‘Where did she work while she was here?’ Benny had asked Odette, who by that stage was lying on her back on one of her long couches with Bessel in a ball at her feet.
‘Vivian? Oh, she worked at the pharmacy. The one in town. My friend Maureen works there now. It’s still run by the same chemist—Dieter. He’s very unusual. He wears white clogs all year round because he wants everyone to know he’s German. Wasn’t Vivian’s father a chemist, back in Adelaide?’
‘He was,’ said Benny, and she considered her grandparents for a moment, Clive and Nola Moon, and how they would send her money. She’d always sensed they pitied her, but not enough to visit.
Benny Miller, down by the river, stood up and pulled her sundress over her head, and then walked over and put her toes in the shallow water. It was cold and it took her a long time to wade in up to her waist. The rocks were so hard and slippery under her feet and reeds brushed her ankles. The fishermen were too far away to bother her; just small shapes on a faraway bank.
Eventually Benny pushed herself forward with her legs and dived under the water. She resurfaced, gasping at the temperature, and swam across fast towards the other side, and then back to the deep middle, stopping there and moving herself around with her arms. She looked across towards the grand old bridge, and the sun was sparkling on the water. It felt good to be swimming and she stayed in until her skin was wrinkled and her body was cold to its core.
When she was ready to leave, Benny gathered up her towel and her new stone and walked barefoot back to her car.
Another vehicle was parked there now, near her own. A white ute, dented and dirty, with extra lights fixed to the bonnet—lights that could illuminate a field.
A man sat in the cabin, and another man was sitting on a picnic table, his feet on the bench, drinking from a bottle in a paper bag. Benny knew straight away from the look of them that they were dangerous men and that they frightened her. She kept her eyes on her feet and held her towel up under her armpits as she walked to her car, wondering how long they had been there, and if they had been watching her swimming.
‘Where you from?’ said the man in the car. He was fair with tufts of rough hair on his chin.
Benny didn’t answer him. She opened her car door and threw her things on the passenger seat and got in.
The fishermen were out of view now; tree trunks were in the way, and the ute was as well, with this man in it.
‘Where you from?’ the man said again, more insistently this time.
Benny fumbled her keys into the ignition and started her car, just as the man opened his door, kicking it hard with his foot.
He got out—swaying a bit in the breeze—and Benny reversed, full of fear. She looked across as he took a step towards her car, and she struggled with the gearstick, shaking as she pushed it hard into first.
‘In Australia we say fucken g’day,’ he said at Benny through her rolled-down window, and she took off in her car with a small jolt that made the dust come up as she drove out of the parking area.
Benny Miller, her heart racing, drove fast along the dirt road by the river and back towards the main part of town.
30
Lunchtime sun came in through the big windows at the Royal Tavern as Tom Boyd set down a counter lunch on the wooden bar and nodded at Tony Simmons.
Simmons sat on a stool in his weekend clothes—a T-shirt and a pair of shorts—and said, ‘Thank you kindly,’ and had a good sip of his beer. He picked up his fork and steak knife and began to eat while the locals chatted away around him and Smoky Dawson played on the stereo.
‘You escape, did you?’ said Ed Johnson, sitting one stool up.
‘Something like that,’ said Simmons, who’d had a shit of a morning. ‘Jenny’s taken the girls to see my mum.’
It was true. Jenny had taken the girls to see their nanna. And Jenny had preceded that by not speaking to her husband for several hours. She’d made Anzac biscuits, hatefully. Simmons had gone outside and mowed the lawn. Jenny walked out and said, ‘Are you going to say something?’ and he said, ‘About what?’ But of course Jenny didn’t explain about what. She’d just said, ‘Don’t bother coming,’ and then she’d left to take the girls over to his mother’s house without him, which would ensure that Elsie knew there were troubles afoot, and Tony did not like it when Elsie worried.
Tony had stared at the grass while the girls yelled their goodbyes from the house. There was so much onion weed in the lawn, he thought. And white clover, too, over near the fence, where the bees hovered.
‘How is old Elsie?’ asked Ed.
