Lyrebird Hill (49 page)

Numbness crept through me. Memories of my sister batted my conscious mind like moths against a lit window – her head hitting the stone, her eyes losing focus; the blood in her hair, and in her mouth, staining her teeth pink. I had seen what Rob was capable of as a young man; how much more brutal might he be now, when all he valued was at stake?

The ground beneath me swelled like a sea tide, then sank away, leaving me adrift. I clutched for something, anything, to anchor myself; my mind threw up a lifeline of anger and I grabbed it gladly.

‘So, what’ll you do?’ I said harshly. ‘Kill me – the way you killed my sister?’

‘You’ve left me no choice.’

Barely ten paces stretched between us. I glanced to the doorway, assessing the distance. If I tried to bolt, would I make it? If I could stall him, keep him talking; if I could escape into the bush, I had a chance.

‘You took a risk, being with me,’ I told him, shuffling back a step. ‘You must have known that sooner or later I’d remember.’

He was watching me attentively, as if enthralled by my trembling, by my wide-eyed stare, by the sharp scent of the nervous sweat I could feel pouring out of me.

He licked his lips. ‘I was curious to see how long it would take. How long I could keep you in the dark.’ His jaw tightened. ‘This afternoon, when I watched you in the bath, I could see you still hadn’t recognised me, but you were close. And once you finally joined all the dots, I knew you’d run straight to the cops.’

Despite what I now knew about him, his words dug under my defences. My logical mind judged his actions and found him abhorrent – a man who hurt others to preserve himself, perhaps even to entertain himself – but there was a small corner of my heart that was slower to make the transition from love to loathing.

‘It was one big lie, wasn’t it? Us, I mean. Everything you did and said for three years – all of it, lies.’

Rob shifted and a beam of light struck his face. ‘Not everything. I enjoyed you for the most part. But then, a while back, you started getting edgy. Having nightmares again. Getting moody, restless. I knew something was brewing, that your memory was getting ready to resurface.’

I risked another shuffling step nearer the doorway, but the light beyond the barn’s gloom seemed no closer. When I focused back on Rob, he’d grown more alert, his breath coming faster than it had a moment ago.

‘You had it all worked out, didn’t you?’ I said. ‘From the start, you knew who I was. You knew it would come to this.’

He nodded. ‘It was always on the cards, Ruby. We were never forever. Eventually, something I said or did would have triggered a memory, and then the whole lot would’ve come pouring back.’

Never forever
. How had I not seen through his lies? Why had I ever believed that he genuinely cared?

I could see him more clearly now, the ghost of the young man my sister had written about in her diary; who she had met on the riverbank, and kissed, and teased as she danced in the sun. The young man who had, in the end, left her to die on the rocks in a pool of her own blood.

‘Why didn’t I recognise you?’

‘Eighteen years is a long time,’ Rob said, running a hand over his mouth. ‘People change.’

‘That’s not it. You’re . . .
different
.’

He stepped close, eclipsing a stream of dying sunlight. ‘Maybe it was the broken nose,’ he said simply. ‘A footy accident that scored me a metal plate. It flattens things out, changes the planes of your face . . . just enough. Besides, you only ever saw me once or twice at the river with Jamie. By the time you Cardels had moved to Lyrebird Hill, I was living in Sydney. I did my final years at boarding school, then I went to uni. My visits home were pretty infrequent. That is, until I met your sister.’

‘But I remember you now,’ I said, grappling to make sense of it. ‘The instant my memory returned, I knew who you were.’

Rob palmed the back of his neck. ‘I was at the core of your amnesia. You blocked out a year of your life because of me, because of what happened that day with Jamie. For most of your life, you
wanted
to forget me.’

‘But you never forgot me.’

He rubbed the side of his face, contemplating me with hard eyes. ‘You and your sister haunted me for years. I did everything to put that time behind me. I even changed my name. It felt good to be free of Bobby Drake. I hadn’t realised until then how much your sister’s death weighed on my conscience. I started thinking about how good it would feel to be
really
free. As in, free of the worry of ever being found out.’

