Thornwood House

by Anna Romer

  I tensed, checking over my shoulder. Hairs stood up on my arms. I sensed I was being watched. Movement in the doorway snagged the corner of my eye. Darkness closed back around the shape I thought I’d seen. Shadows reassembled into harmless emptiness. The doorway was vacant, but the after-image of the figure was locked to my retina.

  ‘Luella? Is that you?’

  I moved to the bench. Not wanting to take any chances, I slid Aylish’s letters from my pocket and placed them silently into one of Luella’s retro cannisters. Then I crept to the doorway, stood a moment to find my centre. I rocked forward, sending furtive glances up and down the hall. Holding my breath, struggling to hear above the roar of my pulse, I moved into the dimness.

  The smell was stronger, the air in the hall was almost unbreathable.

  Bypassing the bathroom, I elbowed into Luella’s room but found it empty. Halfway along the hall I peered into the study with the blue wardrobe. Moonlight pierced the darkness, but that room was empty too. As was Tony’s.

  Glenda’s room looked different. At first I thought it must be the dim light; the drapes had been dragged aside, the moon’s face shone through the window, oily-bright on the iron security grille. Then my heart leapt.

  Bronwyn lay on Glenda’s bed, asleep on the coverlet, her fair hair arranged across the pillow in a silky fan around her head. She looked small and vulnerable, her thin arms draped across her chest, her face a smudge in the gloom. I rushed over, relief making me weak-kneed. Grabbing her arm, I gave her a shake.

  ‘Bronny, it’s Mum. Wake up, we’re going home.’

  She didn’t stir, her eyelids didn’t flutter. I bent to scoop her into my arms, detecting a faint chemical smell. A shockwave of fear went through me. What had Luella done to her? She was in a deep sleep. Had she been drugged?

  The air was suddenly rank.

  I heard a shuffle behind me. Loosening my grip on Bronwyn, I let her roll back on the bed. I registered a presence behind me in the dark, glimpsed a moonlit figure blurred in motion. Arm raised, it came at me swinging. I lurched out of the way and the first blow took me on the shoulder, knocking me sideways.

  Throwing myself in front of the bed, I tried to shield my sleeping daughter. The next strike caught me on the side of the head. Shards of light exploded behind my eyes, blinding me. The room listed. My hands shot out, rubbery and useless. My body pitched forward, then buckled beneath me. I fought a wave of blackness, trying to twist out of its path, groping for my daughter, wedging myself between the bed and my attacker. Seeing for an instant the face illuminated by moonlight – a face I almost recognised, big and pale and nightmarish. A face I somehow understood I had reason to fear.

  26

  ‘Wake up! Please, Audrey . . . wake up – ’

  Blinking, I saw fluttering light. A candle. I was sitting on the floor in a darkened room. There were yellow roses on the wallpaper and ragged toys along the window seat – bears and a knitted ragdoll. Pop posters behind the door.

  A face appeared before me, a woman’s broad face, grey and clammy with sweat. The eye staring at me was wide and green. The other one was blackened shut. Her plump cheeks were smeared with what looked like blood.

  ‘Luella? What . . .’ I tried to sit forward. My eyes blurred and a wave of nausea swamped me. My head was pounding, but through the pain came glimmers of recall. A figure in the darkness. A rankness in the air. An arm swinging up, and lights exploding in my eyes. Then I remembered Bronwyn asleep on top of the covers, serene as an angel, her hair crimped over the pillow, her thin arms crossed on her chest.

  My attention flew to the bed. It was empty.

  Lurching up, I glared into the blood-smeared face of the woman beside me.

  ‘Where is she . . . ?’

  ‘I’m sorry, Audrey, I’m so terribly sorry . . .’

  Awake now despite my ringing ears and double vision, despite the thunderous pounding in my head, I grabbed Luella’s shoulders. ‘For God’s sake, Luella, where’s my daughter?’

  Luella was sobbing, but managed to choke out a single word. ‘Taken.’

  Terror flashed hot across my skin. The candle sputtered, sending timid washes of light up the walls, turning the yellow roses to gold. I got to my feet, fighting to control the dizzying roar in my head.

