Out of Alice (21 page)

The grey eyes glinted in the light as he turned his head, the skin about them creasing in the half smile she had come to love. ‘Both,' he said.

There was cattle on Kileys, their dark shapes standing and lying in the shade of the bloodwoods about the bore. They watched apath­etically as the vehicle nosed past to halt on the creek bank under the white-trunked gums. The little copse of bright-green trees broke the drabness of the bare earth and Sara pointed to them. ‘What are they?'

‘Whitewood. You find them in soft country.'

She cast a bemused look about at the brazen sky and barren ground. ‘You call this soft?'

He shrugged. ‘Softer, then. It's sand country. Grows wattle, whitewood, eucalypt. Not solid mulga. You'll see wild hibiscus here when it rains, and a little desert rose too. Not exactly fern habitat but still.'

He built a fire with quick, economical movements and when the tea was made they sat on the same log as on her first visit to the bore and ate the sandwiches Helen had prepared. It was very peaceful: a pair of finches, their twittering tiny in the stillness, hopped and fluttered along the trough's edge, and were presently joined by another pair. The jaws of the cattle moved as they chewed the cud. The occasional flap of their ears, dislodging attendant flies, sounded plainly in the silence. Sara sipped her tea and let go a long breath that she seemed to have been holding since that moment at the gate when her stalker got out of the car.

‘Am I imagining it, or is it cooler today?'

‘Nope. It's being under the trees. They lose moisture through their leaves and the breeze moves it about. Nature's air conditioning.'

‘Of course. God, I just thought, Jack! It's a school day and I walked out without a word – and Beth's only just got home. I hardly said more than hello to Sam. We should get back.' She would have jumped to her feet save that his hand had closed over her wrist.

‘Relax, Sara. You've had a big day today. Besides, the station owes you more than a couple of hours off. Beth's not a tyrant, you know.'

‘Of course not, but —'

‘She and Mum will manage. And you can catch up with Sam later, he's too excited to be home again to miss your attention just now. Meanwhile, what do you want to do about Markham? I'll dump him back to the roadhouse, if that's your pleasure. Or you can hear him out – trust me, he'll have a proposition to put to you or he wouldn't have come all the way out here.'

Sara looked distressed. ‘He wants to splash my name and picture all over the papers,' she said. ‘What if it's not true, any of it? I don't want to feature in a media scrum.'

‘Yeah, but think about it for a minute. If you don't talk to him, chances are he's still going to write something.
Is this the missing twin? Could this woman hold the clue to a decades-old mystery?
That type of stuff. You heard him say he's been chasing the story down for twelve months. So one way or another he'll write it, factual or speculative. With Blake dead he doesn't even have to worry about libel. If it comes to that, can you defame a criminal? He hasn't got a good name to worry about.'

Sara frowned, green eyes troubled, and he shook her wrist lightly. ‘Look, it's okay. You've got the Ketches in your corner, remember, and the Calshots. Whatever you decide, we're here for you. You're the best damn governess the mulga's ever seen. Nobody will care what the papers print. Not out here.'

Her smile was grateful. ‘Thank you, Jack. I love your family, all of them – and Marilyn is a fool.' Hurriedly, cheeks pinkening a little for the last phrase had slipped out, she added, ‘You think I should talk to him, then?'

‘Only if you want to, but it does seem possible that he knows something. If we find out, for instance, what put him onto you, how he connected the dots – if indeed he has.' He raised a hand to stop her interrupting. ‘Yeah, I know, why no ransom? Why hang on to you? All of that. But maybe he's got answers. I just think it won't hurt to find out. And maybe –' he gently tapped her forehead, dislodging her hat as he did so – ‘talking to him might shake something loose in here, so that you can definitely say that yes, that happened or no, it didn't.'

She heaved a sigh. ‘All right, then. I will.' She glanced at him. ‘I don't know whether he's right but a bad thing did happen to Ben. Something came back to me just for a second or two when I was lost in the dust storm.' She bit her lip, remembering.

‘Hey, you weren't lost,' Jack assured her. ‘You showed good judgement turning your back on the storm and sticking with the animals.'

