Hearts in the Land of Ferns

by Jude Knight

  The nativity would be a series of walk-on, walk-off scenes, starting with the Archangel Gabriel (Cheryl) arriving by motor cycle to deliver a letter from God to a convincingly young Mary (Hazel, Kev the cop’s fourteen-year-old daughter), and ending with Mary and Joseph, against a backdrop painted as a slightly scruffy garage, displaying the baby to shepherds, wise men, and people representing the nations of the world. The backdrop was already up behind the platform in the school hall.

  Every child in the Mangatehapu School would be up on that platform at the end, wearing whatever national costume they had a family connection with, however remote. Or at least an interest.

  Lee watched the Annunciation from the cast assembly area behind one of the classrooms. The visit to Elizabeth was next, Mary waiting at a bus stop for a cardboard cut-out of an Intercity bus. Lee slipped around the back of the Principal’s office and was seated on the rocking chair on the veranda, knitting, before the bus had circled the basketball court in the light rain, weaving in and out of the laughing audience. In the part of Elizabeth, she greeted Mary and mimed her baby’s delight at Mary’s news. That was her part over, and she retreated into the audience to see the rest of the show.

  The crowd loved the modern twist on the old story, with various cast members arriving behind cardboard cut-outs of utes and cars, and on real modern vehicles small enough for the schoolyard: a couple of ATV quad bikes, a tandem bicycle, mountain bikes, a skate board, and the little two-wheeler motor bikes that most of the farmers in the valley used up and down their hill tracks.

  Cheryl zipped up and down the farm on them, often with a dog riding pillion. Lee had ridden off road on one once, escaping with Trevor from her brother’s goons in a little country town called Wellsford.

  They’d been dropped at the police station, but a hand-lettered sign taped to the door said the occupants would be back soon. They’d started walking down to the shops that lined both sides of the main highway to Northland, intending to pick up a new mobile phone and some supplies, when a large four-wheel-drive sports utility vehicle caught their attention by screeching to a halt outside the police station. When Shay and three other men piled out, and stopped to read the notice, Trevor grabbed Lee’s hand and pulled her into the farm supplies shop they were passing.

  Fifteen minutes later, anonymous in helmet and goggles, she followed Trevor across the main highway on one of the farm bikes he’d just bought on a Pritchard Corporation credit card. “Pritchard’ll track us by this, but not till after we’re long gone.”

  One man sat in the SUV outside the police station. She couldn’t see the others.

  She and Trevor rode east out of Wellsford towards the coast, taking smaller roads that wound around the hills and in and out of the valleys. One attempt at rough riding through a forest block ended in a spill when Lee lost control of the bike on a needle-covered slope.

  “I’m okay,” she assured Trevor, but she winced as she tried to rise, and blood from a long graze was seeping through half a dozen rips in her jeans. Trevor took a look as well as he could without her stripping. “We need to find somewhere we can clean this up. It seems to be surface damage, but I want to get the gravel out and look at it properly.”

  The bike had careened on and into a tree. Trevor inspected it briefly, shook his head, and invited Lee to climb on behind him. That was her one and only off-road bike experience, though in the past eight months she’d got quite good on the little ATV they used to get around the gentler farm tracks.

  The showers were growing more persistent and more frequent. At a word from the producer, the Holy Family picked up their heels and ran through the rain for the school hall, leaving the remaining visitors coming to see the Holy Child to appear on the outdoor stage briefly, one by one and in groups, say the few lines written for them, and hare off after the rest of the cast to join the tableau in the hall.

  Around her, the other outside attractions had been dismantled and were disappearing into the back of vans and utes, and a couple of men stood under the edge of the awning over the temporary stage, ready to pull that down as soon as the play was over.

  Lee retreated to the school hall, and pressed through the crowds to the refreshments area, where she was to take a turn on the teapots. The rain was drumming on the tin roof, and even inside, several of the stall holders were beginning to pack up early.

