Murderer's Thumb

by Beth Montgomery

  ‘The dirt. They live in the soil under old gum trees. No wonder he wanted you to piss off. You were probably sniffing around his prime site.’ This time Snake had the ball. He attempted another lay up, which by some fluke succeeded. He punched the air and Adam took up the ball.

  ‘And the shovel?’

  ‘You skim off the topsoil to find their tunnels, poke the cable down and twist.’ He jerked his arm up, pulling an imaginary grub from the ground.

  Adam shot for goal but the ball bounced clear. ‘Basketball sucks,’ he said. ‘Can’t shoot straight.’

  ‘Me neither.’

  A group of boys walked past and sang out: ‘Show us your style Snake!’ ‘Do a slam dunk, you loser!’

  Snake and Adam ignored them and threw a few more shots before Adam spoke again.

  ‘Loody asked about the telescope on the weekend. I reckon he suspects I’m onto something. Asked me if I’d been spying lately. I didn’t like it.’

  ‘You are paranoid.’

  Adam shook his head. ‘No. I’m just serious. Emma was murdered, don’t forget. And the diary is the key to who did it. I’m sure of it. If anyone finds out I’ve got it, I could be next. Have you thought about that?’

  ‘But Loody wouldn’t be the murderer. He didn’t know the body was in the silage, remember,’ Snake said.

  ‘Didn’t know, or pretended he didn’t know? Murderers go back to the scene of the crime, don’t they?’

  ‘Come on, I know he’s a wanker, but he wouldn’t kill anyone. Not Emma anyway.’

  Adam raised an eyebrow. ‘Why not Emma?’

  ‘Well, he was pretty hooked on her. The whole footy club knew he was after her.’

  ‘Yeah, and everyone else was getting a bit of action, but he kept missing out. Maybe he got really desperate when she knocked him back, so he smacked her in the head.’

  Snake shrugged and bounced the ball over and over again. ‘Dunno. It’s possible.’

  ‘Course it’s possible. You should have seen how he killed that joey, slammed its head on the road like it was a doll.’

  Snake shot for goal. ‘You know I hate how you do this, Stats. Before you showed up I just accepted everyone for who they were. Now you’ve got me trying to double guess everyone’s motives.’

  ‘One day you’ll thank me, mate. So what do we do about Loody?’

  Snake made another lay up and botched the rebound. He gathered up the ball and passed it to Adam. ‘We could put him off. Lay a false track.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Well if you’re sure he’s onto you, why don’t we lead him off the scent. Plant some false clues about the diary, so he goes in one direction while we go in the other.’

  ‘A decoy.’

  ‘Yeah. You’ve got the first three parts. Keep them safe, but leave something obvious hanging around that will lead him away from the farm, away from Lina’s palmistry hand.’

  Adam tried a three pointer and the ball flew wide of the basket. ‘To somewhere like the shack at Old Byrd’s place.’

  Snake nodded. ‘Sure. It shouldn’t be too hard to do. Say we found a letter or something, saying the diary was in the shack.’

  Adam’s face lit up. ‘I like it.’

  ‘So where’s this Mount of Mercury, where part four is?’

  ‘I think it’s near the old hay shed, beside the Redvale-Booradoo Road.’

  ‘We could go and have a look this arvo…get off just before your stop,’ Snake suggested. He picked up the basketball and tried to twirl it on his finger, without success.

  ‘Can’t. I’m milking tonight. But tomorrow’s fine and anyway, Loody has Tuesdays off, so he won’t be around to interfere.’

  ‘Set! I’ll get something together to put in the shack for Loody.’

  Adam scooped up the ball and was about to toss it at the backboard when he saw Toot walking past with another senior girl. They both glanced at him and started laughing.

  His face burned. What were they saying? He tried to ignore them and shoot for goal but the jangle of their voices made him hesitate. He dribbled the ball, took a deep breath and shot. The ball hit the backboard and angled wide of the ring. He leapt for the rebound and turned to see them continue on their way, skirts lapping against thighs. He liked her legs: slender, slightly bowed. Not bad. Pity he’d told her to piss off yesterday. Now she probably didn’t want anything to do with him. If only she hadn’t tried to grab the diary.

  Toot looked back over her shoulder, caught Adam’s gaze and lifted her head before turning away. Was it contempt or a come on? She had a better poker face than even he did.