‘Not the best,’ said Simmons. He dipped a chip in a ramekin of mushroom sauce, and Ed nodded and said that he missed his dear old mum, especially on special occasions, that was when you really copped it. She was a good woman and hadn’t deserved the early grave that cancer had gifted her. Simmons listened and commiserated in single syllables while Tom Boyd set dirty schooner glasses in the washer behind the bar, a tea towel over his shoulder.
‘Cora was going over to see Elsie this morning,’ said the voice of Freddy Franks, who sat a couple of stools up from Ed. Simmons had known old Freddy Franks since he was a boy being dragged along by Elsie to book club at Cora’s house, and Fred would let young Tony hang around with him in his shed.
‘That’s good of her,’ said Simmons, who didn’t much care to think of Cora Franks in his spare time if at all necessary. That Elsie Simmons was so fond of Cora astonished him. What did his mother see in the woman? She was nosy and opinionated and didn’t pay any mind to personal boundaries. But the complexity of relations between women was a universe that Simmons didn’t like to dwell on. It was foreign and confusing and it caused him significant discomfort.
So here he was with Tom Boyd, who he found a little too reserved; Ed Johnson, whose bawdy humour vaguely entertained him; and Freddy Franks, who suffered the same affliction as Elsie Simmons: a fondness for Cora Franks. It was a chore in many ways, getting to know the dynamics of new people in a new town.
‘Any luck with the dead guy?’ asked Fred Franks. ‘Or are you sick of people asking?’
‘The latter,’ said Simmons.
‘Lucky you just missed Les,’ said Tom Boyd. ‘He’s got a few good theories.’
‘I timed it just right then,’ said Simmons.
Ed Johnson laughed at that, and Simmons was reminded of how Ed Johnson’s laugh always sounded a little cagey, like the laugh of a guilty man.
‘You hear Tom’s got a girl working behind the bar?’ said Ed, smiling. ‘Very nice.’
‘Is that right?’ said Simmons.
Tom Boyd kept on with the glasses, resting clean ones top down on the tray near the beer taps.
‘I heard she’s Vivian Moon’s kid,’ Ed said. ‘Remember Vivian, Fred?’
Freddy looked up from his fishing magazine and gave a big slow nod, his arms folded over his polo shirt. Ed Johnson whistled in the way a man does when he finds a woman pleasing to his libidinal urges, and Fred went, ‘Hmmm,’ very non-committal.
‘Who’s Vivian Moon?’ asked Tom Boyd.
‘She used to live next door to me and Cora, in Odette Fisher’s place,’ said Fred. ‘Years ago—before your time, Thomas. Now her daughter Benny’s living there. Cora met her. She said she’s a nice kid. Looks like her mother, apparently.’
‘Oh, she does,’ said Ed Johnson. ‘Very similar in the face. When Maureen said she was Vivian’s daughter, I thought, of course she is. I knew that face pretty well. I wonder what Vivian’s up to these days?’
‘She’s dead, Ed,’ said Fred Franks, looking sideways at Ed along the bar. ‘You didn’t hear that bit? She’s just died recently.’
Simmons glanced up from his steak, chewing a big mouthful. The name sounded familiar to him: Vivian Moon. Why was that? He swallowed and felt himself looking stern in concentration. Perhaps she’d been in trouble with the law, was that it? Or, no, it was more like she’d been one of his high school teachers, that’s how the sense of
the name ‘Vivian Moon’ felt to him: distant yet unpleasant. He hated it when something unearthed a faraway memory and he couldn’t find the proper road to reach it. He ate a chip and then picked up another.
Tom Boyd had stopped what he was doing and leaned forward on the bar with both his arms, taking in this news about Benny’s mother with a look of some concern.
‘Dead? No kidding? That’s a shame,’ said Ed Johnson, very nonchalant. ‘She was a stunner back in the day, don’t you reckon, Freddy?’
Freddy said plainly, ‘She was.’
Simmons kept wondering about the name—Vivian Moon—a chip aloft in his hand.
‘Sensational tits,’ said Ed Johnson.
31
Benny pulled into the drive at the green house, still a little shaky, to find the lawn outside the cottage freshly mowed and Cora Franks sweeping the little pathway between their houses.
