The Way Back

by Kylie Ladd

  Rachael nodded, struck blind and dumb by tears. They fell onto Crush, matting his fur. It was good news, she told herself, good news. She just had to hang on, keep waiting. If Charlie was still alive she would be found. If she was dead she would eventually be found too, and if that was the case Rachael would kill herself. The thought brought some relief.

  When she opened her eyes the roof of the stable was sparkling. Charlie rubbed at them, but it didn’t go away, and as she looked around she realised the walls were glittering too, just like at the disco at the end of grade six. Her blanket as well … she put a hand out to touch it and realised it was frost. Immediately she felt the cold in her bones, in her very marrow, and drew herself into a ball, shuddering. A week or so ago she’d begged her blanket back from the man, but the nights were getting so icy that it didn’t help much. It must be the middle of winter by now. Not much sunlight made its way into the stable, but the little that did retreated earlier each day, was almost all gone by five last night when she’d last checked her watch. She wondered what time it was now, but didn’t want to pull her arm out from where she had clenched it between her thighs to check. It didn’t matter, anyway. She was sleeping more and more, it seemed, and while that was a relief it also disoriented her, left her feeling groggy and slow, never fully awake.

  Winter. School holidays. Sometimes in previous years her mum and dad had taken them to Queensland, to have a break from the cold, as her mum had said. One year they had gone to Cairns; another they had hired a yacht and sailed around the Whitsundays. Her dad had cooked their lunch on a barbeque at the back of the boat while her mum sat with a glass of wine beside him. Charlie and Dan had tried to splash them by doing bombs into the water right next to them, jumping together for maximum impact, but the yacht was quite tall and they didn’t succeed. The hamburgers afterwards had tasted wonderful, though, Charlie remembered, with the sun warm on her shoulders and the gentle sway of the deck beneath her feet. Her mind wandered … it was almost the same sensation as sitting astride a horse, like that perfect moment when she and Ticcy had paused where the trail broke free of the bush, waiting for Ivy, and the hills were golden around them … She screwed her eyes closed and pulled her head into her chest. She wasn’t going to think about that, just as she wasn’t going to think about Tic Tac or school or Dan or home or anything from her real life, especially not that bitch Ivy. She wanted to, but she couldn’t. She couldn’t allow herself, it just made her too angry and too sad. The only way she was going to get through this—if she got through this—was to pretend that the outside world had stopped somehow, was frozen in time like the castle and all its inhabitants in Sleeping Beauty. She had made her father read her the book over and over when she was young. She had adored the page with the pictures of the moment when the spell was cast—the chef immobilised as he bent to slide a pie into the oven, the woman hanging out her washing suddenly turned into a statue. When she was first brought to the stable, Charlie told herself, her world had been frozen too; it would awaken when she was finally released. She just prayed that it wouldn’t take one hundred years. Her teeth were chattering. Charlie tugged the flimsy blanket higher, around her ears, and began to count. This was what she did now instead of thinking about home or her parents or how cold she was. Sometimes in threes, sometimes sevens, sometimes just the normal way, up through the tens, the hundreds, the thousands, soothing herself into a trance made of numbers until her stomach unclenched and she fell asleep.

  It must have worked, because the next thing she knew she was waking up again, the frost now gone, Col’s key scrabbling at the lock. He entered carrying a plate.

  ‘Good morning,’ he said.

  She blinked and remained silent, sleep clouding her brain. Maybe he would take her inside to use the shower. He’d been doing that a lot lately, even if she’d just had one the day before. The thought of hot water on her body cheered her.

  ‘Good morning,’ he said again, this time with an insistence to the words.

  ‘Good morning,’ she mumbled. Lately he was less patient, less friendly than he’d been when he first brought her here. Back then he seemed so eager to please, so easily made happy by simply sitting with her and stroking her hair, but in the past weeks it seemed to Charlie that he was constantly snapping at her, that his lips narrowed in frustration or anger whenever she caught his eye. He put the plate down on the straw. Potato chips and cornflakes. Charlie sighed. She was so sick of chips and chocolate. She wished she’d never asked for them. They didn’t fill her up, and the last time he’d let her have a shower she’d noticed acne blooming along her jaw and hairline when she looked in the bathroom mirror.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said softly.

