Indigo Storm

by Fleur McDonald

  ‘This is my fault. I’m so sorry.’

  The sound of thunder and rain on the tin roof woke Reen in the early hours of the morning.

  She smiled as she rolled over to look at the ceiling. A storm before the cook-off would be a wonderful thing. The air might get sticky and humid, but the land would be washed clean and look its best.

  She put her hands behind her head and shut her eyes, listening to the sweet sound, and, through the open window, breathing in the vapour created by rain falling on the earth.

  The phone rang.

  Reen froze for a moment—no one should be ringing at this hour.

  Something was wrong.

  ‘Hello?’ She couldn’t recognise the voice of the person on the other end of the line or comprehend what they were saying. ‘I’m sorry, but can you calm down? I can’t understand you.’ She slowly swung her legs over the edge of the bed and got up, switching on the light.

  The sobbing continued but now she could make out some of the words.

  ‘Heidi . . . Storm . . . Not in their rooms . . .’

  ‘Chris?’ Her voice went up an octave. ‘Chris, are you telling me the girls are missing?’

  There was a strangled, ‘Yes.’

  ‘We’re coming,’ she answered quickly.

  Putting down the phone, she immediately picked it up again and rang Mark Patterson. He was another SES volunteer, and his station was only a fifteen-minute drive from the national park, so he would be able to get there quicker than those to the north of Blinman. ‘Heidi and Tilly are missing at the park,’ she said without preamble. ‘We need to get a search team together.’

  ‘On it,’ he said, obviously immediately as wide awake as she was, and they quickly talked through what to do next.

  Reen shrugged into her dressing gown and limped across the street to the units at the back of her store, where Dave and Kim were staying.

  Dave answered her banging on the door in seconds, instantly on high alert.

  ‘Tilly and Heidi are missing in the park,’ she said.

  ‘Okay. Call the ambulances from Hawker and the SES.’

  ‘Already got Mark on it,’ she said.

  ‘I’ll be right there.’

  Reen hated her body so much when it prevented her from helping out as much she wanted. In years gone by, she would have been part of the search team, but there was no way she could be now. It made her feel so damn useless.

  ‘Eliza,’ she muttered, and went to wake her. Eliza was back in Blinman to help prepare for the cook-off.

  As she gave Eliza the news, Reen saw tears fill her friend’s eyes. Eliza immediately headed to the cupboard and pulled out some clothes. ‘I’ll help look too,’ she said.

  ‘Why don’t you stay here and help me make sandwiches? We’ll have to take them to the park for the volunteers.’

  Eliza stopped what she was doing and looked at Reen. ‘I can’t, I’m sorry. I need to be out there. Kim will help, won’t she?’

  ‘Eliza, you can’t go. You don’t have any experience with this kind of thing. Something could happen to you. The best thing you can do is to help me make these sandwiches and we’ll take them to the park as soon as we’ve finished. You’ll be there when they bring the girls home.

  ‘You’ve got to remember, those kids are resourceful little buggers. I’ve got no doubt they’ll be holed up in a cave, or hiding under a bush or something. They know that park better than anyone. Even Chris.’

  Eliza closed her eyes. ‘Okay.’

  The rain finally began to ease and the thunder sounded like it was moving on.

  Heidi was shaking from both fear and the cold. Rain had kept blowing into the cave, and even though they had huddled as far back inside it as they could, they were still getting wet.

  ‘You okay, Tilly?’ she asked in a shaky voice.

  ‘Yeah. Can we go home now?’

  Heidi crawled to the front of the cave and looked out. It was pitch black now, with no moon to guide them.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ she answered. ‘It’s too dark. We’ll just have to wait until sunrise.’

  While the rain and thunder had abated, the wind had come up and the way it was blowing on her wet clothes made her feel even colder. At least, though, they’d had something they could use for a barrier. The thing she’d found had turned out to be one of several foam boxes, and she’d been able to use them for some shelter.

  ‘Funny how it can be hot one moment and so cold the next, isn’t it?’ she commented to Tilly, who didn’t answer.

