The Way Back

by Kylie Ladd

  Col raised the stick and brought it down hard on the horse’s neck. It reared and pivoted, cantering away, and he watched it go, glad. That would teach her. He just wanted to feel her hair. And he had, hadn’t he? When she was lying down asleep on the ground and not hitting him anymore. He’d stroked it up and down and it was just like the blanket and she was so pretty that he picked her up and balanced her across her horse and took her back home so he could stroke it again and because she’d said hello and he would have someone to talk to. He kept thinking she’d wake up as he lifted her onto the horse or once they got going but she didn’t so she must be really asleep and he must be meant to have her like his mother always said that some things were just meant to be. So that was good. And it took hours and it was dark when they got there but he had got her home and put her on his bed because she was still asleep and stroked her hair some more. But later she woke and she was screaming and crying and he didn’t like the noise so he went away and locked the door so Blue wouldn’t go in. After a while it was quiet so he went back again but she just started screaming again and there was a bad smell and she had wet herself and he didn’t want anyone to wee in his bedroom so he pulled her up and took her outside to the old stable. She tried to get away so he had to hang onto her really hard and maybe it was a bit too hard because then she was crying and holding her shoulder and Blue kept jumping up and getting in the way and it was all confusing so he just pushed her in the stable and it was lucky it had an old padlock. He didn’t think it would work still but it did. And the horse had been in the stable because at first he thought he would keep it but then there was no room for it and he didn’t know about horses so he had to take it back even though it was dark again, but maybe it was better in the dark anyway. No one would see him and start asking questions. Not that many people lived around him but you could never be too careful, that was something else his mother said. Col rubbed his eyes. He hadn’t slept much last night with getting the girl home and all her crying and now it was late again and he still had a long walk to do. For a second he felt very tired but then he thought of the girl who would probably be asleep by the time he arrived and he could go into the stable and touch her hair and maybe talk to her and then he felt happy and all his energy came back.

  ‘Rachael! Matt! Come quickly!’ Gia shouted.

  Rachael was instantly awake, heart pounding—not that she’d really been asleep, just dozing fitfully on the back seat of the car Matt had borrowed the night before last. She grabbed at the jacket she’d been using as a pillow and leapt from the vehicle, momentarily disoriented. It was pitch black, the tiny stars trying—but failing—to make an impression on the night. Was Charlie back? Had they found her?

  ‘Gia?’ she called out. ‘Charlie? Matt?’

  ‘I’m here,’ he said from the other side of the Land Cruiser. A torch beam bobbed in the gloom and Gia appeared, leading a horse. Rachael started towards the animal, but he flinched and sidestepped.

  ‘Is that Tic Tac? Where’d you find him?’ Matt asked. ‘And Charlie?’

  ‘No Charlie,’ Gia said, her voice low. ‘And no one found him. I heard something moving around near the feed room, and there he was, looking for oats.’ She reached up and scratched Tic Tac between the ears, then moved her hand down his neck, soothing him. ‘He was starving, poor boy. And he’s gone lame.’

  ‘Where’s Charlie?’ Rachael cried. ‘If Tic Tac’s here she must be somewhere close. She wouldn’t just let him wander off.’

  ‘I’ll call Terry,’ Matt said, reaching in a pocket for his phone.

  ‘D’you think?’ Gia asked. ‘It’s just after four. There’s nothing he can do now, while it’s dark. And he had a huge day yesterday. He must be knackered. He was out there from sunup to sundown. Maybe you should let him sleep. Call him when the sun comes up again.’

  ‘I guess,’ said Matt. ‘You’re right.’ He let his arm fall to his side.

  ‘Are you mad?’ Rachael shrieked, wresting the phone from his hand. ‘We have to find Charlie! She must be nearby. I’ll call him if you don’t.’ She turned on the phone, banged in Matt’s passcode, then stopped. She didn’t know Terry’s number—Matt was the one who’d first spoken to him—but it would be in the call history. She’d ring every number if she had to. Out of the corner of her eye she saw Matt and Gia exchange a glance, but she ignored them. Her legs felt weak and she leant against the car, the metal cold through her jeans, the phone pushed to her ear.

  Terry had answered straight away. Of course he had; she knew he would. He’d arrived at the pony club less than an hour later, hair still damp from a quick shower. The first thing he’d done was ask to see Tic Tac, who Gia hadn’t stopped fussing over.

