Telling the Bees – Chapter 12
Boundaries
‘Interesting,’ said Tom, ‘But I don’t see what it’s got to do with the Homestead or – anything, really. Just some poor young bugger who met a sticky end out there in the bush a hundred and sixty-odd years ago. I don’t suppose he was the only one, either. Violent times, eh? Like Jason was saying the other night …’
‘But I saw him, Tom.’
‘Sorry? Run that by me again, love. Saw who?’
‘I saw him. Two months ago, when I was walking up in the State Forest. Right where he would have met his death. You remember, the day I came home with muddy knees and I said I’d fallen, which I did of course but –’
‘Amélie, my darling, my love … You aren’t making any sense.’
‘– he was so scared, Tom. Frightened for his life. You could see it in his face. He was as close to me as you are now. I didn’t understand at the time, but now, having read this, don’t you see how it all fits …’
‘Stop. Please stop.’ He gave a nervous little chuckle. ‘You’re scaring me love.’ He tried for a grin, which died on his lips.
The anguish in his dear face stemmed the flow of her words.
It did not shake the growing conviction that she was, in some inexplicable way, right.
‘Mary! Hello! Thanks for seeing me at such short notice,’ she called as she entered the Old Courthouse.
While Mary put on the kettle for coffee, which Amélie knew would be both instant and horrid but a necessary social lubricant, she took her laptop from its case, gingerly cleared a space amidst the piles of documents and correspondence, and called up the newspaper article.
‘Help me to find more like this,’ she said, as the curator leaned over her shoulder to read the screen.
‘More? How do you know there are more, Millie?’
‘I just know.’
They worked out their terms of reference.
‘MO?’
‘What’s MO?’
‘Modus operandi. You know, Millie, like in the cop shows.’
‘Ah, I see … We don’t really know, do we? At any rate, a violent death.’
‘What if this boy was one who got away and had to be caught?’
‘Ah, you mean, an abduction, a kidnapping?’
‘Exactly.’
‘So we should look for missing persons, too …’
‘Definitely. Location? Let’s have a look …’ Mary opened her browser, found a historical map from the nineteenth century, overlaid it with a modern map of the area.
‘Let’s say the whole of the Upper Yarra Valley from Woori Yallock eastwards all the way to Matlock – or Emerald Hill as it was then. What became Upper Yarra Shire in the 1880s.’
Amélie peered at the map, made sense of the scale.
‘It’s a huge area, Mary! It must be a thousand square kilometres.’
‘Sure, but a thousand sparsely populated kilometres. Warburton was the only town of any size back then. Jim’s Creek was really just the Homestead, after the gold prospectors moved on upriver. What’s our time frame?’
‘From the beginning of colonisation to … oh …’ she hesitated.
‘Go on – say it.’
‘Now.’
She shrugged apologetically at Mary’s questioning look.
By the time Amélie drove carefully and slowly back up the hill through the lengthening shadows, her eyes were swimming and there was a burning ache at the base of her skull.
It had been a long afternoon. Yet productive.
Their initial research had turned up more than fifty ‘possibles’: disappearances, violent killings, abductions. Then they had started to screen and sift this mass of paydirt. They agreed to eliminate deaths from domestic violence, altercations or robbery; then any killings where the perpetrator had been apprehended and convicted. Though whether all the verdicts were sound – who knew?
That had left eighteen items of higher interest: fifteen disappearances and three murders roughly within a day’s ride of the Homestead, from the Acheron Gap to McMahon’s Reef. The victims were predominantly young men or women. Two outliers were older vagrant men.
They were grouped in five clusters.
At regular intervals.
Over one hundred and fifty years.
The pattern was striking, but what, if anything, did it mean? How could there possibly be a pattern over so many years, so many generations? Was it simply the result of confirmation bias? Qui cherche, trouve …
‘I’ve got a lot to tell you, mon ami,’ she began after kissing Tom on the cheek.
‘And I’ve got a lot to show you, my love,’ he said. ‘Come on, before we lose the last of the daylight.’
He led her out into the darkening garden and over to the spot where they could look down through the trees to the creek. ‘Will you look at that!’
On the other side of the creek, where the boundary between Crown land and the Homestead lay, were the beginnings of a new fence.
Sturdy steel posts stood three metres high. On the grass of the paddock behind lay rolls of chainlink fencing and something that looked very much like razor wire.
‘The contractors turned up just after you left.’
‘Ah. Do you think our lovely new neighbours are trying to tell us something?’
‘Not just us. I took a look along the aqueduct trail. It looks like they’re doing the whole bloody perimeter.’
Next week in Telling the Bees:
Chapter 13: The Watcher
Tom has to fulfil an obligation. Amélie feels uneasy in her home.
Acknowledgement of Country: The Woiwurrung people of the Kulin alliance are the Traditional Owners of the land on which this story is set. I pay my respects to their Elders past, present and emerging.
Disclaimer: The people and events described in this story are entirely the product of the author’s imagination; they bear no intentional resemblance to real-life people and events. The locations are based on real places.