‘Okay, so when I wasn't lost,' she amended. ‘It was just the briefest flash of recall that didn't make any sense at all. We were in a dark place, Ben and I, and scared stupid, and somehow I knew I was losing him. I was screaming my head off. And that was it.'

‘You mean literally dark?'

‘Yes, everything was black. We were crying and wishing we hadn't done whatever it was. And then I knew . . .' She swallowed. ‘I'm sure of that much. Benny
is
dead, even if the grave and the cairn aren't his.'

This time Jack put his arm round her and gave her a hug, her hair a soft cloud under his chin. ‘We'll find out,' he promised. ‘It has to be better to know, Sara.' He patted her back before glancing at the angle of the sun. ‘Come on, let's go home and make a start.'

Driving back Sara spoke out of the silence that had fallen between them. ‘If we were twins . . .' She trailed off, unaware of the scrub flashing by or of the unfinished sentence. She was in a state of turmoil, caught up in surmise and sadness. Was Ben the shadowy presence she had subconsciously missed all these years? Could their being twins be the reason she felt, deep down, they had been closer than most siblings? Or did all young children feel that way about the brothers and sisters nearest in age to them?

‘Paul said, didn't he, that we – they – lived on a station.'

‘Yeah,' Jack agreed. ‘Vin-something. I'd never heard of the property name, so it's not in the Centre. Might be in Queensland I suppose, or Western Australia – anywhere really. Your father, if he
is
your father, owned a couple according to Markham.'

Sara frowned, saying reluctantly, ‘That would fit with some of what I've remembered.' Her memories of collecting eggs and of the dog. At that moment the name slipped smoothly into her head. Astonished, she spoke the name aloud. ‘Bindy. Our dog was called Bindy. She was red, with a thick coat and a dark patch over one eye.'

‘Sounds like a cattle dog,' Jack mused.

‘She was the same age as us.' Sara's eyes widened as the implication of the words struck her. ‘We
must
have been twins, then!' She hardly knew how to feel about it and sat silent for the rest of the trip, her index finger tapping repetitively against her thumb.

At Redhill Paul Markham paced aimlessly about the homestead garden, thinking that he had never seen a drearier, more isolated place in his life. It was like some tiny outpost stuck down in the middle of the Gobi Desert, supposing they had scrub there. The women were inside, and the men off somewhere amid the collection of rusty-looking sheds.

None of them knew anything useful. Sara Blake had been a complete stranger, it seemed, who had simply answered an advertisement for a governess. They were full of praise for her abilities, and knew damn-all about her past or where she presently was. While the rest of them were drinking tea, the bolshy bastard had shanghaied her out of the place and driven off to God only knew where.

Paul cursed himself again for taking the Greyhound. He should have dealt with the expense and hired an off-road vehicle. He had taken his own car only as far as Alice Springs, having been warned it wouldn't manage station tracks. He would have to rely on getting a lift back to the roadhouse before he could leave, which he had no intention of doing until he'd obtained the confirmation that he'd come for.

He didn't hear the Toyota's return and started in surprise when Jack spoke from a few feet behind him. He was flanked by Sara.

‘Seeing you've come all this way, we'll hear what you've got to say. Give us a hand to get some chairs off the verandah first.'

‘Okay.' Paul brightened, not prepared to challenge Jack's use of
we
. He flicked a look at Sara and smiled. ‘Thanks, and I want to apologise for entering your flat. I feel bad about that. How did you know I'd been there?'

‘I saw you. I had a migraine and came home early.'

‘Christ!' He banged the heel of his hand against his forehead. ‘Then I sent you flowers. You must've thought I was the worst sort of creep.'

‘The jury's still out on that, mate,' Jack said coldly. ‘You gonna gimme a hand or not?'

Seated in the garden as the sun westered and the evening breeze rose to bring the sound of the goat bells coming home, the journalist took Sara carefully through the evidence he had compiled. A call had come in to the paper the November previous, which by good luck he'd happened to take. The man on the phone had a story to sell and wanted to meet him. Markham had demurred. The caller's speech was a little slurred, making him hard to understand; he suspected he'd been drinking or was high on some drug. He was, he admitted to his listeners, brushing him off, and the man must have known it for he suddenly blurted,
Yous'll wanna hear this. I know what
'
appened ter the Randall kids.

