The Waterhole

By Lily Malone

** For readers who enjoy Jane Harper's, The Dry

** Sisters In Crime Davitt Awards short-listed 2022

When a backyard dare to discover the source of a fabled waterhole uncovers human bones, small town detective, Marley West, leaps at the chanc

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lily Malone
• Release date: Nov 21, 2021
• ISBN: 9780995400542

Lily Malone

Lily Malone might have been a painter, except her year-old son put a golf club through her canvas. So she wrote her first book, His Brand of Beautiful, instead. Lily has now written six full length rural romance stories and a novella all published by Harlequin Escape. Her debut trade paperback, The Vineyard In The Hills, was published by Harlequin MIRA in September 2016. Last Bridge Before Home is the third of three books set in the fictional Western Australian town of Chalk Hill, a town which, in Lily's imagination, is about halfway between Manjimup and Mount Barker on the Muirs Highway. Book One was Water Under the Bridge, published in February 2018, which is Jake and Ella's story; and Book Two, The Café by the Bridge, followed Taylor and Abe. When she isn't writing, Lily likes gardening, walking, wine, and walking in gardens (sometimes with wine). She also doesn't mind the odd game of cards and loves her regular Thursday Night hand with the Card Girls. She lives in the Margaret River region of Western Australia with her husband, and two handsome sons who take after their father. Lily is a member of Australian Rural Fiction and Australian Fiction Authors. She loves to hear from readers and you can find her on Facebook, and on Twitter: @lily_lilymalone. To contact Lily, email [e-mail] or visit www.lilymalone.blog

Book preview

1

May 2018. Cowaramup

‘M y money’s on a kangaroo.’

Constable Brigit Winger got the words out almost before Marley’s wheels stopped turning. Definitely before he'd buzzed the car window fully down.

‘Kangaroo, hey?’ Marley said, ducking his head to meet her eye. ‘You sure you didn’t sneak a peek already? How much we betting?’

Winger shifted her butt on the bonnet of the blue and white squad car, heel of one boot jabbing at the toe of the other. She’d never been much of one for waiting.

‘Ten bucks. A pint?’ she said.

He scanned ahead for a space to pull his Hilux off the road. There were vehicles parked half on/half off the curb all about him. Nissans and Toyotas, sides scratched from the four-wheel-drive surf tracks that snaked through the bush to the coast everywhere along the south west capes.

Brigit tapped her wrist. ‘One-time bet, Detective. Won’t last forever. Tick bloody tock.’

‘Pressure’s on. Let me park then we’ll see.’

Marley urged the Hilux beneath the drooping branches of the nearest streetscape peppermint tree and dragged his jacket out from the back seat. He locked the car and jogged back to Winger.

‘You’re not on one of those protein shake diets are you?’ she said, checking him top to toe.

‘I’ve been running a bit.’

‘A bit!’

They shook hands. Brigit’s skin was like ice and she immediately stuffed her hands in the pockets of her coat. He did too. It was only half an hour south from Busselton to here, but you’d think he’d slipped a few latitude lines on the drive. The sun was doing its best to disappear over the Indian Ocean and this time of year, the moment the sun vanished so did the heat. It was cold enough that homes had started using their wood fires at night and the scent of smoke warred with rain-dampened grass and eucalyptus.

‘X marks the spot.’ Brigit nodded at a point over her left shoulder.

A distinctive set of muddy tyre tracks marched down the bitumen road of Limestone Loop, starting before and continuing after the spot where Marley had parked his car. They entered from a gravel driveway four doors back up the street and exited with a hard left into a scrubby section of ratty creekline which marked the end of the built-up civilisation as clearly as any fence.

Marley hitched his pants higher and tried to get his bearings. The limestone outcrop of the national park to the east loomed over the subdivision, craggy and wrinkled.

‘My old man went to school here in the sixties, can you believe it?’ he said. ‘There were less than a hundred kids then. This area here was all bush. All the way up there to the national park. Now they’re pushing four hundred kids in the primary school so they tell me.’

