Chapter 43   

That night, the river swelled. Rain hammered down as if determined to dissolve the earth.

The police recalled the State Emergency Service volunteers searching the Carmichael Road woods for Hannah Gerlic; the forest was simply too wild and treacherous in the rain at night, and this rain was violent. Tethered to powerful spotlight beams, the drenched men and women in orange overalls stumped back from the tree line and headed toward the parked minibus they’d arrived in. They tramped up the checkered steps, stamping hard to shake off the water, switching off torches, tutting to their neighbors about how they wished they could keep looking, but all secretly glad they didn’t have to continue battling through the wild turns of blackthorn and cunjevoi and lantana while this incredible rain smashed down on their skulls.

Veterinarian assistant Katy Rhydderch was the second last to climb the bus stairs. She just happened to glance down at a flicker of movement before she entered the vehicle. An orb weaver spider was straining across the grass on its matchstick legs, slipping as it headed for cover. Katy, notorious among her friends for hating to hurt any living thing (excluding, perhaps, the ticks she occasionally had to pull off matt-furred dogs) was afraid the spider would be crushed under the minibus tires. She knelt to let the creature crawl onto her torch handle so she could move it out of harm’s way. As the spider tentatively stepped onto the flashlight, Katy saw there was a shadowed bundle under the bus.

It was a little girl. She was curled like a comma under the drive shaft, fast asleep.

Twenty minutes later, Hannah Gerlic lay dozing on a stretcher in the back of an ambulance parked just meters from where the minibus had sat. The cabin roared as if the Pacific were crashing on its roof, but Hannah’s parents didn’t seem to mind the deafening noise: each held one of Hannah’s hands. Hannah had woken long enough to yawn, ask to go home, and confess she couldn’t remember one thing that had happened after eating Vee’s enormous lunch.

Police in raincoats paced outside the ambulance, waiting to be released from the scene. Constable Brian Wenn was counting the minutes to the end of his shift—his girlfriend, Eva, had returned from a weeklong conference today and was no doubt lying naked in his bed. Even more pressing, his bladder was full to bursting. Wenn checked his watch, cursed his soaking wet feet, and hurried through the tall grass toward the tree line, unzipping his fly as he went. As his waters mixed with the rain, he glanced idly to his left.

And so the second happenstance discovery of the night was made.

A man lay unconscious in the tall, dark grass, his head not two steps away from Wenn’s stream of warm urine.