The Man in the HOLE - an excerpt

“When everything goes to hell, the people who stand by you without flinching -- they are your family.” ― Jim Butcher

The first week of April 2015 was a week that I will never forget. Although sometimes it still feels too implausible to be reality. Writing about it has proven cathartic. And writing about the seven years since that time will, with all good intentions, hold to account what happened to my brother and his wife. Spoiler alert, they were murdered.

This excerpt will eventually make it into a chapter of a book I’ve been procrastinating over: The Man in the HOLE.

The necessary backstory to this excerpt is that my mate Gordo and our respective wives had planned a holiday together that April in 2015, for Gordo’s 50th birthday. The holiday plan included, first up, a week on a tropical island – cocktails, beaches, diving, happy wives, happy lives. However, the day before our scheduled departure I had to tell them that I couldn't go, as I needed to go to the Goldfields town of Sandstone to attempt help with a search for my brother, Ray, and his wife, Jennie, who had been reported as missing persons.

Gordo had never been camping before then, and had also not driven further north than New Norcia, no doubt for morning tea and scones with his lovely family. Despite that, like the absolute legend he is, Gordo also canceled his holiday plans right then and there and joined me on the trip to Sandstone, for solidarity, leaving our supportive albeit shell-shocked wives at home in Perth.

Due to the police cop-blocking us from the search area, we found ourselves instead holed up in Sandstone caravan park, and in the pub in the evenings, listening in--undercover--to the banter from SES, DFES, Police, and every media reporter from Planet Perth.

Poor Gordo. He would have had many pictures in his mind of where he might have been that week, a couple days before. All I’m sure would have included his lovely wife, a white sandy beach, music playing in the background, a drink with an umbrella in it. Instead he found himself swatting a godzillion flies, drinking king brown beers from a bag, sleeping on the ground, and contemplating what madness I would get him into next.

On day two, a “very decomposed” body was found down a mineshaft. The police and media were adamant that it was nothing to do with the search, given the apparent state of decomposition.

Day three saw us losing patience and options; however we managed to join the Publican, Scruffy, on his lunch delivery out to the search area. After delivering lunch, Scruffy took us to where they had been camped. Amongst many other things--stories for another time--we found this odd stack of rocks, as photo’d, close by their camp.

The police instructed us to leave the next morning; however there was an unsettling feeling in the pub that evening, after the town had turned from Orange to Blue. Everyone seemed abnormally cold, dark, and quiet. Gordo and I decided then and there to stay on an extra day and night, it just didn't seem like we could, or should, leave that next morning. Something wasn't quite right; there was a piece missing from this geological, geographical, Jenga puzzle. Although, Gordo was absolutely sure by now that my sole purpose in life was to get him into a situation where we, or at least he, would be killed.

This following excerpt is Sandstone, day four.

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Our family would mostly spend our ‘downtime’ entertaining ourselves with card or board games while growing up in the ‘70s and ‘80s, in country West Aus. Yahtzee, Euchre, Cluedo, and the like. Jenga was never on that list; although I have played many a game of Jenga over the years, betting for beers with ladyboys in bars while travelling through SouthEast Asia. It is a puzzle game, where you set up and knock down a stack of blocks over and over again. Making a mistake and knocking over the stack is an expected failure while playing. The game ends when the tower falls. Ladyboys are mostly, secretly, structural engineers from my experience; those bitches can balance a fifty-four-block stack on a match head, if it means they don’t have to pay for the next round.

These were the sorts of random thoughts running through my head all night, after our lunch run with Scruffy earlier in the day.

What was the geological Jenga stack at Ray and Jen’s campsite all about? There was no other trace left of them having been there; their camp was packed up and taken home, and no real sign of them was found within a wide radius of where they were last seen. And, there was absolutely no possible way they were simply “missing”.

I had been saying that on a constant repeat last night: “There is no way my brother is missing out there”, to anyone who could be bothered listening to me say it thirty-seven times in a row. It was all I had. So, in absence of ability to sleep, and equal absence of useful purpose, my mind wandered back to childhood games.

Gordo and I were supposed to leave this morning, but something doesn’t feel resolved. The cold shoulders we received last night, from anyone in Sandstone on actual purpose, requires answers. We won’t get any information until this evening, when all return from the search area, so all we can do for now is to keep ourselves occupied for another long day.

