Afterlight (17 page)

‘Water,’ Jordan whispered, astonished.

‘Merri Creek,’ I muttered. ‘And a train line runs right through the area.’

I pointed out Rushall Station. And the string of little stations that ran north above
it.

‘There are more,’ I said, excitedly pointing to the east of the image. ‘A different
train line, that intersects with the other one, once you hit Clifton Hill. They all
look like small, unmanned stations. Just like the one I saw. Completely deserted
in the dark. You could imagine trains going straight through them in the night—express,
no stops.’

Jordan fumbled for the list of
Kelly
s again and peered intently at the address details
for lucky contestant number seven.

‘There should be a little marker,’ I reminded him breathlessly, ‘pinpointing the
guy’s exact location.’

I broke out in goose bumps when Jordan found it. A narrow grey train track cut straight
through the heart of that person’s street and the marker stood right alongside the
point of intersection. The Northcote
C. Kelly
lived in a house next to a railway
line.

I hugged myself, feeling chilled. ‘This is the one,’ I muttered. ‘Bring up the house.
I want to see it.’

Back in satellite view, we studied the magnified image of a faded blue, single-storey,
Victorian timber place with a picket fence in a matching blue and a pocket-sized
front garden that faced onto a narrow street packed with houses of a similar condition
and calibre. I grabbed control of
the mouse off Jordan and angled up and down the
street, clicking to bring myself closer to the railway crossing that was just uphill
from the front of the property.

As I looked up and down the tracks, mentally overlaying the things I’d seen with
the static daylight images on the screen, my body went colder. I zoomed back out
and stared at the surrounding area.

‘Any of the streets to the east of that one could take you down to Merri Creek. If
it was dark, and you were scared and running, it would be easy to lose your way and
forget where the main drags are and get lost in all the bush around there…’

I circled an area at the bottom of the screen with a shaky finger.

Jordan seemed to come to some sort of decision and drew my hands down so that his
face was inches from mine. ‘No heroics. It’s almost midnight. We’ll tackle it in
daylight, okay? And I’ll tell plenty of people where we’re going in case Carter Kelly
turns out to be another one of Eve’s psycho exes.’

He rested his forehead against mine and I closed my eyes.

‘You’re tired and I’m tired,’ he murmured, ‘and we’re not going to start this now
when she’s here, muddying everything, watching over us. But we will start it. We
have already. Something from nothing. A fricken miracle.’

He gave me a feather-light kiss before pushing himself up out of my chair and leaving
my room so quickly and quietly that all I could discern, through my still closed
eyelids, was the sound of the door snicking shut behind him.

14

The sound was repetitive, insistent. Electronic? But, still, I refused to let go
of sleep.

I’d been dreaming of something that had turned into the sound of this…thing.

It fell silent, and I felt myself relax back down, digging for the remnants of the
dream—Dad and me, as a kid. At a lavender farm high on a hill that had every flower
you could imagine growing there, with a glimpse of the ocean shining at its boundaries.
I’d forgotten that place. He’d been leading me by the hand, wanting to show me something
and I’d wanted to see, to see—

But then, a bare second later, the buzzing started again.

Cracking my eyelids open at last, I fell out of bed onto
my knees and lunged upwards,
feeling for the insistent, buzzing shape on my desk.

The fluorescent face of my alarm clock said it was 2.33am. I found myself holding
Jordan’s trembling mobile in my hand because he’d left it in here, along with his
beat-up leather jacket, still slung over the back of my chair.

I hadn’t dreamt him up then. He really was right down the hall.

I picked up the call, muttered: ‘Hello?’

‘Sophie?’ The voice on the end of the line was warm. Seductive. Male. Devastating,
with a hint of something. French, maybe? I’m no good with accents.

I cleared my throat. ‘Uh, this is Jordan’s phone.’ It struck me a second later, still
foggy from sleep. ‘How’d you know my name?’

