Darkening Skies (33 page)

Accepting the invitation to join their table proved a good decision, Jenn relaxing for perhaps the first time since she’d
returned. The conversation was light-hearted and irreverent, avoiding serious topics. But the open affection between the three couples, the body language and the simmering energy of sensuality and love all served to remind Mark of what he didn’t have, and he had to clamp down a surge of envy.

When they eventually called it a night, drifting away in pairs, he stayed at the table with Jenn, the conversation from the bar a hum in the background.

The liveliness fading, she stared down at the empty glass in her hands, fiddling with the edge of it.

He didn’t touch her, not here in public. All evening he’d tried to hide his awareness of her, the way she occupied his thoughts. He wanted to hold his feelings for her privately so that when she left there’d be no awkward questions from others, no pitying looks, no mumbled condolences.

He’d left his gear in her room when he’d showered, but going back up there now to retrieve it, into her small, private
space, didn’t seem a good idea. He drained his glass of water. ‘It’s getting late,’ he said. ‘I should go.’

‘You’ll need to come and get your bag,’ she said quietly.

He took their empty glasses back to the bar, and was a minute behind her going up the stairs. He doubted that anyone in the bar noticed. Good. Neither of them needed any misplaced assumptions or gossip.

In her room, she drew the curtain across the French door to the veranda. He paused in the doorway, his pulse a drumbeat in his head. She was beautiful, with her hair falling loose, the sheer white fabric of her shirt over the curve of her shoulder, the collar framing the delicate nape of her neck. Beautiful and serious and thoughtful.

His bag containing his sweat-stained clothes and shaving kit sat neatly by the door. He should just pick it up, say goodbye and leave.

‘Mark …’ She stopped. A sad half-smile softened her face. ‘Nothing like seeing all that young love to make a person wish … well, wish that everything wasn’t so complicated. Wish that maybe time could roll backwards.’

He spoke quietly, carefully. ‘Wish that he could remember an afternoon, long ago.’

‘Yes. Maybe. I’m sorry, Mark. I’m sorry I can’t be …’ She stopped again, and gave a small, self-deprecating laugh. ‘You were supposed to be out of my system half a lifetime ago. Maybe when all this is over you can come and visit me in Moscow and we can have a wild weekend together. And then we can forget each other and move on.’

Desperate hope
took flight and collided immediately into the brick wall of reality. ‘Maybe in a year or so,’ he conceded, clinging to the frail remnants of hope. Definitely without the
forget each other and move on
. ‘I have to stay here, Jenn. I can’t walk away from Dungirri, from this community when it’s been through so much trauma. Not when some of it is my doing. I have to stay and see it through.’

‘I know.’

She did understand him, because she didn’t argue the point. She stood close to him, only feet from the bed, and if he was a man without a conscience or into casual sex he could easily have manipulated her uncertainty, the loneliness and yearning she’d half-admitted to, and persuade her into bed. But he wasn’t that kind of man, and he didn’t want that kind of sex.

He bent his head and brushed her mouth with his, felt her initial shock dissolve so that she sought his mouth again. He cupped her face with his hands and kissed her one more time, light, brief, gentle and full of all he couldn’t say.

Then he stepped away from her, before the rush of need and desire and longing overpowered him. He had a cloud over his head, an uncertain future, and responsibilities that stood between him and her.

‘I’m going, Jenn. But not because I want to. You understand that, don’t you?’

She nodded without words.

‘I’ll
phone you tomorrow,’ he promised, before he turned on his heel, picked up his bag and walked out.

She dreamed of him. Her subconscious ignored her body’s need for deep, restorative sleep and instead kept neurons firing and nerves on edge with dream after dream, alternating between nightmares of flames, explosions and guns and altogether different dreams of naked skin, passion, and a man who held her close and kissed her and overwhelmed her with tenderness, broke her heart with gentleness.

When she woke for the umpteenth time, at around seven, she gave up trying to sleep. Untangling herself from the twisted sheets she rolled out of bed, blinking grainy eyes until the room came properly into focus. A shaft of sunlight angled in through the gap between the curtains and already the heat was building. She pulled the last clean clothes – jeans, tank top, blue cotton shirt – out of the bag she’d hastily packed the other night, less than two hours after she’d flown home from Tashkent.

Practicalities. The pile of grubby, smoke-stained clothes stuffed in a plastic bag in the corner might come good with a run through a washing machine. Presumably the pub had one somewhere. But she added a trip into Birraga to her mental list. Most people probably went to Dubbo or Moree to shop for clothes but surely she’d be able to get another pair of jeans and some basic T-shirts in Birraga.

She took her laptop down to breakfast. Snagging the best table in the courtyard – under the spreading branches of the kurrajong tree – she accessed her emails and the major news sites while she ate. The police statement she’d written for Leah yesterday formed the basis for each of the brief reports; it didn’t seem as though any of the newspapers or television stations had sent anyone to cover the murders. Yet. No-one had connected
the dots she’d been very careful not to join in the bland police statement. Not because she wanted the story herself – quite the opposite. She hadn’t told her boss the location of her urgent family business, but one of the emails she had to deal with had come from him – a tactful enquiry about whether she was related to the Dungirri Barretts. She replied but told him she was too involved to report on any of the events; too involved to be objective. If he wanted a report he should send someone else – but with Franklin no longer a threat and the latest sports scandal the media frenzy of the day, she doubted he would.

