Ripples on a Pond (43 page)

‘There's a foot between her car and the fence, and a bare foot behind it,' Raelene reported. ‘We'll need to move the wagon and the fucking thing is locked.'

He hadn't come prepared to break into a modern car, but he wanted that Ford. The cops wouldn't be looking for a couple driving a twenty-year-old Ford.

‘Smash the corner window,' she hissed. He had the means to do that in his hand.

‘They'll hear it, you brainless bitch.'

‘They've got no phone. What are they going to do?'

She stripped off her T-shirt, offered it to wrap the spanner to muffle the noise.

They'd come here to get petrol. He was willing to settle for petrol.

She wasn't.

‘I'll do it, you useless bastard,' she hissed and snatched his spanner.

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C
ara's coffee mug was empty. Fewer biscuits on that plate. Cards still on the table, and a bowl of eggs. Five women standing or seated around the table. They heard the dull ‘thunk' of padded metal on glass.

Georgie, unable to identify the sound, raised a finger for silence. Jenny's mouth closed mid-sentence as she turned to the window.

She recognised the tone of her motor firing, and, with no thought in her mind but for her car, she ran, Georgie behind her, flicking on light switches, Cara behind them.

*

Too much light now for Dino. He'd released the wagon's handbrake and gained an extra foot of space between it and the Ford, when that out-of-control bitch decided there was a faster way to move it. She reversed the Ford, and two bumper bars clashed.

Wheels spinning, the Ford's motor roared in pain. The wagon moved, but not enough. Had Collins known the women were alone in the house, that one of them was the moll he'd sworn to get, he may have hung around. He didn't know, and didn't hang around to find out.

Rusting chicken-wire fence before her, which wouldn't hold back much more than a flightless chook, Raelene slapped the gearstick into first and rammed the car at the fence. A post gave way with a snap; chicken wire raked the Ford's previously unmarked paintwork as she backed up, and rammed the wagon again. It moved. Gears grating as she sought one to go forward when the passenger door burst open and a body dived in on top of her. Hands grabbed at her hair, at the steering wheel. Wrongly guided, Raelene's foot flat to the floorboard, the Ford slammed through the fence and into Gertrude's rusting old water tank.

It still held water, and the water flowed as Cara and Raelene fought in the confined area. Only for an instant. Georgie, now in the rear seat, immobilised Raelene with an arm across her throat.

‘Dino, you bastard!' Raelene screamed.

He was long gone.

Panting, choking, defenceless but wily, Raelene stopped struggling. They thought they had her.

‘Where's Tracy?' Cara screamed.

‘Get over to Joe Flanagan's, Jen, and call the cops,' Georgie yelled.

‘He went that way,' Jenny yelled. ‘I saw him running down past the chook pen.'

They thought they had her. She was jammed in against the driver's door, the tank's leakage washing the door, Georgie's arm across her throat. Raelene could fight or breathe. She chose to breathe.

Rats fight when cornered. The adjustable spanner had been in her hand when she'd slid into the car. She'd placed it on the seat beneath her right thigh. Ten or twelve inches long, forged of solid metal, her left hand found the handle. Cara had immobilised her right.

Given the use of her right hand and space to swing, Raelene could have done a lot of damage with that spanner. She had little space, but swung it blindly, and felt it connect. She swung it again, again.

A rat will get through a crack in a wall a mouse might think twice about. Naked from the waist up, Raelene kicked the door open. Barely enough space to get her head through. Like a sweating cork released from a bottle, the rest of her popped free.

Dust and chook dung, given water, turn quickly to mud. Her sandal slid in the ooze. Hands necessary to save herself, she dropped her weapon – and ran.

Georgie, out of the car, took off after her. Her stride longer, she cut off Raelene's escape towards Flanagan's. Flight her only defence now, Raelene wheeled around and ran towards the road, towards the creek, towards the bush.

*

Had she been seeing well, Georgie may have continued the chase and caught her. Her hand discovered why she wasn't seeing well. Blood was pouring from a gash in her eyebrow, sticky, wet, blinding. She yelled to Elsie to bring her ute keys out.

With every light in the house now burning, plenty seeped into the yard, enough for Jenny to see blood.

‘It's bad, love. Come inside.'