  Adam and Matt arrived at the ground at ten past six. By the time they’d both run round the ground, the warm-up exercises were well underway. Players lay in ragged rows on the grass. Adam and Matt found space next to Loody, who looked sinister with his hairy orange forearms crossed against his chest like an Egyptian mummy.

  ‘Fifty crunches,’ Birdie called out.

  Adam wanted to groan, but he knew that would earn him an extra twenty. Better to suffer.

  At first the players rose and fell in time to Birdie’s counting but as they reached twenty-five the uniformity vanished. They all pumped to different beats, like a set of worn-out pistons, puffing and grunting.

  The air tasted of dust. Adam’s muscles were screaming for him to stop. He saw Loody straining to lift against the pain. Only Matt seemed to make it effortlessly.

  ‘Super fit bastard,’ Loody commented, following Adam’s gaze.

  Adam grinned but said nothing.

  ‘The cricketers have got a bye on Saturday,’ Loody puffed. ‘There’s a footy game on…Selwyn have scraped a couple of teams together.’

  This time Adam grunted. Why did Loody talk so much? Everyone else was too breathless to talk, but Loody kept spilling words. Adam had read somewhere that if you can sing while you exercise then you weren’t training at your peak. It must include talking as Loody clearly wasn’t putting in hard enough.

  ‘Can’t wait to see you in action, Stats. Bet you’ll flatten the opposition,’ he added.

  Adam didn’t even acknowledge that one.

  ‘Hear there’s going to be a barbecue Saturday night?’

  Adam shook his head.

  ‘OK guys, turn over!’ Birdie yelled. ‘Fifty push-ups. Remember, backs straight.’

  ‘Here at the clubrooms,’ Loody said. ‘Everyone’s invited. Few drinks…you know.’

  Adam managed a smile as he turned over onto his stomach. ‘Should be good,’ he gasped.

  At ten to four on Tuesday afternoon, the bus dropped the boys off a kilometre before Adam’s stop. Toot’s face pressed against the back window, peering at them suspiciously. Once the bus had disappeared down the corridor of remnant bushland they negotiated the fence.

  Snake slid through the wires easily, but he had to hold the strands apart for Adam to wriggle clear. It would have been easier to climb the gate, but they didn’t want to backtrack in the heat.

  ‘Do you think Toot will dob?’ Adam asked Snake.

  ‘She’s cool. She won’t say anything.’

  Adam didn’t want to admit it, but the way Toot kept looking at him with that inscrutable stare was unnerving. Was she still shitty? Too bad. Keeping the diary secret was the priority. No one, not even Snake’s sister, could be in on it now.

  The boys dumped their bags in the shade of the hay shed and looked around. There were no walls. The floor was cracked earth. A few strands of hay twine lay trampled in the fissures.

  ‘Search in soil…there’s not much of it around here,’ Snake commented. ‘I can’t see how we’re going to find something if she’s buried it. We’re going to need a more detailed map than some gypsy’s diagram.’

  At the far end of the shed, a dozen round bales were stacked, three rows of four. The hay looked grey and unappetising, Adam mused, but to a hungry cow it was probably fine. Then something about the stacked hay reminded him of the clue Lina had left. He ran back to his bag, mutterin
g, ‘Round bales, round bales…’

  He tore a clean sheet of paper from a notepad in his bag, unzipped his pencil case and grabbed a pen. He folded the paper and began to write.

  ‘I knew it! “Real bounds” is an anagram of round bales. So we’re in the wrong place.’ He pointed to an old grain tower that stood about fifty metres away at the edge of the paddock. ‘That’s our “soil”, Snake. The sign we’re looking for is at the “silo”.’

  They shouldered their bags and started towards the silo.

  A car horn blasted from the road. The boys turned to see Olwyn Thackeray, arms waving furiously, standing beside her green sedan.

  ‘Looks like she wants our attention,’ Adam said.

  ‘No, mate, she wants us to get lost, by the look of her,’ Snake said.

  Adam shrugged.

  They veered back to the road, striding through dry stalks of long-dead pasture.

  Olwyn met them at the fence. She stood with her hands on her hips and her mouth pursed in rage.

  ‘What do you two think you’re doing? We don’t want people trespassing around here.’

