Beyond Fear (10 page)

‘Corrine and Hannah will live. They’ve almost polished off a bottle of champagne already, so they’re feeling pretty happy now. They need some dinner before they pass out so if you’ve finished beating yourself up in here, come out and join us.’

Jodie smiled at her. ‘Yeah, I’m finished.’

Louise opened the door, then turned. ‘And just to refresh your memory, that guy from the service station wasn’t just nice. He was
exceptionally
nice.’ She walked backwards into the hallway, grinning.

‘Very nice, maybe,’ Jodie said. ‘Not exceptional.’

Louise, still grinning, reached the kitchen island, picked up two glasses of champagne, handed one to Jodie and clinked the other against it. Then she pulled her by the sweater sleeve over to the fire. ‘Okay, girls.’ She looked pointedly at each of them. ‘Cheers.’ She held up her glass. ‘Here’s to the weekend.’

Jodie eyed Corrine on the lounge, stocking-clad feet resting on a cushion, and Hannah on the next lounge, feet in footy socks crossed at the ankles and propped on the coffee table. Both raised their glasses with a distinct lack of enthusiasm.

This dour mood was her fault, Jodie thought. So fix it. Massage it back into shape before the weekend becomes a total disaster.

‘Okay, it’s official. I’m responsible for the worst start ever to our weekends away.’ She held her hands up. ‘But I’ve given my trusty tyre iron a good talking-to and it’s having some time-out in the bedroom. So do you think we could start over, have a take
three
of Fringe Dwellers Weekend Away, Episode Eight? Pretend Corrine sprained her ankle
before
I picked her up, that she didn’t even bring her gorgeous, expensive Italian boots, and that Hannah doesn’t really think I’m a raving lunatic.’ She looked back and forth between them.

‘We-ell,’ Corrine said. She took a sip of champagne then pointed at Jodie with her glass. ‘You know, I think I remember tripping over Bailey’s soccer ball this afternoon. I was lucky I didn’t break my ankle.’

Hannah was shaking her head. ‘I don’t know, Jode. It’ll be pretty hard pretending you’re not a raving lunatic.’ She raised an eyebrow.

Louise let out a huff. ‘Oh, don’t kid yourself, Jodie, you can’t claim the worst start. That indisputable honour belongs to Hannah. Remember when she locked her keys in the car?’

Hannah frowned. ‘No.’

‘Yes,’ Lou said. ‘It was our third year. We went to the Hunter Valley and did some wine-tasting on the way then we couldn’t get back into the car. We were close enough to home that Pete could have driven out with a spare key but he was on a conference in Sweden.’ She cocked her head. ‘Or maybe it was Switzerland. Whatever, Roland climbed through a window in your house, got the key and brought it out to us.’

Hannah put a hand to her cheek. ‘Oh God, I remember now. And it was Sweden.’

‘We asked Roland to stay for dinner,’ Corrine said. ‘But he didn’t want to intrude on our time away. Gorgeous man.’

Jodie smiled – at the happy memory of Corrine’s husband and at Lou’s ability to lighten a mood. ‘How do you remember all that stuff, Lou?’ She asked and not for the first time. Louise was like a walking, talking memory bank. Hopeless with phone numbers but could recall reams of useless information at will – which was great when you were on her team for Trivial Pursuit but a real pain if you were discussing politics. ‘You’ve got way too much stored in your head.’

‘It’s a gift, I tell you, a gift.’ Louise raised her glass again. ‘Cheers, ladies.’

And Jodie knew then that the mood was on its way up. Not quite at cooking temperature yet but definitely out of the freezer.

After a feast on Louise’s fabulous curry then dessert with buckets of cream followed closely by an indecent amount of cheese and chocolate, all ingested with a steady supply of wine, they were indeed cooking. On a rolling boil, actually.

All four were sitting on the floor, having toppled there one by one during numerous fits of laughter. The hilarity had blown off Jodie’s fear, helped by the fact they were locked safely inside the barn. Corrine even seemed to have forgotten the pain in her ankle as she cackled at Louise’s story of chewing on near-putrid goat meat in the Afghan desert, where she’d been a foreign correspondent some time between the first and second Iraq wars.

