The Dead Path (30 page)

The sight of the old woman walking along Ithaca Lane was unremarkable except for two things. She kept her chin high despite the chilly evening air, walking proudly, aware that she’d once been a lovely thing and perhaps willing that prettiness to linger through her poise. The other was that, where others walked their dogs on leashes, she carried her tiny white terrier in her arms.

“Excuse me?” the driver said loudly out the open window of his slowing car. His name was Miles Kindste.

The old woman looked over, feigning with great skill a little flutter of alarm at being spoken to by a strange gentleman.

“It’s okay,” said Miles Kindste. “Your dog. Did it get hit or something?”

The old lady blinked.

“Yes,” she replied. “I didn’t see it, but I heard the car drive off, and …”

Miles Kindste was certain she was crying, but the evening was now becoming dark and it was hard to tell. He suspected the dog was this lady’s sole companion, and he was right to an extent.

“Well, can I give you a lift? To the vet? Or home?”

“Oh, dear man,” said the old lady. “That would be wonderful.”

Miles Kindste smiled, perhaps feeling a small wave of warmth at the goodness of the deed he was about to do. He opened his car door on his last evening on earth.

Chapter
27
   

  N
ight.

Spiders were busy spinning webs between pepper trees and devil’s apples.

Overhead, rain was brewing. A few scout drops fell on the shingled roof of the old cottage and rolled down to the edge to perch precariously above a rambling herb garden: rich thickets of hops, chickweed, lovage, tonka beans, high john, marigold, and coltsfoot.

Inside the cottage, a naked man lay on his back near a flickering fire. Miles Kindste’s eyes were open and daft, staring at nothing. His breath eased in and out in a slow, opiated rhythm. His erection was thick. Blood oozed from a neat, deep cut in the webbed flesh between the big toe of his right foot and its neighbor. His eyes couldn’t see nor could his mind register that a spider the size of a possum sat on a blanket in the corner of the dark room.

A figure stepped out of the cottage, stooped but spry. She wrapped a scarf around her head against the cold rain and started along the flagstone path through the herb garden. Though the clouds were snuffing the last light from the night sky, were anyone close enough they’d see that her expression was as hard as flint.

The path she took meandered through stands of hawthorn and blackberry toward a ring of trees: twenty-four weeping lilly pilly planted in a wide circle, tall and beautiful. Carved low in the trunk of each was a different arcane symbol. The old woman stepped off the flagstones and around the outside of the circular grove till she found the tree she sought. She stroked its trunk with tenderness. Then she reached to her belt and, with a whisper, unsheathed a sharp stiletto. She cut a finger-thick branch off the tree, then stepped into the circle.

The ring was some ten meters wide. Its surface was sandy dirt kept meticulously clear of weeds. Within the ring were many things, but four were significant: three were posts forming a triangle; the fourth was in the triangle’s center. It was a low column, thigh high and the same wide, made of vertically set branches held fast by woven twigs. On this basketlike pillar sat a sphere, or a globe, or a cage. It, too, was made of woven branches and twigs, but also of bone. It was bound tightly with vines and tough stems and hair.

In the cage was a thin girl. Even Mr. and Mrs. Gerlic would have had trouble recognizing their elder daughter; Miriam’s eyes were red and puffed from terrified crying. Her naked skin was alive with welts: a thousand spider bites. Her arms and legs were tied fast to the ribs of the globe, strung by wrist and ankle. When she saw the old woman approach, a pitiful stream of urine trickled from between her legs. Her throat was raw from hours of fruitless screaming, and only a ragged sigh came out.

“Time to go,” the old woman said.

She caressed the little ladder rising to the odd cage with the branch, then ascended, softly speaking old, old words. She held her sparkling knife to the blind eyes of the trees, and reached down to the girl.

Chapter
28
   

  G
etting Laine out proved disturbingly easy.

Nicholas gave the cabbie a fifty and asked him to wait in front of the hospital, then he hurried inside. He took of one of several wheelchairs sitting idle in the corridors and loitered until the duty nurse stepped from sight, then wheeled the chair to Laine’s bedside.

Her face, normally light olive, was pale. Her eyes were closed and her breaths were shallow and slow. Nicholas went to the trolley at the far wall and hunted through its plastic drawers for adhesive tape, then withdrew the drip in Laine’s arm. He was about to bandage over the pinhole the needle left, but was arrested by the large, ruby red drop that swelled out of the wound. A sphere: round and perfect and thick. A certainty appeared in his mind, whole and clear. He knew what to do.

