Dark Horse (8 page)

‘We’ll pitch in and protest our right to never leave.’

‘Not until our demands are met. I want my farm back. And my business. My horses, too. I’ve got quite a list.’

‘Sounds like it.’

‘What would you ask for?’

He had to think. ‘Aside from five mill in unmarked bills?’

‘Goes without saying. We did agree on a fifty-fifty split, didn’t we?’

‘My dog then,’ he said. ‘I want my dog back. That might sound a bit lame against all your demands.’

‘Not at all.’

Heath was thinking of other things to add. ‘That’s it, just my dog.’

‘You lost him?’

‘He died recently. Old age.’ Heath slowed his eating. ‘It’s like I can’t bear to have a dog now, ’cause I know it hurts too much when they go. It’s kinda like I want one but I don’t want to love it too much.’ He smiled gently. ‘Don’t know how people handle having kids if it frightens me to love a dog.’

‘I love Tansy like she’s my daughter. I’m the same, just the idea of something happening to her . . .’ Sarah shook her head.

‘They get to you all right.’

‘What was your dog’s name?’

‘Jasper.’

‘What breed was he?’

‘Bit of everything. Mostly bloodhound.’

A gust of wind passed through. It was sudden enough to spook Tansy and strong enough to pick up a piece of cord tied to the roof rack on the caravan. The cord end snaked down and whipped against the van. Tansy bolted into her outside yard, seeking safety in open spaces.

Heath looked at the loose cord. With that gust the mist was thinning, or it had been slowly dissipating as they spoke, but Sarah only noticed now.

‘Fog is gonna shift.’ She checked her watch.

‘What time is it?’

‘A bit past four-thirty.’

Heath peered out at the retreating fog. The outlines of the hut and the toilet block were now visible.

‘We’ll hear a helicopter,’ Sarah said.

Another gust swept through the camping ground. Tin on the hut roof rattled, and the loose cord whipped against the van.

‘Or it’s going to get too windy for a helicopter,’ she said. ‘I’ve known of a couple of rescues off the mountain. It’s either wind or fog that holds them up. Always one or the other.’

‘It’s not so much the wind,’ Heath countered, with the confidence of someone who had firsthand knowledge, ‘it’s the fog. Visibility. They can’t fly in poor visibility. The pad,’ he pointed over his shoulder at the shed back wall, indicating the cleared area beyond the wall of the shed, ‘is one of the most dangerous bush helipads around for that reason – because the fog closes in quick up here.’

Sarah watched him steadily for a moment. In a way she wished he’d get his story straight – did he know the mountain, or didn’t he? – because each time he wandered away from his account of things, her unease returned.

‘Maybe we should try drying out the inside of my phone?’ she said. ‘We might as well – it’s not working as it is. If we could get it working we’d at least know what’s happening with the weather and down in the towns, when they might be coming.’

The cord lashing about was becoming impossible to ignore. Heath got to his feet and climbed up onto the van tow bar to reach the end of the rope tied to the roof rack. The van suspension creaked with his weight. His knee was without its clear film bandage. He stuck the leg out on an awkward angle, and tried to untie the cord with one hand while holding on with the other for balance.

‘I can do that,’ Sarah said getting up.

‘I got it.’

Pain paled and tightened his features as he used both legs to stand on the tow bar. She could see his jaw grinding back and forth with discomfort as he finished untying the cord. No doubting his injury then, he was just stubborn about it like she would be.

‘It’s the workmen’s clothesline.’ Sarah tipped her face to the roof beams above her. ‘They would have tied off the other end up there.’

Heath looped the freed cord in his hands. He looked unsure as to how to get down from his elevated spot. As she had done beside the bog, Sarah went to him and offered her shoulder as support. He remained flummoxed about how to make the small drop. She turned and presented him her back.

‘Climb on.’

‘I’ve got to strap it again,’ he said, a half-embarrassed justification for his predicament.

The manoeuvre was less a piggyback and more a slippery slide. She hunched and he leaned his body onto her. She was becoming accustomed to his weight – pulling him through the bog, helping him into the shed, sitting him in the chair. As she straightened he was deposited gently on the floor. He stood on one foot at first, and then tentatively put down his other foot.

‘It’s getting worse.’ His face had turned grey, with worry or pain, or both.

