Ben was relieved. But he knew he could not let his seven-year-old sister go down through a trapdoor in the middle of the night before him. Even a little sister who acted, and maybe was, slightly braver than him.
‘I have to,’ he said.
‘Why? Because you’re a boy?’ she asked, disgusted, shining the torch into his eyes.
‘No, because I’m six years older than you.’ Ben was trying to sound convincing, as if he really wanted to go first.
Olive didn’t say anything more. Nuts, he thought. She could have at least put up a fight.
He sat and let his legs dangle into the outside world.
‘Maybe we should wait till morning,’ he said. ‘There’s no point going out now. What are we going to do?’
‘We’re going out,’ she croaked. ‘We’ve been locked in here forever. And I’m busting.’
He listened for rain. It had stopped now. Just the distant flow of creek.
‘Go on,’ she said.
The promise of seeing the creek by night was enough to move him. He rested his palms on the floor either side of the hole and lowered his legs through the rough-sawn, splintery square. He scratched his hips and bottom as he shoved himself through. Ben wished that he had made the hole slightly wider. Or that he had kept up his exercises or not finished off that block of chocolate. The soles of his shoes touched corrugated iron and then earth. He smiled.
Ben grabbed the torch from Olive and forced the rest of his body down through the hole. He kneeled and shuffled the corrugated iron and some bottles aside. He looked out into the forest of pines as Olive’s legs appeared through the hole. He heard the gentle rush of the creek, the call of dozens of birds, insects and frogs. Olive landed heavily and scrambled out from under the cabin.
‘What are you waiting for, Fatso?’ she said.
‘Can you not call me names?’ he said. ‘If I hadn’t sawed the hole –’
‘Can’t you take it?’ she said.
Ben wondered where Olive had learned to be such a punk. It wasn’t at school. She had always been like this, even before she could speak. Ben trained his torch on her. ‘What if they come back?’
‘Don’t care. I’m going. Why else did we make the hole?’
Ben crawled out from under the cabin. He would go down to the creek. He could think more clearly down there. He would make a decision: stay here and wait for his parents for who knows how long or, in the morning, take off with Olive up to the main road.
By the time he stood, Olive was already heading downhill.
‘Wait!’ he whispered.
‘Why are you whispering?’
Ben wasn’t sure. He just felt that he should whisper in a forest late at night. Olive walked boldly into the dark while Ben scanned the ground with his torch, thinking every stick was a snake, every shadow a werewolf or zombie.
He ran to catch up with Olive and grabbed her hand, partly for her sake, partly for his. They were halfway down the hill, almost to the fallen tree that he and Dad had hidden behind, when he heard it. At first it didn’t sound like a car. Just the distant click and tick of rocks. But Ben stopped, and Olive stopped, and they listened.
Run, said a voice somewhere deep within him.
The car screamed down the final steep section of dirt road, not stopping in front of the cabin but continuing across the clearing. Why would they park away from the cabin? Maybe it wasn’t his parents’ car. But if it wasn’t, who could it be? Low rumble. Brakes. Engine cut.
‘Hurry!’ Olive pushed Ben up through the hole, scratching his sides and hands. Fresh air and creek and freedom disappeared.
Car doors opened.
He took Olive’s hands, pulling her up into the cabin in a single movement.
‘Ow!’ she said.
‘Shhh!’ Ben hissed, switching off the torch.
‘That hurt,’ Olive said, sitting on the rim of the hole in the floor.
The sound of low voices moved quickly across the clearing toward the cabin.
‘C’mon!’ Ben whispered.
She stood up. ‘I hate them! I wish they’d never come back.’
‘What if it’s not them?’ Ben snuck across to the cupboard at the back and looked for the gun, but all he could make out was a shovel. He grabbed the splintery timber handle with two hands. He stood there in the darkness, trembling, Olive clinging to his arm.
‘Should we say something?’ she whispered.
The chain jangled at the front door.
Ben raised the shovel and tiptoed ever so slowly toward the door.
‘Should we say something?’ Olive asked again.
Ben said nothing.
