Twisted Heart (31 page)

‘I’m sorry I couldn’t do anything to help,’ I told a weeping Aurelie. I was sure my vision was true and was shocked that Juliet Amos had died trying to save a child from drowning.

‘This time Jean-Luc won’t forgive Papa,’ she cried. ‘There have been too many arguments, too much bad blood between them.’

‘Richard Ziegler holds a lot of power here,’ I suggested. ‘That’s a big problem for your brother.’

‘Yes, ever since Richard was sent here by the court, Papa has seen something in him that he liked – a quality of leadership that my brother doesn’t possess. Jean-Luc was always jealous.’

‘So shall I go after him?’ I asked. Jean-Luc was making for his own cabin on the lake shore, getting ready no doubt to pick up his bags and drive to the airport as soon as the grader went out to clear snow from the track.

Aurelie wiped her tears then nodded and headed for the cinema room. ‘I’ll talk to Papa. Good luck, Tania!’

As I set off on my mission to reconcile the warring siblings, I took out my phone to check in with Orlando as I went. ‘Jeez!’ I sighed when I saw that I’d lost signal. ‘I only hope you’re doing better than me!’

I was rushing along a trail beside the frozen lake, hoping that he’d found Holly and not paying attention to my surroundings when Jarrold did his speciality thing of appearing out of nowhere.

He stepped out from behind a three-metre finger of rock, right across my path. ‘It’s always great to see you, Tania, but you really shouldn’t have come,’ he warned mockingly.

‘What are you doing? Step out of my way!’ Feebly I tried to push past him but quickly gave up.

‘It’s not safe for you here,’ he muttered.

‘How, not safe? What do you mean?’

I’m in the dark forest with wolves all around. I smell them – their wet fur, their stink. I expect the wolf man to appear on the ridge above our heads, and there he is – wearing a wolf skin around his shoulders, the mummified head draped back, a glittering knife at his waist. His long yellow hair blows across his narrow face, his eyes are lit with a strange amber glow.

‘You’re telling tales against Ziegler,’ Jarrold reminded me. ‘He’s Amos’s head honcho, remember.’

‘Him and Channing,’ I added. Yet again I felt overpowered by Jarrold’s physical presence, scared to death by the wolf-man vision.

A smile played over his lips. ‘Exactly. Your version of the way Aaron died is about to meet with major opposition.’

‘This is so not funny. Why do you always make a joke?’

‘Why do you always get into places where you’re not wanted?’ he countered. ‘Why can’t you see who is your friend?’

‘OK, friend, do something for me!’ If I couldn’t challenge him physically, I could try to stand up to him mentally. ‘Tell me where to find Holly.’

‘Still on that old game?’ he sighed. ‘You don’t give up, do you?’

‘And last night you betrayed me.’ I stayed calm on the outside, gave him one more chance to prove whose side he was on – light or dark, good or evil. ‘I saw you talking to Ziegler right after I’d told you we’d come to take Holly back home from the party. You let him know our motive and that’s why Channing stuck to her like glue.’

Jarrold blinked. ‘You disappoint me.’

‘Are you denying it?’

‘Totally. What I told Ziegler was the exact opposite. I tried to convince him not to worry – you and your little gang were here for the party, end of story.’

I gave a small gasp of surprise and relief that Jarrold hadn’t played the traitor. ‘And now – what are you doing right now, jumping out from behind a rock when I’m trying fix up the situation between Amos and Jean-Luc?’

‘Same as you, Tania. I was on my way to Jean-Luc’s cabin. Ziegler gave me the job of driving him to the airport. I thought maybe I could be peacemaker en route, just like you.’

‘So let’s go,’ I said, pushing against him again and this time finding that he let me pass. He kept pace with me as I walked to Jean-Luc’s cabin.

‘So, Friend,’ he said, as if he was using an ironic title that I didn’t deserve. ‘Let me pass on one more small piece of information.’

‘Which is?’ There was so much in my brain that I was trying to compute, so much pressure to get to Holly before they finally dragged her to the dark side, that I didn’t feel especially interested in anything Jarrold had to say.

‘About Aaron,’ he said.

I stopped in my tracks under the final stand of pinon pines before we reached the shore. Jean-Luc’s cabin was thirty metres away, the ice on the lake sparkled in bright sunlight.

‘You want to know why Amos and Ziegler called off the search?’

