“But what I can tell you is that we’re following up on a nickname. Frog. Cait remembers hearing one of her abductors use it.”
It still wasn’t moving ahead fast enough as far as G was concerned. He wanted action, not excuses.
“We’re doing everything we can, trust me. You’ve just got to be patient. They always slip up somewhere along the line.”
“Cait, I spoke to the police today.”
“Why?”
“Well, I’m not happy with the speed of their investigation. So I gave them a call.”
“You what? Gave them a call?” Cait snapped. She wasn’t impressed. “Without talking to me first?”
“Yeah, just trying to move things along . . .”
“Dad, please, I’m twenty-four. I appreciate your concern, but you can’t take over my life. I would have liked to be there.”
“Just trying to help. Jools and I don’t want you getting too stressed out.”
“Stressed out? How much more stressed out do you think I can get?” Cait’s voice started rising in anger.
“I’ve been kidnapped, stabbed, tied up, in a car accident, in the hospital. I’ve got a broken shoulder, a smashed nose, a few broken ribs . . .” Cait was coming to grips with all she had been through over the past two and a half weeks, and she was becoming pissed off that everyone appeared to be treating her with kid gloves.
“Fuck you, Dad! I was the one who was attacked, and I can handle it, okay? Next time you speak to the police, I insist on being there.”
Cait hated speaking to her father like this, but she currently had a short fuse and he was being way too overprotective.
“Dad, I’m a big girl now. So, please . . . just back off.”
Cait’s sharp response cut deeply, but G took it in stride. Upon quick reflection, he knew she was right. He hadn’t been treating her as an equal; instead she was still his little girl and he was doing his best to protect her from the bogeyman.
Besides, for Cait, embryonic thoughts were now starting to jell on the periphery of her consciousness. She was beginning to face her kidnapping head-on, viewing it through different eyes, developing her own theories as to why it had been her and not just another passerby. Cait had taken Jools’s advice and in her quiet times alone had been reviewing the traumatic events of her kidnapping, sifting through them in minute detail, impartially attempting to recall every fact and nuance she could bring to mind.
“Oh Dad, I’m so sorry.” Cait began to feel really bad about what she had just said to her father. Leaning over toward him, she took hold of his hand, giving it a squeeze.
“I didn’t mean to snap at you like that, but, well, it’s a need-to-know thing. Okay?” Cait looked her father in the eye. “Dad, it’s my problem. Our problem. I have to be involved every step of the way.”
Cait really was sincere. Her father did mean everything to her. He was her mentor, her rock, her backstop, even occasionally her best friend, her guru—which is where G’s nickname came from, as he was well known for his wise, gurulike advice—but at the same time she had to set ground rules, or she knew he would take over. He always did. G was like that.
“Yeah, okay, point taken.”
“Promise? You won’t go behind my back again?”
“Sorry, Cait. That was a bad call. Won’t happen anymore.”
G realized his daughter’s age belied her years and her understanding of what was going on. He’d always known she had a strength of character—his same strength of character if only he could see it—that ran through her psyche like a steel rod, but now he could almost see it. That determined look in his daughter’s eyes had returned with a vengeance. And now that she had called him out for taking over, G began to view his daughter in a different light.
Cait had been toughening by the day, her mental resolve running ahead of her physical healing. She was pushing through the physical pain of her attack, leaving it behind her as she moved forward. She was no one’s fool and certainly not someone to be taken for granted.
G looked at his daughter and saw the woman, not the child: mature, calculating, determined, with a tenacity and focus that went far beyond her years. In fact, if G could only see past the closeness of the father-daughter bond, he would actually be looking at a mirror image of himself. The two of them were like two peas from the same pod–both tall, lithe, ectomorphic, and true to G’s Scottish-Scandinavian gene pool, both possessing a clear-skinned, slightly ruddy and freckled Northern European complexion. Except at the age of twenty-four G hadn’t been recovering after being kidnapped; instead he was backpacking around the world with Jools, risking all for the ultimate experience, taking the route less traveled through some remote Third World country.