‘Fred ran the mower over the grass earlier and I just thought I’d tidy it up a bit,’ said Cora, who had donned a navy King Gee work shirt and long fawn culottes for her yard duties.
‘Oh,’ said Benny, getting out of the car. She looked at Cora and appreciated the older woman’s outfit for a brief moment before returning to annoyance.
‘I can do that,’ said Benny.
‘Oh yes, but I just thought I would,’ said Cora. ‘There,’ she added, as she emptied a large metal dustpan full of leaves into a waiting bin.
Benny stood and watched, still wearing her swimmers, the bath towel draped around her.
‘You’ve been swimming,’ said Cora.
‘At the river,’ said Benny.
‘I used to love swimming. But you get older and it’s hard to get into the river, and then the pool’s so awful on the hair. Just hold on a tick before you go in,’ said Cora, and she strode back into her house while Benny waited near her car. Dirt, brown and chalky, was caked under the wheel wells and the front and sides were filthy with it. Benny had forgotten to put water in the windscreen wipers, too, and the windshield was thick with dust. She liked the look of her car like this, covered in country. She thought about the men in the ute at the river, and she looked at her car now with some small sense of pride. It looked—as much as a Volvo station wagon could—rather rugged.
A screen door slammed and Cora was coming out again, carrying a cake tin.
‘Here you are,’ she said. ‘It’s banana bread. I was making one anyway so I doubled the recipe.’
Benny took the tin and said, ‘Thank you.’ She had eaten half the carrot cake already and, while she hoped this wouldn’t keep happening forever—Cora making her food—she was hungry and glad to have banana bread.
‘If you need anything else …’ said Cora, looking now at Benny’s Volvo as if it were an abomination.
Benny stood steadfast and hoped the woman wouldn’t offer to clean her car.
‘Thank you,’ she said again, ‘I’m fine.’ And she moved towards the green cottage.
‘Well,’ said Cora, clearly wishing for more words to come out of Benny, yet realising that this was not going to be the case, ‘your mother would have wanted someone to look out for you.’ This was delivered in a tone that Benny couldn’t decipher.
Everything that Odette had told Benny the previous night was still sinking in. So only now did it occur to Benny that—of course—Cora Franks would have known Vivian Moon. She would have been her neighbour.
Cora gave Benny a proprietorial look, letting the statement sink in, and then she squinted up at the sky. ‘No rain till next Friday, apparently. I better do the pots.’ Then she smiled and went back up the steps to her verandah and disappeared inside.
Benny, clutching the cake tin, went into the green house, thinking about what Cora had said. How well had she known Vivian Moon? She set the tin on the kitchen bench and opened the lid. It looked good and Benny was hungry and she got a knife from the drawer and cut a big wedge from one end.
And it was then, when the knife moved the baking paper that was wrapped around the edges, that she saw there was something slipped in there, against the side of the tin.
She pulled it out and looked at it: an old photograph of a group of women sitting together around a dining table, with cups of tea and books. Benny recognised a young Cora Franks, back and centre; she was the only one not seated. She had her hands on the back of a chair and a pair of reading glasses perched on her nose. To her left Benny saw a young Odette Fisher, smiling obediently. And next to Odette was her mother, Vivian Moon, looking soft and beautiful in a white knitted jumper.
Benny felt her mind go numb at seeing her mother—in a different setting, an uncomfortable pose, a strange jumper. Her hair was neat and pushed back in a way Benny hadn’t seen before.
She turned the photograph over. Book Club, 1971 was written on the back in faded blue pen.
Then—in a different pen, stronger ink—it said: Benny, I thought you might like to have this. I was sorry to hear about your mother. From Cora Franks.
32
By Sunday afternoon, two days after their media release, Constable Jimmy Hall and Constable Gus Franklin had taken a total of three in-person visits and eleven phone calls with information relating to the unknown man. Hall had paced back and forth to the kitchenette, making several cups of tea and attending to the seldom-ringing phone. Franklin had sat at his desk, flipping through photos of the dead man, and patiently listening to people excitedly telling him things he already knew.
