Lost Girls (30 page)

She was tired
of the birds in the trees that squawked, she was tired of no hot
showers to wash herself properly, just a small tin of warm water
from the fire and a cup to rinse with. She was tired of the same
boring food cooked in a frying pan on the fire every day. She had
read the two books she had brought. Mark did not seem to have any
interesting books, just a few books about Australia that looked
more like text books. She could not even get on the internet out
here to amuse herself. It was way past any place where there was an
internet connection for her tablet and she was tired of just
playing games with herself on it.

She checked the
days. It was now seven days since they had left that last town,
Longreach, not that it was anything, a flat and dusty little hole.
It must have taken three of four more hours of driving south west
from there until they came to this place. She could not name any
other places of civilisation nearby.

All that was
here were little scrubby tree things that Mark called mulga trees
and some other non-descript scrub. It was a place of little rocky
hills. The only signs that other people had ever been here were the
old mine shafts and bits of abandoned equipment rusting in the
sun.

On the first
day she had thought it was beautiful in an arid “badlands” way. Now
she was over that kind of beauty. She had also not understood, as
they were coming here, that no one else lived here.

Mark told her
the nearest places with regular people were two cattle stations
each about twenty miles in opposite directions. He did not offer to
take her to visit. They occasionally sighted another prospector
somewhere in the distance, or saw the dust of a car or truck on
some distant road. But that was it, the total of humanity.

For the rest of
the time it was just him and her, stuck in the middle of this
endless empty desolation. As fine as the collection of opals was
going, and Mark said it was going really well, she was over it.

Mark was giving
her progress reports each time he came up to the surface, usually
every 2-3 hours. He had told her the hole he was working in was not
quite a bonanza but it had a lot of good stuff. He now had a four
gallon drum half full of the bits of rock he had dug.

They did not
look like much to her, but he showed her flashes of colour amongst
a dark rock he called ironstone and said that, when these bits were
cleaned up, there was plenty to sell in here, at a conservative
estimate at least ten thousand dollars worth. Last night he had
suggested that it would take another three or four days to finish
his digging and then he would head north-west to Mount Isa

That was all
fine and she could see it was good money for a week’s work. But
rock was just bloody rock and it was getting seriously boring. She
thought they should stop now, cash it in and go back to the coast.
Then, if he wanted to come back out and dig up some more, he could
come while she stayed and minded the nice place by the sea. She had
pictured a place they would buy, a place with other people to talk
to.

She decided
that when he had finished work tonight it was time to start to
exert control, to demand that he bring them both back to the place
from whence they came, that they must leave tomorrow, not drag it
out for another week to two.

He had told her
a couple times that if she got too bored he would take her back to
Longreach and from there she could catch a bus.

But he could
not just to leave her there and vanish from her life. He needed to
stay with her and mind her the way he did so well. That was where a
baby would be really useful. She did not have one growing inside
her yet but she would find a way to convince him that one was on
the way. Even if it was not quite true yet it would be by the time
it really mattered.

Of course there
was one other card she could play too, it was to say that she would
go to the police and cry rape and abduction, that she had gone to
Airlie Beach and met up with him and she had innocently gone back
to his apartment only to be raped and then forced to come with him
in the dead of night to this God forsaken place.

It was bluff
but he did not know that. So if he tried to leave her off somewhere
that would be the fall back. She had his name and his vehicle ID,
she could tell him it would be easy for the police to run him to
ground if he left her and tried to shoot through.

Going to the
police was the furthest thing from her mind; she did not want any
risk that they would contact the Americans to find out about her.
If they did that it could even result in them deporting her to face
charges back home. But Mark did not know that. So it was yet
another lever to pull if she thought he would try and give her the
slip.

However she did
not want to go there, to use threats. She really liked him and
wanted to stay with him in a nice place. She wanted to keep having
him around. So the other was last resort stuff to have in her back
pocket should the need arise. She felt confident he would listen to
sense and it would not come to that.

She felt so
sure of herself and that she could control the situation. But then
sometimes she thought of those glimpses of his hard implacable eyes
and there was a tiny seed of fear too.

Anne had read
Mark’ diary, she had talked to Amanda’s parents, most usefully she
had talked to the Professor, now living on his own in a much
diminished status. He had lost his prestigious University post in
Newark as a result of his affair with Amanda and lost his wife and
family. He was now living in Canada, as a research scientist on a
much reduced income, with only memories to sustain him.

Despite
pressure from his wife and police he had refused to testify to
extortion. Without that they had no case. So it was only him who
wore the consequences of an affair with a student, his dismissal
from his post.

She imagined
that if it had happened the way he told it to her she would have
been aggrieved and bitter. But instead he was just sad that this
beautiful but misguided girl had met an untimely end.

Despite him
telling Anne the tale of her seduction and manipulation of him, he
refused to speak ill of her, telling of a person that needed to be
dealt with using both strength and love. In their conversations he
said that Amanda had revealed a joyless childhood, one with little
real love and affection. So she had come to a place in her life
where she had substituted control as her purpose in life.

The Professor
seemed to carry a burden of guilt that his advice had led her to
leave America and driven her into the arms of the wrong man and her
demise. He had hoped that, after the lesson with him about the
danger of abusing control, she would have not repeated this
mistake, no longer believed her over inflated sense of power would
get her what she wanted. Perhaps it partly worked; she had become
cleverer in hiding her fatal flaw. Mark had an inkling of this
character trait and had tried to warn her off, but ultimately her
overconfidence made her reckless.