I missed it! thought G. The change. The growth. Yeah, I can see it clearly now. Ever since Jools had her mother-daughter talk with Cait . . .
“And Dad, I want something.”
“Sure. What?”
“Two large pieces of poster board . . . please.”
Cait rummaged through the top drawer of her desk, urgently grabbing as many different colored felt pens as she could find. She was on a mission. Her mind spinning at a thousand miles an hour, she had to download, right now, or her head would explode.
Sitting cross-legged on her bed, Cait threw down the first poster board in front of her, squaring it up so its edges aligned perfectly with the sides of the bed. Ripping the top off the black marker, a synthetic banana smell wafted up to greet her, instantly taking her back to her tutorials at university when she had to use the same pens to write on the whiteboard.
Yuck!
But that was a world away in another time, another place.
Cait let her mind wander, scribbling the word COBRA in large capitals in the middle of the paper, retracing her pen strokes over and over to thicken the lines. As though in a trance, she turned inward for inspiration, ruminating, the clutter in her head pouring onto the paper in front of her, her thoughts flowing through the tip of the pen, leaving its indelible mark as she gave weight to that word.
A mixture of hate and frustration spurred Cait on as she grabbed a red pen and scribbled a jagged zigzag pattern around COBRA, making it stand out like a flashing beacon in a storm.
So, she mused to herself as if on autopilot, subconsciously capping the red pen and picking up the black one again, where to from here?
Cait was on the edge of a vortex, spiraling into her own headspace, her mind scouring and searching the hidden recesses of her memory banks as she focused on the events of that day–her kidnapping. Cait mind-dumped everything, recklessly throwing thoughts at the paper in front of her, scribbling down anything that came to mind at breakneck speed: words and thoughts, observations, snippets of conversations, descriptions, smells, senses, perceptions. Not really thinking, just giving into the moment and writing, she grouped similar things together on the page. She was looking for connectedness, a flow of some sort. A likeness.
Diving deeper and deeper into the moment, Cait succumbed totally and let herself be taken along by her thoughts: the smallest nuances and inflections; the look in her attacker’s eyes; the way the raindrops sparkled like diamonds off everything they kissed; the white van; that cobra tattoo. As if she was hallucinating, it was all rushing so fast that Cait was having difficulty keeping up as recollections and memories furiously stacked on top of each other.
A tsunami of thoughts rolled out in front of her, landing on the page with almost wild abandon.
The cobra; that man with the latex gloves and missing teeth; and that strange nickname . . . Frog.
Cait snatched up the second poster board and threw it on top of the first, precisely squaring it up again to align with the one underneath, and grabbing a red pen again, furiously scrawled the word KIDNAP in the middle, carving a space for it on the virgin paper, once again surrounding it with a jagged-edged oblong circle as she continued to mind-dump. She immediately scribbled FROG in capitals, connecting it almost forcefully with a heavy line to
KIDNAP. Silly thoughts poured out of her pen, like how when she was trussed up and lying on the floor of the van she felt like a dog lying on a sharp stone as something annoyingly dug into her side; the stale odor of human stench mixed with the pungent, rather odd scent of some type of weird cigarette smoke—a smell she hadn’t come across before; the almost sweet taste of her own blood as it trickled down the back of her throat, choking her.
Cait remembered all this and more. Every detail. Memories streamed forth from the deep recesses of her mind and dumped onto the page.
Then as quickly as it took over her presence, it was gone. Finished.
She lay back, totally exhausted. Covered in sweat and breathing heavily, both pieces of poster board were jammed full of scattered comments, some connected by lines, but most standing alone in singular groups, waiting to be linked, joined by a common bond or even vague association.
