13

ALICE

In Tomb Creek, as night fell, Alice checked her windows; they didn’t open wide enough for anybody to get through. Beyond them was darkness and fields and a lot of nothing.

The curtain was thick enough to prevent people seeing in, but not enough to prevent light getting out. She wrapped the gun in her jumper and placed it in the side drawer, close at hand, took her switchblade out of her sock and put it under her pillow. She read over Teddy’s notes while eating her salsa and chips, washed down with a glass of unpleasantly warm tap water. Then she lay in the silence, listening for what was outside, until she fell asleep.

~

Later, in the darkest part of the night, Alice awoke. She stilled, waiting to see what it was that had raised her: the illuminated clock beside her read just after three. A moment later, she heard the rough crunch of disturbed gravel; the wind had picked up, but this was not the leaves scraping in a flurry on the rocks outside. It was something else.

Alice sat up quietly and slid her hand under the pillow, resting her fingers on the switchblade’s mother-of-pearl handle. Two years ago, she and Teddy had their blade handles engraved with each other’s names on the understanding that if, when on seperate cases, the blade marked Alice ended up stuck in somebody’s neck, then the human Alice would be more likely to have an alibi than Teddy would. Alice traced her nails over the letters of Teddy’s name now, and hoped she wouldn’t have to use it. Cleaning blood out of her friend’s name never felt good.

Silently, she swung her legs out of bed. Keeping close to the walls, she crouched down and walked along to the door to her room, listening close. There was a noise that she didn’t immediately understand, and then she realised what it was: somebody was picking the lock to her door. She swapped the knife into her good hand and watched as the lock gave way, the doorknob turned and the door met resistance against the chair she’d pushed underneath the handle.

All the training they had done over the years – and really, there had been a lot of it – was keeping her breath even and her mind calm. She wondered if the other person had a gun; now that she was out of the city and on farmland, the likelihood increased. Quietly, softly, she moved the chair along the carpet away from the handle. Right now, whoever was out there did not know Alice was awake. The room was dark. She was stealthy. They would come in quietly. She watched the handle turn again.

The door opened. A rifle – nothing deadly, but nothing you’d want pressed against your head in the dark – led the way, slowly, not gripped to shoot, held only to have something between whoever this was and Alice herself. She waited until she saw the hand, clad in a black woollen glove, on the gun’s stock. Alice took a single breath and, without making a sound, speared right through the glove and skin and muscle and sinew to the other side, withdrew her knife as they let out a guttural scream, and caught the gun the fucker dropped with her left hand.

They didn’t wait. In the time it took Alice to switch the safety off the gun and get herself armed, whoever had planned to shoot her was running, bolting out the door and into the dark fields like they were on fire. They were fast – faster than her – and from their brief moment of contact, she knew they were bigger. If it came to fists, she might not win, even with their damaged hand. Alice stood outside her room and lined up a shot, but they were too far, it was too dark, and she didn’t know the gun, or the property, but she did know that a gunshot would wake everybody else here up if the scream hadn’t already done so. She went back inside, propped the gun next to the front door, moved the curtain aside, and waited.

~

Hours later, as the dawn rose, Alice put the gun on her bed and washed her knife. A toothpick helped her with the engraving, so Teddy’s name still shone bright. The night before, Chetna had told her that breakfast would be delivered at seven o’clock; it would be here soon, so Alice could eat and get the fuck out of here. Whoever had tried to shoot her today was not Chetna, who was shorter than her, but Alice couldn’t be entirely sure the hotel’s owner didn’t know something about what had happened overnight anyway.

She went outside the room so she could see the dawn coming in around her, tinged a soft, warm yellow, frost still on the grass where the sun hadn’t yet made contact. A magpie walked through the grass towards her. She pocketed her knife, went back inside, and called Teddy.

‘Why the fuck didn’t you call me earlier?’ Teddy shouted, once Alice was done telling her what happened.

‘You couldn’t have been here quickly anyway,’ Alice said. ‘And here I am. Okay.’

‘I’ll come now.’

