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- Herausgeber: Next Chapter
- Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
All three books in 'A Dark Thrillogy', a series of suspense novels by Isobel Blackthorn, now in one volume!
The Legacy Of Old Gran Parks: While middle-aged stalwart Miriam arrives into town, deer hunter Frankie is up in the forested hinterland with her gun. Meanwhile, fisherwoman Old Pearl sits on her front deck, a glass of whiskey in hand, and Emily, the English backpacker, is scrubbing out the pie-encrusted kitchen at the roadhouse. But all is not well... Gran Parks is stirring. Four troubled women. One restless spirit. Who will survive?
Twerk: A Sunday night in a Las Vegas strip club is rocked, when a local oddball dies during a private dance. Amber falls for the hot paramedic who arrives, but her casual encounter quickly descends into a terrifying, twisted nightmare from which she is unable to escape.
The Cabin Sessions: It’s Christmas Eve and hapless musician Adam Banks is standing on the bridge. A storm is rolling into the narrow mountain pass. He thinks of turning back, but instead decides to fulfill his obligation and perform the guest spot at The Cabin Sessions. Fear stirs when he opens the door on The Cabin’s incense-choked air. Meanwhile, the memories of Philip's sister, Eva, begin to surface. But what happened so long ago, on that fateful day by the river?
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A DARK THRILLOGY
THE COMPLETE SERIES
ISOBEL BLACKTHORN
CONTENTS
The Legacy of Old Gran Parks
Acknowledgments
Preface
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Notes
Twerk
Acknowledgments
1. Hot Foxies
2. Amber
3. Lana
4. Amber – Sunday Night
5. Lana
6. Amber – Sunday Night
7. Lana
8. Lacuna
9. Lana
10. Lacuna
11. Lana
12. Amber – Sunday Night
13. Lana
14. Lacuna
15. Lana
16. Amber – Sunday Night
17. Lana
18. Lacuna
19. Lana
20. Amber – Monday Morning
21. Lana
22. Amber – Monday Morning
23. Lana
24. Amber – Monday Morning
25. Lana
26. Lacuna
27. Lana
28. Amber - Monday
29. Lana
30. Amber - Monday
31. Amber
32. Lana
33. Lacuna
34. Lana
35. Amber
36. Lana
37. Lacuna
38. Lana
39. Amber
40. Lana
41. Amber
42. Lana
43. Lana
44. Amber
The Cabin Sessions
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
About the Author
Also By Isobel Blackthorn
Copyright (C) 2023 Isobel Blackthorn
Layout design and Copyright (C) 2023 by Next Chapter
Published 2023 by Next Chapter
Cover art by Lordan June Pinote
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the author’s permission.
THE LEGACY OF OLD GRAN PARKS
A DARK THRILLOGY BOOK 1
This book is dedicated to a small group of family violence survivors whom I had the privilege of teaching creative writing one year.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book could not have been written without the active involvement of my mother Margaret Rodgers. Her involvement from the early stages of plotting and characterization, through to her criticism and suggested changes to the final draft proved invaluable. A warm thank you, too, for choosing, when I was a kid, to buy a rundown roadhouse in South Australia. I had the time of my life!
PREFACE
It was three-deep at the bar. Friday, a scorcher of a day and the loggers were in town slaking their thirst. The generator out the back was taking the strain but what with having to open the fridges every few seconds, Gloria wondered if it would cope.
The teachers from the local primary school were in, as was the Postmaster. The farmers had come into town for the chook raffle, and while the men got pissed, their wives were seated in the lounge drinking lemon squash.
Gloria looked around for her husband. He was off shift and should have been helping her behind the bar, but he was nowhere to be found. She had young Jim from the general store in, re-filling the fridge and pulling beers, and Beryl, a farmer’s wife and as hardworking as they come, in the kitchen, cooking the meals.
Gloria had never known it so busy.
They’d taken over the hotel twenty years before in 1931, after the first owner dropped down dead of a heart attack while he was pulling a dark ale. Back then, Gloria’s husband, Frank, had been young and fit, and Gloria able, and they’d bought the pub with the proceeds from the sale of her recently deceased father’s farm.
The day they moved in the trouble started. Gloria never could figure out why. First it was the put downs, then came the ridicule. It wasn’t long before he was knocking her about. He seemed to think she was his to do with whatever he liked. Being a mean-spirited, woman-hating man, that translated into the sorts of acts a man would have done jail time for if he’d done it to someone other than his wife.
The night before had been the worst she’d ever known. Her body was bruised head to toe. It hurt to inhale, and she was sure he’d cracked a rib. She had to stand behind the bar serving her beery eyed regulars as she explained away her fat lip and the cut above her eye.
Gloria was no mouse. She was a big-boned bushie’s daughter, as deft with a chain saw as she was with an iron or a whisk. It wasn’t fear that brewed in her. It was anger.
With every full glass she passed across the bar, that anger deepened.
Six o’clock shaded into seven and then eight. By nine the meals were over, Beryl had gone home, and the clientele had thinned. At ten she had the lounge all wiped down and straightened out, and the last of the drinkers had staggered outside.
She paid Jim out of the till and let him go, closing the saloon door behind him on the best night’s trade she’d ever known. She went behind the bar to clean up, thinking the night’s takings would cover the doctor’s bill and then some.
She was drying a tray of pots when Frank appeared. From his swagger, she could tell he’d been drinking somewhere else.
‘Get me a beer,’ he snarled.
She didn’t answer.
Instead, she walked away.
He growled at her. She felt his growl as though it were a goblin clinging to her back.
She kept walking, rage pulsating in every cell of her. She went into the lounge and on through to the kitchen. Frank was close behind her. She turned.
There was nothing in his eyes but hate.
He took a step forward and she took a step back, sidling by the long kitchen table.
