Lyrebird Hill (41 page)

Jamie shrieked, and I shifted position the better to see. Bobby’s back was blocking my view of Jamie, but I caught a sharp little motion as Jamie elbowed Bobby in the ribs and twisted out of his grasp.

‘Oh, really?’ she said, sounding annoyed.

She whirled, a funky sort of pirouette on her nimble fairy-feet, and somehow landed on an even higher ledge of stone.
Her hand shot out and her fingers splayed and then there was a splash in the water below.

‘What’d you do that for?’ Bobby yelled.

Jamie lifted her shoulders and looked down her nose at him. ‘I just did you a favour. Sooner or later your mum would have found it, and then she’d know it wasn’t that weirdo brat who took it, but her own darling Bobby-boy.’ She laughed and gestured at the water. ‘This way, there’s no proof.’

‘Hell, Jamie. Mum loved that locket!’

Jamie pouted. ‘More than you love me?’

Bobby went over and glared into the river. Then he slumped on the sun-warmed stone and dropped his face into his hands. ‘Aw, crap. I’m stuffed if she finds out it was me who took it.’

‘She won’t find out now.’

When he didn’t reply, Jamie danced silently up to him, turning out her feet, still doing the ballet thing. She kicked Bobby lightly in the back, and when he still didn’t respond she kicked harder. ‘What’s up, Bobby-boy. Crying for your mummy?’

Bobby gave a yell and grabbed her ankle.

‘You’ll be the one crying, once I’m done with you.’

Jamie shrieked and tried to twist free, but her foot slipped on the mossy stone and she crashed onto her bottom. In an instant Bobby was on her, pinning her beneath him, covering her slender body with his own large one.

Sliding back behind my rock, I sat heavily on the ground as understanding came to me. The locket Jamie had just tossed into the water had glittered in the sun like something valuable, because it
was
valuable.

At least, it had been to Mrs Drake.

The memory had left me feeling jittery.

Suddenly, my palms were damp and I kept wanting to look over my shoulder. Crouching, I ran my hands across the smooth
surface of the granite, collecting particles of lichen and moss, trying to regather myself. I had hoped that returning to this place would jog my memory of Jamie’s death and, now, after my flashback about the stolen locket, I felt close. Too close. The vault had opened, but I wasn’t ready. Perhaps I should come back when I felt stronger, when my heart didn’t pound so painfully, when my limbs were not so weak and prone to trembling.

And yet I lingered, as if the rocks had cast their spell on me once more and trapped me here. Except tonight – and it was almost night, I noticed as the sun began to swan-dive into its ocean of deep pink clouds – it wasn’t the joyful spell Jamie and I had experienced as children. There was something dark about the place, as if the sun-warmed granite beneath my feet was vibrating, rumbling like an ancient beast on the brink of waking from long hibernation.

The trees and bushes that flanked it swarmed with shadow. I searched the dark-infested trunks, seeing figures crouched or standing, as if someone was watching.

I looked back along the track I’d taken to get here, and willed myself to walk towards it, but I couldn’t move. The fragment of memory thrown up by my hypnosis session rushed back around me, terrifyingly real.

There had been a struggle. Jamie had crashed backwards against the upright wall of stone, hitting her head. Her scream echoed around me, amplified and shattered into, not just one scream, but many, and then the sound was no longer erupting from the throat of a girl, but somehow blaring out of the stones around me—

Dragging in a breath, I tried to shake off the hallucination, but the screams continued to rise around me. I covered my ears and began to run, wanting only to leave this place and return along the track to the safety of the farmhouse. As I neared the edge of the rocky shelf, the toe of my runner caught in a crevice and I lurched forward, hitting the rocks with full force. My head
rang with the sudden silence. I tried to move, but I was locked against the ground, immobile, as if the granite had somehow seeped through my defences and turned my limbs to stone.

Sometime later, I woke in darkness. I was no longer on the flat shelf of stone overlooking the river. The roar of the rapids was dim, muffled, as if in the distance. A smell lingered in the air: dampness and the powdery scent of lichen, the sharpness of animal dung. Somewhere overhead a branch creaked like a rusty hinge, but there was no other sound.

Vaguely, I remembered crawling. My body was stiff and sore after my fall, and I had wanted to find somewhere out of the wind to rest until I recovered enough to walk home. I had rested against a large boulder, but then something shifted; the embankment had given way and swallowed me.

I became aware that I was curled on my side, and that stones were digging into me. My joints ached, and the skin of my elbows and knees stung as if I’d been bitten by fire ants. Worse was the feeling that something enormous crouched over me – not an animal, but a large mass the size of a planet. Stretching out my arm, I reached up and my fingertips grazed damp stone.

