Bull had found Errol Soydan in outer Melbourne teaching maths in a state secondary school. I was surprised to read that he was still employed by the education department. But then, he’d always denied Rebecca had ever gone to his house, and always maintained his innocence. No evidence was found after his car and house were searched, meaning his involvement in Rebecca’s disappearance remained an allegation and no charges were laid against him.

  Bull targeted his prey and hit on them in two consecutive days. According to Robyn, ‘He beat the crap out of that teacher to see what he knew about Rebecca’s whereabouts, and probably one extra boot in his ribs for good measure.’ It seemed Bull followed Errol Soydan on an early evening run, caught up with him in a park.

  Bryce Jones got the same treatment. Bull found him at his mother’s place in Benalla, left him lying on the ground inside a shearing shed. Jeremy McCourty had been located in a car park behind his workplace in Echuca, also left bashed and bloodied.

  Breathtaking in his audacity, courage and stupidity.

  Then he handed himself in.

  Bull was given a two-year prison sentence for aggravated assault. He would’ve known the consequences that were coming his way, and at the time I thought what he’d done was heroic, sacrificing his liberty in search of a perpetrator, if there was one.

  I didn’t miss much about Maryhill after I moved to Melbourne. But I often thought of Bull and remembered those times we’d talked about Rebecca, where she might be, especially on that Christmas Day when we coincidently met up at the workman’s cottage.

  I’d written to Bull in Beechworth Prison a couple of times, though he’d never replied. I can see why now. Me, a silly fifteen-year-old girl, who penned a letter telling him how impressed I was with what he’d done.

  He would’ve also been conscious of the situation he’d left Cheryl in. Her arthritis was disabling by then. She was unable to craft any pottery, and presumably carry out other domestic tasks that she’d relied on him to do.

  Anyway, the washup of Bull’s personal interrogation of those three men meant we were left with nothing much. If Bull didn’t get a confession out of them, and the police hadn’t, then what did we have? An unsubstantiated link between Rebecca’s disappearance and the Healys’ deaths. And the odd sighting in Queensland that Sergeant Butler told Dad about.

  At least that’s what I believed at the time.

  SEVENTEEN

  1991

  I glanced sideways at Dad. He was staring ahead, glasses pressing into the bridge of his nose. His eyes were small and squinting into the midday glare. Why didn’t he wear sunglasses? Two hands on the wheel. His forearms were brown from all the years he’d spent in the sun with his sleeves rolled up. I knew my father was a quiet man, someone who liked his own company, thinking his own thoughts. But I didn’t realise he could drive for so many hours saying so few words.

  We were heading to the Gold Coast to continue the search for Rebecca. Since she’d disappeared seven years earlier this was Dad’s seventh trip up the Newell Highway. He always travelled between picking and pruning and followed the same route until he got to Queensland. He stayed for about six weeks, to retrace his previous visits and to find new places to ask around. He handed out the A4-size posters, stapled them on power poles, taped them on bus shelters, anywhere, always at the eye level of an average-height person. In 1988 he drove as far north as Port Douglas and was gone for almost two months. That was my first time. Mum had never been.

  After Dad’s first trip, in March 1985, when he drove away at short notice to follow up a sighting of Rebecca, he bought a small cream-coloured caravan with a green strip along both the sides. It was behind us, being towed by Dad’s four-door Toyota Hilux. Earlier that morning we’d stopped at Benalla and bought supplies, canned food, salad things, general groceries. He stored them methodically in the caravan’s cupboards and the small fridge. In the short time we’d been on the journey, I’d observed his silent routine. Perhaps a better description was that he practised a series of his monk-like private rituals. All his actions were deliberate, and familiar only to himself. I felt he got satisfaction out of the order he created.

  Across the border into New South Wales, at Narrandera, without appearing to hesitate, he pulled over to a parking bay. In the caravan he boiled the kettle, then we sat under a park shelter and drank tea with a slice of fruit cake. That was something else to notice: we ate fruit cake bought from a shop. Mum hadn’t baked or decorated a cake in seven years and I wasn’t expecting that she ever would.