  The refreshments team were doing brisk business, as people warmed their hands on mugs of tea, and dried out from the rain while speculating on how bad the storm would be. Most of the fair committee, including Cheryl and Jamie, had commandeered a table in the corner and were in earnest discussion. After a few minutes, Jamie got up and disappeared into the shifting crowds, reappearing a few minutes later on the stage next to the Holy Family. Someone turned off the Christmas Carol soundtrack, and Jamie spoke into the microphone. “Folks! Folks! Can I have your attention!”

  The buzz of conversation hushed, and he went on. “Folks, the wind is getting up, and you can hear the rain. Here at long last, and far too much of it. We’re going to close early so everyone can go home and hunker down for the storm. It looks like we’ve made some great money for the school and the Union church today, so I thank you very much for that. Spend the rest of what you have in your pockets in the next twenty minutes, folks. The fair is over at two thirty.”

  Chaos followed, as parents extracted their children from the nativity, last-minute bargain hunters negotiated deals on the remaining crafts, baked goods, preserves, and other items for sale, and friends stopped in the middle of everything to hug other friends and wish them a Merry Christmas. Lee stayed out of the way in the refreshments corner until the hall had been emptied of all but stall holders and the committee, but was touched when several people came to wish her and the baby well.

  Old Trev was sitting by the door, leaning his head back against the wall, his eyes shut. Lee and Cheryl exchanged glances and went to see how he was. “Fine, fine,” he told them impatiently.

  “Cheryl,” Jamie said, “get Lee and your Granddad home. There’s enough of us to do the clean up.” Old Trev grumbled, but Jamie circled the hall to collect a plastic shopping bag full of money from the raffles, refreshment corner, sausage sizzle and competition entry fees, handed it over to Lee, and sent them on their way in the pouring rain.

  8

  Trevor drove into the leading edge of the storm at Taumarunui, where he stopped in a queue for gas. Since Auckland, he’d been part of a continuous stream of traffic—other people trying to make it home for Christmas before the weather made travel impossible. Inside the service station, he selected a pie from the warmer and ordered a coffee while he waited his turn at the till to pay for his fuel.

  The man in front of him was asking the cashier about road conditions on the road to Waiouru, across the base of the mountain, which was the way Trevor was heading. To Waiouru, then down the main highway to Taihape, and after that Mangaweka and into the hills to home.

  “Flood and slip warning on State Highway One out of Taihape,” the attendant said. “Better than through Whanganui, though. A trailer unit flipped near Raetihi and they’re down to one lane.”

  Okay. He’d thought of taking the less travelled way through Whanganui, though it was longer. But the main highway it would be.

  Back on the road, he ate his pie and wound the windshield wipers up one more notch in speed. A biker passed him, anonymous in heavy leathers that proclaimed ‘Silver Bikers’, his powerful 1000cc road cruiser every retired man’s dream. Another followed, and then another. Nice machines, and they’d be dry enough in their leathers, but Trevor wouldn’t want to be so vulnerable to the gusts of wind.

  He watched a pair go past, the pillion tucked down behind the rider’s shoulder, face sheltered, only her gloved hands meeting the chill air of their passage and the storm. ‘Her’ was an assumption. He was thinking of Kirilee again, and that mad ride through the Dome Forest, and what came after.

  After her fall, they had to abandon the other b
ike. Kirilee made no complaint; just wrapped her arms around him and held on tight. The man in the farm shop had said every police officer in lower Northland was supporting the armed offenders’ callout on the Kaipara Harbour, so they couldn’t count on finding safety for Kirilee this far north. Their best bet was to make it to Albany or one of the North Shore stations, but Kirilee needed that graze seen to. And they might be better to move by night.

  It must be just after midday, so the recorder implanted in his arm would have transmitted its second data pulse for the day. Trevor didn’t know what kind of backup he could count on, though. He’d told his colleagues that Kirilee needed to be extracted, but they wouldn’t want to risk the game on which he was still intent: ‘rescue Kirilee’ was at the top of his priority list, but the very next item was ‘get back in with Pritchard’. He had come too far and was too close to abandon the case. Too many people would suffer and die while someone else started the slow infiltration process.

