Maggie said nothing as he put his bag in the back seat then opened the passenger door and sat beside her. For a moment, they just watched the ocean. Cooper glanced at the knife, sitting in the cup holder.
‘I have to ask,’ he said. ‘Because I need to know what I’m dealing with here. Blowing up Townsend’s warehouse . . . that was an extreme move. Very extreme.’
Maggie said nothing.
‘Who . . . I mean, who were you working for?’
Maggie almost laughed. ‘No-one.’
‘No-one,’ Cooper replied, unconvinced. ‘Then why?’
‘He broke my boss’s nose.’
Silence.
‘He broke your boss’s nose,’ Cooper repeated.
Maggie nodded.
Cooper laughed. After a moment, Maggie grinned and started the engine.
The landscape slowly changed around them; rainforest replaced by wide fields and the occasional paddock. They stopped for fuel when they needed to and ate in silence outside busy petrol stations, hemmed in by semitrailers and trucks. Then it was back in the car. For hour after hour, neither spoke.
She knew that, when Cooper felt he had a sense of what he was dealing with, the questions about the last year would come. Where she had been, how she had been looking after herself. She hadn’t given much thought to the answer, apart from knowing that it would likely be some vague and logical lie about backpacking and cash-in-hand jobs.
When he finally broached the topic, it was phrased as a comment. ‘You must be getting a bit sick of the road.’
‘What makes you think I’ve been on the road?’
‘You had to get from Melbourne to Queensland somehow.’
Maggie shrugged, eyes forward and hands on the wheel. She could feel Cooper looking at her. He was waiting for more, but she didn’t plan on giving it to him.
‘Where else have you been?’
He asked it easily, in a way that could be written off as small talk. But a quiet voice in her head was asking, How much does he know? Surely not a lot. But then, he was a cop and some of the situations Maggie had found herself in since leaving Melbourne would be on the radar of Australian law enforcement officers, wherever they were.
She went to brush the question off, but something stopped her. An impulse with the flavour of a memory. Because it was a memory.
There had been times when Harrison had visited when her father, after finishing off the regular sixpack offering and rifling through the empty cupboards, would announce a bottle shop run. Harrison would usually make some noises about how it was getting late, but her father would insist and Harrison would stay as Eric lurched out the door.
Maggie would always feel a rush of excitement in those times, because, with Eric gone, Harrison’s attention and smile would be all hers as he sat across the table and asked her about school, her friends, what she wanted to be when she grew up. All the questions nobody else ever had. And how he listened.
In response to her probably stupid answers he would say nice things, about how smart she was or how her teachers at school must either love or hate her for the way she thought. Maggie was too pleased to tell him that her teachers didn’t notice her. That she kept quiet to stop anybody at school from noticing her.
In those moments, moments Maggie would replay in her head again and again, she could let herself believe that there was somebody in the world who looked at her with pride and maybe even love.
And as something tangled and thorny and too big for her to understand rose in her chest, she would find herself wanting to answer the one question he never asked. Because maybe if she told him, he would do something. He would take her away from there, maybe to his own house, to a family that would embrace her as one of their own. And everything would change. If she just found it in herself to tell him the truth.
But something always stopped her. In later years she had assumed it was the fear that she wouldn’t be believed. But in time she came to understand it was really the fear that she would be believed but that it would mean nothing. That Harrison would simply shrug and tell her it was none of his business, or worse, that she deserved it. That he would stop talking to her when Eric went on his bottle shop runs. That he would no longer like her.
Now, sitting in the car, Maggie felt an echo of that old desire. There was no reason to think Cooper would believe she was a liar if she told him about the town she had found while looking for her mother. About the hunters in the night, about the people who died and the ones who didn’t. About Frank and Allie. Simon. About the things she had done to survive. Maybe, some tiny part of her even hoped, he would be proud.
