As they finished their coffee, the light breeze which had kept them cool dropped away. The atmosphere became perfectly still.
Nan, noticing, had seen the signs before. ‘Come on, we’d best go inside now.’
Jessica frowned, puzzled by the change in Nan. She sensed a certain tension which was uncharacteristic of the woman. ‘Why? It’s lovely out here.’
‘There’s a change on the way.’
Jessica shook her head disbelievingly. It was a balmy summer day. Cloudless, warm. Perfect.
No sooner had Nan spoken than a puff of wind stirred the edges of the tablecloth. And then, coming from somewhere far away, towards the ocean, Jessica heard a strange, indecipherable sound. Her head cocked to the left, listening, trying to identify the noise.
All at once a wind gust hit the deck. Plants in pots bent from nature’s forcefulness, hanging pots began to swing crazily. As the full force hit the pottery studio, Jessica thought she saw the corrugated iron buckle slightly: the wind was suddenly so strong!
Then a piercing noise, like a high-pitched screech, rent the air.
‘Good God, what’s that?’ Jessica asked. Getting up, she helped Nan clear the table.
‘Just the wind,’ Nan said casually, ‘just the wind. When it comes up from the south, it’s always like this.’
‘But that noise!’ Jessica’s eardrums beat with the clarion sound, and the sharpness of it set her nerves on edge. ‘What causes it?’
Nan shrugged her thin shoulders. ‘No one knows. Some people have tried to find the source. Marcus has, too, but so far it’s eluded him.’
‘God! The sound sets my teeth on edge.’
‘It has that effect on some people,’ Nan agreed. ‘I’ve heard it for years, so I’m kind of used to it.’
They retreated to the kitchen, shutting the door behind them.
Jessica stared out the window over the kitchen sink. From the safety of the cosy kitchen, she marvelled at the strength of the wind. Small trees were bending as if they’d break, bushes thrashed to and fro as if some invisible hand were pulling them this way and that. The wind raced over the house, whistling around the corners, finding cracks in the old cottage and shrieking through them until there was no escaping nature’s eerie sounds.
‘It doesn’t last long,’ Nan prophesied.
‘Thank goodness. It’s damned unnerving,’ Jessica admitted. ‘You said you’d heard it for years.’
‘Oh, yes. Mum used to tell me a story about the wind when I was little. On reflection I think that’s just what it was, a story.’ She saw Jessica’s questioning expression. ‘About a woman who supposedly lived down near the water, in a cave. People said she was kind of a recluse. Her name was said to be Maddie Lynch, though I never heard of anyone who’d actually met her. They reckoned she used to wait till the south wind blew, then go out and screech at the top of her lungs. That’s what people attribute the noise to.’
Jessica frowned. ‘But she couldn’t still be alive, could she?’
Nan pursed her lips. ‘It’s just a story, Jessica. The islanders of days gone by used stories to explain many things they didn’t understand. I don’t believe that the story of the recluse or the elusive cave or the cause of the noise has much credence, especially nowadays.’
Puzzled, but still curious, Jessica wouldn’t let go of the idea. ‘Is there such a cave?’
‘No one’s found it. Not even Marcus, who’s trekked over just about every centimetre of this island.’ Nan smiled at her. ‘There, see. It’s stopping now, as it always does.’
Jessica shook her head at the mystery of it all. She was gradually learning that Norfolk Island was a place of occasional strange happenings and the screeching wind, quite possibly, was just one of them.
Hidden by the trees and bushes that grew beside the studio, squinting, she spied on Jessica Pearce as she looked through the window. For many days she had studied the woman who, so far, refused to surrender to her power. The woman’s inner strength caused her to admire her and curse her, all in the same breath.
She had watched Jessica stroll about the cemetery, tapped into her feelings as she’d read some of the heart-rending inscriptions and felt sure that, emotionally, she was ripe for the picking.
Her wait was over. Jessica was the one.
Summoning all her spiritual strength, she had directed the force at Jessica.
She saw Jessica stiffen, go as still as a statue. That was a good sign. She was, as she’d believed, malleable to her will.
