Heat still radiated from the electric oven. In it she found a baking dish containing several charred spheres.
‘They never got their pies,’ Skye said, voice hushed as she pointed out the carton of ready-made apple pies next to the other empty food containers.
Stevie replaced the oven tray and chewed on her bottom lip, trying to make sense of it all. At once she became aware of a strange sensation at the back of her neck, a warm breeze, the feathering of a breath.
Her sudden turn towards its source caused Skye to clap herself on the chest. ‘Holy shit! Don’t do that!’
Stevie spotted the open gap in the sliding window behind the sink and let out her own pent-up breath. ‘Sorry, I thought for a minute someone else was in the room.’
‘Look, I don’t feel right about this—this place gives me the creeps,’ Skye said, drawing a breath and exhaling with an unmistakable wheeze. ‘I think we should leave and call the proper police. I reckon they’ll listen to you rather than me.’
The ‘proper’ police, jeez.
‘I’m not pulling out now,’ Stevie snapped back. ‘Wait outside if you like while I check out the rest of downstairs.’
Skye reached into her pocket for a Ventolin inhaler, took a couple of puffs and sidled a step closer to Stevie.
Two of the bedrooms in the west wing were empty and dusty with spider webs parachuting from the cornices. Another room served as a study. A computer on a fake antique desk stood next to a single bed with nothing on it but a bare mattress. A scraggly bottlebrush from the garden bed outside scratched against the window. Stevie cringed at the sound. Blood-red flowers pressed against the glass—as if anyone or anything would want to get into this desolate, inhospitable house.
There was still one room left to check at the end of the passageway, next to a bathroom. She sniffed at the odour leaking through the gaps of the closed door and felt nausea rise. Skye dug her bitten fingernails into Stevie’s arm. The door creaked as Stevie eased it open. She drew a sharp breath.
‘Oh my God,’ Skye said.
CHAPTER TWO
The room was as bare as a prison cell. The only item in it was an old safe cot of the style now deemed politically incorrect. Like an old-fashioned meat safe its walls were made of tough flyscreen topped by a heavy wooden lid.
The cot reeked, the bedding a jumble of urine-soaked sheets, flyscreen walls clogged with lumps of faeces. A soiled disposable nappy had been flung to the far end of the saturated mattress.
The naked baby inside lay still.
With trembling fingers, Stevie fumbled with the latch and flung back the door, making the wooden frame rattle.
Skye pushed her aside before Stevie could reach for the child. ‘Wait a minute,’ she said. Leaning over the wall of the cot she gently inserted her finger into the baby’s mouth. ‘Airway’s clear but the inside of his mouth is dry—he’s very dehydrated.’ Her finger pressed the side of his neck. ‘Pulse rapid, but not too bad. We’re not too late.’
The baby stirred, whimpered and sucked his thumb with increasing vigour. Skye ran her fingers over his dark, matted hair and looked desperately around the room.
‘Here.’ Stevie grabbed a cot blanket from the floor and handed it to Skye who wrapped it around the baby and clasped him to her chest. ‘Let’s get out of here,’ Stevie gasped, as the movement of the bedclothes disturbed the foul air.
In the kitchen they made the necessary phone calls. Stevie reported the incident to the local police, stressing the emergency and then took the baby from Skye so Skye could call for an ambulance. After consulting with the on-call medico Skye decided the baby could be given a small amount of water. She filled a cup from the kitchen tap and put it to his lips. He drank greedily, snatching at the cup with stained fingers, mewling like a kitten when she wouldn’t let him hold it himself. ‘Poor little bugger’s still thirsty,’ she said as she pulled the cup away and placed it on the kitchen table. ‘We’d better not let him have any more, he might vomit it up—this should get him by until he reaches hospital. They’ll need to know how much fluid we gave him, put an IV in.’
The baby didn’t have the strength to yell; his eyes were sunken, his skin hot and dry. He soon gave up his fight to reach the water and flopped his head against Stevie’s shoulder. ‘How could anyone leave a baby like this?’ Skye asked, rubbing soothing circles on his back, eyes glistening with unshed tears.
