He rolled onto his back, opened his eyes, and came face-to-face with the mouth of a hunting rifle.
Chapter 17
Lauren peered over the top of the rifle, lowered it, and swore.
She reached out a hand and pulled Jack up from the dirt. She didn’t have time for him, spun around, and aimed her gun and flashlight up the hill. Jack turned to see the intruder burst into the tree line in a shower of broken twigs and snapped branches and vanish.
“Lauren, what happened?”
“I could have shot you!” She was crying, her toughness stripped away, as if the tears dissolved her back into that young girl trying to hold it all together.
“Who was that? Why do you have a gun?”
“I caught them! I heard something—it woke me up—something crashing around in the shed. So I took the gun. Just because I was scared, okay? They saw me and ran.”
“Did you get a look at them?”
“Did you?” Jack shook his head. She sniffed. “Me neither. It was too dark.” She was breathing heavily, shoulders ragged, shock settling in as the adrenaline wore off. Jack steadied her with an arm. “You don’t understand. They took his ax. Curtis’s ax. They took it.”
Jack understood her panic immediately. He clicked his jaw; he thought he’d been smacked by a baseball bat, but that wasn’t right. It was the wooden handle of the ax. Who could possibly want to steal Curtis’s ax? Only someone who had use for it. And what possible use? Someone who could put Alexis’s blood on it and then plant it somewhere later. Perhaps the same person who had slipped into the vineyard in the middle of the night, months ago, and carefully placed a pink running shoe in a place they knew Jack would have to look. A killer, covering their tracks.
And Jack had been close enough to grab them at last, but he’d let them get away. In the quiet of the night, he could still hear them crunching through the bush. They hadn’t gotten away quite yet.
“Lauren, call the police.” He was already running up the hill. She sat, stunned, dropped to the ground with her head in her hands, gun useless in her lap. Her flashlight beam pooling uselessly on the ground. He should have taken it, he realized halfway up. But it was too late for regrets. He crossed into the tree line.
Now that he wasn’t periodically blinded by brightness, Jack’s eyes were able to adjust to the gloom. Black bars, tree trunks, slotted his vision. He couldn’t run in the dense bush, but he tried to hurry, arms in front, scanning for danger with his palms. Everything felt simultaneously far and close, each shadowed shrub managing to jump out at him. It was the thin branches that caught him off guard the most; the big ones he could make out, avoid, but hundreds of tiny sharp twigs jabbed at him. He felt something on his cheek, wiped it off. Hot and wet. Blood. Heard something ahead, a similar twig-crunching, skin-bruising ricochet through the bush. He was getting closer.
The ground flattened out into a small clearing, he felt a crunch of hard plastic underfoot, and then he was going downhill, steep and quickly, his heels digging in and slipping, plant litter skittering down the hill in front of him. He fell, landed in something wet, felt it soak into his jeans at the knees, bone cold. He got up, reminding himself to tell Andrew Freeman he’d found the fucking creek. Then he was rocketing downhill again. Before he had time to remember the CREST and STEEP DESCENT signs from the main road, he was going faster than he could control. The bar code of the night sky whipped past above. Then something caught him on the shins and swept them out from under him. He landed hard, skinning his palms on asphalt. Asphalt? He gingerly stood up. He was in another clearing. Night sky above. No, he was on a road. A road that bent upward to the left and snaked down in a wide turn to his right, hooking back around behind the bush. This was the long, S-shaped road that was marked on the signs, but instead of going around the curves, they were running across it. Jack looked behind him. He’d tripped on the steel safety barrier; it had knocked his shins and pitched him forward.
Someone was climbing over the barrier on the other side of the road, back into the bush. Jack followed without thinking—he was so close. Get there. Get there, Jack. The shadow seemed to have one leg over the barrier, and then it looked like they turned and shouted something.
It sounded like “Watch out.”
Then the world exploded.