‘I’ll help you strap it.’

He put the cord in his pocket. Both his hands went around his knee. For the first time Sarah saw a look of unguarded fear in his eyes.

‘Hop to the chair.’

He did.

‘Where did you put the cling film?’

‘In the drawer under the bed.’

‘Do you need painkillers?’

‘No, no,’ he said.

The drawer beneath the van bed was hard to find. It was a concealed one that Sarah hadn’t discovered in her initial investigations. She pushed a panel at the foot of the bed and the long drawer popped out. Inside it were the clothes Heath had arrived in – cleaned, dried and neatly folded. Sarah pressed the items, to feel if anything was in the pockets. Without shaking out the pants, though, it was hard to tell if the pockets were full. And something about the precise way the items were folded told Sarah that Heath would know if she’d been fossicking through his gear. The roll of cling film was in the drawer too, as was a drink bottle Sarah had seen up the top of the kitchen cupboard, and a tightly bundled ball of garbage bags that he must have taken from the kitchen cupboards as well.

When Sarah went back out to him, she carried her phone as well as the cling film.

‘You might be better than me at opening this.’

Sarah passed him the phone. She crouched by his leg and began peeling a length of plastic from the roll. He seemed dubious about taking or touching her phone. He placed it beside him on the table. ‘I’d be too worried I’d damage it by opening it.’

‘It’s already damaged. I’m going to open it anyway.’ Sarah peeled a length of plastic from the roll. ‘If I get it working I could explain to the rescuers that I’m not going to leave my horse, all I need is a drop of food and supplies.’ Sarah looked pointedly across at Tansy. ‘I’m not talking out of the top of my head – I
won’t
leave my horse.’ Maybe it was the whiskey but Sarah suddenly felt confident enough to say, ‘If I have to be shacked up with someone, I’m glad it’s you, Heath. If you don’t want me to say anything about you, I won’t.’

‘I just don’t think opening your phone is going to make it work.’

‘It needs to dry out that’s all.’

Sarah was expecting to see swelling in Heath’s knee, but there was only a slight lump above his kneecap, possibly a normal fleshy bit. She’d need the other knee in the same stretched-out position for comparison. He had his other knee bent up with his hand resting on it. She couldn’t very well say in one breath that he should trust her and then in the next make him show her both legs so she could judge for herself how badly he was injured.

‘Is there some special way I should be bandaging this?’

‘Here,’ he leaned down and took the roll. ‘Above and around it.’

Sarah stayed crouched and watched what he did.

He avoided the kneecap itself, a diamond-shaped strapping. Bending forward his head came level with hers.

Even when married, some women don’t shelve that ability to look at a man, hold eye contact and convey the unmistakable directness, eye contact that slices through congeniality, convention, politeness, everything falls away for a moment.
You’ve got a certain something that I like.
Sarah had binned the look long ago. It hadn’t been a conscious act, naturally loyal, she’d lost her pick-up skills well before the altar, before the engagement ring, felt she’d never need to pick up again the moment her husband had said
I love you
and she’d said it in return, dumbly believing in One Love. Ten years plus of dust had settled on Sarah’s look, on her pick-up skills. They must have grown dull. Heath barely glanced back at her. He fiddled around tearing off the cling film and tucking under the end piece.

‘I might actually have one of those painkillers. If you don’t mind?’

It was probably just as well he took no notice of her. Sarah was lurching from one feeling to the next, switching tack midway, grabbing onto whatever looked feasible as a raft. Being constantly in two minds was making her dizzy.

The tablets were in her saddlebag. Wind was gusting every few minutes. A grey, late-afternoon sky could be glimpsed through the thin patches of mist. Sarah walked across to her saddle. She swayed. The food she’d eaten hadn’t been enough to stop the alcohol going straight to her head.

Her painkillers weren’t the over-the-counter type. Sarah had suffered her first ever migraine in the weeks after the collapse of her marriage. Three days laid up in bed, vomiting as well as crippled by head pain. She feared the onset of that ocean liner of hurt; the bow of a P&O ship ploughing into her cranium. Paracetamol couldn’t be trusted after a migraine. These days, at the first twinge of a headache she reached for the big guns. Nip it in the bud.

‘You might only need half a tablet,’ Sarah said as she returned to the table. ‘They’re strong. You’re not allergic to morphine are you?’