Don’t go sentimental on me now, Stevie thought. ‘Here take him.’ She passed the baby back to Skye. ‘Wait in the fresh air for the ambulance, I want to make sure no one’s upstairs.’
She had a quick look around the upstairs of the house, relieved to find just three deserted, almost empty rooms.
Back in the family room rays of light shone through the French doors, highlighting the dusty coating of the tiles, sticky patches and faint footprints. Stevie slowly examined the tracks on the floor from different angles, all the while conscious of the smell of the baby on her clothes. It was during one of these shifts of position that she noticed a clean area of tiles in front of a leather chesterfield, as if the tiles had recently been washed. She pushed the couch back, the sudden draft making the dust-bunnies underneath tumble. Earwigs hiding from the light scampered away across ominous brown splats. She dropped to her knees to examine the stains. Could be spilled Milo or tomato sauce; could be dried paint. Or blood.
It was tempting to search the floor for further evidence, but fear of contaminating a possible crime scene held her back. French doors led from the family room to the small back garden; she’d cause less damage out there, she decided, as she opened the doors up.
The walled garden seemed as badly kept as the inside of the house, although the surrounding flowerbeds, crowded with roses as tall as Stevie herself, suggested a time when it had been well maintained. Somewhere in the distance she heard the wail of an ambulance.
At the swimming pool’s fence she stopped. An ominous bulge pressed up from under the pool’s cover.
Shit.
The gate creaked as Stevie opened it, hurrying across the weed-choked paving to the cover’s reel. The pool surface gradually appeared as she wrestled with the stiff mechanism, and she found herself breaking into a sweat despite the mild temperature. Leaves and dirt swished from the bubbly blue surface, leaving black scum upon the green water. The reason for the bulge, a pink lilo, sprang from the confines of the cover. Globs of algae bobbed on the water’s surface next to the body of a disintegrating blue-tongued lizard. It was impossible to see through the murk to find out what else might be down there and she decided she didn’t want to know either; the rest of the job could be left to the police search team. Finding an abandoned baby was enough for one day.
She heard the ambulance pulling up outside the gate and walked a brick-paved path to meet it at the front of the house. The baby had fallen asleep against Skye’s shoulder. She continued to rub his back, cooing something tuneless under her breath. Stevie explained the situation to the ambulance attendant and asked where the baby would be taken.
‘Straight to PMH. Lucky you found him when you did.’
Skye pushed past him into the back of the ambulance before he’d finished swinging open the doors and settled on the seat with the baby tight in her arms. She cut the man off before he could voice his protest. ‘I’m a nurse, I’m going with him.’ She swung defensively to Stevie as if expecting to be challenged by her too.
Stevie shrugged. ‘Good idea, you can tell me what the doctors say.’
Skye held up a hand as the doors were closing. ‘Look in on Mrs H for me, Stevie, make sure she’s okay, yeah? And call me: I want to know what’s going on here—none of your secret police business.’
Easier said than done, Stevie thought. This was out of her jurisdiction; she’d be lucky if the local police confided in her at all. She pulled her blonde ponytail through her fingers as she watched the ambulance speed away, and tried to remember which police division covered the Peppermint Grove area, pondering the likelihood of knowing an
yone in it. No names sprang to mind.
As she stepped out of the front garden gate, a small colourful object caught her eye. She squatted down to take a closer look and found a silk-covered button. Making a mental note of its location she reminded herself to point it out to the police when they arrived.
It had been about fifteen minutes since her call and there was no sign of them yet. A dark slit appeared in the venetians of the house next door. Perhaps Mrs Hardegan was anxiously waiting for the police too? Skye had asked her to check up on the old lady—surely a quick word wouldn’t do any harm?
Rows of peppermint trees bordered the wide street, filling the air with a minty odour cut through by the tang of the sea to the west. Mrs Hardegan’s was one of the few untouched houses left in the area, most having been extensively renovated or knocked down and replaced by modern concrete monoliths and elegant reproductions such as the Pavels’. Her Californian bungalow was characteristically squat with tapered columns supporting a heavy front veranda, and a gabled roof with winking leadlight windows. Stevie detected the smell of camphor before the front door was even opened.
