Limbo (35 page)

‘Nope. They didn’t ask his address. Seemed to know him pretty well.’

‘You didn’t get close enough to see the actual prescription? They usually have addresses.’

Joy gaped at him. ‘
No!
Jesus, my knees were knocking so hard where I was, getting any closer was not an option.’

He chuckled then and Joy had to shove her hands between her thighs to stop herself from smacking him. But then Ron’s car pulled out from a side parking space in front of the garage and it was action stations.

‘Right then,’ Dash muttered. ‘Take us to your granddaughter, asshole.’

They followed Ronald for fifteen minutes into the hilly McAlester hinterland. Dash drove and Joy followed their progress on her phone app, watching the little blue blinking dot that was them, taking note of the streets they were on and the direction they were heading. After about ten minutes she was fairly certain where they were heading to so when he turned onto the gravelled surface of Hutchins Road she wasn’t surprised.

Dash raised an eyebrow at her and Joy nodded, her excitement just about reading fever pitch now.

They were close.
Isabella
was close.

‘There,’ he said cocking his head at the For Sale sign with the arrow pointing down Hutchins Road that had been staked into the ground next to the street signpost. ‘That’s our cover. We’re checking out the real estate.’

Ron’s car kicked up quite a bit of dust and Dash gave him a lot of leeway. According to the app, the road had no streets that ran off it and was a dead end, so Ronald had to be heading to somebody’s house.

‘Do you think he’ll be suspicious of our car?’ Joy asked.

‘Maybe if the For Sale sign wasn’t there. I’d be hyper vigilant if I was him. But if he is, hopefully he’ll think we’re either going to check out the property or we’re visiting somebody on the street and if he’s not then he probably hasn’t even noticed us.’

The rutted road crested a hill and Dash drove along so sedately Joy just wanted to scream already. They were so close but this interminable drive made it feel so freaking far away.

She knew it was important to keep their distance from Ronald but every time they lost him from sight on the meandering road her heart would be in her mouth and it didn’t return to its rightful place until he reappeared around the next bend.

To their left rickety fences interrupted by occasional haphazard driveways led to ramshackle houses. They were acreage plots which, judging by their heavily treed appearance, had been kept fairly au natural. To their right, a tree break of tall gums lined the road through which a magnificent view of pale-green pastureland could be glimpsed.

‘He’s braking,’ Dash said, nodding to the glow of brake lights in the distance.

Joy peered through the fine swirl of dust. ‘He’s blinking now.’

‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Don’t look at the house. Just take note of the number as we pass it. We’ll park further down and walk back.’

Joy nodded, keeping her eye on the Falcon as it turned left into a property just ahead and drove slowly up the drive. There was a letterbox made out of an old milk urn at street level. The number would have been white once but it was well faded. Joy could only just make it out.

‘Lot forty-nine,’ she said out loud.

Dash nodded and his profile hardened to granite. ‘So not going to be Ronnie’s lucky number.’

Five minutes later Dash had found a layby near a break in the tree line to park and Joy watched him pull out a kick-ass camera from the boot.

‘Well if you fail at being a P.I. you can always join the paparazzi,’ she said.

‘I need photographic evidence and sometimes you need to take it from a distance,’ he said, shutting the boot. ‘Come on.’

She looked around them nervously and followed Dash to the other side of the road. ‘And we’re going to get that by…?’

‘By finding a hidden position where we can watch the place. Lot of treed areas around, shouldn’t be too difficult. Hopefully if we watch long enough they’ll bring Isabella outside — kids like to play outside.’

Joy struggled to keep up with him. Even in stealth mode the man walked with insane length in his stride. ‘And if they don’t?’

‘Then I’ll come back when it’s dark and do my peeping Tom act.’

He said it so matter-of-factly, so much like a he-man, that Joy actually felt her stomach clench. He was sexy when he was purposeful. But that didn’t obliterate the obvious dangers. Ronald may be a doting grandfather who picked up his fake granddaughter’s reflux medication but he was also an armed robber who probably owned at least one shotgun that they knew of.

‘That sounds unduly dangerous.’

‘Nah. It’ll be fine.’ He grinned down at her. ‘I’m like a ninja.’

