by G. S. Bailey
“Yeah, but it tastes better when you do it,” David shot back teasingly, and the others grumbled in agreement.
“Is there any more pickled onions?” one of them called out.
Amanda had already taken the jar from the cupboard, and she cut a bunch of them and sliced a heap of cheese. They all thanked her and made jokes about the food being better when they played there at her house. She set them up with more chips and nuts, and replenished the bowl of dried fruit that had been cleaned up completely.
They poured her a glass of beer, and David gave her his seat and got a fold-up chair from the laundry for himself.
“But I don’t even know how to play,” she protested about being given some poker chips and being dealt in.
The game then became one of helping Amanda against anyone else still in. She was sitting between her brother and his friend Justin, a heavily set Islander with tattooed arms. Either her brother or Justin would fold their hand and help her with hers. She picked up the idea of the game quickly enough but played up to the men for longer than that.
Amanda was revelling in all of the attention, and absolutely basking in the almost constant looks she was getting from the smouldering eyed, square jawed policeman seated directly opposite.
She had seen him around town over the course of the year or so he had lived there in Everly Cove. He had been posted directly out of the academy and shown up single and unattached. Amanda had only seen him in passing and hadn’t spoken to him until the first time he showed up at one of her brother’s card nights. He had joined the group and had been hanging around with David a fair bit over the past few months. This was the second time he had been seated at Amanda’s dining table.
“I’m going all in!” She pushed her remaining chips forward in a bold and defiant move, as she had seen it done on television.
It was only she and Brent left standing. He would have to call her bet or fold. He met her eyes more directly than he ever had until that point. Amanda went all goose-bumpy as she bit down on her smile and stared right back at him.
“That’s eight bucks to you,” Michael told Brent. Michael was a tall, bony computer-shop sales clerk.
Brent checked under the edge of his two cards, nodding to himself. He then counted out the eight dollars in chips and held Amanda’s smile as he presented them forward to cover her bet.
She frowned. “Meany!”
He turned over an ace and a king. It was enough to win the hand.
Amanda pouted.
“So, what of the widow Mulvane? Did she kill her old man or what?” Justin asked of everyone in general. He was only a year or so in town, not exactly a local.
“Yep.” Michael replied. “They say he was an arsehole, though, so he probably deserved it.”
“But how do you know she did?” Amanda challenged. “I don’t think she could have done it. I wouldn’t be working for her if I thought she could do something like that.”
Michael dealt the next hand. “Apparently she’s been stashing her money all these years too. Keeps her account here empty and moves it all somewhere else every month.”
“Like where?” Brent had heard as much, but it was only rumour. Michael’s mother worked at the bank, though.
“Don’t know. But I bet she vanishes one day.”
“Oh, she will not,” Amanda scoffed. “You don’t know what you’re talking about, Michael. Everyone thinks she’s weird, but she’s really nice when you get to know her.”
“Granddad said he bumped into that girl this afternoon up near the mansion,” Brent said. “She was asking him about the widow and what happened. He gave her his version.”
“Which is?” Amanda blushed a little as Brent met her eyes again.
“Granddad’s in the John Phillips-did-it camp. He reckons the widow tried to leave Mulvane and he wouldn’t let her go, and that she and John were lovers. He said some of the old timers around town remember when the widow and John were going together at school, and that when he got back from the navy they picked up again.”
David reached for some chips. “What, that chick was up at the mansion today?”
“Well, up there somewhere,” Brent explained. “Just up near Granddad’s place, I think.”
“They were talking about some other murder down at the wharf this afternoon,” Justin tossed his cards in. “Some remains or something.”
“Yeah, at the soccer field.” Brent added.
“Shit! Seriously?” Michael almost choked on a mouthful of beer.
David collected a few empties and placed them on the kitchen counter. “What, like, new or ancient?”
“It was over behind the new toilet block where they’ve been digging to lay the water pipes. Looks like a young adult female. The boss reckons at least ten and up to thirty years buried.”
“Oh, that’s creepy. That’s just down there,” Amanda cried. The soccer field was at the end of the street. The new toilet block was less than a hundred metres from where they were sitting there in her dining room.
Chat drifted from murders to the recent spate of gang-related shootings in Sydney and Melbourne, and onto rugby and the game the boys were waiting on that evening. When the game started, Justin and Michael retired to the garage where there was a TV set and bar, along with the pool table. Brent remained chatting, and Amanda didn’t know whether she wanted her brother to stay or not. She calculated that as long as David was sitting there beside her, Brent would remain as well. She was excited by the prospect of her brother going outside and Brent staying to talk with her alone, yet the idea also made her chest tighten up and her heart thump a little.
The game had started and David stood. Brent turned in his chair, about to get up as well. Amanda took a ragged breath and met the policeman’s eyes.
“It was nice to see you, Brent.” She pushed a stray lock of hair off her cheek.
“Yeah, thanks for the munchies,” he replied, reddening in the face and looking to David then back to her again.