The channelling of her energy—this was something she hadn’t done for a very long time, and letting her energy flow so freely held risks for her and her subject, yet she knew as well as she knew herself that she had to do it.
Her need had become stronger than her fear of losing her inner strength. After all this time, the waiting time she called it, the chance had come to break free of this place forever. And…she would be free.
‘The wind’s dropping.’ There was relief in Nan’s tone. ‘Let’s go to the studio, I want to teach you the glazing process.’
Silently marvelling at Nan’s ability to read the weather, Jessica looked out the kitchen window and confirmed that what Nan said was true.
The gale force wind had receded. The trees and shrubs around the back yard and the area known as ‘the barn’, because the Hunters had once run a small herd of dairy cows, was settling, the branches once again still.
For a moment she stared at her reflection in the window. Then, as she moved, intending to follow Nan outside, a fine mist rose in front of the glass. Puzzled by its appearance, Jessica stared. The mist cleared and, instead of her own reflection, she saw that of another woman.
Bright red hair, curling tendrils escaping from beneath some kind of cap, and the largest blue eyes she had ever seen were set below straight eyebrows. The eyes shone with intelligence and something else, something that belonged to a magnetic personality. Jessica blinked, too stunned by the visage to question how it had replaced her own reflection. She blinked again and expected the image to disappear. It didn’t.
The woman’s features were attractive without being beautiful, and she appeared to abound with good health, but the most startling thing about her was that all Jessica saw was the head…there was no body attached to it!
What the…? What was going on?
CHAPTER SEVEN
A spasm of terror such as Jessica had never known arrowed down her spine, making her knee jerk to attention. A sudden clamminess sheened over her skin, and her nerve ends tingled in apprehension, but for what reason she wasn’t sure.
Were her eyes playing tricks on her? Was this another example of her losing control?
‘Come on, love, let’s get to it.’
She heard Nan speak as if she were in a distant dimension instead of right behind her. The next instant the hand holding her coffee cup became boneless, the strength draining from it. The cup slipped into the sink, smashing into the crockery they’d used for lunch. Somehow—and Jessica sensed that she had no control over it—her hand became entangled with the crockery. She winced as a broken piece gashed the soft inner skin of her left hand.
The spectre in the window smiled, as if pleased, and then vanished.
In all, the scene had taken place in a couple of seconds, yet it affected Jessica profoundly. Her head began to pound in tempo with her heartbeat. The noise in her ears became a deafening roar and with it came a dizziness, a spiralling of senses out of control, that made her clutch the sink for support. Too late. Her knees buckled under her and she slipped to the floor, up-ending a kitchen chair as she went down.
Nan, a slighter woman, caught Jessica’s inert form before her head made contact with the quarry-tiled kitchen floor. Grunting with the effort of trying to move Jessica’s head into a comfortable position, she managed to rest her on the floor. Only then did she see Jessica’s hand. Dark blood gushed from a cut that ran almost the width of her hand. The life-giving liquid formed a small river, then a pool that st
ained the tiles black. Nan stretched, grabbed a tea towel from the rack, wrapped it around the hand as tightly as she could, then tried to keep it elevated as she struggled to her knees.
The sound of the front door clicking open made Nan sigh with relief. ‘Marcus! That you? Come quick, into the kitchen.’
Marcus assessed the situation in a glance. He helped Nan to her feet, after which he bent down and, with surprising ease, lifted Jessica.
‘Put her on the lounge. She fainted. I don’t know why.’ Nan’s tone was full of concern. ‘We were chatting about the south wind. She was curious about some of the old stories Mum told me about the fabled Maddie Lynch. Then, when the wind started to drop, she looked out the window and fainted dead away. I nearly passed out myself. With fright.’ She gave her brother a knowing look and, with narrowing gaze at the unconscious Jessica, said, ‘Maybe she’s pregnant. I fainted once, when I was carrying Liam.’
