Beyond Fear (16 page)

Jodie led Louise in the opposite direction to the path she’d run earlier, wanting to explore a little further, set her mind at ease – either way. The ridge continued level for about a hundred metres then began a descent into the valley. They found a narrow track of beaten earth and started to follow it down the incline.

They were quiet for a while, watching their feet on the rough ground and taking in the view of the valley. As the ground evened out and the path widened, they walked side by side again and Louise broke the lull in conversation.

‘I don’t know if I ever told you,’ she said. ‘But when I was in Afghanistan, I was caught in gunfire. There were four of us in a car, stopped in a queue at a roadblock. It wasn’t about us, we were just caught in the middle of it. We couldn’t go anywhere so we just got down on the floor and crossed our fingers. The windscreen was hit and glass went all over us. A couple of tyres were shot out. It was terrifying. Anyway, about a year after I returned from Afghanistan, when I was pregnant with Lilly and Alice, I started having nightmares. I’d dream I was in the back of a car and someone was firing a gun through the windows. I was on the floor trying to get as low as I could but my pregnant stomach was in the way. I couldn’t get low enough and broken glass would drop all over me and I could feel the bullets passing over my head.’ She shivered a little, as though she could still see it. ‘It was worse after I had the girls. I’d dream they were in the car with me, crying and screaming and I’d be trying to cover them with my body, expecting a bullet to rip into me any minute.’

Jodie thought of Angela’s screams in her nightmare this morning and her stomach tightened. ‘It must have been horrible.’

‘Pretty hard to deal with when you’ve got newborn twins. You’d think I’d be too tired to dream but no. Ray shuffled me off to a psychologist who said I had posttraumatic stress disorder. Talking about what happened over there helped a lot, you know.’

Jodie nodded a couple of times, waiting for Louise to go on. When she didn’t, Jodie looked over, saw her face and frowned. ‘What?’

Lou shrugged.

‘Are you trying to tell me I need professional help?’ Jodie said.

‘No, I’m saying it worked for me to talk about it. So if you need to, I know how to listen.’

Jodie’s heart beat a little harder and, without meaning to, she picked up the walking pace. ‘I’m fine. It was just a bad dream.’

Louise matched her step for step. ‘If it was just the nightmare, I wouldn’t be saying anything.’ She looked at Jodie, raised her eyebrows.

‘What?’

‘You’re so wound up, Jodie. It’s like you’re on a caffeine drip.’ She grabbed her arm and pulled her to a stop. ‘Can we slow down? You’re killing me.’ She puffed a couple of times. ‘God, I’m so unfit. Look, you’re one of the most together people I know but you’re stressing about everything. And so tense.’ She held out a hand to emphasise her point. ‘And fighting with Corrine and Hannah, waking up screaming, carrying weapons, for God’s sake. Like I said, what’s going on?’

Jodie slid her hands into the back pockets of her jeans. She hadn’t realised the drama in her head had been quite so obvious.

‘Who’s Angela?’ Louise asked.

Jodie sucked in a breath, suddenly angry. ‘The reporter in you just can’t help it, huh?’

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ Louise snapped back. ‘I’m trying to talk to you. I’m worried about you.’

Jodie was starting to worry about herself. She ran her hands through her hair.

Who’s Angela?

Jodie saw Angie’s eyes blinking at her in the dark again, felt the slime of blood on her hands, heard the echo of her scream reverberate around her head, and the air in her lungs evaporated.

14

‘Jodie?’ Louise sounded worried.

Not surprising considering Jodie had just bent double at the waist. She had her hands on her knees, was trying to suck in air. It was no good. She straightened up, clasped her hands around the back of her head and squeezed her eyes shut.

Okay, Jodie, maybe you need to say it. The memory had worked its way up from the bottom of her psyche. Maybe if she let it out it would go away. If nothing else, she’d get another opinion on her perspective. She took a deep breath. God, saying it out loud always felt like she was pulling her heart out with a piece of string. She opened her eyes, looked at her feet and kept them there as she talked.