It was bluster, and they both knew it.

‘I’m done today anyway,’ Alice said. ‘Two more stops, then I deliver him, and then I am driving straight to your place before I go back to Jun and Cherry.’

‘It’s not soon enough,’ Teddy said.

‘Tonight,’ Alice said. ‘You’ll see me tonight. Is Art at yours yet?’

‘Before seven o’clock? He wouldn’t be up that early to solve his own damn murder. Are you going to call him?’

‘I’m not calling anybody else,’ Alice told her. ‘This is the absolute extent of fussing that I can live with, and I’m already done with it.’

‘I think it’s a reasonable amount of fuss if somebody tries to kill you.’

‘I don’t think they were there to kill me.’

‘What were they there for, then?’

‘Keys to the car.’

Teddy took a moment. ‘Huh. Surely they would have tried Chetna’s office, then, for the garage key, before they came to you?’

Alice looked out into the quiet.

‘She probably lives in a house nearby,’ she said. ‘Harder to find a key in all those rooms. And maybe she doesn’t live alone, but there was only one of me.’

‘You’re worth twenty of them.’

‘Not in a fight, though. Maybe they knew I had a key to the garage, too. But how?’

‘You didn’t have to tell me you’d asked for one, but I knew it.’

‘Did you pull a gun on me?’ Alice joked.

‘Alice,’ Teddy admonished.

‘So who was it?’

‘I don’t know,’ Teddy said. ‘What now?’

‘I get a basket of breakfast goods delivered to my door soon,’ Alice said. ‘What do you think will be in there? Humour me.’

‘Fresh orange juice in a glass bottle,’ Teddy said. ‘Half a loaf of bread. A pat of butter in brown paper. Homemade jam. A single fresh peach.’

‘I didn’t even know I was hungry until now. If there’s anything but that list, I’m gonna go to the office and shoot Chetna myself.’

‘That’s my girl,’ Teddy said.

~

At five past seven, Alice saw Chetna’s broad hat and red coat out of the window’s sheer curtains, heading towards her from the office. Alice sank down silently, unseen, and sat with her back against the door to the hotel room, her legs drawn up out of sight if Chetna peered in. The gun was flat against the wall beside her.

Alice’s breath was even, and quiet. Chetna knocked twice, and called out, ‘Alice? Your breakfast is here.’

Alice rested her hand on the rifle.

Chetna rapped on the window, the glass shaking in the pane. ‘Alice,’ she called again, louder. ‘Breakfast!’

She tried the doorhandle next; Alice watched it above her head. It was locked, and when it stopped, Chetna let the handle snap back. Alice heard her put something on the other side of the door, and then there was a long moment – too long – where nothing happened. Alice spent that time getting the knife back out of her pocket and into the best grip position, and waited.

Gravel crunched underfoot as Chetna left. Alice counted to fifty, then to a hundred, before she stood and looked out of the window.

Chetna was still there; away from the room, in the fields nearby, but facing her, and not so far she couldn’t see Alice’s movement. She waved. Alice waved back, opened the door, and took her basket back inside to the kitchen table. Three slices of supermarket bread in a ziplock bag; a single-use container each of Meadow Lea butter, Cottee’s raspberry jam and Kraft peanut butter; a single-size box of Kellogg’s Cornflakes; a small carton of Devondale milk; an apple; a tiny bottle of Mount Franklin water. Alice took a picture and sent it to Teddy.

She washed up in the bathroom sink, cleaned the bloodstains she’d missed on the floorboards, packed her bag, and put the apple in her jacket pocket. She ate the rest of the basket’s contents outside in the fresh air, sitting on the concrete, throwing bread to the magpie even though you weren’t supposed to feed things like that to birds. They would rely on you, people said. She liked to think of it as insurance. If anybody came back to shoot her again now, maybe the magpie would peck their eyes out.

‘You’ll look after me, won’t you?’ she asked, as the magpie took the bread.

It hopped away, back to the grass.

‘It’s okay,’ Alice told it. ‘I don’t really need you anyway.’