‘Nice houses,’ Brigit said. ‘Must be money around here somewhere.’

They were all new or new-looking, and he’d seen only one vacant block on the way in. Even that had a sold sticker across the lot sign.

She nodded at the house across the street: white weatherboard-look with a shining skillion roof. ‘I could see you in something like that. Pottering around in the dope plants hidden behind the tomatoes—purely for your own personal use, not to sell. You’d be in there, plucking out all the males.’ She made a pinch motion with her fingers and laughed, flicked the imaginary leaf away, snuck her hand back in her pocket.

‘Bit flash for me,’ he said, paying attention because Mel said he never paid attention and he was working on his listening skills.

A mosaic tile had been stuck into the timber post and rail fence with the number forty outlined boldly. Mel liked skillion roof designs and she liked mosaics. This was her sort of place. It had a breeze-way filled with plants with those straight spiky leaves.

He’d have preferred something more rustic. The house number on a wooden board stuck into the fence, maybe. And maybe if it wasn’t all so damn white.

Brigit kicked herself off the squad car and grinned at him. ‘Shall we go check out this bloke’s huge boner before some dog sinks its teeth into it?’

Marley winced. ‘Nice one, Winger.’

‘You’re welcome.’

They followed the excavator tracks toward number forty-seven. That was the bloke who’d called in about finding the bone.

Forty-seven’s neighbour had limestone block retaining walls and thick horizontal weatherboards painted a deep sea blue. The entire garden was made up of established natives.

He’d lost count of the number of native seedlings he and Mel potted out, watered and fertilised, exhumed again and shoved into bigger pots. By the time they got the damn spindly things into the ground Mel was a month short of nicking off to Brisbane with Matty from marketing, and now Marley had his own For Sale sign out the front.

They turned into forty-seven’s driveway. Voices drifted from the rear.

‘Hear that?’ Brigit said, cocking her head, ‘or do you need to crank your hearing aid up?’

‘Nah, I heard it,’ he said. ‘Had my annual hearing test last week.’

She glanced sideways at him, suddenly unsure. Marley turned his face to hide a half-smile.

At thirty-six, Marley was very much the senior party to Brigit in age and in rank. She didn’t ever miss a chance to rub salt in the age wound either, but the thing with Winger was she’d got used to ribbing the blokes as a way to hold her own. Most of the female coppers were in the same boat.

A winter creek cut a lonely ditch to the north. Behind the creek a shelterbelt treeline ran along a ruined wire fence—wire coiled low or gone, posts still standing—and behind that a vacant field on a northerly slope, a copse of some sort of plantation gum at the top.

A ginger-haired man in his early thirties wearing jeans and a hoodie skip-jogged toward them.

‘Thanks for coming, officers,’ the man greeted them, scanning his eyes up and down Brigit’s blue uniform, checking out her uniformed arse, or if she carried a gun. Either. Both.

Marley stuck out his hand. ‘I’m Detective Marley West, Busselton Police. This is Constable Brigit Winger from the Margaret River station.’

‘Brian Fox. Is it just you two?’

‘Just us.’

‘Oh.’

‘I’m sure we’ll be manpower enough,’ Brigit said, deadpan.

Fox swallowed, then gestured toward the back of his house. ‘Well it’s this way …’

Marley hitched up his pants. Maybe it was time to buy a new belt. He’d been running heavy dunes and flats on the beach all summer and he was as lean now as he’d been since his father’s funeral. Mel said once that when she reached for him in the night, all she felt was bone.

‘So what happened?’ Brigit asked as they walked.

‘I told the officer on the phone,’ Brian said.

‘You can tell us again. No problem.’

‘Well, me and the missus and a few of our mates were having a few drinks. The fire ban is lifted, you know? It’s the first time I’ve had a fire this year.’

Marley glanced up at the group clustered in a rough triangle between a blazing firepit, a khaki-green Colorbond garden shed, and the fence.

‘Good day for a fire,’ Brigit agreed, blowing on her fingers and rubbing her hands together.

They’d been spotted by the group who’d all been talking animatedly. Now the words died.

