Blood Secret

by Jaye Ford

  33

  ‘That you don’t give your details out over the phone,’ Eliza told her. ‘And you wouldn’t be in for a few days.’

  Good girl. ‘Was that all?’

  ‘The second time he rang, he asked if you had a studio or showroom somewhere.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘I told him you worked from home. And no, I didn’t give him your address.’

  ‘Did he ask for it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Rennie interlocked her fingers, squeezed tight, fighting the urge to get up and walk straight to the car.

  ‘Here you go.’ As Trish slid plates across the counter, Eliza ducked away to serve a customer at the register and Hayden groaned like he hadn’t eaten for days. Rennie just eyed her food, heart pounding beneath her ribs, and waited for Eliza to finish serving.

  ‘The man on the phone, Eliza, what did he sound like?’

  She shrugged. ‘I don’t know. He seemed really nice.’

  ‘Who?’ Trish asked.

  ‘I meant age,’ Rennie pressed. ‘Could you pick what sort of age he was?’

  ‘He was on the phone. It’s hard to tell. What difference does it make if he wants to buy a painting?’

  ‘Have you sold a painting?’ Trish asked.

  Rennie gripped the edge of the counter, frustration and fear and low blood sugar making her want to shout at them. ‘It might have something to do with Max.’ Beside her, Hayden turned his head. ‘Did he sound young or old?’ she asked.

  The mention of Max made Eliza focus. ‘Well, his voice was kind of gravelly. Yeah, I’d say he was an older guy.’

  Rennie wasn’t sure what a twenty-year-old considered as an ‘older guy’ but the man with the camera in the street yesterday was well past forty. ‘When did you take the calls?’

  ‘The first one was yesterday afternoon just before we closed up and then he rang again today.’ She checked her watch. ‘Maybe an hour and a half ago. I remember because we were really busy and I was trying to get him off the phone.’

  Rennie did the sums. Max disappeared on Saturday night and the first call was around three pm Sunday, almost eighteen hours later. Her father could have left and come back. Hurt Max in the car park, taken him far away and returned for her.

  ‘What’s going on, Rennie?’ Trish asked.

  ‘I’m not sure.’ She didn’t know it was her father – there was no way of confirming it from a couple of phone calls – but she wasn’t prepared to take any chances. She glanced at Hayden still chewing on his sandwich and wondered about leaving him here. He would slow her down, however this panned out. But if her father had seen him with her, if he’d already hurt Max for the same reason, Hayden was safer where she could keep an eye on him. ‘Come on, we’ve got to go.’

  ‘I haven’t finished,’ Hayden complained.

  ‘And you haven’t eaten anything,’ Trish said.

  Rennie took a large bite from the corner of her sand­wich then pushed the plate across the counter. ‘I’ll take it with me. Can you wrap it up?’

  ‘Rennie, what is it?’ Trish tried again.

  ‘It’s what I didn’t tell you about. I’ll call you later.’ She waited impatiently as the sandwich was pushed into a bag. Hayden didn’t bother with wrapping, eating as he followed her to the car.

  ‘I thought you were hungry,’ he said as he clipped himself into his belt.

  ‘I can eat on the way.’

  ‘Where are we going?’

  ‘Home.’ She needed the backpack. And the gun.

  *

  The landscape was the same. Still dense black and silent, still dry and sandy under his hands. The only difference was the pain. It was worse. Deeper, dragging, clawing its way into every part of his body. Max knew it wasn’t just his wounds now but blood loss, dehydration, shock, maybe infection, too. He wanted to curl up in a ball and sleep forever; he wanted to grab the agony by the throat and call it a fucking arsehole. What he did was grit his teeth and crawl slowly, exhaustingly forward, hoping it was taking him somewhere and that he’d get there before he died.

  The memories kept his mind focused on something other than the pain and the darkness. He tried to open his mind to them like a door, whistle for their attention, beckon them in with the scoop of a hand and the promise of an endless glass of water. There was no rush in response, though. They trickled in one by one, as though somewhere out of sight they’d got into chronological order and were coming back in an organised, unhurried fashion. When Rennie’s gun sauntered in, it made his heart thump all over again.