Jodie hadn’t known her then. They’d met a few years later at playgroup before their children were old enough to go to school – after Louise had had two sets of twins fifteen months apart, realised she couldn’t have it all and retired from her hot-shot reporter career. Jodie suspected the jaw-dropping stories Louise occasionally popped out were only partly entertainment. The other part was to remind herself she hadn’t always been knee-deep in nappies and school lunches.

They’d met Corrine and Hannah at playgroup, too. Actually, it was Lou who’d met them, found them really, hanging back from the craft table – Corrine trying to keep the paint and glue off her designer clothes, Hannah too impatient to deal with a three-year-old sprinkling glitter on an Easter Bunny cut-out. Corrine and Hannah already knew each other, were playgroup veterans with older kids at school. Lou introduced them to the new girl, Jodie, hauled the three of them back to her house for coffee, let the kids run wild and for some reason only known to Lou, decided they were all going to hit it off. She was right, of course, despite their differences – careers, money, marital status, age (Corrine quietly cracked the big four-oh last year, Lou celebrated with a boozy barbecue three months ago, Hannah would make the milestone next year while Jodie was the baby at thirty-five). And eight years later, the friendships – both collectively and individually – were all the more precious to Jodie for the fact that she’d thought she’d never have close friends like that again.

‘By the way, Jodie,’ Louise said, tossing a scorched almond at her. ‘I think that guy from the service station is perfect for you.’

Jodie rolled her eyes as she laughed. Louise was drunk. Not passing-out drunk, just very funny drunk. They all were. Still no excuse for matchmaking. ‘Let’s not do this again.’

‘No, really, he’s hot. If I wasn’t married and prematurely aged by the ravages of twinology, I’d consider some serious flirting.’

‘Oh, yeah, totally,’ Hannah said and caught a chocolate-coated peanut in her mouth. ‘Not a patch on my Pete, mind you, but totally hot in a non-Pete, non-medical, non-I-only-fall-for-doctors kind of way.’

Corrine nodded slowly. ‘You might think this surprising, considering the type of man Roland was, but I find that slightly scruffy, buffed-up, blue-collar thing quite attractive. And the way he picked me up with no regard for his own limp, just enhanced his whole man’s-man thing. It could just be that I haven’t had real sex for three hundred years but I was quite turned on by some very appealing muscles I felt under his shirt. Yes, I’d say he’s hot. S-s-sizzling, even.’

That brought on another round of chocolate/alcohol-fuelled laughter. It was no wonder Corrine found the blue-collar thing attractive, Jodie thought. She’d spent three years after Roland’s death fighting a nasty legal battle for his share of the solicitors’ firm. Corrine could probably do with some s-s-sizzle, too. Three hundred years was a long time to go without sex.

‘Wait a minute.’ Louise held up her hands, like she was about to make an announcement. Jodie covered her ears. ‘No, no, hear me out,’ Lou said. ‘He’s hot and strong and kind and generous . . .’

‘And lives in Bald Hill and has a good Samaritan complex,’ Jodie finished the sentence for her. ‘No way. I don’t need someone else who wants to save me. James tried that for ten years and I’m done with pretending I can be something other than this. If I ever get involved with a man again – and it’s a big if – it’ll be with one who wants me for who I am.’ She jerked her thumbs at herself. ‘Tough and controlling and bossy and every other thing James says is wrong with me.’

Corrine raised her glass to her. ‘You go, girl. Be as controlling as you like.’

‘And just to let you know, the next time you try to fix me up, I’d like someone who’s sexy and vulnerable and can handle a weapon. Like James Bond – the Daniel Craig version. You know, totally hot, totally armed, totally unrealistic and totally unlikely to be found anywhere outside a Hollywood movie. Oh, yeah, and he’ll have to live a lot closer than an hour-and-a-half’s drive away.’

Louise laughed. ‘You don’t want much, do you?’

‘No, but here’s to hot.’ Jodie held up her wineglass. ‘Good to look at, best not to handle without oven mitts.’ She took a swig and realised her glass was empty. And so was the bottle. ‘Is it too late to open another?’

