The Silent Inheritance

by Joy Dettman

  Away they drove again, this time to Bunnings, where they bought a new letterbox, numbers to screw onto it and a bag of premixed concrete. An hour later, Sarah counted fifty-dollar notes into a huge brown hand then the men, their truck and machine drove away and Sarah put her aids back on.

  They were out the front, digging a hole for their new letterbox, when a neighbour, who’d spent years demanding Mrs Vaughn get her trees cut back, came out and took the shovel from Sarah’s hands, then later offered props to hold the letterbox level while the cement set.

  It looked good from the far side of the street, and props or not, a junk mail deliverer baptised it.

  *

  Freddy hadn’t been out of the house that day, and nor had Rolland. He ate dinner with them, then went to his room when Cheryl tuned into the football. By ten thirty, Cheryl’s team losing and the sitting room not a healthy place to be, Freddy checked on Rolland, and he wasn’t in his room. He wasn’t smoking weed in the backyard either, so Freddy walked around to the front of the house and out to the street.

  He didn’t see what else was missing, or not until he was walking back. He ran the last metres to the sitting room to interrupt the final minutes of the football match.

  ‘I’ll kill him,’ he wailed.

  Cheryl was more interested in killing a player. ‘He was twenty-five metres out from the goalposts. He could have levelled the score, and he kicked it out of bounds.’

  ‘He’s got my Ferrari!’ Freddy wailed.

  She stopped screaming abuse at the player and turned to Freddy. ‘Where did you leave your keys?’

  ‘In the bowl. I’m calling the police.’

  ‘You’re not calling anyone.’

  ‘He’s got my Ferrari. He’s a drug-smoking, ice-sucking, thieving little bastard and someone has to stop him.’

  She stopped watching her match to stop Freddy’s dialling.

  ‘There’s bad blood in him. He has to be stopped.’

  ‘Says the man who wants to put an ice-smoking baby murderer back on the street,’ she said, but the siren had gone, and she was gone, with the phone.

  He followed her. ‘He’s killing me, love!’

  ‘The fat around your heart is killing you, and it’s a car, Freddy, and you know how he is with that car, and you leave your keys lying around where he can pick them up.’

  They had a second phone in the bedroom. She read his mind and beat him to it, and stood across the marital bed, telling him that she’d had her fill of police, and he wasn’t calling them on his own son.

  When her blood was up, Cheryl Adam-Jones was a fighting woman you didn’t want to tangle with, and he could relate to her having had enough of police harassment.

  Three times she’d been called into the station to identify items recovered from the Commodore. She’d been unable to identify the remains of a platform-soled shoe. Freddy knew who the shoe had belonged to. The police had nothing on him, other than degraded DNA, and they weren’t going to get a non-degraded sample.

  He went outside to watch for his pride and joy, his heart lifting each time he sighted a red car, then falling when it was the wrong-shaped red car.

  His Ferrari still missing at midnight, Cheryl asleep, Freddy slid carefully in beside her to lay on his back, listening for the song of his motor while going over the last words he’d spoken to Ross Hunter, who’d all but accused him of concocting that carjacking story as a cover-up for his hoon son.

  Hunter believed that Cheryl’s Commodore had killed that girl. He had no proof and she’d been in Bali. Freddy had no alibi other than the carjacking, and he had to stick to it. Hunter had spoken to Rolland, who couldn’t remember what he’d done yesterday, let alone on a Friday two months ago. He’d told Hunter that he wouldn’t have been seen dead behind the wheel of an old white Commodore.

  Kids used to fear the law, fear their teachers, used to respect their fathers. Not now. The law couldn’t touch a minor – nor could a teacher or parent. These days, they feared the kids, or Freddy did.

  One o’clock ticked over, and, not game to move from his back and have Cheryl taking her pillow to a spare room, Freddy lay still, thinking of a promise made by a twelve-year-old boy to himself.

  He’d found a full-page photograph of a red sports car in one of his brothers’ magazines. Maybe he’d heard of Ferrari before, but until that day, he’d never seen one. He’d ripped the page out and when they’d driven him back to school, that Ferrari had gone with him, in his pocket.