  ‘Do you always stop here?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why?’

  He glanced at me and shrugged. ‘Because I do.’

  When he was away Mum stayed at home on her own. She continued to believe Bull Tennant knew where Rebecca was, or at least what had happened to her. And she didn’t hesitate telling Dad he was wasting his time. I’d seen him stare back at her and say, ‘Until we know something different, I’m looking for our daughter.’

  His quiet voice still had a lot of power to it, a kind of authority that didn’t invite an argument. I’m convinced he travelled every year not just to search for Rebecca, but to have a break from my mother.

  In 1986 there had been a breakthrough, of sorts. Sixteen months after Rebecca vanished, a homeless young woman on the Sunshine Coast, fitting Rebecca’s age and description, told a social worker her name was Rebecca Bundy, an orchardist’s daughter from Maryhill in Victoria. She gave details about how she’d worked at the Healys’ as their babysitter. She knew the names and ages of the kids. That she’d been a student at Gyle Secondary school. She gave vague details about her association with her maths teacher, Errol Soydan. There were other bits and pieces of information, all of it thrilling to us. I could hear the joy and lightness in Dad’s voice when he phoned to tell me. It was a happy coincidence that he was only days away from heading north. He left immediately, arriving two days later in Maroochydore, only to be told the girl couldn’t be located. She’d run away.

  It left us bereft. The police said she was likely to be an attention seeker, possibly an addict with psychological problems. At that time, not so much later on, we found it difficult to believe that anyone would make up a story like that. It was true that all the information she shared had been in the public domain from various media reports around the time Rebecca went missing. Even so, it left us worse off, especially Dad, because every sighting afterwards that Jeff Butler told him about, he linked to that one girl who said she was Rebecca Bundy. He kept thinking, hoping, she was our Rebecca, just not found yet. In the face of having no other clear leads, it’s what motivated him to keep going back, year after year. Still, Mum never took her sights off Bull.

  ‘He knows something,’ she’d say.

  I didn’t have a clear picture of what it’d been like for my parents in the years since Rebecca left us. When I first moved away in the Easter of 1985 – a couple of days after my fifteenth birthday – I lived with Auntie Helen until I finished secondary school at Camberwell High. I didn’t go home to Maryhill for about eighteen months, and when I finally did it was only for a couple of days during the school holidays. Then I moved into a share house in Fitzroy when I started university. I found it difficult being around Mum, mostly because of that secret between us about her affair with Bryce Jones.

  On those few visits, Dad was kind and attentive towards me, and still Mum’s faithful servant, taking her tea and toast in bed each morning. And when she finally got out of bed, she fake-smiled at me, sat too close on the couch, paid me compliments that I knew she didn’t believe. She made a big fuss about cooking my favourite foods, expecting me to be grateful for her efforts. She confused me. I couldn’t relax in her presence. Was she testing me or teasing me? Were we playing acting roles? Actually, I had no idea what she was doing. I knew that I was supposed to love her, but I couldn’t. All I knew was I kept hurting myself, secret cuts on my forearms and the soft skin on my inner thighs.

  At least I was finally getting away. I’d secured a job in London and was leaving in the first week of May. At Melbourne University, I’d studied Public Relations and Communications, got an internship at West & Hutton in Melbourne. And when I applied for a junior account manager position in their London office, I got lucky.

  We were back on the freeway, the caravan rolling behind. Along the never-ending road, I chatted to Dad about my plans to find a share house when I arrived in London, the sort of work I would be doing, meeting clients, writing press releases. I heard my voice as I spoke, telling him about my ambition, pausing at the right moments for him to respond, like normal people do when talking to each other. He had no questions, so there was nothing for it but to go straight to the problem.

  ‘Dad, do you think you’re depressed?’ I asked.

  He scratched his neck.

