Blood Secret (31 page)

48

Rennie opened her eyes to the soft morning light, listening to the whisper of Max's breath, enjoying the warmth of him at her back, the weight of his hand on her hip, like she'd dreamed every night he
was gone.

Six of them in all – two in the tunnels at the point, four more in hospital. It was good to have him back. Despite the gunshot wound, severe dehydration was the worst of his injuries but there was also blood loss, shock, infection, a hairline fracture to his skull, six stitches to his scalp, whiplash, two broken ribs, concussion and amnesia. It was better
than dead.

Slipping out from under the sheets, she pulled on clothes and moved quietly to Max's side of the bed. A wad of gauze didn't quite cover the patch of shaved head where the sutures were still in place. The yellowing bruises looked as though they were leaking out from underneath, oozing across his eye and down
his cheek.

She brushed her lips across his hair, not wanting to wake him, filling her lungs with his sleepy, slightly antiseptic hospital smell before she left. In the hallway, she heard the shower running, guessed it was either Mike or Brenda up, tiptoed across the floor and poked her face into the
living room.

In the half-light, she could see Hayden sprawled on the sofa bed, sheets twisted around him as though they were tying him down, the TV remote just out of reach. The kid had been smacked in the face with cold, hard reality but some things
never changed.

He'd held it together with anger and adrenaline until Max was taken into surgery, then he'd sat in a chair and cried so hard and for so long that Rennie finally joined him. In the following days, Rennie saw how the terrifying hours up at the point had changed him in ways that made her wonder about herself after her mother's murder. It hadn't made him any neater or more polite or less moody but the resentment was gone. There was fear in his eyes still, a little wariness in the way he moved at times and something more respectful when he spoke to Rennie. She was grateful for that, if
nothing else.

The evening after Hayden gave his official statement to the police, his mother and Brenda tried hard to talk him into going up to Cairns to join
his stepfamily.

‘What do
you
think I should do?' he'd eventually asked Rennie.

She didn't know what he'd wanted from her, possibly just a vote either way but Brenda looked at her as though she expected support.

Rennie disappointed her. ‘You should do whatever you need to do.'

‘I want to stay here with Dad.'

‘Then stay.'

‘But it's all so upsetting here,' Brenda insisted. ‘I don't think being around all this is good for a young boy.'

‘He's not a boy anymore.'

Hayden had watched Rennie for a good few seconds, as though weighing and measuring what was assembled inside him now. ‘Yeah, I'm going to stay, Gran.' He said it without a hint of antagonism. Something
else new.

Rennie heard the soft purr of a car in the driveway and let herself out.

‘You ready for this?' Joanne asked as Rennie buckled
herself in.

‘No, but let's do it anyway.'

Joanne had arrived in Haven Bay while the police floodlights were still blazing over Garrigurrang Point. When she'd heard the locals babbling about the gunshots, she'd put two and two together and gone looking for her sister. It took another hour to track them all down at
the hospital.

‘I thought you were staying out of it,' Rennie had said when she finally found her nursing a freshly stitched shin.

‘You thought wrong.'

‘I told you it wasn't Anthony.'

‘I told you it didn't matter who the hell it was.'

‘I didn't get that text.'

‘You shouldn't have needed a text.'

In the days that followed, Jo's tough, familiar support felt like a brick wall. Rennie had spent so long being envious of what other families had that she'd forgotten what her sister's presence was like. Now she understood that nice people with nice lives didn't always make nice families and that the unrelenting, unbending bond she had with Joanne was strong enough for anything she'd
ever need.

They'd talked only briefly about Anthony. Short, curt phrases from daughters who'd wished their father dead. Disbelief, cynicism, resentment. And now, as Joanne drove, Rennie wondered if relief would come when they saw
for themselves.

They stopped for breakfast ten minutes from the hospice. Jo ate like she had something to prove. Rennie drank two cups of strong coffee and worried she wouldn't be able to keep
it down.

She didn't know what to expect. She hadn't seen her father in eleven years, barely knew him before that, remembered little more of his face than the rage-fuelled figure from the night she shot him and his angry, unrepentant expression
in court.

He was in bed with a clean, white sheet tucked neatly across his chest. The arms folded over the top looked like candy canes in red-and-white pyjamas.

Rennie stood beside Jo just inside the doorway, the dread that'd been gathering pounding loud and clear in her ears. She stared at his face, trying to find something of the brutality that'd existed behind it for so many years. His eyes were closed, his mouth ajar and the lines etched into the pale, slack skin could have been carved by hammer
and chisel.

Joanne broke the silence with a harsh voice. ‘Anthony Hendelsen.'

His lids fluttered and as his eyes tracked slowly around the room towards them, his lips moving as though warming up for speech, Rennie's stomach clenched with irrational, involuntary fear. There was no need. His pupils were unfocused, his voice when it eventually made its way from his throat was a gurgling rasp
of cough.

Jo shifted beside her. It was just a transfer of weight from one foot to another but it seemed to mirror what Rennie felt inside. No cascade of emotion. No wrath, no sense of just deserts. No pity, either. Just an internal nod of realisation – that he wasn't going anywhere. That he was all
but dead.

Maybe it would hit harder later, maybe when he was finally gone she'd shout with rage. For now, though, there were no words she needed to say or hear. Nothing would explain it, nothing could excuse it, nothing would change it. All she needed to know was that it
was over.

‘Bastard.' Joanne's voice was quieter this time, tight with rancour and disgust.

‘We've got what we came for. Let's go,'
Rennie said.

They were halfway back to Haven Bay before either of them could string whole sentences together. Then they talked about futures they'd never planned: choosing somewhere to live, taking out a six-month lease, buying furniture.

‘I'm going to get myself an industrial-strength vacuum cleaner,' Joanne declared as though it'd been a life­long ambition.