‘Mum?’ Olive called.
More jangling.
‘Yes,’ Mum said quietly.
Ben’s shoulders dropped. He released a staggered breath. Then he snapped the torch back on, lowered the shovel and moved quickly to the hole, brushing sawdust down into the night. He jammed the three floorboards into place as best he could, the nails making it difficult, then he grabbed the metal handle of the trunk and heaved it back into position.
Someone fiddled with a padlock.
Ben looked to the floor to see if everything was clear. The knife lay there, covered in sawdust. He grabbed it, snapped it shut and pocketed it just as the door opened.
‘Pack the car,’ Dad said, charging into the cabin. Ben trained the torch on him as he went to the table and began shoving things into a bag.
‘What?’ Ben asked.
‘Don’t say “What”. And get that torch off me. Anything you want, pack it in the car. Make it light. No heavy stuff. It’s got to go in your bag. We leave in a few hours.’
Ben stabbed the torch beam at Mum. She stood in the doorway, handbag hanging limply from her shoulder, exhausted, haggard, her cheeks smudged with eye make-up. Ordinarily Ben would have hugged her, seen if she was okay. But not now. Olive stood, arms crossed, back turned in protest.
Dad headed out the door with a bag and a cardboard box.
‘We’ve got to go,’ Mum said.
That was all.
Ben wanted to shout at her but was too shell-shocked to speak. He wished that he and Olive had not turned back. He wished he was still tramping through the darkness to the creek, surrounded by shhhhh and other night sounds. Forests are supposed to be dark and unknown. Parents are not. He wondered if he would ever find his mother’s shhhhh as comforting as he found the sound of that creek.
Mum went to Olive, bent down, tried to hug her, but Olive shrugged her off and moved away, arms still folded, back still turned. Ben wished that Mum was as strong as Olive. He went to the door. The car was parked across the clearing under a low tree. Hidden. They had come down the road so quickly and then hidden the car and said that they were leaving. Was someone chasing them? Did they have the passports?
‘Why didn’t you leave a note?’ Ben asked. ‘You always leave a note. Tell us what’s going on.’
Mum stared at him. Ben could feel the pressure of all the unspoken truths thickening the air between them. ‘We just –’ she began and Ben waited, hungry, needing to hear something, anything, but she changed her mind. ‘Just get your things.’
After twenty minutes of packing the car, Mum and Dad ate dinner by feeble torchlight at the table – cold Big Red tomato soup and bread. Mum mainly looked at hers, and stirred it. Dad watched the window, looking up the hill. Ben sat with them, a brick in his gut: a solid block of unanswered questions, unknown parts of the story. Olive slept, thumb-sucking, her breathing jerky and fitful.
‘Where did you go today?’ Ben asked.
Dad licked butter off his knife and swallowed bread in lumps.
‘We had to arrange some things,’ Mum said.
‘What? Where are we going? Can we go home?’
‘No, Ben,’ Mum said. ‘Not home.�
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‘We’re sorting out a plan,’ Dad said, not taking his eye off the window.
‘Would you guys mind if we don’t go on any more holidays? They kind of suck,’ Ben said.
Dad eyed him.
‘I just want to go home. I miss making my movie. I –’
‘Don’t use your whiny voice,’ Mum warned.
Yeah, Ben thought. Me using my whiny voice is the big problem here. If I just used a normal speaking voice everything would be fine.
‘We’ll leave at 2 am,’ Dad said. ‘Make sure this place is the same as we found it.’
Ben tried to sit there and be okay with the not-knowing. After all, he was just a kid and they were adults and this was best for him. They knew. They would take care of him. They were his parents. He tried not to say anything, but the words exploded.
‘Why do you listen to him?’ he asked Mum. ‘Why don’t you stand up for yourself? You would never have left us like that. Why did you?’
Her chin wobbled. She lowered her head.
‘That’s enough!’ Dad said.
Ben had to get out of there, not be near them or he would tell them how irresponsible they were, tell them that if they ever locked him and Olive up again . . .