‘Hey?’

‘They’re really strong.’

She showed him the box. He recoiled from it. ‘What are they?’

‘Nordoxin.’

‘I was thinking a couple of Panadol . . .’

‘This is all I’ve got.’

‘I’ll give it a miss.’ He glanced up at her face. ‘Thanks anyway.’

Sarah took the tablets back to her saddlebag and put them away. His reaction put a line through one thing – he was no drug dealer. It looked as though he’d never come within cooee of anything more potent than Berocca.

‘I might lie down,’ he called across to her.

Heath was up and in the van before Sarah drew breath to reply. She slumped and parked herself sideways on her saddle, staring at the vacated table. It was one aspect of being single that she’d forgotten about – the utter confusion and the erratic nature of it all, the sting of rejection, even in this situation when it was best to be rejected.

Back at the table, she capped the whiskey bottle and put it away, out of sight. She ate her dessert. Her phone was sitting on his side of the table, forlornly, rejected, a bit like she was. The buzz of alcohol was white noise in Sarah’s ears. She tried to think clearly. Couldn’t. What she did notice was that he’d taken the roll of plastic wrap with him, and that the length of cable was nowhere to be seen.

S
quatting in the grass was a quicker and easier option than going into the toilet block. Sarah took the torch and went around behind the shed. On the way back she went over to the pallet in the shed corner. She shone the torch beneath it. The twisted and tortured snake corpse made her start. For some reason she’d expected it to be gone along with the insects, as though the marching army might have cleared the battlefield of its dead and wounded, crowd-surfed the snake out of there.

The reptile hadn’t coiled up to die. It had unravelled into a kinked, agonised length, mouth open, fangs bared. Bitten, stung, suffocated
and
choked by insects. What a way to go. Sarah tried to see around the snake. She could see past it, yet it must be blocking the torchlight somehow, because she couldn’t see the gun . . .

She lay down on the dirt and reached under the pallet. She used the torch end to prod the snake corpse, checking that it was dead. Stiff as a board, the snake body moved like a thick strip of beef jerky. It was the deadliest of snakes too – a brown. No need for imposing size or bright red bellies when your venom was as powerful as theirs. Sarah pushed and poked at the snake until she had a completely unobstructed view of the area behind it. No gun.

Sarah lay on her stomach on the dirt floor, arm stretched beneath the pallet, coming to terms with the absence of the weapon. The ground was damp. Those places where her body pressed down hardest were becoming wet. With her free hand Sarah felt for the bullets in her jeans pocket. She still had them at least. Custard, plum pudding and whiskey gurgled in her stomach. Her heart thumped against her ribs. Heath had seen her shining the torch beneath the pallet when he’d come in from his half-explained walk in the rain. It had been niggling at her, too, that he’d not come near the pallet during their search for tools. He’d not said one thing about the pallet or its load, not considered the bags of mortar and cement handy, whereas he’d made use of every other building related thing. Couldn’t he have made his inside fence pillars out of the heavy bags? They would have worked better than the firewood.

‘Are you all right?’

His voice made Sarah yelp. He was behind her.

‘Sorry. I didn’t mean to frighten you. What are you doing?’

She got to her feet. A glance told her he wasn’t holding the gun. All he had in his hands was the lamp from the table. Sarah looked away. Her thoughts wouldn’t stop circling in her head, one idea chasing the next, a dog chasing its tail.

‘What’s under the pallet?’ he said.

‘Nothing.’

‘You’re pale, are you all right?’

‘I’m fine.’

‘What’s the matter?’

‘This isn’t going to work.’ There was no logic to her words, if some part of her was saying
stop now, think first
she couldn’t hear it. ‘I don’t know what’s going on.’

He walked forward. Sarah stepped backwards, her heels a few centimetres from the pallet. She sidestepped, making her way to the end shed wall, where she could follow it along, her back to it, all the time facing him, until she had the open camping ground behind her, where she could turn and run . . . Had he built the yard so that Tansy would be hard for Sarah to take? She would have to catch her mare, bridle her, lead her out through the gate. Had he devised a clever obstacle course to slow Sarah down? When tethered, Sarah would only have had to untie Tansy’s reins, mount her bareback and go. If he was that dangerous though, it did seem a rather elaborate and labour-intensive way to impede her leaving.

