Afterlight (15 page)

‘More like apex predators!’ I murmured finally, too dazed to take it all in. ‘It’s
the tatts, Jordan. They give you this untouchable aura...’

Jordan looked down at his bared forearms ruefully. ‘Which is only supposed to work
against the dead, not the living. And I
like
that you’re tall...’ he added so quickly
that I almost missed the words, ‘…because it makes it so much
easier for when I want
to kiss you…’

And then he did, and we staggered backwards through the open door of my bedroom,
pressed together, clinging to each other like two drowning people, and it was only
the thought of having the most precious moment of my entire life witnessed by some
punter who’d missed the turn off to the toilets and kept climbing that made me tear
my lips from Jordan’s and plunge my scalding face into the side of his neck.

‘You taste like a packet of Butter-Menthols,’ Jordan murmured into my hair.

‘There are at least a dozen semi-legless adults downstairs,’ I whispered, half ecstatic,
half terrified, ‘and
my gran
, who knows and sees all. We’re supposed to be doing
research
, remember?’

Terror and lust warring in me, I reached around him and pushed the door closed, so
that only a narrow band of hallway showed through.

Seemingly oblivious to my tissue-infested room, the purple and orange pair of discarded
undies on the floor right by his foot, Jordan linked his hands at the small of my
back and pulled me close again.

‘This
is
research, Soph,’ he murmured. ‘I’m finding out about you and how you react
to me. I’ve never wanted this gift: I spent my whole life trying to ignore it, keep
it hidden. But it brought me
you
. Somehow Eve knew to
involve the one person at Ivy
Street High that I seriously don’t hate being around, who sees me the way I am and
isn’t…afraid.’

I discreetly nudged the underpants back under the edge of my quilt with the toe of
my grubby trainer as he pushed my heavy hair back off my face.

‘Doesn’t it worry you?’ I whispered. ‘That she slipped your defences? It worries
me lots.’

Jordan laughed. ‘Yeah, I lie awake at night wondering what kind of undead Trojan
horse I’ve let in. But what’s the worst she can do to us that she hasn’t already
inflicted on you? The cat lady looked baaad.’

‘The cat lady pretty much took the cake,’ I agreed, swallowing.

Jordan leant forward and kissed me lightly on the mouth and my cheeks flamed up so
brightly it made him laugh.

‘See? And you managed that one all on your own. You’re the bravest person I know,
Soph. And now there are two of us to work out what Eve needs.’

He flicked my cheekbone with one finger and smiled.

‘And after she’s gone, we’ll still be here, trying to figure each other out. So let’s
get to work and get her the hell out of our lives already, okay? Because we don’t
need an audience. Not for this.’

It was nearly dinnertime, and the light outside had long since faded to a pink-limned
grey.

As I continued to hesitate just inside the door, Jordan strode across my bedroom
with a long-limbed grace and threw himself into the creaky captain’s chair in front
of my open laptop, powering it up before peeling off his leather jacket and slinging
it over the curved chair back. He clicked on my sticker-covered desk lamp and rolled
up the unbuttoned sleeves on his denim shirt, querying, ‘Password?’ as if he hadn’t
just been kissing me breathless moments before.

I perched on the edge of my battered desk, shielding the screen with the curve of
my body as I quickly typed in my password and brought up the residential directory
for the state.

There was a surname box, and I typed in:
Kelly
. In the blinking box beside it I typed:
Carter.

Nothing came up.

So I cut the word ‘Carter’ down to a ‘C’ and, literally, one hundred and one hits
came up, citing addresses everywhere from
Spotswood
to
Bonbeach
and places I’d never
heard of before that sounded far away and impossible to get to like
Kurunjang
and
Barnawartha
.

‘This is hopeless,’ I blurted out, as Jordan scrolled down the long list of names.
‘We can’t call them all and ask if they take a size “M” in men’s tees and, by the
way, do you
know an insistent, deceased woman called Monica?’

‘Let’s try a slightly different angle,’ Jordan murmured, nudging me aside. ‘What
was that guy’s name again? The shooter?’

I watched, stunned, as Jordan typed in,
O’Loughlin, K
.

Name and address details popped up obligingly. ‘Just seven,’ Jordan said with satisfaction.