He stood, grabbed his bag, threw his things in, walked out of the cabin.
‘Oi!’ Dad said, but Ben kept moving. ‘Back here. Now!’
Ben slowed just outside the cabin door. He had always listened when his father had spoken. Until yesterday he had never even questioned his father to his face, but whatever bond they had was broken now. This ‘holiday’, whatever his parents had done wrong, the lies, reading out his notebook. Everything was in pieces. Ben continued across the clearing.
He would sit in the car until they left. He would not go back inside that cabin, ever. He ripped the car door open, jumped in and slammed it as hard as he could. He slammed it so hard that the glass in the window shattered and fell like a thousand tiny raindrops. They landed in the car, on Ben’s lap, on the window frame, on the ground.
Ben stared in disbelief.
He looked back to the cabin, expecting his father to tear across the clearing like a lunatic. But he didn’t. The slamming door must have covered the sound of the shattering glass. He opened the door, stood and brushed glass jewels off his lap onto the silvery sand. A near-full moon had pushed its way through the clouds above. He dusted chunks off the window frame and the car seat and he sat back down, clicking the door closed.
He let the breath fall from him and licked his dry lips.
Did a broken window mean seven years’ bad luck? Or was that only mirrors? Either way, Ben felt that his seven years had begun a few days earlier.
Something good will happen. Something good always happens. Tears welled but his eyes swallowed them in gulps. Ben was scared. His parents were scared, so he was scared. Parents were supposed to know the answers. Or to at least pretend they knew.
He was sitting in the back, behind the driver’s seat. In the moon-glow he could see the front passenger seat, the gearstick and half the dashboard. Just above the gearstick, in a groove that looked as though it could hold another stereo, Ben could see a phone. Dad’s or Mum’s new phone.
He looked out the window, back toward the cabin. No one was coming. Raised voices, furniture being moved on the timber floor, the dull thunk of footsteps. The brick in Ben’s stomach grew heavy and sharp at the edges. It gave him physical pain and tears fell down his cheeks then. He wiped at them and told himself not to be a baby. He didn’t need Dad to tell him that any more.
Ben didn’t want to do what he was about to do. If Dad hadn’t read his notebook, if they hadn’t been locked in the cabin, he would never do something like this. But these things had happened. He leaned through to the front and took the phone from the cavity. He pressed a button and the screen came to life with a picture of his mum in the front seat, looking up into the camera – posing, big sunglasses, one raised brow. Ben glanced back at the cabin again. He swiped the screen, making his mother disappear.
Evidence. Ben wondered if a real detective would do this. Or if it was unethical. He hit the message button. No messages. He hit the phone button. Three dialled numbers. One from 7.15 am today, which meant that they must have left before that time. One from 8.22 am and one at 3.48 pm.
Ben turned to the cabin again. They were moving around inside. No voices now. Ben had come to fear silence almost as much as he feared the arguments.
He pulled the notebook from his backpack, took the pen out and jotted the dialled phone numbers in tiny writing near the spine on one of the torn middle pages. Ben knew that it was dangerous to use the notebook again but he hoped that the numbers would not be seen if someone flicked through quickly.
Ben tapped a few other icons but found nothing interesting. There were a dozen photos of Mum, taken by her, and a couple of shots of Dad driving, silhouetted against the blurred background. That was it.
He clicked on a folder labelled ‘Web’ and discovered two icons. He hit the first. Nothing. He clicked the second, an orange ‘M’ logo, and there were seven open pages. He tapped one, then another, looking for anything even slightly suspicious.
He tapped a page for a news site search on ‘Ray Silver’ and his eyes rested on a picture that made the brick in his belly twist and turn.
Two pictures, actually. And a headline.
‘Apricots?’ Mum asked, offering Ben an open tin of No Name fruit with a spoon in it.
Ben shook his head.
‘Cream?’ Dad said.
Ben looked at his father and took the can of whipped cream, spraying some into the middle of a green plastic bowl.
They sat and ate quietly to the sound of Olive sleep-breathing and the wild noises from outside.