  Luella clutched me with cold fingers. ‘I tried to call the police, but the phone line’s been cut. The cars too, neither of them working. The keys are in yours, but the motor won’t start. It’s a couple of hours into town by foot, and the closest neighbours are the Millers and they’re just over an hour away. Oh Audrey, I’m afraid for her, terribly afraid!’ Her voice broke on the last word and her panic infected me. My joints were frozen, I could barely draw breath. I kept getting flashes of my daughter on Glenda’s bed, so still, so heavily drugged in sleep. I remembered the chemical smell lifting off her . . . and then the man I’d glimpsed in the doorway.

  I forced myself to calm. ‘Luella, you’re not making sense. Slow down. I can’t find her unless I know exactly what happened. So tell me slowly, from the beginning.’

  Luella nodded. ‘Bronwyn arrived about six o’clock. She was upset. She told me about your argument, and that you’d decided to leave Magpie Creek. I made her Milo and a sandwich, but before she’d taken a bite there was a knock on the door. She thought it must be you, so I told her I’d talk to you. Only there was no one there. I stepped outside to see if your car was parked in the drive, but it wasn’t. I heard a sound and noticed this dreadful smell, then . . .’

  Luella touched the back of her head, showed me the blood glistening wetly on her fingers. ‘I came to my senses downstairs in the laundry. Gruffy woke me, he’d dug in under the door. I rushed up into the house, but Bronwyn was gone. I searched everywhere, found you lying here. And now she’s been taken, and it’s all my fault.’

  I’d been pacing the room while she talked, going from the window to the door and back, only half-listening, trying to think. But now I took notice.

  ‘What do you mean, your fault?’

  She got to her feet, gripping my arm with cold fingers to steady herself. I could smell the coppery scent of blood lifting from her skin.

  ‘I didn’t tell you everything,’ she said. ‘The night Glenda died, after Tony shot his father . . . later, at the dam, Tony thought he saw something.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘After disengaging the handbrake, we rolled the Holden down the slope until it gained its own momentum. Just as we released it, Tony let out a cry. He started running after it as it rattled down the embankment. I thought in his grief and shock that he intended to throw himself into the water. The car nose-dived into the dam and quickly began to sink, but Tony kept insisting he’d seen his father’s eyes open. So we waited. Half an hour, maybe more. Watching for bubbles, signs of life. I kept my eyes on that spot for ever so long. But Cleve . . . well, he never resurfaced.’

  ‘But he could’ve survived?’

  Luella let go my arm. ‘It’s possible.’

  I felt myself sliding into hopeless panic. ‘God. Bronwyn’s out there with him.’

  Shutting my eyes, I weighed up. No phones. And no cars. I couldn’t waste time footing it into town, not when Bronwyn might still be nearby. The Millers were an hour. By then it’d be too late. I needed to act now.

  ‘Go to the Millers,’ I told Luella. ‘Don’t risk cutting through Thornwood, go via the road. Hobe’ll know what to do.’

  Luella stared. ‘What about you?’

  ‘I’m going after them.’ I crossed the room, but as I reached the doorway a booming crack of sound shattered the night.

  Gunshot.

  Luella cried out. Her face turned slowly, like a sunflower tracking the hypnotic progress of the sun. My own gaze followed hers to the window, and together we stared at the moonlit landscape beyond. The hill behind the garden was dark, the dirt trail that wound up the embankment obscured by trees.

  ‘The gully,’ I whispered.

  Running out to the kitch
en, I retrieved the bundle of letters from the canister and returned it to my pocket. Then I flung open the back door and scanned the night. The moon shone between a convoy of purple stormclouds that made the sky writhe and roll in torment. The air was bitter with the smell of ozone, and the trees high on the hillside lashed from side to side like angry cats’ tails.

  Luella was at my elbow, jostling me in her shocked state. She slid a hard object into my palm. A bone-handled hunting knife. Small and heavy, its leather sheath old and cracked – but the blade was sturdy and well-oiled, wickedly sharp.

  ‘It was my father’s,’ she said, peering into my face, her good eye watery with fear.

  I clipped the knife to my belt and as I raced down the stairs, Luella’s voice called softly from the darkness behind me.

  ‘Do whatever you have to, Audrey. Just bring her safely home.’