‘
You’re not serious?
’ I exclaimed. ‘The guy’s supposed to be a psychopath. You can’t
just call a psychopath asking for answers!’

Jordan dug around inside his leather jacket and pulled out his mobile phone. ‘Why
not? What are the chances any of these people have Caller ID?’ he said, already dialling.

‘He
killed
someone, Jordan!’ I squeaked, aghast, as Jordan said, ‘Oh, good afternoon,
I was wondering if I could speak with Keith O’Loughlin?’

‘That’s right,
Keith
.’ There was a brief pause then Jordan rolled his eyes at me
and said cheerfully, ‘I’m terribly sorry, I must have the wrong number,’ and hung
up.

He did that six more times before conceding defeat. ‘I guess he’s not listed.’

‘D’uh!’ I said, relieved. ‘Man on the run, remember? Shove over, Sherlock.’

I brought up a new window and a different search engine. ‘What was her real name?
Eve’s? Monica
what
?’

Jordan rested an elbow on my knees and it felt so right it
almost took my breath
away. While my insides did an uncoordinated happy dance, Jordan frowned into the
screen.

‘She didn’t introduce herself, if that’s what you mean,’ he muttered. ‘The way I
got her name came out of something she showed me. It was dark, really dark, and
I saw something, like a, I dunno, path? Beside a river? Running water, anyway, I
could hear it, and someone was calling out quietly, like they didn’t want anyone
else to know—
Mon-ica? Mon-ica?
Like the way you’d call a cat. I could hear footsteps
behind her, the sound of his breathing.’

Jordan shivered and I tensed, knowing he was sparing me the full story, all the little
Panavision details.

‘Try him instead, the O’Loughlin guy,’ Jordan murmured, shaking himself. ‘I still
think he’s the key to everything. What’s his story? How big a psychopath are we talking
here? Just big? Or big
big
?’

Reluctantly, as if typing in the man’s name would somehow enable him to see us through
my webcam, I did what Jordan asked. I started feeling sick as news stories, weeks
old, flashed up: of some outlaw bikie kingpin walking into a strip club at 6.17 one
morning and dragging his topless ex-girlfriend, Monica Cybo, straight out of her
shift and into a laneway already filling with office workers. There, Keith O’Loughlin
shot and killed an innocent man who’d tried to intervene on Monica’s behalf, critically
wounding a backpacker who also came to her
defence. A woman in her car at a set of
lights was also hit, but was expected to live.

After that, O’Loughlin and Monica had each vanished into thin air. No one knew what
had become of either of them. One reporter speculated that O’Loughlin—head of the
Reavers outlaw motorcycle gang—was presently employing a vast, interstate network
of bikie brothers-in-arms to stay under the radar and that he was holding Monica
somewhere against her will.

But Jordan and I knew something that none of the papers did: Nadja herself had said
that Keith O’Loughlin had gone to the Maximus Lounge looking for Monica,
even after
what he did
. Somehow, against the odds, she’d gotten away from him that day. But
then she’d died and become the thing I’d come to call
Eve
. Had O’Loughlin found Monica
after all?

Ice! Vodka shooters! Strippers! Roid Rage!

‘She’s the one,’ I said shakily. ‘The one they were all talking about until all that
stuff about
me
pushed all that stuff about her right off the telly and the front
page. Jesus.’

I studied the grainy black-and-white head shot accompanying the news article. It
showed a middle-aged man with a slick pony tail and pronounced widow’s peak, taken
with a long lens. The quality was hopeless, but it was the only picture on file of
the notorious biker. I could feel my teeth chattering and they seemed beyond my control.

‘I was right!
He killed her
, Jordan, he must have. That’s why no one’s seen either
of them for weeks. And you just tried to call him direct! What if he finds out?’

I hastily punched the window closed and all the news stories on Keith O’Loughlin
vanished, to be replaced by the list of seven
K. O’Loughlin
s we’d found in the residential
directory. Revolted, I quickly clicked the
back
button, and one hundred and one
C.
Kelly
s from here to the state’s borders filled the screen again.

The feeling of wanting to throw up intensified.

