Rescue at Cradle Lake

by Marion Lennox

  But the man grabbed the child by the arm, hauled her up so his face was right in hers and spat words at her that made her blench.

  And then he almost threw her aside.

  Others were closer than Fergus. Tony reached her first, sweeping her up as one of his own, hugging her, letting her bury her face in his shoulder and carrying her back to Ginny.

  That should be me, Fergus thought, struggling through the crowd, and the surge of certainty was so great that he felt almost overwhelmed by it. It was as much as he could do not to haul over there and grab the little girl from Tony’s arms.

  But she needed Ginny. Already Ginny had gained her trust, and when Tony reached her Ginny held out her arms and Madison crumpled into them and sobbed her heart out.

  There was nothing for Fergus to do. Except…

  He was right by Oscar now, hardly aware how he’d got there.

  ‘What the hell did you say to her?’

  ‘Nothing,’ Oscar muttered, and held up his empty glass. ‘Get me another. Bloody kid spilled my drink’

  There was a nurse close by-a girl who’d come with the six nursing-home residents. She moved forward, unsure, and Fergus motioned her closer. ‘I want Mr Bentley back in the nursing home,’ he said through gritted teeth. ‘Now.’

  ‘You can’t tell me-’

  ‘The only reason you’re not being prosecuted for cruelty to animals is that you pleaded disability,’ Fergus snapped. ‘The inspectors spoke to me and I was forced to confirm it. But if you’re well enough to attend funerals, if you’re well enough to get drunk on free beer and to abuse young children, then you’re well enough to stand trial over neglected horses and dogs and sheep.’

  ‘You wouldn’t-’

  ‘Watch me,’ Fergus said, through gritted teeth. He glanced up and found Miriam. ‘Miriam, could you arrange Mr Bentley’s transportation now?’

  ‘I’m on it now, Doctor,’ Miriam told him, grabbing Oscar’s wheelchair and propelling it toward the door with savagery. ‘The hospital’s downhill from here. Permission to stand at the door and push?’

  They didn’t know what had been said to the child. No one had caught it. Whatever it had been, though, it was as if Madison’s fragile shell had been shattered. She was limp and unresponsive in Ginny’s arms and her bravado had disappeared completely. This was the Madison of three weeks ago.

  ‘I need to take her home,’ Ginny said, and Fergus agreed.

  ‘I’ll take you.’

  ‘Sam has the official car at the door,’ Ginny said gently. ‘Fergus, leave us be. Please. We need to start as we mean to go on.’

  With Ginny and Madison gone, the wake was over. Fergus’s cellphone rang and it was a woman from Ginny’s antenatal class with a threatened early labour.

  ‘I’m only twenty-eight weeks,’ she quavered into the phone. ‘Oh, Doctor, we want this baby so much.’

  Of course she did, Fergus thought grimly as he climbed into his truck and returned to medicine. Why wouldn’t you want a baby?

  Why wouldn’t you want a child?

  It was as if the medical needs of the community had been put on hold for the funeral and wake, and now, with it over, the queue was suddenly enormous.

  Fergus tried his best to stabilise the young woman and then bailed out, calling in the air ambulance to transport her to Sydney. Maybe his efforts to stop the labour were enough but maybe they weren’t and prem babies had a habit of coming in a hurry. In Sydney a twenty-eight-week baby had a chance. Here there were no facilities for premies.

  If we had two doctors here, he thought, but he got no further than that as his phone was running hot. A cow had stood on a foot. A urinary tract infection had suddenly become unbearable. Someone was drunk and drifting in and out of unconsciousness and the local policeman wanted him checked before letting him sleep it off in the cells.

  Ginny would have to cope with this alone when he left, he thought as he worked on into the evening. Plus she’d need time with Madison. Madison needed a huge commitment if she was to revert to the little girl she should be.

  The vision of her in church stayed with him, a tiny girl who’d held the responsibilities of the world on her shoulders.

  What had Oscar said to her to make her disintegrate?

  He didn’t go near Oscar. ‘He’s fine,’ Tony told him. ‘Settled back into his bed with a self-satisfied smirk. Why he had it in for that family…’

  ‘It’s going to be hard for Ginny to have to keep caring for him here,’ Fergus said, and Tony grinned.