  The track winding along the embankment behind Luella’s house was a tunnel of darkness. Cicadas screamed in the thick creepers that walled either side, shadows clung to the ironbarks, bats swerved and dived over my head.

  As I ran, my thoughts turned crazy. What if I’d acted too hastily? What if Bronwyn wasn’t up here at all, but instead was half-way to Brisbane with her abductor in a stolen car, or heading north to God knows where?

  The gunshot I’d heard earlier still echoed in my head. I tried to tell myself it could have been anything – roo shooters, a farmer culling foxes, feral dog control – but no amount of reasoning changed the facts: my daughter was out there alone, and the man from the settlers’ hut was armed.

  The embankment widened, and ahead of me a broad shelf-like plateau of stone formed a natural bridge across the gully. The gorge was narrow here, its steep sides overgrown with blackthorn and prickly rock ferns, the trickle of creek water buried far below. When I reached the other side, the track veered left and led me downhill. A while later the ground evened out. I pushed through a break in the trees and emerged into the clearing.

  It seemed smaller than I remembered. Silvery grass hemmed in by a perimeter of ironbarks, the tall curved stone at the centre looming like a grave marker. I cast about for evidence they’d been here – a trail trodden through the sward, or maybe a discarded scrap of clothing, but there was nothing. I approached the stone, listening over my ragged breathing for the sound of voices, for a muffled cry – but there was only the gentle drum of rain, the groan of branches, the crying wind. Overhead a boobook mewled, and from lower down the slope came the eerie thump of wallabies in the dark.

  I approached the gully verge, in my panic treading too near the edge. A chunk of earth broke away and rubble spilled into the void. I stepped back. The ground appeared stable, but looking closer I saw it was a deadly trap. A flat rock shelf near the edge marked a section of earth around which a crack had formed in the soil, a zigzag fault line caused by years of drought and now carved deeper by the rain. One careless step and it would crumble away.

  Moving along the verge, I found a more solid area of ground and looked over the side, dreading what I might see.

  Far below, saplings grew from the steep walls, their slender trunks splashed by moonlight. Ferns trembled in the rain, and dead trees jutted like gangways over the chasm. All around were huge grey boulders, pushing from the soil and lending the appearance of stability, but that was an illusion; one misplaced step and the whole edge might cave in.

  Another spear of lightning blazed overhead. In its flash I saw every leaf, every stone, every twist of deadwood, every rabbit hole and glittering spider’s web as clearly as if in stark sunlight – an instant later it all plunged back to shadow.

  Off in the distance, a branch crashed to the ground. I turned too quickly and my foot slipped, sending another shower of dirt and stones into the gully. As I hurried over to the boulder that sat at the clearing’s centre, other sounds came to me – sly rustlings and stirrings in the undergrowth – as if someone was edging nearer, trying not to be heard.

  My hands shook as I grappled Luella’s hunting knife from its sheath. Aunt Morag used to say that it was pointless for a woman to carry a weapon because – in the event of an attack – it would most likely be wrested from her grip and used against her. Right then, dosed up as I was on adrenaline and terror, that old knife handle was melded to my palm. Nothing short of a nuclear blast could have prised it from me.

  The moon drifted behind a cloud, plunging the clearing into near-blackness. In the sudden dark, my fears came to life. I saw another long-ago night in this clearing, a night I’d relived countless times in my imagination. Aylish had once stood where I was now standing, in the moon-shadow of the tall boulder. The darkness along the glade’s leafy perimeter would have shifted, as it did now, and the shadows would have seemed to gather substance, change form, perhaps even morph into human shape.

  Another thread of lightning pulled at the seams of the sky. The night tore open, and in the brief illumination I saw motion in the trees. The bushes at the outer edge of the glade trembled, as if disturbed by a breath of wind. The darkness quivered, fell apart, and reassembled. Then a lone shadow broke from the gloom and moved slowly across the glade towards me.

  27

  I recognised him at once.

  Because, despite the shifting moonlight, despite the misty haze of rain, despite only having glimpsed him before now – the long passage of years following childhood had not changed Cleve Jarman so very much. Aylish’s description of the boy still resonated in the man.

