Alison walked Chris Waters through the scene as she’d found it. Told him every detail she could remember, except the bit about the note with her name and address on it—she thought about the note all the time, and now she wasn’t even sure it had been real; maybe she’d imagined Simone was looking for her. Her brain felt murky these days, turned upside down, and she was doubting what was real and what she’d imagined. She didn’t trust her memory anymore. But he was satisfied she was telling the truth, and when they were finally done, he gave her a card and told her to call, anytime, with any questions. Alison double-checked the information she’d shared was “on background” and got in her car and on her way.
At the turn onto the freeway she pulled up again, waiting for Chris Waters’s car to pass by. As she sat there, her eye caught the letterbox, knocked over to one side, like a car had run into it. She killed the engine and got out. Chris Waters honked twice as he barreled past and Alison raised an arm in good-bye. She walked over to the mailbox, pulled the top up. There hadn’t been a proper mail service all week. Alison didn’t expect the thick, creamy envelope in there at all. She tried to remember if she’d checked the mail on the way in on the day of the fire. She couldn’t. The envelope wasn’t postmarked anyway; it just said “Alison” on it. The l curved a little too much, like a c. She ripped the seal open and pulled out the letter, written on flimsy ruled paper, the kind ripped from a children’s exercise book. He was here. He’d been here all along. She had been right to think someone had been watching her, to feel eyes on her in the shadows. Alison’s breath caught in her throat; she felt the thump of her heart in her chest, the tightness of her diaphragm, the crawling itch across her skin. Shit. Was he watching her right now?
Alison
I know you’ve got the tapes.
Give them back and we can go our separate ways.
It wasn’t signed. But the loops and slants were undeniably his. The sun was high in the sky and there was no breeze to speak of, but goose bumps rose high on her skin and sent a shiver down her spine. She hurried back to the car and skidded out into the road, felt the thump-thump-thump of the tires on the blistered road echoing the bump-bump-bump of her heart, the way it hummed against her ribs, quick as a hummingbird’s in full flight. A blur of blood and bone and bitumen.
She had no idea what tapes he was talking about, but she did know she needed to get the hell out of town. As soon as the idea popped into her head, she couldn’t stop thinking about it. Cairns. Cairns was far enough away that maybe Gil wouldn’t think she’d go back there. And maybe she’d find something there. Something in Simone’s flat? Something that would prove Gil was behind this, that he’d been there in the bush when Simone died. That he’d watched Alison find the car. That he was somehow watching her now. She knew it sounded crazy. If he’d been there, wouldn’t he have come after her right then? Why would he wait? Why would he send her a note, or watch her in the late night, drinking herself to sleep?
She thought about it again. The tapes. If he thought she had something he wanted, it would make sense that he didn’t attack her, that he waited and watched her instead. But she had no idea what these tapes could possibly be. Were they really even tapes? Who had videotapes anymore? Gil was a little old-school like that. He liked proper printed photographs, and he maintained his DVD collection, even now that streaming made it stupid. She remembered he called them all tapes. For all she knew, he could be talking about anything from an actual VHS tape to an audiocassette to a USB drive. She had no idea what he wanted from her. Nothing about this seemed right.
She pulled into Sal’s drive, looked around, skittish. She was stopping only to drop off the bike and grab her toothbrush. She pulled the frame from the car in a hurry, overbalancing with the heft of it, landing on her arse on the grass. Sal popped her head out the front door.
“Alison, you all right?”
“Yep, fine, Sal, just wanted to drop your bike off.” She dusted herself off and explained that she wanted to go north for a bit, get away from the fire, and the media, and the dead woman. But Sal wouldn’t have it.
“Running away ain’t going to fix it.”
“You’re right, but maybe I can figure out what happened to Simone.”
“Oh, come on, Alison. I know you’re hurting, but I talked to Cam’s mother and she said the cops think she died in the fire. Said there’s no evidence of anything else.”
Sal and her sources. “They don’t know. We don’t know anything.” She thought of the destroyed address, the note with its distinctive lettering tucked into her pocket, the way Simone had looked in the car. Her eyes, stony, dulled. There was no point trying to convince Sal; no one was going to help her. She was on her own.
“I just want to get away for a bit.” She didn’t say anything else about Simone. It wasn’t worth the argument. She didn’t mention Gil either, or the way she felt sick when she breathed in the air too deeply or looked too hard along the ridgelines or thought about the cherry-red car sagging in her drive.
Instead, Alison retreated to her car, ignoring Sal’s pleas to stay. Peeled out of town as if Gil were there on her tail—for all she knew, he was. The fear and the anger and the thump of her heart, the uneven, unsettled, erratic intake of her breath, the tightening in her gut—it cascaded over her and spun her into a sort of trance, pushed her onto the road and kept her foot on the pedal, kept her hands on the wheel, kept her straight up the Hume, even when the tank got low, even when fatigue crept in, on and on and on and on, until she began to feel as though she could relax a little more, feel a little warmer, rest a little easier. Distance; distance made it easier to breathe.