‘Nooo,’ was the chorused answer.

She stood a little unsteadily. Hmm, maybe it was a little late for another – she didn’t want to spend the rest of the weekend with a hangover. She went to the kitchen, ran a hand over the marble on the island counter on the way to the fridge. Aside from the dirty dishes that hadn’t been stacked in the dishwasher, it was pretty much a to-die-for cooking space. The stand-alone bench was all that could be seen of the work area from the front door. Recessed in the alcove was a deep U of timber and marble cabinetry housing a double-door fridge, stainless-steel stove and roomy pantry. So different from the dingy fifty-year-old kitchen in her small house in Newcastle, the one she’d been lucky to afford after she and James split up.

She opened the fridge. Wow, four women really knew how to provide for a weekend. It looked like her fridge after a two-week grocery shop. She had to shuffle a few items around – two lettuces, a huge wedge of cheese, punnets of strawberries, the tender, little Wagyu steaks she’d brought – before she found the wine. The last cold bottle. Probably just as well or they might be drunkenly tempted to drink another.

As she shut the fridge door, a light flashed briefly on the cabinets under the island bench. Odd, Jodie thought. She opened and closed the fridge again. No flash of light. She glanced around. The almost double-storey ceiling made the bank of curtains covering the back wall appear quite short but as Jodie stepped over and stood at one end of the run of heavy fabric, she realised they were taller than the average household door. She ran a hand along the folds to find where the first pair of drapes met. She was right. They didn’t quite join and the gap between them was opposite the island bench.

She stood to one side of the narrow opening, hesitantly pulled the right-hand curtain open a fraction and peered through the window behind it. Nothing but darkness. She repeated the move with the left-hand curtain and gasped. She snapped the drapes together, held them closed with a tight fist. There were lights out there. Small, low-voltage,
moving
lights. Her chest tightened and her fuzzy drunkenness disappeared like a bubble bursting. Definitely not house lights – too round, too dim. Not car headlights because one had gone up when the other went sideways. And not bike headlights either – motor or otherwise – unless someone was swinging them around on the end of a short rope. She felt her pulse quicken as she opened the curtains again. Just a touch, just enough for one eye to get a look.

Two dim lights. Torchlights. Moving separately.

There were people out there.

And they were playing torches over the back of the isolated old barn, just a stone’s throw from the end of the verandah.

10

Jodie yanked one curtain end over the other to make sure the gap between them stayed closed then backed up to the island bench.

Okay, the torchlight wasn’t penetrating the heavy curtains. That was good. It meant whoever was out there couldn’t see in. Unless there was another gap between the drapes further down the wall. She fingered her way urgently along the fabric, trying not to disturb the folds in case the torchbearers outside saw the movement. No need to let them know the element of surprise had changed hands.

There were five breaks between the curtain drops and Jodie peeked out each one, reconfirmed she wasn’t imagining things before securing one drape firmly in front of the other.

‘Hey, Jodie, have you tried your phone in here?’ Louise raised her voice across the room. ‘We can’t get reception.’

Jodie moved to the shorter curtains on the window beside the fireplace. ‘No, it’s still in my bag.’ She peered out. She couldn’t see around the corner to the source of light but a glow played across the edge of the verandah.

‘I’m going to see if it’s any better outside,’ Hannah said and stood unsteadily.

‘No!’ Jodie bunched the curtains together in one hand. ‘There’s somebody out there,’ she said in a stage whisper.

All three friends looked at her.

‘Two people. Or one person with two torches,’ she whispered.

‘What?’ Louise clambered up off the floor.

‘Where?’ Hannah said as she and Louise stepped over to the side window.

Jodie parted the drapes a crack. ‘They’re around the corner. You can just see the tail end of the light from here.’

Hannah pulled the curtains further apart. ‘Where?’

Jodie snatched them closed. ‘Don’t let them see us.’ She peered out again. The light was gone. ‘They must be further around.’ She went back to the long curtains, inched apart the drapes halfway along the wall.

‘Where?’ Hannah said again, peering through a gap in the fabric on Jodie’s left.

Louise put her nose to the curtains on Jodie’s right. ‘I can’t see anything.’