She went inside and gathered her things. Then she picked up the rifle, held it close to her leg so it wasn’t obvious and left the room.

~

Darwin was still there. She had gone straight to the garage, trying not to think about what might be waiting for her, but there he was: a coffin, flowers, her Valkyrie looking fine. As far as she could tell, nothing had been moved. She should have left a camera in here – something, anything. She hadn’t even left a hair trap on the door to see if somebody had gone in. No point in worrying now.

She packed everything into the car, hiding the whole damn rifle along the side panel. She drove out of the garage and around to the office, where she left the car running but got out and waited.

Chetna looked tired when she came out of the office, nursing a coffee like it was a pot of gold. ‘Looks like a nice day to be dead,’ she said.

She was, Alice thought, surely oblivious. You couldn’t make that joke if you knew what had happened overnight. Maybe it wasn’t anything to do with her. Both hands wrapped around the coffee were unmarked, and the person with the gun had run away from the motel when she chased them. But to where?

In the distance, an engine sputtered. In response, the birds that had been quiet called back, a kookaburra laughing and a magpie warbling on a roof. ‘It’s a beautiful place,’ Alice said politely.

Chetna snorted. ‘Good luck for the rest of the day.’

God knew what she meant by that. Alice thanked her and got into the car. Chetna watched her, unmoving, until she was out of sight.

~

What had happened in her room didn’t truly land on Alice until she was an hour away from it all, heading north, surrounded on each side by tall green pines. She pulled onto the side of the road when it was finally wide enough and shook so hard that Valkyrie shook with her. It’s okay, she said to herself, as she held on to Valkyrie’s doorhandle and her body heaved with sobs that couldn’t make it past the dam wall. You’re allowed to feel this now. What’s important is that you didn’t feel it at the time. What’s important is that you stopped someone from hurting you, and you scared them, and they ran, and you are alive.

It had been six hours since she’d stabbed someone in the hand as easily as spearing a martini olive with a toothpick. She heard the sound now, a sickening parting of skin and scrape of bone and a squirt of blood. It was like the sound had not existed at three in the morning, but it did now, at nine o’clock, when the day was bright and the memory was allowed out into the sun. There was a man – she was mostly sure it was a man – whose hand had a hole in it. Who had brought a gun into the room where she slept. If she had not stabbed him (that sound, oh God), then maybe he would have shot her. Taken Darwin. Taken Alice from her daughter.

She got out of Valkyrie and called Jun. He didn’t pick up, so she ate her apple and waited for a few minutes, watching each car drive by in case they slowed for her, but none did.

Jun called back when she was down to the core. ‘Hey,’ he said. ‘We slept in.’

‘You lazy bastards,’ she said affectionately. ‘Can I talk to Cherry?’

‘What, I’m not good enough?’

‘I had a bad dream,’ she said. ‘But in the dream, you were fine.’

He handed the phone to Cherry, who squealed, ‘Mama!’

‘My little bomb,’ Alice said, flooded with relief. Mama was a better sound than metal through skin. It was the kind of sound you could hold on to with both hands. She took a deep breath and her heart started to steady.

‘Mama, how is your drive?’

‘Long,’ she said. ‘Boring.’

‘Did you sleep good last night? It rained here and sleep was hard.’

‘Oh, my love, I’m sorry. I didn’t have a very good sleep either.’

‘Daddy says my breakfast is ready. Call back after my pancakes.’

‘Pancakes,’ Alice said, faintly. ‘Sorry, baby, I might be driving. And you know I can’t call when I’m driving. But I love you.’

‘Love you too, Mama.’

‘Can you tell Dad that I love him too?’

‘No,’ she said cheerfully, and hung up.

Alice threw the phone back through Valkyrie’s window and breathed in. The road was long and straight ahead. High in the sky above, a bird circled. A wedge-tailed eagle, waiting to swoop down and eat some poor bird or rodent. Alice thought: I am the eagle. I have the gun. Then she thought: Do not close your eyes again until this is done.