Chapter 25
RUSSELL
The moon was high by the time we left town.
It turned the ghost gums on either side of the road a cold blue.
Bridie drove with her eyes hard on the road, leaning forward too far, the way P-platers do.
I was glad she took the corners with care as the road ascended quickly out of the valley, not just for the sake of the ’Stang’s paintwork but because beyond the guardrail the land dropped off at a sickening angle, sheer walls studded with huge blocks of yellow sandstone.
Wallaby country. I reached over and flicked on the high beams for Bridie without saying anything, but she did a little embarrassed wiggle and touched the lever where I’d touched it, as though assuring me she would have done that herself eventually.
I settled in and called Gail Caplan, then the guys from Chloe’s apartment, then three other people.
I was clipped, getting through the calls in mere seconds, disappointed about the lack of a DNA match for Chloe’s killer.
I reminded myself to ask Evan when I got back to Redbelly just how far the techs were into their testing.
Were these prelim Y-STR results, or were they the full shebang? I made a note on my phone.
The headlights flashed on a property with a wrought-iron sign hanging out by the driveway.
Grevillea Lodge was perched up another steep embankment, a cantilever house with huge glass walls overlooking the valley.
The whole building was lit gold. Bridie parked on a river-stone driveway and yanked the handbrake up in a way that hurt my teeth.
‘Okay.’ She gave the strained sigh of the anxious performer. ‘Let’s do this!’
The oversized oak door of the house opened on a spacious entryway, revealing a slender woman in a shapeless cream linen garment I’ve known rich women to wear; somewhere between a dress and a tunic.
Cult-leader chic. Bridie hung to the side with her rescue cage and seemed to want me to introduce myself first, but I didn’t.
For an agonising few seconds nothing happened, until I gestured for Bridie to take the lead. ‘On with the show, kid.’
‘Oh, uh, right.’ Bridie stepped forward, clutching the cage to her chest. ‘Hello. I’m Bridie Powder. I’m here with Wildlife SOS?’
‘Well, thank god.’ The woman’s eyes widened. ‘Yes. Hello. Welcome.’ She turned and shouted over her shoulder into the house. ‘Damien! Damien, they’re here! The wildlife people!’
Bridie stepped into the house gingerly, moved to the side again to let me go ahead. I put a hand on the small of her back, pushed her forward. ‘What are you doing, Birds?’ I murmured. ‘You’re the wrangler, not me.’
‘Oh, I just figured you would want to, uh …’
‘I don’t want to do anything.’ We followed the linen-wearing lady through the enormous house. ‘This is your gig, Bridie. Go work your magic. I’m just the offsider.’
Bridie seemed taken by some shot of confidence.
We walked into a lounge room straight out of Habitus Living.
Bridie set the cage next to a similarly expensively dressed man: mid-fifties, with the general look of someone gently and expertly dusted off with botox or fillers, the same as the woman.
Bridie introduced herself and I hung around with my hands in my pockets, gazing at the view of the violet-dark valley and feeling poor.
‘We started hearing the noises around three o’clock this afternoon,’ the woman, who’d introduced herself as Myra, told me.
She was gesturing to a pot-belly shaped fireplace standing in a corner: a boxy, detached thing with four legs.
‘We don’t know if it’s a bird, or a rat, or a possum, or what on earth we’re dealing with. ’
‘What kind of noises did you hear?’ Bridie asked.
The couple turned to her. They’d both been staring at me, and I was slowly getting the sense that they thought I was the leader of this whole operation, the way Bridie herself had for reasons I couldn’t fathom.
The couple glanced at each other, then my teenage daughter, who was opening the cage and spreading a towel out on the base.
‘Just scratching,’ the guy, Damien, said. ‘Scratching and clawing. Whatever it is, it seems to get partway up the flue and then falls back down with a thud.’
‘Any fluttering or flapping?’ Bridie asked. ‘Peeping or chirping? Squealing?’
‘No, just the scratching.’
Bridie nodded, took a hair tie from around her wrist and put her hair up.
With her hair in a high ponytail she looked fifteen, not eighteen, picking her way to the side of the fireplace over the posh rugs and travertine tiles like she was worried about devaluing the property just by being there.
She went to the fireplace and peered in through the glass panel at the front, which was clouded with brown smoke-stains.
I watched her cup her bare hands around the stainless-steel flue running from the top of the fireplace directly into the ceiling twenty feet above us.
