Goodwood (12 page)

When they returned, after what seemed like less than ten minutes, Lucas looked all puffed up, like he was leading a parade, and George looked like she'd just seen a disappointing fireworks display. She kicked me, indicating it was time to go, and we had walked home along Cedar Street under the tall and naked trees.

George's seventeenth birthday had been two days earlier. ‘I am a whole year past my age of consent,' she had said. ‘So, I don't know. I consented.'

That seemed like an insubstantial reason to have sex with Lucas Karras to me, especially given the fact that he ended most sentences with an upward inflection—like every single thing was a question? But I did appreciate that Costa Karras had raised a pleasant-enough son and that Lucas couldn't help the way he talked.

‘How was it?' I asked.

‘I don't know, maybe it's been hyped up too much. Like when we finally got to go to Pet Porpoise Pool in Coffs Harbour,' said George, in a more amused tone than I'd expected. ‘You know how when you blow up a balloon and let it go? And it just goes
pffffffft
in circles really fast?'

I was laughing by then and George was laughing, too. She seemed genuinely entertained by parting with her virginity.

‘Poor Lucas,' I said. ‘A bit of an anticlimax?'

‘Not for poor Lucas,' said George.

We walked to the corner of my street, where George goes the other way to the wrong side of the tracks, and I go up the hill towards the mountain. There was not much moon. That was when we could still walk our separate ways, alone in the dark, and not even think a bad thing could happen. That was when Goodwood was still peaceful and quiet—‘a safe town' as Bart McDonald would say—and Rosie was months away from being missing.

‘Maybe it was his first time, too?' I suggested, in Lucas's defence, standing on my corner.

‘Nah. He fucked Liz Gordon's little sister twice—he told me.'

‘Amy Gordon? Isn't she thirteen?'

‘Apparently she's very mature,' said George, smiling. ‘Either way he kind of sucks at it. But, shit, Jean, what do I know? I bet all the boys here suck at it. I bet Toby sucks the worst, followed by the rest of Year Twelve.'

George had ambled off towards the train tracks that night, looking much the same as she had before this momentous event had transpired; and I had wandered up the slight hill towards the mountain feeling strangely disappointed about that and, as a result, about everything.

I was not sure what I thought about Lucas and George—back then in autumn, or that afternoon on the oval. I was not sure what I thought about Ethan West, either. And yet
I agreed to half watch them kick the football back and forth to each other while we lay on the grass and ate hot chips fried by Derek Murray.

We listened to them jeer each other jovially when a kick was bad. We watched them show off when a kick was good. George mock-clapped. Lucas yelled at us in good humour. Ethan looked up a few times to see if I was watching, and George elbowed me and coughed.

‘Where do you think she is?' she said, after a lull in conversation.

‘Who?' I asked, as the faces of Rosie and Evie both popped into my mind at the same time.

‘
Rosie
,' said George. ‘Who the fuck else is missing, Jean?'

‘Bart?'

George looked annoyed. The mood turned. Ethan had fallen over and Lucas was being uncharitable about it.

‘I don't know,' I said. ‘But, you know, I don't think she's dead.'

I'm not sure if I really thought that or not, or if I just said it to be it optimistic. Maybe I was trying to reassure George; or reassure myself.

George ate the hot chips very slowly off the butcher's paper. She put them in her mouth one by one and chewed them carefully and swallowed and took another.

‘I do,' said George. ‘I think someone did something to her.'

Then she pushed the chips away. I folded the paper over them and we sat wordless for a long time. Ethan had picked himself up. His knees were muddy. Lucas looked out of breath. George lay back on the grass and closed her eyes. I watched the football go up and down and up again. I flinched at the dull
ooof
that echoed across the oval with each kick.

17

Mack had spent three days asking everyone he saw in town if they'd seen any sign of the McDonalds' stolen Corolla. Nance, who kept a close eye on Cedar Street from her counter, had not. Neither had Helen or Bill; or Faye Haynes; or Smithy; or Val Sparks; or Carmel Carmichael; or Robin Clunes, who ran Bookworm; or Roy or Derek Murray. Mack asked everyone in every house he happened to have business in, as well as their neighbours, his neighbours, our neighbours, and the ladies at the CWA. It was a no from Carl White, and a no from Mal West, and a no from Davo Carlstrom and his bogan uncle Lafe.