‘Where have you been, boy?’ the old woman demanded. She wore a simple linen dress enlivened with screen-printed green fish and secured with a tight leather belt. She stood ramrod straight, her bright, level eyes fixed unwaveringly upon Stevie. Stevie may have been wearing workman’s overalls, but she didn’t think her gender was that ambiguous. She began to explain. ‘Mrs Hardegan? I–’
‘We’ve been waiting here for days. What’s wrong with the smudgin’ fullets these days, why so long?’
It took a moment for Stevie to realise the woman’s peculiar speech must be the result of the stroke Skye had mentioned. It might also explain why she’d been unable to call the police herself, getting her son and Skye to do it for her.
‘I’m a friend of Skye’s, Mrs Hardegan.’ Stevie consciously slowed down her usual rapid-fire speech. ‘She asked me to look into the Pavels’ house for you. She said you hadn’t seen them for a while and were worried about them. I am with the police, but not from Peppermint Grove. The Peppy Grove police are on their way.’
‘A lovely boy, but the others are useless, quite useless. You’d better come in, have a cup of tea and tell us what’s going on.’ Despite the oddness of her speech, she had the cultured pronunciation of another era, almost English but not quite. Newsreel ABC.
Mrs Hardegan turned and clasped one of the bookcases in the dark hallway. As she eased herself down the passageway, Stevie noticed one leg lagging slightly behind the other. Seeing no sign of a Zimmer frame or stick Stevie instinctively reached for the woman’s elbow, but the well-intentioned gesture was shrugged away with an impatient scowl. On the wall above a bookcase, a black and white photo of a young Mrs Hardegan caught Stevie’s eye; the hooked nose was unmistakable. She was dressed in the uniform of a wartime RAN nurse—it figured.
Mrs Hardegan led Stevie past several closed doors to a lighter, self-contained room with kitchenette at the back of the house, where it appeared she did most of her living. Recycling was sorted and stacked in tidy piles on one of the benches. The surfaces of the kitchenette were clean; soapsuds popped on the drying plastic dishes spread across the draining board. The single bed in the corner of the room was made after a fashion, the lumps disguised by an intricately embroidered cotton counterpane. Stevie found herself wondering how long it had taken the old lady to make the bed, how frustrating the disability must be to someone who probably required everything around her to be shipshape. Every free surface of the room was crowded with various arts, crafts and sewing paraphernalia: crushed tubes of fabric paint, bottles of varnish, glue, jars of bristling paintbrushes. A wooden contraption, like an old printing press, stood near one of the windows. It would be used for screen-printing, Stevie guessed. Several bright cushions of the same fish design as the old lady’s dress were arranged in a precise line down one side of the bed.
An open door led into a bathroom. Stevie glimpsed a toilet and railed bath before Mrs Hardegan moved with surprising speed to close it.
‘Bloody Japs!’ The mechanical voice made Stevie whirl towards the source, a parrot, hanging in a dome-shaped cage from a ceiling beam toward the back of the room.
‘Hello, who’s this?’ Stevie said as she approached, resisting the urge to poke a finger through the bars. The parrot stared back. It had bright black eyes and a beak similar to its owner’s—it could probably shear a finger with a single snip. Bald in places, its patchy arrangement of feathers looked as washed-out as a favourite summer shirt.
‘Captain Flint, our feathered friend,’ Mrs Hardegan said.
The tea was made with only a few minor mishaps—Stevie given three lumps of sugar when she asked for none—and settled by Mrs Hardegan on a tapestried footstool in front of a high-backed easy chair next to the window. One side of the Pavel residence was visible from this vantage point and the binoculars resting on a shelf nearby were no doubt used for further surveillance.
Difficulties of expression do not necessarily mean difficulties with understanding; Stevie knew that. But to be safe, she explained what she’d found at the Pavel house as slowly and as simply as she could. She cringed at the patronising sound of her own voice, so like the manner in which some people talked to her seven-year-old daughter, Izzy, but could think of no other approach. She would tread softly until she could work out the extent of the woman’s brain damage.
But the hooked nose wrinkled when Stevie described the unkempt Pavel house and the blue eyes dampened when she mentioned the abandoned baby. Some of her doubts about the old lady’s comprehension were put to rest.
