Out of Alice (24 page)

‘He was going to pretend to be sick. They'd have to stop, and then we'd run. We did run. Only –' her voice trembled and rose in anguish – ‘I fell over and he caught me. I screamed and kicked, but Ben didn't hear. And then he said to the lady,
One's as good as two and I don't fancy running.
And they left Benny behind.' Tears brimmed over her lower lids and slid down her cheeks and her voice was a desolate wail. ‘I
told
him, I said he couldn't, he had to stop, but he wouldn't.'

‘I'm so sorry, Sara.' Jack didn't have a handkerchief. He patted his pockets then unrolled a shirtsleeve to dab gently at her face. ‘Come on, now, shhh. I know it feels raw and new but it happened a long time ago. You were just a little girl then. Here.' He settled her against the backrest of the seat and fumbled with the water bottle. ‘Drink this. It seems Markham was right after all. You're the mis­sing twin and that bastard did kidnap you.' He should have been glad for her, he thought, but his belly twisted icily at the words. Turning his head, he saw the journalist walking across from his own vehicle and waved him angrily off.

Sara drank obediently, then wet her hands and wiped them over her face. ‘Sorry,' she said again. Her voice was back to normal as she frowned. ‘The first time I saw that big plain at Redhill . . .' She paused, fiddling with her hat.

‘The Twelve Mile, yes?' Jack nodded encouragingly, relieved that her tears had stopped.

‘I was sick, remember?' Sara wiped her fingers under her eyes and pushed back her curls. ‘Do you suppose that was because of this?' She made an abrupt gesture at the emptiness around them, not looking at him to hide her sudden embarrassment.

Jack took a pace back as if also touched by it, though he kept his voice even. ‘It could be, or maybe it was the road. But this track's a good deal rougher, so I think the emptiness may have foreshadowed this memory. I'm sorry, Sara,' he said, spreading his hands helplessly. ‘All this way to discover something like this. I wish I could help you with it, but I can't.'

She lifted wet eyes to his face. ‘Don't say that, Jack. You are helping just by being here. I couldn't do this alone.'

‘Well, remember we can stop anytime. You know about your brother now. You needn't see the cairn, or the canyon. We can go home whenever you want to.'

Sara hesitated then shook her head. ‘I've come this far,' she said. ‘And there must have been other happy days before – before Vic Blake, I mean. I want to remember them too, if I can. So now we're here I might as well finish what we've started.'

‘If that's what you want.' Jack carefully shut her door and resumed his place behind the wheel.

The cairn John Randall had caused to be erected was a simple block of concrete inset with a bronze plaque and enclosed within a chain strung from four low concrete posts. The inscription was simple, a commemoration of the lives and tragic deaths of Bennett H Randall and his twin sister Christine M Randall, born 17 April 1967, died 3 November 1973.

The three of them read it in silence. It was Jack who said softly, ‘When's your birthday, Sara?'

‘July twelfth. That's a lie too. My whole life is a lie built by those two monsters. What if I hadn't lost my memory? Would they have murdered me, do you think? I was a witness to them abandoning Benny to die.'

‘Do you remember your brother's middle name?' Paul asked. ‘And has this,' he waved at the cairn, ‘jogged anything loose?'

She ignored all but the first part of this. ‘I don't know my middle name. M, it says there. Mary, Maxine . . . it's anybody's guess. I find it hard to believe my real name isn't Sara. I certainly don't
feel
like a Christine.'

‘You'll always be Sara to me.' Jack had one eye on Paul, who had pulled out a camera and was now photographing her standing by the cairn. Of course, he would want pictures for the story he'd write.

‘It was Hamish,' Paul said. ‘Bennett Hamish. It's your father's middle name. Yours is Mary – for your mother, I assume.' He eyed her pale face. ‘You were a witness, you just said. Does that mean you've remembered what happened?'

‘Yes.' She swallowed. ‘I know how Benny died. I don't want to talk about it now.'

‘Let's get on,' Jack said abruptly. He was fed up with the man's single-minded focus. Sara's distress meant nothing to him, he thought savagely. All he wanted was a good story for his damned paper.