There was no escaping what he was about to do to her. Soon, he’d have her cornered.
Seeing no way out of the kitchen, she let him approach.
Three more paces and behind her was the stove. Beside the stove was a drawer. In the drawer, were the knives.
There was no time to open that drawer. He’d be on her in an instant.
Panic stirred, familiar, like toast.
Then in her side vision she saw Beryl hadn’t finished clearing up. The cleaver was still on the bench.
Gloria glanced out the window.
Frank followed her gaze.
Her hand gripped the cleaver.
She brought the weapon down on his head, right between the eyes. She heard a crack.
The flesh burst open; blood sprayed in her face.
She flinched, disgusted.
He reeled and fell back hard against the table.
In an upsurge of power, she brought the cleaver down again, her aim sharp, her motion fierce.
Beryl had sharpened the blade.
It took two more blows to kill him. Another twenty to hack him in half.
CHAPTERONE
MIRIAM
I didn’t see it at first. The intersection was staggered so the two arms, north-south and east-west, didn’t quite align. Not that I was thinking in symbols back then. That came later. It came with an awareness that crossroads are meeting places, drawing in forces from all four directions, for better, for worse. Although, that particular intersection didn’t seem to want to be a crossroads. Then again, maybe it did. Best not to overthink things. I do know crossroads are places where decisions are made for you and crossroads are not places to get stuck in. My stay in Cann River taught me that.
My car rolled into town about six. At that time of year—it was autumn—the light of the day had begun to give way to the darkness. I’d been driving all afternoon, and I was on a downhill stretch of road coming in from the west. Didn’t notice the lack of power until I’d reached the bridge and saw the scattered buildings of the town up ahead. It was then, as the road flattened out, that I realised something was wrong. I depressed the clutch and changed down, touched the accelerator and nothing happened.
I felt that rippling in my belly, a sensation I refused to give in to. I had to be practical, rational, calm. Things worked out better when people stayed calm.
It felt like good luck when I saw the roadhouse coming into view on my right, lit up in anticipation of the night. I depressed the clutch again and coasted towards it. Hoping to park out of the way, I jerked the steering wheel as the tyres hit the concrete driveway, coming to a full stop on the forecourt a bit shy of the bowsers.
I pulled the keys from the ignition, thinking with relief I’d been saved. As if some guardian angel up there in the heavens was looking down on me, kindly. In the moment, it was a reasonable thing to think. Had my car packed up a mile back, I’d have been forced to spend the night at the roadside on one of the loneliest stretches of uninhabited forest that corner of the world had to offer. Not a nice place for a single woman to find herself. People have been murdered out there. Bushwhacked, disappearing without a trace. Besides, my belly was empty, and I had no food in the car. My mouth was dry, and I nursed one mother of a headache too, after my send off the night before.
All the way from Cockatoo, that send-off had felt like punishment. I convinced myself my workmates had bought the cheapest grog known to woman or beast, and that it just about summed up their view of me. A sort of alcoholic good riddance.
Or maybe they were jealous.
After all, I was relocating up the coast. Set to take possession of a neat cottage in open country after taking early retirement from a position in local government. I’d had enough of the office lifestyle and thought to try my hand at something else. Besides, my house had burned down in the catastrophic wild fires of February 1983—Ash Wednesday, as they were calling the conflagration and, unlike some, I wasn’t going to rebuild.
That was all behind me and I was looking ahead to the east in anticipation of a fresh start. Sun rising over sapphire waters. Rolling green country and cows. The village fair. I thought maybe I’d join the historical society. They were bound to have one. I was brimming with speculation and optimism. I couldn’t get there soon enough.
Cann River was halfway from where I’d come to where I was heading. Halfway to paradise. The horror firmly behind me.
Even as I entered the roadhouse, taking in at a glance the young man seated by a window to my left, his multicoloured beanie failing to obscure his scarred brow, I had a sinking sense that my optimism was premature. On the jukebox, Joan Baez was busy lamenting poor old Dixie. Misgivings reared, and it was as though the carnage back in Cockatoo had followed me all the way along the highway, trailing behind me like a wraith.
I shook away my thoughts and approached the counter. The woman cleaning the pie warmer looked personable enough. Although she had her back to me, I thought she might have been a kindred soul. She seemed about my age and same in height and build. I thought it funny how women over fifty all ended up looking the same. Well, maybe on the surface. She wore her hair scooped up high on her head and as she turned, I saw the fingers of grey pinned back from her face. She’d painted her eyebrows—they were overly arched—and caked on the makeup, yet her cheeks still creased when she offered me a smile, waiting, hands on hips.
‘What you want?’
‘My car has died on me,’ I said by way of explanation.
She eyed me with cool hostility. Any hope I had of conviviality withered. ‘My car has died on me,’ I repeated, deciding, despite my rumbling belly, that if she expected me to order, she had another think coming.
‘That it, there.’ She indicated with a tilt of her head and I followed her gaze back to my steel-grey hatchback, angled awkwardly, its rear jutting out, obstructing the exit.
‘It isn’t in the way, I hope.’
‘I get Con to shift it.’
Her accent was thick. I couldn’t place it. Italian? I detected a twang. Eastern Europe, maybe. Somewhere like Romania.
She held out her hand. I gave her my keys and she disappeared.
I shifted round a fraction and surveyed the roadhouse interior, avoiding looking in the direction of the scar-faced man. Set alongside the long run of casement windows were tables of lurid orange Formica with matching chairs. The sort of colour that showed every blemish. The floor was covered in cheap grey patterned linoleum, worn and chipped about the entrance.
The counter, with its display cabinets and vintage till, protruded into the space. In one cabinet were the remains after the day’s trade: two sandwiches—egg mayo, and ham and salad—and an otherwise lonely Kitchener bun. I hadn’t seen one of those since the weekend I spent in Adelaide several years back. It looked odd and out of place and homemade.
