‘Last step, Tom. Go easy, okay?’
They reached the landing at the top of the stairs and took a break. Tom felt as if he’d just climbed Mount Everest. His ankle, knee and hips throbbed like nobody’s business, but as he gazed along the upstairs hallway, the promise of what lay ahead of him made it worthwhile.
He caught Abby’s eye and winked. ‘Glad that’s over.’
She was gripping his arm, watching him closely. ‘You need a longer breather?’
‘Nah, I’m good.’
She looked doubtful as she passed him his crutches. ‘You’re pale. Pain level?’
‘Okay.’
‘Can you walk?’
‘Hmm.’
He adjusted the crutches, still savouring the feel of her arms around him as she’d taken his weight on the way up. The soft pressure of her hand on his ribs, the silky tickle of her ponytail against his arm. He hadn’t been that close to a woman in years, and it had taken a body full of fractures for him to realise how he missed it. Not the heady rush of the chase, not even the delicious thrill of anticipating bare skin – just the simple, comforting warmth of human contact.
At the end of the hall they entered a long room with a beautiful stained-glass window. He remembered it from his first tour of the house, but there’d been so much else to take in that he had only given it a cursory look. Since then, he’d spent hours poring over the photos Abby had taken, but they were no substitute for being here. He sensed a weightiness in the atmosphere, as though the air was denser and somehow colder here than in other parts of the house.
Abby went to the wall and slid open a panel, exposing the narrow steel door, which she pushed open. Tom stood on the threshold of the hidden room and looked in. Late afternoon sun shone through the barred window, but the corners of the room were already gathering shadows.
‘It’s tiny. Perhaps okay for one teenage girl, but two?’
‘You can see why Lil avoided talking about it.’
‘Five years in here,’ he murmured. ‘It really was hell.’
He approached the bed. His bad foot dragged a little, his cast leaving a trail in the thick dust. As he breathed the stuffy air, he let his imagination go to work. He envisioned the two sisters sitting on the bed, heads together. One fair, the other dark. They were reading The Nightingale. He could hear their quiet murmurs, the swish of turning pages. They seemed small and fragile in the half-light, so absorbed in their book that Tom felt afraid for them. What horrors had the sisters experienced up here? Why had only one returned home?
‘You poor bloody kids.’
As if at the sound of his voice, the girls on the bed whipped their heads around to look at him. Right at him. And the terror in their eyes was palpable. At least, the younger fair-haired girl, Lilly, was terrified. Frankie’s back was stiff, her shoulders squared, her eyes burning with defiance. The intensity in their faces shocked him. He’d have sworn he was staring at two flesh-and-blood girls.
Tom glanced behind him, catching Abby’s eye. ‘Shut the door, would you?’
She studied him a moment, then nodded. The hinges squeaked as the door closed. The latch engaged with a metallic click. In the dim light he noted there was no handle on his side.
He examined the window. The sun still shone beyond the bars, but so little of its radiance entered the room. Already he felt hemmed in. Breathless. How desperately the sisters must have wanted to run and shout and play in that glorious garden below. How trapped they must’ve felt. And how much worse for them with the door locked, year after year, their only link to the outside world a pitiful gap of sky high in the wall.
And the man who kept them here.
Tom’s skin prickled.
Again he looked over his shoulder at the door. An image of the kidnapper came to him. A weedy guy with a haggard face and haunted, bloodshot eyes. He almost smiled. Most of the villains he’d written into his books were burly toughs. Muscle-bound bullies with tiny brains. This guy, this kidnapper of children, however, was in a league of his own. He was smart, all right, but browbeaten. Nothing to lose. Desperate. All of which made him unspeakably dangerous.
Tom looked at the bed.
Abby’s photos of the room hadn’t prepared him for the raw awfulness of what he was seeing. Threadbare sheets on a sagging mattress, the centre shadowed by a long black stain. The pillow still dented as though someone had only just lifted their head from it, discoloured where something dark and wet had soaked into the thin fabric.
He ran his fingers along the edge of the stain, recoiling from its stiff, leathery resistance. Blood, most definitely.
He flexed his fingers. Ideas were sparking. He was suddenly keen to be at his desk, his fingers pounding the Remington’s keys. He loved sliding into the zone like this. Letting his imagination run wild. Words were banking up in his mind, threatening to overflow, bringing with them a landslide of intriguing, pulsating images.
He glanced around for a light switch, found none. With the door shut, and the sun sinking behind the distant hills, the gloom was stifling. A feeling of wrongness swirled around him. It was like nausea, only outside his body, enveloping him like foetid air. And was it just him, or had it become impossible to breathe?
He squared his shoulders and tried to shrug the feeling off.
Years ago, while researching the details of a particularly nasty murder case for one of his novels, he’d come across an article about haunted houses. The theory was that houses retain energy impressions of the people who dwelled in them. And whatever emotions those people experienced most powerfully and most often were imprinted on the walls like sticky fingerprints on glass. Sometimes those emotions were so intense that years, decades or even centuries later, other people could detect them.
Did that explain what was happening now? Was he picking up the emotional fingerprint of Frankie Wigmore’s murder?
