Beyond Fear (17 page)

There was no one. Nothing. Just empty verandah and the same lush, green view.

Still holding the candlestick, Jodie looked over the railing, walked all the way to the other corner, then halfway along the rear run of deck before turning back.

‘What the hell?’

Lou was halfway through shrugging when a car engine revved into hearing range. She reached the front corner of the barn first, held Jodie back with a hand as it approached.

‘Wait till we see who it is,’ she whispered.

Jodie pressed up against Louise, edging around the corner of the barn, adrenaline flooding her veins. She gripped the candlestick a little firmer. Then the loan car drove into view.

‘Shit.’ Jodie breathed out forcefully, let the candlestick drop by her side. ‘Come on.’ She grabbed Louise’s elbow, pulled her along the verandah and waited at the top of the steps while Hannah parked on the gravel pad.

‘What’s wrong?’ Hannah asked as she got out of the car.

‘We just got here. The front door was open,’ Louise answered.

Corrine got out of the car and Hannah repeated what Lou had told her. Jodie waited impatiently for understanding to dawn on their faces. Surely this was enough to make them rethink the events of the previous night.

‘Did you shut the door properly when you came out the second time?’ Hannah directed the question at Corrine over the roof of the car.

She shrugged. ‘I don’t know. I just pulled it behind me.’ She looked at Jodie’s incredulous face. ‘Well, I had to go back for my diamond studs and I was trying to be quick. It’s not easy getting down the steps with a sprained ankle.’

‘Good one, Corrine,’ Hannah laughed as she pulled a shopping bag from the car. ‘Nice you made sure your diamond studs were out
before
you left the front door open.’

Jodie wanted to yell, ‘Don’t you see it now?’ but she clamped her mouth shut. Don’t piss them off, she told herself. She shook out her fingers and paced between the front door and the steps.

Louise picked up the candle from where Jodie had put it beside the door. ‘You scared the hell out of us. We thought someone was inside.’

‘It wouldn’t take much to scare Jodie at the moment,’ Corrine said as she limped up the stairs.

Jodie registered the comment was made with more humour than her final words at breakfast but she ignored it. She was thinking of the soft shuffling sound from the rear of the house and the thud on the verandah. ‘There was someone inside. We heard them.’

Hannah walked past her into the barn. ‘Don’t tell me. It sounded like thunder.’

Jodie followed her in, wanting to throttle her, and paced around looking for signs of disturbance. The room seemed a little off kilter, as though objects had been picked up and put down in slightly different positions. The corner of a rug was flipped up, a chair at the table was out of place, an overhead cupboard in the kitchen was ajar. And there was a faint tang in the air, like old fruit. Or sweat.

Across the room, Hannah pulled the curtains wide.

Jodie remembered how the drapes had been open when they’d eaten breakfast and sucked in a breath. ‘Were the curtains closed when you left?’

Hannah gave a not-this-again kind of sigh. ‘I don’t know.’

Jodie had wanted to keep her damn mouth shut. But she couldn’t. She was suddenly filled with an anxious, nervous energy that made the blood pump so hard in her legs she couldn’t stand still, kept moving back and forth between the two old tree trunks. ‘If someone broke in, they’d pull the curtains closed so they couldn’t be seen.’

‘But no one broke in. Corrine just left the door open,’ Hannah said, securing the drapes with tie-backs.

Jodie walked to the island bar. ‘No, someone was in here.’ She paced to the lounges. ‘Louise and I heard them.’ She ignored the way the three of them were looking at her and thought about the sound. ‘They were in the bedroom.’ She turned to Hannah then Corrine. ‘Your bedroom.’

Neither of them said a thing, just looked perplexed. Okay, so violence and danger weren’t their first thoughts, but who comes home to an open front door and says, ‘Oh, dear, silly me’? What the hell was wrong with them? ‘Someone
has
been in this barn.’

