WEARY searchers thronged the SES headquarters, most clutching a fat sandwich in one fist and a steaming cup of tea or coffee in the other. Darkness had fallen, and where hope had once lifted the spirits and kept heavy legs moving, now despair curled in everyone’s mind and weighted down the feet that still tramped through the bush.
‘You’ve done enough,’ Flynn told Majella, who had taken over the first-aid post in one corner of the shed.
‘Do you think this is from a stinging nettle?’ she asked, ignoring his remark but looking up from the leg of a man she was treating. ‘Or an allergic reaction to some other plant?’
He knelt beside her to examine the leg, which had long red weals raised along the calf.
‘Do you suffer from other allergies? Are there things that trigger asthma or hay fever or irritated eyes?’ he asked the man, who was a stranger, not a local.
‘Allergic to just about everything,’ the man said. ‘Stupid, really, when I like nothing better than being out in the bush.’
‘Use an antihistamine cream,’ Flynn told Majella, ‘but if you get stinging nettle burn and the patient knows that’s what it is, there’s a new cream that’s more effective for it.’
She spread antihistamine cream on the man’s leg, then, as he left, with her admonishments to put on long trousers and a shirt with long sleeves if he wanted to continue searching, she turned and picked up a small purple jar.
‘You mean this?’ she said to Flynn, holding up a balm made from the sap of the cunjevoi plant, a big-leafed native of the lily family that often grew near stinging nettles. ‘Helen Sherwood developed it, after using the sap from the leaves on nettle stings when she was a child.’
Another patient was approaching, a man with a bloody handkerchief tied around his leg, but Flynn had time to ask, ‘How’s Naomi?’ before the man arrived.
Majella smiled.
‘The baby is just gorgeous and Naomi’s holding up. Thanks for sending the nurse to see her. Mrs Jakes is kind but also talkative. The nurse insisted Naomi try to sleep and although she probably won’t, she might doze a little if she knows the baby is all right and no one’s talking at her.
‘Yuck!’ she added, as the new patient arrived and peeled off his handkerchief to reveal a bloody, lacerated leg. ‘How on earth did you do this?’
‘Missed my footing on a ledge and slid down about ten metres to the next ledge,’ the man said, making Flynn wonder if it was such a good idea to have helpers from the festival in the search party.
But as the man sat down and Majella began to unlace his boots, Flynn squatted down to get a better look at the wound. The scrapes and scratches weren’t deep, but they covered a large area. The man, he guessed, was in his sixties, healthy enough but at an age when wounds on the lower limbs could easily turn to ulcers.
‘I’ll clean it up,’ he said to Majella. ‘Can you check through that first-aid kit and see if there’s some liquid skin—it’s not really skin but a spray-on preparation that will cover the entire graze.’
‘You’d cover it, not leave it open?’
It wasn’t exactly an argument, but the Majella he had known had so rarely questioned his decisions he glanced up at her, saw the green eyes, not challenging but enquiring, as eager to learn as she had always been.
He explained his thoughts, wondering about her training, wanting to ask more of what she’d learned but knowing this wasn’t the time.
Wanting to know so much…
It seemed to Flynn that they’d been patching people up for hours, but when he checked his watch it was only a little after ten. The next shift of searchers, including most of the patients he and Majella had seen, had gone back into the darkness, with torches now, while the police had called for trained dogs to be brought in. Every light in the showgrounds and the town had been turned on and a large fire burned brightly near the camping area, everyone hoping light might guide the footsteps of the two small boys.
Majella was leaning back in the chair they’d used for patients, sipping on a cup of tea, when she turned to Flynn, a frown marring the smooth skin of her forehead, her freckles standing out tonight against the tired paleness of her skin.
‘I wonder if they found the cave?’ she whispered, her voice indicating her uncertainty, and, it seemed to Flynn, an element of fear. Then she sat up, put down her cup, and said, ‘Do you have a crowbar?’
The question was so urgent he answered without asking why.