Mack went around especially to see Judy White when Carl wasn't home. When asked how she appeared, he said she quivered. Not in an obvious way, but when she'd made him a cup of tea, the milk went in shakily and she spilt a few drops on the counter.

Mack took his mug and they sat on the couch for a spell. Judy shook her head and said, ‘There's just nothing,' and Mack had to agree—that after three weeks there was no sign whatsoever of Rosie.

It wasn't as if Mack hadn't followed any leads; it was that there were no leads to follow. If someone had meddled with Rosie, they hadn't left a trace. If Rosie had run away, she hadn't left a trace either. If she'd headed off to her Cousin Tegan's, she had never arrived.

Mack had spoken to Tegan and Alison on the phone three times since Rosie disappeared and they were near inconsolable. And just to make sure they weren't trained actors, Mack called the Ballina police and asked them to sniff around. Tegan went to work every day at the Big Prawn; Alison went to work every day at North Coast Cleaning Services. They lived together, mother and daughter, in a fibro two-bedder. The Ballina police reported that Cousin Rosie from Goodwood was nowhere to be seen.

‘You know how many long-term missing we've got in New South Wales as of July?' asked a serious-sounding Constable Marcon in Ballina.

‘A few hundred?' guessed Mack, on the other end of the phone.

‘Mate, we've got eight hundred and sixty-one long-term missing. That's long term. And we got another four hundred more recent cases. You see the kind of number we're dealing
with? My brother heads up Missing Persons in Sydney. They're slammed. Around here we're dealing with runaways all the time. A lot of people don't want to be found. You reckon you got a runaway?'

Mack didn't know. Some days he reckoned that, sure. Rosie brooded. She kept to herself. She had an air about her—what was it?—like she was closed off from the world. Or damaged. Like she didn't want to be talked to. Maybe she did just run. But why would she? And even so—if she did or didn't—most days Mack had darker thoughts. All he knew for certain was that unless he was dealing with a bunch of terrific liars, no one in all of Goodwood had seen Rosie after she shut her bedroom door that Sunday night. And no one had seen her since.

Again he asked Judy, as they sat in the Whites' musky, carpeted living room, if there was any reason that Rosie would leave. Again Judy said not that she could think of. Again Mack asked, were there any problems at home? Again Judy said, nothing out of the ordinary. Again Mack persisted, but this time, with his new-found knowledge of Carl, he persisted more strongly, and in a more direct fashion.

‘What about Carl, Jude? Do you think he could've had anything to do with this?'

Judy didn't answer. She just looked horrified, like Mack had brought shit in on his shoe and wiped it all over her good rug.

‘I'm sorry, but I have to ask,' Mack said.

Judy quivered. Her tea was like a rough sea in her cup as she held it.

Finally, she managed to say, ‘He's got his faults but he's not a monster,' and looked at Mack grimly. And Mack was left with nowhere much else to go.

‘I'm not saying he is, Jude. All I'm doing is my job. You know how sorry I am—I'm so sorry—I'm just trying to piece this thing together.'

Judy became colder as Mack continued, and eventually he thanked her for the tea and stood up to leave. As he did, he asked one last question, and that was answered with a no: Judy White had not seen the McDonalds' stolen Corolla.

After their awkward encounter, Mack drove out to the browned grass where the cars park by the boat wharves. It was his seventh trip there since Bart had vanished; he'd been keeping notes. He drove out of town along the long road that hugs the river and rounds the mountain; he passed the rest stop just before the bridge, where a fresh kangaroo was mangled on the road, just a few metres from the old one. Ravens were nipping at its flesh and Mack drove right through them, as they flapped off, and tried to suppress the nausea he always felt when he saw them. He drove past the spot where Fitzy hit the railing; and, just after, he went over the high bridge, above the brown water, and along the fast flat road where he liked to ponder. Eventually he pulled up to the spot where the boats bob, and the river became the lake.

He stood there and stared out with his binoculars, hoping the two glass circles would reveal a glimpse of Bart. When they didn't, and Mack had done his customary search of the bankside marshes, he got back in his car and drove back over the bridge towards town.