She marched down the hall, all the way into Corrine and Hannah’s bedroom. The room was neat and organised, both beds made, suitcases stowed somewhere out of sight but the curtains were . . . wrong. Sort of messed up and the pattern of sunny squares on the floor was bent out of shape. She took three quick steps to the double doorway, stopped and stared at the small gap where one side was open, remembered how she’d seen it from the verandah – closed. She slammed it shut, locked it. Locked the windows, too. Then she turned, saw the en suite and walk-in wardrobe on either side of the bedroom door and felt a twang in her gut.

Maybe someone was still here.

She’d been a little afraid before but now she was just mad. How dare someone intrude on their weekend? Force a wedge between them all? She was still holding the candlestick, she realised, and gripping it tight at the base, she held it high and gave the en suite door a shove. A quick look left and right told her it was empty. She did the same to the walk-in robe – apart from a few of Hannah’s and Corrine’s things, it was empty. She went back into the hallway, stood at the door to the second bedroom and felt the hackles rise on her neck. The curtains were haphazardly closed there too, her suitcase on the bed had been opened and she knew – she just
knew
– the stuff on her bedside table had been moved about.

Louise, Hannah and Corrine were standing together at the island bench, heads together, talking quietly when Jodie hustled in from the hall.

‘Someone has definitely been here.’ She opened the fridge, took out a bottle of water and drank straight from the neck. It was wrong. It was all wrong. She shut the fridge then opened it again. ‘Where’s all the food?’ She pulled the door wide to show the others. ‘We had more than this.’

Corrine frowned. ‘I used a lot of it for breakfast.’

‘What about the orange juice and the fruit and the bread? There was more bread.’

‘Okay, so we pigged out,’ Corrine said.

‘And what about the steaks I brought? Where are the steaks?’

‘Are you sure you brought them? Maybe you left them at home,’ Louise suggested.

‘Like a Freudian slip,’ Hannah added.

They all knew the only decent meal Jodie could cook was a steak. They ribbed her about it every year. But this wasn’t funny. ‘No. Someone was here. Your French doors were ajar, the curtains are messed up in both bedrooms, my suitcase is open and food is missing.’ The three girls stood shoulder to shoulder on the other side of the island bench. There was something different about the way they were watching her – the irritation wasn’t there, or the mockery. Or any agreement either. ‘I’m not making it up. Someone has been in the barn!’

‘It’s okay, Jodie,’ Louise said.

Her voice was calm and soothing and it made Jodie want to scream. ‘No, it’s not. We should call the police. You should check through your things. Make sure nothing’s been stolen.’

Louise smiled gently, a sentiment that seemed so out of place with Jodie’s aggravation. ‘Try to relax a little, Jodie.’

‘What?’ Jodie looked at Louise, then at Corrine and Hannah. All three of them seemed concerned and . . . something else. Then slowly, like a camera lens being pulled into focus, she saw it. A pulse started up in the base of her throat and the temperature of her blood started to rise. ‘What the hell have you been saying, Louise?’

15

‘They didn’t understand what was going on,’ Louise said. ‘They needed to know.’

Jodie clenched her fists. ‘
What
did you tell them?’

Louise took a moment to answer, as if she was suddenly not so sure about what she’d done. ‘Just about Angela and the flashback.’

Jodie felt sick. A hot churning high up in her stomach. ‘Jesus Christ, Lou. You had no right.’ She turned away from them, braced herself against the bench on the opposite side of the kitchen, the marble cold against her hot hands. She felt like her friends had just trampled through her deepest, darkest, most shameful memories. Corrine’s exclamation of mock fear she’d overheard this morning came back to her –
Oh my God, the scary men are back
– and she cringed. She didn’t know what was worse – the mockery or the pity she’d just seen in their faces.

Louise spoke to her back. ‘I didn’t think it was right for them to be pissed off with you when there’s a reason you’re going over the top about everything.’

Jodie turned around and glared at her. ‘You had
no right
to tell them anything, Louise. I get to choose who and when I tell that story. And you’re wrong. This has
nothing
to do with what happened almost
twenty years
ago.’