On a menu board, propped on a high shelf behind the counter, were listed hamburgers with the lot and chips, written in neat lettering. Beneath, written in large, clumsy letters by someone who couldn’t spell, was a small range of gourmet pies: Venisen, Hunta and Stake. I thought maybe there was a good cook in residence, for those pies were obviously not bought in. Besides, almost no one deviated from the traditional meat pie, not even in the city. Meat slurry they were normally, with tomato sauce squirted in the crust vent.
The woman reappeared behind the counter.
‘He’s moving it into the garage.’
I looked around to see a burly-looking man heading past the bowsers to my car. He had on the navy-blue overalls of a mechanic. I noticed a slight limp in his gait. He opened the driver’s side door and reached in to release the handbrake and disengage the gears. Then he went around and leaned back against the rear bumper. Once the car was moving, he hurried back and took hold of the steering wheel. There was a brief pause in which I admired his strength.
‘You want to order something?’
‘I’ll have a steak pie, please.’
‘With chips?’
‘Go on, then.’
‘Fresh out of steak,’ the woman said without turning. ‘Only got the hunter.’
‘What’s in it?’
‘This and that. Could be chicken.’ She didn’t sound that sure. ‘He changes it,’ she added as an afterthought.
‘The baker?’
‘Con.’
She gestured behind me. She didn’t mean scar face. She was referring to the mechanic. It was a confronting revelation, that the man who fixes cars also bakes the pies. I chose not to make too much of it.
‘Sauce?’ she said, raising her eyebrows to her hairline.
‘No, thank you.’
‘Better with sauce,’ she mumbled grumpily.
‘If you say so.’
The woman flounced away, her piled-high coiffure bobbing behind her. I leaned against the counter and waited. My sense that I’d offended her was confirmed when she reappeared, grabbed the tongs from the bench and extracted the only pie in the warmer, plonking it on a plate and squirting on the side the sauce I expressly didn’t want, and setting the whole affair down on the counter in front of me along with some cutlery.
‘You have it here,’ she said, nudging the plate in my direction.
‘My chips?’
‘Sit. I bring them across.’
‘Can I get a drink?’
‘Help yourself.’ She pointed to the fridge beside the door to the kitchen. I went over and grabbed an orange squash.
Loaded up with my dinner, I made my way to a table far from the guy with the scar who sat there motionless, staring into space, ignoring his surroundings or oblivious to them.
I leaned back in my seat and waited for the chips. A few minutes later the sour woman came and plonked down a bowl. The chips were heavily salted.
Avoiding the sauce on my plate, which had taken on the colour of congealed blood, I proceeded to cut into my pie. Flakes of pale meat smothered in gravy oozed out. Looked like chicken. He must have used the thigh. I detected the flavour of fresh thyme beneath a liberal dousing of pepper and a hint of something unfamiliar. Aniseed perhaps.
Midway through my repast the mechanic, Con, wandered in, trailing a smell of diesel behind him which spread and infused the room. He put my keys on the counter, turned and scanned around as though observing a crowd, taking in each of the two of us in turn. I reciprocated, taking him in, and not with a sympathetic eye. He was broad shouldered, long in the body and he had a bit of a belly on him. His left foot kicked out sideways. He had fuzzy, brown hair, a cleft chin and his eyes were set too close together. His brow was arranged in a permanent frown, and his lips were the same as his mother’s, thin and tight, curved down at the edges. I placed him around thirty.
Our eyes met and he didn’t look away.
‘Not like the sauce, then?’ he said. I thought he was addressing me, but there was a loud clang behind the counter and the woman cleared her throat.
‘She said, no sauce.’
‘Is that right?’
How could two people get so caught up on whether I wanted the sauce? What difference could it make to either of them? To anything?
I polished off the chips and bit into the last segment of my pie and washed it all down with the orange squash. Outside, long shadows leached into the gloaming. The neon sign centred on the wide verge at the corner flickered as though trembling in the cooling air. Across the highway, stood a hotel. Two storeys, the upper level fronted by a deep veranda, its balcony sheltering the pavement below, the whole affair painted a pale shade of aqua. Two of the downstairs windows were lighted. Another came on as I watched. Upstairs this time.
A woman exited the front door and took in a sandwich board advertising the nightly accommodation rate. For a while no cars passed through the town.
‘You’ll be wanting to stop the night then,’ Con said to me from his station by the counter.
I got up, collected my plate, and made my approach.
‘You can’t look at my car straight away?’
‘Afraid not,’ the woman said, standing behind the till. ‘Con’s come in to wash up for the night. Those pies won’t bake themselves.’
‘She can stay here. We got plenty of room out the back.’
I put down my plate and stepped aside, keen not to stand too close to Con.
‘The hotel looks fine.’
‘It’ll cost ya.’
‘Two dollars twenty.’ The woman held out her hand.
Con came and stood over me as I ferreted about in my purse.
‘Not stopping then?’
‘The hotel will do just fine, thanks.’
‘Suit yourself.’
The door swung shut behind me and I took a lungful of the cool night air. There was no wind. A peppering of street lighting sent forth a milky haze into the dark. The trees that hugged the town loomed like ghouls.
Heading for the hotel, I crossed the forecourt and waited roadside. A second later, I was frozen like a rabbit caught in the high beam of a truck. The great, rumbling behemoth approached from the west. As it crossed the bridge the groan of compression brakes splintered the quiet. Weighed down by its load of tree trunks, the truck thundered by, headed through the town and was gone.
I hurried across the highway in case it had a mate. Approaching the hotel entrance, I started to lose faith in luck. The chips were repeating on me. No doubt fried in rancid oil. The flavours of the pie were blending with the orange squash, the entire mixture resulting in a series of unpleasant belches.
