The Summertime Dead

by Robert Engwerda

  ‘That’s a glib answer. You know what I mean.’

  ‘Weren’t you the one who said she was married? You don’t even want to tell Holloway you’re with me and then you want to … what is it? … run away with me? Is that what you’re saying?’

  ‘Yes, that’s exactly what I’m saying.’

  He studied his cigarette. ‘That’s a tough question, Audrey.’

  ‘I’m sorry I asked you then. I just wanted to know where I stand, I suppose, and you know what I’m asking you, but it seems you don’t want to give me a straight answer, or any answer.’

  ‘It’s hard to when the question is all wobbly, Audrey.’

  ‘Let me say it then. When you leave Mitchell, will you still want to see me?’

  ‘I suppose we could,’ he answered, looking away. ‘Why not?’

  ‘You don’t sound very enthusiastic about it.’

  ‘Don’t I? You’re a treat Audrey, a real treat. Don’t misunderstand me about that.’

  He fixed her with his eyes. She thought she saw sincerity.

  ‘I’m not saying we should rush into it,’ she said. ‘We could cover one thing at a time. It doesn’t have to happen all at once, does it?’ She drew another breath. ‘What do you think, Gene?’

  ‘My sentiments exactly,’ he answered. ‘We don’t have to rush into it.’

  Chapter 26

  To most in Mitchell it seemed the Bridges had disappeared off the map. When Cole knocked at the North Boundary Road address on file the door opened to a different family, people with no idea who might have lived there previously. The Bridges had no registered telephone number and the post office couldn’t assist Cole with a current address either. The woman behind the post office counter told him that Amy Bridges’ parents had separated after the girl’s disappearance, that there was talk that the father had taken the other children away to live over the border, but no one was entirely sure. The mother was supposed to be living not far from town, but that could’ve been idle gossip too, she conceded.

  The street number on file may have been wrong then, Cole concluded, and it took him several hours of asking around to get his hands on the right address not much further along from where he’d been earlier.

  To get to Coral Bridges’ house he inched his car along a badly pot-holed track lined by English elms, at the end of which a weatherboard house sagged beneath the weight of neglect. Blackberry canes overran its verandas and threatened entry through a window missing most of its glass. A waist-high wooden fence in front of the house had lost every second or third picket.

  The place looked nothing short of derelict, abandoned.

  Cole walked to the rear of the house where he found the fly-screen door hanging open. He shut it carefully and then knocked on its wooden margin and waited.

  The woman who came to answer his knock saw his uniform and through the fly-wire quickly asked, ‘You heard something of Amy?’

  ‘No, Mrs Bridges, I’m sorry that I haven’t. But I’m hoping you might let me come in for a minute and talk with you.’

  There had been a flash of animation from her as she’d asked the question, but it was a wretched, haunted face that regarded him through the mesh door now.

  ‘Why?’ she asked. ‘Why?’

  ‘I don’t want to dredge up old wounds, Mrs Bridges. If I could just sit down with you a minute you might be able to help me with a few things. Here, I’ve brought you some small cakes I picked up at the bakery.’

  He held out his offering, wrapped in a white paper bag she studied through the screen door.

  She reluctantly let him in and seemed flustered when he set the cakes down on her lounge room coffee table. It was as if her memory of what she had to do with them had deserted her, before she remembered she should make a pot of tea.

  ‘I haven’t got any milk. Don’t drink it,’ she said, as if that might put him off.

  ‘I’ll take it black,’ he said.

  When she’d organised herself and joined him at the table, she said, ‘There aren’t visitors any more. No one wants to hear my troubles.’

  Cole thought back to when her daughter had vanished, how the then Senior Sergeant Mulligan in charge of the situation had pegged it for a missing persons case. Amy Bridges had been seen in the company of a man in his early twenties with long, straggly hair and a silver earring, someone they could never end up putting a name to. One of her friends had made a statement saying Amy’s behaviour had changed in the weeks leading up to her disappearance, and insinuated she was engaged in a secret relationship, though she didn’t know with who. And then when the Bridges family formally reported her missing all police inquiries resulted in dead ends. A newsagent reported seeing a girl fitting Amy’s description in Deniliquin, while a second sighting came further north in Forbes, as though she was fleeing as far from her family as she could before the trail went stone cold. Cole had also come to the conclusion that the girl was a runaway.

  ‘You might have heard about the young couple here that came to grief?’ he said.

  But she regarded him with such bewilderment he was shocked to realise she hadn’t. As he glanced around the room he saw no television, no radio, no newspapers or magazines.

  He chose his words carefully, ‘Very sadly, a girl and young man from town were killed. Murdered. Max Quade and Rosaleen Faraday. You can imagine how terrible a time it’s been for their families.’

  ‘Amy isn’t dead,’ she objected sharply. ‘And she didn’t run away from us. She never would, never, and no one would ever believe us that she didn’t.’

  The rumours about her husband taking the other children away appeared to be true. There was no indication of anyone else being in the house, only an air of fusty staleness, and of this woman occupying the space like a bereaved ghost.

  ‘Do you have a photo of Amy I could see?’ he asked.