  ‘But I live here…’ Adam protested.

  ‘You live at the farmhouse, not down the paddocks,’ she snapped. ‘As for you, Snake Patterson, you ought to know the dangers of messing around in hay sheds, especially in this weather. Fire can break out.’

  ‘I’m sorry Mrs T, it’s my fault,’ Snake began. ‘I was showing Adam…where…where the fox left the road yesterday morning. We thought we might be able to track its movements, find its den, you know. We weren’t smoking or climbing bales or anything,’

  ‘Get in the car, both of you.’

  The boys exchanged glances. ‘Must’ve forgotten her tablets today,’ Snake whispered.

  They bundled into her backseat and sat silently as she drove. They went past the Thackerays’ front gate and wound along the set of curves that Adam knew were the tips of giant fingers on the aerial map of the farm. As the silage paddock came into view Adam looked at the Brolga in the rear-view mirror. She was staring across at the paddock, sadness in her eyes.

  It wasn’t until they reached the Patterson house and Snake got out of the car that she spoke: ‘I’ll have a word with your parents later,’ she told him.

  Snake shut the door and flicked his fingers at Adam in a half-hearted wave.

  The Brolga reversed the car, then headed out the driveway. Adam stared out the window, aware of the Brolga’s anger but unsure how to cope with it.

  ‘You’re snooping about a lot lately,’ she said.

  Adam tried to use a neutral voice. ‘Why, what do you mean?’

  ‘I mean climbing trees and disturbing our heifers. Colin told me.’

  ‘Just looking around. There’s nothing else to do around here.’

  ‘You won’t find anything. It’s hopeless, you know?’

  He caught her gaze in the rear-view mirror again. The sadness had consumed her earlier fury.

  ‘They say there’s a diary,’ she went on. ‘Don’t believe them. It’s lies, all lies. That Lina girl knew nothing. She was a liar and a thief. She was a witch!’

  ‘That’s a bit harsh…’

  ‘No, Adam. There was evil here. When that girl came it multiplied.’

  Adam decided it was pointless trying to reason with her.

  ‘But now, finally…finally we can bury Emma,’ she added.

  ‘Is there going to be a funeral soon?’

  ‘Yes, thank the Lord. I’ve just been to Booradoo to select the coffin.’

  ‘Oh…er…good.’ He bit his lip. What was he supposed to say? It must be her grief that made her extra weird. He felt so self-conscious and longed to make a getaway, but he was trapped in the car.

  ‘I chose something she would have liked…lots of satin…but not too pretentious. She was never really flashy, not like that other girl with her black outfits.’

  ‘It must be hard for you, going through this again after six years,’ Adam said.

  ‘Yes it’s…it’s hard on all of us, but my faith keeps me strong.’

  He glimpsed her eyes in the mirror again. A flash of piety had replaced the usual mournful expression.

  They turned into the Thackerays’ property. The tyres made a g-rung g-rung noise over the cattle grid. Adam couldn’t wait to get out of the car.

  ‘Remember, farms are dangerous places,’ she said to him as he got out. ‘We don’t want to see you get hurt.’

  Inside the house Adam retreated to his room and fired up his music. The Brolga was right to a point, he guessed. Farms were full of chemicals and dangerous machinery, but she seemed to overreact. But then he considered what Lina had written about the Brolga. She really was neurotic. Same as Rosemary. Why were women such stress freaks? As far as he could see they had no drive or sense of confidence at all. Even Lina, whom he’d grown to admire through her writing, still seemed timid in not dealing with Emma’s killer head on. Making a puzzle of the diary was a clever strategy, but what if the clues were never found? What if the whole thing were overlooked, ink fading and pages growing brittle? Emma would never get justice then. It was a huge risk, hoping the diary would be found. But how lucky was he, finding the first three pieces? Even the first clue? If it had been left for Matt to find, nothing would ever have come of it.

  As much as Rosemary gave Adam the shits he was grateful for one thing: she’d taught him how to do cryptic crosswords.

  Wednesday afternoon was humid, the sky was thick with steel grey clouds and the rumble of threatening rain. Birdie had the players lined up doing suicide runs. They ran as a ramshackle mob, Matt and a few others out in front, with Adam and Snake keeping pace in the centre of the pack. Sprint, run, sprint, run, back and forth, back and forth until Adam’s lungs screamed for oxygen. But he ran on, tagged an imaginary line between the witches hats then turned and sprinted back across the field.

