‘I may need a few days … Sorry.’
Ana hangs up and reaches into her pocket for the bag of pills. She deliberates for a moment before opening it and placing just two on the bench top. Their bright whiteness stands out against the dull green of the formica. The rest of the bag she hides away with the other pills in the back of the kitchen drawer.
Reaching for a spoon she starts crushing the pills into powder.
*
It’s less than an hour since Ana dragged the man down the stairs and in that time he doesn’t appear to have moved at all. Ana gazes across at him from the bottom of the stairs, wondering how seriously she’s hurt him with that blow to the head.
In her arms she holds a tray she’s prepared with a small plastic bottle of orange juice, a basin of soapy water and the well-stocked first-aid kit Lenny gave her the Christmas before last that she’s had no occasion to use until now. A towel is draped over her shoulders, a blanket and a pillow held under her arm. She looks like a cross between a nurse and a motel maid. A nervous one, on the first day of a job she’s not entirely sure she wants.
Moving quickly, Ana sets the tray down by the mattress and reaches for the juice, giving it a good shake to make sure the pills are fully dissolved. He doesn’t look like he’s going to be waking up in a hurry but she needs to be sure. Besides, sleep is good for healing. How River is this morning is evidence of that.
Ana knows enough to guess that the cocktail of her pills, in combination with his head injury and the alcohol he still has in his system, should keep him out for most of the day.
She perches herself on the edge of the mattress and then carefully slides her hand under his neck, lifting his head up. The nape of his neck feels warm and clammy against her hand despite the chill of the air. It’s awkward but with a bit of trial and error she manages to hold him upright by wedging a knee under his shoulders as she holds the bottle to his lips.
She slowly squeezes the plastic sides of the bottle but the juice dribbles straight out of his mouth. Ana knows what the problem is but needs her other hand free to fix it. She shifts closer, levering him up until his whole upper body is leaning back against her. She focuses on the task at hand, ignoring the sensation of panic flooding through her.
She tilts his head gently back and once again brings the bottle to his lips. At the same time she strokes his throat with her other hand, encouraging him to swallow. It’s the same technique she uses to get River to swallow pills and this time it works.
Until the man suddenly splutters, juice going everywhere.
Ana cries out when his hand grasps hold of hers over the bottle. He’s suddenly conscious but is completely focused on his thirst, his grip strong as he sucks back the juice.
Ana’s fight-or-flight instinct has activated every muscle in her body but she forces herself to remain still and let him drink. It’s only seconds before he starts to drift away again, his hand slowly slackening and dropping onto the bed.
Ana immediately struggles out from under him and moves away to collect herself. She leans into one of the pillars, pressing the whole length of her body into the cool support of the concrete, the hand that was trapped in his pressed tight into her belly. How the hell did she get herself into this? More to the point, how the hell is she going to get herself out of it?
She glances back at the man. He drank most of the bottle but even with her best guess it’s impossible to gauge exactly how much time she has before the pills start to wear off and he wakes up again.
Ana takes a big calming breath and moves back in to check on his injuries. That at least is something she knows she can do. Not only was she primary carer for her grandmother for the long year it took her to finally die but even before that, while still a child, she was already skilled in taking care of her mother, getting fluids back into her body after her binges, making sure she got the quiet and rest she needed in order to recover before the next one. It also wasn’t at all unusual for her mother to have acquired some sort of injury with no idea how she got it. It was easier for Ana to patch her up whilst she was passed out and docile rather than hungover and unpredictable.
In Ana’s experience unconscious people are generally a whole lot easier to relate to. Even her grandmother, so stoic and silent for most of her life, raged in those last painful months until Ana was forced to keep her mostly sedated.
Cautiously, she moves around to examine the man’s head. Her fingers find the swollen lump and she parts the long strands of his hair to get a better look at the wound.
It’s nasty.
She reaches for the wet cloth and gently cleans away the blood and dirt. Once clean it doesn’t look as bad as she initially thought but there’s no way to tell what might be going on underneath the skin. Her amateur nursing knowledge stretches far enough to know that swelling anywhere on the head is never a good thing. He’ll have a serious concussion at the very least.
Or brain damage.
There goes that voice in her head again, always going for the worst-case scenario. It’s never helpful or welcome but she can’t seem to switch it off.
She dabs the wound with a liberal amount of antiseptic and then unravels a long white bandage and wraps it around his head, securing it with a butterfly clip before settling him on the pillow. Lastly, she replaces the filthy tarpaulin with the soft blanket she brought down with the pillow. It smells a bit musty but he’ll be more comfortable for the rest of his time here. Even if he’s never conscious enough to know it, she’ll know she did what she could.
Her work is now done but Ana remains there, crouched over him, her ears tuned to the shallow ins and outs of his breath. She brings her face close to his, the animal in her carefully sniffing out the animal in him, trying to figure out what sort of beast he is. He’s strong, she knows that much. She could feel his strength through his hand, even in his weakened state. Her stomach clutches as she inhales with him, slowing her breathing to match his.