‘In the back of my car. I always carry one, just in case I need to move a tree or rock off one of the back roads.’
‘A rock. We may need to move a rock. Come on.’
She headed out of the shed, not stopping to tell the organisers where she was going or why.
‘What cave?’ Flynn demanded, catching up with her as she strode towards where he’d parked the big four-wheel-drive. ‘There are no caves around here.’
‘There’s a cave,’ she said. ‘Come on, get the crowbar and we’ll walk. It’s up that scree between the boundary of the showgrounds and Grandfather’s property. It wouldn’t have been far for the two boys to have walked.’
‘There’s no cave,’ Flynn found himself repeating, although he half smiled at the awareness that this time it was Majella giving orders.
But a crowbar?
‘It’s got a tiny entrance. I used to go there when I was little but then I got too big to crawl through, but I always believed if I could shift the big rock near the front I could make the entry bigger.’
They were out of the showgrounds now, following a narrow lane that had once been used to bring the locals’ milk cows in from the common, back in the days when every family had had a cow.
‘Up here!’ Majella said, scrambling as quickly as she could up the tumble of loose stones, well lit by moonlight. ‘See that clump of bushes. The cave’s behind them.’
Lumbering behind her with the heavy crowbar, dodging the stones and rocks she dislodged, Flynn indulged himself with disbelief. Hadn’t he roamed these hills from childhood? Didn’t he know every bush and stone and crack and crevice for miles around the town?
A cave? She was imagining it.
But now she was kneeling in the bushes, scrabbling at them, then her head disappeared and all he could see in the torchlight was a very shapely butt.
She was calling softly, saying the boys’ names, but so quietly he doubted anyone a yard away would hear them.
Then, as he once again squatted next to her, he heard her say, ‘It’s OK. We’ll get you. You’re all right. You’re very brave boys. Very brave. I’m going to shine my torch inside so you can see the light. Do you think you could come close to where the light is?’
She backed out, face filthy but eyes gleaming with excitement.
‘They’re in there,’ she said. ‘Blow the whistle—no, don’t blow it. The noise will echo in the cave and frighten them again. Damn, we should have brought a walkie-talkie, but we can’t leave them now to go and tell someone. Break a branch off that bush and I’ll push my torch through the opening. Once they have light, it won’t seem so bad. And my water bottle, I’ll push that through as well. I don’t suppose you’ve got a chocolate bar. No, didn’t think so, but I’ll take your torch and put it on the ground inside the tunnel so I can see where I’m pushing things.’
She took the branch he broke off and disappeared again, talking softly all the time, telling the boys how good and brave they were, telling them to come and get the light and the water bottle and that soon they’d be out.
Flynn, meanwhile, was examining the rock formation. There was a rock that might conceivably be moved—if he were superman!
‘They crawled in, can’t they crawl out again?’ he asked Majella, who’d emerged again, dirtier than ever. ‘Moving that rock will be a Herculean task.’
‘We have to do it so I can go in and help them out,’ she said, so determined—so sure he could move rocks, and maybe mountains. ‘The problem is, the entry tunnel is quite long, maybe six or seven feet, and from inside, although there’s light from a fissure somewhere up the rock wall so the cave’s not totally dark, the tunnel looks very dark—and scary! That’s why they haven’t crawled out.’
‘So go to it, Hercules!’ she challenged, but when he set the crowbar at the base of the rock, she stopped him, suggesting he move it more to one side, so they could use another rock as a fulcrum.
‘Army training,’ she said, as if his amazement had been spoken. ‘We get to do all these totally useless exercises—or when we’re doing them they seem totally useless—then, bingo, something happens, like this rock, and a long-ago memory of a yelling sergeant provides an answer to rock removal.’
She’d been setting up the rock she wanted as a fulcrum while she was explaining, then she joined him on the end of the crowbar and together, bodies working as one, they forced it down and down until Flynn was sure the solid steel would break, or they would both get hernias. Then a movement, only slight, and a groan of protest from the rock, but it did move, an inch, another inch, and then three or four, bringing a yelp of triumph from Majella before she remembered the echoes and slapped a hand across her mouth.
