Fall (34 page)

Absurdly, I took out my phone and dialled Imogen. I think my body knew what was happening even if my mind wasn't ready to go there yet.

‘You have to understand, so one day you can accept what I've had to do.'

‘Just wait,' I stammered. I fumbled with the phone to dial again when the call rang out. ‘Just wait a second.'

There were tears on my face. I had to swipe at them to recognise the figure that emerged from the kitchen, looking behind her briefly to watch the door click closed. Hooky took her place beside Eden, and I looked at the two women before me, helpless for words.

‘Imogen found out what I am,' Eden said. Her words burned in my ears, words I knew were coming but I wasn't ready for. ‘She's been working on the Tanner case to try to get hold of the reward.'

‘Please, please, please, please.' I ran my fingers through my sweaty hair, dialled and hung up and dialled. ‘Please, no.'

‘She didn't kill her,' Hooky said gently. I lifted my eyes to the child-woman standing before me. I didn't even ask how Hooky had been brought into this. My little friend. My damaged little genius. ‘She wanted to, but I said no.'

‘My new apprentice here has erased all the evidence Imogen gathered,' Eden said, looking at Hooky. ‘The DNA listings have been altered. The registry files have been replaced. All the reports have been adjusted in the necessary way so that anything Imogen has is useless now.'

‘God,' I was stammering. ‘Oh God.'

‘That should have been it. But you know me, Frank. I wanted her to die. The child convinced me that you wouldn't be able to handle it if I took Imogen away from you. You wouldn't be able to endure another Martina.'

‘Please, Eden.'

‘So I need assurance,' Eden said, lifting her eyes to me. ‘I need to show Imogen that I'm serious.'

Eden reached into the back of her jeans, and from her waist belt drew a gun. It wasn't her service weapon.

‘I told Imogen that I'd take everything she ever held dear if she whispered a word of my story to anyone,' Eden said, actioning the gun and pointing it at me. ‘She needs to know I mean it.'

I felt the impact of the bullets before I heard the sound. Two sharp, hard punches in my midsection, the thumps of a metallic fist that doubled me slightly in the middle. I heard the sound next, two claps of thunder that made my eardrums pump. There was no pain in those first few seconds. I reached down and gripped at my torn T-shirt, not even wet yet. And then I realised I couldn't draw a breath. I'd exhaled hard with the impact. I struggled to pull in air, dropped down to my knees and steadied myself with a hand against the floor. A sort of a pop, and the air came, and the pain was blinding, limb-crumpling, so that I folded and thumped my head on the floor.

I heard Eden say, ‘Go, go.'

And then both the women were grabbing me, turning me over, gripping me under the arms and knees. My head fell back against Eden's chest. I was looking up at her jaw, her cold predator eyes as they carried me through the doorway.

The fire alarm sounded, and Jim began to howl. Hades remembered a time, long, long ago, when he'd heard the sound of a car slowly creeping up the gravel drive, as it did now, delivering a new life to him. He hadn't known it at the time, of course. He'd thought his life was in the slow and gentle roll towards stillness. Quiet. He'd thought the twilight finally had him. And then there they were, two children for him to raise. Two beautiful little killers who needed him, needed his ancient evil wisdom to guide the chaos of their minds.

Eden and Eric had been a surprise for Hades. But this child was not. He'd been expecting her. In fact, she was early.

A storm was flashing on the red horizon, glowing in the diamonds of the screen door as he wandered down the hall. He opened the door, and Jim flew past him, stood on the crest of the hill before his shack and watched the battered little Kia gripping its way onto the flat, parking under the tree. The objects hanging in the tree swayed and jangled in the growing winds, cogs and wheels from engines polished and shining, bottles and chains, some tea cups and tin cans.

Hooky stepped from the car and slung a backpack shaped like a shark over one narrow shoulder. She looked tired. Gold sequined boots settled in the dust and the skirt of her black
cotton dress was lit for a moment by the distant lightning seeping through the lace.

‘Old man,' she said as she approached him. He looked at her fondly, remembered her swearing and snarling at Eden as the garbage dripped from her body. He remembered her spitting blood on the dirt.