Everything
about Mark made him the wrong man; so, so much the wrong man. He
was a man who hated to be bullied. He was kind to a fault when
asked for help without coercion. But alongside this was a deep and
burning rage, a rage at all the people in his life who had tried to
trick, misuse or bully him. So her trying to coerce and control his
was a recipe for disaster.

As the years
had gone by and Mark had his series of doomed affairs that hole of
anger inside him had got ever darker. His diary of the second half
was of a far different man to the earlier years, this brooding
spirit, this crocodile spirit which consumed his soul and could
break out with less and less provocation and do awful things with
no normal human restraints. At those times she felt as if she had
peered inside the mind of a hunting predator. But then, even after
these events unfolded, some parts of his humanity would come
bursting back.

At some point
in this relationship with Amanda something had snapped inside him.
His diary did not say that, it told of his caution in first meeting
her, that she was really pretty and sexy but she had something
eating her up inside a bit like the devil in him. He saw in her a
mirror to his crocodile spirit companion, in her soul was her own
controlling demon.

His diary told
how she had virtually flung herself at him, seeming to be
determined to have him as one more conquest. It told how he had
succumbed despite making his rules clear and trying to warn her
off.

His diary then
told of a lovely and happy week with lots of affection and wild
sex, though more and more as the week passed, the sex seemed to be
a substitute for real love.

Then it told of
Amanda’s increasing unhappiness in the isolation, of his offer to
return her to Longreach from where she could catch a bus back to
the coast. It told of her demand that he drive her back, over 1000
kilometres each way to the coast and of his refusal. Then it told
how it escalated into threats of pregnancy, then threats of crying
rape. But that is where it ended. His diary simply ended her story
by saying

“A is really
doing my head in. She is so angry and keeps trying to boss me.
Today she spat at me when I would not do her bidding. I slapped her
face so she came at me with a knife. I hit her, Finito.”

Susan’s story
gave a likely ending, that he hit her and killed her, then he threw
her body in a mine shaft, her bag in another shaft, and dropped
explosives in each shaft to collapse the dirt in on top of her and
her things.

But his story
did not say that, after the “Finito” she vanished.

What was
chilling was the lack of remorse he seemed to feel about what he
had done. The next entry was several funny stories about two bush
characters he met at Cloncurry pub, seemingly written a couple days
later. He seemed to have discarded her from his life and casually
moved on without second thoughts, a minor annoyance put aside.

The next entry,
a day later, was lots of gruesome crocodile pictures and the
caption, “I dreamed of crocodiles last night. They fill my soul and
I feed on their hunger. It is a kind of joy.”

She wondered
was that a remorse scream coming through a dream or was it only a
lost soul going to ever worse places.

Cathy and her
sister, also called Cathy, were inseparable when they were little.
Actually, when she was little, everyone called her FiFi which was
her real name. It was only later, after the real Cathy had gone
away, well died, that she had taken Cathy’s name to keep the memory
alive. She had hoped that by taking her sister’s name, after she
was gone, she would be able to keep some of the joy they had shared
together. But, after that, her life was empty. Then the other stuff
had started and it had gone from bad to worse until she just had to
escape.

Cathy left home
when she was sixteen, the earliest she was allowed to go and find
work on her own. It was not that she had any falling out with her
parents; she remained close and would ring them regularly even
though she would tell them almost nothing about her private life.
But she had a huge sense of guilt over what had happened to her
sister and did not want to inflict more pain on her parents. Even
though she could not bear to talk about her own life, the things
that she had done and what had been done to her, she had decided
that she wanted to spare her parents as much anxiety as she could
over her own safety.

So she would
ring them at least once a week and chat to both her Mum and Dad.
She recounted things about her work she thought they wanted to
hear, happy stories, nothing dark. At least once every three
months, she would come home for a weekend and pretend they were all
a family again and she was still their little girl.

It was like
playacting and not too hard to do, though by the end of each visit
she would find herself exhausted inside at the effort to sustain
the pretence. But it was worth it. They went on with their lives,
blissfully unaware of the real Cathy, the person she was for the
rest of the time. As they were country folks at heart and almost
never came to any city, she felt little concern they would find her
darker secrets out.

At first she
went to Edinburgh and got a job as an administrative assistant,
working for the boss of a manufacturing company. But the wages were
poor and it was hard to earn enough money to live on. It was also
too close to home, only an hour’s drive from the village her family
lived in. While they did not come to town much she feared them
walking down the street when she least wanted to see them.

She soon worked
out that, for someone like herself, sex was the best exchange
medium. So she gave in to the boss’s groping hands and pawing in
his office, but on the basis that it advantaged her in both pay and
other benefits. As his public assistant and private mistress she
doubled her salary and got a generous expense allowance.

After six
months she moved to Glasgow where her boss arranged a job for her
with a friend of his, another MD in a business that he worked
closely with. She had paid for that job reference in kind with a
last all night loan of her body, indulging his wild fantasies.

It had been a
similar deal with her new work in Glasgow, her type of
administrative assistant did as much work on the couch in his
office with the door locked as she did on the phone or as a
typist.

By the time she
was in Glasgow she had worked out that, if this was part of the
deal for many bosses, she might as well make it pay for her in
other ways. She got a night time job as a higher class working
girl, more discreet than those who worked the streets, no drugs and
protection from catching something, baby included.