The Summertime Dead

by Robert Engwerda

  ‘I went in the hall …’

  ‘How could you have? You told me last time you didn’t have a ticket to get in.’

  ‘I didn’t actually go in the hall. I went into the little entrance thing where you wait to get let in. I tried to look through the door but I couldn’t see her.’

  ‘Was that before or after you were told she had gone off with Quade?’

  ‘After.’

  ‘Why did you look for her then if you’d already been told she wasn’t there?’

  This time he did look up, a fleck of anger in his eye, his hands knuckled.

  ‘I didn’t believe it, that’s why.’

  ‘Okay. So where did you go then after leaving the Centre?’

  ‘I drove around for a while.’

  ‘Doing what?’

  ‘Seeing if I could see Rosy.’

  ‘Where did you drive?’

  He shrugged again.

  ‘I don’t know. Everywhere.’

  ‘So you went to the lake?’

  ‘I didn’t go there.’

  ‘You said you went everywhere. Why didn’t you go to the lake?’

  ‘I didn’t think she’d be there, that’s all.’

  ‘You’d think it’d be an obvious place to look, especially when you knew she’d gone off with Quade in his car.’

  ‘I didn’t see why they’d go there.’

  ‘Where did you actually drive then?’

  ‘I dunno. Past people’s houses. People we know.’

  ‘Did you see anyone or talk to them? Someone who might back up your story?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘And after you finished looking for her? What then?’

  ‘I went home.’

  ‘And your parents saw you get into bed? What time would that have been?’

  ‘They were already asleep when I got back. I told you that last time, too.’

  Cole gave the interview table a resigned tap with his fingers.

  ‘Take over for a minute, sergeant. I’m going to get a Coke from the fridge. You want one?’ he asked Furnell, who shook his head, before Cole got up from his chair and left the room.

  Holloway put his pen down and sat staring at the boy, his fingers drumming impatiently on the table.

  ‘You’re going to have to start saying something,’ the sergeant warned him. ‘The Melbourne detectives won’t be as nice with you as the senior sergeant here has been.’

  He got up and paced the room, letting his footsteps fill the silence around them, the old police trick.

  The boy slouched deeper into his chair.

  ‘You have to say something,’ Holloway said.

  ‘Says who?’

  ‘I do, that’s who.’

  ‘I already did.’

  ‘You haven’t said anything I want to hear.’

  Furnell glanced up dismissively. ‘I don’t have to say nothing to someone like you.’

  In a rage, Holloway grabbed Furnell by his hair and pulled him backwards from his chair, the boy yelping in surprise as he found himself wrestling with the policeman on the floor. As Holloway threw a punch Furnell tried to roll himself into a ball, and then crawl under the table only for Holloway to seize his leg and yank him back out, each struggling against the other.

  Holloway was panting, heaving, fighting against the boy as the door crashed open with Cole standing there.

  ‘Bloody hell, Terry! What’s going on?’

  Holloway stared at him, wild-eyed and in a sweat. Breathless, all he could do was slowly turn his gaze from Cole to the boy moaning on the floor.

  ‘He shouldn’t have been smart with me, Lloyd. I warned him,’ he wheezed as he trudged heavily from the room. ‘I warned him.’

  Chapter 5

  That evening while Cole was kept busy at the station, his dinner drying out in the oven at home, his wife watched him on the Shepparton television news. Relaxing on their new three-seater lounge, she sipped her gin and tonic, studying him intently. These reporters had caught him on the hop, she could see that, but Lloyd looked sharp in his uniform as he fielded their questions with aplomb. It was peculiar though, seeing him through the lens of television. She was proud of him, and wondered about all the other people watching him this very minute too, but it also made him appear somehow distant, as if there was something about it she couldn’t quite believe. But it was just a passing notion, and she wished she could have captured his image as he stood there talking to the reporters, captured it like a photograph that she could keep on the dresser by their bed, and send to their children, Vicky and Alan. She imagined that photograph, Lloyd not quite face-on, as though he’d just had his attention caught by the camera and was snapped turning toward it. She saw the strong face and neck, the expression that always held just a little back. The dark, thick eyebrows she teased him about, his rich head of hair. The sympathetic eyes, blue or almost grey depending on the light. And the soul, the character you could see in those eyes. But there was something else she knew from familiarity too – how there was much more to him than his public face.

  Almost without realising it, she found her glass empty and replenished it.

  The burnt orange lounge setting wasn’t quite to Lloyd’s taste but he went along with it, happy to let her have her way and that was one thing she always admired him for. He wasn’t a dominating man; he saw her as an equal and let her run the household the way she wanted. He was considerate of her and good with Vicky and Alan, even if at the start his ideas for their futures hadn’t tallied with either theirs or hers. Sometimes he could be too quick to jump into something, but he had learnt how to be flexible too, and had reconciled himself to their children’s decision to seek their futures in Melbourne, away from home.

  And if he felt the loss of family in this way, the emptiness created by the children leaving, so too did she. It was a wound, a silence that no amount of letter-writing or new furniture could fill. Lloyd had his work – and his days were already longer with this murder case – but what did she have?

