Devastation Road

by Joanna Baker

  Now that we were there I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t feel able to sit on his bed. A bed is such a personal thing. I perched my backside on the edge of his desk and leant back.

  Chess was going to be no help. She’d come into Wando’s house peering around her as if every detail could be significant, distracted only for a second by the smell of lunch and a bowl of fruit on the hall table. But she wasn’t offered anything to eat and the ginger ale never appeared and now that we were in Wando’s room she was back on the clue-hunting. She was used to hovering in the background while other kids talked. Leaving me to deal with Wando, she went to look out the window and then started edging around the room, inspecting everything.

  I felt like grabbing her and holding her still. It wasn’t just annoying. She was trying to find the necklace, but to me that was the wrong angle. The only important things in this house were inside Wando’s head. I wanted to know what he knew.

  I already knew what he was feeling. Wando felt sick. His face had the yellow sticky look of an under-cooked pikelet. I couldn’t look at him without feeling nauseous myself.

  Chess started running her fingers along the books on Wando’s shelf. I racked my brain for some words and came up with ‘Hi Wando … huh …’

  Wando said, ‘Sorry about last night. It was …’ But the full description was beyond him.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘No way,’ which didn’t mean much but had the right feel to it.

  There was a small TV on Wando’s bookshelf. Chess actually started pressing buttons, flicking through channels. Wando didn’t seem to mind. He was trying to explain about the picnic. ‘There was something I had to tell someone. A message.’ He screwed up his face. ‘I just had to sort someone out.’

  ‘Is that what you were trying to be? Scary?’

  I made a little ‘woo’ noise and wiggled my eyebrows and gave a quiet laugh. The laugh sounded fake, but he appreciated my effort to make a joke out of things. He even smiled a bit. Chess fiddled with the TV aerial. The TV made a crackling sound. I snapped at her. ‘For God’s sake, Chess!’

  ‘It’s all right,’ said Wando.

  But Chess turned off the TV and came towards us. She sat on the bed as if this wasn’t strange at all. Wando moved his legs away. Chess’s eyes fell on a pile of clothes on the spare bed.

  ‘Going away somewhere?’ she said.

  Wando glanced at Chess and then me, guiltily. ‘Melbourne. This afternoon.’ He had an aunt there.

  ‘It’s a good idea,’ said Chess, looking him firmly in the eyes. ‘Very good.’ The tone in her voice made it clear that she was meaning a lot more than she said. Wando saw it too. Chess knew things she wasn’t telling me. And suddenly, after all her rudeness, she and Wando had some kind of understanding that left me out in the cold.

  He said, ‘I hate this. I’ve had it.’

  ‘It’s not your fault,’ said Chess.

  Very nice. But that sort of secret unspoken stuff never works for me. I said, ‘Look, I’ve got to say something, Wando. I mean I know you’re having this really bad time and you feel like horse manure, but there’s some pretty heavy stuff going on and we need to sort it out.’ I took a breath and tried to sound more sympathetic. ‘I know you know something and I know it’s not easy.’

  No one was looking at me. I went straight to the punch-line. ‘But Debbie got killed for knowing something. Didn’t she?’

  I kicked the leg of the desk. ‘That is what we think isn’t it?’ It forced a small nod from Wando. Chess pressed her lips into a pout.

  I spoke to Wando. ‘Well, the point is, going away is a good idea, yes, but what about Tara? If you know something about Jeanette’s death then Tara must know it too … We are talking about Jeanette’s death, right?’ This time there was no response at all. ‘Well, even if Tara didn’t see what you saw, everyone thinks she did, so she’s in as much danger as you.’

  Wando moved uncomfortably on the bed. I was getting to him. ‘What I’m trying to say is the best thing to do to protect yourself and Tara would be to tell everyone what you know. Once everyone knows, then it’s not worth dying for.’

  He looked at me for a minute through dull, puffy eyes, thinking over what I’d said. Then he reached under his pillow and pulled something out. He dropped it on the striped cotton sheet. It was the amber necklace.

  In this light it looked ordinary and cheap but my heart missed a beat anyway. Here it was. The centre of the whole mystery and he had produced it, just like that.

