The Wrong Door (24 page)

Clare sat in the car outside Susan’s apartment sobbing. How dare she not be home? How dare she have her mobile phone switched off? If she had ever needed her best friend’s cheery face, it was now, as her world disintegrated around her. Clare felt her own sense of self splintering. Susan had known her since she was five years old and Clare had a desperate need to see her friend, talk to her, reminisce with her. She was the only person who could reaffirm who she was.

She felt she had been robbed of her identity.
Who am I?
The question went round and round inside her head as she drove to a nearby café and bought breakfast. Her thoughts were insistent and maddening as she huddled at a corner table tearing off pieces of croissant and stuffing them into her mouth. She took the photo packet from her handbag and stared at the laughing
faces. Marla at fifteen. Her mother. Micky Darvill. Her father.

Clare rang the doorbell at the Neutral Bay house and waited. The Saab was in the driveway, exactly where Clare had parked it the night before. She rang the bell again. No response. There didn’t appear to be any movement inside. She walked around the house peering in the windows. I know you’re home goddamn it. She stopped outside one window – the master bedroom. Gwennie was lying on the bed with her back to her. It seemed strange to Clare she should be asleep at this time of the day. She rapped with her car keys on the glass so hard she feared it would break.

Gwennie slowly rolled over. She lay there looking at Clare, making no move to sit up or acknowledge her. Clare rapped again. Come on. What’s wrong with you? Get up.

With great effort Gwennie pulled herself to a sitting position, then swung her legs over the side. Clare walked back around to the front and waited.

Gwennie opened the door but made it clear she wasn’t inviting Clare inside. ‘Yes?’ she said politely, as if the two had never met and Clare was an unwelcome stranger on her doorstep.

‘Can I come in?’ said Clare.

‘Why?’

Clare felt exasperated. She could think of a hundred reasons.

‘To tell you about Pete’s brother Micky.’

There was a glimmer of interest. Gwennie hesitated, then stood aside and held open the door. The house was dark, despite the bright sunshine outside, and quiet, as if all the windows and doors had been sealed. Clare followed Gwennie into a sitting room. As soon as they were seated Clare produced the sleeve of photos from her handbag and spread the half-dozen images across the glass coffee table.

Gwennie seemed distracted as Clare began but with every word she could sense her interest growing. ‘This is Micky Darvill,’ said Clare. ‘Pete’s younger brother. And Marla. My sister. She was fifteen and he was eighteen when these were taken.’

Clare couldn’t bring herself to describe Marla as her mother and the word ‘sister’ stuck in her throat. She rubbed her hand across her mouth as she said it. Any psychologist would immediately have known she was hiding something but Gwennie was more interested in what she was saying than how she was saying it.

Gwennie ran her eyes along the line of photos and back, picking them up one by one and putting them down again. She went into the study and returned with her photo. Same clothes, same background and same mood. Clearly it belonged to the series. She placed it at the end.

‘Pete was a few years older than Micky,’ continued Clare. ‘Their parents died in a car accident leaving the two of them to look after each other. They were very close. Micky was a bit wild while Pete, being older, was the responsible one. They shared a house together in the Blue Mountains.’

‘The Blue Mountains? They lived there together?’ asked Gwennie. She had the feeling of being given another piece of the puzzle. Her hostility towards Clare started to lessen.

‘Yes,’ said Clare. ‘In Blackheath. Micky worked as an apprentice mechanic. I don’t know what Pete did. I don’t know how long they lived there for but I do know they were living there together in 1979.

‘It was then that Marla’s father died in a fire and Micky was accused. The police wanted to question him but he took off and was never seen again.’

Gwennie selected two photos and picked them up, peering at them closely. She held them side by side to compare. ‘This one is so like Pete,’ she said with a wistful smile. ‘But not this one. It’s the way the man is standing. He looks bigger, stockier, than Pete. But then the photo was taken a long time ago. Perhaps Pete was stockier then. I wouldn’t know. He never showed me photos of when he was younger. I guess that was strange now that I think about it. But it just didn’t seem to come up.’