I entered an empty and wide corridor. There was a glass-panelled saloon door to my left and a plain door to my right, and stairs leading up to the accommodation. I heard voices. Pushing open the saloon door I was received by the yeasty smell of beer and three pairs of dismissive eyes as the men at the bar all turned. A silence descended. I took in the blue shirts and the suntans and returned the silence with a casual smile. The back bar was cluttered with bottles of beer, wine and spirits, packets of potato chips and nuts, a Bex powders display and a haphazard assortment of glasses. On a cabinet in the centre sat an old television, switched off. I wondered if it was colour.
‘Can I help you?’
It was a woman’s voice. She materialised, standing up behind the bar. Small, slight of build, with thick sandy coloured hair, shoulder length and parted in the middle. She had a round, open face that carried the nondescript features of a woman too busy doing chores to fuss with makeup. I picked her to be in her mid-thirties. She seemed personable.
I stepped forward and the men turned back to their beers.
‘A room, please. If you’ve one spare.’
Someone sniggered.
‘Okie dokie.’
She disappeared and a second later, poked her head through the saloon door.
‘Follow me.’
The corridor contained a small reception desk tucked beneath the stairs. There were more doors leading off in all directions.
‘Just the one night?’
‘I expect so. Or should I say I hope so.’
‘Aw, take no notice of them blokes in there,’ she said. ‘They’re not used to seeing a woman in the bar.’
You’re a woman, I thought but didn’t say.
‘You on holidays?’
‘Moving interstate. Car broke down.’
‘So that was you. Thought so. I’ll put you in Room Four.’
I followed her upstairs. She was a brisk climber, lithe. The sort of woman always on her feet. I was panting at the last tread.
‘You’ll be comfy in here,’ she said, flicking on the light.
She moved aside for me to enter, handing me the key as I passed by. The room was spacious and pleasantly furnished. High ceiling, faded rugs on scantly polished floorboards. Other than the bed, the room contained a free-standing wardrobe on legs, a dressing table and a couple of chairs. Long velvet curtains hung open, framing the windows. I went and stood in the middle of it all.
‘You eaten?’
‘I had a pie across the road.’
‘Belly okay?’
‘Why do you ask?’
‘No reason.’
That explained it then. It was the pie.
‘Breakfast at seven thirty suit you?’
‘Sure will.’
‘Have a good night.’
She closed the door.
I ambled about the room, ran a finger along the dressing table
top and found it satisfyingly clear of dust. Then I stood by the pair of windows. They were double hung, with nets of cream lace strung across the lower frames. The sills were set at waist height which meant I had a clear line of sight out the top panes. She’d given me the corner room, overlooking the crossroads. The iron lacework beneath the railing conjured a vintage era of horses and carts. Realising I was a silhouette backlit by the single pendant light hanging from the ceiling, I crossed the room and switched it off, returning to my lookout, knowing I wouldn’t be seen.
I wasn’t there long when I heard a cough, followed by a groan and a muffled scrape of something—a chair maybe—being dragged across the floor of the adjoining room. Then all went quiet. I took umbrage at having been put right next door to another guest. Wasting no time, I left my station and locked myself in my room. Over by the door I heard the distant sound of laughter coming up from the bar. It felt comforting in a fashion, yet the cheery sound seemed to reinforce my isolation.
A digital clock on the bedside table told me in vivid green that it was seven. I considered joining the men downstairs but thought better of it. Instead, I returned to the window.
The town looked lifeless. Nothing moved, not even in the roadhouse. Despite the brightly lit neon sign, the roadhouse was closed. I wished I’d had the presence of mind to grab a few things out of the car before checking in, but then again, Con had been hostile. Realising he still had my keys, I didn’t like to think of all my possessions piled on the back seat, and in the boot. I felt oddly violated, intruded upon, as though something vital had been taken from me. My power. Maybe I should have stayed there, the better to guard what I had brought with me, all that I’d scraped together in the aftermath of my charred life.
I was there in a flash, back in Cockatoo, standing by another window, the one in the living room that looked out over a forested valley, on one of the hottest days I’d ever experienced.
I should have known it would turn out bad after the birds had gone. It was Wednesday the sixteen of February and at that hour in late-summer, sulphur-crested cockatoos would grace the valley with a raucous chorus. Not that day. On that day, the silken trunks of the mountain ash stood tall along the back fence of my yard, silhouetted in a dense haze. The sun, blazing red on the horizon, couldn’t raise a glimmer or a shadow. The feathery fronds of the ferns were crisping about their edges. Not a rustle of a lizard could be heard in the undergrowth. High above, the tufty tree canopy was still.
A conflagration had been billowing beyond the western hills all day. A southerly was due any minute. Everyone was hanging out for the cool change. The heat wave had been dragging on too long and this was the hottest day of all. We were all craving that wolfish wind to roar through and devour the fire front, make it blow back on itself. Aching for the sigh of cool and clean air that would follow. I had the radio on. The presenter said the wind would arrive in an hour, possibly two.
I waited. Like a lot of people in town that day, I waited. What few of us knew was another, smaller fire was threading its way east through the bush up Bailey Road and heading for the town centre.
The leaves on the trees beside the road fluttered for a few moments before settling still. I leaned forward and gazed up at the canopy. Clusters of leaves on the ends of thin branches were swaying languorously. Fern fronds in the undergrowth quivered and waved. I opened my bedroom window to listen. Smoke stung my nose—the air acrid from the smoke of the Belgrave and Beaconsfield fires. The radio had said those fires were under control.
The sun dipped behind the western ridge. Then, below the gentle crackle and crinkle of the tinder-dry bush, there was a distant, roaring rush, like a far-away kettle-drum roll.