  ‘I know where you’re coming from,’ he said, ‘because a missing child is a kind of grief that can’t be recovered from. But I don’t think I’m depressed. I just don’t have much to say.’

  ‘So what do you think of when you’re not talking?’

  ‘Nothing much. Just looking out.’

  My chest ached with sadness for him.

  ‘What do you think of my new job, me moving to London?’

  ‘I don’t understand things like that. But I see you’re happy about it.’

  ‘Haven’t you ever wanted a bigger life?’ I asked.

  ‘A bigger life? Until Rebecca went away I had everything I ever wanted. Two beautiful daughters. And Diane, of course.’

  We drove on. In front, various road signs, a railway crossing, another small town. On the left, in a paddock, was a large muddy dam. I thought of the Healys, and wondered what Jacob might’ve been thinking about when he waded into the middle of his dam, before he lifted his rifle and blew his brains out.

  Late the next morning we crossed the border into Queensland, drove into Burleigh Heads and pulled into a long parking bay. Out of the car, stretching, feeling my legs, we walked up to the main street. Dad didn’t say where we were going and I’d stopped asking questions because he seemed too tired or reluctant to answer. I was trying not to be a nuisance.

  Dad pushed back the red plastic flyscreen strips and I followed him into Connie’s Fish & Chips.

  ‘Have you been here before?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  It wasn’t the first time I’d thought that my father had a private life away from the orchard. All those roads, caravan parks, shops, service centres, so very different to living at Maryhill.

  Dad ordered without asking me what I wanted. So I spoke up and said I’d like some scallops and potato cakes as well the fish and chips. What I would’ve preferred was one of Nico The Greek’s falafels, and a cold beer.

  He looked at me in dismay, like I’d asked for something he didn’t understand. The way he slowly opened his wallet and pulled out another note made me feel I’d done something wrong.

  I held the hot sweaty package to my chest as we walked to a picnic bench with a view across a choppy sea. We sat side by side. And when Dad told me it was the Pacific Ocean in front of us, I acted surprised as if I didn’t already know that. I unwrapped the paper and lay our meal on the table. The warm salty smell was wonderful.

  Seagulls circled and squealed.

  ‘Don’t feed them,’ Dad said, ‘until we’re finished.’

  ‘Okay.’

  I thought back to when I used to work for Robyn in the Maryhill shop, those popular fish and chip nights. Six and a half years ago, yet it seemed much longer. That Friday night, when Rebecca went missing, it was the last time I’d worked late. I remembered Cheryl coming to pick up her order. Her arthritic hands, and the friendly way she’d spoken to me when paying. All my memories of her fused together, the gap between her front teeth, her wrinkled but lovely face, the way she could talk with a cigarette wedged in the corner of her mouth. That time she turned on me and said I was a little bitch.

  There’s bad news about Cheryl. In 1987, a few weeks after Bull got out of prison, she died. Bull found her in their woodshed half frozen. The talk was she’d been gathering up logs to take inside, had a heart attack and collapsed. Bull wasn’t home and didn’t discover her until after dark. Mum had said, ‘Fifty years of chain smoking, what did she think was going to happen?’ For sure all the smokes would’ve been a factor, but it couldn’t be denied she’d undergone enormous stress with Bull in the police crosshairs, followed by his time in prison.

  And so, with Cheryl buried in the Maryhill cemetery, and Bull’s reputation forever ruined, he left the mountain. I’d asked around but no one seemed to know where he went. On one of my short visits to Maryhill, I’d caught up on all the rumours, how he’d just shut the door on the old house, whistled Woody onto the back of his ute, and drove away.

  With everything I knew, it was foolish of me to harbour a romantic idea that when Bull moved away he went to Rebecca, that maybe they’d been together in those intervening years.

  Dad was squeezing the juice from a wedge of lemon onto his battered flake.

  ‘When Bull left the mountain, do you think he went to Rebecca?’ I asked.

  He looked at me, surprised or annoyed, maybe both.