‘Get the wood axe,' Georgie ordered as Elsie came with the keys. ‘Get the shovel, Else, and use it on them if they come back. Close the windows, doors.'

Cara stood nursing her elbow and looking at Robert's almost brand new wagon, at the open door, the broken corner window.

‘Go inside with them,' Georgie commanded. Jenny, armed with the axe, reached into the car for Cara's handbag.

‘You get inside. That cut needs seeing to,' Jenny said, but Georgie was in her ute and Cara was attempting to open the passenger door.

Georgie unlocked it. The shop's hand towels were on the passenger seat, waiting to be laundered. She used one of them to clear her sight as Cara slid in beside her.

You can't back a car around and change gear with one hand. The towel on her lap, she backed up, swung the ute in a tight circle, then drove fast towards town and the police station. Left the motor running and ran to the door, the hand towel again doing what it could to stem the flow of blood.

No local man there, but a young one in uniform.

‘Raelene King was down at my place minutes ago,' she told him. ‘I'm out on Forest Road, halfway to the caravan park.'

Half of Melbourne knew where to find the caravan park. He wanted details.

She wanted action.

He followed her back to the ute, but she was in it and it was moving. Drove on down to the bridge, where two cops with flashing torches stopped her progress.

‘Raelene King and Collins. They're down at my place. I'm a mile out along Forest Road.'

They sent the message through on their walkie-talkies, and four miles on, two cop cars, sirens howling, passed the red ute.

A dark road, dark land, but no chance of missing Monk's property. It was lit up tonight as it may have been lit a hundred years ago when Maximilian Monk had thrown one of his grand garden parties. For once, his monogrammed gates were flung wide and welcoming. Three Pines they used to call that place, before it became the commune, the druggies' camp. Tall, imposing gates, designed to immortalise the property's name, old man Monk's initials set in iron circles atop each gate. Strong gates, built back when man had taken pride in his labour, so certain that his world would last forever.

Monk's mansion was long gone, gutted by fire in the early sixties, only the partial chimney still standing. Cops partied around that chimney tonight, blue lights, amber, floodlights, moving torches and multiple men in uniform.

A flashing torch halted the ute's progress at the gate, but the cop knew why they were there. He reached into the car to remove the bloody wad of towel hiding half of Georgie's face. Fresh blood poured and he returned the wad; shone his torch in Cara's face.

‘She's the missing child's mother,' Georgie said.

‘Have you found her?' Cara asked.

‘Drive on down,' the cop said.

‘Have you found Tracy?'

‘A chap down there will speak to you.'

Ute moving again, until another cop stopped them with a flashing torch.

‘Have you found any sign of the little girl?' Georgie asked.

‘Park off the side of the drive,' he said, as two more police cars drove out.

Georgie parked where his torch beam directed, the ute's front wheels on a hillock of weed-covered rubble. They got out as another male approached.

‘Have you found the little girl?' Georgie asked again. ‘Cara is her mother.'

‘Is she dead?' Cara said.

‘There's no news yet on the missing child,' he said. ‘Was Collins sighted at the property?'

‘She called his name,' Georgie said. ‘My mother saw him running towards Stock Route Road. I didn't see him.'

Jim Hooper had recognised the red ute or the red hair. He came limping out of the dark, John McPherson at his side. Georgie introduced Cara to Morrie's father, to Robin's grandfather, and the scene, played out against the backdrop of lights and movement, was surreal. At another time, in another life, an unused portion of Cara's mind would have been standing off to the side, taking mental notes. Tonight, she needed every brain cell to retain her balance.

As did Georgie. Her hand-towel pad was doing little to stop the ooze of blood.

A cop led them across rough ground to an ambulance, where a medic pinched the edges of Georgie's wound together, taped it, then covered the tape with an elastoplast patch. Her hands finally free, blood-stained, Georgie reached for her smokes and lit one.

*

The activity was centred to the west of a chimney.

‘Jim's father used to own this place. The house was a mansion,' Georgie explained. ‘When he was engaged to Jenny's sister, the house was still standing. Jenny reckons he damn near lived out here, slept in the root cellar evading his father and Lorna – and Sissy.'

Tonight, like a homing pigeon, he'd guided the police to where the old trapdoor had once been. It was long gone, but they'd found the opening, beneath grass and rubble and heavy timber planks; found it not ten inches from the spot he'd pointed to.

