Her explanation dried at the back of her throat, as she realised Bradbury was looking at the window, at a scuff mark left by Jake’s shoe.
‘You were alone in here?’ he asked Sadie.
Now was her chance. Her knees sagged with relief. She could tell them about Jake, about everything. Let the police sort it out. She could just return home, resume her quiet life. So why was she already nodding?
‘Yes, just me. Here I am, alone.’
She didn’t trust them, she realised. She couldn’t believe all the stuff Jake had said, but she’d seen things the police wouldn’t understand. Chances were Frobisher’s killer was skulking about the bottom of the harbour.
Bradbury pointed at the scuff mark. ‘Someone’s gone out the window.’
‘The murderer, maybe?’ Sadie said.
Bradbury turned sharply. He glared at her for what felt like a minute, while she tried to hold her hands still.
‘Get her out of here,’ he said to Williams, who was already reaching for Sadie’s shoulder.
Detectives arrived in well-pressed suits, followed by men in white coveralls. Bradbury compared notes, then came to join Sadie and Constable Williams in the police car. Sadie waited for the inquisition to recommence. But when Bradbury slammed the driver’s door behind him, he didn’t say anything. Williams asked for Sadie’s address and they drove her home in silence. It was only as the constable came around to open Sadie’s door for her that Bradbury looked up in the rear-view.
‘Just know this,’ he said. ‘I’m watching you. If you’re connected to this, then I’m gonna bring you in.’
Sadie nodded, but she was barely listening. The drive home had passed in a daze.
Going into the house, she heard the front door click closed behind her and heard her grandmother call from the kitchen, but it felt like all of these things were happening somewhere else. She stood at the foot of her bed and she fell face first onto the doona. She had been holding herself together until this moment, she realised. Telling herself she just needed to make it this far.
Fall apart when you’re safe, when you’re alone.
She didn’t cry. She stared at the wall. At the harbour waters offering a welcome. Stared at Jake breaking bones on the quay. At the hole in Frobisher’s head. And at blue and red lights flashing in a puddle.
9
THE QUIET LIFE
When Tom came in the next day, Sadie was pressed into the far corner of her bed, wearing her striped cotton pyjamas, even though it was late afternoon. She had The Odyssey open in front of her, but was staring out the window.
‘Hey.’ Tom closed the door behind him. ‘You okay?’
Sadie barely looked across at him. She had been expecting him, she realised. She had wanted him to call. But now he was here she wasn’t sure what she wanted to say to him.
‘I heard what happened,’ he said, ‘with the police.’
‘Nothing happened. They gave me a lift home, that’s all. Grandpa made a big fuss over nothing.’
‘Kim said you’d been arrested.’
‘Kim says walnuts give you warts.’
Half a minute passed.
‘So?’ he prompted.
‘I don’t want to talk about it.’
‘Okay.’ Tom nodded and glanced about the room for a clue. The furniture was Sadie’s grandparents, but everything else was Sadie—an eclectic collection of books, op-shop knick-knacks, CDs and, in the corner of the room, a shop mannequin wearing one of her mother’s dresses and a straw hat. On the walls, there was a large, dog-eared photo of Bob Dylan, another of Nick Cave, and tour posters for The Triffids and Okkervil River.
‘Is that it?’ Sadie was staring at him, her arms tightly folded.
‘What?’
‘You’re not going to try a bit harder?’
‘Harder?’
‘Tom, if a girl tells you she doesn’t want to talk about something, it means she wants you to make more of an effort asking.’
Tom bit his lip and sank his shoulders.
‘Was it something to do with the old bloke?’
Sadie flinched and then nodded. ‘Kind of. But it’s complicated.’
‘And that boy at the house? Jake?’
A funny sort of smile bent Sadie’s lips. She really didn’t want to be talking about Jake. ‘Kind of.’
‘Have you been hanging out with him?’ The question burst from him so quickly that both of them winced.
