by Anne Buist
She never got to find out how seriously he would have tried. Whether sex was even on his radar at that moment. Whether she would have reacted or would have been overwhelmed with the tiredness that was creeping up on her from nowhere. Part of her wondered if he would have tried at all. There was menace and threat, but there was also some kind of resignation. Perhaps that, in the end, he wasn’t alpha enough. That try as he might, Grandpa was always going to outdo him.
She never got to find out because they were both stopped in their tracks, frozen by a sound. A sound she didn’t recognise until it came again, louder, and with it a rush of flames and heat as the door to the boatshed exploded. This time, the aim was better.
60
I hit the water and it knocked the breath out of me. Then I was on the bottom of the lake tangled in weeds, my chest straining for air. The instinct for survival is strong so I must have fought first to make it to the surface, first thought of air and the need to breath, done so automatically and without question. Other things came later. There was no pain from the burns to my face and torso, no awareness of the blood I was losing from where some debris had punctured my abdominal wall. Instead, the first thing I recalled was not the boathouse on fire, not Mala’s shriek, but an intense rage. A murderous rage that I hadn’t felt since I was ten years old—wanting to kill Vesna for telling Wendell who my real father was, but instead becoming catatonic.
Then, my rage incapacitated me. For years the memory had been confined to nightmares and my sleepwalking searches. The white walls of the Bethlem adolescent unit and the studied caring of its staff were the only memories I retained of those three months. I was silent when I felt rage, hit out when I longed to be touched; refused to eat even when hungry.
I never recalled those nights when I was found in odd places, but I assumed in retrospect that I was trying to get home.
I never remember what I do when I sleepwalk.
‘The loss of his father,’ said the soft voices of those stupid enough to think they could see inside my head.
‘The shock of a new sister,’ said others.
Yet when they finally brought Mala in, she was the one thing that soothed me, that made sense of the furious torment inside me.
My mother knew; knew what I had heard. Knew what my father—Wendell—had discovered and why a man who was normally teetotal had drunk himself into oblivion and then tried to kill us both.
Now my rage felt targeted and controlled. But murderous all the same.
There was another explosion. I saw the debris coming towards me but was too slow. Everything went black.
61
The noise rang in her ears and Natalie felt herself flying through the air. Watching, as if in slow motion, the floorboards travelling with her.
The first sensation was relief as she hit the water: a balm for her overheated senses. But it was brief. She didn’t have an easy relationship with water, had always hated submerging her face even for a second. As a child it had made her panic.
She struggled to swim to the surface and take in the situation, aware that she was still in danger, uncertain if she had been hit by the debris. She thought the figure on the bank was Frank.
Another bang sent more flames across the lake and she reluctantly dived back under, reflecting that he couldn’t possibly have got to the edge so fast. When she surfaced both the figure and most of the boathouse had disappeared.
Gulping air, she heard debris falling around her. She dived back under but the reeds tangling around her legs impeded her movement. If Frank was there, finding him was not going to be easy. She looked around her, trying to judge how far he might have been flung, using the floating debris as a marker.
The chill of the water cleared the fuzziness in her head, but waves of exhaustion were pushing back against the adrenaline and fear that surged through her. She knew her body; knew it didn’t feel right. She thought of the tea. Had he drugged her? His wives had both had temazepam in their system. It wouldn’t affect her quite the same, though—with the amount of meds she used, two or three sleeping tablets wouldn’t have that much effect. But Frank knew she was on medication—had he calculated for it?
She took a deep breath and dived under the largest chunk of wood, but couldn’t stay down for long. Nothing. Further along she did the same, but she was struggling to stay under. The feeling was the same panic she felt when dreams of the Worm woke her.
If Frank was submerged, time was critical. She didn’t think about whether she wanted to save a killer or not. She fought back her fear of putting her head under water and took herself, for a moment, to the balcony of the stilt house, replayed her morning mindfulness. Smelled the salt in the air, heard the waves.