Tony Bell and his associates had found a new use for that massive underground cavern. When enough rubble had been cleared away, when two sheets of corrugated iron had been tossed aside, they'd seen light seeping up from between heavy planks.

Jim could have gone home, well pleased with his night's work, but he'd stayed on to watch those planks removed, to watch four uniformed men lower down ropes to an underground field of marijuana, growing in pots beneath fluorescent lights.

The constables hadn't emerged up those ropes, but six or eight hundred yards away in a cabin in the wood paddock. They'd gone up a dozen metal steps to a sliding door behind a wardrobe, and into a bedroom. They'd brought an extra out with them – a bail-jumping truckie, arrested for drug running in South Australia six months ago.

Sometime during the past ten or so years, comfortable living quarters had been dug into the rear of Monk's cellar; and an hour ago, a stash of bank notes big enough to choke an elephant had been found there. They'd found heroin down there too, enough to keep every man, woman and child in Woody Creek pain-free for life. No sign of the missing child they'd come out here to find.

Tony Bell and his wife were on their way to Melbourne with the bail jumper, as were the two female occupants of the cabin. Their five kids had been taken into care. Kids everywhere. Kids standing with parents; older kids throwing clods at a loaded police van. John's car copping its share of clods as he and Jim followed the van.

Georgie walked away from the light, down a slight incline towards the creek. She wanted to wash her hands.

Cara followed her.

They'd been closer than sisters for a few years, then nothing, not a phone call, not a card. There were a thousand questions in Georgie's mind, but tonight wasn't the right time to ask them.

Georgie didn't ask why Cara was nursing her elbow, just continued down to the water's edge, where she squatted to scrub her hands, her arms. Rinsed the bloody hand towel, then used it to wipe drying blood from her face, neck, hair. Balled it when she was done, tossed it overarm towards the opposite bank. Balled cloth doesn't fly well. It landed with a soft plop.

They stood, side by side, watching the slice of moon play hide-and-seek in the ripples.

‘She's over there,' Georgie said. ‘I can feel her watching me.'

‘It's bush. Your place is miles away.'

‘Anyone who can swim could cut through from my place and be here in half an hour or so. It's not far – as the crow flies.'

Not far at all. A crow could break his fast on Granny's eggs and fill up on a dead lamb at Monk's without breaking into a sweat. Bush kids, like crows, learned to draw direct lines.

‘They've stopped looking for Tracy,' Cara said.

‘They'll find her.' Maybe – or maybe they'd found better fish to fry. And what hope did they have of finding one little kid amid the mess of kids out here?

The massive adrenaline rush had left her now. The wound she hadn't felt at the time throbbed in time to her heartbeat, and her legs needed a place to sit down. She walked upstream until she found a log to sit on. Cara sat with her, still supporting her elbow.

‘What's wrong with your arm?' Georgie said.

‘Bruised.'

They watched the police van attempting to take another load away, umpteen women and kids attempting to prevent it leaving. Flower people may well have preferred to make love not war, but could make a lot of war-like noise.

‘Ever tried marijuana?' Georgie asked.

‘A few times.'

‘I had a suck on a joint one night and vomited my lungs out for the next four hours. I feel a bit the same way tonight. Too much of the stuff in the air, I reckon.'

Cara was looking across the creek to the trees. ‘How could they hope to find one tiny little girl in that?'

‘They do. We had a two year old wander away from the caravan park recently. They found him curled up asleep beside a log. And . . . though I know it doesn't help much right now . . . but if Raelene had any intention of harming your little girl, she would have done it where you'd find her. She left your dog where you'd find him. She did the same once to Trudy's kitten – cut its throat and hung it on the clothes line by its tail.'

Half a dozen cops walked in line in front of the van, clearing a pathway with their bodies.

‘A rotten job, being a copper,' Georgie said. ‘I thought about doing it once.'

‘They're all we've got between us and anarchy.'

Silence then, and it continued too long. Someone had to break it.

‘I heard a good joke today,' Georgie said. ‘Why do they bury dole bludgers in shallow graves?'

Cara, in no mood for good jokes, shook her head.

‘So they can still get their hand out,' Georgie said, then offered her cigarette packet.

They lit two smokes from the one flame. The smoke might keep the buzzing mosquitoes at bay.