My heart thudded, almost stopped then kick-started back into life. Finally I gave Jarrold my full attention.

‘Because there really wasn’t any point,’ he said.

I didn’t speak. I didn’t understand. I waited for more.

‘They didn’t find a body, and you want to know why?’

Scarcely able to nod, I held my breath.

‘Because there isn’t one,’ Jarrold explained with that strange half-smile.

‘Why not? What are you saying?’

‘Imagine a different scenario,’ he said, still toying with me. ‘Say things didn’t happen the way you saw them, Tania. Say Holly’s ex-boyfriend didn’t really drown in Turner Lake.’

The ice glistened, the sun made the frozen surface sparkle like a billion tiny diamonds.

‘Aaron’s alive?’ I gasped. I felt an unreasonable surge of hope mixed with a sense that everything was slip-sliding out of control.

‘Maybe.’ Jarrold leaned close and put his lips to my ear. ‘Don’t tell anyone I told you,’ he whispered then walked on towards the glittering lake.

I
t felt like freefalling from a plane and plummeting down. You pull the cord and expect the chute to open. If the chute fails, you have no chance. This is how it hit me when Jarrold twisted the facts about Aaron’s death – falling without a parachute, dropping through chaos into the dark jaws of the unknown.

He’d walked away and left me falling, gasping, grabbing onto thin air.

He suggested things didn’t happen the way I saw them, said to use my imagination.

‘
Someone
drowned in that lake!’ I yelled after him as he disappeared inside Jean-Luc’s cabin. I started to struggle through the snow after him then stopped.

Or maybe they only wanted me to
believe
that someone had died – after all, the dark angels were masters of shape-shifting and twisting the truth.

‘Imagine a different scenario,’ Jarrold had said.

Last night as I stood in the doorway of the social centre, Aaron had run up to me in the black native American vest and white shirt that Grace had stitched for him. He’d said he needed my help to split Channing away from Holly. I’d said no, we needed the others – Orlando, Jude and Grace. He’d insisted it had to be me, and quick.

So wait. What if that hadn’t been Aaron after all? What if it had been one of the shape-shifting angels taking on Aaron’s identity? Suddenly it hit me as a new possibility.

And remember how easy it had been for me to persuade Channing to go off into the night on a fool’s errand, how Aaron had failed to get through to Holly on the rock overlooking the lake. What if that had been set up to fool me? The whole fight was fake, and Aaron’s fall from the rock – all one big illusion.

I was tumbling into confusion, into a nightmare of doubt and not knowing – and this was exactly what my dark angel had planned!

These new realizations shot through my body like jolts of electricity. I’d been tricked. If there was a chance that Aaron was alive, I knew I had to tell Orlando! But before I could set off to find him, Jean-Luc came out of his cabin with Jarrold, both lugging Jean-Luc’s heavy bags in the direction of the parking lot. Jarrold called to ask for my help.

‘Take the small bag,’ he instructed, throwing me a blue carry-on, which I caught.

‘You realize the road out of here is impassable?’ I said, then told them about the drift blocking the track out on to the highway.

Jean-Luc groaned and muttered something about the whole world conspiring against his leaving New Dawn – including the Colorado weather. ‘All I want to do is sit on that plane to Paris and get the hell out of here.’

‘So you two wait in the social centre while I fix the snow plough on to the grader,’ Jarrold offered. ‘It’ll take me an hour maximum to get out there and clear the route.’ He abandoned us with the bags and forged ahead towards the service area where they parked tractors and other big machinery.

‘That Jarrold is quite a guy,’ Jean-Luc grimaced as we lugged the bags through the snow. He sneaked a glance my way to judge my reaction.

‘Action man,’ I agreed. ‘Quite scary, actually.’

‘Really?’ We’d reached the entrance to the social centre and Jean-Luc arranged his bags under the porch. ‘I already told you – he’s irresistible to women – those muscles, that Viking look.’

‘Believe me, here’s one girl who can resist,’ I muttered, maybe too forcefully.

Jean-Luc grinned and said nothing, and before long, Regan and Blake and a bunch of other Explorers came out on to the porch to say their goodbyes and I saw the opportunity to slip away.

‘Hey, Tania!’ It was Marta who stopped me. ‘Are you doing OK – after, you know, last night at the party, the accident to your buddy … ?’

