Lyrebird Hill (28 page)

She pecked my cheek, and we said goodbye. I went along the path, and when I reached the gate I turned to wave, but Mum had already disappeared back inside. I studied her closed door.

I was under suspicion, as were you.

The seed of doubt I’d been storing in the back of my mind for the past eighteen years finally slid into fertile soil and began to germinate. My feelings of guilt; my conviction that Mum secretly blamed me; my fear of recall – all of it skirting the real issue of that one forgotten event that, if remembered, would shatter me from the inside and leave me broken forever—

There was a clatter of glass further along the street as someone emptied their recycling. I squinted into the blinding sunlight, rubbing my temple. I had a sick, sinking feeling, and then the leafy footpath, my mother’s house with its picket fence and landcaped garden, and the sleepy bustle of the Armidale street vanished. I blinked, and there I was instead, a twelve-year-old sitting down to breakfast in the kitchen of my childhood home.

A single boiled egg sat on my plate, the last of Esmeralda’s. I was planning to scoop it out of its shell and mash it across a piece of wholemeal toast, but I was still deciding how to eat it. Should I scoff hungrily like I usually did, or take my time and savour every bite?

I was picking up my knife when Jamie’s voice drifted through the open kitchen window.

‘I saw them up on the ridge last night,’ she was saying. ‘Ruby . . . and a
boy
.’

She must have been standing behind the water tank talking to Mum, who’d gone out to the vegie patch to pick greens for our school sandwiches.

‘What boy?’ Mum asked.

‘That foster kid staying with Mrs Drake.’

‘What were they doing?’

Jamie’s reply was muffled by birdsong, but something in her tone made me nervous. Picking up my knife, I cut open the egg and scooped it onto my toast.

Mum came into the kitchen looking flushed, as if she’d spent too long in the sun. She took a colander from its hook on the wall and rinsed the greens under the tap.

‘What were you doing with the Mrs Drake’s foster boy last night?’ she asked without looking around. ‘Jamie said she saw the two of you out after dark.’

I glared at Jamie. She’d followed Mum in and was examining the plate of scones, her eyes all big and innocent. She chose the largest, I noticed, and broke it into bits on her plate.

Mum shook the colander into the sink. ‘Well, Ruby?’

‘Nothing.’

She turned to look at me. ‘What’s got into you lately? You used to be such a quiet girl. Your grades were good, the teachers only ever had praise for you. Now there are notes sent home every week about your attitude. And as for your outburst yesterday – I understand you were upset, but swearing? I think that foster boy is a bad influence.’

I sat up straight. ‘No, he’s—’

‘You’d better stay away from him.’

I opened my mouth to argue, but a loud clatter cut me off. All eyes went to the far end of the table. Jamie had dropped her butter knife.

‘Sorry,’ she said sheepishly, but when Mum turned her attention back to the greens, Jamie pulled a face.

I glowered back.

A couple of years ago we’d been best friends. Swimming in the river together, fishing for yabbies. Collecting ferns and yellow-buttons and everlastings to dry in the flower press we’d found in the barn. Jamie had written stories, and I’d drawn pictures to go with them. We’d been a team, thick as thieves, best mates.

Then Jamie started high school in Armidale. She began experimenting with make-up, and saved up to buy her own clothes. She got in with the cool crowd. All of a sudden, in her eyes I was a baby. Boring.
A regular yawn
, she’d written in her diary.

And that wasn’t all she’d written.

I can’t believe I’ve got a boyfriend. Mum would freak if she knew, so I only ever meet him at our secret place. Yesterday we kissed for the first time . . . sigh, I think I’m in love.

I looked at Mum. She was frowning at four slices of brown bread arranged on the benchtop. They were slathered in homemade mayonnaise, and Mum began arranging sorrel leaves in rows across the yellow gloop. A mound of grated carrot sat nearby, awaiting its fate as sandwich filling.

Scraping back my chair, I got to my feet. I was shaking so hard I knocked over my glass, splashing milk across the tablecloth.

‘You think Jamie’s so perfect?’ I yelled at Mum. ‘You think she never does anything wrong? You always blame me for mucking things up, but if you knew the truth about
her
, you’d get a rude shock.’

Mum frowned at Jamie, then at me. ‘What are you talking about?’

I stared at Jamie in triumph. But all of a sudden, her face was pale and her big golden eyes were pleading at me. She was no longer the sophisticated teenager, but a kid just like me; her freckles popped against her creamy skin and she looked about to start blubbering.

Mum was waiting, her dark hair frayed into wisps around her face. The empty colander dangled from her fingers.

‘Well?’

I opened my mouth, but no words came. I didn’t want to hurt Jamie. Despite her awfulness to me sometimes, I still loved her. And I still secretly hoped that one day we would be friends again, just as we’d been before she started high school.

So I said nothing.

Later that night after dinner, I saw her sneak into the yard. The incinerator was still smouldering from when Mum had burned a load of blackberry canes. Jamie stoked the ashes until the fire licked the incinerator rim, then she threw something in.
She stayed there a long time, a shadow in the darkness, staring at the blaze, her face painted gold and crimson by the flames.

