No One Can Hear You

by Nikki Crutchley

  Zoe pulled into Lillian’s driveway with some trepidation, her thoughts turning to Aroha. She’d seen Megan, she told Zoe — and then she disappeared. Zoe had suffered through smashed windows and a break-in and wondered if, or when, she too would disappear. She texted Faith: Fancy a trip to Auckland tomorrow? Meeting detective at 2pm.

  Faith responded almost immediately. Hell yeah!

  Zoe jumped at the loud tap on the passenger window. She turned to see Alex’s smiling face, his fringe covering one of his eyes. She got out of the car.

  ‘Sorry, didn’t mean to scare you. You OK?’

  ‘Long story. It looks like Aroha Kingi’s missing.’

  ‘Shit, really? I haven’t seen her in a couple of days. I left a message for her dad yesterday afternoon. Although I’m doing that almost every week these days. Is it serious, do you think?’

  ‘Yeah, I do,’ Zoe said, not wanting to go through the whole story again and reluctant to put any other friends in danger.

  ‘Have you been to the police?”

  ‘Yeah, that’s where I’ve just been. They’ll take care of it, I’m sure. What are you up to?’

  ‘You’ve been summoned,’ he said, indicating Pam’s house.

  They walked over to Pam’s and as soon as they were in the front door Jeff popped a champagne cork that went flying past Alex’s head. ‘Woah, easy, old man!’ he said.

  ‘What’s all this for?’ Zoe asked, taking a glass.

  ‘It’s all a bit silly, really,’ Pam said, unable to stop grinning.

  ‘This lovely lady has agreed to marry me,’ Jeff said. Zoe didn’t think she’d ever seen Jeff Worthington smile as wide or for so long.

  Zoe stood open-mouthed and everyone laughed. She grinned in embarrassment and gave them both a hug. ‘I thought—’

  ‘You thought this old guy would never get a divorce from that nasty—’ Alex said.

  ‘Alex, watch it, I know you’re a grown man, but I am still your mother and you need to be respectful,’ Pam warned, but her frown was soon replaced with another smile.

  ‘Yes, Mum.’ Alex grinned at Zoe.

  ‘My lovely now ex-wife has finally decided that we were making each other miserable. I only wish she’d realised this twenty years ago.’ Jeff beamed down at Pam, an arm around her waist. ‘She has agreed to a very generous settlement.’

  ‘Can I ask what made you do it?’

  ‘We’ve been legally separated for years, we live apart, but I knew if I tried to divorce her she’d take me for everything I had. But age seems to have mellowed her.’

  ‘Plus a new toy boy,’ Alex muttered. Pam swatted at him.

  ‘And she agreed. Divorce was finalised a couple of days ago.’

  ‘So where’s your ring?’ Zoe shot a look at Jeff, smiling.

  ‘Ah,’ said Jeff. ‘I thought you two might want to be witness to this since you’re probably the only ones who knew about this almost from the beginning — and, well, you’re family.’

  He got down on one creaking knee, and pulled out a blue velvet box. ‘Pam, you have always been the one. You have made the last twenty years of my life the happiest I have known, and if you would let me I’d love to finally be your husband.’

  Zoe wiped at the corner of her eye as Alex put an arm around her. Pam covered her face with both hands, her shoulders heaving.

  ‘Mum, are you OK?’

  ‘I’m fine,’ she said behind her hands. ‘More than fine.’

  Jeff took her left hand and slid on a diamond-and-sapphire ring and pulled her into a hug, whispering something in her ear that Zoe and Alex couldn’t hear.

  Zoe again wiped at her eyes. It wasn’t so much the proposal, it was Jeff saying that he considered her to be family. She’d been on her own for so long, she didn’t even realise she was missing it till he’d pointed it out.

