Darkening Skies

by Parry, Bronwyn

  ‘It’s okay, Jenn,’ he said, with the gentleness that had always been his strength. ‘Breathe. Cry if you need to. We’ll find somewhere else to stay tonight. You’re going to be fine.’

  She meant to move away from him after that moment but she stayed, her wet cheek dampening the soft cotton of his shirt, his arms firm and warm holding her. Part of her was twelve again, running away in distress from the hateful house and the nightmares, lost in never-ending bush in the dark … before the boy found her, wrapped a rug around her, lifted her on to his horse and promised to teach her about the land so that she could always find her way, and never feel so lost and alone again.

  Midnight came and went, and still Mark lay awake, his thoughts too crowded and active to allow him to slip into sleep on the hot, still night. Starlight shone through the narrow window above the bunk bed, and occasionally the headlights of the police car making a sweep of the caravan park flashed into the room, the officer exchanging greetings in a low voice with the one on guard outside the cabin.

  In the main room of the cabin Jenn slept in the double bed, peaceful for now. He could see her through the door she’d insisted he leave open so the slight breeze from the overhead fan could flow into the tiny bunkroom. At times she turned, or caught her breath or murmured something in her sleep, but the wave of panic that had caught her in the hospital had dissipated once she was out in the fresh air and calm of the night.

  With Birraga’s only motel full with a tour group, and the hotels too insecure in Steve’s opinion, the caravan-park cabin had been their only choice.

  In the morning he’d make arrangements to take Jenn to Dungirri and return to Marrayin, but even if he had access to a vehicle now he had enough sense not to risk a long drive in the dark after the minor injuries of the explosion. And he could not have left her alone in the hotel in Dungirri tonight. Besides, Steve would be back in the morning, with the homicide detective and prints of all the photographs so that they could go through them all properly, one by one.

  Mark checked his watch, the time glowing in the darkness. One in the morning. In Bolivia his parents were fifteen hours behind – ten a.m., Saturday. If they were travelling into the nearest small town from the village they might already be there, might have checked their email. He reached for his phone. No messages.

  He closed his eyes again. Exhaustion, physical and mental, overwhelmed him. His mind was fruitlessly dragging all the unanswered questions around and around. He needed to stop thinking, get some rest.

  His senses leapt to full alert as Jenn caught her breath again and made a small sound into the pillow. But she turned on to her side and settled without waking, curled under the sheet, one arm clutching it to her chest.

  Thirty seconds, perhaps a minute he’d held her tonight before she’d regained her equilibrium and limped away with a murmured apology; not much longer the night before when Jim had died.

  He couldn’t ignore it any longer. All the friendship, the affection, the love he’d felt for her in their teens – none of it had faded. And neither would the memory of those few minutes of closeness. The pride, resilience and independence that had enabled her to survive and triumph over a difficult youth remained, stronger than ever, and he doubted she would reveal that much vulnerability again, allow him close again. She’d leave Dungirri as soon as she could – and who could blame her? Her wounds cut too deeply and she had nothing to hold her here, nothing she cared about enough to stop her from going. Just like last time, he would have to let her go. And just like last time, she would leave an aching void in his life.

  He rolled on to his stomach and punched the lumpy pillow into a better shape. With one arm flung over it, he rested his face against it, and just for a moment allowed himself to remember the warmth of Jenn in his arms and the trust and connection between them.

  He woke with sunlight streaming through the window on to his face, the sound of running water in the small bathroom and the quiet rolling crunch of a car pulling up on the gravel outside. Sitting up hastily, he narrowly avoided hitting his head on the low bunk above, but relaxed on hearing Steve greet their guard-duty officer.

  He yanked his smoky, ash-stained jeans on again and didn’t bother to tuck in his rumpled shirt before he answered Steve’s knock on the cabin’s sliding door.

  Steve handed Mark a plastic bag as he walked in. ‘Kris said she sent some clothes for Jenn around last night, and here’s my contribution. Clean jeans and T-shirt. Thank me later. Sorry I didn’t have any socks washed, and I ain’t lending anyone my jocks.’