‘And we got talking. I mean, we’ve said it on and off for years now. This bloke here, that’s Dave,’—he motioned toward a tall man with a shaggy shock of brown hair—‘Dave runs his own plumbing business. It’s his mini-excavator there.’

Marley scoped the orange machine on the other side of the fence. It was parked with the lowered bucket on the upslope by a pyramid of dumped earth and clay. Empty driver’s seat.

‘Well, all of us, we were having a few drinks as you do, and then we got talking about the waterhole that used to be here before they filled it in when they built the subdivision.’

‘How old is this subdivision?’ Brigit asked.

‘The first of it started, maybe twenty, twenty-five years ago?’

‘What was it before, do you know? Farmland? Bush?’

‘A bit of both I think.’

Marley digested that. Farmland meant the bones could be a steer or a sheep. Bush shortened the odds on Brigit’s kangaroo.

‘What about this part? The houses look newer?’

‘Yeah. Fifteen, twenty years maybe? They released it in stages you know? The first stage was across that way, east of the national park, and it all spread from there. The Bedgys were first on the Loop.’ He indicated another of the men who wore a Hawthorn Football Club jacket over jeans and had his hand wrapped around a can in a Hawks’ stubby holder. ‘How long you been here, Bedgy?’

‘1997 we moved in,’ the man said. ‘Had the whole place to ourselves for years ’til this lot came and stuffed up my serenity.’

Brian resumed his story. ‘So the guys who worked on the subdivision, you know, the contractors who cleared the bush and did all the fencing and the services and shaped the roads and carted all the rocks up to that flat spot where they filled in the oval. You would have passed it driving in? There’s a set of footy goals there now.’

‘Yep,’ Marley nodded. He’d seen the goals. There’d been a kid standing up on the crossbar and another kid trying to knock him off by kicking a footy at him. Visit to emergency just waiting to happen.

‘Well, those blokes said there used to be a spring-fed waterhole at the back of our block. It had water in it all year round and it was deep enough a bloke could swim. Deep enough you couldn’t touch the bottom. They said in the summer when it was stinking hot, the work crew could come down and jump in after work and they thought it was a great spot. We’ve talked about it heaps haven’t we guys?’ Brian’s eyes dodged to the neighbours at the fence and on the chairs and they nodded and agreed with the sort of cut-off country ‘yep’ that sounded like frogs starting up a song.

‘We were talking about the waterhole again today.’

It didn’t take much to get the picture. You get a group of blokes who have access to a mini-excavator on any given Sunday and add enough beer, and even if they’d been talking about that waterhole for years and done nothing … it only took one day.

Brigit caught his eye from where she stood near Brian. Boys with toys.

‘…and I said to Dave that if we dug down maybe we could find the water source and then if we did, we could get a couple of tanks and pump it in and we’d have free water all year round for the gardens, you know? So Dave said he’d take a bit of a dig around and see if we could pick up that spring again.’

Dave took up the story, teeth flashing around a wide grin. A faint sheen of zinc cream covered his nose and cheeks. ‘I dug up a whole lot of fill first, then hit clay, poked around a bit more and then the girls and the kids came back from a bushwalk and I stopped so I didn’t run over any of the little tackers—’

‘And then next thing the kids were making sandcastles in it,’ someone said.

‘And then one of them started on about finding a dinosaur bone,’ someone else said.

‘And Russ here, he’s a doctor, he said I better call the police because he would bet his left nut that dinosaur bone was a human femur …’ Brian finished, a little out of breath.

‘So where’s the bone now?’ Marley asked. He didn’t doubt the GP, but it wasn’t always easy to know bones from bones.

‘Down there. We left it where it was. We took it off the kids and we didn’t touch it after Russ said about the femur.’

The blokes led him and Brigit toward the fence, one of those hip-high post and rail jobs and this one had no wire at all which probably meant the family didn’t own a dog or have young kids or anything they had to keep in or out.