He’d never been woo-woo. The supernatural held little interest for him. He based his novels on true-crime cases for a good reason – he liked their gritty reality, the way they made him rethink what it meant to be human. What it meant to hover on the threshold of right and wrong, knowing instinctively on which side he belonged. He liked pushing the boundaries of everyday experience, and peeling back the layers to the truth beneath. He liked putting himself into a story, imagining how he would react if the same thing happened to him. The anguish he’d feel if the people he loved were in danger. The horror if he were helpless to save them. As a writer, the darker end of the emotional spectrum was his domain – but usually he only got to explore it from behind the safety of his typewriter. Being in this room, with its sticky, unpleasant residue of the past, was something else entirely.
Downstairs, the phone began to ring. The door opened behind him and Abby peered in.
‘Will I get that?’
He nodded. ‘I can’t imagine who it’d be at this hour . . . But yeah, thanks.’
He listened to Abby’s footfall along the hallway and then more faintly on the stairs. Then silence. Eerie, all-consuming silence. He ran his hand over the dust on the iron bedhead, and then rubbed his gritty fingers together. As a boy, he had craved the outdoors. Escaped at every opportunity into the bushland behind his parents’ home in Katoomba; explored creek beds and climbed trees and hunted frogs in muddy waterholes, soaking up the glorious freedom.
How would such a boy have coped in this cramped room? A few hours would have been bad enough; hell, after five minutes he was already chafing to get away. But five years? To a child, five years was a lifetime. An endless, mind-numbing lifetime. Since his accident, Tom had spent most of his time inside, and was no stranger to cabin fever. But the idea of living year after year trapped in this tiny room seemed beyond hellish; beyond anything he could imagine. As he gazed around, he shook his head. How had those two young girls managed not to go utterly and completely barking mad?
• • •
‘You know,’ the old man wheezed, twisting from the passenger seat of Abby’s car to gaze around at Tom. ‘I’ve been a fan of yours for years. Lil’s not much of a reader, but I was stoked to think you’d moved to the area. Just a pity we had to meet under such circumstances.’
Tom sat propped in the back, his crutches on the floor, his bad leg stretched along the seat. He patted Joe’s shoulder. ‘We’ll find her, mate. Whatever it takes.’
Joe turned back to stare through the windscreen. ‘I appreciate you not calling the cops. Lil does this sometimes. Wanders off. Usually she’s back well before dark. She wouldn’t want a fuss made, which is why I rang you.’
Abby changed gears as they approached a bend. ‘Where does she go, Joe?’
‘Just around the place.’ Joe tugged at his seatbelt. ‘Ever since I’ve known her, she’s had these turns. After what she went through as a kid though, who can blame her? Retreats into herself, gets lost in there somewhere. We’ve been to doctors over the years. She baffled most of them. It’s not Alzheimer’s, more a sort of lapse they call psychogenic amnesia. Blackouts and confusion, loss of memory. One specialist suggested it might be related to PTSD.’ He lifted his glasses and rubbed his eyes. ‘We never told anyone about Lil’s past. She didn’t want to. Got upset every time I suggested it might help to talk to someone. Other than me, that is. A counsellor or psychiatrist. She wouldn’t hear of it. So in the end I stopped suggesting and just started managing the problem.’
‘Does something trigger the turns?’ Tom asked, adjusting his leg.
‘Stress. Upsets. A change in the weather.’ Joe’s bony shoulders twitched. ‘Who knows? We can go for years without any trouble, and then all of a sudden she’ll wake in the middle of the night and plod through the house like a sleepwalker. Off to the bathroom, so I think. Then before I know it, she’s in the car and driving away somewhere. Couple of hours later she’s back. Can’t remember where she’s been, or why she even went there. She says it’s like having a nightmare and waking in a sweat, with this hazy sense that she’s somehow in danger.’
‘Danger from what?’ Tom asked.
‘Oh, Lil’s not in any danger.’ Joe took out a little puffer bottle and considered it, then tucked it back in his pocket. ‘At least not any more. But she’s never quite been able to shake herself free of the past.’
‘I feel awful,’ Abby said. ‘It was stressful for her the other day, talking about her abduction. This is my fault, isn’t it?’
‘Aw, no, Abby.’ Joe peered at her. ‘Don’t say that. Don’t even think it. Lil’s a strong woman, she’s got her own mind. If she hadn’t wanted to talk to you, she’d have sent you packing.’
‘It gave her a headache.’
‘You know what she said to me after you left? It felt good to offload. They were her exact words: “good to offload”. I’ll tell you now, lass. The only other person on the planet Lil has ever spoken to about . . . you know . . . is me. And she only gave me the barest bones – no details, mind you, just the black and white facts. A lot of people tried to get the story out of her, and a lot failed. She likes you, Abby. Trusts you. She wouldn’t have opened up otherwise.’
Tom studied the roadside trees. ‘Heck of a worry for you, Joe.’
‘That it is, Tom. That it is.’