  ‘We can all be thankful for that,’ Mark joked in return. A shower and fresh clothes would help to clear the grogginess in his head and wake him up properly. Six hours’ sleep hadn’t quite made up for days of sleep deprivation. Coffee might help, too – the empty mug in the sink said Jenn had already had some. He refilled the still-warm electric kettle and set it to boil, found the remaining two mugs in the cupboard and emptied a couple of instant-coffee packets into them.

  Steve dropped a bulging folder on the table and pulled out one of the chairs. ‘That’s the printouts of the photos. Not for sharing around, but maybe you or Jenn might recognise more people. I only recognised one. Nothing to pin on him, of course, but wherever there’s a hint of trouble, he’s there somewhere.’

  Mark took the enlarged black-and-white photographic print Steve passed him. The door of a house, a large bush to one side of it, and two men on the porch, exchanging a joke as if they’d just walked out the door after an enjoyable time.

  It took him only a second to identify one of the men. ‘Dan Flanagan,’ he said. ‘But he’s a fair bit younger there. What’s the date code on the file?’

  ‘The file names are on the backs of the photos. That one doesn’t have initials like the others, but it has a precise date – day, month and year.’

  Mark flipped it over. ‘Two months before the accident. Around the same time as the photo of my mother. But there’s no indication here what the connection is.’

  ‘No. You’re good with faces and names – any idea who the other bloke is?’

  Mark stared at the man’s face, a vague fraction of memory again dancing in and out of his mind, never quite solid enough to grasp.

  The latch on the bathroom door clicked and Jenn limped out, her dark hair wet around her shoulders, the borrowed blue T-shirt loose over a pair of jeans. Her face had more colour than last night’s pallor, and although her eyes still carried some strain, the redness had gone. She’d left the crutches by her bed but seemed able to put weight on her injured foot, albeit briefly.

  Mark drew out a chair for her. ‘How are you feeling this morning?’

  ‘Better than last night. Somewhere approaching human. And you?’

  ‘About the same.’ He passed her the photo. ‘We didn’t look at this one last night. Do you recognise the man on the right?’

  ‘That’s Dan Flanagan on the left, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘This other guy – he’s familiar. But I can’t remember …’ Her brow furrowed as she focused, deep in thought. ‘He can’t be from Dungirri, because we knew everyone there. Must be Birraga, or the region—’ Her eyes widened. ‘The bank. Not the one your office was in, Mark. The one in the main street, on the other side of Vanna’s salon from the Gazette. He was senior, the manager or deputy manager or something. Mc-something. Irish.’

  Mark placed him, now, with sparse recollections of seeing him around town. Not part of his parents’ social or business circles, as far as he’d been aware. Marrayin’s accounts were with a different bank. ‘McCarthy?’ he asked, the name coming to mind, but not quite right.

  ‘Maybe … No, it was McCarty,’ Jenn said, emphasising the hard ‘t’. ‘I remember now. Gerard McCarty.’

  Mark realised the significance of the name the same moment she did. GM. They both reached for the pile of photos but it was closer to him, and he quickly flicked through to find the early one of his parents at the party, and laid
it on the table. ‘The question is: is this also him?’ He didn’t voice the bigger questions – about the relationship between his mother and the man, and the implication of the sequence of photos that there’d been some connection, some cause-and-effect, for more than eighteen years, from before his birth until the accident.

  ‘Could be him,’ Steve said. ‘Can’t see his face, though. Is this guy still in town, Mark? I haven’t run into him.’

  ‘That bank closed its Birraga branch while I was at uni. He must have gone somewhere else, because I can’t recall seeing him since then.’ Gone, and with him any immediate answers. An internet search might find his current whereabouts, but whatever Steve planned officially, Mark also intended to discover what he could.

  Steve’s phone beeped, and with a quick glance at it he rose. ‘I have to go. Briefing with homicide and the boss in five minutes. I’d appreciate it if you two could go through each image today, see who you can identify. I’ll be in touch again later this morning. Jenn, the constable can run you back to Dungirri and you to Marrayin when you’re ready, Mark. We can only spare one officer at present to protect you but she can stay with you today.’