Gordo is walking back from the ablution blocks when I drag myself out of the bivvy bag. It seems he’s used up a few precious minutes of time early on, not saving them for later as he did yesterday. He’s got a pace on, too. Either there was no bog-roll in the toilet block, or he’s found something important.

“Dave, I’ve found something for us to do!” he said with a skip to his step. “There’s a map in the laundry block that shows an old homestead to the north of town for us to visit. There’s a campground there, too.”

It was an ideal solution, as we were cop-blocked from anywhere to the south, and had already visited all three other potential tourist activities to the west and east.

“What, you’re not enjoying sitting around the esky, staring at the heat refractions in the air, Gordo?”

“You know what Dave, everyone always talks about the beauty of the Australian Outback...but I ain’t fekking seen it yet.”

I laughed so hard I nearly peed my pants. Not that it would have mattered if I did, there were worse stains on them already.

After another delicious plate full of burned meat and potatoes peppered with flies, we packed up camp and headed off out of town in the Landie, toward Lake Mason Homestead. It was a half-hour drive along a heavily corrugated gravel road--the Sandstone to Wiluna Rd. A rooster tail of dry cervicitis blood followed us. To either side of the road, sparse barbed shrubs filled the pancake-flat land with hostility, the same as the surrounding gazillion hectares. We finally came across the sign directing us off the main road, to a worse corrugated goat track, toward the homestead.

We reached Lake Mason and the Homestead. Lake Mason was a dried scratch of smoother rocks and lighter sand than its surrounding sharp red rock base. Perhaps water had been there for a day or two in the last year, it was hard to tell. There was certainly none there now. The homestead an abandoned pastoral cottage, with sheds and workers accommodation to the other side of a cleared patch of red dirt toward the north. The cleared area no doubt the campground.

Driving around the site, Gordo was again taken aback by the supposed “beauty” of the Australian Outback, or lack thereof. “Why the bloody hell would anyone want to live out here?” he asked.

Meanwhile, however, I was taken back to my childhood – it was as if it were a carbon copy of the first property that I remember living as a child. The house was an old timber framed semi-transportable type building with wide verandah; the laundry and toilet outside in a separate building; an old hills hoist buckled from years of us; and a low wire fence around the once-lawned area, to keep the livestock off.

We pulled up near the fence and got out. I opened the gate and walked toward the house. Gordo was hanging back, beside the Landie. “What are you doing?” he asked, wide eyed.

“I’m going in,” I replied.

“But...But! Oh bloody hell...” he mumbled as he followed me up to the verandah.

The house wasn’t locked, of course. Nobody bothers to lock their house in the country. It was deserted anyway; no one had lived there for years.

Walking inside was like stepping back in time. The floorboards all creaked and moaned as we entered, breaking silence like they would when we boys got home from school all those years ago. When the sunlight filled the room, I could see it all again. There was Dad sitting reading the paper at the table. Mum is busy cooking something in the kitchen, probably mutton. Mal’s in the lounge room watching ABC on the old black and white TV. Ray will no doubt be in his room, building some project or other. I threw my school case across the floor, letting it skid along, to come to a rest in the corner.

Gordo and I wandered through the house until it was empty again, then headed back outside. “Close the bloody door! You don’t live in a tent, do ya?”, someone yelled from inside. I went out to the laundry and gave our Collie, Kelly, a pat.

Outside, the only sound, apart from the flies, was from the creaking rhythm of the windmill, pumping water for the camp tank. We walked across the camping ground. There were no campers there that day. I wondered if there ever had been. A short walk later, past remnants of a fireplace from another homestead now demolished, we came to the workers accommodation. Gordo and I looked at each other, his eyes indicated he was spooked, and I was too. There was a real sense of trepidation in the air. Perhaps we had watched one too many movies.

I pushed open the door and walked inside. There had been someone there very recently, as there was a clean shirt and underwear draped over a chair in the very centre of the main living room, and the whole building was cleaned like it had just been bleached and mopped. But, there were no tracks leading into, nor around, the property.

“I don’t like this, Dave.” said Gordo, swiftly walking back out.

“Me neither, mate!” I said. We moved on quickly toward the shearing shed.

By now, Gordo and I were both hesitant to go inside any more buildings, but I felt drawn into the shearing shed. It was just how I remembered. The smell of the wool and oil leached into the wood, the structure bent and twisted, and sharp steel sheeting sticking out in all places it shouldn't. We walked carefully through the building, climbing over and through fallen timbers, then out the back entry. A lean-to had been built over what would have been the holding pen. It seemed the only structurally sound part of the building left.