  ‘Thank you, Col,’ he ordered.

  ‘Thank you, Col,’ she said obediently. She reached for the cornflakes, but inadvertently knocked the plate over instead, her hands shaking with cold. The chips and cereal scattered across the ground.

  ‘Stupid girl!’ Col shouted. ‘You’ll have to pick it all up. I don’t have any more.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Charlie said. ‘It’s just that I’m freezing. I can’t feel my fingers. Please can I come inside for a bit? I promise I won’t do anything. Or maybe could I have another blanket?’

  ‘Want, want, want—always wanting, aren’t you?’ Col lunged at her and she shrank back against the dirty straw. ‘Well, what about what I want? Hey? Did you think of that?’ He made a move as if he was going to grab her, then abruptly turned away and stomped out of the stable, banging the door behind him. Charlie waited until she was sure he had gone, then desultorily picked at the remains of her breakfast. He had her there, a captive, didn’t he? What more could he want?

  Matt fought the urge for hours, but in the end he couldn’t resist. Rachael had fallen asleep on the couch after yet another bad night and Dan was at school. The house was still. Nobody would see what he was doing. He sat down at the family computer and logged on, sweat springing beneath his arms and down his back as he waited for it to boot. Don’t do it, he told himself, but it was too late. Google popped up, he typed in the name of the website, and four clicks later he was reading all about how he’d murdered—and most likely raped—his own daughter.

  He’d first found the chat room by accident. Well, not really an accident as such—it wasn’t as if he’d stumbled across it when he was checking the footy results, but he certainly hadn’t gone looking for it, hadn’t dreamed such a thing could exist. He’d been home by himself late one afternoon. Both Rachael and Dan were out, who knows where; Dan was out quite a bit these days, he realised to his surprise. He’d never gone out before Charlie was taken. Matt himself should have been at work, but Dobbsy had finally prevailed on him to take some leave; had, if truth be told, simply stopped rostering him on. So instead he was at home and the house was silent and Charlie was missing and to stop himself going mad and punching his fist through every single window in the place he’d sat down at the computer, opened a search engine and typed in Where is Charlie Johnson?

  It was a whim, it was madness, it was all he could think about, but to his surprise the internet had no end of answers. She’d been abducted by a cult fundamentalist group to become a child bride. Muslims had taken her, to sell into slavery like those girls in Nigeria. Scientologists were brainwashing her right now, but would return her to spread the word. Such theories were easy enough to disregard, but then Matt found himself in a chat room of a well-known parenting website titled simply Charlie Johnson. I don’t know much about the case, the first post he read stated, but I’ve said from the beginning that her parents must be involved somehow. There’s just something about them that rubs me the wrong way. Further down, somebody calling themselves mytwoprinces had written It’s because they’re rich. I saw her once in a fancy black car. Much easier to get away with it if you can pay the police off. Matt wanted to scream. Rich? He was a fireman, for fuck’s sake. They had a nice-enough house in a nice-enough suburb, but it still had a mortgage on it and the kid
s went to a public school. Yes, Rachael drove a BMW, but it was ten years old—she’d inherited it from her mother when Ava had been diagnosed and had had to give up driving. Yet why the hell would anyone care about Rachael’s car? Who among these anonymous posters knew the first thing about them?

  He’d logged off in disgust but the next day found himself back there again, like a dog returning to its vomit. This time it was worse. On the eighth page of comments MumtoJax had written I just don’t like Charlie’s parents. Did you see them on TV? There’s something fishy about them. They might be completely innocent, but I dunno. In response, another poster had replied Innocent? Fat chance. I bet Charley’s father was abusing her, then he had to kill her to cover it up. The police should be digging up their backyard. Before he could stop himself, Matt registered and pounded out a response. You’re kidding, aren’t you? She went missing when she was out riding, everyone knows that. Her father was at work at the time. The police said so. You’re just talking crap. Then, as an afterthought, he added, And if you know so much, how come you can’t even spell her name right?

