The Hunter Inside (44 page)

He passed a car
on the way up the Pass – an old tiny Datsun that didn’t look much better than
his Chevy and probably had two more lovestruck teenagers making out inside.

As he pushed
onwards through the rain towards his destination, he tried to silence the
contesting voices of his father and brother inside his head, preferring to
focus on what little of the road he could see through the dark night. Tall, thick
conifers bordered the road on either side, making the narrow lane difficult to
traverse, and he was glad when he reached his destination, pulling the Chevy
into what normally was the most picturesque view of Camberway Valley available.

The valley opened
out below him like a huge crater, the steep bank dropping off from Key Brow
towards the mostly sleeping town below. Most of the people in Camberway would
be tucked up in their beds, safe and sound, as the cold night gripped the small
town.

Luke killed the
engine of the aging Chevy and listened to the silence that surrounded him. It
was a little eerie and unnerving to be there alone after midnight, and he
wished Kimberley had been able to go with him. The only sound he could hear was
the low whine of a bitter wind that blew through the trees. If she had been
there, he knew he would never have heard, or even considered, the haunting
sound of that wind. He would be wrapped up in her; something he realised – even
after just five dates – could be more than literal. He was wrapped inextricably
– his mind, his soul, everything in fact, in Kimberley Carter.

He looked down
at the Kennedy River, and the few lights that twinkled through the rain below,
and thought about the first date they had been on together, ignoring the
growing chill inside the Chevy. It had been the best night of his 18 years. Of
course, he had been terrified. Not of her, but of the attitude his father and
brother had tried to hammer into his head.

Don’t show
weaknesses, boy. Give er one for me. Let her pay her own way, them Carter’s are
loaded. Pressure, Luke, pressure. Probably just a teaser like the rest of em.

Except she
wasn’t. Well, he hadn’t gotten past first base and he’d been dating her for
over a month. Jim would have hightailed it to his next victim by now like he
had a jetrocket backpack attached to him. But that was the last thing Luke
wanted to do.

He couldn’t
imagine what a future without her would be like. If this was how he felt after
a month, he couldn’t wait to see what it felt like after a year, or five, or
even ten. Ever since that first date, when they had driven across the bridge
into Turton to see a movie at the Turton Odeon, its century-old projector
making Tom Cruise look like he had advanced parkinson’s disease, the feeling
growing inside his soul had been like nothing he had ever experienced.

He imagined Jim
and his father had never gotten anywhere near such a feeling, and he kept it a
secret from them. He would be hard pressed to tell them in words just how it
felt. He was no John Keats – didn’t even know who John Keats was in actual fact
– but he imagined it felt like standing at the top of a five hundred foot drop
and knowing you could fly, but being too afraid to jump. Indecision; emotions
ranging from despair to great anticipation and paranoia to great confidence;
the brink of tears through fear to the soaring joyous heights of her smile,
when the ground below ceased to be part of the equation and looking into her
eyes made his heart lighter than the air on which he floated when he was with
her.

It was something
magnificent, and his father and brother’s obsession with sex was one that he
didn’t share.

Okay, so tonight
he had been jacked up with testosterone and had nearly split his pants, but
that wasn’t him. That was what the boffins on CNN called peer group pressure
and now, as he looked through the clouds at the land he knew so well, he was
ashamed and angry with himself for the erection that had made him try and
pressure her into going up there with him.

She was so pure
and perfect. She was serene. There was nothing, and no-one, in this world that
could amaze him so much and concentrate his attention so fully.

He lit the
display on his Casio. 1.30AM.Pretty soon his father and brother would likely
pass out drunk, and he could slip in and go to his room without being
questioned. Then he could dream about the most amazing thing he had ever seen –
Kimberley Carter.

Except all that
was about to change.

*

The damn rain had
stopped. But not like it usually did, fading gradually until it ceased
completely. It was more like God had watched him with great amusement as he
had struggled along on his journey, before flipping a switch marked ‘Rain over
Barrett Holroyd’.

