Chapter 16: The First Love
The alarm bell pierced through Roxy’s sleep like a butcher knife through silk and she sat up with a start, feeling anxious and ill rested. She had hardly slept a wink, Max’s words circling manically through her brain, and as she peeled the sheets away and slipped under the shower, she could not thrust his face, his sad, defeated face from her mind. ‘Damn you, Max!’ she hissed into the water as it sprayed down upon her.
She switched herself on autopilot, thrusting a spare set of clothes and some toiletries into an overnight bag before catching a cab to the domestic terminal of Sydney airport. She had lucked upon an early morning seat to Macksland and didn’t want to miss it. In the cab she sent a text message to her mother letting her know she’d be out of town for a while and promising to call when she got back. ‘Just work stuff, nothing to worry about!’ she lied. She also checked her inbox and couldn’t help feeling a wave of relief. There were no new threatening emails. It looked like Fabian Musgrave had called off his gorilla of a brother-in-law.
The plane was on time and as soon as it departed, she dropped her seat back and fell instantly asleep. An hour later the captain woke her with the announcement that they were fast approaching Macksland. ‘We’ll soon be starting our descent,’ the flight attendant proclaimed afterwards. ‘Please ensure your seat is in the upright position and that your seat belts are securely fastened.’
Roxy did as instructed then peeped out the cabin window to see the wheat fields turn to roads and then into a small tar airstrip onto which they landed. Once they had made their way inside the tiny terminal, Roxy continued straight towards the exit sign, her bag already in hand, and towards a waiting bus.
‘You going into town?’ she asked the large, rosy cheeked woman behind the wheel and then clambered aboard. The airport was just five kilometres from the heart of town and, within ten minutes, Roxy found herself wandering its wide, ute-filled streets in search of the Information Office.
‘Lovely weather we’re havin’, eh?’ the small man behind the counter enthused when she strolled in.
‘Yes, beautiful,’ Roxy replied. ‘I’m wondering if you can help me, I’m looking for some accommodation.’
‘Not a problem. What kinda digs you lookin’ for?’
‘Oh, pretty basic, just pub accommodation will do. Got any recommendations?’
‘Damn straight I do.’ He produced a tatty map from below the desk and, spreading it before her, circled one street corner with a capital H printed on it. ‘The Shearer’s Hotel is a beauty. Thirty-five bucks for a room and breaky in the mornin’, can’t do much better than that.’
‘Sounds great.’
‘You might have to share a bathroom but the rooms are clean and, well me missus says they look like something out of a Laura Ashley catalogue book. I think that means they’re pretty as a postcard.’
‘Great,’ Roxy repeated, ‘point me in the right direction.’
The Information Officer’s wife was spot on and Roxy cheered up enormously as she entered her spacious room above the old pub. A giant four-poster bed dominated the room and, beside it, sat an antique dresser with a china water basin on top and, beside that, an old milk jug filled with wild flowers. The walls were plastered with dainty floral wallpaper and two French doors opened out to a wide wooden veranda which, Roxy noticed as she stepped out to take in the view, encircled the whole hotel. There wasn’t a soul about and she guessed the unseasonably warm weather had lured everyone elsewhere.
She decided to put all thought of Max aside and get on with the job at hand. It was not yet 10:00 a.m. and she had a full day ahead of her. After freshening up in the communal bathroom down the end of the hall, Roxy gave her glasses a good scrub, applied a little lipstick and brushed her black hair down. Then, swapping her bulky jacket for a light red cotton cardigan, made her way back to the reception desk in the pub below. The woman who had signed her in was nowhere to be found so she wandered into the main bar, which was already occupied by a motley group of men, despite just opening. She spotted a young man working at the bar and marched up.
‘G’day,’ he said, clearly surprised to see a woman in the pub so early. ‘Did ya want a drink?’
‘Yeah, give me an orange juice, thanks.’
As he poured the juice, the bartender kept one eye on the young woman, as though sure she were a mirage about to vanish before his eyes. When he placed the glass down, he offered a sheepish grin and it was obvious he liked what he saw. Roxy grabbed the opportunity and pulled the picture of the old country guy from her handbag.
‘I’m hoping you can help me.’
‘Sure,’ he said, widening his smile.
‘I’m trying to locate this man. He’s from here and I think his first name’s Frank, but that’s all I’ve got to go on. You don’t happen to know him do you?’
As the barman examined the picture, Roxy crossed her fingers. If she could locate him by lunchtime, she could be out of there in time to catch the 6:00 p.m. flight back to Sydney.
‘Yeah I know him,’ the barman said and Roxy looked at him, excited. ‘He looks like every second guy who comes in ’ere.’ He liked the look of the woman but she wasn’t real bright. It was now Roxy’s turn to smile. The guy was right. According to her own research, there were over 10,000 people in the Macksland region and a good number of them no doubt wore beat-up Akubras and answered to the name Frank.