She returned the photos to the table. ‘So Pete had a brother,’ she said quietly, more to herself than Clare. She stood up and moved around the room. ‘I just don’t get it. If Pete had a brother, why keep him a secret? You say they were close. But he never even mentioned him. In fact he actively wiped all trace of him from his life.’ Gwennie paced the length of the room. ‘And why did he go to the Blue Mountains every month? And if you aren’t the CD he put in his logbook each month, who is?’

‘He wrote CD in his diary?’

‘Yes. The first Wednesday of every month he drove 220 kilometres. He recorded it in his logbook alongside the letters CD.’

The two women stared at each other. There was a subtle change in the air between them.

‘Why did you come to our house last night?’ asked Clare.

‘I wanted to ask you about Pete.’

Clare thought about this for a minute. ‘Because I came to his funeral?’

Gwennie nodded.

‘How did you find out who I was?’

‘You signed the condolence book.’

Clare’s face lit up. She felt a tingle of excitement but tried to keep it in check. ‘Do you have that? Could I see it?’

Gwennie looked bewildered but agreed.

The condolence book was on the top of Pete’s desk in the study. She picked it up and took it back into the sitting room. Clare flicked through the pages reading the rows of names, neatly printed in blue ink, with the corresponding signatures beside them. She recognised her own, towards the end. She had been the third last person to sign.

‘Was there anyone in here you didn’t recognise?’ she asked.

‘Why?’

‘Well, if Micky and Peter were so close, maybe Micky came to the funeral.’

‘Oh, I would have recognised him. I’m sure I would have. They are obviously so alike. There is such a strong resemblance in your photos. I would
imagine Micky now would look a lot like Pete now,’ Gwennie paused, ‘… how Pete did look.’

‘Maybe he changed his appearance,’ suggested Clare. ‘Dyed his hair, grew a beard. Surely if they had been that close once, he would have made every effort to go to his brother’s funeral. If he could, of course. Even if he hadn’t seen him for more than twenty years. Don’t you think? I know it was a large service, lots of people, but was there anyone there you didn’t know?’

Gwennie looked down the list of names. ‘No, no, they are all workmates of Pete’s. Or his university mates. I knew all of them.’ She read through all the names. ‘No. I know all these people. No unaccounted for men who could have been Micky in disguise. The only names I didn’t recognise were yours and another woman’s.’ She looked disappointed and flicked the book closed.

Clare stared at her. ‘What other woman?’

‘A woman who wrote to me. She was much older. In her sixties. I don’t remember her name but I remember her. She was very kind to me at the wake. Motherly, understanding. She had red hair and wore very red lipstick. I assume she was a client or something.’

Clare opened the condolence book again. ‘What was her name?’

Gwennie read through the list. ‘There. Terri Pryor.’ She pointed to the signature. It was a feminine, elegant script, suggesting an educated woman from another era. Other than that, it gave no clues.

Gwennie returned to the study and brought
back her folder of correspondence. She rifled through and withdrew a letter. ‘Lots of people wrote to me after he died. Here it is.’ Placing it on the coffee table, she sat down on the sofa beside Clare.

They stared at the letter and then at each other. The notepaper was crisp and white with a delicate filigree of flowers etched around the border. On the top right-hand corner, in the same elegant script, were the words Cherry Dell and the date, 23 March 2002.

‘Cherry Dell,’ whispered Gwennie.

‘CD,’ agreed Clare.

They didn’t talk much in the car. Clare concentrated on driving while Gwennie gazed through the window, lost in private reverie. The only indication of her state of mind was the intense way she clutched the printout from the computer. The two women had searched the Web and found a directory to the Blue Mountains. They had searched all the links to real estate sites but found no matches for Cherry Dell. Then they tried the tourist sites. Again no luck. It had taken some time but eventually under the directory of local businesses they found a listing for Cherry Dell Nursery Supplies. There was a phone number but both women had baulked at using it. What would they say to Terri Pryor on the telephone? They agreed they should drive up and meet her face to face. For some reason neither of them could articulate, they wanted to surprise her.

Clare reset the odometer. It was Gwennie’s idea. She wanted to know if Cherry Dell was 110 kilometres away, half the 220 kilometres that Peter had recorded in his car logbook.

Both women had a lot to mull over as they retraced their journey through the suburbs, onto the freeway out of Sydney and along the Great Western Highway that wound its way up through the various towns of the Blue Mountains. They passed through Katoomba.

