Small Spaces

by Sarah Epstein

  I spin around to face the dog cage on the floor behind me. Mallory stirs in her sleep, her pale cheek pressed up against the wire bars. Another piece of this sickening puzzle slots into place: Mallory’s been held captive in this cellar before. I’ve seen her notebook. I’ve seen her memories.

  “This is where he kept her,” I whisper. I see Ally watching me from the corner of my eye. I march over to her. “Why did Patrick Jonas abduct Mallory from the carnival?”

  Ally turns her face to the ceiling and groans. “We don’t have time for this.”

  “You’ve dodged explanations for nine years, Ally. You’d better start talking right now.”

  Ally gives me a dark look loaded with the kind of contempt she usually reserves for my father. She nods at the knife on the floor between us. “You cut and I’ll talk.”

  40

  THEN

  20 DECEMBER 2016

  TRANSCRIPT FROM THE OFFICE OF DR INGRID BALLANTINE, PHD CHILD AND ADOLESCENT PSYCHIATRY, NEWCASTLE CHILDREN’S CLINIC

  PATIENT: NATASHA CARMODY, 17 YEARS OLD

  NC: I read a quote the other day.

  IB: A quote?

  NC: Somebody reblogged it on Tumblr.

  IB: Okay.

  NC: Ever since then the words have stuck in my head.

  IB: What is the quote?

  NC: “A bird sitting on a tree is never afraid of the branch breaking, because its trust is not on the branch but on its own wings.”

  IB: I see. What do you think it means?

  NC: Well, it’s a self-belief thing, isn’t it?

  IB: Go on.

  NC: Like, am I relying too much on others? Do I have enough faith in my own abilities to save myself?

  IB: And do you?

  NC: Well, that’s the thing. We’ll have to wait until the branch breaks to find out.

  41

  NOW

  I pick up the breadknife and resume my assault on the plastic cord. It’s looped so many times it’s like hacking through inch-thick rope. Mallory stirs in her cage again and the sight of her frail body stuffed inside there fuels the fire within me. It’s so degrading. I wish I could take her place, now and nine years ago.

  My aunt hisses as I yank the cord a little rougher than I need to. “You picked PJ up from prison?” I ask her.

  “About three months ago. How do you know that?”

  “Figured it out, no thanks to you. He’s an ice dealer?”

  “An ice addict.”

  I glance up. “I read a newspaper article about all that stuff they found in his unit. He was charged with trafficking.”

  Ally stares at the knife and stays silent.

  “Wait, you were the anonymous tip that got him caught?”

  “I had to do something! He was using way too much and getting violent. Things were out of control.”

  “If he was an addict and not a dealer, where did so much ice come from?”

  I manage to sever the last loop of cord on one side of the pipe. Ally yanks her arm free while I move to her other side. She loosens the cord around her free wrist using her teeth.

  “Ally?” I say.

  She shoots me an impatient look. “I planted my supply at his place and called the cops.”

  “What?”

  “It was mine, okay? My business. PJ helped me. Or helped himself, as it turns out.”

  The phone calls and deliveries, the locked rooms I wasn’t allowed into. Ally had drugs in there? Wads of cash? Jesus. I was an eight year old in her care. My parents trusted her. I trusted her.

  “I’ve never sold it since. Just weed now. A few pills.” She glances at my knife paused mid-cut and rolls her eyes at my shocked face. “Oh, spare me the sanctimonious crap. I get enough of that from my brother.”

  You supply people with poison, I want to say. You practically put it in their veins. Ally criticises my father because he’s a conservative tie-wearing desk jockey, yet she’s made a living off other people’s misery. I wonder if she can even hear herself. All that yoga and organic eating … what a joke.

  “PJ was using all the time,” she says. “He was losing weight and his skin was grey. Even his gums were grey – he’d lost teeth. His body was rotting from the inside.” She shifts on the floor using her free hand to rub the spot between her shoulderblades. I’m hit with a whiff of pungent body odour. “I knew he had to be taking from our stash. The numbers didn’t add up. Carl – our supplier – he expected payment. We owed him. I had to lock doors. I had to start doing all of our deliveries myself. I couldn’t risk PJ blowing through any more of our stuff.”