‘Let me try now,’ she said to Flynn, dropping to her knees again, calling to the boys, telling them about the signal Flynn would blow on the whistle to let people know they were found, and not to be frightened by it.
Flynn knelt beside her and saw the narrow tunnel she was preparing to squirm through, while voices in his head yelled in protest—telling him to stop her, it was dangerous, she’d kill herself.
‘You can’t go in there—you won’t fit. Or the rock might move and you’ll be trapped. There’s got to be another way. Let me get some more help.’
She smiled again.
‘While the boys spend more time frightened and alone? I don’t think so, Flynn, and at least, if I get stuck, you’ll know where to bring the searchers. But now the rock is moved, I will fit. The way it was, when I began to grow, my hips used to get stuck, although I’m sure there’s a theory that if one’s head will fit through an opening the rest of you should be able to.’
She bent to the small opening and called, ‘I’m coming, boys. Jamie shine the torch into the tunnel, darling, so I can see.’
To Flynn’s amazement, a light wavered in the darkness of the low cleft in the rocks and for the first time in this exercise he actually believed they’d found the boys. Oh, Majella had been certain, but what did he know of her these days? Hippy beads in her hair—for all her talk of army training he didn’t actually know anything about her. She might have been chatting to leprechauns in the cave—might have been right off the planet.
He stood up and blew the three long blasts on the whistle to signal that the boys had been found.
Would anyone hear it and get word to Naomi and her family? The search parties had covered this area first and were now much further afield. The showground was close enough, but would people be listening?
He got his answer immediately—excited yells from the showground, then car horns sounding, repeating the three long blasts of his whistle.
Majella’s feet had disappeared, but now he heard her voice calling to him.
‘Flynn, Jamie’s coming first. Can you lie on your stomach and push your hands as far in as you can so he can reach out to you as he gets into the narrow part? He can squiggle through but touching someone would be good.’
‘Would be good’ had to be the height of understatement for a child who’d been trapped in a gloomy cave for more than twelve hours, Flynn realised as he lay full length and tried to squirm as far as he could into the narrow aperture, keeping his torch in front of him all the time so the child would see it and be reassured by the light.
A little figure appeared, crawling towards him, one hand dragging a dirty cowboy hat containing a bundle of some kind.
‘Hi, Jamie, I can see you,’ Flynn said softly, not wanting to frighten the little boy with the echoes Majella had warned him of. ‘You’re nearly up to me. Can I take your bundle?’
‘No, it’s treasure and it’s mine. Mine and Sam’s. Sam cried a lot but I didn’t, even with the bears.’
‘You’re very brave,’ Flynn assured the child, but when the little hand reached out and clasped his, it clung on so tightly he wondered if Jamie’s bravery had been all used up.
Holding the hand and talking all the time, Flynn wriggled backwards, until finally Jamie squeezed through the narrowest part of the tunnel and was free. Flynn folded his arms around the fragile body and held him tightly, telling him how brave he was, and that soon he’d be back home with mum and dad.
Jamie cried out his relief, clinging like a limpet, and though Flynn wanted to poke what he could of his big frame back into the tunnel to guide Majella and young Sam out, he couldn’t let go of the child who was free.
‘Hush, it’s all right now. You’re safe,’ Flynn soothed, rocking the child in his arms.
Jamie snuffled a little more then moved his head, no doubt, Flynn realised, wiping his nose across Flynn’s shirt.
‘We heard bears out here, that’s why we couldn’t crawl back out. Bears roaring like bears do!’ the child sobbed, and Flynn wondered if, by some cruel turn of fate, the echoes of the searchers’ cries had actually kept the children in the cave.
‘Sam’s coming now,’ Majella called, but though Jamie’s storm of tears seemed to have passed, he still clung to Flynn’s chest like a baby koala to its mother’s back. ‘I’ve wrapped him up so he’s warm and toasty and I’m going to push him through like a little pretend train, going choo, choo, choo through the tunnel.’