‘What’s the odometer reading?’ asked Gwennie.

‘Ninety-eight kilometres.’

After the Hydro Majestic Hotel at Medlow Bath they slowed for the roadworks.

‘Here is the bend where we collided,’ said Clare.

Gwennie looked at her lap. ‘Mmmm. Sorry about that.’

Clare shrugged. ‘What happened? Didn’t you see the roadworks? Did you not realise how close we were when you tried to overtake?’

‘I suppose so. I don’t really remember what happened before the accident. I must have hit my head.’

Clare broke the awkward silence. ‘What were you doing up here?’

Gwennie thought of the shaman. ‘Looking for Pete. And you?’

Clare remembered how she felt when she had found the box of letters and photos in Marla’s wardrobe. Excited. Curious. Apprehensive. Like she had been given a key to the family’s secrets. Why had that inspired her to come up here? She
couldn’t really say. Inexplicably she thought of Mr Sanjay.

‘I was looking for my father,’ she replied.

The sign for Blackheath loomed and was gone. Clare noted an auto repair shop as they drove through the town. She wondered if that was where Micky had worked. Perhaps they could stop for petrol there on the way home. The thought surprised her. What difference would it make? What did it matter? She could find no answer.

The shops and businesses of Blackheath gave way to homes on huge blocks, nestled back off the road behind towering pine trees and eucalypts. They looked dignified and solid, each one a private sanctuary. The landscape changed again as it wound its way through national park.

‘What’s the reading now?’

‘One hundred and four.’

Gwennie stretched her arms back over her head to release some of the tension in her neck. Clare tapped her fingers on the steering wheel in time with the steady purr of the engine.

‘Left at the next road,’ instructed Gwennie.

Clare slowed and turned the car. After a few kilometres the road branched in two.

‘Left,’ said Gwennie.

The road was uneven bitumen, full of potholes. They bounced along in the little Honda for another two kilometres.

‘We must be close,’ said Clare. ‘We’re on 109 kilometres.’

‘Then that must be Cherry Dell,’ said Gwennie.

She pointed to a building only partly visible through the trees.

Clare slowed to a crawl. The driveway to the property was so nondescript they nearly missed it – just a gap between two trees and a dirt track that twisted off through bushy undergrowth. There were no signposts or markings to let them know that this was Cherry Dell.

‘What do you think?’ Gwennie looked at the instructions on her printout, then back at the track. ‘It doesn’t look like much of a business does it? I guess I was expecting a big sign saying Cherry Dell, come on in. But this must be it. We’ve followed the directions and it is 110 kilometres from our place. Pete was pretty methodical.’

‘What have we got to lose?’ agreed Clare. She swung the car off the road.

The sky above them shrank to a narrow strip of pale blue, almost obliterated by the huge old eucalypts and dense undergrowth of wild blackberries. The track was gloomy and Clare had trouble seeing the potholes before they were in them. She switched on the headlights.

After about a kilometre the track opened out into a large clearing. There was a quaint weatherboard house and, in front of it, four enormous sheds. The double roller door of one shed was open and inside they could see rows and rows of sandstone bird baths, urns and planter boxes of various sizes. Nearby were parked a couple of four-wheel-drive vehicles and two trailbikes.

They parked and got out of the car. On the side
of one of the sheds, in faded red lettering, was
Cherry Dell Nursery Supplies.
Inside was deserted.

‘Where do you suppose everyone is?’ whispered Gwennie.

‘Why are you whispering?’ asked Clare.

Gwennie smiled. ‘I don’t know,’ she said loudly.

The sound of banging in another shed made them both jump. Clare led the way, trying to appear more confident than she felt. A tractor occupied most of the shed and it took a moment for them to locate the source of the noise. A pair of denim-clad legs and workman’s boots protruded from underneath.

Clare waited for a lull in the banging and yelled, ‘Hello?’

The legs slid out followed by a torso and a head. The man got awkwardly to his feet.

He was about forty, with a shaved head and a long scraggly beard. His singlet would once have been white but now was covered in grease and stretched so it fell loosely, emphasising his thin, wiry frame. Every visible inch of his body was covered in tattoos. He glanced quickly at Gwennie then moved to Clare. His eyes looked her over, making it plain he liked what he saw.