Sunlit Shadow Dance (43 page)

Then the old man sang a song, it was a song
like no other, no words but only clicks and grunts and barking
noises, but as the sounds came and went they formed into a melody.
As the melody swelled so too did the crocodile, growing in size and
power, glowing with light. He filled the pool and still he grew as
the melody grew. Now his tail touched the ocean and his head
dwarfed the bodies beside him.

At the crest of the melody he
opened his own mouth, teeth yellow, jaws gaping wide.
Ever wider went his
mouth, as if sucking the whole world into his being. To Vic it
seemed his spirit had flowed out of his mouth and now enveloped
Susan and the old grey crocodile man. Their bodies became
shimmering outlines within this other presence. For a time that
seemed to last forever this world stood still.

Then the crocodile barked. He barked the
bark of a male reclaiming his territory. It shook the sky and the
water like a thunder clap.

And then there was silence.

The man started tapping and
singing again,
loud first, the volume diminished slowly and then dwindled
to nothing. As the music subsided, so did the crocodile, first
growing smaller, then sliding backwards and down until all that
remained was the water.

The man stood and took Susan’s hand. She
stood beside him. He signaled for her to walk back to the others.
She walked on her own, barefooted in the dust. Vic looked at her;
she looked back at him and smiled. For a long time he had just held
her smile, she was so precious to him. Then he reached out and
touched her and she was returned to him.

After, neither she nor Vic could ever
properly describe what happened on that day. But some things they
knew, the old man had sung the supreme crocodile spirit and the
spirit had come.

Then, as the music rose, the spirit of that
crocodile had come into her mind. It joined with the other
crocodile spirit which lived there, absorbing it into the greater
being. It had filled her ever more completely, until it was all she
knew. When it had captured the whole of her own crocodile spirit it
had barked. In the bark it had reclaimed its own, a part of its
territory reassumed.

With that done it slowly slid out of her
mind, and then it was just her again. Part of her felt sadness for
the thing she had lost, part of her felt peace that she had long
forgotten. It just was not there anymore, but no longer was there a
place of absence that restlessly searched to be filled, a void
requiring presence. She felt empty but content. She was Susan or
Emily no longer, she was only Jane again; she had chosen that name
to be free of the spirit. Now it was gone that name belonged best
to her.

Now she was
Jane but with more, a part
Susan of old seemed to have come back too, driven to do things, to
achieve, to catch up for her missing years. The memories had not
returned, that must be something else. But in their place was a new
found will.

She applied herself to the
adoption of her new son, and in three months they greeted
Nathaniel off a
plane in Darwin. She applied herself to getting Vic to set up in
his helicopter business, she employed a lawyer to draw up the
contract for the lease of premises at Darwin airport, she sourced
and leased two machines, a small one for mustering and a large one
for the heavy lifting. She found a second pilot, someone that Vic
told her he could work with.

Vic went
along with her in all her
endeavors, his heart overflowing with gladness. Maybe now she was a
bit manic and bossy, but she was his Susan of old, oozing willpower
and determination, unstoppable. He loved her so.

Her belly gr
ew bigger with their second
child but still she powered on. She bought a house in Darwin, big
enough for her whole family and for all her friends to visit at
once if they chose. She assembled and edited Vic’s Afghan
ancestor’s story, a story of a man in whose footsteps walked her
husband, someone who had abandoned his home for a woman he loved
and made a new home across the sea to which his bride to be
promised to come. But she had never come and he had never returned.
The bride of his dreams married another. But then he had found a
dark skinned girl and loved her instead. One day she would publish
it, a story deserving to be told.

However, most of her time went into
winding up her inheritance from Mark. She catalogued and
progressively liquidated the properties and assets that Mark had
acquired; only the stones she did not touch.

When it was done there was more
than ten million dollars sitting in a bank account. All the debts
and bequests were paid and enough remained in other places to meet
any needs that she o
r Vic could foresee.

So she asked Anne to call for a
meeting of the Trustee’s of the Lost Girls Trust. She asked Vic to
come with her to the meeting in Sydney
. When all were assembled she asked
if she could speak.

She said, “The man who caused
all this to begin was once my friend
and lover. I knew him only as Mark Bennet.
When he died he left me all that he owned. My husband was named the
executor of his will and together we have made all the bequests he
asked. Then we sold all the assets which were unneeded. Their value
was a small amount more than ten million dollars.

“
Even though I believe that Mark
was overall a good man, I know he caused harm to others. So, I have
decided to do two things.

“
The first is to donate the
money left from his estate to this trust.

“
The second is to give his diary
to the trust, on the condition that it is maintained for anyone who
wants to read it to know of the man. I ask that it be kept
somewhere safe, where anyone who wants to know of the man, can read
it. The reading of it may give to some of those he knew, or those
who knew them, some greater level of understanding or
comfort.”

With that she
laid the diary on
the desk in front of her, hers no longer.

Vic took it from the place where it rested.
There was something teasing at his mind, it was from the time when
he had found the will.

He remembered there were other
papers in that place too
; another sheaf of several sheets. He had
forgotten them in all that had passed since.

He opened the back cover and
looked at the gap from wh
ere the will had come. It was still unrepaired. He
eased it open and looked within. The sheets were still there. He
took them out and laid them on the table before him. The first
sheet was in Mark’s writing, saying:

In the event that this diary becomes the
property of another after my death, I have decided that I should
record the places where I buried the persons of whose deaths I tell
in this diary.