Too involved to be objective
. Her gaze drifted to the table she’d shared with Mark and the others last night.
Mark
. The turmoil of confusing emotions swirled again as it did every time she thought of him – and even when she didn’t. It was there, underlying everything, a constant sense of drowning in him even as he seemed the only solidity she could count on.

She pushed aside her empty cup and closed her laptop. Practicalities. But as she climbed the stairs to her room to collect her things, something niggling at the back of her mind broke through. The blood-alcohol reading. The
Gazette
had reported it as 0.14. That was
high
. That was a count that would have a young man reeling, obviously drunk. Mark might have only reached the legal age days before, but out here moderate amounts of alcohol were part of life, and although the pub had been strict, no-one blinked when the older teenagers had a beer at a barbecue, or shared a six-pack between a group of friends at the waterhole. She’d never known Mark to have more than one beer, and he didn’t touch alcohol when he was driving. Paula wouldn’t have got into the car with him if he’d been drunk.
She enjoyed a wine cooler now and then but with an alcoholic father she knew too well the impairment of intoxication.

Realisation hit. The blood-alcohol reading couldn’t have been Mark’s. Even if he’d gone on some kind of bender that afternoon after he’d dropped her home, Paula would have stopped him driving.

As she walked down the short corridor to her room, she passed the open door of another room, and caught a glimpse of the head forensic officer – Sandy, she recalled someone calling him – closing up a laptop bag with one hand while he spoke on the phone.

‘I took a metal detector out to the original accident site at first light this morning,’ he was saying, and she paused as she put her key into her door. ‘Picked up a couple of wheel nuts and bolts buried in the sand beside the road. I’ll have to clean them up further, but at least one of them suggests deliberate weakening. I know, sir, but it’s a country road, a dry climate. Metal lasts decades. If the bolt type matches the make and model of the vehicle, then combined with the photographic evidence there’s strong evidence that the vehicle was tampered with.’

She let herself into her room and quietly closed the door behind her.
Strong evidence
. Loosened wheel nuts, maybe damaged wheel bolts. Swerve hard to avoid a kangaroo, lose a wheel … and lose control.

That afternoon, long ago, Mark had parked his car in the usual place in town, in the shade of the gum trees at the waterhole. Away from the activity of Dungirri’s main street, and off the road far enough for someone to get to it, unnoticed.

And the
evidence was building that someone had tried to harm him, back then.

She couldn’t tell Mark what she’d overheard. But they both needed to go into Birraga later in the day, among other things to finish their statements about the explosion, and if they drove in together, perhaps Steve would give him an update and the official word about it.

Driving to Birraga and back, buying groceries and finalising their statements about the explosion? Two hours, he figured. Two hours with Jenn in town, and then maybe … maybe he’d be able to make some sense, some meaning of the connection that still bound them together. Maybe find some peace for the yearning that had been with him for so long.

She’d been distracted when she came to get him. So distracted that she’d acknowledged it with a shaky laugh, made some excuse about being tired, and handed him the car keys.

A few kilometres beyond Ghost Hill, he slowed for a rough section, where the road awaited repair. But the truck that had come up behind him didn’t, swinging out into the other lane and drawing up alongside him.

‘Idiot,’ Mark muttered, slowing still further to let it pass.

Instead, the truck veered over, slamming against the side of their car, the force of the hit jarring through his body, sending the car off its course. Jenn cried out and grabbed the dashboard.

With no clear verge, and too many trees lining the road, Mark fought to keep the wheel steady and the vehicle on the edge of the bitumen. He couldn’t see the driver’s face, but he
did see his hand, mimicking a gun shooting at him, as the truck veered over and scraped along the side of the car.

He swore. If he stopped, so could the truck, and that might put them in more danger. He’d have to accelerate. He had more power than the truck, could pull ahead and out of its range. He pressed his foot down.

Mark braced to keep control on an upcoming bend, hoping for a good grip on the road. As the acceleration kicked in and he pulled ahead of the truck, he heard the answering roar of its engine … and saw the school bus rounding the bend, travelling straight towards the truck.

The school bus.

With no choice, he yanked the steering wheel over, sending the car off the road towards the trees.

For long, slow microseconds his senses sped into overdrive. The gnarled trunk of the huge tree in front of them. Jenn’s sharp gasp. The grip on the steering wheel as he angled it, desperate to hit the tree on his side, not hers. His voice in his head, drumming, ‘Not Jenn. Please, not Jenn.’ The white explosion of the airbag. The crunch of the bullbar against thick wood. The hard band of the seatbelt, ramming into his chest. And more distant, the squeal of brakes on bitumen, and the harsh scream of metal tearing as the school bus and the truck collided.

She was
alive. Alive and conscious and breathing, and despite the general undefined ache of her jarred body, in that first few seconds after the car stopped, she identified no major pain.

Mark moved, pushing aside the airbag to switch off the ignition, unclipping his seatbelt.

‘Are you hurt, Jenn?’ She heard the tremor in his voice.

‘No.’

‘The school bus … we have to … I’ll get you out.’ He pushed on his door, and when it didn’t open he shoved hard against it, but still it stayed closed.