The next time she dived, she went deeper. And found Frank.
Swimming had always seemed a frustrating activity to Natalie: cold, wet; the release of explosive movement perennially muted. Pulling Frank out of the reeds only added to the frustration of working against the water itself. Her lungs felt like they were going to explode. It had been less than three minutes, though, she was sure. He appeared to be unconscious but there was still hope if she worked quickly.
Then she discovered it wasn’t the reeds pinning him. There was a large piece of the boathouse on his leg, too big to lift. But the lake floor was soft. She dug with one hand and pulled his leg with the other. On the third attempt it came free. She used her last remaining strength to pull him up with her to the surface.
She didn’t have to go far before she found that she was able to stand. Half-swimming, half-walking, she pulled herself and Frank through the reeds. Slipped; lost her footing. In the corner of her eye she caught sight of the figure she had seen earlier. He was wading into the water. There was a chance he wouldn’t notice her crawling out on her own; zero chance if she had to pull Frank out and try to revive him.
Frank was too heavy for her to do more than prop him on the edge of the lake. She thought she found a faint pulse, banged him hard on the chest anyway, then half-rolled him over to clear the lake debris from his mouth. He coughed. Coughed again, this time bringing up fluid. In the dark it was hard to know how much was lake water and how much was blood.
As she breathed slower and relaxed a little, she took a better look at him. Even in the shadows she could see that, while she might have saved him from drowning, he was far from being out of danger. The entire right side of his body was severely burnt; all that remained of his clothes was the right arm of his shirt. Natalie didn’t need light to know these were first-degree burns. The chances of him surviving were limited. And the scarring…She thought of how beautiful he had been and wondered if he would prefer to die.
Frank coughed again. He opened his eyes and saw her.
‘What…?’
‘There was an explosion.’ Natalie kept her voice low, eyes darting to the other side of the lake. ‘Someone tried to kill us.’
Frank’s breathing was shallow. ‘You okay?’
Natalie nodded. Enzymes and adrenaline would counter any sedation that was running around her system. She was starting to think more clearly. Whatever Frank had been planning, it didn’t include the explosion.
‘Jasper?’
She nodded again.
‘How am I doing?’
Did he catch the slight stillness before she spoke, or had he smelled the burnt skin? It was down to bone on his right hand. He would soon be feeling excruciating pain. But he might remain conscious, even if his body started to shut down. Burns like these could lead to a long, slow, agonising death.
‘Might take a while before you’re as pretty as you used to be.’
Frank tried to put a hand to his face but she stopped him.
‘I need to call an ambulance.’ She moved but didn’t get far, his left hand grabbing her wrist tightly.
‘First…’ he coughed. ‘I…’
‘Later Frank.’
He shook his head, eyes staring right into her. He had always had the ability to make her feel like the
only person in the room. Now she felt as if she was the only person in the world. She saw in that look that Frank knew he was going to die.
‘Did you drug me, Frank?’
It was hard to make sense of his expression in the shadows. He coughed.
‘Olanzapine,’ he said. ‘In the tea.’
A sedative antipsychotic. Vesna’s. She’d had it a couple of times and hated the fact that it made her want to eat constantly. But her body was well practised at metabolising these drugs. She was fighting it okay.
‘You thought it would kill me?’
There was a moment of hesitation but she couldn’t see his face well enough to try and read his intent. ‘No. There was going to be a motorbike accident.’
No one would have thought twice about olanzapine being in her system. Even Declan knew she was prone to self-medicating—he might have figured that if this was all she could get, she’d have made do, even though she hated it. Would he ever have wondered about where she had got it from? Unlikely. And she’d had suicidal thoughts not so long ago, ones she had mentioned recently. They’d all just think it was a sad tragedy. Put it down to her illness.
‘Why, Frank?’