‘Why did you have to go and die?’ I wailed, looking for her in the ancient plaster
ceiling rose; in the amber glass teardrop chandelier some colourblind dag had installed
in the 1970s; in the dark and dusty corners of my bedroom; but seeing nothing. Oh,
I could almost smell her though, almost feel her lurking, waiting to see what we
would make of all the crappy, unhelpful little clues she’d let fall our way.

‘It’s not enough, Eve,’ I mumbled, ‘give us more.’

I had been about to add:
Damn you
, but bit back the words. That part had already
happened.

I was tired. My mouth felt like sawdust and my head seemed filled with molten lead
and all I wanted, really, was to crawl back into my bed cave, preferably with Jordan
by my side, and never come out.

But
they
have opinions. They possess some animalistic,
residual ability to reason,
some kind of low cunning that persists, even after death. I knew that, because of
the man in Room 3, with his hatred of the pokies in the Sports Bar that had never
existed when he was alive.

If they could reason, they could be goaded.

I sat bolt upright and told Jordan: ‘Go get something to eat.’

‘Hey?’ Jordan replied, surprised, squinting up at me.

‘Not much more we can do tonight,’ I said, crossing my arms. ‘Leave now. Go home.’

Inwardly, I was cringing, remembering the time I’d told Eve to take her problems
to someone else and she’d pushed me so hard I’d blacked out. Outwardly, I made my
body language so fierce and spiky and unfriendly that any casual observer could see
I wanted Jordan gone.

‘What?’ he said, sounding hurt. ‘But we could start calling. It’s not even seven
yet. There’s, what, a hundred Kellys to knock over? And I think we, uh, established
that we can handle, um, spending time together. I’m good to go, if you are.’

I noted the faint flush that moved across his cheekbones with interest, but hardening
my heart, I snarled, ‘We’ll do it tomorrow. Or maybe next week. Sure, we’ll call
every one of those people, but we’ll take our time doing it. I mean, no sense hurrying,
right? Seeing as she’s already old news. What’s the goddamned rush? I’m sick of being
pushed around by a dead stripper just dumb enough to get herself killed. Now get
out of here, J. I like you, but I can’t stand being around you right now.’

Jordan stood up, still looking uncertain. He twisted the armbands around one wrist,
saying, ‘You said so yourself, Soph. It can never wait.’

I could tell from the way he was holding himself that he didn’t really want to leave.

But I thought again about the man in Room 3, and what he was doing to our floorboards.

‘I’ve decided it can,’ I sniffed dismissively. ‘She was a
ho
, Jordan. A lowlife skanky
skank. Why even bother, right? We’ve done enough. This is pointless.’

I felt guilty even before the words left my mouth. ‘You know, she probably had it
coming. She probably deserved exactly what was done to her.’

Jordan went still like a cornered animal.

I only got the faintest whiff of violets before my entire bedroom vanished around
me.

13

It wasn’t like the last time: a polite show reel involving strange faces, strange
places somehow projected behind my eyes.

No. This time I was
inside
a…memory?

Some tiny part of me registered that I couldn’t have moved. Dimly, I still sensed
my trainer-shod feet resting on the pitted jarrah floorboards of my bedroom, heard
my own laboured breathing in my ears.

But my eyes were telling me that I was standing on a gravel-strewn railway line that
cut straight through the heart of a quiet suburban street. The street—hilly, steep
and narrow—stretched away from me on either side of the track. It was edged with
compact Victorian workers’
cottages; the homes built so closely together that they
seemed like houses made for little people, mostly of timber, mostly rundown.

I turned to look behind me and saw two small, badly lit train platforms, one on either
side of the rails, empty at this hour.

It was dark. So dark: only a few houses along the street had lights on.

Then a single porch light flashed on at the front of the faded blue weatherboard
house just down the hill. The place had been built right up against the railway line;
the track itself formed one of the property’s side boundaries.

The front door swung open and emitted a curvy woman wearing a black tank top and
black jeans, flip flops, her long black hair worn unbound and forwards across her
shoulders. In the warm porch light I caught a glimpse of a tall, lean shape just
inside the open door. The woman leant up on tiptoes and gave the shadowy figure a
lingering hug, planting a kiss on the person’s pale cheek, before the door was shut
behind her.