Jacinta reread the words, more emphatically. ‘
I will keep account of time until you are out of time
,’ she quoted, looking up at me. ‘Why,’ she asked. ‘What’s so great about that?’
I suddenly knew where my sister was. ‘She’s out of time,’ Julian Bower had said to me as he died. She must have been killed elsewhere and somehow, Treweeke and Julian had got her body here, maybe by night, driven it in the car, buried her in the soil under the sundial. I recalled the date 1975 stamped on the metal disk. Maybe the excavations at the end of the garden, awaiting the construction of the sundial’s footings, had suggested a grave site. I looked at the pedestal again, at where it was sunk into the soil with a circle of snowy alyssum surrounding its base.
‘She’s here,’ I said, suddenly knowing it. ‘Rosie’s buried here. They put her under the sundial.’
It didn’t take long to locate her. Almost as soon as the backhoe operator had lifted the first lot of soil, we could see that the earth had been disturbed there once, the lighter sandstone of the subsoil mixed up with the darker loam of the top. And far deeper than was necessary to support a sundial. Colin Swartz from Springbrook police drove Greg and Jacinta home to Charlie’s place, while my brother stayed with me.
‘I’ll ring Mum,’ Greg had said before they left, ‘and tell her what’s happened.’
I nodded and thanked him and he knew he had my blessing.
Now, blue and white Crime Scene tape secured the back garden and Mrs Bailey kept up the supplies of tea and sandwiches for the small group. Two young Crime Scene detectives from Parramatta waited with us while the digger moved the topsoil and the pedestal of the sundial. The operator took it very gently, just scraping down through the layers but once he’d got a metre or so down, I took off my coat and so did Charlie and, without a word, the two Parramatta detectives who’d been gently scraping the dug-out earth gave us their shovels and we jumped down into the trough we’d made.
I could feel tears running down my face as I dug, but it wasn’t grief, it was some sort of old release. So that when my shovel scraped on the thin brownish sticks, so much a part of the earth now that they were barely recognisable as anything else, I knew it was my sister’s rib cage and I got down on my knees and started pushing the dirt away with my hands. I could feel Charlie’s hand on my shoulder and I worked like an archaeologist, smoothing around the bones as they revealed themselves. Soon, I had one side of her skeleton in high relief and the domed vault of the back of her skull. She was lying curled up like a baby in the sandy subsoil, turned into the earth with the bones of her hands gracefully folded near her head. Something shone in the dirt near the delicate bones of the cervical vertebrae and I knew what it was even as I tugged it free. I passed it up to Charlie and he took it wordlessly from me: the blue and yellow enamelled silver necklace I’d given her only days before her death.
I heard a voice I knew and climbed up to see Bradley Strachan striding over, carrying his boots and overalls. He’d come up from Sydney, I was later told, because he thought it would be easier on me if the examination in situ was done by someone I knew rather than a stranger. I hadn’t realised people I only knew professionally would be so kind.
Later, when Bradley lifted Rosie’s skull out of the soil and turned it round, I could see the fracture lines over her left eye socket. His gloved finger gently touched the ruined post-orbital ridge. ‘Blunt instrument,’ he said to me. ‘Severe blow to the frontal area.’ He looked up at me from my sister’s bones. ‘Do you want to stay for the rest?’
I did. It was the least I could do for my sister.
We didn’t bury her near our mother in the local graveyard after all. Charlie, the kids and myself, with our father silent and chain-smoking, took her ashes and threw them together with some yellow and blue irises over the cliff near Springbrook Falls where the dark tree-covered ridges fall sharply away to gold and purple sandstone walls and the valley floor gathers the shimmering water into a winding river a kilometre below. As I shook the container, the small cloud of dark dust became invisible almost immediately. We walked back to the car in a silence my father maintained until we dropped him back at his shed. Charlie put out a hand to help him up the step into his one-roomed home but the old man ignored it and walked inside.
‘Doesn’t amount to much, does it?’ he said, just before closing the door. ‘A life.’
We four looked at each other and it was Greg who banged on the door in anger.
‘Yours mightn’t,’ he yelled. ‘Speak for yourself.’
Then he ran away ahead of us, his long body heading off up the driveway, out onto the road, away from the sad, rented house. Charlie, Jacinta and I jumped in the car and caught up with him right down the end at the corner where Mrs Bower had seen the Holden and lied about it. A large brown pool had collected in the elbow of the corner from recent rain and a butterfly flirted dangerously low across its surface.
Jacinta swung the back door open as Charlie slowed the car. ‘Come on, Reg!’ she yelled after the running figure and he stopped and turned round. ‘Hop in, ya dag!’
A sun shower had come from nowhere, and slanted rain fell diagonally through the sunlight. The sudden shower stimulated every bird in the area and the butcherbird’s chimings were drowned by the sort of bird chorus I’d only heard once or twice in my life, and then only at sunrise. Currawongs, magpies, noisy mynahs, kookaburras and, overhead, the ringing calls of a blazing flock of rosellas. We got out of the car and looked around and up as the volume increased. Jacinta looked like a delighted little kid again as she listened, head cocked to one side. My brother stood with his eyes closed, taking it all in and Greg stood grinning at the puddle, watching its surface wrinkle under the sparkling sun shower.
I glanced up and there he was, sitting on the lowest bough of the huge eucalypt, with his sharp, angular head and beak, the soft gold shining from his breast contrasting with the brilliant blue of wings and head—a sacred kingfisher, taking no notice of me. I held my breath and waited, signalling the others with a whisper and a slow hand movement. Everyone froze, staring at him. And now, in this magical moment of the birds’ chorus with the rain falling like a shower of gold through a summer afternoon, my sacred kingfisher swooped over the reflecting surface of the puddle, a streak of gold and cerulean blue.
Gabrielle Lord
graduated from the University of New England in 1975 and has since worked as a teacher, brick-cleaner, peach-picker, labourer, market-gardener and office-worker. She has a continuing interest in Old Norse and sings in a choir.
Her first novel,
Fortress
, was published in 1980 and translated into six languages, as well as being made into a successful film starring Rachel Ward. Since
Fortress
, Gabrielle has published a number of other successful novels, including
The Sharp End
,
Tooth and Claw
,
Jumbo
,
Salt
and
Whipping Boy
. Her stories and articles have appeared widely in the national press and been published in anthologies. She now writes full-time and is currently adapting her novel
Bones
for the screen.