  Wando said, ‘It’s not important any more. Give it back to the Carmodys. It was Jeanette’s really. She never gave it to Debbie.’

  I didn’t touch it. I badly wanted to ask how Debbie had got it, but I couldn’t. I thought for a minute and then decided to have one more go at him.

  ‘You’ll probably find that whatever you know isn’t that much. Chess knows most of it already.’ I paused but he wouldn’t look at me. ‘Even a poor thicko like me can work some of it out.’ No one laughed and no one said I wasn’t thick. I went on. ‘What if I tell you what I know? It’s not that hard to guess.’

  They didn’t try to stop me. I went on. ‘I’ll start with one of Chess’s riddles. Two eight-year-olds see a car. One says it’s white the other says it’s dark blue. How can a car be dark blue and white at the same time? No magic, no tricks. Just logically.’ His eyes remained on the window but flickered with interest. I was encouraged. ‘Answer — it can’t.’

  That was my moment. Chess was supposed to congratulate me. She didn’t move a muscle. But I was on a roll now and I didn’t care what they did or didn’t say.

  I went on, ‘Conclusion: either one of the children is mistaken or one is lying. Now, I don’t remember much about being eight, but I know kids learn their colours before they learn their one, two, three, and I also think a shock doesn’t make us blind. We might stop thinking clearly, but there’s a lot of basic stuff we hang onto.’ I was thinking about the day we found Deb. ‘Sometimes colour might be the only thing we remember.

  ‘So I reckon one of you is lying.’

  It had taken too long. I should’ve gone for a bigger surprise factor. Wando had had time to see where I was leading and build up defences. He looked straight at me and all I saw in his face was stubbornness. He wasn’t going to tell me a thing.

  I softened my voice. ‘Look, let’s get to the point. I reckon Jeanette knew something she wasn’t supposed to know — about robberies, or fires maybe. And Craig Wilson ran her down. Debbie and Tara and you all saw it. You’re all too scared to talk. But Debbie knew a lot of bad things about him and she was worried. Then he burns down the Rolands’ café and nearly kills me, and she realises he’s never going to change and she should dob him in before he really hurts someone. She decided to tell. But now Debbie’s dead. And you’ve gone out last night and stirred up the whole can of worms. I really reckon you’re better off going to the police with whatever it is you saw. Be a witness. We know it was Craig. Chess thinks so too.’

  ‘No I don’t,’ said Chess.

  Well, that floored me. After all my hard work on Wando I thought at least I could rely on her to back me up. There was an apology in her eyes and so there should have been. But her chin had gone all pointy and that meant it’d be no good arguing with her.

  And now Wando spoke for the first time since he’d pulled out the necklace. ‘That’s not it,’ he said. ‘It’s way off.’

  ‘Oh, really?’ I said coldly. And then I got angry. I banged the desk behind me. ‘What is it then?’ No one was going to answer. I reached over to the bed and picked up the necklace. ‘It’s something to do with this, isn’t it? Debbie was wearing this on the day she was killed. How did you get it Wando?’

  Wando closed his eyes and tipped his head back on the pillow.

  I waved the necklace around. ‘Is there a message on it? Eh? Is that it? What will it tell me?’

  I started inspecting it, mainly just to get his attention. It was attached to the chain by a little gold f
itting shaped like a leaf and apart from that it was just a stone. Not exactly a stone, not cold enough, but not plastic either. I turned it around, checking it from every possible angle and there was not a mark on it. No letters. No initials. No secret sign pointing to a murderer.

  I held it up to the light from the window. Even the yellows had become dull and uninteresting. Not like the fire of last night. The inside of the stone seemed to be made of bubbles, rising up from a blob at the bottom. I peered at them, hoping for an idea.

  I’ve never been any good at this kind of thing. Ink blot games and Magic Eye books are wasted on me, and when other kids would look at clouds and see castles and teddy bears I could only see cotton wool.

  ‘Bubbles,’ I said.

  I held it out to Chess hoping she would make something of it. She didn’t even take it from me.