Everything turned a blinding white. Jack had about two seconds to contemplate the new brightness, enough to see his hands bleached bone white, his dirt-crusted, bloodstained fingertips. And to see the wall of light pushing toward him. Close enough now to see a huge aluminum grill. Close enough to see insects swirling inside two cylindrical beams, as if the darkness outside were solid. The ground vibrated. The squeal of brakes and hot rubber, burning brakes, thickened the air. Wind dragged around him. Close enough now to see nothing but brightness. Nothing but death.
Then light.
Then dark.
Jack was surprised that his feet lifted off the ground before he felt any pain. He was even more surprised that the pain, when it did come, was in the wrong spot. A shock through his arse that jarred his back.
He barely noticed the truck had come to a stop in front of him. Smoke was curling from the back tires, the truck bed jackknifed at a slight diagonal to the cabin. There was a hiss and the cab hopped on its suspension as someone got out. Hazards clicked behind the smoke, casting the scene in a flickering glow every few seconds, like a series of orange-hued photographs. Jack breathed in, the tang of pulverized brake pads so acrid that he could smell it with his tongue. He was sitting on the road next to the truck that should have killed him. But he was alive.
The truck driver was talking to someone. Jack heard him say “You sure?” and then a few more mumbled words. A door slammed. The rumble of an engine starting. The truck pulled away, and Jack saw a white pickup with the door open behind it.
“Fucking got away,” someone said next to him, a deep familiar growl, “because of you.”
Jack looked up at Curtis blankly. He remembered the noise of a car starting from back in Andrew’s vineyard. While Lauren had given chase, Curtis had waited around the bend for the intruder. Then Jack had staggered out of the bushes. Curtis must have seen the truck, grabbed Jack by the collar, and flung him backward. Jack, still reeling, slowly pieced it together. Curtis had saved his life.
“Well, get up then,” Curtis said, one hand raised in frustration. “You’re still sitting in the middle of the fucking road.”
Jack hauled himself up. Curtis was already at his truck. He got in and slammed the door. He started the car and the brake lights lit up the skid of black rubber on the blacktop. That had almost been Jack. He stood on the double white line, not sure what to do. There was a whir of a window lowering, a bang on the door.
“Fuckin’ hurry up.”
Jack hopped in the passenger seat. Locked in the cabin with Curtis, Jack could smell his breath, a yeasty musk. Curtis looked at him with a mixture of confusion and pity, flicked on the overhead light, put a hand on Jack’s jaw, and tilted his head roughly. Jack felt his neck grind in its joints.
“Did you see who it was? When they did this to you?”
“They didn’t.”
“What?”
“I fell.” Jack didn’t want to tell Curtis he’d had the shit kicked through him.
“Here I was thinking you could take a beating. And turns out you did it to yourself.” Curtis did a U-ey—there was a thunk-thunk as the wheels went over the reflective yellow humps that split the road—and revved it to get going on the hill. “What the fuck, man? What the fuck?” Curtis was shaking his head. “You’re insane.”
“They took your ax.”
“And you let them get away with it too. I’ll be counting on you to back me up when the damn thing turns up again, doused in someone else’s blood.”
He had a point. As much as Curtis liked crying wolf, this time, it seemed, he was actually victim to a
conspiracy, someone picking around his property to find something incriminating. The problem for the framer, Jack supposed, was that now Curtis knew exactly what was missing, it could hardly turn up again. Jack looked out the window as they weaved around a long, sloping bend. The bush it cut through was steep, with rocky drops several meters high in places. Jack was lucky to have ended up with just a bruised coccyx, and that wasn’t even considering almost getting blown apart by a semitrailer.
“I didn’t save you because I wanted to,” Curtis said bluntly. “The last thing I need is the attention of a journalist getting squashed flat after snooping around my property.”
“I’m not a journalist,” said Jack. He was cold, his jeans sticking to his legs.
“And you’re not squashed flat either.” They were at the top of the hill now. “You’re welcome.”