Except, a bigger part countered, he wouldn’t. Harrison’s world was a different one. He lived according to law and order and went home at the end of the day. For Maggie, it was as though the death of her father had opened a doorway to a kind of shadow world, a twisted reflection of the reality she knew in which nothing made sense and danger was around every corner. The myth of the lawless west, Maggie now knew, was as real as it was alive. People were just very good at looking in the opposite direction.
And Maggie had done bad things. Selfish things, things that still ate at her, things that innocent people died because of. Harrison Cooper didn’t need to know about those things.
He was still watching her, expectant.
Maggie kept her eyes on the road. ‘Here and there,’ she said. ‘I’ve been here and there.’
Thoughts and warnings circled uneven and half-formed through her mind. She tried to focus on the road but as late afternoon crept towards evening her body started to protest. She was running on servo food and no sleep.
‘Maggie.’ Cooper’s voice was low, gentle. The sky was pale, the sunset creeping away. ‘Maggie.’
She didn’t look at him.
‘You’re about to pass out. Pull over.’
She shook her head.
‘Maggie.’ Soft but insistent. She glanced at him. He looked tired too. ‘Should we find a motel?’
‘No.’
‘Then let me drive. You’ve been behind the wheel all day.’
She wanted to say no, but she couldn’t think of a reason. She pulled over. Her eyelids were drooping. Off to the side was a vast expanse of tall grass. Cooper’s door opened, then he was gone. She watched the grass. She heard her own door open. She got out of the car. The air was cooler. She looked back the way they had come, up the stretch of highway. She didn’t know how far from Port Douglas they now were.
‘Maggie.’ Cooper touched her shoulder.
She looked at him.
He smiled. ‘Get some sleep, yeah?’
She nodded and rounded the car. She got in, put her seatbelt on and put the seat back. Beside her, Cooper had restarted the engine. Pale blue was darkening through the windscreen. She could see the occasional star.
The car wasn’t moving. She looked at Cooper. Brow furrowed, he seemed to be staring at the steering wheel. Maggie waited.
‘I didn’t know,’ he said. ‘What he was doing. I promise you I didn’t know.’
Maggie watched him.
‘But I . . .’ He closed his eyes and exhaled. ‘But I wondered.’
‘You knew about the drinking.’
Cooper nodded.
‘So why did you bring him booze?’
He looked at Maggie, and even through her half-conscious haze it hit her how old he looked now. It went beyond the worry lines or the lack of hair. It was the tiredness.
‘There was one time I didn’t,’ he said. ‘Eric asked if I wanted a drink. I told him we should just have a coffee and chat. He was like a cornered animal. Men like him, they know. They know they’re wrong. But they don’t know how to stop so they act blind and hope that we all fall into line around the lie. And we usually do. The moment somebody suggests the smallest thing that might indicate change, or judgement, they lose it. I knew then that your Dad would rather have no friends at all than one who was honest with him. I thought he needed a friend, so I compromised. I
fucked up.’
‘Even though you saw me,’ Maggie said. ‘Every time you turned up with your sixpack.’
Cooper looked away. ‘Yeah. Even then. Because it was easier to pretend no damage was being done. Or that the damage wasn’t . . .’ He grimaced, and when he spoke again his voice was disgusted. ‘Or that the damage wasn’t as bad as it could have been.’
‘So . . . what?’ Maggie could hear the steel in her voice. ‘Because it wasn’t sexual, it was okay?’
Cooper shook his head. ‘No. It wasn’t okay at all.’
They sat in silence for another moment. Maggie turned away. The car pulled back onto the road.
Maggie swapped with Cooper early the next morning. Her sleep had been fitful but had more or less lasted through the night and she felt, if not much better, then at least like she could think. With Cooper asleep in the passenger seat, she stopped at a roadhouse and sat cross-legged on the car’s bonnet, eating a doughnut and drinking a metallic coffee as she watched clouds move across a mostly overcast sky. They were definitely out of Queensland, down where autumn meant something more than a lack of torrential rain.
Cooper woke up around midday. Maggie gave him a bottle of water, which he accepted with a grunted thanks. She glanced at him as he drank. There had been one question that, in all that had happened, she had forgotten to ask.
