Telling the Bees – Chapter 16
Rewind
‘Whoa there!’ said Tom. ‘Can you run all that by me again, love?’
‘I told you,’ she replied in exasperation. ‘Les seigneurs de la chasse. It’s all happening again, can’t you see? A new generation …’
‘Amélie, my sweet, I have no idea what you’re talking about.’
‘I told you,’ she repeated. ‘Before you went to Perth.’
‘You didn’t tell me anything, love.’ He sounded bewildered, anxious.
They stared at one another blankly.
‘You did say you had something to tell me,’ he said, in that annoying tone of one dredging up a remembrance from the distant past, ‘that time when you came back from town with a bee in your bonnet about some old newspapers. Your friend at the Courthouse, that Chinese lady …’
‘Vietnamese. Mary Huynh.’
And she’s not really my friend. I don’t seem to have many of those left. Just my GP, a shy teenage girl … and a husband who thinks I have a ‘bee in my bonnet’.
‘Yes, her. But then, the business with The Fence … then Mum …’
‘I really didn’t tell you?’
‘No. I don’t even know what it is you didn’t tell me. Because you didn’t tell me.’
‘Oh. I was so sure I’d told you. I can hear the words, in my head.’
‘Maybe, but they didn’t make it out of your mouth and into my ears.’
‘I’ll get my laptop.’
Half an hour later, Tom sat back and took off his spectacles, pinched the bridge of his nose, the way he did to ward off a headache. Scratched the back of his neck, the way he did when he was perplexed.
‘It’s all very interesting, I’ll give you that, but …’
‘Interesting, Tom?’
‘Interesting. But I think you’re reading far too much into it.’
‘There’s a clear pattern of behaviour here, what Mary called a … an … MO.’
‘An MO. Is Mary a fan of CSI, by any chance?’ He put on an excruciating American accent. ‘“What’s the perp’s MO, lootenant?”’
‘I have no idea, but I thought you’d take this more seriously.’
‘You said yourself, love, or Jason said, Jim said, somebody said – this was a violent frontier back then. Wild-West-level shenanigans. There would have been any number of murders, killings, disappearances. And that’s just among the settlers, let alone the poor bloody indigenous …’
‘But what about the more recent cases?’
‘Think about where we are. The forest out there,’ he waved his arm vaguely, ‘anyone can get lost in it. Anyone. That’s why I worry about you, wandering around up there by yourself …’
‘I don’t “wander around” – I know exactly where I am at all times,’ she wanted to say, but instead she let him talk on.
‘… City slickers come out here on a day trip, go for a little walk in the bush, and they get lost. Lose their bearings. Cause it’s only ninety minutes from the CBD, so it’s not real bush, right? Sometimes, if they’re lucky, they get found, sometimes not.
‘Only last year there was that marathon runner guy, do you remember? Got dropped off at Donna Buang, set out over the Acheron Gap towards Narbethong where he’d parked his car, stepped off the trail for a pee … and spent five days wandering lost in the bush. They tracked the silly bastard down in the end – just about to cark it. Didn’t realise there wouldn’t be phone coverage, he said.’
‘So you don’t think there’s anything sinister going on next door?’
‘Sinister? No. I think this owner bloke is a bit secretive …’
‘If he exists. If Jason hasn’t made him up.’
‘Yeah, well, let’s not get into that. But organising some kind of hunting party, with people as the quarry? That’s crazy stuff, love. You’re taking two plus two and making twenty-two.’
‘What about the chopper?’
‘Rich people travel by helicopter. Probably straight from their Docklands penthouse, or Canberra, lunch with the PM then pop over to see how the lackeys are getting on with the renovations at that delightful little spot in the Yarra Valley, don’t-you-know?’
‘The men with machineguns?’
‘The men who might have had a gun – or a furled umbrella in case His Lordship fancies a spot of tiffin on the lawn. It doesn’t make their boss a Bond villain, does it?’
She gave up. He was determined to have a mundane explanation for every individual observed fact, oblivious to the rickety structure he was building overall.
He didn’t trust her judgement any more. She was a silly old woman, sliding into terminal dementia and confabulating crazy stories about the neighbours. That was what it came down to.
Had he ever really accepted her as an equal, she wondered. Or had this fundamental lack of respect for her intellect always been an undercurrent of their relationship?
Next week in Telling the Bees:
Chapter 17: Collateral Damage
Amélie gets militant about protecting her property’s privacy.
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.