That was when I became aware of the cold.

My shoes were gone, and I’d lost my cardigan, too. I was shivering, my thin jeans and tank top useless against the chill. I groped around. I seemed to be lying in a dirt cavity; a cave hollow or grotto.

I crawled towards where I believed the opening to be, but I bumped my head on a sloping bank of earth. It seemed to take forever, wriggling around the base of my hollow, seeking an opening, not finding one.

Finally, I curled into a ball to contain my body heat, but I was already shivering uncontrollably. Lying very still, I breathed
deeply and tried to stay calm. My panic over the vision that had swamped me on the rocks had dimmed, replaced by a new fear.

No one knew where I was.

My body was jarred, my ankle swollen and sore.

And I was cold. Very, very cold.

Even if by some miracle Pete
did
come searching for me, how would he ever know where to look? He couldn’t know about the rocks, or that Jamie had died there. He couldn’t know that I’d returned here in search of answers.

Squeezing shut my eyes, I tried to find the doorway into sleep. Instead, I found myself sliding into the silvery twilight of the past. A riverbank, and my sister casting her shadow across the rocks as she leaned out over the water, a glittering chain swinging from her fingers . . .

When I found the place where Jamie had thrown the locket in the water, I stripped out of my clothes, folded them, and laid them on a dry rock. Then I waded into the river.

The water was icy. My body prickled all over with goosebumps. When the water reached my knees, my breath left me. When I was waist-deep, my teeth started clacking like castanets. When it slapped my chest, I sucked in a gulp of air and let out a groan.

Then dived under.

A watery world folded around me. I groped among the pebbles on the riverbed, my fingers throbbing with cold. Sharp fragments of quartz cut into my feet, and my knuckles bruised against water-smoothed knobs of granite and jasper. The freezing water stung my eyes, but I all I could think of was finding that locket and proving to Mrs Drake and everyone else that the Wolf was innocent.

Something string-like slithered between my fingers. I made a grab for it, but it was just a length of old fishing line, the catgut festooned with sparkly air bubbles. I yanked at it, hoping to
snap the line, but it whipped across my palm and drove the hook into the fleshy base of my thumb. I wriggled it, wincing as the barb worked deeper under my skin, and then somehow my frozen fingers fumbled it free.

I was about to toss it back in the river, but stopped. What if it caught in the throat of a platypus or some other poor animal whose only crime was being thirsty? I wanted to keep looking for the locket, but maybe the fishhook was a sign that I needed to rest for a while and warm up?

Halfway back to the bank, I saw a shadow dart from the trees.

Two shadows. The sun was in my eyes, but I knew who they were.

‘Well, well,’ Bobby Drake said. ‘Check it out, Jamie – it’s the Little Mermaid.’

Jamie’s laugh sounded like birdsong, only there was something sharp in it. I bobbed neck-deep under the water and glared at them, willing them away, mortified to be seen naked, even if one of the people seeing me was my sister. I didn’t have much to see, but somehow that felt even worse.

Jamie slid something from her pocket, dangled it in the sunlight. It spangled, the chain reflecting liquid light, the bauble on the end winking pure silver.

‘I don’t suppose you’re looking for this?’ she asked.

I stared at the locket, astonished. ‘How did you—’

Jamie twittered. ‘You silly nong! I didn’t really throw it in. What do you take me for, an idiot?’

‘But I saw something go in the water.’

‘I knew you were spying, so I threw a pebble to get you off our scent. Stop following us – and if you tattletale to Mum, you’ll be
really
sorry!’

She whirled away, her dark hair swinging behind her as she strode off along the embankment and vanished into the trees.

Bobby came to the water’s edge. I squinted into the glare, but with the sun behind him, he was a dark featureless blob.

‘Spying little brat,’ he said nastily. Picking up a stone, he skimmed it across the water. I jerked out of the way, which made him laugh. Then he went over to where I’d left my clothes, and kicked them into the water.

‘Quit following us,’ he warned, ‘or you’ll be in deep doo-doo. That’s a promise. I got rid of your weirdo friend, and I can get rid of you, too.’

Vaguely I registered that I was dreaming – the chill of river water, the icy wind on my bare skin, and the fear that tiptoed through my bones.

But then the dream turned warm – at least it did along one side of my body. In my mostly-asleep state, I imagined it was Pete lying next to me. I nestled against his body heat, wishing he would raise his arms around me and hold me close, because the side of my body he
wasn’t
pressing against felt frozen. At least I’d stopped shivering. At least sensation was finally starting to circulate back into my hands and feet.