‘Okay, smart-ass,’ she retorted. ‘I thought I’d try my luck. How much do I owe you for the OJ?’
‘Buck, twenty.’ He offered her another smile, his white teeth flashing brightly in his tanned face. He could have passed for the Marlboro Man, she thought and paid him in change. As he spilled it into the till, he drawled, ‘Why don’t you ask old Bluey over there. If anyone knows him, he will.’
Roxy nodded her head appreciatively and made her way over to a side table where a group of men were perched on stools staring out at the street beyond.
‘Bluey?’ she asked, her eyes wandering over the four weather-beaten men, almost identical but for the size of their beer guts and the color of their shirts. The oldest and smallest of the group tipped his head at her and grunted. She placed her things on the table and produced a free hand to shake his.
‘Hi, I’m Roxy Parker. I’m looking for someone and the barman suggested you might know him—’
‘Awww, you lookin’ for a man are ya love?’ bellowed another man, younger, flabbier with a wicked smirk across his face. ‘Bluey gets that all the time! Don’t ya Bluey?!’
The men erupted into peals of laughter and Roxy smiled patiently. Ah, country blokes, she thought. What a riot. She thrust the photo in front of him. ‘All I know is he’s from Macksland and his name’s Frank.’
Several of the men continued to chortle but Bluey took the picture and stared at it hard. ‘It’s old Frankie O’Brien,’ he said matter-of-factly and then handed it to the man next to him, the one with the faded flannelette, for verification.
‘Yeah, could be,’ the man said, ‘but then again. What ya want him for?’
‘Just looking him up on behalf of an old friend,’ Roxy said.
‘Who’s Frankie O’Brien?’ came the young, flabby guy and for a few seconds nobody answered. Roxy noticed that Bluey and his flannelette-clad friend exchanged cautious glances before the former said simply, ‘An old timer is all.’ Nobody uttered a word.
‘Do you know where he lives? Where I might find him?’ asked Roxy.
‘Two different questions,’ Bluey said, before dragging on a rollie cigarette as though he had all the time in the world. Out here, she thought, glancing about her doubtfully, he probably did. ‘He lives way past the Wilo turn-off. Get on the old highway and head north, take the Wilo exit and keep goin’ until you see a dirt road called Possum Shoot Road. Lives down there yonder, don’t know the property name, don’t know the number. But that’s Frankie’s place.’
Roxy scrawled this all down on the back of a beer coaster, not wanting to fluff about with
the memo page on her smartphone, not in front of these potential Luddites.
‘But you won’t find him there now,’ Bluey continued and Roxy glanced up.
‘Oh?’
‘They tell me he spends his life in church, prayin’ for God knows what. I don’t want to know. The nearest church to his place is the old Anglican just south of the turn-off. I’d bet me hat that’s where you’ll find him.’
The two younger men guffawed again but Bluey was not laughing. As she walked away Roxy thought she heard him say, ‘Poor bastard. Been off his rocker for 50 fuckin’ years.’
Within the hour Roxy had hired a rental car and, with the help of the GPS inside, found her way on to the old highway on the road to Wilo. Bluey’s directions seemed simple enough but no church was indicated on the map and the man at the rental yard had laughed at her suggestion. ‘There’s no church out there,’ he said, looking at her as if she were half-mad, ‘nothing but cows and dust.’
She set out anyway, what did she have to lose? Besides it was a beautiful day for a drive. The journey seemed to take forever and, as the rental man had warned, the road stretched for miles in a colorless collusion of dusty hills and lethargic cows that barely bat an eyelid as the weird white woman sped by. She passed few cars on this road and wondered, as she usually did, whether she had been sent on a wild goose chase, whether the blokes back at the pub were pissing themselves laughing at the stupid city chick chasing after ghosts.
‘Why do I do that?’ she suddenly cried aloud, smacking the steering wheel with both hands. ‘Why do I instantly mistrust people?’ Did she get that from her mother, too, she wondered? Or had she developed it, like her ironclad independence, so that she could never be let down. If you expect the worst from people, you were never disappointed.
When Roxy reached the Wilo turn off she felt her heart sink. It was just as she’d been warned, not a church for miles. She turned the car around and slowly retraced her drive, scanning the road for any signs of life. About ten kilometres back, she spotted a thin dirt road leading towards a clump of trees, and brightened up. She had noticed the trees on her way through but the dirt road was so overgrown it was almost obscured from view. She signaled right, despite the empty road around her, and turned slowly up the track.