  A scholarship boy, little Freddy Jones, a chubby insult to the church-supplied uniform, a homesick, howling little sod until his Ferrari. He’d slept with it under his pillow thereafter, his hand on that folded page.

  That was the year the principal had told him and an auditorium full of boys and their parents that no dream was impossible, the second-last year he’d invited his mother to the school. He’d learnt to fit into that uniform and to mimic the way John Swan had spoken. His mother having never learnt to mimic Lady Swan, he’d put an end to his annual torture.

  During his final year, he’d got himself a job tutoring a few junior boys which had saved him the agony of weekends at home.

  His mother had loved him. He’d loved her but hadn’t liked her much. He’d hated his brawling brothers – and John the Baptist, who had managed to separate himself from the family with a priestly dog collar.

  The day Freddy had walked into the hallowed halls of Melbourne University, he’d pencilled in that hyphen between Adam and Jones, and it had looked so good, he’d gone over the pencil with a biro, knowing that to have any hope of unshackling himself from his family, he’d needed that hyphen.

  Bill had separated himself with distance. Bert had gone further. He’d bought a one-way plane ticket to London twenty years ago. Of the others, Freddy preferred not to know. There was a rotten gene in the Jones family. It surfaced every generation or two. He’d had the snip after Rolland, had quit while he’d been ahead. Should have had it done twelve months sooner.

  *

  At one thirty-five, a red Ferrari was clocked doing in excess of a hundred and forty in a fifty kilometre zone, through Lilydale. It was now heading towards Healesville, a police car giving chase.

  A vehicle guaranteed by its makers to be capable of reaching speeds in excess of three hundred kilometres an hour, in the control of a youth determined to push every boundary, a minor curve in the road—

  Two constables saw that vehicle become airborne, watched it attempt to leap over a kombi van travelling in the opposite direction. It failed, but continued its maiden flight until a tree got in the way, a big tree.

  The constables were running when the Ferrari exploded. Nothing they could do other than call it in then turn their attention to the kombi, which lay like a bug on its back, wheels still spinning, its lone driver buckled in, upside down, turning the night air blue.

  He was taken by ambulance to the Lilydale hospital. The Ferrari driver was incinerated in the inferno.

  SUNDAY MORNING

  Six o’clock when a phone rang beneath Cheryl’s pillow. She’d taken four phones to bed: two landlines, two mobiles. The landline was ringing. She found it, silenced it and eased herself from the bed, speaking in a whisper until the door between her and her sleeping husband was closed, when she told the female on the line that her husband changed his cars like most other people changed their socks, that she’d never had time to memorise the numbers on his registration plates.

  She spoke to the woman in Rolland’s room, and when she didn’t find him in his bed, she ran with the phone out to the garage.

  Freddy’s Ferrari wasn’t there.

  *

  It took until Wednesday to formally identify Rolland Adam-Jones. It took dental x-rays and a capped front tooth. Steve, his mate, had no recent dental x-rays, but he had ankle and leg x-rays showing two metal plates inserted after a bike accident. The female passenger, seated on Steve’s lap at the time of impact, had not been identified when the youths’ names were re
leased to the media.

  That same Wednesday the plumber and his labourer arrived early to start the ripping down and replacement of guttering and downpipes, while Pop moved out of a shiny blue paradise with shiny new taps and spray rose that was the shower room. He didn’t move far. The bathroom was next door.

  Mrs Vaughn’s ghost had vacated the house. It smelled of paint and tile glue now. Her old curtains had gone out in the green bin, but not her carpet, not yet.

  And Pop wouldn’t give them a bill for the tiles, only for his labour, and not enough for that. Dave told Marni that when Pop had moved in he’d brought half a tonne of tiles with him.

  ‘Let him be, love,’ Dave said. ‘I’m getting rid of tiles and he’s enjoying himself.’

  The plumber gave them a bill and a big one, but it was a big job.

