Embers and Echoes

by Daniel De Lorne

Ben sank into the couch. ‘I guess he figured those feelings were still there, and that hurting you was the best way to hurt me.’

  ‘And those feelings aren’t there anymore?’ He dragged the question from the depth of his stomach, bringing to the surface the fears that had sunk to the bottom. At least Ben didn’t look at him; his skin had probably gone pale.

  Ben stared at a spot on the wall. ‘What good are they, Toby? What good have they ever been? I wanted you so badly that I went out and got a copy—a shit copy I admit—but a copy nonetheless. I knew he wasn’t you…’ Ben buried his head in his hands.

  Toby hurried around and sat on the coffee table in front of Ben, took hold of his hands and pulled them away from his face. A shiver rushed under his skin.

  ‘You have nothing to feel bad about, Ben. You weren’t to know what Jared would be like.’

  ‘You don’t understand.’ He shook his head. ‘I thought I’d got him out of my life and dealt with my failure.’

  ‘What failure?’

  ‘Don’t patronise me, Toby.’ Ben withdrew his hands.

  ‘I’m not. What are you talking about?’

  He stood and marched away. ‘The way you looked at me when I slunk back to town, you needn’t have bothered. I couldn’t have felt any worse about myself.’

  The air punched from his lungs. How could Ben have ever thought that? ‘What’s got into you?’

  ‘You thought I was a screw-up.’ Ben’s lips crinkled. ‘I know how highly you regard your own integrity. The idea of losing that sickens you. It wasn’t hard to see you thought I’d lost mine.’

  Where was this coming from? He scrabbled through as many memories of Ben as he could find; all he saw was how few there’d been since his return.

  ‘I really didn’t.’ He crossed the room, but his approach brought Ben’s arms across his chest. Toby placed a hand on his arm anyway. ‘When you came back I was worried. I hated the idea of you with that dickhead and then to hear what he’d done and how he’d endangered your job—because I know how much you love it—how low he must have brought you.’

  ‘When I moved back, all you said was, “I’m sorry to see you back”.’

  ‘I was.’ Even if a big part of him—the part that was currently gunning like a V8 engine—had rejoiced to have him near again. ‘You should have been in Sydney, doing what you love, rather than being back here.’

  Ben unfolded his arms and scratched his throat. ‘So, if you don’t think I’m a failure, then why stay away from me?’

  Toby had come to give Ben answers, but now the moment was here, the words stayed locked inside. He stumbled back.

  Ben closed the gap almost immediately. ‘I want to know because I can’t take it anymore. These past few days, as bad as they’ve been, they’ve brought us together more than in the past decade. Before this we could get through our days with barely seeing each other, but after this is over I can’t go back to that. I don’t want to.’ Pain contorted Ben’s face.

  I did that. I’m the one who’s brought this suffering.

  Ben advanced, forcing Toby to retreat until his back hit the wall. With nowhere left to go, he had to surrender.

  ‘There’s something I’ve kept from you, and when you hear it I don’t know what you’re going to do.’

  Ben towered over him. His eyes pleaded for an answer. ‘What could you have done that was so terrible? You used to tell me everything and then you stopped. You shut me out.’

  His stomach turned seeing how much he’d hurt Ben, remembering how much it had hurt to deny him.

  Toby hugged himself.

  I had to.

  ‘It was the only way I had of holding on to what we shared. It mattered too much to me to destroy it and…’ He took a deep breath that opened the locks to his secrets. ‘And because of that, I never told you what really happened when our mothers died.’

  Ben straightened, the mask descending to show a face clean of emotion.

  Please, anything but this.

  ‘They’re dead because of me.’ Toby beat his chest, hard enough to rattle his ribs. ‘I caused the accident.’

  Ben walked across the room. ‘No, you didn’t.’

  ‘It’s true.’

  ‘No, it’s not,’ Ben said firmly. ‘Your mum was driving too fast, she swerved and lost control of the wheel. The car left the road, flipped, slammed into a tree and burst into flames. Both Ella and Mary were killed, but you survived because you were in the back wearing a seatbelt.’ He rattled off the facts like he gave testimony at an inquest. Official. Distant. ‘I’ve seen the report, Toby.’