All the blokes and Brigit climbed over—a few of the women ducked beneath the top post and went through—and then Marley landed on the other side with a jolt and scrambled through grass and reeds long enough to wet his boots and the bottom of his pants until he got to a point in the creek where he could work back up the slope toward the mini-excavator. He had enough time to admire the skills of Dave the driver; it wasn’t the easiest spot to get in to.

The hole was three or so metres deep, a single blunt face that started with yellow-red topsoil then got grey-white with grit before hitting reddish-brown clay as the scoop butchered the earth. The hole shallowed on the downhill side where the soil and rock had been dumped out. That damp earth smell reminded him of the day he and Mel—

‘There. See? We left it on the excavator,’ Brian said, forcing Marley’s focus back to the bone.

On first inspection he agreed with the GP’s assessment.

The bone stood out enough against the mud clinging to the black trackpad, but if he’d had a bright white bit of paper to compare it with, it would dirty up quick. It was like looking at the last dregs in the bottom of a tea cup. Everything was brown, but the tea-leaves would always be browner.

Must have been buried for a while.

‘What do you think?’ Brigit asked him quietly, blonde ponytail bobbing.

‘I think we need to get an anthropologist down here.’ He heard a mechanical buzzing and frowned, and then the sound was hidden by someone starting a lawnmower in another street. ‘I wonder if there were any Aboriginal burial sites down here? Hope not. That complicates things.’

‘Because it could be a sacred site?’

‘Yeah. We don’t know yet if it’s an entire skeleton or just a single bone. It could have washed here before the creek was filled if it’s just a bone, or been dragged here by an animal, then got buried in the subdivision earthworks. There’s a chance if they had to truck in a heap of sand for earthworks it could have been transported here. Hard to say.’

‘If it got filled in with the subdivision works it’s been there for years,’ Brigit said. ‘The developer’s records should be easy enough to track down. That will give us some sort of date.’

Marley backed away from the excavator, spending a bit more time examining the freshly dug rock and sand. There was a lot of clay in those scoops and they’d had enough autumn rainfall to make it clump.

Water already pooled in the bottom of the pit.

He couldn’t see any other bones without shifting the sand. There was some rope caught on the excavator bucket—about half a metre of dirt-stained length—but as he ducked back toward the machine to take a closer look, the noise he’d heard earlier whacked up from nowhere, drowning out the lawnmower’s whine.

‘Ahh, bugger …’

Brigit swore at the same time.

He lifted his face to the sky. The others craned their necks too, shifting their weight to tiptoes and flat again, trying to see through the shelterbelt trees on the north side of the creek.

Darting out from the top of the trees like one of those predatory wasps, a news helicopter cleared the canopy, blades slicing the sky.

2

When Jack Ross finished reading his brother’s Sunday Times, he drove down to chuck it back in Bill’s mailbox along with the wad of unread junk mail. He never read the catalogues. Why would he? He always bought the same bloody thing at the supermarket for breakfast, lunch and dinner, week after week, no matter what was on special or what earned him those silly points. What use was free flyer points anyway? He hated planes. If he was gonna travel anywhere he’d do it in his caravan, thanks very much, not crammed in like a sardine in a flying tin can that would probably explode in mid-air and kill every dumb bugger on board.

Betty at the post office told him he should mark himself off the junk mail list, but where was the fun in that? He whistled as he transferred the brochures into his brother’s box. Much more fun this way.

He rolled it tight, then shoved the weekend paper into the hollow cylinder Bill had fixed to the top and stood tall. Not much sunshine got its fingers into him here beneath the trees, but the soil and the paddocks all around him still held that hint of warmth. There’d be worms wriggling under that green grass that’d be loving the first rains. There’d be new feed for the sheep in a couple of days. You watch his lemon tree grow now!

He rocked back and forward on his toes, glancing around his patch of planet, feeling pretty damn good about the grass and the trees, it had to be said.

Then he saw the glint of steel star-picket in the paddock.

Red sweat prickled him all over. And just like that, his afternoon went to shit.

Those little bastards had nicked his signs again.

Rage blew up his chest.

Did he still have his hammer in the back of the ute? If he’d left the hammer there from last time he could bash the signs back in place.