  Heidi put her arm around her sister and they sat there, staring out into the darkness.

  There didn’t really seem to be anything else to say, although Heidi’s brain was churning with thoughts. Aside from the storm, there was her discovery of the foam boxes. She’d managed to open one by pulling off the sticky tape it was sealed with. Inside, she’d found a wad of cash, just as a lightning strike lit up the cave. Heidi hadn’t counted it but it looked like a lot of money.

  She heard noises outside the cave and went back to look out.

  There were lights outside.

  ‘Help!’ she cried. ‘Tilly, come and yell! There’s people out here.’

  Together, they screamed ‘Help!’ but not a single light turned in their direction. Heidi’s throat became raw from shrieking but she still couldn’t make herself heard. ‘Tilly,’ she said, turning to her sister, ‘I want you to stay here. I can get down the hill quicker by myself, and get someone to come and help us. You’ll be okay here by yourself?’

  ‘I’ll be okay,’ Tilly said in her bravest voice. ‘You’ve got to be careful too.’

  ‘I will be.’

  Heidi scrambled out of the cave and kept sliding down the steepest part of the hill until her foot hit a rock. Carefully, she held her hands out in front of her and took a small step. Slow and steady. Heidi knew she couldn’t afford to fall over, and maybe break something.

  She walked deliberately towards the lights, checking before each step. The lights were a lot further away than they had looked from the cave.

  She kept calling out with every step she took, hoping someone would hear her. The rain had made the creek run, and the rush of the water, not the rain or the wind, was drowning out her voice now.

  ‘Heidi?’

  She heard the voice quite close to her. ‘Help!’ she said, but her throat closed over and nothing came out.

  ‘Heidi?’

  It was a man’s voice, but she didn’t know whose it was. Summoning all her courage, she took a deep breath and yelled, ‘Over here!’

  The man let out a shout: ‘Heidi! I can hear you! Keep yelling, sweetie, I’ll walk towards your voice.’

  Heidi yelled and yelled, until finally a bright beam from a flashlight came into view. Within seconds, she was in her Uncle Jacob’s arms.

  Chapter 40

  Heidi and Tilly sat in the lounge room of their house, blankets wrapped around their shoulders, sipping hot chocolate. Eliza was sitting opposite them, overcome with relief that they hadn’t been hurt.

  ‘It wasn’t that scary, Dad,’ Heidi said, trying to reassure her father.

  ‘It was for me,’ he answered, his hand on her shoulder. ‘Don’t ever do anything like that again. Promise me? I can’t lose you two.’

  ‘Sorry, Dad,’ Tilly said quietly. ‘We were just so hot. Then the thunder started, and we thought we’d watch the lightning from the cave.’

  Eliza noticed that Chris seemed to freeze as Tilly mentioned the cave. He squatted down and looked her in the eye. ‘Is that where you hid? In the cave at the top of the bluff?’

  ‘Yeah. I thought we wouldn’t get wet there.’

  ‘That was a really good idea,’ Eliza said, leaning forward with a gentle smile. ‘You guys are so wise about the bush, you did all the right things.’

  Now Dave came into the room and dropped onto the floor in front of the sisters. ‘Well, you gave everyone a nasty scare, didn’t you?’

  ‘We’re sorry,
’ Tilly said.

  ‘Not to worry, all’s well that ends well. I’ve got to put in a bit of a report, though, so I need to ask you both some questions. Are you up to it?’

  Heidi looked at him indignantly. ‘We’re fine!’ she answered. ‘We didn’t really need you all to come looking for us. We would have been all right to get home by ourselves when it had got light. We just couldn’t walk anywhere in the dark.’

  ‘And I am so glad you didn’t,’ Dave answered with a grin. ‘It would have caused a whole new lot of headaches if you’d actually got lost.’

  ‘We wouldn’t have got lost,’ Heidi said scornfully. ‘It was just cold. And dark.’

  ‘And wet,’ Tilly added.

  ‘It certainly was,’ Dave replied. ‘And noisy too, with all the thunder and lightning. Why did you go out in the first place?’