They turned onto the New Forest Road and drove north – in the direction of Ravensong – along the eastern side of the Deepwater Gorge Reserve. The landscape here was rugged and thickly forested. A hundred years ago, loggers had cut down most of the old growth. Now the trees grew close together, obstructing access to much of the steep, rocky land. As dusk turned to night, shadows swarmed between the boulders and blackness swallowed the trees.
Abby pointed ahead. ‘There.’
A dark-coloured Forester was parked askew on the verge, almost hidden by the bushes. As they pulled up behind it, Abby’s headlights caught the open driver-side door.
‘She’s here,’ Joe said, unbuckling his seatbelt and stumbling out.
Abby was right behind him as they hurried to Lil’s vehicle. Tom was slower, moving carefully along the rocky verge, praying that Lil was in the car, unharmed. But as he approached, Joe looked around.
‘She’s gone walkabout.’ The old man wandered away from the car and further down the road, calling Lil’s name.
Abby pressed her hand to the bonnet. ‘The engine’s still warm. She can’t be far.’ She walked along the verge and then stopped and gazed after Joe, who was barely visible now in the dark, his hoarse voice echoing through the night.
Abby returned to Tom. ‘I’m worried she’s wandered off into the reserve in a daze and got lost. I only hope she’s not hurt. I have to find her.’
‘You’re not going alone, it’s pitch black out there. I’m coming with you.’
‘Thanks for the offer, but you’ll slow me down. This part of the reserve is rough going, even for someone who knows it well.’
Tom cursed his useless legs. ‘How will you find your way back?’
Abby went to the Fiesta and took out a torch. She flicked it on and the cone of light turned her into a shadow. ‘Every ten minutes, sound the car horn. I’ll stay within hearing range.’ Fumbling out a fresh roll of mints, she offered one to Tom, but he shook his head. She popped one in and chewed, hugging herself as she gazed into the darkness. Then she turned to him and searched his face, her eyes huge and gleaming. ‘If she’s out there, I’ll find her. I promise.’
• • •
When the car horn sounded in the distance, I paused beside a vast old gum tree and glanced back towards the road.
‘Right on time,’ I whispered.
Nearby, the bushes rustled. I hit them with my torch and a wallaby bounded away, its powerful legs thumping the ground.
I continued downhill, pushing between prickly banks of tea-tree and ducking under low-hanging branches. A while later I heard the car horn again, but it was faint. As it cut out, I paused to listen. Leaves whispered in the dampening air, insects droned as night settled in. An owl flew past, its enormous wings eerily quiet. Then I became aware of another sound: the crunch of footsteps moving towards me.
Spinning around, I searched the trees. ‘Lil, Is that you?’
There was no reply, but the footsteps continued to approach and a light bobbed through the trees. There was someone else here, and it had to be Lil – but why wouldn’t she acknowledge me? Moving towards the sound, I shone my torch into the darkness. Between the ghostly tree trunks, it caught a tall, woman-shaped shadow pushing through the undergrowth.
‘Lil!’
She broke through the bushes and saw me, shone her light in my face, but showed no sign that she recognised me. Her back was ramrod straight and her frown fierce, her mouth downturned. ‘Why have you followed me here? What do you want?’
I lowered my torch and went over. ‘Lil, it’s me, Abby. Joe’s waiting at the car, he was worried that you might be unwell. Let’s get you back there, okay?’
Lil peered into my face. Torchlight carved hollows into her cheeks and under her eyes, flaring eerily off her glasses. Her usually soft features had sharpened, and her eyes were small and hard. With one long-legged step she closed the gap between us.
‘I remember you.’
My breath caught. She had clearly mistaken me for someone else. I should have said something, but my mouth wouldn’t open, my jaw clamped tight. The torch quivered in my hand and the trees around us seemed to loom closer. How far were we from the road? I tried to remember the number of horn blasts, but my mind had gone blank. There was just the darkness and the trees and the damp night air that was growing colder. And the stranger staring back at me through Lil’s eyes.
‘All grown up.’
It had been the barest whisper, so I wasn’t sure I’d heard right. Closing my fingers around Lil’s arm, I gave her a shake. ‘What did you say?’
Before she could reply, the car horn sounded in the distance. It seemed to snap us both back to reality. Lil blinked and the ice in her gaze melted away. She blinked again, little rapid flutters, and pulled away from me with a frown. Finally her features settled into an expression of confusion.
‘Abby?’ She gazed around. ‘Why are we here?’
‘Come on, Lil. Let’s get you warmed up.’
Shrugging out of my coat, I wrapped it around her shoulders, remembering again what Joe had said about her turns. She needed warmth, quiet, hot tea. A familiar environment where she could settle back into her old self and recover.
‘I was dreaming, Abby.’
‘It’s over now, Lil.’
‘A terrible dream.’
‘Come on, Joe’s waiting for you. Here, take my arm, it’s not far.’
She gripped me tightly. As we walked, she hung her head and began to moan quietly, muttering to herself.
I led her back through the trees, navigating the rough ground as I followed the distant glow of headlights. It was only when we had almost reached the verge that I made out what she was saying.
‘Oh, Frankie, leave me alone. Please, leave me alone.’