One Sunday (8 page)

Even at this time of day Kennedy's new house looked hot. It was locked up tight. Big windows, three on the eastern side, all hostages to that sun and not a tree to shade them. Until his marriage, Dave Kennedy lived in a two roomed hut, near hidden by shrubbery, and to Tom that hut looked a damn sight more habitable than the house – or this morning it did.

Not many in town locked their doors, but with the railroad running through his land and a lot of freeloaders jumping on and off that train at the crossing, and with those fruit pickers camped in his river paddock, Kennedy had no doubt learned to keep his house locked up tight.

Using his cupped palms as blinkers, Tom squinted through the windows as he worked his way around the house. Not a lot to see, until he came on a bedroom, the double bed stripped, the bedding piled on the floor – odd, or maybe not in certain cases. That was pretty much the way he left Rosie's bed if she had an accident in the night.

He should be getting home to her instead of poking around down here, but it was early yet. She wouldn't be waking for a while and Kennedy should be back soon. He carted fruit for the cannery, left at dawn and was usually back before eight.

The shade of a big old timber shed beckoned to him. He walked over to it and inside found a kerosene tin bucket overflowing with peaches – probably pig food, but Tom wasn't fussy when it came to peaches. He helped himself to one.

Kennedy was fussy with the making of his kero buckets; he'd slid the fencing wire handle through a piece of rubber hose. He had a dozen or more of them, all with that same handle. Easier on the hand than wire when carrying a loaded bucket.

Every family in town owned a kero bucket or two. Just remove the top square with the trusty old tin opener, hammer down the jagged edges, take a length of strong fencing wire, bend it to shape, hook the ends through two nail holes in the sides, and you had a new lightweight bucket at no cost. It stank of kerosene for a while, but time took care of that.

A lot of kerosene was used in this town. Each night in both well-to-do homes and hovels, table lamps, functional or fancy, received their measure of kero. There was a smell about them, always a whiff of kerosene. Tom's washhouse smelt of it – that's where he kept his kerosene tin – and he always managed to spill a bit while decanting enough off to light his night.

How had man survived without kerosene? And how would he continue to survive in this town when the electricity finally came and he didn't have his constant supply of kerosene tins? Lightweight, square, and twice as tall as they were wide, they came in handy for a hundred uses.

‘Beautiful peaches.' He helped himself to another one. He wasn't accustomed to wandering around before breakfast – there wasn't a lot of early morning police work in Molliston. It was the wrong thing to do, eating peaches on an empty stomach; they'd probably go straight through him, but that pain was for later and the pleasure for now. He sucked the flesh from the stone, then pitched it in a different direction to the last stone, spreading the evidence like a guilty boy.

Kennedy's peach trees were loaded, the fruit was ripe, and there wasn't a picker in sight. Maybe they started late on Sundays. No fun picking today – that sun was already burning down.

He took out his notebook, a pencil stub attached to it by a length of twine, and he scribbled a brief note, walked back to the house and slid the note beneath the front door. Of course, a lot of folk never opened their front doors. He wrote a second note.

Mr Kennedy. Time is now six am.
It was now near eight, but the first time he'd pedalled out here it wasn't.
Please contact the police station at the earliest opportunity. Thompson.

He slid the second page beneath the back door, ripped off a sprig from some dead shrub and poked it in the keyhole, just to catch Kennedy's attention, then he did the same at the front door, hoping the twig wouldn't break off and jam the lock. He pulled it out, and it came out intact, so he pushed it back in again. A bloke with a locked door couldn't miss those twigs, which might make him see one of those notes instead of walking right over them.

His notebook and pencil suggested he ought to write his few thoughts down – before he forgot them.
Missing handbag? Upended bedroom. Kennedy left for cannery around four-thirty.
That information had come from Mason, who had heard the truck start up and seen the headlights through the trees while he was collecting wood to brew up a billy of tea.
Party dress,
Tom wrote.
Party handbag?