  “So, you let a drug addict come and go as he pleased while I was staying here?”

  “I told him to keep away,” Ally snaps, “but he was hanging around outside and sneaking in at night.” She juts her chin towards the windows above the bookcase. “He was getting in and out through the windows.”

  I think of the guestroom I stayed in, Sparrow perched on the window seat. He didn’t flutter in like a little bird wanting to befriend a lonely eight-year-old girl. He broke in like the drug-addled criminal he was.

  “Why would you let him anywhere near me?”

  “I didn’t. He stumbled across you in the downstairs bedroom that second night you stayed. He came up with a plan to extort money from my brother to pay back the drug debt.”

  “What do you–?”

  “Then he screwed it all up. He kept trying to get you down here to the cellar. I mean, it’s insane – this house is the first place the cops would search for you.”

  I can’t possibly have heard her right. “The two of you were going to fake my abduction? Is this some kind of joke?”

  “I mean, you saw PJ’s face! He had to know you’d tell the cops everything afterwards. About this cellar, about where he’d been keeping you. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out …” She glances at me, wincing.

  “Figure out what?”

  She swallows and looks away. “PJ wasn’t planning on giving you back once we’d received the money.”

  Her words can’t possibly apply to me.

  “I got scared,” she says, her bloodshot eyes pleading. “I told him I wouldn’t go through with it.”

  Bile rises in the back of my throat. “Ally …”

  “So I pulled the plug and told him to leave. He went and did it anyway.” She nods in Mallory’s direction. “He took that Fisher girl instead of you.”

  I roll onto my haunches, dazed, the knife slipping from my hand. It barely registers when Ally snatches it up and continues cutting herself free.

  “He only told me afterwards,” she says, her face pink with effort. “He brought me down here and showed me the cage. I told him he had to return her but he was too wasted to see sense. I had to put an end to it myself.”

  “Mallory …”

  “PJ kept her sedated. She’d wake up and he’d feed her more food laced with something and she’d be out again like a light.”

  “How did she end up at Barrington Tops?”

  Ally sighs. “I had to wait until after your dad came to collect you before I could get her out of this cellar and into my truck.”

  Realisation stuns me: Mallory was held captive right underneath my feet. And then my own aunt discarded her in the bush like a bag of garbage. I now understand why Mallory stiffened last night when I gave her a hug before bed. Ally’s cardigan isn’t the only thing infused with her sweet, smoky scent. It’s all over her truck.

  “You dumped her in the national park?” I say, breathless. “She was six years old …”

  Ally continues sawing at the cord, pretending she hasn’t heard me.

  I think about how Sparrow tried to lure me into the cellar, almost drowning me so I’d black out and he could drag me down here. He nearly had me that day at the carnival, hidden in a costume trunk, ready to load into a car and whisk me away.

  Would I have been crammed into this cage instead of Mallory? Would I have ended up in the national park, starving and alone, tearing ou
t chunks of my own hair?

  Glancing at Mallory’s blonde locks spilling out of the wire cage, a memory flashes into my head of Sparrow splayed across the back verandah, rambling about games and magic.

  I can turn a fistful of hair into a pot of gold.

  My breath catches. I touch a hand to the Ziploc bag in my pocket with the words 11 BORONIA AVE scrawled across it.

  “Sparrow pulled out her hair,” I say. I don’t even need Ally’s confirmation. “For the ransom.”

  It was supposed to be my hair. It was supposed to be me.

  Ally grunts as she works on the last few loops of cord tethering her left wrist to the pipe. “He was going to send it to her parents to prove he really had her.”

  She says it in such an offhand way it nearly unravels me. Mallory and I were nothing but currency to a couple of debt-ridden drug dealers.

  I tug at the door of the dog cage, yanking so hard it rattles the hinges. The padlock tumbles back and forth, unscathed and steadfast.