Well, of course that changed things. The story might have been a couple of decades old but every journalist knew the background to JC Randall's financial rise. How, following the loss and presumed death of his abducted children and his wife's subsequent suicide, he had turned his back on his grazing interests and moved first into trucking and then commodities. The pundits had said that the country boy would be out of his depth in the big end of town but he had proven them wrong, rising above tragedy to conquer in the boardroom. His bid to bury the past was less successful: reporters regularly disinterred his history as a footnote to every column in which his name featured.

‘So you met him,' Jack cut in. ‘What did he claim to know? And where did he get his information?'

‘You should be a journo yourself,' Paul said sourly. ‘I'm telling you, all right?'

The man was a deadbeat with a record. He and Blake had been in prison together and he claimed to have learned it from him in the last year of his life.

‘Blake just up and confessed?' Jack was sceptical. ‘He admitted to a capital crime that coulda got him another, I dunno, twenty years? And all this to another crook?'

‘Not exactly. According to my informant, who shared a ward with him in the prison hospital, Blake wasn't aware of what he was saying. It happened when he was dosed up on painkillers. Blake had prostate cancer that metastasised to his bones. That's what killed him. He rambled a bit when he was drugged, apparently. Ordinarily he was a cagey bastard, my caller told me. Mind you, so was he. I never got his real name and he wanted five hundred for the information.'

Jack was incredulous. ‘You paid him? For that, a yarn anyone could spin?'

‘I gave him a fifty,' Markham said curtly, ‘then I started digging, and the more data I amassed the more it fit together. Blake pulled that bank job, which was a bust, by the way. Blake and his mate got away with less than three hundred bucks to show for it. Anyway, Blake lit out for the Territory till things cooled off, which puts him in the right state when the kidnapping went down. The way I'm thinking, he needed to score again and he lucks onto JC and his family, and follows them out into the bush.'

‘And you know Blake was in the Territory at that time because . . .'

‘Because I trawled through the old registration books in half the pubs in Alice Springs until I found his name. So yes, he was there all right.'

Sara spoke for the first time. ‘But how could he have known that Randall had money?'

‘That I don't know,' the journalist admitted. ‘Somebody might have mentioned he was a grazier. That automatically makes him wealthy in most people's eyes. Or he might have just looked well to do. An expensive vehicle, a fancy camp rig – your regular middle-class bloke. Blake might've reasoned that he'd have savings, a house to mortgage, who knows. You're not gonna argue with someone holding your kids, are you?'

‘If he was in the area, how come the police never put two and two together?'

‘Because he shot through back to Adelaide, then got banged up for the bank robbery. They were hunting him all right, but for another crime altogether. The state and territory armed robbery squads wouldn't have been searching for kidnappers. Blake wasn't given bail so he was on remand until he was sentenced, which happened just after young Bennett's body was found. The police weren't looking in jail for their kidnapper, either.'

Jack pulled abstractedly on a knuckle until it cracked. ‘There's an awful lot of
mights
and
maybes
in that lot. How'd you come to latch on to Sara? Weren't both kids supposed to be dead?'

‘Not according to Blake. Well, Blake's alleged ramblings. He claimed his old woman had her.' He looked at Sara. ‘I tracked you through the electoral rolls. Lucky for me you were still single. I figured they must've changed your name to match theirs and when I had a list I went looking for redheads of the right age and found you.'

So if she had kept Roger's name instead of reverting to her old one, he would never have found her. ‘How did you know my hair was red?'

‘It seemed likely. Your mother's was,' he said, and she felt a strange frisson at the words.

If he was right, she had a mother other than Stella. But also, if he was right, that mother was dead and she had further grief to face. Sara swallowed and pushed her hair back, catching Jack's concerned glance as she did so. It steadied her.

‘I still don't know what you want from me. If I can't remember, then I'm afraid I can't help you.'