Jack stomped across the driveway—still more pea-gravel and grit than mud despite the rain—to where his two signs had been tossed. Leaning into the wire fence—the top wire pretty much cut him in half—he could almost get his fingers around the base of the star picket. Close. But not quite. And everybody knew close was only good enough if it was a hoof and a horseshoe.

Jack took off his cap and ran one hand over a head that was more scalp than hair these days. He thought again about the hammer. If it wasn’t in the ute he’d have to go up to The Big House first and find it in his shed, then he’d hafta drive back down into the paddock.

He huffed out a breath. What a pain in the arse.

He trudged to the ute and undid the corner of the tarp, lifting it so he could peer into the dim corners.

That’s when he heard the helicopter. Squinting up, the thing swooped above the trees.

It wasn’t the right colours to be the Royal Flying Doctors and it didn’t look like the guy who ran scenic tours and was always taking people to stick their noses in things that were none of their business.

It looked more like the TV news.

Maybe a shark got another surfer down at the point? That was always a story for the bloody media. Damn vultures.

The helicopter flew so low it had all the leaves flapping in the patch of trees on the ridge. It was the last patch of trees on the old farm. Everything else had been cut down and cleared, and now the farm was in the middle of a patchwork quilt of houses and lawns and vegie patches and trampolines.

There was his bit here, and Bill’s bit there, and what the hell was that pilot doing? He’d stopped over the old creek. If the old house had still been there, that helicopter woulda been right over the roof.

What were they sniffing around at down there?

Movement at the corner of his eye told him it was time to stop looking at the helicopter and go. Those two scruffy mutts of Bill’s were about fifty metres away, scratching and shuffling through the damp leaves at the edge of the driveway.

If it was Bill on his own, Jack might have waited just to see Bill’s face when he got an eyeful of all that junk mail. But if Annette was with him, he didn’t want to see them together. He didn’t want to see Annette on her own either. He didn’t need that kick in the guts.

He rushed his old shanks back to his ute, did a quick scrape on the sidebar to clean his feet a bit before he got in, then shoved the ute into reverse. He had twenty metres to get to a spot where he could turn. He left the tarp flapping, which reminded him he still had to find a hammer if he wanted to bang his signs back in the ground.

And he did want to bang his signs back into the ground. Bloody kids!

He revved the first twenty metres hard, reversed around a tree into a turnout, then he shoved the gears into first and the ute lurched over the potholes toward The Big House. Gravel spat out behind his wheels. He checked his rearview mirror. Didn’t quite make it around the bend before he saw the grey hair and sloping shoulders of his brother arrive at the mailbox and lift the lid to peer in. Then Bill’s pink face shone for a second when he turned his head to watch Jack’s wheels fly.

Bill Ross stamped his boots on the mat at the front door of the cottage on the hill that he’d called home since 1961.

The dogs flopped into their bed beside the door, tongues flapping.

‘It’s not your tea-time yet and you can’t come in yet either. Don’t look at me like that,’ he scolded the pair of them before shouldering his way in with the Sunday Times and a thick pile of junk mail.

‘Will you look at all this?’ he said to Annette who was in her chair by the fire, reading something on her iPad, rocking. He waved the fist that was carrying all the catalogues as he shut the door.

He didn’t get an answer, but he didn’t really expect one. Netty knew how many damn catalogues came on a Sunday. Whoever they had doing the deliveries they should sack him. There were always double-ups and how many catalogues did a bloke need exactly? Talk about killing the trees.

He slapped the stack of brochures on the sideboard.

It was warmer in the house than outside—since Easter they’d started lighting the fire in the afternoon to keep it warm overnight—and he slung his coat over the back of a chair and laid the paper on the table to scan the headlines.

‘Someone pulled up Jack’s signs again,’ Bill chuckled.

Netty didn’t say anything. She got like that when she was reading.

‘There’s a helicopter flying about the creek near where your old place was. Don’t know what they’re doing down there.’ He settled on a chair and pulled the paper closer, opened the front page and flipped through.