Cait slowly raised her head and looked up through clouded eyes, staring blankly at the wall of her bedroom, taking in the nondescript color, but not noticing it at the same time. The space in front of her was simply something to focus on while the storm inside her head settled.
Almost painfully dragging herself away from the blank state in front of her, Cait gently placed the two disparate but related pages side by side and stared at them, searching for a connection. Searching for a way to piece the events of her kidnapping together into a single but mixed story.
Blue, green, brown, and black pens were then picked up, and like a giant connect-the-dots puzzle, Cait started making links and possible associations. The connections came so fast it was as if she was being driven by a force external to her physical presence.
The reason’s in front of me, she thought as she furiously grouped and continued to connect related items with multicolored lines.
The two sheets of poster board ended up resembling a giant bowl of rainbow spaghetti. But then the more she stared—absorbed the moment and made connections—a semblance of a pattern gradually emerged through the clutter; a strange interdependency was starting to coalesce.
Yes. It’s there! I know it. I can feel it.
“So, where’s your head at, Cait? Want to talk?”
After their mother and daughter session last week, Jools had left Cait to percolate and absorb what they had discussed. She knew her daughter well. Like her father, if she was pushed too hard or too early, she would close up tighter than a fish’s backside and continue working through this on her own. She could be frustratingly obstinate and pigheaded, especially if she was driven by a cause, which was the last thing Jools wanted to occur at present.
Jools and Cait had an interdependent, loving mother-daughter relationship which was occasionally scarred with the vestige of past battles. Jools’s dominant Irish-Celtic lineage dated back to the distant past when Druid women dominated Ireland, and this had bequeathed her with a fiery, take-no-prisoners nature that had been known to get the better of her from time to time. Although Jools always had her daughter’s best interests at heart, in true warrior fashion Jools was known to flare up and let fly, with Cait giving back as much as she received. Their verbal clashes often ended in both of them later regretting the unkind words that had passed between them.
But not now. This time Jools was the healer, the confidant, the shaman of old, and she was convinced it was important for her to get inside Cait’s head so she could help her, guide her, and educate her in the healing powers of The Gift.
Jools knew the road ahead would be a challenging time for Cait which could see her powers of insight and perception blossom and grow if she was shown how to recognize and use The Gift. Otherwise, well, it would only serve to confuse and frustrate her.
“Sure, Mum. I need to unload.” Cait was ready to talk. Not with G. With her mother.
“I’ve got so much running around in my head I’m finding it hard to focus.”
“Totally natural, darling. Apart from the shock of it all, the anesthetic would have scrambled your brain a bit. Tends to do that.”
“Yeah, I know what you mean. I feel really out of it sometimes.”
Cait had been sitting on her bed, staring at her mind map one more time. Making extended connections now, linking them up with long green lines.
“Looks like a three-dimensional spider’s web. You want to talk me through it?”
Jools angled the paper her way slightly and studied it.
Without waiting for a reply, she said, “You know the best way to learn something?”
“Sorry?”
“It’s not to study it. And not to read it. The best way to learn something is to teach it. Helps crystallize what you know and what you don’t know.
“And this is almost like learning something.” Jools turned the mind map back toward Cait. “Except in this case, you’re looking for clues. So talk me through it. I’m all ears.”
With that, Cait started with the word COBRA and worked outward from there, jumping all over the place, bringing in some remote fact here and there, linking it with something else in another part of her mind map. But she kept returning to the pivotal point, the central theme over and over again.
COBRA. KIDNAP.
And as her explanation progressed, Cait gained clarity of thought by the moment.
“You know what I dreamed about last night?” Jools picked up on the use of the word “dream.” Just last week, Cait would have said “nightmare.””
“What, darling?”
“Rishi. He came to me. He was so real I could smell him, taste him.”
Cait paused while she gathered her thoughts, adding Rishi’s name to her mind map.
“He may as well join the chaos.”
Jools’s antenna sprang to attention: The Gift. Cait may have had a crossover to the Otherworld.
