The Leaves Forget, page 9
“You need to talk to us,” I say. “Tell us what we need to know and we’re gone. There’s no need for any more of this. Okay?”
26
JUSTIN’S MOOD CHANGE is extreme. From the aggro determination of when he had the shotgun to the trembling fearful whip before us now, I almost feel sorry for him. Almost.
“Why did you point a gun at us, dude?” I ask.
“Eli said people were looking for me.”
“We just want to talk.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“Did you think the people looking for you meant you harm?” my dad asks him.
Justin nods, looks down. There’s a deep purple bruise forming on one side of his chin where the flesh is swelling, stretching his grey and blond stubble. I’m still impressed with my dad’s outburst of violence, I never knew he had it in him.
“I’ve had dealings with unsavoury people,” Justin says. “Thought maybe . . .” He lets the sentence trail away.
Andrew and I spare each other a glance and I can tell he’s thinking the same as me. What kind of people would a guy like Justin Kirby consider unsavoury? Then again, that’s pretty judgemental. We really know nothing about this man.
I crouch before him so he doesn’t have to look up to answer me. “Listen, Justin. My sister is missing. Has been for months, and we’re trying to track her down. We know she got mixed up with a bunch of people including Jonathan Drake, Peter Franks, and your boy, Matthew Kirby.” I see Justin wince at the names. “You know the group of people I’m talking about, right? Obviously you know your son, but Jonathan and Peter too. Yeah?”
Justin sniffs, shakes his head slightly as he rubs at his bruised chin, but it’s a rueful movement, not a negative. “Children are arrows and we’re the bow, mate.” He looks up at me, his eyes defiant. “We try to give ’em a good start, send ’em in the right direction, but once they’re in flight where they land has nothing to do with us. We have no control over it.”
“That’s bullshit,” my dad says. “That’s called abdication of responsibility. You can have as much or as little influence on your children as they’ll let you, but there’s always something. And that attitude of yours is sure to alienate any kid.”
“So maybe I never fucken wanted kids!” Justin spits. “You ever consider that? The fucken wife insists on kids then fucks off with some fucken SCUBA instructor and leaves me with two bastard fucken teenagers who hate me. They was both gone by the time they was sixteen.”
“Matt has a sibling?” I ask.
Justin’s eyes track back to me and he calms. He’s clearly angry with my dad, probably because it was Dad who shamed him with a punch. “Younger sister. She lives on the mainland now, writes me sometimes. She’s not so bad. Matt was always a cunt.”
My dad growls and I hold a hand back to him, palm out, to stop any outbursts. We need Justin to keep talking, not clam up. “Okay, I get that you never got along with your son. I don’t need to know your family politics. I’m sorry you had such a rough time of it, I really am. No one deserves that.”
Justin eyes me suspiciously. I wonder how often in his life anyone has been kind to him. I wonder how his father treated him, how far back this trauma goes. But it’s not my job to fix anything.
“I just want to find my sister, okay? Do you have any idea where Matthew might be?”
“You said it yourself. Him and Jonathan and Pete were thick as thieves since high school. They’re all up at Jonathan’s place in Deverin. Have been for years, doing their dodgy fucken rituals and whatever weird shit they’re into now. I haven’t seen Matt for at least five years.”
My stomach chills again, my heart drops. No. This can’t be the end of the trail for us. “We’ve been there. The place is abandoned. They’ve all moved on somewhere.”
Justin shrugs. He looks up at me, then Dad and Andrew standing behind me and shrugs again. “Dunno what to tell you.”
“Anything, please. Is there anywhere they might be? Any property owned by Matt or Pete? Another place owned by Jonathan?”
“His mum is here in town. Jonathan’s mum. Ask her, maybe?”
“We did. She doesn’t know anything.”
Justin stares at us, his dark eyes suddenly boyish. Lost. “They’re doing harm, aren’t they.” It’s not a question.
Dad comes and crouches beside me. “They are, Justin. And it might already be too late for my daughter. But I can’t give up on her.”