  Chapter 47

  Megan looked up into the sky which was already growing dark. She breathed in the air around her before Tai pushed her into the back of a white van. He tied her arms behind her back and then tied her feet together. She tried to find a comfortable position to sit or crouch in but gave up when the van started and Tai hurtled down the driveway and onto the main road, causing her to topple over and land heavily on her shoulder. After half an hour she couldn’t feel her left side and didn’t care. She quite liked the numb feeling and just wished it would envelop the rest of her body, including her brain. Car lights and street lights would light up the van for a second, shapes playing along the panels of the van shining in through the gaps of the newspaper that Tai had put up. From the start she tried to work out where they were going, taking note of the lefts and rights taken. She held on to the hope she was going back to the Crawton Tavern, to Garth and her dead-end job but gave up after she felt the van speed up on a long, smooth road.

  An hour or so later the van slowed. It stopped and started, and Megan could see the changing traffic lights’ glow through the papered-over windows. She adjusted herself for the hundredth time on the journey, wincing as her hipbone dug into the floor of the van. She managed to get herself into a sitting position and pressed her face against the window, looking through the small crack. They were in Auckland. The Sky Tower loomed up ahead of them, lighting up the sky around it. Then the van came to a standstill and Tai cut the engine. He opened the back doors, climbed in and closed the doors behind them. He put a torch on the floor. The light shone up and hit just under his chin, the shadows and light playing across his face making him look even more threatening.

  ‘Don’t move.’ He untied her feet, leaving her wrists bound, and pulled her out of the van.

  Megan looked around her, always ready for the possibility of escape. After weeks of silence, of having only her own ragged breathing for company, she heard music pumping out of the tall buildings surrounding her on every side, the bass reverberating through her body. She looked up to the night sky which was stained a yellowish-dark blue from the city lights.

  They were down a dark alley, not much wider than the van. In front of them was a brick wall. A couple of metres behind them was a door and further down people walked past the alleyway without giving it a second glance. A lot of them were still in suits, some in pairs or groups out on the town, some stumbled in high stilettos, shrieking with laughter. A homeless man sat cocooned in a sleeping bag on the corner.

  She did it without thinking of the consequences. She yelled and screamed. She yelled out ‘Help!’ and ‘Fire!’ how you were supposed to do to get people’s attention. But the foot traffic didn’t slow, the music from the clubs like a pied piper: they were deaf to anything else. The homeless man turned to her, adjusted his cardboard sign, turned back to the throngs and held out his hat as people passed. They ignored him the way he ignored her.

  Tai covered her mouth with one hand and held her tight around the waist with the other and kicked the metal door twice. Seconds later it opened and she was thrust inside. The door banged behind them, and her eyes became used to the murky darkness, broken only by a single dim lightbulb overhead.

  ‘All OK here?’ Tai asked a man who looked like a bouncer in a black T-shirt and jeans. His dark brown hair, wet and combed back off his face, and his long side burns made him look like a greaser from the Sixties.

  ‘Yeah, fine. Just had a call, though. You can’t go back. Something to do with a missing kid. Someone saw you. Looks like you fucked up.’

  ‘Fuck!’ Tai said, releasing Megan, who struggled to find her footing in the tight space and landed against a wall.

  ‘I was told to tell you to stay up here. Not to step foot in Crawton till further notice.’

  ‘Yeah, OK.’ Tai sounded dejected, as though he’d been told off by his mother.

  ‘You better not’ve fucked this whole thing up, eh,’ the greaser said.

  ‘Fuck off. It’ll be fine. It’s not like they’re gonna find her —
or me.’

  ‘Better you than me, mate. They’ll be in contact, anyway.’

  This was Tai’s dismissal and he disappeared out the way he came. Megan felt a sudden surge of loneliness. Tai was a piece of shit, but she knew him. As long as she was with him, she’d talked herself into thinking nothing really bad was going to happen.

  ‘Trash,’ the man said, shaking his head. ‘Let’s go.’ He took her by the wrists.

  ‘Please, what am I doing here?’ The same question, one she was sure wasn’t going to be answered but she wasn’t going to stop asking it.

  He ignored her, and she let out a sob. She could hear the music from the clubs in the distance, but closer was the sound of a piano being played. The man led her to a door at the end of a short corridor and opened it. She turned her eyes away from the bright fluorescent light.