Was the little boy so terrified he couldn’t crawl?
Majella’s tone was light, as if this was the best game in the world, but he sensed concern behind the gaiety.
Four was very young to be lost for so long…
‘I’ve got to reach in for Sam,’ Flynn told Jamie, then realised maybe Jamie needed to be involved. ‘But we also need to keep blowing the whistle so people will know where we are. If I give you the whistle, can you do that?’
Jamie eased away from him and took the whistle Flynn held out to him.
‘Blow three times as hard as you can then stop for a little while then three more and stop and keep doing it until you see people coming up the slope.’
Jamie nodded his agreement, but when Flynn disentangled the two of them and lay prone once again, he felt a small hand clamp around his ankle. Jamie wasn’t going to lose himself again.
Flynn forced himself in until the narrowing refused to allow his shoulders to go further, and stretched out his hands, hearing Majella’s soft choo-choo noises and the scrape of something on the rock.
‘Choo, choo, choo. Choo, choo, choo. Nearly there, little Sam train, nearly at the end of the tunnel. And who’s out there? Mummy and Daddy and a brand-new baby sister. Isn’t that exciting? Isn’t this fun?’
About as much fun as castration with no anaesthetic, Flynn thought, then the bundle reached his fingers and it was his turn to talk to Sam.
‘Hey, little man, you’re nearly out. Can you hear that loud noise? That’s Jamie blowing the whistle to tell everyone the train’s nearly at the station and the two lost boys are found.’
He got a purchase on the fabric Majella had wrapped around the little boy and began to pull him slowly over the rocky floor of the tunnel, talking all the time, until, moving backwards himself, he finally was able to hold the child in his arms.
Sam was wrapped like an Eskimo papoose, a solemn, tear-stained, grimy face wrapped in a motley collection of clothes and greying rags. And though he talked soothingly and Jamie chatted excitedly to his brother, Sam gazed at the outside world around him with fear-blank eyes.
‘Look,’ Jamie said, ‘people coming. My whistle worked.’
And from down below people were coming, but before Flynn could celebrate he had to get Majella out of the cave and examine this child who had been through such trauma.
He unwrapped enough of the clothing to allow Sam to move his arms, but the boy lay still and limp. Flynn held water to his lips but it trickled down his chin, and the need to get him to the hospital became more apparent every second.
But to go and leave Majella in the cave?
He bent to the entrance.
‘Where are you? Are you on your way out?’ he called, and though she answered, her words were distorted by the rock.
Or maybe tears?
Because the children had now been found? Women could cry from relief. Especially if they had a child of their own. And hadn’t he got just a little choked up when he’d heard the voices and then lifted Jamie in his arms?
‘Can you take off your shirt?’
Majella’s voice again—still echoing or teary.
‘Take off my shirt? Why?’ he demanded, more of his mind on Sam whose pulse was thready, and whose vacant stare was really bothering Flynn.
‘I wrapped my clothes around Sam. I need something to cover me when I get out.’
She was closer now, no echo, although her voice still sounded thick.
He put Sam down, grabbed Jamie who was about to plunge headlong down the scree to greet a man who apparently was his father, and managed to take off his shirt while keeping one hand on the two children all the time.
‘You found them!’
The man who’d rushed ahead scooped his elder son into his arms then reached down for Sam. But when the little arms didn’t reach for him as Jamie’s had, the man dropped to his knees and gently lifted the still bundled child up against his chest.
‘It’s OK, Sam, boy,’ he whispered. ‘Daddy’s here now. You’re safe.’
The man’s voice was cracking, Flynn was swallowing hard, then a scrabbling noise behind him reminded him the heroine of the exercise was yet to emerge.
