by Jaye Ford
‘How much do you know about hacking into computers?’ she asked.
‘A bit.’ His expression was a little cagey. She figured that meant more than a bit.
Two k to the turn-off. If he was going to help, it had to be on her terms.
‘We have to talk, Hayden. Can we do it without an argument?’
A shrug.
It would have to do. ‘I made a mistake. I thought I knew what’d happened to Max and who’d broken into the house. It’s not what I thought but something’s going on. I don’t know what it is but I think the answer, or at least part of it, might be at the house. I’m going back there. I think you can help but you can only come if you promise to do what I tell you.’
‘Why?’
‘Because whoever broke into the house has a gun.’
‘How do you know?’
‘It was in my backpack and now it’s gone.’
‘You had a gun?’
‘Yes.’
He gave her a long, hard look. ‘Were you a cop, too?’
She raised an eyebrow, wondering what scenarios he’d invented for her. ‘No.’
‘Then why’ve you got a gun?’
‘People like me need a weapon. Are you going to do what I tell you?’ He looked like he wasn’t sure he wanted to go anywhere with her. ‘You don’t have to come. I can take you to a station and you can get a train to your grandparents’ house.’
‘No. I want to help find Dad.’
‘Then you do what I say.’
‘Okay. What’s at the house?’
‘The computer.’
*
Fresh panic had pushed Max hard, scrabbling in the darkness, calling out to Rennie, hoping and dreading she was down here with him. Had her past come after her? Had she lured violence to Haven Bay? Fear and anger felt the same.
He didn’t have the energy to sustain the pace, though, and now he could barely shuffle one knee in front of the other. He couldn’t save himself, let alone the woman he loved. Falling against the wall, clenching his fists around the dry sand under his hands, he felt a stone and threw it. Frustration, futility, a final fit of pique.
The tap was close. Very close – and different from the sound that came off the rock. Sharper, tinnier. He stretched out a hand, edging forwards. Fingertips, then his whole hand touched the cool, rough and smooth surface of a brick wall – and something stirred in his memory.
He used the brickwork to drag himself to his feet, patting high, low, wide. It was built into the tunnel, curved where it met the roof, mortar bulging like ooze between the rectangular blocks.
Squeezing his eyes tight, he tried to hold the memory his mind was catching on. What was it? He relaxed his face, fought for slow, even breaths, pleading with the memory to keep still long enough for him to get a hold. It was . . . in the dark, running, shouting.
‘James!’ Max was calling. He was a kid, the sound of his thudding feet and crazy laughter echoing around him. He had a torch in his hand but it didn’t work. It didn’t matter: he only had to go in a straight line. ‘James! Slow down!’ The tips of his fingers were stinging as he trailed them along the rock, making sure he didn’t run right into it.
A rock wall? The same one?
How many could there be?
He skidded around the corner, trotted through the doorway, climbing up and out into bright sunlight that hurt his eyes, flopping to the ground, laughing and panting, exhilarated by the speed and the darkness and the thrill.
‘You’re a fucking dickhead, Max.’ James was above him, sweating and mad.
‘What? It wasn’t me. The torch ran out of juice.’
‘Bullshit. You did it on purpose.’
Max hitched himself up. ‘What’s wrong? The torch has carked it before.’
‘We were bloody miles in.’ James was stalking about in front of him. ‘You think you’re so fucking clever. Fucking clever and fucking funny. And you’re not. You’re a dickhead and you can just piss off.’
They were both dickheads back then, hormone-addled teenage boys. Max remembered his adolescent ‘gotcha’ chuckle at realising his cousin was scared of the dark. And his pathetic shout as James was flouncing into the trees: ‘You piss off!’
Max shook his head. Ironic, wasn’t it, that Max was the one who ended up with the darkness phobia. And why was he remembering that? There was no brick wall in that memory. The torch had died, they’d . . .
Wait, another time. He saw it hovering behind his eyes, squinted to encourage it.
A blink of light. On then off.
‘Yeah, okay, hilarious, Max. You can you turn the bloody thing back on now.’ It was Pav.
‘No, mate, seriously. The torch is dead.’
‘Let me see it.’
‘You can see it all you like if you’ve got more batteries.’
Pav fumbled along Max’s arm before he found the lamp in his hand. Max listened to a couple of thumps, a metallic unscrewing and rescrewing, a bit of rattling and a stream of Polish.
‘You been eating many carrots lately?’ Max asked.
‘They’d need to be grown in nuclear waste.’
‘Ah . . . why?’
‘So our eyes would glow in the dark.’
‘Now there’s a good look. How about a phone instead?’ Max pulled his mobile from his back pocket, flipped it open and a dull, blue glow lit up his hand. ‘Better than nothing.’ He turned it around to show Pav and saw the brickwork behind his head in the gloom. Mortar oozing between cheap, red blocks of clay.
Like the ones under his hands.
Was he there? ‘Oh, fuck.’
He knew the spot. He and James would’ve run past it the day the torch failed. It was erected when the council got worried about insurance and kids getting lost. It still left several kilometres to explore – a long, long way when he had to do it on his hands and knees and in pain.