  ‘Why do you say that?’ he said.

  ‘No reason. Just a thought I’ve had.’

  Dad stared ahead, thinking.

  ‘The police would know if he knew where she was. They interviewed him enough times to uncover something like that. And he wouldn’t have roughed up those other fellas to find out what they knew if he already knew where she was.’

  We kept picking at the chips. I offered Dad a scallop and he shook his head, no.

  ‘What did Robyn say to you? You know, that time she wanted you to call her when you were up here on that first trip.’

  Dad put a chip in his mouth, chewed, but I could tell he was weighing something up. I’d asked him a couple of times before, but he’d always avoided answering me directly.

  ‘I guess you’re older now, so I’ll tell you,’ he said, sitting up straighter, looking ahead, pausing to consider his words. ‘Maybe at the Healy clearing sale, I don’t know, but Robyn got hold of a lot of Sinead’s private things, books, photo albums, and such. She found a journal that Sinead had been keeping, like she was writing long letters to herself. Maybe there was more than one journal, Robyn didn’t say. The point is, it seemed there was lots of arguing between Jacob and Sinead over money. I remember at the time there was talk about financial strife, that Sinead paid for things they couldn’t afford on a credit card. But the other thing was, as I remember it, Sinead didn’t like Rebecca being in the house alone with Jacob, even when there were littlies with them. Robyn was upset about it and thought I should be told.’

  Strange how random memories push forward. There I was at the shop, standing in my usual spot behind the counter, Robyn beside me. Sinead had just driven away, all the kids in the car. I’d watched Elliot strap Mason into his car seat, thinking how responsible he was, the eldest child. Robyn quietly spoke, as if to herself, ‘Why does she spend more than she can afford? Perhaps she’s unhappy.’

  I recounted that memory to Dad, but all he said was, ‘No one really knows what goes on inside the walls of other people’s houses.’

  We sat there together, side by side, a treasured memory. Briny air, a slight breeze.

  It was then I told Dad about the photo I had of Rebecca taken at the Healys’ house, described it in detail.

  ‘You should’ve told me about that,’ he said.

  I felt unfairly accused. Back in those first months after Rebecca disappeared, our family was broken, making it near impossible to add to the already wild accusations going around.

  ‘So, what does all that mean?’ I asked. ‘Do you think Rebecca going missing had something to do with Jacob killing his family and himself?’

  ‘I told Robyn to take the journal to the police. But because Jacob was dead, there was no one to interrogate. Still, there’s a question there.’

  ‘I think so too,’ I said.

  The quiet whoosh of waves rolling on sand. Impatient gulls overhead, squawking.

  ‘Does Mum know about Sinead’s journal?’

  ‘She’s not a strong person, so I’ve not told her.’

  It was all too hard. I wanted to relax, be in the moment, yet all I felt was an urgent need to separate, to split off.

  ‘Rebecca has become a stranger to me,’ I said.

  ‘She’s not a stranger. She’s your sister and a victim of rumours and misunderstandings. Don’t ever forget that.’

  I was happy he’d said that.

  Mid-afternoon, after we arrived at the caravan park and Dad unhitched his ute, we drove to all the bus shelters and phone boxes, the noticeboard at the local library, supermarkets and the pubs. It was obvious he’d done that many times before, the way he didn’t hesitate as he stapled or taped Rebecca’s face at eye level. And always, before he stepped away, he pressed the palm of his hand on Rebecca’s beautiful face and held it there, like he was saying a prayer, or maybe he was making a wish for that particular poster to be the one that brought her home. A few times an old poster remained from a previous trip. He didn’t take it away, but positioned the new one on top. I understood something then. Dad was on a pilgrimage. The solitude and routine had become central to his wellbeing. It was how he coped.

  I asked if I could help, have my own bundle of posters.

  He pinched his lips and looked worried. ‘I’ve only got one of these staple guns,’ he said, ‘and I only have one roll of tape on the go at a time.’

 

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26