This took a moment to process. When understanding dawned, it bloomed in me like an ink stain, quick and dark
and indelible. ‘And the only person standing in your way,’ I murmured, ‘was me.’

Rob almost smiled, and then he blinked, a slow deliberate reflex, as if capturing my shock on an internal camera. ‘I thought you’d forgotten about Bobby Drake. Eighteen years passed, I thought I was home free. But when you rang my publicist wanting to organise a book event, I got worried. I had to meet you in the flesh, find out what you remembered.’

‘Is that all I was to you – damage control?’

‘At first, yes.’ Rob moved nearer. ‘You intrigued me. Not just your amnesia, and your terror of remembering. You reminded me of Jamie. I couldn’t resist getting close. But after a while, I fell for you . . . or rather, I fell for the vulnerable part of you.’ Rob moistened his lips with his tongue, and smiled. ‘Do you know how that feels to a man, Ruby? To know you’ve won the trust of someone so untrusting? Pure intoxication.’

His words seeped into me like poison. I felt the slow burn of shame rise to my face, but from deeper down came a rush of white-hot anger.

‘Why aren’t you in jail?’ I cried. ‘Didn’t anyone think to question you after she died? How did you slip through the net?’

‘I
was
questioned. But
no one knew I was her boyfriend. I came home a couple of times a month when I could get away from uni, and Jamie and I always met in secret. She said your mother was strict and would have stopped her from seeing me.’

I glanced at the doorway. I was close enough that I might make it if I ran, but the questions were hammering at me, and I needed to know. ‘You were there the day she died. Why didn’t they suspect you?’

A tremor went through Rob’s body, not quite a shudder. In a sudden motion, he raised his hands and clawed his fingers across his scalp.

‘When I left you and your sister on the riverbank, I went home and drove straight back to Sydney. Mum was away, and no one knew I’d been anywhere near Lyrebird Hill. I made sure I was seen on campus that weekend. My alibis were pretty much watertight. And anyway, because of the way your dad died, your mother was a major suspect in Jamie’s case. She stole the limelight from everyone else.’

Despite my trembling, I couldn’t stem my anger. ‘I’m going to tell them everything. You’re finished, Rob. You’re going to jail.’

Rob’s lips drew back, his smile was all teeth. ‘I don’t think so, babe.’

I sensed a sudden shift between us. My heart began to jackhammer. I turned and ran, but Rob caught me from behind and swung me around to face him, then dragged me over to the wall. My spine thudded into a post, and I was momentarily winded, but I managed to thrust my knee towards his groin. He recoiled and his grip weakened. Twisting my torso, I wrenched free my arm and, making a half-fist, rammed the heel of my palm up under his chin.

His head snapped back. He grunted, and blood bloomed on his lower lip. I tore loose and sprang away, but he seized a handful of my hair and hauled me back. This time when he drove me against the wall, my head cracked on a beam and lights exploded behind my eyes. Rob slammed me backwards again – and suddenly my heart was swelling in fear because I was there again, on the rocks with my sister and Bobby, with the river rushing by and the sun glaring through the storm clouds. But instead of Jamie’s hair and scalp matted with blood, instead of her eyes staring in that unseeing way, instead of Jamie’s face contorted in pain . . . it was mine.

From far away, someone shouted my name. Rob heard it too, because he let out a growl and looked around.

‘Ruby?’ Pete called from outside. ‘Where are you?’

Rob shoved me to the ground and whirled towards the door, grappling at the small of his back. I caught a flash of steel and, as I struggled to my feet, I registered his weapon.

‘Pete,’ I tried to call, but my throat was tight with fear. I dragged in a breath to try again, but Rob lurched over to me and struck me across the head with his fist. I staggered and tripped, falling against the side of the Morris.

‘Pete,’ I yelled. ‘He’s armed!’

A shadow flit across the dying sunlight that was pouring its last rays through the door. A familiar silhouette appeared. He saw me, and started to run towards me. From the corner of my eye, I saw Rob raise his arms and take aim.