  The dreams began that night. Until then it seemed he’d barely dreamed at all, largely because, like Rachael, he’d barely slept. Now, though, it seemed that the minute he closed his eyes a stream of images appeared before him. Not of Charlie, which was what he might have hoped for or expected, but long-ago incidents from his working life, incidents he thought he’d forgotten. A ghastly close-up of the teenage girl who’d been sitting, unrestrained, on her boyfriend’s lap in the front of a speeding car, then thrown through the windscreen when it hit a tree; the blackened body of a small child found in the debris of a house fire; an eyeball forced from its socket in a domestic dispute he’d had to break up. He’d dealt with all these things years ago, and then he’d packed them away—or he thought he had. Why were they returning now? His nights became filled with blood, with ashes, with grey matter draped like cobwebs across steering wheels or forced through the visors of motorcycle helmets. He’d wake up gasping, the sheet beneath him sodden, reaching for Rachael only to find empty air.

  He didn’t tell her about the dreams. He didn’t tell her about the websites either. She didn’t need to know about either of them, and he was going to stop reading the websites, anyway. They poisoned him; they filled him with rage. But someone needed to monitor them just in case there was anything there, someone needed to respond to the trolls, to the voyeurs of grief, and try to set them straight. He’d just check the chat room, and then another site he’d found last week supposedly set up by a former detective sergeant who was doing his own investigations into the case, and then he’d log off for good.

  The doorbell rang. Matt waited to see whether Rachael would answer it, then got to his feet when it chimed a second time. He hesitated before he opened the door. He hoped it wasn’t the media—they seemed to have lost interest in the last month or so, but you never knew when something would set them off again, and he couldn’t bear another microphone shoved in his face. Maybe he should leave it, go back to his desk, but maybe it was Terry, or those two interchangeable CIB guys whose names he could never remember. But to his great surprise, standing on the porch, her school bag hitched over one shoulder, was Britta.

  ‘Hi,’ she said. ‘I was just walking home. Can I come in?’

  ‘Sure,’ he said, stepping back so she could enter. ‘Britta. Hi. Wow. Let’s go into the kitchen. Rachael’s asleep in the lounge.’

  If Britta thought this was strange she didn’t question it, just dropped her bag by the door, exactly where Charlie had always dropped hers, and went ahead of him down the hall.

  ‘Can I get you a drink?’ Matt asked. ‘Water, orange juice, milk?’ Milk? He thought to himself. She wasn’t five. But they’d never done this before, never stood awkwardly across the kitchen from each other without Charlie there. Britta had been a frequent visitor to the house before Charlie went missing, but Matt, if he wasn’t at work, had stayed out of their way. He’d hear the screen door slam, the thud of their school bags on the wooden floorboards and Britta’s loud laugh, then the fridge would open and close, glasses would tinkle against the stone benchtop and finally calm would return as the girls went outside or into Charlie’s room. That Britta was always talking, always moving, and seemed about six feet tall. This Britta was slumped, subdued, playing nervously with a lock of her hair. It didn’t suit her.

  ‘Water, thanks,’ she said.

  He poured her a glass and handed it to her. ‘It’s good to see you.’

  ‘You too,’ she replied, her eyes on the floor. The tap dripped slowly into the sink. Silence stretched between them.

  ‘Is there any reason you came over?’ Matt ventured after a minute or so. ‘I mean, it’s really great to see you, and you’re welcome any time, we haven’t seen any of Charlie’s friends since—’

  Britta cut him off. ‘No one mentioned her at school today.’ She took a sip from the glass, tucked the lock of hair behind her ear. ‘When she was first … lost, kidnapped, whatever, it was all anyone could talk about, you know?’ She looked up briefly. Matt nodded. ‘In the classroom, on Facebook, texts, IMs, you name it—Charlie, Charlie, Charlie, where was she, what had happened to her, that we missed her. Not just all of us, the teachers too—they’d bring it up whenever they could, they talked about her at assembly and offered counselling and put it in the newsletter and stuff. But then lately I noticed that no one was saying much anymore. They were talking about Damon’s party, or the science assignment, or who made the netball team. The netball team! Who gives a shit? Charlie should have made it, that’s who.’