He looked at her and it was hard to believe he was a cold calculating psychopath. But that was what had made him so successful. She’d picked narcissist, yes. But he’d never made the hair on the back of her neck rise, the one feeling that had never let her down before when she met someone without remorse. Only the subtle hints about him from Declan. That, and her feeling of being pulled in.
He’d fooled Alison and Reeva too, but it irked her all the same. They weren’t psychiatrists. And she’d been looking hard for it.
‘You wouldn’t let it go.’
She frowned. ‘My being here tonight?’
‘Wei told me you’d been at the computer.’
‘Why did Alison think you had Huntington’s, Frank?’
This was one bit that she hadn’t worked out.
‘My father.’
‘You know you don’t have it?’
There were now a number of people. She could pick out Drago and Senka standing at the other end of the lake. Mala, still in white, was standing near what remained of the boathouse shouting for her brother. The figure in black was nowhere to be seen.
Frank nodded. He was struggling to speak, shock beginning to set in. She felt for his pulse. Racing. His breath shallow. ‘She was wrong.’
His eyes started to glaze, voice fading.
‘Thought my father had tried to kill me because we were both…sick. A genetic illness. My mother’s…Alison thought there had been miscarriages because the baby was genetically abnormal, abnormal because of the gene from Wendell. I…let her think it. Told her he had tried to kill me at the same time as he killed himself.’
Let her? Or maybe even encouraged her. Because it was better than the truth. If Wendell had tried to kill Frank, Natalie knew it wasn’t because of the Huntington’s gene, but because he was a child of incest.
Denial of pregnancy. Vesna’s three pregnancies and three dead babies, also products of incest, killed or left to die under the boathouse. But Alison couldn’t ever have known that.
Natalie had wondered about a house with a pet cemetery but no pets. A pet cemetery with three crosses. ‘What did Alison think happened to the babies Frank?’
Frank coughed. It took a moment for him to breath evenly again. ‘That they died at birth.’
‘And were buried here? In the cemetery ?’
Frank started to speak then stopped. ‘The pet cemetery crosses, just for show. For my mother to mourn. She visits it often; Alison worked that out.’
And Alison must have misread Frank’s narcissism as fear of some familial disorder that had caused his mother to miscarry; found out about the Bethlem admission and Wendell’s murderous intent, sending her even further along the wrong trail of a genetic psychotic disorder. At least until the end, when the negative test result must have reassured her. Poor Alison; great with text books but here in the real world she’d added two and two to get five.
‘Alison didn’t understand you or your family, did she Frank?’
His grip on her tightened. ‘Antonije was a great man… flawed…but he saved me. Us.’
‘But Reeva didn’t think so did she? She found out the true story, didn’t she?’
She watched Frank fight his body, trying to survive. She saw Mala by the boathouse, stood up and yelled out. Frank should have his family by him. If he did pass out he might never regain consciousness.
‘Alison knew in the end, some of it. About Jasper. Reeva was…smart,’ Frank whispered. ‘She was going to tell. I couldn’t let that happen, you see.’
Natalie knelt back down as Mala started to run towards them around the edge of the lake.
‘You killed both of them, Frank? Reeva wasn’t psychotic, was she?’
‘She wouldn’t listen…’
‘She was going to leave you, right? And Alison too?’
Poor Alison, who had dreamed of a prestigious husband and a baby, and instead had married into a family with a warped and dangerous paternal legacy.
‘I tried to control my temper,’ said Frank, coughing again. ‘But…I don’t always know what I do at night.’
Sleepwalking.
Natalie had heard of it being used as a successful defence once before and Frank had the perfect history. Early childhood sleep problems, terrors and bedwetting as an indication of unresolved conflict. Then major childhood trauma in an accident that killed the father who had been intent on murdering him at the same time. Finally a documented psychiatric admission at ten. It would probably reveal that his suppressed rage and unresolved conflict came out in sleepwalking.
‘Do you remember doing it, Frank?’ Had his wives even known?