One second he
was fighting against a swirling blizzard of drizzle that attacked him like a swarm
of bees protecting their queen in the hive, the next he was standing one
hundred yards away from the dilapidated old house, looking up at the sky and
wondering how the rain could have ceased so suddenly and so completely.

God’s idea of
how life for Barrett Holroyd should be. One big crazy joke. Let’s make the rain
stop just in time to really piss him off. Even better, let’s kill his wife
after degrading her memory so much that he hates her guts for the feeling she
left inside him. God’s idea of fun, when he wasn’t busy murdering children or
starting wars all over the world. When floods and earthquakes got boring – time
to have some fun with Barrett Holroyd.

He was frozen,
unmoving, to the spot. Looking up at the sky as the cold invaded his body and
attacked him from every angle. Standing still in soaking wet clothes in 35
^o
Fahrenheit. What was he thinking of?

He half-expected
Betsy’s face to appear, huge above him in the sky, eyes sunken and ringed with
dark bags, face drawn and pale, cheekbones and jaw jutting out, hair a mess.

‘Just what are
you doing, standing there waiting to get pneumonia? You’re a stupid man,
Barrett Holroyd. You should know better at your age. Linda will be worried
sick. Do you never think about anything or anybody other than yourself?’

Except he wasn’t
thinking about himself. In fact, he wasn’t thinking about anything. He was
standing still, and his mind felt like a blank canvas, a morning schoolboard
wiped clean of yesterday’s chalk.

What
had
he been thinking about? He swung the splintered wooden gate behind him and
walked towards the house. He wasn’t thinking of the Ford, abandoned after
chugging to a standstill a mile away from Miller’s Diner. He wasn’t even
thinking about how much he’d like to give the Bonalo boy a shiner when he saw
him tomorrow or Louise Miller’s cleavage when she had bent down in front of him
earlier.

He pushed his
slightly bent, silver key into the rusted lock and let himself into the house.
The door’s hinges screamed in rusted protest and he winced, thinking about the
boy. And Linda.

‘Daddy,’ she
exclaimed in a voice that was little more than a whisper, ‘where have you
been
?’

The dog, Samuel,
pricked his ears at the sound of her voice. He lifted his head from the blanket
on which he lay and studied Barrett through the gloom for a moment, before
resting his head and closing his eyes, ears still pricked to attention.

She began to sob
as she went to him and put her arms around him, seemingly unaware of his
soaking wet clothes. ‘I was so worried; I thought something had happened to
you. Where have you been? Are you okay? Why didn’t you call?’

Her grip around
his neck was painfully tight. Her heart was beating fast, too fast, against his
chest, and her whole body shook against his.

Emotionally, he
knew, she was in pieces. But he couldn’t have called, for two reasons. The
first was that he didn’t have a cell phone. The reception in Camberway was shot
to shit, it being in the middle of nowhere and all. Bill Lyons forever
complained about it to Barrett whenever they ran into each other in town.
‘Something should be done, Barr,’ he would say, a finger wagging in whatever
wind was up on any given day. He was the only person Barrett Holroyd had ever
known that shortened his name. He didn’t like it but he didn’t complain, partly
because he didn’t want to suffer the embarrassment and partly because Bill
Lyons was a doctor, and Barrett had a lot of respect for doctors, and the level
of performance they had to keep up for many years. Not to mention the studying
they had to do. The studying was as much a part of the job as diagnosing cancer
in people like Betsy Holroyd was.

All the roads in
his life led back to the same stormy intersection. The one inside his heart,
mind and soul.

Linda was the
most important thing right now. Not Dr. Lyons’ cell phone problems and not
Betsy.

The second, and
most definitely defining, reason he couldn’t have called was because the phone
had been cut off weeks ago, after they had ignored the second final demand.
That had left Linda sobbing, same way she was now, head boring into his
shoulder like he imagined an ostrich to do with sand – except he was sure they
didn’t really do that at all. He had heard that somewhere. Maybe Dan Rather.
Maybe Discovery Channel.

Focus, Barrett.

