Thornwood House (59 page)

Think. You have to think.

Cleve had said she was his security, that he’d put her somewhere for safekeeping. Had he lied, was she even at the hut? God, she could be anywhere . . .

‘Audrey – !’

A figure emerged from the trees and began to charge across the clearing towards me. In my dazed state, I felt an impossible glimmer of hope. Bronwyn? But of course it wasn’t her. Through the grey curtain of rain I could see the figure’s lofty height, the thickset shoulders. A man. And he was fast approaching. Who was it? Cleve? Had he survived his plunge into the gully?

Fumbling the old handgun from my belt, I gripped it in both hands and shouted a warning.

‘Stop! Don’t come any closer.’

He kept advancing.

Clicking back the hammer, I took aim. I re-screamed my warning, but the man didn’t slow. The heavy thud of boots kept coming, splashing nearer, and my heart seemed to explode a little with every step.

I yelled again, but on he came, a blur in the dim clearing. My finger reflexed on the trigger. There was a powerful crack as the gun discharged. A flash, of lightning or memory or imagination,
I couldn’t tell which, and in it I saw a face. Broad features framed by wild unruly hair, a full mouth, and dark eyes fixed on me in shock.

He pitched sideways, then went from view.

I raced after him. Careening around the side of the hut, I scanned the open expanse then fixed my attention on the verandah. No one there. I was about to whirl around when steely arms grabbed me from behind. I threw back my head and bucked against my attacker, my body exploding with fresh pain, barely registering the man’s surprised grunt.

He shoved me forward at arm’s length. A hand closed over my fingers and prised my weapon loose, tossed it onto the muddy ground out of reach. Then he swung me around to face him.

It took forever for my brain to stop spinning. Another eternity to comprehend. Rain dripped from his hair and his green eyes were wild, his face haggard pale as he looked at me. I’d never seen him angry before. At first I thought his anger was directed at me. A bruise bloomed on his forehead, a streak of blood smeared his brow; dimly I acknowledged it was my doing.

Danny took my face between his hands and searched it, then drew me close against him and held me firm in his arms. I hadn’t known how cold I was until his heat engulfed me. Heat like a jolt of brightness that broke the spell of my terror. My good arm slid around him and I pressed near, as near as I could get. It had been so long, and my need for comfort was so great that I clung like a little girl, feeling the brittle walls of my protective shell finally crumble away.

We broke apart, but he stood near. Touching his fingertips to my swollen face, frowning at the blood-soaked wad tied to my shoulder, giving my cold fingers a squeeze.

‘I can’t find Bronwyn,’ I said through chattering teeth.

Police are on their way
.

‘How?’

Luella walked to Hobe’s. They telephoned police, then me.

‘We might be too late.’

No
, he signed sharply.
We’ll find her
.

He took my hand and started towards the hut. I had a flash of the last time we were here, of our botched kiss at the rocky plateau, and then Danny showing me the buried water catchment built by the settlers, where he and Tony used to . . .

‘Oh . . . God, no.’

I started running, splashing across the muddy ground towards the rear of the hut, Danny close behind. The underground tank was barely visible in the rain. Its low timber sides were water-blackened and raindrops danced on the circular cover, making it look like a wooden backyard swimming pool half submerged.

I grappled with the heavy plank lid, my wet fingers sliding uselessly across its splintered rim. Water was sloshing out from underneath the cover, had been for some time judging by the moat of water puddled at the base. This could only mean that the tank was full to the brim . . .

And Bronwyn was in there.

I was too late.

Danny was beside me, sliding the heavy lid across the tank’s rim, wrenching it sideways until he was able to drag it off the top of the tank and heave it aside.

I stared down. Black water lapped the tank’s circular inner wall. The smell of earth and sourness rose up, and my cry finally escaped.

Pale and ghostly, my daughter’s upturned face floated on the surface. Water rippled against her cheeks and her milky hair spilled freely around her. She seemed to be clinging to the catchment wall – but she looked so ashen, so small and unmoving, that my heart stopped. The sight of her blurred before I had a chance to notice the vital signs: Was she breathing? Were her eyes open? Was she . . . was she even alive . . . ?

I was in the water, a cold shock in the dark, gulping dark mouthfuls. Bronwyn’s skin was slippery as I pushed her upwards to Danny’s reaching hands.

‘Mum . . . ?’