“It must be good to have children you want to protect. Children who respect you. These are your kids too?” He nods at me and Andrew.
Dad puts a hand on my shoulder. “This is my son, Craig. That’s his partner, Andrew. I’m Clive. Please, Justin. Can you think of anything?”
Justin squints from me to Andrew and back and a million possible outbursts dance through my mind, then he just nods softly. His mouth is tight, but his lower lip quivers almost imperceptibly. He will never cry in front of strangers, but I wonder how much good it might do him to let it all out. To bawl and shout and rail. “Matt kept talking about her farm.”
It was almost too quiet to hear and all three of us strain slightly forward. “What’s that?” I ask gently.
“My ex. Matt’s mum. Her family had a farm. She grew up there, fucken hated the place, but we’d go and see her parents once in a while. It was always fucken horrible. Anyway, Matt loved the place for some reason. He always bugged Julia about it, when was she going to inherit it from her parents, and his mum always told him to shut the fuck up about it. She’s an only child and said when her parents died the farm would be hers and she’d sell the blighted place the moment the deed landed in her hand. She needed the money. She was always after money. Matt always said she’d better sell it to him and she laughed it off, like he’d ever make enough of himself to afford a property. Anyway, I heard on the local grapevine a few years ago that that’s exactly what happened. Where he got the money I have no idea, but apparently he did buy the place off Julia. Fuck all of ’em, whatever they’re up to.”
Justin’s shoulders slump after that speech pours out of him and my sympathy for the man is increased tenfold. What a litany of sadness, for every member of his family and, it sounds like, all those peripherally attached. But my heart rate has increased at the news, because it’s a lead. If Matt owns a place like that and they had to abandon the conclave in Deverin . . . They might have gone there. We have to look. “Where is it?” I ask Justin. “This farm.”
“Clarendon Road, just north of St Marys.”
“St Marys?”
“Yeah. Long fucken way,” Justin says, staring at the ground. “Julia’s family were east coasters. It was called Breaker’s Farm back in the day, don’t know if it still is. Flower farming, supplying florists and shit. But Julia’s parents weren’t very good farmers. Her dad used the back paddocks to grow weed and that’s how they made most of their money.”
“Thank you.” I put a hand on his knee and he looks up at me.
“Really, thank you,” I repeat. “We appreciate this.”
“Is there anything we can do?” Dad asks. “Do you . . . do you need anything?”
“I need you to fuck off. I told you that at the start.” Justin’s dark eyes are belligerent, but he’s a broken man. That guy who runs the caravan park said Justin was loopy, but he’s not. He’s as sane as any of us, just broken inside.
Dad nods, stands. “Thank you.” He walks back to the car, Andrew beside him.
I stand and start to follow.
“If you find him,” Justin calls out. We all pause and look back. Justin stares, his haunted gaze roving back and forth between the three of us. “I don’t know where it all went wrong,” he says eventually. “Even as kids those three were into some nasty shit.” He shakes his head. “I dunno. I hope you find your girl.”
27
“ST MARYS IS FIVE HOURS AWAY,” I say as dad heads back down the driveway. “Turn left at the end and I’ll direct you. It’s right across the state from here.”
I glance in the side mirror and Justin is still sitting on the chopping stump, one hand pressed to his bruised chin, staring after us. Then he’s lost to view as the driveway curves and Dad turns back onto the road.
“We really going there?” Andrew says. “It’s our only lead now, right?”
“Yeah.” Dad’s fire has gone out a bit after the violent outburst, his eyes hooded. He looks so tired, all of his years and maybe more. “And if they’re not there, we’ll get some information at least. We don’t quit.” He flexes his hand. It’s clearly causing him pain from where he hit Justin.
“Dad, pull over. Let me drive.”
He looks at me, seems about to protest, then nods once. “Thanks.”