  ‘He’s lame in the left foreleg, d’you see?’ she’d asked Terry. Terry didn’t see, Rachael could tell, but he’d dutifully bent to inspect the limb nevertheless.

  Matt reached for her hand and squeezed it gently.

  Terry straightened up and flicked open a notebook. ‘What time did you say you found him? And does he have any other injuries?’

  ‘Just before four,’ Gia replied. ‘I was in the tack shed, trying to have a nap, and I could hear something getting into the feed. I thought it was rats, but it was Ticcy.’ She reached across and stroked him again, as if reassuring herself he was really there. ‘And no, no other injuries, not that I can see, though I’m going to call the vet to come and check him out.’

  ‘No marks?’ Terry went on, ‘No blood? Nothing on the saddle? The reins? The stirrup irons?’

  With a start, Rachael realised what his questions were angling at. Gia shook her head.

  ‘Just the bad leg. It’s really swollen—as if he’s galloped on it after hurting himself, but no horse would willingly do that, and I know Charlie wouldn’t have made him.’

  ‘It’s strange.’ Terry exhaled. ‘We had 25 SES volunteers out looking all day yesterday, plus my crew, and nothing. Then the horse just wanders in out of the blue.’

  ‘It’s a big area,’ Matt said. ‘Larger than I expected. I guess they just didn’t cross paths.’

  ‘Tic Tac knows it better than any of them. That’s how he found his way back.’ Gia tousled his forelock. ‘You’re a clever boy, aren’t you?’

  Rachael felt rage building up inside of her. Everyone was so focussed on the bloody horse that no one seemed to remember that her daughter was still missing. Tears sprang to her eyes. ‘If he’s that fucking clever, why didn’t he bring Charlie back with him?’ she snapped. To her surprise, it was Terry, not Matt, who immediately put his arm around her.

  ‘We’re going to find her, I promise, probably today, alright? I’ve got some sniffer dogs coming this morning, and we’ll get Ivy back and send her out with them so they know exactly where to start looking.’ He squeezed her upper arm. ‘I know it’s been awful and it’s not over yet, but it’s a good sign that her horse has been found. Means she hasn’t run off.’ He held up a hand to still Rachael’s protest. ‘I know you said she wouldn’t, but we have to rule it out. The fact that none of the searchers found her yesterday and she hasn’t returned on foot makes me think that she’s probably injured, maybe unconscious, or somewhere we haven’t looked. If that’s the case the dogs’ll find her. They’ll be straight onto it. OK?’

  Rachael’s throat was so choked with sobs that she couldn’t speak. She nodded instead, briefly catching Gia’s eye. Gia looked away.

  The dogs arrived and were dispatched; Ivy too, though Rachael didn’t see her. Rachael was already out with Matt and Gia, endlessly driving down fire track after fire track, calling Charlie’s name until she was hoarse. At first she seemed to see her everywhere she looked: the huddle of blue beneath a ghost gum, the flash of bright hair deep in a valley, but they were shadows or illusions, tricks of her mind, and as the day wore on and each fire track looked exactly like all the others, bereft of her daughter, she felt a migraine coming on. Matt noticed and insisted they go back.

  ‘You’re exhausted,’ he said.
‘You need to lie down. Have you got your tablets with you?’

  She shook her head. They were at home, where they should be, with the rest of her normal life. ‘I can’t,’ she protested. ‘I need to keep looking.’

  ‘You won’t be able to see properly soon if you don’t lie down,’ he gently replied, brushing her fringe away from her face. ‘Just for a few hours, in your car, or that swag Gia has in her office. You’ve barely slept.’

  ‘Neither have you!’

  ‘But I’m used to it. I do night shifts all the time. You don’t. Go on—we’ll drop you off. Leave your phone on and I’ll call as soon as we hear anything. And it means you’ll be there if they bring her in. You’d like that, wouldn’t you?’