  Marni was watching Deal or No Deal, and the contestant only had four cases to open and only one was green, and it was the two hundred thousand.

  ‘No deal,’ the contestant said, then the channel cut to the news headlines.

  ‘Dead youth identified as Rolland Adam-Jones, son of well-known barrister …’

  He was a cousin. He’d just turned seventeen. Marni hadn’t known him but she knew Uncle Fred.

  The contestant lost his nerve when he had the two hundred thousand and the fifty dollars left. He took the deal, then found out that he had the green case.

  Sarah came in as the news showed what was left of Uncle Fred’s incinerated Ferrari, which Marni had ridden to school in, and it felt too personal. They showed photographs of two boys in school uniforms, then the news presenter told Melbourne about the murderer Frederick Adam-Jones was currently defending, and that barrister and Hubert their angel seemed like two different people.

  They sent a bunch of flowers to the barrister’s office because they didn’t know Uncle Fred’s address. Marni studied the funeral notices in the newspaper, determined to go to Rolland’s because she hadn’t gone to Mrs Vaughn’s. Her mother said that funerals were dead people in coffins, priests praying and people crying, and that kids shouldn’t go to them. There was no Adam-Jones funeral notice in the paper, or not that week.

  She found it in Monday’s newspaper.

  Pop had finished in the bathroom and moved into the kitchen before Rolland Adam-Jones was buried. Dave said he was snow-blind and he tried to talk them into having a feature wall in the lounge/dining room, but they’d ordered their drapes and they didn’t want colour on that wall that might clash with what they’d chosen.

  Sarah drove to Camberwell for the funeral and she couldn’t find a place to park when they got there, and the only one she could find left them a block to walk to the church, and they were late.

  And it was packed full of suited men and well-dressed women and boys in school uniform and priests in white nightgowns, and it went on and on forever and every time Marni thought it was over, it started again.

  And their policeman was there, outside, probably to protect Uncle Fred from the family of the woman his current client had murdered, according to Marni.

  *

  Ross was there in a semi-official capacity. Clarence Daniel Jones hadn’t yet been located, or John Paul, or Joseph Jacob Jones. It was a big turnout. He’d expected to see a few of Freddy’s family there. He’d signed the condolence book so he might take a look at the names of earlier signers. There was no Jones in it.

  He was thinking of a line from Macbeth, thinking that had Rolland Adam-Jones died next week or next month, Lady Cynthia Swan and her neurologist son might not have added their names to that book, or Freddy’s partners.

  He knew the dead youth had been driving his mother’s Commodore when it hit Lisa Simms, knew it in his gut – and in his irritated sinuses. There was the damage to the Commodore’s panels, the remains of the windscreen in the boot, the charred platform-soled shoe, which looked like one of Lisa’s, or her housemate had said it did. Ross’s gut knew that Freddy’s carjacking story was a cover-up, that he’d heard his son’s call for help sometime that night and gone running.

  He had no proof of it. Nothing, nix, nil, zilch, other than degraded DNA that was a biological match to that of the Jones family. He’d got hold of fat Freddy’s phone records, and all they’d proved was that Freddy’s mobile and landline had been idle for most of that weekend, that Rolland’s had been busy, but only to his friends’ numbers. They hadn’t found the accident or burial sites, and no more resources were being wasted in looking.

  And he saw those girls break away from the crowd.

  They weren’t wearing jeans and toting backpacks, but their hair, their I’m-on-my-way-to-somewhere walk identified them sufficiently for him to drop his butt into his peppermint tin and follow them, at a distance – until they were about to turn down a side street, when he called. ‘Marni.’

  She stopped, caught her mother’s arm, and they turned, waved and walked back to meet him halfway. Marni asked if he’d put a tail on them, and he laughed.

  Remembered hearing that same sound in Perth, and on that Camberwell Street the wind playing in the last of the autumn leaves, he felt a few of his years blowing away with them while they spoke of quokkas and tours and Perth hotels and things of little consequence, and the wind grew colder.

  A few spits of rain suggested they move on. ‘Mum doesn’t like driving in the rain. She didn’t want to come today,’ Marni said.

