The Bryants went home to their guests, Ernie went home to get an hour or two of sleep. Gertrude walked. She’d slept well before they’d come knocking and there was no sleep left in her.
The wind had dropped sometime during the night. She hadn’t noticed when. The sky to the east was growing lighter. Dawn wasn’t far away, and maybe a better dawn.
She glanced at the bloody towels, blanket and stained clothing piled against her outside wall. If she was going to get that blood out, she’d need to get them soaking. She gathered the load, carried it across to her shed-cum-washhouse, where she dumped the lot into a single wooden wash trough.
A rainwater tank on her west wall supplied the water, though rain hadn’t supplied what was in it. Through the summer months she and her horse spent many an evening hauling water from creek to tank — and they’d be at it again by nightfall. It took eight buckets of water to half-fill that wash trough, which was as much as she could do in the dark.
Little Elsie was still asleep in her corner. If she’d been aware of what had taken place in this room tonight, she’d made not a murmur. A shy and frightened little girl, it was unlikely she’d have murmured no matter what she’d seen.
Wood in the stove, kettle filled, and Gertrude walked out into the first light to cut greens for her hens and goats, to beat the birds to two buckets of apricots. Each year she made a few dozen pots of apricot jam.
She had four goats milking. It all took time. She fed her chooks, collected her eggs, and by seven was back at the trough, wringing out her washing for the clothes line.
There was a bulge in one of the coat’s pockets. She reached in and withdrew a small purse, a pretty, hand-embroidered thing, six inches by four, the type of purse a woman might like to take out with her in the evening. Using the flat of her palms, she pressed excess water from it, then carefully opened it, seeking something that might identify the woman. There was little to find. A wet ten-shilling note, a few coins, a handkerchief and a soggy piece of brownish cardboard, which threatened to disintegrate when she tried to straighten it. She was using newspaper to press moisture from it when Ernie Ogden came back, Moe Kelly and his funeral van behind him.
Moe took the stranger away. Ernie stayed on to drink a mug of tea and to study the stranger’s purse and its contents. The cardboard was still damp, but once flattened, it proved to be an old luggage label. Destination was printed clear, printed black, but where that destination might have been wasn’t clear. The ink used was red and had bled. They could make out a definite T and maybe what could have been an R or a P, then a clear V and a very definite Wood followed by a C, which had to be Woody Creek.
‘The T and V could be a name.’
‘Tom Vevers,’ Ernie said.
‘Could be.’
‘I’ll have a word with him.’ He spread the handkerchief on the table. It was a white lace-bordered thing with a blue JC embroidered in one corner.
‘She didn’t leave us much to go on,’ Gertrude said.
‘She could be one of Jenner’s Italians. I’ll get out there when the hour’s a bit more reasonable.’
‘You know his infant was born with a crippled foot?’
‘I heard. Damn unfair. He went right through that war, you know.’
‘Damn unfair.’ Gertrude turned again to the handkerchief. ‘At least we’ve got her initials.’
‘I wouldn’t place too much store in initials on a hanky, Trude. Folk find, borrow, lend, steal hankies.’
‘It looks like her — fits with what she was wearing. Dainty, pretty, city things. And look at that shoe.’
‘Not the sort most would choose to go walking across the countryside in.’
‘It screams of city store to me,’ Gertrude said. ‘Everything about that woman screams city store and money to spend in it. The frock she was wearing — the beadwork alone on it must have taken someone hours, days, to do. And I probably ruined it by washing it. Crepe has got a bad habit of shrinking when it contacts water.’
‘She was dressed for travelling, you thought.’
‘I’d stake my life on it. Any chance that she came in on the train last night?’
‘Squizzy Taylor could have come in on last night’s train toting two shotguns and not a soul would have noticed him amongst your son-in-law’s lot,’ Ogden said, standing up and draining the last drips from his mug. ‘And as much as I might like to, I can’t sit around here all day.’
The babe was stirring. He watched Gertrude lift her from the makeshift crib, feel the makeshift napkin. ‘I’ll get her off your hands as soon as I can.’
‘She’s doing no harm, Ernie. She’s not doing a lot of anything, the poor wee mite.’
The land around Woody Creek being flat as a tack made it good bike-riding country. Within minutes Ernie was back in town and approaching a group of strangers leaning against the pub wall, looking for something to look at and hard pressed to find it. He skidded his wheels to a halt beside them.
‘Morning,’ he said.
They were a middle-aged to elderly lot, all males, bar one, and she sucking as heavily on a cigarette as they. He leaned his bike against a verandah post and took out his own packet, lit one.
‘You wouldn’t have a youngish woman in your group, would you, thirty-odd, long black hair?’ he asked, blowing smoke with the crowd. A bunch of heads shook in unison. ‘Any passengers you might have seen on the train who’d fit that description . . . dark complexion, wearing a black overcoat?’
They were Duckworths, or wed to Duckworths; they’d seen nothing but other Duckworths. Ogden took two quick drags on his smoke, killed it, then pushed off towards the station to ask about unclaimed luggage, or any passenger last night who might have fitted the woman’s description.
Norman had his mother’s funeral on his mind. He was no help.
Nor was Melbourne when the post office chap got a phone call through to an uninterested sergeant, who showed less interest still when Ogden described the stranger now sleeping in a pine box in Moe’s cellar. No wedding ring, had an Italian look about her, died maybe of blood loss after giving birth beside a railway line. It didn’t sound like a priority to the city sergeant.
‘I’m thinking of getting her onto the train this afternoon,’ Ogden said. ‘I need someone down there to know she’ll be coming.’