Joy laughed. Dash was way too big to be some black-clad, springy creature of the shadows, and from what she’d seen on cop shows he’d have been raised in the big-black-boots-kicking-doors-in tradition.

‘That’s it, right?’ he said.

Joy recognised the mailbox several properties down immediately. ‘Yep,’ she confirmed, instantly lowering her voice.

He slowed down and she followed suit, his gaze darting all around as they advanced. ‘There,’ he nodded to the thickly treed tract of bushland just up ahead that abutted Ronald’s land. ‘We’re going cross country.’

Joy followed Dash a minute later as, with one quick look, they stepped over a broken-down fence and scrambled up a small bank before pushing into the dense bush.

‘You okay?’ Dash asked as they trudged along, picking their way through, parallel to the road.

‘Yep,’ she said. ‘Just think yourself lucky I’m not one of those girly girls who’d be bitching about breaking a nail.’

Joy couldn’t imagine Eve tramping through the goddamn bush.

‘Nope. You’ll just bitch about the state of your poor hungry belly.’

Joy would have liked to have refuted that, but she knew at some point she’d be starving again.

‘There,’ Dash said, stopping several minutes later and pointing as the driveway to lot forty-nine started to become visible through the trees. ‘Let’s find a place a little nearer to hunker down. Get behind me and follow in my footsteps. And for god’s sake, stay downwind, they’re going to smell you coming.’

Joy rolled her eyes. There were worse things to smell like than an eau de parfum factory.

He moved more strategically now, from tree to tree. The house gradually appeared as they got closer and he crouched down. Joy followed suit until a massive felled tree presented itself just prior to the line where the thicker bush stopped and the more lightly treed house yard began.

He turned and murmured, ‘Here’s good.’

Joy nodded and fell in beside him as he seated himself down, his back against the massive girth. ‘Turn your phone to silent,’ he whispered. ‘If you need to wee there’s plenty of places to squat.’

Joy shot him a sarcastic look. The thought that she might be caught with her pants around her ankles by a child abductor wielding a shotgun was enough to scare her kidneys into temporary shutdown.

Dash fiddled with his zoom lens for a bit and she watched him silently, trying to get her pulse to settle. This time it had nothing to do with the fact that she and Dash were sitting much closer than they usually did (unless he was licking her nipples of course), rubbing shoulders and thighs, and everything to do with the import of this moment.

She tapped a quick text to Stan. If someone had told her a month ago she’d be texting a minister of religion she’d have told them they were crazy but today she’d take any help she could get to bring Isabella home.

If you’ve got a spare second pray for me. Doing something really important. God would approve, I promise.

Her phone vibrated within seconds.

Dear Lord, watch out for Joy. Protect and help her this day. We need her for our choir. Amen.

Joy smothered a laugh. It was typical Stan but she’d take it. They’d come too far for this to all fall apart now.

Dash shifted beside her, turning around and rising onto his knees, balancing the camera on the top of the log.

Joy turned too and peeped her head above the trunk. The house was a basic fibro-looking shack that was elevated on stumps so it rose about half a meter off the ground. It looked like a puff of wind could blow it down. It certainly didn’t look sturdy enough to be anybody’s prison.

A rusty Hills Hoist clothesline and a very new-looking swing sheltered under the shade of a huge gum. A big blue plastic clam shell littered with brightly coloured toys lay on the ground closer to the three front stairs.

Up the back, behind the house, was a massive four-door steel shed. It looked
very
sturdy.

‘What if it’s not his place?’ Joy whispered as they watched the house, Dash looking through his lens. ‘What if he’s just stopped in to visit a friend?’

‘In that case we’ll be screwed. But,’ he pulled his eye away from the viewfinder, ‘you’re not going to tell me you believe that for even a second are you?’

Joy shook her head. She believed it was Ronald’s place of residence. She believed Isabella was here. ‘It’s a big coincidence if it isn’t,’ she said, keeping her voice low, like him, as he went back to scoping out the joint. ‘It’s Hutchins Road. The Grapes of Wrath sign that Hailey talked about on the bathroom window? That could be something old left behind by the previous owner.’

‘Yes.’

‘The reflux medication for his
baby granddaughter
when we know his granddaughter died. Unless he’s got another one?’