Something told me to get out of the house fast. Going outside was like entering a fan-forced oven. Breathing was an effort, the smoke raw in my lungs. It was eight-thirty and the sun had nearly set when the wind caught the thin thread of blaze that had been tracking down the hillside, transforming it into a mile-long fire front blasting down the valley with the force of a hurricane. It all happened so fast. The smoke had got so thick I couldn’t see more than a few metres. Trees were falling, some uprooting. Families were running out of their houses, screaming, and heading down to the reserve. Panic-stricken men and women raced their cars helter-skelter towards the Woori Yallock Road. Suddenly, the police helicopter was overhead with its siren blaring. In minutes the firies started evacuating the
town. They did the right thing, cos that fire was raging down Bailey Road razing everything in its path.
We didn’t know it then, but in just sixteen minutes, two-hundred and eighty-three houses were gone. Another twenty-four were lost in the following hours and days.
The firies had been tackling blazes all day. They were exhausted. You could see it in the way they moved. Yet they went hell for leather up and down the streets behind the shops and there wasn’t a whole lot of time. There were hundreds of us who couldn’t get out. We had nowhere to shelter.
Someone must have had a key to the kinder building down by the railway line. It wasn’t ideal. We knew it wasn’t much more than a shack, despite its fancy design, a glass-windowed carousel. But we had no choice. The smoke was suffocating us. The fire was sucking the oxygen from the air. Birds, the ones that had ignored their instincts, like us, and hung around, were dropping dead from the sky. You could hear the gas bottles exploding. Boom. Boom. Boom. And then came the fireballs, larger than a soccer ball. The endless roar of the fire, deafening like a hundred jet engines. None of us thought we would survive.
Seared in my memory was the terror of three-hundred residents crammed shoulder to shoulder into that kindergarten building. Stinking hot we were, staring out all those windows at the apocalypse. A third of us were kids. Some men climbed up onto the roof to keep it free of embers. It was a bitumen roof, and without those men risking their own lives to keep us women and kids safe, the building would have burned for sure.
They were good men.
I will never forget how good they were.
You don’t forget something like that. The distress on everyone’s face, the terror in their eyes, the crying, the wailing, the choking stench.
My thoughts were interrupted by headlights approaching from the west. The vehicle didn’t stop. I followed it with my gaze and was about to move away from my post by the window when I saw the roadhouse garage doors open. More headlights, this time a double set, and I watched a station wagon pulling out and heading across the forecourt. As the car entered the reach of the street lights I saw it was canary yellow. Its engine rumbled and chugged. The driver, Con presumably, made a right turn and then a sudden left, and disappeared up the road to the north.
Where was he off to at that time of night?
It came to me then that I knew not a thing about Cann River, a town I’d driven through on my way up the coast so many times before. It had always been a nothing place, a welcome relief from the endless forest, a chance to take a short break, a corner sort of place where, soon after, the coastline would stop being southern. A place welcoming at first sight.
Half an hour later, and I was always glad to see the back of it.
I drew the velvet curtains, flicked the light back on and lay down in the centre of the bed. Noises from next door started up again, bonks, a moan, a cough. I tried to block them out. Told myself the next day, I would be on my way. It couldn’t have come soon enough.
CHAPTERTWO
FRANKIE
I was on my belly, rifle cocked at the beast. When I saw the headlights, I cursed under my breath. The deer froze, alert, sensing. As the vehicle crested a rise and entered the hairpin on its way up to the next, its engine grunted angrily, wheels emitting a screech. The deer bolted. I didn’t need to turn and watch as the station wagon drew closer. The noise, the manner of driving, were predictable. It was Con. It was always Con, disturbing the peace up in those foothills.
He was on his way up the mountain. He’d be back down in an hour or two. Pat had sent him. He never did a thing without her say so.
I couldn’t begrudge him his time out in the wilderness, away from the suffocating clutches of that mother of his. She was a piece of work, that one. Moved down from the ranges when her husband died and ushered her only son into his slavish existence at the roadhouse. Rumour had it she’d received a widow’s payout from the company as a salve in lieu of the proper compensation she might have got if she’d taken them to court. They knew and she knew that was never going to happen. Besides, it wasn’t the company’s fault Igor had fallen to his death. He was standing where he shouldn’t have, on the edge of the dam wall, while behind him two men were walking by, holding a length of timber. As they passed the wind picked up. The men struggled. The foreman tried to warn Igor, but he spoke no Hungarian and Igor no English, so down the buttresses he tumbled. Con would have been about twelve at the time.
Pat—I doubted that was the name she was born with—installed Con in the café serving customers and waiting tables, and when he wasn’t doing that at weekends and before and after school, he was at the bowsers pumping gas. Soon after, she pulled him out of school altogether and had him baking pies. In his twenties, he half-finished a couple of apprenticeships, one for a baker, the other a mechanic, and he’d scarcely left the area since.
The roadhouse was Con’s prison. I felt sorry for him. He looked a bit strange with his cleft chin and his foot that jutted out sideways, but I didn’t think he meant any harm. You couldn’t begrudge the guy a nocturnal trip up the mountain, even if he had been sent out on a mission. It was all the freedom he had. Although there was no escaping he did get in my way.
I waited for the sound of his engine to fade and scanned the knoll up ahead, but the deer was well and truly gone. I picked myself off the ground. As I brushed myself down, my nose received strong whiffs of the eucalyptus oil I’d squirted on my clothes to mask my own, human smell. With the rifle in the crook of my arm, I headed off to my shack.
I’d been squatting in the abandoned timber cutter’s shack for about three years. When I first found the place, it was in a sorry mess and stank of stale piss. One of the windows was smashed, and the floor festooned with animal droppings. Looked like no one had been inside for many months. The surrounding forest had long since been logged out of all its old-growth ash, and the forest-raping, timber industry had moved on.