Three local Cedar Valley residents, for example, had called in to report the man’s strange stretching movements as he sat outside Curios (‘prancing about with his hands’; ‘like he was doing ballet’; ‘raised his arm up all the way and then let it drop down limply’). A few people back in Clarke had noticed him sitting at the bus stop, waiting for the bus. (‘An eccentric,’ was how one man described him. ‘Why do all these eccentrics catch public transport?’) And a woman from Clarke who had caught the bus in question and alighted at Barrang, where she was a member of the bridge club, came all the way to Cedar Valley that Sunday to tell James Hall that the unknown man’s suit was right out of the 1940s—the real deal—and whoever this man was, he was clearly ‘a connoisseur of vintage fashion’.
‘It was very similar to this one, see?’ said the woman, whose name was Margot Young but who appeared very old. She held up an image of a man in a suit from an advertisement in an ancient magazine.
‘Yes, it was,’ said Hall politely. ‘Are you some kind of clothing expert, Mrs Young?’
‘I am somewhat of a connoisseur myself,’ she said, in a faintly British accent that one did not often hear in a person who resided in the regional town of Clarke.
‘Thanks very much for coming in,’ said Hall, who didn’t have the heart to explain to Margot Young—who’d demanded her husband drive her all the way to Cedar Valley in her Sunday Best—that the police were in fact in possession of the man’s clothing, and did not need to be shown a faded picture of what that clothing resembled.
Gussy Franklin had taken a call from a Miss Leonie Wallace—an employee of the Harvey World Travel in Clarke—who’d been sent to Mick’s Famous Pies for a pasty run, to cater for an office party that Wednesday morning. She’d stood there at the pie cart with the unknown man behind her—he was waiting to be served—as Mick counted out her fifteen pasties.
The woman had turned to the man in the suit and said, ‘They’re not all for me,’ because, as she explained to Franklin over the telephone, she was a little embarrassed, as a woman on the larger side, to be ordering fifteen pasties in one go.
Instead of sharing a smile with her, as she expected, or offering a jovial remark to allay her discomfort, the man just nodded and kept his eyes to the ground.
‘I almost went, “Oh, come on, mate, have a laugh,” but he seemed … I don’t know. He seemed pretty off in his own world. Like, not rude, but just awkward. I felt a bit sorry for him.’
‘Why was that?’ Franklin asked.
‘Because he seemed lonely,
’ said Leonie from Harvey World Travel. ‘And probably quite hot.’
Franklin hung up and relayed all this to Jimmy Hall.
‘Not much of a talker, was he?’ said Franklin.
‘Apparently not,’ said Hall, stretching his fence-pole arms up above his head and producing a neat cracking sound from his shoulders.
‘Well, I got one thing,’ said Franklin, looking down at the photographs, which he had spread out like a fan. He blinked for a moment at the figure of the man slumped against the window.
Constable James Hall tipped his neck to one side and then the other. ‘What is it?’ he said.
‘Nige Haling popped in just earlier, when you were in the kitchenette. He was talking to Stevie about those rifles he’s had stolen,’ said Franklin. ‘Apparently, Nige’s wife saw a couple of dodgy-looking guys in a ute coming back down their road that day, so he’s come in and reported that to Steve. Then he sees me here with the photos and he pipes up that he was in town returning his videos on Wednesday and saw our guy outside Curios. He walked right past him but didn’t get a good look …’ Franklin paused theatrically, making sure he had Jimmy’s attention. ‘Because there’s a blonde woman crouched in front of our guy, and she was talking to him. Nige says they were definitely talking.’
‘Oh, that’s pretty good, isn’t it?’ said Jimmy Hall.
‘It is, mate,’ said Gussy Franklin, nodding. ‘Nige says she’s this rich-looking lady, all dolled up, talking to this fancy-dressed bloke on the footpath, and Nige has had a laugh to himself about the kind of people you see when you come into town.’
‘Well how about that,’ said Hall, and Franklin beamed, very pleased with himself.
He looked down at the photos again, and then pushed them all back together into a neat pile. ‘Where are the ones of the people in the crowd?’ he asked. ‘I thought you took more of the crowd.’
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