  ‘It’s not the necklace that’s important,’ she said, ‘except that the clasp is so strong. It’s important because of where it’s come from. I told you that.’

  We both looked at Wando again. Wando glanced up warily, not at me, at Chess. They were back into their cosy secret thing. I couldn’t believe it. He was glad she was there. More glad about Chess than he was about me. He was actually depending on her.

  Chess gave him a tiny little nod.

  He said, ‘I’ll tell you about when Jeanette died. Will that …?’ He stopped.

  ‘Yes,’ said Chess.

  That was all she had to say. My ranting had got me nowhere, but all Chess had to say was ‘yes’. It was if someone had pressed the ‘Start’ key. Wando began talking.

  ‘The Rolands and Mum and Dad were all going to a wedding and Jeanette was babysitting me and Tara at their place. The Rolands’ garage had burnt down, right? Plus Tara had wrecked her new shoes and a pair of tights and they’d got right into her for that. They were really mad.’ He rubbed at his face with both hands. His voice was low and flat. ‘When they left, Mr Roland spun the tyres and did this huge fish tail.

  ‘Then we were left with Jeanette. She started going on about the fire in the garage. She said Tara used to play in there and she was lucky she hadn’t been burned alive. She kept asking her if she saw anyone hanging around and Tara kept saying no.

  ‘It turned out the garage was an accident. Someone had left a heater on, but they found that out later. On that night, Jeanette was making out she was going to find out who did it.

  ‘She didn’t like us. We weren’t good kids like Matty Tingle. We gave her a hard time. So every time she minded us she used to take us for a walk to tire us out so we’d go to bed. On that night we went right up the hill behind Tara’s. It doesn’t look that big but it took a long time. It was getting dark. The grass was wet. Jeanette charged on ahead and we followed her. I remember being really puffed and my legs were aching.’

  My legs were aching, too. I slid back to sit on the desk. This was going to take a while.

  Wando had got into his story now. ‘At the top there are a few trees and then over the far side there’s a kind of cliff. You can’t really see it until you get right up to it. It’s not all that high but it’s high enough. We were never allowed up there, but Jeanette said we could go so we though it must be OK.

  ‘When we got to the top she was standing at the edge and she wanted us to go right up there too, but we were scared and we stayed back. The sun was setting over the next lot of hills and shining right into our eyes. There were some trees near Jeanette and one of them had a branch going out low and that threw a shadow way back to us. So we stood with the bit of branch between our eyes and the sun, and then we could see her.

  ‘She wasn’t looking at us. She was facing out over the cliff and had the necklace in her hand and she started raving on about the sun being this huge eye that sees everything.’

  ‘The Eye of Ra,’ said Chess.

  ‘She was saying this poetry. Something about a boat sinking between the mountains and there were lions on the mountains … We couldn’t hear properly. Mostly she faced the other way. The necklace was shining and behind her was the sunset. The whole world had gone orange and against that she looked a hundred metres tall. She was just this big black figure. We were panicking. Tara had me by the arm and she was starting to pull me away. Then Jeanette turned round. The sun came below the branch and got in our eyes again and Jeanette said, “Now I see”, in this really creepy way.’

  ‘Did she say what she had seen?’ said Chess.

  ‘We didn’t give her a chance,’ said Wando. ‘We ran for it.’

  ‘What had she been looking at?’ I asked.

  Wando shrugged. ‘Cars, sheds, I dunno. We just bolted down the hill. Tara was leading. I can’t remember much except slipping, and trying to keep up.

  ‘Somehow we ended up at the road and Tara took me straight across and we went left. I thought she was heading for Debbie’s place, but then she turned around and started back towards town. We were crashing through grass and low bushes. I tried to tell Tara to stop but I had no air. And then we could hear Jeanette on the other side of the road running the same way we were. She shouted something. She was much higher than us, coming down from the hill.

  ‘We got near the corner — the blind corner — and Tara stopped. She was out near the road. I was further back in. Then Jeanette appeared across the road, up on a high bank, looking at us. She still had the necklace on. I could see it. The bank was right on the road. There was no flat ground in between. Everyone stopped.’

