by Kris Pearson
Anton said the men would be working inside number seventeen on Tuesday, but when she came home, she found a big chunk of the side fence missing, the old timber palings stacked up beside her bedroom, and a door rather roughly installed through the outside wall of Gran’s old spare bedroom/site office.
“I knew you wouldn’t want everyone tramping through the house,” Anton said, as if he’d done her a favor.
Privately she agreed. If extra people had to access the site office, she had no wish to see them or their muddy boots, but she wasn’t about to look grateful for his thoughtfulness.
By Wednesday knockoff time, the old terracotta roof tiles had disappeared from seventeen. She presumed that meant the timber flooring had been retrieved. The best windows had certainly gone. She kept well clear, not wanting too vivid a picture of number fifteen’s eventual fate. If it ever came to that, of course...
On Thursday morning, an evil yellow digger arrived on a truck and proceeded to bash its bucket into what remained. Seventeen put up no fight at all. There was bare land when she arrived home from work that day. A bright orange netting fence strung with ‘Keep Out—Construction Site’ notices had been erected across the road frontage.
And by then, she was almost used to him. He was always up and dressed by the time she woke, so that took care of any awkwardness in the mornings. She’d find him in one of his superb suits if he was heading into the city; in jeans if he was aiming to be on site next door.
His evenings were a mystery to her—he never mentioned Claire, and he spent hours tapping away on his laptop at the kitchen table. And being charming to her if she was home. Her guard was dropping fast.
By ten on Thursday night, she was in bed with a new magazine, guiltily keeping half an eye on her larger TV. She’d pushed the latch safely across.
She’d survived four whole days living with a man...
Sometime after midnight, a noise scratched at the edges of her sleep. An eerie crackling. Snapping and popping, somewhere far too close.
She woke enough to register the flickering orange light through her curtains must be flames. The stink of smoke confirmed it a nanosecond later.
Number seventeen was on fire!
Her sleep-addled brain took a little longer to tell her number seventeen no longer existed. And at that exact moment, the glass in her window cracked and exploded with the heat, and the hungry flames roared up her curtains and rushed across the ceiling.
Get out, get out, get out!
She lurched from her bed and staggered across the room, blinded by the invading smoke. She groped in the murk, cannoned into the end of the unaccustomed larger bed, and almost pitched to the floor. Somehow, she stayed upright, grabbing, grasping, feeling things cascade from the edge of her lowboy as her frantic fingers scrabbled along in the eerie light. Her throat closed up with fear. The blood beat a furious tattoo there, pounding, choking, stifling. Her heart thumped as loud and fast as a kettledrum. Sudden tears welled from her eyes, stinging in the acrid air. Please God, where was the door?
At last the handle. She wrenched it down, but the door refused to budge. Stuck fast. Immovable. A hateful barrier to her freedom.
The latch. The latch.
She fumbled and found it. Wrenched at the metal, but her hands were drenched with perspiration from the stomach-curdling fear pouring through her. No chance of a proper grip on the bolt. Her desperate fingers couldn’t slide it aside.
Panic flooded every vein. “Anton! Anton! Fire!”
Please God—make him hear.
She screamed and pounded, and tugged again on the slippery bolt. Time raced by.
“Anton! Help me!”
She coughed and gagged, and in the nick of time an old school-day rule blossomed in her smoke drugged mind. ‘Bend low for air’ it reminded her.
She dropped to the floor, gasping for oxygen, really choking now. At least it was a little better down there. A fraction cooler. Slightly lighter. She lay down and pounded her heels on the door like a two year old in full desperate tantrum mode.
“Anton!” she screamed, again and again. “Help me!”
If he yelled anything back, she didn’t hear him, but suddenly the door shuddered against her heels, and she sensed he’d thrown his weight against it. The sound of splitting timber cracked out over the voracious roaring of the flames.
Jetta scrambled sideways and buried her head in her hands, praying he’d be successful, praying he’d save her. The door gave several more almighty shakes and then crashed open against her legs.