  ‘I was hot,’ Tilly answered. ‘And we thought it would be cooler out on the flats, so we walked there.’

  ‘Then the storm came,’ Heidi put in, ‘and we were too far from the house to get back in time to miss it, so we went up to the cave, so we could watch the lightning.’

  ‘Did you have a torch?’ Dave asked.

  Eliza was listening to what the girls were saying, but couldn’t take her eyes off Chris. He was pale and clammy, his hands were shaking, and he kept wiping sweat from his forehead, even though it was now quite cool after the rain.

  The shock of losing the girls tonight had really taken its toll on him.

  ‘No, we just went by the moonlight,’ Heidi answered.

  ‘True bushmen,’ Dave said. ‘Oh—excuse me—bushwomen.’

  Heidi giggled.

  ‘The cave was okay until the rain started to really hammer down,’ she continued. ‘We got wet because it was coming in the entrance. We used the foam boxes up there as a barrier, but they didn’t really stop us from getting cold. The worst of everything was the cold.’

  Dave stopped writing and looked up. ‘Foam boxes?’ he asked. ‘Can you tell me a bit about them?’

  Heidi screwed up her face as she thought. ‘I think there were about eight or nine. I just set them up across the cave, to try and break the wind and rain up a bit.’

  ‘That was really clever,’ Dave said.

  Heidi looked down at the mug she held in her hand. ‘I found something else,’ she said. ‘In the boxes.’

  Everyone was silent, waiting for her to tell them what it was.

  ‘There’s a lot of money up there too.’

  The sun was rising, bathing the clean countryside in gold and pink. Normally, Dave would stop to absorb such a spectacle, but not today.

  ‘You need to show me how to get to this cave,’ he said to Chris when they were out of earshot of the girls. ‘I know you don’t want to leave them, but it’ll only take an hour or so. I can handle everything once you show me how to get there.’

  Chris rubbed his hands over his tired eyes. ‘I’m not sure if we can get to it, with all the water in the creek.’

  ‘Let’s go and have a look. I need to get up there as soon as I can.’

  Chris was silent for a long time. ‘The girls . . .’ he finally said.

  ‘Come on, mate, this won’t take long.’

  ‘Sure. Sure. Okay. Just let me tell them where I’m going.’

  Chris led the way in his vehicle. Dave knew that all he wanted to do was get back to his girls—hell, if it was him, he’d never let them out of his sight again! But Dave needed to investigate why there were foam boxes and a wad of cash where poaching could be taking place.

  Chris stopped, and Dave pulled up next to him and got out, collecting his backpack with the equipment he would need for the investigation.

  ‘It’s a bit of a climb,’ Chris said, pointing up the stony hill. ‘Come on, I’ll show you the easiest way.’

  He set off at a quick pace. Following in Chris’s sure-footed, quick footsteps was difficult. Dave stumbled a few times, rocks tumbling beneath his feet. ‘Shit!’ he said as it happened again and he went down on one knee.

  Chris didn’t say anything in response, just kept striding up the hill.

  When Dave finally got to the top, he had to stop for a moment to catch his breath. He took out his water bottle and gulped from it and, even though the weather wasn’t hot yet, he wiped sweat from his face. In the silence of the landscape, flies buzzed around his face and he swatted them away impatiently. He looked around and caught a glimpse of the cave entrance.

  As it was partially hidden by bushes, his immediate impression was that anyone who wanted to utilise this cave would need to have known about it in advance. No one would just stumble across it.

  ‘How did you know about this place, Chris?’ Dave asked, looking around him. Not wanting to be distracted by the beauty of the area, he tried to block out the galahs and their morning screeching, as well as the drops of rain glistening on the ends of the branches.

  ‘The bloke who had the job before me told me about it,’ he answered. ‘Don’t come up here very often. No reason to, really.’

  ‘It’s an amazing place.’

  ‘It sure is.’ Chris kicked at the ground and Dave knew he was impatient to get home.

  ‘Righto, off you go. Go back to your girls. I’ll check everything out from here.’