  “Where’s the key?” I bark over my shoulder.

  Ally remains focused on freeing herself.

  “Where’s the key?” My hands are shaking so much I want to march over there and shake Ally instead.

  Her head snaps up. “There is no key! Don’t you get it? We’re not supposed to get out of here.”

  Crawling around the cage, I hunt for a weak spot. “Why me and Mallory? We didn’t dob him in to the cops!”

  Ally makes the final cut through her binds and the cord falls away. “He’s setting something up with guys he met inside,” she says. “Some meth lab down in Victoria. They told him to get his shit in order and sit tight until he gets the call.”

  “What the hell does that mean?”

  She tosses the knife aside and uses the pipe to pull herself upright. Her legs are weak and almost fail her. “Tie up loose ends, Tash,” she says. “Which is why we need to get out of here.”

  It hits me: we are the loose ends. The remaining witnesses to his former crimes.

  “But he got out of prison months ago,” I say. “Why hasn’t he done something before now?”

  Ally grimaces in her second attempt to stand. “He had to track her down for starters.” She gestures dismissively at Mallory. “He’s been following you around. Looking for opportunities.”

  Opportunities for what?

  Shuddering, I recall the day I spotted him at Watergardens, the sightings of Ally’s ute around Port Bellamy, that feeling of being followed on my way to the Fishers’ party. Ally led Sparrow to me the day he was released from prison, and then I unwittingly led him to Mallory just like I did at the carnival when we were kids. Mallory was always safe at home; there were no opportunities for him to get to her.

  Until last night when I let her come here to comfort me.

  “But I’ve been alone so many times. He could have grabbed me,” I say, thinking about my mornings at the beach, the hours after I argued with Rachael at the pier. “He attacked my friend Rachael instead of me.” It takes me a split second to realise I just referred to Rachael as my friend.

  “The girl with the phone? Yeah. He heard her that night threatening you about some voice recording. It would implicate him in the abduction so he had to get rid of it.”

  “He didn’t get rid of it,” I say. “I found the phone in my bag yesterday.”

  “There was nothing on it anyway.”

  “So why give it to me? He could throw it away, smash it to pieces.”

  “Nowhere near as fun as messing with your head, is it? How’d you like all those dead sparrows?”

  I’m stunned for a moment and Ally shakes her head.

  “Don’t you get it, Tash?” she says. “You’re his little plaything. You were back then and you are again now. He gets off on making you afraid.”

  I swallow hard, embarrassed. If that’s true then I’ve been giving him everything he wants. “How do you know?”

  She snorts. “You kidding me? The drugs make him ramble; he never shuts up. I’ve been down here for weeks, Tash! You think I’m not asking questions, searching for weaknesses, trying to talk my way out of here?”

  “If it’s been weeks, why hasn’t he tried to abduct me before now? Or Mallory–”

  “Too soon.” Ally staggers past me. “Too messy. He had to get you both here at Willow Creek.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s less suspicious to get rid of us this way than three separate disappearances.”

  “What way?” I scoff. “Triple homicide?”

  “House fire,” Ally says. “Tragic accident.”

  “What?”

  “It’s so damned neat. There’s no way he came up with this by himself.”

  “I don’t–”

  “It’s an insurance scam,” she says, like she can’t believe I’m not getting it. “Bastard sweet-talked me from prison, and the whole time he was plotting revenge.”

  I groan. Patrick Jonas is the “somebody else” Ally made beneficiary of her estate instead of my dad.

  “His new associates will claim he moved straight to Victoria after being released,” Ally says. “So he won’t even be in the same state when this house burns down with us inside.”

  “It’ll still be suspicious,” I say, gesturing towards Mallory. “Don’t you think fire investigators will be suss about a body in a cage?”

  Ally hobbles towards the door. “Who cares? You think PJ’s thinking clearly? When you brought her home last night he hit the jackpot – all three under the same roof. He’s scrambling around town trying to get what he needs to put his plan into action today.”