Long arms reached down and dragged her into the hallway, dumping her on the hard timber floor like a sack of garbage. Then his huge shadow reached out and slammed the door shut again as he tried to confine the fire to one room.
Thank God, thank God, she thought as he swept her up against him in a crushing hug. His strength felt wonderful all around her, but far too soon he pushed her into the site office, wrenched a chair away from under the door handle, flung the hastily installed door wide to the air, and threw her out into the night.
“Get the garden hose on it if you can,” he yelled. “I’ll get my phone.” He slammed the door again, leaving her wheezing and petrified for his safety.
“Vandalism?” Anton asked. “Arson?”
“Or maybe someone flicked a cigarette butt away and didn’t look where it landed,” one of the firemen said. “Could have been smoldering for hours. Not a great idea stacking timber right against the house.”
Anton bowed his head, sick with guilt. He’d asked young Jack to clear it away, but there it had stayed. He’d had too much else to do to insist on moving it.
After the brigade and concerned neighbors departed, he stood with Jetta in the darkness and inspected her wrecked and sodden room. She shivered fiercely now the adrenaline rush had passed.
“I’m indecent,” she groaned, staring down at her once-white broderie nightgown. It clung damply over her breasts, and she folded her arms in a useless attempt to hide how cold she was.
“They didn’t mind a bit.”
She managed a small brave smile at that. “Hopefully they were too busy. Anyway, you’re not looking too smart yourself.”
He knew that. His dark blue pajama pants stuck wetly to his legs. Cinders and dirt striped his naked chest and arms, even though he’d tried to swipe himself clean. Blood seeped from a stinging graze on one shoulder. It ached like a bitch from the repeated pounding it had taken against the door.
“Bedtime, babes—you’re shaking with shock and cold.”
“I’ll make up a bed on the sofa.”
“You must be joking—I don’t think either of us is on for that tonight,” he said, sweeping her into his arms, heedless of his pain.
“Put me down, Anton!” she squeaked, face half buried against him as he cradled her against his chest.
He strode along the hall towards his room.
“Got you right where I want you now,” he teased, adjusting his grip as she tried to struggle free.
“Let me go,” she screamed.
“Not a hope. You need a comfortable bed and a warm man wrapped around you.”
“Nooooo!” she howled. “Put me down. Please, Anton, please...”
She shook harder now if that was possible—a trembling little wreck of a girl with tears running down her face and dark eyes wide with terror. Obviously deeply in shock. He couldn’t begin to imagine how bad it must have been for her, trapped in that room.
“No!” she choked, struggling against him.
His arms wrapped around her more securely. “You need to get warm,” he insisted.
“I need to get down.”
“Let me warm you up. You’re shivering enough to shake apart.”
He turned and bumped his bedroom door open with his hip, then carried her in, collapsed down onto the bed, pulled her against him, and somehow got the duvet over them both.
“Pleeeeeease!” she begged. And then she started to scream as though the hounds of hell wer
e after her.
“Shush,” he urged, trying to cover her mouth to quieten her, but she snapped at his hand like a frenzied animal.
She continued to wriggle and swear, and he pinned her down by sliding his legs around hers in a scissors action.
“Shhhhh...stay still, stay still,” he groaned, one arm clamped around her waist, pulling her back against the warmth of his chest, the other cradling her thrashing head and wrapping around to confine her arm. “I’ve got you safe, Jetta. Calm down.”
It was minutes before she gave in and stopped struggling—long hellish minutes for his injured shoulder. She continued to tremble. Should he call an ambulance and get her properly checked over?
“Any better now?” he whispered, dropping a soft kiss on her nape. He’d wanted to kiss that tender curve since the moment he’d seen her—feisty, dusty, and no matter how bad an idea it had been.
“Don’t, Uncle Graham,” she begged. “Don’t make me.”
What was she talking about? Deep in shock and half out of her mind by the sound of it. “Who’s Uncle Graham?” he asked.