  His hair was no longer bristly, but long and caught back in a ponytail, dull silver in the moonlight. His face was exactly as I’d conjured it in my mind’s eye – the crease between his pale brows, the wide eyes brimming with unease, the whitish gleam of his skin. Now, though, he had a grungy beard, and wore a shapeless jacket and jeans. He was holding his right arm stiffly, straight at his side. I wondered if it was injured – then guessed that he was keeping something out of view . . . possibly Samuel’s handgun.

  ‘Hello, Audrey. Did you bring them?’

  His voice shocked me. It was soft, cultured. Polite. At odds with his ragged, unkempt appearance.

  With my free hand I drew the bundle of letters from my pocket and held it aloft, then hid them back out of sight.

  ‘First I want to see her,’ I bargained. ‘I want to see that she’s unharmed. Then you get your letters.’

  ‘A fair trade.’

  I waited for him to move. Waited for him to turn and shamble toward the uphill track, perhaps look back and beckon. But he continued to stand motionless in the shadows, watching me.

  Had I misunderstood? A fair trade, he’d said. His letters in exchange for Bronwyn. So why was he lingering? Why weren’t we going to her?

  ‘Where is she?’ I couldn’t stop myself asking.

  ‘Throw your knife to the side. Then we can talk.’

  No need for a nuclear blast, after all; plain old garden-variety fear did the trick. I tossed the hunting knife into the shadows near the gully edge.

  ‘I’ll only hand over the letters when I see she’s safe.’

  ‘She’s safe for now, you still have time. But first, there’s something I want from you.’

  ‘What . . . ?’ I cringed at my eagerness, at the ragged desperation in my voice. ‘What do you want?’

  ‘You’ve read the letters, then?’

  I nodded. In the back of my mind, his earlier words niggled. She’s safe for now, you still have time. Time for what? What did he mean?

  He trod closer. ‘You’re a seeker of the truth, aren’t you, Audrey? I can sense it in you. You’re driven by curiosity about the past – a passion I also share. But if you’ve read those letters, you only know her side of the story. Meanwhile mine remains untold.’

  A sharp pain shot into my temple. I was struggling to grasp what he was saying. My heart had begun to beat erratically, my palms dripped with sweat. Understanding dawned. It wasn’t going to be a simple exchange, after all. Cleve was toying with me, playing some sick game; a cat batting its
claws at a frightened mouse.

  ‘The police are on their way here, Cleve. If you don’t take me to Bronwyn now, they’ll find her. And you’ll go to jail.’

  Shadows danced over him as he ventured closer. ‘That’s what Glenda said. But there was no jail then, and there’ll be no jail now. I cut the phone wires, Audrey. At Thornwood as well as William Road . . . and there’s no mobile coverage out here. Unless of course you sent an SOS via telepathy?’

  ‘Luella went for help.’

  ‘Then you’d better pray she takes her time.’ Cleve’s tone turned grim. ‘If anyone interrupts us before we’re done, then our sweet little Bronwyn is as good as dead.’

  I faltered, lost my nerve. ‘What have you done?’

  ‘I’ve put her somewhere for safekeeping.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘She’s my security. If you do as I say, she’ll survive. But if you piss around and prattle on about cops or anyone going to jail or other such crap, then I’ll stall. And if I stall, our sweet little girl will . . .’ He drew his finger across his throat.

  My skin went cold. A dozen images flooded in. My daughter crumpled on the floor of the settlers’ hut, her blood leaking from a fatal gunshot wound; or lying on the gully bed, her body battered and broken by the fall; or slumped in some dark crevice, vomit drying on her chin as her heart slowed by degrees from a lethal dose.

  ‘No cops,’ I assured him, lifting my palms in a sort of shaky surrender. ‘I’ll do whatever you say, I just want her to be safe.’

  Lightning flickered, but it was distant, its brightness fleeting. Cleve’s face loomed with corpse-like pallor, then fell back to shadows. The purple twilight returned, but not before I’d registered the object he had, until now, been concealing. A wooden shaft that – though indistinct in the blotchy moonlight – was vivid in my mind’s eye. Splintered and blackened, worn smooth by the years. I recalled the feel of it from the settlers’ hut, the near-warmth of the old wood, the greasy patina. Blood, I’d realised later. Aylish’s blood. Maybe Glenda’s, too. Was Cleve now planning to add mine to the mix? And Bronwyn’s?