‘The lawyer is dead.’
‘What?’
‘The lawyer who arranged everything. The one who gave me the house. We went to his office and he was dead. Shot.’
‘No way. You saw him?’
‘Yeah. The thing is, that’s not all. There were these, well, I don’t know what they were. These people. In the harbour.’
‘At the harbour?’
‘No. In the harbour—they came out of the water. At least, I think they did. The whole thing’s seriously weird. It was like I’d been drugged. But Jake fought them.’
‘He got into a fight?’
‘Yeah. Well, no. The thing is, they sort of attacked me. Oh, look, it sounds so stupid. I don’t know exactly what happened, but he fought them off.’
‘Why did they attack you?’
‘I don’t know. I think they wanted him. I thought he was going to kill them right there.’
‘So he’s a psycho? You’re not going to see him again?’ Tom wanted this to be a statement.
‘I don’t know. But it’s all connected with him, it has to be. Whoever killed Mr Frobisher, they did it because of him.’
‘Yeah, but it’s not your problem, is it?’
‘Isn’t it? I feel like it is. Aren’t you curious?’
Tom shrugged. ‘It’s nothing to do with me.’
Sadie pulled her knees up and looked out the window. There was no breeze, but Tom felt something shift in the room. That conversation was over and he couldn’t help feeling he’d somehow disappointed her. He studied his shoes, twice tweaking the laces. ‘So, are you grounded or what?’
‘Who said I was grounded?’
‘Guess.’
‘Grandpa was pretty angry,’ Sadie admitted. ‘But Nan talked him down. We’ve sort of agreed that I won’t go anywhere until the weekend. You know, to show I can be trusted, something like that.’
‘Right.’
Tom glanced again around the room. It suddenly seemed smaller and uncomfortably intimate. Sometimes he would give anything to be alone with Sadie, but other times the air pulled tight. Today, more than ever, he felt a new distance between them. Something kept pulling her away, into unexpected silences.
Still, by the time he left, she seemed more like her old self.
‘We’ll go for a swim tomorrow,’ she said at the screen door.
‘Okay, cool.’ He turned to go, but she put out a hand, just fleetingly, to his elbow, and it was enough to turn him back.
‘Thanks for coming around,’ she said.
Tom stood a moment longer on the doormat. There was eye contact and this long, electric second opened before him. Magnetism was at work, he could feel it. He was going to kiss her. Maybe just a peck, maybe just a friendly kiss, maybe more. It felt right. The other night would have been bad timing. But now, now—
‘Okay, bye then!’
Sadie snapped the screen door shut and disappeared away up the hall.
They were friends. It was nothing.
It was a twenty-minute walk home, but Tom was in no hurry. He was already an hour late for dinner.
Around the corner from Sadie’s, he left the street and took himself down the sandy laneways that cut through the leafy residential blocks. It was his favourite way to walk. Through loose palings and wire fencing, he coul
d see into expansive backyards and through living room windows. Swimming pools, tennis courts, lawns large enough for a footy match. As he walked, he rehearsed conversations he knew he would never have. He talked, Sadie listened; he held her chin and they leaned towards each other.
He was lost in an imagined scene, when he heard the beast. A loud snort and a grunt. He stopped and looked behind him. Without streetlights or moonlight it was hard to see anything, but he could discern a dark shape there, a large dog maybe, snuffling and snorting in the dirt.
Each step felt clumsy as he moved on, as if his feet were in more of a hurry than the rest of him. He heard the animal bound after him. He stopped again, and turned. It was less than ten metres away, too large and too heavy to be a dog. Horns jutted from the sides of its broad, dark head. It was a bull, a large, black bull.
He didn’t run, not straight away. He remembered warnings about running from bulls. If anything, he should run at it, yelling furiously to scare it away. Right now, that didn’t feel like a good idea.