The two vehicles came to Kings Canyon late in the afternoon across undulating, lightly wooded country. Sara sat forward in her seat, straining to recognise something, anything, but she couldn't. The long line of the range towered over the scene: it was almost flat on top, its sheer-looking sides deeply indented with shadowed hollows where the duns and ochres of the rock were touched with purple. It seemed to run on for miles and she might never have set eyes on it before, for all her memory told her. ‘It's like I've never seen it before,' she said despairingly.

‘You were six,' Jack answered comfortingly. ‘Probably cranky and tired and just wanting to stop. How many little kids notice their surroundings?'

‘It's hard-looking country, and beautiful in a way.' She shivered. ‘But a tough beauty. Does anybody live out here, apart from the men at the gas field, I mean?'

‘Yeah, there're stations. Kings Creek is up the road a bit. I don't know about back in the seventies though. It musta been pretty empty country then.' He slowed down, squinting from the range to a worn set of wheel tracks. ‘That could be the road in. I dare say it gets a fair bit of traffic these days now everyone's got a four-wheel drive – though not lately, by the look of it.'

‘Too hot,' Sara suggested and heard him grunt agreement.

‘There's a sign.'

It led them to the campground, deserted at this time of the year. Paul booked them in and they pulled up at length in the shade of a cluster of kurrajong that Jack named as bean trees. The area had been graded flat and was delineated by a line of half posts sunk into the ground. There were fireplaces, a big overhead tank at the ablutions block, and beyond that a screen of scrubby growth that hid the simple corrugated iron dwelling where the ranger lived.

Jack looked about and addressed the journalist. ‘It'll be dark soon. We'd better get set up. You wanna fetch some wood, I'll start a meal.'

The ice in the cool-box had melted. Jack removed the fresh food – the remaining apples, cheese, salami, bread and butter – and drained the box. There were dry supplies in the tucker-box; he rooted among them to produce rice, onions, a tin of sausages and another of whole tomatoes. Then he found a lidded tin to decant the melting butter into, and a jute sugar bag behind the seat to wrap around it for a butter cooler.

Observing his preparations, Sara peeled and chopped the onion, then searched for a pot to cook in. Paul had started the fire. It flared golden against its stone windbreak as the night closed softly around them, pulling a cloak of dusky velvet over the range that blotted out the shapes of trees. The stars glittered out of the darkness as the day's heat fled and it seemed to Sara that the very earth sighed in relief.

Jack stood the filled billy against the flames and dropped into an easy squat beside her while Paul laboriously rolled a rock towards the fire to serve as his seat.

‘Did you bring a swag?' Sara asked him.

‘I'll sleep in the vehicle. I borrowed a blanket from the motel.' He fidgeted, trying to get comfortable. ‘Should have grabbed one of their chairs too,' he said ruefully.

‘Tell me,' she said abruptly, ignoring his remark. ‘That day at the beach. Was that the first time you saw me? Or did you follow me there?'

His eyes shifted from hers. ‘Yeah, I did, follow you, that is. I'd just pulled up at your place when you came out and drove off. I was using a phone book and you were the fourth Blake I investigated. A redhead and about the right age. Of course, I couldn't be sure about the hair colour but that and your skin tone seemed to fit. I was right behind you when that beach ball came over us. Bumping you seemed the easiest way to make acquaintance.'

‘I see.' She searched his face, frowning in thought. ‘It still doesn't explain why the sight of you freaked me out.'

‘About tomorrow,' Jack interrupted. ‘Are we all done here now we know who Sara is?'

‘Well, I sorta hoped, if you don't object, Sara, we could take a walk up the canyon first. See if anything else comes back to you. So far we've got nothing about the actual kidnapping. We know that JC and your mother did the rim walk.' He waved an arm at the towering cliffs. ‘There's a track round the top apparently, and whatever happened occurred in their absence. The governess said she went to speak to neighbouring campers – she told the police that she was only away for five or ten minutes and that you were gone when she returned. The campers were a family group, parents and two kids, up from Port Augusta. The police tore into them, of course, treated 'em as suspects at first, but they all told the same story. And no previous connection could be established between them. The only conclusion one can draw is that you must've been snatched during that ten-minute window.'

‘How could anyone plan that?' Jack demanded. ‘It had to have been a spur of the moment thing. Which raises another question, how did the kidnappers know whose children you were?'

‘Unless they weren't after a ransom? There are other uses for kids, and the younger the better,' Paul said levelly, poking a stick end into the flame.