Inside the pen, right in the centre, there were two dead kangaroos lying on the ground, cradling each other. One was a large buck, the other a medium grey doe. The buck looked to have been dead for some time, perhaps a week or more, whereas the doe appeared to have died very recently. There was no visible reason for death--they hadn’t been shot, or other injury to suggest how--they were simply lying on the ground together. Dead.

I looked at Gordo. Gordo looked at me. Neither of us needed say anything. That was about enough for us city folk. It was time to go. We jogged back and jumped in the Landie, then gunned it, sailing above corrugations toward Sandstone.

My phone rang as we arrived back in town. “Hi Dave”, said an unfamiliar voice, It was one of the reporters. That sneaky bitch from channel twenty-one who’s been sucking up to all the locals at the bar every night for snippets of information, no doubt. “Whereabouts are you currently?”

“Whyyy?” I replied.

She went on, “I was wondering if you might be in Sandstone by any chance?” It appeared that someone had finally let the cat out of the bag, perhaps the cops had offered me up as a morsel to the media flies. They were all no doubt bored out of their tiny brains. All the reporters could do all day was the same as Gordo and I--wait until the day’s search was over.

I hung up, and Gordo and I bailed out of town for the afternoon, driving to a lookout area to the east, and spent the day wandering around aimlessly in the bush.

My mind was a mess of memories of childhood and scenes from the morning, and the previous day. It is just not possible that Ray could be missing out there. We grew up in this landscape. And, while I have been well and truly reborn a city boy, Ray never left. He never wanted to. It was insulting to suggest he even could be missing.

Is this a game? I thought. A puzzle. Was that why they left that Jenga stack near their camp, and the kangaroos at Mason Homestead? I’m going insane, aren’t I?

I yelled out to Gordo, he was poking an ant nest, or was he clubbing a rabbit? It was hard to tell. “Gordo, let’s get out of here. I need a beer!”

“Thank fuck,” he said, dropping the stick and striding with purpose toward the Landie.

We got back to town just as the convoy of Police and SES vehicles made their way in from the other direction. We parked up at the pub and entered the front bar, ordering and skulling a quick beer each. It was time to catch up with the cops, to see if there was any news from the search. Gordo stayed in the pub, and I walked over to the shire offices, where they were packing things up for the day.

The head copper did a double-take as I walked up, he had expected I would have been on my way back to Perth today. He was finishing off some paperwork with the TRG and another group in blue overalls, who were packing up their van ready to go. The rear doors all slammed shut on the van, and he wished them a safe journey, before turning to me.

“The extraction at the mine shaft where the body was found was successfully completed today. That van is taking everything back to Perth for forensics,” he said. “I thought you were going home today?”

“We will tomorrow.” I promised.

“Good,” he said. “I think it’s a good idea if you do. You should spend some time with your family now, there is nothing you can do here.” He paused for a moment, looking down, then went on: “The body that we extracted was a male, and not as decomposed as we expected.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“There is nothing more I can tell you right now, the body is being taken back for forensic investigation.”

“Wha...what do you mean?”

“There is really nothing more I can tell you now, mate. I’m sorry, but I have a lot of work to sort out right now. I suggest you get yourself some rest tonight and head home tomorrow, okay?”

He shook my hand, I think. I don’t actually know. He was walking away. I turned and waddled back toward the pub. A few seconds later, the Minx called.

“What the hell is going on, Uncle Dave?”

“I really don’t know Chars...why, what have you heard?”

“The Gero Police just called, and they said something about the body in the mine shaft.”

“Yeah, they just said something to me too.”

“Well, they said something about the clothing, that it was mining gear. They even said the word Cloudbreak”

Ray worked at Cloudbreak...the body was a male...not as decomposed as expected...

Everything fell out from under me. The game ends when the tower falls. And the geological, geographical Jenga tower just fell.

“Ohhh... I’m so sorry, love...” I whimpered.

“What?”

“I’m so sorry,” was all I could say.

The Minx is the strongest person I know, but everyone has their limit. She broke, I know she broke, but she would never show anyone, so she just quietly said, “I’ve got to go,” and hung up.

I walked into the pub, stunned. Gordo was sitting at the bar. He turned, then did a double-take. “What happened?” he said. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost!”