  She turns her back on me and starts shuffling away.

  “Wait! You need to help me with Mallory!”

  She ignores me.

  “Help me!” I plead. “It will take both of us to carry her out of here. You owe her that much!”

  Ally pauses underneath the windows, tilting her head. I think I might’ve actually got through to her but she shooshes me, glancing up. “You hear that? It’s the sound of my truck on Cowpasture Road.” She throws me a stricken look. “He’s coming. We need to leave now.”

  Flicking the breadknife aside, I grope for the candlestick behind me on the floor. “Help me with her then!”

  “If you’re smart you’ll leave with me right now.”

  “Not without Mallory.” I whack the candlestick against the padlock, sending a tremor through the wire cage.

  “I’ll run to the neighbours,” Ally says. “I’ll send the police.”

  “They won’t make it in time if he sets this place on fire!”

  I look over my shoulder and realise I’m talking to thin air. I don’t quite believe it until I hear Ally’s feet thumping up the cellar steps.

  “At least throw me my phone,” I call after her. “It’s on the kitchen table. Ally.” I hear the front door being thrown open, then the screen door clattering closed. Ally’s doing what she does best: looking after number one.

  I thump at the padlock again and again, chips of candlestick flying off in all directions. The jarring sound rouses Mallory awake. She blinks at me, groggy and confused, raising a palm to touch the cage.

  “Mallory.” I shove my hand through a gap in the wire to grip her fingers. “It’s okay. You’re okay. I’m going to get you out of here.”

  She tries to sit up as I tug on the cage’s door again. I’ve managed to bend some of the wire. Not enough for it to give way, though.

  “Sparrow did this,” I tell her. “He’s real. He came back here for us.”

  Mallory spots the rosewood wardrobe and her eyes widen. I can only imagine the panic coursing through her, the familiarity of this cruel scenario.

  Moving in front of her, I cut off her view of the wardrobe. “I’m going to get you out of this, okay? I will not leave you here alone.”

  Her eyes lock with mine and she nods, trying to hide the tremble in her lips. I’m about to ask her if she can kick the cage door from the inside when I’m interrupte
d by the sound of squealing brakes. The ute has pulled up alongside the house. I glance at the windows above the bookcase; from this angle I can see one is cracked open an inch.

  Mallory whimpers. I bring a finger to my lips and move silently across the room. Can I sprint upstairs for my phone and make it back down here with enough time to barricade the door? I can’t get Mallory out, but I can stop Sparrow from getting in. I just need to keep him at bay long enough for police to arrive.

  From here, all I can see through the windows are a few tall weeds growing outside at ground level. I place my foot on the lowest shelf, assessing it for sturdiness. Mallory rattles her hand against the cage, shaking her head for me not to climb.

  “It’s okay,” I whisper, reaching for a high shelf with my hand. “I’m just going to lock the window.”

  I freeze at the sound of a car door slamming. Footsteps crunch across gravel and I strain to determine if they’re heading towards me or the verandah. I begin climbing again just as legs appear right outside the window – grubby cargo pants, steel-capped boots – and I drop from the bookcase to crouch low against the floor.

  The window swings up and out, a red plastic jerry can shoved at one corner to prop it open. Another one is dumped beside it before the black boots move away from the window.

  I don’t need to see the spillage down the side of the jerry cans to know they are full – I can already smell the petrol from here. I glance around me at all the wooden furniture, realising how effectively it will work as kindling. Mallory rattles the cage to gain my attention, and I crawl to the wire door and tug at the hinges. They’re buckling a little, yet still holding fast. She shoves a hand through the wire and grips my wrist, making me look at her.

  “I know,” I say, my voice strained. “I know.”

  She squeezes my hand again, her mouth open wide. Her throat lurches like she’s gagging. It takes me a second to realise she’s attempting to speak.

  Her mouth allows one desperate wisp of a syllable, her haunted eyes expressing perfectly what she’s trying to communicate.

  Hide.

  42

  THEN

  I hide.