Shadows of Winter Robins by Louise Wolhuter

Author:Louise Wolhuter [Louise Wolhuter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, General, Crime, Mystery & Detective
ISBN: 9781761153105
Google: IZThEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Hardie Grant Publishing
Published: 2024-06-04T23:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Nanny had never learned to drive, and Bonnie had her own car, so Alison’s Barina passed to me. It was Ned’s idea to check its GPS, shuffling through its history and saved addresses. There were four in the southwest. One each in Bunbury and Bridgetown, and two around Margaret River.

You cannot do all the good that the world needs. But the world needs all the good that you can do, Alison used to say. No one thought it was her quote to credit, but there was something of her in it, and we printed it on the cards we spaced along the benches at her funeral, beneath a photograph Bonnie had taken recently at Araluen, a blur of tulips behind her. There were a few of the cards left over, and I slipped them into Alison’s army surplus jacket, which I had not been left but took. It smelled of her, the creases in its elbows moulded like the knees of jeans, and I left all her odds and ends in its pockets and the badge on its lapel: Be Kind.

‘Now?’ Nanny said. It was a fortnight since the funeral. ‘You’re going now? Leaving me here alone?’

‘You’re not alone,’ I told her.

Monkey was snug on the couch beside her. They spent their days together, every one of them the same, beginning with the beep of her alarm, the ping of a kettle boiled, the spring of toast.

‘I’ll be gone a day or two at most,’ I promised.

‘I don’t really see why you have to go at all,’ Nanny said, not for the first time. ‘Father Timothy told you they’d informed everyone who knew Alison that she’d passed.’

‘Yes, but I don’t think he knew all of them.’ I didn’t want to go through it again. So what? I think she would have liked to say but didn’t. ‘Ned will be round tonight,’ I reminded her. ‘He’s bringing fish and chips.’

‘Does he know you’re going?’

‘He offered to come with me.’

‘Well, that’s not a bad idea, you know,’ she said. ‘Where there are drugs there are weapons, I always say.’

‘When do you say that?’ We both laughed then, and there was a release like steam. ‘There aren’t going to be any drugs,’ I assured her. ‘They’re recovered alcoholics. They’re clean.’ But in truth I didn’t know what they were.

‘Text me when you get there,’ she insisted, and that was her goodbye.

I’d thrown a change of clothes into an overnight bag, just in case. Tall trees would pull the curtain early, Ned had warned me, and I didn’t want to hit something in the dark. ‘Better to cop a night in a motel than wind up in hospital,’ he’d said. Mid-week and term-time, I didn’t think I’d struggle to find a place to stay in Margaret River. I knew there was a motel on the main street, a couple of pubs if I wanted company around me, a good bakery and a bottle shop if I didn’t.

It was Alison who’d taught me to drive.

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