  The last line had convinced her. She’d allowed Matt to settle her on the swag with the promise he’d call, and immediately fell into a dreamless sleep. When she woke up it felt as if hours had passed, but when she checked her watch it had only been twenty minutes. She sat up, head still thumping, and got to her feet. There was no way she could go back to sleep. She made her way to the pony club car park, where the police and SES had based themselves, anxious for news. A couple of searchers, who were milling about in their bright orange overalls, smiled at her but shook their heads when they saw her coming. She took a sandwich one searcher offered her, but couldn’t force any down. She simply wasn’t hungry. Funny, when she’d hardly eaten anything for the past two days. She suddenly thought of the meal she’d been preparing when the call from Gia came, and how she’d turned off the heat but left it on the stove, assuming she’d be back to finish it in an hour or two. The pot had been a wedding present, but she’d throw it out when they finally got home again with Charlie. She’d throw it out and buy her whatever junk food she wanted.

  Rachael looked for Dan, but he and the girl Hannah were out with one of the SES groups. She turned on her phone but there was nothing from Matt, just three increasingly urgent messages from the museum, wondering where she was. Work. She’d forgotten about it altogether; had forgotten that today was even Monday. There was only Saturday, when Charlie went missing, then the next day, which was yesterday, then the next day, today. At a loose end, she wandered over to where Tic Tac was stabled and sat down in the straw outside his box.

  ‘Where is she, Ticcy?’ she asked softly, but the horse just nickered and flicked one ear back.

  Rachael closed her eyes and slumped back against the wall. It was almost 48 hours since that phone call. Two days and two nights of waiting and searching, of being interviewed by Terry or one of his colleagues, of watching people come and go: Dan, who would grab some food and kiss her and head back out again; Terry, almost always talking into his mobile; Matt, his face serious but demeanour calm. This must be how he looked when he was on a job at work. Caitlin and Ivy had appeared on Sunday morning and immediately been ushered by Terry into Gia’s office. You shouldn’t have left her Rachael had screamed after Ivy, unable to restrain herself. Ivy had said nothing, though she looked away, and Caitlin had wrapped a protective arm around her daughter and hurried through the door.

  Rachael yawned. Two nights of not sleeping, and soon it would be night again. She shivered and pulled her jumper tight. It was still autumn and the nights weren’t yet freezing, but they had a bite to them and on both mornings there had been dew on the ground. Charlie must be so cold, she thought to herself. She hadn’t taken her jacket. How much longer could she last out there in just a short-sleeved shirt and jodhpurs, and without anything to eat?

  She must have dozed off again, because for a second time that day a shout woke her up. She scrambled to her feet and collided with Terry as she came out of the stables. He held something up. A helmet.

  ‘That’s Charlie’s!’ she cried.

  ‘I know,’ he said. ‘Her name’s written inside it. The dogs found it under a bush, not far from where Ivy said she left her. Then this, a bit further down the track.’ He produced a white bow attached to a hairclip.

  ‘That’s hers, too,’ said Rachael.

  ‘I thought it probably was. The dogs went nuts. But they didn’t find Charlie. They lost the scent.’ Terry turned the helmet over in his hands.

  ‘They lost it? But they had it, right? That’s how they found her things. So why did it just disappear?’

  Terry swallowed. ‘You need to call Matt, get him back here. I hope I’m wrong, but when the dogs are onto something and then it suddenly vanishes it usually means the person has got into a car, or been picked up and carried. If Charlie was still anywhere near where we found her helmet we’d have her by now, but she’s not.’ He put his hand on her arm. ‘This changes things, Rachael. I don’t think she’s just missing anymore. We’re dealing with a potential abduction.’

  This time when she woke up, Charlie kept her eyes closed. If that creepy man was there again, she didn’t want him to know she was awake. She’d done that last time and he’d tried to talk to her and touch her hair, then got angry with her when she started crying. The tears were there again now, but she forced herself to lie still and keep her breathing steady. Maybe if she played dead he’d leave her alone.

  It was her bladder that finally forced her to sit up. She squeezed her legs together for as long as she could, but it was no use. Her jodhpurs were still damp from when she’d wet herself earlier, and she couldn’t risk it happening again. Was that today or yesterday? Her watch showed the time as 1.15, but it seemed like more than a day since she’d been out riding with Ivy. There’d been a bed when she first woke up and the sky was dark outside the window, but then she must have blacked out again. All she could remember after that was a dog barking and the gush of her own urine against her skin, warm for a moment but quickly chilling, and the man grabbing her by her shoulder and half-marching, half-dragging her here. He’d left her for a bit then, for quite a while, but he’d come back again when it was dark and she’d heard him fumbling with the padlock, trying to get the key in. So that was twice it had been dark. Two nights, and today must be Monday. Charlie cradled her head in her hands. It was still sore. It hurt, everything hurt, her head and her shoulder and her hip, where she’d fallen on it when she let go of Tic Tac, but surely it couldn’t be Monday? She couldn’t bear for it to be Monday.