As she neared the forest of gum trees, she spotted a splash of white and what looked like a steeple, and then she saw it, a small wooden church, almost consumed by the trees around it. She maneuvered her car carefully across a thin wooden bridge towards a dirt clearing in front of the church. Once it must have once been brimming with cars, today it was empty, except for a dusty ute which she knew just had to belong to old Frankie. Her heart leapt. Luck was finally going her way. She parked her car beside it and, switching the engine off, sat for several seconds transfixed by the quiet and the peeling dereliction of the unused church before her. How perfect a place, she thought, to hide away and pray.
She stepped out of the car and closed the door quietly behind her, almost tiptoeing up to the entrance. It wasn’t secrecy she was after—Frank had no doubt heard her pull up—but there was a serenity about this place that she was reluctant to disturb. Roxy straightened her hair and pulled her cardigan sleeves down. The surrounding trees had starved the area of sun and it was suddenly very cold.
She strode up to the old wooden doors and creaked one carefully open, then, hugging her cardigan closer, stepped inside. The church, which was deathly quiet, was as ice-cold as a butcher’s freezer, and just as dark. A sudden chill ran down her spine, but it wasn’t from the cold. She knew, almost immediately, what she would find, even before the rotting stench hit her nostrils, even before her eyes had adjusted to the darkness and she spotted him kneeling there, all alone.
Roxy wanted to turn away, then, to run like a mad woman out the front doors and away. But she found her feet moving despite herself, striding calmly down the aisle, as though to take communion from some imaginary priest waiting up the front. But there would be no priest today, just an old man and his hat. She focused on the beat-up Akubra as she walked, one hand covering her nose and mouth, the other clenched in a tiny fist to her side.
When at last she reached him, she willed herself to look, to face what she feared she could not face. He was slouching a little to one side, his hands still clasped in front of him, his head resting silently on top. She whispered, ‘Frank?’ knowing it was too late, and then a blur of blood, a neck slit from ear to ear and fleeing frantically back down the aisle and out, where the birds chirped carelessly in the branches above. And the horrible knowledge that she was just days too late as a stream of yellow vomit hit the side of the old ute.
The Macksland police chief was not surprised to hear that Frank O’Brien was dead, simply asked Roxy to stay put, he’d be there ‘in a sec’. Twenty minutes later, Chief Butler arrived in a cloud of dust and informed the young woman that his deputy and the county coroner were on their way. ‘Just finishin’ their lunch,’ he remarked as he shook her hand, ‘Now let’s see the old bloke.’
Roxy led the way inside but stopped before the pews and, as he went to inspect the corpse, returned outside to the fresh air. What she didn’t tell him was that she had already returned inside, despite her stomach’s objections. She wanted to study the crime scene before the cops came and whisked it all away.
‘They can’t put this one down to suicide,’ she told herself as she stared at his gaping wound, the flesh curling up at the corners where it had resisted the murderer’s knife. She could not see the murder weapon anywhere and doubted that she would. It had probably been thrown into a lake by now, or was lost in the fields beyond. It struck her that this was the perfect place for a murder and felt a pang of sadness for the old man still praying in death before her. Whatever he had known, whatever his secrets, they were not worth this. Surely they were not worth dying for.
Ignoring the stench of his decaying corpse, she had taken a pen from her handbag and used it to inspect his hands, making sure she did not leave her mark. She could not see any fresh skin under his nails or any scratching to indicate a struggle. There were no cuts under his knuckles or across his inner palm, which you would expect if he had tried to fend off a knife. In fact, he looked like he had been taken by surprise. Roxy stepped around his body to the most likely vantage point for the kill and noticed the old floorboards creak loudly beneath her feet. How had he not heard his assailant approach? Was he in such a deep trance, praying for whatever it was he needed to pray for, that he did not notice another person sneak up inside an empty, unused church? Or had he just let it happen, like a penance from God?
‘Now that’s a nasty bit of work,’ the police chief was saying as he stepped out into the sunlight again. He was a large man with a stocky build and a face that was scarred from skin cancer. A small round indent on the side of his nose showed where a deadly chunk had once been removed and he had the habit of stroking this while he talked, as though playing with a war wound. ‘He’s just as you found him?’
‘Of course.’
‘And you’d never met the man, you say?’
‘No, he was a friend of my client’s, Beatrice Musgrave—of the Musgrave department stores? You see, I’m a writer and I was writing Beattie’s biography. That is until she, um, died two weeks ago.’
‘And what were you doing here, why did you come?’
‘Well, Beattie had spoken about Frank fondly, they’d been friends since way back, and I was hoping, foolishly perhaps, that he could shed some light on the whole subject. Could help me understand her death.’ The policeman seemed content with this and pulled out his notepad to take down her details. She gave him her home address and the name of her hotel.
‘I’m gonna need to get an official statement from you back at the station.’
‘That’s fine.’
‘And I’m afraid, for now, we’d really appreciate it if you could hang around, probably just for a day or so, until we, ahhh, clear a few things up.’