Sinking to his butt again, he leaned against the cool, lumpy surface and tried not to think about the distance. Told himself it was easy now, just a straight line to the exit.
Unless the council had put in more brick walls. It was years since he’d been down here. That day with Pav was probably the last time. He and Trish had only been in town a few months and Max was doing his, ‘Let me show you the bay’.
At the time, he thought Pav was a nice guy with a who-gives-a-shit attitude, a laugh like a clap of thunder and a cool accent. Later, he was a mate, the kind you need when your life turns to hell. He didn’t judge, didn’t tell him it would get better, didn’t try to fix anything. Just listened and nodded and said that’s the way it goes sometimes. Maybe it was something Polish or European, from a place where death and devastation had cut a regular swathe over the centuries, where people grew up understanding about horror and survival and picking through wreckage for the things you need to start over.
Max pushed himself to his hands and knees, found the wall to his left and started up again. Christ, it hurt. His palms and kneecaps were sore, his back ached and his arms trembled – and they were just the new pains on the list. He didn’t want to think about the others. They were telling him he was thirsty and sick and weak. Too weak. That he’d die if he didn’t find his way out soon. Maybe he’d die even if he did.
37
Rennie drove fast, anxious to get back and figure it out. This was new for her – going back instead of moving on, covering old ground instead of finding a new one. And it made her apprehensive, not knowing what was ahead and how to play it.
She worked through the fragments of the puzzle, laying them out in her head like a deck of cards. The blood in the car park, the thump on the back fence, the half-finished text message, the tampering in the glove box, the password protection, the phone calls to the cafe – shuffling and sifting them, unsure which facts were related to Max and which weren’t. Possibly all of
them, maybe none.
The blood worried her the most. There was a chance it wasn’t his, but if he was injured, what would the early summer heat do to him? It was coming up to forty-four hours since he’d been gone – almost two days – and it had been windy yesterday, the temperature in the high twenties this afternoon. She thought about blood loss, concussion, dehydration, infection, internal bleeding. How long would he last? Was he dead already?
Her mind kept coming back to the search of the house and the glove box. It had to be connected to Max’s disappearance.
Technically, it wasn’t a break-in. No locks or windows were broken. The metal plate on the front door wasn’t scratched. Did Max use his key? Had he given it to someone – or had someone taken it? She let that thought sit for a moment.
Yes, it was possible someone from out of town had assaulted Max in the car park, taken his key ring, waited around to go through the car and the house when no one was looking. She wanted it to be that, an unknown, unnamed person who’d picked Max for no other reason than he was in the dark car park on his own. But doubt niggled and experience made her uneasy.
It wasn’t a robbery, either, at least not the standard TV/stereo/computer kind. And who stole keys then just riffled through wardrobes and drawers? Not your average assailant after money and/or goods. Her father had done it like that. Reconnaissance, scare tactics, a sick private joke. But it wasn’t that. Someone was looking for something.
Did they know Max? Was that how he let them get close enough to take his keys?
Or did it happen another way? Were they lifted from him at Trish’s birthday celebration?
If that was how it worked, it was someone who Max knew, maybe someone they both knew. And that idea made her blood heat and her jaw tighten. That was her life, it didn’t belong here.
The sun was starting to drop and shadows were lengthening as she pulled into the carport. Her father was out of the picture but caution still felt appropriate. Someone had her semiautomatic pistol.
She told Hayden to wait in the car while she checked both sides of the house. It was to test him as much as it was for security and she hoped he’d disobey so she could be loud and clear about his boundaries.
When she got back, he’d opened the door but was still sitting inside. She told him to wait on the porch while she checked the house and made a quick, quiet inspection of the rooms. As far as she could tell, no one had been there since they’d left. She stood by the study door and waved Hayden in. He sat in front of the monitor and said, ‘What am I looking for?’
‘First up, we need to get into Max’s files. He put a password on them. It’s not the one we use for emails. James couldn’t get past it.’
‘Uncle James is crap on the computer.’
‘Well, let’s see how good you are.’
She stood behind him, eyeing the Post-Its still in place above the desk. She collected the ones that’d dropped to the table, wondering if they were selected or had fallen while the room was combed. The ones in her hand were as vague as the ones on the ledge. Scrawled words, numbers, dates, names. She scanned the shelf: phone books, business how-to’s, mining equipment manuals and chunky folders. Five folders in all and they weren’t lined up neatly.
The first held records of his renovations on the house. The next was a history of his medical expenses. She flipped quickly through the rest – personal loan records, child support, copies of Hayden’s school reports. Surprisingly orderly. Nothing of interest to anyone but Max.
She yanked on the drawer that was ajar in the filing cabinet. Hanging files, lots of them. She fingered urgently through the coloured tabs: Insurance, Legals, Warranties, Car – surprised at Max’s organisation, no idea why they’d been searched. What interest were they to anyone? She gritted her teeth, swore under her breath.
‘Did you find something?’ Hayden asked.
‘No.’ She slammed the drawer.
‘What?’
