousin got the looks in the family. Let’s be having you now.’

  He wrenched the tie from my arms and my shoulders shrieked in protest as I brought them back down from above my head. My hands were still secured with a broad electrician’s tape – the same that he’d used on my ankles, which he now cut free.

  ‘Just till we get you out, so don’t be silly now. There’s nowhere to run.’ He jumped down, caught my right ankle and hauled and with an agonised yell, I was out in a heap on the ground. The pain in my neck brought tears to my eyes and it was a moment before I could take in my surroundings. When I d
id, my breath stopped for he’d returned us to the little stone hut built into the hill, the site of Annabelle’s murder.

  ‘Why here?’

  ‘You’d rather be tied to a tree?’ He pulled me to my feet and pushed me towards the entrance, switching off the motor as we passed the cab. ‘It’ll do while we wait.’

  ‘Wait for what?’

  ‘For the jewels your bitch of a cousin took to be returned to me,’ he snapped. ‘I can’t find them myself so they’d better. She’s hidden them somewhere, but they’ll find them if pushed to it. You’ll write a note, Charlie, to whoever values you most, telling them so. They’ll find them and bring them to me or they’ll not see you again. Not alive anyway. I’ll give them today, so they’d better not waste any of it. One person fetches the package and you die at the first sign of a double cross. Make sure you tell ’em that just in case they’re thinking of getting clever and involving the coppers. Get inside now.’

  ‘But …’ I turned in the dark little doorway, fervently hoping that my acting was up to the task of projecting bewilderment. ‘What jewels? What are you talking about? Oh —’ I managed a gasp as the penny dropped. ‘That was you who tore up the place? It was, wasn’t it?’ I cried accusingly. ‘Besides, Annabelle – she was only in the house for twenty minutes – just long enough to shower, Mum said. She didn’t have time to hide anything!’

  I gave silent thanks then that the police hadn’t advertised the recovery of the stolen goods. Allowing a hint of curiosity into my tone I added, ‘How big a package? You’ll have to help if you want them to find it.’ Forgetting my injury, I made to shake my head and uttered a little cry of pain and brought my hands up, but bound as they were they could do no more than support my chin. ‘You don’t know what you’re asking!’ I let the desperation I felt creep into my tone. ‘There’re four sheds, and the roadhouse, and the dongas and the dump … They’ll never search all that in a day.’