  ‘Yeah, well, there’s a few of us have been thinking… We reckon Oscar’s asthma makes him needful of a nursing home where there’s round-the-clock access to a doctor. This place doesn’t qualify. We need to declare he’s too sick to stay here. A nursing home in Sydney would be much more suitable, wouldn’t you say, Doctor?’

  ‘What the hell did he say to Madison?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Tony admitted, his face growing grim. Then he shrugged. ‘I hope Ginny can defuse it, whatever it was. Meanwhile, mate, there’s another call. Seven-year-old Mathew Torney. He fell out of the top bunk and his mother thinks he’s dislocated his shoulder.’

  ‘But Ginny…’

  ‘Some of Richard’s friends were going back to the house,’ Tony said gently. ‘Mate, we can’t do anything there any more. You know that.’

  No. A child with a dislocated shoulder. Medicine.

  Hell.

  It was midnight before Fergus finished work. He walked out of the hospital and hesitated.

  He so wanted to go to Ginny.

  She’d be exhausted. She hadn’t slept for days.

  She wouldn’t need him tonight.

  ‘But tomorrow,’ he said into the night. ‘Tomorrow, please…’

  The call came at two in the morning. He’d been staring at the ceiling and it was as if he’d been expecting it. He lifted the receiver and when he heard Ginny’s voice at the end of the line, maybe it was as if he’d expected that, too.

  ‘Fergus.’

  ‘Ginny,’ he said softly. ‘Love.’

  ‘Fergus, help.’

  The tension slammed into him as he heard her fear. He heard her terror.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘I…’

  ‘Say it,’ he said strongly, ridding his voice of all emotion, making it curt and businesslike. ‘What’s happening?’

  ‘It’s Madison.’

  ‘What’s wrong with Madison?’

  ‘She’s disappeared.’

  Five minutes later he pulled up at the farmhouse. Ginny was waiting, standing at the gate, staring hopelessly down the road.

  Fergus emerged from his truck and Ginny walked straight into his arms.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  AFTER the funeral the little girl had been wan and listless, saying nothing, and nothing Ginny could say had broken through.

  Richard’s friends had been there, back at the house, wanting to sit on his veranda, wanting to feel close to him, and she’d been hamstrung. They’d driven for hours to be there-some having come from interstate. She hadn’t been able to send them away. So she’d cuddled Madison until she’d slept. At seven, when Madison had seemed deeply asleep, she’d tucked her into her own bed and she’d checked her every half-hour or so.

  At a little after one a.m. the last of Richard’s friends had said goodbye.

  Ginny had walked into the house to find Madison’s bed empty.

  ‘We’ll have people searching from one side of the valley to the other within half an hour.’ Ben Cross, the police sergeant, had been there within minutes of being called and was now in organisation mode. ‘You’re sure the people who were here were OK? None of them could have…?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Ginny whispered, appalled beyond belief. ‘They were Richard’s friends. There were about twenty of them. Some of them I know but some I’d never seen before. I was so careful. I was so worried.’

  ‘Hey, Ginny,’ Fergus said, and hugged her tighter against him. ‘
This is not your fault, love. Let’s just focus on finding Madison. Let’s think. She wouldn’t run away, would she? Where would she go if she ran?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ There were car lights coming up the hill. Two cars. Three. Four. Ben’s calls for help were being answered in spades. ‘She seemed almost happy today. We talked and talked. She was so wonderful at the funeral. And then Oscar…’

  ‘We all saw that,’ Ben muttered, not bothering to hide his distress. ‘What did he say to her?’

  ‘She wouldn’t tell me,’ Ginny whispered.

  ‘Maybe it’s time we found out.’ Fergus put Ginny at arm’s length, and held her gaze. ‘Love, there are people coming to help search. Ben’s here. I think the most important thing I can do is to go and talk to Oscar.’

  Wrong, his heart was saying. The most important thing he could do was to hold on to Ginny, for ever and ever and ever.