She crawled out, the moonlight showing a filthy, blood-streaked woman, clad only in a bra and skimpy pair of panties, clutching a small cowboy hat in her hands. Flynn wrapped his shirt around her, pulling her into a hug at the same time, then, while his head wanted to yell at her for putting herself at such risk and his heart wanted to hold her for a bit longer—a lot longer—he went into responsible mode and began to give orders.
‘I’ll take Majella back to the hospital and I want you—’ he turned to the boys’ father ‘…to bring both boys up to the hospital so I can check them out.’
No need to worry him by saying it was Sam he really wanted to see.
He remembered the family logistics and added, ‘Naomi won’t want to be separated from them so soon after they’ve been found, so bring her and the baby as well. You can continue your family reunion just as easily there.’
The man looked from excited Jamie, whooping by his side, his bundle of treasure still clutched in his hand, to the silent child he held in his arms. He nodded to Flynn as if he understood.
‘I’ll bring them all straight up,’ he said.
The man took off down the hill, followed by the other relieved searchers eager to spread the word that the whistle’s signal had been correct and both boys had been found.
Flynn turned back to Majella, who was trying to get a shaking arm into the sleeve of his shirt.
‘Hey,’ he said gently, taking her hand and guiding it into the sleeve then wrapping his arms around her again, holding her close, pressing kisses on her hair, her dirty cheek—her lips.
Heat flared through his body, so unexpected he forgot to breathe, kissing her more deeply now, feeling her response, as hot and desperate as his own, aware in some far corner of his mind that this was utterly and absolutely both the wrong time and the wrong place, yet unable to stop.
‘Flynn.’
His name, muffled by his lips on hers, broke the spell, and he turned, kept an arm around her shoulders and led her down the scree, steadying her when loose stones rolled beneath her feet, holding her because he couldn’t let her go, didn’t want to let her go—ever.
Where had that thought come from? The ‘ever’ thing? The kiss he could put down to relief that she was safe, and the boys found, and, if he was honest, to the attraction he’d been feeling towards this adult Majella ever since he’d met her.
But he’d been attracted to many women over the years, without ever considering an ‘ever’ as in not wanting to let them go—
‘Our cabin’s just along here. I’ll be OK now. Thanks for the shirt,’ she said, detaching herself from his side when they reached the bottom of the hill and the caravans in the showground were only a hundred yards away. ‘I’ll wash it and get it back to you.’
He stared at her in disbelief, then realised she hadn’t been party to his thoughts.
Though she’d responded to his kiss…
‘You can’t just walk away,’ he said, searching hurriedly through his bemused brain for a valid reason to keep her close. ‘Apart from anything else, you’ve cuts and scrapes all over you. I need to look at them, treat them, patch you up a bit.’
She half smiled and shook her head.
‘I can patch myself up. Done it dozens of times. Or Helen and Sophie can do it. I really need to get back to the cabin now, Flynn. Apart from anything else, I need to check on Grace, need to see her. Also, with the festival closed for the night, Helen will be getting anxious.’
‘Then we’ll call by the cabin, you check on Grace and tell Helen where you’ll be, then we’ll go to the hospital.’
She shook her head, and though Flynn was desperate to have her with him—he’d think more about that later—he couldn’t find a way to make her bend to his will. She was no longer the Majella for whom his word was law.
He remembered the blank eyes of the child.
‘I’d like you to come for Sam,’ he said. ‘He seems to have gone into cataplexy. You’re the one he saw first, maybe you can break through.’
‘Even when his parents can’t?’ she asked, but he sensed her wavering and nodded.
‘OK. But I’ll shower here, dab some antiseptic on my scrapes, and put some clothes on first,’ she told him. ‘Then drive up. I won’t be far behind you, and you’ll have to examine both him and Jamie.’
He had to accept this was as close to agreement as he would get, so he touched her on the shoulder and moved away, trying not to think of the long legs that had stretched below the hem of his shirt or the streak of blood that crossed the scar beside her eye.
Trying not to think of the kiss, although the legs had made his pulse beat faster and his blood heat again.
But the blood on the scar had somehow hurt his heart.