“And you know what? It’s really strange, but I feel like he’s been next to me all day. Mum, I can feel him. It’s almost as if he’s reaching out, touching me.”
“What’s it like, Cait? You know, when you can feel him?”
“I know it sounds crazy, but it’s, well . . . sort of like . . . like wrapping up a part of me in warm, wet air. I can’t say it any other way. And then when that happens, I can see him in my head. You know, it’s not like he’s a ghost that’s suddenly in front of me. He’s just there.
“Ah, I must be imagining it. I still miss him so much since those bastards murdered him.”
“Cait, stranger things have happened. Remember when Rishi was in a coma in intensive care and you held his hand and had a conversation with him? Remember how the heart monitor started beeping? His heart rate rose.”
“Yeah, I think about that a lot, Mum. Now that was weird.”
Jools looked up at her daughter and took hold of both her hands, which Cait had let drop into her lap. She stared lovingly and proudly into her eyes and said, “Cait, it’s The Gift, darling. It’s talking to you, pleading with you to listen, understand. It’s trying to show you a way through the clutter.”
Jools gave a pregnant pause, giving time for what she was saying to sink in. “You’ve got a connection with The Gift, for better or for worse. And I’m here to help you with it.”
“Here’s a bus ticket to Darwin and three grand in small bills. You leave at eight fifteen tonight from Southern Cross bus station,” said Boss-man in an officious tone to Frog.
They were both members of the same outlaw motorcycle gang—the Warlocks—and the word had come from above that Frog had to leave town. Immediately.
And Boss-man was the messenger.
“When you arrive, you’ll be met by a fat guy with a shaved head who calls himself Dirtbag. If he’s not there, go to the Hotel Darwin and wait in the beer garden. It’s just around the corner in Mitchell Street. He’ll find you.”
“But . . .”
“Just shut the fuck up and do what you’re told, Frog. And I need you to take a package up there. I’ll meet you at the bus tonight with it, seven thirty. Don’t be late.”
“Yeah, s
ure thing, Boss.”
“And don’t wear no fucking patched gear. Don’t want you drawing attention to yourself. Jeans and a T-shirt, mate. That’s it, now piss off.”
Boss-man was in no mood to be screwed around. Since their identikit sketches that the bitch had given the police had been plastered all over the papers, life had become increasingly difficult. While neither of them had been ID’d yet, it was only a matter of time before some prick pointed the finger, so they were all laying low. And Boss-man was getting heavy “you-need-to-fix-this-now” pressure put on him by Mongrel, president of the Warlocks. Boss-man had already had one run-in with Mongrel, and no doubt the next one would see him end up in the hospital. Mongrel was not someone to mess with.
Even worse, now that bloody Macillicuddy had gotten hold of Frog’s name and broadcast it all over his latest featured article in the Australian Tribune, it was only a matter of time before the cops made a connection to the Warlocks, and this was the last thing the motorcycle gang needed. Heat from the cops sniffing around could severely restrict their extremely lucrative crystal meth operation.
“And don’t come back till I call you, you hear? That bitch gave your name to the cops, and now you’re in the papers. You’re hot.”
Silence.
“Travel light. You’ll be moving around.”
Frog pulled out a pack of Gudang Garams and tapped out one of the Indonesian cigarettes.
“Gimme one of those wog cigs,” said Boss-man.
As they lit up, the familiar smell of cloves hung in the air, the blue-gray smoke twisting in a pattern that resembled the bark of a gnarled tree as it rose to the heavens.
“What about me bike? And me missus? Shit, I can’t just up and go without her and the kid.”
“Leave your bike here. It’s too fuckin’ obvious. And tell her you’re goin’ away on business. Whatever you want, I don’t give a shit. Just be on that bus, or it won’t be good for your health to be seen on the streets in Melbourne. Understand? And hide your patches, right.”
The Cait Lennox Box Set Page 32