  He’d found it the weekend after she almost left him. That event in itself had scared the hell out of him. The argument was short and firey, out of character for Rennie but nothing like the yelling matches he’d had with Leanne, then five minutes after he’d stormed out to the deck, he’d heard the old garage door wrench up and her car start. Even though he was well past his running days, he found enough pace to reach the bottom of the driveway as she did, almost getting dragged under a wheel as he jumped in beside her. She’d seemed more resigned than angry when they talked, as though she’d been waiting for the moment it would turn to shit.

  He’d wanted to stagger about with relief when she agreed to stay. Instead he carried her backpack inside so she couldn’t change her mind and make a dash with it. There was barely anything in it but it was as heavy as if she’d grabbed Gran’s antique silver candlesticks on the way out. She took it from him when they reached the bedroom and shut it in the wardrobe before she let him kiss her.

  He’d wondered for days afterwards what was in there, enough to make him go and look when she was working the next weekend. The pack was back on the top shelf and weighed down by a single object that distended the soft base.

  He couldn’t remember now if he’d felt guilty about doing it, just recalled the curiosity that made him unzip the bag like a kid uncovering a treasure. He’d spent a lot of time wondering about her life, concocting episodes that might explain her various layers. What he found made him scratch the lot.

  A gun. What the fuck?

  Shock made him fumble and drop it, cringing, expecting it to go off. It was black and mean looking, with moving parts and an empty hole in the grip where the canister for the bullets went.

  He tried to fight the image of it in her hands but the bold, tough, wary parts of her slid together in his mind and yeah, a gun could make sense – if she’d needed to protect herself or someone else or . . .

  Looking for answers, he went through the contents of the backpack. There was an empty clip and loose ammunition in a pocket, fat rolls of cash in a plastic bag, a mobile phone and charger, a zip lock bag with someone else’s birth certificate pressed against one side of the clear plastic. He’d got up and paced around, wringing his hands, not wanting to connect the dots that were on his bedroom floor. Then he opened the zip lock and the first thing he saw was the photo. One of the kids in it was definitely Rennie around the age of nine or ten. The woman was similar enough to suggest it was her mother and he guessed the other girl was her sister, Simone. He’d seen her once at the cafe when Rennie first started there and met her, very briefly, at the house after Rennie moved in.

  He’d come home early from work. Both of them seemed startled when he walked in, as though they’d been caught out at something. He tried a bit of friendly ‘So what brings you here?’ chitchat but Simone looked him up and down with such tough-arsed scrutiny that he almost felt like apologising. She went out to her car after that and he watched discreetly from the bay window as Rennie talked with her in the driveway. Simone was a taller, darker, pissed-off version of Rennie. There was no endearing sisterly familiarity between them; they were tense and edgy together and he thought maybe there’d been an argument. They hugged before Simone got in the car, though. A sudden, taut clinch that said more for the intensity of their relationship than love and
tenderness.

  Max almost returned the photo without flipping it over. The writing on the back was old-style cursive: Katrina, Mum, Joanne, Feb. 1989. He turned it back and forth a couple of times, thinking he must’ve been wrong. But he wasn’t. It was Rennie and she’d once been called Katrina or Joanne. He checked the birth certificate again – it was for a Katrina Nicole Hendelsen; mother Donna, father Anthony, born in 1978. Same year, same month as Rennie.

  There was more in the plastic bag, leftovers from a childhood: a blue ribbon from a cross country race, a medallion for swimming, but an old driver’s licence and the School Certificate confirmed the other name.

  Max’s heart pounded and his hands trembled. There could be a lot of explanations for Rennie changing her name, plenty of reasons why she hadn’t told him. But she had a gun in the wardrobe – and none of the dots told him whether it was Katrina Hendelsen or Renée Carter who needed it.