  But if he was to rebuild a family for them all then he had to gather the family members together. Madison was part of his family. He knew that in his heart. Maybe he’d always known it.

  ‘I’ll be back as soon as I can,’ he told Ginny. ‘But I need to go.’

  Oscar was sleeping the sleep of the pure of heart. His asthma had receded. The last few weeks of regular meals and limited alcohol had improved his health. He was sleeping in a single room with a view over the valley toward the farm he’d neglected for years, and where half his stock had needed to be put down. Yet no conscience kept him awake. He’s a patient, Fergus told himself, and somehow he refrained from shaking the man awake and shouting. Instead, he switched on the night-light behind the bed, touched him lightly on the shoulder and sat down in the visitor’s chair, waiting for him to wake gently.

  He was doing very well, he thought in some abstract part of him that was able to be dispassionate. The doctor part of him congratulated the part of him that wasn’t anything to do with his medicine. The non-abstract part.

  The part of him that loved Ginny.

  And…Madison?

  But Oscar was waking up. ‘What do you want?’ The big man’s voice was slurred with sleep and the after-effects of the alcohol he’d drunk the previous afternoon. ‘You wake a man up in the middle of the night to do your bloody tests-’

  ‘I’m not here for tests, Mr Bentley,’ Fergus said, still in that strange voice that was all professional and not personal in the least. ‘I need to know what you said to Madison at the funeral today.’

  ‘Madison?’

  ‘Richard Viental’s little girl.’

  ‘The kid,’ he said, his face clearing. ‘The Viental kid.’

  ‘That’s right.’ Still that detached tone. Good, he told himself. Very good. No anger. No shouting. ‘When she tried to put the flowers round your neck…what did you say to her?’

  His face darkened. ‘She spilled my drink.’

  ‘She did,’ Fergus agreed. ‘I’d be guessing that made you pretty angry. A man’s got to have a drink.’

  ‘He bloody does,’ Oscar said. ‘Bloody nurses…’

  ‘It was good of Ginny to put on free beer for the men today,’ Fergus said thoughtfully, and he watched Oscar’s face change.

  ‘Her. I shouldn’t have drunk her beer.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘She’s a Viental. They should all be dead by now.’

  ‘Why?’ Still the conversational tone. Somehow.

  ‘They’ve got this bloody disease. That woman… I asked her to marry me, you know. This bloody woman’s mother. My farm’s four times as big as bloody Dave Viental’s and she chose him. Made me a laughing stock. I used to see ’em every time I walked up to the ridge, playing happy families, poor as blasted church mice and being…’ He sucked in his breath on an angry hiss. ‘Anyway, when the first kid died I thought, Great, this is how it ought to be. She chose misery over me. She could suffer the consequences. Then the next kid died and Dave took off.

  ‘You know what I did then? I went over there, cap in hand, and said, “You know what, Mary, I’m a big man. I can let bygones be bygones. We’ll ship the girl off to school in the city and the other boy’ll soon be dead. We can start over the way it’s supposed to be.” And you know what? She stood there, staring at me like I was a lunatic, and then she started laughing. She laughed and laughed and laughed, like it was so hysterical she couldn’t stop, and then that bloody girl came out and grabbed her arm and said, “Come on, Mum, you need to rest.” And that was that. I went home and I vowed I’d never go to that side of the ridge again until every last one of them was dead. Every last one…’

  Somehow Fergus stayed silent. Somehow the medical side of him-the part of him that could suggest a diagnosis of obsessive paranoia, of a solitary man stuck in the groove of hate for over thirty years-could force the other part of him to shut up.

  ‘And now Richard’s dead,’ he said conversationally, and Oscar nodded.

  ‘Good riddance.’

  ‘But Ginny…and Madison?’

  ‘They’ll have it,’ he said, and his hatred sounded awful in the stillness of the night. ‘They’ll both have this cystic thing. Her brothers are all dead, she will be soon, and this last one…Richard…will have passed it on to the kid.’

  ‘I’m sorry to have to disappoint you.’ Fergus was amazing himself. His voice was almost gentle. ‘Neither Ginny or Madison have cystic fibrosis.’

  ‘Yeah, but they will.’