We switch and I pull away, my phone with the map open in the holder mounted on the dash. It’s a little after nine-thirty a.m., we have all day to get there. Dad rings Mum, fills her in without too many details, tells her where we’re going and that he loves her, then we drive in silence. It seems no one has anything to say.
I guess we’re all thinking the same stuff. How lives can turn sour. How some people don’t even get a start, but are born into generational trauma. It’s not an excuse for anything, of course. But maybe it’s a reason.
After nearly an hour we come around a bend and traffic is at a standstill ahead. Maybe a dozen or so cars we can see, then another bend obscures the front of the line.
“Weird to see this many cars on a quiet highway like this,” Dad says.
I pull up behind the last car and we sit and wait.
“Roadworks?” Andrew asks.
I shrug. “Maybe.”
After nearly ten minutes, with us all offering more and more outlandish possibilities for the stationary traffic, a grizzled-looking guy in his forties or fifties climbs out of a Toyota sedan ahead of us and starts walking along the white line. His breath plumes in the frozen air.
“I was thinking of doing that myself,” Dad says. “Now I don’t have to get cold and we can ask him when he gets back.”
After a few minutes, the man returns, face clouded with annoyance. He stops and chats with each car as he passes it on his way to his own. Another couple of vehicles have pulled up behind us. The cars he’s spoken into start making three-point turns and heading back the way we came.
The man pauses at his door and makes a “turn it around” gesture at us.
Dad opens his door, stands up on the sill to talk. The blast of cold air into the heated interior of the car is breathtaking. “What’s up?”
“Ice on the hill,” the man says, gesturing back over his shoulder. “A truck lost control and overturned, right across the road, both lanes. There’s no way around and it’ll take hours for them to clear it. Turn around and head back.”
More cars are turning and heading past us, annoyed faces over their steering wheels.
“Damn it,” Dad says, sitting back down.
The Toyota sedan starts its three-point turn and the cars behind us have got the message and they’re turning too. I start to match them and Andrew holds up his phone in the back seat. “You’ll have to go back as far as Zeehan, then turn south to Queenstown and take the A10 to head east that way. It’ll add at least another two hours to the journey.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Dad says. “Nothing we can do. Let’s just get there as soon as we can.”
We drive all day. A couple of toilet breaks and nearly an hour around midday when we stop to eat. “Got to stay strong,” Dad says, and that fills me with a kind of dread.
It’s nearly six p.m. and dark by the time I pull into a service station just outside St Mary’s and fill up with petrol. When I get back in the car I look at Dad, then turn to Andrew. “We good?”
“I looked up Breaker’s Farm,” Andrew says. “Googled it. But nothing came up. I’ve found Clarendon Road on the map. I guess we just drive along it and look?”
“Guess so.” I turn back to Dad. “We doing this now?”
“Why not?”
“In the dark and all?”
Dad gestures out the window. “Full moon tonight. And clear skies. Even where there’s no streetlights, we’ll be able to see plenty. And if these bastards are staying there now, I want to talk to them right away.”
Full moon. It feels somehow fated, pregnant with potential. Heavy with some meaning I can’t grasp, or perhaps don’t want to, and I do my best not to think about it.
“Okay.” I put the car into gear and follow Andrew’s directions for Clarendon Road.
28
BREAKER’S FARM LOOKS at first like a regular house. Small, old, mostly weatherboard with a brick foundation. There’s a gated driveway, the gate itself wooden and aged from the elements, with “Breaker’s Farm” branded into the top crossbar. Otherwise there’s just the street number on the gate post, no other signage. I wonder if we would never have found the place if they’d replaced the old gate. There’s a parking area off to one side of the house with a large double garage on the far side, an established garden of trees and roses to the other. It looks nothing like a farm. But in the bright moonlight we can see beyond the house and there’s a big California barn about a hundred metres further back, and what looks like an old truck and tractor near that. It’s impossible to know how much land extends beyond the house.
We sit in the car, engine idling, right outside the driveway. There’s a light on over the porch at the front door and a few lights inside as well. Someone’s home.