  He saw what he’d been looking for, and veered suddenly onto a side track, causing Kirilee to tighten her arms convulsively around his waist. Within minutes, they’d come out of the trees to a plateau looking out over the reserve, where a neglected bushman’s hut provided a dry place to stop, and possibly even a first aid kit.

  It was better than he’d expected. Dry, not too dirty, with a small wood-fired stove. Trampers had left a clean pile of wood under the porch and various cans and packets of food in plastic buckets that protected the contents from rats and possums, and the first-aid kit was well supplied with gauze, tweezers, and antiseptic cream.

  Trevor had to take a bucket fifty meters down the hill to a spring, but that didn’t take long. Kirilee hadn’t stayed on the bed where he’d told her to lie down, but was trying to start a fire in the stove. He cleared out the heavy logs she’d chosen, set two of the smaller ones either side, and used them as the base for a lattice tower of kindling. “The trick is to start small, with something that will catch easily, then use that to set fire to something larger, and so on and on till your big logs will work,” he explained, as he slid some fine shavings and crumpled paper under his lattice tower.

  “I don’t know any of this,” Kirilee explained, or complained, rather, sounding exasperated that her education had been deficient in such lessons. He hadn’t expected her to be such good company on the run. He liked this girl. He liked her a lot.

  He set a pot of water to warm and asked Kirilee to strip off her jeans and lie on the bed. She blushed, which he hoped meant she was seeing the same salacious images of him, but probably just meant she was shy.

  Her knickers had been shredded in the fall, too, held together only by the elastic, which she pulled up out of the way of the graze. She lay on her side facing away from him, and he made himself focus on the injury, and not on the perfect curve of her butt, inadequately covered in the drifting fall of ripped silk.

  It was just a surface graze, thank goodness. It must sting like hell, especially when he pulled the larger bits of gravel out of it, and flushed water across it to clean the smaller particles. But she made no complaint.

  “There are two schools of thought about leaving scrapes open to the air, but given we’re not in a clean environment and you don’t have a change of clothes, I’m going to smother it in this antiseptic cream and tape gauze over it.” He suited action to word, then covered her tempting lower reaches with a blanket. “Now just rest while I fix us some lunch.”

  But she caught his hand and used it to lift herself into a sitting position and to pull him closer.

  “Thank you,” she said. And kissed him.

  To this day, Trevor wasn’t sure who ratcheted the kiss of gratitude into something more. He hoped it was her. He was very much afraid it was him, drunk on a cocktail of adrenalin from their series of narrow escapes and the simmering lust that had plagued him for weeks, and roared to a furnace when she lay half naked on the narrow camp bed.

  Though when he tried to apologize afterwards, she scolded him. “I hope you are not sorry, for I am certainly not,” she’d said. He was tempted to show her how unsorry he was, but his temporary insanity had passed and he was mindful of the audience for the six o’clock data pulse, who would certainly have an earful from the last fifteen minutes of heated lovemaking. He contented himself with a lingering kiss and went to heat some bean stew on the top of the stove.

  Trevor shifted and pulled at his jeans to make a bit more room. With the storm’s effect on road conditions, he needed to focus on driving, not on his memories of one of the most passionate encounters of his life. Perhaps, now that the implant was out of his arm, she’d consider… After all, she was his wife!

  An accident on the road into Taihape stopped the traffic, and he sat waiting for the ambulance and fire truck to clear the scene, daydreaming about an intimate reunion with the lovely Kirilee. Unlikely. He wasn’t the man she thought him; the daring hero, the CIA agent of her dreams. She’d never believed his denials. But he was a country cop at heart, and each undercover job, each wound to his soul, made him yearn all the more for the hills of home. It was time to retire, and what would a city girl like Kirilee do in Mangatehapu?

  The banked traffic was being allowed through, a few vehicles at a time, and he took his turn, easing his way past a mangled van stuck half under the body of a jack-knifed truck and trailer. Poor sods. Someone’s Christmas had taken a turn for the worst.

