Chapter 42
EVAN
I went to the verandah, shouldered the screen door open, stood there listening.
I was waiting for the approach of Martin Rodger, the neighbour to the east, upon hearing the gunshots.
‘Uncle’ Rodger, as Arthur had bitterly dubbed him, had been storming over from the direction of his similarly hoarded and unkempt property intermittently since Russell and I were kids, reacting to gunshots, the smell of smoke, loud music or the animalistic whooping of teen boys in the wild strip of forest that separated the two slabs of land.
I counted off five minutes, hearing only the sound of distant ride-on mowers, bugs buzzing, dogs barking.
Country sounds. Then I went back inside.
One of my father’s feet was rhythmically twitching, like he was revving an engine in his sleep.
Blood was pooling everywhere, black and inky, following the patterns in the linoleum.
I was emotionless. Hard, cold, moving from one action to the next.
I went to the bedroom, tugged the comforter from the bed and brought it into the kitchen.
The foot-twitching stopped. I rolled the old man onto the comforter, wasn’t shocked by the soft, breathy groan that came as air moved around in my dead father’s lungs.
I tucked the top and bottom of the comforter into the bundle, rolled the man twice more, and then hefted him onto my shoulder.
I took him down through the long, wet grass to the third shed along a winding row of leaning aluminium structures filled with rusting trash.
I heaved the bundle onto the ground, pulled up the door and went in, opening the front passenger side of Dad’s current main car, a Ford Falcon sedan.
In the footwell, I spied what must have been Chloe Lutz’s laptop and phone, quiet, still, the batteries removed and lying on the mat beside them.
I didn’t even move them. I ratcheted back the front passenger seat, loaded the bundled comforter with its swaddled body into position and shut the door.
My breath was coming in short, dry huffs, like I was jogging back to the house, not walking.
Working my way through the miles and miles it took to murder a person, a marathon.
I was staying focused, talking myself out of the impulse to stop, to give in to the exhaustion.
A big, cheerful yellow sun was rising above the eucalypts.
Lorikeets tinkling. I went to the house, walked around the blood pool that was left where Arthur had died and into the laundry off the kitchen. I started gathering supplies.
It took a good half an hour to clean up the blood on the linoleum.
A garbage bag full of rags, towels, paper towel, sponges.
There was blood spray on the kitchen window over the sink.
On the cabinets. In their handles and hinges.
When I was done cleaning, I went into Dad’s bedroom, changed into a set of his clothes, and took an old duffel bag from the shelf, dropping my sopping and bloodied and gunpowder-dusted clothes into it.
I zipped up the bag, tucked it under my arm.
Taking the garbage bag with the used cleaning supplies and my bloodied clothes in the bag, I went out and walked it back to the car where Dad lay waiting for me.
Driving beside my father, I gripped the wheel, stared ahead, told myself that the bundle slumped beside me contained bones and flesh and blood and nothing else.
Arthur was gone. He was gone. I tried to believe it.
But the hope always came side by side with the terror of disappointment. They were siblings, those two.
My phone rang in my pocket. I slid it out and answered it, my eyes locked on the road ahead.
‘Where are you?’ Russell asked. No hello. Nothing.
‘Dad’s.’
‘Good,’ he said. ‘You’re already halfway to Sydney. I have two jobs for you, and one involves going back to Pemulwuy. To evidence holding, this time.’
As I drove my murdered father towards the nearby river, my brother explained what had been found in Chloe Lutz’s phone and email accounts.
Linda Special, Marian Richley, and the unnamed teenager from Womerah.
‘She might have been on the edge of something enormous here,’ Russell said.
I could hear the excitement in his voice.
‘She might have been about to solve a case that’s been around twice as long as she was even alive. ’
‘Maybe,’ was all I could say. My jaw was chattering and my fingers were tingling on the steering wheel. Shock finally kicking in.
‘I want to keep my feet on the ground about this,’ Russell said. ‘Not get carried off with the fairies too quickly. Because it’s a very long shot. The guy would have to be in his seventies at least.’
I looked over at the bundle beside me.
‘So, I’m not dropping the angle with the lanky kid with the cap,’ Russell said. ‘I want you to get Fry to send you the image from the CCTV, and I want you to organise a region-wide SMS blast. Tell him to get it to the local press. The ones coming into town.’
I managed to breathe the word ‘Okay’.
‘At Pemulwuy,’ he went on, ‘get them to tell you what they have in evidence holding for Linda and Marian’s cases.
Linda’s husband says there was never any DNA.
But they can run everything again. The technology is better now.
We might get something. And if we can link Linda and Marian’s guy to Chloe’s killer … ’
Russell trailed off. I held a hand against my mouth so I wouldn’t gag.