  ‘No,’ he said, and his voice was suddenly harsher than he’d intended. ‘You need two cystic fibrosis genes to be ill. Ginny has one cystic fibrosis gene. That means if she marries someone with a matching gene then she might have an ill child but she herself won’t get ill. Madison’s clear. She’s totally free. A normal little girl with a life expectancy of eighty or more.’

  ‘But her mother-’

  ‘Her mother died of cardiomyopathy. It’s an infection of the heart. Like the flu. Madison’s no more likely to die of it that you are.’

  There was a moment’s silence. Then Oscar’s breath whistled in through his lips in an angry gasp as he accepted Fergus’s words for fact.

  ‘Then they’ll live.’

  ‘Yes.’ With me, Fergus thought, and the thought was a good one. It was reassuring in the awfulness of what he was listening to. Please, he thought. I just need to get him to tell me…

  ‘So what happened at the funeral to make you angry at Madison?’ he asked, and Oscar’s fingers clenched into fists on the coverlet.

  ‘Made me sick.’

  ‘What made you sick?’

  ‘All that crap about the Vientals. Everywhere…people saying what a shame it was how all the kids had died, and how she’s coming back here now and the kid’s staying with her and won’t it be great? And then that stuff about shells. “She thinks my mummy and daddy might have found a new shell together,”’ he said, mimicking Madison’s tone and words from the funeral, and Fergus winced. ‘That was what I told her. I told her it was crap.’

  ‘What did you tell her?’ Fergus demanded, and if he forgot to keep his voice even it wasn’t for want of trying. He thought back to that fragment of time-a little girl slipping a garland of flowers over this man’s head, the spilled drink, the fury, the grabbing, hauling her up, spitting the words at her. There’d have been time for so little before onlookers intervened. What could he have said in that short interval?

  ‘Just…’ Oscar said, and paused.

  ‘Just?’ Fergus was holding his breath. He was trying so hard to contain himself that he felt sick. ‘Just what, Oscar?’

  “‘Your mother hasn’t found a shell,’” he spat, lying back on the bed and repeating his words with relish. “‘Your mother died in the car. She’ll be rotting in the ground or, if there is anything afterwards, she’ll be stuck on the road outside the football ground, whinging about her lost lover for ever.’”

  He didn’t hit him.

  Somehow Fergus backed out of the ward and closed the door, then leaned against the wall of the hospital corridor, feeling ill
.

  Such hate. In the middle of tragedy, to hold such hate to yourself when there was room to move on…

  He thought suddenly of Molly, his precious little girl, beaming up to him at bedtime, winding her arms around his neck and kissing him goodnight.

  There was room to move on. You should move on, because not to…

  He had to move on.

  He walked out of the hospital, thinking fiercely. Trying not to muddle thoughts of the future with what needed to be done now.

  He stood in the car park and let his gaze wander around the moonlit valley.

  The football ground lay to the north, about a half of the way round from the hospital, or a quarter of the way round from Ginny’s farm. At night the lights would be on for player practice. Let’s assume Madison heard those words of Oscar’s and took them to heart.

  She’ll be stuck on the road outside the football ground.

  Madison could see the football ground from Ginny’s farm. It wasn’t very clear during the day but at night it was lit up like a beacon. Madison would have a very clear idea of where it was.

  But the lake was six miles round, and the way from Ginny’s farm was rough. There was a better road lower on the lake shore but the road from Ginny’s was a milk run, designed to take in every farm. There’d be dogs along the road, Fergus thought, hauling his phone out and starting to dial.

  There were people searching already but they were searching the bushland around the farm and the lake below. They were also following the main road back this way, thinking that she might have tried to head back to wherever she thought of as home.

  His gut twisted at the thought. Madison.

  Madison and Ginny.

  Ginny answered at the first ring, her voice tight with strain and hope and terror.

  ‘It’s OK, love,’ he told her. ‘I think I know where she’s gone. Let me talk to Sergeant Cross.’

  ‘How-?’

  ‘I talked to Oscar,’ he told her. ‘Let’s not get our hopes up too far but I think we’re searching in the wrong place.’