He lifted Laine gently and slid her gown over her shoulders and down her chest, exposing her breastbone, stopping just above her small breasts. He dipped his fingertip into the large drop of blood on her arm and drew on the skin of her sternum a vertical line with a half-diamond attached. He looked at it critically, then used the little bit of blood remaining to tidy up the lines, making them equally thick. Satisfied, he closed her gown and put the tape over the puncture on her bruised forearm.

She was surprisingly light. He placed her in the chair, put her feet on the rests, wrapped a blanket around her torso, and wheeled her out. The cab was still waiting. It had taken less than ten minutes to kidnap an unconscious woman from a busy ward of a public hospital.
Something for the résumé,
he thought glumly, and asked the cabbie to take them to Lambeth Street, Tallong.

  N
icholas watched his mother.

Katharine Close sat in a chair beside the bed Laine was laying in, watching the younger woman breathe. Laine’s jaw twitched, and a light frown danced on her forehead. The scratch mark on her face was healing fast. Katharine held the back of her hand to Laine’s forehead and cheeks, and nodded to herself.

“It’s an improvement,” she said and looked up at her son. “If ever I’m in hospital, please don’t kidnap me. Leave me there.”

“Done deal,” said Nicholas softly.

He’d watched his mother carefully as he’d carried Laine from the cab into the Lambeth Street house, expecting a reaction from her when she saw the symbol on Laine’s chest. But Katharine had said nothing, and merely straightened the slumbering woman’s hospital gown.

Now, Katharine stood, smoothed Laine’s sheets and nodded, indicating that they should leave her to sleep in peace a while.

They walked softly down the hall toward the kitchen.

“I rang your sister,” Katharine said. “Nelson’s ill.”

“Yeah.”

“Nothing serious. She wanted you to know that she’s ‘keeping it up.’ That you’d understand. Do you know what that means?”

Katharine went to the sink and filled the kettle.

“Yes,” replied Nicholas, and waited for his mother to ask him to elucidate. She silently fetched the teapot and leaves, and he realized the question wasn’t coming.

He went to the fridge and grabbed the milk. They both sat. Katharine poured the tea. It smelled strong and good.

“She still wants me to move down there. And she said you were thinking of going?” Katharine asked lightly. She looked at Nicholas over the rim of her cup.

Nicholas stirred sugar into his tea. “No.”

They sipped in silence a while.

“So much rain,” said Katharine. “Too much.”

Nicholas wondered how he looked. When was the last time he’d eaten? Or shaved? He must look like the wild-eyed derelict that every mother fears her daughter might bed or her son might become. He watched his mother. She bore dark circles under her eyes, and her skin seemed so thin he could almost see the worried skull beneath. She folded her hands together on the table and returned his gaze.

He shifted and waited for the lecture to start.

“Your father,” began Katharine, frowning and uncomfortable, “thought that Mrs. Quill was an evil woman.”

Nicholas was so surprised, it took him a few seconds to realize that he was holding his breath.

Katharine kept her eyes on him.

“Don told me not to go to her with our mending,” she said. “I used to do it all myself—God knows we didn’t have a brass razoo to spare to pay a dressmaker.” She shrugged and pulled her cardigan tighter around her shoulders, and smiled fondly. “He was such a fool like that, your father. Had he said nothing, I’d have done nothing. But it made me so
angry
, Don supposing he could tell me what to do and where to go and who was fit to mend my babies’ clothes and who wasn’t. So, I started taking bits and bobs there. To Quill.”

Nicholas felt suddenly very small. The house around them seemed thin and unsubstantial. A frail shell of wood. Vulnerable.

“When was this?” he asked.

Katharine topped off her tea; steam rose from the cup, making her face look dreamier and younger.

“Oh, you were three. Suzette hadn’t turned one. Your father drank perhaps a beer a week after mowing the lawn.” She smiled sadly at Nicholas. “And he hated rum.”

Nicholas remembered shadowy images of his long-limbed father lurching down the hallway followed closely by a sickly sweet smell of sweat and alcohol. Rum had been all his father drank.

“That changed.”

“Yes.” She stared into space, remembering something. Nicholas was quiet, unwilling to disrupt this strangely unfolding conversation. Finally, Katharine roused herself and sipped from her cup.