There was no time to shout a warning. The crack of gunfire shattered the air, and Pete reeled sideways and slumped against the door. I threw myself across the barn, clutching for him, crying out when I saw the blood spreading across the front of his shirt, a dark saturating bloom. I gathered him to me, running my hands over him, seeking the damage, finding the slow sticky ooze of blood just below his collarbone.

‘Run,’ he told me, his voice harsh and full of urgency. ‘Go to my place. Take the ute.’

‘I’m not leaving you.’

There was a snarl behind me. I twisted around, saw Old Boy spring at Rob and knock him sideways. Rob shot off a round and the old dog let out a harsh human-sounding howl of rage and pain, then drove his teeth into Rob’s forearm. Rob bellowed and went to his knees under the weight of the animal.

I hauled Pete to his feet and got him through the doorway and out into the dying light. As we struggled uphill, there was another gun blast, and Pete moaned. Locking his arm around my shoulders, his hefty weight buckling me nearly double, I managed to get him across the dry expanse of open grass and away into the trees.

The cave was dark. When we ducked into the cool space where we had, only a week ago, visited the lyrebird’s nest, Pete crumpled. I lowered him to the ground and settled him against the wall.

He had bled a frightening amount as we fled up the hillside, and the wound in his chest was still oozing. Tearing off his shirt, I wadded it against the flow, praying we’d lost Rob on the other side of the tea-tree forest.

Pete clutched my hand. ‘Where’s Old Boy?’ he rasped. ‘Did he make it?’

My body trembled so hard I could barely form the words. ‘No, Pete.’

His eyes searched mine, his face drained of colour. ‘Ah, God. Bardo?’

‘Rob poisoned her.’ My words caught in my throat, and I had to gulp a breath of air to loosen them. ‘She was alive half an hour ago, but I don’t know what he gave her. I’m sorry, Pete. I’m the one Rob wanted, now you’re hurt and the dogs—’

Pete’s jaw tensed and he gripped my hand. ‘Rob?
Your
Rob?’ Understanding dawned in his eyes. ‘The guy in the barn . . . that was Bobby Drake.’

I nodded. ‘It was him all along, but I’d blocked him out. Even when I had all those flashbacks, I never managed to see his face clearly. Until this afternoon. We argued, and he mentioned Jamie. It rang my alarm bells, and then everything flooded back. It was Rob on the rocks that day. He killed my sister.’

Pete lifted a trembling hand and traced his fingers along the side of my face. ‘And now he’s come after you?’

I nearly lost it, then. Three of the beings I loved most in the world were slipping away from me. Old Boy gone, Bardo’s system failing, and now Pete—

Please, not him. Take anything else . . . I’ll give anything, my life. Just not him.

‘I’m going to your place,’ I told him. ‘I’ll call for help, then come back here. We’ll be safe in the cave while we wait. Rob won’t find us here.’

Pete’s expression turned fierce. ‘Forget coming back. Here,’ he said, his voice ragged. He fumbled at his pocket. ‘Get my keys, will you?’

I dug in his pocket and took out the keys. ‘I’m not going to abandon you. Not ever again. You understand?’

He shook his head, his gaze fixed to my face. ‘Go to my place. Take the ute to Clearwater, to the general store. Call the cops from there once you’re safe.’

A sob stuck in my throat. I had been alone all my life, but the emptiness had never ached as acutely as it did now, knowing what I stood to lose.

Pete’s cheek was smeared red where I’d touched him with my bloody fingers. His blood was all over me; I could taste it on my lips, feel its stickiness on my skin.

I took his face in my hands. ‘Hang on, Pete. Please hang on. Old Boy saved us. Don’t waste that.’

He shut his eyes for a moment, and when he opened them again his pupils had engulfed the blue. ‘Hey?’

‘What?’

‘I love you, Roo.’ His hand shook as he reached out and cupped the side of my face. ‘Always have.’

I crushed his fingers against my lips and kissed them hard. ‘Don’t you dare say goodbye,’ I said hotly. ‘If you freaking die on me, I swear I’ll never forgive you.’

He drew me near, and I clutched the wild mess of his hair and pressed my face against his.