  The glass trembled in Britta’s hands. Matt moved across the kitchen and took it from her, placing it on the bench, then put his arms around her. Her tears were warm against his shoulder. He let her cry until she was ready to speak again.

  ‘I just kept expecting her to come back, you know? And I thought everyone else did too, but it’s like they’re forgetting her. I mean, her locker’s still there, but I keep thinking that if she isn’t back by the end of the year, then next year they won’t give her a locker, and then she’ll really be gone.’ A sob caught in her throat, and she looked up at him, eyes wet and beseeching. ‘How do you do it? How do you cope?’

  Matt pulled her back against him, his chin resting on the top of her head. Through the window he could see the chooks huddled together in the afternoon gloom, feathers fluffed against the wind. If Charlie was home she would cook them rice on days like this, ignoring Dan’s eye-rolls and Matt’s protests that they were chickens for goodness sake, they were used to living outside, she didn’t need to try to warm them up.

  ‘I don’t,’ he said. ‘I don’t let myself think about it. I just try and get through each day.’

  Britta sniffed. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I’ve got snot all over your jumper.’

  Matt almost laughed. ‘It’ll wash out. Did you ever go to any of that counselling?’

  She shook her head. ‘No. Mum wanted me to, but what’s the point? It’s not going to change how I feel, and it won’t bring her back.’

  ‘Yeah. I know.’ Dobbsy had suggested the same, that Matt talk to one of the psychologists attached to the fire brigade, but Matt had felt much like Britta: for what? It wouldn’t make the pain go away. The only thing that could do that was having his Charlie-girl home again.

  Britta gently disengaged herself. ‘Could I go and sit in her room? It’s been so long. I just want to feel her again, be with her.’

  ‘Sure,’ Matt said. ‘You know where it is. Do you want me to come with you?’

  ‘No, thanks. I won’t be too long.’ She paused for a second, then kissed him on the cheek and left the room, footsteps fading back down the hallway. Matt picked up her glass and put it in the dishwasher, then tightened the dripping tap. He returned to the desk, but then changed his mind and went and sat on the floor outside Charlie’s bedroom. If Britta needed him, he’d be there.

  Rachael could hear her phone ringing i
nside her bag. It was the second time in less than fifteen minutes. Terry put down his pen.

  ‘Do you want to get that?’

  She shook her head. ‘No, let’s keep going. I don’t want to waste your time. Sorry.’

  ‘OK, well, as I was saying, we’ll need some new pictures. Different ones—maybe without the horses this time.’

  ‘Her school photo?’

  Terry weighed it up. ‘Nah, I don’t think so. Just in casual clothes, jeans and a t-shirt, that sort of thing, the way she might look if you passed her in the street. And recent, as recent as you’ve got.’

  Rachael nodded. She had no idea what they had. Matt took the pictures and stored them on their computer. She’d have to ask him to look through the files. She couldn’t bear to do it herself.

  ‘Our best hope’s a tip-off now,’ Terry went on. ‘We’ve searched and we’ve searched—you know that—and we haven’t found her.’ He cleared his throat and looked down, his eyes skittering away from hers. ‘So now we have to call on the public again, to ask them to rack their brains and to keep their eyes peeled. Somebody out there must know something, even if they don’t know that they know it, if you get my drift. It’s up to us to give them a nudge. Here’s what I’m envisaging.’ He pushed a piece of paper across his desk to her. Rachael’s phone rang again and she reached inside her handbag and turned it off without looking at it. It couldn’t be important. Everything to do with Charlie’s case came through Terry, and if there was any new information he would have let her know.

  She picked up the paper. It was a mock-up for a billboard. 100 days gone—Can YOU help us find Charlie? screamed the bright pink letters across the top. Beneath that were two spaces left blank, presumably for photos, then lower down, in a smaller font, details of the disappearance and whom to contact.