‘This killer,’ Maggie said. ‘Who do you think it is?’
Cooper finished off the bottle and screwed the lid back on. He didn’t look at Maggie. ‘I don’t think it’s anyone, as such. I don’t have the evidence.’
‘My father gave you a name.’
‘He gave me a name, not a reason to think he was right.’
‘But reason enough for you to come north.’
‘My job is finding the truth. That’s all. Right now, as far as I’m aware, this man is completely innocent.’
Maggie kept her eyes on the road. ‘Who is he?’
‘I’m not going to tell you that.’
‘Why?’
‘Because I’m not associating a potentially innocent person’s name with a killer.’
‘Who am I going to tell?’
‘That’s not the point, Maggie. It’s . . .’ Cooper sighed. ‘Listen, imagine if it was you. If a drunk was going around telling people you were a murderer, but you knew you were innocent. Would you want anybody hearing it?’
‘That’s very conscientious.’
‘Cautious. I’ve seen enough cases where cops think they’re onto a sure thing, speak about a suspect like they’re a lock, then some exonerating evidence comes in and next thing the lawyers swoop down on them for defamation. And fair enough, really. I don’t think you’re going to tell anyone. But that doesn’t change the fact that I’ve got a rule about these things. If your dad had real evidence, then I’ll share it with you. Until then, there’s nothing to share.’
Maggie didn’t push the issue. But she couldn’t shake the feeling that Cooper’s reasoning was well-thought-out bullshit.
CHAPTER FIVE
They drove. Sometimes they stopped; sometimes they alternated. Neither said very much. During her turns in the passenger seat, Maggie would look out the window, noting the turn-offs to Sydney, then Canberra. Already she missed Queensland. Here, brown hills gave way to scrubby forests then extensive paddocks. Sometimes the trees hemmed them in, obscuring little settlements that could barely be called towns, other times the landscape rolled out to either side of them, populated only by grazing cows and the occasional farmhouse. Maggie noted the long grass and gentle slopes, ochre combinations of yellows and oranges as the minutes and kilometres slipped quickly away.
Maggie tried to ignore the green signs which, each time they passed, marked how much closer they were getting to Melbourne. Nothing was stopping her from changing her mind, from telling Cooper to get out of the car before she headed off in a different direction. But despite the decreasing kilometres on those green signs, she never did.
As afternoon neared evening, Cooper turned from the wheel. ‘I don’t know if I can drive through another night.’
Maggie felt the same. The car was stuffy and she really wanted a shower. She also wanted to get to Melbourne and get this over with as soon as possible.
‘There’s a town up ahead,’ Cooper said. ‘Holbrook. Let’s stop. Get some food, stay overnight in a motel, then leave in the morning. We can easily be in Melbourne by tomorrow afternoon.’
A tightening in Maggie’s chest at the thought. Maybe slowing the process down wasn’t the worst idea in the world. ‘Okay.’
The exit wasn’t far ahead. A narrow road arced away from the highway, through trees and into a tiny township.
‘I used to bring my son here,’ Cooper said. ‘Back in the day, when he was younger. He loved it.’
‘Why would he love it?’ Maggie asked. All she could see up ahead were a rundown corner pub, a dilapidated supermarket and— ‘Oh.’
To their right, glaringly out of place among the small-town Australia trappings, was the bulk of a long, black submarine, half-buried in the neat grass of a public park. It took Maggie a couple of moments to be sure of what she was seeing. From the bulbous nose to the tapered far end, it had to be almost a hundred metres long.
‘HMAS Otway,’ Cooper said. ‘Ultimately, it’s just a weird feature in a park, but it gives the town a bit of a tourist attraction. We used to run up and down it pretending to be sailors.’
‘I’m not doing that with you.’
Cooper looked sideways at her. ‘Thwarted. Can I at least convince you to grab a burger with me and eat it on the sub?’
‘Purely because I never expected to hear that sentence in my life.’
Cooper laughed as they took the side street towards their motel.