Marcus nodded curtly, scarcely bothering to listen. His sister tended to gabble on when an anxious situation arose. That was how she dealt with it. ‘Nan, get the medical kit from the bathroom, some saline and clean cloths. She’ll come round by herself, but we need to do something about that hand. We’ll just clean it up and put a pressure bandage on it.’ Looking at it, he saw that blood had already begun to seep through the folded tea towel.
He heard Jessica moan and, on his knees beside the lounge, stroked the hair off her forehead. ‘It’s okay, Jessica. You’re safe.’ He didn’t know what she was safe from, or if there were anything she needed to be safe from, but he hoped the words would soothe her as she regained consciousness.
Jessica’s eyes opened. She tried to sit up but a residual dizziness made her fall back against the cushions. For several seconds she stared as if she didn’t know him; then, with recognition came a sigh. Marcus. The sheer bulk of the man, his confidence, his reassuring smile made her relax and push the scene, and her disturbing reaction to it, to the back of her mind.
‘It looks as if rescuing me is becoming something of a habit,’ she murmured.
‘Lie quietly, don’t talk,’ he issued the order in a gentle tone. ‘You’ve hurt your hand. I’m going to take a look at it, but I think it’ll need stitches.’ He gave her a lopsided grin and said with his usual practicality, ‘Thank goodness you’re right-handed. You’ll be able to paint while it heals.’
Nan came back into the room with the necessaries, and fussed. ‘How are you, Jessica? God, you gave me a scare! Do you want me to call Simon?’
‘Let’s look at the hand first, shall we?’ Marcus said.
In the end Marcus was right. The cut was deep and needed suturing.
‘We’ll have to go to the hospital, but first, do you want to tell us what happened? Did anything in particular make you faint?’ Marcus asked as he put a thick sterilised gauze pad over the wound. He then strapped it with an elasticised bandage as tightly as he thought she could bear. The pressure, he hoped, would stop the blood flow until it could be attended to.
Jessica’s free hand waved about aimlessly, the gesture restless, nervous. How could she explain something she didn’t understand herself? She couldn’t tell them about her fears, either—that she was beginning to see and sense things that couldn’t possibly exist and would make no sense to a normal person. They made no sense to her and, despite what had happened on more than one occasion, she still believed she was rational, not the opposite.
‘I think my imagination went crazy,’ she tried to dismiss what had happened with a shrug. ‘I thought I saw something which I…I couldn’t possibly have seen. It freaked me out and I fainted. End of story.’ She looked at Nan. ‘I’m sorry I upset you, and ruined our day in the studio.’
Nan sniffed. ‘Doesn’t matter, love. There’ll be other days.’
Marcus had no intention of letting Jessica off that easily. ‘What do you think you saw?’ he probed as he helped her up off the lounge.
‘I don’t know how to explain it, it was very odd, that’s all.’
‘Was there someone at the window?’
Her gaze flew to his. Was he just intuitive or a mind-reader? ‘What makes you ask that?’
‘Just trying to put the pieces of the puzzle together. Nan said you were looking out the window when whatever it was happened. I thought you might have seen something unusual which alarmed you.’
‘There’s no one around Hunter’s Glen except us,’ Nan pointed out.
Marcus looked at his sister, gave her a secretive nod. ‘I know, Nan, but we also know that sometimes when the south wind blows, extraordinary things have been known to happen.’
Nan silently nodded her head in agreement.
‘All right. So long as you don’t tell Simon. He’s very protective and he worries that I’m, that I’m…’
‘Not coping.’ Marcus finished for her. ‘Tell us what you saw, Jessica. Don’t lock it up inside. Get it out where it can’t worry you any more.’
Her eyebrow arched. ‘Is this the historian or the psychologist talking?’
He smiled at her. ‘A friend, that’s all.’
‘Well, I was looking out the window, as you said. I could see my reflection, and then a mist came across the glass, and the face of a woman appeared in place of my own. She was someone I’m sure I’ve never seen before.’ She flashed a glance at Nan. ‘Perhaps it was a representation of the woman you spoke about, Maddie Lynch. But the odd thing was that she only had a head. No body. And huge blue eyes, that were almost hypnotic. I…I could feel myself falling into the depths of those eyes, as if she were trying to absorb me. It was all very strange. Then I became dizzy and you know the rest.’ She turned to look at Marcus. ‘So, am I crazy or what?’