“I’m not complaining.”
Curtis was massaging the leather on his steering wheel.
“You make everything worse, you know that?”
“I’ve been told.”
“I mean it. Fuck, you’re still not listening. People die on that road all the time. Not to mention what you’ve done to yourself crashing through the bush. You almost got yourself killed. Believe it or not, that’s not what I want. I’d rather catch whoever’s trying to frame me.” Jack noticed when Curtis was speaking that, even if it was obviously bullshit, he believed it so hard. As if he could conjure truth from sheer willpower alone.
But something was still strange. The person in shadow, as they fled from the road, had turned and yelled as the truck bore down. If it was the killer, why give Jack a warning?
“Who do you think it was?” Jack asked.
“Lauren didn’t see them. But who do you think?” The accusation lay unspoken—Andrew Freeman. But he was on top of the tower. At least, he had been when Jack had left, and he’d only made it halfway down the drive. No way.
They were stopped out the front of the bed-and-breakfast. The engine hummed.
“Listen, Curtis.” Jack struggled with the words. “Thank you.”
“Go home, Jack. You don’t need to be here. Someone’s setting me up. You think I hated her because she sent me to jail? Someone bashed in the back of her head. With a single blow. And you think I hated her so much because she sent me away?” He leaned over and opened Jack’s door, gave it an extra shove so it swung wide. “You’re so obsessed with proving me wrong, you can’t even see when you’re actually right.”
Curtis lowered his voice, almost reverentially, the tone that should be taken when talking about the dead—but not from this mouth, not with these words. “Because I did hate that bitch. But if I’d killed her, I would have done it slowly. Go home.”
Chapter 18
Jack spent the next morning fast-forwarding through his old interviews. He could watch the interviews at speed, projecting himself back into his seat, clipboard in hand, to remember most of the conversations. He’d slow down when he needed to remember something better. The difference between the raw footage and the final cut was staggering. He’d interviewed Lauren and Vincent for four hours, and their cut had been a total of twenty-two minutes. Ian McCarthy had it worse. Jack was proud of the mise-en-scène on that one: They’d pulled over on the side of a dirt road, sun setting. Ian had sat on the trunk of his 4WD, his boots dangling above the dust. They’d talked for over an hour, but in episode 4, Ian had been trimmed to a slim six minutes.
Jack pressed Play on the raw footage. Ian was in the middle of telling him how they’d moved the body, intending to take Eliza to the hospital.
Ian: It was when we picked her up that we realized she was actually pretty dead.
Jack: And then?
Ian: It sounds stupid, but it didn’t seem real. I mean, yeah, she had her fingers in her mouth. That looked strange, but it didn’t look real. So neither of us were sure what to do.
Jack: I’m not blaming you, Ian. It must have been hard to see whether she was alive or not. What did you do next?
Ian: Andrew went up to the house, while I stayed with the body and called for backup. When Andrew came back, he told me he’d arrested Curtis Wade. He said he’d cuffed him to something, and we had enough evidence.
Jack: How did he know for sure?
Ian: He said we had a witness.
Jack: A witness? There was no witness at the trial.
Ian: I know.
Jack: So all you had to go on was Andrew Freeman telling you he had enough evidence, and that was enough for you to know that Curtis was guilty?
Ian: Well, yeah. He’s the sergeant. I believed him.
Jack: Even without any actual evidence? Just his word.
Ian: Even without evidence. I guess. Now that you mention it, I don’t know what he actually meant. You’re right, but it’s a blur. I trusted what he told me, you know.
Jack: So tell me how you felt. Forget the trial and this show and everything. I just want to know your first impression.
Ian: As soon as we set foot on the property, I had a bad feeling. And by the time we left, yeah, we were certain Curtis was guilty.
Jack rubbed his eyes. Andrew’s witness had, of course, never surfaced. It was just an excuse to lay the cuffs on Curtis.