Past the rest stop on his way home, Mack could see Kevin Fairley's little dairy, and his cows eating grass in the paddock. Kevin rarely came into town. He mostly did big shops at the Woolworths in Clarke so they'd last him enough time to stay on his farm and be with his cows. He had been blessed with a wife for forty years, Susan, but she died of cancer at Clarke Base Hospital in 1988, the year we had a bicentenary parade at school. Kevin sought comfort in his herd. While he was forced to sell off almost half of them when Susan got sick and could no longer lend a hand at milking, he still had forty-five cows—a mix of Jerseys, Friesians and Brown Swiss—and moved them weekly from paddock to paddock, wherever the grass grew greener. Kevin Fairley was known to moo to his cows, on a daily basis. He lowed and made deep sounds. His cattle dog, Remington, barked, and Kevin mooed and the cows mooed and the man and the dog and the cows made a three-part harmony under the silent sky.

Mack drove back into town that day, turned off along the road near the clearing, and went all the way alongside the river to the Fairley Dairy.

‘G'day, Kevin,' he said, when he found Kevin in the sheds.

‘Constable,' said Kevin. ‘To what do I owe the honour?'

‘Ah, just off on a drive, thought I'd pop in,' said Mack, even though he'd not once popped in to the Fairley Dairy before.

They shot the breeze a little. Kevin was sorry to hear about the troubles—he'd seen Nance at the Fosseys in Clarke and she'd been very pleased to fill him in. Mack agreed it'd been a tough few weeks.

‘Not a good thing,' said Kevin, shaking his head.

‘I don't see you much in town,' said Mack.

‘I don't come much into town,' said Kevin. ‘You know me.'

But that wasn't true. Mack didn't know Kevin at all, because he didn't come much into town.

‘Big job doing it all by yourself.'

‘Oh, I manage okay,' said Kevin. ‘Don't know how to do anything else is the truth of it. I get some problems with off-flavours from time to time, but I manage okay.'

‘How's that?'

‘Lately a bit weedy. Usually a bit barny,' said Kevin.

Mack nodded and had no idea what Kevin was talking about. Then he brought up the stolen Corolla and asked Kevin if he'd seen it.

‘I seen how your paddocks run along the road out of town just now when I was driving in, so I thought I best come and ask you,' said Mack.

‘Well it's a good thing you did,' said Kevin, and told Mack the short story of what he'd seen.

Three Saturdays ago, he'd been moving his herd from the paddock that almost spills into the lake into the paddock that starts at the dairy and ends up closest to town, next to the clearing. The road out of Goodwood was long, since it had to meander around the river. But if you walked from the clearing where the willow was—where the money was—and down along the edge of the river, along the brim of Kevin's paddocks, you got to the bank of the lake in less than half an hour.

That's where Kevin was walking, but in the opposite direction—towards town—when he saw an old white Corolla parked on the road that forked off from the clearing and headed into the bush, where it stopped a short time later in a cul-de-sac of trees. He could see the road from his paddock, and that's just what he did. He saw it; and on that day, there was a car there.

‘It looked like it needed a moment to itself,' said Kevin.

‘The car did?' asked Mack.

‘That's right,' said Kevin, and Mack wrote it down.

Kevin didn't know the car belonged to Bart. He thought Bart drove a Commodore. Or a Hilux. And that Mrs Bart drove a little blue Mazda. Mack said that was all true, but some people never have enough cars.

Kevin was sure he'd seen the car on the Saturday at dusk, because he always moved his cows to that paddock on Saturdays at dusk. Mack asked him if it was there the
following Saturday, at dusk, but Kevin didn't know. He'd moved his cows, but he'd walked high on the paddock and hadn't had a view of the clearing. He was sure, however, that on the Tuesday after that, at dusk, it'd been gone. He'd seen a report on
Four Corners
that made him worry about his heart, so he'd started taking an evening constitutional, and he started them that Tuesday, two days after Bart disappeared. He'd walked all the way along the perimeter of his paddocks with Remington, and they went right past the clearing. The car was gone.

‘So it could've been there for over a week?' said Mack.

‘Well,' said Kevin, ‘I suppose it could've,' and the two men were quiet for a moment. ‘Or it could've been less.'