To Tom's knowledge, there'd been no party in town last night, apart from Murphys'. Rachael wouldn't have been there. The Murphys and the Squires didn't move in the same circles. No dance on, nothing happening at the RSL club, no movie show, so why the party dress?

Party at the Squire house?
Tom scribbled, nodded, liking that theory and trying to follow it. Kennedy had maybe left the party early, knowing he had to deliver those peaches, thinking his wife would stay there the night. That girl had done a good bit of traipsing backwards and forwards since her marriage. So why had she decided to leave her parents' house and walk home? Could she have walked all that way in high-heeled shoes? Maybe. That girl had done a lot of walking, though why walk further than necessary? She would have come over the bridge and straight down Railway Road, which led to Kennedy's gate.

Anyway, what the hell did a bridegroom of three months think he was doing, leaving his pretty little wife alone at a party? That's looking for trouble. And a thirty-six year old bloke who looked fifty, had a gimpy leg, the personality of a cod and the face of a mangy fox in winter, had no right in marrying a pretty little girl of eighteen, and Nicholas and fat Olivia Squire should have stopped her from doing it too. And what the hell had that little girl been thinking of, wanting to marry up with him for, anyhow? ‘Which, I suppose, is none of your flamin' business, Thomo.'

He glanced in the direction of Dolan's hotel, only a few hundred yards away – if you followed that short cut through the bush. There was a party down there every Saturday night, which no respectable young lady would be seen at for love or money, though not all of the young ladies in town were respectable, even some of the more respectable ones. Tom shook his head, aware that thought hadn't surfaced in quite the way he'd thought it, but it was a fact.

With that swarm of pickers in town, he should have had a poke around at the pub last night. Hindsight is a bugger, but he'd got Rosie settled early, and in such situations you make certain decisions. Not that he'd got much sleep. Again he scratched. That damn helmet made his head itch. He removed it, raked at his scalp. His hair, once a nondescript brown, was greying at the temples, so why did his whiskers still grow through black?

‘Go home, have some breakfast and spruce yourself up a bit,' he said.

At the gate, Tom considered his options. A ride straight up Railway Road would take him home to Rosie. A right hand turn and down over the railway crossing would take him to the swimming bend and to the pickers' camp. Squire's land was on the far side of the river, miles of it, forests of it, sheep by the thousand, beef, fruit trees, a manor house surrounded by the finest garden you'd be likely to see outside of Melbourne. Nicholas Squire had money to burn, and he'd never done a hand's turn to earn it.

The Johnsons ran the place. When Tige, their oldest son, was alive, Tom had knocked more than a few times on the Johnsons' door. Kids everywhere, heads popping out from beneath tables, around doors – like a plague of redheaded, red-eyed mice. He'd seen the lads shearing sheep before they were as big as the sheep they shore, had seen little girls standing on boxes hanging out the washing while fat Olivia and her daughters lived the life of ladies.

As the crow flew, the Squire house was less than half a mile from Kennedy's gate, but Tom couldn't fly, he wasn't dressed for swimming and his legs didn't feel like making the ride up that hill, out over that bridge, all the way around and back again – or not before telephoning and making sure they were there.

‘A man of my age, expected to cover the territory he's expected to cover, shouldn't have to push a bike,' he said. ‘A man of my age should be driving a car.'

About to mount and ride, he noticed the imprint of a woman's high-heeled shoe in the dust. Rachael had been wearing shoes with heels, and one of those shoes had probably made that print.

‘So she walked away, she wasn't carried from this place.' He found another print, and a good one, and it was heading for Merton Road.

‘She's walking,' he said, moving forward, eyes searching the dust. ‘She's still walking here, and still alone, Thomo. And there she is again.' He tracked those shoe prints ten or twelve yards up Kennedy's Road before he lost them.

‘You'll never make a black tracker, Thomo.'

With Merton Road and the hotel close by, he stopped. He'd have to have a word with the widow Dolan sooner or later, a waste of time or not. Why not do it while he was down this end of town?

‘Go and get her out of her bed, Thomo,' he said.

