The Dry (Aaron Falk #1)(55)
That’s partly what took city natives like the Whitlams by surprise, Falk thought. The quiet. He could understand them seeking out the idyllic country lifestyle; a lot of people did. The idea had an enticing wholesome glow when it was weighed up from the back of a traffic jam or while crammed into a garden-less apartment. They all had the same visions of breathing fresh, clean air and knowing their neighbors. The kids would eat homegrown veggies and learn the value of an honest day’s work.
On arrival, as the empty moving truck disappeared from sight, they gazed around and were always taken aback by the crushing vastness of the open land. The space was the thing that hit them first. There was so much of it. There was enough to drown in. To look out and see not another soul between you and the horizon could be a strange and disturbing sight.
Soon, they’d discover that the veggies didn’t grow as willingly as they had in the city window box. That every single green shoot had to be coaxed and prized from the reluctant soil, and the neighbors were too busy doing the same on an industrial scale to muster much cheer in their greetings. There was no daily bumper-to-bumper commute, but there was also nowhere much to drive to.
Falk didn’t blame the Whitlams. He’d seen it many times before when he was a kid. Arrivals looked around at the barrenness and the scale and the sheer bloody hardness of the land, and before long their faces all said exactly the same thing. I didn’t know it was like this.
He turned away, remembering how the rawness of local life had seeped into the kids’ paintings at the school. Sad faces and brown landscapes. Billy Hadler’s pictures had been happier, Falk thought. He’d seen them dotted around the farmhouse, colorful and stiff with dried paint. Airplanes with smiling people in the windows. A lot of variations on cars. At least Billy hadn’t been sad like some of the other kids, Falk thought. He almost laughed out loud at the absurdity. Billy was dead, but at least he wasn’t sad. Until the end. At the end he would have been terrified.
Falk tried for the hundredth time to imagine Luke chasing down his own son. He could conjure up the scene, but it was hazy and wouldn’t quite come into focus. Falk thought back to his last meeting with Luke. Five years ago, on an unmemorable gray day in Melbourne. When the rain was still a nuisance rather than a blessing. By then, Falk had to admit to himself, in a lot of ways he’d felt he barely known Luke at all.
Falk spotted Luke immediately across the Federation Square bar. Harried, damp, and straight from work, Falk was just another gray man in a suit. Luke, even freshly liberated from a lengthy suppliers’ convention, still had an energy that was hard to miss. He leaned now against a pillar with a beer in his hand and an amused smile on his face, surveying the early evening crowd of British backpackers and bored youths dressed head to toe in black.
He greeted Falk with a beer and a slap on the shoulder.
“Wouldn’t trust him to shear a sheep with a haircut like that,” Luke said without lowering his voice. He pointed his drink at a skinny young guy sporting a style that was half shaved, half Mohawk, and almost certainly expensive. Falk smiled back but wondered why Luke felt he had to trot out the country-boy comments every time they met. He ran a complex six-figure agribusiness in Kiewarra but played the country-mouse-in-the-big-city card without fail.
Still, it was an easy shorthand excuse for the gap that seemed wider to bridge every time they met. Falk bought a round of drinks and asked after Barb, Gerry, Gretchen. All were fine, apparently. Nothing to report.
Luke asked how Falk was coping since his father had died the year before. OK, Falk said, equal parts surprised and grateful his friend had remembered to ask. And that girl Falk had been seeing? Again, surprise. Good, thanks. She was moving in. Luke grinned. “Jesus, watch out for that. Once they’ve got their throw cushions installed on your sofa, you never get them out.” They’d laughed, the ice broken.
Luke’s son, Billy, was one now and growing fast. Luke pulled up photos on his phone. Lots of them. Falk scrolled through with the polite forbearance of the childless. He listened as Luke reeled off anecdotes about fellow suppliers at the conference, people Falk had never known. In return, Luke feigned interest as Falk spoke about his work, playing down the desk work and ramping up the entertaining bits.
“Good on you,” Luke would always say. “Bang up those thieving bastards.” But he said it in a way that implied, very gently, that chasing men in business suits wasn’t real police work.
On this occasion, though, Luke was more interested. It wasn’t just men in suits this time. A footballer’s wife had been found dead with thousands of dollars of cash in a pair of suitcases by the bed. Falk had been called in to help trace the bills. It was a weird one. She’d been found in the bathtub. Drowned.
The word slipped out before he could stop it and hung in the air between them. Falk cleared his throat.
“Has there been any trouble in Kiewarra for you lately?” He didn’t have to specify what kind. Luke shook his head briskly.
“No, mate. Not for years. I told you last time.”
Falk felt an automatic thank-you forming on his lips, but for some reason he couldn’t bring himself to say it. Not again. Instead he paused and watched as his friend stared past him.
He wasn’t sure what it was that made him want to push it, but this time he felt a flash of irritation. He was perhaps just fractious from work. Hungry and tired and keen to get home. Or maybe he was fed up with always having to feel grateful to this man. Feeling that whichever way the cards came up, Luke could be relied on to deal himself the stronger hand.