“Don’t make me do it.”
“Make you do what?”
“Let me go. I don’t want to do it.”
“You don’t have to do anything. What is it you don’t want to do?
She dissolved into sobs again. “The trousers thing,” she whispered in a broken voice.
Suspicion—hot and sick and horrible—flooded through him. “Who’s Uncle Graham?” he demanded. “Jetta—it’s me, Anton. I’ve got you safe. Who the hell is Uncle Graham?”
Some of that registered with her because the trembling eased down a notch.
“Anton?” she asked in a voice filled with wonder. She twisted in his arms and examined his face. Hers was fright-white and tear stained, and now daubed with blood from the graze on his shoulder.
“Me,” he said, loosening his death grip so he could stroke her face and hair. “Only me. Only Anton. Making you warm after you got so cold.”
He watched as she closed her eyes for a few seconds like a trusting child. Her sooty lashes lay against porcelain skin, but not for long. Her eyes shot wide open again, full of queries.
“And I’m in your bed?”
“You’re in my bed. Safe and warm. Relax and get some sleep—you’ll need it for tomorrow’s cleanup.”
“I can’t stay in bed with you!” She began to struggle again, and he dragged her back against his chest and wrapped his arms around her. He hurt, he shook with exhaustion, and the rush of the fire had deserted him, leaving him short on patience and desperate for rest.
“Of course you can stay in bed with me,” he snapped. “Where else are you going to sleep? I’m not bloody Uncle Graham, whoever he might be. Tell me who he is and what he did, and maybe we can sort this out.”
She stayed silent for a very long time, and finally sighed—a long soft resigned exhalation that almost broke his heart. “He was my Dad’s brother,” she said in a cracked whisper. “My Daddy’s only brother.”
She seemed disinclined to say more, but Anton sensed she was still wide awake and sorely troubled.
He buried his face in her hair, barely smelling the smoke because he was awash with it too. “Tell me,” he murmured against her ear.
“I can’t. I really can’t. It was a long time ago...”
“And it’s not going away, is it? He’s still got you spooked. Tell me, and maybe we can make him go.”
He waited, teeth clenched to stop them chattering together, and finally she relaxed against him by the tiniest fraction. Even that miniscule movement had him mentally cheering.
“Your Dad’s only brother,” he prompted softly.
“Younger than Daddy. A lot younger. Eighteen I think.”
She clammed up again, and Anton waited, suspicious of what would follow, and hoping beyond hope he was wrong. “So he was just a teenager, really?”
“A big boy,” she said with sudden fierce derision. “Always eating takeaways. A fat big boy whose breath stank like onions from the burgers.”
“And he came to visit your Dad?”
A tremor rippled right through her and he cuddled her closer. “It’s okay—he’s not here,” he soothed, laying his lips against her damp temple, wanting to kiss the hurt away, and knowing that was the least likely solution to her problem.
“He’s in Canada.”
“A long way from New Zealand then.”
“They made him go far away, after what he did. ‘Right on the other side of the world’, Daddy said.”
“And he’s still there?”
She froze in his embrace, and he cursed his stupidity. If her comfort was in having the bastard half a world away, then that’s where she needed to think he was.
“I don’t know. I thought so. He never came back to our house.”
“So he’s in Canada.” He put finality and confirmation into the words and she sighed in a sort of acceptance. Anton breathed out slowly.
“When I was nine,” she suddenly began matter-of-factly, “My parents used to go to ballroom dancing every week.”
To Anton, this had the flavor of a prepared speech. Had she been coached to say those words—for a court statement perhaps? He closed his eyes at that thought.
“And Uncle Graham looked after me,” she continued.
“Did he live with you?”
“No—he lived with Nanny Rivers. She was old.” She huffed out an indignant breath. “He was supposed to look after me,” she amended. “And in the beginning it was okay. We played poker.”
Anton’s eyes shot open. “At nine?”