‘Anyway, go do that,’ he said. ‘Now. Stop rubbing your father’s tootsies for him and get back to work, and while you’re leaving, tell him I said to do the world a favour and go fuck off and die.’
‘He might be about to do just that,’ I said.
‘What?’
‘He’s got cancer.’ I cleared my throat, adjusted my grip on the wheel. ‘Dad. He’s got lung cancer. He’s packing right now to go up north for a while. Hasn’t said exactly where.’
‘Oh, Evan,’ Russell said, ‘I wish you’d saved this news for me for later on today. It’s too early to get stuck into the champagne.’
I didn’t answer. Russell drew a breath and let it out, long and slow and loud, a huge sigh that crackled the line.
‘This’ll be great,’ Russell said. ‘It’ll be like The Time He Went, only better.’
I remembered. The time our father disappeared on us for six months, a period known as ‘The Time He Went’ in Powder Brother lore.
Russell had been sitting his HSC, and I had been struggling with a minor weed addiction and a particularly bad bout of teenage acne.
We’d woken up to find the old man and his Ford Fairmont gone from the driveway, which wasn’t unusual.
Dad ran his own schedule. Was sometimes there, sometimes gone.
But he hadn’t been back when we returned from school.
And he wasn’t there in the morning. The relief turned to excitement, barely contained.
The teenage Russell and me had felt it was safe enough to relax a bit in the third week, to truly celebrate in the fourth.
Dad had taken off for a couple of weeks or a month at a time before without explanation, so we figured we’d better start enjoying ourselves, quick, before he popped up again.
We’d gone fishing all that weekend, had a big fry-up, stayed up late watching TV, got into the liquor cabinet.
We’d carried the guns out into the bush to take pot shots at tin cans.
We’d lit fires, talked freely without looking over our shoulder, called people on the house phone, gone visiting with girls.
We’d cleaned the house from top to bottom, mowed the lawn, lounged on the verandah steps with beers on our knees and sweat on our necks and watched the bats flying over.
Russell took the books he kept hidden under his bed out and started reading them in the living areas of the house and leaving them lying around.
I’d started playing music on the speakers in the lounge room and sang loudly along.
Selling our services door to door and through friends at school as lawn-mowers, rat-catchers, junk-haulers and fox-hunters, we’d made a good living, kept the fridge full and both put on weight.
My acne cleared up, and I’d given up the weed.
Russell got taller and started sprouting a beard.
It was like, with the old man gone, we were forgotten plants getting their first drink of water and sunlight.
And then he was back.
I drove my dead father through the dark back fields now and remembered that day. Hearing the Fairmont on the gravel drive. The dream dying the way everything died—without warning, without a chance to negotiate, to beg for one more day.
We’d refer to The Time He Went now and then, over the years, Russell and me. Dad would do something horrible, and one of us would say, ‘Remember The Time He Went?’ and the other would smile.
I knew then that I couldn’t give in. That I couldn’t let a connection be made between Arthur Powder and Chloe Lutz, or Arthur Powder and Linda Special, or Arthur Powder and Marian Richley.
Because then people would come looking for my father.
This wasn’t just about saving Chris anymore.
It was about saving myself. I needed this to be The Time He Went and Never Came Back. Because I deserved that. We all did.
Sever the connection. The one Chloe had made.
Then all they had was Chris and Arthur at the pub that night.
Dad’s DNA was on the girl, yes, but nothing else.
No reason for him to be watching her. No motive.
No hidden secrets. The past staying in the past, and not becoming my future.
I’d take Chloe’s phone from the footwell now and head back to Redbelly with it, after I’d done what I needed to do at Pemulwuy.
I’d put Chloe’s phone and laptop in the Branch house somewhere.
Wait for them to connect the dots. It was all about connecting the dots, completing the circle, making it neat enough that the truth of it all would be carried away on the current.
I rang off with Russell and disposed of my father’s body in an unremarkable spot in the river that snaked through a patch of crown land not far from the old man’s house.
I was determined to watch, as I rolled the car into the water, pushing from the rear, my dad’s shoes on my feet sinking into the mud.
With all the windows cracked and the handbrake off, the vehicle slid easily into the deep and started spewing bubbles.
I stretched my eyes, took it all in, the roof sinking away, the bubbles still rising and rising until they finally stopped.
I was afraid to blink. Expected the man to come bursting through the surface.
Like Jaws. Like Godzilla. I saw myself wading out to gather Arthur in my arms, pulling him back towards the shore.
Crying my apologies. My promises. Because the tears that were streaking down my face now were coming from a brain screaming in that child’s voice, I’m sorry, Dad, I’m sorry.
It was an extreme act of willpower to turn and walk away. I managed it. Managed the few kilometres walk back to the house, to my car. I carried Chloe Lutz’s phone and laptop in my hands all the way there. I started the engine and pulled out and drove away, heading for Sydney.