‘Angela was my best friend in high school. We were followed from a bus stop one night. Three vicious bastards beat her up, raped her and cut her throat. One of them chased me when I got away and stabbed me in the stomach six times.’ She breathed in and out, felt the anxiety ease up a little, as though the vice holding her body tight had loosened. She looked up at Louise. ‘I’m sorry. It’s a horrible story.’

‘It’s okay.’ Lou smiled gently. ‘I’ve heard lots of stories.’ She waited a beat before asking the next question. ‘How long have you been dreaming about it?’

Jodie shook her head. ‘It wasn’t the dream that freaked me out.’ She told her about the flashback, how she hadn’t had one for years, how she couldn’t shake the edginess it had left her with. ‘I keep thinking through everything that’s happened since then, the guy in the pub, the two men, the lights on the verandah, the car in the night, trying to figure out if I’d feel this anxious if I hadn’t had the flashback. And I just don’t know. All I know is that it feels wrong. It feels like a threat.’ She held Louise’s eyes. ‘Tell me I’m not nuts.’

Louise took a deep breath like she was deciding how to respond. It wasn’t a good start, Jodie thought.

‘To be honest, I don’t know what to think. The guy in the pub was bad timing. You just happened to cross his path at the wrong time. The two men outside sounded a bit creepy, I’ll give you that.’ She shrugged. ‘But for all we know, people could camp around here all the time. The lights and the car – well, I didn’t see or hear either of them so I’m undecided there.’

Jodie took a step away, stuffed her hands in her pockets. ‘Bloody hell, Louise, don’t tell me you think I made them up, too.’

‘I’m not taking sides, I’m just trying to be objective. Only one person saw the lights and heard the car, the same person who admits to having some kind of uncontrolled reaction to a flashback.’ She cocked her head to one side. ‘Logically, it doesn’t make sense for anyone to be prowling around here in the middle of the night. On the other hand, I’ve written a ton of stories about strange things happening in unlikely situations. And generally I’m writing them because they don’t have a happy ending.’ She shrugged again. ‘So, in the interests of having a good weekend and staying out of the headlines, I’d prefer to think something unexplainable happened during the night but it’s not as bad as you think.’ She raised her eyebrows, a prompt to go with the positive spin.

But Louise had said nothing to dispel her unease. ‘
Preferring
to think everything’s okay doesn’t actually make it okay.’

‘Look, I know what it’s like to have a bunch of crap running loose in your head but you’ve got to try to get a handle on it.’ Louise folded her arms across her chest. ‘The whole point of this weekend is to give yourself a break and at the moment you’re stressing yourself and everyone else out.’ She looked away, turned back. ‘We’re meant to go home on Sunday feeling like we’ve recharged our batteries and had a few laughs. But if you can’t do that here, then . . .’

Jodie frowned. ‘You want me to leave?’

‘
No.
I meant, maybe we should
all
leave. The weekend is meant to be for all of us. We could go somewhere else. The pub in Bald Hill is pretty big. Maybe we could stay there. It might be fun. We could play darts.’ She laughed a little, as if she was trying to convince herself. ‘Or maybe we could just go home. Do it another weekend. Somewhere else.’

Jodie saw the valiant smile on Lou’s face and hot tears burned behind her eyes. She couldn’t believe Lou would offer to leave – for her. She knew how much Lou looked forward to their weekends. How much she needed them. And even though a part of her wanted to run with the idea, to pick up and leave and start again somewhere else, she knew she was never going to do that. She wasn’t going to ruin the weekend, wasn’t going to ask Louise to go home or make Corrine bunk down in a country pub. Not when she wasn’t sure, not really sure, what was real and what wasn’t.

‘No, we’re not leaving,’ Jodie said firmly. ‘I’m sorry I worried you but I’m fine. It’s all fine. I’ll have a nap this afternoon and everything will be okay.’

‘You sure?’

No question. They were going to stay. They were going to talk and laugh and chill out. And Jodie was going to do it with them. She was going to have a great time or win an Academy Award convincing them she was. She made herself smile. ‘Absolutely.’