Hades knew, the moment he had laid eyes upon the girl, that the same thing that had been twisted and broken away from the souls of Eden and Eric when they arrived on his doorstep was gone in her too. The light that twinkled in the eyes of most children, even older children like Hooky, had been extinguished. He didn't know yet if he could turn her off the dark path she was following, if he could somehow stop her progress towards being helplessly evil, the way that Eric had been, the way Eden sometimes was. Maybe there was something of her that could be redeemed yet. She was smart. She was tough. She didn't have to go bad. Maybe if he tried hard enough, he could save her.

And if he couldn't save her, he'd do the best he could to patch her up. The way he did with everything that came to him in the tip. She'd be crooked. She'd be hollow. But she'd be alive again.

Hooky smiled at Hades as she walked towards the little house, and the old man remembered seeing the same sarcastic teenage smile on Eden many, many years ago. The smile that breaks through the loneliness, that gives every day new purpose.

The two walked inside. The dog followed.

It wasn't so much consciousness but a series of half-formed thoughts that whistled through my drugged brain as I lay in the bed, sometimes seeing, sometimes just watching colours and shapes. The first realisation that formed with any real clarity was that I'd lost the sight in my left eye. I felt as though I'd heard this mentioned a couple of times by people in the room while I was asleep. I didn't know for certain who was speaking, but I picked up and held little pieces of what they said, repeated them over and over in dreams.

We're seeing some minor brain damage from lack of blood flow to the brain. Nothing that'll hinder him too badly. He's been talking in his sleep. Making sense. But that left optical nerve has died. That's lifelong, that one.

There's nothing we can do to save it?

Two close-range gut shots and twenty minutes or more to the hospital? This guy had a 30 per cent chance at survival. The eye is collateral damage.

My head was turned, and my vision was restricted to half the window beside my bed, the people going past, disembodied chests and shoulders and heads. Nurses in green with gentle faces. Freckles. Big smiles. Imogens, all of them, in their prettiness and simultaneous hardness, women who could care for a dying man, bring him back out of the arms of death.

I'd been out a long time. A good-size beard prickled against the pillow, felt sore against my temples. Everything ached. Not a powerful or unbearable ache, but the frighteningly deep kind you know is being held in check by blessed drugs, the kind of pain that will be all-consuming if the drugs so much as waiver, a feeling that makes you sick inside. Helpless.

Some story had been orchestrated about the shooting. I knew this because I had a sense that Eden had been in the room, more than once, while I floated between layers of dream. I'd heard her voice, confident and soft, commanding the way that only pack leaders can command, with the certainty that they'll be taken seriously. No apologies. No requests. I had the feeling she had sat for some time on the end of the bed and watched me sleep.

Thirty per cent chance. She had to have known those were the odds she was playing with when she shot me in the guts. It had to look like she'd meant to kill me. Imogen had to think my survival had been a mistake, an accident, and that if she didn't run now, Eden would come for me again when she could.

I lay and looked out the windows to the corridor with my one working eye, realising things behind the oxygen mask but
not yet ready for anyone to know I was awake. I was aware that Imogen had never been in the room. I couldn't remember ever hearing anyone talk about her as I drifted in and out, fighting for my life. That didn't mean I'd heard everything. Maybe she'd called. I doubted it. If I knew Imogen, I knew she was smart, and if she was smart she was a long way from me right now. If she loved me, she was gone. She'd have left a break-up note, packed her things and moved to Perth if she had any sense. Eden had tried to kill me. And if Eden was willing to kill me, her own partner, she was willing to go further – to kill everyone Imogen had ever loved and held dear, to make her watch, and then to come for the beautiful psychologist in the night, maybe tomorrow, maybe the next day, maybe a year from now. I was an example. A demonstration of Eden's seriousness. If Imogen was smart she was already changing her name, and she would never speak of Eden Archer or Morgan Tanner ever again.

No matter how far she went, Eden would be watching. Imogen would know that.

Imogen was lost to me now, as wholly and completely as if she were dead, the way I was meant to be. She might follow my story in the paper but she would never contact me or anyone close to me ever again. I saw her poring over my story in the papers in a sunny café in Fremantle, her hair dyed and her shoulders bronzed and those damned freckles standing out everywhere like mud spatter. I hoped that's what she was doing. I hoped she was clever and she stayed alive. I hoped I never laid eyes on her.