He arrived at the hospital just as the family pulled up. Naomi must have taken one look at Sam and seen the need for haste. She climbed out of the front seat of the big vehicle, the little boy in her arms, still swaddled in Majella’s garments, although a bright yellow bunny rug with red chickens on it had been wrapped around him as well.
‘What’s wrong with him?’ she whispered to Flynn as he got out of his car.
‘I think it’s just shock—and remember he’ll be dehydrated as well. I want to get fluid into him fast, then take some blood so we can see if there’s anything chemically wrong.’
He hated the idea of prodding and probing the little boy and sticking needles into him, but fluid resuscitation was a must so needles there would have to be.
The boys’ father, now introduced as Mike, carried Jamie on his right hip, and the baby capsule in his left hand, and so the procession wound into the hospital, Flynn leading the way to the fortunately deserted A and E.
With Naomi’s help and a constant stream of cheerful chat to her younger son, they unwound the clothes from Sam’s small body. Talking all the time to the little boy, and with Jamie watching closely and telling Sam all over again what was going on, Flynn found a vein in the back of Sam’s left hand, withdrew some blood for testing, then taped the cannula into place and started a drip.
The examination began—the usual checks of blood pressure, pulse, respiration rate and temperature, nothing to get alarmed about, nothing to explain the child’s flaccid body and lack of response, even to his parents.
Physical examination next. Both knees were scraped, but though Flynn examined every inch of skin, wondering if a spider bite or insect sting might be the cause of Sam’s inertia, he could find no puncture marks or redness indicative of a bite.
‘You’re safe now. Talk to Mummy,’ Naomi begged but the little lips stayed closed, and the brown eyes, like his mother’s, remained fixed on some point on the ceiling.
‘It’s shock,’ Flynn told Naomi, urging her into a chair beside the examination table. ‘He’ll come out of it.’
Naomi offered him a strained smile.
‘You said you’d find the boys and you did, so I suppose I should believe you about this,’ she whispered, and Flynn, though far less sure about the child than he’d been about the outcome of the search, nodded his acceptance of her faith.
He tucked the bright blanket around the little boy. It was obviously a favourite, then turned as Jamie announced he was going to show Sam the treasure.
‘This will make him better,’ Jamie said, dumping the dirty bundle he’d been carrying on the edge of the bed and peeling away the wrapping, which appeared, from its faded stripes, to be an ancient teatowel.
Inside was a small rag doll, gnawed by some rodent that had no doubt dwelt in the cave, and some pieces of metallic paper, brightly patterned, like the covering of chocolate Easter eggs, two marbles and some dull coins, one dollar and two dollar, while a silver bracelet with a broken catch completed the trove.
‘Look, Sam, at what the fairies left behind when they moved out of our cave,’ Jamie said, holding up each item one by one, his stubby fingers, still grubby from his adventure, smoothing the silver paper carefully.
Sam responded to the extent his eyes moved as Jamie waved each piece of treasure in front of him, and when Jamie added, ‘And the fairies got us out, didn’t they? I told you they would,’ Sam’s eyes closed voluntarily for the first time since Flynn had pulled him free.
‘Sleeping?’ Naomi whispered hopefully, and Flynn didn’t like to disillusion her, although if Sam had closed his eyes in order to avoid looking at reminders of his ordeal, that, too, was good.
He checked Sam’s pulse then stood up, intending to leave the family together while he tested Sam’s blood sample, but as he turned to leave, Majella walked in, clad in a long floaty dress that frothed around her calves and hid, yet in some way still revealed, the curves he kept on noticing. The beads were gone, and her hair, released from the tortuous braids, had reacted by flying every which way. She lifted her hand to it and smiled ruefully.
‘It was full of spider webs and probably bat excreta—I had to take it out.’ Then she moved closer, and he saw her eyes take in the dirty teatowel and Jamie’s little pile of treasure. Every vestige of colour left her face, and with a sigh she collapsed onto the ground in a dead faint.