  ‘Didn’t you ever wonder why she swerved? On a stretch of road she’d driven on for nearly twenty years?’

  Ben shrugged but it didn’t come easy. ‘Maybe when I was younger. Maybe when I later read the report. But I’ve seen enough car crashes to know that sometimes it’s dumb luck.’

  ‘That’s me. Bad-luck charm.’

  ‘You gave a statement. You said you didn’t know what she saw.’

  He bit his bottom lip. ‘I lied.’

  Ben scraped his fingers over his scalp, again and again. What Toby would have given to take Ben’s hands and hold them still. To ease this.

  ‘We argued,’ he said.

  ‘About what?’

  ‘About you and me and us.’

  ‘I swear to god, if you say this is my fault I’m throwing you out of here.’

  ‘No, no, no. You’re blameless in all this. All you did was give me what I’d always wanted. It was my fault what happened after.’ He scraped one thumbnail over the end of the other, catching at the little nicks and breaking them down. ‘The three of us were in the car, and your mum asked if I knew why you’d been acting so strange the past few days. Loved up, she called it. And I guess I wasn’t thinking, or maybe I was feeling the same way, realising that what had happened between us was what I’d wanted, I… I told her.’ His throat strained with the truth to come. ‘I told both of them.’

  Ben collapsed onto the couch. ‘What did you say?’

  ‘I said I hoped it was because you were in love because I was feeling the same way. It took your mum about half a second to realise what I meant and she broke out in this—’ The anguish over keeping Ella’s happiness from Ben scoured his body. It could have been Ben’s last good memory of his mother, but Toby had kept it.

  Maybe he’d been jealous.

  ‘She broke out in a big smile, a great gasp, it was… God, she looked so happy. She reached behind and took my hand and squeezed. It was like how those close families around town look when the daughter from one marries the son from another. Except it was for us.’

  Ben wiped at both eyes with the heel of his palm. ‘You should have told me,’ he whispered.

  Toby’s heart stung from bottom to top. He dug his fingers into his chest and kneaded the muscle. ‘I know. I wanted to but then…then you would have known what else happened.’ He breathed out. ‘My mum took longer to grasp it. Ella explained and Mum lost it. Called me all the names under the sun, you too, and then blamed you and Ella, saying it was her fault you had turned out that way and how now her son was trying to corrupt me. It was just…horrific.’

  His knees weakened and he had barely enough strength left to stay upright. He’d relived that moment so often over the years, and every time there’d been a twist of acid to go with it, a poison that tried to cripple him. Speaking it aloud, and to Ben, almost floored him. But Ben had to know the rest.

  Toby straightened, sweeping back a few fallen curls. He sniffed. ‘I couldn’t believe that these hateful things came out of Mum’s mouth. I tried to reason with her, but she wouldn’t listen. She kept going on and on and on, getting more worked up. And Ella wasn’t having any of it. She defended you and tried to convince Mum it wasn’t something to be angry about. But it got worse, and all these other things came out about their friendship and then they were screaming at each other. It was so bad and then…and then Mum lost control of the car.’

 
; Warm dizziness swirled through his head. His eyes slid closed but that didn’t stop the ghosts shrieking. In fact they wailed louder.

  ‘Ella screamed and told her to watch out, but by then it was too late and the car jack-knifed. It was a mess. I got knocked out.’ Toby thumbed his left bicep where the break had been. ‘Your mum was thrown out the windscreen while mine was broken over the steering wheel. When I came to, I screamed at her to wake up, but she was dead. Then I saw the flames and dragged myself out of the car, over to your mum.’ He swallowed a few times to wet his mouth. ‘I got to her but she… The car went up and burned my mother’s body, but I dragged Ella’s with me as far as I could. I wanted you to have her back. But… oh god… but I had to leave her behind.’ His eyes stung in a ring of tears barely held back. ‘I’m sorry, I had to leave her.’ He wiped his nose with the back of his hand.