The air around him is cloying and warm, his skin like a magnet to hers. Softly she grazes her cheek over his. It’s barely a touch but as she does it she realises how weird it must look, her self-consciousness getting in the way even when there’s no one there as witness. A not so desirable side-effect of watching others is that you can sometimes find yourself split in two, watching yourself.
Ana pulls her face away but reaches her hand back and touches his bandaged head. Like a pat she might give River.
A direction to stay.
*
Ana throws a bucket of boiling water on the vomit patch outside the basement door and scrubs at it with a hard brush. She stops abruptly when she notices the dint in the bonnet of her car, hearing again the sick thud of his body hitting metal. Seeing him through her windscreen, catapulting up and over her bonnet.
The bile rises back up in her throat but she manages to push it down. There’s something that has been bothering her and she knows she didn’t imagine it or, as she can sometimes do, retrospectively reframe it in her mind.
He ran at her car. She’s sure of it. It was like he wanted her to hit him. Was he so desperate to get to her, to stop her, that he’d risk hurting himself? Or was he so drunk he didn’t know where he was or what direction he was running?
What was he doing out there?
The very first time he saw her they were sitting in the dark. He saw her only in profile but felt her intensity. A match to his own. Like an invisible thread ran between them.
With it came the certainty that she was as aware of him as he was of her, even though she never once looked in his direction.
They were at the movies. Both on their own. There were two seats between them but he swore he could smell the scent of her body under her perfume. It was so overwhelming that the screen in front of him may as well have been blank. She wiped everything else out.
Afterwards, he followed her home. She looked behind only once, just long enough to make sure he was there.
He knew exactly how it sounded. Like something
he’d made up. A fantasy he wanted to believe. It might have been true had she not been waiting for him at the start of the next street.
She told him that was as far as he could come. Then she told him when and where to be the next day.
She didn’t even ask his name.
Over the weeks that followed he thought of it often, that first time. How full of promise it was.
FIFTEEN
Ana climbs out of her car, nervously scanning the road. It feels strange being back out here again so soon and in daylight, where anyone can see her. Far too exposing. It also seems too quiet, as if this part of the road has shifted into some alternative plane.
Apart from the damage to her bonnet, the only evidence of what happened here is the torch still lying near the embankment where she dropped it. After a final check to make sure no one is around Ana scoots across to claim it. She hides it under the driver’s seat of her car which she locks before making her way back to the embankment and starting down the incline. She follows the path she took last night, her eyes methodically searching the ground all the way down to the place where Rebecca’s body lay. A forensic team would have already done a clean sweep of the whole area so she doesn’t really expect to find anything but maybe he dropped something last night. Something to tell her who he is.
Her eyes stop on the bed of floral tributes, crushed now from where she lay down. She wonders if an expert could detect the indent of her body in the blooms and brushes her hands over them until the evidence of her having been there is gone. She rests her palm lightly on the wilted flowers as if they could somehow communicate to her through her fingers.
Now would be a good time for her to wake up and tell herself it was all just a bad dream – one she could simply add to her collection – but Ana knows this one won’t go away that easily.
Dragging herself up she continues on with her search.
Behind the tree where she first saw him she finds a half-empty bottle of bourbon. That explains the smell of him but not why he was here.
Killers sometimes hang around the scene of the crime, that’s a commonly known fact, but what exactly was he doing there? It was the middle of the night, so it’s not like he was playing with the police, daring them to notice him. If Ana hadn’t stopped here on her way home no one would have been any the wiser. He didn’t want to be seen. That much is clear.
Ana wanders along the dirt track that runs beside the river, her eyes still combing the ground. She’s about to give up when her vision is momentarily startled by the reflection of sunlight through the trees. She looks around until she finds the source.
It’s a mirror. She can just make out a white vehicle in the nearby carpark.
*
Ana pulls her car into the reserve carpark. There’s one other vehicle, parked close to the road and clearly visible to passing traffic. It’s not white. Probably belongs to hikers. No one else would brave the muddy conditions after the rain. The vehicle Ana glimpsed was further back, closer to the river, and as she starts a circle of the carpark she almost misses it.
The van is partially obscured by a large bush, hidden from the road but still visible from the walking track that follows the river to the spot where Rebecca was found. The carpark is too close for this whole area not to have been thoroughly scoured by the police so the van can’t have been here since then. It’s also not likely to be here for long. Vehicles aren’t just left in places like this unless they’re dumped or stolen, so someone is bound to report it.
Ana parks her car and climbs out.
The first thing she notices as she edges her way around the bush is that he parked haphazardly. The side mirror on the driver’s side has been knocked out of position by a low-hanging branch. That must be what she saw reflecting the sun onto the track.
As she peers in the driver’s window she’s surprised to see the keys are in the ignition. That’s odd but then he didn’t know when he left them here that he wouldn’t be coming back.
The tree branch has wedged the driver’s door shut. He would have had to climb out the passenger side. Ana moves around to the back where the red paint residue confirms it as the same van. Not that she had any doubts.
A vein throbs at the side of Ana’s head as she moves close enough to peer through the window. Inside is as she remembers, except of course Rebecca is now dead.