‘It’s me frightening you,’ he said. ‘I don’t know how to make you relax. Can’t you see I’m not the sort of person who’s going to hurt you? I’m in a mixed-up situation, that’s all. I’m stuck and waiting. We both are.’

‘It’s not drugs,’ she said.

The commonsense part of Sarah found its voice then –
shut up!
it shouted inside her mind, the tone shrill and alarmed. He has the gun. Don’t argue with the person in possession of the weapon. She had dual things to worry about – him and
her
, the stupid things she’d say.

He walked closer to the pallet and leaned down to look under it. The lamplight wasn’t direct enough. ‘Is it wise for me to stick my nose under here?’

‘Why didn’t you use those bags when building the yard today?’

He straightened. ‘These?’ He looked at the cement and mortar. ‘We didn’t have the equipment to mix cement.’

‘The bags though, the pallet – you didn’t think those things would be useful?’

‘That’s what’s upset you? That I didn’t use this stuff?’

‘You know it’s not.’ A rush of fear and frustration made her say, ‘You moved my gun.’

His brow creased and lifted. ‘
O
-kay. You have a gun.’

‘No. You have it.’

‘No . . . I don’t.’

‘It was there.’ Sarah pointed to the spot. ‘It’s gone.’

One hand open, and then both hands open to her as he put the lamp down by his feet — ‘I did not touch any gun. I swear to God.’ He held his hands out further, straight arms, fingers wide, palms stretched taut. ‘I find it a bit disturbing that you had a gun hidden, but, anyway, I haven’t touched it.’

‘Don’t,’ she said shaking her head, ‘lie.’

‘What do you want me to say? I didn’t touch it.’

‘I don’t want you to lie.’

‘I’m not.’

‘It’s been moved.’

‘Not by me.’

‘Are you saying someone else moved it?’ Her torch beam had been aimed down at the shed floor, shining a disc of light near him but not at him. She lifted it and shone it in his face. ‘Who else is here?’

He shied and blocked the light with his outstretched hands. ‘Shit, come on.’

‘Come on what? What do you mean?’

‘Settle down.’

‘More people are with you.’

‘Calm down.’

‘No. My gun is gone and you won’t say who you are or why you’re here, you’ve not asked me anything. Why aren’t you asking me anything? You don’t know who
I
am. You don’t know why
I’m
here.’

‘I do know why you’re here.’

‘I haven’t told you,’ she accused. Then she had to rack her brain: what exactly had she told him? Her thoughts were scattered, her thinking jumbled. He was confusing her – he was
deliberately
confusing her.

‘Would you move that light out of my eyes?’

‘No.’

Squinting and head turned away he muttered something. All that Sarah caught was the word
kill
. Her insides dropped. Her blood sank low. It was what the darkest part of her had suspected, the reason he was evasive, the reason he wouldn’t tell her his full name –
murder
,
killing
, those words had been creeping around in the backblocks of Sarah’s mind, hanging back in the shadows, in the fog.

‘What did you say?’ she breathed.

‘Take the torch out of my face.’

Sarah pointed it at his chest. ‘What did you say?’

Her body was ready to run, her leg muscles were braced, her arms and torso had lost rigidity, preparing to go with her legs, and her eyes checked the ground around her, identifying the best escape route.

‘I said . . .’ he wiped his lips and blinked, ‘. . . you came up here to kill yourself.’

She stayed poised to run while what he said filtered through past all her other thoughts. ‘No . . .’ fell from between her lips. She frowned. ‘No,’ she said again. Her muscles slackened. Strings connected to her joints and bones were snipped through by his words. ‘What?’ But she had heard him.

‘The tablets, and now you tell me you have a gun. That kinda confirms it. You were out on your own on Christmas Day, in the bush, beaten up, with tablets and a gun, and . . . it’s in your eyes, Sarah, I can see it.’

‘Why would you say that?’

‘Sorry if it upsets you for me to be so blunt.’

‘Stop saying sorry all the time.’

‘You’re defensive now.’

‘What?’

His gaze ran up and down her. Of course she tensed up with him eyeing her like that. ‘If you said to me I was up here to kill myself, and I knew I wasn’t, it wouldn’t make me defensive and angry. I’d simply say, I wasn’t.’