David shook his head, rolled his eyes and left, and Amanda stood, tugging her dressing gown into place. Brent turned back, wringing his hands and pulling on a thumb.
“It’s really good living back here after Melbourne.” He rubbed the back of his hand and inspected the result. “I’m glad I got posted here.”
“Oh, right… You used to live here before, didn’t you?”
He nodded. “Yeah, until I was ten and Mum and Dad split.” He edged onto the arm of a lounge chair.
Amanda stood in front of him, not knowing what to do with her hands. She fiddled with her gown tie.
“I remember you,” the policeman said. “You had a purple bike.”
Amanda smiled. “It’s under the house… How could you remember that?”
He shrugged and relaxed into a nice smile as well. “You used to peg a card on the wheel to make it sound like you had a motor. Plus you used to have amazing long hair.”
“Oh, my God! David used to put the card on the wheel. Though I can’t believe you remember that too!”
Amanda unconsciously groped her hair and twirled the length of it to one side. The man was looking at it. It used to be almost blond when she was a child. It was still her natural colour, though it darkened considerably as she matured.
“I sort of remember you.” She tossed her hair over her shoulder. “I think I remember you and David making a raft and trying to float across the creek one time, but it sank.”
He chuckled. “Yeah, that was me. But you would have only been what, five or six? I can’t remember anything that far back.”
“I would have been six when you left town. I remember a little bit.”
The conversation was stalling awkwardly. Amanda couldn’t think of what else to say. Brent was looking around, sort of toward the back door.
“I guess um—”
“Poker was—”
They had spoken at the same time.
“Poker was fun,” Amanda went on, blushing.
The guy nodded.
“Do you want to um—like, get a coffee or something sometime?”
“Okay!”
Amanda’s heart leapt. The guy expelled a breath.
“Okay!” he also exclaimed. “Maybe I could call you?”
Amanda nodded, biting her lip. She was looking into his eyes, transfixed.
He thumbed toward the back door. “I’d better—” he said. “What’s your mobile number, though?”
There was a small corner phone table with a notepad by the phone. Amanda wrote her number and folded the page. She was chewing on her lip as she handed it to him. He was peering all around, nodding and blushing and motioning toward the back door.
“I’d better—” he said again, and he left her standing there staring after him.
Amanda drifted over to the dining table and tidied the empty bowls and beer bottles. She did that in a daze then turned off the lights and floated through the house to her bedroom. She flopped back on her bed with her belly tingling and her eyes still fixed wide as she stared at the ceiling.
Her window was open, and she could hear the guys’ voices from the garage quite clearly. She tossed her dressing gown and got into bed, lying awake and listening intently for Brent’s voice and for any mention of her name.
Chapter 7
The flat, dark earth morphed into two black mountains. They were tall and narrow, and they towered over Clair—huge, jagged creatures dripping black tar from arms that reached for her.
She sat bolt upright in bed, her heart pounding as she peered around the dimly lit room. Where am I? What is this place? Her mind gripped memory of the four-poster bed and plush quilt. She was in her rented room, in Everly Cove. She checked her phone. It was almost five in the morning.
She slipped from beneath the quilt and stood at the window. The two headlands were silhouetted against the dawn sky. Her monsters dripping tar, she reasoned as the memory of her dream sort of scurried away. She had dreamt of her grandmother in Melbourne, visiting her there in her tall house surrounded by trees, although her grandmother actually lived in a city apartment.
Clair shook off a creepy, unsettling feeling as that memory of her dream also scurried away with some other abstract images she had processed. She crept along the hall to use the bathroom and washed her face to freshen up while she was there.
She sat in her room and watched the sun break through a shimmer of clouds on the horizon between the two headlands. It had rained through the night, but the sky was clearing to a fine morning. She pulled on tights, hiking boots and a short woollen dress. She took her car and cruised up onto the headland, taking a gravel road turn-off that climbed toward the old lighthouse. The road was uneven and pot-holed. It ended at a set of rusted iron gates, chained and padlocked.
The gates were banged up. It looked like they may have been rammed a time or two. There was a warped bit beneath the chain where Clair was able to slink through, and she continued up the overgrown gravel track toward the lighthouse glistening in the crisp morning sunlight.
The lighthouse was a white concrete tower beside a small stone block house. It was built at the edge of a rocky cliff, with the sound of the ocean rumbling and pounding away below. Clair stood looking up at the peak of the tower where the remnants of a glassed light-room were visible. The windows there were smashed, and the rotating lens was rusted black and aged in place. The tower stood at a height of about 20 metres and was as broad as the small house at the base.
Clair touched the stone wall of the house. It was sandy. The blocks were sandstone and naturally white in colour. They were washed clean by the elements and glistened new in the sun. There was a slatted wooden door that rested half open. It was wedged in place between a wooden cupboard lying on its side on the floor and what appeared to be a heavy timber step that had been flipped in through the door and jammed up-side-down against it.
Clair stepped over the threshold and into the building. The room she had entered was a living room. There were the metal frames of a lounge and chair with tattered brown fabric, faded and brittle looking. The cupboard against the door was a bureau with the glass front and mirrored interior smashed and fragments all over the floor.