The stranger laughed, and it sent shivers straight down my spine. ‘Charmian—Jordan’s
mother—told me you’d be together. You sound intriguing, Sophie.’

As usual my brain ran ahead of my mouth. ‘I don’t feel intriguing. Do you know what
time it is? Want me to get him? He’s asleep.’

The man on the other end chuckled, and I coloured instantly, even though he couldn’t
see me.

‘Um, not in here,’ I gabbled. ‘I meant, ah, Jordan’s sleeping, but in another room
altogether. Down the hall. I can get him. If you want.’

I sounded like a five-year-old with poor linguistic abilities.

‘Please, Sophie,’ the man drawled, ‘if you would. I need to talk to him. I have a
message. I can’t say that I understand it, but it’s very urgent.’

‘Uh, okay.’

I pushed my door open and peered down the hall, feeling the hairs on my body rising
at the sight of Room 3 in the distance, the winking jukebox beyond it.

A man had died in that room and was still, by all accounts, residing there. My God,
what had my life come to?

Thankfully, Jordan had chosen a room down the other way, between my room and Gran’s,
and I didn’t have to walk past the
Orange Room
in the dark.

I still had Jordan’s phone pressed to my ear and was feeling around for my oversized
bunny slippers with my toes, when the stranger said again, ‘Sophie?’

I jumped and almost dropped the phone. There was warmth in his voice still, but also
a steely edge in his next words.

‘Get him, please?
Hurry
.’

Flustered, I murmured, ‘Hold on a minute, okay?’ and shuffled out my door.

As I made my way down the cold hallway, I heard the fat, muted
blat blat
of a Harley
moving down the street.
Dad had had one to the end, and I recognised the peculiar
timbre of its engine, that underlying threat of power. It must have done a U-turn,
because I heard it circling outside then go back the way it had come, before the
sound faded out of hearing.

I reached Jordan’s door and tapped tentatively. Even though Gran generally slept
like a woman in a coma, all that separated his room from hers was a tiled, 1970s-era
bathroom redolent of the electric blue of peacock feathers. If I ever did work up
enough nerve to put the moves on Jordan Haig, it wasn’t going to happen within spitting
distance of Gran, or The Star. Nothing could be less romantic than this place. It
was home, but it was falling apart. Dad just saw it through rose-coloured glasses,
and when he was alive, we had too.

Nothing stirred behind the door so, still knocking, I pushed it open slowly, hissing
in the direction of the lump on the bed, ‘Jordan?
Jordan?
Phone call. Urgent.’

There was a creak of bedsprings at last, and Jordan trailed out of the darkness into
the doorway. He was yawning and wearing a white V-necked T-shirt and black boxers
and nothing else, his dark hair standing on end like ruffled quills.

I held his phone out to him as if he were mildly contagious, and shuffled back out
of reach, just in case Gran had her beady eye planted in the crack of her doorway.

‘Phone,’ I repeated nervously, telling myself to
look away
,
look away
from the long,
bare, muscular expanse of his legs. It wasn’t helping that I was standing here in
a pair of blue flannel pyjamas with pink and purple smiling cats printed on them,
a couple of large, stuffed rabbits on my feet, my hair a ginger explosion.

Jordan glanced at the phone in his hand blearily then held it up to his ear.

‘Hello?’ His voice was sleep-roughened and uncertain.

Quite clearly, I heard the man on the line say, ‘Jordan?’

Jordan’s dark eyebrows shot up and he looked at me in concern, every trace of sleepiness
gone. ‘Daughtry? What are you doing back? And why are you calling
now
?’

I saw Jordan’s gaze go to the street-facing windows behind my back, then sharpen.
‘Is it Mum? Is she in trouble? Is that why you’re calling?’

Daughtry’s answering laugh was faintly quizzical. ‘No, no, nothing like that, my
friend, she’s very well. We just spoke. No, I called for you. There is a message;
it is urgent, I think.
You must stay down.
Does that make sense? That you must get
down, get out of the way?’