‘I wasn’t.’

‘Why did you bring a gun?’

‘None of your business.’

‘Your husband cheated on you, he hit you; you’ve told me that without telling me. It’s not hard to see. You were suicidal. I’m not saying you are now, or that you would have done it, I think surviving on the bridge has changed you, made you see things differently. You were suicidal though.’

‘Get fucked.’

He looked down at his feet. ‘It’s not weak to be depressed.’

‘Oh . . . I see – that’s why you told me about your brother. Wow, how neat is this? I’m stuck with the perfect counsellor. You’re a genius on the matter. I take it your brother gets angry and defensive too, does he?’

‘Yes, he does.’

‘When did you decide I was suicidal?’

‘This morning.’

‘I’ve spent the day firming that up nicely for you, haven’t I? The clincher must have been me crying in the shower.’

‘You don’t want to talk about it.’

‘Is not talking step one or step two on the road to nowhere? Am I midway along the line?’

‘I think you’re a bit further on than that.’ His voice was firm yet kind.

She stared at him.

‘I’m not challenging you, Sarah. You should ask yourself why you feel challenged.’

‘Shit, yeah, why on earth would I be feeling challenged? I can’t think why at all.’ She dropped the sarcasm to add, ‘If you didn’t move the gun, someone did. This . . .’ she waved the torch behind him at the pallet, the place of the missing weapon, ‘. . . doesn’t make me comfortable. If I’m acting challenged and defensive, has it crossed your mind that it’s the only way I can be? I tried sitting around and pretending you’re not a liar, and I would have kept doing that, but you —’ She lost her train of thought. The wind and a noise in the night distracted her. She listened: blustery conditions and the growl of a nocturnal marsupial, a possum in the bush. She tried to focus again. ‘You don’t want me to know anything about you? Then it’s probably best that I don’t know you.’ She began to back up, thought twice about the safety of the darkness behind her, and stopped.

The night was closing in around her. The mountain felt small, like one of those trick rooms they have in funhouses, where the floor appears to be listing and corners taper off, nothing was as it seemed. Sarah realised she was absolutely trapped. Every exit was shut – fleeing, staying, getting along with this man, not getting along with him, believing him, not believing him, in essence it didn’t matter, the only way out was the way she’d come in, and that was flooded.

‘I think . . . it’s going to be best if I stay in the hut.’

‘I didn’t want to do this – to upset you. But, Sarah, you were riding in the mountains with a gun and tablets on Christmas morning. What would you think if you were me?’

Sarah ran her hand over her hair, felt the coarseness of it, touched her face, almost as though to remind herself of who she was, rubbed along her cheekbones, smoothed her hands down over her neck. Her pulse was fierce beneath her fingers. Her heart was such a stalwart, pumping on, regardless. Her bluff and bravado began to wane. She wished she hadn’t gotten angry. By getting heated she’d played into his hands. Heath was proving to be far more tactical than she was. Did he even have a brother? Was the story made up to set her up and throw her off? It had.

‘Tansy can be tethered down at the hut with me. You have some kind of problem,’ and she motioned out to the night to clarify that rather derisive statement, ‘I’ll leave you alone to deal with it.’ Sarah’s back to the night suddenly felt exposed. She moved around to stand against the shed wall. It only made the front of her body feel like it sat square in the firing line. ‘Is there someone else?’ she said.

The moment those four words left Sarah’s mouth, she couldn’t help but be hit with the irony: those four words were the ones that had started it all. If not for those four words she wouldn’t even be on the mountain. What were the chances of her having to utter
is there someone else
while here too?

Heath was looking intently at her face. ‘Sarah . . . did you move the gun?’

‘What?’

‘Please stay calm.’ He said in a lowered voice, ‘Maybe you moved it and you don’t remember.’

‘How would I not remember something like that?’

‘You might have hidden it from yourself. Hidden the reason you felt you had to put it somewhere hard to get?’

‘Give me a break,’ she sighed. ‘This is going to be tedious; I can see that now.’

It was ludicrous, the limb he wanted her to climb out on.
He’d
moved the gun and she’d like to bet he’d also taken the battery from her phone. That was why he’d been reluctant to open it.

She said, without thinking, ‘Let’s open my phone and sort this out.’