‘I think it does,’ Hannah said, lifting her head in a challenge. ‘I’ve done some psych training and I think the crash last night set something off and the flashbacks and the nightmare and paranoia are symptoms of some kind of breakdown.’

A sarcastic laugh escaped Jodie’s lips. Her years in therapy beat Hannah’s semester of uni psych. ‘I don’t know how much Louise managed to tell you in the minute it took for me to check the bedrooms but I think you’re talking out your arse. And by the way, I’ve had self-defence training and I think the fact that the front door was open and the curtains were closed and some things have been moved are symptoms of someone breaking in.’

Hannah shook her head. ‘You’re not well, Jodie. You need help.’

If it wasn’t so hurtful, it’d be hilarious. ‘I’m
not
nuts. Believe what you want to believe about last night but someone was in here just now.’ She looked across their faces and her blood boiled at the sympathy she saw. ‘Louise, you were here. You heard the thud on the verandah. What the hell made that sound, if it wasn’t someone getting out in a hurry?’

Louise shrugged apologetically. ‘I don’t know. It could have been anything. A possum, maybe.’

‘A possum? It’d have to be a fucking big possum to make that kind of noise. Why are you doing this, Louise?’

‘Jodie, it’s okay,’ Lou said.

‘No, it’s not okay.’ She stepped up to the island bench, faced them over the barrier between them. ‘It’s not okay for my friends not to believe me.’

‘It’s not like that,’ Louise said.

Hannah frowned. ‘We’re worried about you.’

‘Jodie, honey, I know what it’s like to lose someone.’ Corrine inclined her head in empathy. ‘It takes a long time to get over it. Maybe we never will. It hurts to talk about it, I know, but it helps to share it, too.’

Jodie stared at her caring, sanctimonious smile. Corrine didn’t have a bloody clue. She turned away, ran her hands through her hair, fighting the urge to throw something. Don’t lose it, Jodie. Don’t give them another reason to think you’re losing your mind. She looked back at them. ‘I know you’ve done it tough the last couple of years, Corrine, and I respect that. But, not to put too fine a point on it, Roland died of a heart attack on the squash court. You got a phone call from a friend. I was tied to a tree a couple of metres from where Angela was beaten and raped. I heard her screaming until they cut her throat. And someone stuck a knife in my gut. Do you want to
share
how it feels to be covered in your own blood? Or how it feels to leave your best friend behind to get murdered?’

‘That’s horrible, Jodie. You’re just trying to upset me now.’

‘No, I’m not. I’m being straight with you. You have no idea. And I hope you never do.’ Jodie was shaking. Damn them for making her think about it. Like it made any kind of difference. ‘And now that I’ve
shared
all that, guess what? I still think someone broke into the barn. So does that make me nuts, Hannah?’ She looked at the concern on Hannah’s face and decided not to wait for a reply. ‘Actually, I’ve heard enough of what you all think and, frankly, I’d prefer my own conversation right now. So who’s got the car keys?’

‘What do you need the keys for?’ Hannah challenged.

Why was she making this so hard? ‘To get my car from the service station, which at the moment sounds a whole lot more fun than hanging out here.’

Hannah lifted her chin. ‘Perhaps you shouldn’t be driving at the moment.’

‘What the hell is that supposed to mean?’

‘You’re very upset, Jodie.’

‘Just give me the damn keys.’

‘No, don’t,’ Louise said. ‘She shouldn’t be driving like this.’

‘Lou’s right,’ Hannah said. ‘What if you have another flashback while you’re behind the wheel?’

Jodie felt the air leave her lungs. Something heavy and hot filled them up again. She stared at them for a long moment, her mouth clamped. ‘Oh my God,’ she finally said and even to Jodie her voice sounded strangely calm. ‘You just reminded me why I never told you about Angela. You’re just like James. Once you know the story, you can’t listen to me without hearing the horror of it all. But try to hear this. I have lived with what happened for eighteen years without needing your advice on whether I should drive a car. So give me the keys so I don’t have to listen to any more of your psych-trained, editorialising, caring-sharing ideas about how I should handle my life.’