‘When did you last see the Pavels, Mrs Hardegan?’ Stevie asked, speaking more naturally.
Mrs Hardegan leaned back in her easy chair, tented her fingers and looked sincerely back at Stevie. ‘About twenty years ago.’
Stevie’s raised hopes took a dive. ‘Did you know them well?’
Suddenly the elderly woman’s face twisted and she stamped her feet on the linoleum floor, the force of her anger surprising Stevie. ‘We can’t tell you—it’s all our fault!’ Tears spilled down the old lady’s cheeks.
Stevie got up from the footstool and placed a calming hand on her shoulder only to have it dashed away with a string of unintelligible words. She looked helplessly around the room, wondering what to do next. This meeting was going nowhere fast—she shouldn’t have even tried, should have trusted her instincts and not become involved at all. Damn you, Skye. What if she caused the old lady to have another stroke? She spied a box of tissues on a work table crammed with sewing paraphernalia. Stevie offered the box and Mrs Hardegan swiped at her eyes. ‘Can’t help it ... can’t get out. Trapped...’ she said, tapping fiercely on her temple.
Stevie hadn’t noticed the arrival of the police car earlier, and spotted it now parked outside the Pavels’ house, one door carelessly left open.
With relief she said, ‘I’d better go now...’ about to add a consoling ‘love’, she stopped herself in time. ‘The proper police are here and they’ll probably need to talk to you. If talking is hard, perhaps you could write down what you remember about the Pavels for them?’
Mrs Hardegan shook her head.
‘Never mind,’ Stevie said, injecting her tone with false brightness. ‘I’m sure the other neighbours will be able to help out.’
Mrs Hardegan closed her eyes for a moment and took a deep calming breath. ‘We’re sorry, better leave now. Needed to do that.’
‘Are you going to be okay?’
Mrs Hardegan nodded and reached into her sewing basket. Stuck into the padding was a row of pre-threaded needles of various shades of wool. Inspecting them in the window’s light she selected a strand of lemony green. ‘Too long,’ she muttered to herself, cutting it to size with a decisive snip of the scissors, before picking up a swathe of cross-stitch tapestry. Stevie was dismissed.
She made her way unescorted to the front door. Mrs Hardegan would be written
off as a witness, even though it was obvious she knew more than she could tell. They’d have to dig into the Pavels’ history from other sources.
Wait a minute; Stevie stopped halfway down the darkened, book-lined passageway. What was she thinking? This wasn’t her problem; her problem was a can of paint she’d forgotten to put the lid on and some half-finished eaves she’d have to live with until her next day off. She looked to the west and noticed the brewing bank of grey clouds, hoping what she’d painted that morning had had a chance to dry; it looked like the weather bureau had got it right for a change.
All she could do now was have a quick word with the local cops, put the incident behind her and return to her family. (Image 2.1)
Image 2.1
CHAPTER THREE
A plainclothes cop in a snappy suit and crisp white shirt leaned on the car’s bonnet, writing notes. He barely looked up when Stevie approached. ‘Hi, I’m Stephanie Hooper; I called you. The Silver Chain nurse and I found the baby.’
The cop lifted his left hand in brief acknowledgement and continued to write. ‘Detective Sergeant Luke Fowler, Peppermint Grove.’ He put a full stop at the end of his sentence, straightened and inspected her through mirrored sunglasses. ‘You’re a painter?’
‘No, I was painting my own house. Nurse Williams called and asked me to go with her to the Pavels’. The old lady next door told her there was something amiss over there.’
‘Well she’s got that right in one, no sign of the Pavels at all—but why did the nurse call you?’
‘The old lady was getting agitated. She has speech problems and had already asked her son and the nurse to call in her suspicions to the police, but apparently the matter wasn’t followed through.’ Stevie made sure to keep her tone neutral; she didn’t want to get off on the wrong foot. ‘Nurse Williams decided to call me because we’ve worked together before. I’m with Central...’
Fowler cut her off. ‘That wouldn’t be Skye Williams, would it?’
SH03 - Take Out Page 2