They checked in, with Cooper paying for two clean but plain rooms, then headed to the little fish-and-chip shop. Cooper ordered burgers while Maggie stood outside, watching the road. A couple of teenagers kicking a footy passed her, but otherwise the town was still.
Up close, the size of the sub was striking. The dissonance with its surroundings seemed especially pronounced here. Cooper pointed to a ladder on the side. Maggie climbed up and sat cross-legged, facing the setting sun as she unwrapped her burger. Cooper joined her. For a few moments, neither spoke.
‘You seem on edge,’ Cooper said finally.
‘A lot has happened,’ Maggie said. ‘I’ve just learned to be careful.’
‘But that’s the thing.’ Cooper’s voice had risen slightly. ‘You shouldn’t have to be careful. You should be living your life in Melbourne, partying with friends, meeting guys or . . . I dunno. How old are you now, twenty-three? I still remember you as this little kid. And now I see you blowing up warehouses and . . . I mean, surely on some level you want to return to something easier than this? Once everything’s sorted out you could go back to uni, get a job, have a life, you know? Stop being . . .’ He faltered. He clearly didn’t know how to describe what Maggie was now. She couldn’t blame him. She didn’t either.
The sun was dipping below the horizon now. Maggie and Cooper finished their burgers in silence.
‘I’ve got this theory,’ Cooper said. ‘The amount of years in either direction tends to dictate where your focus goes. In your twenties, everything’s about building a future, laying foundations or whatever. In your fifties and up, it’s all about contending with the past. Tying up loose ends, atoning for your screw-ups, making sure you’ve arrived at a place where you can live with yourself and die knowing you’ve done alright.’
‘Jesus,’ Maggie said. ‘You’re not that old.’
‘No,’ Cooper said. ‘But I’m getting to that stage. And hindsight is starting to show me that I’ve got more than my fair share of regrets. What I’m saying is that I’d hate to see you end up in that same boat.’
‘I don’t have any regrets.’
‘Not yet. But when you start killing or meting out punishment with impunity . . .’ Cooper shook his head.
‘I knew guys who went down that road. Cops who aren’t cops anymore, thank God. What I’m saying is I don’t want you to end up in a place where I have no choice but to arrest you.’
The sun was gone. The night had turned cold around them. Maggie looked at Cooper. His eyes were on the stars.
‘Feel like a beer?’ she asked.
Cooper looked surprised. ‘Really?’
‘I reckon we’ve earned it.’
‘Sure, but . . .’ Cooper shrugged. ‘I’m just surprised you even drink.’
Maggie went to speak. She stopped. The wind picked up. She stood.
The pub was directly across the road from them. It was an old-fashioned, mustard-coloured building sitting on a street corner. Quiet music played inside and there were only a few other customers, mainly old men watching the footy on a wall-mounted TV. Maggie ordered two pints and joined Cooper in a booth off to the side. They both sipped.
‘How’s Aaron?’ Maggie asked.
Cooper paused, mid-drink. ‘You remember his name?’
Of course she did. All the nights she had imagined the world where Cooper took her home, where Aaron was introduced as her new brother. All the little snippets of information about him that Cooper had let slip that she had clung to, just in case. She knew he liked riding his bike and drawing, that he played guitar but was bad at it, that his favourite book as a kid had been Alice in Wonderland.
She nodded.
Cooper drank. ‘He’s fine. Good, really. He’s finished off his degree, making his mother and me look like a couple of uneducated idiots.’
‘What was your wife’s name?’ Maggie asked, even though she remembered.
‘We’re divorced.’
‘Sorry.’
Cooper shrugged. ‘Long time coming, really. My job isn’t kind to relationships.’
‘Why do it then?’
‘That’s the million-dollar question.’ He smiled ruefully. ‘Probably you watch one too many movies as a kid, get it in your head that the pursuit of truth and justice is what you were put on this earth for, then you start pursuing truth and justice and you realise that they’re both fucking complicated. Justice, for example, doesn’t make most people happy. Most people want revenge, not justice.’
The Inheritance Page 5