There was a sudden mechanical roar; like a jumbo jet was taking off out the front
of The Star. A sustained rumbling you could almost feel going up through the walls
and floorboards.

Jordan moved towards me, instinctively, still holding
the phone to his ear. But I
stood stock still, recognising the sound because I’d only just heard it. It was the
sound of a Harley; only magnified. There were lots of them, I realised, moving down
Sancerre Street in formation, going fast, engines revving.

Jordan’s eyes flew to mine and he dropped the phone, pulling me to him so fiercely
that he fell over backwards onto the floor, with me sprawled across his body.

I felt the breath leave him in a
whoosh
and heard Daughtry’s voice, small and tinny,
shouting: ‘Jordan?
Jordan
!’ a split second before shots rang out.

All the windows along the face of our hotel shattered inwards, filling the air where
I’d just been standing with the smell of gunpowder and rain, and the sound of Gran
screaming my name.

The police interviews—conducted in the Public Bar with appropriate refreshments—took
hours.

‘Daughtry can be our backup when we go see Carter Kelly,’ Jordan had insisted as
the police had finished up their search of Sancerre Street and the surrounding neighbourhood
and indicated that they wished to speak with me.

‘You think that’s wise?’ I hissed out the side of my
mouth, as a large man in dark
blue crooked an index finger at me. ‘He’s just one guy.’

‘Who can handle himself and every man, woman or unquiet spirit you could hope to
come across,’ Jordan shot back. ‘You have to see Daughtry to understand what I’m
talking about. He knows
stuff
, I’m telling you. He has skills. That sharpened stick
he wears in his hair? He knows how to
use
it on people. I’ve seen him. A couple of
drunks took Daughtry and me on one night in the street and he, I dunno, disabled
them with it. Smashed the end of it into one man’s collarbone, hit some pressure
points in the other dude’s head and neck and he went down and stayed down. I didn’t
even have time to react and we were already walking away.’

I shook my head in disbelief.

‘Eve wants it this way,’ Jordan insisted. ‘
Us
handling it. She came to you. She didn’t
go to them.’ He nodded at the waiting police officers who were finishing up with
Gran and her take on events.

‘I’m betting that when she was alive,’ Jordan added, ‘Eve wouldn’t have gone near
the police if she could help it. We “gathered” the shirt, just as she wanted, and
now we hand it over to Carter Kelly. That’s all the orders we have. If there’s anything
else, Daughtry’s back in town.
He
can handle Eve, and the cops can do the rest, and
we bow out, having done all we humanly can.’

‘And if the drop-off goes bad?’ I’d said sourly, ‘we’ll either be dead or need witness
protection from the Reavers and their associates. The Reavers drink at the Maximus
Lounge, Roman said as much. Which means that Roman must have told O’Loughlin we paid
a visit, and this is the way they return a favour.’

‘At least we’ll be together,’ Jordan had murmured with a crooked smile as I took
a seat beside Gran. ‘Look at the positives.’

Jordan adjusted the sleeves on his leather jacket carefully, so that his arms were
covered up past his wrists, before taking the seat beside mine on the other side.
‘Boyfriend,’ he responded so confidently to the officers’ looks of enquiry that the
word did terrible things to my heart.

‘We’ll get to you later, chief,’ said the officer who’d introduced himself to me
earlier as Senior Constable Ben Ferguson. He was tall, square-shouldered and square-jawed,
clean-shaven with cropped curly brown hair and blue eyes. If he wasn’t a policeman,
and kind of old, I would have described him as fairly hot. The other one was a ranga
like me, lean-built, with bad acne scars all over his narrow face and watchful brown
eyes. He looked like a fifteen-year-old who’d stolen someone’s uniform as a joke.

The two men made me go back through the Crime Stoppers stuff, everything: what I
was doing out at all
those places, how I could even have known about them. They even
called the cops I’d spoken with each of the other times, trying to link it all together
with what had gone down overnight at The Star.