‘That’s
fine,’ she repeated unperturbed. She had not yet obtained the answers she was after and this new death only made things murkier. ‘You don’t happen to have an address for Frank’s wife or any kids I can send a sympathy card to ... later, of course, once you’ve spoken to them?’
He looked at her surprised. ‘Oh he never married, no. Bit of a loner old Frankie. Mad as a hatter, they say. Actually it’s a good thing you happened by. He might have turned to dust before anyone noticed he was gone.’ He said it so matter-of-factly, as though that was just the way things were, and Roxy looked away sadly. ‘I won’t be back for a little while but just drop by the station before 5:00 p.m.’ He slammed her car door behind her. ‘We’ll get the details down and then you can go and enjoy the night.’
I’m not here to have fun, Roxy wanted to tell him, but nudged her lips into a small smile and drove slowly away. When she reached the main road she hesitated, checked her rear vision mirror making sure she was out of sight of the police chief, and then turned left, back in the direction of Wilo.
She had a house to check out.
At the Wilo exit she turned off and, as Bluey had instructed, located the dirt road to Frank’s house and headed north. As she drove along she checked the empty postal barrels that teetered on the edge of the road from time to time with their hand-painted lot numbers and flowery property names. But nowhere did she see the words ‘Frank O’Brien’. She was beginning to wonder if she was chasing ghosts again. At one point she spotted a beat-up four-wheel drive plowing towards her in the opposite direction. She considered stopping the man behind the wheel to ask for help but couldn’t risk drawing attention to herself and whizzed past him waving one hand in front of her face concealing it from view. After several more kilometres she spotted an unpainted barrel brimming over with mail. The number ‘64’ had been painted across it in a shaky hand and she was about to look away when the penny dropped. The other mailboxes were all empty. Roxy pulled over to the side and, placing the car in park, jumped out to check the letters— mostly bills and junkmail—that were poking out from within. Just as she suspected, they were addressed to Frank P. O’Brien.
Roxy reversed her car and then turned up his dirt road checking her rear-vision mirror constantly. Chief Butler would still be busy with the coroner at the crime scene and she estimated that she had at least half an hour up her sleeve, but she wasn’t taking chances. When she reached what looked like the main house, she pulled up at the front door, switched off the engine and jumped out. She needed to hurry.
Like the mail barrel, the farmhouse was old and falling down in parts, but it looked like it had been freshly painted and several empty paint cans piled under the house confirmed this. What looked like a new set of steps led up to the main verandah and a brand-new welcome mat sat below the door as clean as a whistle. Pulling the edge of her sleeve up over her hand, Roxy banged on the door several times but it was clear the place was empty, she could hear her knocks echo across the wooden floorboards inside. Keeping the sleeve in place, she tried the handle and smiled. Thank Goodness for country living; it was unlocked. She pushed it open and entered.
Just like the exterior, the interior had been freshly painted but the job had not been finished and several cans and brushes sat just outside one of the bedrooms. She glanced inside and noticed how shabby it was. It looked like it had not been cleaned, let alone painted, for over a decade.
‘Why the sudden reno’?’ Roxy whispered aloud, making her way down the hallway to the living room. It sat across from the main bedroom and a quick glance in both revealed that Frank O’Brien had had another uninvited guest recently. The two rooms were a mess. Clothes and personal affects were strewn around the room and every drawer had been tipped over, the contents clearly searched. Someone had been here looking for something, and it was most likely the same person who’d slit the poor man’s throat. She wondered if they had found what they were looking for. And if they were still around.
Roxy hesitated briefly before shrugging off her fear. There wasn’t time for trepidation. She swiftly scrutinized each room, trying to get a picture of how the old man had lived and what, if anything, was missing. If there had been any incriminating material, love letters from old Beattie, perhaps, she realized with a sigh that the murderer had no doubt taken them or destroyed them somehow. She stepped towards the main fireplace hoping to find the evidence half burned inside and scowled at its emptiness. It was worth a try. Then she noticed the mantelpiece. It was covered in dust except where several thin, rectangular items had once stood. A quick look at the floor revealed two photo frames, both smashed where the burglar had dropped them. She glanced back at the mantelpiece. There were five dust-free marks. Where were the other three frames? Carefully she checked the contents on the floor, but the pictures were nowhere to be found. They had probably been taken.
Roxy glanced at her watch and then returned to the hall, following it down to an old kitchen at the back. It was surprisingly tidy with a small wooden table in the middle and an old fridge and cooker leaning against each other on one side. Nothing seemed amiss and she was about to turn back when she had an idea. She crossed to the fridge, which, predictably, had an assortment of pamphlets, bills and a postcard dangling precariously beneath old magnets. She scooped the lot up and scurried back down the hall and out of the house, careful to cover her hand up before closing the door.
Back in her car, Roxy roared the engine to life and swung it around and away. Within minutes she was back on the old highway and heading towards town.