The shack didn’t seem to belong to anyone, so I cleaned it up a bit and moved in. No one to bother me up there. I hadn’t done much to it since, other than repair the window, and oil the floorboards to brighten them up. I never planned to stay long enough to care. I bought a small diesel generator to power the lights, but the noise obliterated the sounds of the bush. I only cranked it up when ageing a deer in the fridge, which lately had been more often than not.
It was too early for bed, so I broke open a beer and sat back in the only chair I had, a battered wing back I’d found on the side of the road. Someone had replaced the webbing under the seat pad with a few planks of Oregon. Not that comfortable but I wasn’t fussed. I rested my feet on an upended milk crate that served as a coffee table and tuned into nature’s chorus, loud enough to obliterate the steady thrum of the generator. More cacophony than symphony, especially after the light seasonal rain, when the frogs tried—and failed—to drown out the cicadas and the crickets. It was autumn, and the bush chorus had quietened down after its raucous summer zenith: mating season for the cicadas.
I tuned into the various tones; I heard the faint yap of a sugar glider echoing through distant trees. Nearby, a possum burst forth its croaky growl.
I was halfway through my beer when another sound cut in, jarring. Faint at first but soon it threatened to drown out the competition. The critters were struck dumb for a while. All I heard was the vehicle, screaming down the fire track that coursed the waney ridge above my place. I knew it wasn’t Con. Different engine, and Con never used that track on account of the humps and deep swales that had been bulldozed into existence to prevent erosion. Not to mention the debris. Only a complete idiot would barrel down the old logging tracks in the dark. Con could be accused of many things, but he was not an idiot.
I next heard the shriek of brakes and knew the vehicle had reached one of the track’s many hairpins. There was a dull thud. Had the driver come a cropper? Hit a deer, or a kangaroo maybe? I slugged my beer and waited.
There were no more engine sounds.
I toyed with the idea of checking out the damage, when the high-pitched whine of spinning wheels hit my ears and I felt my top lip curling in response. Not long after, the vehicle thrummed its way to the main road. Whoever it was had come as if from nowhere. I wanted to hear where they were headed. The engine noise faded as the vehicle dipped behind a saddle for a stretch and I pictured the road, its uncompromising path through the rough terrain, all the wooded gullies and nature-made rock dumps, the termite mounds and stringy barks left to rot where they fell, the old-growth logged, saplings poking up in the undergrowth like hope, the blackened trunks of the larger trees where a fire had gone through. It was terrain supporting an uneasy alliance of wild and feral life.
The vehicle drew closer. It had to be a ute or station wagon, and it was heading for the town.
The hotel would be in for a fun night.
With the vehicle out of earshot, I thought no more of it. The bush came back to me in all its complexity, an aural pleasure of harsh and pleading calls.
The capacity for survival out in the wilderness amazed me. It had been a scorcher of a season and the ground was still baked dry despite the recent showers that had freshened up the undergrowth. Summer wouldn’t let go. The birds, the bandicoots, the snakes and goannas were all thirsty. Plenty of water in the river, but up at the shack I was on tank water and couldn’t spare much. I did put out an old dog bowl now and then of an evening, and it was drunk dry by morning. I didn’t have a dog.
Cassie said I should have a dog. Maybe she was right. Still, nature had other methods for taking care of its guardians. All summer a copperhead had taken up residence under the floorboards, until it was chased away by the largest goanna I’d ever clapped eyes on. The snake was not impressed but no amount of angry hissing put off that mother of a beast. I left them to sort it out between themselves. No point interfering in nature’s course unless I had to.
I made my living hunting deer. Deer were feral and had no right to occupy the bush. I had no qualms helping the cull. I had a twelve-gauge slug gun with a rifled barrel, and I was a good shot. I skinned and hung and butchered too, selling the best to a truck-driver mate with connections in the city. Rick had a refrigerated van. I gave him a fair cut and we did good business selling to high end restaurants and the odd luxury hotel. Places where they knew how to spell ‘venison’.
Word had it my venison was the best on the south coast. It was all in the killing.
Fear toughens the flesh.
I adopted a softly-softly approach. Even as a kid I was a caring sort, too caring according to my mother. Back then, she reckoned I ought to toughen up if I wanted the world to treat me well. ‘You’re a big softy,’ she would say. She wanted me tough. She wanted to make up for the fact that I didn’t have a dad. Then my stepdad, new on the scene, would follow on her tail with, ‘Nah, Frankie’s just a big girl.’
I took that as an insult.
Howard was a pig of a man with a pork-fattened belly, which sort of completed the swinish circle in my mind. Good fortune rained on me and my mum the day he was decapitated by a sheet of roofing iron while working on a building site up north. I would’ve been about seventeen at the time. We were told he was bending down to pick up the hammer he’d dropped when a magpie swooped a plumber on the roof. It was all instinct after that. The plumber raised his hands to protect his head, letting go of the sheet of iron in his grasp in the process, and that was the end of my stepdad.
What was it with men and construction sites?
Howard Potter, deceased.
They put his head in a bucket and called the ambulance.
When the plumber, and then the project manager, came around to apologise, it was all my mum and I could do not to invite them in for tea and cake to celebrate. Mum kept a straight face, and I had to stifle the laugh bubbling in my tummy. Maybe it was the shock as well. No one wants to be confronted with news like that, but it has to be said that we never mourned his loss. We’d have been hypocrites if we had. The old bastard hit my mum so hard she only had half her teeth and she had to have a hysterectomy because of the pounding he’d given her guts. I would have been about fifteen when that happened. The year was 1974 and the Vietnam war had come to an end by then.
That mongrel of a man was American by birth. He’d bolted to Australia in ‘72 and married my mum, who was practically the first woman he’d met since back then she had a job as a cleaner at the airport. He did all that to avoid the US draft after Whitlam had abolished it in Australia. Mum said they got the first letter wrong when they named him ‘Howard’.