Clair picked up a tiny glass giraffe with two legs missing. She picked up a small, splintered wooden picture frame with no picture in it. There were two bureau drawers missing but one still in place, and she pulled it out to find some bleached white papers with hand-writing barely distinguishable. They looked like accounts regarding diesel fuel purchases. They were pinned together with a heavy rusted staple. The dates were from April through November, 1968. The signature at the bottom of each page was the same. It was loopy and extravagant. It appeared to read N. D. Cornish. There was a small metal tobacco tin in the drawer. The lid was sealed with age, but it twisted off with some encouragement. There was tobacco inside that had the texture of tree bark and no scent.
The room smelled of sea-salt. There were window frames with no glass in them. The wind, rain and spray of the ocean could blow right through the place. There were two doorways, one leading to a kitchen with a corroded-white metal sink and rusted tap above it. There was an open fireplace and the shell of an enamel combustion stove with the top rusted orange. There were cupboards, all open and empty, and a wooden table with two legs broken off. The chairs from the table were around the room, and several were intact.
Clair sat on one of them. She still had the glass giraffe and the bleached papers. There was another room where she could see a concrete washtub and a back doorway with no door at all. She sat there on the wooden chair remembering the place. She had been there before.
The other doorway from the living room led to a bedroom, she recalled. She went and checked to find the sprung frame of a small single bed upturned against a wall. There was another bureau with gutted drawers smashed around the floor. There were tattered rags of clothing and a striped mattress, torn and water-stained rusty brown.
The small house was lifeless. There had been no life there for years. Clair sat on the wooden chair again and wondered what was so familiar about the place. She contemplated her feeling of childish excitement mixed with dread—the same feeling of dread she often woke with from one of her chest-pounding nightmares.
She kept the papers and the giraffe and explored further. She knew there would be an entrance to the base of the light-tower around the back of the house, and she found the door missing and the block of a diesel engine bolted to the floor inside. There was no other mechanism in the tower. It had obviously been stripped bare years ago, with the engine block probably not worth salvaging. The tower was hollow with a wooden staircase spiralling upward and hanging off the wall in places. Beneath the base of the stairs there was a section of the wall that had been rendered with red bricks. Clair had a strange feeling creep over her as she bent down to look at the brickwork. She touched the underside of the stairs, as if she had done it before, and she ran her fingers over the bricks, feeling as if something was different. But different from what, she had no idea, so she shook off the weird sensation and backed out of there.
The staircase was reasonably sturdy, and Clair climbed carefully to the top where she met an updraught of cold ocean air that combined with the thunder of waves crashing into the cliff-face below to blow her hair back. She sucked in the salty air and gazed out to the expanse of pristine blue ocean, and she took in the magnificence of that until a seagull landed on the broken window ledge beside her.
Clair then gazed down at the wharf and the awakening little town, and she looked across at the mansion staring back at her from the other headland. It looked as white as the lighthouse, and she considered it was probably constructed of the same sandstone blocks.
She felt she was in an opposing castle. She was a princess and there was a king and a queen. That wasn’t a new thought either. She had played that game before. She had imagined that exact fairy tale from that exact spot—right where she was standing, only in another life it seemed. It also occurred to her that she was not alone in
that game. It was something shared.
Clair’s mobile phone buzzed in her pocket.
“Hello!”
“Hello, Candy. This is Marion Reeves. Will you be joining us for breakfast?”
“Oh, yes. Thank you,” Clair replied. “About fifteen minutes?”
“Yes, that’s fine, dear. I’ll set you a place.”
Clair didn’t have a good reason to keep the papers and giraffe but she kept them, anyway, and she collected the tobacco tin and old picture frame on her way back to the car as well. She was there in town investigating, and they were the only things in the lighthouse not completely dead. They were like little clues, though to what she could not imagine. It was just the sort of thing you did when snooping, she reasoned jokingly as she rolled back down the road to the B&B.
After a hearty fried breakfast she was off and snooping again. She left the car this time, deciding to double up the detective work with getting some exercise. She kept her hiking boots in favour of joggers because of all the puddles and mud. The walkways of Everly Cove were only paved along the foreshore, otherwise it was grass worn to a dirt track in places.
Clair walked the streets—all of them. She wandered up into the base of the surrounding mountains and back to the shore. Everyone she passed either nodded or said hello. She chatted with a few different ladies about the weather or about gardens and flowers.
She called in at the police station.
“No, Officer Cooper is not on duty, miss. Is there something I can help you with?”
She was talking over a chest-high counter to a huge sergeant with a voice that boomed.
“I was speaking with his grandfather yesterday. I was hoping to speak with him about the Mulvane case,” Clair explained.
“The Mulvane case?” the sergeant questioned.
“Yeah, I mean the old unsolved death of Charles Mulvane,” Clair went on, leaning over the counter with the big man’s eyes dropping to her cleavage momentarily. “I’m a student doing a research paper.”