  He shoved the backpack on the shelf again, went to the yard and dug up a storm. He was mad: that she had it, that he’d found it, that he’d been so far off base about her. That the story she hadn’t told him was ugly and dangerous and she’d brought the remains of it to his house. He considered undercover cop, witness protection, on the run. He thought about things she’d said: she didn’t know how to stay, this chapter was better than the two before it, the book of her life was a horror story. And his anger became fearful and apprehensive. For her. For himself – because he didn’t know how to protect her.

  And as he hacked at the soil, he knew that was what he wanted to do – keep her safe so she didn’t need a gun. Whatever the hell had happened in her past had made her tough and wary. It also made her twitch and gasp in her sleep, quietly anxious at times, slow to make friends. It’d carved deep scars that were hidden under the layers of the person she was now – and she looked at him as though she understood his damage, the way only someone who’d lived it could.

  Max took a breather in the dark, tried to move his thoughts on from the gun. He didn’t get a whole lot further.

  The contents of her backpack and his deception in rummaging through it had weighed on his mind but it didn’t stop him going back the next weekend, hauling it out, plugging in the mobile phone and going through the contacts list. There were only four numbers. The name ‘Jo’ seemed to confirm his theory that the Joanne in the picture was the Simone he’d been introduced to. His name was there, which was comforting. There were two others: Evan Delaney and Nathan Bruce-Allen. He returned everything and went online.

  Bruce-Allen was easy to find. He was a defence lawyer at a Sydney firm called Bruce-Allen & Beckeritch. According to the website, they handled anything from drink-driving charges and hearings with sporting tribunals to extra­dition proceedings and murder trials. He didn’t call, realised they weren’t going to tell him anything about a client, if that’s why their number was on Rennie’s phone.

  Evan Delaney was a little harder to locate but Max eventually found him mentioned in newspaper articles. He was a police detective, quoted in stories about grisly murders. With a bit more digging, he discovered that before rising to detective ranks, he’d been a country cop around New South Wales.

  He googled Rennie’s name, too: Hendelsen and variations with Katrina, Joanne, Donna and Anthony. Mostly he found websites in some Scandinavian language that didn’t help even when he hit translate. He signed up to a search engine for archived newspapers and magazines but she’d lived all over and after three hours of trundling through national dailies and regional rags, Rennie came home from work and he had nothing except a raft of unanswered questions and the same possibilities of undercover cop, witness protection and bad girl on the run.

  Max took up the crawling again, trying to figure it out, wondering if he’d already discovered the answers and couldn’t remember.

  He doubted she was an undercover cop, not because she wasn’t up to it. She spent her time working in a cafe in Haven Bay – what was there to investigate?

  Witness protection fitted. The contents of the zip lock bag might be the last scraps of her old self. Maybe whoever she was being protected from was still walking the streets or she doubted how well she could be concealed.

  On the run was his least favourite possibility. She could be hiding from the police and he didn’t want her involved in something that could send her to prison. On the other hand, if it was bad guys, bad enough that she needed to change her name and carry a gun, what could he do to protect her?

  He paused, panting and aching, apprehension and misgiving heaving in his chest. Had whatever she was running from found her? Had it found him, too?

  Was he meant to protect Rennie? Was that what he needed to do that he couldn’t remember?

  34

  Rennie took a roundabout route home, scanning the few cars that passed, thinking about her father and wondering what the hell to do. She only knew how to run. Staying was new territory.

  ‘Pass me some food,’ she told Hayden.

  He handed her half a sandwich and she chewed as she tried to pull thoughts together. If the caller asked for her address, he didn’t know where she lived – at least he didn’t ninety-odd minutes ago. But the question indicated more than that. If he’d been watching her in Haven Bay, following her home wouldn’t have been difficult. Which meant he probably hadn’t been here long, more than likely only a few days. Then how did Max get caught up in it?