  ‘Go. Donna’s waiting for you.’

  She looked down into a basement. It smelt damp and mouldy, smelt of loneliness and desperation. She wondered how many girls had walked down these stairs before her — and then wondered, with another sob, how many walked back up.

  ‘Enjoy your time at The Secret Garden.’ He gave her back a light tap, and she descended the steps. As she got to the bottom she realised this was a new, fresh hell. If she could trade this place for the storage room back in Crawton she’d take it in a heartbeat.

  A woman met her at the bottom of the stairs and ushered her into a large square room. ‘I’m Donna.’ Her black hair was cut in a severe bob; her black eyes, which, even when she smiled with scarlet lips, stayed dead, emotionless.

  ‘Please,’ Megan said looking around the room. ‘Tell me what I’m doing here.’

  She ignored Megan and pointed out the bathroom in the corner on the right and a row of mattresses along the back wall. ‘That one’s yours,’ she said. Her voice was husky as though she had a cold or a pack-a-day habit.

  Megan walked over to the mattress. There were ten in all. The sheets and pillow looked clean. To the left was a row of ten steel lockers lined up against the concrete wall.

  ‘You can put any of your belongings in there. This is yours.’ She led Megan over to a locker with the name ‘Rose’ printed on a piece of cardboard. Other names on the lockers were Ivy, Daisy, Jasmine, Lily. Inside the locker were a new toothbrush, toothpaste, shampoo, hairbrush and a bar of soap.

  ‘It’s important to keep yourself clean all the time. Got it?’

  Megan nodded. Confused, scared. She started shaking and couldn’t stop. She clasped her hands together.

  ‘I’ll leave you to it. The other girls won’t be back for a while. Drink up,’ Donna said, indicating the water bottle at the end of her mattress. ‘It’s important to stay hydrated.’

  She left without another word and Megan sat herself down on her mattress. She opened the water bottle Donna had left for her and gulped back half the contents. All the mattresses were empty apart from one at the very end. If it wasn’t for the T-shirt rising and falling every now and then Megan would’ve sworn the woman was dead. Her pale face was still, with pronounced black smudges under her eyes. She didn’t look much older than eighteen. There were no windows in the basement and an extractor fan lazily hummed in the corner, doing nothing to rid the place of the heavy air, laden with body odour and the stench of urine. Megan took another sip from the bottle and swore when she felt the familiar fog come over her. Tai’s words came back to her: ‘Special water.’ She threw the bottle across the room where it landed on the concrete floor. The girl on the mattress stirred but fell back asleep and Megan soon did the same. Not that she had any choice.

  Chapter 48

  Zoe woke up the next morning feeling as though her head was going to be split in two. She knew it was the stress. She’d taken ages to get to sleep, worried, as usual, about Megan and Tania, and then, when she finally got to sleep, faceless women appeared begging her for help, telling her that they were waiting for her, asking her why she hadn’t found them yet.

  She made a strong coffee and rummaged in the bathroom for something stronger than paracetamol. She opened a pack of ibuprofen, pulled out a sheet of tablets and a yellow Post-it note fell to the floor. Her usual feeling when coming across a clue from Lillian was confusion and worry, but now she grabbed the small piece of paper off the linoleum floor and opened the folded square in anticipation.

  The Secret Garden. Auckland?

  It was something, even if she had no idea what the hell ‘The Secret Garden’ meant. It conjured up memories of a favourite childhood story, and nothing else. She downed two tablets then slipped the piece of paper into her jeans pocket and wondered again what Lillian’s frame of mind had been towards the end. She was getting all this new information, trying hard to remember it all, learning that people she would normally trust were now against her. It must have been frightening and confusing. No wonder the information was spread across her house and office. Zoe had thought Lillian was being clever hiding clues for someone to find, but now she wondered if even Lillian remembered where she hid them.

  Faith turned up on the door step not long after she’d finished her coffee.

  ‘Look what I found.’ Zoe pulled the note from her pocket.