He grinned at her. ‘Few people who really are crazy ask if they are crazy. They prefer to think the whole world is crazy instead of themselves. I reckon you’re not. Possibly what happened was that you became overstimulated mentally by one of the island’s piece of folklore and had a kind of daydream.’
‘Is that possible?’ Jessica queried, not convinced.
‘With the mind, almost anything is possible,’ he replied enigmatically. ‘I think we’d better take you to the hospital. On the way we can decide what to tell Simon. Okay?’
He understood. She smiled conspiratorially at him. ‘Okay.’
Matron Sue Levinski gave a single rap on the glasspanelled door before she entered Simon’s office. Since letting her hair down at Nan Duncan’s Christmas party, she had worked her butt off to get back into his good graces. That had taken time, but Simon, she’d learned, wasn’t a man who held grudges. He’d stated what was on his mind—told her off—and then, gradually, their relationship had returned to a friendly professional position, the only difference being that he refrained from mentioning his wife. That didn’t bother her too much. She wasn’t interested in Jessica, but she was eager to have him fully trust her again. And she intended to work on that, believing that soon they’d be on the same footing again.
Simon was not a complicated man, she’d worked that much out about him. He was dedicated to the work he did and doing the best job possible. He was protective towards Jessica, too. That was evident from the dressing down she’d received. And, if he had flaws, one was that Dr Simon Pearce was kind; and inclined to think well of people rather than the opposite. That knowledge, she decided, was a weakness she could use to her advantage as soon as she got back into his good graces and had him confiding openly to her again.
‘Simon.’ She saw him bent over some paperwork and waited until he looked up. ‘Your wife’s here, in casualty.’ She tried to soften the news and quickly emphasised, ‘Jessica’s all right, but she’s had an accident to her hand.’
Simon knew Jessica had been at Nan’s. He rose quickly from his chair and joined her at the door. ‘How did it happen?’ His imagination went into overdrive. In his head he imagined the worst, some dreadful accident with the potter’s wheel, fingers mangled beyond recognition and repair.
‘Marcus
Hunter’s with her. He said it was a domestic accident. She cut her hand on some crockery, that’s all.’ She patted the sleeve of his shirt, just once, and made sure that her features mirrored the right amount of concern. ‘She’s okay, Simon. Marcus did a good job of patching her up. She just needs a couple of sutures, nothing too dramatic, according to Sister Holbrook.’
In casualty, Jessica sat sideways on the examination bed, holding her bandaged hand up almost vertically. Marcus was talking to Sister Holbrook, the second-in-charge sister of the hospital, helping her fill in the necessary details on the patient’s card.
‘Jess.’ Simon’s tone echoed anxiety and a touch of frustration. ‘What have you been doing to yourself?’ His gaze took in the paleness of her skin, the pain she was trying, unsuccessfully, to hide.
‘I cut my hand in Nan’s kitchen. Silly thing to do, really.’
Simon acknowledged Marcus. ‘Hi. You’ve rendered first aid.’ He turned Jessica’s hand around. ‘A pretty professional job, too. How did you learn to do that?’
Marcus shrugged. ‘As a teenager on the football field. Some player was always spraining, breaking or otherwise injuring a part of his anatomy. The coach appointed me unofficial medical person until the doctor would arrive, even though I’d much rather have been involved in the play. From watching doctors bandage limbs, I kind of picked up the way to do it in an emergency.’
Simon began to unravel Jessica’s bandage and, as he did, he called a request to Sister Holbrook. ‘Get a local anaesthetic, Sister.’ He glanced at Jessica. ‘You okay?’ She nodded affirmatively. ‘The anaesthetic will sting at first, but then you won’t feel anything.’ Then he said intuitively, ‘It’s throbbing like hell, isn’t it?’ She nodded again. ‘It’ll go numb pretty quick.’
Whispers Through the Pines Page 11