  ‘He was a relative?’ Ross asked.

  ‘Mum’s cousin,’ Marni said. Ross had already placed Sarah on Freddy’s wife’s side of the family. She had the dark hair and the looks, but Marni continued. ‘Uncle Fred is my grandfather’s baby brother. See you around then – on television,’ she said.

  He followed no further, until the lights of a dusky metallic blue Hyundai blinked.

  ‘How long have you had your car?’ he asked.

  ‘The end of April, and Mum needs a bravery award for driving it in here. First we got squashed between two trucks, then we couldn’t find a place to park, and when we did, she squeezed it into a space about big enough to park a motorbike.’

  ‘They’re a good model,’ he said.

  ‘It belonged to our landlady we told you about. She died while we were in Perth.’

  ‘Does she have a husband?’

  And Marni pointed a finger at him. ‘I know what you’re thinking because I thought the same when we saw our car on television. I wanted to ring Crime Stoppers and dob in her son but Mum wouldn’t let me. He used to take that car for whole weekends – and he looks like the Freeway Killer too.’

  But Sarah was in and eager to go.

  ‘Raymond Vaughn,’ Marni said as she got in. ‘He lives in Mooroolbark out near Lilydale.’

  Gone then. Ross took shelter beneath a leafless tree while he lit a cigarette and watched them – or their car – turn left and disappear into traffic. He’d found another link to the Jones family. Better than that he’d got a name and a general area.

  ‘Raymond Vaughn, Mooroolbark.’

  *

  He found a phone number and an address in Mooroolbark for a L.R. Vaughn. He called the number but it went through to an answering machine. He gave L.R. Vaughn an hour or two to get home, then drove out to his address, and whoever he was, he was selling up. There was an auction sign on his front lawn.

  A MORNING DATE

  On Sunday morning, a low dark sky pelted rain down on Melbourne, and with the bedroom curtains and blind pulled, the room was dark. Marni might have slept until ten o’clock if not for the phone, the landline phone. Her mobile lived beside her bed; she could reply to it from bed. The landline was in the kitchen, and the floor between her bed and the phone was cold on bare feet.

  ‘Am I speaking to Mrs Carter?’ the caller asked.

  She thought it was one of the tradesmen she’d left messages for, and, wanting to be rid of him fast, said: ‘We’re right for tradesmen, thank you.’

  ‘How are you fixed for a bacon and egg McMuffin?’ the caller asked.

 
‘What?’ Forgot her freezing feet, told him that they didn’t have one of them, then asked how he’d got their phone number.

  ‘I have my means,’ he said.

  ‘Are we on the CIA’s hit list because we bought the murder car?’

  ‘Your landlady was the only Vaughn in your general area,’ he said.

  ‘When do you deliver the McMuffins?’

  ‘How does half an hour sound?’

  ‘Mum is still asleep.’

  ‘How late does she sleep?’

  ‘Ten seconds more. Don’t hang up.’

  *

  He didn’t arrive for their date in a police car. He drove a white Commodore which he parked behind their car. Marni was telling him about how their landlady who’d been ninety-something had died in her bed when Sarah came out – wearing lipstick and the new black sweater she’d bought to wear to the funeral, and her jeans tucked into her new boots, and they had heels. He looked impressed, and he opened his passenger-side door for her and held it until she got in. Marni got in with the junk in his rear seat then told him where the nearest McDonald’s was, and maybe he already knew because he drove straight to it.

  They were seated in a cubicle with their bacon and egg McMuffins, hash browns and coffee, when he told them he’d found an address for a L.R.Vaughn in Mooroolbark, and that the house was for sale.

  ‘He’s already made his getaway,’ Marni said.

  ‘Maybe Singapore,’ Sarah said. ‘He went there for his business many times.’ She told him later that she’d bought her landlady’s house as well as her car, only to turn the subject away from her family. He spoke of his unit on the seventh floor, how he could look down on the city and see what the eagle saw when he flew the sky, then he asked again where she’d lived before moving to Melbourne.