  ‘No,’ Mark objected. ‘I can arrange a ride home for us, and I’m not convinced there’s a threat to my life. The most likely scenario is that last night’s attack was aimed at my car, not me. Vandalism, not a murder attempt. If it hadn’t been for the fuel, I’d have only had a damaged ute.’ The fact that Dan Flanagan knew of the fuel worried him, but the chances of Dan organising a murder attempt in an hour or two had to be slim, and if Dan really wanted him dead, surely there were far more effective ways to accomplish it. ‘You must have higher priorities for the available officers,’ he continued. ‘I know how thinly they’re spread even when there aren’t two arson attacks and two deaths to investigate.’

  He could see Steve wavering, the harsh realities of perpetual short-staffing an undeniable issue. ‘Okay. For the moment. I’ll see what the Feds have to say. Maybe they’ve got some resources to spare. I’ll let you know.’

  Mark stood on the cabin’s porch as Steve drove away, followed by the constable in the marked police car. When he turned inside again, Jenn was watching him, photos spread out on the table in front of her.

  ‘Are you thinking what I’m thinking?’ she asked.

  ‘I’m thinking that I should be able to hire a car from my mechanic. He keeps a couple of loan cars for customers. And then I’m thinking that it’s not much of a detour to Wolfgang Schmidt’s place on the way home.’

  She smiled, the austere lines of her face softening into a beauty that had only deepened in the years she’d been away, and that made his chest tighten.

  ‘Great minds think alike,’ she said.

  Jenn almost didn’t recognise in Mark’s mechanic the pimply, pipsqueak kid who’d been a couple of years below her at Birraga High, but Ian remembered her – or at least knew of her local connections. Word had travelled and in the circumstances Ian didn’t object to being called on a Sunday, and quickly offered to bring around a vehicle. He arrived within ten minutes, with a blue Pulsar sedan. More than ten years old and a little dented and faded in the paintwork, but mechanically sound and clean – and automatic, so she didn’t need a functioning left foot to drive it.

  ‘How much to hire it for a few days?’ she asked, reaching for her credit card, determined to refuse to let Mark pay. He had his LandCruiser at Marrayin, and only needed to get to it. She needed to have a car until her insurance company provided a proper hire car or a replacement car, and out here that would probably take days.

  ‘No charge,’ Ian said. ‘Use it for the whole week if you need it. It’s bloody terrible what happened to your cars. That kind of shit doesn’t belong in Birraga.’

  Didn’t belong anywhere. But she kept seeing it again and again and it didn’t matter if it was Birraga or Baghdad or Beirut – the combination of anger, violence and weapons was a human speciality, both individually and collectively.

  The cynicism brought a sour taste to her mouth and she reminded herself that decent people like Ian still existed, people who’d go out of their way to do a favour for someone they hardly knew. And people like Mark, who stood up for their ideals and dedicated themselves to serving their communities, to bringing communities together rather than ripping them apart – negotiators and peacemakers who too often became the target of an assassin’s gun.

  She shivered, despite the growing heat of the day, thankful that Mark lived here, in western New South Wales, and not in some place where war and hatred raged. She smiled, shook Ian’s hand and wished him the best.

  While Mark showered, Jenn washed their mugs, stuffed their smoky clothes into a plastic bag, and hobbled around to sweep the cabin floor. She picked up the car keys when he emerged from the bathroom.

  ‘I’ll drive. You can check your emails and phone messages on the way.’

  He didn’t object. ‘Thanks. Can we go past my office? I’d like to see how bad the damage is.’

  When Jenn pulled to a stop beside the barriers closing the street, they both stared silently at the rubble. Little remained of the building apart from the back wall and a small portion of the front wall, the angle of the latter looking precarious with no internal beams to support it. What the fire hadn’t destroyed the demolishers would have to pull down. Her car was a shell of blackened metal and Mark’s ute was unrecognisable. She made a mental note to call her insurance company this morning.