‘I'm going to buy books,' Rennie told her.

They laughed, too, the sound of it like cool, fresh air after stepping from a sauna. In the end, a whole life was too long for Joanne to work with. She said she'd keep working Rennie's shifts at Skiffs through the New Year . . . and then see.

Rennie wasn't ready to make a decision, either. Until the moment she'd stepped from the hospice, every choice she'd ever made had been based on survival. She'd never allowed herself to imagine ‘forever' in Haven Bay. She'd never decided to stay – she just hadn't left. Now she was on the first page of a new story and she wasn't sure what it was
about yet.

As Jo turned off the expressway for the last twenty-minute stretch to Haven Bay, Rennie let the final chapter of her last story filter through her mind with
new eyes.

Naomi went into early labour three days after she discovered her husband was a monster. On the night of the confrontation at the point, she heard about the gunfire and when two uniformed police knocked on her door, she thought James must have somehow been caught in the crossfire. The reality buckled her at the knees and prompted the cops to call a doctor to
the house.

Rennie went to see her two days later. Not to discuss the how and why of it all but because Naomi had been her friend when she'd needed one. She figured a cup of tea and toast was the least she could offer.

Naomi's parents and a younger sister were with her, as shocked and exhausted as Naomi. Rennie made tea and toast for all of them then took Naomi to the nursery and helped her assemble the cot that'd been in the back of James's car just hours before he tried to kill three people. They put sheets on the mattress, hung mobiles and organised nappies, laughing at how small they were and crying for Naomi'
s loss.

She'd had no idea of James's plans or the money he'd taken or the year-long affair and Rennie wondered if Naomi's need to find the good in every story had only deceived her – or whether it would protect her when the whole truth
came out.

The contractions started the next day and Naomi rang Rennie to ask if she'd sit with her at the hospital. She didn't just sit. She held her hand through the sweating and pushing, stunned by the process, honoured to be included. Rennie had no idea what it took to care for a newborn baby, she just knew Naomi's little girl was coming into a tough new world and she'd need her mother to be strong and capable.

Pav had nothing to do with Max's disappearance and chastised himself for asking for the loan, figuring he was the catalyst for the violence. Rennie had felt guilty about suspecting him after the full story was out – now she hoped it was a sign she was learning how to be
a friend.

At Max's urging, Pav and Trish took steps to come out from the shadow of their own past. Rennie introduced them to Evan Delaney, who introduced them to someone in Immigration. Pav hadn't done anything wrong in Australia but the Department was interested in his information. So were the
Serbian police.

Evan had turned up like a surrogate parent and, as he'd done before, filled in some of the missing detail. Notification of Anthony's release had been sent to their solicitor just days before Nathan Bruce-Allen died of a heart attack, leaving his partner in the throes of a major extradition case and his practice in disarray. The letter was presumed to be a duplicate for his files, got listed as non-urgent and five months later was still waiting for attention when Evan started asking questions. Rennie wondered what would have happened if she'd received the details five months earlier. Would she have searched for Max when he went missing or just believed the weight of evidence? Would she have told him about Anthony or kept the secret and hoped Max never had a chance to see her father's DNA
at work?

Then yesterday, she caught up with Eliza for the first time since the shooting. She'd given Rennie a business card, told her the man who'd rung the cafe while Max was missing had come in. He owned a small art gallery in Newcastle. He wanted to talk to Rennie, said there was no hurry in light of what had happened but to give him a call if she was interested in meeting him. Nothing like the call from her father she'd imagined.

‘I'll be a couple of hours,' she told Joanne as she pulled into
the driveway.

‘Will it take that long?'

Rennie glanced up at the house, the dark grey of the timber looking cool under the midday sun. ‘There are things that need to be said. It'll take as long as it takes.'

It was cool in the hallway after the heat outside. Brenda and Mike's car was gone and the silence gave her hope that they'd taken Hayden with them. She didn't want to do this with
an audience.

She went to the bedroom first, pulled the backpack from the wardrobe, carried it through the house and propped it by the wall inside the back door. The smell of gardenias reached her on the light breeze as she watched Max in his veggie patch, holding his injured side as he stretched to reach the tomato stakes.

His weight loss was obvious even at this distance: five and a half kilos in two days then another as he recovered from surgery. Rennie had worried that James's deceit and violence would damage him more than the physical injuries, crush the optimism that the mine accident had almost destroyed. But while James was still an open, stinging wound, Max knew he'd come between his son and a gun and that somehow made it okay
for him.

As she stepped onto the deck, he turned and smiled.

‘Should you be doing that?' she asked, nodding at the vegetables.

‘Gardening therapy.'

‘For you or the veggies?'

He shrugged, wincing at the movement. ‘Both. The lettuces aren't looking too good but check this out.' He pulled two plump Lebanese cucumbers from the back pocket of his shorts and grinned. ‘We're eating from the garden tonight!'

She laughed a little. Last week she thought he wouldn't stay for cucumbers, but maybe
he would.

‘You just missed Phil Duncan,' he told her, taking the steps up to the deck cautiously. He had broken ribs on one side, with a shoe-shaped bruise where James had stomped him, and stitches front and back on the other where the bullet had passed right
through him.

‘What did he have to say for himself?'

‘Some of the forensics are back. They confirmed the blood in the back cab of James's ute. Mine.'

She nodded. James had attempted to clean it in the days Max was missing, picking up the cot and storing it there to keep the stain out of sight. Rennie figured the thud on the back gate was him too, trying to get at the computer and destroy Max's files when she went out to pick up Hayden. Not that James was talking about any of it. He'd been charged with attempted murder, fraud and a bunch of other crimes but he wasn't admitting to anything. Rennie wondered how his patronising, arrogant smirk was going down with
the cops.