  Wando clenched the sheet. ‘It’s true you know! No one pushed her. The police found all the footprints. She was by herself. There was just us on one side and Jeanette on the other.’

  ‘Yes, Wando. OK,’ said Chess.

  Wando looked at Chess in a way he’d never looked at me. He was getting strength from her. It reminded me of the way her father looked at her. Sort of pleading and dependent, as if she was someone he could rely on.

  Wando went back to the story. ‘I could hear a car was coming, and maybe Tara heard it too, because she ran back towards me, but Jeanette started coming down the bank. And she slipped. She couldn’t stop. She just slid down on the gravel. She came out onto … She just … I mean …’

  Wando’s voice gave out and we sat in silence for a second, picturing the rag doll Jeanette going up and over the car and rolling along the road. Wando looked terrible.

  ‘Yeah,’ I said, slowly and quietly. And then my voice dropped out too. ‘Jeez,’ I whispered.

  But he didn’t need me to fill the silence. He was still talking to Chess. He went on.

  ‘I didn’t see the driver. I’ve been asked a hundred times. But I will tell you one thing.’

  ‘Yes?’ she said.

  ‘That car was definitely white.’

  ***

  At that point, we heard a car pulling up in the street. Chess pressed her face against the fly screen and must have been able to see some of the road.

  ‘Tara’s car. Sounds like her mother and her.’

  ‘They were coming for lunch,’ said Wando.

  There was one thing I knew. I didn’t feel like seeing Tara. I dropped down from the desk. ‘I think we’ll go. Have a good time in Melbourne and don’t worry about what I said. Tara will be fine.’

  Wando blurted out, ‘Just watch out for her OK?’

  ‘Yeah, mate. I’ll do my best.’

  But he didn’t want to leave it at that. We could hear Tara and her mother meeting Mrs O’R at the front door. It threw him into a panic.

  ‘Don’t worry about Craig. It’s not him. Evil people don’t always look evil.’ There were more noises outside.

  ‘Who is it?’ I looked at Chess. ‘Who is it?’ She was pale and close to breaking point. She had tried to take some of the burden of Wando’s knowledge, but it looked now as if she almost couldn’t bear it.

  ‘Come on, Chess! For Christ’s sake!’

  ‘You don’t understand!’ Her voice failed her. The words came out in a weak whisper.

  Wando said, ‘Some p
eople have this look. Nice clothes, nice hair. No one knows what really goes on.’

  ‘Look, Wando, you want me to look after Tara. Tell me who to protect her from.’

  ‘She pretends she doesn’t care. But she’s like that. She keeps everything hidden.’

  I knew I shouldn’t lecture him at this point, but I couldn’t help nagging. ‘She’d be safer if you’d tell everyone what you know … Chess?’

  Wando looked at Chess. He went even whiter.

  ‘It’s not my secret to tell,’ said Chess.

  ‘Tara will never say.’

  Chess punched at her forehead. ‘I need to think. I can’t think.’

  We could hear people coming up the corridor. Wando looked at me and repeated his plea. ‘Just watch out for her, OK?’

  Chapter 23

  ‘You saw it that time, didn’t you?’ said Chess.

  ‘I saw Wando being ashamed of himself and you going around his room like Inspector Clouseau, making him feel like a criminal.’

  ‘Forget all that stuff. It isn’t going to help you.’

  ‘Well you’re not helping.’

  I sounded sulky, but I couldn’t help it. We were half way up the hill behind her place, in full afternoon sun. I was hot from the climb and I wasn’t really sure I wanted to be there. I’d promised Wando I’d look after Tara and that was what I wanted to do. As soon as we’d left Wando’s place I was ready to shake Chess right off, but she’d said she was coming up here to confirm her theory about the death of Jeanette, and she knew I couldn’t resist that. The trouble was I’d assumed she’d share that theory with me. Instead she was on Exercise Three from her manual of How to Be an Infuriating Geek.

  ‘OK. Three more clues and that’s it.’ Chess stopped and allowed me to catch up. ‘The heater, the engagement ring and the stripy paper bag.’