‘What’s wrong with you?’ Dad asked.
‘Cat got your tongue?’ Mum said.
Ben felt as though he had been transported into an alternative universe. How could they be talking about apricots and cream and cats’ tongues, knowing what they knew, what Ben now knew?
Mum had come out of the cabin soon after Ben discovered the news article. He had thrown the phone back into the dash compartment and moved quickly to meet her halfway across the clearing, trying to stop her from seeing the smashed window.
‘Come back to the cabin. Have some dessert, get some sleep. We’re going in a few hours,’ she had said. So Ben, guilty, mind roaring, floated back to the cabin.
‘Are you over your little performance now?’ Dad asked, serving himself another bowl of spray cream. ‘Storming off to the car like a three-year-old.’
Ben tasted a small spoonful of cream. It felt thick in his throat. He rested the spoon back on the table.
‘It’ll work out,’ Dad said.
‘Maybe we’ll go somewhere with a pool. And room service,’ Mum added.
Ben stared at her, the pores of her skin, that terrible selfie haircut. He almost didn’t recognise his own mother. It’s a weird day when you realise that your parents aren’t who you think they are. Ben wondered if there would come a time when he realised that he, himself, was not who he thought he was, that he was someone totally different. Someone capable of doing what his parents had done.
Bank Error in Your Favour. That’s what the news headline had said on Mum’s phone. Then the story . . . bank mistakenly deposited the funds into Silver’s account . . . Silver transferred the money.
‘I’d like to tell Ben where we’re going,’ Mum said.
Dad looked at her, small trickles of cream gathering at the corners of his mouth. ‘It’s a surprise,’ he said, straight-faced. Something caught his eye and he tipped his head to the right, looking out the window and up the hill.
‘What?’ Mum asked, alert.
‘Nothing.’ But Dad continued to look as they waited, holding their breath. ‘It’s nothing,’
he said, finally, turning back to his dessert. He took the last scoop and stood, dumping the bowl in the plastic wash tub, then looked in the esky. He searched around as Mum and Ben sat quietly, looking at each other.
‘Who ate my chocolate?’ he asked, looking up at Ben. ‘Did you?’
Ben nodded. He wasn’t scared any more.
‘Why did you do that?’
Ben did not answer.
‘You can clean up the dishes, chuck them into that garbage bag. And you can replace my chocolate when we get to a shop,’ Dad said. ‘I should be able to trust you.’ He stood and gave Ben a little whack on the back of the head.
Offshore account . . . Ben remembered what the article had said . . . Ray and April Silver . . . police asking for witnesses. He had read this before he had thrown the phone back into the empty cavity on the dashboard. Offshore. Overseas.
‘Let’s go,’ Dad said. ‘Ben, clean up. Now.’
Ben gathered the plates together and his mind crunched through the contents of the article. One fragment of a line turned over and over in his mind more than any other.
. . . $7.2 million . . .
He couldn’t get that number out of his head. Seven point two million dollars. The amount they had stolen. Offshore account – where the rest of the money must be.
‘Seven point two million dollars.’ He said the words as he threw the plates into the bag. Not loud, but loud enough for them to hear.
Mum and Dad stopped what they were doing.
‘What’d you just say?’
‘I said . . . seven point two million dollars,’ Ben repeated.
Dad flew across the room and grabbed him by the neck of his t-shirt, pressing him against the rough log wall.
‘You’re a real little smart alec,’ he said into Ben’s face, too close to focus.
‘Ray!’ Mum barked.
‘Why did you do it?’ Ben asked. ‘Why didn’t you tell us? Are you going to give it back?’
‘Shut up,’ Dad said, stabbing a finger at him. ‘Don’t say another word. No more questions.’
Ben wanted to ask another question so bad. He didn’t even know what he wanted to ask but he still wanted to ask it. Dad pressed him harder into the wall. Ben heard the cotton stitching on his t-shirt tear. Dad maintained his grip, staring into Ben’s face for the longest time. His watery eyes seemed to swim with a thousand disturbing thoughts.
Two Wolves Page 9