Her voice came from another world. Shrill and tremulous, a faint spectral echo. I tried to catch it, tried to snare the threads of it so I could pull myself back to her, find her in the labyrinth of darkness which now engulfed me . . .

Danny wrapped her in his shirt then braced himself against the catchment wall and reached in again, gripping his fingers around mine, hauling me from the water. I felt solid ground beneath me, felt my daughter’s shivering body in my arms.

‘Oh, Mum – !’

Her body was wracked with sobs, her skin ice-cold. As I squeezed her tightly to me, she wound her arms around my neck and squeezed back. Hot tears scalded my face, mine or hers I couldn’t tell. All I cared was that she was here with me now, breathing and alive, safe.

‘Oh sweetheart, I’m so sorry, I’m so very sorry – ’

‘No, Mum.’ Cold lips moved against my cheek, her breath warm. ‘I’m the one who should be sorry. I shouldn’t have said those things to you, I shouldn’t have run away . . .’ She pulled back suddenly, her eyes wide as she touched the side of my head with her icy fingertips. ‘Your poor face. Oh Mum, it’s all my fault . . . He said he was going to hurt you – ’

I grasped her fingers, tried to warm them against my lips. ‘It wasn’t your fault, Bronny – do you understand? None of this was anything to do with you. He was a bad man, a damaged man, but he’s gone now. You’re safe . . . we’re both safe.’

Bronwyn nodded, smoothing her fingers over the top of my head. Her face was streaked with filth, scratched in places, her eyes like saucers, the sapphire irises huge, nearly black. Tears spilled down her cheeks. Droplets of rainwater clung to her fair lashes.

‘I know what he did,’ she whispered, pressing her lips to my face. ‘He told me. He killed Dad, didn’t he?’

It chilled me to hear her speak so matter-of-factly – but then she’d always been the level-headed one, just as Tony had been. She started crying again, her eyes brimming like lakes, her gaze not moving from mine. One day I would tell her what I’d learned about Tony, and why he’d felt the need to withdraw from her life . . . but not now. That would come later. Much later. Instead, I held her tight and near, didn’t bother trying to talk away her tears, didn’t bother trying to comfort her. I just let her cry, holding her silently until she was done.

Finally, she wiped her wrist across her eyes and – to my surprise – slid a motherly arm around my shoulders. Nestling close, she kissed the top of my head – the way I used to kiss hers a million years ago when she’d been a little girl.

She hugged me tight. ‘We’ll be all right now, won’t we, Mum?’

‘Yes, Bron,’ I promised. ‘Yes, we will.’

Looking over her shoulder, I found Danny watching us, his expression dark with emotion. He gave me the thumbs up sign, and I nodded. I tried to summon a smile, but my lips were trembling. The tears that had been wobbling in my eyes – it seemed for a lifetime – finally rolled over my lashes. We would, I knew. We would be all right.

I pulled my daughter closer and, just for that one precious moment, allowed myself to believe.

Aylish, March 1946

L
eaves and sky. That was all I could see. I tried to turn my head to the side, but a great heaviness had settled on me. I’m asleep, I thought.

But no, my eyes were open. Otherwise how could I have seen the leaves and sky?

The bush crackled around me, waking up. It was pre-dawn, the cicadas were singing, and a bullfrog grumbled from some faraway muddy hollow.

Looking sideways, I saw a coil of long hair. My hair. For some reason the sight of it made my heart sink. The hair was tangled, littered with leaves and clots of earth. Strands of it were matted into clumps by a sticky dark substance, and a funny smell rose out of it. Towering over me was a boulder, its grey flanks dotted with lichen. Beyond the boulder curved the stony verge of a dirt track. Nearby, the ground was splashed with shadow, glimmering in patches as though something wet was spilt there.

Again, I tried to move. Nothing happened. I was lying on my back, my limbs twisted beneath me. My head rested on stones. All I felt was cold. Deep, bone-biting cold. I tried to raise a shiver, but my body wouldn’t respond. It wasn’t so much that I was uncomfortable. Rather, I felt disjointed, my bones loose
and no longer connected to me. I wanted to cry out, but even if I’d been able to muster a breath, I knew there’d be no one to hear –

I was wrong.

Footsteps approached. Then a man was kneeling beside me. Calloused fingers explored my face, grasped my shoulders, felt along my arms. His touch ran over me, every inch. I could feel the heat in his palms.