  Birdie signalled the end of the drill and the group dissolved. Some went for water bottles, others slumped to the ground or stood stretching, their hands above their heads. Everyone was puffing, even super-fit Matt.

  Loody sounded like he was having an asthma attack.

  ‘You right?’ Adam asked him.

  ‘Fine…just the fags doing me in. Can still beat pizza features here,’ he said nodding in Snake’s direction.

  As usual, Mongrel had an ear in on the conversation. ‘No contest,’ he said. ‘Anyone could beat that loser.’

  ‘What’s that?’ Snake said with a lilt to his voice. ‘Are you big macho boys challenging me to a duel?’ He flicked his wrist at them. ‘Oh, goody!’

  ‘Fucken poof,’ Loody muttered and he and Mongrel walked off.

  Adam couldn’t stop laughing. ‘You wanker. No wonder they think you’re a poof.’

  ‘Only way to get them off my back. If I got upset they’d just hang shit even more. They’re the ones with the problem, not me.’

  Before anyone had time to rest Birdie split the group into four. Adam and Matt were in a group together and were sent off with the football to the far side of the field.

  ‘I’m glad you’ve come,’ Matt said.

  Adam wasn’t sure what he meant.

  ‘She t…told me to trust you,’ he added.

  ‘Who did?’

  ‘She said one day someone would want my key and I had to trust them.’

  ‘Who said that? Lina?’

  Matt looked away. ‘Sky’s looking black. Might get a drop of rain.’

  Adam smiled to himself. Of course it was Lina who had given Matt the advice, long ago.

  On Thursday afternoon the boys got off the bus at the Mount of Mercury stop and, once over the fence, they ran like commandos for the cover of the silo. But its steel legs were too thin to hide either of them. There was an old rusted water trough alongside a windmill. Adam stashed his bag behind the trough. Three gum trees grew nearby. The biggest gave some shade and a trunk thick enough for Snake to vanish behind. He propped his bag at the base of the tree
and watched the road.

  ‘No one coming,’ he called. ‘Do you think the Brolga can see us from this angle?’

  ‘Not if we stay down,’ Adam said. He took the torch from his bag. ‘You stay here while I check out the silo.’ He crept low, approaching from the side closest to the road.

  ‘Are you mental? Someone will see you!’

  ‘Just tell me if a car’s coming,’ Adam snapped back at him.

  One of the silo panels was missing a few rivets. The steel sheeting gaped open. Adam pulled at it, and peered inside. It was too dark to see the walls clearly. He shone the torch through the gap. Specks of dust floated in its beam. Inside was nothing but a hot, empty chamber filled with the nutty scent of grain.

  ‘Car!’ Snake shouted.

  Adam flung himself down, wriggled to the nearest tree and lay still in its shadow. They waited in silence as the car drove past.

  ‘Gone,’ Snake said. ‘Find anything?’

  ‘Nah.’ Adam stood, brushing the dust and grass seeds from his shirt. This time he went back and made a careful inspection of the outside walls, craning his neck to examine every surface. ‘There’s nothing here,’ he said. ‘But I can’t see on top. Maybe there’s something on the roof.’

  ‘There’s a ladder,’ Snake said pointing.

  Adam found a set of thin steel bars that were fixed to the far side of the silo. He hauled himself up and was almost at the top when Snake yelled, ‘Car! It’s her!’

  Fortunately the ladder was screened from the car’s approach, but by the time the Brolga drew level or beyond, Adam would be conspicuous.

  The car was momentarily hidden behind a clump of trees.

  Adam slid down the steps then dropped to the ground, flattening himself in the shade underneath the silo. ‘Shit!’ he gasped, rolling over just as the Brolga’s car sped past.

  ‘Don’t move, you dickhead!’ Snake warned.

  ‘Has she slowed down?’

  ‘No. Shit that was close, you idiot,’ Snake said.

  ‘Wait a minute. I’ve found something,’ Adam said, staring at the underside of the silo.

  Snake crept to where Adam lay pointing upwards. The words HAT TOUR GREW 5,6 were written in black Texta.