If he answered Natalie she didn’t hear it. Thunder, so loud it seemed to shake the ground, was followed by the largest and brightest lightning bolt she had ever witnessed. An arm stretched down so close that she half imagined it was the wrath of Zeus himself. In front of her, to the right of the house, where fireballs from the boathouse explosion had already taken on a life of their own, the bolt struck the huge tree that had supported the treehouse of Vesna’s childhood.
In its flash of illumination, Natalie realised Jasper was standing beside her. Staring at her and Frank. Natalie stiffened. Checked, in the dimmer light after the flash, that she hadn’t imagined him.
‘Back off Jasper,’ she said, standing slowly. ‘You got what you wanted with Frank. You don’t need another murder charge.’
Jasper walked towards her, stopping about a metre away. Close enough for her to size him up and know that if he chose to attack, she was history. ‘The whole fucking family should die.’
‘I’m not one of them, Jasper.’
‘Yeah?’ He gave a nasty laugh. ‘Not for want of trying, I’m told.’
They both turned towards a new sound—not as loud as the thunder but accompanied by, Natalie imagined, the sorrowful groan of the dying Malosevic legacy. Embers from the boathouse explosion had taken hold in the roof and trees around the main house, all now ablaze. The roof of the garage buckled and crackled as it crashed down onto the Bentley. And her Ducati.
Jasper might have intended just to kill her and Frank, but the fire was likely to do much worse—including destroying the inheritance he had his eye on.
She watched in horror as the flames laid claim to the remainder of the house. Drago, who had been heading towards her, saw it too. He yelled something to Senka and ran inside. To call the fire brigade, Natalie hoped.
Jasper was still gazing in disbelief, stunned at the unfolding demolition, when Mala arrived. She glanced briefly at them both before sinking down beside her brother. Jasper was looking around wildly, agitated. If he knew Frank was still alive he might still act. If it was a family vendetta perhaps Mala was more at risk than Natalie.
‘Mala?’ Jasper looked from the house to Natalie and then to Mala.
Natalie wondered if he was on drugs or if the sheer adrenaline had sent him over the edge. Now he looked around wildly, confused. Staring at the woman whose gown was now clinging to her, drenched in blood from Frank’s abdominal wound, the hem muddy and torn.
Mala turned away from Frank to meet Jasper’s eyes. ‘You should have gone,’ she said coldly, and turned back to her brother. Natalie wasn’t sure who she was speaking to.
She remembered how Jasper had looked at Eliza in the kitchen and made an instant assessment, hoping she’d guessed right. He was dependent on the women in his life. He presented as a bully, but underlying his anger was a fear of rejection.
‘Find your mother, Jasper,’ Natalie ordered. ‘She’ll know what to do.’
Jasper took another look at Mala; then, staring at Natalie, seemed to return to reality.
‘Hurry,’ said Natalie, keeping her voice even. ‘Before the police come.’
He left without saying anything. After a few metres he started to run.
Frank hadn’t moved.
‘I’m going to ring for an ambulance,’ Natalie told Mala. She thought about Vesna and yelled over her shoulder, ‘We need to get your mother.’
In her mind she was trying to work out how to get Frank to a car, if any had escaped the fire, and whether that would be quicker than an ambulance. The olanzapine wasn’t helping her think, but the adrenaline was working on her side. ‘Burn faster,’ she willed her enzymes, aware of the irony.
Drago was stuffing the contents of a cabinet into a bag. Gordana emerged from Frank’s study with another bag filled with stuff, Natalie felt sure, that would be deemed to have burnt with the house.
‘There’s no time,’ said Natalie. ‘Where’s Vesna?’
‘Don’t know.’
‘We need to get Vesna and Frank out.’
‘Let them all burn in hell,’ said Gordana defiantly.
Natalie found her mobile, still on the arm of the sofa, called triple zero and asked for an ambulance. Mentioned the fire before she hung up. She didn’t entirely trust Drago to have called the CFA.