‘Except that it didn't happen,' Sara objected. She fetched bread and the butter and enamel plates to the fire and they ate in its glow. Jack reached for the billy, pouring for himself and Sara, whose fingers tingled as their hands brushed. Paul seemed to sense the current between them. She saw his hand lift to touch the yellowing bruise on his jaw, as if he had just understood the reason behind Jack's aggressiveness. When the meal was over he collected a much-scuffed briefcase from his vehicle. From it he took an exercise book and handed it to Sara. ‘Here. It's all the clippings I've managed to find. Most are photocopied. It hasn't done much for the pictures, I'm afraid.'

Sara held it for a moment, almost afraid to open it. Her fingers felt the slickness of the thin, brightly patterned cover that showed a cartoon character. Jack said, ‘Let's get you some light,' and she followed him dazedly over to the trouble lamp in the Toyota's cab. Taking a deep breath, she bent her head into the white glare and opened the book.
Missing Twins
screamed the headlines and
Lost in the Bush
, then in huge black type
Randall Children Feared Kidnapped.
The print was smudged in places and her brain seemed incapable of taking in all of it. Much was repetition and surmise – reporters hundreds of miles away from the tragedy building stories from the little that was known, which was basically nothing. The children had vanished, nobody knew where, why or even how it had happened. The kidnapping headline was premature. The police were still treating the twins as lost rather than taken. They had wandered into the bush. Perhaps they had tried to climb the canyon in imitation of their parents, an officer was quoted as saying. Grave fears were held for their safety. Only the year previous a man had fallen to his death from the walls of Kings Canyon.

There was a photograph of the parents. Sara stared and stared, straining to recognise some detail she could relate to in the picture, which was obviously taken at some function at an earlier date. She moved a finger gently over the faces but they remained unreal to her, just two strangers she would never have recognised had they met. Perhaps the picture had been taken at the races, for JC Randall wore a tie and a broad-brimmed hat that shadowed the top half of his face. Beside him Mary Randall, a head shorter than her husband, smiled into bright sunlight. Her hair, or the bit visible from under a close-fitting hat, was curly, but it could well have been permed. It was impossible to tell its colour. She was probably pretty, Sara thought, for her features were even, but the photo was too grainy to show much more than that.

Disappointed, Sara turned to a picture of the missing children that had been superimposed over a wide shot of the canyon. The original image must have been a studio portrait and showed the two seated side by side on a padded bench backed by dark drapes. The young faces staring out at her were solemn, caught in a sudden shyness. Sara's heart ached to see the way the hands between their two bodies were gripped together as they faced the ordeal of the picture shoot. She saw and recognised herself – her nose, her chin, the neatly pinned riot of curls. She wore ankle socks and a dress with a patterned yoke and little capped sleeves, but it meant nothing. No memory of the occasion existed, or at least none she could access. Sara stared hungrily at the image of her twin. They were very alike but only in a familial way. His hair had been curly too but there were differences in the shape of his face. Sitting he was a little taller, his knees knobby below the shorts, his neck looking thin within the collar of his shirt. She touched his image tenderly, mourning for the boy who had never grown up.

Back at the fire she returned the book to Paul. ‘Did it bring anything back?' he asked hopefully.

Sara shook her head.

‘Never mind. Tomorrow's another day.' Jack yawned and tapped his head. ‘It's all in there somewhere, just give it a chance to assemble. Meanwhile I suggest an early night if we're walking tomorrow. We'll need to be moving by daylight.'

‘Then I'll say goodnight.' Paul stood and stretched. ‘You better give us a call in the morning.'

Jack grunted assent and picking up Sara's swag carried it to the far side of the vehicle. ‘There you go. Sleep well, and don't worry,' he added gently. ‘It'll work out. Things mostly do.'

‘Says the man facing divorce, who has a sick nephew and is caught in the middle of a drought,' she responded wryly. ‘But thanks, Jack.'

‘I'm not taking your problems lightly,' he protested, hurt by the implication. ‘Just trying to put the best face on things.'

‘I know. You were being kind. You are kind, Jack – to everyone, and I appreciate it. I really do. Goodnight.'

It was a dismissal.

‘Goodnight,' he said. Then his tall frame, black in the moonlight, retreated into darkness, leaving her alone under the stars.