  ‘Eventually the police and the firefighters came. I got to safety, but I could still see the fire burning, and I kept thinking how I’d caused this. And how I’d killed your mother.’

  His breath shuddered through his body and emerged into a thick silence. The cicadas in the summer evening, the whirr of the fridge, and the slow creaking of the roof and the floorboards became louder. Toby had crushed Ben beneath the weight of his revelation. Standing with his back against the wall, he dared not approach.

  But the quiet stretched and his heart, stripped of energy from the recounting, thrummed in nervous anticipation.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

  ‘Please leave,’ Ben whispered. He stared at the floor with his hands holding his head.

  His heart froze, casting a chill through his body that hardened him into ice. Cold. Empty.

  No, not this. It can’t end like this.

  ‘Ben, talk to me.’ He risked a few steps closer. What he really wanted was to fall at Ben’s feet.

  ‘No!’ he shouted. ‘Leave. I won’t ask again.’

  He shivered. How could this happen? ‘But—’

  Ben launched off the couch and strode past him to the front door. Opened it. Waited. Eyes ahead. His free hand bunched into a fist.

  I’ve blown it.

  Ben vibrated where he stood. Ben wouldn’t ever use unjust force against him, but Toby didn’t want to be strong-armed out of a cop’s home. His feet dragged on the way to the door, pausing in front of Ben, but Constable Fields was already moving and using the door to herd him out.

  Toby found himself on the front step. Ben was closed to him—perhaps forever—and night had fallen over Echo Springs.

  Ghosts stalked the land.

  The darkness hid a man who wanted him dead.

  And tomorrow was on the other side of a very long night.

  ***

  The Echo Springs Hotel was quiet, even for a Tuesday night. A few regulars held up the bar, others played a game of pool. Apart from a couple of nods hello, they left Toby alone to nurse his beer in a booth as far as possible from everyone. He couldn’t go home, wasn’t ready to go back to the station, so this was as good as it was going to get. And the drink gave him something to do besides wait outside Ben’s door like a stray dog whining to be let in.

  He should have kept his mouth shut. He took a long drink, the full-strength brew landing on top of the one he’d had at Ben’s. But rather than drown his sorrows, they pushed them to the surface, sloshing about on top of foamy waves.

  Had he really thought Ben would understand? He’d revealed he’d been the one to get his mother killed. How else was Ben meant to react? He squeezed his eyes shut, his hand covering them as if he could make it all disappear and go back to how it was before.

  But before what?

  ‘Mind if I sit?’ Erika Hanson said.

  He wiped his hand down his face, about to tell her to leave, but she was already sitting and dumping a stack of papers and files on the table in front of her. She didn’t look at him, her focus on the pages, no doubt searching them for some sign of her missing brother. At least Erika was the sort of person to not in—

  ‘Want to talk about it?’ she asked without looking up. She shuffled through a couple of pieces of paper, pen in one hand, its end tapping away.

  If he said no, she’d leave it at that. After the short time they’d been working together, he at least knew that about her. He appreciated her professionalism and her dedication, and if he said he wanted to be left alone, she’d accept that without being insulted. Problem was, he did want to talk about it. The words burbled up inside him, a desperate panic to pour out and have someone listen and hear what he had to say. All these years keeping it locked up and spilling it once to Ben hadn’t been enough.

  So he told her.

  And she listened.

  She didn’t flinch when his voice cracked or when he wiped away half-formed tears, or fill the silence when he fought to hold himself together. And when he finished, when he told her what had happened to Ben and how much he’d meant to him, she waited until he’d stopped talking. Her hand hovered above his for a second before she lowered it and their skin touched.

  ‘You know you didn’t kill them, right? And there’s no way Ben could think that either.’

  ‘You didn’t see the look on his face.’ He cringed at the memory of it. He could have lived with his guilt if it had meant he’d never see that pain on Ben’s face again.

  ‘I carried the guilt of my parents’ death for years,’ she said, withdrawing her hand. ‘Not only had I survived but I’d failed to save them too, and that made it worse.’ Her parents were another statistic for country road deaths. The numbers hid the awful impact on the town and those left behind. ‘But it wasn’t true. It wasn’t my fault they died, just as it wasn’t yours.’