I drank the last dregs of my beer and wiped my mouth, before pulling on my boots and heading outside to check on the moon rise. Through a clearing in the trees I saw the forest down below, stretching towards the southern coast. Short flashes of headlights took me by surprise. I thought it might have been that same hoon. I knew my instincts agreed when my top lip reared again.
CHAPTERTHREE
PEARL
Shit happens. That’s been my motto in life. Seen me through thick and thin, and I’m too set in my ways to change now. It’s what I told my daughter, Kylie, when her husband took off with his boss. His way of going up in the world. Shit happens, I said. She didn’t want to hear it, not with two babies hanging off her. I offered to help out, but she didn’t want to know. She didn’t want another thing from me, she said, or even set eyes on my face.
She didn’t have to make things so final.
I pushed back a cuticle with the jagged edge of a thumb nail, the pain quick and sharp. I was sitting out on my front deck, watching the last of the daylight fade out over the western rise.
I don’t believe in permanence, but Kylie had held fast to that stance, for years. She’d always been tenacious. She never came down to visit me after I moved out to Peachtree. Not once. I’d abandoned her, apparently, although she hadn’t given me much to stay for in the city. I thought the little twinnies would have liked it out in the country, but Kylie said the area around Cann River was too wild.
How would she know?
Then again, she was right. Of course, it was wild! There was nothing out there other than bush.
The place didn’t look so lush in the autumn of ’83. It’d been a long hot summer and there was little green underfoot except along the riverbank. I’d been on my own for weeks. None of the city folk who usually came out to the campsite or their shacks to fish the inlet were game enough to head into the tinder-dry forest after the fires. The whole state was traumatised. I thought it a bit of an overreaction, but then again, it had been one helluva conflagration.
At Peachtree, I felt safe enough. If a blaze did pass through, I had my boat, and the inlet was a couple of kilometres wide. As for the shack, well, I’d lost a lot more in my life than that clapped out old weatherboard. I’d lost two houses on account of a man: A house to
his debt, and a house to a flood. You get used to loss the same way you get used to a sore hip. You ignore it.
A cool breeze stroked my face. The lights were off in the house. That’s the thing with being off grid. All I had was a generator and a 12-volt battery for emergencies. In the 1980s, solar power was just about unheard of. I relied on candlelight by night. It did me just fine. I had the dog for company and a large glass of scotch to keep me amused.
And to numb the pain in my tongue.
Sometimes the inexplicable happens and that was the situation with my tongue. I thought I must have gnawed it with my back molars in my sleep because I woke up with it, and only discovered the full force of the pain when at breakfast I tried to swallow some toast. A bullet of agony shot right into my ear. I nearly gagged.
The scotch worked wonders. I could swallow without discomfort, although I knew the ulcer was there. It would have taken a lot of scotch to get rid of that sting altogether. Funny how the little things hurt like the big things. An ulcer matching, say, a severed foot in intensity, if only for a pointed moment.
Sam lay at my feet. She was a staunch companion, a smart and loyal Kelpie, getting on in years so we were a good match. She’d found one of my old slippers and was having a merry old time severing heel from toe, when a rumble in the distance caused her to cock her ears. Me and Sam both sat fast, listening. I’d have heard on the bush telegraph if anyone was expected. No one came out to Peachtree at night and I wasn’t due a visitor. Besides, no one I knew drove at that speed, not without a bull bar. The roos and the wombats were not given to looking both ways before crossing the road.
So, who the hell was it?
The clearing by the river that was Peachtree consisted of six rundown shacks, each on its own large block, all of them owned by city dwellers wanting to escape the rest of humanity now and then, do a bit of fishing, go walkabout in the wilderness, or take a hike along the beaches that stretched for miles and miles. Put a toe or two in the Southern Ocean that churned and pounded the shore. Probably no more than a foot. The coast had strong long-shore rips that would drag even a good swimmer out to sea. Swimming was advised only when the waters were absolutely calm, and that was hardly ever.
Croajingolong National Park was a wild, inhospitable place in every respect. Which was why, when a sedan pulled into old Fred’s place across the dirt track, I went inside to fetch my binoculars. Not that I expected to make out much in the dark, but I wanted to see whatever I could. The driver had obliged my curiosity by leaving his headlights on. Wanted to see his way around. I assumed it was a ‘he’ and when I returned to the deck and adjusted the binoculars, I found I was right.
Sam let out a low growl. I hissed at her to stay quiet.
The man disappeared around the back. I heard a dull bang and then another. Sounded like he was breaking in. I could have run across and told him where to find the key, but I wasn’t about to make his entry easy.
No need.
He’d got in anyway.
The front door opened and out he strode, all cocky confidence.
He was a small, stocky man, dressed in puffed out city gear. With his big hair, I had him marked out as a yuppie. Judging by the way he ferried the contents of his boot into the house, he wasn’t that strong. Three trips later he opened the rear passenger side door. He bent in and when he stood up, I could see a sleeping child in his arms. The kiddie would have been no more than five, judging by the size. Moments later he was back at the car, and out came another one, about the same size as the first. My heart squeezed in the looking. I wanted to think the guy was just some devoted dad taking his kids on a holiday, but old Fred never let his shack out to anyone with kids, and judging by the way he’d entered, the guy was more likely not meant to be there.
If he’d been a woman, I’d have rushed over to offer my support. As it was, I felt torn between my concern for the welfare of those kiddies and wariness over that man. The father? Had to be, surely? How did he know about the shacks? A local? Not dressed like that. Someone who’d been there before, on holiday? There was no point dwelling on it. I’d phone Fred in the morning.
Sam made low throaty grumbles. I thought any moment she’d bark so I tugged her collar and yanked her inside. I had to sit with her, stroking her back, keeping her calm, while I tried to think what else to do.