Tom backed away, facing the beast. It stayed where it was, pawing the ground, its fierce breath shifting dirt and dry grass. Tom tripped, but managed to keep himself upright. When he had put twenty metres between himself and the animal, he turned and ran for his life.
The beast gave chase. Tom was a good runner, but he could hear it gaining on him. He emerged from the laneway onto a well-lit, narrow street. He considered turning left or right, but ended up running straight on, into the next lane. He was looking for a fence he could jump, but they were all too high.
Tom realised the bull was no longer following. It had stopped at the end of the previous lane. He could see it shuffling about in the shadows.
He laughed, with relief. The creature was scared of the light. He should tell someone, but who? He was about to call triple zero when he saw the bull emerge, hesitant, into the light.
Tom almost dropped the phone.
It was walking on its hind legs.
No, he realised, it was running on its hind legs. Running towards him, each stride covering two metres.
Tom ran, terror burning at the back of his throat. Too soon, he could hear the beast, whatever it was, close behind him. He could smell its rancid, sweaty animalism. Then he could feel its hot breath on his back and then—
Tom dived left, and the beast charged on, barely missing him. He felt it pass, carried on by its own momentum, a solid mass of muscle sucking the hot night air behind it.
There was a second laneway here, running towards the Cottesloe town centre. Tom raised himself on grazed knees, limped a bit and then sprinted on. He had barely started before he heard the beast behind him, its hooves tearing chunks from the dry earth.
The lights of the shopping centre car park were at the lane’s end, a hundred metres ahead of him. Tom pushed himself, ignoring his screaming muscles. Each breath felt like broken glass in his chest, but all that mattered was he was in front. There was the finish line! There was light, and safety!
His right foot went down and collided with the concrete lid of a storm drain. His ankle twisted and his knee gave way. The beast was on him. A new, sharp pain scalded his left side, just beneath the ribs, and he was lifted up and thrown into the air, crashing through the brittle branches of an overhanging peppermint tree.
He slammed against cold concrete, and sprawled in the car park beside a badly parked Volvo. The voices of Saturday shoppers and the rattle of supermarket trolleys surrounded him—so ordinary, so reassuring. He was back in the light.
He clutched at his side with a grazed hand and found his T-shirt wet. The beast had gored him. He could hear someone nearby calling an ambulance.
Fighting for breath, he stared at the laneway’s end, where the dark path was marked off by three steel bollards. The beast was there, lurking in the patchy night, out of reach of the bright car-park lights. It had the body of a man—matted with dark hair, but human—and a rotting chamois was tied on a rope around its waist, as some small gesture of modesty. But the head! The horns! It might have been a mask, but Tom knew it wasn’t. He had glimpsed the spittle on those black lips, had seen snot and steam jet from those huge nostrils.
Tom wasn’t sure he believed in God. But now, here in a supermarket car park, he was sure he had just met the devil.
10
STRANGE CURRENTS
That night, Sadie dreamed of Frobisher. There was no escaping him. Several times she woke, frightened by every shadow on her ceiling, but then fell back into the same nightmare. He was dead, staring at nothing. Sometimes he sat up and spoke to her.
‘I blame you,’ he said.
Jake was there too, running away. She wanted to tear at him, to pull him back, to shout at him, to bite him, to slap him—but also to embrace him and cling to him as if he was the single still point in this madness. Strange currents stirred in her blood.
Sometime after midnight, Sadie was woken by heavy breathing. There was an animal outside her window. The night was absolutely still. The dry heat wrapped itself around her as she took careful steps to the flyscreen.
The moon was high and almost full, and the garden looked sharp in the silver light. A figure was rustling in the shadows under the fig tree. Sadie thought about calling for her grandpa—whatever had torn a hole in his fence had come back—but she wanted to see it for herself.
She had fallen asleep reading, clutching The Odyssey to her chest. It was still in her hand now, raised like a weapon. She lowered herself onto the sofa beneath the window and then slowly lifted her head to peer out. Two large paws slapped down on the window sill and she jerked back in fright.