When the fire died and Jamie came inside, I went to investigate. At first, I saw only ashes. But when I prodded the ash with a stick, I upturned a blackened blob of metal that, on closer inspection, turned out to be the remains of a tiny padlock.

My sister had burned her diary.

The flashback, on top of my conversation with my mother, had left me feeling drained. For the longest time, I stood at the gate outside Mum’s, gazing back, trying to summon the energy to retrace my steps along the pathway and knock on her door.

In the end, it seemed too hard.

And too unlikely that Mum would be much bothered by my recollection of a snippet from so long ago; besides, she’d probably already known about Jamie’s one-time boyfriend. I swallowed a lump of disappointment about the diary, too; the book Esther had mentioned was probably just a volume of fairytales after all.

The sun was high and bright overhead, the air had turned warm. I had promised to meet Pete at the mechanic’s in Marsh Street at 2pm, which meant I had a couple of hours to kill; shopping was the last thing I felt like doing, so instead I walked. Soon I had blisters on my heels, and a little while later they became painful. I found a park bench, and sat for an hour watching a family of magpies pick over drifts of rubbish around the picnic tables.

Something Mum said about the letters wasn’t adding up.

Had she really only been trying to protect me from the shock of discovering my great-grandmother was a murderer? Or to prevent the letters being sensationalised by the press? Or was she motivated by reasons of a more private nature?

The notion of bad genes had crossed my mind.

Bad genes. Traits passed from one generation to the next. Could Mum really believe that? I was about to discount it as simply too outlandish, when I remembered the title of the painting that had led me to the walnut tree in the first place.

Inheritance
.

I went hot, and then every molecule of heat drained out of my body and my blood turned ice cold. Slowly, the truth dawned. Mum didn’t just blame me for Jamie’s death; she didn’t simply hold me responsible for not getting help fast enough, or for not remembering important facts that might have helped the police catch Jamie’s killer.

Mum believed I
was
Jamie’s killer.

Sliding my hand down to my instep, I found a blister that had worn tender beneath my sandal strap. When I dug my fingernails into the watery bubble, it burst and leaked fluid. I dug harder, and the slow ooze of blood rose under my nail.

. . . no trace that anyone other than you and Jamie had been on the rocks that day.

I peeled off the blistered piece of skin and let it drop in the grass. Was Mum right? How would I ever know for certain? And if I never knew, how could I live with myself?

The answer to that was simple: I couldn’t.

By the time I asked directions to the mechanic’s, promptly got lost and asked again, then finally found my way to the motor repair shop, it was well after two o’clock. There was no sign of a woolly-haired man with two kelpies, or his old ute. Just a car yard full of demo vehicles, a garage littered with engine parts, and an office hidden behind smoked glass.

My phone buzzed. I looked at the display, it was another message from Rob. I deleted it, then typed a reply.

Leave me alone.

But when I tried to press send, my fingers fumbled and the message disappeared. Rather than try to retrieve it, I just stood there, hunched over my phone, feeling so suddenly weary that I
actually considered curling in a ball and resting my head on the warm concrete.

‘Ruby?’

Pete had emerged from the office and was walking towards me. ‘Hey,’ he said, ‘are you okay?’

‘Not really. My boyfriend – that is, my ex-boyfriend – cheated on me. Now he wants to talk. And Mum thinks . . . she thinks I—’ My words choked off. All I could do was stare into Pete’s impossibly blue eyes and fight back the tears.

Taking the phone from my fingers, Pete slid it into my bag and grasped my hand. Then, gently, he led me around the side of the building where his ute was waiting. Bardo and Old Boy were on the back tray. They’d been sitting quietly, but the moment they saw me they sprang to their feet and began to whine excitedly, straining their chains. Bardo’s tail wagged with such vigour that her entire back end twisted to and fro.

Pete opened the passenger door and I got in. A moment later he was settling into the driver’s seat, buckling up. He looked at me, his big freckled hands loosely grasping the wheel, his dark hair raked into wild tufts, his blue eyes shadowed with concern. He was clearly curious about what had shaken me loose, but had the restraint not to ask. Instead he reached for my hand. His fingers were warm and calloused, and the way they curled cautiously around mine made me feel marginally better.

After a moment, he withdrew and started up the car.

‘What is it about you and those dogs?’ he marvelled. ‘You ignore them, avoid them, and generally act as if they’re not there – which from a dog’s perspective is somewhat upsetting. And yet they hero-worship you.’

I shrugged, and ventured a small smile.

But as we drove up Marsh Street and then hooked right at Rusden, I caught myself turning my head ever so slightly. The cab window was directly behind me, but if I peeked from the corner of my eye I could just see two pointed, furry faces with
ears pricked and tongues lolling and lips pulled into sloppy grins. Their moist noses were pressed near the glass, and both dogs were watching me, their golden eyes brimming with happy fascination.