‘There, there,
you calm down now,’ he said as he stroked her hair, worried that she might wake
the boy with all this crying. Not that ‘there there’ was going to knit her
broken heart back together or make her feel better, same way Betsy lying
half-wasted and half-dead saying ‘I’m a fighter’ wasn’t going to stop the
cancer from killing her. Except she was already gone.

Linda’s all
that matters now
, he thought, mentally slapping himself to focus his
attention once more and on calming his (wildly overreacting) daughter. He was
only an hour and a half late, after all. Why should he have to touch base every
five minutes like she was Betsy? Betsy was gone.

Linda, Linda,
think about Linda.

He realised he
was shivering. Lightheaded too. Maybe he was catching pneumonia after all.

That damn
Bonalo.

Linda’s sobbing
continued unabated.

She must have
cried a hundred million tears
, he thought.

‘Linda,
sweetheart, calm down,’ he coaxed, freeing himself from her vice-like grip and
looking into her exhausted, tear streaked and puffy face.

The gloomy light
from the hallway wall lamp cast only a dim glow, and he suddenly realised that
she looked closer to his age than she did her own. She was only 33, but the
stress and pain of the last twelve months etched itself in lines that would
always hold testimony to how completely her life had been torn apart.

‘Daddy, it’s
almost 2AM. Where were you?’

He could see the
quizzical, almost betrayed expression on her face as she asked him, and a
teardrop hung from the end of her nose, large and ready to drip.

2AM. She said
2AM.
That couldn’t be right. He had left the diner at 10PM. Within five
minutes the car had broken down, but it hadn’t taken him four hours to walk
home.

‘2AM? It can’t
be. I…’ he trailed off. His head was fuzzy, cloudy. He was damn tired after the
damn car and the damn cold and the damn storm and the damn dark walk home. But
it hadn’t taken him more than an hour and a half, surely?

That made it
midnight, at the latest. He could walk to Miller’s Diner and back in four hours.

At Linda’s
inquisitive glare he felt nervous. Her tears had stopped, and in the dimly lit
hallway it was like looking at Betsy years ago. Betsy before they were married.
Before he had taken her to bed. Betsy before all the years they spent together.
Before the cancer.

Barrett Holroyd
was unnerved. His eyelids fluttered several times and tears welled up in his
eyes. He hoped she couldn’t see those tears. She might think he was feeling
sorry for himself, when he was actually pitying her. But she wouldn’t want him
to pity her, he knew that.

‘But Linda, it
can’t be,’ he said as he stepped past her and went into the kitchen. The clock
on the wall did indeed say 2AM, but it couldn’t be. There was no way in the
world.

‘So, where were
you?’ She had followed him into the kitchen, and her voice had taken on what he
could only perceive as an accusatory tone. A
Betsy
tone.

‘I was, I was at
Miller’s Diner. Where else would I be?’ He asked the question in a ponderous
tone as he attempted to reconstruct his journey home inside his mind, from the
car breaking down to the walk through the cold, dark night down Sangrew Hill,
and falling down on his bony old butt (which hurt like a bitch – he expected a
big black bruise by the end of tomorrow), and standing looking up at the cloudy
sky and the few visible stars just a hundred yards from the house.

Couldn’t have
taken him too long to get himself those five miles, yet the clock on the wall
still said 2AM, and the digital clock on the front of the refrigerator said the
same.

He looked at his
watch, only to see that the silver Rotary hands had stopped moving at exactly
midnight. On the dot. To the second. He tapped the glass with his fingernail,
in full knowledge of the fact that it was not going to start the hands moving
again, before flopping down heavily and disconsolately on one of the low budget
kitchen chairs that they had watched dwindle from four to two in eight months.

That’s the
trouble with getting the cheapest car on the lot, he mused. Always breaks down
sooner or later. The house was full of ‘the cheapest’. The cheapest TV, which
crackled like bacon on a platter, the cheapest armchairs, which creaked like
the doors of a haunted house, the cheapest beds, with springs that reacted like
a jack-in-the-box mechanism whenever you tried to get comfortable, the cheapest
clothes, which made them look a decade out of fashion.