  He didn’t want to play tit-for-tat over who caused their parents’ deaths, so he kept quiet. As far as he was concerned he’d ignited an argument that had blown his mother onto a suicidal crash course and taken Ben’s mum with her. He was culpable.

  ‘Ben knows that too,’ she continued when he didn’t respond. ‘You’ve given him a shock, that’s all. He needs time to process it.’

  ‘But it would have been better if—’

  ‘A lot of things would have been better if other things weren’t done first. It doesn’t matter. You do what you have to do to survive and then you deal with the consequences later.’ She got a faraway look in her eyes before shaking it off and coming back to focus on him. ‘Ben will come around. His heart’s too good to hate, and considering how he looks at you, he could never hate you. Not in a million years.’

  Fingers stroked his heart before they shoved their nails in. If what she said were true, then he’d wasted too many years holding on to this secret, keeping Ben’s mother’s final moments to himself, dissolving as much of the old Toby as he could in the hope that there’d be nothing left for Ben to love and he could move on.

  But Ben hadn’t. Unless now it really was too late. Erika might be right, but she couldn’t know for sure. He should have told Ben when they were younger, and then none of this would be happening. He could have done it if he hadn’t been terrified. Then his house wouldn’t have burnt down and Jared wouldn’t be after him.

  Shoulda. Coulda. Woulda.

  Idiot.

  He drained the beer, hoping it would quell the impotent rage boiling inside him. This is all your fault. He shoved the voice aside, and grabbed a stack of Erika’s pages. ‘What are you looking for?’

  Better to distract himself with her problems than dwell on those of his own making. She didn’t answer for a while, and he could feel her eyes on him, but he was done with self-pity. He’d blown it. Time to move on and assault the next problem head-on—whatever that was going to be—and hope Ben found it in his heart to forgive him one day.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Ben’s ringing phone reached into his sleep and dragged him out of tortured dreams. He smacked his hand down on top of it, and ground the sleep out of his eyes.

  It had taken an age to fall asleep, what with the heat
and Toby’s revelations replaying through his head. Only when he’d decided on his next course of action had he drifted off. He was going to be on night shift so he could afford the lie-in.

  He held the phone in front of his face.

  Six-thirty am. Dispatch calling.

  Fat chance of sleeping in now.

  ‘Fields,’ he croaked.

  ‘Major fire incident. All officers to attend.’

  His heart punched into his throat. Jared. Toby. He was awake now. But the nightmares had followed him out.

  ‘On my way.’

  He leapt out of bed, pulled on his uniform and ran out the door into a hot wind. He inhaled smoke and his lungs squeezed to expel the air.

  Jared had picked a good day to wreak havoc.

  Ben sped to the station and rushed inside. Two officers followed in after him but the others were already there. Superintendent Stuart greeted them, her face bleak as she outlined the situation.

  ‘We’ve got multiple fires surrounding the town.’ She pointed to three points on the map, one in a paddock, one in scrub and the other in a broad area in the south. Burn-off hadn’t happened for about three years; it was a surprise this hadn’t come sooner.

  ‘You four, you’re to position yourselves here on the Mitchell from the north and stand by ready to stop traffic. There’s a fire crew stationed there battling that blaze. The wind is pushing it away from us so that’s not the main threat to Echo Springs, but if it shifts we’re going to be in trouble.’

  She pointed to the south. ‘Here’s the biggest fire and it’s blowing our way. Officers from Newmont are redirecting traffic at this point but I want a blockade at this junction. No one leaves town from this road. Only emergencies get through.’

  ‘Regional support?’

  ‘Units are coming in from the surrounding towns but they’re taking time. Fire Rescue volunteers have been called up and the firefighters are coordinating them. Helitax has already dropped a load on this fire,’ she indicated the blaze in the west, ‘and a team has nearly knocked that one out. I want the rest of us on crowd control. Emergency vehicles have to get through, everyone else gets out of the way.’