Exactly. What the hell was she looking for? How would she know if she found it? Or whether it’d been taken? She pushed her hands through her hair, saw the apprehension on Hayden’s face. ‘Keep working. I’m going to . . .’ kick something ‘. . . go out there.’
She stalked the living room, needing space to release some stress without being watched. Lack of sleep and food were taking their toll. Her eyes stung, her brain was fading and her stomach felt like it was caving in. She swung the fridge open, tore a handful of grapes from their stalks, pulled a bottle of something fizzy from the door. Two minutes later, the cold drink had woken her up and the sugar hit had cleared her head.
Okay, maybe she was going about it the wrong way. Whoever had been here had searched the study and the wardrobe. Maybe they’d looked other places. Figuring out where might tell her more. She turned her gaze to the back windows, watching the yard in the late afternoon light.
‘I’m going out to the studio,’ she called. ‘Don’t leave the house.’
She took a large frypan with her – as good a weapon as any at short notice and safer to wield than a knife in the close quarters of the studio. She jogged quickly across the lawn, pausing to listen before opening the door. It was dim inside but bright enough to see she was alone and that the big easel in the middle of the floor had been bumped off its usual spot. Not by much, maybe only the span of a large foot, but she was particular about it, liked it centred under the skylight and its new angle told her someone had been moving carelessly about.
Heart beating hard, she moved through the room, scanning for more signs of intrusion. Nothing among the stacked canvasses, the tins of paint, the bed. Nothing until she got to the back of the room, where Max’s overflow from the study was in cardboard document boxes against the wall. One stack of four was now two of two. A cardboard lid had been lifted and not replaced.
Rennie glanced over her shoulder to the door, unnerved, thinking it through. Whoever had come in had made a hurried path through the room, knocking the easel and going through the boxes. Or at least checking under the lids. Were they after paperwork or something that would fit in a document box? Whatever it was, it was about Max, not her.
She went back to the house and began a sweep through the rooms, wondering about the intruder’s state of mind as they’d moved about. A jar out of place on the old dresser, the sofa cushions untidy. It wasn’t angry, there was no destruction, barely more than a few items shifted about. Maybe it was casual, a stroll in someone else’s space, opening drawers, touching their stuff, like her father had done. Or was it hurried? A brief, rushed search, the fear of being found making them careless.
In Hayden’s room, the bed and floor were a jumble of blankets and clothes. It was a fair guess that was his doing. She doubted he’d considered folding anything or using a coathanger, which meant someone else had left the wardrobe door and top drawer in the dresser open. They held nothing of value – neither did the cupboards in the bathroom – but someone had thought they might.
In her own bedroom, she swung the wardrobe doors wide again and cast an eye over the disarray. Study, bedrooms, bathroom. Was it random or logical? Had they looked in the obvious places first or did they start in one spot and move systematically through the house?
And why look in every room? What could potentially be kept in all those places?
Not files or folders. Who kept those in a bathroom? Jewellery maybe, except they didn’t have any. Tissues, pens, condoms, candles. No. Something . . .
She took a wide-angle view of their wardrobe. Okay, don’t get specific.
Her eyes moved slowly up and down her sparse belongings, then over Max’s stuff. The underwear she’d folded and sorted had been shunted about in the drawer but it wasn’t socks and jocks being hunted down. Something that would fit under or among the clothing. She stared at the shelf above. What was there before?
She thought back to this morning when she’d tidied Max’s belongi
ngs, made some order out of his clutter, trying to find some trace of who he was. It was like that game she’d played as a kid – name every item on the table and you win. She’d been good at it, trained by her mother to take note of what she saw. So think.
She went through it in sections, closing her eyes and listing items in her mind then checking them off with what she saw in the wardrobe. His stuff on the shelf: all present. The paperwork: nothing she recalled was missing. The spilled contents of the ashtray: she’d forgotten the rubber bands. Had she left anything else out?
She went over it again: rubber bands, single cuff link, coins, paper clips, tacks. They were all there, all except . . .
The USB drive. Small, black, shiny. She’d found its plastic cap and replaced it.
She sifted through the stuff on his shelf, lifting and sliding and relocating until she’d covered the whole surface. Then she searched the carpet, among his shoes, around her own.
The USB drive wasn’t there.
Max rested more than he crawled. No keeping tabs with the wall, just shunting his hands forwards and dragging his knees in behind.
Pav held court in his memory now: the time they were down here, the deep roll of his laughter rebounding around the walls. Nights in his courtyard, the vodka and bourbon, Trish’s brief visits to deposit food and retrieve empty plates, not unhappy to have the house to herself. Good times, not the ones when Max had beaten himself up and drowned what was left.
And then Rennie was with them, making it four. Barbecues on Max’s new deck, cold nights gathered around the fire in the brazier, celebrating Rennie’s first paintings, toasting someone’s birthday with champagne at the water’s edge, Hayden’s party and Pav tossing a protesting, laughing teenager over his shoulder just because he’d dared him to.
‘Remember I told you once I’d done a desperate thing?’ Pav said.
They were sitting on Max’s deck. The living room lights were glowing on the timber, the studio windows in the yard ablaze. It wasn’t cold enough for the fire, not warm enough for T-shirts. When was it?