  Even once he was through the blockage, it took thirty-five minutes to do the fifteen-minute trip to Mangaweka; twice the road was down to one lane because of slips. The road home was a few minutes on, and he turned left off the highway; first a dip down to the river, now swollen and muddy with the rain, and then up into the hills.

  His speed dropped dramatically for the descent and the switchback rise, and he kept it low. It was eight o’clock, and he’d been on the road for seven hours. So much for surprising them at the Christmas Fair! He’d be lucky to make it home before dark, which would add an extra edge of excitement, since the pouring rain cut visibility enough, and he’d already had to take evasive action several times when slips crumbled the side of the road or bounced rocks across onto his side.

  At this rate, and in this vehicle, Trevor was never going make it.

  Ten minutes later he knew he was going to have to abandon the rental car. Twice already it had been up to its hubcaps as he forded impromptu streams that crossed the road before leaping down the hills on the other side. Once, it had bogged down while inching gingerly over a slip, a sea of mud and rocks on which it slipped and slid before reaching the gravel again on the other side.

  He wasn’t going to try another slip, and a tree down would stop him in his tracks. With any luck, he’d be able to borrow an ATV quad bike from a friend who lived just a little bit further down this way… Ah. Yes. There was the gate. He followed the winding driveway, now a dancing stream, up the hill and knocked on the door.

  His old mate, Kev, who was the constable at Hunterville on the other side of the river, swung the door wide. “Trevor Greenshaw, as I live and breathe! Lee never mentioned you were expected tonight.”

  “I thought I’d surprise them,” Trevor explained. “Just as well. I should have been here around lunchtime, and they’d be worrying by now. How are they all?”

  “Pretty good, pretty good. They were all at the fair. You likely know that. Lee and Cheryl were both on the committee, and Old Trev wouldn’t miss it.”

  Trevor shook his head. “I haven’t heard anything. Seen a few social media posts, is all. Look, I wondered if you had a quad I could borrow? The rental car isn’t going to make it.”

  “Better stay here the night, Trevor. You’re welcome, of course. If they’re not expecting you, tomorrow works as well as today. As long as you get there before Lee pops.”

  Pops? What was he talking about?

  “You don’t know? You don’t know, do you? Lee’s carrying a bundle. You’re going to be a daddy sometime early in the New Year.”

  Trev
or squeezed his eyes shut and gave his head a quick shake but that didn’t change the words lodged in his ears. Lee was pregnant. He was going to be a father. If it was his. But as soon as his subconscious fed him the sour words, he rejected them. If everyone accepted him as the father then it was because Lee knew he was the only candidate. She wouldn’t claim such a thing otherwise.

  “Can you let me have a quad, Kev?”

  “Sure, but stay overnight, Trevor. Wait till it’s light.”

  “No. Thanks, but no. I need to get home now.”

  Kev argued a bit more, but soon Trevor was on his way, riding a quad bike that could handle anything short of being caught in a river or a landslide.

  About ten minutes later, he passed through a darkened Mangatehapu at the mouth of his valley, and soon he was climbing the hill to the farm. Pregnant! He was going to be a father!

  9

  Old Trev had gone to bed early. He said he was fine, but he was pale, and moving cautiously, and hadn’t insisted on helping with the evening chores.

  “Should we get him to the doctor?” Lee worried.

  Cheryl shook her head. “Not happening. No one is coming or going in this weather. If they’ve got the phones back on by morning, I’ll ring Hunterville and get him to talk to the doctor, but chances are we’re stuck here for several days.”

  Lee wondered about mentioning the persistent ache in her lower back, but it was probably nothing. She’d been on her feet much of the day, and she and Cheryl had both been flat out since they got home. The baby wasn’t due for ten days, and everyone knew first babies were often late.

  Anyway, if they couldn’t leave the house, then telling Cheryl wasn’t going to change anything.

  Overhead the lights, on early because of the storm, flickered, went out, then came on again.