Chapter Twenty-eight #2
Shyla had said the man was “white,” but that had meant more than Billie realized.
It was the man with the snow-white hair.
The man with the airman’s burn, or the plastic job.
The man from that table with Georges Boucher at The Dancers.
Hadn’t she also seen someone with snow-white hair at the auction house?
Yes, and the Packard, before they were set upon in the alley.
What a nasty little circle this was. Any fleeting question of whether she should follow the Packard quickly vanished. Billie had to know who he was.
Billie ignited her engine and followed the Packard, heart thumping.
The big car turned left out of the driveway, in the direction of Blackheath and Lithgow.
Billie stayed two cars back, a good distance.
There was no reason for the man to think she would be there, she reminded herself.
No reason for him to think he was being followed.
Still, she was grateful for the flow of local traffic that helped her to blend in.
She ran through the scene inside the Salon du Thé.
No, he had not been among the businessmen dining there.
What had brought him up this way? she wondered.
Had he, too, taken an interest in the boy in isolation in Katoomba Hospital?
The Packard wound its way along the highway and passed through Blackheath, through the intersection where the shattered rear windshield of the ill-fated Oldsmobile had since been swept up.
The grand motorcar went on, not slowing, past the old cemetery, then continued through bush and agricultural land dotted with the occasional homestead and weatherboard house.
Many properties were overgrown, suggesting a boom between wars, now quashed by the lack of able-bodied men to work the land.
The powers that be had done a fine job of cutting down the generations.
And still the black Packard drove on, away from the city, and to what destination?
All the way to Colo? If so, there would be no time to get information from Constable Primrose, no time to figure out who he was.
The motorcar finally slowed at Mount Victoria, right at the top of the mountains, and turned off the Great Western Highway at the main intersection.
Billie slowed, happy that one of the two vehicles ahead of her was also making the same turn.
They passed the famed two-story Hotel Imperial, Australia’s oldest tourist hotel, sitting pale and regal on the corner, its parapets decorated with medieval-style detail.
Billie had taken tea there once with her parents, seemingly a lifetime ago.
The pale driver did not stop, instead heading out toward Mount Tomah and Bilpin.
A country automobile with a flat back pulled onto the road in front of Billie, an extra buffer between the two black cars, her roadster and the Packard.
For nearly an hour Billie followed the Packard along Bell’s Line Road, hanging back behind the truck and the other car, just far enough to avoid being noticed.
Or at least she hoped so. It depended somewhat on the Packard’s driver, but in Billie’s experience most people did not check to see if they were being followed, even those who really ought to know better.
Who is Frank? Was he a confident man? Suspicious?
The sun was beginning to set when the big black car finally slowed and pulled up outside the Kurrajong Heights hotel, a huge timber building with, Billie guessed, a spectacular view over the valley.
She was forced to drive past, knowing that pulling off the road suddenly would attract the man’s attention.
She followed the farm vehicle and the other car down the road until the hotel was out of sight, then circled back and managed to drive around the closer side, up a second driveway, to park next to a large truck that concealed the roadster from the hotel entrance.
She switched off her headlamps and waited, not knowing whether to get out.
Now that she knew “Frank” was the man from The Dancers, she realized that he might recognize her by sight, as clearly as she had recognized him.
Was he stopping for refreshments? The telephone?
Would he stay for the night? She ran over what she knew about him in her mind as she waited, deliberating whether to enter the hotel or try to spy through the windows to see what he was up to.
Thankfully, only a few minutes later he was striding back to his car, his blanched hair and complexion standing out with a ghostly glow in the gathering dark, exaggerating his almost alien foreignness.
Had he spoken with someone? Delivered something?
His mood seemed not to have changed, his body language speaking of a confident man, a man who perhaps even felt superior to those surrounding him, a man who did not appear suspicious and afraid he was being followed.
He started up the Packard and pulled away, not even bothering to look around him.
He . . . travels in a motorcar, carrying things to Sydney, Shyla had said.
What things, exactly? He’d visited the Hydro Majestic and now this hotel, both places with good reputations.
As the Packard’s taillights faded down the road, Billie eased the roadster into life and followed again with extra care.
By the time he turned off the road onto a smaller dirt road signposted colo, there was no one between them to provide a convenient buffer, and little light to speak of.
In the country, headlamps announced you once the sun was down, but so, too, did the dusty road telegraph your direction.
Billie found it easy to follow far back in the Packard’s dusty wake as it passed small settlements and isolated homesteads.
Eventually there were no settlements, no houses.
A kangaroo hopped across the roadster’s path and Billie slowed just in time, the other roos in the troop blinking at her in the darkness just beyond.
Past the remote Upper Colo church and cemetery, she caught his headlamps as he turned right far ahead.
Windows down and headlamps off, Billie drifted along the narrow moonlit road, feeling the summer air and taking in the scents of eucalyptus, citrus orchards, and the wildness of the bush.
She sensed the damp proximity of water, the Colo River, she supposed, probably slow-moving and low in the summer heat.
In gaps through the trees to her left she made out a silvery shimmer.
Good goddess, I hope this isn’t a trap, she thought, feeling the isolation of the place.
Her Colt was strapped to her thigh. She might well need it.
When she rounded a tree-lined bend, creeping slowly, a homestead by an old orchard of citrus trees came into view.
Was this the place Shyla had mentioned? It was the only source of light in the area apart from the moon.
Billie stopped, then reversed until it was almost out of sight again.
Yes, the Packard was driving up to the main building, having entered through a wooden gate.
Her eyes had adjusted to the dark and she could make out that it was a surprisingly grand single-level house in colonial style, elevated on short footings, with a long verandah running from end to end.
The house was flanked by various outbuildings and backed by a rugged natural ridge of some height, providing cover from the rear.
The area of roadside where Billie had stopped was too unprotected for her to remain on, so she pulled away, headlamps still off, and circled back until the bush became dense again and she could conceal the roadster from both the homestead and the road.
It would not do to have the man expecting her, after all her careful tailing.
She decided to approach the place on foot and see what she could from the protection of the bush.
Reaching into the glove box, Billie grabbed her binoculars and a battered Rayovac torch that looked like it had seen two world wars, not one.
Made hyperalert by the unfamiliar and increasingly heavy rural darkness around her, Billie stepped out of the roadster onto the unlit country road, clicked her door shut quietly, and looked around with the watchful presence of a rabbit, straining for sound or movement.
Again, she was reassured by the weight of the mother-of-pearl-handled Colt strapped to her thigh.
Her mother had always said you could never tell where the day would take you, and now with Billie’s only leads being a familiar face, a license plate number, and a conversation with Shyla that felt like a lifetime ago, she found herself in quiet moonlit bushland, far from home, far from any police station or even another house, and without much of an idea of what she might find, or even what she might be looking for.
What was the precise nature of the concerns about the girls working in the house?
Why hadn’t anyone heard from them? Were they okay?
And how was this white-haired man, “Frank,” connected to it all?
Was it mere coincidence that he’d been at The Dancers and the auction house?
The little woman in her gut knew the answer to that.
There were no coincidences here, just a nasty little circle—one she was about to become more deeply drawn into.
Moving cautiously up the road, Billie replayed what she was able to recall of the conversation with Shyla.
There’s a bad feeling about him. He has some of my mob there—four girls . . . I’m worried, Billie.