I hope one day to have the courage to meet
Elfin and Belle’s parents and tell them about their daughters and
how and where their lives ended, but each time I have set my mind
to do this my courage has failed me.

After this
sheet each other piece of paper
had a name and a diagram, a hand drawing with names and numbers.
The first was labeled Elfin, the second was labeled Belle, the
third was labeled Josie, the fourth Amanda. The fifth name was
George Davis. Vic tried to place George Davis, the name had some
ring of familiarity but he could not remember. Then, as he looked a
second time it came to him. It was the man that Cathy and Jacob had
sought, the missing uncle of Cathy Rodgers.

Vic said to all assembled. “Just for now
we need to keep these sheets of paper. From what I can see they
tell of the places where Mark buried those he killed or who died
while with him. This information needs to go first to the police
and their next of kin.”

He handed the final sheet
to
Jane
saying, “You should ring Cathy and tell her of this.”

*

Two weeks later
Alan set off. The
district police were happy to do the site visits locally and see
what they found. But Alan wanted to be there himself, to see with
his own eyes, to record each detail and come to his own point of
closure with this man, Mark. He did not know if he hated or pitied
him, but certainly it was a strong emotion that ran through him
each time he thought of this name.

It had become much more personal since that
day when Sandy had almost joined the crocodiles, the way he had
been rooted to the spot and unable to move, except somehow Vic had
the willpower to break free.

Before that he had a desire to help the
girl Susan, and not have her blood on his hands. It had been
personal, sort of. But when she had drawn Sandy into that crazy
space, inside her head full of crocodiles it had become fully real
for him. Now he knew just how powerful was the destructive force
associated with this man. He had been dead now for three years, but
yet he still shaped events from beyond the grave. And, although
Alan could not see how, he sensed that there were yet more dangers,
seen and unseen, in following this man’s trail to the
end.

So Alan was determined that he, and only
he, of them all, would go first to see. The others could make their
own visits later if they wanted. Both Jane and Anne were heavily
pregnant now, so he had David and Vic on side. Strangely neither
woman protested overmuch; perhaps it had shocked them all to the
core just how dangerous the last trip had been. Cathy and Jacob had
protested most but they had their own trip to make to try and find
the Uncle. He was the one where what happened was most clear but
the location was not. Sandy had been unexpectedly quiet.

So now Alan was off on his own. A
policemen from each locality was coming with him, to help interpret
the clues. First stop was Birdsville, where his chartered plane
would land. He would be collected there by the local policeman,
Fred Howard, who would come with him, as they worked their way
east, following the directions to the place named for
Elfin.

They could have come another way but Alan
wanted to retrace the journey which Mark described he made from
Birdsville to this place. Mark had noted in small writing,
alongside the diagram he had drawn.

I followed the
directions
of the old miner from Coober Pedy, the way he knew from
thirty years earlier. He came from Birdsville so I came first from
Birdsville. His directions were good.

So they began as Mark had begun those years
before, taking the road through Betoota towards Quilpie. Before
they reached the junction for the next main road they looked for a
sign to Four Mile Tank. Three miles along that they took a track
that brought them north along the edge of the Beale Range. From
there the roads were little more than goat tracks, but they still
existed as roads used by miners and stations.

Eventually, after another tortuous half
day of driving, with several dead ends they had to backtrack from,
they came to a collection of old mine sites spread out across some
broken and rocky low ranges. The station owners had fenced these
off to keep cattle from falling down mine shafts.

They knew this must be it;
there was a river channel below that fitted with the river Mark
described. It was not flowing now though the ground was lush with
dense
grass,
still with green shoots from last summer’s rain.

They searched through the knee high grass,
seeking the rocks Mark had carried to make the shape of a boat. The
river bank was a mud channel with rocks mostly absent. They found
the occasional one amongst the grass.

For two hours they searched as the
followed along the contour of the river bank, having only found the
odd solitary rock. The sun was getting low. They had spent a long
day driving and now searching. They both had cold beer on their
minds and agreed to stop when they got to the next bend in the
river. The rest could wait until tomorrow.

Then Freddie who was working the down
slope while Alan covered the upslope called out, “Two rocks
together, make that three. Bloody Hell, I think this is it.” They
cleared away the long grass. It was it, the place sought, quite
unmistakable, boulders the size of footballs that Mark had brought
from the hillside, making a boat shape ten feet long by five feet
wide.

They gazed in awe at the effort it must
have cost for a single and solitary man to dig a hole this size,
place a boat and a body in it and then fill it again and carry
these big stones to make this rocky memorial.

Mark had simply said in his
diary,
“I
dug a hole by the river, big enough to take the boat. I carried her
cold body in my arms down from the mine above.

“
I placed her into the boat with
the opals she had found. Perhaps they will pay the ferryman to
bring her to a happy place. After I filled the hole I carried rocks
from the hill to mark the place in the shape of the
boat.

“
God I miss my Elfin
Queen.”

Next day a team arrived from
Brisbane in a helicopter, with a pathologist to complete the
excavation. To
Alan’s surprise Sandy stepped out of the helicopter, along
with her Queensland colleague. She had been determined not to argue
with Alan. But once she knew the find had been made she had caught
the night jet to Brisbane and, with her powers of persuasion, she
was here for it too.