  The lone policeman on duty recognised Mark and strolled over, leaning on the side of the car to chat through the open window.

  ‘G’day, Mark.’ He nodded in her direction. ‘Morning, Miss. Can’t let you any closer than this, sorry. Walls might collapse.’

  ‘No worries, Todd,’ Mark said. ‘I just wanted to get an idea of the damage.’ From some well of internal strength, he dragged up a grin. ‘We left in rather a hurry last night.’

  ‘Too bloody right,’ Todd replied. ‘Must have been some blast. Arson squad will be here soon to take a look. Hope they find some evidence so we can catch the bastard.’

  Todd didn’t mention it, and Mark didn’t either, but clearly visible in the middle of the blocked-off street sat a chunk of the base of a brown bottle. Jenn had seen enough Molotov cocktails thrown to know you gripped it at the base with your dominant hand, lit the taper with your other, and flung it, hard.

  She waited until she’d completed a three-point turn and was back on the main street again before she said, ‘There might be fingerprints on that piece of bottle.’

  Mark glanced up from his phone. ‘Yes. But fingerprints aren’t helpful unless they can be matched on a database, or to a suspect.’

  ‘You’re right. And real-life crimes aren’t solved as easily as on TV, in a one-hour program.’ She heartily wished they could be, but the gulf between reality and fantasy grew even wider with the added complication of isolation. The autopsies on Jim Barrett and Edward Russell would be held in Newcastle, hundreds of kilometres away. The arson investigators were travelling from Tamworth – again. The forensic team was coming from Inverell – again. And Steve, the lone detective in a district of hundreds of square kilometres, was trying to cover it all, with Kris Matthews and the dozen or so other uniformed officers stationed at Birraga. ‘Please tell me you have an email from your parents, explaining everything.’

  ‘Nothing from them yet,’ Mark said. ‘I’ll check my phone.’

  She drove silently while he dialled and listened to message after message, the line of his mouth tighter with each one. At one point he had to hold the phone away from his ear, the abusive yelling loud enough for her to hear.

  Graffiti on his office door, the firebomb, abusive messages … ‘Are they all like that?’ she asked as he cut off the message.

  ‘There’s a few,’ he acknowledged, without being specific. ‘My standing in the community took a nose-dive yesterday.’

  ‘Would you like me to vet them for you?’ That, she could do for him
. Spare him the pain of listening to them all.

  ‘No. Thanks. I have to go through and save them all. And if my parents have phoned, their message might be in the middle of the others.’

  The sun was still low enough in the morning sky to cast shadows from the trees lining the road, the kilometres flickered by. The tree at the site of the accident seemed more benign in daylight than in darkness, its long-dead branches grey against the startling blue sky. As the Birraga River began its curve to skirt around the base of Ghost Hill, she slowed, looking out for the pottery sign on the other side of the road and the track leading into the large pocket of scrub, a few hundred hectares that had never been cleared.

  The sign for the pottery had gone, only a bare post with empty hooks remaining, but she saw it in time to make the turn without hard braking. The track had deep ridges of sand and she had to take it slowly, keeping the car to one side so that the undercarriage didn’t drag down the centre ridge, and it was a constant struggle to keep the car straight.

  Some men might have commented, criticised or offered to drive. Mark didn’t. Even when teaching her to drive in Marrayin’s paddocks he’d never belittled her skills or undermined her confidence. Unlike many men she’d met over the years.

  He finally finished listening to his voice messages and lowered his phone. ‘Forty-eight messages, but nothing from my parents,’ he said. ‘They can’t always get into the nearest town easily. Maybe later today or tomorrow.’

  Disappointment dropped her spirits low. Probably not as low as his, although he hadn’t expressed frustration. Only that hopeful ‘maybe later …’ She tried to be positive. ‘Wolfgang should be able to give us some answers.’

  The sandy track running through the trees ended at a gravelled parking area in front of the mud-brick pottery studio. An open shed on the side protected a large brick kiln, with a wood pile beside it. Thirty metres beyond the studio the house stood on the other side of the wide clearing in the scrub, a vine-covered pergola providing cooling shade around it.