‘Aylish,’ he said. His face moved into view. His dear face. He was smiling. If I’d been able to move my lips I would have smiled back . . . and begged him to gather me into his arms, hold me hard against him, chase the cold with his own vital warmth.

He must have read my thoughts, because he lifted me as though gathering up a sleeping child. Then he bent his head and kissed me, his mouth just as I remembered it, warm and strong, lush with promise. My lips tingled. An ember flickered and burst into flame; my frozen body stirred. A delicate sensation: the knitting of bone, the flow of blood; the slow, delicious return of circulation through my limbs . . .

Samuel began to walk, but rather than going downhill in the direction of his father’s old homestead, he went up. Along a ferny trail, between arching arms of bracken, around big boulders laced with lichen. Through a corridor of casuarinas whose weeping branches bowed and sighed in the breeze. Cool shadows gathered around us, while overhead the treetops shimmered in the sunlight. In between the leaves were bright coin-sized medallions of luminous blue sky.

Leaves and sky. Always leaves and sky.

‘Samuel,’ I whispered, ‘where are we going?’

‘To our secret place, of course.’

Of course.

He kissed me again, more tingles flooded me, more warmth. Then to my glad surprise he released me from his embrace and lowered me to my feet. I stood, a little wobbly at first, my limbs
quivering, my head giddy-light, unsteady as a newborn foal. Yet when Samuel took my hand and led me up the trail, I fell in beside him, soon matching his long, confident strides.

While I walked, I breathed. Drinking in the spicy scent of yellow-buttons and eucalyptus, of bark and crushed leaves, savouring the darker aromas of earth and sap and stone.

With each breath I grew stronger.

The sky lightened. Dawn burst forth, making heaven seem close. I could hear the birds now, belling their dizzying song into the blue morning, a chorus of crystal notes that soared high and pure as the sky.

Bellbirds . . . my bellbirds, their voices like stars, singing me home.

Audrey, March 2006

A
perfect day dawned over the Lutheran churchyard. A pair of emerald-grey dollarbirds swooped from the branches of a nearby red gum and flashed across the sky. I wondered if they were the same ones I’d seen the day I’d come looking for Aylish’s gravestone . . . and if they were, perhaps, not birds at all but guardians of a hidden world.

I shifted on the bench, cold in the shade despite the scorching sun. Three weeks had passed since that night at the gully. In that short span of time I’d tried to bend my mind away from the events that had nearly stolen my daughter from me. Which was no easy task; there were so many questions.

First the police, then the detectives. Then, with more ferocity than the other interrogators combined, the media. Who was he? they wanted to know. Was he a relative, a family friend? Why had he abducted my daughter, and was she coping in the aftermath? Did I plan to stay on at the property after my ordeal, or would I sell up and move?

I answered as best I could. My memory of that night was disjointed and nightmarish. Sleeping pills were keeping the dreams at bay, and Bronwyn and I had decided to simply put that night behind us and focus on the better times that we
believed lay ahead. For her, it seemed to be working. For me . . . well, I knew it would take some time for the flashbacks to grow more infrequent and finally dwindle.

The discovery of Cleve’s body in the gully, combined with my account of what I’d learnt, sped up the forensic investigation into the remains found in Cleve Jarman’s submerged Holden. The body was that of a bushwalker who’d been reported missing in Toowoomba, a man in his twenties with a string of convictions for drug possession. Apparently he’d been ‘bushwalking’ to the remote highlands of the national park to tend his marijuana crop. That’s how he’d encountered Cleve. There were no signs of physical trauma to the skeleton, and the police mentioned the possibility of strangulation or poison, but that particular detail was – like so many others now – buried forever in the impenetrable substrata of the past.

The police had retrieved the scattered letters from the dark spaces of the gully, where I’d thrown them during my struggle with Cleve. They’d made copies and returned the originals to me, though the sergeant later admitted that the events recounted in Aylish’s letters wouldn’t have been enough to lawfully convict Cleve of any crime – young Cleve might have stolen a possible weapon, but it didn’t mean he’d used it. What had clinched the deal for them was the partial fingerprint they’d lifted from the Winchester found with Tony’s body – Gurney Miller’s old rifle, which Cleve had retrieved from the submerged Holden when he’d buckled his dope-growing stand-in into the driver’s seat. The fingerprint was a perfect match to the man whose lifeless body they’d retrieved from the gully floor; the man the local sergeant had personally identified as Cleve Jarman.