The chap didn’t want her coming, or not until he’d taken a look at who he might have had reported missing. He told Ogden to give him a call back around midday, then left him holding the telephone listening to a few hundred miles of dead wires swishing. The post office chap hung it up and Ernie Ogden went home for breakfast, where he related his night’s work to more interested ears.
Duckworths talked. He’d say that for them. The bunch staying with Vern got together with the bunch from the hotel, and before he’d downed his second cup of tea, a flat-faced girl of twenty-odd and a chap of fifty-odd were at his door.
‘Mum spoke to that woman you’re describing at one of the stations,’ the young Duckworth said. ‘Mum said to me that she wasn’t game to take her coat off for fear someone would steal her brooch. She had the most gorgeous brooch.’
‘A black coat?’
‘They all wear black — she was one of those dagoes, Mum said.’
He forgot about his tea growing cold. Two foreign-looking women wearing black overcoats in yesterday’s heat wasn’t likely. He hadn’t found a brooch — though maybe the reason he hadn’t found the brooch was the reason the woman had been found beside the railway line four miles from town.
‘Did you notice if she was travelling alone?’ he asked.
‘I couldn’t say. I went into the canteen to get Mum a cup of tea. Mum might know. I’m not sure where she’s staying.’
‘She actually spoke to her, you say?’
‘Just passed the time of day. She was very taken by that brooch. It had a ruby in it as big as a hen’s eye, she said.’
‘I appreciate you coming around,’ he said.
They left, he followed them out, followed them back across the railway lines where he found Vern hiding from his batch of Duckworths in Miller’s boot shop, trying on boots he didn’t need.
‘Caught you,’ Ogden said.
‘Your jail is looking better by the hour,’ Vern said, putting his own boot back on.
Two minutes later they were heading out towards the Bryants’, Ernie now on the scent of a brooch.
Vern knew that road well, had known it since infancy. His land was out on this road, his father’s land, his grandfather’s. He’d ridden a horse to and from school for a couple of years, knew every paddock, every tree. It was good land out this way, bone dry right now but the creek was close by. Vern’s grandfather had come with the first wave of hardy souls who had settled this area. He’d claimed his fair share of that creek, as had old man Monk, who had also got a good chunk of forest, which he’d harvested. He’d set up the first sawmill, an old pit mill. The modern mills put him out of business.
Lonnie Bryant was out with his dogs, but they found Nancy in, and she more than eager to show them where she’d found the stranger. They spent half an hour searching the area, looking for the brooch. They found blood, found the second shoe, midway between the railway line and where the woman had ended up, which could have suggested she’d been pushed from the train by whoever now had her brooch.
Near ten, they left Nancy with her Duckworth guests, and Vern, in no hurry to join his own, turned again down the bush road to Gertrude’s property, where they found her attempting to interest the infant in sucking boiled water from a teat better suited to a motherless goat than a newborn infant.
‘You didn’t find a brooch pinned to that coat last night?’ Ogden said, placing the second shoe beside its mate, still on the hearth.
‘If it was on it, it’s still on it.’
Her hands full, Gertrude pointed with her elbow to a cane laundry basket and her night’s washing, already bone dry and removed from the line ten minutes ago. The sun was sucking moisture from wherever it could suck it today.
A domesticated man, Ernie folded the towels and blanket, turned the gold crepe frock right side out, shook it, then offered it to Vern.
‘Someone paid big money for that,’ Vern said. He knew the cost of women’s clothes. He had a wife who liked spending money, and two daughters from previous marriages, still schoolgirls but with very definite opinions on what they wore.
‘I almost cut it off her,’ Gertrude admitted, offering the teat again to an uninterested mouth. ‘It’s beautifully made. You could wear it inside out.’
‘Someone will be looking for her,’ Ogden said, patting the coat down, feeling for the brooch he couldn’t see. He shook it, willing that brooch to fly free. It didn’t. It wasn’t caught up in the lining either, nor in the pockets.
‘Nice-looking coat too,’ Vern said. ‘Beautiful fabric. It wasn’t made in Australia.’
‘It smelled like wool when it was wet.’
‘A wool mix,’ Vern said. He knew his wools.
‘Everything that woman had on her back reeks of money,’ Gertrude said. ‘And she’s been up here before too, or someone she knew has been up here.’ She slid the now dry luggage label across the table.
‘A few years back, though. It’s one of the old labels,’ Vern said, turning it over. He did a lot of train travelling with his wife.
‘Any chance she’s connected to Norman’s folk?’ Gertrude said.
‘Not from what they say,’ Ernie said.
‘One of the young Duckworth’s lady loves?’ Vern suggested. ‘Decided to follow him up and surprise him in front of his family?’ Ogden nodded, considering the theory, while Vern looked at the handkerchief, the ten-shilling note. ‘The sum of a woman’s life,’ he said. ‘It’s not much, is it?’
‘And this mite — who won’t be long behind her mother if I can’t get her sucking.’
‘It’s too small to live,’ Vern said.
‘Not all infants are ten-pound Hoopers,’ Gertrude said.
‘What’s it weigh in at?’
‘A smidgen under five pound. You might see if Jean and Charlie have got any decent feeding bottles up there. She’s gagging every time I get this one in.’
‘I’d be gagging too,’ Vern said. ‘I take it you won’t be going in for the funeral?’
They were burying Cecelia Morrison at eleven thirty, then having a luncheon wake at the town hall, which would save the billeting families the hassle of feeding their guests lunch.
‘What I had to say to that woman I said to her in life,’ Gertrude said.