  She lay down and let the tears fall again, sliding from her face onto the dusty straw beneath her. The man had rattled at the lock for what felt like an age and she’d held her breath, praying he couldn’t get it to open, but eventually he had. A torch beam had swept over her and he’d pushed the door closed and muttered something as he sat down beside her. He smelt of dog and sweat, but something else too—of the outside, of crisp evening air—and before he turned the torch off again she noticed that his old boots and the bottoms of his overalls were soaked with dew. Then it had just been both of them in the dark, and his hand came out and went for her hair and she’d screamed. She couldn’t help it. What did he expect her to do, just sit there and let him touch her, run his filthy hands all over her? Immediately he’d clapped his palm to her mouth. She should have bit it, she thought to herself, but she’d been so surprised and she couldn’t breathe. His hand had clamped down across her cheeks, her lips, her nose; his other hand had grappled with hers, fending them off. Little pinpricks of light had erupted at the edges of her vision, like fireworks, like shooting stars, and before she passed out she remembered a moment, years ago, when her dad was carrying her out to the car after they’d had dinner at her grandparents’ and she’d looked up, sleepy, and seen a spattering of tiny golden lights falling down the sky behind him. She rubbed her arm across her eyes and forced herself to take some deep breaths. Had it been a meteor shower? Fireflies? But there were no fireflies in Australia, were there? She’d asked her parents, but they hadn’t noticed anything and had told her she must have dreamt it.

  Charlie stood up and shuffled a few steps to the furthest corner of the building she was in. If only this was a dream. It felt like a dream, it seemed too impossible to be true, but she was hungry, s
he needed to pee. Her body was telling her it was real. She pulled her pants down and squatted, her eyes adjusting to the gloom. For the first time, she made an effort to take in her surroundings. She was locked inside something—a shed? Some sort of hut? She wasn’t within a house anymore: it was too cold, and the floor was just earth, with a thick layer of straw on top. Not new straw, though—this had been laid weeks, if not months, ago, and smelled faintly of mildew. The walls were wooden and splintered and formed a rough rectangle—two short sides and two long ones, large enough for Charlie to lie down and stretch out, but not big enough for anything else. It was too dark to see the roof. There were no windows, though enough light seeped in between the old boards to tell her that it was day. She dried herself with a handful of straw, which crumbled in her grasp, then as she stood up she noticed something. Horse droppings, a neat pile just a foot away. She prodded at it with the toe of her boot, then crouched down again to inspect it. They were fresh—not so fresh that she’d noticed the smell, but she’d mucked out enough stalls to know that they’d been here less than a day. Stalls. Charlie’s head went up and she moved to the door. She’d tried it already, of course; she’d thrown herself at it at some time in the darkness, howling and crying, and it had sagged a little under her weight but had stayed firm. She hadn’t noticed this, though, a horizontal groove a finger thick at waist height stretching from one side of the frame to the other. Charlie bent down, pressing her eye against it. She couldn’t see anything, but she felt a slight breeze. The groove must go all the way through the door. She realised that she was being held captive in a stable: the bedding on the floor, the droppings, the half-door. She could see now too that there were bolts on both the top and bottom sections of the door, each with its own padlock, though the man must have only opened one to get in. And if this was a stable and there had been a horse here recently it must have been Tic Tac. She felt her throat tighten, panic rise in her chest. He’d brought her here on Tic Tac. She dimly remembered the motion beneath her, the uneven gait. He’d been lame, poor Tic Tac, that was what had started all this, and she’d been face-down across the saddle, her nose in his flank, hurting and only half-conscious and aware that something was terribly wrong but unable to do anything about it. Charlie tried to think clearly. So if Tic Tac had been here, where was he now? Had the man let him go? Was he still around somewhere? Or had he killed him? She sunk to her knees, clawing at the door and screaming for her pony, but nobody answered.