I poured myself another whisky. Then I drew the curtains and locked all the doors in case the stranger went on a nocturnal walkabout. I sat there in the kitchen in the dark with my whisky and my dog, hoping daylight would bring sanity to the situation.
The dark always brought the dark along with it. I kept thinking he had to be a child abductor, a paedophile, a snuff movie maker, a serial killing psychopath about to do those kiddies unspeakable harm.
Who knew?
My mind was running away with me. I couldn’t sit there speculating. I drained my glass and went over to the living room and stoked the wood stove for the night. Then I made a quick brew with the water still hot in the kettle that I’d set to the edge of the hot plate. I took my tea, black and sugarless, and Picnic at Hanging Rock to bed.
My bedroom was at the rear of the house, its window facing the back yard. In there, I could safely light a candle.
I put down the tea and the book and started to get changed into my bed wear. It occurred to me as I was pulling my thin grey sweater over my head that I might need to leave it on.
All I took off were my boots.
Two chapters in and I put the book down, deciding Hanging Rock was a stupid place to take a group of flighty schoolgirls. Then I thought those girls and that teacher couldn’t all have simply disappeared. There’d have been traces, ripped clothing, droplets of blood, screams someone had to have heard. The ground hadn’t opened its jaws and devoured them. In all, the setting, Hanging Rock, was ludicrous as it was essentially an exposed mountainside. I’d been there with Kylie when she was small. You could see and be seen for miles. Not like Peachtree. You could walk ten feet into the bush of Croajingolong and never be seen again. It was hilly terrain, riddled with creeks and rivers, a few towering gums and a lot of thick undergrowth. Then there were the tea trees, banksias and heathland beside the coast.
Not that folk were in the habit of going missing in Croajingolong. Just that the wilderness coast could devour a person if they let it happen, and people had to show the place respect.
I wasn’t from round those parts. I was a Tassie girl by birth, my family hailing from Ulverstone in the Apple Isle’s north west. We were farming folk, taking advantage of the rich red soils of the northern slopes that came down off the Central Highlands and met the coast. It was a homely existence, plenty of potatoes to fill the belly, hard work out in the fields, and not much to trouble us. I had a perfect childhood. No complaints there. I loved my mum and my dad and my sisters, Clara and Flo. My younger brother was a cry baby, but I managed to ignore him until he was old enough for fishing. We’d go off for hours then, me and dad and Clive. We’d come home with dinner, and mum would have the spuds cut for chips.
My family were what folk called well-adjusted and comfortably off. We were not religious or political, none of us were gamblers, and all of us played sport. Mum loved tennis, Dad was into cricket, Clive kicked balls, with me and Clara it was netball, and Flo loved to swim, which we all said went nicely with her name. The only dent in that cradle of familial happiness was when I, the eldest, met Mal, the brickie, and we took off to Melbourne after the wedding.
My Kylie came along three years later, and that was when I discovered my darling Mal was a gambler. The day the house we’d bought and lovingly done up was sold from under us to pay off his debts, I left him. That was in the late 1950s and it was no decade to be a single mum, but I got by working in the office of the Younghusband Wool Store in Kensington. I would have been about thirty, and I only survived the workplace, and the stench of fleece that went with it, because I was a farm girl who knew how to fish and peel spuds and get her hands dirty. I toughened up quick and repeated all of Mal’s tales and jokes as if they were my own. I guess that was also when I learned how to lie if I had to, if it came to saving my own skin.
I could keep other folks’ lies too. Like Con and old Pat’s at the roadhouse. Wild horses couldn’t prise out of me what I knew about them, but I could never help the shudder that passed through me whenever one of those young backpacker girls crossed the state border in a coach, heading west to heaven knew what El Dorado was in her head. When I went into Cann River to check the mail and have a catch up with Frankie, there she’d be, the latest after the last one got away, all wet behind the ears, slaving away at the counter.
CHAPTERFOUR
EMILY
The coach heading down the coast from Sydney pulled up at the roadhouse at about midday on weekdays, and two in the afternoon on weekends. A second coach came through on Tuesdays and Thursdays at six, pick up only. That coach arrived in Melbourne at five the following morning after making numerous stops along the way. The coach heading up the coast from Melbourne arrived in Cann River at one in the afternoon, three on weekends. On Mondays and Wednesdays, the night coach came through at four in the morning.
A little before midday, Pat and Con would be poised ready to receive the Sydney-coach passengers, and shortly after they would try to hide their disappointment as they watched the raggle-taggle of coach-fatigued travellers decant and wander off to the bakery and the general store up the street. Con would angle the sandwich board listing their gourmet pies to catch the eye, but it was rarely enough to lure most, who wanted nothing more than to stretch their legs and see what else the town had to offer, or go and eat a normal pie at the bakery, the preference of regular travellers. Pat and Con enjoyed the patronage of the grannies too old to walk far, the occasional markedly weary traveller, someone with crutches or a limp, a mother eager to shut up her fussing children, and rarely—very rarely—someone lured by the word ‘gourmet’ that was attached to the common-as-flies, great Australian pie.
Other than those two coaches, the town, servicing a smattering of farms in the hinterland, relied for its survival on tourists journeying on the highway from here to there, keen to stop midway along a two-hundred mile stretch of wilderness; weary of the thinned-out forest of identical-looking trees, a forest stripped of its magnificence, weary too after battling the logging trucks that seemed to own that stretch of road, a road that went on and on, as though destined to never end.
Almost no one came down from the high country to the north, because almost no one lived up there, and those who did were just as likely to head in the opposite direction than come down the mountain, because the road was dirt and known to be treacherous.
To the south, some fifteen miles away as the crow flies, and about an hour by car on roads that veered first one way then another, was the coast, replete with a string of wild and dangerous beaches. The whole region had been classified wilderness for good reason. It was largely inaccessible, and it was so far from anywhere significant it might as well fall off the end of the earth altogether and be done with it.