The interview was a gold mine; Jack had got his mileage out of the inferred bias here. He switched the file to episode 4, the final cut as it appeared in the show, and scrolled through to the scene with Ian. The interview started by zooming in on the beer beside Ian. Ian hadn’t even drunk it, but it had been a hot day and Jack hadn’t brought any water. (He had, but he didn’t tell Ian that.) Here, have this, Jack had passed him a beer. I don’t want to look like I’m drinking on the job, Ian had said. We won’t film it, just hold it against your neck if you want, to cool down. Yet the shot lingered on the sweating can. Just to make Ian a little less reliable, a little more incompetent. That’s low, thought Jack, even for you.
On-screen, they’d started to talk. Jack jacked up the volume.
Ian: It was when we picked her up that we realized she was actually pretty dead.
Jack: And then?
Ian: Andrew went up to the house, while I stayed with the body and called for backup. When Andrew came back, he told me he’d arrested Curtis Wade. He said he’d cuffed him to something, and we had enough evidence.
Jack: How did he know for sure?
Ian: He said we had a witness.
Jack: A witness? There was no witness in the trial.
Ian: I know.
Jack: So all you had to go on was the fact that Andrew Freeman had told you that he had enough evidence, and that was enough for you to know that Curtis was guilty?
Ian: Well, yeah.
Jack: So tell me how you felt. Forget the trial and this show and everything. I just want to know your first impression.
Ian: As soon as we set foot on the property—even without evidence—we were certain Curtis was guilty.
Jack had to close the laptop. He felt sick. He didn’t remember cutting it together that badly. He’d edited out every bit of footage that may have made viewers sympathetic to Ian. He came across as dim, a bit conniving—part of the grand conspiracy against the Wades. He’d kept in that Ian hadn’t known Eliza was even dead for the black comedy of it, ignoring his explanation that he would have been panicked, confused, and was just trying his best. But that didn’t fit Jack’s narrative either, so it had to go.
But worst of all was the final sentence.
Ian: As soon as we set foot on the property—even without evidence—we were certain Curtis was guilty.
Jack had even cut away from Ian’s face to a shot of that stupid beer can, as he dubbed the words even without evidence (kidnapped from a different line of dialogue earlier in the interview) and spliced them into a new sentence, dropping out half the context in the process. Just like that, he’d created police bias.
He felt sick. It didn’t feel like he was crafting a story anymore, as he had in the editing room, where he’d move things around only to achieve a better story. But this was so real. He was hurting people. Creating villains.
By the time he’d gorged himself on enough footage, the sun sat high enough to sluice through the venetians, throwing prison bars of shadow across his room. Jack got up and went to the mirror in the bathroom. His left eye was bloodshot, broken capillaries flooding the bottom of the socket in a crescent, a half-full wineglass. There was a slash on his cheek. Mixed with the only just recovering yellow of his nose, courtesy of Ted Piper, Jack had transformed into what the bigwigs call “off-camera talent.” He felt a sudden surge of tiredness, sat down on the side of the bath. The toilet was just next to him, the lid up.
Andrew had lied to him about something, he was sure, but he didn’t know what. He’d lied on the night of the murder as well. He didn’t have anything worth putting Curtis in chains, apart from the coincidence of location and his own prejudice. There was no witness.
Alexis’s funeral was tomorrow. He’d almost gotten himself killed yesterday. Why was he here? Who was he helping? He stood and spat in the toilet. Blood and mucus pirouetted in the water. He looked into the bowl. Not today, he thought. He sidestepped the speckling banana, still in his doorway, and went outside.
Alan Sanders served Jack a child’s meal without complaint—chicken nuggets and fries. He rang it up as a rib eye, which was pricier than a chicken parma.
Jack hadn’t planned on coming to the Royal exactly, but the main street lacked attractions. Besides, he knew eating on a schedule was important, and it was lunchtime. He couldn’t start skipping now. His tightrope walker was wobbly enough as it was.
Trust Me When I Lie Page 15