Ana covers her hand with the material of her T-shirt and tries the door, which clicks open. She peers back at the walking track. The river walk takes less than two hours to complete and whoever belongs to the other vehicle could return at any time. For now, though, all is quiet. This is it. Her opportunity to discover who this blank canvas of a man is.
Ana climbs into the back of the van, shutting herself inside. She remains crouched by the door, peering around the dim interior. The world is muted in here and it’s cold. Colder even than outside. It’s a tradesman’s van but the tools have been roughly pushed to one side to make room for a makeshift bed.
Did it happen there, she wonders, as the van sat parked outside Rocky’s? By the time Ana was lying in her warm bed unable to sleep, was Rebecca already gone? Was her body left lying out there all night in the cold and rain?
It all looks so seedy now, so unlike her fantasy through the glass.
There’s a duffle bag pushed into the corner and Ana has to crawl over the narrow mattress to reach it. Once again she uses the hem of her T-shirt as a glove and pulls it towards her. The flap is already open and inside is a mess of men’s clothing. Ana rifles through it and at the very bottom glimpses a scrunched-up ball of colour. She instantly recognises it as the piece of fabric Rebecca had clutched in her hand.
A piece of her left here for Ana to find.
Ana pulls it out to reveal a long scarf. It’s beautiful, a blurred pattern of different colours merging together. She runs the delicate fabric through her fingers, releasing a subtle waft of musky perfume. Echoes of Rebecca and the man having sex envelop her – those sounds she initially read as distress. Is she misconstruing them now too, she wonders?
She lowers herself down onto the thin mattress, taking her mind back as she trails the scarf across her face, her skin tingling from the caress of the silk, trying to conjure up the scene from this new perspective. The shadowy figure of the man starts to take shape, leaning over her. He’s still just a snapshot but his features are distinct now, seen whole instead of in fragments. Her eyes seek out the window behind him where her own face stares back at her. As naked with desire as Rebecca’s was.
Ana abruptly sits up, struggling to breathe.
Of course there is no one at the window. Not that other version of her, nor anyone else, but she’s spooked now and quickly scurries over into the front seat, hands curled into fists so as to not leave a trail of fingerprints.
The floor is littered with old pizza boxes, along with another bottle of bourbon. This one empty. The only thing she hasn’t searched is the glove box. As Ana quickly rifles through it she hears voices from outside and throws herself down across the seats. She can’t be caught here. Her mere presence could be construed as tampering with evidence.
She hears the lilting cadence of the Swedish language as the hikers pass by on their way to their car. At the same time she notices her naked hand pressing down into the leather of the car seat, only now remembering she always has a spare pair of woollen gloves in her car. She still has Rebecca’s scarf clutched in her other hand and she uses it to rub at the spot.
SIXTEEN
Twenty minutes later Ana is still there sitting in her car with the engine on, heater blaring, trying to focus. She knows she shouldn’t be loitering here but she can’t move on, not until she works out what she’s going to do. She glances at the passenger seat on which Rebecca’s scarf is bunched along with his keys.
Her thinking was to bring him back here after dark. It seemed like an easy, even elegant, solution to her problem to simply slip him in his van and make an anonymous call to the police. Essentially handing them Rebec
ca’s killer on a platter. Now that she’s had some time to think it through she’s not so sure.
She’s been over and over it in her head and despite initial doubts she’s sure she did not get it wrong. There was no fear in the eyes that gazed so intensely back into hers. No hint of what was coming. Rebecca’s gaze is Ana’s only conduit to him but whatever it was that she witnessed passing between them, it didn’t feel like death.
Ana knows it makes no sense but she feels connected to them, somehow even more so since the man literally crashed back into her life. When she made the decision to take him home, it was like they both became her responsibility. Right now, he’s not even on the radar of the police but he will be once the van is discovered here, so close to where Rebecca’s body was found.
If he is her killer then why is it that every part of her still feels like the criminal who needs to hide away the evidence of what she’s done?
What if he’s innocent? Would they even care? Rebecca’s DNA must be all over his van, and his DNA must be all over her. Once they discover that would they even bother to investigate further?
Maybe he crashed into her for a reason that’s not yet clear.
With the exception of her childhood, Ana’s life has moved forward according to careful strictures and routines, broken only by her surreptitious journeys around the edges of other people’s lives. Even at those times when she’s pushed the boundaries it’s always been from a place of control. She can count on one hand the moments in her life when she’s done something spontaneous, most of them in the last few months.
But this – this sense of not knowing what might happen next – it’s as exhilarating as it is terrifying. She doesn’t want it to stop. She suddenly understands why people get addicted to thrill seeking. It’s like fate has brought him to her, literally smashing them together, answering a call she didn’t even know she was making. She’s not ready to let him go yet.
She could keep him in the basement a bit longer, just until she knows more. He doesn’t seem in any condition to be moved again anyway – it might do more damage – and she doubts she has the strength needed to get him back up the stairs tonight anyway. It’s no longer just her arm that’s screaming, her whole body aches now. She is also in desperate need of sleep and knows herself well enough to know that means she won’t be thinking straight.
Lonely Girl Page 10