‘The parole dude said he moved up this way with his wife and daughter and her partner,’ he murmured. ‘
To get away from the memories
. No mention of another kid.’

Joy nodded, trying to keep the rise of excitement in check. It mixed with the continuous drip of worry that eked like poison into her system. She alternated between a this-is-it high and a what-if-it-all-goes-to-shit low.

‘And now,’ she said as she stared gloomily over the log, ‘we wait some more.’

He didn’t say anything but his smile taunted her peripheral vision.

***

An hour later Joy, who had abandoned watching a stubbornly closed front door and a still house, was sitting with her back to the log, listening to some music through her earbuds, when Dash nudged her.

She looked at him, pulling the bud out of her nearest ear. ‘Action stations,’ he whispered.

Joy switched her music off and pulled out the other bud. She heard voices as she turned around, and the sound of a screen door slapping against its frame, as she tentatively poked her head up high enough over the log to see what was happening.

Her heart drummed madly in her chest as Ronald appeared holding a baby…well, a toddler really. In a pink jumpsuit, with a yellow flower hairband atop a full head of sandy brown hair.

Isabella? Joy squinted.
Was it Isabella?
It had to be. Joy scrambled for similarities, wishing she had the advantage of the zoom lens.

‘Is it her?’ she whispered to Dash.

‘I think…I’m not sure…’ he whispered back. ‘Babies change a hell of a lot in six months.’

The girl wiggled to be set free as soon as Ronald had carried her down the stairs and Joy stared hard at the little face as he laughed and put her on the ground. All Joy had to go on was the picture of Isabella from the board of death, taken just before she and her mother had disappeared off the face of the earth.

A lot had changed. The baby in the picture had practically no hair whereas the little girl who tottered determinedly towards the swing set, using her arms as stabilisation devices, had a lot of hair. She was obviously bigger, taller and weighed more.

If someone had put a gun to Joy’s head and asked her to swear on her life that it was Isabella Richardson in front of her, she wasn’t sure she could.

But her gut told her it was.

That it was far too big a coincidence not to be.

A younger woman came down the stairs, smiling at the little girl. Ronald’s daughter? ‘Be careful Keisha,’ she called as the toddler lost her balance and landed on her butt and started to cry.

Joy blinked at the name. They were a distance away but the voices carried easily in the middle of freaking nowhere. She looked at Dash. ‘Did she just say Keisha?’ she whispered.

‘She sure did,’ he murmured as he snapped off some pictures.

Keisha, who had died a year ago?

Whoever this child was, it was clear to Joy that it wasn’t Ronald’s dead granddaughter Keisha. And if it wasn’t, who the hell’s child was it?

Dash took a set of rapid photos as Ronald swung the girl up in his arms and made soothing noises. The younger woman joined them, rubbing the toddler’s back and kissing her hands, trying to cajole her into better temper.

The camera clicks right next to her ear sounded like gunshots, and Joy tensed, waiting for Ronald to look directly at them, but his attention was focused on the girl, as was his daughter’s, and the child was making enough noise to block out a nuclear explosion.

Ronald carried her over to the swing, turning his back to their position, and the child’s cries soon died down once she was being pushed in the sturdy seat. It allowed Joy to study her further and Dash to snap some more close-ups of the face as the little girl giggled and bounced in the seat, her hair ruffling with the whoosh of air from her pendulous motion.

In all, the trio were in the front yard for about an hour, moving from the swing to the clam shell to play with the various toys, before an older woman with grey hair and an apron came to the front door and called, ‘Smoko.’

‘Smoko!’ Ronald repeated to the toddler, whose little face lit up, and within seconds all three of them were disappearing inside the house.

Joy spun around and sat back down, propped against the log. Her knees were numb and sore from kneeling on twigs and sharp little rocks for an hour but it has been worth every second.

‘Well…fuck me,’ she whispered.
It had to be Isabella
. ‘It’s her, isn’t it?’ She looked at Dash. ‘Tell me it’s her?’

Dash who had also moved and was now sitting next to Joy on the ground, flicked through the different shots on the camera’s digital screen. ‘It’s her. I’m certain of it.’ He showed her a photo he’d taken that zoomed in on the little girl’s face. ‘You did it,’ he said. ‘You found her.’