Bridie bent and put her nose to the seam where the tubular flue met the black top of the fireplace and sniffed loudly, drawing a deep chestful of air through her nose.
She straightened, put her hands on her hips and announced, ‘It’s an adult male brush-tailed possum. ’
The couple looked from Bridie to me and back to Bridie.
‘What?’ The woman frowned. ‘How can you tell that?’
‘If it was a bird or a rat it would have been crying out after it fell in, calling for its mate or its pack to come get it,’ Bridie said.
‘A possum would be silent. It wouldn’t want to draw attention to itself.
And it’s the animal that makes the most sense.
Possums climb down people’s chimneys all the time.
If it rains, sometimes they come in search of shelter, find they can’t get back up the flue because it’s too smooth inside.
Or sometimes a male will chase another male down there in a fight over territory. ’
‘But how do you know the species? And the gender?’ Damien asked. ‘You can’t smell that, surely.’
‘I can. It’s definitely male, just from the strength of the odour.
But as far as species goes: whatever it is, it’s so large it’s filling the entire base of the chimney flue.
’ Bridie cupped the flue again with her hands, which was about the circumference of a bread plate.
‘I can feel the warmth of its body through the metal. That says brushie to me, not ringtail.’ She turned to Myra. ‘Do you want to feel?’
‘Not one bit.’ Myra clutched at the neck of her linen thing, actually took a step back. ‘No, thank you. I won’t be coming anywhere near it. I know they can be quite vicious.’
‘I wouldn’t use that word exactly.’ Bridie crouched and eased the lever of the fireplace door down carefully, pried the door open a crack. ‘They get pretty scared and put on a performance, but they’re not gonna kill you.’
‘Wait a minute.’ Damien’s arms were folded. He nodded at me. ‘Isn’t now the time for you to get involved, mate? Before it comes flying out?’
‘I have nothing to do with this.’ I put my hands up again. ‘I’m just here for my good looks and sparkling personality.’
‘But you’re not going to remove it.’ Myra stepped towards Bridie, her face taut with apprehension, as though she meant to pull the girl back from the fireplace. ‘It’s—You should—It shouldn’t be her that does it. It should be you.’
‘Why?’ I frowned.
‘Well, because it’s—it’s—it’s—’
‘It’s a wild animal!’ Damien blurted.
‘Yes, so I’ll be leaving it to the experts.
’ I waved at Bridie. I saw a hint of a smile creep onto my child’s face, even though she was crouched at the fireplace and turned away from me.
Myra and Damien made unconvinced noises as Bridie bent, peering into the area where the flue met the top of the fireplace.
‘But, darling,’ Myra persisted, ‘shouldn’t you put some gloves on or something?’
‘Look, usually I would.’ Bridie shifted something aside at the back of the fireplace. ‘But I’m working blind here. I like to feel exactly what part of the animal I’m grabbing hold of.’
‘Oh my god.’ Myra held her brow.
‘What I’m going to do,’ Bridie said, ‘is shift the plate that separates the flue and the fireplace forward just enough so that I can get a hand in. Then I’m gonna grab his ankles and his tail and pull him out backwards.’
Myra turned away, her hand to her mouth. ‘I can’t watch, Damien. I just can’t. She’s going to get savaged.’
‘She knows what she’s doing,’ I said. Bridie looked over her shoulder at me.
Even though I could only see her eyes, I saw that they were bright.
I jutted my chin, my mind filled with guilt about the lack of confidence I’d shown in my kid in the houseboat for her serial killer theory.
‘She’s trained, and she’s experienced. Just give her some space and let her do her thing. ’
Myra, Damien and I watched as Bridie gently manipulated the steel plate from its housing, dealing with the weight of the animal on the plate and rust and ash and grit lodged between the plate and the roof of the fireplace.
I had memories of driving Georgia to these kinds of rescues when Bridie was so small she would just sit nearby on the carpet, her eyes locked on her mother and her thumb in her mouth.
I’d always encouraged my wife’s love of animal rescue volunteering and my daughter’s similar fascination with it, because in my own childhood I’d had to accompany my father on hunts, and I felt bad about the psychopathic joy he’d taken in killing and hurting things, and my inability to intervene.
Or, early on, my plain childlike ignorance of the pain and suffering of those animals.
I felt I owed a debt to animal kind in general.