  The ranger turned to go, but Dave hadn’t finished. ‘Chris, hug them extra tight and don’t worry. I’ll get the bastard who’s doing this poaching. Okay?’

  ‘Okay,’ he answered. Dave watched as he went down the hill, got into his ute and drove off.

  Then he turned back to the job at hand. Walking up to the entrance of the cave, he stood looking in. Bushes brushed against his jeans, instantly soaking them. All the flora was saturated from its overnight drenching.

  ‘So, what do we have in here?’ he asked himself, as he got down onto his hands and knees and crawled a little further in. Being so tall, it was difficult for him to manoeuvre into small spaces.

  He could see the foam boxes towards the back and was in a quandary. He wanted to get in there and examine them, but he’d be disturbing a crime scene if he did that. He’d been hoping he could just drag the boxes out and look at them.

  ‘Bugger—I’ll have to get in there and take photos,’ he muttered to himself, getting out the camera. Pulling on latex gloves, he went about examining the scene and deciding which angles he wanted to take photos from. He took many photos, from as many angles as he could, then got out his fingerprint kit.

  Brushing over a foam esky, he picked up a few fingerprints. He guessed some were the girls’, but, with any luck, he would find others that were on the police database.

  It wouldn’t be so easy, though, Dave was sure. It never was.

  Pulling the lids off the boxes, he looked inside each one.

  In the third one, he found the cash. Carefully, he photographed it in situ before opening the bundle and counting it out. When he finished, he looked out across the landscape, a chill running through him.

  There was fifteen thousand dollars here.

  To him, this screamed a high-tech and well organised operation. He assumed that this money was the cut for the person who collected the wildlife.

  Thinking out loud, he said: ‘Okay, one to catch and supply, one to courier, one to sell, and someone running the whole operation. That’s a lot of fingers in one pie. Fifteen grand for the supplier is a bloody lot of money.’

  Or was the money for the supplier? Was it the takings from a few deliveries that just happened to be stored up here?

  Dave didn’t think so.

  Packaging the money up, he put it back in the box and wrote a memo to get all the notes dusted for fingerprints as well. He didn’t have time to do that while he was out in the bush.

  The sun had risen fully and he could begin to feel the sting of the heat. Humidity rose from the soil and, once again, he started to perspire. Now, too, the flies had competition, as mosquitoes buzzed around Dave’s ears, making things very uncomfortable. He swatted at them
, but with no effect. He decided it would be easier to tape off the cave, cart the boxes to his vehicle and look at everything when he was back in Blinman.

  The boxes were large and difficult to carry, so he only took one at a time to the car. As he picked up the third one, he noticed something in the corner of the lid.

  He put the box down and looked a little closer.

  Handwriting.

  Grabbing his camera from the ground where he’d left it, he focused on the corner and took a couple of shots.

  ‘“Frill-necked lizards”,’ he read out loud.

  On the way back to the camping grounds, Dave detoured to the place where he had hidden the cameras. Flicking open the catch on the camera, he ejected the SD card and replaced it with a new one. Then he did the same with the other cameras he had placed around the area.

  He didn’t think he’d find anything on them. But now that his boss had okayed the use of them, he wasn’t going to let them go to waste.

  Back in his vehicle, with the air conditioner running, he flicked the replay switch on his camera, just to have a quick glance at what the first SD card had captured. The cameras only started to record when motion was detected, and he expected to see kangaroos, birds and foxes.

  What he did see made him stop and rewind. He watched the shadowy, grainy images on the small screen four times before he was sure of what he’d seen. Lowering the camera, he stared out the window, trying to piece everything together.

  He put the car into gear and drove to the camping grounds.

  Chapter 41

  The morning of the cook-off dawned clear and warm. Eliza wandered down the main street feeling very satisfied with life. She also had a bubble of excitement in her chest. After the stress of the girls disappearing, yesterday evening had ended up being rather wonderful.

  She had gone in search of Jacob, who she knew would be over at the large fire pit they had lit the day before. ‘We need coals to distribute to everyone first thing in the morning,’ Jacob had told her.