The doctor rode around to the Templeton house that evening. The Packard was in the drive and he could hear sawing coming from the shed. He crept to the closed door and stood listening, then he crept around to the small window and climbed to the fork of the overgrown apricot tree. It was high enough for him to see inside the shed where Stella was squatting, sawing at something deep in the earth. Sawing through metal, with a hacksaw.
He watched her for minutes. He watched her until a small piece of curved metal came free. He watched her stand, her face pleased with her labour.
Only then did he rap on the window. ‘Digging for gold, Mousy Two?’ he asked.
She spun around, looked up and saw his face amid the bare branches, then she dropped the piece of bike wheel to the floor, and with her shoe kicked a heap of screening back, burying the metal, and what she had cut the metal from. By the time Parsons crawled down from his perch, and untangled his beard from a twig, the door was open and she was in the Packard, moving it back to its rightful place.
He stood at the driver’s side, preventing her escape. ‘I thought the old girl had cracked up,’ he said, fingering a scratch on his face.
‘It needed a new battery, so I bought one.’
The old battery was on the bench, ready to be put back into place when she was done. He saw it. He saw much. A bike man from way back, he knew a piece of wheel when he saw it too, and he was pretty certain what bike it was she’d been cutting into.
She slid across the seat, opened the opposite door, and hurried to the storeroom where she began tidying the bags of knitting wool, sorting through them, matching colours. He followed her and stood watching.
‘As I was saying today, we got a sample of the rapist’s sperm, lass. Thought you might like to know. I got his blood group from it. Got my own idea of who it was. I reckon I’ve solved a couple of mysteries here today.’ There was no reply, no sign that she had heard him. ‘I’ve had my own opinion of what might have happened to our rapist, lass. I reckoned someone with a daughter might have a fair idea of what happened to him.’
A breath drawn slowly, held, she worked on, her head low.
‘Now, my money was on the Murphys,’ he said. ‘On Spud, young Kelly’s old man. Only trouble is, those who threaten murder, rarely do it. Spud would have thrashed him within an inch of his life, fixed him so his voice went a few octaves higher. But murder. That’s not the Murphys’ style. Murder is usually a hot-blooded thing. A lot of people might threaten to do it, but we usually have to be pushed into a corner before we kill.’
Still she made no reply, but her hands were shaking out of control, her stomach, her mind, her heart was shaking.
‘Young Spencer came by your place, didn’t he, lass?’
‘Leave me alone. Go away and leave me alone.’
‘You’re pregnant. I’d say, fourteen, fifteen weeks. Not a day less.’
‘You’re wrong. It is less. It’s much less. I . . . I met a traveller at the motel in Sydney. I told Father about him when he was in hospital. An American tourist. His name was Wayne. Wayne Lee.’
‘Taking a page out of the old lady’s book now with your mysterious lovers. He wasn’t a relative of John Wayne by any chance, was he? I know him well.’
‘Ask Father if you don’t believe me.’
‘Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And pigs might fly, Mousy Two, but in Maidenville they rarely do. Did young Spencer call on you?’
She turned away, spilling the wool to the floor. ‘Damn you,’ she said, attempting to pick up the scattered wool, but dropping more. ‘Damn you.’
He squatted by her side, gathering up the colourful balls, dusting them on the leg of his baggy shorts, before handing them back to her to place into their bags.
‘I’ve been doing my arithmetic. Miss Moreland has been dead for close on four months, and young Thomas Spencer, missing since four days after her funeral, and my interfering eye says you were impregnated around the time he took off. Now that’s an equation Johnson could have a lot of fun with, I reckon. Add to that young Spencer’s blood group, which I happen to have on record. The sperm fits, lass, and when you pop his infant, I can get some of its blood, check his DNA. I’m God in this town.’
She flung the bag of wool to the floor, kicked it at the wall. ‘Damn you. Damn your God, and damn the wool, and damn this bloody-minded town, and damn your probing doctor’s eyes, and damn your interference. Damn you!’ And she walked to the Packard, where she stood, her head against its cold metal.
He stood behind her, a hand on her shoulder. ‘They don’t make them like they used to, do they?’ he said. ‘A little bloke like me could set up house on the back seat of this old girl.’
‘Nothing is like it used to be,’ she said. ‘Nothing. I am not like I used to be.’ She turned to him then, her eyes holding his. ‘I rarely look to the past, Doctor. As you no doubt remember, I learned early to put each day behind me and to never look behind. I look ahead to each dawn, to a better dawn, and that is what I am trying to do now.’
‘And what about that future dawn, lass? What about tomorrow?’
‘Tell me – you tell me, Doctor Parsons, does my only chance of a tomorrow, of going forward into tomorrow, of leaving some small part of me, of Father, to the future, does it deserve to be gouged from me and flushed down some sewer?’
‘Where is he, lass?’
She pointed with the toe of her shoe to the earth beneath the Packard.
‘Life happens,’ he said, dropping to his knees, half expecting to see a corpse in a body bag tied under the chassis. ‘Where?’
‘With the bike. I . . . I dug a . . . a shallow pit.’
‘Shit happens, lass. And when it does, sometimes the best thing you can do with it, is to bury it. How shallow is shallow?’
‘Very,’ she replied, eyeing him defiantly. ‘Far too shallow.’
He stood, took a handkerchief from his pocket, and he wiped the handkerchief across her cheek.
‘What?’ Her hand went to the place he had touched.
‘You’ve got butter all over your whiskers, Mousy Two,’ he said.