Her voice fell away and I didn’t have time to answer before a sudden loud siren tore apart the silence. It started faintly from a distance but soon rose to an ear-splitting wail, bringing everyone, including Kaylee and Ava, running out of the centre on to the porch.

The siren came from the direction of the dam so we all ran to the lake shore and strained to see what was happening. Half a mile away we made out major activity – giant yellow trucks and diggers were chugging along a forest track towards the dam, and still the screech of the siren split the air.

Then Ziegler came running down from Trail’s End, a two-way radio in his hand. He slid and skidded through the snow, kept his balance, kept on coming. ‘They found a crack in the dam!’ he reported. ‘Ice damage – a twenty-metre split.’

My heart thudded to a halt then flickered back to life. A breach in the dam. A wall of water waiting to burst through.

‘Can they fix it?’ Kaylee asked above the general hubbub.

‘They’re doing all they can.’ As usual Ziegler was in control. ‘The engineers out there can’t pour fresh concrete in sub-zero temperatures so they have trucks carrying sand bags to shore up the crack. But there’s massive pressure from the water behind the dam. It depends if they can plug the gap fast enough.’

Desperately I looked along the shore and up the slope into the forest to see where Orlando had got to.

‘The concrete in that dam is decades old. Something like this was bound to happen.’ Jean-Luc sounded resigned. To him this latest emergency looked like part of the conspiracy to stop him breaking free from his stepfather and everything that the New Dawn Community represented. He stood back and watched Ziegler organize a team of Explorers who would drive out the New Dawn tractors to help with the sand-bagging operation.

Quickly Amos’s deputy got his guys together and they headed off to the service area, leaving the rest of us to fend for ourselves.

‘What happens if they can’t fix it?’ It was Ava who nervously asked the question that weighed heaviest on all our minds.

‘Yeah, there’s two million cubic metres of water behind that dam,’ Regan informed us. ‘If it breaks, that whole amount of water floods into this valley where we’re standing right now.’

My own heart was already flittering and fluttering, but this new information pressed a panic button in everyone else’s minds.

‘I’m out of here!’ Blake was the first to make the decision. She told Marta and Regan that they could ride with her into town and the three of them quickly headed off.

‘Not yet.’ I yelled after them, raising my voice above the wailing emergency siren to explain that the road was blocked by snow.

‘So what now? Do we try to get out of here on foot?’ Marta turned to Regan, who agreed that the best tactic was to climb to higher ground.

‘If we make it to the ridge above the cabins we should be OK, at least for a while,’ he said. ‘If the dam does give way and the water looks like it’s going to flood the valley, we climb higher until we’re sure we’re safe.’

So that’s where they headed – everyone except Jean-Luc, who decided to set out along the trail to find out how Jarrold was getting along.

The siren scrambled my brain as I watched a dozen figures struggle up the snowy hillside and disappear into the trees.

I hear spirit voices lamenting in the icy wind, see ghost dancers fall exhausted to the ground.

‘Our dream is dead,’ Red Cloud sighs from a high ridge. He is silhouetted against a grey sky. ‘We give up our land to the rising waters, we leave our own country for ever.’

Satanta, Lone Wolf, Swift Bear and Big Tree stand beside him as flood water surrounds them. They lift their gaze to the snow-capped mountains, they dream of the past, of sweeping across the plains on horseback, of living off the land, gathering food, making medicines from the plants that grow. It is over. The mountains they roamed, the freedom they enjoyed, the rivers they fished in and the buffalo they fed from are lost.

A swirling torrent sweeps it all away.

I stood alone by the shore, overcoming the impulse to run with the rest of the Explorers. Then the siren suddenly stopped and deep silence engulfed me. I looked around – which way should I go, what should I do?

Someone came running down the hill towards me, shouting my name. ‘Tania!’ I was in my cocoon of bewildered silence, at first not recognizing Orlando’s voice, not knowing which way to turn, certain because of my latest vision that the crack in the dam would get bigger, that the water eventually would break through. The corpses in Turner Lake would rise to greet us.

‘Tania, come with me!’ Orlando grabbed my hand and staggered on. ‘I found Holly. She’s in Ziegler’s cabin. Come this way!’

I ran with him towards a cabin I hadn’t visited before, only convinced that it belonged to Ziegler when I spotted his black Stetson hanging from a hook in the porch.