  When the children were of school age she felt useful, important even. There were any number of tasks she volunteered for at both the primary and secondary school, from helping the weaker children read, to making and serving lunches in the high school canteen. She and Lloyd were active in the tennis club, the cricket club, the bush hospital fund raising and committee. Although they weren’t particularly religious, they occasionally lent garden tools and labour to church working bees. Their children’s friends always buzzed about the house: the dropping-in after school, the birthday parties, Easter egg hunts, Christmases, impromptu sporting games in the back yard, the recording of car number plates in Main Street on foolscap pages, the surprise pets brought home, the glass dishes that slopped with pond scum and tadpoles, the yabbies inadvertently left broiling in the afternoon sun. The worn-out clothes, the scabbed knees to attend to. There were disputes to settle over rightful possession of marbles and tears to stem when a wooden wheel separated itself from a toy cart.

  She never knew where the days went, and she was never happier.

  Some afternoons now she read to blind Mrs Huntly who lived behind the post office. There were the New Australians in the Housing Commission street near the cannery whom she occasionally helped with shopping or their English. She found that satisfying, and wondered at the lives they’d left behind, just as she had seemed to leave a life behind. She marvelled at how hard they worked, some of the men working two or three jobs. Dark-eyed, dirt-poor Italian girls with husbands and babies at sixteen, everyone making the best of what they had. If she and Lloyd drove by their houses at dinner time they found men in white singlets on their front steps, laughing, waving. The children dashing about their yards, swung up high by their fathers, their wives joining them on stoops pushing tangled hair away from their faces. So different to their lives, and yet it touched somethin
g deep in her; some kind of longing for a life she’d left behind.

  And the contrast between these Italians and their house now always came as a great jolt. She loved Lloyd, of course she did. She loved her children to bursting point. But their going away to live and study in the city had wrenched away the part of her that had grown up with them. Sometimes she looked in a mirror and saw how much she had been diminished.

  When she knew the children were coming to visit she marked the dates on the kitchen calendar – a giveaway from Furnell’s garage – her eye drawn to it every time she entered the kitchen. She’d count the days, willing them to hurry along. When Vicky and Alan did return it was like birthdays and Christmas all rolled into one, and she dreaded their leaving, as much as she and Lloyd tried to talk their way through it.

  But this other thing that had come out of the blue. She was excited, too, that they were going to host a barbecue dinner this Friday for the Melbourne detectives. When Lloyd had mentioned it yesterday she’d immediately thought of all the preparations that needed to be made, and tonight she’d have to grill him until he gave her exact numbers of expected guests. There was the shopping to do, the furniture that would need rearranging, decorations for certain. All of this would keep her busy.

  She sipped from her glass, the drink stronger than she’d intended to make it, as she ran through the barbecue preparations in her mind.

  She was scribbling down a shopping list, sketching a plan to open up the lounge and dining rooms for their company, when she heard Lloyd’s car bumping into their driveway. She hurriedly tipped the rest of her drink down the kitchen sink.

  *

  Audrey Holloway, too, was preparing for her evening.

  She stood at her kitchen window, looking over the backyard where her husband was unlocking the aviary door. She watched Terry fuss the lock open and tip water from the birds’ drinking bowls, replacing them with fresh water. As he moved about, zebra finches and budgerigars flitted across the lower perches in darts of movement. He adjusted the position of a cuttlefish in the cage’s wire mesh, peering into feeders before scattering seed on the ground as quail nipped back and forth.

  She opened the window and called out, ‘It’s getting late, Terry. Dinner’s on the table!’

  She shut the window again, noticed him half-turn toward her before he returned to his birds.

  Their meals were already cooling on the table when he came in. She could tell he was out of sorts.

  ‘I’ll just wash my hands first,’ he said.

  He closed the bathroom door and turned the bar of Velvet soap in his palms working up a lather he lifted his head now and then to look into the mirror, always surprised to catch himself at it.

  He tugged the hand towel from its peg and dried his hands and arms, drew the towel between his fingers and scrubbed his arms until there was no feeling of dampness left on them. Then he replaced the towel on the peg, put the stopper back in the basin and ran the water again.

  ‘Will you be long?’ Audrey called.

  ‘I’m nearly there,’ he answered, but to himself.

  He took the soap again, brushed it even more vigorously up his arms as he thought of the dead girl in the paddock and the revolting sight of her fleshy, rotten nakedness. And then of how he’d lost his temper with the Furnell boy.

  He gazed at himself in the mirror and shook his head.

  Audrey was waiting at the table for him when he finally emerged from the bathroom.

  ‘Here, your dinner’s ready,’ she said, doing her best to conceal her annoyance. ‘I don’t know why you spend so long in there. We’re all supposed to be saving water.’

  ‘I do my bit,’ he answered. ‘You don’t see me washing down the driveway or hosing off the windows like they do next door.’

  She was thirty-four, younger than him and weary of her life’s stagnation. But if he noticed the impatience in her voice he didn’t show it. They sat opposite each other at the card table in the kitchen, a simple white cloth over it. They hadn’t used the dining table since Christmas two years ago.