“Don was not a practical man. A lovely, funny man, yes. That’s why I married him. But infuriating. Implacable. You look more and more like him. How much did I tell you?”

Nicholas cocked his head. “About what?”

“About your father’s death.”

“Enough to stop me asking anymore.”

Katharine licked her lips. Nodded.

“He took a job out west at Biloela. He was away for a few months. Do you remember that?”

Nicholas shook his head.

“Well, I wasn’t too happy about him going and leaving me with you two,” continued Katharine. “Maybe it was spite, maybe it was because a bit of extra money was coming into the house, but I kept taking the odd garment to Mrs. Quill.”

Nicholas watched his mother. Her hands burrowed into one another nervously.

“Anyway, he came back all jolly and full of yarns. I’d been tending a toddler and a baby, and was exhausted. Full of spit and fury. I told him all the things I’d done without him, how good we were without him. I told him how I’d taken torn pants and shirts without buttons to Mrs. Quill—I don’t even know how that came up. But it did. And he suddenly—”

She looked at him. He saw her lower lip was trembling.

“He looked like you look now. Pale and haunted.”

Nicholas blinked. He hadn’t heard this much about his father … well, ever. And never without a bitten-back curse word thrown in.

“And?” he asked.

“And he went to see her.”

Katharine held his gaze for a long moment, then looked down at the tea cozy.

“What happened?”

“I don’t know,” she replied, picking up the teaspoon and wiping it on the tablecloth. “I really don’t. He came back. His face was red, angry red. He went to his garage and started hammering at something.” She shrugged.

“But … ?” urged Nicholas quietly, knowing what came next.

Katharine sighed. “But. He started drinking. Maybe a week or so later, he brought home a bottle of rum. Yes. I asked him to move out, oh, six weeks later.”

Nicholas remembered the few times he’d seen his father after he’d left their home—iceberg moments: cold, sharp tips with enormous unhappiness hidden below. Banging on the door at eleven at night. Meeting him and Suzette after school. Each time thinner, until it seemed impossible there was man left to waste.

“And then the crash,” he said quietly.

“And then the crash.”

He could see her eyes were welling with tears. The tea was cooling and there was no more steam to fog away her wrinkles. She’d passed middle age and was becoming elderly. Smaller. His insides felt hollow and cold; if he could plunge into his mind and retrieve his thoughts, they’d come away frozen and hard. Quill had killed his father. He was sure of it.

“Did you ever connect the two?” he asked. “Dad’s visit to Quill and his drinking?”

“Of course not,” Katharine snapped. She clattered the spoon back on her saucer, then swiftly straightened it as if that might erase the recent noise.

“Did you wonder why he went to her?”

“I didn’t have to. He told me. He said he was going to warn that witch off his children.”

Nicholas opened his mouth, but nothing came out.

Water tinked in the downpipe outside; a lonely, cavernous sound.

“She stayed there, Mrs. Quill, in her shop for another fifteen years or more. Then I heard she moved to Ballina. But other people heard her sister had won the lottery and bought her a house in Hobart. All we knew was, she was gone.” Katharine shook her head and shifted in her chair. “Then a large lady opened some sort of Celtic shop, selling—oh, tartan cloth, Scottish gifts, tea towels, tinned haggis, and trinkets from Edinburgh. Did you ever see her? Family crests. I don’t know how she turned a dollar, but she was there till a couple of years ago. Then a pool shop. And now this new young lady with her health food.” She sneered out the last two words.

Nicholas stared at his tea. It was brown and inscrutable.

“And still,” whispered Katharine. Nicholas wondered if she was reading his thoughts, until she said, “Still this business goes on.”

She looked at him. Her eyes were hard. “It’s her again, isn’t it? Down there now?”

He felt a shiver of panic race down his spine to his bowels.

“Don’t you go down there, Mum,” he said.

“Nor should you,” she replied quietly. “I think you should pack your things and hurry down to your sister. Or farther, if you can.”

She seemed to realize her eyes were wet. She plucked a tissue from her sleeve and dried them. She stood and took her teacup to the sink.

“I’m sorry I never said too many good things about your father. But no woman likes to come second to a bottle.”

Nicholas watched her put her cup on the drainer. She smoothed the front of her cardigan.

“I’ll check our guest and then be off to bed,” she said.

As she passed Nicholas, her hand drifted over his shoulder and squeezed it, then left as lightly as a startled swallow taking flight.