“He taught me. I could do it. I used to win money off him.”
She began to tremble again, violent shivers that had him wrapping his arms even tighter. “One night instead of winning money he started taking our clothes off instead.”
“Strip poker.”
“And when I didn’t want to take my panties off, he said I could keep them on but he had to put his hand inside them.”
“Bastard!” Anton hissed, having no trouble imagining the scene. Jetta at nine would have been tiny. The uncle at eighteen, a fearsome slob.
“When he was supposed to take his off,” she continued, still in that strangely automatic tone, “he said he didn’t want to either, and I had to put my hands inside them.”
She fell silent for several minutes.
“And rub him,” she eventually added. A shudder of revulsion rippled through her.
Anton closed his eyes again, trying not to see it, but powerless to keep the disgusting image out of his brain.
“How long did this go on for?” he whispered.
Her only answer was a shrug, her shoulder smooth against his chest.
He had to ask; had to know. “Did he do worse than touch you?”
“Only with his fingers,” Jetta said, surprising him by burrowing back against him, her warm curvy butt in danger of making contact right where neither he nor she needed it.
He eased himself away with caution—covering his movement with a yawn and a stretch.
“Boring you, am I?” she queried in a voice much closer to her own.
“You poor kid.”
“Damaged goods. Had counseling of course. Did the self defense thing and read the books they gave me once I was a bit older.”
“And it hasn’t quite done the trick.”
“You could say that.”
He swallowed, and wondered if any sort of apology would ever be adequate. “Sorry I manhandled you earlier. Didn’t know. Couldn’t know, I suppose. You’re such a feisty little spitfire I didn’t suspect anything like this.”
She laughed against his shoulder. “So I’m getting away with it, am I?”
“Fooled me. I had you down for a confident, street-savvy party girl.”
That seemed to please her quite a lot because this time her chuckle was audible.
“So how did it end?” he couldn’t help asking.
“Hmmm,” she
muttered—and said no more until he’d almost given up hope of a reply.
“When you’re a kid, you don’t know anything,” she finally murmured. “And I had no brothers, so I knew even less. I knew the theory of what boys had down there, but I hadn’t seen one since I was maybe five, and I certainly hadn’t seen the grown up version.”
Another big shudder shook her small body. Anton expected she’d keep him waiting again, but she continued almost immediately.
“Dad didn’t amble around the place without his clothes. As I said, Granny Rivers was quite old, so I guess she brought him up to keep his gear on. Shame she didn’t do as well with Graham.”
“We’re all different,” Anton said. “When I was a kid I loved skinny-dipping, but that didn’t last. Well—I still enjoyed it, but not in company.”
“Shy, Anton?” she needled. “I don’t believe it.”
“Not these days,” he said, grinning in the dark. “But when I hit my teens, yes. You know—body going haywire.”
“Oh, don’t I just. My body was...thoroughly confused. Still is.”
She sighed again. Her breath wafted warmly across his arm, raising the hairs in a tickling caress. Then, as embarrassment got the better of her, she ducked her face down under the duvet as though the shelter might give her the courage to continue, and said in a muffled woebegone voice, “The end was…a total farce. Utterly terrifying. Very noisy. Mom forgot to swap her glasses for her contacts and they came back for them. They walked right in on us through the open French doors.”
CHAPTER NINE
She began to sob again. “It was awful,” she gasped. “Graham somehow shot his load right at that instant. God knows how he managed to. He sounded like he was in agony. Dad yelled obscenities I’d never heard before. Mom screamed her head off.”
Anton let loose a splutter of laughter at the imagined scene, and Jetta popped her head up again. “No, don’t—it was terrible,” she said, giggling through her tears. “I was so, so frightened. Mostly because I thought I’d hurt him. I could feel all this runny blood...”
“Ah. Not blood?”
“Not blood. But I didn’t know that at the time, so I started to howl, thinking it was all my fault. He’d always finished himself off, so I’d been spared that at least.”