I realised as I lay there that I would never bring anyone into my life like that again. Hooky had been right to turn Eden away from killing Imogen. She was right when she told the
older woman that I wouldn't be able take it. I owed Hooky so much for that. For protecting me.

I would give my life over to her now, to protect her while she lingered, however long, under the dark wing of that deathly bird she'd chosen to sidle up to. There was no way on earth Hooky knew what she had done. How completely she'd signed her soul away, the true nature of the being who now owned it. I would never leave her now. I was locked to the two of them.

This was what I had been destined for, from the moment I walked into the Parramatta headquarters and Captain James introduced me to my beautiful new partner. Eden had me now and I'd never be free.

As I lay looking, a man came to the desk beyond the window ledge and stood there marking down things, a white-coated man with a thick black beard. I knew I knew him, but at first I didn't know from where. I realised who he was when I saw him lift his dark eyes to the clock on the wall behind the desk, almost instinctively, as though an alarm had gone off inside him, as it did every night. It was eight o'clock. Aamir looked at the clock for a long moment, and then went back to his paperwork, his jaw tightened and his brow heavy.

It's Ehan's bedtime,
I saw him thinking.
I have to go say goodnight.

What felt like years ago, I had told this man that there was nothing after the cold, consuming tragedy of murder. That when you lose someone so completely, as I had lost Martina, there was no great revelation, no meaning, no answer. I'd tried to give him realistic expectations of life after his son was lost to him.

But I wasn't sure now. When Eden lost her parents, it had been just the beginning of what she was. So much would come
after that. Their murders stood forever as the sentinel over a life cluttered with darkness and evil and pain. She was the afterwards. She was the clean-up crew, the response of nature after the event that righted the balance of living and dead, of agony matched with agony. She was the seed that cracked free of its shell and grew, despite all odds, after the fire had ripped through the land, destroying everything else.

Eden was my fire. And what was growing in me now as I lay in the hospital bed was something so new, something so different, that I could feel its tendrils creeping up my insides, feel its curling sprouts fluttering open in my mind. Those seeds had been there a long time, but it was only the heat of the bullets Eden had put in me, and the child's heart she now held hostage, that had given them what they needed to sprout.

I didn't know what I was becoming. But I knew it wasn't good.

This book, like all my books, is the product of my apprenticeship under truly great minds in creative writing teaching in Australia. Most notably these include Dr Gary Crew and Dr Ross Watkins of the University of the Sunshine Coast, and James Forsyth. I also owe much to Dr Kim Wilkins and Dr Roslyn Petelin of the University of Queensland, and Dr Camilla Nelson of the University of Notre Dame, Sydney.

I am grateful to a number of cafés and restaurants who have tolerated my quiet and persistent yet hardly lucrative presence, including Marcelle on Macleay in Potts Point and The Upside Café in Chippendale.

I couldn't do what I do without my tough and brilliant agent Gaby Naher and that sweet-hearted Bev Cousins.

My thanks to my wonderful editor, Kathryn Knight.

Finally, my lovely Tim. Here is a man who endures living
with a crime writer who, among offering constant trivia about killers, can't bare to have him read her work without checking what page he's on every five minutes so that she can know if his emotional expressions are appropriate to the material. You are my rock.

 

Photo: John Heweston

Candice Fox
is the middle child of a large, eccentric family from Sydney's western suburbs composed of half-, adopted and pseudo-siblings. The daughter of a parole officer and an enthusiastic foster-carer, Candice spent her childhood listening around corners to tales of violence, madness and evil as her father relayed his work stories to her mother and older brothers.

Bankstown born and bred, she failed to conform to military life in a brief stint as an officer in the Royal Australian Navy at age eighteen. At twenty, she turned her hand to academia and taught high school through two undergraduate and two postgraduate degrees. Candice lectures in writing at the University of Notre Dame, Sydney, while undertaking a PhD in literary censorship and terrorism.

Her first novel,
Hades
, won the Ned Kelly Award f or best debut in 2014 from the Australian Crime Writers Association. The sequel,
Eden
, won the Ned Kelly Award for best crime novel in 2015, making Candice only the second author to win these accolades back-to-back.
Fall
is the third Archer and Bennett novel. Candice is also currently co-writing a thriller with James Patterson, set in the Australian outback and due for release in 2016.