Ma said, “Good riddance,” and we turned away.
In the bedroom, Ma put the bed back together. She laid Julia’s clothes neatly on a chair and put Julia’s shoes side by side beneath it. She took Julia’s purchase out of the bag—an expensive scarf— spread it out on the duvet as if Julia had taken a moment to admire it, then Ma and I looked around. The place looked pristine. Julia’s purse was where she’d left it, money, credit cards, everything she’d had was untouched. No one would be in here for at least twenty-four hours. By then, we would be out of France. The room didn’t look like a place where murder had been done. The truth might eventually come out, but finding the murderer or a reason for the crime might never be known. We hoped.
“So,” Ma said. “We good here?”
“I am.”
“Me, too. Let’s go.”
She opened the door to the hallway an inch, listened a moment, peered out, then left. I followed quickly. Wearing gloves, Ma put a sign on the door, French side out, Ne pas déranger—Do not disturb—then we walked away.
Hours later, at Orly Airport, Sarah and Ma flew west toward America. I caught a different flight and went east.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
BORROLOOLA, AUSTRALIA.
I dug holes beneath a blazing sun.
That was what I did. I didn’t think about the past. I dug holes three feet deep in tough red dirt then used what came out to make a kind of slurry of dirt and water in a wheelbarrow, then poured it in around a nine-foot fence post centered in the hole, held up by diagonal braces clamped to the post and to stakes pounded into the ground. In two days the slurry would harden like concrete and that fence post would be there forty years later. Then I dug another hole and did it all again and the whole thing was like a kind of immortality marching across the land at a rate of forty feet a day. In a little over four months I’d dug nearly six hundred forty holes and put up the same number of fence posts. My work stretched fifty-one hundred feet the last time I’d measured it. Somewhere along the line it felt as if the fierce summer heat had burned away that black crust that had formed around my heart the day Jeri died.
“I brought you some water, Steve,” Sally said. She was in dusty boots and a sleeveless cotton dress of some indeterminate sun-bleached color. She’d driven up in an ATV with a thermos in back. We were half a mile from the main house, a dark, low place beneath half a dozen gum trees. Sally was sixteen years old, starting to fill out. Cute kid. Another few years and she would be a knockout.
“Thanks, kiddo.”
“I’ve got bread baking. Ma told me to tell you.” She looked at my chest, probably at the little round scar where Winter had run her foil entirely through my body. It looked like a .22 caliber gunshot wound in my sunbaked hide.
“Good deal,” I said.
“You should eat more.”
“Don’t want to get fat.”
“You’re not fat. Ma says you’re skinny. Well, not skinny, but she thinks you’re gettin’ awful thin. She’d kill me if she knew I told you, so don’t.”
“Told me what? Shoo.”
Sally smiled and turned away. Ma was Kate Hardy, mother of Sally—and Matt, age twelve. Kate was a mile away in an old Ford pickup, wrangling sheep or whatever they call it when they run them around. I didn’t do sheep. I dug holes and put up fences to keep sheep in. Or out. Sheep in a flock or in pens stink. Bad. I’d rather dig holes.
Kate was a tall, good-looking woman of thirty-seven with dark brown hair and skin that had seen too much sun, calloused hands that had done too much work. She’d lost her husband three years ago. I was working for room and board, nothing else. Everything I’d known before was either a million miles away or gone forever.
The temperature had topped out at a hundred four degrees that day—about typical for Borroloola in February. Above the waist I was getting as brown as an aborigine.
I was down to two hundred four pounds. I’d lost twenty-six in four months, and I’d put on pounds of muscle, so I didn’t look much like the guy who’d rolled a woman in a bedspread and snuffed out her lights like someone stepping on a roach.
My shower was outdoors. It worked off the well system. It was meant for cleaning off the worst of the crud folks around here get into, sheep stuff you didn’t want to bring into the house. There was a shower inside, but I only used the one outside. I looked askance at it when Kate said I could use it or the indoor shower. I didn’t want to make myself at home, but the outdoor shower didn’t come with a curtain of any sort. It was just a showerhead, a single valve, no hot water, and a kind of wooden platform to stand on. Water ran off into the dirt and that was that.
“We . . . things are pretty natural around here,” she said when she saw me eyeing the house, thirty feet away.
“You’ve got kids.”
She shrugged that off, but the next day I put up two posts and strung a wire between them, clipped a bed sheet between the shower and the house, and called it good. Three months later I was showering, shampooing my hair, which I did on Wednesdays and Sundays. It was evening, dusk, about nine o’clock. When I was finally able to open my eyes, Sally was six feet away, watching. “Ma says she’s got apple pie in the house, if you