“Look.” Andrew points to the far side of the garage where a battered old box-back truck is parked under the shadow of old trees. “That’s like Liv described, right?”
“It is.” My heart ratchets up about four times faster and I share a glance with Dad.
“Park,” he says.
I pull forward and up to the kerb and I’ve barely killed the engine before he’s out and walking back to the farm gate.
“Dad, wait!”
Andrew and I are only a few paces behind as Dad strides in through the gate and stomps up to the porch. He hammers on the front door with the side of one fist.
Nothing happens. No sound from inside, no movement we can see. Dad moves side to side, tries to see in the windows, but all the light is diffuse through closed curtains. He hammers the door again, and still nothing.
“Let’s try around the back.” Dad is off before we can discuss it. I feel like me and Andrew are simply being pulled along in the wake of his desperation and rage.
We walk around the house and there’s a large back deck with a table and chairs. A scrubby lawn extends beyond that and a low picket fence marks the boundary of the garden. The driveway extends past the garages, where the box-back truck is parked, and then past the California barn and the tractor. The ground is relatively level, a couple of large paddocks beyond the garden fence gone thoroughly to seed. A rugged track, two channels through the grass like vehicles regularly use it, travels from the side of the California barn between the overgrown fields. Gum trees stand here and there, and the bush thickens beyond the paddocks.
Dad walks up onto the back deck and flings open a screen door, hammers again. There’s a light on in the kitchen and no curtains. It looks entirely domestic, thoroughly normal. A kitchen table has three place settings. Three stained dinner plates sitting there. Three mugs.
Andrew steps up beside me and I point. “Jonathan, Matt and Peter?”
He nods. “Could be.”
“The fuck are they?” Dad spits and I’m about to suggest maybe they’ve gone to the pub in St Marys or something, perhaps we can sit in the car and wait, when a sharp, high scream rings out behind us and is rapidly cut off.
We spin around, staring across the long grass and weeds in the direction of the sound. I feel the bright full moon staring down at me.
Andrew points a little to the left of where I’m looking. “There.”
It takes a second, then I see it. A dull orange glow, flickering slightly. “A fire?”
“Looks like.”
“Let’s go.” Dad strides off again.
“Dad, wait! We might need . . . I don’t know. We might need to be prepared, you know?”
He looks at me, eyes narrowed a moment, then scans the back yard. His gaze lands on a small metal shed, about four by three metres. “Garden tools?” he suggests.
My stomach is watery, but I nod. We dig around in the shed and when we emerge thirty seconds later we’re armed like refugees in some apocalypse story. Dad has a hefty axe, rust-spotted but sharp. I’m holding a half-metre crowbar, heavy, black anodised metal with a cruel split hook in one end. Andrew has a ground-breaker shovel, its shield-shaped blade reflecting the light of the moon. The clear night makes the air ice cold, but my blood runs colder. Dad strides out again, axe held tight across his chest.
“We really doing this?” I ask.
“What else?” Dad says.
Andrew puts a hand on my shoulder. “With any luck we won’t need this stuff. We’ll talk to them.”
“You heard that scream,” I say. “What if it’s Liv?”
“Let’s just get there!” Dad says, and doubles his pace.
Andrew and I fall in behind him, walking single file along one of the tyre tracks through the fields, heading for the dull glow of the fire deep in the bush.
29
OUR BREATH PLUMES in the moonlight as we walk. My teeth are gritted as much from fear as against the cold. It feels like an endgame of some kind. What if that was Liv screaming?
“This full moon . . .” Andrew says, then his voice peters out.
“What?” I ask. Has he been thinking like me?
He swallows audibly, then, “I’ve been trying to add stuff up in my head. Stuff Liv said.”
“Spit it out, Andrew,” Dad says.
“Okay, well Liv’s last letter said that she messed things up for Jonathan. She thinks he tried to kill her, but she screwed up his plans. He told her he needs to start the Commitment of Three again.”