  She nodded, walked off down the passageway and returned with a photo in a heavy silver frame, handing it to him.

  He’d barely been able to remember what she looked like, but her image came back to him now he handled the photograph. It was a head and shoulders shot, a school snap. Amy with her faintly freckled face and broad smile showing good teeth. Happy eyes. He studied the photo a while before passing it back.

  ‘That’s a lovely picture,’ he said. ‘She’s different to you in the face though.’

  ‘Amy was adopted,’ she said, staring at the photograph. ‘We never thought we could have children, so it was a blessing when we got her as a baby. And then the two boys came along out of the blue when we never expected it. But with Amy I had to love her even more than the others because she was adopted, to make up for it.’

  ‘I can’t remember you saying anything about this at the time, Mrs Bridges.’

  ‘I never treated her any different from the others. No one would have taken her because she was adopted.’

  ‘Did you know who her real parents were?’

  ‘No. I didn’t want to know. Only someone from Melbourne, that’s where she was born.’

  Cole sat back, mulling it over.

  ‘And you don’t think her parents might have snatched her back?’ he said.

  ‘No, she was a baby when we adopted her. Why would they come back all that time later?’

  ‘Alright. Can you recall what she was wearing the day she went missing?’

  ‘Yes, I can,’ she said, more animated now. ‘She was wearing a pair of new white Dunlop shoes and blue jeans. And a bright yellow top made out of thick yarn like wool, only it wasn’t wool. I can still see her walking out of the house, happy as a lark.’

  ‘Did she have anything else with her?’

  ‘Just a purse. A little, silver, Glomesh purse.’

  ‘You never thought Amy might have taken off with this fellow that was identified by one of Amy’s friends?’

  ‘Never.
Because she loved her family and would have known what it did to us. She loved us,’ she said, a furious glint in her eye.

  ‘There wasn’t a boyfriend, or someone special to her?’

  ‘She had friends. What girl doesn’t? But no one she or anyone else would call a boyfriend.’

  ‘And you never saw anyone hanging about the place, or had someone working here you didn’t like the look of at the time of her disappearance?’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘No. I never saw anyone with Amy, and she never took any interest in anyone who was here.’

  ‘So you saw nothing unusual at all around the time Amy went missing? Even a small thing Mrs Bridges, something you thought mightn’t have been important then?’

  He let her ponder it, and then she said, ‘No. Nothing. There was only an old bomb parked on the main road, just near the top of the drive. I might have seen it a couple of times before Amy went, but I don’t remember it afterwards.’

  ‘Can you remember what sort of car it was, a Holden or a Ford, for example? Or what colour it was? Anything that made it stand out?’

  But she only looked at him dolefully.

  ‘It was an old bomb. That’s all I can remember.’

  He knew there was nothing to be gained by pushing her harder.

  ‘I know this is upsetting for you, and if I could do something to help I would,’ he said.

  ‘They shut down the case as quick as they could. But she never went to Queensland. She never ran off with anyone.’

  He sipped his tea, tasted stale tea leaves bitter on his tongue.

  Thinking he would wade into Amy’s story one last time, he asked, ‘What do you think happened to her then?’

  She stared into her tea.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said then. ‘But she’s still alive somewhere. I can feel it.’

  ‘And your husband, and your other two children? Where are they?’

  ‘They went away,’ she said. ‘They couldn’t cope with it here. I talk to them sometimes.’

  ‘You’ve got the phone on then?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then they visit you here?’

  ‘No. I couldn’t just leave Amy. I need to stay here so when she comes home she can find me.’

  ‘I’m sure she’d come and see us, or tell someone else,’ Cole said softly.

  ‘You couldn’t be sure though could you? No. I wouldn’t take that risk.’ She drank her tea. ‘I won’t be leaving here,’ she said firmly. ‘You don’t just leave your children.’

  ‘When Amy went, are you sure she didn’t take clothes with her? Or anything else?’

  ‘No. She didn’t take anything, just the little silver purse. That’s how I know she’s coming back. She’ll need clothes won’t she?’

  And Cole felt her misery. And the hurt the rest of the family had to be feeling too, that they’d be split apart by something they couldn’t come to terms with.

  ‘Your husband. His name’s Winston, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  She looked away, distantly.

  ‘Can you tell me where he lives now?’

  ‘Deniliquin,’ she answered, her eyes closing tiredly. ‘He doesn’t talk about Amy any more. He thinks she’s dead.’

  As Cole drove away leaving the ramshackle house behind he wondered how long Coral Bridges would hang on living like she was, before she was tipped right over the edge. And he was unsure now that his marking down of Amy Bridges as a runaway had been right. At the time it seemed cut and dried, sure, but seeing this woman in her grief he doubted a child so loved would have left of her own volition. The fact that the girl had never been found, that there was never a confirmed sighting from her or any message or sign to her family, all suggested that something far more sinister had happened to Amy Bridges.

  One thing he was certain of, though. If Amy Bridges had been disposed of over four years ago, the chances of it being at the hands of a fourteen, fifteen year old Lee Furnell were very remote. So he could strike that possibility from his list of lingering questions.