 

Tom had knocked on Harry Dolan's door more regularly than he knocked on his widow's door. Born and raised in that pub when pub hours had been pretty much as you like it, Harry had considered six o'clock closing as a personal attack, brought in by the government purely to ruin his business. He'd ignored it.

His widow, city born and bred, made a good show of complying by the laws of the land, closing her bar room door at six on the dot on weeknights, but every Saturday night she had a party in her cider pit, and had some lying coot lined up who'd swear black and blue that he was throwing the party, that the drinks were on him. She had a fundraising get-together every Sunday afternoon, served tea and scones in the cider pit – or so she said. He knew she was selling grog in there. Where she hid it, he didn't know; he'd wasted a lot of time during the early months of her widowhood, creeping up on that pit and trying to find out.

Len Larkin spent half his life at the pub, though he wasn't a heavy drinker. Other than losing half of one arm, Larkin was one of the few returned boys who'd come through the war unscarred. He, Dave Kennedy and Tige Johnson had been the only survivors of Molliston's 1914 football team, until Tige went mad one night and blew his brains out on Squire's front lawn.

Tom parked his bike in the shade of an overgrown pear tree, heavy with fruit, remembering the last time he'd parked it there when he'd ended up threatening to charge the widow with everything from selling grog after hours, to selling herself. That woman always put him at a disadvantage, always sent his good sense scattering like a flock of cockatoos off a wheat paddock.

He checked his watch. No sign of any life down here – however, it was now well past rising time for normal folk, and if the widow wasn't one of the normal folk, then that was her problem, Tom told himself as he marched to her front door and rapped hard on it.

No sound from within. He hammered that door, near ringbarking his knuckles before it opened and a wild frizz of red-gum auburn hair came through it.

‘Oh, it's just you, lovey. Drop your trousers in the hall and put your two bob on the table,' she greeted him, one amber eye mocking him, the other hidden behind that hair.

He lifted his chin, but not his helmet, which was on a level with the top of that hair this morning, only because the doorstep gave her an extra five inches, though the widow Dolan was no midget; Tom had touched six foot two and a half when he'd joined the force.

‘A sensible word or two this morning, thank you, Mrs Dolan.'

‘Oh, don't go all official on me now, lovey. They call me Red in the bedroom.'

‘They call you a menace to decent flamin' society, that's what they call you! Your mouth needs hosing out with turpentine.'

Shouldn't have said that. Always saying the wrong thing with this woman, but she had a tongue on her that drove him to it. Every time he had to deal with her, he ended up suffering from foot-in-mouth disease.

He'd known her in the city a long time ago, and knew a bit too much about her. That was half of the problem. And she knew that he remembered her – and that was the other half of the problem. Not that he'd told anyone in town what he knew – or ever let her know he remembered her. She'd come to Molliston as Mrs Harry Dolan, so he always made a point of calling her Mrs Dolan.

The drinkers liked her, the teetotallers wanted to be rid of her, but that pub had been in the Dolan family since the coach service to Merton ceased, when the Dolans went into the production of apple cider. Harry continued the family tradition, and had gone through a lot of his own cider in sixty-odd years. He'd gone through three wives too, then wasted no time in finding his fourth, who he'd wed in the Molliston Catholic church. This one, apparently more than a match for him, had him back in that church in a box twelve months after the wedding.

After the funeral she'd committed the unforgivable sin of selling Harry's twenty acre bottom paddock to Joseph Reichenberg, which had got a lot of the old guards' backs up. There were a few in town who'd prefer to lose money than sell to a German. A week after the sale, she'd taken off in Harry's truck, grinding gears and raising dust out on the Willama Road, leaving four lodgers down here to fend for themselves. Tom had been relieved to see the back of her, but she'd returned, driving a little green roadster which she'd had no licence to drive. He'd given her one, with reservations.

‘Take it slow,' he'd warned. ‘And keep it out of town until you can control the thing, Mrs Dolan.' He might as well have told the man in the moon when to rise.

By the bejesus, he resented that car, or resented her owning it, and him still pushing a bike – resented her whizzing past him, spraying grit and tooting her horn while he pushed those pedals up that hill.