That’s how he read his news. Fast through the front pages to the comics in the middle, then he’d turn to the back to check out the sport. Then he’d flip to the front again, flicking slowly this time and reading the headlines and the opening paragraphs and anything else if it caught his interest and wasn’t politics.

He pulled out the comic section and glanced up.

Usually Netty took the comics from him. The stars were in that section and she liked nutting out the sudoku.

Her chair rocked slowly, back and forth.

The newspaper pages in Bill’s hand wafted under their own weight, slowly sinking like a butterfly with a busted wing.

Netty had a quilt over her shoulders, all purple and pink squares that Edie Batley crocheted as a gift on her fiftieth birthday. The quilt hung over the arms of the chair, rocking with her, almost touching the floor.

He’d made that chair for her at the end of the war. Made it so well it never squeaked in 1971 and it didn’t squeak now.

‘You’ll get that quilt caught if you’re not careful,’ he warned, bringing the comics section back to the table. A draft caught the top page and shifted it, and Bill got a glimpse of something out of place in the bottom corner.

‘That sneaky—’

He picked up the paper, opened it, and turned it so Netty could see.

She didn’t look up, so he told her. ‘Look at what bloody Jack has done now! He’s done my flippin’ crossword!’

He turned another page to check the sudoku, and swore again.

‘He’s cut out the TV guide!’ Bill said, fuming.

Once, Jack put one of his damn paper spiders in the mail box so that when Netty pulled out the paper, the spider leapt out and almost gave her a heart attack.

Bill rattled the page again, waiting for her outrage. ‘Look. You see that, Netty? He’s gone and got my newspaper and already done my crossword.’

Nothing. Not even a gasp.

‘Netty?’

Rock. Rock. Rock. Wings of the woollen quilt swooshed softly through firewood splinters and chips they hadn’t yet swept from the floor.

Bill got out of his chair, scurrying across the room. He couldn’t kneel anymore with his dodgy knee and his bung hip, but he stooped as low as he could go and put a hand on her shoulder.

‘Netty? Are you okay? Do you need your pills?’

Her mouth opened. No sound came out. She shook her head.

Her eyes were wide, silver-grey, clear and shining as always but when they locked with his, the pain in them struck him like a punch to the chin.

‘What love?’ His fingers gripped. ‘What is it?’

‘It’s all over Facebook,’ she said, voice so low he could hardly hear her and he was only a foot away.

‘What’s over Facebook? What are you looking on there for?’

‘In the Cowaramup town group. Anita Fox says one of the neighbour’s kids found bones in the creek. Police are down there now. That’s why the helicopter’s there.’

Her fingers fluttered to her throat and she tapped. It made a hollow bouncing sound on her chest, a bit like the noise of those helicopter blades.

One second.

Two seconds.

‘They’ve found it,’ she whispered.

Three seconds.

Smell of dust in his nostrils. Heat shimmering off river rocks baked in the sun. A man crying for his mother.

Blood.

‘I have to call Trace,’ Annette said. The quilt hit the floor and she surged to her feet. The chair rocked violently.

Bill’s gaze settled on the bookshelf, one fat spine in there, bottom shelf …

He remembered everything. Especially everything Netty didn’t know.

3

April 1993. Port Vincent. South Australia

It’s always hard to work out a bra size from a photograph unless, you know, the photo gets taken at the beach or something and you can see, or if it’s one of those fancy pictures, like a dress-up party. Gotta be the right costume, though. Family photos don’t show anything good because the mum always sits the kids on her lap and that covers up her tits and you can’t see for shit.

So Greg doesn’t get his hopes up. He just waits. Staying still and not even holding his breath while the old guy—Charlie Someone—digs his wallet from the pocket of a pair of jeans gone all baggy in the arse.

Some of these old blokes’ll open their wallet right in front of you; they’ll show you a driver’s licence, credit card, card for park memberships or the local RSL, membership of the Big 4 tourist parks, a health fund if they’re rich buggers or the Medicare card if they’re poor. Some of ’em have money stuffed to falling out: twenties, fifties, tens. Never