The distant burble of a car engine drifted over the ridge. They both turned and looked up the hill but couldn’t see the barn this far down in the valley. Jodie strained to hear it but it was too brief and too far away to match it with the rumble from last night.

‘Come on,’ Louise said and hooked an arm through Jodie’s. ‘The others must be back from town. Maybe they bought something for afternoon tea.’

Jodie watched the top of the hill a moment longer. ‘Yeah, it’s probably just the others.’ She blew air out through her mouth. Everything is fine, Jodie. ‘Are you hungry already?’

It was more or less lunchtime – a late lunch – but they never actually ate it on the Saturday of their weekends. After Friday night’s foodfest then brunch, no one felt much like a meal during the day.

‘No, but I consider it my duty to support the communities we visit by tasting their locally produced yummies,’ Louise laughed as they started back up the hill.

Jodie let her set the pace then dropped in behind her when the track became too narrow to walk side by side. Her friends were lucky, she reminded herself, that violence and danger weren’t the first thoughts on their minds when things didn’t add up. She needed to sort the facts from her fears. If it still felt wrong, she’d pack them up herself, drive them home and put up with the consequences later. But until then, for the sake of a good weekend – and perhaps for the sake of a couple of friendships – she had to keep her damn mouth shut.

They approached the barn from the bedroom end, climbing the steps that took them onto the stretch of verandah outside Corrine and Hannah’s room.

‘Hey, they’ve got French doors,’ Louise said.

The sun shone through the open curtains, casting bright squares of light on the bedroom floor. ‘Nice.’

Their shoes clomped hollowly on the timber decking as they turned the corner and looked down the length of the barn. It took a second for Jodie to realise what was wrong with the view.

‘The car’s not here,’ she said, her feet starting to slow.

‘Maybe they parked around the back.’

Jodie looked at the gravel pad in front of the barn and thought of the grassy slope on the other side. Out front was the obvious place. She looked quickly around. ‘Maybe the car we heard wasn’t ours.’

Louise continued along the verandah and stopped several paces short of the front door. The way she stood there, one hand on the railing, just looking at the door, made Jodie’s heart thud. She walked carefully, trying not to clomp on the decking, and her hair stood on end when she saw what Louise was looking at.

The front door was open.

Not wide open. Not just ajar. Somewhere in between. More closed than open. As though it hadn’t been pushed hard enough to carry it all the way to the jamb. Or wide enough for a quick exit.

Jodie looked hesitantly at Louise, held a finger to her lips then stepped up to the door, blood thumping in her head like a drum as she peered through the gap. She could see the writing desk, the lounges, fireplace and half the dining table. But it was what she couldn’t see that worried her. Like what was behind the door.

She slid a hand through the open doorway and silently picked up a wooden candlestick from the writing desk. She pulled off the candle, put it on the deck, looked briefly at the three-centimetre spike it had been attached to and slowly pushed the door wider. If Hannah or Corrine popped out and sang, ‘Surprise!’, she’d beat them over the head with the damn candlestick.

As the door opened further, she saw the rest of the dining table, the full run of curtains covering the back windows, the island bar, the open doorway to the hall. The front door touched the wall behind it and she let out a relieved breath.

Louise moved into the doorway beside her and they stood and listened to the silence for a long moment.

‘Hannah?’ Louise called lightly. ‘Corrine?’

If they’d parked the loan car around the back and were catching up on some sleep, Jodie thought, she and Louise would look like bloody idiots turning up at the door with a candlestick in hand. Then a soft shuffling sound came from somewhere at the rear of the barn and her mouth went dry. She glanced at Louise, who returned her look with wide eyes. They moved towards the hall, were just through the door when a loud thud made them both jump. It was on the verandah. At the bedroom end.

Jodie moved first, bumping into Louise in the narrow space. They fumbled about a moment then burst out of the hall and made for the front door. Their feet clomped unevenly on the timber as they ran the length of the deck, spilled around the corner and pulled up short.