  She’d worked Thursday, Friday and . . . Max had dropped into Skiffs for lunch on Saturday. She remembered now; there were markets at the park in the morning and everyone who visited the stalls seemed to want a coffee, too. She hadn’t had time to stop and talk and Max had gone to the kitchen to see Pav. Had he even eaten? She couldn’t recall him sitting at a table, only that she’d walked him out when he left. She’d kissed him goodbye on the footpath, a quick crush of lips before she hit the coffee machine again. Had her father been out there? Was that where he’d seen Max? Had he hung around hoping to find them again and struck it lucky when they turned up at the party?

  Rennie parked in the carport, anxious to get inside and feel the security of a gun in her hands, but a well-rehearsed caution slowed her up. She checked both sides of the house, glanced up and down the street from the porch, examined the base plate of the lock for tampering before she inserted the key and swung the door wide. It was cool and dim in the hallway, only silence coming from the rest of the house but she hesitated, years of suspicion and wariness telling her to take it slow.

  Hayden moved to walk around her and she stuck out an arm. ‘Wait,’ she murmured.

  ‘I need to go to the bathroom.’

  ‘Be a big boy and hold on.’

  He folded his arms but didn’t challenge the order.

  Moving quietly into the hall, she tipped her head into the living room. It was empty but a sense of intrusion tickled at the hairs on her neck. She let her eyes roam around the room: bay window, sofas, kitchen, table, glass at the back. The only sign of disturbance was on the lounge, the scatter cushions tossed to one side, the foam upholstery askew. She couldn’t remember what state they were in when they left and, not for the first time, she wished Hayden had picked another occasion to run away from his mother and throw himself at the furniture.

  She crossed the hall and as she stood in the bedroom doorway, fear scuttled up her spine. Both wardrobe doors were ajar. She wanted to charge across the room and grab the gun from the backpack but she kept the urge in check. She could be cornered over there. Or Hayden reached before she could get to him. She swung her head to him on the porch. If she took him with her, they could both be trapped in the bedroom before she could get her finger on the trigger.

  Sweep the house first, she told herself. Slipping back to the front entry, she picked up the doorstopper – a large and rusted nut and bolt Max had found in a mine somewhere – and gripped it by its narrower end. Not a bullet but it would drop a man if
she swung it well. Hayden lost the folded arms and stood a little more anxiously.

  ‘What is it?’ he asked.

  ‘Stand inside the door and don’t move,’ she told him.

  Blood hissed in her ears as she made her way quickly, noiselessly down the narrow corridor, listening as she went. She pushed Hayden’s door until it touched the wall. It was empty but the room looked like it’d been ransacked – how much he’d done himself, she couldn’t tell. The bathroom was clear. In the study, she ran her eyes over the cluttered space. Stuff had been shoved about: the mousepad, the keyboard, a pile of paper. The line of Post-Its along the shelf edge was broken in several places where notes had dropped to the tabletop. Two drawers in the filing cabinet were half open, the bottom one in the desk wasn’t quite shut.

  Breathing hard, trying to contain the urgency building in her, Rennie went to the back windows, checked the door – locked – scanned the yard. Nothing moved, nothing looked out of place.

  But someone had been here.

  It was her father. It had to be.

  After he’d called the cafe. Sometime in the last two hours.

  Rennie clenched her teeth and squeezed her eyes shut. The familiar hum of dread rose in volume but anger was louder. Fuck. Fuck him. He’d been in her house. Her home. His filthy hands had touched her belongings. Max’s things. Their lives.

  ‘Bastard.’

  ‘Who?’

  Hayden was at the far end of the room, not in the hallway where she’d told him to stay. There was no belligerence or cynicism from him now, just alarm and the vulnerability of an untried boy. Christ, he was a kid. He knew nothing about real danger or survival.

  She took off fast, almost jogging down the hall to the bedroom, reached the wardrobe in long strides, threw the doors wide and saw why they’d been ajar. Her pack wasn’t pushed to the back where she’d left it. It was in front of the drawers, tipped on its side, obstructing the opening. Rennie snatched it up, the zip gaping open and the weight telling her the full story. She upended it on the bed anyway and pushed her hands through the tangle of contents. It was gone.