  ‘What the hell’s The Secret Garden?’ Faith asked.

  Zoe shrugged.

  ‘Have you looked into it?’

  Zoe pulled her phone from her handbag and brought up Google. She turned the screen towards Faith so she could see as well, and typed in ‘Secret Garden’, having no idea what to expect, apart from many entries on the children’s novel of the same name. They browsed the results, the first one being the novel by Frances Hodgson Burnett. There were a few cafés and garden centres listed throughout New Zealand.

  ‘Surely it’s none of those,’ Zoe said.

  ‘Add Auckland to the search,’ Faith suggested.

  The same cafés came up, but at the bottom of the page was something different. Zoe clicked through to the website. They stared at the screen for a full ten seconds before Faith said, ‘Well, what the fuck is this?’

  The screen was black and decorated with an ornate white floral border. The text inside the border, written in curving script said The Secret Garden. At the bottom of the screen was a rectangular box with the words: Membership number.

  ‘I don’t get it,’ Faith said.

  ‘We’re not going to get any further without a membership number, obviously. I guess it’s some kind of club, maybe? I have no idea.’ Zoe hoped they were onto something. They stared at the screen for another few minutes then Faith said, ‘Come on, let’s get going.’

  They were on the outskirts of Auckland just over an hour later, the traffic slowly starting to get busier. Soon they were crawling along the Southern Motorway. ‘Where the fuck are all of these people going?’ Faith said. ‘Haven’t they got jobs?’

  Zoe smiled, used to the snail’s-pace traffic. Then — ‘Shit!’ She braked suddenly, causing screeching tyres from behind. She braced for impact but there was none. The person behind her honked his horn and she raised an arm in apology and moved on.

  ‘What the fuck was that?’ Faith asked, a hand across her chest, no doubt to steady her heart.

  ‘Fuck, fuck. I just thought of something.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’ve seen that Secret Garden before.’ Zoe ran a hand along the side of her head.

  ‘Well, where is it?’

  ‘No, I mean that black screen and the floral pattern we saw. I’ve seen it on a box of matches.’

  ‘What the hell are you talking about?’ Faith said, losing patience.

  ‘The principal at my old school, at St Clement’s, he had a matchbox I saw once, without him meaning me to. It was normally kept in his desk. It was black and had that exact floral pattern. I’m sure of it.’

  ‘Could be coincidence.’

  ‘I don’t think so.’r />
  ‘So what do we do? That still doesn’t give us any more information.’

  Zoe was sure the matchbox had writing on it. ‘Maybe there’s an address or something on it?’

  ‘Yeah, maybe, but how do you think we’re going to get it?’

  Zoe indicated and crossed three lanes of traffic, causing more horn honking and slamming of brakes as she took the next exit. ‘We’re going to pay Mr Harold Paynter a visit.’

  Twenty minutes later they pulled into the grounds of St Clement’s School for Boys. ‘Fuck me,’ whispered Faith as they parked in a visitor parking space. Cream two-storey buildings surrounded them in a neat U shape. Topiary divided cobbled paths and a grey-white marble fountain stood at the main entrance.

  ‘Believe me, it’s not all it’s cracked up to be. St Clement’s is all about looks,’ Zoe said.

  A few students were entering the administration block but other than that it was as quiet as a church. ‘Where are all the kids?’ Faith whispered.

  ‘It’s lunchtime. They’ll all be around the back.’ Zoe pointed through a set of double doors that showed an expanse of green fields. Closer to them were wooden picnic benches where boys in black shorts and green jerseys sat eating lunch.

  ‘Can I help you — oh, Zoe. How nice to see you.’ The receptionist smiled up at Zoe, ignoring Faith.

  Zoe smiled back, realising she didn’t really have a plan. ‘Hi, Kath, I’m just here to catch up with a few of the staff. Is it OK if I head up?’

  ‘Of course. You know the way.’

  She and Faith headed up the wide carpeted stairs. Zoe headed towards Paynter’s office. ‘He always goes out for lunch. Anything to get him off the school grounds for an hour.’