‘Kingsley, get down.’
The bulldog dropped back down between lavender bushes, then sighed and swaggered over to his master’s feet. Jake stepped out into the moonlight, sniffing at a large, ripe fig.
‘The fruit of paradise,’ he said. ‘I might take a few for breakfast, if your parents don’t mind. Fresh figs, yoghurt, Turkish coffee. I got quite a taste for it back in Constantinople.’
‘My parents won’t mind,’ Sadie told him, wishing he’d lower his voice. ‘They’re dead.’
‘Oh.’ Jake stopped, his lips pursed in concern. ‘Who killed them?’
It wasn’t the question Sadie was expecting. ‘Nobody. It was an accident. Six years ago.’
Jake nodded. ‘Good.’
‘Good?’
‘I was worried you’d had an extremely bad day. Are you all right?’
‘It was six years ago.’
‘Forgive me, I meant with what happened yesterday. Did the police give you a hard time?’
‘Not really. No thanks to you.’
Jake nodded again, resigned to any blame, if not actually apologetic. He was looking at the book Sadie was still wielding. She let it drop. ‘The thing is, I owe you an explanation or two. I wondered if you might like a midnight stroll.’
‘I can’t. I’m grounded.’
‘I thought you said your parents were dead.’
‘You think I was making that up? I live with my grandparents.’
‘I see.’ He jerked a thumb towards Kingsley. ‘I brought a chaperone, if you’re worried about your virtue.’
Sadie wasn’t worried about her virtue, but about her grandpa. She’d had a taste of his disappointment and didn’t want another. But there were things she needed to talk to Jake about. Things she could talk about with nobody else.
‘I keep seeing him lying there. Frobisher.’
‘You’ve never seen death before?’
Again, Jake’s blunt response surprised her. ‘No, I don’t think so. I don’t remember. I hope not.’ She moved closer to the flyscreen. ‘It wasn’t just some random walking in off the street, was it. It’s something to do with you and that box of yours.’
‘Everything centres o
n the relic. We need to find it before anyone else does. Before more people die.’
‘You don’t seem upset. Frobisher was your friend, wasn’t he? He was murdered.’
‘Frobisher’s dead. There’s seven billion people out there who aren’t. What might happen to them worries me more.’
Sadie knew what she should do. She should close the window, return to bed and forget all about Jake. But she also knew what she had to do. Her fingertips, pressed at the flywire, were tingling with static. Tom was wrong, this was her problem. ‘These explanations of yours—I want the truth.’
Jake put his hand on his heart. ‘The whole truth, et cetera.’
‘Give me five minutes to pull some clothes on.’
Jake and Kingsley waited at the corner of her street.
‘May I ask you a question?’ he asked when Sadie arrived.
‘You may. But you need to stop talking like that. It makes you sound like a dork.’
‘I see. Why is there a hole in your back fence?’
‘Oh, that. Funny, it was probably a mate of yours.’
‘What was?’
‘There was something in the garden, the other night. I thought it was some kind of animal, but then it looked more like a man. Except—and if you laugh at this I’m going straight back to bed—except he had horns.’
Jake didn’t laugh.
‘You don’t believe me,’ Sadie said, ‘after all the garbage you expect me to swallow.’
Crossing the road outside the closed corner shop, she noticed Jake seemed to be studying her. She adjusted her dress, in case it was tucked into her undies.
‘You were reading The Odyssey,’ he said. ‘That’s not normal bedtime reading, is it?’
At first, Sadie thought she would say nothing. She never talked about these things, not with Tom, not with anyone. But there was safety with a stranger, there was space, so she answered. ‘My dad was a professor of ancient history.’
Jake nodded and, perhaps, understood more than she wanted him to.
‘That creature you saw,’ he said, as they reached the next corner. ‘It was the Minotaur.’
Fire in the Sea Page 6