  And the more he thought about it, the more he considered Lee Furnell and his family, he knew he was right in thinking the boy could never have killed his girlfriend and Max Quade either, however unhappy he might have been at her canoodling with him. Fielder had it all wrong and he needed to take a stronger stance with the detective now.

  When Cole arrived back at the station he hovered around Janice a minute, before she noticed and said, ‘Go on. I can take it. What do you want me to do for you this time?’

  ‘Nothing big. Just a small favour.’

  ‘Fire away then.’

  ‘Do you remember Amy Bridges who went missing about four years ago? It turns out she was adopted as a baby. Can you try to find out who her real parents were, please?’

  ‘Sure Lloyd. And you’re right about it being a small favour. It’s about as small as a needle in a haystack. Maybe even smaller. I’ll put my glasses on.’

  *

  That night as they lay in bed, Cole told Nancy about Coral Bridges.

  ‘It must be so painful, I can’t imagine,’ Nancy said. ‘And living there all by herself. Do you think she sees the husband?’

  ‘He’s in Deniliquin. I’ll need to see him soon, so it’ll be interesting to get his take on Amy and what happened. I should give someone at Rotary or the Lions a call, too, see if they can organise one of those working bees they run for a clean up at Coral’s.’

  ‘I’ll help, too.’

  ‘We both can,’ Cole said and felt the bond that still remained between them. He propped himself on an elbow. ‘After the detectives have gone back to Melbourne, why don’t we take a short break? Have a weekend in Melbourne and see Vicky and Alan? We could take them out for a fancy dinner somewhere.’

  ‘Yes, that’d be really good, Lloyd. When do you think the case will be closed?’

  ‘I wish I knew. But that shouldn’t stop us from planning something together, should it?’

  ‘Not at all,’ she answered, resting on her side now to be close to him.

  ‘And I’ve got another idea, too, about something else completely, or maybe not completely.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Why don’t you learn to drive our car?’

  ‘Drive the car?’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘But what for?’

  ‘Well,’ he explained. ‘You could get out more. I could leave the car with you and walk to the station. It’d do me some good, too.’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘And you could take yourself out for a drive any time you wanted, Nance. You might not feel so trapped here all the time,’ he said, both knowing what he meant.

  ‘I don’t feel trapped here, Lloyd.’

  ‘Stuck then. I want you to go out and do things. You could go to Melbourne to see the kids, like we’ve just said. Or drive to Shepparton for the shopping for a change.’ He leant over as if he needed to whisper. ‘You could take me to the drive-in for a romantic evening out. Get up to a bit of mischief there.’

  She laughed, ‘Oh go away, Lloyd. Couldn’t we do that here?’

  ‘Sure we could. And why couldn’t we?’

  She drew a hand along his cheek. ‘You mean now?’

  ‘I don’t have to be at work until the morning,’ he joked.

  She looked at him with bemusement.

  ‘Hmm. Maybe.’

  ‘What about we get some practise in for the drive-in when you take me there?’

  ‘Well,’ she sighed humorously. ‘If I must.’

  They laughed and wrapped each other up. And whatever restraint normally governed them, in this they were so used to each other, so comfortable with what the other wanted that the house could’ve tumbled down around them and they wouldn’t have noticed.

 
When they lay more quietly in each other’s arms, Cole listened to her breathing.

  ‘Fancy us.’ Nancy said. ‘This is one part of our life that always stays good, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Always.’

  ‘And that’s because we love each other so much, isn’t it?’

  ‘That couldn’t be truer, Nance.’

  ‘Well that’s the right answer,’ she said, snuggling against him, before she remembered and drew herself up on an elbow. ‘But were you serious about what you said earlier? About me learning to drive the car?’

  ‘Of course I was.’

  ‘But how would I? And when?’

  ‘I’d teach you. We can start as soon as you like. Tomorrow in the driveway after I’ve finished work. You sit in the driver’s seat and I’ll explain how everything works, and then you’ll have a go. It’s as easy as falling off a log.’

  ‘Alright,’ she decided. ‘But could we learn somewhere else, not here?’

  ‘Sure, but why?’

  ‘I don’t want anyone to see me learning. I want them to see me driving that car down Main Street all proud and taking the old ladies to church and – you know what would be the best thing? – I want Vicky and Alan to see me get in the car and drive them around. Wouldn’t that be funny?’

  ‘I’d like to see the look on their faces. And you’d be a pioneer around here, too, Nance. Hardly any women are driving when they should be. Why not? We’re supposed to be living in modern times aren’t we? And it’s a practical thing to do.’

  ‘It is,’ she beamed, and he thought that it was in these moments that he loved her more than he ever had.

  Chapter 27

  That night, a police car and its two occupants out on watch for whom the local newspaper was jocularly calling The Clothesline Bandit, noticed a figure skulking about a property at the western end of the town. Careful not to send their quarry scurrying, the sergeant driving the vehicle, Bill Forrest, continued nonchalantly on at the same speed they’d been travelling, as if they hadn’t seen anything.

  ‘We’ll go around the block,’ he told Constable Whittaker. ‘Then walk up from the other side. If we have to chase him, we’ll do it on foot.’