  ‘What do you think?’ she said of the dinner. ‘I’ve tried something new. Steak Diane.’

  He regarded the plate in front of him suspiciously, dredged a knife through the heavy mushroom sauce covering the steak.

  ‘Yes,’ he agreed without looking at her. ‘Lovely.’

  They ate in their usual silence, until she said, ‘Those poor children. How will the families ever get over it?’

  He stared at the plate as if it had asked the question. ‘They shouldn’t have put themselves in that position in the first place. Carrying on like that at the lake.’

  ‘They were just children, Terry. Sixteen and nineteen. However can it have been their fault?’

  This time he did look up.

  ‘They were drinking. She was underage. You don’t know all the facts.’

  ‘It still doesn’t excuse what happened to them does it?’

  ‘No, it doesn’t, but young people also need to know the danger out there. A bit of common sense goes a long way.’

  He left the table and went into the lounge room where he drew the curtains shut and turned on the television.

  She cleared the table and washed the dishes. She turned the radio on softly, the American musician Bob Dylan singing something about not needing a weatherman to know which way the wind blows. He was right about that, she thought.

  She passed the lounge room door and saw the back of his head fixed in his leather chair and his feet up on the stool. Some nonsense and fake laughter came invisibly from the television.

  She felt a faint breeze as she sat on the back step. She touched her cheeks still warm from the kitchen and cooking.

  The poor families. She and Terry had no children, for reasons doctors were never able to establish, but she could well imagine the distress in the homes of those murdered children.

  She undid the buckles of her sandals and removed them feeling the wooden step cooler under her feet. She ruffled the light cotton dress away from her knees. It was twilight, a supposed time of settling and quietening down. But when she thought of her old school friends, the futures they’d made for themselves, she couldn’t help but think of herself as their poorer cousin. And her life here with Terry could hardly be described as either peaceful or successful. His reluctance to socialise, his unspoken shackling of her, had day-by-day closed the door on her having a life of her own. She read stories in magazines, saw the advertisements in newspapers, admired the lives other women were living, these examples all beckoning her towards some different existence. The world was changing wasn’t it? Sometimes when she glanced at her bedside mirror she saw a flash of her old self and thought, It doesn’t have to be like this, does it? Was it just opportunity that was lacking for her, then? Or was it courage?

  She and Terry no longer had sex, nothing even like it, and he didn’t seem to mind. It had been different once, a place that seemed so long ago now it was barely real. She was bright and lively then, keen to share her opinions and Terry had been the first to listen, smart in his uniform and with wry comments to make about his work. She’d glossed over that other part of him that drew him into long silences, the part that sometimes had him carrying himself like a wounded animal. But she would change him wouldn’t she? She would make him happy and he would make her happy. Didn’t they all think like that back then?

  They had gone from town to town the last ten years, including a brief relieving stint in Mitchell four or five years ago, Terry never able to settle as they packed and unpacked over and over. Just when she did begin to make friends in a new place there would be another posting and they’d have to start packing again. She wondered whether he did it deliberately.

  How long would they last in Mitchell this time, then?

  She thought about leaving him, but where would she go? She had no job, no work experience
of any kind, and only a little money put aside from an inheritance. Complicating matters was the fact that she’d seen so little of her wider family these last years there was no chance of her landing on their doorsteps either. And her old friends had families themselves now and were busy and grown up. Everywhere she looked, everything she thought of, she drew a blank.

  She was mulling over these things, thinking about never having babies, never having friends who stayed, feeling a nagging sensation of life passing her by as she smoothed the skin on her legs with a hand. She watched twilight go and the stars emerge as pinpricks of light, when she heard floorboards creaking toward her.

  Terry had come through the house to find her.

  ‘By the way,’ he said. ‘Lloyd is having a barbecue dinner this Friday to welcome the murder squad from Melbourne. I can’t see the point of it, but I suppose we’ll have to go.’

  ‘Tell me about these detectives,’ she asked.

  ‘What do you want to know?’

  ‘Who they are. What they’ll be actually doing. That sort of thing.’

  ‘There’s three of them. It’s the tall one, the senior detective, Gene Fielder, who’s in charge of the investigation now. He just came in and took over from Lloyd. There wasn’t any discussion about it.’

  ‘But isn’t that what you expected? The Homicide Squad are the experts aren’t they?’

  ‘They’re supposed to be. But probably the only thing they’d notice was maybe a speck of food fallen on their nice, new suits.’

  ‘There’s nothing wrong with dressing well.’

  ‘No, but they’re here to solve a crime, not to go prancing about in their finery. Stupid Yank.’

  ‘Who is?’

  ‘Oh, Fielder.’ He gazed up at the night sky. ‘You’ll like him. He’s American.’

  ‘Out here? Really?’

  ‘Yes, really. He thinks we’re country bumpkins who have to be told how to tie up our own shoelaces. He’ll think the same about you.’

  ‘Then we’ll just have to prove him wrong, won’t we?’

  ‘We don’t need to impress anyone like him.’